KEW GARDENS
PAINTED BY T. MOWER MARTIN
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KEW GARDENS
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THE RHODODENDRON
KEW GARDENS
PAINTED BY
T. MOWER MARTIN, R.C.A.
DESCRIBED BY
A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF
WITH
24 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1908
73
K51M7
PREFACE
KEW GARDENS contain what seems the com-
pletest botanical collection in the world, handi-
capped 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 effec-
tive subjects in the rich vegetation gathered into
this enclosure and in the relics of its former state.
CONTENTS
I
PAOB
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
vii
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
ix
x KEW GARDENS
FACING PAGE
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
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 cultiva-
tion 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
2 KEW GARDENS
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 neigh-
bourhood, a distinction dating from before the
Conquest. Both Kew and Richmond began
parochial life as dependencies of Kingston, the
Kings 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 build-
ing in the practical form of ordering it to be
ROYAL RESIDENCES 3
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 re-
building it, this king changed its name to Rich-
mond after his Yorkshire earldom, itself another
of the beauty-spots of the kingdom. Yet the
old name, probably a cousin of the German
scJuJn, 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 re-
turn allowed him quarters in one of the royal
lodges at Richmond, from which, as the king's
4 KEW GARDENS
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 Han-
worth 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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 5
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 Eliza-
beth 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
6 KEW GARDENS
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 foot-
steps 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,
HEXRY.
RICHMOND, 23rd October 1605.
ROYAL RESIDENCES 7
This prince, we know, died young, according
to one tradition through rash bathing in the
Thames ; but a modem 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
8 KEW GARDENS
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.
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.
ROYAL RESIDENCES 9
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
10 KEW GARDENS
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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 11
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,
12 KEW GARDENS
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 genera-
tions. 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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 13
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
S axe- Got ha, 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 mesalliance; Prince
Frederick and Princess Louisa, who both died
young ; and Caroline Matilda, who married the
worthless King of Denmark, and had a miserable
14 KEW GARDENS
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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 15
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
16 KEW GARDENS
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,
ROYAL RESIDENCES 17
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,"
18 KEW GARDENS
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.
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.
ROYAL RESIDENCES 19
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 mediaeval 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,
20 KEW GARDENS
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 horti-
culture ; 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 state-
ments 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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 21
house have not always loved their parents. Later
on, he was thought to have grown a little im-
patient 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
22 KEW GARDENS
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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 28
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 predica-
ments ; 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 him-
self out to heighten the Prince's notion of the
prerogative. There can be no doubt that he had
24 KEW GARDENS
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
ROYAL RESIDENCES 25
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 un-
official 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 after-
wards boasted that he never believed. " I never
4
26 KEW GARDENS
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 brides-
maid to the new queen. She soon got over
ROYAL RESIDENCES 27
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
28 KEW GARDENS
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,
ROYAL RESIDENCES 29
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 establish-
ment, 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 rendez-
vous. 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
30 KEW GARDENS
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 throw-
ing the Park open.
Having thus marked out all the royal resid-
ences 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.
THE QUEEN'S COTTAQE
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,
31
32 KEW GARDENS
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
KEW IN FAVOUR 33
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
5
34 KEW GARDENS
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 ! "
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
KEW IN FAVOUR 85
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
36 KEW GARDENS
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 tear-
fully 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, a 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
KEW IN FAVOUR 37
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 senti-
ment, Aim at Improvement.
It was not through parental indulgence if
these boys grew to despise such innocent
pursuits. Queen Charlotte taught them her-
self in their ABC 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
38 KEW GARDENS
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
Signer 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
//. 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 supplidum, 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
KEW IN FAVOUR 39
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
40 KEW GARDENS
prompter. Their uncle, the Duke of Cumber-
land, 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 Egalite 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.
What with the goings on of the Prince of Wales at
the Lodge, the fun with Fischer, the celebrated oboe player,
and the various amusements in which I was engaged, the
season was one of gaiety, mirth, and enjoyment. The
well-known bet of five guineas between Bach and Fischer
was made in the presence of his Royal Highness and of us
all. The bet was that Fischer could not play his own
minuet. He was a very nervous man, and after allowing
him to get through a few bars, Bach stood before him
with a lemon in his hand, which he squeezed so that the
juice dropped slowly. Then he bit another so that the
juice ran out of his mouth freely. Fischer tried once or
twice to get rid of the water that must, on such a sight,
fill the mouth ; but not being able to conquer the sensation,
he was obliged to own himself beaten. . . . Another joke
was played off upon poor Fischer this merrymaking season,
KEW IN FAVOUR 41
to this effect : After the concert, which Fischer attended
twice a week at Richmond or at Kew, wherever the King
and Queen were, he used eagerly to seize upon the supper
before he went to London. Upon one occasion, the
Prince came in and said, " I have ordered something that
I know you like," a dish was brought in, and when the
cover was lifted, out jumped a rabbit. Germans have a
particular dislike to that animal in every shape and form ;
therefore it is easy to conjecture poor Fischer's state of
mind. This joke cost him only the loss of his supper,
but many nights succeeded before he could be prevailed
on to again enter the eating-room.
Making a butt of a dependent seems no
princely pastime ; but this lady has worse to
tell us of the "First Gentleman in Europe's"
amusements at the age of sixteen. " Much do
I lament to add that some of those about the
young princes swerved from principle, and in-
troduced improper company when their Majesties
supposed them to be at rest, and after the
divines had closed their day with prayer."
