The village began to grow apace, old houses being pulled down or enlarged, and new ones built towards Richmond along what is now the thoroughfare of a big London suburb. The population was swollen by all sorts of newcomers—from ladies-in-waiting to gardeners, from preceptors to soldiers, for a guard was kept at Kew House, near which barracks had to be provided. One winter, the King is said to have found work for his idle garrison by setting them to make the Hollow Walk, now filled with such a fine summer show of rhododendrons.
There would be no want of church services then at a place well equipped with scholars and divines. Mrs. Papendiek mentions two bishops as living at Kew, besides subordinate tutors of the princes. While the royal family were in residence, they had at hand Sir John Pringle, “physician to the Person,” and one or other of the brothers Cæsar and Pennell Hawkins, the royal surgeons, “for the Queen would have two of them always on the spot to watch the constitutions of the royal children.” Later on, as we saw, the King’s illness brought a swarm of medical men about Kew, at least as lodgers or visitors. Rather earlier, Lord Bute, who was but a poor nobleman till enriched through his wife, the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s daughter, appears to have occupied two houses on Kew Green, that now known as Cambridge Cottage, and the Church House, described as his study, perhaps used by him for a botanical collection. His interest in botany, one must recall, was the foundation of Kew Gardens. He privately printed for the Queen’s benefit a work on the subject in nine quarto volumes; and when he moved to a more lordly home at Luton, his first care was to form there a large botanical garden of his own.
THE RHODODENDRON WALK
The servants of the royal house, too, required accommodation, which was by no means humble in every case, for some of them must have made a good thing out of their places. Miss Amelia Murray, whose mother had a post about the princesses later on, tells us how “a bottle of wine every two days, and unnecessary wax candles, were, I remember, the perquisites of the ladies’ maids. Candles were extinguished as soon as lit, to be carried off by servants; pages were seen marching out before the royal family with a bottle of wine sticking out of each pocket; and the State page called regularly on each person who attended the drawing-rooms, with his book, to receive the accustomed gratuity.” In earlier days at Kew, George and Charlotte may have been able to keep a sharper eye on waste; but their economy would always be counterweighed by custom and flunkeydom. Mrs. Papendiek, brought up in the air of the backstairs, has much to say on matters of concern to those high-minded servants, their jealousies, their stifled quarrels, their pickings, the unworthiness of saving in a king’s household, and such like. She mentions incidentally a footman named Fortnum leaving the service to set up as a grocer in Piccadilly, where his name would wax into renown. Another name now brought to note in London was Almack’s, the Earl of Bute’s butler, né M’Call, a form which this canny Aberdonian, in view of his countrymen’s unpopularity, thought well to anglify thus in appealing for fashionable patronage.
The taste for music fostered by the royal family drew many professional players into the neighbourhood, mostly foreigners, such as J. C. Bach, son of the great composer; Abel, the viol da gamba player; and Fischer, Gainsborough’s son-in-law, celebrated for his performances on the oboe, all of whom were well known to Mrs. Papendiek as an amateur in their art. The arts of design were also well represented by foreigners, at a period when John Bull affected the pride of being still rather stockish and shy with the Muses. We hear of Mr. Englehart as living on the road to Richmond, one of several of the name who rose to note as artists or engravers. Another German, who practised as a limner or miniature-painter—the photographers of that day—and who appears to have designed the coinage of that reign, was Jeremiah Meyer, so thriving as to have a home at Kew as well as one in town. Mrs. Papendiek states that he caught his death by a dutiful visit of inquiry at Kew House after the King’s first serious illness; Meyer had himself been ailing, and on that errand he suffered from the ill-humour of the page Ernst—once George’s favourite attendant, but about this time in disgrace—who “kept poor Meyer waiting for him in a room that had just been washed, and which was therefore cold and damp. He returned home in haste, but fresh cold succeeded. A relapse came on, and poor Meyer was no more.” He has a monument in Kew Church, with an epitaph by Hayley.
Mrs. Papendiek’s chief friends among the artistic colony settled hereabouts were the Zoffanys, who had a house at Strand on the Green, where indeed the master was not always at home. That erratic German genius, John Zoffany, having studied art in Italy, sought fortune in London, like other esurient foreigners. After an ordeal of poverty, he rose to note by his theatrical portraits, and came for a time into the sun of Court patronage. His speciality was portrait groups like that which was to include with the Vicar of Wakefield’s family “as many sheep as the painter would put in for nothing.” He painted one such of George III. and his family, and a notable one of his brethren in the then young Royal Academy, founded under this King, who was an interested, if not very discriminating, patron of art. Another of his celebrated pictures, The Last Supper—in which St. Peter is said to be his own portrait, and for the rest of the Apostles Thames-side fishermen sat as models—he gave for an altar-piece to the church at Brentford.
At the height of his renown, Zoffany went off to Italy for years, with a commission from the King to copy the Tribune of the Uffizi Gallery at Florence. This task he executed well, but as in his absence he had accepted other commissions from Kaiser Joseph II., and the title of Baron, an honour resented by George for a British subject, he seems to have lost the royal favour. Again, in a fit of disgust or adventurousness, he started off to India, where he must have had a wide field much to himself as a portrait painter, and thence brought back gorgeous pictures of A Tiger Hunt and A Cock Fight, to revive his vogue in England. The latter picture had the curious history of costing an estate to a young Irishman who figures in it, his father, Robert Gregory, having threatened to disinherit him if ever he took part in cock-fighting.
Mrs. Papendiek grew up intimate with Mrs. Zoffany, though this lady was looked on askance in the genteel society of Kew, having been a girl of humble birth, seduced by the painter at fourteen and married afterwards on the death of a deserted wife. She so far lived down the rather squalidly romantic story of her youth that her daughter’s hand was sought by a rich suitor, Colonel Martin of Leeds Castle, who shut himself up here in single cursedness when the obstinate young lady insisted on marrying a plain and awkward young man named Horn, whose father kept a prosperous school at Chiswick, a match that turned out ill—for the couple and for the school. Zoffany, his wanderings at an end, lived into the eighteenth century at Strand on the Green, and was buried in Kew Churchyard, by the east end of the church.
On the south side, under the wall, are close together the graves of Meyer, Kirby, and Gainsborough, the last under a tomb restored in our time. Thomas Gainsborough lies here, not as a Kew resident, but buried by his own desire beside his lifelong friend and fellow East Anglian, Joshua Kirby, F.R.S., who began life as a coach-painter at Ipswich, and rose to fame as a writer on art and architecture. Helped on by Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, Kirby had the luck to become teacher of perspective drawing to Prince George, and the King liked this master so well as to give him a permanent appointment as Clerk of the Works set on foot in Kew Gardens, under Sir William Chambers. At a house by the ferry-side he passed the rest of his life in ease and respect; but to our generation may be best known as father of Mrs. Trimmer, and uncle of William Kirby, the entomologist.