He took possession of Lambeth Palace in November, 1691, having first repaired the building, altered the windows, wainscoted the rooms, and erected a large apartment for his wife, he being one of the earliest Archbishops living there in lawful wedlock. [Sidenote: SANCROFT.] With congratulations from friends there came insults from foes. Arian, Socinian, Deist, Atheist, were titles bestowed on his Grace; and in allusion to the doubts respecting his baptism, he received the nickname of _Undipped John_. His manner of bearing such treatment showed his proficiency in the Christian virtues of patience and meekness. One day, when he was conversing with a gentleman, a servant brought in a sealed packet containing a mask. The Archbishop smiled, and said, “This is a gentle rebuke, if compared with some others in black and white,” pointing to papers lying on the table. A bundle of letters, found after his death, exhibited a memorandum in his own handwriting, “These are libels. I pray God forgive them; I do.”[219] [Sidenote: 1692.] It is interesting to follow Sancroft into his retirement. He left the Metropolis--never to see it again--in August, 1691, for Fresingfield, a village in Suffolk, where his family had been settled for generations, where his ancestors lay buried in the parish church, and where he himself had been born and baptized. He went down at harvest-time, the sweet air and quiet of the place being, as he said, so preferable to the smoke and noise of London. Presently we find him busy in building a new house, reckoning up the time it would take to daub and tile it, to clothe and cover it in, amidst the dews and mists which might be expected to begin by St. Bartholomew’s-day--then at hand. He complains of being weakly, and describes himself as eating bread-and-butter in a morning, and “superbibing a second dish of coffee after it;” waiting to see what that, and time, and native air would do for his health. He gave up pills, and swallowed juniper-berries, and lived upon plain food, and ate with a keener appetite than he had been accustomed to at Lambeth. In the late autumn the new house remained incomplete; there was winter work to do within doors, paving and flooring, daubing and ceiling, plastering, glazing, and wainscoting, making doors and laying hearths; the old tenement, in the meantime, being packed close from end to end with the Bishop, his little household and workmen.[220] The superintendence of building, which appears to have occupied him for a time, presents a strange contrast to previous employments in the Church and the Palace, the Court and the Council-Board; and the simplicity of Sancroft’s rural life appears simpler still when we think of the palatial splendour in which he had previously moved. He wished to shut out the world; he sometimes felt like a dead man out of mind; old friends dropped off, and tales of sorrow aroused his sympathies; yet he seems, on the whole, to have spent a pleasant time down in Suffolk,