_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
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration]
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
PAGE
I
ROYAL RESIDENCES 1
II
KEW IN FAVOUR 31
III
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 83
IV
THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT 113
V
VISITING THE GARDENS 157
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Rhododendron Dell _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. The Wild Garden in Spring 8
3. The Lake 18
4. The Queen’s Cottage 30
5. In Queen’s Cottage Gardens 34
6. Looking up the Thames 42
7. The Pagoda 58
8. The Water-Lily Pond 64
9. The Palace 78
10. In the Italian Garden 90
11. The Ruined Arch 96
12. The Azaleas 102
13. The Peonies 108
14. The Palm Trees and Main Gate 112
15. The Rhododendron Walk 124
16. The Poppy Beds 138
17. The Rosary 146
18. Wild Hyacinths 152
19. In the Rock Garden 158
20. The Palm House 164
21. The Greenhouse 172
22. Wild Flowers in the Beech Woods 176
23. The Lake, looking South 198
24. The Herbaceous Ground 200
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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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!”
[Illustration: 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.