as Vauxhall, for, as the lady tells us of 1776--“Kew now became quite
gay, the public being admitted to the Richmond Gardens on Sundays, and
to Kew Gardens on Thursdays. The Green on these days was covered with
carriages, more than £300 being often taken at the bridge on Sundays.
Their Majesties were to be seen at the windows speaking to their
friends, and the royal children amusing themselves in their own gardens.
Parties came up by water, too, with bands of music, to sit opposite
the Prince of Wales’s house. The whole was a scene of enchantment and
delight; Royalty living among their subjects to give pleasure and to do
good.” The brothers of Granville Sharpe, the philanthropist, kept moored
at Fulham a notable fleet of pleasure-boats, one of them a barge or
“yacht,” serving as house-boat in summer, on which the owners took trips
up the Thames, sometimes stopping to serenade the royal family or to have
the honour of receiving on board the King and Queen, or the young princes
under care of their tutors. This stretch of the Thames is said to have
been the nursery of pleasure-boating; but though a canoe and a shallop
are enumerated among the Sharpes’ craft, we do not yet hear of fine
gentlemen, still less ladies, undertaking to row themselves.
The village began to grow apace, old houses being pulled down or
enlarged, and new ones built towards Richmond along what is now the
thoroughfare of a big London suburb. The population was swollen by all
sorts of newcomers--from ladies-in-waiting to gardeners, from preceptors
to soldiers, for a guard was kept at Kew House, near which barracks had
to be provided. One winter, the King is said to have found work for his
idle garrison by setting them to make the Hollow Walk, now filled with
such a fine summer show of rhododendrons.
There would be no want of church services then at a place well equipped
with scholars and divines. Mrs. Papendiek mentions two bishops as living
at Kew, besides subordinate tutors of the princes. While the royal family
were in residence, they had at hand Sir John Pringle, “physician to the
Person,” and one or other of the brothers Cæsar and Pennell Hawkins, the
royal surgeons, “for the Queen would have two of them always on the spot
to watch the constitutions of the royal children.” Later on, as we saw,
the King’s illness brought a swarm of medical men about Kew, at least
as lodgers or visitors. Rather earlier, Lord Bute, who was but a poor
nobleman till enriched through his wife, the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley
Montague’s daughter, appears to have occupied two houses on Kew Green,
that now known as Cambridge Cottage, and the Church House, described as
his study, perhaps used by him for a botanical collection. His interest
in botany, one must recall, was the foundation of Kew Gardens. He
privately printed for the Queen’s benefit a work on the subject in nine
quarto volumes; and when he moved to a more lordly home at Luton, his
first care was to form there a large botanical garden of his own.
[Illustration: THE RHODODENDRON WALK]
The servants of the royal house, too, required accommodation, which was
by no means humble in every case, for some of them must have made a good
thing out of their places. Miss Amelia Murray, whose mother had a post
about the princesses later on, tells us how “a bottle of wine every two
days, and unnecessary wax candles, were, I remember, the perquisites
of the ladies’ maids. Candles were extinguished as soon as lit, to be
carried off by servants; pages were seen marching out before the royal
family with a bottle of wine sticking out of each pocket; and the State
page called regularly on each person who attended the drawing-rooms,
with his book, to receive the accustomed gratuity.” In earlier days at
Kew, George and Charlotte may have been able to keep a sharper eye on
waste; but their economy would always be counterweighed by custom and
flunkeydom. Mrs. Papendiek, brought up in the air of the backstairs, has
much to say on matters of concern to those high-minded servants, their
jealousies, their stifled quarrels, their pickings, the unworthiness of
saving in a king’s household, and such like. She mentions incidentally
a footman named Fortnum leaving the service to set up as a grocer in
Piccadilly, where his name would wax into renown. Another name now
brought to note in London was Almack’s, the Earl of Bute’s butler, _né_
M’Call, a form which this canny Aberdonian, in view of his countrymen’s
unpopularity, thought well to anglify thus in appealing for fashionable
patronage.
