y at
the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find
themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a
single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at
the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar,
to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which
somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they
were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest
Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the
ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men
in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from
the age of the Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see the
light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the
spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the
stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion
of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very
characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern
restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the
beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the
Church that finds its centre there.

And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of
the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface
of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece
Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a
foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with
English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the
settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and
younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the
Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call
him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselm had been
foreigners--strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they
ruled--he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom,
their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set
everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the
Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When
the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence