Connected with the parish church of Putney, which, as already stated, was rebuilt in 1836, is a gem of early sixteenth-century architecture, a little chapel with a beautiful fan tracery roof, built by Bishop West of Ely, who was the son of a baker of Putney, and greatly loved his native place. The chapel originally stood on the south of the chancel, but when the restoration of the main building took place it was carefully removed to its present position, and is still practically what it was when first completed, though the ancient window-frames have been filled in with modern stained glass. Unfortunately, some of the quaint monuments that were in the old church have been destroyed, but its {181} successor still retains some interesting tombs with characteristic laudatory inscriptions, including those of Richard Lister, some time Lord Mayor of London, and his wife Margaret Diggs, and of Philadelphia Palmer, whilst in the Bishop's Chapel is a noteworthy brass to the memory of John Welbeck and his wife. Less than a century ago Putney still owned many an historic mansion standing in its own grounds, including the so-called Palace, Fairfax House, Essex House, Windsor Lodge, and Putney House, but they have all, alas, been demolished, as has also the no less interesting gabled cottage by the riverside in which Henry VIII.'s hated minister Thomas Cromwell was born, and the more important Lime Grove House, standing well back from the village on the road to Wimbledon, in which the great historian Edward Gibbon first saw the light. Fortunately, however, their sites can still be identified, and are even now, to some extent, haunted by the memory of the great names associated with them. The palace, built about the end of the fifteenth century, and now represented by River Street and River Terrace, was a place of no little note, and was connected with the one occupied by the Bishop of London by a subterranean passage. Long the seat of the Waldeck family, the palace was owned in the reign of Elizabeth by Mr. John Lacy, a wealthy cloth-merchant, who several times entertained the maiden queen in it. Her first visit took place in 1579, and her last in 1603, when she was on her way to her beloved palace at Richmond, where she {182} died two months later. To the Putney Palace came also her successor James I., just before his coronation, and thirty-nine years later it was for a time the headquarters of one of his son's most bitter enemies, General Lord Fairfax, who had succeeded the Earl of Essex in command of the Parliamentary army that was encamped at Putney during the three months of 1647 when Charles I. was a prisoner at Hampton Court. The mansion was then the property of the High Sheriff, Mr. Wymonsold, and after the Restoration it changed hands many times. Early in the nineteenth century the property was thrown into Chancery, and sold to a gentleman whose name, fortunately perhaps for his memory, has not been preserved,