The taste for music fostered by the royal family drew many professional
players into the neighbourhood, mostly foreigners, such as J. C. Bach,
son of the great composer; Abel, the viol da gamba player; and Fischer,
Gainsborough’s son-in-law, celebrated for his performances on the oboe,
all of whom were well known to Mrs. Papendiek as an amateur in their
art. The arts of design were also well represented by foreigners,
at a period when John Bull affected the pride of being still rather
stockish and shy with the Muses. We hear of Mr. Englehart as living
on the road to Richmond, one of several of the name who rose to note
as artists or engravers. Another German, who practised as a limner or
miniature-painter--the photographers of that day--and who appears to have
designed the coinage of that reign, was Jeremiah Meyer, so thriving as
to have a home at Kew as well as one in town. Mrs. Papendiek states that
he caught his death by a dutiful visit of inquiry at Kew House after the
King’s first serious illness; Meyer had himself been ailing, and on that
errand he suffered from the ill-humour of the page Ernst--once George’s
favourite attendant, but about this time in disgrace--who “kept poor
Meyer waiting for him in a room that had just been washed, and which
was therefore cold and damp. He returned home in haste, but fresh cold
succeeded. A relapse came on, and poor Meyer was no more.” He has a
monument in Kew Church, with an epitaph by Hayley.
Mrs. Papendiek’s chief friends among the artistic colony settled
hereabouts were the Zoffanys, who had a house at Strand on the Green,
where indeed the master was not always at home. That erratic German
genius, John Zoffany, having studied art in Italy, sought fortune in
London, like other esurient foreigners. After an ordeal of poverty, he
rose to note by his theatrical portraits, and came for a time into the
sun of Court patronage. His speciality was portrait groups like that
which was to include with the Vicar of Wakefield’s family “as many sheep
as the painter would put in for nothing.” He painted one such of George
III. and his family, and a notable one of his brethren in the then young
Royal Academy, founded under this King, who was an interested, if not
very discriminating, patron of art. Another of his celebrated pictures,
_The Last Supper_--in which St. Peter is said to be his own portrait, and
for the rest of the Apostles Thames-side fishermen sat as models--he gave
for an altar-piece to the church at Brentford.
At the height of his renown, Zoffany went off to Italy for years,
with a commission from the King to copy the _Tribune_ of the Uffizi
Gallery at Florence. This task he executed well, but as in his absence
he had accepted other commissions from Kaiser Joseph II., and the
title of Baron, an honour resented by George for a British subject, he
seems to have lost the royal favour. Again, in a fit of disgust or
adventurousness, he started off to India, where he must have had a wide
field much to himself as a portrait painter, and thence brought back
gorgeous pictures of _A Tiger Hunt_ and _A Cock Fight_, to revive his
vogue in England. The latter picture had the curious history of costing
an estate to a young Irishman who figures in it, his father, Robert
Gregory, having threatened to disinherit him if ever he took part in
cock-fighting.
Mrs. Papendiek grew up intimate with Mrs. Zoffany, though this lady was
looked on askance in the genteel society of Kew, having been a girl of
humble birth, seduced by the painter at fourteen and married afterwards
on the death of a deserted wife. She so far lived down the rather
squalidly romantic story of her youth that her daughter’s hand was sought
by a rich suitor, Colonel Martin of Leeds Castle, who shut himself up
here in single cursedness when the obstinate young lady insisted on
marrying a plain and awkward young man named Horn, whose father kept
a prosperous school at Chiswick, a match that turned out ill--for the
couple and for the school. Zoffany, his wanderings at an end, lived into
the eighteenth century at Strand on the Green, and was buried in Kew
Churchyard, by the east end of the church.
On the south side, under the wall, are close together the graves of
Meyer, Kirby, and Gainsborough, the last under a tomb restored in our
time. Thomas Gainsborough lies here, not as a Kew resident, but buried
by his own desire beside his lifelong friend and fellow East Anglian,
Joshua Kirby, F.R.S., who began life as a coach-painter at Ipswich, and
rose to fame as a writer on art and architecture. Helped on by Hogarth
and Joshua Reynolds, Kirby had the luck to become teacher of perspective
drawing to Prince George, and the King liked this master so well as to
give him a permanent appointment as Clerk of the Works set on foot in
Kew Gardens, under Sir William Chambers. At a house by the ferry-side he
passed the rest of his life in ease and respect; but to our generation
may be best known as father of Mrs. Trimmer, and uncle of William Kirby,
the entomologist.
