sums upon it. Laud's restoration of the chapel windows drew down upon them the vengeance of the Puritans, whose rough handling left much to be done at the restoration by Juxon. It stands now, a relic of old London, by the river side, itself a patchwork of the contributions of each successive occupant almost from the time of the first foundation of the see. The palaces which once surrounded it have long been gone. Nothing now remains of the magnificent pile once known as Winchester House, in the priory of St. Mary Overies, Southwark, or of its park, which extended over seventy acres. Its walls, as well as those of the Lollards' Tower at Lambeth, served as a prison for the Cavaliers during the great rebellion. La Place, afterwards Carlisle House, the town residence of the Bishops of Rochester in Lambeth, has shared the fate of the mansion belonging to the Archbishops of York at Battersea. The stately old castle which still lowers over the town of Farnham below, has stood many a stout buffet in its time. Parts of it must have belonged to that ancient fortress which, built originally by Henry de Blois, was razed by Henry III., having become a retreat for rebels,' and which had previously, like Guildford and Reigate, surrendered to Louis the Dauphin. Most of the present edifice was the work of Bishop Morley, who obtained the see at the Restoration. The servants' hall is one of the oldest parts. From the ancient multangular keep, the top of which is now laid out as a sunk flower-garden, there is an unrivalled prospect over the park and surrounding hop-grounds, the white tents of the camp at Aldershot dotting the horizon. In the spacious dining-hall, seventy guests can be entertained with ease. The whole palace suffered much during the civil war, when it was taken from Sir John Denham by Waller, and placed in charge of another Surrey poet, George Wither the Parliamentarian. It was while on a visit at Farnham, where she was a constant guest, that Queen Elizabeth gave that pleasant' advice to the Duke of Norfolk, 'to be careful on what pillow he laid his head,' which, had he heeded his monitress, 'might have saved it from the block. But Farnham was not the only place honoured in her progresses. In 1599 Lord Burleigh entertained his royal mistress at Wimbledon House, a daring structure,' 'considered by some to equal, if not exceed, Nonsuch.' The previous year she had been the guest of the Master of the Rolls, Sir Julius Cæsar, at Mitcham; not altogether, it would seem, to his satisfaction, as, in addition to his presents of a gown of cloth of silver, richly embroidered, a black network mantle with pure gold, a taffeta hat white with several flowers, and a jewel of gold set therein with rubies and diamonds,' he complains that the ex penses of the entertainment, 6 with a former disappointment,' amounted to 7007. sterling, besides mine own provisions, and what was sent by my friends.' She was at Beddington in 1599 for three whole days, where the fruit of a cherry-tree had, by the artifice of straining a canvas cover over it, which was kept constantly wet, been delayed for the queen's visit upwards of a month beyond the season in the rest of England. Sir Francis Carew had always been famous for his choice fruit-trees;' and it was at Beddington that the first orange-trees ever seen in England were raised from seeds, brought thither by Sir Walter Raleigh, who had married the owner's niece, and was himself for some time his neighbour at Mitcham, hard by. The oak planted by the queen on this visit is still pointed out; but the old hall, with its curious open roof, is the only part of the mansion which is Elizabethan, the remainder being a good specimen of Queen Anne's time, in whose reign it was rebuilt by Sir Nicholas Carew. The elms near the house still contain the rookery from whence came the parent brood whose progeny until lately tenanted the high trees in the Temple Gardens. Bluff King Harry,' whose stormy infancy had been cradled at a farm-house still to be seen near Woking, was, as well as his daughter, a great patron of the county. Many of his prime favourites were from thence, and were plenteously rewarded with the lands of the Surrey monasteries. Sir Edmund Bray, who, as captain of the Band of Pensioners, attended him to the field of the cloth of gold; Sir Anthony Browne, his Master of the Horse, and first husband of the far-famed 'fair Geraldine;' and Sir Christopher More, King's Remembrancer, were all large recipients of his bounty. Thomas Lord Cromwell was the son of a Putney blacksmith, though he lived to be lord of the manor within the bounds of which he was born. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the victor of Flodden Field; his son, whom Henry's death alone saved from the block; and his still more illustrious grandson, the poet Surrey,' were all residents in the county. About a mile below Woking, on the banks of the Wey, may still be seen the foundations of the old palace of the Despensers, which, after passing through the Hollands into the possession of Margaret Beaufort, became the occasional residence of her grandson, who received there from Wolsey himself the intelligence of his promotion to a cardinal's hat. King Henry's 'trysting-place' with Anne Boleyn (ominously enough under the boughs of a yew-tree) is still pointed out in the grounds of Ankerwyke Purnish; and he was more than once at Crowhurst Place, the ancient seat of the Gaynesfords, on his lover's visits to her at Hever Castle, four miles off, on the Kentish border. It was from a mount in the grounds of the palace at Richmond, under the walls of which he had broken his first lance at a tournament held there in the year of his accession, that he watched through the darkening shades of evening for the upward flight of that rocket which was to announce from Tower Hill the death of that ill-fated queen upon the scaffold, on the eve of his marriage with Jane Seymour. Francis Weston, eldest son of Sir Richard Weston, of Sutton Place, was one of the five courtiers who were involved in her ruin. Having been made Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and received the honour of knighthood at her coronation, he shared also the undeserved fate of his mistress. Oatlands owed its origin to Henry as its founder; and one of the last acts of his life was the extension of the chase of Hampton Court over the manor of Thames Ditton; when he waxed heavy with sickness, age, and corpulency, and might not travel so readily abroad, but was constrained to seek his game and pleasure near at hand.' But his favourite hobby was the Palace of Nonsuch, near Cheam, commenced in his reign, but of which not a vestige now remains above ground, though the foundations may with