Then we come to the later works, of which there are more than we need
set down--are they not written in Ducarel the Laborious and in
Cave-Browne the Life-giver to the dust and ashes of ancient facts? The
principal gateway as we now see it is the fifteenth century work of
Cardinal Morton; it is built in the same style as the gateway of St.
John's College, Cambridge, but is much larger and finer; with the
Church, it forms a most effective group of buildings. The present Water
Tower was built by Archbishop Chicheley, but on the site of an older
tower; it contained, as I have said, the water gate--that is to say, the
real gate of communication with the world. To this gate came all the
visitors--Kings and Cardinals, Legates, Bishops and Ambassadors; and to
this gate came the barges with supplies for my Lord's table. Cranmer is
said to have built the small tower at the north-east of the Chapel.
Cardinal Pole, who died here, built the Long Gallery, and probably the
piazza that supported it. Laud built the smaller tower on the south face
of the Chicheley Tower. Let us remark here that the Tower never had any
connection with Lollards, and that all the talk about the unhappy
Lollard prisoners is without foundation.
[Illustration: LOLLARDS' PRISON]
Juxon, who found the Palace a 'heap of ruins,' spent his three years of
occupancy and 15,000_l._ of his own money in restoring the place for the
honour and splendour of the Church. As for what has been done since that
time, especially by Archbishop Howley, it all belongs to the detailed
history of the Palace. It is sufficient here to note that the Palace is
a worthy House to-day, as it was five hundred years ago, for the
residence of the Primate. He belongs still, as his Roman Catholic
predecessors, to a Church whose members love some splendour in their
ecclesiastical Princes, just as they love splendour in their churches
and stateliness in their ritual. They do not desire to make a Bishop
rich: they do desire that a Bishop should not be hampered by narrow
circumstances: they desire that he should be able to take the lead in
all good works. In ancient times, the Bishop rode or sat in splendid
state: he sat every day at a table loaded with costly and luxurious
food: outwardly he was clothed with silken robes. But he touched nothing
that was set before him: he lived hardly and abstemiously: and he wore
next his skin a hair shirt: and for greater self-denial he suffered his
hair shirt to be full of vermin. That was the ideal Bishop of mediæval
times. Our own is much the same: a simple life: a splendid house: modest
wants: a large income: for himself no luxuries: and an open hand. Such a
house: such an income: we have always given to an Archbishop, whether of
the old or of the Reformed Faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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