"He built a large Alms-house near to his own Palace at Croydon in Surrey, and endowed it with maintenance for a Master and twenty-eight poor men and women; which he visited so often that he knew their names and dispositions; and was so truly humble, that he called them Brothers and Sisters; and whensoever the Queen descended to that lowliness to dine with him at his Palace in Lambeth,--which was very often,--he would usually the next day show the like lowliness to his poor Brothers and Sisters at Croydon, and dine with them at his Hospital; at which time, you may believe there was joy at the table." Walton thought him a very tactful prelate. He managed Queen Elizabeth admirably, and "by justifiable sacred insinuations, such as St. Paul to Agrippa--'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband." Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch flesh in Lent. The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a pamphlet of Cavalier days, _The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly unfolded_, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward for his military services, had been given several sequestrated properties, a chief forestership, and a seneschalship. Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of which bears his name, _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_. To be "as black as a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon sanguine" was a deep red-brown.