16 John of Padua. 
only palace on which King Henry was engaged at his death 
was Nonesuch, near Cheam, in Co. Surrey, now long since en- 
tirely destroyed. This fantastical and costly building was one on 
which some very novel and un-English ideas in architecture were 
indulged: and it is possible (though there is no evidence to show it) 
that the Italian new-comer may have brought those fanciful ideas 
with him.! 
It is only a tradition that he was employed by Protector Somerset 
upon Old Somerset House, in the Strand:? and Sir John Thynne, ~ 
the founder of Longleat, having been closely and officially connected 
with the Protector, the same tradition extends to the designing of 
Longleat. And because there are other houses in the West of 
England that are built somewhat in the style of Longleat {as, for 
instance, Kingston, or the Duke’s House, at Bradford-on-Avon), for 
this, and for no other conceivable reason, topographers, and guide-book 
compilers, copying from one another,and without any other authority, 
persist in referring them to this John of Padua. Walpole would 
give him Sion House, in Middlesex. ‘ Much,” says Mr. M. D. 
Wyatt most justly,’ “is attributed to him that is apocryphal.” 
Instead of “ much” I am rather disposed to say “all”: that is, so 
far as regards his having been the sole contriver and arranger of 
the architecture of any large house. For the fact is that not a 
single scrap of documentary evidence has ever been produced of any 
work, great or small, in which he was engaged. 
In the “ Vetusta Monumenta,” vol. iv., the Gate of Honour at 
Caius College, Cambridge, there delineated, is also ascribed to him, 
but quite erroneously. Still, in the middle of the last century, his 
} Nonesuch palace was an expensive toy left unfinished by King Henry: the 
grounds filled with statues, pyramids, fountains, Dianas and Acteons, &c. “The 
whole front of the house was faced with plaster work, made of rye-dough, in 
imagery very costly.” (MS. note in Le Neve’s copy of Aubrey’s “ Surrey.”), 
There is an engraving of this very singular palace, by Hoffnagle, copied in 
“ Lysons’ Environs of London,” vol. i., 153: also in “ Nichols’s Progresses of 
Queen Elizabeth”: and on the margin of Norden and Speed’s Map of the Co. 
of Surrey: but the most complete is in Braun’s ‘‘ Orbis Terrarum,” 1572. 
2“(A mixture of the most heterogeneous conceits.” ‘A piebald mass of 
masonry.” (Mr. Sarsfield Taylor.) 
8’ “The Builder,” 20th Juno, 1868. 
