THE KING S MANOR, YORK. 
5 1 
Before the close of the year 1538, the President and Council 
were comfortably settled in that Mansion of which the Lord Abbot 
of St. Mary’s had been so recently dispossessed, and, in order that 
its very name and all remembrances of its previous occupants 
might be lost for ever, they conferred upon it the royal style and 
title of The King's Mannour. 
The first President to reside at the King’s Manor was Robert 
Holgate, Bishop of Llandaff, afterwards Archbishop of York. 
For political reasons, Henry VIII., soon after he appointed 
Bishop Holgate to be Lord President, formed the intention of 
making a progress to the North and sojourning for a while at York. 
In contemplation of his visit, the King ordered that a new Palace 
should be built for his reception upon that part of the site of St. 
Mary’s Abbey which lay between the Abbot’s House and the river. 
His first visit was made in September, 1541, when he and his 
unfortunate Queen, Catherine Howard, occupied the new palace 
for a short time. But the building, hastily raised, was doomed as 
suddenly to disappear. Within a few years after Henry’s visit to 
York, the Royal Palace became as total a ruin as the sacred Abbey 
upon whose site it had stood. The only part left of this Palace is 
the spacious vault which faces the South front of the School for 
the Blind, and is still known as the King’s Cellar. 
For the first thirty years after the Dissolution, no material 
alteration was made in the Abbot’s Blouse. In the course of time, 
however, the existing buildings were found to be incommodious 
and dilapidated ; and in the Presidency of Thomas Radcliff, Earl 
of Sussex, considerable alterations and additions were made. 
Plate III. (a). 
It is of interest to note that the expenditure in connection with 
this work was much in excess of the estimates, and on the Lord 
President’s request for an additional grant of money and timber 
being refused by Elizabeth's Government, he was constrained to 
resort to other means of reimbursing himself the money he had 
expended upon “ the Queen’s Majesty’s house.” Portions of the 
fines imposed upon offenders by the Council of the North, and of 
the fines exacted from those implicated in the rebellion of the 
two Northern Earls, Northumberland and Westmorland, were 
used for this purpose. 
Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, whose wife was a 
sister of the Queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, succeeded the Earl 
of Sussex in the Presidency of the Council of the North, and it 
