Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has a friend with him, and, as we jolt from Kensington Gore into the High Street, points out the palace, and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary lived and died there, amid William’s stolid Hollanders. He tells a story which he heard from his grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look at the King’s dropsical ankles, said, when asked what he thought of them, ‘Why, truly, I would not have your Majesty’s two legs for your three kingdoms.’ He tells the friend that the King procured a more courtly and less blunt medical adviser; and we can well believe it. More stories beguile the way: how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark ended here in the fulness of time; how their successor, George the First, furious with Sir Robert Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and anything and everything, used to tear off his wig and jump on it, in transports of rage. How he would gaze up at the vane on the clock-tower entrance to the palace (which we can just glimpse as we pass), anxious for favouring winds to waft his ships to England with despatches from his beloved Hanover, and how he died suddenly at breakfast one morning after being disappointed in those breezes.
These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however, has reminiscences of his own, and can recollect the Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the Prince Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810 and 1814—‘a red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled hair, all spangles and scarlet cloak, like a play-actress, making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the people, and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood for houses to let.’ The old gentleman who says this is a Radical, and, like all of that political creed, likes to see Royalty ‘behaving as sich, and not like common people such as you an’ me.’ Whereupon another passenger in the stage, on whom the speaker’s eye has fallen, audibly objects to being called, or thought, or included among common persons; so that relations among the ‘insides’ are strained, and so continue, past Kensington Church, a very decrepit and nondescript kind of building; past the Charity School, the Vestry Hall, where a gorgeous beadle in plush breeches, white stockings, scarlet cloak trimmed with gold bullion, a wonderful hat, and a wand of office, is standing, and so into the country. Presently we come to the village of Hammersmith, innocent as yet of whelk-stalls and fried-fish shops, and so at last, past Turnham Green, to Brentford.
IX
Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the Bath Road, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for what says Gay?—
Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.
