LAMBETH PALACE 
have been rectors of Lambeth for eight hundred years. In the 
churchyard lie buried several of the Archbishops, but they 
are interred in greater number at Canterbury. ; ae 
In connection with gardens and their historical evolution, it is 
interesting to relate that in Lambeth Churchyard lie three genera- 
tions of a family of famous gardeners, mentioned in the itro- 
ductory chapter. John Tradescent, senior, was gardener to Queen 
Elizabeth ; his son succeeded him in her service, and on her death 
became gardener to Cecil, the first Lord Salisbury; thus helping 
to make the celebrated Hatfield Gardens, and he ended his career 
as gardener to Charles I. 
His son was that John Tradescent who founded the Ashmolean 
Museum at Oxford. The Tradescents being prosperous and highly- 
esteemed residents of Lambeth, it is extremely probable that—at a 
period when their royal mistress frequently visited the Primate— 
father, or son, or both, may have been called in to give advice con- 
cerning the Archbishop’s garden. Their tombstone in Lambeth 
Churchyard has an inscription that is worth quoting ; it runs thus : 
“ Know, Stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone 
Lye John Tredescent, Grandsire, father, son, 
The last dy’d in his spring: the other two 
. Liv’d till they had travell’d Art and Nature through, 
As by their choice collections may appear 
From what is rare, in Land, in Sea, in Air. 
Whilst they (a Homer’s Iliad in a Nut) 
A world of wonder in one closet shut. 
These famous antiquarians that had been 
Both gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, 
Transplanted now themselves, sleep here and when 
Angels shall with their trumpets waken men, 
And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise 
And change the garden for a Paradise.” 
Notwithstanding their close connection, matters did not always 
run smoothly between Lambeth House and the township or parish. 
In the quaint, but rather tedious pages of Ducarel, there.is a 
detailed report of a suit brought in 1776 by the then Archbishop, 
by which he pleaded exemption from payment of taxes, on the 
ground that Lambeth Palace was in the diocese of Canterbury 
and not in that of Winchester, the bishops of which instituted the 
Rector of Lambeth to the living, that town and parish being 
within their ecclesiastical jurisdiction. 
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