UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME

THE COTSWOLDS

By G. F. Nicholls and Francis Duckworth

NORTH DEVON

By Henry B. Wimbush and F. J. Snell

SOUTH DEVON

By C. E. Hannaford and Charles Rowe, M.J.I.

GALLOWAY

By James Faed, Jun., and J. M. Sloan

IRELAND

By Francis S. Walker, R.H.A., and Frank Mathew

LIVERPOOL

By J. Hamilton Hay and Dixon Scott

THE PEAK COUNTRY

By W. Biscombe Gardner and A. R. Hope Moncrieff

KEW GARDENS

AGENTS

THE RHODODENDRON DELL

KEW GARDENS

PAINTED BY
T. MOWER MARTIN, R.C.A.

DESCRIBED BY
A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF

WITH
24 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908

PREFACE

Kew Gardens contain what seems the completest botanical collection in the world, handicapped as it is by a climate at the antipodes of Eden, and by a soil that owes less to Nature than to patient art. Before being given up to public pleasure and instruction, this demesne was a royal country seat, specially favoured by George III. That homely King had two houses here and began to build a more pretentious palace, a design cut short by his infirmities, but for which Kew might have usurped the place of Windsor. For nearly a century it kept a close connection with the Royal Family, as the author illustrates in his story of the village and the Gardens, while the artist has found most effective subjects in the rich vegetation gathered into this enclosure and in the relics of its former state.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

KEW GARDENS

I
ROYAL RESIDENCES

The most conspicuous feature of Kew is its Pagoda, from many points seen towering over the well-wooded flat watered by a winding reach of the Thames. Such an outlandish structure bears up the odd name in giving a suggestion of China, not contradicted by the elaborate cultivation around, where all seems market-garden that is not park, buildings, groves or flower-beds. Yet the name, of old written as Kaihough, Kaiho, Kayhoo, and in other quaint forms—for which quay of the howe or hough has been guessed as original—belongs to a thoroughly English parish, whose exotic vegetation, nursed upon a poor soil, came to be twined among many national memories. These, indeed, are most closely packed about what may be called the willow-plate pattern period of our history, when a true-blue conservatism had the affectation of letting itself be spangled with foreign amenities and curiosities, jumbled together without much regard for perspective or natural surroundings.

Before coming to the Gardens that are its present fame, we should understand how Kew, even in its days of obscurity, had all along to do with great folk. Almost every line of our kings has had a home in this Thames-side neighbourhood, a distinction dating from before the Conquest. Both Kew and Richmond began parochial life as dependencies of Kingston, the King’s town that once made a chief seat of Saxon princes, whose coronation stone bears record in its market-place. The manor, included with that of Sheen—the modern Richmond—was held by the Crown at Doomsday. For a time it seems to have passed into the hands of subjects, but there are hints of the first Edwards having a country home at Sheen. Edward III. certainly died at a palace said to have been built by him here. Richard II.’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, also died at Sheen, to her husband’s so great grief that he cursed the building in the practical form of ordering it to be destroyed. Henry IV. left it in ruins, and is said to have had a house at Isleworth across the river; but by his son Sheen was restored to royal state. While Henry VII. occupied it, the palace was destroyed by fire; then in rebuilding it, this king changed its name to Richmond after his Yorkshire earldom, itself another of the beauty-spots of the kingdom. Yet the old name, probably a cousin of the German schön, long fitly lingered in poetry—“Thy hill, delightful Sheen!” is Thomson’s invocation—and it still survives in East Sheen, which, once a hamlet of Richmond, like Kew, now begins to count rather as a suburb of London. Sheen House here had a later connection with quasi-royalty, as it was for a time occupied by the Count de Paris, heir of the Orleans family, that has hereabouts found other temporary refuges.

In Henry VIII.’s reign, the Crown gained a new seat in this neighbourhood, Hampton Court, too pretentious monument of Wolsey’s pride. At the first signs of the storm that was to wreck him, the swelling Churchman took in sail by giving up his palace to the king, who in return allowed him quarters in one of the royal lodges at Richmond, from which, as the king’s displeasure deepened, he was banished, first to Esher, finally to his archiepiscopal northern diocese. Within the hunting-park formed by Henry about Hampton, was a lodge at Hanworth that became the home of his wife Catherine Parr, when she had the luck to be his widow.

One most picturesque figure in English history must have been familiar with Kew, though its name does not appear in the sad story of fair, wise and pious Lady Jane Grey, the “nine days’ queen.” On the spindle side, she was grand-daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, married to Henry VIII.’s sister Mary, through whom came her heritage of peril. Her father, Marquis of Dorset, was created Duke of Suffolk, and succeeded to Suffolk House at Sheen. The scene of Roger Ascham’s notable visit to the studious princess was Bradgate in Leicestershire; but part of her youth would probably be spent at Suffolk House. The boy husband provided for her, Guildford Dudley, was son of a neighbour across the river, the crafty and ambitious Duke of Northumberland, who had secured Syon House here as a share of Church plunder first granted to the Protector Somerset. On Edward VI.’s death, not without suspicion of poison, Northumberland kept the event secret for three days, in hope of being able to seize the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, before carrying out his plot to put Jane and her newly wedded husband on the throne. It seems to have been at Syon that the reluctant queen was informed of the part she had to play; and thence she was taken by water to the Tower, in which she would find a heavenly crown.

Both Mary and Elizabeth lived from time to time at Richmond, recommended by its nearness to London, and by the river that made a royal highway in that age of bad roads. Here Elizabeth died, and from her death-bed Sir Robert Carey spurred through thick and thin to carry news of his inheritance to the King of Scots. James I. was not the man to neglect such a good hunting country; early in his reign we find the Courts of Law and all seated for a time at Richmond, when driven out of London by the plague. But Hampton Court up the river, as Greenwich below, seems to have been preferred for the king’s residence; then that lover of the chase found a paradise more to his mind in Theobald’s Park, near Enfield, for which he exchanged Hatfield with the Salisbury family; and this became his favourite abode. Richmond he gave to be the home of his son Henry, who from it dates a pretty letter to the Dauphin of France, all the twelve-year-old boy’s own composition, we are told, for the learned father would let him have no help. Prince Henry might not have been pleased to hear all that was said of him in the French nursery, where little Louis asked about his correspondent—“Is he called the Prince of Wales (Galles) because he is mangy (galeux)?”

Monsieur and Brother,—Having heard that you begin to ride on horseback, I believed that you would like to have a pack of little dogs, which I send you, to witness the desire I have that we may be able to follow the footsteps of the kings, our fathers, in entire and firm friendship, also in this sort of honourable and praiseworthy recreation. I have begged the Count de Beaumont, who is returning there, to thank in my name the king your father, and you also for so many courtesies and obligations with which I feel myself overcharged, and to declare to you how much power you have over me, and how much I am desirous to find some good occasion to show the readiness of my affection to serve you, and for that, trusting in Him, I pray God, Monsieur and brother, to give you in health long and happy life.—Your very affectionate brother and servitor,

Henry.

Richmond, 23rd October 1605.

This prince, we know, died young, according to one tradition through rash bathing in the Thames; but a modern physician has diagnosed the indications of his illness as typhoid fever. Richmond then passed to his brother Charles, who was much at home here and at Hampton Court. He, as king, made a new enclosure, the present Richmond Park, a hunting-ground nine miles round, formed by somewhat high-handed expropriations recalling the harsher dealings of William Rufus with the New Forest, and going to make up this king’s unpopularity. When poor Charles himself had been hunted down, the royal abode at Richmond was sold to one of the regicides, Sir Gregory Norton, the new Great Park being given over by Parliament to the citizens of London, who, at the Restoration, restored this gift to Charles II. with a courtly declaration that they had kept it as stewards of his Majesty. The Park was now put under a Ranger; and the Palace fell into neglect, though, according to Burnet, James II.’s son, the Pretender, was nursed in it. Nothing of its old state remains but the Gateway on Richmond Green, above which may be traced the arms of England, as borne by Henry VII. The adjacent row of houses, still known as the “Maids of Honour,” also the cheesecakes of that ilk, appear to record the later day when Queen Caroline’s home at Richmond was so cramped as not to allow of her ladies “living in.”

As Richmond decayed, Hampton Court flourished in royal favour; and Cromwell, in his days of mastery, made bold with its ample accommodations. Its canals and garden took the fancy of Dutch William, who in England felt most at home here. His fatal accident he met with while riding in its park; and in the palace was born the only one of Queen Anne’s many children who grew towards any hope of the crown. George I. was a good deal at Hampton Court, it being recorded of him that on his way to London he used to make his carriage drive slowly through Brentford, for which he had an admiration shared by few beholders.

THE WILD GARDEN IN SPRING

George II. as Prince of Wales, acquired for his wife another seat in this princely countryside, buying from the Duke of Ormond a house in the Old Deer Park beyond Kew Gardens, which, re-christened Richmond Lodge, made a royal home at intervals for nearly half a century. Richmond was looked on as Queen Caroline’s property, the expensive improvements on it supposed to be paid out of her private purse, though, if we may trust Horace Walpole, one of his father’s ways of securing her favour was to draw from the King’s close-buttoned pocket, on the sly, for this purpose. After the death of the managing Queen, Richmond was little used, but for a weekly visit from the Court. Every Saturday in summer, says that mocking Horace, “they went in coaches and six in the middle of the day, with the heavy Horse Guards kicking up the dust before them, dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade; and His Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe.” It had been his wife’s favourite residence; and there Scott should surely have put her interview with Jeanie Deans; but he seems to mistake in placing Richmond Lodge within the present Park, whereas it was on low land beside the river, where now stands the Observatory; then to reach it from London the Duke of Argyll would never have taken his horses up Richmond Hill merely by way of gratifying the dairymaid with a fine view, which after all, appealed most to her taste as “braw rich feeding for the cows.” Sir Walter must have had the White Lodge in view, yet without considering that it is half an hour’s walk from the Richmond Hill edge of the Park.

George II. and Caroline sometimes lived at Hampton Court, as when their eldest son gave them deadly offence by secretly carrying off his wife thence to lie-in at St. James’s. And it was there that, in Frederick William fashion, the King once struck his eldest grandson, a memory that is said to have given George III. his dislike to this palace. He let it fall to its present position as a mixture of Cockney show-place and aristocratic almshouse, while he much affected Richmond Lodge, till he got possession of his boyhood’s home at Kew.

So at last we come to the Kew mansion, whose connection with royalty was comparatively a late one, and lasted only for two generations. The reader must bear in mind that this was not the present Kew Palace, which hardly seems to deserve such a title of pretence. The latter had belonged to Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was sold by him to Sir Hugh Portman, a rich Holland merchant, who rebuilt or altered it in the Dutch style, so that it was commonly known as the Dutch House. By some local inquirers it has been identified with the “Dairy House” also mentioned in old books. Opposite this, on the other side of a public road, in the seventeenth century stood a larger mansion, Kew House, as to the original date of which one is not clear, but it may have been at least on the site of a mansion at which her Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, entertained Queen Elizabeth. Under Charles II., when Evelyn calls it an “old timber house,” it came by marriage to Sir Henry Capel of the Essex family, afterwards Lord Capel, who died Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. From his widow, it passed into possession of Samuel Molyneux, described as secretary to George II., soon after whose death, in 1730, it was taken on a long lease by Frederick Prince of Wales.

