the same right to be there. It was here that Charles II. committed the only brutal act recorded of him, when he insulted his unfortunate Queen by forcing her to receive his mistress before all the Court. At her lodgings in Whitehall Lady Castlemaine gave birth to her son, the first Duke of Grafton. Soon after this event she wished to entertain the King at supper, but, as her lodgings were low to the water's edge and the river was high, on the day of the feast the kitchen was flooded. The cook came to tell her ladyship of the disaster, and that the sirloin ordered for the royal repast could not be cooked: Zounds!' exclaimed the Countess, you may set the house on fire, but the beef shall be roasted.' And so it was, but outside the palace walls.

Tragedy jostles with comedy at Whitehall. A few years later the palace by the river was the scene of the fatal error which wrecked the future of the House of Stuart. On a December night Queen Mary of Modena, Consort of James II., fled from Whitehall with the infant Prince of Wales, contrary to her wish, and in obedience to the stern command of the King. The Queen, carrying her infant son in her arms, disguised, under cover of the darkness, stole down to the backstairs to the private water entrance of the palace, where a boat was waiting to convey her across the river to Lambeth. She journeyed to Gravesend and thence to France. In consequence of that mistake her son remained all his life an exile and a fugitive from the land of his birth, and the throne of his ancestors was filled by his Hanoverian cousins.

The following year William and Mary of Orange came to Whitehall, and here they were formally offered the crown. Of the new Queen Evelyn writes: Mary came to Whitehall ' laughing and jolly as to a wedding.' She ran all over the palace fingering the quilts, opening the cupboards, and entering with joy into possession of the house which only a few months before had been her father's home. Even Burnet, her warm supporter, was shocked, and thought her conduct 'very strange and unbecoming.'

After the death of Mary, William III. came but rarely to Whitehall, possibly because his sister-in-law Anne, whom he hated, had lodgings there at one time. Four years before his death, in 1698, Whitehall was burned to the ground. As a royal residence it ceased to exist, and only the magnificent banqueting hall remained to bear witness of what was once the stately palace of Whitehall. After the accession of George I. this hall was converted into a Chapel

Royal, and it so remained until 1890, when it was dismantled as a place of worship. Many notable services were held in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, not the least interesting being the thanksgiving service attended by their present Majesties and all their children the day after their silver wedding (March 11, 1888), when the eloquent Dr. Magee, Archbishop of York, preached.

Shortly after this event the hall was closed as a Chapel Royal. It was 'lent' by Queen Victoria to the Royal United Service Institution, and has since been fitted up by that body for the exhibition of trophies connected with the history of the army and navy. This is a utilitarian age, but as a matter of sentiment it is a pity that this ancient relic of the palace of Whitehall should be diverted to its present uses; the old order seemed much more fitting. True, as a chapel it was never consecrated, but it was hallowed by the prayers of two centuries, and to many it was sacred as the hall through which the royal victim passed on his way to the scaffold, when, in the words of the old Puritan poet, Andrew Marvell, he

'bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed.'

Moreover, from an æsthetic point of view, though the glorious Rubens ceiling remains unspoiled, the galleries whence it can best be seen are now closed; the noble proportions of Inigo Jones's hall are marred by huge glass cases containing models of ships and so forth, and the walls are disfigured by drab paint. London is not so rich in ancient monuments that it can afford thus to misuse this precious relic of the palace of Whitehall.

The burning of Whitehall led to the recognition of St. James's as a royal palace. For though St. James's was first acquired by Henry VIII., it was not until the reign of William III. that it became the accredited seat of royalty. The phrases The Court of St. James's,' The Palace of 'St. James's,' date from the Revolution era-before then it had been The Court of Whitehall.'

The Hospital of St. James's, founded for the reception of 'fourteen sisters, maidens, that were leprous, living chastely ' and honestly in divine service,' was acquired by Henry VIII. in the year 1532, by comparatively honest means, for though he turned the sisters out of doors he granted them pensions. The hospital was razed to the ground, and St. James's Manor House was erected in its place, under the direction of Crom

well, Earl of Essex. Holbein is said to have furnished the plan, but this may be doubted. Henry VIII. entered into occupation of his 'goodly mansion of St. James's' at a time when his passion for Anne Boleyn was at its height, and carved on the chimney-piece of the presence-chamber may still be seen the Tudor badges and the initials H. A. intertwined the cipher of the monarch lover and his swanlike bride. Anne Boleyn must have spent some of the happiest hours of her brief reign at St. James's, and have witnessed there many a stately masque. The King, perchance, associated St. James's with his wayward fancy for Anne Boleyn, for he seldom went thither after her tragic death, but repaired to his more commodious palace of Whitehall. Mary, his daughter, passed much of her time at St. James's. From its gates at her accession she rode in state to Whitehall with the Princess Elizabeth at her side. The Tudor sisters rode on white palfreys, gaily caparisoned, and followed by a brave show of ladies and knights. In St. James's, too, a few years later Mary dragged out the last days of her inglorious reign, weeping over the loss of Calais, and sighing for Philip her husband, who came not.

