The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies

by Martin A. S. Hume

Headpiece

A PALACE IN THE STRAND.[[1]]

Probably not one person out of a thousand of those who hurry along the busiest part of the Strand notices even the existence of a closed iron gate by the side of a public-house opposite the Vaudeville Theatre. If you peer through the grating you will only see a dark, narrow court, now blocked up by the building operations connected with the Hotel Cecil, and you will have no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that this avenue, which has been gradually going down in the world for the last two centuries, is destined before very long to be blotted out altogether. For this was an important thoroughfare once, called Ivy Lane, one of the three public roadways by which access was obtained from the Strand to the river and the boats, the other two being Milford Lane and Strand Lane, the entrance to which latter still exists, a mere passage between two shops opposite Catherine Street. Down the centre of Ivy Lane ran a brook, over which the roadway of the Strand was carried by a bridge called Ivy Bridge. This lane, which separates the liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster from the city of Westminster, ran sloping down to the river between the garden walls of two of the great Strand palaces which, erected, as they all were at first, by bishops, were subsequently grabbed by kings and courtiers for their own use. To the east stood, on the Savoy demesne, the house of the Bishop of Carlisle, which was granted to the Elizabethan Earl of Bedford, and subsequently came into the possession, by exchange, of Robert Cecil, afterwards the first Earl of Salisbury, second son of the great Burleigh, whose own house stood nearly opposite, on the site of Exeter Hall; and on the west, covering all the space now occupied by the Adelphi as far as Coutts' bank, there rose the ancient mansion which for centuries was the town palace of the prince-bishops of Durham, known to history as Durham Place.

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 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 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.

The Egerton Papers (Camden Society) tell us somewhat in detail of the arbitrary expulsion of Raleigh from Durham Place, where, by the grace of his mistress, he had lived happily and splendidly for nearly twenty years. These facts and some others in the subsequent history of the house are recited by every writer who has touched upon the subject, and I have no desire to repeat at length incidents which are already well known. One error into which most writers have fallen has been to jump at the conclusion that whenever recorded history is silent on the subject of Durham Place, the house reverted to the possession of the See of Durham. Such does not appear to me to have been the case. It is usually asserted that Henry VIII. first took possession of the house by forcing the Bishop, Cuthbert Tunstal, to exchange his palace for some other property. This is founded on Stow's statement that Cold Harbour, in Thames Street, was granted to the Bishop because of "his house near Charing Cross being taken into the King's hands, Cuthbert Tunstal was lodged in this Cold Harbour." It is certain, however, that Katherine of Aragon lived here during her widowhood, before Henry VIII. came to the throne, as many of her letters to her father in Spain are in existence dated from this house, ranging over several years prior to her marriage with Henry in 1509. On the very year of Mary's death Cuthbert Tunstal wrote a letter[[2]] to Cardinal Pole thanking him for obtaining for him the reversion of the house;[a/][2]] and it is usually assumed from this that he actually entered into possession of it. But he did not; and it is the story of Durham Place during this time, namely, the last years of Mary and the first few years of Elizabeth, that I wish to tell.

The historians of the house generally make short work of the matter by saying, "When Elizabeth came to the throne Tunstal was again driven from this house, and about 1583 Elizabeth granted it to its greatest tenant, the glorious Raleigh."[[3]] In all probability Tunstal only lived in the house a short time if at all. He was appointed to the See in 1530, and in 1540, as we know by Stow's description of the already-mentioned festival, Durham Place was a royal house, and so it remained until 1603, when Lord Salisbury used Toby Matthew, Bishop of Durham, as his catspaw to claim it, in order that he might filch the best part of it—the Strand frontage—for himself, which he did to his own great profit. In any case, it is certain that Tunstal never got the house back again from Mary or Cardinal Pole, whatever promises may have been made to him.