On the 12th of February, 1652, a Declaration, ‘that Scotland shall, and may be incorporated into, and become one Common-wealth with this England’ was proclaimed at the Mercat Cross, in the High Street of Edinburgh. An English bystander noted with innocent surprise, that ‘there was a very great concourse of people att the proclayming … but soe sencelesse are this generation of theire owne goods that scarce a man of them shew'd any signe of rejoycing.’ This Union with Protectorate England was to last until the Restoration.

The rule of General Monck was arbitrary and military in character. It evolved in a system of Justices of the Peace, a highly successful instrument of government. That it was effective is shown by the following ‘letter from the Highlands’:

A book of drawings in the R.I.B.A., a group of buildings at Garendon Park, near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, and a passage in John Nichol's History of Leicestershire combine together to present a reasonably full picture of Ambrose Phillipps, an amateur architect of the 18th century.

His grandfather, also called Ambrose, was a successful London lawyer who purchased the Garendon estate in 1683 from the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and was knighted three years later. Sir Ambrose died in 1706, when Garendon was inherited by his second son William, who had been a merchant in Constantinople until called home by the death of his elder brother in 1716. William had married, in 1703, Jane, the daughter of Sir Samuel Dashwood, at one time Lord Mayor of London. They had three sons: Ambrose, who was born in 1706 or 1707, and Samuel and William, who both became merchants in Smyrna.

The restoration of the Temple Church in the early 1840s was a major triumph for ecclesiology and a minor tragedy for several of the individuals involved. Natural hazards, from the Great Fire to Hitler's bombs, and the fashions of taste, from the age of Wren to the age of Pugin, have combined to make the Temple Church an architectural palimpsest of extraordinary interest. Its construction during the 12th and 13th centuries had been a milestone in the development of the Gothic style. The alterations of the 17th and 18th centuries represent an interesting commentary on the vagaries of liturgical fashion. Its restoration during the 19th century was an early landmark in the history of the Gothic Revival. Its partial destruction in 1941 made possible the most drastic and the most accomplished restoration of all.

Both the Inner and Middle Temple contributed to the remarkable expansion of public building during the post-Napoleonic period. In 1819 both societies appointed a new architect with a mandate for reconstruction. The Inner Temple chose Robert (later Sir Robert) Smirke.

From the moment when in the early 1850s its patterned walls first rose above the monotonous stock-brick streets north of Oxford Street, All Saints’ Margaret Street (Fig. 1) has been recognized as a building of exceptional originality and significance. Long before its interior was finally completed for consecration in November 1859, the church was illustrated and applauded in the architectural press (Figs 2 and 4). Subsequent critics, from Eastlake and Bumpus and Muthesius to Summerson and Hitchcock, have all acclaimed it as a turning point,‘a bold and magnificent endeavour to shake off the trammels of antiquarian precedent’ which had fettered the early Victorians, ‘in many ways the most moving building of the century.’ Even so, the critics have always been puzzled by All Saints'. How did this revolutionary building come to be designed as the model church of the Ecclesiological Society, whose concern had hitherto been the strict observation of English medieval precedent ? How, indeed, does it fit into the Victorian Gothic Revival? Does it represent the influence of Rus-kin? If, as Professor Hitchcock and Sir John Summerson both conclude, its revolutionary features are due to its architect, William Butterfield, did he get the ideas through travelling, or reading, or did he invent them? Are the faults in the building, as well as its powerful inventiveness, due to naïve ignorance and an inability to co-ordinate the work of fellow artists, or to a deliberate and sadistic hatred of beauty? Finally, what is the real aesthetic effect of this building : certainly it is fascinating, but is it fascinatingly beautiful or fascinatingly hideous?