Public convenience had long suggested the expediency of establishing a permanent residence for the Chancellors of England, when either by successive expressions of the royal will, or by the individual choice of several successive holders of the _Clavis Regni_, a noble palace on the northern bank of the Thames came to be regarded as the proper domicile for the Great Seal. York House, memorable as the birthplace of Francis Bacon, and the scene of his brightest social splendor, demands a brief notice. Wolsey's 'York House' or Whitehall having passed from the province of York to the crown, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, established himself in another York House on a site lying between the Strand and the river. In this palace (formerly leased to the see of Norwich as a bishop's Inn, and subsequently conferred on Charles Brandon by Henry VIII.) Heath resided during his Chancellorship; and when, in consequence of his refusal to take the oath of supremacy, Elizabeth deprived him of his archbishopric, York House passed into the hands of her new Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon. On succeeding to the honors of the Marble Chair, Hatton did not move from Holborn to the Strand; but otherwise all the holders of the Great Seal, from Heath to Francis Bacon inclusive, seem to have occupied York House; Heath, of course, using it by right as Archbishop of York, and the others holding it under leases granted by successive archbishops of the northern province. So little is known of Bromley, apart from the course which he took towards Mary of Scotland, that the memory of old York House gains nothing of interest from him. Indeed it has been questioned whether he was one of its tenants. Puckering, Egerton, and Francis Bacon certainly inhabited it in succession. On Bacon's fall it was granted to Buckingham, whose desire to possess the picturesque palace was one of the motives which impelled him to blacken the great lawyer's reputation. Seized by the Long Parliament, it was granted to Lord Fairfax. In the following generation it passed into the hands of the second Duke of Buckingham, who sold house and precinct for building-ground. The bad memory of the man who thus for gold surrendered a spot of earth sacred to every scholarly Englishman is preserved in the names of _George_ Street, _Duke_ Street, _Villiers_ Street, _Buckingham_ Street. The engravings commonly sold as pictures of the York House, in which Lord Bacon kept the seals, are likenesses of the building after it was pulled about, diminished, and modernized, and in no way whatever represent the architecture of the original edifice. Amongst the art-treasures of the University of Oxford, Mr. Hepworth Dixon fortunately found a rough sketch of the real house, from which sketch Mr. E.M. Ward drew the vignette that embellishes the title-page of 'The Story of Lord Bacon's Life.'