Swift, in his letters to Stella, mentions dining with the Duke of Argyll at Kew in 1712. I do not find any other allusion to this residence: perhaps Swift landed at Kew and went on to Sudbrook Park, where the Duke had a seat, that should rather be reckoned as belonging to Petersham, united with Kew as one dependent district of the Kingston parish. This mansion was near the famous avenues of his birthplace, the Duke of Lauderdale’s Ham House, said to have been originally intended for Prince Henry, son of James I., and chosen by the Lords of the Council as a fitting retreat for James II., when the Prince of Orange was about to enter London. It would be the convenience of water transit that had dotted the Thames side with lordly mansions and villas; and of course it should be borne in mind how, at a time when the Court could be spoken of as moving from Kensington to London, places like Kew and Richmond were practically as far from town as now are Haslemere or Missenden, while the champaign rusticity of the former would be more to the taste of Cowley’s and Pope’s generations.
Kew is said to have had some sort of chapel before the Reformation; but it was not till 1714 that its church was built, the brick building on the Green, that, with additions and dubious ornaments, has mellowed into a specimen of what may be called the ugly picturesque. The excrescence at the east end marks the sepulchral chamber containing the Duke of Cambridge’s tomb. The organ is understood to have been Handel’s, and to have been played on by George III. The gallery, added in 1805, still keeps its dusty state as a royal pew, though now used on occasion for less illustrious worshippers. Both inside and outside are many memorials to persons, famous or forgotten, some of whom must presently be mentioned. In the close-packed churchyard an unusual number of foreign names seem related to the German colony of Queen Charlotte’s attendants, and to the Hanover connection long kept up through the Dukes of Cambridge and Cumberland, the former of these princes having acted as regent or viceroy of Hanover till the Salic law put his unbeloved brother on its throne.
One of the early ministers at Kew was that Stephen Duck, already mentioned, who began life as a Wiltshire labourer, then by dint of self-education came to be known as the “thresher-poet,” taken up by Queen Caroline, to the jealousy of unpatronised poets like Swift. She settled a pension on him, made him first a Yeoman of the Guard, then, as a post more suitable to the poet than to the peasant, Keeper of her library at Richmond. He married her housekeeper at Kew; and one takes to be his daughters the Misses Duck, who half a century later are found in charge of the Dutch House, the last of them living till 1818. The father’s ambition led him on to take Orders; and he preached with much acceptation at Kew Chapel. Before long he had been put into the Rectory of Byfleet under St. George’s Hill; then, a few years later, only fifty years old, he drowned himself in a fit of dejection. But for the merit of being able “to burst his life’s invidious bar,” he hardly deserved patronage, his verses being a mere echo of the epithetical commonplaces of a generation whose rhyming shepherds hardly knew a crook from a flail. Perhaps the most readable of his effusions is The Thresher’s Labour, an account of a farm-servant’s life, in which now and then he drops pseudo-Arcadianism for touches of human nature and actual experience.
Soon as the rising Sun has drank the Dew,
Another Scene is open to our View:
Our Master comes, and at his heels a Throng
Of prattling Females, armed with Rake and Prong;
Prepared, whilst he is here, to make his Hay;
Or, if he turns his Back, prepared to play;
But here, or gone, sure of this comfort still,