Peeps at Royal Palaces of Great Britain

of the English Kings from the time of Edward the Confessor until the reign of Henry VIII. For five centuries the monarchs of England k

Westminster as their principal palace, and often kept their Christ

n, and we are told that the incident of his rebuke to his courtiers concerning the tide occurred on the shores of the River Thames. At that time Westminster w

er, though immune from other foes, suffered terribly from fires, which have robbed us of the greatest part of one of the most picturesque of palaces. Just after Edward I. had finished repairing his royal dwelling a huge fire broke out, so tremendous that the palace was rendered uninhabitable, obliging the King to accept the hospitality of York Place, the London house of the Archbishops of York. Edward II. rebuilt the palace, which remained the main roya

arge, for all the King's work was done upon his own premises. [pg 7] Bakers, brewers, chandlers, armourers, blacksmiths, carpenters, furriers, masons, gardeners, barbers, stablemen, embroiderers, weavers-all lived and worked within the palace walls, and received wages and lodging. As Sir Walter Besant tells us, in his fascinating history of Westminster, the palace was "a crowded city, complete in itself, though it produced nothing an

l, and to the river, where the King's barges lay to take him down to the Tower of London in the city, or up the river towards Windsor. Immediately beyond the busy throng of the palace and the monastic build

he work of [pg 8] Rufus, for we learn that three hundred years later, in 1397, Richard II. ordered the "walls, windows, and roof to be taken down and new made." The following year Richard, the most magnificent of the English Kings, kept his royal Christmas in the newly finished hall. Dressed in cloth of gold, a

antry of the past, to the sombre procedure of State trials. Perhaps the best remembered scene is that of the trial of Charles I., who had been brought hurriedly from Windsor, and was lodged during his trial in part of t

the hall, judges sitting in different parts det

founded it, but [pg 9-10] Edward I. rebuilt it, only to have his building burnt down a few years later. His grandson, Edward III., restored it in such splendour that, as Camden says, "he seems rather to have been the founder than only the repairer." He made it a collegiate church, endowing it with so much wealth after his victories in France that it al

inste

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ce, except once during the reign of Charles I. For the reception of the members the beautiful chapel was ruthlessly altered, but enough of the original work remained to make the fire of 1834 a disaster to all lov

covered them was removed, and thus revealed the meaning of the room's designation. Gone, [pg 11] too, is the old House of Lords, used by the peers until the Commonwealth, where the famous tapestry representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada was hung. In the vaults underneath, originally the Confessor's kitchen, Guy Fawkes and