“‘Say you so? Then, fair uncle, I am now old enough to manage mine own affairs.’
“So saying, he took the Great Seal from the Archbishop, and the keys of the Exchequer from the Bishop of Hereford; from the Duke of Gloucester he took his office; he appointed new Judges; he created a new Council.
“Look you,” said Francis of Winchelsea, “how secret are the counsels of the mighty! They keep their designs secret because they cannot trust their courtiers. The King made no sign when his uncles took the management of the realm into their own hands; he was not yet strong enough: he amused himself. They drove away his favorites and beheaded them; the King still made no sign; he amused himself. When the moment came he sprang up and delivered his blow. ’Twas a gallant Prince. Alas! that he was not always strong. That he compassed the death of the Duke of Gloucester no one doubts; but then the Duke had compassed the death of his friends. Twice in his life Richard was strong; on that day and another; twice was he strong.
“That night there was high revelry in the Palace; the mummers and the minstrels and the music made the Court merry; and the dancing girls moved the hearts of the young men. And the King’s Fool made the courtiers laugh when he jested about the Duke’s amazement and the Archbishop’s discomfiture. And as for me, plain Francis the scribe, I am inclined, seeing the miseries that have since fallen upon that most puissant Prince and upon this country, to humble myself and to acknowledge the mercy of Heaven in refusing me a higher place than this of scribe. The Kings succeed; the council changes; the ax and the block are always doing their work; but the scribe remains, and were it not for the stiffness of this right knee and a growing deafness, I should have but little cause for complaint.”
Here ends the manuscript of Francis de Winchelsea.
When the King’s House was removed from Westminster to Whitehall the importance of the old Palace suffered little diminution. St. Stephen’s was dissolved, but the chapel was not destroyed nor were the cloisters broken down. The Commons came across the road, leaving the Chapter House and exchanging one lovely building for another. They proceeded so to alter and to rebuild and add and subtract that by the time of the fire there was not much left of the old St. Stephen’s. The other buildings of the Palace were gradually modernized, so that in the end little was left of the old Palace except the nest of chambers that belonged in the first instance to Edward the Confessor, with the Hall of Rufus. As for this mediæval Palace, with its narrow lanes, its close courts, its corridors and cloisters, its lancet windows, its tourelles, its carved work—all that was gone, never to be replaced. But a good deal of history, a great many events, had to take place on this site before the building of the present House of Parliament, which is the greatest change of all. I set out in these chapters with the desire not to repeat, more than was necessary, stories that have been told over and over again. It is not always possible to avoid this repetition, since things must be related if only to avoid a probable charge of ignorance. Some things can be avoided as belonging rather to the History of the Nation than the History of Westminster. Among such things are the rise and development of the House of Commons. Some things again may be avoided as having been told so often that no one is ignorant of them; such as the death of Henry the Fourth in the Jerusalem Chamber. In what follows, chiefly concerning the Palace after its desertion by the King, there will be found some things well known to everybody, some things half known, some things not known at all.
In the Old Palace Yard, the open court belonging to the first Palace, many functions took place; tournaments, executions, trials by battle. At one of these tournaments, that of 1348, two Scottish knights, the Earl Douglas and Sir William Douglas, prisoners of war, acquitted themselves so valiantly that the King sent them home free. Of executions in Old Palace Yard there is recorded the hanging of a man for slaying another within the Palace; his body, for an example, remained hanging for two days. Of trial by battle, many are recorded in Tothill Fields and elsewhere, and those of Old Palace Yard. One of these was held in the presence of King Edward III., between Thomas de la Marche and John de Visconti, to prove that the former had not been guilty of treachery against the King of Sicily. De la Marche unhorsed his opponent and struck him in the face as he fell. It is not stated what became of the wounded man.
On the south side of the Old Palace Yard were certain fish ponds, or stew ponds, which were kept stocked with eels and pike. On the east side Geoffrey Chaucer, for a very short time,—less than a year,—occupied a house. It stood nigh to the White Rose tavern, abutting on the old Lady Chapel. King Henry the Seventh’s Chapel now occupies the site. And there was a gateway or passage from the Abbey churchyard to Old Palace Yard, over which was a house sacred to the memory of Ben Jonson, who lived there.
In the southeast corner of Old Palace Yard stood the house which was hired by Percy, one of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot, through which the barrels of powder were conveyed to the vaults. In Palace Yard four of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, Thomas Winter, Ambrose Rokewood, and Robert Keyes were executed fifteen years later, to the shame and dishonor of the English nation. Raleigh was brought to Old Palace Yard to die. The day chosen for his execution was Lord Mayor’s Day, so that the crowd should be drawn to the pageant rather than the execution. It is curious to read how Lady Raleigh attended at the execution and carried away the head in a bag. She kept it during the rest of her life, and after her death it was kept by her son Carew. The body lies buried in the Chancel of St. Margaret’s.
The memory of these great mobs closes the history of Old Palace Yard. One of these was in 1641, when six thousand citizens, armed with swords and clubs, seized on the entrance to the House of Lords and called for justice against Lord Strafford. The second, in 1773, when the Sheriff and Aldermen and Common Council of London, in a procession of two hundred carriages, attended by a huge mob, went to Westminster to petition against the Excise scheme of Sir Robert Walpole. The third is the mob that followed Lord George Gordon. On this occasion both Lords and Commons found it necessary to adjourn.