The first open scandal about the Prince was
his intrigue with the unfortunate "Perdita"
Robinson, who turned many a head beside his
by her acting in The Winters Tale. We know
very little about that episode except what the
lady thinks fit to tell us in her Memoirs. The
boy lover, not yet eighteen, was so closely kept
42 KEW GARDENS
at Kew that for some time he had to content
himself with ardent letters. At length an
interview was arranged under circumstances
which suggest that the tutorial turnkeys must
have been in the way of nodding over their port.
Lord Maiden, who played Leporello in this
amour, brought Perdita to an inn on the island
between Kew and Brentford, to await the signal
that should invite them to cross.
The handkerchief was waved on the opposite shore ;
but the signal was, by the dusk of the evening, rendered
almost imperceptible. Lord Maiden took my hand, I
stepped into the boat, and in a few minutes we landed
before the iron gates of old Kew Palace. The interview
was but of a moment. The Prince of Wales and the Duke
of York (then Bishop of Osnaburg) were walking down
the avenue. A few words, and those scarcely articulate,
were uttered by the Prince, when a noise of people
approaching from the palace startled us. The moon was
now rising ; and the idea of being overheard, or of his
Royal Highness being seen out at so unusual an hour,
terrified the whole group. After a few more words of a
most affectionate nature uttered by the Prince, we parted,
and Lord Maiden and myself returned to the island.
The Prince never quitted the avenue, nor the presence of
the Duke of York, during the whole of this short meeting.
Alas ! my friend, if my mind was before influenced by
esteem, it was now awakened to the most enthusiastic
admiration. The rank of the Prince no longer chilled
into awe tbat being who now considered him as the lover
KEW IN FAVOUR 43
and the friend. The graces of his person, the irresistible
sweetness of his smile, the tenderness of his melodious yet
manly voice, will be remembered by me till every vision
of this changing scene shall be forgotten.
Repeated assignations, she says, followed " at
this romantic spot," where now the party took
courage to continue their walks till past mid-
night. Prince Frederick and Lord Maiden, we
are to know, were always there to play goose-
berry. The lady wore a dark -coloured dress,
and the gentlemen were disguised in great-
coats, except that harum-scarum Bishop, who
would make his companions uneasy by showing
himself in an unclerical buff coat, "the most
conspicuous colour he could have selected for
an adventure of this nature." The tutors
having got into their nightcaps by midnight,
one supposes, these moonlight ramblers even
ventured on a little music as the food of love,
Frederick being the minstrel whose tones,
"breaking on the silence of the night, have
often appeared to my entranced senses like
more than mortal melody." It is clear that
Perdita does not tell the whole story. Mrs.
Papendiek, well up in the gossip of the back-
stairs, roundly asserts that two officials who
44 KEW GARDENS
had been about these princes from childhood,
"privately overlooked the domestic vices and
irregularities of their young charge," and that
they smuggled Mrs. Robinson through a back
gate to the Prince of Wales's apartments.
The beautiful actress, who was a poetess,
too, a ses heures, might well be dazzled by those
shining personalities. The Prince vowed un-
alterable love till death; and the most con-
vincing of his billets-doux was a bond promising
to pay Perdita 20,000 at his majority. Perhaps
he was sincere for the moment; but we know
what such callow vows come to. When, at
eighteen, he became to some extent his own
master, this unhappily married woman was
taken into keeping, and for a time cut a
notorious dash before the footlights of society.
After Florizel grew tired of her, Perdita's
gushing sentimentality did not overlook business-
like considerations. She let the King buy up
the Prince's letters for 5000 ; and his bond
was commuted for a pension of 400. But,
these profits swallowed up by debts and extra-
vagant habits, the poor creature fell into bad
health and hasty authorship. Paralysed and
harassed, she died in 1800, buried by her own
KEW IN FAVOUR 45
desire, " for a particular reason," in Old Windsor
Churchyard, where her tomb may be seen fenced
in with spiked railings to defend it from the
body-snatchers that infested those river -side
graveyards ; and on it may be read an oft-
quoted epitaph idealising the painful facts of
her career.
At Richmond lived Mrs. Fitzherbert, the
Prince of Wales's more lasting flame, to whom
he appears to have been honestly, if illegally,
married. When this Prince was launched upon
the wicked world, and the Bishop in partibus
had been sent off to finish his education abroad,
the royal pair still had their quiver full of
youngsters, who for twenty years came so fast
as to be cue for Horace Walpole's jesting
prophecy that " London will be like the senate
of old Rome, an assembly of princes." Besides
others who died young, there were the princes
afterwards known as Dukes of Clarence, Kent,
Cumberland, Sussex, and Cambridge, and the
Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, Mary, Elizabeth,
Sophia, and little Amelia, the darling of her
father. Where all these children were stowed
away, one cannot always make out clearly : we
hear of the Princes William and Edward living
46 KEW GARDENS
with their tutors in what is now Cambridge
Cottage, and two of the younger boys in a
house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte
Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate
house near the river ; then another is spoken
of as the "Princess Elizabeth's house." Kew
House itself was a scrimply inconvenient
mansion, for which the royal household made
a tight fit even in its state of reduced cere-
mony. Pictures of it when it was the Princess
Dowager's villa, show a square, plain front with
two one -storied wings, from which in all
thirty-two windows look straight out upon the
lawn. At that time it bore the alias of "The
White House." Miss Burney describes it as
a labyrinth of stairs and passages, where at first
she continually lost herself among the "small,
dark, and old-fashioned " rooms.
