ROMANCE OF A PALACE.

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17605, 9 January 1929, Page 9

ROMANCE OF A PALACE.

HOME OF ARCHBISHOPS. , j LAMBETH AND ITS STORY. When Mrs Randall Davidson, the wife of the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, left Lambeth Palace recently she severed an association of girlhood, for, as the daughter of Archbishop Tait, she grew up in those historic precincts. Compared with the ordinary home, Lambeth Palace impresses the visitor as a somewhat strange environment for a woman. Both the large drawing •room and dining room—the latter formerly the Guard Chamber, reminiscent of the days when the archbishop had his own military guard—are hung with ponderous portraits of past archbishops and other church dignitaries. In the dining room alone, with its corbelled, timbered roof, there are portraits o'f nearly 30 archbishops hung along the four walls. Masters like Romney, Reynolds, Lawrence, and Holbein are represented in an historic series which goes back to 1503. In addition, the arms of every archbishop are there, from the time of the Conqueror. Truly an austere setting for the distinguished dinner parties over which Mrs Davidson has presided as hostess.

One doubts if the homeliest of misI tresses could make the vast drawing room wholly homely (says a writer in the Daily Chronicle), for how can one imbue with personal and intimate charm a home which is onLy partly one’s own and partly vested.in a trust which reserves so much of it for the use of successive The wonder is that Mrs Davidson was able to achieve so much in this direction. What with the “official” furnishings, the historic portraits in heavy frames, the traditional relics reposing on an old chest by the wall, none too much scope is left for those individual touches which every woman likes to impart to her surroundings. How strange it must have seemed, too, when, as sometimes • happened, Dr. Davidson elected to dine deep down in the late Norman crypt of the chapel, which he had deepened and restored when he came to Lambeth 25 years ago. Nothing less homely or more monastic can be imagined than that bare, pillared chamber below the high-water level of the river, which at one itme practically lapped its outer wall. Wander through the corridors of that strange “house” with its fifteenth ■century Lollards’ Tower annexe, where the Bishops of Manchester, Winchester, 'Lichfield, and Chichester have their London quarters, and one encounters more aged portraits, tapestries, relics. Here, under a glass case, is the shell of a tortoise, supposed'to have belonged to Laud, and to have died, aged 120 years, because of the neglect of a gardener. There, in the vast library, with its 40,000 printed books and 1300 volumes of manuscripts, stacked in

huge bookcases, is a case displaying not only a faded cookery book of the ydfe of Archbishop Tenison, in Queen Anne’s time, but some cake made many years ago from one of its recipes. When the present Queen read this recipe, on a visit some years ago, she is reputed to have remarked: “How very unwholesome!" The writer adds: “For my part, I should say the happiest things I saw there when I was shown over the palace recently were two portraits on easels in the drawing rooms—one by Watts, depicting Mrs Davidson as a beautiful young woman, beside her sister; the other an equally beautiful study of Mrs Davidson as we know her to-day, by Do Laszlo. - “And how much, one reflects, that time-haunted, sombre palace of the archbishops has had to do with the lifetime of years in between !”