George III., returning to the plan set on foot in the early years of his reign, took a fancy for building a castle here, after plans prepared by Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad taste of the period. The design is to be seen in one of the rooms of the present palace. The other house was pulled down in 1802, to make way for the new structure, which would have stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the not very royal town of Brentford, that “town of mud,” so strangely admired by the Georges and reviled by their poets. But the works were interrupted by the King’s fresh attack in 1804, and this building never got further than the state of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly a quarter of a century, and was then demolished by George IV. That monarch had no more love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court. He had spent freely upon his own whims, on Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the latter gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for contemporary taste, and a byword with irreverent writers like Byron—
Shut up,—no, not the King, but the Pavilion,
Or else ’twill cost us all another million!
His father, unless for saddling us with so many expensive sons, had lived so carefully and economically, that the nation need not have grudged him a “Folly” for once in a way. It was his spendthrift heir who began to restore Windsor Castle, demolishing the Queen’s Lodge there, and to rebuild Buckingham Palace in its present form.
THE PALACE
When Kew House had disappeared, the sturdy “Dutch House,” now known as Kew Palace, became the occasional retreat of the royal family, its scant accommodations, no doubt, eked out by those other mansions held on Kew Green. It was here that Addington found the King dining rather before one o’clock on the simplest fare. His mind continued to be rather cranky, as shown by his strange freak of wearing a huge powdered wig in conjunction with the mediæval trappings of the Order of the Garter. Blindness came gradually on to increase his afflictions. In 1809 the nation joyfully celebrated his Jubilee, with much feasting of the poor—and the rich—relieving of prisoners for debt, pardoning of military culprits, illuminations, libations, and such memorials as the statue on the Weymouth Esplanade, that records the townsfolk’s gratitude to the King, whose stay at his favourite bathing-place had so often sent up the price of its lodgings. We may be sure Kew, in its small way, was not behindhand in such loyal doings.
But Kew was hardly again to welcome the Father of his People. Repeated agitations went to overthrow his reason for good—the triumphant marches of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British arms not yet brightened by Wellington’s victories, the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia. At the beginning of 1811, George had just wits enough left to consent to the Prince’s Regency. A few months later, Charles Knight was one of the Windsor crowd that saw their aged Sovereign in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by and by of deafness, cheered by music, by religious exaltation, and by delusive memories of the past, more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy reason, in one of which he had the satisfaction of learning Napoleon’s downfall and the recovery of Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind old King with his white beard, only now and then visited by those nearest to him. It is said that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when one day he overheard his father murmuring the complaint of Milton’s Samson:—
O dark, dark, dark! Amid the blaze of noon,