We have not long left Twickenham before we see the little oblong island about which there was so much contention because it formed an item in the famous Marble Hill view, seen from the heights of Richmond Park. The London County Council are now owners of the Marble Hill estate, and have made it into a public park. It lies on the Twickenham side. The house was built by George II. for the Countess of Suffolk. Gay, Pope, and Swift all took an interest in the building, and voiced their opinions as to the style and the laying out of the grounds. A suite of rooms in the house was afterwards set aside for Gay, who was a great favourite with the countess.
The other side of the river is open, and it must be admitted that on a sunny day this bit is a stiff pull if one is unfortunate enough to be going against the current. It is often to be described by the word "glaring," yet the fine scimitar-like sweep of the tree-crowned heights above, capped by the huge mass of the Star and Garter Hotel, toned to unoffending mediocrity of colour, is worth seeing.
Richmond, like nearly all the other places on the river, has an atmosphere of its own, difficult to put into words. It is less flippant than Kingston, and has not a tinge of the gravity of Twickenham. The houses rise high and are irregular; those in the main street recede from the water as they leave the bridge, and between them and the stream are innumerable others, some with gardens, some overshadowed by trees. Weeping willows, Scotch firs, and ivy-covered trunks abound, and the place is the perfection of a residential quarter. There is enough oldness and irregularity to avoid stiffness, enough modernity to ensure cleanliness. The bridge has a peculiarly individual curve—a real humpback—and its stone balustrade is very fine. At the southern end, far too many new red-brick flats are springing up, alas! but on the north or east, where lies old Richmond, they are not visible to any appreciable extent. The scene below the bridge is distinctly pretty. Large boat-building yards, as at Kingston, occupy the foreground, and the warm cinnamons and ochres of newly-varnished boats are generally to be seen, as well as the more crude and garishly painted craft. The islands are tree-covered, and are well placed in the stream. Yet one may note that, popular as Richmond is, it is not flooded in the summer time with such crowds of boating visitors as Hampton. There are more large craft about, and boating people do not care for that.
What remains of Richmond Palace must be sought below the bridge, for it will not be seen without a little effort. The old palace stood right on the margin of the water, and an engraving of it is still extant, showing a pinnacled and many chimneyed building. The angular towers are capped by turrets like those of the old palace at Greenwich. Henry I. was the first English king to live here, but until Edward III.'s time it was hardly a recognised royal palace. It fell before the hand of Richard II., who in a fit of frenzy at the death of his wife, which occurred here, ordered its destruction. Henry V. restored it, but it was burnt down in the end of the fifteenth century, and afterwards rebuilt by Henry VII., who changed its name from Sheen to Richmond, and who himself died there. The old Tudor gateway of his time remains still. It is said, but with doubtful accuracy, that the Countess of Nottingham died in the room over the gateway, after having confessed to Elizabeth her duplicity about the Earl of Essex and the ring he had confided to her charge. We have many records of Richmond from the time of the miserable Katherine of Arragon—widow of one boy prince, but not yet affianced to the other, a foreigner in a strange land, bitterly hating her surroundings—to the time of Charles I., who made the great park and hunted in it. A large Carthusian monastery stood near the palace. Perkin Warbeck found an asylum in the monastery, and in 1550 Robert Dudley was here married to Amy Robsart.
There is a half-tide lock at Richmond, with a footbridge. This is at present the lowest lock on the river, though there is some talk of making a similar one at Wandsworth. It is quite different in construction from the usual kind. It has three great sluices, each weighing thirty-two tons, and when the tide brings up the water, so that it is equal with that above—that is to say, at half-tide—the sluices are raised by the addition of a small weight to the massive pendules by which they are exactly balanced, and the water is allowed free way.
All along this stretch of the river there is on one side a fine row of shady trees growing to a great height. Beyond the raised footpath is the old Deer Forest, on which stands Kew Observatory, and a minor stream, which afterwards forms a moat to Kew Gardens, runs along merrily. Isleworth is finely placed at a bend of the river, and though it is a manufacturing place, it is not so bad as Brentford. The large willow-covered ait in front affords occupation to the osier gatherers. The church is ugly; it is placed very like that at Hampton, and, like Hampton also, its ugliness is mitigated by a covering of ivy. The tower, as so frequently happens, is much older than the rest. Was it that church towers were built more solidly than the naves, or that the naves would have stood equally well had they been allowed to remain?
Then we come to the great park surrounding Syon House (Duke of Northumberland), a park fringed with marshy ground, where reeds and rushes flourish, and which is overflowed at every flood. Crows consider it a delightful place, if their perpetual presence may be taken to indicate opinion. A great clump of cedars stands between the house and the river, but we have to go considerably further on before the severe line of frontage, with its ground floor arcade and battlemented parapet, can be seen at full length. The astonished lion stands clear up against the sky, as he did of old at Northumberland House, over the site of which now flows a ceaseless stream of traffic. Long years ago there stood here at Isleworth a convent for nuns. This was suppressed at the Dissolution. Katherine Howard was imprisoned in Syon House until three days before her execution, and only five years later the corpse of her murderer, the tyrant Henry, stopped here on its way to Windsor. Edward VI. granted the place to Lord-Protector Somerset, who, with his usual mania for building, began to reconstruct it on a much larger scale; but before he had got farther than the mere shell of his design, he suffered disgrace, and Syon House passed to the Duke of Northumberland. Here came Lady Jane Grey, timid and doubting, to receive the offer of the crown, and from here she started on her last sad journey to the Tower.
Queen Mary naturally tried to re-establish the nuns, but found it difficult, as some had died and others had married! Fuller's comment is worth quoting:
It was some difficulty to stock it with such as had been veiled before, it being now thirty years since the Dissolution, in which time most of the elder nuns were in their graves, and the younger in the arms of their husbands, as afterwards embracing a married life.