Harper's New Monthly Magazine

RIVER of many springs in its bright beginnings among the Cotswold Hills, of many turnings as it gathers depth and speed upon its pleasant way through lush green fields, with farmhouses and sheep and browsing kine, and slopes where castles, palaces, and towers of churches rise between the curving opens of the woods; a river of many bridges too, quaint spans of plank where its bed is laid with rushes, ruddy of brick where the mills and weirs wax busy, and sombrely grand of well- massed stone where the towns have thickened to its verges: such is the river Thames, until at last, wider and swifter and muddier much, yet fair with sky hues still, and very hard worked with every sort of craft that plies for trade or floats for pleasure, it comes rushing in to London town, staying its force a little as it nears the walls of beautiful old Lambeth Palace, thence swirling demurely across to the steps of the towers of Parliament, as if it cherished recollections of the days when church and state, when mace and mitre, wrought their decrees in the jealous intimacy of much conflicting lust of power; then hur rying on beneath the arches of Westminster Bridge to join its crowded water life to the crowded shore life of certainly the largest, perhaps the loveliest, surely the saddest, city in the world.

In describing the palace of Lambeth it is natural to speak, and even to speak first, of this fine river, still flowing so near it, which used to wash its very walls, and

rock the archbishop's barge in its old moorings at the palace stairs, which has borne so many scholars and prelates bond and free, so many kings and queens and lordly retinues, to and from its portals. And it is from the river, from the decks of the little steamers speeding by, that its irregular outlines mass in most harmonious effect to the eye.

The history of this stately pile, for upward of seven centuries the home and the official seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury, is not only the story of the English Church in its amities and enmities with the Church of Rome; of the archiepiscopates of more than fifty primates during England's most contentious period of civil, political, and religious evolution; and in its motley structure a record of the art and architectural changes of the ages that have produced it; but it is a romance of court and cloister as strange in its tragic verities, in the crimes and virtues of its actors, the splendor and the shadow of its scenes, as the most improbable of modern tales.

Its Saxon name, originally spelled Lamhethe or Lamehithe, signified "dirty station," which it must have been before the present Thames Embankment was built. One spelling, Lambhyd, "or lambs' harbor," had apparently no other foundation than that of an æsthetic impulse shrinking from the former meaning.

In very early times Lambeth was a royal manor the Saxon kings lived there, and it was part of the estate of the Countess Goda, sister of Edward the Confessor. It changed hands during the Saxon-Danish wars, but later came to its own again. There is no certain account of what Goda's palace was like, but discussion and deeds of conveyance show that it stood on the present site of Lambeth.

As a home for the archbishops, Lam

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by Harper and Brothers, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

VOL. LXVII.-No. 397.-1

beth-in those days out of the see of Can- | 28th of May, 1533, while this most wo

terbury-was a kind of protest on the part of the English Church against the Church of Rome, and the initiative in this recession was taken by Archbishop Baldwin, who could not "get on" with the monks of Canterbury, and chose, with the countenance of Henry II., a site at Hackington, where he could bring around him a chapter of canons apart from them. This scheme had the favor of a papal bull, but jealousy quickly got that revoked, and at Baldwin's death the monks pulled down his chapel.

Some years later Lambeth-"there being reserved only a small piece of land sufficient to erect a mansion for the Bishops of Rochester whenever they came to Parliament"--became by legal process of exchange the sole property of the see of Canterbury, and a successor of Archbishop Baldwin, about 1197, began to rebuild thereon. Once more the froward cowls of Canterbury drew down on this design three successive papal anathemas, but though his work was destroyed, the archbishop staid on at Lambeth without his college and canons; and that, after its final transfer to the see of Canterbury, Lambeth was the fixed dwelling of the primates is plain from the consecutive record of their activities. It is believed that the consecration of Thomas à Becket took place here, and that as many as five hundred consecrations occurred between the archiepiscopates of Warham and Sumner, and though these ceremonies now more frequently occur in the Abbey, St. Paul's, and elsewhere, Lambeth Palace is not less the "original centre of Anglican Church life." Among accounts of many feasts and assemblies are details of two very large conventions of church, state, university, and law dignitaries banqueting most luxuriously at ye Archbishop's Inne" at Lambeth in 1408 and 1446; for in spite of the struggle between Rome and the English episcopate it had its cardinals, and because they were learned men in times when few were so, they often held state and judicial offices, and there were eleven Lord Chancellors among them during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of course the prestige of the great influence this gave them with both church and state still attaches to the primacy. In 1501, Catherine of Ara- | gon rested here with her ladies on her first coming to England; and here, on the

