What Hubert built here is uncertain, but it is certain that he did build some kind of residence. Stephen Langton added other buildings; Boniface, A.D. 1260, found the buildings in great need of repair or insufficient. He was the first considerable builder of Lambeth. One may make a fair guess at the work of Boniface. We may consider it by the light afforded by the monastic Houses—this was not a monastery, but there was certainly something of the monastic spirit about the House. We may also take it for granted that certain essential parts of the building, though they might be rebuilt with greater splendour, would not change their position. For instance, when in after years we find a chapel, a cloister, a water-tower, or entrance from the river, and a gate-tower, or entrance from the land—then these things existed from the first. Boniface, therefore, found a chapel in the north-west corner of the Palace, where it still stands; on the west side of the chapel he found a water-tower with a gate opening upon a creek of the river by which everything was received into the House, the door of communication with the outer world, while the Archbishop's barges and boats lay moored up the creek. South of the chapel Boniface either built or rebuilt the cloisters; south of the cloisters he built or rebuilt his Hall. A Hall was absolutely necessary for a great house, and for an Archbishop's Palace it must be a splendid Hall. What is now called the Guard Room was probably at first part of the Archbishop's private apartments.
Doorway in the Lollard's Tower
A list of the rooms then in the Palace was made in 1321. At that time there was the Archbishop's private Chapel, his Chamber, his Hall, the Chancellor's Chambers, the Great Chapel, the Great Gate, and certain minor apartments—a modest list, but the dormitories and principal bedchambers are not enumerated, nor is any mention made of the Library, the offices, the cells, or the Main Gate, all of which must have been there.
Then we come to the later works, of which there are more than we need set down—are they not written in Ducarel the Laborious and in Cave-Browne the Life-giver to the dust and ashes of ancient facts? The principal gateway as we now see it is the fifteenth century work of Cardinal Morton; it is built in the same style as the gateway of St. John's College, Cambridge, but is much larger and finer; with the Church, it forms a most effective group of buildings. The present Water Tower was built by Archbishop Chicheley, but on the site of an older tower; it contained, as I have said, the water gate—that is to say, the real gate of communication with the world. To this gate came all the visitors—Kings and Cardinals, Legates, Bishops and Ambassadors; and to this gate came the barges with supplies for my Lord's table. Cranmer is said to have built the small tower at the north-east of the Chapel. Cardinal Pole, who died here, built the Long Gallery, and probably the piazza that supported it. Laud built the smaller tower on the south face of the Chicheley Tower. Let us remark here that the Tower never had any connection with Lollards, and that all the talk about the unhappy Lollard prisoners is without foundation.
LOLLARDS' PRISON