Thus the obscure name of Kew began to appear in the scandalous chronicles of the Georgian period. Frederick’s parents, it will be remembered, were much at the neighbouring Richmond Lodge; and when Queen Caroline took a lease of the Dutch House also, this not very affectionate royal family had a group of residences too close together, one might think, for their comfort. The official guide states that at one time Frederick, too, must have occupied the Dutch House, as shown by his cipher and the device of Prince of Wales’s feathers on the locks; but I can find no mention of his living here in memoirs of the period. It may be that he had it for a time before his marriage; but the other was the house occupied by him as a family man, and by his widow after him.

There is some mystery about the origin of the extraordinary ill-will shown both by George II. and Caroline towards their heir, a feeling surpassing the antipathy between father and son that made an heirloom in this family for generations. The King tried to keep Frederick from coming to England; then, later on, he was half-willing to cut off Hanover from the English Crown that it might be bestowed upon his favourite, William of Cumberland. The eldest son he usually abused as a puppy, a fool, a beast, and by other such elegant epithets; while the Queen, if we are to believe Lord Hervey, offered once to give him her opinion in writing “that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it.” Yet, when father and son were not on speaking terms, all the family lived together at St. James’s, till, after the birth of the Prince’s first child, he was turned out at short notice to take refuge at Kew, and at makeshift London residences which became in turn the head-quarters of the Opposition. One would suppose that in the country those cat-and-dog neighbours might have chosen to have at least a river between them; but at Kew they were separated only by a road.

Kew House, then, began to figure in history as the country-seat of the Prince of Wales. Frederick was by no means a model husband nor a princely man; but he had affection and respect for his wife, the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and they at least lived decently together. Here were in part brought up their children: George III.; Edward, Duke of York, who died abroad in 1767; William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who lived to 1805; Henry, Duke of Cumberland, who, as well as the last-mentioned, came into disfavour through a mésalliance; Prince Frederick and Princess Louisa, who both died young; and Caroline Matilda, who married the worthless King of Denmark, and had a miserable end. Horace Walpole sneers at Frederick’s desire to name his children from heroes of English history, not always with his father’s approval; but this trait goes to show the Prince’s aspirations to be a patriotic king. He is said to have taken the “Black Prince” as a model he got no chance of following, perhaps as well for his possible subjects; but the scanty records of his career suggest rather one of Browning’s characters:—

All that the old Dukes were without knowing it,

This Duke would fain know he was without being it.

During the married life of Frederick and Augusta, the memoirs of the time give slight and sometimes rather spiteful hints of their doings at Kew, as to which, indeed, Lord Hervey’s caustic pen has no worse to tell than that they walked three or four hours daily in the lanes and fields about Richmond, with a scandal-blown lady-in-waiting and a dancing-master for company. The Prince was much given to private theatricals, but also to athletic games, among them such innocent ones as rounders, tennis, and base-ball, the last not yet banished across the Atlantic. The dog given to him by Pope is remembered by the couplet inscribed on its collar:—

I am His Highness’s dog at Kew,

Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

This poet-neighbour boasted himself not a follower but a friend of His Highness, who did not want for two-legged dogs wagging their tails to him in town and country, on the speculation that his father’s death might any day change the tap of honour and profit. But all such expectations were nipped short. In March 1751 the Prince caught cold at Kew, and had symptoms of pleurisy. Supposed to be out of danger, he went back to Kew, where he walked about like a convalescent; but the same night, after returning to town, showed signs of a fresh chill. Again he seemed to be on the mend, then suddenly one evening was seized with a violent fit of coughing. “Je sens la mort!” he exclaimed, and these were his last words. It proved that a tumour had burst, produced either by a fall or by a blow from a tennis ball three years before.

“Thus,” says Horace Walpole, “died Frederick, Prince of Wales, having resembled his pattern the Black Prince in nothing but in dying before his father.” He appears to have been not unpopular with the mob, as princes are apt to be who make the money fly; but history has no good to tell of him, unless one kindly act in his intercession for Flora Macdonald. Scholars and divines duly lamented him with overdone effusions in the Tu Marcellus eris vein; but these crocodile tears of the Muses are less well-remembered than that uncourtly epitaph that seems to have better expressed the not even lukewarm loyalty of the first Georgian generation:—

Here lies Fred

Who was alive and is dead.

Had it been his father,

I had much rather.

Had it been his brother,

Still better than another.

Had it been his sister,

No one would have missed her.

Had it been the whole generation,

Still better for the nation.

But since ’tis only Fred,

Who was alive and is dead,

There’s no more to be said.

George II. behaved at first not unkindly to his widowed daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He visited the bereaved family, throwing off royal ceremonial, kissed them, wept with them, and gave the princes good advice: “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.” Horace Walpole remarks in his malicious way that the King, who had never acted the tender father, grew so pleased with playing the part of grandfather that he soon became it in earnest. For the moment, natural good-feeling reigned in the families that had been such bad neighbours. The Opposition was crushed by the death of its patron, the Prince; and the discordant place-hunters of the day let themselves be tuned to a comparative harmony of interest under the Pelham brothers, who now had all their own way. Later on there sprang up fresh clouds between Kew and Kensington, the respective horizons of the rising and of the setting sun. For a little, Prince George appears to have lived with his grandfather at Hampton Court; but they did not take to each other, and the boy went back under his mother’s wing.

The first care of the King and the Ministry was to appoint instructors for the young Princes, an important choice in the case of the Heir to the Crown. The Governor appointed was Lord Harcourt, who “wanted a governor himself,” says Horace Walpole, and sneers at him as unfit to “teach the young Prince any arts but what he knew himself—hunting and drinking.” For Preceptor was chosen the Bishop of Norwich. Under these figure-heads were the tutors who should be about the royal children and do the actual work of education. Stone, the sub-governor, was a personal favourite of the King, “a dark, proud man, very able and very mercenary.” As sub-preceptor, or real schoolmaster, was kept on Mr. Scott, who had already been chosen by the Princess to teach her sons, when she found that at eleven Prince George could not read English. Of him, in old age, George III. spoke highly, and seems to have liked him best of all his instructors. But he was suspected in some quarters as recommended by Bolingbroke, the author of that “patriot-king” theory so abhorrent to Whigs.

THE LAKE

The question of the Regency had to be settled, in case of the King’s death before his grandson came of age. That high office might have fallen to George II.’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, between whom and his sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, no love was lost; nor was he beloved by the nation, least of all by the Jacobites. Horace Walpole tells a story of Prince George visiting his uncle. “To amuse the boy, he took down a sword and drew it. The young Prince turned pale and trembled, and thought his uncle was going to murder him.” There were others who judged the “Butcher” quite capable of altering the succession on mediæval precedent, in which party spirit was unjust to this Prince, not so black or so bloodthirsty as he was painted in the hatreds of the time. To the satisfaction of most people, but not of the Duke, the future King’s mother was appointed Regent under control of a council; and her father-in-law allowed her to act as guardian of her children.

A lady, who any day might thus become the chief personage in the State, would not lack courtiers in a generation of politicians more concerned about interest than principle. Among her special friends came to be noted John Stuart, Earl of Bute, that unpopular bogy of the next reign. Their intimacy did not fail to pass for scandalous; but the Archangel Gabriel himself would hardly have escaped scandal had he moved in Court society of the period. Bute had been a favourite and boon companion of the Prince, and remained a close counsellor of the widow, especially in the matter of bringing up her sons. Another matter influenced by him was the development of Kew Gardens, he himself taking a strong interest in botany and horticulture; but the Gardens may best be treated apart from the royal residences.

The best-founded reproach made against the Princess is that she brought up George III. and his brothers in strict seclusion, entirely under her influence and Bute’s. A careful mother’s excuse might well be the manners of the fashionable world. Bubb Doddington, admitted to walks and talks with her in Kew Gardens, reports her as anxious to keep the future King out of bad society, and not knowing where to find good companions for him among the dissipated nobility. Our age can sympathise with this desire more than did the factious scandalmongers of the period, who soon raised a cry that the Princes were being trained in principles of arbitrary power. To Doddington the Princess protested that she did not interfere with her son’s teachers. Between the contradictory statements of friends and foes, it is difficult to judge how far she was sincere in such professions; but it is clear that George loved her as sons of that house have not always loved their parents. Later on, he was thought to have grown a little impatient under the yoke of this masterful mother.

Before long the staff of preceptors fell all by the ears, the high officials quarrelling with the sub-tutors, who were understood to be in more favour with the mother. The former complained of Stone as taking too much on himself; and as for Scott, Horace Walpole tells a wicked story of the Bishop turning him out of the Prince’s Chamber “by an imposition of hands that had at least as much of the flesh as of the spirit.” What brought these jars to light was the Bishop finding in the Prince of Wales’s hands a French book written to justify James II.’s measures, an offence which Stone tried to palliate by making out that this Jacobite treatise had been lent the Prince by his sister, to whom, one understands, it would do no such great harm. The end of it was that both Governor and Preceptor resigned their offices, replaced by Lord Waldegrave and the Bishop of Peterborough, who appear to have got on for a time more smoothly with the subordinate instructors, as with the family. The new Bishop, said their mother, gave great satisfaction, and the children took to him. Lord Waldegrave, by his own account, became no favourite with his most important pupil, and had a poor opinion of him. His Memoirs scout the Princess’s professions that she did not interfere in the boys’ education. The preceptors had little influence, he says; “the mother and the nursery always prevailed.” The Prince he sets down as obstinate, sulky, too stingy and too self-righteous for his years. George, for his part, is afterwards found recalling this Governor as a “depraved, worthless man.”

What seems most certain as to George III.’s education is that he learned very little from books, not even to spell, but that he came to speak French and German, and that he allowed his mother and her friend, if not his tutors, to stamp the theory that a king of England should not only reign but govern, upon a nature that proved wax to receive and marble to retain such impressions. The mother spoke of George as a good, dutiful boy, rather serious in his disposition than otherwise, but a little wanting in spirit. Whether at her apron-string he grew up sly as well as shy and sleepy, is a question raised by the story of his youthful amour with a Quakeress named Hannah Lightfoot, which makes the plot of one of Besant’s novels; but it is hard now to tell the truth of it. The idea one gets of this King’s youth suggests Blifil rather than Tom Jones. All the other sons turned out more like Tom Jones, while “insipid” was an epithet applied to young George, who would yet develop a strongly-flavoured character. His moral courage and pluck came to be well proved in several trying predicaments; and at the opening of the Seven Years’ War, he showed spirit by demanding to serve in the Army, to the King’s jealous displeasure.

We need not rake up all the scandals that echoed about the quiet household at Kew. The Whigs went on sounding an alarm that the Prince of Wales was brought up in Jacobite principles, a particular hullabaloo being raised by a charge that his tutor Stone had drunk the Pretender’s health twenty years back, in company with Murray, better known as Lord Mansfield. The chief reproach against Bute, as yet, seems to have been his easily supposed illicit relations with the Princess, of which there is no proof. It was after the accession, rather, that he came to be pilloried as having laid himself out to heighten the Prince’s notion of the prerogative. There can be no doubt that he had a great part in moulding the future King’s mind, and that they were really fond of each other. It is said that they took an incognito tour together through England, and as far as Edinburgh and the Isle of Bute.

