all seated for a time at Richmond, when driven out of London by the plague. But Hampton Court up the river, as Greenwich below, seems to have been preferred for the king’s residence; then that lover of the chase found a paradise more to his mind in Theobald’s Park, near Enfield, for which he exchanged Hatfield with the Salisbury family; and this became his favourite abode. Richmond he gave to be the home of his son Henry, who from it dates a pretty letter to the Dauphin of France, all the twelve-year-old boy’s own composition, we are told, for the learned father would let him have no help. Prince Henry might not have been pleased to hear all that was said of him in the French nursery, where little Louis asked about his correspondent—“Is he called the Prince of Wales (Galles) because he is mangy (galeux)?”
Monsieur and Brother—Having heard that you begin to ride on horseback, I believed that you would like to have a pack of little dogs, which I send you, to witness the desire I have that we may be able to follow the footsteps of the kings, our fathers, in entire and firm friendship, also in this sort of honourable and praiseworthy recreation. I have begged the Count de Beaumont, who is returning there, to thank in my name the king your father, and you also for so many courtesies and obligations with which I feel myself overcharged, and to declare to you how much power you have over me, and how much I am desirous to find some good occasion to show the readiness of my affection to serve you, and for that, trusting in Him, I pray God, Monsieur and brother, to give you in health long and happy life.—Your very affectionate brother and servitor,
Henry.
Richmond, 23rd October 1605.
This prince, we know, died young, according to one tradition through rash bathing in the Thames; but a modern physician has diagnosed the indications of his illness as typhoid fever. Richmond then passed to his brother Charles, who was much at home here and at Hampton Court. He, as king, made a new enclosure, the present Richmond Park, a hunting-ground nine miles round, formed by somewhat high-handed expropriations recalling the harsher dealings of William Rufus with the New Forest, and going to make up this king’s unpopularity. When poor Charles himself had been hunted down, the royal abode at Richmond was sold to one of the regicides, Sir Gregory Norton, the new Great Park being given over by Parliament to the citizens of London, who, at the Restoration, restored this gift to Charles II. with a courtly declaration that they had kept it as stewards of his Majesty. The Park was now put under a Ranger; and the Palace fell into neglect, though, according to Burnet, James II.’s son, the Pretender, was nursed in it. Nothing of its old state remains but the Gateway on Richmond Green, above which may be traced the arms of England, as borne by Henry VII. The adjacent row of houses, still known as the “Maids of Honour,” also the cheesecakes of that ilk, appear to record the later day when Queen Caroline’s home at Richmond was so cramped as not to allow of her ladies “living in.”
As Richmond decayed, Hampton Court flourished in royal favour; and Cromwell, in his days of mastery, made bold with its ample accommodations. Its canals and garden took the fancy of Dutch William, who in England felt most at home here. His fatal accident he met with while riding in its park; and in the palace was born the only one of Queen Anne’s many children who grew towards any hope of the crown. George I. was a good deal at Hampton Court, it being recorded of him that on his way to London he used to make his carriage drive slowly through Brentford, for which he had an admiration shared by few beholders.
THE WILD GARDEN IN SPRING
George II. as Prince of Wales, acquired for his wife another seat in this princely countryside, buying from the Duke of Ormond a house in the Old Deer Park beyond Kew Gardens, which, re-christened Richmond Lodge, made a royal home at intervals for nearly half a century. Richmond was looked on as Queen Caroline’s property, the expensive improvements on it supposed to be paid out of her private purse, though, if we may trust Horace Walpole, one of his father’s ways of securing her favour was to draw from the King’s close-buttoned pocket, on the sly, for this purpose. After the death of the managing Queen, Richmond was little used, but for a weekly visit from the Court. Every Saturday in summer, says that mocking Horace, “they went in coaches and six in the middle of the day, with the heavy Horse Guards kicking up the dust before them, dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade; and His Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe.” It had been his wife’s favourite residence; and there Scott should surely have put her interview with Jeanie Deans; but he seems to mistake in placing Richmond Lodge within the present Park, whereas it was on low land beside the river, where now stands the Observatory; then to reach it from London the Duke of Argyll would never have taken his horses up Richmond Hill merely by way of gratifying the dairymaid with a fine view, which after all, appealed most to her taste as “braw rich feeding for the cows.” Sir Walter must have had the White Lodge in view, yet without considering that it is half an hour’s walk from the Richmond Hill edge of the Park.
George II. and Caroline sometimes lived at Hampton Court, as when their eldest son gave them deadly offence by secretly carrying off his wife thence to lie-in at St. James’s. And it was there that, in Frederick William fashion, the King once struck his eldest grandson, a memory that is said to have given George III. his dislike to this palace. He let it fall to its present position as a mixture of Cockney show-place and aristocratic almshouse, while he much affected Richmond Lodge, till he got possession of his boyhood’s home at Kew.
So at last we come to the Kew mansion, whose connection with royalty was comparatively a late one, and lasted only for two generations. The reader must bear in mind that this was not the present Kew Palace, which hardly seems to deserve such a title of pretence. The latter had belonged to Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was sold by him to Sir Hugh Portman, a rich Holland merchant, who rebuilt or altered it in the Dutch style, so that it was commonly known as the Dutch House. By some local inquirers it has been identified with the “Dairy House” also mentioned in old books. Opposite this, on the other side of a public road, in the seventeenth century stood a larger mansion, Kew House, as to the original date of which one is not clear, but it may have been at least on the site of a mansion at which her Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, entertained Queen Elizabeth. Under Charles II., when Evelyn calls it an “old timber house,” it came by marriage to Sir Henry Capel of the Essex family, afterwards Lord Capel, who died Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. From his widow, it passed into possession of Samuel Molyneux, described as secretary to George II., soon after whose death, in 1730, it was taken on a long lease by Frederick Prince of Wales.
Thus the obscure name of Kew began to appear in the scandalous chronicles of the Georgian period. Frederick’s parents, it will be remembered, were much at the neighbouring Richmond Lodge; and when Queen Caroline took a lease of the Dutch House also, this not very affectionate royal family had a group of residences too close together, one might think, for their comfort. The official guide states that at one time Frederick, too, must have occupied the Dutch House, as shown by his cipher and the device of Prince of Wales’s feathers on the locks; but I can find no mention of his living here in memoirs of the period. It may be that he had it for a time before his marriage; but the other was the house occupied by him as a family man, and by his widow after him.
There is some mystery about the origin of the extraordinary ill-will shown both by George II. and Caroline towards their heir, a feeling surpassing the antipathy between father and son that made an heirloom in this family for generations. The King tried to keep Frederick from coming to England; then, later on, he was half-willing to cut off Hanover from the English Crown that it might be bestowed upon his favourite, William of Cumberland. The eldest son he usually abused as a puppy, a fool, a beast, and by other such elegant epithets; while the Queen, if we are to believe Lord Hervey, offered once to give him her opinion in writing “that my dear first-born is the greatest ass and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it.” Yet, when father and son
