It is not improbable that Kensington Palace and Gardens originated in
the royal nursery established in this district, for the benefit of
his children, by King Henry the Eighth. If so, here Queen Elizabeth
grew up awhile, as well as Queen Victoria, and here health was in vain
attempted to be given to the sicklier temperaments of Edward the Sixth,
who died young, and his sister, Queen Mary, who lived only to be an
unhappy bigot.
As the circumstance, however, does not appear ascertainable,
antiquaries must put up with the later and less illustrious origin
which has been found for these distinguished premises, in the house and
grounds belonging to the family of the Finches, Earls of Nottingham,
whether the tenement which they occupied had once been royal or not,
it seems to have been but a small mansion in their time; probably
consisting of nothing more than the now least-visible portion of it
north-west; and indeed, though it was subsequently enlarged under
almost every one of the sovereigns by whom it was occupied, it was
never, in one respect, anything but what it is still, namely, one of
the plainest and least pretending of princely abodes.
In vain we are told, that Wren is supposed to have built the south
front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no
more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a
box, or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can
be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; it is a good air;
and though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it;
all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character,
which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and
thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well
recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to
receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington
Palace seems a place to drink tea in; and this is by no means a state
of things, in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good
wishes of the subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely
enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns--at
least, on the part of the ladies; and if the present queen does not
reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the
care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now
goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been
heard from the Palace windows, than the “tuning of the tea-things,” or
the sound of a piano-forte.
[Illustration: KENSINGTON PALACE, ENGLAND.]
We may thus, in imagination, see the house and the gardens growing
larger with each successive proprietor. First, there is Heneage Finch,
the Speaker of the House of Commons, at the accession of Charles the
First; for he is the earliest occupant we can discover.
This gentleman possessed but fifteen acres of ground; which his son,
Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, increased by a grant
that was made him out of Hyde Park. To the Earl’s son and heir, Daniel,
succeeded King William the Third, who bought the house and grounds of
Daniel, and enlarged them both, the latter to the extent of twenty-six
acres. Anne added thirty acres; Queen Caroline, wife of George the
Second, added three hundred; and the house, which had been growing all
this time, was finally brought to its present size or appearance by the
late Duke of Sussex, who added or rebuilt the rooms, with their still
fresh-looking brick-work, that form the angle on the south-west.
The house nominally possesses gardens that are miles in circumference;
but these having become public every day in the week, which in the
early times of the Georges was not the case, it has, in reality, to
any sequestered purpose of enjoyment, no gardens at all, except at one
corner.
The gardens in the time of the Finches consisted of little but
the ground squaring with the north side of the Palace, laid out
in the first formal and sombre style of our native gardening, and
originating the still existing circle of yew trees, a disposition of
things congenial with the owners. Heneage Finch, the Speaker, and his
sons, the first and second Earls of Nottingham, were all lawyers and
statesmen; and though a clever, and upon the whole, a worthy, appear
to have been a melancholy race. The first Earl suffered under a long
depression of spirits before he died; the second was a man of so
atrabilarious a complexion that he was nicknamed Dismal; and Dismal’s
son, from a like swarthy appearance, and the way in which he neglected
his dress, was called the chimney-sweep. Hanbury Williams, the reigning
lampooner of the days of George the Second, designated the whole race
as the “black funereal Finches.”
These unusual “Finches of the Grove,” made way for a kind of Jupiter’s
bird in the eagle-nosed, hawk-eyed, gaunt little William the Third;
a personage as formal and melancholy as themselves, though not so
noisy (for Dismal, notwithstanding his formality, was a great talker);
and under William, the Gardens though they grew larger, did but
exchange English formality for Dutch. The walks became longer and
straighter, like canals; the yews were restrained and clipped; there
was, perhaps, a less number of flowers, comparatively; for the English
had always been fond of flowers, and the Dutch had not yet grown mad
(commercially) for tulips; in short, William the Third with a natural
love for his Dutch home, made the palace and gardens look as much like
it as he could.