some difficulty be made out. This stately edifice was built, according to Hentzer, a German traveller in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 'with an excess of magnificence and elegance even to ostentation; one would imagine everything that architecture can perform to have been employed in this one work. It may well obtain and justify its name of Nonsuch, being without a rival, as the poet sings, This which no equal has in art or fame, Britons deservedly do None-such name.' The palace itself is so encompassed with parks full of deer, delicious gardens, groves ornamented with trellis-work, cabinets of verdure, and walks so embowered by trees, that it seems to be a place pitched on by Pleasure herself to dwell in along with Health. Situated in the midst of two parks, one bearing its own name, the other called Worcester Park, it commanded, in the words of another writer, from its lofty turret, extensive views of the adjoining country. It was built round two courts, an outer and an inner one, both very spacious; the entrance to each was by a square gate house highly ornamented, embattled, and having turrets at the four corners.' These gatehouses were of stone, as were the lower stories of the palace itself; but the upper one was of wood, richly adorned, and set forth, and garnished, with a variety of statues, pictures, and other antic forms of excellent art, and workmanship, and of no small cost;' all which ornaments it would seem were of rye dough, and in modern language would probably be called basso relievos.' From the eastern and western angles of the inner court, rose two slender turrets five stories high, with lanthorns on the top, which were leaded and surrounded with wooden balustrades. These towers of observation, from which the two parks attached to the palace, and a wide extent of champaign beyond might be surveyed as in a map, were celebrated as the peculiar boast of Nonsuch. The palace was subsequently granted to the Earl of Arundel, by whom it was completed and returned to Queen Elizabeth, who frequently resided there. Indeed, it was at Nonsuch that Essex suffered that loss of her favour which ultimately cost him his head; by his arrival from Ireland, full of dirt and mire,' when he burst in upon her in her bedchamber, newly up, the hair about her face.' Nonsuch ultimately passed, as an appanage of the barony, to the notorious Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, by whom it was pulled down. 6 A square brick tower, with stone mouldings, and octagonal turrets, crowning a central gateway, still rises on the banks of the Mole among the trees of Esher. It is all that remains of the palace, which, built originally by William of Waynflete, became, under the auspices of Wolsey, the stately brick mansion and gatehouse' known as Asher Place.' Hither, when the great seal was finally taken from him, he retired with his servants the space of three or four weeks, without either beds, sheets, tablecloths, dishes to eat their meat in, or wherewithal to buy any.' Even after plate and trenchers had been obtained, from Master Arundell, and the Bishop of Carlisle,' he still dismissed, at Hallownetide,' the greater part of his retinue, and at Christmas fell sore sick, that he was likely to die;' principally of vexation at the forcible surrender which he was compelled to make of York House to the king. 'A comfortable message,' and a ring from his master, revived him sufficiently to enable him to remove to Richmond, where it was a marvel,' says Hall, to hear how the common people grudged, saying, So the Butcher's dogge doth lie in the manor of Richmond.' The present building was afterwards incorporated into the house erected under the superintendence of Kent, in 6 6 Esher's groves, Where in the sweetest solitude, embraced From courts and senate, Pelham found repose.' Horace Walpole, Kent's great admirer, was a frequent guest here, and preferred it to all villas, even to Southcote's,' at Woburn Farm hard by, adding that Kent was Kentissime' here. The grounds of the present house, which is built on higher land to avoid what Wolsey called the moist and corrupt air' of the river bank, probably owe their general arrangement to Kent. There yet stand, though somewhat shorn of their pristine glories, two noble specimens of the Elizabethan period in the county. Sutton Place, built in 1529 by Sir Richard Weston, was originally a quadrangle. Three sides alone are now left, the fourth, which contained the gateway, having been pulled down half a century ago. The building is of red brick, the mouldings are of terra cotta, Aubrey's Flanders bricks,' many of them marked with the initials R. W. and a tun, the rebus of the founder. The south gallery still contains a Roman Catholic chapel. The old long gallery was burnt down shortly after Queen Elizabeth's visit in 1591, not without suspicion of 'malice prepense' on the part of her servants. The interior has been greatly modernized; but the windows of the great hall contain shields of arms brought from a still older manor-house, which formerly existed here, and some of the ancient embossed leather hangings yet adorn the walls. The trim gardens and formal avenues which once surrounded it have long since disappeared. Losely, although it has lost its west wing, consisting of a gallery 121 feet long and a chapel, still retains its former characteristics. One noble avenue stretches away southwards from the house, which, in the midst of a domain possessing some of the finest timber in Surrey, looks out upon a boundless expanse of glades and woodlands. Built about 1562, by Sir William More, it occupies the site of an old Saxon mansion. The workmen who erected it are said to have received a penny a day for wages.' The argent cross of More, with five sable martlets, still glitters in the oriel window of the great hall. The drawingroom, with its ornamented Gothic ceiling, has an elaborate chimneypiece of the native chalk, while the mulberry-tree, which is repeated upon the cornice, is the ancient cognizance of the house of More. The gardens are in character with the house. Along one side, a broad terrace, turreted at each end, overlooks the park; the formal parterres and smooth-shaven turf,' recall the time when James I., or even the maiden queen herself, visited it in their progresses. Sir William More's eldest daughter (herself a lady of the privy chamber) had married her Grace's Latin Secretary, Sir Francis Wolley of Pirford, where, as well as at Losely, she was a frequent visitor. The Losely manuscripts are amongst the most interesting of the archives of the county. Some of them have no counterpart, embracing letters of Henry VIII., Lady Jane Grey, Queen Mary, and Queen VOL. II. No. III. K |