e old houses knew has gone. They pulled it down in the
forties--that unhappy decade for anything ancient and quiet in Surrey
villages; all they left was the tower, a mighty mass of stone and ivy
that stands with its nave reft from it, the forlornest and most
meaningless of ruins. If the tower might stand, why not the nave? They
pulled the nave down, and left the tower standing, so Mr. C.J. Swete,
one of Epsom's historians, tells you, in order that it "should remain to
beautify the landscape." They acted, he observes, "with good taste and
judgment" in so doing. Theirs is that praise.

But Ewell has a greater ruin. Ewell Castle preserves it in Ewell Park;
but when I was at Ewell the Castle and Park were for sale, and I could
find no one who could show it me, or even who knew where it was. Few,
perhaps, have seen it, and there can be little to see, by all accounts,
but what remains is the ruin of Nonsuch Palace--just the foundations of
the banquet hall; that is all that remains of the palace which was to be
incomparable, like no palace a king ever built before, the royalest
building in Christendom. That was what Henry VIII meant to make it, when
he began it in 1538, and he had built most of it when he died nine years
later. It stood unfinished for ten years more; then Mary sold it to the
Earl of Arundell, and he finished it. Elizabeth bought it back, and so
it came a royal palace to the Stuarts; even the Parliamentary wars left
it untouched, and it was the refuge for Charles II's Exchequer at the
fire of London. Pepys has a picture of Nonsuch, just after the
Restoration. "A very noble house," he calls it, "and a delicate park
about it, where just now there was a doe killed for the King, to carry
up to the Court." Two years later he walked in the park and admired the
house and the trees; "a great walk of an elm and a walnut set one after
another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures
of stories, and good painting of Rubens' or Holbein's doing. And one
great thing is that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts and
quarters in the walls, with lead, and gilded. I walked also into the
ruined garden." That is Charles II; the doe killed in the park for the
King, the ruined garden. An old print shows Nonsuch in 1582; a great
quadrangle with towers at the corners, and cupolas, which perhaps were
gilt, and bannerets round the cupolas, and countless little windows;
along the face of the building are hig