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The Palace of Westminster covers an area of nine acres. Eleven courts or quadrangles give light and air to its 1,200 or 1,300 rooms, its hundred staircases, and its two miles of corridors. In the very heart of the Palace is the great Central Hall, above which rises a tower terminating in a spire, and right and left of the Hall are the two Houses of Parliament—the Commons’ Chamber nearer to the Clock Tower, the Lords’ Chamber nearer to the Victoria Tower—while about them lie the retiring rooms of their respective Members and the homes of their principal officers. There, used to be twenty official residences in the Palace. They have been considerably reduced in order to provide more accommodation for Members. Still, on the Commons side, the Speaker, the Clerk and the Sergeant-at-Arms are commodiously housed. In the old Palace a Minister had no escape from the House of Commons except the Library or smoking-room, which were available to all Members, and one gathers from the published recollections of old parliamentarians that it was not seemly for a Cabinet Minister to be seen there. “The place for a Minister,” it used to be said, “if at the House, is in the House.” In the new Palace every Minister has a private room in the corridors at the back of the Speaker’s Chair, in which he may transact departmental business and receive visitors, when his presence in the House is not particularly required.
The principal entrance to the Palace of Westminster is by St. Stephen’s Porch, in Old Palace Yard. Immediately to the left extends the wonderful and impressive Westminster Hall, the thrilling associations of which must quicken the pulses of the least imaginative. Straight ahead lies St. Stephen’s Hall, leading to the Central Hall of the Houses of Parliament. This noble hall is traversed daily, during the session, by thousands of the public on their way to or from the Legislative Chambers. How many pay heed to its strange vicissitudes? It occupies the site of old St. Stephen’s Chapel (originally the Chapel Royal of the ancient Palace of Westminster), in which, as I have said, the Commons sat regularly from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. In the building of the new Palace, St. Stephen’s Hall was raised on the vaulted foundations of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The positions of the Speaker’s Chair and the Table are marked by brass plates set in the floor of St. Stephen’s Hall. Here it was that one of the most historic of parliamentary incidents took place. On this very spot stood Charles I and Mr. Speaker Lenthal when the King demanded whether there were then present in the House the five Members, including Pym and Hampden, who had promoted the Grand Remonstrance against his unconstitutional action, and the Speaker made his famous reply: “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am,” and when the angry cries of “Privilege, Privilege!” raised by Members were the presage of civil war. St. Stephen’s Hall fittingly contains statues of twelve of the greatest and wisest statesmen whose voices so often rang through the old House of Commons. The statesmen thus honoured are Selden, Hampden, Falkland, Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham, Mansfield, Burke, Fox, Pitt and Grattan; and the selection was made by the historians Macaulay and Hallam.
Beneath St. Stephen’s Hall is the old crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Like the Chapel, it was originally used for religious services. For centuries after the Reformation it was used as a place for shooting rubbish. About a quarter of a century before the fire of 1834 it was converted into a dining-room in which the dinners given by the Speaker to Members took place. After the fire the crypt was restored to its original purpose, and for a time was a place of worship for the numerous residents within the area of the Palace of Westminster. It is the most beautiful place in the Palace, with its altar, inlaid marble floor, walls of mosaic and groined ceiling. It is also a place of solitude and silence. Not for years has it been used as a place of worship. The only sound to which it now re-echoes is the cry of the infant as the water of baptism is poured on its head. One of the few privileges of an M.P. is that a child born to him may be christened in St. Stephen’s Crypt.
A new Member is not many hours in the Palace of Westminster before he has secured the special peg for his hat and overcoat in the beautiful cloisters of old St. Stephen’s, which has been turned into a cloak-room for the Commons; obtained one of the long rows of lockers, or presses, in the corridors, immediately surrounding the Chamber, to which each Member is entitled, for storing books and papers; enjoyed a pipe or cigar in the smoking-room; had a meal in one of the several dining-rooms; read the newspapers in the news-room, or made himself acquainted with some of the contents of the extensive Library; strolled on the Terrace; had tea in the tea-room, and dispatched numbers of letters on the official stationery of the House to relatives and friends giving his first impressions of the scene where glory or obscurity awaits him as a representative of the people.