A little nearer to Richmond, and so happily placed that it commands the river from below Richmond Hill to Teddington Lock, is the modern and very bizarre successor of Pope’s Villa. Only a specialist in architectural mania, or a member of the Société des Incoherents, could attempt a description of this astonishing building. It is said to have been erected by a tea merchant, and it certainly looks very much like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a house of cards. Its lawns and shrubberies are very pretty, and after all there is something to be said for having all the river-side monstrosities gathered into one parish. The house does not occupy the exact site of the original Pope’s Villa which, thanks to a too common lack of sentiment, was demolished long ago. The famous Grotto, one of the works of embellishment of the “little crooked thing that asks questions,” still remains, but in a damp and mouldy condition, and despoiled of all that rendered it interesting. Pope had no great love for gimcrackeries, and we can in some measure imagine the tenor of the lines in which he would have immortalised the tea merchant could he have foreseen the change a century would bring about. The associations of Pope’s Villa and gardens are primarily literary, even as those of Strawberry Hill, at a later day, were fashionable, frivolous, and dilettante. In Pope’s time Twickenham was the centre of literary interest in England, and if the Jove who dwelt in this Olympus was querulous and stinging, his genius went a long way towards making lustrous an age in which taste and manners slept. Taste, at least, was still slumbering when Lady Howe considered herself justified in demolishing one of the most famous abodes that have ever been connected with our literary history. It is in the neighbourhood of Pope’s Villa that the injury which has been done to the Thames by the mass of sewage sludge that has been so recklessly poured into it of late years first becomes noticeable. Although the effects of the tide are not much felt above Richmond Bridge, the condition of the river hereabouts at low water is lamentable. A broad edging of slimy ooze stretches for some distance from the bank on either side, and when the weather is really hot, and there is a drought of any considerable duration, as happened in the summer of 1884, the odour is hardly that of frankincense. The Thames Conservancy embankment between Twickenham and Richmond will no doubt improve matters somewhat; but it is, to say the least, melancholy that it should have become necessary to so disfigure the Surrey shore. Nor does the presence of unwieldy dredges in these reaches enhance the picturesqueness of the stream, while the new towing-path made with dried mud from the river-bed is an agency of martyrdom.
TWICKENHAM FERRY.
Behind Eel Pie Island—famous in the annals of angling and sweet in the memory of generations of picnickers—is seen the red tower of Twickenham parish church, architecturally much more interesting than the majority of Thames Valley churches. The ancient building fell down in 1713, and the fact that Sir Godfrey Kneller, who was at that time one of the churchwardens, had a hand in its rebuilding, albeit he was not the actual architect, may account for the excellence of the workmanship. The brickwork is almost as good as some of the best Tudor achievements in that line. Some famous and many interesting people lie buried here and in the churchyard. Pope’s own tomb is hidden beneath the seats; but the marble monument which he erected to the memory of his father and mother, and in anticipatory commemoration of himself, is still to be seen on the east wall. In that part of the inscription which refers to himself Pope left blanks for his age and the date of his death; but such is the carelessness which prevails in such matters that these lacunæ have never been filled up. Kneller, the courtly painter of so many beauteous coquettes, is also buried in the church. Here, too, sleeps Admiral Byron, the author of the once popular “Narrative of the Loss of the Wager,” irreverently described by his grandson as “My Granddad’s Narrative.” Kitty Clive, the charming actress who lived at Little Strawberry Hill, and for whom Walpole had a platonic attachment, is buried in the chancel. Naturally, in a classic village where many tremendous personages have dwelt, Twickenham is full of fine and interesting old houses, mainly of that square red-brick order of architecture which, if not precisely picturesque, is suggestive of comfort and homeliness. The old houses at Twickenham are of the sort in which Thackeray’s people lived—still redolent of the charming but indescribable odour of the days of good, harmless Queen Anne. Perhaps the most interesting of them all is York House, immediately opposite Eel Pie Island, in which Anne herself and her sister Mary were born. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Anne’s somewhat plebeian grandsire, lived there, and it is one of the five or six houses in which he is said to have written that monstrous dull book, the “History of the Rebellion.” For several years after their clandestine marriage the Duke of York—he who when king made so pitiful an ending of it—lived with Anne Hyde in this house, although it was undoubtedly called York long before then. In the second half of last century, Prince Stahremberg, Viennese Envoy Extraordinary, lived here, and achieved such fame as can therefrom result by a long succession of private theatricals in which a bevy of lovely and high-born dames took part. Orleans House likewise has royal associations, but of a somewhat melancholy kind, as memories of exile usually must be.
