. . -' L ^ GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES AND CELEBRATED GARDENS IN AND ROUND LONDON CELEBRATED GARDENS IK AND AROUND LONDON JESSIE MACGREGOR 6 LONDON HUTCHINSON & C9 PATERNOSTER ROW ^ ^ ^ ^ And if indeed in some old garden thou and I have wrought And made fresh flowers bloom from hoarded seed, And fragrance of old days and deeds have brought Baek to folk weary, all was not for nought ; No little part it was for me to play The idle singer of an empty day." WILLIAM MORRIS, " The Earthly Paradite." fto Q'>r ) CO - TO THE MEMORY OF MY SISTER AM Y CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY .......... 1 II. LAMBETH PALACE AND GARDENS . . . . . . . 29 III. FULHAM PALACE AND GARDENS ....... 62 IV. SIGN HOUSE AND GARDENS, ISLEWORTH ..... 94 V. THE CHELSEA " PHYSICKE GARDEN" . . . . . . 114 VI. MARLBOROUGH HOUSE AND GARDEN ...... 139 VII. CHISWICK HOUSE AND GARDENS . . . . . . .154 VIII. WALPOLE HOUSE, THE MALL, CHISWICK 188 IX. HOLLAND HOUSE AND GARDENS . . . . . . .198 X. HOGARTH HOUSE AND GARDEN, CHISWICK ..... 227 XI. No. 3, THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 237 XII. CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA ........ 255 XIII. KELMSCOTT HOUSE AND GARDEN, UPPER MALL, HAMMERSMITH, AND WILLIAM MORRIS ........ 271 XIV. LEIGHTON HOUSE, KENSINGTON, AND LORD LEIGHTON . . 297 AFTERWORD . . . . . . . . . . 321 PREFACE FOR kind permission to make the drawings reproduced in the following pages, and for the facilities so freely given me in doing so, my thanks are due To Her Gracious Majesty Queen Alexandra. His Grace the Lord Archbishop, of Canterbury. His Grace the late Duke of Northumberland. The Right Honourable Mary Countess of Ilchester. The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London. Major Goldman, M.P., of Walpole House, The Mall, Chiswick. The late Dr. Tuke and Charles Tuke, Esq. Charles Grant Church, Esq., of 3, The Grove, Highgate. Warwick Draper, Esq., formerly of Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith. The Trustees of Hogarth House, Chiswick ; The " Physicke Garden," Chelsea ; Carlyle House, Chelsea, and Leighton House, Kensington. I also cordially acknowledge the valuable aid I have received, through information not otherwise obtainable, from Mary Countess of Ilchester, The Lady Frances Balfour, The Hon. Charlotte Knollys and Lady Thornycroft. And there are two others to whom though I do not name them I am deeply grateful, for without their sympathy and steady, kindly encourage- ment I am inclined to think the book would never have been written or, at least, completed. With regard to the work itself, I should like to say in explanation of a certain want of continuity that may be felt in its pages, the manner of its genesis should be known. Pictures in a picture gallery are regarded as distinct entities, but the chapters of a book (unless it be frankly a collection of short stories) ought to have some logical connection. I have dealt chronologically with the various histories related in the following pages, as far as it has been possible to do so. Also, if the Reader will look for it, there is a well-defined chain of circumstance linking together many of the chapters in " Gardens of Celebrities "but since its existence is accidental, and it is broken in places the book, I fear, must plead guilty to a lack of cohesion. This is largely because the illustrations earliest in point of time those of Kelmscott House, Hogarth House and Holland House, which were executed PREFACE as long ago as 1911 and 1912 were originally intended solely for an exhi- bition of garden pictures. The exhibition was inevitably deferred, when it was decided that they should first appear in book form, because the drawings had to be held over for reproduction in colour. In its first inception, the raison d'etre of the book was purely a pictorial one, and the text accompanying the pictures would therefore have been merely elucidatory and descriptive. The text, in short, was to have illus- trated the drawings, not, as now, vice versa. But alas ! in six months there followed the cosmic upheaval of the last four years with the inevitable postponement or destruction of all human plans and projects. In August, 1914, when I was in the full swing and enjoyment of my outdoor work like a bolt from the blue the measureless calamity of the Great War was upon us ! At the moment when all eyes were turned to the stricken fields of France and Flanders, when, there, and else- where in the wide area of strife, husbands, sons, brothers and nephews heroes all, in their readiness and steadfastness, martyrs in their faith were, voluntarily, paying so heavy a price for the ultimate freedom of mankind none at home would have had heart or time to consider the beauty and the peace of gardens and therefore the book itself was more than once post- poned. But my own small bit of work went on. The drawings themselves were ready in 1915 and in working at the text I came unexpectedly upon a mine so rich that, since the unhappy prolongation of the war allowed it I seized the chance to treat my subject or rather subjects for thirteen different ones are dealt with much more fully. To treat it exhaustively, even without reference to many interesting or beautiful metropolitan gardens existing, which I have not so much as mentioned would be impossible within the limits of one volume. And the book, even so far as it goes, is incomplete. I had purposed, as a matter of course, to include a drawing of " Strawberry " the famous garden of Horace Walpole, and to make more than a passing allusion to his place in the history of gardening ; but much to my regret I was not permitted to do so. And though facilities were kindly given me to draw in the gardens of Gray's Inn, laid out, it is said, by Bacon himself, I found that they had been so sorely cut up and worn by the perpetual drilling of thousands of troops, that on aesthetic grounds I was compelled to leave them out. JESSIE MACGREGOR. Swallowfield, October 15th, 1918. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS WATER COLOUR DRAWINGS MARLBOROUGH HOUSE ...... LAMBETH : The Palace from the Gardens .... The Tudor Gateway FULHAM : The Courtyard ....... The Flower Walk in the Walled Garden Gateway between Walled Garden and Grounds SIGN : Looking toward Parterres and Fountain Looking toward the River Thames PHYSICKE GARDEN, CHELSEA : View of Garden ...... CHISWICK HOUSE : The Obelisk in the Pool The Inigo Jones Gateway ..... The Conservatory . . . WALPOLE HOUSE, THE MALL, CHISWICK : View of House and Garden .... HOLLAND HOUSE : The Dutch or West Garden .... HOGARTH HOUSE : View of House and Garden .... No. 3, THE GROVE, HIGHGATE : View of Garden and House .... CARLYLE HOUSE, CHELSEA : View of Garden and House .... KELMSCOTT HOUSE, UPPER MALL, HAMMERSMITH : The Garden, looking from the River View of House and Garden, looking riverwards LEIGHTON HOUSE, KENSINGTON : The Studio Balcony, from Garden . , , Frontispiece . Facing p. 32 46 98 110 134 166 170 182 194 218 232 250 260 270 292 296 LAMBETH : The Fig-tree, in Greater Courtyard FULHAM : The Entrance to the Palace Sl N : 112 Ancient Cedar in Grounds . PHYSICKE GARDEN : The Gateway in Swan Walk .... CHISWICK HOUSE : Sketch of Temple in Grounds South Front and Cedar Avenue . xn GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES AND CELEBRATED GARDENS CHAPTER I AFTER the Romans left Britain, about A.D. 300, the art of landscape gardening, in which they had instructed the islanders, died out, and under the Saxons the garden was merely a yard; the word ' yard " etymologieally derived from the Anglo-Saxon geard, i.e., hedges, enclosure signifying the small, enclosed space in which those plants intended for domestic use were sheltered. But though neglected in England, the art had advanced in France ; and when, in 1066, the Normans came over, they reintroduced it, bringing with them many plants and fruits hitherto unknown in Britain, and an appreciation of flowers for their own sake. The author of " Gardens Old and New " tells an anecdote that attests this : Christina, Abbess of the famous Abbey of Romney, in Hampshire, who was closely allied to the former royal house of England, had under her care her young niece, Matilda, afterwards Queen of Henry I. She must have been considered beautiful, for William Rufus desired to see her, and when (his reputation being dubious) the Abbess demurred, lie pretended that he had only come to see the flowers in the convent garden, reported to be worth a visit. Henry of Huntingdon, an early authority, tells us that Henry II. made a " Parke," or chase, at Woodstock, in Oxfordshire. In a bower in its leafy groves, approached by a labyrinthine path, accessible only to one who had the clew, the King concealed his love, fair Rosamund Clifford. It was there his Queen discovered her, and offered her the choice of death by the poison bowl or the dagger. Tradition has it that she chose the former. i GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES Speaking of Blenheim in his " Observations on Modern Gardens,'* Wheatley says : " The sides are open lawn. On that farthest from the house formerly stood the palace of Henry II., celebrated in many an ancient ditty as ' Fair Rosamund's Bower.' ' A little clear stream, which rises there, is by the country people still called " Fair Rosamund's Well." Since at Blenheim the remains of a Roman Villa were found, it is possible that the trees in Henry's " Parke" were survivors of those that had been in the garden of that Villa ; and if so, Blenheim may claim to be the most ancient, as it is one of the finest examples of landscape gardening, in the country. The first English writer on Gardens was one Alexander Mark- ham, foster-brother of Richard Coeur de Lion who became a professor in the University of Paris, and towards the end of his life, Abbot of the Augustinian convent of Cirencester. In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a poem entitled, " John the Gardener," composed in the fourteenth century, that gives practical advice upon sowing and grafting ; and a fifteenth century manuscript still extant, contains a treatise bearing the wordy title : ' For a man to know in which time of the year it is best for a man to plant trees, also to make a tree bear all manner of fruit of divers colours and odours, with many other things." The reader is advised to give due attention to the signs of the Zodiac, for in that age astrology the forerunner of astronomy con- cerned with the supposed influence of the stars on terrestrial affairs, determined the times to sow and to graft ; and the efforts of the alchemist to transmute inferior metal into gold were rivalled by the attempt of the horticulturist to produce hybrid varieties of flowers and fruit peaches with the kernels of nuts, stoneless cherries, pomegranates from peaches, and so forth. Chaucer is a rich mine in which to dig for information on the subject of medieval gardens. He took many of his plots from Boccaccio. ' The Black Death," the most devastating of the five visitations of the plague in the fourteenth century, of which the Italian poet, in the introduction to the ** Decameron " gives a vivid and terrible description, swept through Europe reaching Florence, where sixty thousand persons are said to have died, in 1348, when Chaucer was eight years old. Boccaccio's lavish praises 2 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS of the garden wherein Fiametto and her companions took refuge, and which he likened to a Paradise on earth have almost their counterpart in Chaucer's " Romaunt of the Rose," in which he describes : A " garden fair to see," bounded by a high, embattled wall, and entered only by " a wicked smal. ..." " So fair it was, that trusteth wel It seemed a place esperitual For certes ! as at my devys There is no place in Paradys So good in for to dwelle or be As in that garden thoughte me." He describes the concert of the birds the nightingale, the finch, the laverock (sky lark), the throstle, the mavis, and the turtle, each one seeking to eclipse the other in the sweetness of its song truly a chorus known to few foreign lands. He tells us also of another garden : " A garden saw I, full of bloomy bowes Upon a river in a grene mede . . . With flowers whyte, blew, yeloe and rede." The poet of the " Canterbury Tales " died in 1400, and thirty- seven years later another British singer, James I. of Scotland, fell by the hands of assassins at Perth. His poetic genius was of no mean order, but I fear Scotland may scarcely claim him exclusively, since it was nurtured in England, where he was a captive for nineteen years. From his prison at Windsor he beheld the fair young daughter of the Earl of Sussex walking in the garden below, and fell in love with her. She ultimately became his Queen. In his beautiful poem, " The King's Quhair," he describes the garden : " So thick the boughis and the leavis greene Beshaded all the alleys that there were, And mids of every arbour might be seen The sharp greene sweete juniper, Growing so fair with branches here and there. " And on the smalle greene twistie sat The little nightingale and sung So loud and clear, the hymis consecrat Of lovis use, now soft, now loud, the wallis rung Right of their song." 3 I* Then, walking beneath his tower, he espies the maiden and thus apostrophizes her : " Ah sweet ! are ye a worldly creature Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature ? " Or are ye God Cupides own princess And coniin are to loose me out of band ? Or are ye very Nature the goddess That have depainted with yr heavenly hand This garden full of flowers as they stand ? " The mediaeval " arbour " here referred to, according to W. C. Hazlitt, was not a summer-house as we understand it, but a garden within a garden, sufficiently large to enclose great trees. He quotes in support of this statement the ancient rhyme : " And in the garden, as I wccne Was an arbour fair and grecne ; And in the arbour was a tree. A fairer in the world might never be." In the King's poem before quoted, however, the word " arbour " is so used as to convey much of its present meaning a meaning which it had indisputably acquired at the beginning of the sixteenth century. So early as the first century after Christ the English climate had been eulogized by Tacitus as favourable to the cultivation of all vegetables and fruits except the vine and the olive. