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.”
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
A much forgotten bard, named Henry Jones, who had been an Irish
bricklayer, sought to win patronage, like Stephen Duck, by a whole poem
in two cantos on _Kew Gardens_, a versified catalogue of their contents,
with a high-pitched description of the Pagoda, and flowing flattery of
their master, as to all which the less said the better. The same title
was given to one of poor Chatterton’s effusions; but he, reduced in his
garret to ape _Junius_ by “patriotic” letters signed _Decimus_, lets the
garden run under his pen to weeds of spite and scandal.
Hail Kew! thou darling of the sacred Nine,
Thou eating-house of verse, where poets dine!
It has already been told how George III. enlarged the demesne at Kew,
buying up some fields about the site of the Pagoda, and eventually
getting the lane closed that separated it from the Richmond grounds. The
Botanic Garden proper was enclosed and managed apart from the general
pleasure-grounds, within which seem to have been dioceses or spheres of
influence looked after by different _employés_. It is not quite clear
to me how these gardeners were ranked or related; perhaps, as in the
case of higher officials, their functions may sometimes have clashed,
or been complicated by royal favour. Mrs. Papendiek records that in her
time Haverfield was the King’s gardener, who lived at Kew, his second
son acting as his assistant there, as did an elder son in the more
remote Richmond garden; and that after him the sons succeeded to these
appointments. She also mentions the Queen’s flower garden up Richmond
Lane, where one Green was the gardener, who had nursed some orange trees
to be the pride of his life, but was heart-broken when they dwindled for
want of means to enlarge his hothouses, though he offered to pay half the
cost out of his own pocket. This diarist, not always to be depended on
in matters outside her own observation, intimates that the Board of Works
declined undertaking any improvement in the Queen’s private garden; from
which we should understand that the Botanic Garden was partly carried on
at the public cost, where Chambers had already built an orangery, now
turned into the Timber Museum. One thing appears plain, that even the
subordinate gardeners had good places, when Green could offer £250 as
his contribution towards those denied hothouses, and Haverfield brought
up his youngest son to be a clergyman. In all, the Gardens came to cover
some 120 acres, about half their present extent, as might have seemed a
small matter to Tamerlane, who boasted of his garden measuring 120 miles
round Samarcand.
The chief name among Kew gardeners of this reign was William Aiton’s,
who, if he had spelt himself Aytoun, like others of the family, would at
once be recognised as coming from the North. Waiving the question as to
whether Adam, the first gardener, were not a Scot and a Presbyterian, one
finds it notorious that Scotsmen have renowned themselves in planting
the richer plots of the South, a fact explained by philosophers of Dr.
Johnson’s school in the sneer that a man who has coaxed flowers and fruit
to grow beyond the Tweed has an easy task elsewhere. Of course this is
ignorant prejudice, as many a demesne might show in Caledonia stern and
wild, where nothing is needed for exuberance but the “fertilizer” we have
seen running short even in the Queen’s garden at Kew.