On the south bank of the Thames, just opposite the Palace of Westminster, Lambeth has for eight centuries been the London residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, primates of the Church of England. In the Renaissance this palace of brick and stone was one of the places where the religious fate of the kingdom was decided.
The palace of the primates
The residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury since the thirteenth century, Lambeth faced, across the river, the royal power of Westminster: Church and Crown looked at each other from bank to bank, and one crossed from one to the other by boat. At the end of the fifteenth century Archbishop John Morton raised the fine red-brick gatehouse (Morton's Tower, c. 1490) that still guards the entrance — one of the first great brick works of London, announcing the Tudor style. Behind it stretched the great hall, the thirteenth-century chapel, the 'Lollards' Tower' and the gardens, where old fig trees said to be of the 'Marseille' kind are still shown, which tradition traces back to the time of Cardinal Reginald Pole, in the mid-sixteenth century. The palace had its prison too: several religious dissenters were shut up there through the crises of the Reformation, and the great hall, destroyed during the seventeenth-century civil war, was rebuilt soon after by Archbishop Juxon, who capped it with a splendid hammer-beam roof.
A cradle of the Reformation
Under Henry VIII, Lambeth became a key place of the Reformation, for Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who lived here, was one of its chief architects. It was largely from Lambeth that he led the break with Rome, pronounced the annulment of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and shaped the new English Church — for which he wrote in 1549 the Book of Common Prayer, a monument of the English language whose prose still gives rhythm to Anglican worship. The palace housed theological debates, trials and councils. Its library, founded in 1610 by Archbishop Richard Bancroft, is one of the oldest public libraries in England and holds priceless medieval manuscripts and the archives of the Church. Lambeth thus remains the living witness of the moment when England gave itself its own Church.
What to see
- The late-fifteenth-century red-brick gatehouse (Morton's Tower).
- The medieval chapel and the great hall, rebuilt after the troubles of the seventeenth century.
- The Lambeth Palace Library and its manuscripts.
- The setting of the Thames, facing Westminster, and the 'Lollards' Tower'.
Seeing it differently
Draw near Morton's Tower and look at the brick: at the end of the fifteenth century this new material, still rare and costly, was a declaration of modernity and power. Then turn towards the river: from this bank Cranmer saw Westminster every day, the king's power on which his Church now depended. The whole English Reformation is held in this face-off of two banks — crozier and sceptre eyeing each other across the water. Seek, finally, in the spirit of the place, the weight of the library: it is there that the Church of England kept the written memory of its birth, often contradictory and painful.
Did you know?
Archbishop Cranmer, who made Lambeth the laboratory of the Reformation under Henry VIII, paid the price under the following reign: the Catholic Mary I had him tried and burned alive at Oxford, in 1556. At the stake, it is said, he first held out to the flames the hand that had signed his recantation, that it might burn first. The palace that had seen the birth of the Church of England had been the home of its most famous martyr.
Notes
Lambeth Palace lies on the south bank of the Thames, at Lambeth, facing the Palace of Westminster; it is the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury.
Quiz
- Which prelates reside at Lambeth Palace?
- The Archbishops of Canterbury
- The Bishops of London
- The Abbots of Westminster
- Which archbishop shaped the Reformation here under Henry VIII?
- Thomas Cranmer
- Thomas Wolsey
- Reginald Pole
- From when does the brick gatehouse (Morton's Tower) date?
- The late fifteenth century
- The eighteenth century
- The Norman period