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that melons, cucumbers, and many of the more expensive products of the kitchen garden were common in England as early as the reign of Edward III. But the Wars of the Roses interrupted agriculture, and these vegetables after- wards were unknown, until the reign of Henry VIII., when the art of gardening came to a new birth. There was for some time a curious prejudice against hops, and in the reign of Henry VI. Parliament was petitioned against the " wicked weed." But in 1576 Reginald Scott published a pamphlet entitled, " The Perfect Platform of a Hoppe Garden." Potatoes were not in common use before the middle of the seventeenth century. A writer in the " Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland " in 1753, though himself of opinion that Sir Walter Raleigh brought them over, remarks that " the- 4 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS public is much obliged for the cultivation of them to the anonymous author of ' England's Happiness increased, or a Remedy against succeeding Dear Years, by a Plantation of Potatoes'" (1664). And he further tells us that " sallads," carrots, and turnips, and cabbages, were brought over from Holland, And we read of pumpkins, garlic, onions and peas. 1 Rassiris " (raisins) are said to have formed part of the second course of the institution feast of Archbishop Nevil in 1464 ; if this be true, they must have come from abroad. Pippins were introduced in 1514, and the " pale gooseberry " about the same time ; and so well have we succeeded with the gooseberry, that we have come almost to regard it as indigenous. On the other hand, though both oranges and figs were certainly known in England in the reign of Henry VIII., orange trees have never flourished here in the open, nor have fig trees done much better. The two famous fig trees mentioned in the account of Lambeth Palace, are descended from those planted in the Archiepiscopal garden by Cardinal Pole, and were then regarded as " trees of curiosity " and very carefully nurtured. It is said that the first mulberry trees were those in the Protector Somerset's garden at Sion, Middlesex, and were doubtless planted under the auspices of Dr. Turner, physician to Edward VI., of whom I shall have more to say. However, according to others, the mulberry was first planted in the gardens at Hatfield. It seems to have been James I., and not Queen Elizabeth as sometimes supposed, who, with a view to the establishment of the silk industry in this country, caused the mulberry tree to be planted freely in the South of England. That strawberries were common in England in the sixteenth century we have Shakespearean authority for stating, for Gloucester says in Richard III. : "When I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there. I do beseech you send for some of them." But whether Shakespeare was guilty of an anachronism in mentioning the fruit as having been grown in this country a hundred years earlier, I do not pretend to know. We read of peaches, and even citrons, and attempts were made to cultivate the grape, but without success. An essay on gardening by a certain Thomas Hills, which appeared about 1560, shows a distinct advance both in the theory 5 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES and practice of horticulture. He recommends the planting of hedges of briars and thorns, and dwells much on the maze, or labyrinth, an example of which we see at Hampton Court. Indeed, in Hills' time no self-respecting horticulturist would have laid out a garden of any importance, without one of these curious places in which to " sport at times." Such treatises, and the various herbals, were written avowedly to advance the science of horticulture ; but there are many accidental allusions to garden- ing and flower-growing in the general literature of the age, which throw valuable .. and illuminating sidelights on the history of gardening in England in the Middle Ages. In the chapter on Sion reference is made to Turner and his herbal. Following his lead, in Elizabeth's reign, appeared a notable work, the " Herbal or Historic of Plantes,"by John Gerarde, who, as we shall find when we come to the Chelsea" Physicke Garden," owned the first herb garden in this country. The earliest on' the Continent was that established at Padua. Gerarde's garden was attached to his house in Holborn, and must have been of con- siderable size, since he was able to raise eleven hundred different plants and trees. He was a citizen and surgeon-apothecary of London, and head gardener to Lord Burleigh. Nor were medicinal plants and herbs forgotten. They were cultivated by the thrifty dames of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in every farm-house, manor house, and baronial hall. Dwelling for the most part, as they did, in country districts where intercommunication between towns, and villages, and outlying hamlets, was painfully slow and difficult, and in an age when the science of medicine was in its infancy, in default of the presence of well-equipped disciples of Esculapius, they were content, to a great extent, to practise the healing art themselves ; and if many of their nostrums, as we find from the herbal literature, were extravagant and absurd, and calculated, according to modern ideas, to do their patients more harm than good, they themselves brought often to the service of humanity if not science and learning at any rate, skill, initiative, and common sense, as well as the wisdom which may be derived from practical experience, and handed down from mother to daughter. But there can be but little doubt that, up to the sixteenth century, we owe the preservation, if not positively the new birth of the science, after the Wars of the Roses, 6 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS largely to the monks. They were able and industrious gardeners, and often skilled in the application of the herbs and simples they so assiduously cultivated ; and in remote neighbourhoods, in the absence of the leech or apothecary, must frequently have been called upon to undertake, not only the cure of souls, but the cure of bodies also. We owe a good deal to the " monks of old " ; their place knows them no more, though such names as " Grey Friars " and " Covent "or Convent ' Garden " are suggestive of the old Romish times. It would seem from the illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum and elsewhere, that the English mediaeval gardens were, for the most part, square in shape, and had grass plots, sanded walks, and little alleys and borders. Box played a great part in the outlining of these borders, and there was generally in each domain a " Privy Garden," or playing place. A little later there was invariably a bowling-green. Among the characteristic features of the Tudor garden may also be cited the " Mount," by means of which in a flat country a view of the landscape could be obtained. It was ascended by a winding path, described by an old writer as being " like a cockle-shell, to come to the top without paign." Mounts did not go out of fashion until the boundary wall was superseded in the eighteenth century by the sunk fence, or " Ha ha." In large Tudor establishments there was often a gallery leading from the great house to the pleasure-grounds, by which they could be reached under cover ; and even in the time of Erasmus these and other garden buildings were sometimes frescoed inside, a fashion which came from Italy. Erasmus speaks of a garden with such galleries, the doors painted in imitation of grass and flowers, and the walls representing woods. At a later period Evelyn describes one which he had seen at Rucil, (that he has the bad taste to commend) in which " the arch of Constantine was painted on a wall in oyle as large as the real one at Rome, so well done that even a man skilled in painting may mistake it for stone and sculpture ; " and so cleverly was the sky painted in the opening of the arch, that birds dashed themselves against it, thinking to fly through. The old game of bowls is comparatively little played nowadays, except by rustics in remote country villages ; but at the time of 7 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES which I am writing a banked-up bowling-green was attached to almost every considerable residence, and answered the same purpose as the modern tennis-ground : or perhaps it would be more correct to say of the golf links ; for though more limited in area, it provided suitable recreation ground for men of mature years ; and it is said that Drake was playing bowls when the Armada was sighted. At any rate, it was the favourite pastime of the sturdy squires and yeomen of England, just as the maypole dance was that of her youths and maidens. It was under the Tudors that English gardens first assumed a national character. The Tudors were richer than the Plantagenets, and more secure in possession, and had also the advantage of the new learning of the Renaissance that, ere long reaching our shores and providing a stimulus to every form of intellectual activity, inspired fresh ideas and undertakings in horticulture, scarcely less than in literature and art. Henry VIII. had done much to encourage gardening and garden-planning, and justly celebrated appear to have been the royal gardens of Nonsuch, near Ewcll, in Surrey ; but these, together with the palace, have since been entirely destroyed. Although greatly altered, some portions of those at Hampton Court yet testify to the care which Henry VIII. spent on their embellishment when the Palace and Grounds passed into his hands. Not always commendable, however, were his schemes, if it be true that " Beasts and the columns they stood upon" were a prominent feature of the Hampton Court Gardens during the period of his ownership. At the time of Elizabeth's accession, English gardens had probably arrived at their highest beauty, and since as yet they were but little affected by French and Dutch notions of garden- planning, they had acquired that peculiar, indefinable charm that we have learnt to associate with the words, " an old English garden." In Elizabeth's reign a passion for travel and discovery awoke, with large results ; one of which was the advance of horticulture as a science. For a new impulse was given to its study when men of the type of Cavendish and Raleigh, animated by a keen spirit of adventure and a desire for wider horizons, set forth to navigate summer seas in the far Indies, and, ere long, to explore the newly- discovered continent of America. AND CELEBRATED GARDENS These travellers brought back with them to this country the seeds and roots of foreign plants and herbs, which quickly adapted themselves to our climate : and as Elizabeth, who is said to have loved flowers, like her father encouraged gardening, when once the fame of Raleigh's collections had spread abroad it will be seen when we come to the Chelsea " Physicke Garden" that more than one distinguished botanist and horticulturalist was attracted to this country from the Continent. The orchard, in Elizabethan times, is frequently mentioned, and would almost appear to be synonymous with the garden. In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero, standing with Margaret in Leonato's garden, in which the scene is laid, bids her go seek out Beatrice, and " Whisper her ear and tell her, I and Ursula Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse Is all of her : say that thou overheard'st us And bid her steal into the pleached bower, Where honeysuckles, ripen'd by the sun, Forbid the sun to enter . . * there will she hide her, To listen to our purpose." The 'pleached" (i.e., the intertwined and interwoven bower) the maze, and the bowling-green, were all indispensable adjuncts of the pleasure-grounds attached to the abode of any person of social importance. The word " arbour," which, as previously remarked, had to us a doubtful meaning as employed in Chaucer's time, had in Shake- speare's day certainly come to be used more in our modern sense. The arbour was then commonly constructed of timber. Henry VIII., in the Privy Purse expenses in 1593, was charged live shillings for the making of an arbour at " Baynardes Castell." I think it is only in the same restricted sense that Shakespeare, in the passage quoted above, put into Hero's mouth the word ' bower." He means an arbour in the modern sense, but a rather large one. Such a " bower " Horace Walpole had in mind when planning his garden at Strawberry Hill more than one hundred and fifty years later. He wrote : " My bower is determined, but not at all what it should be. ... I had determined that the outside should be of treillage (trellis). . . . Rosamond's bower, as you 9 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES and I, and Tom Hearne, know, was a labyrinth ; but as my territory will admit of a very small clew, I lay aside all thoughts of mazy habitation, though a bower is very different from an arbour, and must have more chambers than one." Gardens probably assumed the definite character to which I have referred, before the reign of Elizabeth, and there was little or no variation from this during that of her successor. The gardens of Hatfield, where Elizabeth as Princess spent so much of her time, are typical of the period. There is the pleached, or platted, alley and the little " Privy Garden " enclosed by it. John Tradescent. who succeeded his father as gardener to Queen Elizabeth, and whose son founded the famous Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, was gardener to the first Lord Salisbury, and ultimately to Charles I. English gardens in Tudor times were distinguished from foreign ones by the evidence of the gardener's greater pleasure in their culti- vation. We are told that to make up for the disadvantage of our damp atmosphere, and a comparative lack of sunshine, the English 4 indulged in bright flower parterres rather than in the use of coloured earth, sculpture, and vases," as abroad. The Tudors introduced the " knot," or intricately designed, box-bordered flower-bed, of which, later, we hear so much. They rejoiced also in sweet-smelling herbs; " the comfortable smell of their rooms," says Lavinius Leminius, a Dutchman, who paid a visit to England in 1560, " cheered me up and entirely delighted my senses," and this was owing to the English custom of strewing their houses with fragrant herbs and decorating them with flowers. Mar- joram, thyme, rosemary, etc., were largely cultivated, and in many cases formed the borders of the above-mentioned " knots," that, as it were, divided the parterre into compartments. In many instances the centre of this flowery area was occupied by a fountain, and sometimes open conduits conducted water to all parts of the garden. A fountain-pool might also often be found in the middle of the turfed, or stone-paved fore-court in front of the mansion. The servants' offices, stables, etc., surrounding the base, or " bass-court," usually lay at one side of this fore-court. On the other were the pleasure gardens and parterres ; very often a wide terrace overlooked the garden, so raised as to com- mand a view of the parterre. 10 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS The garden thus overlooked would be very gay indeed, and very sweet also. In the sixteenth century Spenser could write of one wherein ' Nature lavish, in her best attire Puts forth sweet odours and alluring sight And art with her contending doth aspire T" excell the natural with made delight." He further describes how all things " fair and pleasant " in this garden abound " in riotous excess," which surely includes the English singing-birds. William Lawson, in his " New Orchard," published in 1618, remarks that " Blackbirds on a May morning may gratify the senses," but he had rather want their company than his fruit ; but " nightingales," he says, " are another matter ; a brood of them is a chefe grace ; but they will clear you of cata- pillars and noysome wormes, and the gentle Robin Redbreast, and the silly wren will help in this." The gardens that I have been chiefly describing were, of course, those of the noble, or the squire, or, at any rate, of the substantial yeoman and richer citizen. They were the pleasure places of palaces and manor houses, and, in an earlier age, of the feudal castle, when, unless they overflowed beyond the walls, they were necessarily circumscribed. They appear always to have taken up a considerable part of the demesne, and even in Plantagenet times were used for pleasure and refreshment as well as for utility. 4 Wherein," asks Lawson, " do kings and the great most delight ? And whither do they withdraw themselves from the troublous affairs of State, being tyred with the hearing and judging of litigious controversies ? choked (as it were) with the close Ayre of their sumptuous buildings, their stomacks cloyed with a variety of Banquets, their ears filled and overburdened with tedious dis- coursings ? Whither but in their orchards ? made and prepared^ dressed and destinated for that purpose, to renue and refresh their sences, and to call home their over-wearied spirits, it is (no doubt) a comfort to them to set open their casements into a most delicate Garden and Orchard, whereby they may not only see that wherein they are so much delighted, but also to give fresh and sweet and pleasant Ayre to Galleries and Chambers." W. C. Hazlitt is of opinion that the cottage garden cannot be confidently referred to a date anterior to Worledge, whose 11 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES " Sy sterna Horticultural," published in 1677, was one of the earliest manuals for the guidance of those laying out and culti- vating a garden ; this is a rash statement, for we have only to refer to Shakespeare again, to disprove it. In The Winter's Tale, Perdita, in the Shepherd's Cottage, bestows upon her foster-father's guests, flowers cottage-grown to suit all ages : of " Carnations and streak'd gillyflowers," she says, " our rustic garden's barren," but adds, " Here's flowers for you " (addressing the Greybeards) : " Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, The marigold that goes to bed wi' the sun And with him rises weeping, these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age Then turning to Florizel (and others present), she says : " I would I had some flowers o' the Spring that might Become your time of day, and yours, and yours Oh. Proserpina, For the flowers now that frighted thou let'st fall From Dis's waggon ! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty, violets dim. But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses. That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength a inalady Most incident to maids ; bold oxlips and The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one ! " It is clear that Perdita describes here flowers that in their season must have been blowing in her cottage garden ready to her hand ; and that Shakespeare loved such flowers well, because they were of English growth, for he knew nothing of foreign flora, there being no shadow of evidence that he ever crossed the Channel, or even went nearer to it than Dover. There, as everybody knows, is a cliff which bears his name, but since Edgar in King Lear exaggerates its height in his description of it, it is questionable whether Shakespeare ever actually beheld it, whether he is but giving hearsay evidence. He was an islander, and moreover a lowlander, and whether he placed his dramatis personce in 12 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS Italy, Denmark, or Bohemia, their environment, in his mental picture of them, is always an English one. The action of The Winter's Tale takes place ostensibly in Bohemia, but Perdita is essentially an English maiden, and the plants she tended are British ones. Therefore, in some of the loveliest lines in English verse, spoken by Shakespeare's sweetest heroine, we find the fact established, that sixty years before Worledge's Manual appeared, if not earlier, the peasant's humble cot, and the yeoman's home- stead, as well as the baron's castle and the royal demesne, had each its own garden-plot. It is, however, pretty certain that up to the fourteenth century, and perhaps even up to the sixteenth, the English garden must everywhere have much resembled a modern kitchen-garden, in which we frequently find the commoner kinds of flowers growing side by side with vegetables. The orchard and the garden, until after 1618, were one. The smaller gardens would very much resemble what we now call a ' cabbage patch," and all evidence goes to show that in earlier times, in the ground attached even to lordly residences, herbs designed for culinary uses were allowed to grow up together, side by side with flowers and flowering shrubs. From all the foregoing it is clear that long before the seventeenth century the garden played a considerable part in the life of the English people. It would naturally do so, for the houses of the commonalty, especially in towns, were confined, gloomy, and airless. They were badly lit by small, deeply-recessed, heavily- leaded lattice windows, such as are still to be seen in old, thatched, gabled, and half-timbered cottages in some parts of the country- habitations that are deliciously picturesque, but insanitary. Even the larger farm-houses, where the yeomanry dwelt, and the abodes of substantial citizens in town, were dark by reason of their heavily- mullioned windows and thick walls, and also because in cities the streets were narrow, and the upper story of a dwelling com- monly projected beyond the lower, and sometimes almost touched its opposite neighbour, leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible between. Such houses could not be good to live in. Yet the English race has always been ruddy and healthy, the men stal- wart, the women fresh and fair. From this we may infer that not only the country gentry, always addicted to sport, and the peasant who tilled the soil, but the citizen also, lived very much 13 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES in/ the open. Many of the most stirring episodes in English history happened there in the green fields, or on the King's highway. We picture Queen Elizabeth less in the council chamber, than in her girlhood, in the old garden at Hatfield ; or at Greenwich stairs, stepping from her barge on to the velvet cloak that the astute Raleigh sacrified in order that the Royal stocking should not be sullied by Thames mud, or haranguing her troops at Tilbury when an invasion of England was threatened. I venture to think that ballads, nursery rhymes, and lyrics innumerable, attest the fact that the life of our forefathers was much more alfresco than is ours. When " all the maids of Islington went forth to sport and play," it is safe to assume that the maidens of other towns and hamlets did so also. The lover woos his mistress with the promise of country joys : " Come, live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove That hill and valley, dale and field And all scraggy mountains yield." Again : " Ye little birds that sit and sing Amidst the shady valleys, And see how Phillis sweetly walks Within her garden alleys, Go, pretty birds, about her bower ; Sing, pretty birds, she may not cower : Ah me ! methinks I see her frown I Ye pretty warblers, warble ! " And Herrick, to Corinna gone a-maying sings : " 'Tis sin, Nay, profanation to keep in, Whereas a thousand virgins on this day Spring, sooner than the lark, to fetch in May." Old songs tell the same story it is everywhere the outdoor call that is strong. " Come, lasses and lads, get leave of your dads And away to the Maypole hie." Or: " Boys and girls, come out to play, The moon doth shine as bright as day." 14 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS Then comes the reference to gardens : " Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow ? " And many other examples. I have made no study of folk- lore, but I cannot help thinking that though some of these rhymes and songs may be comparatively modern, others bear the mark of antiquity, and that the origin of the simplest of these may be traced back to customs and observances that have fallen into disuse ; to beliefs, traditions, and superstitions, themselves for- gotten ; or to some incident, maybe, in the life of mediaeval England, which, did we but know it, would invest the childish rhymes and the bucolic songs with even greater charm, interest, and significance, than on the surface they may seem to possess. If the Rush-bearing still practised in some parts of the country, if the festival of Harvest Home, if the ceremonies attendant on bringing in the May, if the crowning of the fairest and most virtuous maiden of the village annually, as Queen of the May, if Milton's lovely " Hymn on May Morning " mean anything at all, they point to an outdoor manner of existence practically universal, and in which garden and meadow alike played an important part ; and surely " Little Jack Horner who sat in the corner " is the only evidence forthcoming on the other side that the youth of " Merrie England " did not live out of doors even at Christmas-time ! I am indebted to W. C. Hazlitt for an amusing story, which gives indirect support to the theory that the English always lived much in plein air. A man, whose demesne probably sloped to the water's edge, having invited a friend to dinner, contrary to the wish of his wife, insisted that the repast should be served on the river's bank. The lady could not endure contradiction, and sat sulking, with her back to the stream. The more he begged her to look pleasant, the farther she pushed her chair from the table, till at last, backing too near the edge of the river, she fell in. The husband, jumping into a boat, insisted on going against the tide in search of her, and when his friend remonstrated, urging him to look for her down-stream, he refused, saying that, as his wife had been so opposite all her life, he was sure her body would float against the current. 15 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES There seems to have been but little change in the methods of horticulture, or in the character of the gardens themselves, under the Stuarts, until we arrive at the reign of Charles II. During the Commonwealth little gardening was done, and the garden of Evelyn's family mansion at Wotton was one of the few laid out during the years of Cromwell's rule. Still, the taste for horticul- ture was not altogether dormant, since even one of Cromwell's most capable captains could indulge in it. General Lambert, second only to Monk in distinction, who in 1656 was Lord of the Manor of Wimbledon, when estranged for a time from Oliver, withdrew from public life, and devoted himself to the care of his garden, of which he was very fond. He was so successful in the cultivation of tulips and gillyflowers, that in a satirical pack of cards published during the Commonwealth, the eight of hearts bears a small full- length portrait of him, carrying in his right hand a tulip, beneath which is the legend, " Lambert Kt. of ye Golden Tulip." But by this time foreign influences were beginning to work. modifying the national character of the English garden as it had been under the Tudors. These influences, though not without trace of Dutch formality, were probably chiefly Italian and French. Later on the Dutch fashions, under William III. and Mary, were dominant. But, on the whole, during the reigns of James I. and Charles I. there were but few changes in the manner of laying out gardens. This was to be expected ; the same gardeners or their sons were living. ' Paradise Lost " gives us a hint of the style of garden most approved of in Milton's time ; elsewhere the blind poet of t he- Commonwealth speaks of those who " in trim gardens take their pleasure," but in his great epic he describes that wondrous garden wherein grew " Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose." Horace Walpole thinks he had some recollection of the famous pleasure grounds of Nonsuch, and of Theobalds, Lord Burleigh's garden, when he wrote : " The crisped brooks Ran nectar ! visiting each plant, and fed Flowers worthy of Paradise ; which not nice art In beds and curious knots, but nature boon Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain/' 16 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS Obviously the reference is to a fashion prevalent at the time, of planting in beds and plots, a fashion that was not set in the Garden of Eden, and therefore not commendable. Such, as far as I can gather, was " the happy garden state " of our ancestors up to the eighteenth century. Old-world gardens, in many respects unchanged, may yet be found " in and round London," to one or two of which I shall later introduce you. They are touched, it is true, by " decay's defacing finger," but they are still flowery, shady, and sunshiny too. In them old- fashioned flowers the cabbage rose, the sweet william, the stock, the monkshood, the snapdragon, and the pansy flourish ; and in spite of dividing walks of springy turf, and borders of ancient box, elbow each other in their eagerness to invade the territory of the turnip and the cabbage. There, in the "months of April, May and June, the lilac and the hawthorn intermingle boughs and blossoms, and, in August and September, peaches slowly ripen on sunny walls, whilst apples grow rosy in other quarters. In such a garden, reminiscent of the time when orchard and garden were one, apple-trees, pear-trees, and plum-trees, hoary with age, mossy with long inertia (in some sense an illustration of the proverb that "rolling stones gather no moss"), mount guard over the vegetable kingdom, dropping windfalls for the children to pick up. They stretch gnarled and twisted arms benevolently over the rosemary and southernwood, the lavender and the rose-bushes, as though in mute benediction on the little ones playing, or on the lovers seated, beneath. The names of four distinguished Englishmen, who were experi- mental and practical gardeners, stand out conspicuously in the history of horticulture in this country during the years intervening between the beginning of the seventeenth and the latter half of the eighteenth century. They are Francis Bacon Lord St. Albans, Sir William Temple, John Evelyn the diarist, and Horace Walpole. The ideas of the aristocratic Bacon on the subject of pleasure- grounds are on a grandiose scale. In his famous essay, " Of Gardens," he says that the ideal garden should comprise not less than thirty acres of ground, and he tells us that he is speaking only of those that are " indeed Prince-like." Dying in 1626, in the second year of the reign of the unhappy Charles I., it is probable that, owing to the vast ness of his 17 2 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES ideas in horticulture, and the difficulties to be met with in carrying them out, Bacon left the sciences of horticulture and floriculture very much where he found them, and he himself being under a cloud, his various schemes would be dis- credited. I do not propose to dwell upon his theories, which are well known to all readers of his essays. ' God Almighty," he says, " first Planted a Garden, and indeed it is the purest of Humaine pleasures. It is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of Man." He does " not like Images Cut out in Juniper, or other Garden Stuff e. They be for Children." He recommends Fountains as " a great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pooles marre all and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs." He gives a long list of flowers and plants that flourished in his day, among them, all those that are mentioned by Spenser and Shakespeare. "I do hold," he prettily says, " in the Roy all ordering of Gardens, there ought to be a garden for all the moneths of the yeare ; in which severally, things of Beauty may be there in Season ; ' and then he proceeds to unfold the wonderful pageant of the procession of Flora, and under the heading of each month gives a catalogue surprisingly long of her offspring, beginning with things that are " Greene all Winter," and winding up with " These Particulars are for the Climate of London." " Roses Damask and Red" he says, " are fast flowers of their Smels " ; three hundred years ago " damask " so often used by the poets in describing a maiden's cheek meant pink, not dark crimson, as with us. When I was a child I wondered why the delicately-fringed, sweetly-scented little flower which I was taught to call a " pink " was so named, since, unlike Burns' daisy, the common example was not even ' crimson- tipped," but pure white. Bacon teaches us that the modern name is etymologically incorrect. Pink would appear to be a corruption of Pinct or pinked stabbed, pierced, decorated by scallops as the petals of this flower certainly are. " Prime-Roses " is a better word than primrose. " Dammasin " is prettier than damson ; but one does not at once recognize in Bacon's " Lelacke Tree," the lilac, the favourite of our April gardens, with its heavy clusters of pale purple flowers to my mind the fairest and most fragrant of all the flowering trees of our English spring. 