"The window was ordered in 1499, and took five years to be executed at Dordrecht (or, as some authorities state, at Gouda) in Holland. It was intended as a gift from King Ferdinand the Catholic and his wife, Queen Isabella, to Henry VII. to commemorate the marriage of their children, and was originally purposed to be erected in the Lady chapel of Westminster Abbey, then in course of construction by Henry VII., and now generally designated by his name. As Prince Arthur died in 1502, before the arrival of the window in England, and as it was the policy of Henry VII. to avoid the repayment of the widow's dowry by her marriage to his younger son, for obvious reasons, the window was never erected in the Lady chapel of the Abbey of St. Peter. After the vicissitudes of three centuries, it has been eventually put up in St. Margaret's Church, within a very short distance of its original destination. Henry VIII., after marrying his brother's widow, naturally disliked the window, and presented it to the Abbey of Waltham, where it remained till the Dissolution of Religious Houses in 1540. Then the Abbot, with a view to its preservation, transferred it to his private chapel at New Hall in Essex. This property, strange to relate, fell at the Reformation into the hands of Sir Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, father of Queen Katharine's rival, Anne Boleyn. On the death of Sir Thomas without a male heir, Henry VIII. seized New Hall with the rest of the Boleyn patrimony, in right of his murdered wife, on behalf of her daughter Elizabeth. He then wished to alter the name of New Hall into Beaulieu, but the old nomenclature survived. Queen Elizabeth bestowed the estate on Ratcliffe, Earl of Essex, who sold it to Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. His son, in turn, sold it to General Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who caused the window to be taken down and buried in chests, thus preserving it from the iconoclastic zeal of the Puritans during the Civil War. The next owner of New Hall, John Olmius, offered the window, in a letter dated July 30, 1738, preserved in the British Museum, to the authorities of Wadham College, Oxford, for their chapel; he terms it 'one of the finest large windows of painted glass in England.' The negotiation apparently fell through, for it was bought from him by Mr. John Conyers of Copt Hall, Essex, for fifty guineas. The son of this gentleman, on February 8, 1759, sold the 'window with its stone frame, ironwork, and other appurtenances' to the Churchwardens of St. Margaret's, Westminster, for £420. This sum formed part of the Parliamentary Grant of £4500 then voted for the repair of the Parish Church of the House of Commons." The parishioners of that small sanctuary possess in this much-travelled window as inspiring and beautiful a treasure as any of those which attract so great an attendance to its mighty neighbour Westminster Abbey.