LAMBETH PALACE 
retain much charm, must have been exceedingly fair to look 
upon in the reign of the Virgin Queen, being ideally situated— 
bounded on one side by the then pellucid Thames, which ran 
between high and irregular banks—on the other by the blue, illimit- 
able distances of Surrey. Unfortunately our information con- 
cerning them is meagre, and we have but slender data to go upon : 
the Computus Bellevorum, so regularly kept, seem to have dealt 
only with the domestic expenditure of the household, and with 
the outlay, for additions and repairs, to the buildings. The refer- 
ence, however, toa “ Rabbed garden ”—by which must have been 
meant a rabbit warren—suggests that only a portion of the attached 
land was cultivated, the rest being allowed to remain picturesquely 
wild. Among the long list of the Primate’s servants there is no 
mention of gardeners, probably because the outdoor service was 
not included at all: but the flowers of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
and Spenser, did not spring up unbidden; and gardeners there 
certainly were to plant and water, before the age of the Tradescents, 
who, though gardeners to royalty, were resident at Lambeth, 
where their influence would be exerted and felt. 
Ducarel tells us that Cranmer erected in the gardens a curious 
“‘ Solar” (or summer house) of exquisite workmanship ; and that 
Archbishop Parker, who did repair and “ re-edify ”’ all the houses 
of the See of Canterbury, “in the year of our Lord 1569, greatly 
repaired and beautified this Palace. The Great Hall he covered 
with shingles : he made entirely the long bridge”’ (7.e., the horse 
ferry pier) “that reached into the Thames: the famous ‘ Solar,’ 
or summer-house in the garden built by Archbishop Cranmer 
and now almost decayed, he restored to its ancient form and 
beauty. He also repaired two aqueducts for the conveyance of 
water, one in the garden, and another for the common use of the 
household in the inner cloister.” 
It is probable that the summer-house was destroyed when the 
regicides, Scott and Hardy, demolished so much that was venerable 
and of historic interest ; for no trace of it remains. 
Nor is there any longer any vestige of a park, or of the chase, or 
wilderness ; but the grounds, at the end of the seventeenth century, 
had already attracted attention; and Gibson, in his account of 
the Gardens near London in 1691, at the beginning of the reign 
of William HI., remarks that “The Archbishop of Canterbury’s 
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