A glass case contains:  The Four Gospels in Irish, a volume which belonged to King Athelstan, and was given by him to the city of Canterbury; a copy of the Koran written by Sultan Allaruddeen Siljuky in the fifteenth century, taken in the Library of Tippoo Saib at Seringapatam; the Lumley Chronicle of St. Alban’s Abbey; Queen Elizabeth’s Prayer-Book, with illuminations from Holbein’s Dance of Death destroyed in Old St. Paul’s; an illuminated copy of the Apocalypse, of the thirteenth century; the Mazarine Testament, fifteenth century; and the rosary of Cardinal Pole.

A staircase lined with portraits of the Walpole family, leads from the Library to the Guard Room, now the Dining-Hall.  It is surrounded by an interesting series of portraits of the archbishops from the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Through the paneled room, called Cranmer’s Parlor, we enter the Chapel, which stands upon a Crypt supposed to belong to the manor-house built by Archbishop Herbert Fitzwalter, about 1190.  Its pillars have been buried nearly up to their capitals, to prevent the rising of the river tides within its wall.  The chapel itself, tho greatly modernized, is older than any other part of the palace, having been built by Archbishop Boniface, 1244-70.  Its lancet windows were found by Laud—­“shameful to look at, all diversely patched like a poor beggar’s coat,” and he filled them with stained glass, which he proved that he collected from ancient existing fragments, tho his insertion of “Popish images and pictures made by their like in a mass book” was one of the articles in the impeachment against him.  The glass collected by Laud was entirely smashed by the Puritans:  the present windows were put in by Archbishop Howley.  In this chapel most of the archbishops have been consecrated since the time of Boniface....

Here Archbishop Parker erected his tomb in his lifetime “by the spot where he used to pray,” and here he was buried, but his tomb was broken up, with every insult that could be shown, by Scot, one of the Puritan possessors of Lambeth, while the other, Hardyng, not to be outdone, exhumed the Archbishop’s body, sold its leaden coffin, and buried it in a dunghill.  His remains were found by Sir William Dugdale at the Restoration, and honorably reinterred in front of the altar, with the epitaph, “Corpus Matthaei Archiepiscopi tandem hic quiescit.”  His tomb, in the ante-chapel, was re-erected by Archbishop Sancroft, but the brass inscription which encircled it is gone.

The screen, erected by Laud, was suffered to survive the Commonwealth.  At the west end of the chapel, high on the wall, projects a Gothic confessional, erected by Archbishop Chicheley.  It was formerly approached by seven steps.  The beautiful western door of the chapel opens into the curious Post Room, which takes its name from the central wooden pillar, supposed to have been used as a whipping-post for the Lollards.  The ornamented flat ceiling which we see here is extremely rare.  The door at the northeast corner, by which the Lollards were brought in, was walled up, about 1874.