held in the banqueting-hall, and again in 1526 when he took refuge there from the plague then raging in London, but he never really cared for the palace as a residence. In 1527 Cardinal Wolsey, who was still in high favour, spent a fortnight at Eltham, drawing up there what are known as the Statutes of Eltham, and are still honoured at the English court for regulating the affairs of the royal household. This was perhaps the last time that any important gatherings assembled in the once popular residence, for though Queen Elizabeth and James I. were sometimes there, their visits were but brief. Charles I. never lived in the palace, but his favourite painter Sir Antony van Dyck was once the guest of the king's physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne in what was then Park Lodge, and Horace Walpole in his chatty _Anecdotes of Painting_ refers to sketches made by the great master in the neighbourhood. After the death on the scaffold of Charles I., Eltham Palace was taken possession of by parliament, and a report was drawn up of its condition, in which it is stated that it consisted of a fair chapel, a great hall, and several suites of apartments covering an acre of ground, all very much out of repair. {123} A little later the entire building was sold for the modest sum of £2753, the chapel and all the rooms were pulled down, and the grand banqueting-hall was converted into a barn. Several centuries elapsed before any effort was made to rescue it from this degraded position, but in 1828, at the instance of the Princess Sophia, who was then living at Greenwich, it was carefully restored, and it now remains, with the picturesque ivy-clad bridge spanning the moat, a notable witness to what must have been the beauty and grandeur of the group of buildings of which it was once the most remarkable feature. The hammer-beam roof, in spite of the loss of most of its pendants, ranks with that of Westminster Hall as a fine example of combined lightness and strength of construction, and the effect of the vast and lofty hall, with its grand bays at the upper end, must indeed have been impressive before the windows by which it was lighted from both sides were blocked up. When Eltham Palace was pulled down, the three parks that had belonged to it were also practically destroyed, all the venerable trees in them having been cut down, so that, as remarked by a seventeenth-century writer of somewhat gruesome tastes, there was scarcely one left to make a gibbet, the deer were killed off, and what had long been one of the most beautiful neighbourhoods near London was transformed into a scene of desolation.