“Yes, and he took all the royal apartments for himself and lived in state with the poet Milton as his secretary. Here he died, only two or three years ago, and now the Palace is filled to overflowing with the great Court of the present King. Let us walk across to the river front.”
They passed through many gardens and courts surrounded by houses built in the Elizabethan fashion, with gabled roofs, and timbered fronts, till they came to a long stone building facing the river, but divided from it by a pretty garden.
“This is called the Stone Gallery,” said Godmother, “and here two of the beauties of the Court have their apartments. One is Lady Castlemaine, and the other the Duchess of Portsmouth.”
“What a lovely place to live in!” Betty exclaimed. “Overlooking this garden and the beautiful river.”
“It has its disadvantages,” Godmother remarked drily. “Sometimes the river floods the lower rooms at high tide. Only yesterday, for instance, when Lady Castlemaine had invited the King to dine with her, the cook came to tell her that the water had put the fire out in the kitchen.”
Betty laughed. “What did she do?”
“Pepys wrote it all down in his diary this morning, so we know. He tells us that Lady Castlemaine exclaimed, ‘Zounds!’ (a favourite word in these Restoration days), ‘you may burn the palace, down but the beef must be roasted!’ ‘So,’ the ‘Diary’ goes on, ‘it was carried to Mrs. Sarah’s husband, and there roasted,’ ‘Mrs. Sarah’ being the housekeeper to one of Mr. Pepys’s friends.
CHARLES I.
“Those are the Queen’s rooms,” Godmother went on, pointing to a row of windows some distance from the Stone Gallery, but like it, facing the river. “Poor Catherine! she is very much neglected, and these Court ladies’ apartments are much grander and better furnished than hers.”