Both William and Mary were greatly interested in furnishing and furniture. They took up their residence at Hampton Court Palace soon after their coronation, and the place suited William so well and pleased him so much that it was very difficult to get him away from it. William was a great soldier and a great statesman, but he was more at his pleasure in the business of a country house than in the festivities and scandals of a court life, both of which he perhaps equally disliked. The Queen also cordially liked country life, and no less cordially disliked scandal. Mr. Law, in his interesting book on Hampton Court, mentions the story that Mary would check any person attempting to retail scandal by asking whether they had read her favourite sermon--Archbishop Tillotson on Evil Speaking. With the assistance of Sir Christopher Wren as Architect and Grinling Gibbon as Master Sculptor, great changes were made in the Palace at Hampton Court. The fogs and street smells of Whitehall drove William to the pure air of the country, and there was the additional attraction that the country around the palace reminded him in its flatness of his beloved Holland. When one of his Ministers ventured to remonstrate with him on his prolonged absences from London, he answered: "Do you wish to see me dead?" William, perhaps naturally, cared nothing for English tradition: he destroyed the state rooms of Henry VIII. and entrusted to Wren the task of rebuilding the Palace. The architect appears to have had a difficult task, as the King constantly altered the plans as they proceeded, and, it is said, did a good deal towards spoiling the great architect's scheme. In William's favour it must be admitted that he took the blame for the deficiencies and gave Wren the credit for the successes of the building. The result--the attachment of a Renaissance building to a Tudor palace--is more successful than might have been expected. The King's relations with Wren seem to have been of a very friendly sort. Mr. Law mentions the fact that Wren was at this time Grand Master of Freemasons; that he initiated the King into the mysteries of the craft; and that William himself reached the chair and presided over a lodge at Hampton Court Palace whilst it was being completed, which is, in the circumstances, an interesting example of the working rather than the speculative masonry.