It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be
turned upon this semi-private life by the diary
of a then most popular novelist. At the end
of the year before, Fanny Burney had been
staying with her venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney,
at Windsor, when one afternoon into the draw-
ing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in
black with a star on his breast. Even the
KEW IN FAVOUR 47
short-sighted visitor hardly needed to be told
who he was. As every one in the room drew
back out of the way, she was for slipping off;
but the King asked in a loud whisper, "Is
that Miss Burney ? " and after good-naturedly
giving her time to recover from her modest
confusion, entered upon a conversation of
questions, punctuated with what, whats, in
which he showed himself very inquisitive as to
how she had come to write and print Evelina.
The Queen soon followed, to whom George
introduced her by repeating their conversation ;
and Miss Burney went to bed enraptured with
her new acquaintances. Further interviews
followed, which only increased her admiration,
though the satirist rather than the courtier
peeps out in her account of directions given her
for behaviour in the presence of royalty.
Her demeanour certainly gave satisfaction in
the royal circle, for a few months afterwards she
was offered the post of one of the Queen's
dressers, which she accepted after some modest
misgiving. We remember Macaulay's indigna-
tion, " That with talents which had instructed
and delighted the highest living minds, she should
now be employed only in mixing snuff and in
48 KEW GARDENS
sticking pins ; that she should be summoned by
a waiting -woman's bell to a waiting -woman's
duties ; that she should pass her whole life under
the restraints of a paltry etiquette, should some-
times fast till she was ready to swoon for hunger,
should sometimes stand till her knees gave way
with fatigue, that she should not dare to speak or
move without considering how her mistress might
like her words and gestures."
This engagement was certainly a mistake on
both sides : Miss Burney might have found more
congenial employment ; and the Queen could
have had a better dresser. But Macaulay, after
his manner, has rather over-emphasised the evils
of her lot in the royal service. She certainly
took it as a rise in the world, and to her father it
seemed dazzling good fortune. The remunera-
tion offered her, with the chance of further
favour, might well have satisfied even successful
novelists of that day, few among whom would not
have jumped at such admission to the skirts of
Court life. Her year's salary, 200, was almost
as much as she got from her second novel, and
far more than the proceeds of her first one ; then
Macaulay slurs over the Queen's generosity in
presents. To look at the matter in no mere terms
KEW IN FAVOUR 49
of pay, literature probably lost little by her
laying down the pen for a time ; her best work
had been done in Evelina ; Cecilia was a falling
off; and Camilla, written after her experience of
service, did not deserve the pecuniary success
won for it, in part, by royal patronage. In her
diary, Miss Burney herself makes little serious
complaint but of the ill-tempered tyranny of
her senior colleague, Mrs. Schwellenberg. Court
life soon ceased to be a little heaven below for
her ; but she had distractions in royal journeys
to Oxford, Cheltenham, Weymouth, seats at the
trial of Warren Hastings, glimpses of great folks,
and even spells of moral flirtation with at least
one gentleman of the household, not to speak of
rather troublesome attentions from another who
was a married man. She cannot say too much
of the kindness of the King and the princesses ;
and if her " sweet Queen " proved sometimes
an inconsiderate mistress, it was from want of
thought rather than a hard heart. The confine-
ment upon which Macaulay lays such stress was
no stricter than that of most domestic ladies,
who had not Windsor Park and Kew Gardens to
walk in. Had she been more robust, the novelist
might have lived on to become a second Mrs.
50 KEW GARDENS
Delaney in the royal esteem. But her health
broke down, and after five years' genteel servitude
she retired on a pension of a hundred pounds..
During these years the Court had its summer
head-quarters at Windsor. Every second week,
the "Royals" spent from Tuesday to Friday
at Kew, using this as a half-way house for
St. James's, where on Thursdays the Queen held
her fortnightly drawing - rooms. This was Miss
Burney's hardest job. She had to be up at six
on drawing - room days, with hardly time for
breakfast, to help in dressing the Queen, who
put on most of her finery at Kew, the " tippet
and long ruffles " being carried in paper to save
them from dust ; then the final touches were
added at St. James's, where, after the function,
the idol had to be undecked in all, three
laborious attendances and two journeys, from
which the tired keeper of the robes got back
to dinner not till nearly seven o'clock, as then
seemed a very late hour.
In winter, when the Court moved to London,
there would be no going to Kew, which indeed
was not fitted up as a cold weather residence.
When it came to be occupied for months during
the King's illness, strips of carpet and sandbags
KEW IN FAVOUR 51
had to be provided to make the princesses
tolerably comfortable. All the luxury of this
house was outside, in its spacious gardens. But
the want of state was made up for by the more
home-like life of Kew, though that had also its
disadvantages ; the ladies and gentlemen were
not free to see their friends where the King and
his younger children might at any time come
wandering along the passages and poking into
the small rooms. There was not even a chapel
in the house; and when the Royal Family
happened to spend a Sunday here by some
chance, they heard prayers in a private room,
through the door of another, where the chief
attendants took their place, the servants being
edified in an outer apartment, which reminds us of
the complaint of one of Queen Anne's chaplains
that he had " to whistle the Gospel through the
keyhole." It was later that George III. fitted
Kew Church with a gallery to serve as royal pew.
