Of somewhat later date than the guard-chamber, for it was built by Archbishop Stafford between 1443 and 1452, and restored in the seventeenth century by Archbishops Laud and Juxon, the great hall is still, in spite of much defacement, a noble structure, with a fine timber roof and a beautiful late Gothic porch. It is associated with many important historic memories, for in it, when in residence at Croydon, the archbishops held their court, receiving visits from the reigning sovereign and the great nobles and statesmen. It was there that Archbishop Cranmer, in 1553, condemned the heretic John Firth to the stake, at which he was himself to suffer three short years afterwards; there that Queen Mary, with Cardinal Reginald Pole as her adviser, presided over her first council after her beloved husband had left her and she had realised how hopeless was the task of winning his affections; and there her successor, Elizabeth, gave frequent audience to Archbishop Parker, whom she had made primate soon after her accession, and whom she sorely embarrassed by expecting him to give her and her whole court hospitality for several days at a time. In the great hall at Croydon, too, the virgin queen received the French ambassador after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, taking his breath away by {151} introducing him to his fellow-guests as the man who had plotted to bring about her own death; and it was there, perhaps, that the doomed Archbishop Laud penned much of the journal that reveals the secret springs of his severely criticised actions. To Croydon, after the see of Canterbury had been vacant for fifteen years, came the newly appointed Archbishop William Juxon, the faithful friend who had ministered to Charles I. to the bitter end, in spite of the contempt the ill-fated monarch had shown for his wise counsels; and later the palace was tenanted for a few weeks at a time by Archbishop Sheldon, builder of the theatre named after him at Oxford, and by his successors: Sancroft, suspended in 1689 for his refusal to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary; Tillotson, the famous preacher who attended Lord Russell on the scaffold; Tenison, Herring, Hutton, and Dr. Cornwallis; none of whom, except Archbishop Herring, who wrote of it in loving terms, showed any affection for their Surrey home.