At eighteen, when the Prince was considered fit to have done with tutors, in the new household formed for him, Waldegrave being shunted as a persona ingrata, the Kew influence availed to have Bute made his official mentor as Groom of the Stole. The King offered him quarters at Kensington, with a royal allowance; but the lad declared that he would stick to his mother, which seems only a way of speaking, as by this time he had a home of his own at Saville House in Leicester Fields. He was at Kew, at all events, when, starting for London on horseback one morning, he met a messenger with the news of George II.’s sudden death, confirmed presently by the appearance of the Prime Minister’s carriage on its way westwards to the new fountain of power and pensions.

We know with what fair prospects George III. ascended the throne, “glorying in the name of Briton,” as Bute is said to have prompted him in addressing a people of whom the majority would rather consider their king as born an Englishman. A true John Bull he proved to be in his sense of duty, in his narrow outlook, and in his pig-headed obstinacy. Too soon the sky clouded over this well-meaning Prince, who took pains to repair the deficiencies of his education, and had his character quickly developed in the light that pours upon a throne. The lessons of Kew had not been thrown away upon him. That unofficial tutor, hitherto kept behind the scenes, became his open counsellor, and presently Prime Minister, till overthrown by blasts of popular indignation excited against the unconstitutional politician, the slandered favourite, and the ambitious Scot, who made a magnet for drawing crowds of his hungry countrymen to the source of patronage. The young King shared the unpopularity of his adviser. He fell out with nobles and statesmen; from the mob his carriage had to be guarded by prize-fighters. And in the irony of fate, the cry of liberty swelled loudest round an unprincipled libertine, who, taking to patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” quickly rose to be the idol of the mob, and made his fortune out of the cause in which he afterwards boasted that he never believed. “I never was a Wilkesite,” said Wilkes; but poor George was at least honest in his notions of governing. It looks like a satire on the British Constitution that our most virtuous and well-meaning kings have usually been those who did us most mischief. At that time a puppet would have been more welcome than a patriot king, but not a puppet whose wires were pulled by Bute.

One thing cannot be denied by his worst enemies, that this king made an honest effort to rule himself, to lead a clean, simple and wholesome life, which did so much in the end to win back respect for royalty among the respectable classes. At the outset of his reign he seems ready to have married for love of the bewitching siren, Lady Sarah Lennox, who took care to be seen making hay on the lawn of Holland House, as the young king rode by on the road to Kew. But that mock-Arcadian romance was nipped in the bud by his managing mother, who made haste to look out a wife for him among the Protestant princesses of Germany. George “sighed as a lover, but obeyed as a son.” Lady Sarah, great-grand-daughter of Charles II. as she was, had to content herself with serving as bridesmaid to the new queen. She soon got over her disappointed ambition, marrying twice and dying at a good old age as mother of the famous soldier-brothers Napier. It is a touching coincidence that her old age was afflicted by blindness, like her royal sweetheart’s, who in his last days appears to have recalled or imagined an earlier passion for Lady Elizabeth Spencer, afterwards Countess of Pembroke.

The royal bride chosen was Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a girl of seventeen, who for more than half a century gave a new tone to English society. After a little flutter of gaiety natural in her position, she entered upon a life of dignified propriety and domesticity with a husband who won her heart as well as her hand, and George, whatever wild oats he may or may not have sown, made a constant husband to his rather plain bride. This model couple agreed in the simple tastes at which worldly courtiers sneered. St. James’s Palace they kept as a stage for State functions; and they made little use of Windsor in the first years of the reign. For the “Queen’s House” was bought the Duke of Buckingham’s red-brick mansion on the site of what is now Buckingham Palace; and out of town the King lived a good deal at Richmond Lodge, also given to the Queen, where perhaps his mother still liked to keep him near her. Every evening, it appears, King and Queen dutifully visited that domineering princess either at Kew, or at her London residence, Leicester House. Carlton House, afterwards given to the next Prince of Wales, was also hers; and at one or other of these she lived “in a privacy that exceeded economy.” That is Horace Walpole’s reproach, who speaks of her as avaricious, but does not give the Dowager credit for paying off her husband’s debts, nor for her liberal charities. Her worst fault seems to have been a masterful temper that expressed itself in the lesson imprinted on her son’s softness, “George, be a king!”

Richmond Lodge soon proving too small for the growing royal family, George III. proposed to build a new palace for himself in Richmond Gardens, near the river opposite Syon House. The design is still preserved, and the work was actually begun; but a hitch occurred in the obstinacy of the Richmond people, who refused to sell the King a piece of ground he wanted to round off his demesne. Then the Princess Dowager, when her other sons left the nest, gave up Kew House to George and Charlotte, taking for herself the “Dutch House” across the way, till her death, not long afterwards; and when the lease ran out, it was bought for the Queen. The larger mansion had also been acquired, the royal family thus, from tenants, coming to be owners of both houses.

The smaller house—the present Kew Palace—was kept up by them with a separate establishment, at first used as the royal nursery, later on for the education of the older sons: and for a time it came to be known as the Prince of Wales’s House. Even then there was not accommodation for the dozen or so of youngsters who spent much of their childhood at Kew; and we hear of the King leasing or buying houses on Kew Green, where his flock of princes and princesses could be brought up in good air, the old Kew House serving always as the family rendezvous. In the grounds, towards the Richmond Park side, Charlotte built the picturesque “Queen’s Cottage,” where this industrious lady would ply her needle with her children about her, while the King read aloud, often from Shakespeare, for whom he professed a truly British admiration, though, as he told Miss Burney, the great poet’s works contained “much sad stuff—only one must not say so!”

At the beginning of George III.’s reign, the present Kew Palace is found described as “Princess Amelia’s House,” so George II.’s old-maid daughter, whose proposed marriage with Frederick the Great fell through, as Carlyle has told at length, must have lived here for a time; but she soon moved to Gunnersbury, not far off. This wilful Princess Amelia, who had faults and merits of her own, held the office of Ranger of Richmond Great Park, that brought her into collision with the public. She tried to keep the gates shut against both gentle and simple, but found that she was living in a free country, when one Lewis, a Richmond brewer, took the lead in an action for right-of-way, which would have gone against her, had George II. not anticipated the result by throwing the Park open.

Having thus marked out all the royal residences in and about Kew, let us next fix our attention on Kew House during the period when it was the favourite residence of George III.

THE QUEEN’S COTTAGE

II
KEW IN FAVOUR

The chief memories of Kew are associated with its royal master who, by his doings here, earned the nickname of “Farmer George,” in his unpopular days also belittled as the “Buttonmaker,” a sneer at his turning-lathe, and the taste for other mechanical pursuits which he shared with Louis XVI. The “Squire of Kew” is a title that would have suited him better; and he might have lived more happily and usefully had his station been no higher than that which he here affected. When he could get away from State functions and cares, not indeed neglected by him, he liked to live at Kew as a simple country gentleman, keeping a pack of hounds, superintending a model farm, improving his grounds, looking after his children, walking out with his wife, and not wasting his money. As the homely and frugal ways of this royal couple gave offence not only to dissipated courtiers, who felt themselves rebuked, but to the mob, always apt to be a snob, “meanly admiring mean things,” the caricaturists and lampooners of the reign found abundant encouragement to make coarse fun of George’s and Charlotte’s domestic virtues as well as of their public offences. But one guesses that Gillray and Peter Pindar were not applauded by the King’s neighbours at Kew.

For some ten years, as we have seen, Richmond Lodge made his favourite country-seat; and for about the same period he was most at home in Kew House. Then, after taking up their residence at Windsor, the royal family went on making longer or shorter visits to Kew, kept as a villeggiatura where they could be under less ceremony and restraint than in their statelier palaces. Their winter abode was usually Buckingham House. Not till George had been nearly twenty years on the throne did he care for living at Windsor. The castle itself had fallen so much out of repair, that a new “Queen’s Lodge” was built where now are the royal stables; then this took the place of Kew as chief summer residence. When the Richmond people found they were like to lose such distinguished and profitable neighbours, they sorely repented their refusal to sell the bit of land coveted by the King, which was now pressed upon him, but too late to change his intention. That Naboth’s vineyard was eventually taken into the royal grounds; then by an Act of Parliament closing “Love Lane,” a public way between them, George was able to unite the grounds of Richmond and Kew, which long, however, remained distinct enclosures.

So George and Charlotte settled down, had a large family, and lived happily in private life, till fresh troubles came upon them. We should all know Thackeray’s sly account of that life:—

King George’s household was a model of an English gentleman’s household. It was early; it was kindly; it was charitable; it was frugal; it was orderly; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the King kissed his daughters’ jolly cheeks; the princesses kissed their mother’s hand; and Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. At the same hour the equerries and women-in-waiting had their little dinner and cackled over their tea. The King had his backgammon or his evening concert; the equerries yawned themselves to death in the anteroom; or the King and his family walked on Windsor slopes, the King holding his darling little Princess Amelia by the hand; and the people crowded round quite good-naturedly; and the Eton boys thrust their chubby cheeks under the crowd’s elbows; and the concert over, the King never failed to take his enormous cocked-hat off, and salute his band, and say, “Thank you, gentlemen!”

IN QUEEN’S COTTAGE GARDENS

In the Memoirs of Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband and father were Court pages, and who was brought up at Kew, it is mentioned that during the “No Popery” riots the children were sent away to Kew, while the King stayed at his post in London, showing courage and spirit, but would ride down between four and seven in the morning for a peep at his darlings, brought up to their parents’ early hours. Other reminiscences give glimpses of the royal domesticity and rusticity, not so dull to all tastes as to those of a man about town like Thackeray. One lad, John Rogers, who lived into Victoria’s reign, remembered seeing the young King, shut out of Richmond Lodge after a morning walk, tapping at the window in vain, till at last he contrived to open one and push himself in head foremost. In the country, George and Charlotte were up at six, and breakfasted with their children about them. They often dined with the children, too; later on the King took to early dinners that scandalised his guests by the simplicity of mutton and turnips. His usual drink was a sort of lemonade known in the household as King’s cup. In an age of intemperance and riots, he preferred sobriety, the morning dew, and the open air, with plenty of exercise to keep down his fat. The lucky children had all Kew Gardens to play in; and once a week the whole family made a regular promenade through the Richmond grounds. When he went further afield, George loved Paul-prying into the cottages of his poorer neighbours, showing an interest in their petty affairs, and pouring out upon them more questions than could be answered, such as that famous one, how the apple got into the dumpling?

Though the London mob, at different times, were insolent to both sovereigns, they never lost popularity at Kew. When they next visited it after the King’s escape from assassination by a mad woman, the road over Kew Green was found crowded by all the inhabitants, “lame, old, sick, blind, and infants,” with a band of musicians “who began God Save the King! the moment they came on the Green, and finished it with loud huzzas”—a neighbourly demonstration that moved the Queen to tearfully declaring, “I shall always love little Kew for this.”

