This volume was published in 1893.

Excerpt from the Preface:

One by one the old buildings of our country are perishing by acci-
dent, neglect, or wanton destruction ; their memory passes away, and their place knows them no more. When the passion for covering this island with railways and factories shall have done its worst, our great-grandchildren will hardly possess a fragment of the older work to recall to their eyes the beauty and the life of England in the past. And so it becomes a sort of social duty for those to whom chance has thrown it in their path to preserve such wreckage of old things as the tempest of change has left — any relic that they find still mouldering in the flotsam
and jetsam of time.

Thus I came to put together in spare days of leisure some memorials of a very beautiful and most interesting house, which is a landmark in the history of art, and has not a few associations with the history of our country. During the last eighteen years I have often found there a time of peace and quiet thought ; and pacing up and down the court, and watching the hues of russet and orange in the mouldings, or the evening light as it glowed through the jewelled quarries in the oriels, I became curious to know a little more about the builders and the building of it. From what movement of art did it spring ? Whence came those amorini over Tudor gates, and the Italian arabesques in those Gothic traceries ? What manner of life did these walls witness and
serve ? Of what kin were the men whose devices are recorded in the painted glass ? As, one by one, I learned to recognise the story they could reveal, and had found how curiously the house was connected with the tempestuous days of the eighth Henry and his three children and successors, as I traced all the circumstances of the strange and bloody tragedy which set its mark upon these walls almost before the mortar in them was dry, I began for myself a connected record of the place.

A well-known historian used to say to me, " Sink a shaft, as it were, in some chosen spot in the annals of England, and you will come upon much that is never found in the books of general history." So I sunk my shaft in this spot, and tried to understand a bit of local history, as seen from a single manor and a particular family and house. I tried to identify SUDTONE, as it is described in Domesday, and to make out the meadow, and the land or arable, the woodland "of 25 swine," and the mill. The fortunes of the manor sway back and forwards during
feudal times, as the fortunes of England itself. Ten times it fell back into the hands of the Crown ; ten times it was granted to royal favourites or ministers ; eight times it was lost by attainder, forfeiture, or surrender between the days of the Conqueror and the days of the Tudors ; till at length Henry VIII grants the ancestral domain of the last of the Beauforts, his father's mother, to the soldier and minister of his own who built the house.

I have often pictured to myself the veteran gazing at his newly-
finished home when his only boy lay headless in the fresh grave on Tower Hill. I would wonder if he still continued to entertain here his fierce master, and still put his faith in princes. It would seem so, for he kept his honours and his wealth ; and in the inventory of his goods for the proving of his will is a " grete carpete to lay under the Kyng's fete." And we find his widow soon after sending presents of game and " swete bagges " from this house to the Princess at Guildford. And then I would try to conceive with what feelings the son of that slaughtered youth came to receive the daughter of Anne Boleyn in the house which his father had not lived to inherit, which he himself owed to the slayer of that father.