inuations, such as St. Paul to
Agrippa--'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought
himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use
of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and
of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth
was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband."
Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch
flesh in Lent.

The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The
line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of
the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary
Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was
nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be
beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a
pamphlet of Cavalier days, _The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly
unfolded_, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a
thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious
stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also
to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward
for his military services, had been given several sequestrated
properties, a chief forestership, and a seneschalship.

Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey
industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London
with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal
which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One
Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in
the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating
a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently
celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of
which bears his name, _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_. To be "as black as
a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon
sanguine" was a deep red-brown.

Once Croydon, always Croydon. The first railway line built in the
country and sanctioned by Parliament ran from Croydon to Wandsworth. It
was part of an original scheme proposed in 1799 for linking up London
with Portsmouth by an iron railroad running through Croydon, Reigate,
and Arundel. But it was thought best to begin with the part which ran
from Croydon to Wandsworth, a