And his Court, for the most part, was as gloomy as the gardens; for
William was not fond of his new subjects; did not choose to converse
with them; and was seldom visible but to his Dutch friends. Yet here
were occasionally to be seen some of the liveliest wits and courtiers
that have left a name in history, forsakers, indeed, of reserved and
despotic King James, rather than enthusiasts for the equally reserved
and hardly less power-loving King William, who had become, however, by
the force of circumstances, the instrument for securing freedom. Here
came the Earl of Dorset, Prior’s friend, who had been one of the wits
of the Court of Charles the Second; Prior, himself, who had stirred
William’s Dutch phlegm so agreeably as to be made one of the gentlemen
of his bedchamber; Congreve, whose plays Queen Mary admired; Halifax,
a minor wit, but no mean statesman; Sir William Temple, who combined
public with private life to so high a degree of wisdom and elegance;
Swift (probably) then a young man, whom Sir William made use of in
his communications with the king; Burnet, the gossiping historian,
sometimes wrong-headed, but generally right-hearted, whose officious
zeal for the Revolution had made him a bishop; the Earl of Devonshire,
whose nobler zeal had made him a duke, one of a family remarkable
for their constant and happy combination of popular politics with
all the graces of their rank; Lord Monmouth, afterwards the famous,
restless Earl of Peterborough, friend of Swift and Pope, conqueror of
Spain, and lover, at the age of seventy, of Lady Suffolk; Sheffield,
afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire, a minor wit and poet, in love with
(the rank of) the Princess Anne; and last, not least in anything, but
good-breeding, and a decent command over his passions, Peter the Great,
semi-barbarian, the premature freer of Russian pseudo-civilization, who
came to England in order to import the art of ship-building into his
dominions, in his own proper mechanical person, and out of the five
months which he spent here, passed a good many days out of one of them
in interchanging visits with King William at Kensington. The only
distinct personal anecdote recorded of William the Third in connection
with Kensington will remind the reader of similar paternal stories of
Agesilaus and others.
A tap was heard one day, at his closet door, while his secretary was in
attendance.
“Who is there?” said the king.
“Lord Buck,” answered the little voice of a child of four years of age.
It was Lord Buckhurst, the son of his Majesty’s lord high chamberlain,
the Earl of Dorset.
“And what does Lord Buck want?” returned William, opening the door.
“You to be a horse to my coach,” rejoined the little magnate. “I’ve
wanted you a long time.”
William smiled upon his little friend, with an amiableness which
the secretary had never before thought his countenance capable of
expressing, and taking the string of the toy in his hand, dragged it up
and down the long gallery till his playfellow was satisfied.
The Court and Gardens of Kensington were not livelier in Queen Anne’s
time than in that of King William. Anne, as we have seen at Campden
House, was a dull woman with a dull husband. They had little to say
for themselves; their greatest pleasures were in eating and drinking;
the Queen was absurdly found of etiquette; and as there was nothing to
startle decorum in the court morals, the mistress in King William’s
time had given something of a livelier stir to the gossip. Swift
describes Anne in a circle of twenty visitors as sitting with her fan
in her mouth, saying about three words once a minute to some that were
near her, and then upon hearing that dinner was ready, going out. In
the evening she played at cards; which, long before, and afterwards,
was the usual court pastime at that hour.
She does not appear to have been fond of music, or pictures, or
books, or anything but what administered to the commonest animal
satisfactions, or which delivered her mind at all other times from its
tendency to irresolution and tedium.
Addison and Steele might have been occasionally seen at her Kensington
levees among the Whigs; and Swift, Prior, and Bolingbroke among the
Tories. Marlborough would be there also; ever courtly and smiling,
whether he was victorious as general and as the favourite Duchess’s
husband, or only bowing the more obsequiously alas! for fear of losing
his place and his perquisites.
Anne enlarged the Gardens, but she did not improve the style of
gardening. Addison in a paper of the _Spectator_, written during
the last year but one of her reign, catching the last glimpse of
a variation, speaks with rapture of the conversation of a disused
gravel-pit, which had been left remaining, into a cultivated dell;
but it would seem as if this exploit on the part of the gardeners was
rather in the hope of making the best of what they considered a bad
thing, than intended as an advance towards something better; for they
laid out the Queen’s additional acres in the same formal style as King
William’s.
Long, straight gravel-walks, and clipped hedges, prevailed throughout,
undiversified with the present mixture of freer growing wood. An
alcove or two, still existing, were added; and Anne exerted herself
to build a long kind of out-house, which still remains; and which
she intended, it is said, for the balls and suppers which certainly
took place in it; though we suspect, from the narrowness of its
construction, it never was designed for anything but what it is, a
green-house.
These most probably constituted all those “elegancies of art,” with
which a writer of the time gives her credit for improving the Gardens.
Such, at any rate, was the case in the more public portions of them;
and if the private ones enjoyed any others, we may guess what they
were, from Pope’s banter of the horticultural fashions of the day, in a
paper which he contributed to the _Guardian_, the year after the
appearance of that of Addison’s in the _Spectator_. The following
is a taste of them. The poet is giving a catalogue of plants that were
to be disposed of by auction:
“Adam and Eve in yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the Tree
of Knowledge in the great storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing.
“St. George in box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a
condition to stick the Dragon by next April.
“An old Maid of Honour in wormwood.
“A topping Ben Jonson in laurel.
“A quick-set hog, shot up into a porcupine, by its being forgot a week
in rainy weather.”
The Kensington Gardens were popular throughout the whole of the three
Georges’ reign, but flourished most, as far as names and fashions
are concerned, in those of the first and second. The space of time
includes half a century; and Walpole, Lady Suffolk, Beau Nash,
and Colley Cibber, lived through it all; the two last from a much
earlier period, and Walpole into a much later one, down to the French
Revolution. At the beginning of it, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, with
the wits of the Kit-Cat club about her, may be considered as having
been the reigning belle of the promenaders; to her, succeeded the
Bellendens and Lepells, with the same wits grown older; then came Lady
Townshend, with the new wits, Horace Walpole, Selwyn, Hanbury Williams,
and others; and then crowds were alternately drawn by the “Chudleigh”
and the Miss Gunnings.
With the decease of George the Second, glory departed from Kensington
as far as Courts were concerned. No reigning sovereign has resided
there since George the Third, who inheriting, perhaps, a dislike of
the place from his father, the Prince of Wales, appears to have taken
no notice of it, except in appointing the clever, but impudent quack,
Sir John Hill, its gardener, at the recommendation of Sir John’s then
omnipotent brother botanist, the Earl of Bute.
George the Fourth probably regarded the place as a homely concern,
quite out of his line. It might suit well enough the book-collecting
inclinations of his brother, the Duke of Sussex, with which he had
no sympathy; was not amiss as a means of affording a lodging to his
brother, the Duke of Kent, with whose habits of regularity, and
pardonable amount of debt, his sympathies were as little; and lastly
he was well content to think, that the staid-looking house and formal
gardens rendered the spot a good out-of-the-way sort of place enough,
for obscuring the growth and breeding of his niece, and probable
heiress, the Princess Victoria, whose life, under the guidance of a
wise mother, promised to furnish so estimable a contrast to his own. As
to his brother, King William the Fourth, though he too was a brother,
in most respects, very different from himself, we never heard his name
mentioned in any way whatever in connection with Kensington.
Adieu then, for the present, and for we know not how long a time
hereafter, to Court-holdings in the Palace; to Court splendours,
and Court scandals. Adieu Kings listening in closets, and Queens
calumniated by ungrateful biographers. Adieu even Maids of Honour. They
departed their life with George the Second, and went to live a terribly
dull one with his grandson’s Queen, Charlotte, who nearly tired Miss
Burney into a consumption.