Besides enlarging the gardens round about the Palace, Queen Anne greatly extended the area of the park-like enclosed grounds attached to Kensington Palace. Mr. Loftie has declared that “neither Queen Anne nor Queen Caroline took an acre from Hyde Park.” But this we have found not to be the fact. In an old report on the “State of the Royal Gardens and Plantations at Ladyday, 1713,” among the Treasury Papers in the Record Office, there is a distinct reference to “The Paddock joyning to the Gardens, taken from Hyde Park in 1705, and stocked with fine deer and antelopes;” and again in another document, dated May 26th in the same year, being a memorial to the Lord High Treasurer from Henry Portman, Ranger of Hyde Park, it is stated that “near 100 acres had been enclosed from the park of Kensington, whereby the profits he had by herbage were much reduced.” Later on, in George II.’s reign, in 1729, we find a grant of £200 made to William, Earl of Essex, Ranger of Hyde Park, “in consideration of loss of herbage of that part of the said park which is laid into his Majesty’s gardens at Kensington.”
T was at Kensington Palace that Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, at length succumbed, in 1708, to a prolonged illness of gout and asthma. During his last sickness and death, Anne had the “consolation” of the Duchess of Marlborough’s “sympathy.” Her Grace’s deportment, according to an eye-witness, “while the Prince was actually dying, was of such a nature that the Queen, then in the height of her grief, was not able to bear it.” She actually forced her way, as Mistress of the Robes, to the poor Prince’s deathbed, and only drew into the background when peremptorily ordered by the heart-broken wife to leave the room. After Prince George had breathed his last, she stepped forward again, and when all the others had left, insisted on remaining with poor Anne, who was “weeping and clapping her hands together, and swaying herself backwards and forwards” in an agony of grief. The Queen was at length induced to accede to the Duchess’s advice to leave “that dismal body” and remove to St. James’s.
Two years later, in these very same state rooms of Kensington Palace took place the famous final interview between the Queen and her whilom favourite, also subsequently noticed in our description of “Queen Anne’s Private Dining Room.”
N the summer of the year 1714 Queen Anne was seized, at Kensington Palace, with apoplexy, brought on by political worries. She had been failing in health for some time; and on July 27th had an attack of blood to the head, while presiding at her Cabinet Council, and was carried in a dead faint to her bed. Four days after, Charles Ford, an official of the government and a correspondent of Swift, wrote: “I am just come from Kensington, where I have spent these two days. At present the Queen is alive, and better than could have been expected; her disorder began about eight or nine yesterday morning. The doctors ordered her head to be shaved; while it was being done, the Queen fell into convulsions, or, as they say, a fit of apoplexy, which lasted two hours, during which she showed but little sign of life.” At six in the evening of the same day, another anxious watcher within the palace walls, says Miss Strickland, wrote to Swift: “At the time I am writing, the breath is said to be in the Queen’s nostrils, but that is all. No hopes of her recovery,”—and in effect she breathed her last the following day, in the fiftieth year of her age. “Her life would have lasted longer,” wrote Roger Coke, in his “Detection,” “if she had not eaten so much.... She supped too much chocolate, and died monstrously fat; insomuch that the coffin wherein her remains were deposited was almost square, and was bigger than that of the Prince, her husband, who was known to be a fat, bulky man.”