18 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS Far less well known than Bacon's essay " Of Gardens," is his ' Sylva Sylvarum" or " Natural Historic in Ten Centuries, "* published after the illustrious author's death. His studies and practical experiments in horticulture are recorded in detail in the- fifth, sixth, and part of the seventh centuries, of this learned work. Nothing was too large and nothing too small to attract and engage the attention of this extraordinary man. Lord Chancellor of England, and occupied with the highest affairs of state, he could yet turn from them at any moment and bring the vast powers of his intellect to the consideration of the method of raising straw- berries, of bringing sun to ripen wall-fruit, of grafting, of water- ing, and to the discussion of the causes of the degeneracy of plants, and of the colours of fruit and flowers ; and, as one of his admirers puts it, " he could descend from the Woolsack to investigate the economy of manure beds." As before stated, horticulture made no advance during the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and not until the Restoration was any change in the character of English gardens apparent. Then a new interest was awakened. French gardening had made progress, and Charles II. and his exiled courtiers, had had excep- tional opportunities for studying its methods, and had imbibed a preference for the French manner of laying out pleasure-grounds. With Le Notre and other great gardeners of Louis XIV., spacious- ness was the chief desideratum in gardens ; and these were laid out with mathematical precision, but no great originality of design. And, as Ruskin says, in a passage which, although referring to another art, may with propriety be applied here : " Grandeur depends on proportion and design, not, except in a quite secon- dary degree, on magnitude. Mere size has, indeed, under all disadvantages, some definite value, and so has mere splendour. But even splendour may be purchased at too heavy a cost." Ere long, much of the French character impressed itself upon English gardens, so that before the end of Charles' reign all traces of the mediae valism that had lingered round the gardens of Henry VIII. had vanished. Size and elegance, or what passed for elegance, usurped the place of the picturesqueness and privacy of the gardens of the Tudors ; the galleries, the mount (that, according to Bacon, should properly be thirty feet high, offering a view from its summit over the high walls of the enclosure) had been swept away, and a 19 a* GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES flat effect was aimed at. " Knots and parterres," we are told, " became so elaborate that the small tortured spaces between the box patternings were less and less homes for plants, more and more filled with coloured sand." Topiary work that is, clipping and training trees and shrubs into fantastic shapes now came into fashion, but as yet was not carried to excess, and the seven- teenth-century garden, no doubt, had much beauty. J. D. Sped- ding says : " There is about the Jacobean Garden an air of scholarlism and courtliness, a flavour of dreamland and Arcadia and Italy a touch of the Archaic and classical yet the thing is saved from utter artificiality by our English love of outdoor life " and also, I suggest, by that independence of restraint that is innate in the British character. And ever we find the English gardener, except when by force of circumstances he came very much under foreign influences, indisposed towards formalism ; though of coiirse the ideal garden holds the balance between nature and art. John Evelyn, author of the famous diary, did much more than Bacon, with all his theories and experiments, to advance horti- culture. Whilst Bacon schemed and talked, Evelyn was prac- tical. He was born in 1620 at Dorking, of parents who occupied a good position, and he was educated at Balliol. A devoted Royalist, he yet seems to have placed prudence before patriotism, as he understood it, for, lest he and his brother should be exposed to ruin by their espousal of the King's cause without any com- pensating advantage to His Majesty, he joined the King's army only to leave it at the end of three days. After travelling on the Continent for four years, he returned to England, and settled in 1652, at Sayes Court, near Deptford, where he was able to indulge his horticultural tastes. But Evelyn was a courtier as well as a gardener, and after the Restoration we find him much at White- hall, and occupying several official posts. And he was from the beginning a prominent member of the newly-founded Royal Society. His diary not published until a hundred and twelve years after his death, and of which Sir Walter Scott said he " had never seen so rich a mine" is no less illuminating in the light it throws on the history of his day, than that of his lively contemporary, Pepys. From time to time in its pages pages that deal with the important 20 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS events of seventy years we glean something of his interest in gardens and gardening. In laying out his estate at Deptford he tells us that he first began with the " oval garden." When he went there it was merely a rough field of one hundred acres, " with scarcely a hedge to it," but he covered it with groves, walks, and plantations. When, in 1694, he went to live at Wotton, with his brother (to whose property he succeeded five years later), he let Sayes Court to Admiral Benbow, on condition that he kept it up, which he failed to do. In 1698 Benbow sublet it to the Czar Peter the Great, at that time visiting the dockyard at Deptford. He proved " a right nasty tenant." So great was the injury done to the property by him and his retinue, that Benbow, who was responsible to Evelyn, called in Sir Christopher Wren with London, the King's gardener, as his assistant to estimate the damage, which was assessed at 350 9s. 6d. Irreparable injury was done to trees and shrubs ; and no wonder, for one of Czar Peter's refined amusements was to be wheeled in a barrow through the garden hedges, and among the things specified in the inventory as having been damaged, were three wheelbarrows ! Evelyn translated a work called " The French Gardener," which has much to do with pickling, preserving, and drying fruits ; and Hazlitt says that " Jam, as an ingredient of our culinary economy, does not date much farther back than the middle of the seventeenth century," when Evelyn published his adaptation from the French. But Evelyn accomplished a greater feat than popularizing- preserves. In Tudor times it had been complained that men " were more studious to cut down trees than to plant them," and in the reign of Charles II. the scarcity of timber began to make itself severely felt. What was to be done ? Wood was wanted for ships, and none was forthcoming. The Navy Board turned to the newly-founded Royal Society for help ; and Evelyn, as the member most competent to advise on the subject, took the matter up, and in 1664 published his ' Sylva," by which, as the King afterwards told him, he had induced many people to mend their broken estates, and the woods ' which the greedy rebels had wasted and made havoc of." 21 The result was that a century and a half later Isaac Disraeli remarked : " Inquire at the Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson were constructed, and they will tell you that it was with the oaks that the genius of Evelyn planted." Sir William Temple, had he no other claim to attention, would command it as the patron of Swift, who for years was his secretary : and also as the husband of Dorothy Osborne, whose charming letters to him during a long courtship are universally admired. My object in this book is primarily to write about the gardens I have painted, but I desire also to interest the reader in the men and women who made, or owned, and in many cases, loved them. Therefore, I claim the right to be discursive at times, and occasion- ally to dwell upon events apparently irrelevant, and if I should linger longer than may seem necessary over the early history of Sir William Temple and Dorothy Osborne, his wife, it is because, as a horticulturist, he comes legitimately into my scheme, and also because never was there a more chequered and prettier love- story than theirs. In its very opening it is romantic ! Temple, a youth of twenty, and described as a lively, agreeable young man of fashion (fresh from Cambridge), son of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, who was a follower rather than a keen partisan of Cromwell, sets out upon his travels abroad, in the year before King Charles was brought to the scaffold. ' On his road to France," says Macaulay, in his fascinating essay, " he fell in with the son and daughter of Sir Peter Osborne. Sir Peter held Guernsey for the King, and the young people were, like their father, warm for the Royalist cause. At an inn where they stopped in the Isle of Wight, the brother amused himself with inscribing on the windows his opinion of the ruling powers. For this instance of ' malignancy ' the whole party were arrested and brought before the governor. The sister, trusting to the tenderness which even in those troublous times scarcely any gentleman of any party failed to show where a woman was con- cerned, took the crime on herself, and was impiediately set at liberty with her fellow-companion." The incident made a deep impression upon Temple. He fell in .love with the charming Dorothy (who was accounted a beauty), and whose vivacity and sweetness are shown in her letters. Although she~ reciprocated his feeling and accepted his 22 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS addresses, the course of their true love never did run smooth And little wonder, since " the father of the hero was sitting in the Long Parliament ; the father of the heroine was commanding in Guernsey for King Charles ; and even when the war was ended," continues Macaulay, " and Sir Peter Osborne returned to his seat at Chicksands, the prospects of the lovers were scarcely less gloomy. Sir John Temple had a more advantageous alliance in view for his son. Dorothy Osborne was in the meantime besieged by as many suitors as were drawn to Belmont by the fame of Portia." Among them was Henry Cromwell, son of the Lord- General, afterwards the Protector. Dorothy's relatives were bitterly opposed to her intended marriage with Temple, and she had to defend her lover's character from all sorts of attacks. She held firm, and when at last, after seven years, her constancy was on the point of being rewarded, she fell ill of smallpox ; she escaped with her life, but her beauty was gone. Temple, however, was not lacking in chivalry, and the pair were married. Hereafter we hear little of Dorothy. Sir William Temple's fame as a statesman rests chiefly on the celebrated league by which England, Sweden, and the Netherlands, in 1668, united to curb the power of France under Louis XIV. But the sympathies of Charles II. were thoroughly French, and in 1670 he treacherously concluded another and secret treaty with France, the Treaty of Dover, which rendered Temple's work futile, and the great Triple Alliance, which Pepys, in his diary, calls " the only good thing that hath been done since the King came into England," inoperative. Temple thereupon retired to a small estate which he had purchased at Sheen, near Richmond, and threw himself with such ardour into horticulture that the fame of his fruit trees spread far and wide. He did not return to public life until the popular resentment against the French Alliance and the Dutch war rose to clamorous heights, and compelled Charles to send for him to negotiate a separate peace with Holland. For, easy and pleasure-loving as Charles was, and though served by unscrupulous ministers, he still had wit enough to seek to bind to his interests a man whose political character was unblemished, who was in high favour with the nation, and whose capacity might even at that hour have restored England to the position she had held abroad under Elizabeth and Cromwell. Over and over again 23 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES the King pressed upon Temple the office of Secretary of State ; over and over again he refused it !* On more than one occasion, as Macaulay tells us, when the country was in danger, " the Triple Alliance was mentioned with reverence in every debate, and the eyes of all men were turned to that quiet orchard, where the author of that great league was amusing himself with reading and gardening." He obeyed the royal command, it is true, and left his garden and his books as Cincinnatus left his plough ; but, his mission accomplished, -he returned to them, for his was not the sustained patriotism which at all risks must wait to see the vessel of the State floating smoothly in placid waters. Macaulay charges Temple with shirking responsibility and fear- ing to imperil a safe position by grasping at prizes which he might not reach, even when the best interests of his country demanded the risk. He " dreaded failure more than he desired success." " Fain would I climb but that I fear to fall," would almost seem to have been his motto, as it was that which Raleigh had engraved upon a window in Queen Elizabeth's presence. I think it possible that finer reasons may have influenced the man whom Dorothy Osborne loved during seven faithful years, and in whose career she was apparently content to merge her own strong individuality. Such a woman as Lady Temple would have been out of place at Whitehall, and Temple's firm rejection of place and power may have been partly due to his recognition of this fact, and his high appre- ciation of her. She seems to have been his companion in Ireland and at The Hague, and she probably shared his passion for flowers. Temple was an enthusiastic and very successful experimental gardener, and though undoubtedly his chief abilities lay in diplo- macy and politics, he loved to slip away from both to his " little nest " at Sheen. Among his diplomatic successes may be reckoned the part he took in bringing about a marriage between the Prince of Orange and the niece of Charles, the Lady Mary that union which, amid other and more important results, had ultimately so much to do with spreading the taste, in this country, for Dutch gardening and garden-planning. In 1699 Temple, who had been in Holland, returned to England at an urgent summons from Charles, and found the country in a fearful state. Eighteen years of misrule had wrought dire consequences. He patiently organized new schemes for 24 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS Government ; was elected to the new Parliament for Cambridge ; had a seat in the Cabinet that Council within a Council the new Privy Council of thirty, which was his own panacea for the evil he found. But at any moment of difficulty, at a crisis when violent passions were called forth, '* when the whole nation was con- vulsed by party spirit, he told his constituents that he should not again apply for their suffrages, and set off for Sheen, resolving never again to meddle with public affairs." Did Lady Temple applaud this conduct ? I wonder ! . Any- way, he held to his resolution, and says Macaulay : " The troubles which agitated the whole country did not reach the quiet orangery in which Temple loitered away several years without once seeing the smoke of London." The revolution came, and he remained neutral; but soon he transferred the loyalty which Macaulay stigmatizes as " lukewarm " to the new sovereign, who would only too gladly have made him his Secretary of State, would he have accepted office. " He paid court to William at Windsor, and William dined with him at Sheen." His eldest son died under distressing circumstances, and the family retired from Sheen to Moor Park, at a greater distance from London. There Temple passed the remainder of his life. 4 The air agreed with him, the soil was fruitful and well suited to an experimental farmer and gardener. The grounds were laid out with the angular regularity which Sir William had admired in the flower-beds of Haarlem and The Hague. A beautiful rivulet flowing from the hills of Surrey bounded the domain. But a straight canal which, bordered by a terrace, intersected the garden, was probably more admired by the lovers of the picturesque in that age." The form of garden which Sir William himself most approved was an oblong on a slope. In his essay upon " The Gardens of Epicurus, or of Gardening in the Year 1685," he says : " But after so much rambling into Ancient Tomes, and Remote Places, to return home and consider the present Way and Humour of our Gardening in England, which seem to have grown into such vogue, and to have been so mightily improved in Three and Four and Twenty years of His Majesty's reign, that perhaps few countries are before us ; either in the Elegance of our Gardens ; or in the number of our Plants, and I believe none equals us in the Variety of Fruits, which 25 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES may be justly called good ; and from the earliest Cherry and Strawberry to the last Apples and Pears, may furnish every Day of the circling year." To achieve this end, the production in this country of fruit in great abundance and variety, Temple himself worked assiduously. And perhaps we shall never know how much in this respect we owe to the author of the Triple Alliance. Lysons, who wrote in 1792, nearly one hundred years after Temple's death, speaks of the visits which King William III. was in the habit of paying to Sir William Temple at Moor Park, and of his futile efforts to induce him to become his Secretary of State. If the King called when Temple was laid up with the gout, Swift, the Irish amanuensis, was deputed to show him round the garden. On one of these occasions, it is said William offered to make Swift his Master of the Horse, and taught him how to cut asparagus in the Dutch manner. But far more interesting to many of us it is to know that pretty and dark-eyed Hester Johnson was about this time employed in Temple's household as waiting-maid to his sister, Lady Giffard, w r ho lived with him, and that in the garden at Moor Park Swift first made love to Stella. William III. no doubt would have had everybody, not only cut asparagus, but also lay out gardens in the Dutch manner. At any rate, Dutch taste in garden-planning now came much into vogue ; and it continued so, despite all ridicule and criticism, for many years. By the time of Addison the love of stiffness and topiary work had gone to such extravagant lengths that The Spectator inveighs against it. " The Chinese," he points out, " laugh at the planta- tions of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line ; because they say anyone may place trees in equal rows and uni- form figures. . . . Our British gardeners, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the mark of the scissors upon every plant and Bush. . . . For my own part, I would rather look upon a Tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion of Boughs and Branches than when it is cut and trimmed into Mathematical Figures, and cannot but fancy that an Orchard in Flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the labyrinths of the most finished Parterre." 