Another gardener rose to note, who about the same time was seeking jobs in Mortlake, Kingston, or any parish around Kew where he could find poor lodging and ill-paid work. His real name was William Hunt, but he changed this to Huntingdon, as would appear, by way of hiding himself from the consequence of some youthful ill-doing; and he afterwards justified the alias in characteristic fashion by claiming to have undergone “the new birth” under that assumed name, to which—“as I cannot get at D.D. for want of cash, neither can I get at M.A. for the want of learning”—he added the odd degree S.S., meaning “Sinner Saved.” After undergoing the pangs of spiritual labour along with hard troubles of the flesh at Ewell and Sunbury, he began to preach among his humble neighbours, and kept up this ministry while earning a livelihood by unloading coals at Thames Ditton, so that he became notorious as the converted coal-heaver. He rose to be the Spurgeon of his day, with John Bunyan rather for model, as far as one can judge from the twenty volumes of his works, little known to the “new theology” of our generation, which hardly remembers him unless from a casual allusion by Macaulay. He was indeed of a more fanatical and fuliginous spirit than would nowadays recommend a popular preacher; and his picture in the National Portrait Gallery suggests a coarsely strong animal nature, subdued, as it might be, by religious enthusiasm. So great grew his following that “Providence Chapel” was built for him in London, and rebuilt in Gray’s Inn Lane when destroyed by fire. Though he boasted of being “Beloved of God, but abhorred of men,” godliness proved to him no small gain. He is said to have had an income of £2000 a year in his latter days, when, having lost the helpmeet of those early struggles, he married Lady Saunderson, widow of a Lord Mayor, with whom he lived in a villa at Cricklewood. He died at Tunbridge Wells, 1813, and was buried at Jireh Chapel, in the outskirts of Lewes.
It would make too long a story were one to bring in all the celebrities and notorieties living at Richmond, which has books enough of its own to illustrate it, and a fame that would overshadow that of Kew. The latter place owes everything, unless its river prospects, to princely care; but Richmond is so richly endowed by Nature that it could not fail to be a favourite place of residence. Perhaps the best known of its inhabitants in the Georgian century was James Thomson, the poet of The Seasons, who ended his life at a cottage in Kew Foot Lane, its place afterwards taken by the Richmond Hospital. But there were lords, belles, and fashionable folk who also had homes here. At the time of the French Revolution, Richmond society got a new element in some of the immigrant noblesse lucky enough to be able to rent houses in such a choice ville de plaisance, while others had to content themselves with mean lodgings in St. Pancras or Soho.
It is difficult, indeed, to draw the line between these neighbour villages that have now grown into each other. The Old Deer Park of Richmond ran into the parish of Kew. They had a common excitement in 1795, making a more than local sensation, when one John Little, said to have been a favourite attendant of George III. in his walks through the Gardens, came to a bad end. He is described as keeper or porter of the Observatory, who passed for being a quiet, worthy, and even religious man till he committed a most brutal murder under circumstances that suggest insanity. He had borrowed money from a friend, an old man named MacEvoy, living in the lane between Kew and Richmond; and when this creditor pressed for payment, Little wiped out the debt by climbing into his house at night, beating him to death with a large stone, and killing his old housekeeper in the same way. Their cries roused the neighbours, who burst in too late; but instead of making off, the murderer had hid himself in a chimney of the house, and was there found by a Richmond constable. He was convicted and hanged on Kennington Common, along with the notorious highwayman, Jerry Abershaw, and with a woman named Sarah King, when a newspaper of the day could remark on the curious coincidence that this was also the name of Little’s victim, the housekeeper.
Notices of Kew naturally become rarer after the poor old King had been shut up at Windsor. In 1813, Sir Richard Phillips made his Morning’s walk from London to Kew, where he did not admire George III.’s unfinished “Bastile,” then cumbering the ground. He is not the only writer of the period to mention a singular exhibition, not quite obliterated a dozen years later, a fresco on a scale unsurpassed by Raphael or Michael Angelo. “As I quitted the lane, I beheld, on my left, the long boundary-wall of Kew Gardens; on which a disabled sailor has drawn in chalk the effigies of the whole British navy, and over each representation appears the name of the vessel, and the number of her guns. He has in this way depicted about 800 vessels, each five or six feet long, and extending, with intervening distances, above a mile and a half. As the labour of one man, the whole is an extraordinary performance; and I was told the decrepit draughtsman derives a competency from passing travellers.”