Yet, indeed, so short-winded is fame in many a case, there may be sons
and daughters of this generation who know not the name of Mrs. Trimmer,
once so familiar in every well-ordered schoolroom; while her _History of
the Robins_ stands still on our publishers’ lists. One of the group of
literary-minded ladies who had the privilege of sitting at Dr. Johnson’s
feet, she married a Brentford man, and went to live across the river,
where she brought up a round dozen of children on the best of principles.
She seems to have been a model of virtues from her youth. When at Kew
she carried on a contest of early rising with a friend on the opposite
bank, the first up hanging a handkerchief out of her window as triumphant
token. Mrs. Barbauld’s popularity as a writer for the young stirred
Mrs. Trimmer to publish her lessons to her own large family, which won
great success, helped by her earnest Evangelical Churchmanship, whereas
the author of _Evenings at Home_ was no better than a Unitarian. After
the example of Raikes of Gloucester, Mrs. Trimmer took a prominent part
in starting Sunday-schools in her own neighbourhood, and was consulted
by Queen Charlotte on this matter. Other causes she had at heart were
kindness to animals, and “the injured African”; it may have been one
of her sons who objected on principle to being caned at school because
he understood the instrument to be the fruit of slave labour. She
corresponded with Hannah More, and such kindred spirits. It exalted her
as an extraordinary honour and privilege when the books of a mere female
writer like herself were admitted on the list of the S.P.C.K., which
has since found plenty of work for women’s pens. She edited _The Family
Magazine_, forerunner of many such, “each number consisting of a sermon,
generally abridged from the works of some learned divine of the Church
of England, and of descriptions of foreign countries, in which care was
taken to make the lower orders see the comforts and advantages belonging
to this favoured land, and also to render them contented with its laws
and government.” How many readers would be won now for a magazine
conducted on such lines, even if spiced by the “Instructive Tales” of its
editor? The good lady died in 1810, and was buried at Ealing, the parish
church of Brentford, which, though the county town of Middlesex, ranked
ecclesiastically as a mere dependent of its neighbour.
About Kew, in her time, there were spirits less loyal and orthodox.
Across the river in her youth she may have heard the roars of the mob
greeting Wilkes’ repeated hustings triumphs at Brentford--a din that
must have reached the royal ears, if George III. did not keep clear of
Kew for the nonce. At one of those abortive elections, every road to
the poll was blocked by a crowd that would allow no one to pass unless
wearing the popular idol’s blue cockade. Wilkes and George might well
be nicknamed the “Two Kings of Brentford.” And for ten years or so New
Brentford, as the village was then called, had a firebrand parson who
would not commend himself to Mrs. Trimmer. Her future home, indeed, was
at Old Brentford, now being swallowed up in Ealing.
The Brentford political parson was John Horne, afterwards better known
as Horne Tooke. Son of a London poulterer, whom he styled to his Eton
school-fellows “a Turkey merchant,” Horne was not the best man to hold
a living which his friends bought for him about the time of the King’s
accession. He is said to have done his duty at least as conscientiously
as most parsons of his day; and he seems to have been on the way to
become a popular preacher, if he had not been distracted by other
avocations. He had studied for the Bar, had suffered as usher in a
school; and he practised medicine _en amateur_ among his parishioners,
no doubt with “a lurch to quackery,” as is Dr. O. W. Holmes’ reproach
against divines straying into his own field. He took pupils at Brentford,
one of them the Elwes afterwards so notorious as a miser; and with more
than one he travelled on the Continent, leaving behind him, let us trust,
an orthodox curate. Then the cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” set him on
commencing as politician and pamphleteer; and for years he revelled in
the hot water of faction. He canvassed for Wilkes with such zeal that he
is accused of saying “in a cause so just and holy he would dye his black
coat red.” We hear once of all the constables in London being drafted to
Brentford, where the turbulent elections did not go off without bloodshed
as well as much beer-tapping. A man lost his life, as was alleged, at the
hands of bullies in the pay of the Court party; and that bellicose parson
exerted himself to bring the accused to justice, who were convicted but
pardoned by the Ministry.
