The great pile of Audley End was not, however, reared in his time, and although when it arose it was given his name, which it still bears, it speedily, for lack of heirs of his blood, came into altogether alien hands. His daughter was sole heiress. She married, at the age of fourteen, Lord Henry Dudley, and when he died, became wife of the widowed fourth Duke of Norfolk. She died at the age of twenty-three, and the Duke then married for the third time, became for the third time a widower, and finally closed his career in the approved way by dabbling in conspiracy and getting beheaded for it. His son, that Lord Thomas Howard who so signally helped to destroy the Spanish Armada, was restored to the estates, made Lord High Treasurer and created successively Baron Howard de Walden and Earl of Suffolk. It was he who built the vastly spacious and vastly costly house of Audley End, of which the existing building, large though it be, is only a portion. In 1721, and again in 1749, great ranges of it were taken down by the then owners, unable to bear the enormous expense of maintaining so huge a place. The building and furnishing of Audley End are said to have cost the Lord High Treasurer not less than £200,000. He began the works in 1603, and not until thirteen years later were they completed. Well might James I., who visited the incomplete palace, declare, with sarcastic meaning, that “it was too much for a King, though it might do very well for a Lord Treasurer.” It was not an ill-founded belief that the treasury chests of the nation had been laid under contribution for the benefit of my Lord’s building extravagances. His wife, too, was credited in public opinion with receiving bribes from the Constable of Castile, and the saying thus arose that “Audley End was built with Spanish gold.” Whatever may be the truth of those charges, certainly this magnificent man rather overdid his magnificence, with the result that his descendants could not live in the place, and the third Earl sold it to Charles II. in 1666. At that time the King, who had already become a great patron of the Turf at Newmarket, had no adequate lodging there, and was easily persuaded to buy Audley End for £50,000. That easy-going monarch probably purchased Lord Suffolk’s white elephant more for the sake of relieving him of the burden of it than for any liking himself had taken to a place twenty miles away from Newmarket Heath, and therefore not in those times particularly convenient for seeing the races. Only £30,000 of the purchase money was ever paid: the rest remained on mortgage. For some few occasions Audley End was used by the Court, but chiefly by the more reputable section of it. Here, while Charles was housed at Newmarket with courtiers of an infamous stamp, the Queen and her household led a country life so remarkable for its dulness that on one occasion, in October, 1670, to save themselves from dying of _ennui_, they are found going in disguise to Saffron Walden fair. A