A sight that lasted longer was the City State Barge, the Maria Wood, rotting at Kew Bridge almost to our own day, till it had to be broken up; but well on in the nineteenth century it still made a scene of junketings, and earlier it had cruised with aldermanic guests as far as Richmond and Twickenham, not to speak of that famous voyage to Oxford described in the Middlesex volume of this series. Another lion of Kew in the early part of the last century was a pretentious modern structure, said to have been built from the materials of George III.’s unfinished palace, but as Sir R. Phillips notes them both on his walk this statement seems doubtful. It took the name of the Priory, that has been spread over a district of the present suburb.
The Priory was built by a Catholic parishioner. Romanists and Dissenters would have every chance of making way at Kew, when its living, still conjoined with Petersham, was held for ten years, from 1818, by Charles Caleb Colton, a parson who might well speak of himself as only a “finger-post” on the road to heaven. This eccentric divine was more concerned about angling in the Thames than to be a fisher of men. He did not live at either of his cures, but in shabby lodgings in Soho, going down to Kew only for necessary services, and spending the week-days after the manner of a Bohemian author, perhaps not unknown to Thackeray. At one time he carried on business, sub rosâ, as a wine-merchant, in cellars underneath a Methodist chapel, a possible hint for Mr. Sherrick’s dealings at Lady Whittlesea’s; but Colton had none of the Rev. Charles Honeyman’s suave humbug, while in some respects he may have sat as model for the coarser reprobate who blackmailed Philip Firmin’s father. His most unclerical pursuit was gambling, through which he got into some difficulty that packed him off to America in haste. He returned to put in an appearance at his living, which, however, seems now to have lapsed out of his incumbency. He next went to Paris, plunged head over heels into gaming, and blew out his brains in 1832. Yet this was the author of that once popular book Lacon, that among other edifying and sententious sentiments denounces the desperate gamester as doubly ruined: “He adds his soul to every other loss; and by the act of suicide renounces earth to forfeit heaven.” The cure of souls he had filled so unworthily passed into the hands of the Rev. R. B. Byam, who held it for forty years, in favour with all classes and especially with his chief parishioners, the royal dukes who still from time to time showed themselves in Kew Church.
When Kew had been deserted by kings and courtiers, its gardens being turned into a public institution, the keepers of them grew to be important personages, of whom more has been said in the last chapter. For a time names of note are less often met with in this neighbourhood. One long link with the past was the life of Mrs. Gwyn, who died here in 1840, the year of Madame d’Arblay’s death, in whose Diary this lady’s name appears. She was the widow of Colonel Gwyn, one of the royal equerries in that time of trouble which Fanny Burney passed through half a century before. She had been the beautiful Mary Horneck, “the Jessamy Bride” whom Goldsmith loved in vain; and there may be those still alive at Kew that heard her memories of Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, of the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, and the first fame of the Vicar of Wakefield.
About the same time as Mrs. Gwyn, died Francis Bauer, a half-century resident at Kew, brought there by Sir Joseph Banks to exercise his remarkable skill as a natural history draughtsman. At the end of the eighteenth century he had brought out a volume of delineations of the exotic plants in the Gardens; and many of his plates lie still unpublished at South Kensington. It is said that in 1827 he laid before the Royal Society a paper by J. N. de Niepce, another foreigner living at Kew, who sought in vain to draw attention to some such process as was afterwards developed by Daguerre, so that Kew may claim to be a cradle of photography. While we are on the head of art, Hofland the painter should be mentioned as having been brought up at Kew; also his wife, the once popular novelist Barbara Hofland, who wrote a book about the Richmond neighbourhood, sumptuously illustrated in the style of its day (1832), with much the same aim as the present volume, but containing a larger proportion of fine words to a smaller stock of matter.
THE ROSARY