[Illustration: EXECUTION OF TOMKINS AND CHALLONER (_see page 95_).]
The Law Institute, that Grecian temple that has wedged itself into the south-west end of Chancery Lane, was built in the stormy year of 1830. On the Lord Mayor's day that year there was a riot; the Reform Bill was still pending, and it was feared might not pass, for the Lords were foaming at the mouth. The Iron Duke was detested as an opposer of all change, good or bad; the new police were distasteful to the people; above all, there was no Lord Mayor's show, and no man in brass armour to look at. The rioters assembled outside No. 62, Fleet Street, were there harangued by some dirty-faced demagogue, and then marched westward. At Temple Bar the zealous new "Peelers" slammed the old muddy gates, to stop the threatening mob; but the City Marshal, red in the face at this breach of City privilege, re-opened them, and the mob roared approval from a thousand distorted mouths. The more pugnacious reformers now broke the scaffolding at the Law Institute into dangerous cudgels, and some 300 of the unwashed patriots dashed through the Bar towards Somerset House, full of vague notions of riot, and perhaps (delicious thought!) plunder. But at St. Mary's, Commissioner Mayne and his men in the blue tail-coats received the roughs in battle array, and at the first charge the coward mob broke and fled.
In 1815, No. 68, Chancery Lane, not far from the north-east corner, was the scene of an event which terminated in the legal murder of a young and innocent girl. It was here, at Olibar Turner's, a law stationer's, that Eliza Fenning lived, whom we have already mentioned when we entered Hone's shop, in Fleet Street. This poor girl, on the eve of a happy marriage, was hanged at Newgate, on the 26th of July, 1815, for attempting to poison her master and mistress. The trial took place at the Old Bailey on April 11th of the same year, and Mr. Gurney conducted the prosecution before that rough, violent, unfeeling man, Sir John Sylvester (_alias_ Black Jack), Recorder of London, who, it is said, used to call the calendar "a bill of fare." The arsenic for rats, kept in a drawer by Mr. Turner, had been mixed with the dough of some yeast dumplings, of which all the family, including the poor servant, freely partook. There was no evidence of malice, no suspicion of any ill-will, except that Mrs. Turner had once scolded the girl for being free with one of the clerks. It was, moreover, remembered that the girl had particularly pressed her mistress to let her make some yeast dumplings on the day in question. The defence was shamefully conducted. No one pressed the fact of the girl having left the dough in the kitchen for some time untended; nor was weight laid on the fact of Eliza Fenning's own danger and sufferings. All the poor, half-paralysed, Irish girl could say was, "I am truly innocent of the whole charge--indeed I am. I liked my place. I was very comfortable." And there was pathos in those simple, stammering words, more than in half the self-conscious diffuseness of tragic poetry. In her white bridal dress (the cap she had joyfully worked for herself) she went to her cruel death, still repeating the words, "I am innocent." The funeral, at St. George the Martyr, was attended by 10,000 people. Curran used to declaim eloquently on her unhappy fate, and Mr. Charles Phillips wrote a glowing rhapsody on this victim of legal dulness. But such mistakes not even Justice herself can correct. A city mourned over her early grave; but the life was taken, and there was no redress. Gadsden, the clerk, whom she had warned not to eat any dumpling, as it was heavy (this was thought suspicious), afterwards became a wealthy solicitor in Bedford Row.