Honouring the Past: Attending the Quit Rents Ceremony in its 813th year
On this page, below, we give the text of the address given at the 813th Quit Rents Ceremony at the Royal Courts of Justice, Strand, London.
The Royal Courts of Justice
The event took place in Court 4, The Court of the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales.
Sign for Court Number 4, RCJ
Afterwards, there was a reception in Middle Temple. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night took place on February 2, 1602, in the hall of this Inn of Court.
The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night occurred in the hall on 2 February 1602: Shakespeare himself was probably present.
It’s believed that Shakespeare himself may have been in attendance. The play was likely performed as part of the Candlemas celebrations, a traditional time for revelry and entertainment.
Following that, we were delighted to retire to Gray’s Inn where we were the guests of Jacqueline Perry KC.
Sir Francis Bacon Statue, Grays’ Inn
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Tim Ashton
Address to the 813th Quit Rents Ceremony before His Majesty’s Remembrancer
Court of the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales, Royal Courts of Justice
09 October, 2024
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First, in this forest, let us do those ends
That here were well begun and well begot:
And after, every of this happy number
That have endured shrewd days and nights with us
Shall share the good of our returnèd fortuneThese words are spoken by the virtuous Duke Senior at the close of Shakespeare’s beloved play ‘As You Like It’, (which is set in Shropshire where the Quit Rents fields are located).
Then, the god Hymen commands a dance of eight to be done to celebrate the recovery of harmony, which has been the play’s quest.
These sympathetic dancing characters should be interpreted as embodying the nature of Plato’s guardians, and the dance as manifesting the duties of such people.
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Today, I am concerned with the duties of Plato’s guardians, and how these duties are explored by the life and legacy of my forebear, Sir Rowland Hill of Soulton: Lord Mayor of this great City in 1549/50 – a year in which his statecraft was called upon to prevent a civil war as the Protectorate of Somerset collapsed while he took his oath.
Shakespeare (his cousin) wrote ‘As You Like It’ (from which I have just quoted) as a cultural monument to him: he is the Old Sir Rowland who is the father of Orlando and the embodiment of virtue in the universe of the play.
That this is so has already been set out in a lecture given in this city in January of this year at St Mary Abchurch, a 55ft cubed Wren building with a dancing pavement that is an homage to Old Sir Rowland’s house at Soulton Hall.
Pressures of time mean that I cannot attend systematically to the Shakespeare valencies of Sir Rowland Hill today, beyond stating it as a fact. I can, however, direct interested people to the recording of that lecture which is on the website of Byrga Geniht under the title:
And I take this opportunity to thank James D. Wenn for his scholarly support of my family in these matters.
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Sir Rowland Hill is one of the most brilliant, exotic, brave and remarkable people of the Tudor period.
But his name is lost to us.
There are excellent reasons for this, but they are hard reasons substantially connected with the publication of the Geneva Bible, a book which has been put to one side in the United Kingdom for centuries because of how it was redeployed by actors in later generations, for example during the English Civil War, and when the Americans declared independence.
My Lord, Sir Rowland Hill was many things – including a judge who sat on treason proceedings.
And, my Lord, in their moment (under the Catholic dispensation of Queen Mary), a number of the secret actions of my forebear, Old Sir Rowland, were very clearly treason and heresy.
I am aware that I have just outed my forebear (in the court room of the Lady Chief Justice, and before two sheriffs of the City of London) as having made out offenses of treason and heresy.
Believe me when I say I thought about how sensible a thing that was to do…
But I am content to have finally brought that out of the closet after half a millennium, because what he did was subsequently ratified by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Parliament, the Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes and Queen Elizabeth I herself.
But what he did in his pursuit of harmony, as he saw it, was immensely dangerous, such that it was still unsafe to talk about until well into the twentieth century, which is why it was not discussed and some of this feels startling to relate now.
Without his brave work – sheltering (in his house built in renaissance codes at Soulton Hall) artifacts, scholars, and texts (including at least one copy of Magna Carta) – the glorious renaissance that gave us Shakespeare and a renewed and confident England would have been impossible.
Questions which include religious forces of this nature are necessarily sensitive, and time does not permit a deeper development of these themes, but I wish to acknowledge:
- that all sides suffered in the trauma of the Reformation,
- and that the scars are still healing and vital reconciliation work is still ongoing, for example the important work in Lichfield with the return of the relics of St Chad.
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The office of Sheriff, which we have seen confirmed on to officeholders today, is ancient indeed. It reaches back over 1000 years, perhaps as far back as the time of St Erkenwald, the light of London, and the founder of St Pauls.