26 AND CELEBRATED GARDENS But then Addison, as he himself says, was one who was looked upon " as a humourist in gardening ... if a field flower pleased him he gave it a place in his garden ... he always thought a kitchen garden a more pleasant sight than the finest orangery and artificial greenhouse : " he owns himself to be in another respect " very whimsical," for his garden invites into it all the birds of the country ; he offers springs and shade, solitude and shelter, and suffers no one to destroy their nests in the spring, or drive them from their usual haunts in fruit time. >l I value my garden," he says, " more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs." Furthermore, he tells us, thus unconsciously describing for us the fashionable gardens of the period, that he" thinks there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry. Your makers of parterres and flower- gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this art : contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are romance- writers ; Wise and London are our heroic poets." Wise and London, mentioned more than once in future chapters, were gardeners to William III. and Queen Anne. They had a nursery between Brompton and Kensington. Evelyn mentions visiting it in 1701, when he himself was in his eightieth year ; and it was London, the King's gardener, who, as the reader will remember, was called in by Admiral Benbow to assist Sir Chris- topher Wren in estimating the damage done by the Czar Peter to Evelyn's gardens at Sayes Court. In their day Wise and London were^distinguished horticul- turists, but they carried on the tradition of a bad school. Dutch gardeners endeavoured to make Nature statuesque. Shears were ruthlessly used, and shrubs and trees the holly, the yew, and the box as The Spectator had stated, were clipped and teased into all manner of unnatural shapes, with the result that the natural growth of the plant and tree was destroyed in this ex- travagant abuse of topiary work. The reaction was bound to come ; and it came with the advent of Bridgman, Launcelot, known as " Capability " Brown, Kent, and other great landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole's " Essay on Modern Gardening " issued from the Strawberry Hill Press in 1785. His letters to Sir Horace Mann are full of allusion to his own attempt to turn a few acres of 27 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES ground into an entire country-side. He says : ' I have enough land to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind." . . . Again : " My present sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great progress, and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce runs to seed, overturns all my botany, and I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub. Then the deliberation with which trees grow is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience." Strawberry Hill, accurately described by Walpole himself in his letters to Sir Horace Mann, is so famous that, had I been allowed to do so, I would have introduced a picture of the garden as it now is, with the trees its dilettante owner planted, grown up. I should then have added to it a fuller report of his distinct place in the history of English garden- ing. But all requests, by myself and my publishers, for permis- sion from its present owners to draw there, were firmly refused, this being the only exception, I rejoice to say, to that universal rule of kindly and courteous acquiescence, that has made my task in preparing these drawings so delightful. We learn that the taste of Pope, as shown in his own grounds at Twickenham, had a marked effect on landscape gardening in England, and helped a good deal to abolish the stiff Dutch style. The introduction of landscape-gardening, or rather its revival because it was the Romans who first brought the art to Britain- whatever its defects, was undoubtedly a great improvement on the extravagance of the topiary school. So much will be said of landscape-gardening in the following chapters that I will only here remark that, when formality went out of vogue, fashions in gardens ere long passed to the other extreme. It was the inevitable swing of the pendulum, and no more need be said. 28 CHAPTER II LAMBETH PALACE THE vicissitudes in the fortunes of England, political as well as ecclesiastical, may be followed in the story of Lambeth Palace with scarcely less completeness than in that of the Tower of London itself. So truly is this the case, that a series of pictures by a competent brush, of events of which Lambeth has been the scene from the time of the building of the chapel about 1270, up to the Gordon Riots in 1780 would, if they could be executed, be almost a sufficient substitute for a text-book for the use of the previously! well- instructed student of English history, inasmuch as they would suffice to recall to him the entire course of his studies. Such a sequence of pictures in their right order would be es- pecially serviceable in the regrettable absence of a really complete history of the building. This, as Mr. Arthur Sheppard, secretary to the present Archbishop, says, has "yet to be written" and to write it the historian will require much help from within and access to all the archives. Dr. Ducarel, who was Librarian at Lambeth in 1758, is the chief authority on its early history. His account is interesting but confused ; he gives undue prominence to events comparatively unimportant, and omits mention of some of greater interest. The " Lambeth Palace " of the Rev. Cave-Brown is an admirable paraphrase of Ducarel's work, but fails to throw much new light on the subject. In the short account offered in the present chapter I acknowledge considerable indebtedness to both writers, and nil up the gaps in their evidence with data gleaned from general 29 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES history, whereby some sidelights on Lambeth's story are inci- dentally thrown. The connection of Lambeth with the ecclesiastical history of this ^country began long before the present archiepiscopal palace or any part of it was built. It began when Goda, the pious sister of Edward the Confessor, and wife, first, of Walter, Earl of Mantes, and afterwards of Eustace, Earl of Boulogne presented the Manor of Lambeth to the Bishop and Monks of Rochester - reserving, however, all church patronage to herself. At the Conquest, the Manor was seized by the Crown, and a portion of it granted to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, a half-brother of William I., but it was afterwards restored by William Rufus, who added to the gift the Church of St. Mary at Lambeth. Ducarel gives a somewhat drawn-out and confusing account of the manner in which the land, whereon the Palace is built, passed from the possession of the See of Rochester to that of Canterbury. It seems that considerable friction had for some time existed between the secular clergy and the monks of Rochester, who, among other privileges, claimed the right to elect the Archbishop. Archbishop Baldwin, the prelate who afterwards accompanied Richard Cceur-de-Lion to the Holy Land, was desirous of restraining the power of the monks, and to this end he proposed to form a college for the secular priesthood at Harlingden, near Canterbury. The King, Henry II., who had suffered much from ecclesiastical insolence, encouraged the scheme, and the Archbishop, in order to conceal his real design from the monks, pulled down the church of St. Stephen under the pretext of building one to SS. Stephen, and Thomas a Becket. Meeting with strenuous opposition he hurried on' the work, and having no stone for the chapel, built it of wood, and solemnly consecrated it, declaring that in so doing he was only carrying out the pious intention of his saintly pre- decessors, Anselm, and Thomas a Becket. Urged by the monks, who appealed to Rome, Pope Urban III, ordered the Archbishop to stop all further work at Harlingden. and to demolish all that was already completed there. But at this juncture the Pontiff, who had protected the monks, died. During the short reign of his successor, with whom Baldwin had some influence, the latter finding the demolition of his collegiate 30 LAMBETH PALACE buildings could no longer be delayed, seized the opportunity to begin rebuilding, but wisely decided to do so elsewhere. He effected an exchange with the See of Rochester, and secured a piece of land on the Thames, near London, and with the con- currence of King Richard, the Bishops, and Barons, laid the founda- tion of the collegiate buildings at Lambeth, and for their construc- tion he moved thither, by water, all the building materials he had collected at Harlingden. But the energetic prelate did not see his work completed, for he died in Palestine at the Siege of Acre. It thus fell to Archbishop Hubert Walter to carry out his pre- decessor's plans. To do so he made further exchange of land with Rochester, and in 1197 he and his successors were confirmed in the possession of the entire demesne by Richard I. But the monks, still jealous and discontented, and rejecting the friendly and advantageous overtures of the Primate, sent to Rome two of their number, who succeeded in obtaining a Bull from Innocent III., couched in arrogant and unreasonable terms. These were that the newly-built chapel on the banks of the Thames was to be demolished, as in Baldwin's time the dhapel at Harlingden had been, and the canons were to be ejected within thirty days ; failing which the province of Canterbury was to disown the Arch- bishop as its Metropolitan, and he himself was to be suspended from office. So the quarrel dragged on, until in 1202 the matter, still under dispute, was subjected to arbitration, the decision being that after the destruction of the recently created chapel, Walter was to be permitted to build an ordinary church upon its site, to place therein a limited number of canons, and to endow them with one hundred pounds per annum. This was only on condition that no bishops were consecrated there, no councils held, no abbots admitted, and no orders conferred, and, naturally, the Archbishop declined to build upon such terms. However, says Dr. Ducarel, " these disputes between the Arch- bishop and monks of Canterbury proved of infinite advantage to this place, since they brought and fixed the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, who have ever since honoured that town with their palace and chief residence." Archbishop Hubert Walter, and his successor, Stephen Langton,. 31 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES the same who, in 1215, headed the Barons and obtained the Magna Charta, each in turn resided at the Manor House, which Glanville, Bishop of Rochester, at the end of the twelfth century, had built for a London residence for the Bishops of Rochester. By the year 1262 it appears to have become dilapidated, for at that date a Bull from Pope Urban IV. empowered Archbishop Boniface to dispose of a fourth of the offerings at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, " and to turn them to pious uses " ; and he was ordered either to repair his " houses " at Lambeth, or to build new ones. Which alternative he elected to follow is not quite certain ; it is supposed that Boniface erected the present chapel over the then existing crypt, but the crypt itself contains no architectural work earlier than the close of the twelfth, or beginning of the thirteenth century. Ducarel suggests that he also laid the foundation of the Great Hall ; and, on the whole, Boniface is generally credited with being the first builder of the present palace. Each succeeding Primate, with one exception, appears to have done something to add to its dignity and convenience. The exception was Archbishop Kilwarby, or Kilwardby, who, about 1275, robbed the See of Canterbury, and carried away with him to Rome all the jewels, plate, money, and, most important of all, the Register books belonging to the Archiepiscopate. The loss of these Registers has made the early history of Lambeth House very difficult to trace. In 1351, during the reign of Edward II., Archbishop Reynolds restored portions of the house. In 1381, in the reign of Richard II., Wat Tyler, incensed by the unpopular Poll Tax, headed a rebellion against the King, seized the Tower of London, and led a party against Lambeth House. They beheaded the Archbishop, Simon de Sudbury, sacked the building, and " did all the mischief that a careless and enraged mob is capable of doing." This mischief two succeeding prelates, Courtney and Arundel, did their best to repair. Arundel, the great persecutor of the Lollards, was followed by an eminent building Archbishop, Henry Chicherley, to whom Lambeth owes more, architecturally, than to any occupant of the See of Canterbury except Cardinal Morton, who built the great Gatehouse about the year 1490. 