The only remaining fragment of old Ely House is the chapel, dedicated to St. Etheldreda (630), daughter of Anna, King of the West Angles, and wife of Egfrid, King of Northumberland, whose society she forsook to become Abbess of Ely and foundress of its cathedral. She was best known after death by the popular name of St. Awdry. A fair was held in her honour, at which a particular kind of beads was sold called St. Awdry or Tawdry beads. Gradually these grew to be of the shabbiest and cheapest description, and became a by-word for anything shabby or flimsy whence our familiar word "tawdry" commemorates St. Etheldreda. The chapel, long given up to the Welsh residents in London, is now in the hands of Roman Catholics, who have treated it with the utmost regard for its ancient characteristics. The walls of the ancient crypt are left with their rugged stonework unaltered. The ceiling is not vaulted, and the roof is formed by the chapel floor, but some stone pillars have been supplied in the place of the solid chestnut posts by which it was once sustained. A solemn half-light steals into this shadowy church from its deeply recessed stained windows, and barely allows one to distinguish the robed figures of the nuns who are constantly at prayers here. The church has not been "restored" into something utterly unlike its original state, as is usually the case in England.

In the upper church, which retains its grand old decorated window, the last "Mystery" was publicly performed in England-the Passion-in the time of James I. It was here also that John Evelyn's daughter Susanna was married (April 27, 1693) to William Draper, by Dr. Tenison, then Bishop of Lincoln. Cowper, in the "Task," commemorates

the over-loyalty of the chapel clerk, who astonished the congregation by singing God save King George on the arrival of the news (1746) of the defeat of Prince Charles Edward by the Duke of Cumberland.

"So in the chapel of old Ely House,

When wandering Charles, who meant to be the third,
Had fled from William, and the news was fresh,

The simple clerk, but loyal, did announce,

And eke did roar, right merrily, two staves

Sung to the praise and glory of King George."

A relic of the bishops' residence in Ely Place may be observed in a blue mitre, with the date 1540, on the wall of a court leading from hence to Hatton Garden.

At the entrance of the Viaduct from Holborn is an Equestrian Statue of the Prince Consort, Albert of Saxe Gotha, saluting the City of London, by Bacon, erected in 1873. Since the opening of the Viaduct people have ceased to remember the steepness of Snow Hill, down which the pestilent street-marauders called Mohocks in Queen. Anne's time used to amuse themselves by rolling defenceless women in barrels.

"Who has not heard the Scourer's midnight fame ?
Who has not trembled at the Mohocks' name?

I pass their desperate deeds and mischief, done
Where from Snow Hill black steepy torrents run,
How matrons, hooped within the hogshead's womb,
Were tumbled furious thence."-Gay. Trivia.

A

CHAPTER V.

WHITEHALL.

LMOST the whole of the space between Charing Cross

and Westminster on one side, and between St. James's Park and the Thames on the other, was once occupied by the great royal palace of Whitehall.

The first palace on this site was built by Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, the minister of Henry III., who bought the land from the monks of Westminster for 140 marks of silver and the annual tribute of a wax taper. He bequeathed his property here to the Convent of the Black Friars in Holborn, where he was buried, and they, in 1248, sold it to Walter de Grey, Archbishop of York, after which it continued, as York Place, to be the town-house of the Archbishops of York till the time of Wolsey.

By Wolsey, York Place was almost entirely rebuilt. Storer, in his "Metrical Life of Wolsey," says―

"Where fruitful Thames salutes the learned shoare

Was this grave prelate and the muses placed,

And by those waves he builded had before

A royal house with learned muses graced,
But by his death imperfect and defaced."

Here the cardinal lived in more than regal magnificence,

sweet as summer to all that sought him," and with a household of eight hundred persons.

"Of gentlemen ushers he had twelve daily waiters, besides one in the privy chamber, and of gentlemen waiters in his privy chamber he had six, of lords nine or ten, who had each of them two men allowed to attend upon them, except the Earl of Derby, who always was allowed five men. Then had he of gentlemen cup-bearers, carvers, servers, both of the privy chamber and of the great chamber, with gentlemen and daily waiters, forty persons; of yeomen ushers, six; of grooms in his chamber, eight; of yeomen in his chamber, forty-five daily. He had also almsmen, sometimes more in number than at other times."-Stow.

Hither Henry VIII. came masked to a banquet,* where, after the king had intrigued, danced, and accompanied the ladies at mumchance, he took off his disguise, and they "passed the whole night with banquetting, dancing, and other triumphant devices, to the great comfort of the king, and pleasant regard of the nobility there assembled." It is at this banquet that Shakspeare portrays the first meeting of the king with Anne Boleyn.t

It was hither that, when his disgrace befell, the Duke of Suffolk came to bid Wolsey resign the Great Seal, and hence, having delivered an inventory of all his treasures to the king, the Cardinal "took barge at his privy stairs, and so went by water to Putney," on his way to Esher, leaving his palace to his master, who almost immediately occupied it.

Henry VIII. changed the name of York Place to "the King's Manor of Westminster," more generally known as Whitehall, and greatly enlarged it. He also obtained an Act of Parliament enacting that "the entire space between Charing Cross and the Sanctuary at Westminster, from the Thames on the east side to the park wall westward, should

* Cavendish's "Life of Wolsey."

+ Henry VIII., act i. sc. 4.

from henceforth be deemed the King's whole Palace of Westminster." He erected buildings-a tennis-court, cockpit, &c.—along the whole southern side of the Park, and formed a vast courtyard by the erection of two gates, the Whitehall Gate and the King Street Gate, over the highway leading to Westminster. The first of these gates, which stood on the Charing Cross side of the present Banqueting House, was a noble work of Holbein, "built with bricks of two colours, glazed, and disposed in a tesselated fashion." "1* It was embattled at the top, and adorned with eight terra-cotta medallions of noble Italian workmanship.t This gate was pulled down in 1750: the Duke of Cumberland intended to have rebuilt it at the end of the Long Avenue at Windsor, but never carried out his idea. The King Street Gate, which had dome-capped turrets at the sides, was pulled down in 1723.

Henry VIII. began at Whitehall the Royal Gallery of pictures which was continued by Charles I. Holbein had rooms in the palace and a pension of 200 florins. It was "in his closet, at Whitehall, being St. Paul's day" (Jan. 25, 1533), that Henry was married by Dr. Rowland Lee, afterwards Bishop of Chester, to Anne Boleyn (for whom he had previously obtained Suffolk House as a near residence) in the presence of only three witnesses, one of whom was Henry Norris, Groom of the Chamber, afterwards a fellow-victim with her upon the scaffold. From the windows of the great gallery which Henry VIII. built on the site of the present Horse Guards, overlooking the Tilt-Yard, he reviewed 15,000 armed citizens in May, 1539, when an inva

↑ Three of these-Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Bishop Fisher-are at Hatfield Priory, near Witham, in Essex. Two are at Hampton Court.