GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
bered as the beneficent founder of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and 
of other similar institutions. In character he was certainly more 
humane than Arundel, for he was instrumental in passing the 
Act that in some cases substituted the lash, and other lighter 
punishments, for the horrible penalty of death at the stake. In 
any case, it is difficult to believe that he could have been guilty of 
the deliberate cruelty of building a great addition to the Lambeth 
pile, for the express purpose of therein immuring and torturing 
the Wycliffites, and the popular belief that he did so leaves an 
undeserved stain on his memory. The true Lollards Tower, 
according to Dr. Maitland and to other evidence both direct and 
indirect, was not at Lambeth at all, but at the ‘‘ Bishop’s prison ” 
attached to London House, the town residence of the Metropolitan 
Bishop, and was, in fact, a portion of old St. Paul’s. 
Foxe, in his “‘ Actes and Monuments,”’ speaks of the ‘“ Lollard’s 
Tower ” of St. Paul’s—“ Paul’s,” as the cathedral was colloquially 
termed—and Stowe, writing in 1598, makes mention of two towers 
at its western extremity, of which the one at the southern corner 
was known as “ The Lowlarde Tower, and hath been used as the 
Bishop’s prison of such as were detested for opinions contrary 
to the faith of the church.” 
One might suppose that such evidence would have been con- 
sidered conclusive, but it seems it was not so; for after the 
Commonwealth, and the Restoration, when the Great Fire of 1666 
had swept away every vestige of old St. Paul’s, of London House, 
its Lollard Tower, and its prison—the tradition of a “ Lollard’s 
Tower ”’ still remaining, it was transferred bodily to Lambeth, 
and the odium attaching to its erection and use, came at last, 
by a not unnatural sequence of ideas, to be cast upon the man, 
who having punished heresy and built a tower, had (so it was 
erroneously concluded) intended it, and used it, as a prison for 
Lollards. 
Popular beliefs, like prejudices, are not easily eradicated ; 
they take much uprooting ; and, therefore, so long as the walls of 
Lambeth Palace stand, so long will idle passers-by look up at the 
hoary stones of the supposed Lollard’s Tower, and vaguely picture, 
as having been enacted behind them, scenes of sorrow and violence 
that never took place. Posterity has fixed this stain upon the 
memory of the great building Archbishop, and there it will remain, 
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