32 tX u -C; h. > - - * : Uf-:2 . -v- ., / *, <* t> e V LAMBETH PALACE Chicherley spent vast sums upon the demesne of Lambeth. He restored the house and added a fountain, or aqueduct, and also a " rabbed garden." A fountain suggests a garden, and we thus come upon the earliest reference to the gardens of the Palace. Chicherley's chief contribution, however, to the growing pile of buildings on the south bank of the Thames, was the square, grim, battlemerited tower, built of rough, grey stone, standing at the western extremity of the chapel ; it was erected about the thir- teenth year of the reign of Henry VI., when Chicherley had been eight years Primate. An old stone building was cleared away to make room for it, of which a small turret was spared and incor- porated in the main body of the new tower. From the steward's accounts for that year, the latter is found to have cost 278 2s. 11 Jd., something like 3,000 of our present currency. The tower has long been known as the " Lollards Tower." Ducarel records this fact, but makes no comment on it. Dr. Maitland, however, who was Librarian at Lambeth about 1840, states authoritatively that there is no foundation for the popular belief that the unfortunate followers of Wycliff were ever incar- cerated there ; and that the stone chamber on the summit, in which a so-called " oubliette " is shown, was never used as their prison. Nevertheless, the " oubliette," though it is no oubliette, and certain rings and staples to which prisoners might have been chained, are still regarded by some as evidence of the melancholy purpose to which they assume it had been put by its builders. This is unfair to the memory of Chicherley, for the disgrace of the persecution of the unhappy reformers should fall chiefly on Arundel, who was responsible for the statute legalizing the burning of heretics in 1401, the year when the fires of Smithfield were, I believe, first lighted. Any priest who had arrived at the dignity of Archbishop of Canterbury, was bound in those days to be more or less a per- secutor, and Chicherley was no exception ; but he was not only an ecclesiastic, he was also a statesman, and a man of the world, occupied with large public and benevolent undertakings. It was Chicherley who encouraged Henry V. to begin the successful campaign against France, and to found the famous twin monastery of Sion at Isleworth, concerning which there will be more to say in a succeeding chapter. Above all, he will always be remem- 33 3 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES bered as the beneficent founder of All Souls' College, Oxford, and of other similar institutions. In character he was certainly more humane than Arundel, for he was instrumental in passing the Act that in some cases substituted the lash, and other lighter punishments, for the horrible penalty of death at the stake. In any case, it is difficult to believe that he could have been guilty of the deliberate cruelty of building a great addition to the Lambeth pile, for the express purpose of therein immuring and torturing the Wycliffites, and the popular belief that he did so leaves an undeserved stain on his memory. The true Lollards Tower, according to Dr. Maitland and to other evidence both direct and indirect, was not at Lambeth at all, but at the " Bishop's prison " attached to London House, the town residence of the Metropolitan Bishop, and was, in fact, a portion of old St. Paul's. Foxe, in his " Actes and Monuments," speaks of the " Lollard's Tower " of St. Paul's " Paul's," as the cathedral was colloquially termed and Stowe, writing in 1598, makes mention of two towers at its western extremity, of which the one at the southern corner was known as " The Lowlarde Tower, and hath been used as the Bishop's prison of such as were detested for opinions contrary to the faith of the church." One might suppose that such evidence would have been con- sidered conclusive, but it seems it was not so ; for after the Commonwealth, and the Restoration, when the Great Fire of 1666 had swept away every vestige of old St. Paul's, of London House, its Lollard Tower, and its prison the tradition of a " Lollard's Tower " still remaining, it was transferred bodily to Lambeth, and the odium attaching to its erection and use, came at last, by a not unnatural sequence of ideas, to be cast upon the man,, who having punished heresy and built a tower, had (so it was erroneously concluded) intended it, and used it, as a prison for Lollards. Popular beliefs, like prejudices, are not easily eradicated ; they take much uprooting ; and, therefore, so long as the walls of Lambeth Palace stand, so long will idle passers-by look up at the hoary stones of the supposed Lollard's Tower, and vaguely picture, as having been enacted behind them, scenes of sorrow and violence that never took place. Posterity has fixed this stain upon the memory of the great building Archbishop, and there it will remain, 34 LAMBETH PALACE perpetuated in the name by which the tower is best known. Thus ' the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." There are people who, finding the stories they had believed ill to be apocryphal, straightway lose their chief interest in history ; for, robbed of its romance, it becomes to them merely a dry thing of dates, and statistics, a catalogue of Acts of Parliament and accounts of the struggles to get them passed, punctuated, and relieved, here and there, by a battle, or a revolution. Hence, while it is a good thing to bring criticism and research to bear upon the perversions and exaggerations that distort historical fact, it is not always necessary, while it is frequently undesirable, to sweep away ruthlessly all the picturesque and innocent accretions that may in time have grown round them. When a tradition apper- taining to a person, or a place, is morally beautiful, inspiring and harmless, when no memory is unfairly attacked by its accept- ance, when there can be no question at all of giving even the devil his due, it is surely a pity that it should be robbed of a shred of its picturesqueness by means of a merciless investigation, that, when accomplished, cannot in the least alter the trend of that history of which it is, in all probability, merely an unimportant side-issue. For example, childish faith in the stories of William Tell and Fair Rosamond did nobody any harm, and what earthly interest can we find in " TelPs " chapel on the shores of Lake Leman now that we all know that the incident of the shooting of the apple from the child's head is pure fiction, and since that most disagreeable person, the iconoclastic historian, has gone so far as to assure us that Tell himself never existed ? With regard to Fair Rosamond and the dreadful choice she had to make, we cannot whitewash the memory of the jealous queen by doing away with the bowl and the dagger, the labyrinth and the clew ; for Eleanor, the divorced Queen of France before she became Queen of England, was in no position to cast a stone at the unhappy object of her hate. It is a sordid, ugly story, anyway, though founded on solid fact, for there really was a beautiful Rosamond Clifford, and, as I had occasion to mention in the first chapter, Henry II. actually had a palace and a shooting lodge, and a " parke " or chase, at Woodstock ; and if the poison-chalice 35 3* GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES and all the rest of the tragic happenings, be indeed all moonshine, or rather limelight and stage effect, their elimination would serve no purpose. The case of the tower that Archbishop Chicherley built, however, and the tradition attached to it, is altogether different, since to remove the calumny from the builder, as we are bound to do, is not to perceptibly diminish the interest in the building ; for so intimately has Lambeth been associated with events of importance in England's history, so constantly, arid of necessity, have the Primates played a great part in these, that it is unnecessary to work up a fictitious emotion by the aid of incorrect or uncor- roborated assertions. The Water Tower, to give it its right name, has claims upon the attention of the student of history and archaeology that are independent of any supposed connection with Lollardism ; to these we shall return later. The Computus Bellevorum, or steward's accounts, were very regularly kept at Lambeth, and they show that Chicherley restored, if he did not actually rebuild, the whole of the Great Hall, which many years later was certainly carefully reconstructed by Juxon, on the lines laid down by his predecessor. But if Archbishop Chicherley was thus a great builder, one who has largely left his mark upon Lambeth, Cardinal Morton, who became Primate in 'I486, and Lord Chancellor of England in the following year, was yet a greater. He it was who erected the massive and stately Gatehouse which is the most remarkable feature of the Palace buildings. Of its kind there is no finer or more characteristic example of Tudor architecture in England. It is built of red brick, with stone quoins and dressings, and must have been one of the earliest erections of the kind in this country, for, up to the time of the fifth or sixth Henry, stone, or timber with an admixture of brick, was exclusively used in buildings in the southern part of the island. There seems to have been no attempt at consistency or unity of design in the several additions made at various dates at Lambeth ; and there was none in the material of which they were constructed. This variety makes for picturesqueness. One cannot, however, fail to note that the rough grey stone of the Water Tower has received no added charm and dignity from age, whereas the smooth 36 LAMBETH PALACE brickwork of Cardinal Morton's Gateway, once red, but now under certain effects of light wearing a true mulberry bloom, has but gained fresh charm in the process of growing old. The same rich but subdued colouring may be seen in the more ancient portions of Hampton Court, and also in the quaint quadrangle and porch of the Bishop of London's Palace at Fulham. What can have been the secret of that art in brick-making possessed by those fifteenth- century builders ? a secret that seems to have been entirely lost, for the squares and streets of Georgian and Victorian London betray no sign of its possession ; they are dingy, and grimy, and brown ; whereas Morton's Gatehouse, in spite of equal exposure to London's atmospheric conditions, and its vastly greater antiquity, has only become mellowed into greater beauty in the passage of four centuries and more. Solid though it be, when approached from Lambeth Bridge it wears an aspect of curious unreality. One could easily conceive its strength to be make-believe, and itself a bit of stage architec- ture ; for it seems to stand, without foundation, on the bit of roadway in front of it much as a painted scene might do. But whether real or not, it is an anachronism seeming to belong, as indeed it does belong, to another and old-time world ; it wears an air of total detachment from the present. Nor have I found that a more intimate acquaintance with the venerable Gatehouse .destroys or even modifies this first impression. While one is standing at the postern, waiting for it to open, and seeing nothing of the rest of the Palace, the gateway appears a derelict survival of the past, stranded there in mediaeval grandeur. But when at last one is within the precincts, this impression vanishes. Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Lambeth Palace was separated only by a leafy " Bishops' Walk " from the Thames, which flowed within a stone's throw of it. At the present day a broad roadway and the Albert Embankment intervene ; thus its environment is the spirit of modernity visualized ; and yet it stands, a precious relic of England in the olden time, curiously out of keeping with the constant passing of the London County Council trams, and the ceaseless traffic by land and by water. From within, the best view of the Gatehouse is to be obtained from the opposite side of the courtyard on a fine summer's day. Then, if one return from visiting the gardens on the north side of 37 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES the Palace by way of a little passage and a small pointed archway at the base of the Water Tower, one is confronted by the impressive vision of this imposing entrance gate. It might very well be the approach to some gigantic fortification of the Middle Ages, instead of to the peaceful dwelling of the head of the English Church. The Great Hall, now known as " Juxon's Hall," is to our left, and opposite to it is the long high wall separating the archiepis- copal demesne from the public road. Intervening, there is a wide stretch of green soft turf, and also a broad gravel walk, across which the long shadows of the hawthorn, sumach, and other trees, cast by the westering sun, travel with such rapidity that my brush was well-nigh beaten in the breathless race to overtake them. The gateway itself is facing us : the span of its nearer and inner arch is greater than that of the outer. Heavy gates and -the solid, iron-studded, oaken postern before mentioned, shut out the high road. Below the arch, and between the great flanking towers, there is a vestibule of considerable size, which has a flagged floor and a groined roof. On either side of it are the janitors' private rooms and offices, and above it is a spacious chamber, with an embattled roof, and a three-light perpendicular window. This room was formerly used as a record, or muniment room, but the precious archives and registers of the See of Canterbury, once kept there, are now removed elsewhere. Abutting closely upon the Gatehouse so closely that the two would appear to have drawn together for mutual comfort and protection in this strange, new, twentieth century with which they have so little in common is the ancient grey tower of St. Mary's, the parish church of Lambeth. It owns a clock which has its own independent computation of time, even bravely challenging Big Ben itself, for it ventures to strike a quarter of a minute later than its powerful rival.* Has it not the best of rights ? For Lambeth Church Tower is of such venerable age that, compared with it, the clock tower of Westminster is but of mushroom growth a thing of yesterday. It forms an integral portion of the picturesque, gatehouse-group of buildings, and is the only remaining part of the second, possibly of the third, church erected on the site, for one is mentioned in " Domesday Book," and there * The drawing of the gateway was already far advanced, when war was declared in August, 1914 since when Big Ben has been silent. 38 LAMBETH PALACE have been rectors of Lambeth for eight hundred years. In the churchyard lie buried several of the Archbishops, but they are interred in greater number at Canterbury. In connection with gardens and their historical evolution, it is interesting to relate that in Lambeth Churchyard lie three genera- tions of a family of famous gardeners, mentioned in the intro- ductory chapter. John Tradescent, senior, was gardener to Queen Elizabeth ; his son succeeded him in her service, and on her death became gardener to Cecil, the first Lord Salisbury; thus helping to make the celebrated Hatfield Gardens, and he ended his career as gardener to Charles I. His son was that John Tradescent who founded the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The Tradescents being prosperous and highly- esteemed residents of Lambeth, it is extremely probable that at a period when their royal mistress frequently visited the Primate- father, or son, or both, may have been called in to give advice con- cerning the Archbishop's garden. Their tombstone in Lambeth Churchyard has an inscription that is worth quoting ; it runs thus : " Know, Stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone Lye John Tredescent, Grandsire, father, son, The last dy'd in his spring : the other two Liv'd till they had travell'd Art and Nature through, As by their choice collections may appear From what is rare, in Land, in Sea, in Air. Whilst they (a Homer's Illiad in a Nut) A world of wonder in one closet shut; These famous antiquarians that had been Both gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, Transplanted now themselves, sleep here and when Angels shall with their trumpets waken men, And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise And change the garden for a Paradise." Notwithstanding their close connection, matters did not always run smoothly between Lambeth House and the township or parish. In the quaint, but rather tedious pages of Ducarel, there is a detailed report of a suit brought in 1776 by the then Archbishop, by which he pleaded exemption from payment of taxes, on the ground that Lambeth Palace was in the diocese of Canterbury and not in that of Winchester, the bishops of which instituted the Rector of Lambeth to the living, that town and parish being within their ecclesiastical jurisdiction. 