The Year after the Armada, and Other Historical Studies

by Martin A. S. Hume

The neighbours had complained over and over again, Cecil said, of the quarrels and fights of the Bishop's dependants, and had asked for his removal from the house. There had been a squabble, one of many, between the English porter and the Bishop's scullions about the water, which, after serving the conduit in the inner courtyard, ran down to the basement kitchen of the house itself. The Bishop's servants kept their tap running in the kitchen out of malice, in order to deprive the upper conduit of water, and when the English porter complained, they shut the door of the great hall, so that neither he nor the neighbours could get to the conduit at all. Then the porter said he would cut the pipe and stop their supply, and at this threat they went to his house with weapons in their hands and said they would kill him if he did so; and he was the Queen's servant! But, worst of all, Cecil accused the Bishop of plotting with Shan O'Neil and Arthur Pole, and said that since the house had been in the Bishop's occupation it had become sadly dilapidated and damaged as regarded the lead, glass doors, and so on, and that the Queen had decided to put it into proper repair and find another fitting residence for him. The Bishop retorted by denying all the charges, and saying that as the house was low-lying and damp and he was old and ailing, he would be glad to leave it. But soft spoken as he was to the Council, he was burning with rage, and wrote to Granvelle in a very different tone.

It was some months yet, however, before he moved from Durham Place, and during that time the Queen's Marshal again descended upon the house one morning of a Catholic feast-day, and haled all those who were attending Mass to the Marshalsea. The guard had, it appears, concealed themselves betimes in the porter's house, and Cecil had given them orders that if any resistance whatever was offered they were to attack the house in force and capture all the inmates at any cost. But at last the poor old Bishop, heart-broken at having to suffer so much indignity, was got rid of and lodged elsewhere. Deeply in debt and penniless, he went in the summer of 1563 to Langley, Bucks, where he died in August, some say of poison, some of plague, and some of grief. Then Durham Place, refurbished and repaired, again became a royal guest-house.

On the 16th of July, 1565, the Queen lent Durham Place to Sir Ambrose Cave, one of her Privy Council, for the celebration of his daughter's wedding with the son of Sir Francis Knollys, the Vice-Chamberlain, and the new Spanish Ambassador, Canon Guzman de Silva, was invited to the supper in the evening, at which the Queen had promised to be present. By mutual consent it had been arranged that the French and Spanish Ambassadors should never meet at Court, or where the vexed question of precedence might arise; but the two diplomatists, wily Churchmen both, were for ever on the look out for a chance of scoring off each other. No doubt Ambrose Cave thought he had cleverly evaded the difficulty by asking the French Ambassador to the more important meal, namely, the eleven o'clock dinner, and the Spanish Ambassador to the supper in the evening, at which the Queen was to be present. But when De Foix learnt at the hospitable feast at Durham Place that the Queen was coming later, he announced his intention of staying to supper as well. If Guzman did not like it, he said, he might stay away, and poor Cave, foreseeing an unseemly squabble in the Queen's presence, rushed off in despair to the Spanish Ambassador to beg of him not to come. But this was too much for the Toledan pride of the Canon, and he told Cave that he had not sought an invitation to the feast, but since it had been given and accepted he was not going to stay away for the French Ambassador or any one else. As for precedence, his master was the greatest King on earth, and if the worst came to the worst he would fight out the question. In vain Cave protested that the Queen would not come if there was to be any quarrelling, and he would be ruined at Court. He could not, he said, get rid of the Frenchman, who flatly refused to go, and he could hardly throw him out of the window. Guzman said if there was much ado about it he would throw him out of window himself, and sent off Cave in a huff. Then Guzman hurried to Whitehall in order to catch the Queen before she started for Durham Place. He waited for some time, he says, in the privy garden by which she would have to pass to her barge; and after she had vainly attempted to smooth matters over, and said she herself must refrain from going if there was to be any disturbance, she pretended to fly into a rage at Cave's management of the affair, and sent Cecil and Throgmorton off to Durham Place to get rid of the French Ambassador somehow. What arguments they used Guzman neither knew nor cared, but when he arrived with the Queen the rival Ambassador was gone, and he was the principal guest next to the sovereign. "The Queen stayed through the entertainment, and the Emperor's Ambassador and I supped with her in company with the bride and some of the principal ladies and the gentlemen who came with the Emperor's Ambassador. After supper there was a ball, a tourney, and two masques, and the feast ended at half-past one in the morning."

In September, 1565, Durham Place received a royal guest in the person of Cecilia, Princess of Sweden, Margravine of Baden, who came principally to spy how the land lay with regard to the oft-repeated suit for Elizabeth's hand made by her brother Eric XIV. The English queen, as was her wont, made much of her at first; but she, too, wore out her welcome during the months she stayed, for, as we have seen, the housekeeping of great folk in those days was far from economical, and when the Swedish princess ran short of money and wanted pecuniary help, as she soon did, frugal Elizabeth's friendship began to cool, and it ended in the poor Princess having to pledge even her clothes to satisfy her more pressing creditors before they would let her go; and her husband, a ruling prince, was put into gaol at Rochester by the irate tradesmen who had trusted his wife. But all this was at the end of her visit; the beginning was certainly brilliant and auspicious.