manly wife and queen was still living, the marriage of her faithless husband with the Lady Anne Boleyn was confirmed by Cranmer-that same Cranmer who gave to the clergy the oath assigning the royal succession to her heirs, yet only two years later, when seated judicially in the under-chapel (crypt) of the palace, annulled the marriage itself, having artfully tempted the captive and already sentenced queen to avow some just and lawful impediment to her marriage with the king," in the hope of avoiding the stake for herself and her adherents. From that dark crypt the miserable young queen, dishonored by the king, betrayed by her highest earthly spiritual adviser, and forced to affirm in her own disgrace the disinheritance of her offspring, went forth only to the scaffold, and the third day after her beheading, her maid, Jane Seymour, took her place as the wife of Henry VIII.

It is strange reading that in the very next year (1537), by virtue of the Royal Commission, various conventions of the archbishops and bishops were held at Lambeth to "devise the Godly and Pious Disposition of a Christian Man," known to history as the Bishops' Book.

And it seems not so inscrutable as many of the so-called acts of Divine Providence that these meetings should have been dispersed by the plague, "persons dying even at the palace gate. That strange man, the eighth Henry, once came in his barge to the foot of the "Water Tower," and called his tool Cranmer down the stairs to tell him of certain plottings of Bishop Gardiner and other of Cranmer's enemies, and put him in the way of triumphing over them.

Among other royal visitors of the past have been Queen Mary, who often called on her favorite Cardinal Pole, and is said to have completely furnished the palace for him; and Queen Elizabeth, who frequently visited Archbishop Parker, whom she warmly liked in spite of his having a wife, a married prelate being the gravest incongruity in her eyes. There is a funny account of her behavior when parting from them after one of these visits. had been entertained with much devotion and luxury, and could not help feeling grateful even to Mrs. Parker. Madam I may not call you," said the maiden queen, "and mistress I must not call you;

She

yet, though I know not what to call you, I do thank you."

Another queen came to the palace, not as a guest, but as a fugitive. On the 9th of December, 1688, James II.'s unfortunate wife, the beautiful Mary of Modena, in the disguise of an Italian washer-woman, came flying from Whitehall, through dreadful wind and rain, in a little open boat, across the Thames to the foot of the Water Tower, with her six-months old child, the future "Pretender," in her arms, rolled up as a bundle of linen. The coach in which she expected to go on to Gravesend was not there, and she hid in the angle of the tower till it came and she could make her escape.

Queen Victoria visited the palace during the primacies of Archbishops Howley, Sumner, and Longley, and the late archbishop, Dr. Archibald Campbell Tait, received the Prince of Wales at Lambeth.

In sailing down the Thames the oldest portions of the palace are first to meet the eye-the tower of the parish church, close to those of the fine Gate-house, the roof and west façade of the Great Hall (Juxon's), Lollards' Tower, the lesser tower, and the graceful lancet windows of the

chapel. Portions of the palace show great antiquity, though it is not known whether any of it is of the actual Saxon fabric of the Countess Goda, or whether her palace was identical with that reported to have been repaired by Archbishops Langton and Hubert Walter. Certainly it fell into decay until the advent (1216) of Archbishop Boniface.

This Boniface must have been a very choleric and doughty fellow. While on a visit to the priory of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield, he entered into a spontaneous and deadly wrangle with its prior and canons over some simple matter, and when the indignant canons unclerically but manfully fell upon him tooth and nail, he, after much and telling usage of his powerful fists and scathing tongue, fled away to Lambeth. There he got the king's ear against the canons, and actually excommunicated them. Pope Urban IV. viewed the matter, however, in another light, and bade Boniface, in expiation of his outrageous conduct, restore and increase the Lambeth Palace.

Some authorities think Boniface's predecessor did the actual work upon borrowed sums, while Boniface boasted that

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Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 6