In 1395, a year after the death of Queen Anne, which was such a bitter grief to Richard, the French historian Froissart, who was then engaged in writing his famous _Chronicles_, went to Eltham to present one of his books to the widowed king, and was present at a council, of which he gives a very graphic account. He was also, he relates, admitted to a private audience in the monarch's bedroom and he tells how he laid his gift upon the bed and how greatly the recipient appreciated it, for he dipped eagerly into the manuscript here and there reading portions of it aloud. It was at Eltham in 1396 that the marriage was arranged between Richard II. and the eight-year-old Isabella, daughter of Charles VI. of France, and it was from the palace that the newly married pair went forth in great state for the coronation of the bride in Westminster Abbey. Isabella was but eleven years old when three years later her husband {121} was deposed, and they were never again at Eltham; but Henry IV. often held his court in the palace, spending Christmas there no less than four times. It was in it that he was first seized with the illness that terminated fatally in Westminster Abbey in March 1413, and there that his son and successor Henry V. spent much of the short time he lived in England. From Eltham Palace he hastened up to London in January 1414 to deal with the Lollards. Henry VI., after his long minority, and before he realised how insecure was his tenure of the throne, went to Eltham to superintend the restoration of the palace for the reception of his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and her infant son, the ill-fated Prince Edward, but so far as the royal family was concerned his labour was all in vain. The queen never saw the home prepared for her, and it was her bitter enemy Edward IV. who reaped the benefit of her husband's improvements. The new king became greatly attached to his palace at Eltham, and some authorities attribute the building of the banqueting-hall to him, though the probability is that he only enlarged and beautified it. In 1480 his third daughter Bridget was born in the palace, and baptized in the private chapel, and in 1482, three months before his sudden death, the king kept Christmas there with great pomp, daily entertaining more than two thousand guests. The founder of the Tudor dynasty too, Henry VII., whose marriage with one of Edward IV.'s daughters united the red and white roses, kept up the traditions of Eltham hospitality, and did much to embellish the palace, building, according to Hasted, a handsome {122} front towards the moat. The sixteenth-century chronicler Lambarde gives a vivid description of the fair residence at Eltham, but he also strikes the note of the waning of its glory, for he remarks that the court was beginning to prefer Greenwich to it. Henry VIII., it is true, was sometimes at Eltham, keeping Christmas there in 1515, when a mock tournament was