Before long the reverend champion of liberty quarrelled with Wilkes,
against whom in his private character Horne pointed an acrimonious pen,
to the chuckling delight of their political opponents. He started a
newspaper for publishing parliamentary debates, which led to a famous
collision between the officers of the House and the City magistrates, and
indirectly to the tacit acceptance of a liberty of reporting, hitherto
practised by stealth. He next broke a lance against that unknown knight,
Junius. It was a more daring adventure when he touched the Government’s
shield by hotly espousing the cause of the American Colonists, and
writing of the Lexington victims as “murdered” by the King’s troops, for
which he had to stand his trial and be convicted of a libel.
By this time the parson had resigned his living, and thrown off the gown
that hampered his robustious exertions as an agitator, but he remained
a resident at Brentford till circumstances took him into Surrey. A Mr.
Tooke of Purley had invoked his assistance for a dispute about common
rights in that neighbourhood; and Horne proved such a doughty advocate in
this case that close intimacy sprang up between the two men. The younger
assumed Tooke’s name, and from his house dated the philological and
grammatical treatise, _Diversions of Purley_, by which he is best known.
In the end there seems to have been some cooling of their affection,
for Mr. Tooke left his supposed heir only a small legacy, along with the
welcome opportunity for a lawsuit. But Horne Tooke’s real father had left
him means to live comfortably at Wimbledon till 1812, long enough to take
part with a new generation of Radicals, in which the names of Sir Francis
Burdett and Major Cartwright came to the front. He succeeded in slipping
into Parliament, strangely enough, as representative of a rotten borough,
Old Sarum; and his “election” led to a Bill disqualifying the clergy
as members, though a generation would pass before the lease of rotten
boroughs was cancelled by such reform as Horne Tooke had loudly advocated
at the cost of again standing a trial for high treason.
Another noisy reformer, if he be not better described as a pig-headed
lover of the past, who was Tory and Radical by turns, had a glimpse of
Kew, about or soon after the time that Horne Tooke left Brentford. In the
farther corner of Surrey there was then living a sturdy little peasant
who, with a smattering of the three R’s, went to work in the fine gardens
of Waverley Abbey, then got another job of clipping and weeding at the
Bishop’s Palace of Farnham. He could hardly have entered his teens,
though the date is not made clear in his story, when a gardener came that
way who had just left the King’s Gardens at Kew, and gave such a glowing
account of them that nothing would serve the boy but setting off to seek
a place there. This was not a lad to let the grass grow under his feet,
when he had a purpose in mind; and he at once left an episcopal service
in hand for a royal one in the bush. It was William Cobbett, who now made
his first acquaintance with the writings of an old sojourner in his own
country nook, the sullen dependent of Sir William Temple at Moor Park,
Jonathan Swift, whose downright diction this boy lived to copy through
his long series of _Political Registers_.
The next morning, without saying a word to anyone, off I set;
with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen
halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and
I accordingly went on, from place to place, inquiring my way
thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond
in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese and a
pennyworth of small beer, which I had on the road, and one
halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other left three pence in my
pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through
Richmond, in my blue smock-frock and my red garters tied under
my knees, when staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book
in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written:
“_Tale of a Tub_; price 3d.” The title was so odd that my
curiosity was excited. I had the three pence, but, then I could
have _no supper_. In I went, and got the little book, which I was
so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper
corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a _haystack_. On the
shady side of this, I sat down to read. The book was so different
from anything I had ever read before: it was something so _new_
to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of
it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I
have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on
till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When
I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and
tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the
birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started
to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress,
the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and,
doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who
was a Scotsman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging,
and set me to work.
In his fragmentary reminiscence of that experience, Cobbett does not
say how long he stayed at Kew; but we presently find him at home again,
soon to set out on further escapades. He tells us how the boy princes,
attracted by the oddity of his dress, stopped to laugh at him as he was
sweeping the grass round the Pagoda. I have somewhere read a story that
King George himself took notice of the young rustic as carrying a book
with him to work, and was so pleased by his talk as to desire that he
should be kept on; but I do not remember any statement to this effect
in Cobbett’s own writings. In later life, the doughty demagogue became
something of a nursery gardener himself, carrying on near Kensington, by
the Kew road, a seed-farm from which he was zealous to propagate a kind
of acacia he introduced, and also, with less success, the cultivation of
maize under the name of “Cobbett’s corn.” All through life he kept up
his interest in gardening, as shown by more than one of the works whose
style has been happily compared to a kitchen-garden’s relation with a
flower-garden.
