Lambeth Palace—the Name continued - Archaeologia Cantiana

Englishmen, Sir Thomas More for example, spoke of the Archbishop's "place" at Lambeth. The Bishop of Rochester's London residence, close at hand, was also known as "La Place," but here, too, the name at times alternated with "palace." Under King James, Archbishop Abbot's house was called "Lambeth Park,"¹ and under Charles I, in popular parlance, "The Archbishop's Palace."²
The old style of address, "From our Manor (or Manor-house) of Lambeth," however, persisted until Laud's time. One historian thinks he was the first to substitute "Lambeth House" alternatively with this time-honoured phrase.
After Laud's execution, the Survey of 1647³ relates to "the Scite, circuite and precincts of ye Pallace of the late Archbishop of Canterbury called Lambeth House" and now confiscate to the Parliament. Then came the episode of the appropriation of Lambeth (or Canterbury) House for the detention, under appalling conditions, of Royalist and other prisoners.⁴ When the King came again it is hardly surprising that a name of such melancholy association should have been gradually superseded. A petition by Archbishop Juxon's heir in 1663 heralded an equiry into the state of "Lambeth Palace."⁵ Queen Catherine of Braganza's river parties, about 1670, provisioned "sometimes at Vauxhall, sometimes at Lambeth Palace," where Archbishop Sheldon now resided⁶

   Sancroft sometimes wrote from "Lambeth House," but his Jacobite acquaintances in France reported him at his "Palais de Lambeth."⁷ A letter of Edmund Gibson's, who was then Librarian to Archbishop Tenison, in 1703, is dated from "Lambeth Palace,"⁸ and so throughout the eighteenth century, when, for instance, under Secker's kindly sway, both his ward Catharine Talbot and her correspondent, the blue-stocking Elizabeth Carter, knew no other address.⁹
   Thus, when Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the name "Lambeth Palace," at once ancient and modern, had long since taken its place on the roll of London's fame.
                                  DOROTHY GARDINER.
   ¹ Cal. D.S.P., Ja. I, 1611-1618, p. 523.
   ² Ibid., Ch. I, 1634-1635, p. 186.
   ³ Surrey Archæol. Coll., vol. xli (1894-5).
   ⁴ Gardiner, loc. cit., pp. 154-171.
   ⁵ Cal. D.S.P., Ch. II, 1670, p. 685.
   ⁶ Ibid., p. 175.
   ⁷ Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep., vii, p. 149b.
   ⁸ Gardiner, p. 217.
   ⁹ Letters between Mrs. E. Carter and Miss C. Talbot (1808),
Vol. I, p. 430, Vol. II, pp. 133, 173, etc., etc. The Rev. Montague Pennington's ed. of The Works of Miss Catharine Talbot, 1809. His account of her Life, pp. vii-xxxvi.