George succeeded to his mother’s interest in Kew Gardens, now enlarged and improved as will be told in another chapter. He also carried on a large home-farm that extended into the parish of Mortlake, while the Old Deer Park was turned into pasture for a flock of merino sheep which he imported into England. The young princes were brought up to the same tastes. Before getting into their teens, the two eldest had a plot of ground given them, where, à la Sandford and Merton, they planted a crop of corn, weeded, reaped, thrashed and ground it with their own hands, and saw it made into bread, of which the whole family duly partook. Up till our own time was standing in Kew Gardens a miniature structure said to have been built by the princes as part of their apprenticeship to life. In the present Kew Palace are preserved specimens of their early writing, George’s copy being Conscious Innocence, while Frederick traces very creditably the sentiment, Aim at Improvement.

It was not through parental indulgence if these boys grew to despise such innocent pursuits. Queen Charlotte taught them herself in their A B C stage: and when they were given over to tutors, the order was that they should be treated like ordinary scholars, flogged if they deserved it, and so forth. The rod seems not to have been spared on him who was to become the Lord’s anointed; and his education in the classics prospered better than his father’s. The notorious Dr. Dodd, who came to be hanged for forgery, was at one time proposed as the Prince of Wales’s tutor. He was brought up with his next brother Frederick, who, till created Duke of York, bore in boyhood the foreign title of Bishop of Osnaburgh, and had been made a Knight of the Bath in the nursery. The little Bishop did not take kindly to books; but in later life George IV. could pose as a scholar before the courtly wits about him; even in his teens he corrected his Governor, Lord Bruce, on a false quantity, so mortifying the noble pedagogue that he gave in his resignation. There is another story, perhaps recorded by Signor Ben Trovato, that in the Prince’s later life an uncourtly Provost of Eton mentioned Homer to him as “an author with whom your Royal Highness is probably not much acquainted,” to which H.R.H. suavely replied that he had forgotten a good deal of his Homer, but remembered one line, and went on to quote Il. i. 225, which, for readers in the same case as to Homer, may be rendered by Dryden’s version, “Dastard and drunken, mean and insolent”—epithets that too well fitted the rebuked pedant in question.

The Eton boys of that day, for whom the summum supplicium, according to Henry Angelo’s Memoirs, was not over six cuts of a birch, would appear to have been handled in less Spartan fashion than were the King’s sons in their private schoolroom. The Princess Sophia told Miss Amelia Murray that she had seen her eldest brothers, at thirteen and fourteen, held by the arms to be flogged with a long whip. But once the naughty boys are said to have turned against one of their severe masters, using upon him the rod he proposed for them. This story may have suggested a scene in Thackeray’s Virginians, as it might have been prompted by one in Roderick Random, or a variant in The Fool of Quality, a very long and edifying romance of the Sandford and Merton school, which had a vogue at this period. The Queen held no high opinion of novel-reading; and if her sons studied the works of Smollett, it would perhaps be on the sly, as must have been a good many doings in that family.

We know how these carefully educated princes had more of Merton than of Sandford in their disposition; then they soon found flatterers and courtiers to set them against their strict training, and to curry favour with a future sovereign. Childish mischief may excuse the freak of the boy Prince of Wales saluting his father with the hated cry of “Wilkes and Liberty!” But it was a serious matter when the second son was precociously found playing the Don Juan with a cottage beauty. That scapegrace Bishop is accused of leading his elder brother into wrong-doings for which he perhaps needed no prompter. Their uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was another bad counsellor, who delighted in debauching his nephews out of ill will to the moral King. A worse companion, later on, would be the notorious Duke de Chartres, afterwards Égalité Orleans, who brought to London French-polished vices to exchange for English jockeyism.

The Prince of Wales, like his father, was fond of music, and, if flattery may be trusted, made no despicable performer. Mrs. Papendiek, having the same tastes, can give us some glimpse of his hobbledehoy recreations.

What with the goings on of the Prince of Wales at the Lodge, the fun with Fischer, the celebrated oboe player, and the various amusements in which I was engaged, the season was one of gaiety, mirth, and enjoyment. The well-known bet of five guineas between Bach and Fischer was made in the presence of his Royal Highness and of us all. The bet was that Fischer could not play his own minuet. He was a very nervous man, and after allowing him to get through a few bars, Bach stood before him with a lemon in his hand, which he squeezed so that the juice dropped slowly. Then he bit another so that the juice ran out of his mouth freely. Fischer tried once or twice to get rid of the water that must, on such a sight, fill the mouth; but not being able to conquer the sensation, he was obliged to own himself beaten.… Another joke was played off upon poor Fischer this merrymaking season, to this effect: After the concert, which Fischer attended twice a week at Richmond or at Kew, wherever the King and Queen were, he used eagerly to seize upon the supper before he went to London. Upon one occasion, the Prince came in and said, “I have ordered something that I know you like,” a dish was brought in, and when the cover was lifted, out jumped a rabbit. Germans have a particular dislike to that animal in every shape and form; therefore it is easy to conjecture poor Fischer’s state of mind. This joke cost him only the loss of his supper, but many nights succeeded before he could be prevailed on to again enter the eating-room.

Making a butt of a dependent seems no princely pastime; but this lady has worse to tell us of the “First Gentleman in Europe’s” amusements at the age of sixteen. “Much do I lament to add that some of those about the young princes swerved from principle, and introduced improper company when their Majesties supposed them to be at rest, and after the divines had closed their day with prayer.”

The first open scandal about the Prince was his intrigue with the unfortunate “Perdita” Robinson, who turned many a head beside his by her acting in The Winter’s Tale. We know very little about that episode except what the lady thinks fit to tell us in her Memoirs. The boy lover, not yet eighteen, was so closely kept at Kew that for some time he had to content himself with ardent letters. At length an interview was arranged under circumstances which suggest that the tutorial turnkeys must have been in the way of nodding over their port. Lord Malden, who played Leporello in this amour, brought Perdita to an inn on the island between Kew and Brentford, to await the signal that should invite them to cross.

The handkerchief was waved on the opposite shore; but the signal was, by the dusk of the evening, rendered almost imperceptible. Lord Malden took my hand, I stepped into the boat, and in a few minutes we landed before the iron gates of old Kew Palace. The interview was but of a moment. The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York (then Bishop of Osnaburg) were walking down the avenue. A few words, and those scarcely articulate, were uttered by the Prince, when a noise of people approaching from the palace startled us. The moon was now rising; and the idea of being overheard, or of his Royal Highness being seen out at so unusual an hour, terrified the whole group. After a few more words of a most affectionate nature uttered by the Prince, we parted, and Lord Malden and myself returned to the island. The Prince never quitted the avenue, nor the presence of the Duke of York, during the whole of this short meeting. Alas! my friend, if my mind was before influenced by esteem, it was now awakened to the most enthusiastic admiration. The rank of the Prince no longer chilled into awe that being who now considered him as the lover and the friend. The graces of his person, the irresistible sweetness of his smile, the tenderness of his melodious yet manly voice, will be remembered by me till every vision of this changing scene shall be forgotten.

LOOKING UP THE THAMES

Repeated assignations, she says, followed “at this romantic spot,” where now the party took courage to continue their walks till past midnight. Prince Frederick and Lord Malden, we are to know, were always there to play gooseberry. The lady wore a dark-coloured dress, and the gentlemen were disguised in greatcoats, except that harum-scarum Bishop, who would make his companions uneasy by showing himself in an unclerical buff coat, “the most conspicuous colour he could have selected for an adventure of this nature.” The tutors having got into their nightcaps by midnight, one supposes, these moonlight ramblers even ventured on a little music as the food of love, Frederick being the minstrel whose tones, “breaking on the silence of the night, have often appeared to my entranced senses like more than mortal melody.” It is clear that Perdita does not tell the whole story. Mrs. Papendiek, well up in the gossip of the backstairs, roundly asserts that two officials who had been about these princes from childhood, “privately overlooked the domestic vices and irregularities of their young charge,” and that they smuggled Mrs. Robinson through a back gate to the Prince of Wales’s apartments.

The beautiful actress, who was a poetess, too, à ses heures, might well be dazzled by those shining personalities. The Prince vowed unalterable love till death; and the most convincing of his billets-doux was a bond promising to pay Perdita £20,000 at his majority. Perhaps he was sincere for the moment; but we know what such callow vows come to. When, at eighteen, he became to some extent his own master, this unhappily married woman was taken into keeping, and for a time cut a notorious dash before the footlights of society. After Florizel grew tired of her, Perdita’s gushing sentimentality did not overlook businesslike considerations. She let the King buy up the Prince’s letters for £5000; and his bond was commuted for a pension of £400. But, these profits swallowed up by debts and extravagant habits, the poor creature fell into bad health and hasty authorship. Paralysed and harassed, she died in 1800, buried by her own desire, “for a particular reason,” in Old Windsor Churchyard, where her tomb may be seen fenced in with spiked railings to defend it from the body-snatchers that infested those river-side graveyards; and on it may be read an oft-quoted epitaph idealising the painful facts of her career.

At Richmond lived Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Prince of Wales’s more lasting flame, to whom he appears to have been honestly, if illegally, married. When this Prince was launched upon the wicked world, and the Bishop in partibus had been sent off to finish his education abroad, the royal pair still had their quiver full of youngsters, who for twenty years came so fast as to be cue for Horace Walpole’s jesting prophecy that “London will be like the senate of old Rome, an assembly of princes.” Besides others who died young, there were the princes afterwards known as Dukes of Clarence, Kent, Cumberland, Sussex, and Cambridge, and the Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth, Sophia, and little Amelia, the darling of her father. Where all these children were stowed away, one cannot always make out clearly: we hear of the Princes William and Edward living with their tutors in what is now Cambridge Cottage, and two of the younger boys in a house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate house near the river; then another is spoken of as the “Princess Elizabeth’s house.” Kew House itself was a scrimply inconvenient mansion, for which the royal household made a tight fit even in its state of reduced ceremony. Pictures of it when it was the Princess Dowager’s villa, show a square, plain front with two one-storied wings, from which in all thirty-two windows look straight out upon the lawn. At that time it bore the alias of “The White House.” Miss Burney describes it as a labyrinth of stairs and passages, where at first she continually lost herself among the “small, dark, and old-fashioned” rooms.

It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be turned upon this semi-private life by the diary of a then most popular novelist. At the end of the year before, Fanny Burney had been staying with her venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney, at Windsor, when one afternoon into the drawing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in black with a star on his breast. Even the short-sighted visitor hardly needed to be told who he was. As every one in the room drew back out of the way, she was for slipping off; but the King asked in a loud whisper, “Is that Miss Burney?” and after good-naturedly giving her time to recover from her modest confusion, entered upon a conversation of questions, punctuated with what, whats, in which he showed himself very inquisitive as to how she had come to write and print Evelina. The Queen soon followed, to whom George introduced her by repeating their conversation; and Miss Burney went to bed enraptured with her new acquaintances. Further interviews followed, which only increased her admiration, though the satirist rather than the courtier peeps out in her account of directions given her for behaviour in the presence of royalty.

Her demeanour certainly gave satisfaction in the royal circle, for a few months afterwards she was offered the post of one of the Queen’s dressers, which she accepted after some modest misgiving. We remember Macaulay’s indignation, “That with talents which had instructed and delighted the highest living minds, she should now be employed only in mixing snuff and in sticking pins; that she should be summoned by a waiting-woman’s bell to a waiting-woman’s duties; that she should pass her whole life under the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should sometimes fast till she was ready to swoon for hunger, should sometimes stand till her knees gave way with fatigue, that she should not dare to speak or move without considering how her mistress might like her words and gestures.”

This engagement was certainly a mistake on both sides: Miss Burney might have found more congenial employment; and the Queen could have had a better dresser. But Macaulay, after his manner, has rather over-emphasised the evils of her lot in the royal service. She certainly took it as a rise in the world, and to her father it seemed dazzling good fortune. The remuneration offered her, with the chance of further favour, might well have satisfied even successful novelists of that day, few among whom would not have jumped at such admission to the skirts of Court life. Her year’s salary, £200, was almost as much as she got from her second novel, and far more than the proceeds of her first one; then Macaulay slurs over the Queen’s generosity in presents. To look at the matter in no mere terms of pay, literature probably lost little by her laying down the pen for a time; her best work had been done in Evelina; Cecilia was a falling off; and Camilla, written after her experience of service, did not deserve the pecuniary success won for it, in part, by royal patronage. In her diary, Miss Burney herself makes little serious complaint but of the ill-tempered tyranny of her senior colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg. Court life soon ceased to be a little heaven below for her; but she had distractions in royal journeys to Oxford, Cheltenham, Weymouth, seats at the trial of Warren Hastings, glimpses of great folks, and even spells of moral flirtation with at least one gentleman of the household, not to speak of rather troublesome attentions from another who was a married man. She cannot say too much of the kindness of the King and the princesses; and if her “sweet Queen” proved sometimes an inconsiderate mistress, it was from want of thought rather than a hard heart. The confinement upon which Macaulay lays such stress was no stricter than that of most domestic ladies, who had not Windsor Park and Kew Gardens to walk in. Had she been more robust, the novelist might have lived on to become a second Mrs. Delaney in the royal esteem. But her health broke down, and after five years’ genteel servitude she retired on a pension of a hundred pounds.

During these years the Court had its summer head-quarters at Windsor. Every second week, the “Royals” spent from Tuesday to Friday at Kew, using this as a half-way house for St. James’s, where on Thursdays the Queen held her fortnightly drawing-rooms. This was Miss Burney’s hardest job. She had to be up at six on drawing-room days, with hardly time for breakfast, to help in dressing the Queen, who put on most of her finery at Kew, the “tippet and long ruffles” being carried in paper to save them from dust; then the final touches were added at St. James’s, where, after the function, the idol had to be undecked—in all, three laborious attendances and two journeys, from which the tired keeper of the robes got back to dinner not till nearly seven o’clock, as then seemed a very late hour.

In winter, when the Court moved to London, there would be no going to Kew, which indeed was not fitted up as a cold weather residence. When it came to be occupied for months during the King’s illness, strips of carpet and sandbags had to be provided to make the princesses tolerably comfortable. All the luxury of this house was outside, in its spacious gardens. But the want of state was made up for by the more home-like life of Kew, though that had also its disadvantages; the ladies and gentlemen were not free to see their friends where the King and his younger children might at any time come wandering along the passages and poking into the small rooms. There was not even a chapel in the house; and when the Royal Family happened to spend a Sunday here by some chance, they heard prayers in a private room, through the door of another, where the chief attendants took their place, the servants being edified in an outer apartment, which reminds us of the complaint of one of Queen Anne’s chaplains that he had “to whistle the Gospel through the keyhole.” It was later that George III. fitted Kew Church with a gallery to serve as royal pew.

Towards the end of 1788, this routine was painfully broken upon by the King’s illness, which began during one of his temporary stays at Kew, prolonged then for more than a week, to the great discomposure of the household, ill-provided with clothes, or with books in Miss Burney’s case. The cause of the attack was said to be His Majesty’s sitting in wet stockings; but for some time back signs of strangeness had been noted in him, who had enough to disorder his mind in the conduct of his eldest sons, and in his brooding over the loss of the American Colonies. Miss Burney’s diary gives a vivid picture of those wretched days at Kew, when no one felt sure what to say, and some, like herself, hardly knew what to think of the rumours that filled the house. The King was noisy and voluble beyond his wont, talking himself hoarse in his assurances that there was not much the matter with him, mingled with complaints that he could not sleep. More than once Miss Burney found the Queen in tears. Charlotte had good reason for anxiety: she must have been aware of the character of a similar attack near the beginning of the reign, which had passed off so quickly that it could be hushed up.

By October 25, George seemed so much better that he moved to Windsor, where his restlessness and weakness grew worse again. He obstinately insisted on going out to hunt as usual in the November weather, yet he had to confess that all at once he had become an old man. A few days later there was a terrible commotion in the family. It leaked out that at dinner the King had broken into positive delirium, seizing his eldest son by the collar and pushing him against the wall. The Prince is said to have burst into tears, while the Queen had a fit of hysterics. Her husband could with difficulty be persuaded to spend the night in a separate room, from which all night long she heard his ravings, now no secret to any one in the house.

The King’s death being looked on as imminent, the Prince of Wales at once took command of the misery and confusion at Windsor. His heartless conduct during his father’s illness is matter of history, as also the bitter struggle between his faction and Pitt’s Ministry on the Regency question, the former maintaining the very unwhiggish doctrine that royal authority should pass, in the circumstances, into the Heir Apparent’s hands, while the Tories would make him Regent only with the sanction of Parliament, and under restrictions. The rabble was now on the King’s side; and all respectable persons, not being partisans or place-hunters, were disgusted by the profligate Prince’s conduct. The doctors attending the King had been threatened with popular violence if his illness proved fatal. Their case was a hard one, as not only would the royal patient not always take their remedies nor even see them, but they were treating a complaint then ill understood even by physicians who professed special experience in it. It is said that poor George was put in a strait-waistcoat, chained to the wall, and actually struck by one of his keepers, which would be quite after the practice of that day. But the stories of his harsh treatment are somewhat dubious, for the notion that he was being ill-used often figured among his delusions.

At the end of November the doctors determined on removing him to Kew, where he could get exercise in the privacy of the Gardens. The King angrily refused to leave Windsor, and had to be coaxed away by a promise that he should see his wife and children, gone on before him. “Princes, equerries, physicians, pages—all conferring, whispering, plotting and caballing, how to induce the King to set off!” noted Miss Burney, who accompanied her mistress on their hasty flitting to Kew House, where the Prince of Wales had written in chalk over each room the name of its occupant. Everybody had to put up with the discomfort of being crowded together in that ill-furnished mansion. The only good rooms were given up to the King, those above being left empty that he might not be disturbed. Part of the household overflowed into the Prince of Wales’s house opposite; the younger children being lodged in their usual quarters on Kew Green. Pent up closely with “the Schwellenberg,” Miss Burney had her full share of troubles; but her womanly devotion rose to the occasion, and she declares that “not even the £20,000 prize in the lottery could, at this time, draw me from this melancholy scene.” She had the satisfaction of being employed, every morning, to carry the physicians’ report to the Queen, who, by her enemies, was accused of doctoring those bulletins to give the most favourable view of symptoms on which, for once, doctors differed.

The Prince of Wales and his partisans listened rather to those big-wigs of the profession that were most gravely shaken over a case they did not understand. They perhaps agreed best in looking askance on an outsider called in upon the removal to Kew. This was the Rev. Mr. Willis, who at Lincoln, and in a private asylum of his own, had shown the benefit of a more rational treatment of the insane. Though he had a medical degree, he was belittled as a quack by many members of a guild apt to suspect innovators; but his success had been so notable that he was now employed, with his sons, trained in his methods, to be constantly about the King. From the first he took a hopeful view of the case; and when, with occasional interference, he was allowed to have his way, it soon appeared that he was the right man in the right place. His secret seems to have been a mixture of kindness and firmness; but perhaps he was not above using nostrums of his own. Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband was in attendance, says that one of the remedies used was musk, the smell of which the King could not bear, but the doctor insisted on it as efficacious. He took the responsibility of giving the King a razor to shave himself, for which he was afterwards denounced almost as compassing Lèse-majesté; but on all such questions he stipulated for leave to go by his own experience and judgment.

Had this been in the era of newspaper kodaking, we should no doubt have fuller details of the King’s madness, as to which more or less doubtful stories leak out in the memoirs and letters of the day. He is described as wanting to climb the Pagoda, and on being thwarted, throwing himself sulkily on the ground, from which it took four or five men three-quarters of an hour to raise him. Another day he tried to throw himself out of a window. The worst symptom was his incessant garrulity: he would go on talking for hours about everything or nothing. One of the doctors once found him translating the Court Calendar into doggerel Latin. The most pathetic story is that of his being overheard earnestly praying for his recovery. At times he showed touches of humour and shrewdness. He managed, though it had been forbidden, to get hold of a copy of King Lear, Dr. Willis not being strong in literature; and when his elder daughters were first allowed to visit him, he told them “I am like poor Lear; but thank God! I have no Regan, no Goneril, but three Cordelias.” Once he reproached Willis with having given up his sacred calling for profit; and when the reverend doctor excused himself on the precedent of Christ healing demoniacs, “Yes,” said the King, “but He did not get seven hundred a year for it!”

The Willises, by the way, afterwards complained of their remuneration, whatever it was; but their treatment of George III. made an excellent advertisement for the family, one of whom was sent for to Lisbon in the case of a mad Queen of Portugal. They seem to have given some offence in the household by the position they had to assume. Great was flunkey indignation when four of Dr. Willis’s keepers were raised to brevet-rank as pages, that after his recovery they might remain beside the King in case of a relapse. About that time several of the regular pages seem to have been dismissed or disgraced, it is said for carrying tales to the Prince of Wales. These “pages,” of course, had now grown into adult servants above mere menial rank, such beardless boys as figure in history and romance being distinguished as “pages of honour.”

THE PAGODA

Poor Miss Burney was so worn out that one of the doctors, noticing her wan looks, insisted on her taking daily exercise, such as was the prescription for the King. As the orders were to keep every one out of his way, she made a point of inquiring whether he would be in the Kew or the Richmond grounds; but once there was a misunderstanding that led to the most violent agitation of her life. While tramping her constitutional round of Kew Gardens, through the trees she saw three or four figures, whom at first her short-sighted eyes took for workmen, till she was too late aware of His Majesty’s person among them.

Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not to know more, but turning back, ran off with all my might. But what was my terror to hear myself pursued!—to hear the voice of the King himself loudly and hoarsely calling after me, “Miss Burney! Miss Burney!”

I protest I was ready to die. I knew not in what state he might be at the time; I only knew the orders to keep out of his way were universal; that the Queen would highly disapprove any unauthorised meeting, and that the very action of my running away might deeply, in his present irritable state, offend him. Nevertheless, on I ran, too terrified to stop, and in search of some short passage, for the garden is full of little labyrinths, by which I might escape.

The steps still pursued me, and still the poor hoarse and altered voice rang in my ears—more and more footsteps resounded frightfully behind me—the attendants all running, to catch their eager master, and the voices of the two Doctor Willises loudly exhorting him not to heat himself so unmercifully.

Heavens, how I ran! I do not think I should have felt the hot lava from Vesuvius—at least not the hot cinders—had I so run during its eruption. My feet were not sensible that they even touched the ground.

Soon after, I heard other voices, shriller, though less nervous, call out “Stop! stop! stop!”

I could by no means consent; I knew not what was purposed, but I recollected fully my agreement with Dr. John that very morning, that I should decamp if surprised, and not be named.

My own fears and repugnance, also, after a flight and disobedience like this, were doubled in the thought of not escaping. I knew not to what I might be exposed, should the malady be then high, and take the turn of resentment. Still, therefore, on I flew; and such was my speed, so almost incredible to relate or recollect, that I fairly believe no one of the whole party could have overtaken me, if these words from one of the attendants had not reached me, “Doctor Willis begs you to stop!”

“I cannot! I cannot!” I answered, still flying on, when he called out, “You must, ma’am; it hurts the King to run.”

Then, indeed, I stopped—in a state of fear really amounting to agony. I turned round, I saw the two doctors had got the King between them, and three attendants of Dr. Willis’s were hovering about. They all slackened their pace, as they saw me stand still; but such was the excess of my alarm, that I was wholly insensible to the effects of a race which, at any other time, would have required an hour’s recruit.

As they approached, some little presence of mind happily came to my command; it occurred to me that, to appease the wrath of my flight, I must now show some confidence; I therefore faced them as undauntedly as I was able, only charging the nearest of the attendants to stand by my side.

When they were within a few yards of me the King called out, “Why did you run away?”

Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward to meet him, though the internal sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most proper to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so violently combated by the tremor of my nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of personal courage I have ever made.

The effort answered: I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of countenance, though something still of wildness in his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders and then kiss my cheek!

I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when I saw him spread out his arms! Involuntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me; but the Willises, who have never seen him till this fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing, perhaps, it was his customary salutation.

She was soon relieved to find the King talking reasonably enough, though with a certain flightiness, not very different from his ordinary manner. He insisted on prolonging the interview, after the Willises in vain tried to cut it short. He talked of Mrs. Schwellenberg, seeming quite well aware of what Miss Burney had to bear from her “Cerbera”; of the lady’s own father, author of the History of Music; of his favourite composer, Handel, snatches from whose oratorios he tried to hum over with painful effect. As they walked on together, he asked endless questions about his friends, expressed his intention of appointing new officials, complained angrily of his pages. At last he was persuaded to part from this reluctant confidante, promising to be her friend as long as he lived; then she went off to the Queen with a report which ensured forgiveness for that innocent adventure.

The favourable symptoms continued, little to the satisfaction of the Prince and his friends, who are credited with passing brutal jests on the King’s condition. Just as power seemed to be within their grasp, the Regency Bill was shelved, after an audience given by the King to the Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, though that shifty Polonius is said to have remarked that His Majesty had been “wound up” to talk to him. Miss Burney, who now confined her walks to the roadside, had the happiness of thence seeing the royal pair walking arm-in-arm in Richmond Gardens. Next day, the King came to tea with his family in the drawing-room; then, a few days later, meeting Miss Burney in the Queen’s dressing-room, he said that he had waited on purpose to tell her—“I am quite well now—I was nearly so when I saw you before—but I could overtake you better now.” After four months of royal misery and public excitement, the evergreen sneerer, Horace Walpole, could note—“The King has returned, not to what the courtiers call his sense, but to his non-sense.”

The news called forth an outburst of public joy, that hit the Prince’s party hard. A thanksgiving prayer was read in every church; and later on the King, to the dread of his advisers, would not be satisfied without the excitement of attending a solemn service at St. Paul’s, where he and the princesses were moved to tears, while his graceless sons attracted attention by their irreverent chattering. There is some slight palliation for the Prince of Wales’s conduct throughout this trying time, in the fact that the King had showed a dislike to him, and even a want of fairness to his shortcomings; but the Duke of York, always the father’s favourite son, has no excuse for backing up his undutiful brother. Soon after the recovery was announced, London had hailed it with a general illumination, from rushlights in the humblest cottage window to blazing devices on the clubs. It was witnessed by the Queen and all her daughters except the youngest, while, in their absence till the, for them, most unwonted hour of 1 A.M., Kew House too was lighted up and adorned with a transparency displaying The King—Providence—Health—Britannia; and on either side of the gates, in gold letters on a purple ground, shone these most loyal lines:—

Our prayers are heard, and Providence restores

A patriot King to bless Britannia’s shores.

Nor yet to Britain is this bliss confined,

All Europe hails the friend of human kind!

If such the general joy, what words can show

The change to transport from the depth of woe,

In those permitted to embrace again

The best of fathers, husbands, and of men?

Inside the house also the Muse was not silent. His darling Princess Amelia came to kneel before him, presenting her father with verses in the Queen’s name, from the pen of her novelist-attendant.

THE WATER LILY POND

Amid a rapturous Nation’s praise

That sees thee to their prayers restored,

Turn gently from the general blaze,—

Thy Charlotte woos her bosom’s lord.

Turn and behold where, bright and clear,

Depictured with transparent art,

The emblems of her thoughts appear,

The tribute of a grateful heart.

O! small the tribute, were it weigh’d

With all she feels—or half she knows!

But noble minds are best repaid

From the pure spring whence bounty flows.

P.S.—The little bearer begs a kiss

From dear papa, for bringing this.

In the middle of March, after their unusually long stay at Kew, the royal family moved to Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be received by the townsfolk with an ovation of welcome. In June, to complete the cure, he went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere on the journey hailed with acclamations and demonstrations that might well have turned a weak head. At Weymouth, the exuberant loyalty of the people was embarrassing. All the shops and bathing-machines placarded God Save the King, a device repeated on the bonnets and waists of the bathing-women, as indeed on dresses all over England. “All the children,” reports Miss Burney, “wear it in their caps—all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors in their voices; for they never approach the house without shouting it aloud—nor see the King, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers.… Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up ‘God save great George our King!’” It was now that occurred the ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged Mayor presenting an address, and not being able to kneel, to the scandal of the officials. And here, the “Royals” having gone on a day’s visit to Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years Miss Burney had a holiday, which she spent with a friend in a “romantic and lovely excursion” to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near the neck of Portland Island, a peep into which she might have found more romantic, had some couple of miles not been a Georgian lady’s limit on foot.

After a tour through the loyal West country, the Court returned to its routine of London and Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer. But henceforth Miss Burney’s diary has little to say about Kew; and after another year we lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The life of a glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon her health and spirits: “Lost to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was worn with want of rest and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance.” Her chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent philandering with the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Colonel Digby—the “Mr. Fairly” of her journals—a favourite with the King, too, to whom he could “say anything in his genteel roundabout way.” This gentleman the lady clearly admired none the less when he became a widower, though to us she presents him rather too much in the character of a priggish novel hero, full of edifying reflections and opinions. But the sentimental friend turned out not impeccable, for he married Another, the “Miss Fuzilier,” about whom his fellow-servant had often rallied him; and she cannot conceal that this choice seemed unworthy of him. Her health was so evidently breaking down that her literary friends cried out on the sacrifice; even the newspapers gossiped about her condition; and the meddlesome Mr. Boswell declared that he would set the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were not allowed to resign.

This she was most loth to do. She tried taking “the bark,” but that did little good. The Rev. Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she found “too violent” in its effect, while grateful to him for his interest in her. “Why,” said he, “to tell the truth, I don’t quite know how I could have got on at Kew, in the King’s illness, if it had not been for seeing you in a morning. I assure you they worried me so, all round, one way or other, that I was almost ready to go off. But you used to keep me up prodigiously. Though, I give you my word, I was afraid sometimes to see you, with your good-humoured face, for all it helped me to keep up, because I did not know what to say to you, when things went bad, on account of vexing you.”

Every one noticed her miserable plight, yet the Queen showed herself too blind to the fact of a life being wasted in her service. Even the ill-tempered Mrs. Schwellenberg was kind in her way, who seems to have found this subordinate a pleasingly submissive victim, and occasionally spoke well of her behind her back: “The Bernan bin reely agribble!” This “Cerbera,” whatever her faults, had the virtue of devotion to her lifelong mistress, and could not understand living by choice out of sunshine of Court favour. She tempted Miss Burney with the dazzling prospect of her own post in reversion. But the novelist was sick of her gilded cage. With trembling knees, after long hesitation, as if it were a crime, in the form of a petition she offered her resignation, not over-graciously received. The Queen proposed a six weeks’ holiday, a change of air. When this was declined, the Schwellenberg raged against Miss Burney and her father as almost guilty of treason. “I am sure she would have gladly confined us both in the Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves from a daring so outrageous to imperial wishes.”

She held on some months longer to let the Queen find a successor, secured in the person of a Hanoverian pastor’s daughter, Mdlle. Jacobi, who, for sign of family poverty, brought a niece with her in the disguise of maid. Miss Burney’s last King’s birthday ball under the royal roof was marked by a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg’s room from the young Duke of Clarence, our future sovereign, of which the diarist jotted down a long and most amusing description, though she has to apologise for not giving a full “idea of the energy of His Royal Highness’s language.” He insisted upon them all drinking the King’s health in champagne so often that some of the courtly attendants were a little shaky on their legs; and as for the Sailor Prince, he got so drunk that, as he told his sister next morning, “You may think how far I was gone, for I kissed the Schwellenberg’s hand”—and he might have added, bid her “Hold your potato jaw, my dear!” If this be a true sketch from high life, the novelist need not be accused of exaggerating the manners of her Braughtons and Captain Mirvans.

Among her last duties was expounding to the inquisitive King and Queen the allusions in Boswell’s Dr. Johnson, in 1791 the book of the day, which Miss Burney hardly approved of, being one of the few who “by acquaintance with the power of the moment over his unguarded conversation, know how little of his solid opinion was to be gathered from his accidental assertions.” Now she was at pains to vindicate to her royal patrons “the serious principles and various excellences” of her famous friend. The year before, when Boswell visited her at Windsor, he had in vain pressed her to contribute “personal details” to his work. “You must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor’s; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam—all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam: so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself.”

The last day of Miss Burney’s five years’ slavery dawned at Kew, from which she attended Her Majesty to St. James’s, and there took leave of her with deep emotion. Freedom, congenial society, and country air soon restored the lady’s health; and the faithless Colonel Digby’s place in her heart became more than filled by General D’Arblay, one of a colony of French émigrés settled at Juniper Hill above Mickleham, near her sister’s house, and her friends, the Lockes of Norbury. Lessons in one another’s language gave excuse for meetings, at which Cupid was soon of the party. The not-over-young couple married in haste and privately, but seem never to have repented. With the proceeds of the bride’s next novel, Camilla, they built Camilla Cottage, still conspicuous, as Camilla Lacey, on the slopes above Box Hill station; but at the peace General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife became for years an involuntary exile.

Mrs. Papendiek has a mischievous statement that Miss Burney was dismissed on account of the Queen’s displeasure that she used her spare hours for writing a novel in the palace; and that the authoress was much mortified by the loss of her post. But this seems mere scandal. Madame D’Arblay owned to writing an unsuccessful tragedy at Kew and Windsor; and some years after, when Camilla was published, she confessed to the King and Queen that the “skeleton” of it had been jotted down under their roof, at which they expressed no displeasure, but graciously acknowledged the dedication with a gift of a hundred guineas. The same gossiping authority says that Miss Jacobi did not recommend herself to the Queen, nor to “old Schwelly,” who refused to allow that niece-maid to dine at her table. A few years later Mrs. Papendiek herself succeeded to the post once held by the novelist, for which she was much fitter, to judge by the space given to dress in her journals. But these records end before she entered upon her duties; and we know little more of her Court life but that she gained promotion in the royal household, from which she retired to spend her old age at Kew.

In 1805, another literary lady came into the service of Queen Charlotte, Miss Cornelia Knight, afterwards companion to the Prince Regent’s daughter. Her journals are much more discreet about the royal family than Miss Burney’s; and there is a hiatus in them for most of the period of her living at Windsor, where she gives little more than hints of dissensions and grudges in the highest circles, and a general impression that Kew had fallen out of its old favour. All these three writers had a common point, in being able to boast of Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance, most intimate in the case of Miss Burney.

Thorne, in his Environs of London, as also the official guide, have it that the King was confined, during his first illness, in the present palace, apart from his family; and this statement is followed by a mob of guide-books, servum pecus, that often go tumbling after one another into the same ditch. But Miss Burney and other witnesses prove that it was not so; and Thorne has misled himself in his reference to George Rose’s Diary. Rose clearly refers to the next serious attack in 1801. It was whispered that in 1795 there had been a recurrence of the symptoms, passing off in a few days. But at the beginning of the next century, when the King’s mind was agitated by the resignation of Mr. Pitt on the Catholic Emancipation question, he caught a bad cold that ended as before. This time the illness began at Buckingham House; then, after His Majesty seemed fit to attend to business again, on his going to Kew a severe relapse took place, shown by his informing the Prince of Wales that he proposed to abdicate the English Crown and retire to Hanover or America.

It was now that he came to be separated from his family, and confined in the “Dutch House” under charge of the Willises, to whom he had taken a strong dislike, and is said to have struck one of them before his removal could be effected by force. The father no longer appears as taking the leading part in the King’s treatment; but one of the sons for a time was the fly-wheel in the State, since through him all papers had to be presented for the royal signature. When the Lord Chancellor was admitted to the King’s sick-room, he vehemently declared, “as a gentleman and a king,” that he would sign no document nor perform any act of sovereignty unless he were that very day restored to his wife and daughters; and he was then taken back to the house over the way, to be still more or less closely watched by the Willises.

Dr. Thomas Willis,[1] writing at this time to Mr. Rose in the King’s name, tells that his own quarters are on Kew Green, “a few doors below the Rose and Crown,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the King’s Arms, also mentioned in books of that period. Kings reign and pass away; kingdoms flourish and fade, mansions rise and fall, while public-house signs often seem to have more permanence in them than most human institutions. Yet of them too transit gloria, if we may believe the report that half the taverns of England at one time took Wilkes’s head for their sign, as to which evidence of popularity he himself used to tell how he overheard a loyal old lady’s remark, “Ah! he swings everywhere but where he ought.”

The second avowed derangement lasted, by fits and starts, till the summer of 1801. A course of sea-bathing at Weymouth again completed the patient’s recovery; but the dread of fresh attacks remained. The next one came in 1804, when his repugnance to the Willises was so marked that the doctor of Bedlam was employed. It is, of course, a common symptom of insanity, the turning against its best friends. And now poor George showed intermittent symptoms of dislike to the Queen herself, so that they began to occupy separate apartments, and are found not even dining together. The old domestic happiness was gone, along with the uncomfortable Kew House, that had so often been its scene. Yet, had the King kept his health, there seems reason to believe that Kew might have become more of a home to him than ever.

George III., returning to the plan set on foot in the early years of his reign, took a fancy for building a castle here, after plans prepared by Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad taste of the period. The design is to be seen in one of the rooms of the present palace. The other house was pulled down in 1802, to make way for the new structure, which would have stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the not very royal town of Brentford, that “town of mud,” so strangely admired by the Georges and reviled by their poets. But the works were interrupted by the King’s fresh attack in 1804, and this building never got further than the state of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly a quarter of a century, and was then demolished by George IV. That monarch had no more love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court. He had spent freely upon his own whims, on Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the latter gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for contemporary taste, and a byword with irreverent writers like Byron—

Shut up,—no, not the King, but the Pavilion,

Or else ’twill cost us all another million!

His father, unless for saddling us with so many expensive sons, had lived so carefully and economically, that the nation need not have grudged him a “Folly” for once in a way. It was his spendthrift heir who began to restore Windsor Castle, demolishing the Queen’s Lodge there, and to rebuild Buckingham Palace in its present form.

THE PALACE

When Kew House had disappeared, the sturdy “Dutch House,” now known as Kew Palace, became the occasional retreat of the royal family, its scant accommodations, no doubt, eked out by those other mansions held on Kew Green. It was here that Addington found the King dining rather before one o’clock on the simplest fare. His mind continued to be rather cranky, as shown by his strange freak of wearing a huge powdered wig in conjunction with the mediæval trappings of the Order of the Garter. Blindness came gradually on to increase his afflictions. In 1809 the nation joyfully celebrated his Jubilee, with much feasting of the poor—and the rich—relieving of prisoners for debt, pardoning of military culprits, illuminations, libations, and such memorials as the statue on the Weymouth Esplanade, that records the townsfolk’s gratitude to the King, whose stay at his favourite bathing-place had so often sent up the price of its lodgings. We may be sure Kew, in its small way, was not behindhand in such loyal doings.

But Kew was hardly again to welcome the Father of his People. Repeated agitations went to overthrow his reason for good—the triumphant marches of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British arms not yet brightened by Wellington’s victories, the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia. At the beginning of 1811, George had just wits enough left to consent to the Prince’s Regency. A few months later, Charles Knight was one of the Windsor crowd that saw their aged Sovereign in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by and by of deafness, cheered by music, by religious exaltation, and by delusive memories of the past, more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy reason, in one of which he had the satisfaction of learning Napoleon’s downfall and the recovery of Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind old King with his white beard, only now and then visited by those nearest to him. It is said that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when one day he overheard his father murmuring the complaint of Milton’s Samson:—

O dark, dark, dark! Amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark! Total eclipse

Without all hope of day!

O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word,

“Let there be light! and light was over all,”

Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree?

When George III. was laid with his fathers in 1820, his stout-hearted and narrow-minded Queen had gone before him. To the last she tried to do her duty, according to her lights. Reconciled, at least outwardly, to her eldest son—indeed it appears that all along the strict moralist had something of woman’s weakness for that rake—she exerted herself to play the figurehead of his Court, taking the place of his discarded wife; and she shared his unpopularity to such an extent as to be hissed by the mob on her way to hold a Drawing-room; then, after the death of the Princess Charlotte, she had to face an outburst of popular resentment in the City. By the autumn of 1818 she was hopelessly prostrated by dropsy. On the way from London to Windsor her state became so serious that a halt was made at Kew Palace; and there she died in a chair, in the room now marked by a brass tablet, her last looks, it is said, fixed on a picture of The Dropsical Woman.

A more moving loss in the preceding year had been that of the Princess Charlotte, upon whose young life so much seemed to hang, while bitter hatred kept her parents apart. She died in childbirth at Claremont, wife of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, future King of the Belgians, who else might have taken in England the part afterwards filled by Prince Albert. When thus King George’s family of fifteen seemed like to die out, unless through the detested Ernest of Cumberland, three of the now elderly princes were hastily married in the same month—the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Clarence, and the Duke of Kent. These weddings, that might come close on funerals, were performed privately in the drawing-room at Kew Palace, the two latter on the same day, but at different hours.

We know which of the branches took root. Next year was born the Princess Victoria, whose father died at Sidmouth about the same time as the King. The cause of his death is said to have been sitting in wet clothes after a long walk; and similar carelessness seems to have been usually the prelude to George III.’s afflictions, but for which the place of Windsor might have been usurped by Kew, through this King’s favour.

To the same favour was mainly due the rise and progress of the Gardens, that have been hitherto left too much in shade upon pages that bear their name. Now that nothing but the present “Palace” remains to block them out of our view, it is time to trace their development from a princely hobby into a national institution.

III
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS

Gardens appear to be an old story in this neighbourhood. The Monastery of Sheen, that stood on the flats somewhere about the present Observatory, was equipped with its orchard, vineyard, and other enclosures, through which the holy fathers, like those of Melrose, would be able to make “good kail, on Fridays when they fasted”; and let us trust that suppressed spite never drove them, as in a certain Spanish cloister, to keep a brother’s pet flowers “close-nipped on the sly.”

Kew’s connection with botany is as old as the Tudor time, when Dr. William Turner had a garden here. Of this physician, our first scientific botanist, Chaucer could not have said, “His study was but little on the Bible.” He was a disciple of Latimer, and a hot-gospeller, among whose works figure titles like The Spiritual Nosegay, The Hunting of the Romish Wolf, A Preservative or Treacle against the Poison of Pelagius. Under Henry VIII. such a writer found the air of the Continent more wholesome than that of Hampton Court or Smithfield; and he spent some time in Germany, whence, along with Protestant theology, he brought home a collection of foreign plants. When it was safe for him to be back in England, he doubled the parts of chaplain and physician to the Protector Somerset, who built Syon House on the site of the convent that for him proved unlucky church plunder; this may account for his chaplain’s garden across the river. But Turner did not fall with his patron, rising to be Dean of Wells, though again for a time, under Mary, he had to extend his knowledge of foreign gardens. He is best remembered as author of a herbal which marks the planting in England of scientific botany; nor would this study seem so far aloof from his theological interests, if we consider a commonplace of our forefathers, thus versified by Cowley—

God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain.

The Kew mansion of Queen Elizabeth’s keeper was furnished with a garden, in which Her Majesty had delivered to her a nosegay, enriched with a valuable jewel and pendants of diamonds, worth four hundred pounds. This offering was only part of a series of handsome gifts that suggest how a visit from royalty in those days must have been indeed a visitation. In Bacon’s Essay, Of Gardens, we get some hint what a garden ought to be that seemed worthy of entertaining a queen; and after this model is said to have been laid out the garden of Moor Park in Hertfordshire.

The contents ought not well to be under thirty acres of ground, and to be divided into three parts; a green in the entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides; and I like well that four acres of ground be assigned to the green, six to the heath, four and four to either side, and twelve to the main garden. The green hath two pleasures: the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to enclose the garden: but because the alley will be long, and, in great heat of the year, or day, you ought not to buy the shade in the garden by going in the sun through the green, therefore you are, of either side the green, to plant a covert alley, upon carpenters’ work, about twelve feet in height, by which you may go in shade into the garden. As for the making of knots, or figures, with divers-coloured earths, that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may see as good sights many times in tarts. The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all the whole four sides with a stately arched hedge; the arches to be upon pillars of carpenters’ work, of some ten feet high, and six feet broad; and the spaces between of the same dimensions with the breadth of the arch. Over the arches let there be an entire hedge of some four feet high, framed also upon carpenters’ work; and upon the upper hedge, over every arch, a little turret, with a belly enough to receive a cage of birds: and over every space between the arches some other little figure, with broad plates of round-coloured glass gilt, for the sun to play upon: but this hedge I intend to be raised upon a bank, not steep, but gently slope, of some six feet, set all with flowers. Also, I understand that this square of the garden should not be the whole breadth of the ground, but to leave on either side ground enough for diversity of side alleys, unto which the two covert alleys of the green may deliver you; but there must be no alleys with hedges at either end of this great enclosure—not at the hither end, for letting your prospect upon this fair hedge from the green—nor at the further end, for letting[2] your prospect from the hedge through the arches upon the heath.