The Princess arrived at Dover in the Queen's ships, and was there received by Lord Cobham and his wife, the Mistress of the Robes, and a knot of courtiers sent by the Queen from Windsor. They rode as usual through Kent to Gravesend, where the Queen's barges awaited them, and the Queen's cousin, Lord Hunsdon, and six pages in royal livery received the Princess, who was thus carried up the river with all pomp and circumstance to the water-gate of Durham Place. Her dress on the occasion attracted attention in London by its strangeness. She was attired, we are told, in a long black velvet robe, with a mantle of cloth of silver and black, and on her fair hair she wore a golden crown. At the top of the water-stairs at Durham Place she was received by the Countess of Sussex, Lady Bacon, and Cecil, and installed in the house with all honour. A day or two afterwards the Queen came from Windsor to visit her. "She received her Majesty at the door, where she embraced her warmly, and both went up to her apartments. After the Queen had passed some time with her in great enjoyment she returned home, and the next night, the 15th, the Princess was delivered of a son." In due time the young Prince of Baden was christened with great pomp, and Durham Place was a scene of festivity on that and many other occasions whilst the Swedish Princess resided there. We have rather a full account of one of Queen Elizabeth's visits to the Princess at Durham Place, as Guzman, the Spanish Ambassador, happened to be at Whitehall when her Majesty was starting, and, at her invitation, accompanied her thither in her barge. He says he was with her alone for some time in the cabin of the barge, until, probably, her Majesty becoming tired of a tête-à-tête with an elderly clergyman, called her new pet Heneage to her, and began to whisper and flirt with him. The Princess awaited the Queen at the water-gate as usual, and led her to the principal apartments upstairs, although neither royal lady would consent to be seated until a stool was brought for Guzman, who relates the incident. The Queen came by water, and returned in a coach by way of the Strand. When she was seated in the carriage with Lady Cobham, her maiden Majesty could not resist the opportunity afforded by the condition of her companion to make rather a risky joke to the Ambassador, who, ecclesiastic though he was, retorted fully in the same vein, and carefully repeated the conversation in a letter to his royal master the next day.

For the next few years Durham Place gave shelter to many courtiers, ambassadors, and honoured guests of the Queen, and was occasionally lent, as we have seen, for parties and merrymakings, its large size and easy access by land and water making it peculiarly appropriate for such uses. But the elder Earl of Essex, Walter Devereux, made a somewhat longer stay in some of its apartments. It was here, probably enough in the turret-rooms which were Raleigh's favourite abiding-place, that Essex planned that expedition to Ireland with which his name was destined for all time to be linked. From here he started in August, 1573, and, with the exception of one flying visit in 1575, never saw Durham Place again.

In 1583 the Queen granted the house to Raleigh. It was in a dilapidated condition, and he spent, as he says, £2,000 in repairing it; certain it is that during twenty years that Raleigh lived there Durham Place reached its apogee of splendour. The Strand had greatly altered for the better since the time when Feria lived at Durham Place. The Bishop of Carlisle's house, on the other side of Ivy Lane, had disappeared, and Robert Cecil had built a splendid house for himself on its site. His father and elder brother, too, across the Strand had another palace, and between them they had paved and made up the roadway for a considerable distance before their properties. But slowly, too, the Strand was becoming a great fashionable thoroughfare, and long-headed Robert Cecil knew well that as shops grew up along its line the street frontage would increase in value. So he cast covetous eyes across his own boundary at Ivy Lane on to the great ramshackle congeries of stables and outhouses which fronted the Strand at Durham Place. As long as his mistress lived he dared not disturb Raleigh, but no sooner had the great Queen passed away than Raleigh was turned out with every circumstance of harshness and insult, and Lord Salisbury got his street frontage, upon which he built Britain's Burse, which was to be a rival to the Royal Exchange.

Thenceforward Durham Place went down in the world. A sort of square, with entrance by what is now called Durham Street, was built on a portion of the garden and great courtyard, but the hall and mansion themselves were left intact, and the latter was still used for the lodging of ambassadors and others, and the Bishops of Durham appear to have had lodgings in what formerly was their own palace. Lord Keeper Coventry lived, or at all events wrote, his letters here, and Lord Keeper Finch died at Durham Place in 1640. Lord Pembroke bought the whole site soon after, intending to build himself a house there, but although the plans were made the project fell through. The Commonwealth soldiers were quartered in the house for nearly two years, and Lord Pembroke had to find himself a house elsewhere, for which the Parliament voted him £200.

The Strand front became more and more valuable, and by and by another exchange was built on the rest of the frontage, whilst the property in the rear continued to get more squalid as the time went on. In the middle of the last century the exchanges were pulled down and a fine row of shops built on the site, whilst projects for dealing with the space still occupied by the old palace were busying many men's minds. At last came the brothers Adam and made a clean sweep of it all, back and front, and built the Adelphi as we see it to-day. The wide expanse of mud which at low tide formerly spread from the walls of the old palace is now replaced by the waving trees of a public garden. Great railway stations, gigantic hotels, towering masses of "flats" and "mansion" rear their high heads all round the site of old Durham Place. The wealth and power have passed from the hands of the few to the hands of the many, and instead of one man living in squalid splendour in the comfortless palace surrounded by hosts of unproductive hinds, hundreds live in comfort, usefulness, and self-respect upon the spot. There is probably more money spent in a week by working people in the garish music-hall that occupies the Strand front than would have sufficed to keep Durham Place in full swing for a year during the time of its greatest grandeur.