After Mary's death the course of events flowed away from St. James's. Elizabeth cared nothing for the palace, but she sometimes held receptions in the state apartments. James I. went thither but little, and though he affected to be pleased that it bore his name, the magnificence of Whitehall appealed much more to him. So he made over the Manor House of St. James's to his son Henry, Prince of Wales, who occupied it until his premature death. Charles I. had a liking for St. James's, and most of his children were born there. So too had Queen Henrietta Maria, who lodged a colony of priests and friars in the Friary Court, to the great indignation of the Puritans. It was not long before the Queen's French priests were turned out of the Friary Court with scant ceremony, and the Queen, who viewed their ejection (which she was powerless to prevent) from one of the palace windows, was so enraged that she broke the glass with her clenched hands.

In

St. James's is full of tragic memories. It was here that Charles I. passed the eve of his execution, here that he took leave of his children and slept his last sleep before he exchanged a corruptible for an incorruptible crown. the Chapel Royal, which he had fitted up, he attended divine service on the morning of his execution before he 'walked through the park, guarded with a regiment of foot, to Whitehall.'

Within these same walls, to them a prison, the younger children of Charles I. played in the weeks that followed their father's death-a death which they could have understood but dimly. One day, after a game of hide and seek in the corridors, the Duke of York (afterwards James II.) was missing. For two hours his little brother and sister, the Duke of Gloucester and the Lady Elizabeth, sought but found him not. He had hurried to the garden gate leading to the Mall, where a trusty friend was awaiting him, and there, donning a disguise, he entered a coach and drove post haste to a vessel anchored at Gravesend, and so to Holland.

After the Restoration the Duke of York came back in triumph to the palace from which he had fled when a boy, for the King made most of St. James's over to his brother. Charles II. greatly improved St. James's Park, which was one of his favourite promenades. Pepys is never tired of writing of the Parke' and 'the great and noble 'alterations' which were being made in the demesne. In St. James's the Duke of York lost his two sons by Ann Hyde, a bereavement which Coke mentions with other gossip in a most inconsequent fashion. The King' (Charles II.), he says, 'told the Prince' (Rupert) how he had shot a duck, ' and such a dog fetched it; and so they walked till the King came to St. James's House; and there the King 'said to the Prince, "Let's go in and see Cambridge and Kendal," the Duke of York's two sons, who then lay 'a-dying. But upon his return to Whitehall he found all ' in an uproar-the Countess of Castlemaine, as it was said, bewailing above all others that she should be the first to be 'torn to pieces.' News had come that the Dutch fleet had appeared in the river.

6.66

6

James II.'s son by Mary of Modena was born at St. James's, the Chevalier de St. George, known as the 'Old 'Pretender.' Despite the fact that nearly seventy persons were in or about the bedchamber, the rumour went forth that a spurious child had been smuggled up the back stairs in a warming-pan. Queen Anne wittily said anent this legend that the old palace was much the properest place 'to act such a cheat in.' Anne used St. James's occasionally for ceremonial purposes, Whitehall having been burned down a few years before she ascended the throne. But it was not until the accession of George I. that St. James's became actually the residence of the sovereign, a place to live in as well as the scene of levees and drawing-rooms.

VOL. OXOVI. NO. 00001.

L

What Whitehall was to the Stuarts, St. James's became to the first two Georges.

It was at St. James's in the early part of his reign that George I. held his crowded and indecorous courts—a great contrast to the dull and sparsely attended drawing-rooms of Queen Anne. To these courts almost any one of any station came who would, and there was much pushing and jostling to get within sight of royalty. Cards and music were invariable accompaniments of these assemblies. Lady Cowper writes of one of the King's drawing-rooms at St. James's: There was such a court I never saw in my life. 'My mistress' (Caroline Princess of Wales) and the Duchess of Montagu went halves at hazard and won six hundred pounds.' The company was sometimes none too sober. One George Mayo was one night turned out of the royal presence for being drunk and saucy. He fell out with Sir James Baker, and in the fray pulled him by the nose.'

In St. James's Palace George I. lodged his ugly German mistresses Schulemburg and Kielmansegge, and later, when he paid the nation the doubtful compliment of selecting an Englishwoman, Mistress Anne Brett. In the apartments of Schulemburg (Duchess of Kendal) he would spend many an evening drinking beer and playing cards-no English persons being admitted save only Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the younger Craggs. In St. James's took place the battle royal between George I. and his son, at the christening of the infant Prince George William. This led to the King's turning his son and daughter-in-law out of the palace, a scene which was humorously described in a ballad beginning

'A woful christ'ning late there did
In James's house befal.'

When George II. came to the throne the first thing that he and Queen Caroline did was to eject the Hanoverian mistresses and minions from the palace and renovate it thoroughly for the purpose of holding their courts there. Some of these courts were very brilliant, and, though high play was still the rage, the company was far more select than in the previous reign. George II. and Queen Caroline also revived the custom of dining in public on Sundays in one of the large state rooms of St. James's; the public were admitted by ticket, and allowed to stand behind the barriers and see the royal personages dine.

To St. James's Frederick Prince of Wales came on his arrival in England, and was taken without ceremony up the