Then came a day when Sir Thomas, prudent man, seeing that there was nothing left to paint, began to think that a tame artist was an expensive luxury. How to get rid of him decently? The Chancellor was a man of resource. He gave a great garden-party which the King announced his intention of honouring. Up the river came the royal barge, with banners flying and trumpets braying, a brave pageant. At Chelsea the King alighted, and was received with all due honour just outside my house that was to be. Old Sir John Tyrrell—a famous character at the Carlton Club some fifty years ago, used to say: “Yes! I’ll go and stay with you on two conditions; first, that I breakfast at my own time, and secondly that I am not taken round to see the improvements.” Sir Thomas More spared King Henry VIII. none of the “improvements.” When with royal courtesy he had admired the outside, His Majesty was taken within, and there, like the great judge that he was, he was smitten by the beauty of the glorious canvases and panels which hung everywhere. “Is such a painter yet alive, and to be had for money?” he exclaimed, and Holbein was produced out of a closet in which he lay hidden. The King was overjoyed. The painter’s fortune was made and the Chancellor’s weekly bills were reduced. Next, in Charles II.’s time, all the way from St. Martin’s Lane came Sir Theodore Mayerne, the confidential doctor of three kings, and he too was a patron of art, for he set up a furnace and worked at enamelling with Petitot the Swiss miniaturist, the excellence of whose flesh tints are said to have been due to the discoveries of the great medicine-man. When Sir Theodore died his house was pulled down and Lord Lindsey bought the property and built himself a home with the river in front and a garden at the back. There is some reason, based upon internal evidence, for supposing that Sir Christopher Wren may have been the architect. There are still remaining some of those ogival chimney-pieces such as he introduced into Hampton Court; and what more likely than that the famous Court architect should have built for the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain? Here dwelt his descendant, the Duke of Ancaster, with his beautiful duchess, whose portrait was painted both by Hudson and by a famous pupil of his, one Sir Joshua Reynolds. The beautiful portrait by Hudson, with shipping in the distance, was painted to record the mission of the Duchess when she went to Germany to bring back Queen Charlotte.