39 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES It was urged for the plaintiff that though " there are instances of a parish lying in two counties, there is none of one lying in two dioceses." Lambeth, therefore, claimed to be extra-parochial ; and the claim was allowed, the question whether the house and gardens known by the name of the Archbishop's Palace at Lam- beth, was or was not in the parish of Lambeth, being settled in favour of the plaintiff. " In consequence," says Ducarel, " the Parish was condemned in costs amounting to one hundred and fifty pounds, which money was raised by an assessment on all the inhabitants, and paid to Archbishop Cornwallis, who a few months after, very generously presented the whole and more to the Parish, and paid his Solicitor's bill out of his own pocket." Lambeth parish continued in the diocese of Winchester until 1877, when it was transferred to the enlarged and rearranged diocese of Rochester. This circumstance is interesting, when it is recalled that the Palace occupies land that, in the first instance, was acquired from the Bishop and monks of Rochester. In the days when London had but one bridge, and houses and shops were crowded upon it, the right of passage by the horse ferry at Lambeth, the only ferry for cattle over the Thames, was a monopoly of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and brought in a considerable revenue in tolls, prior to the building of a bridge at Westminster in 1750. The See of Canterbury, and the surviving patentee, were paid 2,208 in compensation for the loss of the tolls. Tremendous state was kept up by the Primates, as befitted their exalted position. As is well known, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the order of precedence, ranks after the Princes of the Blood Royal ; but it is perhaps not so generally remembered that in the past there have been six Cardinals, and eleven Lord Chancellors, among them. The post of Lord Treasurer was also, in former times, occasionally held by the Primate ; while Archbishop Radulphon, about 1414, and Hubert Walter, about 1494, each united in his own person, the offices of Lord Chief Justice and Archbishop. Noblesse oblige, and William Stubbs, in his " Con- stitutional History of England," tells us that the two Arch- bishops maintained households on the same scale as dukes, and the bishops, as far as influence and expenditure were concerned, maintained the state of earls. They had their embattled houses, their wide, enclosed parks, and unenclosed chases ; they kept their 40 LAMBETH PALACE court with just the same array of officers, servants, counsellors and chaplains ; they made their progresses with armed retinues, and trains of baggage. And we read that in 1559, Tunsdall, or Tunstall, the good old Bishop of Durham, when he came up to the Metro- polis to be deprived and to die, came riding to London with three-score horsemen. In the Middle Ages a body-guard and a guard-room were as necessary in these great ecclesiastical establishments, as was a great hall in which to dispense hospitality. After the Wars of the Roses, the Guard-room at Lambeth was turned into an armoury; and even as late as the time of Archbishop Laud it was said to contain munitions of war sufficient to equip two hundred men. It is now the state dining-room, and round its walls hang the interest- ing portraits of the Archbishops. The building at the left-hand side of the drawing of the Gate- house is the Great Hall, supposed to have been originally erected by Boniface when he received the Pope's mandate to repair, or re- build, the Lambeth " Houses." As we have seen, it was " re-edify'd," which probably meant largely reconstructed and decorated, by Chicherley, but it goes by the name of " Juxon's Hall," because, having been entirely wrecked by the partisans of Cromwell, it was rebuilt by Archbishop Juxon in 1660. It is nearly one hundred feet long, is forty feet broad, and fifty feet high ; and since Juxon retained the fine oaken roof of the interior, and as far as possible followed the design of the earlier building, we may assume that these were the original dimensions of the great room. Such halls were necessarily large, because, as remarked before, the retinue of an Archbishop in olden times had to be commen- surate with his dignity, and he kept open house. Strype, the ecclesiastical historian, writing in 1694, says that of Cranmer included a master of the horse, yeomen of the horse, gentlemen riders, ushers of the chamber, grooms of the chamber, yeomen of the chamber, yeomen of the wardrobe ; the steward, almoner, treasurer, and comptroller, the janitors, chandlers, caterers, clerk of the kitchen, clerk of the spicery, the butchers and bakers, and the pantlers, who had charge of the bread and other provisions, the butlers, who looked after the wine and ale, the server who set down and removed all dishes, the carver, the cup-bearer, and finally the harbinger ; whose duty seems to have been to go forward 41 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES on occasions, probably on the Primate's journeyings over his diocese, to provide lodgings ; and certainly, if my lord of Canter- bury travelled with but half his train of servitors, the office could have been no sinecure. Great state was kept up by his successor, Cardinal Pole, who, by virtue of a patent from Philip and Mary, was allowed to keep one hundred servants. Strype gives an account of the manner in which the good Arch- bishop Parker, who was appointed to the See of Canterbury by Elizabeth, kept open house. ' In the daily eating," he says, * this was the custom ; the steward, with servants that were gentlemen of the better rank, sat down at the tables in the hall at the right hand, and the almoner, with the clergy and other servants, sat on the other side," which reads as though the chaplains and lower order of clergy were ranked with the lower order of servants. The food left over from each day's feast " did suffice to feed the bellies of a great number of poor hungry people that waited at the gate ; and so constant and unfailing was this provision at my lord's table, that whoever came in either at dinner or at supper, being not above the degree of a knight, might there be entertained worthy of his quality either at the steward's or the almoner's table, and moreover it was the Archbishop's command to his servants that all strangers should be received and treated with all manner of civility and respect, and that places at the table should be assigned to them according to their dignity and quality, which redounded much to the praise and commendation of the Archbishop. The discourse and conversation at meals was void of all brawls and loud talking, and for the most part consisted in framing men's manners to religion, or to some other honest or becoming subject." There was a monitor in the hall, whose business it was at meal- times to cry silence if any person spoke too loud, " or concerning things less decent." In the Great Hall were also held the consecration banquets of the Southern Province, at the charge of the newly consecrated bishop ; perhaps the one most memorable for its magnificence being that of William of Wykeham in 1367. These, however, were special occasions ; but so bounteous was the provision even for the daily feasts, during the time of Cranmcr, 42 LAMBETH PALACE Parker, and others, that the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table sufficed to feed an army of mendicants ; and not seven only, but seventy times seven, scriptural basketsful of the fragments that remained, must have been taken up in the course of a year. The surplus was distributed daily at the gates, and thus arose the famous " Lambeth Dole." It was at Lambeth, under the roof of the Archbishop, that Katherine of Arragon, on arriving in England for her first marriage with Arthur, Prince of Wales, was for some days lodged. Here, thirty-two years later, Archbishop Cranmer confirmed the union of Henry VIII. with poor Katherine's rival and successor, Anne Boleyn. Still more important was that meeting over which he soon after presided, on a day late in April, 1534. England had reached one of the many crises in her history. The Spanish party at Rome had triumphed ; the marriage of Henry VIII. with Katherine of Arragon had been pronounced valid, and if the King refused to acquiesce in this decision, he was to be declared " excommunicate," and to forfeit the allegiance of his subjects, and the Emperor was to invade England and Henry to be deposed. He did not acquiesce, for now it was that, in the words of Froude, 14 the Tudor spirit was at length awake in the English sovereign ... he met defiance by defiance. The Act of Parliament, altering the succession to the children of Anne Boleyn, was immediately passed ; Convocation, which was still sitting, hurried through a declaration that the Pope had no more power in England than any other bishop. The ordnance stores were examined, the repairs of the navy were hastened, and the garrisons were strengthened along the coast. ... A commission appointed under the Statute of Succession opened its sittings to receive the oaths of allegiance. - . . The peers swore, the bishops, abbots, priests, heads of colleges, swore with scarcely an exception ; the nation seemed to unite in unanimous declaration of freedom. . . . The Commis- sioners sat at the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth, and at the end of April, Sir Thomas More received a summons to appear before them. He was at his house at Chelsea, where for the last two years he had lived in deep retirement, making ready for evil times. Those times at length were come. On the morning on which he was to present himself, he confessed and received the Sacrament in 43 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES Chelsea Church; ' and ". whereas,' says his great-grandson, 'at other times, before he departed from his wife and children, they used to bring him to his boat, and he there leaving them, bade them farewell ; at this time he suffered none of them to follow him forth of his gate, but pulled the wicket after him, and with a heavy heart he took boat with his son Roper.' He was leaving his house for the last time, and he knew it. He sat silent for some minutes, and then with a sudden start said, 4 I thank our Lord the field is won.' : Lambeth Palace was crowded with people who had come on the same errand as himself. More was called in early, and found Cromwell present, with the four Commissioners and also the Abbot of Westminster. The oath was read to him. " He desired to see the Statute of Succession himself, and, after reading it, said he would swear to the part of it that secured the succes- sion to the children of Queen Anne, but he refused to ' peril his soul ' by subscription to the remainder of the statute. He was asked to reconsider his answer." To do so he was sent into the garden, and in his absence others were called in ; among these, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who replied in the same terms. Returning from the garden, More made his choice. It is a matter of history what that choice was. Here, so far as Lambeth is concerned, ends a momentous chapter in the history of Tudor England, for the well-known melancholy sequel belongs of right to that of the Tower, to which prison More and Fisher were committed. Thus Henry VIII. had his Catholic martyrs, as his daughter Mary had her Protestant ones. Meanwhile the Succession was seemingly securely settled on the children of Anne Boleyn, whose star was now in the ascendant. But wait ! Two short years only, and another chapter is opened, another and very different page is turned. Again the stage is Lambeth ; again the instrument of Henry's will is Cranmer ; again the season is Spring the lovely English Spring ; everything is green and bursting into beauty in the large gardens behind the Palace, the same in which More had been sent to walk to reconsider his refusal. But this time the scene is laid neither in the Great Hall nor the Guard-room, but in the gloomy crypt beneath the beautiful chapel of the Palace. Conveyed hither by water from her prison in the Tower, pale, 44 LAMBETH PALACE frightened, hysterical, and under sentence of death, the once brilliant and triumphant Anne stood before the Archbishop, who, in his own words, " had loved her not a little for the love I judged her to bear towards God and his gospel." She made her confession, in hopes perhaps, that, if she did so, her life might be spared, and Cranmer, " sitting judicially, pronounced her marriage with the King null and void." The crypt, described as a " certain low chapel beneath his [the Archbishop's] house at Lambeth," is the oldest part of the Palace buildings. Too long perverted to ignoble uses, it has now, by the liberality of the present Primate, Archbishop Davidson, been excavated and restored. On the way to the gardens, which are reached at the river side by a short cut from the outer courtyard, its low, dingy windows, rising but a little above the level of the ground, are still in evidence. Small and square, they look dreary enough, for smoke and time have still further darkened a spot where God's sunshine never seems to penetrate. In the days when the Thames washed the foundation of the Water Tower, the river stairs and landing-place to the Palace, were situated at its north-west corner, on a little creek, crossed, it is said, by a wooden bridge. Within the tower itself a short flight of steps still leads from the crypt to the " Post-room" a chamber that forms a stately vestibule to the beautiful chapel. Incident- ally it should be mentioned that the " Post," or pillar, which gives the name to this apartment, is merely a support to the roof, and was never, as is vulgarly supposed, a whipping-place for Lollards. On that fatal Wednesday, Anne, a queen no longer, returning from her dread ordeal in the crypt, must necessarily have mounted the stone steps, and crossed the Post-room to reach the doorway, now built up, which led to the landing-place. Here awaited her the boat that was to take her back to the Tower, where, the next day but one, she met her fate. Unhappy Anne Boleyn ! For unhappy she was, whether sorely erring, or merely guilty of most unbecoming and unqueenly levity ! One gladly closes this chapter in Lambeth's chequered history, although there are others scarcely less dark to follow. Lambeth Palace has been honoured by many Royal visits, all of which are duly noted in the parish vestry books in the form of fees paid to bellringers. 45 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES Even so early as 1345, Edward III. received homage here from John de Montfort, Duke of Brittany, during the regime of Arch- bishop Stratford ; and in his " Survey of London " Stowe tells us that " Henry Bolingbroke, while staying in his palace at Keri- nington, accepted the hospitality of Archbishop Bouchier, a few days before his coronation." Here Henry VIII. visited Archbishop Warham in 1513, and thirty years later he crossed to Lambeth Stairs to warn Cranmei in a friendly manner, of the intrigues of Bishop Gardiner against him. Mary Tudor frequently came to Lambeth to see her cousin. Cardinal Pole, when, as Archbishop, he was in residence here ; and it is said, that, at her own expense, she furnished and redecorated the Palace for his benefit. During her brief reign nought but the fires of Smithfield went merrily ; two hundred and seventeen persons suffered at the stake in three years, and it is difficult to conceive of the gloomy Queen taking active part in any festivities : and yet many such must have been held by Pole in her honour, since, as previously mentioned, by virtue of a patent from herself and her consort Philip, the Cardinal was permitted to keep one hundred servants, a fact which implies lavish hospitality, fit only for royalty. Things changed on the rising " of that bright occidental Star Queen Elizabeth; " as the translators of the Bible have designated her. She loved state and show, and many times honoured Matthew Parker, the Archbishop par excellence of the Reformation, by visiting him during his Primacy of seventeen years. But she disliked the idea of a married clergy; and on one occasion, after a sojourn of three days at Lambeth, while thanking her host on her departure for his hospitality, she did not hesitate to make sundry caustic, and disagreeable remarks to his wife, in bidding her farewell. Grindal, the next Archbishop, came under the ban of Her Grace's displeasure, and to him she paid no visits, even when he became old and enfeebled ; but she was frequently the guest of his successor, Whitgift, visiting him no less than fifteen times, and she sometimes stayed two or three days at Lambeth. The Gatehouse dominates the precincts, and its aspect can have so little changed in four hundred years, that, when the great gates are closed, and the twentieth century shut out, it requires but a 46 LAMBETH: The Tudor Gateway Page 46 LAMBETH PALACE small stretch of the imagination to call up a mental vision of the same place in the days when Elizabeth was Queen. And so we will picture her on a certain fine day in the year 1574, when she has come to pay one of her frequent visits to Archbishop Parker, and the bells of Lambeth Church tower are ringing merrily. It is " the time when lilies blow, and clouds are highest up in air; " and as she issues from the shadow of the archway, the sunlight flashes on the jewel in the little green cap that partially conceals her frizzy, red-gold hair. She is mounted on a richly