EORGE II. was the last sovereign to occupy Kensington Palace, which thenceforth, during the long reign of George III., was left almost entirely neglected and deserted. Several members of the royal family, however, occupied, at various periods, suites of apartments in the Palace. Among others, Caroline of Brunswick, when Princess of Wales, lived for a short time here with her mother. Her behaviour greatly scandalized the sober-minded inhabitants of the old court suburb. “She kept a sort of open house, receiving visitors in a dressing-gown, and sitting and talking about herself with strangers, on the benches in the garden, at the risk of being discovered.”
Another but more worthy occupant of the Palace in George III.’s reign was our present Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who collected a magnificent library here of nearly fifty thousand volumes, which he spent the last years of his life in arranging and cataloguing.
Destined, however, to invest Kensington Palace with associations and memories far transcending any that have gone before, was the advent here of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, seven months after their marriage. They occupied most of the old state rooms on the first and second floors of the easternmost portion of the Palace. Three lives then stood between the duke and the throne, and little could the newly-married pair have imagined that from their union would spring the future Queen and Empress of such a vast and mighty empire as now owns the sway of their first and only child.
HE Queen was born on the 24th of May, 1819, at a quarter past four in the morning. “Some doubt,” says Mr. Loftie, “has been thrown on the identification of the room in which the future Queen was born; but the late lamented Dr. Merriman, whose father attended the Duchess, had no doubt that a spacious chamber, which has been marked with a brass plate, was that in which the happy event took place.” This room, which is on the first floor, exactly under the “King’s Privy Chamber”—the State Rooms being on the second floor—has a low ceiling, and three windows, facing east, looking into the “Private Gardens.” It has been identified by the Queen as the one Her Majesty was always told she was born in. The brass plate, put up at the time of the first Jubilee, in 1887, states: In this room Queen Victoria was born, May 24th, 1819.
Faulkner, writing the year after the event, confirms this identification, insomuch that he says: “The lower apartments in the south-east part of the Palace, beneath the King’s Gallery, have been for some years occupied by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, whose premature decease—eight months after the birth of his daughter—this nation has so recently and deeply lamented; and they are still the residence of Her Royal Highness the Duchess.”