In vain we are told that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; in a good air; and, though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it: all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in: and this is by no means a state of things in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good wishes of its subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns—at least on the part of the ladies; and if the present Queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows than the “tuning of the tea-things,” or the sound of a pianoforte.
KENSINGTON PALACE.
The associations of Kensington Palace are almost entirely with the earlier Hanoverian reigns; the later Georges neglected it. Rumour hath it that this royal domain originated in the establishment of a nursery for the children of Henry VIII. If it were so, Elizabeth and Victoria must have been brought up on the same spot; but the tradition is not well supported. Its first ascertained proprietor was Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons at the accession of the First Charles, who built and occupied only a small nucleus of the present structure, which was enlarged from time to time by most of its successive occupants, but with no pretension, and without much plan. From the second Earl of Nottingham, the grandson of Finch, William III. bought the house and grounds. The latter he enlarged to the extent of twenty-six acres. To these Anne added thirty, and to these in turn Queen Caroline, wife of George II., added three hundred. The house had been the while proportionately growing. Its last expansion was contributed by the Duke of Sussex.
The gardens were pedantically squared to Dutch uniformity by William of Orange, and the semblance of a Court which he held in this Palace was correspondingly gloomy and dismal. The most singular visitor ever received by William was the Czar Peter, who drove hither incognito in a hackney coach, on his arrival in London, and was afterwards entertained here with some slight show of state. In Anne’s time, the palace and gardens were little livelier than in William’s. The Queen hedged herself in behind absurd chevaux-de-frise of etiquette, and the court chroniclers of the period record little else than eating and drinking. Swift and Prior, Bolingbroke and Marlborough, Addison and Steele, nevertheless, lent occasional gleams of brightness and dignity to the otherwise sombre scene.
The most fascinating and memorable association of Kensington Palace is in connection with the Courts of the first two Georges, and of the son of the latter, Frederick Prince of Wales. These associations are specially connected with the bevies of frolicsome, and sometimes frail, maids of honour, who now live in the pages of Pope and Gay, of Hervey and Walpole. Chief among them was the gay, sprightly, and irresistible Molly Leppell, who resisted, in a manner equally indignant and comical, the degrading overtures of the coarse-souled George II. She married Hervey, the most effeminate and egregious dandy of his time. Chesterfield thus toasted her in a ballad on the beauties of the Court;—
Oh! if I had Bremen and Varden,
And likewise the Duchy of Zell,
I’d part with them all for a farden,
To have my dear Molly Leppell.
Caroline of Anspach, consort of Frederick, Prince of Wales, introduced the habit of promenading in gorgeous costume in the gardens, first on Saturday, then on Sunday, afternoons. By degrees the quality were admitted as well as the royal family and their immediate attendants. The liberty was gradually extended to the general public. Hence it was that Kensington Gardens became in time as open to all comers as are the royal parks. These gorgeous promenades ceased with the commencement of the last malady of George III. It was in allusion to the stately train of attendant beauties who accompanied the Princess Caroline of Wales, that Tickell wrote—
Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread,
Seems from afar a moving tulip bed,
Where rich brocades and glossy damasks glow,
And chintz, the rival of the showery bow.
Here England’s Daughter, darling of the land,
Sometimes, surrounded with her virgin band,
Gleams through the shades. She, towering o’er the rest,
Stands fairest of the fairer kind confess’d;
Form’d to gain hearts that Brunswick’s cause denied,
And charm a people to her father’s side.
With the death of George II., the glory departed from Kensington. No future English King favoured or frequented it. George III. never resided in the Palace, and it was altogether too dull and homely for his eldest son. He was willing enough that his bookish brother Sussex, and his steady brother Kent, should abide in it; and, as one writer puts it, depicting the “first gentleman in Europe” in a light far from pleasing, but for the use of which we fear there was too much foundation—“He was well content to think that the staid-looking house and formal gardens rendered the spot a good out-of-the-way sort of place enough, for obscuring the growth and breeding of his niece and probable heiress, the Princess Victoria, whose life, under the guidance of a wise mother, promised to furnish so estimable a contrast to his own.”
WILBERFORCE AND THE PRINCESS.