In the lawless times, when these mansions were first founded, it would have been dangerous for any but ecclesiastics to have resided outside of the protection afforded by the City boundaries, and so it came about that all the way from the Temple to Whitehall, along the banks of the silent highway, which then was the principal thoroughfare of London, there ran a string of bishops' palaces and religious foundations. Their outhouses and stable gates opened on to the rough country road we still call the Strand--a road which even in the time of Mary, we are told, was filthy and unseemly, and remained so, indeed, until the great nobles made these palaces their homes. Many books have been written about the Aldelphi and its site, and Durham Place, which was by far the most important of the Strand palaces until the Protector built Somerset House, has come in for its own full share of notice, but the writers {265} upon the subject have copied each other with slavish fidelity, errors and all. The same set of facts and assumptions has invariably done duty in all descriptions of Durham Place. I wish in the present article to break new ground, and relate some hitherto unnoticed episodes in its history. Stow has not much to tell of Durham Place, except of the great festival of 1540, when the future rivals, Dudley and Seymour, with Poynings, Carew, Kingston, and Richard Cromwell, challenged all Europe to a tourney, and held open house with regal lavishness for a week at Durham Place, lent to them for the purpose by the King, who rewarded each of them, moreover, with an income for ever of a hundred marks a year and a house out of the plunder of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. The State Papers now and again give us a ray of side-light on the history of Durham Place. We know how Somerset granted it to Elizabeth for her life after he had beheaded his brother, who there had coined the doubloons with which he thought to bribe his way to the throne. We know on Somerset's fall how jealous Northumberland gave to the Princess the great unfinished palace of the dead Protector, and took for his own town house Durham Place, in which, although it was nominally hers, she had never lived. We know something, but not much, of the fastuous splendour of Dudley's life during the three years he lived here, of Jane Grey's ill-starred wedding in the house, of the plotting of her father-in-law, verily a lath painted like a sword, and the weaker time-servers around him, to perpetuate their rule and confirm them in their ill-gotten gains, of the pitiably crumbling down of the {266} house of cards when the supreme moment came; and how Northumberland went forth from the Tower to the scaffold, never to see Durham Place again, hoping in his craven soul, till the axe fell, that his abject recantation would purchase his worthless life.