This portrait—as well as the more famous group of More and his family, now in Nostell Priory—was painted by Hans Holbein, {48} while he was living with More. He had grown tired of his dissipated life in Basle and of his wife, and had come to England with a letter of introduction to More, from Erasmus, whose portrait Holbein had just finished in Basle; and More was so pleased with the man that he gave him a home with himself. Here were passed three of the happiest years of the great painter’s life, during which he did much good work. Some of this was shown to the king on one of his visits, More having hung several of the portraits in a fine light for that purpose; and they so charmed the delicate-minded monarch that he asked, “if such an artist were still alive, and to be had for money?” So it came to pass that Holbein, on losing his good friend, entered the king’s service, and there remained until his own death. * * * * * After More’s execution, and the confiscation of his property—which is a tautological way of speaking of any of Henry’s murders—the house passed through many hands, noble and base, clean and dirty; and while everything is of interest concerning walls which, in Cicero’s words, “could give such good reason for their fame,” it would be but dry detail to follow their forlorn fortunes fully. Of the noblemen and courtiers who dwelt here, few are worthy our notice: but I may mention that as early as 1586 Lord and Lady Dacre had bought the house and estate; and here her brother, Thomas Sackville, often visited her, and from here many of his letters are dated. Here he may have written his “Gorbudic,” the first English Tragedy. It was Sackville who was sent to tell Queen Mary of Scots that her sentence was signed, and he it was who saw it executed. Lady Dacre, surviving her husband, willed the place to the great Lord Burleigh; and so it came to his son, Lord Robert Cecil, afterwards Earl of Salisbury. He rebuilt the house and improved the place in 1619, so that even then it was “the greatest house in Chelsey.” So great that, later, James I. found it just the place he wanted for his favourite “dear Steenie,” first Duke of Buckingham; giving its owner, then Craufield, Earl of Middlesex, snug lodgings in the Tower, in exchange. Charles I., as deeply infatuated with the Duke as his royal father had been, gave the estate out and out to him, in 1627; and his it remained until the Commonwealth seized on it. His son, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham—a man worthy of, and worse even than his sire—regained the property by his shifty marriage with the daughter of Fairfax, and it was confirmed to him on the Restoration; but in 1664 it was sold, along with all the other estates of this poor and profligate scoundrel—the last and the lowest of the Villiers. He was the Zimri of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”: