King Charles spent his last night in this Palace. The Royal martyr has still admirers, but they do not flock to St. James's to weep over the unspeakable sadness of that night. The elder Pretender was born here, but we have almost forgotten his life, to say nothing of his birth, in spite of the romantic warming-pan. There are stories of love and intrigue, of jealousy, of ambition and disappointment, connected with St. James's ; yet, with all this wealth of material, it is not a palace of romance: at Whitehall, when we think of that vanished House, the face, the eyes, the voice of Louise de Querouaille light up the courts; the Count de Grammont fills the rooms for us with lovely ladies and gallant courtiers; outside, from her windows looking into the Park, fair Nelly greets the King with mirthful eyes and saucy tongue as he crosses from Whitehall. Well, Miss Brett was perhaps quite as beautiful as Nelly or Louise, but we do not in the least desire to read about her. The book of the French courtier treats entirely of the world, the flesh, and the devil,—we read it with rapture; the Chronicles of St. James's might be written so as to treat of exactly the same subjects,—yet we turn from them. Why? Because it is impossible to throw over the Georges the luminous halo of romance. George the First, the Second, and the son of the Second, were perhaps as immoral as Charles and James; yet between them all they could not produce a single romance. The first romantic episode in the history of the house of Hanover is that simple little legend of Hannah Lightfoot. Perhaps another reason why St. James's has never become to the imagination a successor to Whitehall and Westminster is that from the year 1714 to the year 1837 the old kind of loyalty to the sovereign no longer existed. Compare the personal loyalty displayed to Henry V., to Henry VIII., to Elizabeth, with that felt for William III., who saved the country from Catholic rule, and for George I., who carried on the Protestant succession. The country accepted these kings, not because they had any personal love for them,

but because they enabled the nation to have what it wanted. The new kings did not try to become personally popular; but they were ready to lead the people in war for religious freedom, and they represented a principle. But as for personal loyalty of the ancient kind, that no longer existed.

For exactly a similar reason Kensington has never been a palace in which the world is interested. William III. chose the house for his residence; he died here. An excellent king, a most useful king, but hardly possessed of the nation's love. George II. died here; the Duke of Sussex died here; yet there is no curiosity or enthusiasm about the place.

With Whitehall the case is quite different. It was the Palace of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, of the Tudors and the Stuarts; the Palace of sovereigns who ruled as well as reigned, who were English and not Germans, who lived in the open light and air for all to behold; if they did not hide their vices, they openly displayed their virtues : there is more interest attaching to the Whitehall of Charles II. alone than there is to the St. James's of all those who came after him. Since, then, we can here consider one palace only out of the remaining four, let us turn to the Palace of Whitehall.

We have seen that, of all the buildings which once clustered round the Painted Chamber and formed the King's House of Westminster, there now remain nothing more than a single hall much changed, a crypt much restored, a cloister, and a tower. But this is autumnal opulence compared with the Palace of Whitehall. Of that broad, rambling place, as taken over and enlarged by Henry VIII., there now remains nothing at all-not a single chamber, not a tower, not a gateway, not a fragment; everything is gone : even the disposition of its courts and lanes, generally the last thing to be lost, can no longer be traced. And of the Stuart Whitehall which succeeded there remains but one chamber, the Banqueting Hall of Inigo Jones. Perhaps no royal palace of recent times, in any country, has been so lost and forgotten as that

HOLBEIN'S GATE AND THE BANQUETING HALL

From the original Picture by Samuel Scott, in possession of Mr. Andrew Chatto

of the Tudor Whitehall. Even the Ivory House of Ahab, or the Golden House of Nero, has not been more completely swept away. I wonder how many living men-even of the few who have seriously studied the Westminster of the past -could draw from memory a plan of Whitehall Palace, or describe in general terms its courts and buildings. Yet it was a very great house; certainly not venerable or picturesque, such as that which stood beside the Abbey: there were no sculptured fronts, no tall gables, no tourelles, no gray walls, no narrow windows, no carved cloisters; there was hardly any suggestion of a fortress; it was a modern house from the first, the house of an ecclesiastic, built, like all the older houses, in a succession of courts. One who wishes to understand Whitehall must visit Hampton, and walk about the courts of St. James's.

The first mention of the House is in the year 1221, when it was bequeathed by Hubert de Burgh, Henry III.'s Justiciary, to the Dominicans of his foundation. The original home of the Black Friars in London was in Holborn, exactly north of Lincoln's Inn ; whence, fifty years later, they removed to the corner where the Fleet runs into the Thames, just outside the ancient City wall. Here their name still survives. The monks kept Hubert's house till 1276, when they sold it to the Archbishop of York. For two hundred and fifty years it was the town house of the Archbishop. Wolsey, the last Archbishop who held it, greatly enlarged and beautified the house. Concerning the magnificence with which he lived here-such magnificence as surpassed that of the King his master, such splendour as no king of England, not even Richard II., had ever shown at his court-we are informed by his biographer, Cavendish. Wolsey's following of eight hundred men, including ten peers of the realm and fifteen knights who were not too proud to enter the service of the Cardinal, was greater even than that of Warwick, the King-maker of the preceding century.