Towards the end of 1788, this routine was
painfully broken upon by the King's illness,
which began during one of his temporary stays
at Kew, prolonged then for more than a week, to
the great discomposure of the household, ill-
provided with clothes, or with books in Miss
52 KEW GARDENS
Burney's case. The cause of the attack was said
to be His Majesty's sitting in wet stockings ;
but for some time back signs of strangeness had
been noted in him, who had enough to disorder
his mind in the conduct of his eldest sons, and
in his brooding over the loss of the American
Colonies. Miss Burney's diary gives a vivid
picture of those wretched days at Kew, when no
one felt sure what to say, and some, like herself,
hardly knew what to think of the rumours that
filled the house. The King was noisy and
voluble beyond his wont, talking himself hoarse
in his assurances that there was not much the
matter with him, mingled with complaints that
he could not sleep. More than once Miss Burney
found the Queen in tears. Charlotte had good
reason for anxiety : she must have been aware of
the character of a similar attack near the begin-
ning of the reign, which had passed off so quickly
that it could be hushed up.
By October 25, George seemed so much
better that he moved to Windsor, where his
restlessness and weakness grew worse again.
He obstinately insisted on going out to hunt
as usual in the November weather, yet he had
to confess that all at once he had become an
KEW IN FAVOUR 53
old man. A few days later there was a terrible
commotion in the family. It leaked out that
at dinner the King had broken into positive
delirium, seizing his eldest son by the collar
and pushing him against the wall. The Prince
is said to have burst into tears, while the Queen
had a fit of hysterics. Her husband could with
difficulty be persuaded to spend the night in a
separate room, from which all night long she
heard his ravings, now no secret to any one in
the house.
The King's death being looked on as
imminent, the Prince of Wales at once took
command of the misery and confusion at
Windsor. His heartless conduct during his
father's illness is matter of history, as also the
bitter struggle between his faction and Pitt's
Ministry on the Regency question, the former
maintaining the very unwhiggish doctrine that
royal authority should pass, in the circumstances,
into the Heir Apparent's hands, while the Tories
would make him Regent only with the sanction
of Parliament, and under restrictions. The
rabble was now on the King's side ; and all
respectable persons, not being partisans or
place-hunters, were disgusted by the profligate
54 KEW GARDENS
Prince's conduct. The doctors attending the
King had been threatened with popular violence
if his illness proved fatal. Their case was a
hard one, as not only would the royal patient
not always take their remedies nor even see
them, but they were treating a complaint then
ill understood even by physicians who professed
special experience in it It is said that poor
George was put in a strait -waistcoat, chained
to the wall, and actually struck by one of
his keepers, which would be quite after the
practice of that day. But the stories of his
harsh treatment are somewhat dubious, for the
notion that he was being ill-used often figured
among his delusions.
At the end of November the doctors deter-
mined on removing him to Kew, where he could
get exercise in the privacy of the Gardens. The
King angrily refused to leave Windsor, and had
to be coaxed away by a promise that he should
see his wife and children, gone on before him.
"Princes, equerries, physicians, pages all con-
ferring, whispering, plotting and caballing, how
to induce the King to set off!" noted Miss
Burney, who accompanied her mistress on their
hasty flitting to Kew House, where the Prince
KEW IN FAVOUR 55
of Wales had written in chalk over each room
the name of its occupant. Everybody had to
put up with the discomfort of being crowded
together in that ill -furnished mansion. The
only good rooms were given up to the King,
those above being left empty that he might not
be disturbed. Part of the household overflowed
into the Prince of Wales's house opposite ; the
younger children being lodged in their usual
quarters on Kew Green. Pent up closely with
"the Schwellenberg," Miss Burney had her full
share of troubles ; but her womanly devotion
rose to the occasion, and she declares that " not
even the 20,000 prize in the lottery could, at
this time, draw me from this melancholy scene."
She had the satisfaction of being employed,
every morning, to carry the physicians' report
to the Queen, who, by her enemies, was accused
of doctoring those bulletins to give the most
favourable view of symptoms on which, for
once, doctors differed.
The Prince of Wales and his partisans
listened rather to those big-wigs of the profes-
sion that were most gravely shaken over a case
they did not understand. They perhaps agreed
best in looking askance on an outsider called in
56 KEW GARDENS
upon the removal to Kew. This was the Rev.
Mr. Willis, who at Lincoln, and in a private
asylum of his own, had shown the benefit of a
more rational treatment of the insane. Though
he had a medical degree, he was belittled as a
quack by many members of a guild apt to
suspect innovators ; but his success had been
so notable that he was now employed, with his
sons, trained in his methods, to be constantly
about the King. From the first he took a
hopeful view of the case ; and when, with
occasional interference, he was allowed to have
his way, it soon appeared that he was the right
man in the right place. His secret seems to
have been a mixture of kindness and firmness ;
but perhaps he was not above using nostrums
of his own. Mrs. Papendiek, whose husband
was in attendance, says that one of the remedies
used was musk, the smell of which the King
could not bear, but the doctor insisted on it
as efficacious. He took the responsibility of
giving the King a razor to shave himself, for
which he was afterwards denounced almost
as compassing Lcse-majeste\ but on all such
questions he stipulated for leave to go by his
own experience and judgment.
KEW IN FAVOUR 57
Had this been in the era of newspaper
kodaking, we should no doubt have fuller
details of the King's madness, as to which
more or less doubtful stories leak out in the
memoirs and letters of the day. He is
described as wanting to climb the Pagoda, and
on being thwarted, throwing himself sulkily on
the ground, from which it took four or five
men three-quarters of an hour to raise him.
Another day he tried to throw himself out
of a window. The worst symptom was his
incessant garrulity : he would go on talking
for hours about everything or nothing. One
of the doctors once found him translating the
Court Calendar into doggerel Latin. The most
pathetic story is that of his being overheard
earnestly praying for his recovery. At times
he showed touches of humour and shrewdness.