[Illustration: THE POPPY BEDS]
Another gardener rose to note, who about the same time was seeking jobs
in Mortlake, Kingston, or any parish around Kew where he could find poor
lodging and ill-paid work. His real name was William Hunt, but he changed
this to Huntingdon, as would appear, by way of hiding himself from the
consequence of some youthful ill-doing; and he afterwards justified the
_alias_ in characteristic fashion by claiming to have undergone “the new
birth” under that assumed name, to which--“as I cannot get at D.D. for
want of cash, neither can I get at M.A. for the want of learning”--he
added the odd degree S.S., meaning “Sinner Saved.” After undergoing the
pangs of spiritual labour along with hard troubles of the flesh at Ewell
and Sunbury, he began to preach among his humble neighbours, and kept up
this ministry while earning a livelihood by unloading coals at Thames
Ditton, so that he became notorious as the converted coal-heaver. He rose
to be the Spurgeon of his day, with John Bunyan rather for model, as far
as one can judge from the twenty volumes of his works, little known to
the “new theology” of our generation, which hardly remembers him unless
from a casual allusion by Macaulay. He was indeed of a more fanatical and
fuliginous spirit than would nowadays recommend a popular preacher; and
his picture in the National Portrait Gallery suggests a coarsely strong
animal nature, subdued, as it might be, by religious enthusiasm. So great
grew his following that “Providence Chapel” was built for him in London,
and rebuilt in Gray’s Inn Lane when destroyed by fire. Though he boasted
of being “Beloved of God, but abhorred of men,” godliness proved to him
no small gain. He is said to have had an income of £2000 a year in his
latter days, when, having lost the helpmeet of those early struggles, he
married Lady Saunderson, widow of a Lord Mayor, with whom he lived in a
villa at Cricklewood. He died at Tunbridge Wells, 1813, and was buried at
Jireh Chapel, in the outskirts of Lewes.
It would make too long a story were one to bring in all the celebrities
and notorieties living at Richmond, which has books enough of its own to
illustrate it, and a fame that would overshadow that of Kew. The latter
place owes everything, unless its river prospects, to princely care; but
Richmond is so richly endowed by Nature that it could not fail to be a
favourite place of residence. Perhaps the best known of its inhabitants
in the Georgian century was James Thomson, the poet of _The Seasons_, who
ended his life at a cottage in Kew Foot Lane, its place afterwards taken
by the Richmond Hospital. But there were lords, belles, and fashionable
folk who also had homes here. At the time of the French Revolution,
Richmond society got a new element in some of the immigrant _noblesse_
lucky enough to be able to rent houses in such a choice _ville de
plaisance_, while others had to content themselves with mean lodgings in
St. Pancras or Soho.
It is difficult, indeed, to draw the line between these neighbour
villages that have now grown into each other. The Old Deer Park of
Richmond ran into the parish of Kew. They had a common excitement in
1795, making a more than local sensation, when one John Little, said to
have been a favourite attendant of George III. in his walks through the
Gardens, came to a bad end. He is described as keeper or porter of the
Observatory, who passed for being a quiet, worthy, and even religious man
till he committed a most brutal murder under circumstances that suggest
insanity. He had borrowed money from a friend, an old man named MacEvoy,
living in the lane between Kew and Richmond; and when this creditor
pressed for payment, Little wiped out the debt by climbing into his house
at night, beating him to death with a large stone, and killing his old
housekeeper in the same way. Their cries roused the neighbours, who burst
in too late; but instead of making off, the murderer had hid himself in
a chimney of the house, and was there found by a Richmond constable. He
was convicted and hanged on Kennington Common, along with the notorious
highwayman, Jerry Abershaw, and with a woman named Sarah King, when a
newspaper of the day could remark on the curious coincidence that this
was also the name of Little’s victim, the housekeeper.