“Yes, but these are already falling out of fashion, and will disappear, because finer play-houses are being built on this side of the river. Drury Lane Theatre is one of them.”
“I went there to a pantomime last Christmas,” Betty remarked. “But of course it’s quite a different building now, in our time, isn’t it?”
“There have been three Drury Lane theatres since the one in which Nell Gwynne plays now. You went to the fourth building on the same spot.... Now we’re at the end of the Strand and I’m just going to let you have a glimpse of Whitehall Palace which last time we saw only from the water. Look at that beautiful monument in the middle of the road, just where in our time, stands the statue of Charles the First on horseback. That’s the last of the thirteen crosses put up by Edward the First to mark the place where his wife’s body rested when it was brought from Nottinghamshire to be buried in Westminster Abbey.”
“It’s in Charing Cross Station yard now, isn’t it?” Betty asked.
“Not that one. The monument outside the station in our day, is only a copy of the cross you are looking at. I needn’t tell you that when it was first set up, long, long ago in Edward the First’s time, this place was all country with a tiny hamlet called Cherringe surrounded by fields and woods, where we are standing....
“Now look down the road, remembering that if we were in our own day we should have our backs to Trafalgar Square and our faces towards Westminster. On our left we should see, first shops and houses, and then big buildings all the way down to the Houses of Parliament. On our right, there would be the Horse Guards and a line of Government Offices with St. James’s Park behind them.”
But on what a different scene Betty looked! The whole of the space stretching between the river (which she could see gleaming on her left) and St. James’s Park in full view on her right, was covered with houses, separated from one another by gardens and lawns, but all belonging to, and part of, the Palace of Whitehall. Right through the midst of this great plot of buildings, ran a public road, over-arched by two fine gateways at some long distance apart.
“You remember I told you that Henry the Eighth was the first king to live in this palace?” said Godmother. “He moved here, you remember, from the old Palace of Westminster when Cardinal Wolsey, to whom it originally belonged, fell into disgrace, and had to give it up to him. Henry invited the German painter Holbein, to live at Whitehall, and began a famous collection of pictures here. It was Henry the Eighth also who built many of the houses you see now. They are all part of the Palace. You know that this was one of Queen Elizabeth’s many homes, because you saw her land from the river over there on the left. Now look in the opposite direction. Do you see that great open space on the right? It is called the Tilt Yard, and you have walked through it many times—as it is now in our own day, I mean.”
“Have I? What is it now?” Betty asked.
She was puzzled, for the whole place looked so different from the Whitehall she knew.