He managed, though it had been forbidden, to
get hold of a copy of King Lear, Dr. Willis
not being strong in literature ; and when his
elder daughters were first allowed to visit him,
he told them " I am like poor Lear ; but thank
God ! I have no Regan, no Goneril, but three
Cordelias." Once he reproached Willis with
having given up his sacred calling for profit ;
58 KEW GARDENS
and when the reverend doctor excused himself
on the precedent of Christ healing demoniacs,
"Yes," said the King, "but He did not get
seven hundred a year for it ! "
The Willises, by the way, afterwards com-
plained of their remuneration, whatever it was ;
but their treatment of George III. made an
excellent advertisement for the family, one of
whom was sent for to Lisbon in the case of a
mad Queen of Portugal. They seem to have
given some offence in the household by the
position they had to assume. Great was
flunkey indignation when four of Dr. Willis's
keepers were raised to brevet -rank as pages,
that after his recovery they might remain beside
the King in case of a relapse. About that
time several of the regular pages seem to have
been dismissed or disgraced, it is said for carry-
ing tales to the Prince of Wales. These
"pages," of course, had now grown into adult
servants above mere menial rank, such beardless
boys as figure in history and romance being
distinguished as " pages of honour."
Poor Miss Burney was so worn out that
one of the doctors, noticing her wan looks,
insisted on her taking daily exercise, such as
THE PAOOOA
KEW IN FAVOUR 59
was the prescription for the King. As the
orders were to keep every one out of his way,
she made a point of inquiring whether he
would be in the Kew or the Richmond grounds ;
but once there was a misunderstanding that
led to the most violent agitation of her life.
While tramping her constitutional round of
Kew Gardens, through the trees she saw three
or four figures, whom at first her short-sighted
eyes took for workmen, till she was too late
aware of His Majesty's person among them.
Alarmed past all possible expression, I waited not
to know more, but turning back, ran off with all
my might. But what was my terror to hear myself
pursued ! to hear the voice of the King himself loudly
and hoarsely calling after me, " Miss Burney ! Miss
Burney ! "
I protest I was ready to die. I knew not in what
state he might be at the time ; I only knew the orders
to keep out of his way were universal ; that the Queen
would highly disapprove any unauthorised meeting, and
that the very action of my running away might deeply,
in his present irritable state, offend him. Nevertheless,
on I ran, too terrified to stop, and in search of some
short passage, for the garden is full of little labyrinths,
by which I might escape.
The steps still pursued me, and still the poor hoarse
and altered voice rang in my ears more and more foot-
steps resounded frightfully behind me the attendants
all running, to catch their eager master, and the voices
60 KEW GARDENS
of the two Doctor Willises loudly exhorting him not to
heat himself so unmercifully.
Heavens, how I ran! I do not think I should have
felt the hot lava from Vesuvius at least not the hot
cinders had I so run during its eruption. My feet
were not sensible that they even touched the ground.
Soon after, I heard other voices, shriller, though less
nervous, call out " Stop ! stop ! stop ! "
I could by no means consent ; I knew not what was
purposed, but I recollected fully my agreement with
Dr. John that very morning, that I should decamp if
surprised, and not be named.
My own fears and repugnance, also, after a flight and
disobedience like this, were doubled in the thought of
not escaping. I knew not to what I might be exposed,
should the malady be then high, and take the turn of
resentment. Still, therefore, on I flew ; and such was
my speed, so almost incredible to relate or recollect,
that I fairly believe no one of the whole party could
have overtaken me, if these words from one of the
attendants had not reached me, "Doctor Willis begs
you to stop ! "
" I cannot ! I cannot ! " I answered, still flying on,
when he called out, " You must, ma^am ; it hurts the
King to run. 11
Then, indeed, I stopped in a state of fear really
amounting to agony. I turned round, I saw the two
doctors had got the King between them, and three
attendants of Dr. Willis's were hovering about. They
all slackened their pace, as they saw me stand still ; but
such was the excess of my alarm, that I was wholly
insensible to the effects of a race which, at any other
time, would have required an hour's recruit.
As they approached, some little presence of mind
KEW IN FAVOUR 61
happily came to iny command ; it occurred to me that,
to appease the wrath of my flight, I must now show
some confidence ; I therefore faced them as undauntedly
as I was able, only charging the nearest of the attendants
to stand by my side.
When they were within a few yards of me the King
called out, " Why did you run away ? "
Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a
little assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly
forced myself forward to meet him, though the internal
sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most
proper to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so
violently combated by the tremor of my nerves, that I
fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of
personal courage I have ever made.
The effort answered: I looked up, and met all his
wonted benignity of countenance, though something still
of wildness in his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise,
to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders
and then kiss my cheek !
I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my
affright when I saw him spread out his arms ! In-
voluntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me ; but the
Willises, who have never seen him till this fatal illness,
not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was
from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing,
perhaps, it was his customary salutation.
She was soon relieved to find the King talk-
ing reasonably enough, though with a certain
flightiness, not very different from his ordinary
manner. He insisted on prolonging the inter-
view, after the Willises in vain tried to cut
62 KEW GARDENS
it short. He talked of Mrs. Schwellenberg,
seeming quite well aware of what Miss Burney
had to bear from her " Cerbera " ; of the lady's
own father, author of the History of Music ; of
his favourite composer, Handel, snatches from
whose oratorios he tried to hum over with
painful effect. As they walked on together,
he asked endless questions about his friends,
expressed his intention of appointing new
officials, complained angrily of his pages. At
last he was persuaded to part from this reluctant
confidante, promising to be her friend as long as
he lived ; then she went off to the Queen with
a report which ensured forgiveness for that
innocent adventure.
