York House was never, however, finished; but as
the lover of old haunts enters Buckingham Street in the Strand, he will
perceive an ancient water-gate, beautifully proportioned, built by Inigo
Jones--smoky, isolated, impaired--but still speaking volumes of
remembrance of the glories of the assassinated duke, who had purposed to
build the whole house in that style.
'_Yorschaux_,' as he called it--York House--the French ambassador had
written word to his friends at home, 'is the most richly fitted up of
any that I saw.' The galleries and state rooms were graced by the
display of the Roman marbles, both busts and statues, which the first
duke had bought from Rubens; whilst in the gardens the Cain and Abel of
John of Bologna, given by Philip IV. of Spain to King Charles, and by
him bestowed on the elder George Villiers, made that fair _pleasaunce_
famous. It was doomed--as were what were called the 'superstitious'
pictures in the house--to destruction: henceforth all was in decay and
neglect. 'I went to see York House and gardens,' Evelyn writes in 1655,
'belonging to the former greate Buckingham, but now much ruined through
neglect.'
Traylman, doubtless, kept George Villiers the younger in full possession
of all that was to happen to that deserted tenement in which the old man
mourned for the departed, and thought of the absent.
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