the worthies of England. We have a confident trust that, under the new impulse given to art by the works of modern antiquaries, and the liberal patronage and support of the present Sovereigns of England, France, Prussia, and Bavaria, the College of Arms, in despite of the difficulties with which it has to struggle, will receive many honourable augmentations to its roll of immortal members; and from its yet unexplored treasures of antiquity shed a flood of light upon the history, manners, customs, and habits of the people of England.

THE stranger will seek in vain in London for palaces of the nobility, such as abound in Rome, Florence, and Naples-structures which bespeak their patrician ownership, and have each a history of its own as old almost, and as full of matter, as the city of which it forms a part. Equally vain will be the search of the amateur of gossiping memoirs and letters of literary men and women, or their patrons, for hotels like those of Paris, which have been the scene of world-famous petitsoupers, and other intellectual re-unions. The shadow of the royal tree prevented the aristocracy of England from bourgeoning into such exuberant rankness as the aristocracies of the Italian cities; and the high billows of popular wealth and independence, surging around and submerging their old civic mansions, prevented them from becoming landmarks of history. Something, too, must be attributed to the rural tastes of the English aristocracy; or perhaps the very causes alluded to helped to create these rural tastes. King Jamie, of blessed memory, need not have been so desperately anxious to convince the magnates of the land that they were much greater men on their own estates than in London. The power of the Crown, and still more the power of its ministers generally, selected from the gentry or younger nobility, on the one hand, and the shouldering of the mob on the other, have kept them sensitively alive to it. In short, whatever the cause, London is, less than the capital of any other country, the

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H

place where the power and prestige of the nobility are conspicuously displayed. The aristocracy of England have always been inclined to hold with the old Douglas, that "it is better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep."

Scattered, however, through the multitudinous habitations of London there are a few aristocratic mansions to which associations of social or public history do cling; and accidental circumstances such as the name of a street or court— recall the memory of others which have long been swept away, enabling us to trace the gradual westwardly migrations of the nobility.

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In the earlier periods of our history a good many of the nobility appear to have possessed residences in the City. A nobleman, who stood well with the citizens, might not unfrequently find such a mansion a more secure abode than his strongest castle, on hill or on the open plain. There was policy, too, in retaining these civic abodes it enabled their noble owners to flatter the Londoners by affecting to call themselves citizens. These city residences of the aristocracy appear to have been frequently occupied so late as the wars of the Roses. Many of them remained in the possession of their families as late as the Revolution of 1688, and their sites are in some instances possibly still retained by their descendants. Nay, as late as the reign of Charles II. they had not been entirely evacuated by their titled occupants: some old-fashioned dames and dowagers, some old-world lords, still nestled in the walls peopled with the shadowy memories of their ancestors.

It would require a big book to trace all the lordly mansions within the City walls, and their histories: a few only of the more interesting can be here noticed as specimens.

In Silver Street, at the south end of Monkwell Street, there stood in 1603 a house built of stone and timber, then appertaining to Lord Windsor, and bearing his name. This building had been in olden times known as "The Neville's Inn.” In the 19th of Richard II. it was found by inquisition of a jury, that Elizabeth Neville died, seized of a great messuage, in the parish of St. Olave, in Monkwell Street, in London, holden of the king in free burgage, which she held of the gift of John Neville of Raby, her husband. The house continued in the possession of the Nevilles, at least until the 4th year of Henry VI., when Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland, died, seized of "that messuage," in the parish of St. Olave, in Farringdon ward, 'held burgage as the City of London was held.'" The Nevilles owned also another London residence-the great old house called "The Erber," near the Church of St. Mary Bothaw, on the east side of Dowgate Street. Edward III. granted this messuage to one of the family of Scrope: its last proprietor of that name, in the reign of Henry IV., gave it for life to his brother Ralph, Earl of Westmoreland. Richard, Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, inherited the mansion, and retained possession of it till he fell in Barnet Field. George Duke of Clarence, the hero of the Malmsey-butt, obtained a grant of the house from Parliament in right of his wife Isabell, daughter of the Earl of Warwick. Richard III. appears to have taken possession of it; for, in his reign, it was called the King's Palace, and a ledger-book of that King shows that it was occupied for him by one Ralph Darnel, a yeoman of the crown. On the death of Richard it was restored to Edward, son of the Duke of Clarence, in whose hands it remained till his attainder in the 15th of Henry VII.

It appears, from an entry in the Archiepiscopal Registers of Lambeth, that

when the king-making Warwick had his town-house in Dowgate Street, Cicely, the dowager Duchess of York, resided in the parish of St. Peter's Parva, Paul's Wharf, united since the great fire, to the parish of St. Benedict. The register referred to states, that on the 7th of May, 1483, the archbishops, prelates, and nobles, who were nominated executors of Edward IV., met in the Duchess's house, in the parish above mentioned, to issue a commission for the care and sequestration of the royal property. This is the only mention known to exist of the Duchess's city-house. It is curious, and worthy of note, that the will under which this assembly acted is not known to exist: some writers have conjectured that it was intentionally destroyed during the reign of Richard III.