The favourable symptoms continued, little
to the satisfaction of the Prince and his friends,
who are credited with passing brutal jests on
the King's condition. Just as power seemed
to be within their grasp, the Regency Bill was
shelved, after an audience given by the King
to the Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, though that
shifty Polonius is said to have remarked that
His Majesty had been "wound up" to talk to
him. Miss Burney, who now confined her
walks to the roadside, had the happiness of
KEW IN FAVOUR 63
thence seeing the royal pair walking arm-in-
arm in Richmond Gardens. Next day, the
King came to tea with his family in the draw-
ing-room ; then, a few days later, meeting Miss
Burney in the Queen's dressing-room, he said
that he had waited on purpose to tell her "I
am quite well now I was nearly so when I
saw you before but I could overtake you
better now." After four months of royal
misery and public excitement, the evergreen
sneerer, Horace Walpole, could note "The
King has returned, not to what the courtiers
call his sense, but to his non-sense."
The news called forth an outburst of public
joy, that hit the Prince's party hard. A thanks-
giving prayer was read in every church ; and
later on the King, to the dread of his advisers,
would not be satisfied without the excitement
of attending a solemn service at St. Paul's,
where he and the princesses were moved to
tears, while his graceless sons attracted attention
by their irreverent chattering. There is some
slight palliation for the Prince of Wales's con-
duct throughout this trying time, in the fact
that the King had showed a dislike to him, and
even a want of fairness to his shortcomings ;
64 KEW GARDENS
but the Duke of York, always the father's
favourite son, has no excuse for backing up
his undutiful brother. Soon after the recovery
was announced, London had hailed it with a
general illumination, from rushlights in the
humblest cottage window to blazing devices
on the clubs. It was witnessed by the Queen
and all her daughters except the youngest,
while, in their absence till the, for them, most
unwonted hour of 1 A.M., Kew House too was
lighted up and adorned with a transparency
displaying The King Providence Health
Britannia ; and on either side of the gates, in
gold letters on a purple ground, shone these
most loyal lines :
Our prayers are heard, and Providence restores
A patriot King to bless Britannia's shores .
Nor yet to Britain is this bliss confined,
All Europe hails the friend of human kind !
If such the general joy, what words can show
The change to transport from the depth of woe,
In those permitted to embrace again
The best of fathers, husbands, and of men ?
Inside the house also the Muse was not
silent. His darling Princess Amelia came to
kneel before him, presenting her father with
verses in the Queen's name, from the pen of her
novelist-attendant.
KEW IN FAVOUR 65
Amid a rapturous Nation's praise
That sees thee to their prayers restored,
Turn gently from the general blaze,
Thy Charlotte woos her bosom's lord.
Turn and behold where, bright and clear,
Depictured with transparent art,
The emblems of her thoughts appear,
The tribute of a grateful heart.
O ! small the tribute, were it weigh'd
With all she feels or half she knows !
But noble minds are best repaid
From the pure spring whence bounty flows.
P.S. The little bearer begs a kiss
From dear papa, for bringing this.
In the middle of March, after their unusually
long stay at Kew, the royal family moved to
Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be
received by the townsfolk with an ovation of
welcome. In June, to complete the cure, he
went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere
on the journey hailed with acclamations and
demonstrations that might well have turned a
weak head. At Weymouth, the exuberant
loyalty of the people was embarrassing. All the
shops and bathing-machines placarded God Save
the King, a device repeated on the bonnets and
waists of the bathing -worn en, as indeed on
dresses all over England. "All the children,"
66 KEW GARDENS
reports Miss Burney, " wear it in their caps all
the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors
in their voices-, for they never approach the
house without shouting it aloud nor see the
King, or his shadow, without beginning to
huzza, and going on to three cheers. . . . Nor
is this all. Think but of the surprise of His
Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he
had no sooner popped his royal head under water
than a band of music concealed in a neighbour-
ing machine struck up * God save great George
our King ! '" It was now that occurred the
ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged Mayor
presenting an address, and not being able to
kneel, to the scandal of the officials. And here,
the "Royals" having gone on a day's visit to
Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years
Miss Burney had a holiday, which she spent
with a friend in a "romantic and lovely ex-
cursion" to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near
the neck of Portland Island, a peep into which
she might have found more romantic, had some
couple of miles not been a Georgian lady's limit
on foot
After a tour through the loyal West country,
the Court returned to its routine of London and
KEW IN FAVOUR 67
Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer.
Hut henceforth Miss Burney's diary has little
to say about Kew ; and after another year we
lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The
life of a glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon
her health and spirits : " Lost to all private
comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was
worn with want of rest and fatigued with
laborious watchfulness and attendance." Her
chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent
philandering with the Queen's Vice- Chamberlain,
Colonel Digby the "Mr. Fairly " of her journals
a favourite with the King, too, to whom he
could "say anything in his genteel roundabout
way." This gentleman the lady clearly admired
none the less when he became a widower, though
to us she presents him rather too much in the
character of a priggish novel hero, full of edifying
reflections and opinions. But the sentimental
friend turned out not impeccable, for he married
Another, the "Miss Fuzilier," about whom his
fellow-servant had often rallied him ; and she
cannot conceal that this choice seemed un-
worthy of him. Her health was so evidently
breaking down that her literary friends cried
out on the sacrifice ; even the newspapers
68 KEW GARDENS
gossiped about her condition ; and the meddle-
some Mr. Boswell declared that he would set
the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were
not allowed to resign.