caparisoned palfrey, and its saddle cloth nearly reaches the ground. Her riding coat of green velvet, richly wrought in a diaper pattern with gold and seed pearls, stirred by the movement of the horse, shows a lining of cloth of silver, and we catch a glimpse of a jewelled stomacher, and a heavy rope of pearls. Her ruff to-day is lace- trimmed, but of comparatively modest dimensions ; and her hands are encased in embroidered gloves, over which she wears many rings. She sits with easy dignity in her saddle, and carries her forty-one years lightly ; and it is very easy to see that, like her cousin Mary Stuart, she has been unlucky in her portraitists, for all have given more attention to the last button on her sleeve, than to the force and character in the countenance of the woman in whose reign England first became a world power. She is always represented as a dressed-up wooden doll, with a large aquiline nose, a somewhat hard mouth, and tousled red hair. But mark her as she turns to address a gracious remark to the cavalier in cream-coloured velvet, riding on her left, who is none other than the Earl of Leicester. The severity of mien we associate with the wearer of the portentous ruff and formidable farthingale, is absent now. She has come from Greenwich, and ridden fast to consult my Lord Archbishop on some pressing affairs of State, and the pale skin wears the becoming flush of exercise. She smiles, and there is even fascination in her smile, for is she not Anne Boleyn's daughter ? The severe lines in her face relax, the dark-brown eyes, beneath their curiously heavy lids, brighten. The woman is upper- most now, yet she looks every inch a queen not the queen of starch and whalebone, of tags and finery, compact of vanity and im- periousness, of the National Portrait Gallery, but the " Rose and Lily Queen " of the Tradescent tomb in Lambeth Churchyard. Ah ! depend upon it, there was a lovable side to her nature, since, 47 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES so long after she had " shuffled off this mortal coil," and when flattery could no longer reach or move her, that tender, graceful epithet could be applied to her by the servants and dependents who knew her best. Its testimony does not stand alone. Numerous other memorials to the great queen-regnant, erected after her death when the recol- lection of her was still green and vivid, tell the same story, and equally express the love, veneration, and admiration of her subjects for the " good Queen Bess." Prime favourite at this time, of his sovereign, Leicester bends smilingly towards her saddle-bow ; gay words are on his lips, exultation in his heart, for never again will Robert Dudley be so near his ambition's goal as at this moment. On her left rides the great Burleigh, but recently made Lord Treasurer. To him she now and then addresses a few gracious words, for Elizabeth, with the wit to choose her servants well, knows also how best to bind them to her service. Behind Burleigh comes his brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon, distinguished father of a much more famous son, and they are followed by a bevy of fair ladies and many courtiers. A number of lackeys, and a detachment of those yeomen of the guard who were the institution of the Queen's grandfather, Henry VII., bring up the rear of a procession which, in splendour and brilliancy of apparel and accoutrements, far exceeds any pageant of modern times. It passes from the arch to the courtyard, and scintillates for some brief minutes in the sunshine. There is a trampling of horses' feet and rapid dismounting, a clatter of arms, the ringing of steel upon stone, and then its constituent parts break up into many-tinted, moving fragments, resembling the bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, and, in true kaleidoscopic fashion, they separate, and come together again. They form into knots and groups before the door of the Great Hall : some of these follow the Queen to the principal entrance, to which the Archbishop hurries to receive her ; and others wander off into the gardens behind the Water Tower, and that other tower that is the com- paratively recent erection of the late Archbishop Cranmer. But, even as one looks, the day-dream fades, and resolves itself into nothing more romantic than a group of very tall, well-grown, Boy Scouts, lads of sixteen or seventeen, whose picturesque costume, with its touches of colour, and the staves that, seen from the dis- tance, suggested lances, had, on that bright summer's day, sufficed for one brief moment, to revivify the past, and to carry me back from the twentieth century to the sixteenth. And so it was almost with a shock of surprise that I was roused from this vision to the crude, present-day reality ; for, staring at the Gatehouse, one can scarcely help living backwards, and pro- jecting oneself into that bygone age to which it properly belongs, for the history of England, or its side-issues, is writ all over it. At the present day all sorts and conditions of men pass in and out of it, as they have done for four hundred years, as they did when the famous Lambeth Dole was distributed there. Watching the gates, I half expected to see them open to admit one of the great gilded coaches, with heavy fringed hammer-cloth, decorated panels, and mighty wheels, still to be seen reposing in the seclusion of a dignified old age in a corner of the Victoria and Albert Museum ; or else that an Archbishop's lady, of the middle of the eighteenth century, would soon be returning home from some function in the fashionable west- central district, conveyed by two servitors in one of those cosy carry ing- chairs on poles, then in constant use ; chairs, on the embellishment of which some of the greatest French pastoralists did not disdain to employ their exquisite art, and which took their name from a town in France which has since acquired a sinister significance, Sedan. But the gates rolled back and let in only the Archbishop's motor- car, a characteristic product of this age of steel and petrol : next came a boy on a bicycle, with a basket of loaves for His Grace's household, and this was followed presently by that already unusual sight in the metropolis, a hansom cab, which seemed even more oddly out of keeping with the ancient pile than the auto- mobile. It had here much the same incongruous effect that a horse and cab, on the stage, always have. The pigeons, of which there are many hundred at Lambeth Palace, clearly thought it had no business there, for, though near feeding-time, they rose in a fluttering cloud from the grass and stones, and, with the rushing noise of wings in rapid flight, sought refuge on their favourite van- tage ground, the cornices and pinnacles of the Great Hall. Yet they did not disturb themselves at all when two grave dignitaries of the Church, the Lord Bishop of - - and the Very Reverend 49 4 GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES the Dean of , in close confabulation, passed out by way of the postern door in the Gatehouse. As the gates closed on all who went and came, one caught a glimpse of the prosaic modern world outside of Lambeth Bridge, of some men in khaki, and of a passing Tooting tram ! Still, however insistently, and almost grotesquely, the present may sometimes intrude itself upon the old-world calm of the ancient Palace, there is a certain charm and attractiveness in this strange intermingling of the old with the new, of the past with the present. No doubt the old exceeds the new in interest. Yet when the later chapters of its history come to be written, though outwardly Lambeth seems to take but little part in the terribly stirring events of our times, its inner history may prove to have a large significance ; and the influences emanating from it may be found to have had a most important bearing upon the trend of history. At present, however, the past surges up, and its interest verily overwhelms the present. In mental retrospection, we see the ghosts of scores of notable men and women who lived between the eras of Cranmer and Juxon. A few are smiling, many are weeping ; and we place them instantly in their proper environment. As we look, they shape themselves, vanish, and give place to others. We see Thomas Cranmer, the tool of the King, and the instrument of his pleasure in the matter of the divorce of Katherine of Arragon : we see him later, truly attached to the Reformed faith, yet for want of moral courage recanting his opinions ; then, repenting of his recantation, nobly vindicating what he had before repudiated, and dying a martyr's death, the hand that had signed the recanta- tion being forced by his own will to be the member first to suffer. We see the recalcitrant bishops who refused to take the oath of supremacy at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, consigned to the custody of Archbishop Parker, and watch him treating them more as guests than prisoners. We see the Duke of Norfolk and Lord William Howard, his brother, in 1574, joining in a conspiracy in favour of Mary Queen of Scots, the elder punished by death, the younger, who ill requited the Primate's kindness, interned at Lambeth. Next arises a vision of a wet and stormy night in 1600, when the once debonair and powerful Essex, now disgraced and forlorn, together with his friend, the young Earl of Southampton, was on his way to the Tower by water. The river, lashed into 50 LAMBETH PALACE fury by the wind, was rough, the rain splashed on the decks of the light craft, and added physical discomfort to the captives' mental misery. The voyage had to be broken at Lambeth, where many a time, in happier days, the favourite had landed from Elizabeth's gilded and cushioned barge of state. How bitter must have been the contrast between then and now ! The boat was moored to the landing-place at the foot of the Water Tower. Archbishop Whitgift, apprised of the unexpected visit, met the noblemen at the head of the stairs ; the flaring light from a cresset, fell full on his grey head and grave face. He was visibly distressed. " My lord," he said sadly, addressing the fallen favourite, " I am indeed concerned to see this time when you are brought here thus ! '' But it would require the pen of a Carlyle, the brush of a Rembrandt, to paint that scene ! Suffice to say, that by and by, when the storm abated, the barge was remanned, the prisoners took their places, and by the same watery way that had swept Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and others to their doom, the Earl of Essex passed to his, and, in his passing, broke an old Queen's heart ! " She is much disfavoured and unattired," wrote her godson, Sir John Harrington ; ; ' she disregardeth every costly cover that cometh to her table, and eateth little but manchet and succory pottage. . . . Her Highness hath worn but one change of raiment for many daies," a pregnant sign in one whose love of dress was notorious. Among so many tragic happenings at the old archiepiscopal residence, it is a relief to meet with a romantic story of true love. By a clandestine marriage, which upset the royal plans, two lovers of high degree had incurred the displeasure of Charles I. The bride was the Lady Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Lennox, and ward and kinswoman to the King, whose purpose it had been to unite the great Scottish houses of Lennox and Argyle, by the bestowal of her hand on the Marquis of Lome. But the girl had vastly preferred the Lord Montravers, heir to the earldom of Arundel (the duchy of Norfolk being then under attainder). For supposed connivance in the match, her parents were sent to the Tower, but Charles, for all his extravagant notions of the divine right of kings, was no tyrant, and he merely punished the rebellious pair by committing them to the care of Archbishop 51 4* GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES Abbot. Then were there billings and cooings, other than those of the pigeons, in the shady garden of the archiepiscopal residence, and happy hours also; even although in the near distance could already be discerned the first mutterings of coming civil strife. Many years later, when the storm of internecine war was ac- tually about to break, we find Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, the historian of the great rebellion, and a devoted servant of the monarchy, coming to Lambeth to warn Archbishop Laud of his unwisdom in forcing a liturgy on the Scots. He found him in the garden pacing up and down an alley afterwards called the " Clarendon Walk," which is supposed to be the leafy path that runs at the side of the wall now separating the gardens of Lambeth, from Lambeth Palace Road and the Embankment. The future Chancellor entreated the Primate to be wise in time, pointing out that unless he changed the course of the ship of state, it must inevitably be dashed against the rocks which he discerned ahead. The warning was unheeded, and the year 1641, says Evelyn, " saw the Bishop of Canterbury's Palace at Lambeth assaulted by a rude rabble from South wark." A fortnight later, during which the Archbishop, by his own account, had had time to get cannon and fortify the house a midnight attack was made on it, " but God be praised," said he, i;< I had no harm." The end of his troubled reign was near, notwithstanding. Attainted by the Commons in 1644, he was imprisoned, and executed a few months later. Then followed a change in the nature of the events I have been recalling. From this time, for sixteen years or more, there was no Archbishop Episcopacy itself was abolished, and we look at Lambeth, and find it the theatre of tragic events very painful to contemplate. The building itself suffered severely, as was but to be expected, seeing that it was the very citadel and heart of episcopacy, and naturally drew upon itself the vindictive wrath, and fanatical zeal, of the most violent and iconoclastic of those spirits in whose eyes the Church of England was an accursed thing. Even before Laud's death, " Lambeth House lying empty and convenient " began to be used by the Commons as a prison for dispossessed clergymen and Royalist prisoners, " the malignants 52 LAMBETH PALACE and delinquents having to bear their own charges," which were often extortionate. " Near an hundred ministers," says Bishop Kennet in his " Regis- ter and Chronicle," " were brought out of the West and clapp'd up in Lambeth House where almost all of them were destroyed by a pestilential fever," a gross exaggeration ; though it is true that after Naseby, the Lambeth prisons were greatly overcrowded, resulting in a serious epidemic, and rather heavy mortality. This dismal retrospect is relieved but by one picturesque episode -The devoted wife of Dr. Guy Carleton, who had been ejected from his Berkshire living and was suffering many hardships during his Lambeth incarceration, planned his escape. She managed to have a boat in readiness beneath the Water Tower, and a rope conveyed to him, by which to descend ; but the rope was too short, and underestimating the distance, Carleton risked a drop by which he severely injured both legs : he managed, however, to crawl to the boat, and was rowed away to a place of safety. The heroic wife, by selling her belongings, and by hard manual labour, contrived to support him till he could escape to France, and he lived to become after the Restoration, Bishop, first of Bristol, and afterwards of Chichester. As we follow the fortunes of Lambeth House, we find them at their lowest ebb in 1648, when a considerable part of the building was purchased by Colonel Scott and Matthew Hardy, two leading parliamentarians, for the sum of some 70. They divided the spoils, Scott taking the Great Hall, demolishing it, and selling the material Hardy the chapel which he robbed and desecrated, destroying the tomb, and removing the remains of Archbishop Parker, which had rested there since 1575. After the Restoration they were reinterred, and the Great Hall rebuilt, as before related, by Archbishop Juxon. After this, for a time, there seems to have been comparative tranquillity at the Palace, and only incidentally is it mentioned in contemporary diaries and chronicles. But in 1688 one more picture presents itself. It was a night in December, and Mary of Modena, Queen Consort of England, with her infant son the Prince of Wales, two attendants,