Immediately to the west of the church extend the grounds of Fulham Palace, which run for some distance alongside the river, where a strip has been modernised and provided with an embankment wall, and opened to the public as the “Bishop’s Park”; Fulham Palace and its wide-spreading lands forming the “country seat” of the Bishops of London, whose “town house” is in St. James’s Square. The Bishops of London have held their manor of Fulham continuously for about nine centuries, and are said in this respect to be the oldest landed proprietors in England. Here they have generally maintained a considerable degree of state and secluded dignity, hidden among the luxuriant trees and enclosed within the dark embrace of a sullen moat, which to this day encircles their demesne, as it probably has done since the time when a body of invading Danes wintered here in A.D. 880-1. This much-overgrown moat is a mile round, and, together with the surrounding ancient muddy conditions which were remarkable enough to have given Fulham its original name of the “foul home,” or miry settlement, must have proved a very thorough discouragement to visitors, both welcome and unwelcome.
Fulham Palace does not look palatial, and its parts are very dissimilar. The two principal fronts of the roughly quadrangular mass of buildings face east and west. That to the east was built by Bishop Howley in 1815, and has the appearance of the usual modest country mansion of that period; while the west front, which is the oldest part of the Palace, and dates from 1502-1522, when the then dilapidated older buildings were cleared away, is equally typical of the less pretentious country-houses of the age. It was Bishop Fitzjames who rebuilt this side, and his approach gateway and the tower by which the Palace is generally entered, remain very much the same as he left them. A modest, reverend dignity of old red brick, patterned, after the olden way, with lozenges of black, pervades this courtyard, upon which the simply framed windows still look, unaltered. The sculptured stone arms under the clock upon the tower are those of Bishop Juxon, more than a century later than the date of these buildings, and have no connection with the position given them here in modern times.
The Great Hall is immediately to the left of this entrance. It is in many ways the most important apartment in Fulham Palace. Here, while it was yet a new building, the ferocious Roman Catholic Bishop Bonner sometimes sat to examine heretics, while on other occasions they would appear to have been questioned in the old chapel, a structure that seems to have been situated in the eastern, rebuilt, portion of the groups of offices. The boldness of those sturdy men, many of whom became martyrs and confessors for righteousness’ sake, reads amazingly. They were brought here in custody to the enemy’s own precincts, and questioned for their lives, with preliminary tastes, in the shape of burning on the hands, of greater torments to come if their answers were deemed unsatisfactory. Yet we do not find that they often faltered. On September 10, 1557, there were brought before Bonner, in his private chapel here, Ralph Allerton and three other religious suspects. To one of these Bonner propounded the singular question, “Did he know where he was?” The answer came swiftly, “In an idol’s temple.” This was bold indeed, but awfully injudicious, according to modern ideas. But expediency and time-serving were cast aside then, and men were earnest though they died for it. I do not know what happened to the person who made that bitter repartee, but I suspect he suffered for it.
THE FITZJAMES COURTYARD, FULHAM PALACE.
In the Great Hall occasionally used by Bonner in his examination of those who were not of his way of thinking in religious matters, Thomas Tomkins had his hand burned over the flame of a candle. He perished at Smithfield in February 1555.
This hall, after various changes, was converted into a domestic chapel by Bishop Howley, who had demolished the old chapel in the course of his rebuilding works. And so it remained until Bishop Tait had completed his modern chapel, in 1867; when it became again the Hall, and the marble flooring in black and white squares, with which it was paved, was replaced by oak.
Among the several changes that followed upon Bishop Howley’s rebuilding of a portion of the Palace was that by which the old dining-parlour was converted into a kitchen. In the time when Beilby Porteous was Bishop of London, 1787-1809, there hung over the mantelpiece an object that aroused the curiosity of all the Bishop’s visitors; not because they did not know what it was—for it was nothing more than a whetstone, a sufficiently common object outside the dining-room of a Bishop—but because they could not understand its being here. And when the Bishop further mystified his guests by telling them it had been given to him on one of his journeys as a prize for being an accomplished liar, they gave up wondering, and waited for the story obviously belonging to it.