This she was most loth to do. She tried taking
" the bark," but that did little good. The Rev.
Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she
found "too violent" in its effect, while grateful
to him for his interest in her. " Why," said
he, " to tell the truth, I don't quite know how I
could have got on at Kew, in the King's illness,
if it had not been for seeing you in a morning.
I assure you they worried me so, all round, one
way or other, that I was almost ready to go off.
But you used to keep me up prodigiously.
Though, I give you my word, I was afraid
sometimes to see you, with your good-humoured
face, for all it helped me to keep up, because I
did not know what to say to you, when things
went bad, on account of vexing you."
Every one noticed her miserable plight, yet
the Queen showed herself too blind to the fact of
a life being wasted in her service. Even the ill-
tempered Mrs. Schwellenberg was kind in her
way, who seems to have found this subordinate
a pleasingly submissive victim, and occasionally
KEW IN FAVOUR 69
spoke well of her behind her back : " The Bernan
bin reely agribble ! " This " Cerbera," whatever
her faults, had the virtue of devotion to her life-
long mistress, and could not understand living
by choice out of sunshine of Court favour. She
tempted Miss Burney with the dazzling prospect
of her own post in reversion. But the novelist
was sick of her gilded cage. With trembling
knees, after long hesitation, as if it were a
crime, in the form of a petition she offered her
resignation, not over-graciously received. The
Queen proposed a six weeks' holiday, a change
of air. When this was declined, the Schwellen-
berg raged against Miss Burney and her father
as almost guilty of treason. "I am sure she
would have gladly confined us both in the
Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit
place to bring us to ourselves from a daring so
outrageous to imperial wishes."
She held on some months longer to let the
Queen find a successor, secured in the person of
a Hanoverian pastor's daughter, Mdlle. Jacobi,
who, for sign of family poverty, brought a niece
with her in the disguise of maid. Miss Burney's
last King's birthday ball under the royal roof was
marked by a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg's room
70 KEW GARDENS
from the young Duke of Clarence, our future
sovereign, of \vhich_the diarist jotted down a long
and most amusing description, though she has to
apologise for not giving a full " idea of the
energy of His Royal Highness's language." He
insisted upon them all drinking the King's health
in champagne so often that some of the courtly
attendants were a little shaky on their legs ; and
as for the Sailor Prince, he got so drunk that,
as he told his sister next morning, " You may
think how far I was gone, for I kissed the
Schwellenberg's hand" and he might have
added, bid her " Hold your potato jaw, my dear ! "
If this be a true sketch from high life, the
novelist need not be accused of exaggerating
the manners of her Braughtons and Captain
Mirvans.
Among her last duties was expounding to the
inquisitive King and Queen the allusions in
Boswell's Dr. Johnson, in 1791 the book of the
day, which Miss Burney hardly approved of,
being one of the few who " by acquaintance with
the power of the moment over his unguarded
conversation, know how little of his solid opinion
was to be gathered from his accidental assertions."
Now she was at pains to vindicate to her royal
KEW IN FAVOUR 71
patrons " the serious principles and various
excellences" of her famous friend. The year
before, when Boswell visited her at Windsor, he
had in vain pressed her to contribute " personal
details " to his work. " You must give me some
of your choice little notes of the Doctor's ; we
have seen him long enough upon stilts ; I want
to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and
great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam
all these he has appeared over and over. Now I
want to entwine a wreath of the graces across
his brow ; I want to show him as gay Sam,
agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam : so you must help
me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself."
The last day of Miss Burney's five years'
slavery dawned at Kew, from which she attended
Her Majesty to St. James's, and there took leave
of her with deep emotion. Freedom, congenial
society, and country air soon restored the lady's
health ; and the faithless Colonel Digby's place
in her heart became more than filled by General
D'Arblay, one of a colony of French emigres
settled at Juniper Hill above Mickleham, near
her sister's house, and her friends, the Lockes of
Norbury. Lessons in one another's language
gave excuse for meetings, at which Cupid was
72 KEW GARDENS
soon of the party. The not-over-young couple
married in haste and privately, but seem never to
have repented. With the proceeds of the bride's
next novel, Camilla, they built Camilla Cottage,
still conspicuous, as Camilla Lacey, on the slopes
above Box Hill station ; but at the peace General
D'Arblay went back to France, where his wife
became for years an involuntary exile.
Mrs. Papendiek has a mischievous statement
that Miss Burney was dismissed on account of
the Queen's displeasure that she used her spare
hours for writing a novel in the palace ; and that
the authoress was much mortified by the loss of
her post. But this seems mere scandal. Madame
D'Arblay owned to writing an unsuccessful
tragedy at Kew and Windsor ; and some years
after, when Camilla was published, she confessed
to the King and Queen that the "skeleton"
of it had been jotted down under their roof,
at which they expressed no displeasure, but
graciously acknowledged the dedication with a
gift of a hundred guineas. The same gossiping
authority says that Miss Jacobi did not recom-
mend herself to the Queen, nor to " old
Schwelly," who refused to allow that niece-maid
to dine at her table. A few years later Mrs.
KEW IN FAVOUR 73
Papendiek herself succeeded to the post once
held by the novelist, for which she was much
fitter, to judge by the space given to dress in her
journals. But these records end before she
entered upon her duties ; and we know little
more of her Court life but that she gained pro-
motion in the royal household, from which she
retired to spend her old age at Kew.