In the next century Capel’s seat at Kew had a garden which, more than once, won high praise from that connoisseur, Evelyn. “The orangery and myrtetum are most beautiful and perfectly kept.” Other gardens in this neighbourhood called forth Evelyn’s admiration—the Duke of Lauderdale’s at Ham House, “inferior to few of the best villas in Italy itself”; and Sir William Temple’s, “lately ambassador to Holland,” whose East Sheen villa, Temple Grove, has long been a boys’ school—taken for the select establishment figuring in Coningsby—where his Essay on Gardening might be read with more advantage than The Battle of the Books. Stephen Switzer, one of our first writers on gardening, mentions Lord Capel as distinguished in this pursuit, especially for “bringing over several sorts of fruit from France.”

Molyneux, heir of the Capels, had an interest in science, leading him to set up in his grounds a telescope, by means of which the Astronomer Royal Bradley began observations that led to his great discoveries of the aberration of light and the nutation of the earth’s axis. The site of that instrument is now marked by the sun-dial, some way off in front of Kew Palace, erected by William IV. as a memorial, which serves also to show whereabouts stood the vanished Kew House, often confused with its neighbour. The Observatory, in what used to be the Richmond Gardens, may be considered as another monument to the scientific work so early carried on at Kew.

When Frederick, Prince of Wales, came to occupy Kew, curbed in his martial and political ambitions, he took to improving these grounds, for which purpose he employed William Kent, a bad painter, better esteemed as an architect, and best remembered by his ideas of what he called landscape gardening. Inigo Jones had not disdained to design gardens; and the “improvers” who, throughout the Georgian age, came to be busy about English country-houses, were more often than not architects by occupation as well as professed artists in landscape, who had to design groves and flower-beds, but also temples, grottos, terraces, steps, statues, fountains, and other ornaments in the taste of their time. Such pretentious gardeners now found plenty of employment at lordly seats like Stowe, Badminton, Wanstead, Canons Park, and others aspiring to the celebrity of elaborate pleasure-grounds.

The art of gardening, like architecture, has had two main schools, that might be styled the Classic and the Gothic. The ancient model, flourishing longer on the Continent, dealt in straight lines and formal shapes, in parallel rows, accurate vistas and such trim patterns as the star and the quincunx. This prospered in England while our mediæval buildings were being replaced by Palladian structures. Our first great gardens of that period seem to have copied the conceits of the Italian style, with its terraces, balustrades, stairways, arcades, and stiff arbours among walls of clipped hedge. Le Nôtre in the seventeenth century headed in France a school of geometric gardening on a large scale, which spread across the Channel. William III. patronised among us the Dutch ideas of quaint formalism, especially shown in thickets of box and yew. Now came into great favour the Topiarian monstrosities of “verdant sculpture” still kept up here and there, notably in the Lakeland gardens of Levens Hall. So, in the age of Queen Anne, English gardens had fallen into the conventional affectation satirised by Pope.

No pleasing intricacies intervene,

No artful wildness to perplex the scene;

Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,

And half the platform just reflects the other.

The suffering eye inverted nature sees,

Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;

With here a fountain, never to be played,

And there a summer-house that knows no shade.

About the same time the Spectator complains: “Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.” But Addison rather surprises us by pointing abroad for better models “in an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.”

IN THE ITALIAN GARDEN

At all events, the revolt against that formal orthodoxy was raised under the standard of what came to be called the English school, whose principles suggest those of Gothic architecture. At first it was rather a Strawberry Hill Gothic which improvers practised in imitation of natural effects, heightened by art that clung to tawdry decorations. The cradle of this school was not far from Kew, at Twickenham, where Pope and Horace Walpole, “prince of cockle-shells,” set copies in a “more grand and rural manner,” advocated by a local author, Batty Langley, in his New Principles of Gardening. The rank of leader of the revolution has been claimed also for Stephen Switzer, who, though of foreign origin perhaps, was born in England, and from a working gardener became a nurseryman, then in 1715 published the Gardener’s Recreation, a work showing better education than might be expected from such a career, unless the writer got some literary craftsman to graft flowery tropes and classical tags upon his practical knowledge. Another gardener named Bridgeman is mentioned in connection with Kent, who designed ornamentation both outside and inside the Prince’s villa at Kew.

Kent is commonly called the father of the English or natural school of landscape gardening, and seems at least to have been its first exponent on a large scale. He was followed by rival doctors of the picturesque, very apt to differ, to accuse one another of quackery and of malpractice in the exhibition of clumps, belts, vistas and sheets of water. The Picturesque and the Gardenesque became watch-words like Allopathy and Homœopathy. One practitioner was judged to starve Nature, another to use the knife too freely.

To improve, adorn, and polish they profess,

But shave the goddess whom they came to dress.

These artists in scenery, one of them insists, on a foundation of painting and gardening “must possess a competent knowledge of surveying, mechanics, hydraulics, agriculture, botany, and the general principles of architecture,” besides professing themselves cognoscenti and virtuosi. They dealt with gardens mainly as one feature in a larger field of operations, the laying-out of parks, pleasure-ground, fermes ornées, and such fanciful paradises as Shenstone made famous at the Leasowes. Into the park, of course, the garden proper passes by transition over the lawn turf that is the special beauty of English culture, often separated from less trim outskirts by the invisible barrier of a sunk fence, said to have been Kent’s invention, but this statement seems dubious, as may be Horace Walpole’s story that the name Ha-ha expressed a rustic’s astonishment at being brought to an unexpected stand. But for poets like Cowley and Marvell, who courted “a green thought in a green shade,” it was left for writers of our time to dwell lovingly on the garden they love, however small; the tasteful authorities of that century hardly condescend to notice anything below the pleasure-grounds that ran into lordly demesnes. Humphry Repton, doyen of a later generation of improvers smiled at by Jane Austen, in his proposals for Woburn Abbey, distinguishes the gardens about a country-seat under the following heads:—-

The terrace and parterre near the house.

The private garden, only used by the family.

The rosary, or dressed flower garden, in front of the greenhouse.

The American garden, for plants of that country only.

The Chinese garden, surrounding a pool in front of the great Chinese pavilion, to be decorated with plants from China.

The botanic garden, for scientific classing of plants.

The animated garden, or menagerie.

And lastly, the English garden or shrubbery walk, connecting the whole; sometimes commanding views into each of these distinct objects and sometimes into the park and distant country.

This plan was much on the model of what had grown up at Kew, to which let us return, after recalling that before its grounds came into note, Queen Caroline had begun or enlarged the gardens about Richmond Lodge, extending them over an unkempt flat, as we understand from her private laureate, Stephen Duck. To poets of his school there was no beauty in heath and wild copses, like the rough patch of Sheen Common still left to the gratitude of our Bank-Holiday age.

Not so attractive lately shone the plain,

A gloomy waste, not worth the Muse’s strain;

Where thorny brakes the traveller repell’d,

And weeds and thistles overspread the field;

Till royal George, and heav’nly Caroline

Bid Nature in harmonious lustre shine;

The sacred fiat thro’ the chaos rung

And symmetry from wild disorder sprung.

But Nature might not be trusted to shine here by her own unvarnished charms; and the Richmond Gardens were bedecked with “follies” in the taste of the time: “Merlin’s Cave,” that appears to have housed a waxwork collection as well as the library of which Stephen Duck was keeper; a hermitage, inhabited by busts of distinguished men; a menagerie, a maze, and, of course, a grotto, to gratify “heav’nly Caroline’s” admiration for what “royal George” bluntly denounced as “childish silly stuff.” Rival poets celebrated “the much sung grotto of the Queen,” one under the sly pseudonym of “Peter Drake, a fisherman of Brentford,” making fun of Stephen Duck, the so-called thresher-poet.

The widowed Princess of Wales, prompted by her friend Bute, showed a warm interest in horticulture; and under her was nursed the Botanic Garden of exotic plants that became the special feature of the Kew grounds. They were laid out by Lancelot Brown, a self-taught gardener, so celebrated in his day as to be known by the name of “Capability” Brown. He, indeed, rather than Kent, is sometimes styled the father of landscape improvers, among whom Repton, for one, speaks of him as his master or forerunner. Brown appears to have insisted masterfully on the carrying out of his own ideas, if we are to believe the story of George III. chuckling over his death to an under-gardener: “Now you and I can do as we please here!” In Mason’s Heroic Epistle, Brown is said to have had a free hand over the Richmond Garden also, where he destroyed Queen Caroline’s fanciful structures, so as to be accused of having “transformed to lawn what late was Fairyland.”

Under Bute’s patronage the post of superintendent of the Botanic Garden was given, but seems not to have been made pukka, to Sir John Hill, as he styled himself on the credit of a Swedish decoration, that humbug physician and author, best remembered now by Garrick’s epigram:—-

For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is:

His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.

THE RUINED ARCH

Another questionable authority in taste, introduced by Bute to the Princess and her son, was William Chambers, an architect who built himself into no small note. In his youth, as supercargo of a vessel he had travelled as far as China, then a land of fresh wonder, to bring back extravagant notions, set forth in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, and in a mania for Chinoiseries, which was let loose at Kew. Hence the building of the Pagoda in 1762, of a House of Confucius, and of a mosque, with temples, grottos, and other outlandish erections, most of which have long disappeared. He also built the Observatory where Richmond Lodge came to be demolished. His innovations were not confined to buildings, as appears in Mason’s satire:—

Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight,

Join we the groves of horror and affright.

The architect-gardener declared himself very complacent about the dealings with Nature here carried out. “Originally the ground was one continued dead flat, the soil was in general barren, without either wood or water. With so many disadvantages it was not easy to produce anything even tolerable in gardening; but princely munificence overcame all difficulties. What was once a desert is now an Eden!”

As controller of the works actively pushed on at Kew, Chambers prospered so much as to be knighted, and to buy Whitton Place, near Hounslow, where the third Duke of Argyll, brother and heir of Jeanie Deans’s protector, himself better known as Lord Islay, had established a nursery of exotic trees, which it was his hobby to naturalise in England. On the death of this duke the cream of his collection seems to have been transplanted to Kew, now become a truly royal botanic garden, unsurpassed in England, with a fame that went on growing till Erasmus Darwin was bound to note it in his herbarium of verse.

So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride

Imperial Kew by Thames’s glittering side;

Obedient sails from realms unfurrow’d bring

For her the unnam’d progeny of spring;

Attendant nymphs her dulcet mandates hear,

And nurse in fostering arms the tender year,

Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed,

Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead;

Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers

With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers.

Etc. etc.