Pope’s nearest neighbour here was Lord Radnor, whose grounds are now turned to public enjoyment. A little further on stands back from the river the park of Strawberry Hill, where Horace Walpole’s “piecrust battlements” succeeded Pope’s Villa as lion of the place. The once famous collection of curiosities, after being dispersed, was in part regathered into the present mansion, enlarged and improved from that “Strawberry Hill Gothic” structure that became a proverb, not to say a by-word, with more tasteful architects. The nucleus of it was “a little plaything house,” which its dilettante owner, on removing there from his “tub at Windsor,” described as “the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges.... Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah’s when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind.... Lord John Sackville pre-deceased me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.” Still, of a summer evening, such mysteries are celebrated on the lordly expanse of Twickenham Green; but if this self-satisfied letter-writer’s ghost could come skimming under what were once his own windows, Father Noah might find it no harder to be at home in a toyshop ark than Walpole to recognize the “romance in lath and plaster” that was his much-advertised work of half a century.
Behind Twickenham, amid more rural surroundings, stands, in a transformed state, the mansion of Sir Godfrey
Kneller the painter, which came to be a training-school for teachers, with the late Archbishop Temple for one of its principals, but is now the home of another muse as an academy for army bandsmen, whose performances are open to the public once a week. Kneller Hall was originally Whitton House, and not far off, on the south edge of Hounslow, survives the name of Whitton Park, where bagpipes should once have been practised; for, in the early part of the eighteenth century, it was a seat of the Duke of Argyll who in its grounds did so much towards introducing alien trees, to become naturalized citizens of our groves and gardens. This was the Duke who served with distinction under Marlborough and as victor over the Old Pretender’s forces in 1715; while he may be best remembered as patron of “Jeanie Deans.”
In the famous view beheld by that heroine from Richmond Hill, Twickenham is seen imperceptibly merging into Teddington, a parish of less fame, but it, too, has had notable inhabitants, from William Penn the Quaker to Peg Woffington the actress; and R. D. Blackmore, the novelist of our own time, practised the moral of Candide in a market-garden here. Both Upper and Lower Teddington are well populated now, the latter best known to Londoners for the first full lock on Thames tide-water, the former as an approach to Bushey Park. This is a royal demesne of over 1,000 acres, public access to which was secured by a local Hampden, Timothy Bennett, shoemaker, who in the eighteenth century fought the question of right of way at his own expense, then, in 1900, was rewarded by a curious memorial set up at one of the entrances to the park. The last royal personage who lived here was William IV., as Duke of Clarence; and one of the last acts of Queen Victoria was granting Bushey House to be a National Physical Laboratory. The park is now practically a public one, where a Sunday in May draws throngs of Londoners to admire the flowering of the chestnuts on its renowned avenue. But “when the high midsummer pomps are on,” too, and in the glories of autumn decay, and, indeed, at all seasons, Bushey, with its fine timber, its stretches of bracken, its ponds, and its herds of tame deer, makes a sight that no visitor to London should miss. The main avenue, a straight and broad mile, leads from Teddington to Hampton Court, on the other side approached from Kingston Bridge through the glades of Hampton Park, to which one could come round by the river and the villas of Hampton Wick.
The history of this palace is, of course, familiar to every British schoolboy; but in case any of my readers should be more at home in Versailles or the Vatican, I will treat them as M. Jourdain desired of his master. Hampton Court was built by Cardinal Wolsey at the height of his power and pride, that would have cast into shade the magnificence of Canons Park, the household of the butcher’s son being nearly ten times as numerous as that of Queen Anne’s Paymaster-General. Extensive as his building was, Wolsey appears not to have completed its full design when his power became endangered by the conflagration lit at Anne Boleyn’s eyes. He hoped to avert Henry’s wrath by presenting that too ambitious home to the King, who, in Diomedean exchange, gave him the manor of Richmond, where soon there were harder dealings between Ego and Rex meus. Henry pulled about the Cardinal’s architecture in his own high-handed style, building the present hall and chapel; and he made Hampton a hunting-palace, with several parishes around as preserves. Edward VI. was born and partly brought up here. Here, too, Mary spent her dark honeymoon—that unloved sovereign whose faults have been excused by a schoolgirl on the plea of a temper soured under too many stepmothers. Hampton was a favourite residence with Elizabeth also, and with James, who held at it his famous conference of divines, from which came our present translation of the Bible. Charles I. was much at home at Hampton, and so in turn was Cromwell—a fact which may have caused the mental confusion of that schoolboy quotation of him as exclaiming, “Had I but served my God as I have served my King!” Charles II. and his brother are found now and then at Hampton, to which William took a special fancy, so that he had it restored and enlarged by Wren, to be a home reminding him of Holland by its canals and gardens; and he met his fatal fall from horseback in the park. Queen Anne’s sickly son, above mentioned, was born at the palace, where the poet remarks how—