"King Richard," says Stow, "having in Smithfield overcome and dispersed the rebels, he, his lords, and all his company entered the City of London with great joy, and went to the lady princess his mother, who was then lodged in the Tower Royal, called the Queen's Wardrobe, where she had remained three days and two nights, right sore abashed. But when she saw the king her son she was greatly rejoiced, and said, 'Ah! son, what great sorrow have I suffered for you this day!' The king answered and said, 'Certainly, madam, I know it well; but now rejoyce, and thank God, for I have this day recovered mine heritage, and the realm of England, which I had near-hand lost.'"
Richard II. was lodging at the Tower Royal at a later date, when the "King of Armony," as Stow quaintly calls the King of Armenia, had been driven out of his dominions by the "Tartarians;" and the lavish young king bestowed on him £1,000 a year, in pity for a banished monarch, little thinking how soon he, discrowned and dethroned, would be vainly looking round the prison walls for one look of sympathy.
This "great house," belonging anciently to the kings of England, was afterwards inhabited by the first Duke of Norfolk, to whom it had been granted by Richard III., the master he served at Bosworth. Strype finds an entry of the gift in an old ledger-book of King Richard's, wherein the Tower Royal is described as "Le Tower," in the parish of St. Thomas Apostle, not of St. Michael, as Stow has it. The house afterwards sank into poverty, became a stable for "all the king's horses," and in Stow's time was divided into poor tenements. Sic transit gloria mundi.
ST. ANTHOLIN'S CHURCH, WATLING STREET
The church of St. Antholin, in Watling Street, is the only old church in London dedicated to that monkish saint. The date of its foundation is unknown, but it must be of great antiquity, as it is mentioned by Ralph de Diceto, Dean of St. Paul's at the end of the twelfth century. The church was rebuilt, about the year 1399, by Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of London, who was buried here, and whose odd epitaph Stow notes down:—
"Here lyeth graven under this stone
Thomas Knowles, both flesh and bone,
Grocer and alderman, years forty,
Sheriff and twice maior, truly;
And for he should not lye alone,
Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan.
They were together sixty year,
And nineteen children they had in feere," &c.
The epitaph of Simon Street, grocer, is also badly written enough to be amusing:—
"Such as I am, such shall you be;
Grocer of London, sometime was I,
The king's weigher, more than years twenty
Simon Street called, in my place,
And good fellowship fain would trace;
Therefore in heaven everlasting life,
Jesu send me, and Agnes my wife," &c.