Crosby House was occupied about the same time by the Duke of Gloucester, who continued to reside there as Lord Protector before he assumed the kingly title. Some of his retainers were lodged in the suburbs beyond Cripplegate, as appears from the following passage in Sir Thomas More's "Pittiful Life of King Edward the Fifth:"-" And first to show you, that by conjecture he (Richard, Duke of Gloucester) pretended this thing in his brother's life, you shall understand for a truth that the same night that King Edward [IV.] died, one called Mistelbrooke, long ere the day sprung, came to the house of one Pottier, dwelling in Red-Cross Street, without Cripplegate, of London; and when he was, with hasty rapping, quickly let in, the said Mistelbrooke showed unto Pottier that King Edward was that night deceased. By my troth,' quoth Pottier, 'then will my master, the Duke of Gloucester, be king, and that I warrant thee.' What cause he had so to think, hard it is to say; whether he, being his servant, knew any such thing pretended, or otherwise had any inkling thereof; but of likelihood he spoke it not of aught."

A palace, built of stone, is said to have stood in old times at the end of Crooked Lane, facing in the direction of what is now Monument Yard; and here tradition says Edward the Black Prince had his residence.

Great and Little Winchester Streets, in Broad Street ward, occupy the site of Winchester House and gardens, but that mansion belongs to a later period. It was built by Sir William Paulet, created Earl of Wilts and Marquis of Winchester, who was Lord High Treasurer under Edward VI. The ground was a grant made to the Marquis, when Lord St. John, by Henry VIII., of part of the foundation of Fryars Eremites of St. Augustine, settled there in 1253. Lord Winchester pulled down the east end of the Augustine friars' church to obtain room for his own mansion. The steeple and choir were left standing and inclosed; and in 1550 they were let to the Dutch nation in London, as their preaching-place. Token House Yard, in the same ward, occupies the site of a house and garden, the property of the Earls of Arundel, and purchased from the Earl then living, by Sir William Petty, in the reign of Charles II.

The ward of Castle Baynard was thickly studded in old times with noblemen's houses. The royal mansion designated "the King's Great Wardrobe" probably constituted the centre of attraction, and gathered "the West End" of those days around it. This house, which bore the name of the King's Wardrobe as early as the fifth of Edward III., was built and inhabited by Sir John de Beauchamp, Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports, son of Guido de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Sir John dying in 1359, the house

was sold to the king by his executors, and from that time the property of it remained in the Crown. Richard III. resided here a short time, in the second year of his reign. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth it was occupied by Sir John Fortescue, Master of the Wardrobe, Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer. The secret letters and writings touching the estate of the realm were wont to be enrolled in the King's Wardrobe, and not in Chancery.

Among the residences of the nobility clustering round the Wardrobe, in addition to the house of Cicely, Duchess of York, noticed above, were-1. a large house originally called Beaumont's Inn, belonging to the family of that name, in the fourth of Edward III. It afterwards fell into the hands of the Crown, and Edward IV. in the fifth of his reign gave it to his Chamberlain, William Lord Hastings, from whom it descended to the Earls of Huntingdon, and being occupied by that family as a town residence, was known in the time of Henry VIII. by the name of Huntingdon House; 2. Near St. Paul's Wharf was another great house, called Scrope's Inn, which belonged to that family in the thirty-first of Henry VI.; 3. The Bishop of London's Palace stood on the north-west side of St. Paul's Churchyard; the Abbey of Fescamp, in Normandy, possessed a messuage between Baynard's Castle and Paul's Wharf, which, having been seized by Edward III., was by that prince granted to Sir Simon Burleigh, and afterwards called Burleigh House; the Prior of Okeborn (in Wiltshire) had his lodging in Castle Lane, but the priory, being of a foreign order, was suppressed by Henry V., who gave this messuage to his college in Cambridge, now called King's College.

But a more celebrated building than any of these was Castle Baynard itself, from which the ward derives its name. It was built by Baynard, a follower of the Conqueror. After his death the castle was held in succession by Geffrey and William Baynard. The latter lost the honour of Baynard's Castle by forfeiture, in 1111. It was then granted by King Henry to Robert Fitz-Richard, son of Gilbert, Earl of Clare, and came by hereditary succession, in 1198, into the possession of Robert Fitzwater. This Robert played a conspicuous part in the Barons' wars in the time of King John; and the guilty love of that monarch for Fitzwater's daughter, the fair Matilda, is one of the legends with which the struggle for Magna Charta has been adorned or disfigured-the reader may choose the epithet which pleases him best. On the 12th of March, 1303, another Robert Fitzwater acknowledged his service to the City of London for his Castle of Baynard, before Sir John Blunt, Lord Mayor of London. Stow has recorded the rights ceded by the Commonalty of London in return to Robert Fitzwater as their Châtelain and Banner-bearer. These consisted of a certain limited jurisdiction within his hereditary Soke or Ward of Castle Baynard, and the following privileges and authority in time of war :

"The said Robert and his heirs ought to be and are chief Banners of London, in fee for the Chastiliany, which he and his ancestors had by Castle Baynard, in the said City. In time of war the said Robert and his heirs ought to serve the City in manner as followeth: that is

"The said Robert ought to come, he being the twentieth Man of Arms on horseback, covered with cloth or armour, unto the great west door of St. Paul, with his banner displayed before him of his arms. And when he is come to the