GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
St. James’s Street, and it is believed that they occupy the exact 
site of the ancient leper hospital. To the deer-park the King 
added an extensive chase, to make which he enclosed some miles 
of land to the north and north-west, and by royal proclamation 
forbade any of his subjects to hunt or hawk in it. 
Throughout the reigns of Charles II. and James II., we find 
King and courtiers still established at Whitehall; nevertheless 
St. James’s Palace by degrees, became the centre of English Court 
and diplomatic life, and on the marriage of Charles he granted 
to his queen, Catherine of Braganza, by letters patent under the 
Great Seal, a ninety-nine years’ lease of the ground upon which 
Sir Christopher Wren afterwards erected Marlborough House. 
The chapel which had been provided for Queen Henrietta Maria, 
was restored for the use of the Portuguese princess, who brought 
to England in her train, certain Capuchin monks for whom lodgings 
were found near the chapel, the place becoming known as “ The 
Friary.”’ Cloisters were built round a green court, in which per- 
sons belonging to the Queen’s religious establishment might be 
interred with the Romish ceremonial. 
Edward Walford in ‘‘ Old and New London,” mentions an old 
plan of St. James’s Palace printed in 1689, that shows a burial- 
ground exactly opposite the Queen’s Chapel. The spot was not im- 
probably selected because it was the supposed site of the burial-place 
of the old religious house, and therefore already consecrated ground ; 
but it does not appear that any one of the friars was actually 
interred there. The only human remains ever found therein were 
those discovered in a stone coffin, of a date long anterior to the 
Stuart kings. 
Pepys describes his visit to the Queen’s Chapel at the Friary. 
His diary is a rich mine from which to dig data for the topography, 
as well as the modes and manners, of the period immediately pre- 
ceding the foundation of Marlborough House. 
Birdcage Walk, according to Walford, was so called because the 
aviaries of Charles II. (who was fond of birds as well as of little 
dogs) were ranged in order along the road which then, as now, 
forms the southern boundary of St. James’s Park; but the “‘ Mall ” 
of those days was not the broad roadway that—stretching from 
Buckingham Palace to the Admiralty Arch—now goes by that 
name. “The Mall” of the Pepys period seems to have been a 
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