RICHMOND: THE MEADOWS AND THE PARK.
Twickenham might pleasantly detain us for a whole chapter; but the wooded slopes of Richmond rise beyond, and tempt us on to “Ham’s umbrageous Walks,” and the green meadows of Petersham. The river between Eel Pie Island and Richmond Bridge has a charm all its own, which owes much to the associations of the shores between which it flows. The meadows on the Surrey shore are sweet to look upon from the water; but until Ham is approached there is greater interest and variety upon the Middlesex bank. Ham, with its famous “Walks,” lies low, and little of it can be seen from a boat. From the towing-path, however, there is to be had a very pleasant glimpse of Ham House, shaded, and, indeed, almost hidden, by splendid elms, some of which, against the pale which divides the grounds from the public path, throw in summer a cool and welcome shadow across the glaring footway. There is something solemnly picturesque about Ham House, as, indeed, there nearly always is about an old red-brick house closely surrounded by graceful, darkling elms. Ham is, in fact, so hemmed in by foliage that it but narrowly escapes being gloomy. Horace Walpole, who was nothing if not cheerful, declaimed terribly against its dreariness; and to Queen Charlotte it appeared “truly melancholy.” It is shut in and almost surrounded by high walls; but a good view of the front may be obtained from the towing-path through the handsome iron gates in the centre of a dwarf wall. These gates are said not to have been opened for many years, and the house itself has the appearance of being rarely lived in. Ham is a good example of very early Jacobean architecture. It has a longish front with a slightly projecting wing at each extremity, and is approached by avenues on almost every side. Few country houses in the neighbourhood of London are more interesting either historically or architecturally. Neither within nor without has any restoration been attempted, and there has been only such renovation as was imperatively necessary to prevent decay. It was built, it is said, for Henry Prince of Wales, elder brother of Charles I., who died a mere youth. The actual builder of the house was Sir Thomas Vavasour, King James’s Marshal of the Household, and the belief that it was extended for the Prince of Wales is strengthened by the Vivat Rex, which, together with the date, 1610, is carved over the principal entrance. Since 1651 it has belonged to the Earls of Dysart. The first Earl of Dysart was, in Hibernian phrase, a Countess, Elizabeth, daughter of William Murray, one of the owners of Ham, and the wife of Sir Lionel Tollemache. After Sir Lionel’s death, the Countess married John, Earl of Lauderdale, who, within three years of his marriage, was created Baron Petersham, Earl of Guildford, Marquis of March, and Duke of Lauderdale. John Maitland, the “L” of the Cabal Ministry, and his Duchess, were two of the most infamous creatures of the Restoration. The Duchess was bad because it was her nature to be so; her second husband, whose relations with her before marriage and in the lifetime of their respective first partners had been at the least compromising, was too weak and too easily swayed to withstand his wife’s imperious ways. She openly sold the places in the Duke’s gift, and it was the opinion of Burnet that she “would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass her ends.” The “Cabal” constantly held their councils at Ham House, the Duchess of Lauderdale often being present to sharpen their flagging wits, exhausted by the concoction of shameful schemes for replenishing their own and their master’s exchequers. The house was magnificently decorated and furnished out of the spoils of politics, and internally it remains very much as the Duchess left it—full of pictures, portraits, tapestries, rich cabinets of ivory and cedar. In one of these cabinets is preserved a crystal locket containing a lock of hair from the ill-fated head of Elizabeth’s Earl of Essex. It had been proposed to assign Ham House as the residence of James II. after his enforced abdication; but that courageous person found it expedient to take himself off, and to weep on a kindlier shore.