Culturally, this great city claims its foundation as having been done by Greek heroes from Troy in the time of the pagan King Brutus before the Romans came.
That unique and ancient constitutional status of London is manifested both by the city electing its own sheriffs, and by the nuances of the Quit Rents ceremony that is being performed today; a status that was vouchsafed and embodied in ancient times by both Erkenwald and the Norman Bishop William. Both figures of familiarity and importance to Old Sir Rowland.
Sir Rowland Hill was himself made sheriff of London in 1541-42. As with so many of the public offices he held it was a remarkable term of office, and his time laid the foundations for the concept of Parliamentary Privilege because he was put in an impossible position when he was ordered to effect the arrest of an MP attending the Commons (an institution grappling with its growing powers that was sorely offended by this insult).
For his (blameless) troubles he was sent to the Tower of London, only to be released and promptly knighted to make amends.
This incident is the reason the attempt of Charles I to arrest members of the Commons exactly 100 years later was so shocking and precipitous; and in our own times was one of the reasons why the 2019 prorogation crisis was so charged.
Old Sir Rowland was no stranger to walking tightropes and remarkably good and successful at it, as his service on the Privy Councils of each and all of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth (virtually unique) and on both the Commission Against Heretics and the Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes (absolutely unique and frankly extremely suspicious) shows. Under these violently contradictory commissions he had the power to save art and artefacts that were an anathema to both dispensations, and we know he did because we have the Parker Library (which he hid at Soulton, along with Mathew Parker himself) and the Mercer’s Christ which he buried under the floor of the chapel that interconnected with his house in London.
All of this could look like a shrewd politician, who is a businessman first and foremost. But to say that would be to overlook the conspicuous and vast dangers involved.
That the fact that he survived an attack by pirates is too mundane a thing to spend time on with you today underlines his remarkable energy and force.
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I have said he is an exemplar of Plato’s Guardians.
He had a fortune that was colossal, and it is obvious he held office, but am I entitled to say he held it for the public good?
Absolutely: he attended to the collapse of social welfare (that the Reformation in England sadly represented in parts of how it was done) liberally:
- founding schools, refounding and superintending all the hospitals in London,
- patronising the arts, funding scholarships,
- attending to architecture, public works, labour exchanges, the needs of the mentally ill and the poor.
I do not have time to take you fully through all this, so I will quote from a contemporary, who was just as exhausted by Old sir Rowland’s Renaissance magnificence as we might all be:
This Sir Rowland Hill, to the great praise of his vocation, and…
singular comfort of the public wheel of his country, erected many notable monuments and good deeds, which were to long here to write.
Wherefore I referred them to my Summaries.[2]
As a renaissance mind we can see he published on diverse topics from classics, philosophy, the discovery of America, the state of English allies, and mathematics.
His house at Soulton has the only (I learned this week) ancient Rithmomachia board surviving in the world, and is so densely planted in code that reference Alberti, the Bible, the geometry of the Platonic solid that is the rhombic dodecahedron that it would take access to Soulton and three hours to set before you properly.
Returning to ‘As You Like It’ and the dance I opened by reference to.
It is symbolised by a rose of eight-fold symmetry, or a star of the same.
This symbol is seen on old Sir Rowland Hill’s chair of estate which survives at Soulton as well as the famous dancing pavement there that actually shows the choreography of that dance, known to the ancients at Eleusis.
This symbol is all over Mansion House, the British Museum, and London generally – look for it and you will see.
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I have not had time today to develop fully the life and legacy of one of the most remarkable and sadly for the moment (but not for much longer) marginalised Englishmen that ever lived and one of the greatest ever fathers of this wonderful city.
However, I hope I have done enough to get you to cherish and want to become more familiar with this man who is so important he lives a little outside of time, of whom Shakespeare causes his two best romantic leads to say:
I am more proud to be Sir Rowland’s son,
His youngest son; and would not change that calling,
To be adopted heir to Frederick.and:
My father loved Sir Rowland as his soul,
And all the world was of my father’s mind********
In this spirit, and at a time when Shropshire, London and our country all find themselves again questing for renewal and a better destiny I hope we can find the values and value of Shakespeare’s Old Sir Rowland.
My Lord, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention.
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The event was covered by the Shropshire Star here, as well as by the BBC with the following interview:
It was also reported on by Byrga Geniht here.
The Great Hall. Royal Courts of Justice
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[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGoEM6SanXo
[2] Modern Spelling is used. Stow, John. The summarie of English chronicles (lately collected and published) nowe abridged and continued tyl this present moneth of Marche, in the yere of our Lord God. 1566. By J.S. Thomas Marshe,. London: in Fletestrete, 1566.
