King’s House of Westminster, there now remain nothing more than a single hall much changed, a crypt much restored, a cloister, and a tower. But this is autumnal opulence compared with the Palace of Whitehall. Of that broad, rambling place, as taken over and enlarged by Henry VIII., there now remains nothing at all--not a single chamber, not a tower, not a gateway, not a fragment; everything is gone: even the disposition of its courts and lanes, generally the last thing to be lost, can no longer be traced. And of the Stuart Whitehall which succeeded there remains but one chamber, the Banqueting Hall of Inigo Jones. Perhaps no royal palace of recent times, in any country, has been so lost and forgotten as that of the Tudor Whitehall. Even the Ivory House of Ahab, or the Golden House of Nero, has not been more completely swept away. I wonder how many living men--even of the few who have seriously studied the Westminster of the past--could draw from memory a plan of Whitehall Palace, or describe in general terms its courts and buildings. Yet it was a very great house; certainly not venerable or picturesque, such as that which stood beside the Abbey: there were no sculptured fronts, no tall gables, no tourelles, no gray walls, no narrow windows, no carved cloisters; there was hardly any suggestion of a fortress; it was a modern house from the first, the house of an ecclesiastic, built, like all the older houses, in a succession of courts. One who wishes to understand Whitehall must visit Hampton, and walk about the courts of St. James’s. The first mention of the House is in the year 1221, when it was bequeathed by Hubert de Burgh, Henry III.’s Justiciary, to the Dominicans of his foundation. The original home of the Black Friars in London was in Holborn, exactly north of Lincoln’s Inn; whence, fifty years later, they removed to the corner where the Fleet runs into the Thames, just outside the ancient City wall. Here their name still survives. The monks kept Hubert’s house till 1276, when they sold it to the Archbishop of York. For two hundred and fifty years it was the town house of the Archbishop. Wolsey, the last Archbishop who held it, greatly enlarged and beautified the house. Concerning the magnificence with which he lived here--such magnificence as surpassed that of the King his master, such splendor as no king of England, not even Richard the Second, had ever shown at his court--we are informed by his biographer, Cavendish. Wolsey’s following of eight hundred men, including ten peers of the realm and fifteen knights who were not too proud to enter the service of the Cardinal, was greater even than that of Warwick, the King-maker of the preceding century.