Thus fortified, the Palace assumed something of the usual plan of a Norman castle. The Outer Bailly was represented by the New Palace Yard, with its Clock Tower and place for martial exercises, ridings, and tournaments. Westminster Hall faced the Outer Bailly; to right and to left, to east and to west, stood buildings; on the south were other buildings which inclosed the Inner Bailly, now Old Palace Yard; south of these were gardens and stables with less important houses, offices, and barracks. The great mass of the Palace buildings was between Westminster Hall and the river.
PLAN OF WESTMINSTER PALACE IN 1834.
Of the old Palace there survived, long after the removal of the Court to Whitehall, and until the fatal fire of sixty years ago, a group of its most interesting and most historical buildings. Changes had been made in them; their roofs were taken down and replaced, their windows were altered, the very walls in some had been rebuilt; yet they were the rooms in which Edward the Confessor and all the kings and queens of England lived up to the time of the Eighth Henry. Beneath them the solid substructures of the Confessor remained after the fire, and, for all I know, remain to this day.
The plan shows the position of these buildings. Beginning with the south, there is first of all the Prince’s Chamber, afterward the Robing Room of the old House of Lords. It was forty-five feet long and twenty feet wide; it ran east and west. The chamber had five beautiful lancet windows on the south side and three each on the east and west. On the north side it opened into the old House of Lords. It was in this room that Queen Elizabeth hung up the tapestry celebrating the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This excellent piece of work was afterward transferred to the Court of Requests, where it was burned in the last fire.
The hall adjoining the old House of Lords formed, with the Painted Chamber and the Court of Requests, Edward the Confessor’s living rooms. Under the House of Lords was the King’s kitchen, afterward the cellar where Guy Fawkes and his friends placed the barrels of gunpowder. After the Lords removed to the Court of Requests this room was called the Royal Gallery.
The third room, perhaps the most beautiful, was the Painted Chamber. This hall, certainly that in which the Confessor breathed his last, was eighty feet long, twenty broad, and fifty high—a lofty and narrow room, perhaps too narrow for its length. The meaning of its name had long been forgotten, until the year 1800, when, on taking down the tapestry, which had hung there for centuries, the walls were found to be covered with paintings, representing on one side of the room the wars of the Maccabees, and on the other side scenes from the life of Edward the Confessor. It was then remembered, or discovered, that in an itinerary of two Franciscan pilgrims in the year 1322, preserved among the manuscripts of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, these paintings are mentioned. In the year 1477 the hall was called St. Edward’s Chamber; Sir Edward Coke calls it the Chamber Depeint or St. Edward’s Chamber.
