A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward along the river to the gate.
The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place. What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.
Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of the People.