In 1805, another literary lady came into
the service of Queen Charlotte, Miss Cornelia
Knight, afterwards companion to the Prince
Regent's daughter. Her journals are much more
discreet about the royal family than Miss
Burney's ; and there is a hiatus in them for most
of the period of her living at Windsor, where she
gives little more than hints of dissensions and
grudges in the highest circles, and a general
impression that Kew had fallen out of its old
favour. All these three writers had a common
point, in being able to boast of Dr. Johnson's
acquaintance, most intimate in the case of Miss
Burney.
Thorne, in his Environs of London, as also the
official guide, have it that the King was confined,
during his first illness, in the present palace,
apart from his family ; and this statement is
10
74 KEW GARDENS
followed by a mob of guide-books, servum pecus,
that often go tumbling after one another into the
same ditch. But Miss Burney and other wit-
nesses prove that it was not so ; and Thorne has
misled himself in his reference to George Rose's
Diary. Rose clearly refers to the next serious
attack in 1801. It was whispered that in 1795
there had been a recurrence of the symptoms,
passing off in a few days. But at the beginning
of the next century, when the King's mind was
agitated by the resignation of Mr. Pitt on the
Catholic Emancipation question, he caught a bad
cold that ended as before. This time the illness
began at Buckingham House; then, after His
Majesty seemed fit to attend to business again,
on his going to Kew a severe relapse took place,
shown by his informing the Prince of Wales that
he proposed to abdicate the English Crown and
retire to Hanover or America.
It was now that he came to be separated from
his family, and confined in the " Dutch House "
under charge of the Willises, to whom he had
taken a strong dislike, and is said to have struck
one of them before his removal could be effected
by force. The father no longer appears as taking
the leading part in the King's treatment ; but
KEW IN FAVOUR 75
one of the sons for a time was the fly-wheel in
the State, since through him all papers had to be
presented for the royal signature. When the
Lord Chancellor was admitted to the King's
sick-room, he vehemently declared, " as a gentle-
man and a king," that he would sign no docu-
ment nor perform any act of sovereignty unless
he were that very day restored to his wife and
daughters ; and he was then taken back to the
house over the way, to be still more or less
closely watched by the Willises.
Dr. Thomas Willis, 1 writing at this time to
Mr. Rose in the King's name, tells that his own
quarters are on Kew Green, " a few doors below
the Eose and Crown" a tavern still standing in
less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the
Kings Arms, also mentioned in books of that
period. Kings reign and pass away ; kingdoms
flourish and fade, mansions rise and fall, while
public-house signs often seem to have more
permanence in them than most human institu-
tions. Yet of them too transit gloria, if we may
1 The Dictionary of National Biography s article on Francis Willis,
written, I understand, by a descendant of his, hardly does justice) to
this one of his sons. The writer mentions John and Robert as con-
cerned with treating the King at different times, but does not bring
forward Thomas, who, so far as I can make out, was closely in charge
during the attack of 1801.
76 KEW GARDENS
believe the report that half the taverns of
England at one time took Wilkes's head for their
sign, as to which evidence of popularity he him-
self used to tell how he overheard a loyal old
lady's remark, " Ah 1 he swings everywhere but
where he ought."
The second avowed derangement lasted, by
fits and starts, till the summer of 1801. A
course of sea-bathing at Weymouth again com-
pleted the patient's recovery ; but the dread of
fresh attacks remained. The next one came in
1804, when his repugnance to the Willises was
so marked that the doctor of Bedlam was em-
ployed. It is, of course, a common symptom of
insanity, the turning against its best friends.
And now poor George showed intermittent
symptoms of dislike to the Queen herself, so that
they began to occupy separate apartments, and
are found not even dining together. The old
domestic happiness was gone, along with the
uncomfortable Kew House, that had so often
been its scene. Yet, had the King kept his
health, there seems reason to believe that Kew
might have become more of a home to him than
ever.
George III., returning to the plan set on foot
KEW IN FAVOUR 77
in the early years of his reign, took a fancy for
building a castle here, after plans prepared by
Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad
taste of the period. The design is to be seen in
one of the rooms of the present palace. The
other house was pulled down in' 1802, to make
way for the new structure, which would have
stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the
not very royal town of Brentford, that " town of
mud," so strangely admired by the Georges and
reviled by their poets. But the works were
interrupted by the King's fresh attack in 1804,
and this building never got further than the state
of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly
a quarter of a century, and was then demolished
by George IV. That monarch had no more
love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court.
He had spent freely upon his own whims, on
Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the latter
gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for
contemporary taste, and a byword with irreverent
writers like Byron
Shut up, no, not the King, but the Pavilion,
Or else 'twill cost us all another million !
His father, unless for saddling us with so many
expensive sons, had lived so carefully and
78 KEW GARDENS
economically, that the nation need not have
grudged him a " Folly " for once in a way. It
was his spendthrift heir who began to restore
Windsor Castle, demolishing the Queen's Lodge
there, and to rebuild Buckingham Palace in its
present form.
When Kew House had disappeared, the sturdy
"Dutch House," now known as Kew Palace,
became the occasional retreat of the royal
family, its scant accommodations, no doubt, eked
. out by those other mansions held on Kew Green.
It was here that Addington found the King
dining rather before one o'clock on the simplest
fare. His mind continued to be rather cranky,
as shown by his strange freak of wearing a huge
powdered wig in conjunction with the mediaeval
trappings of the Order of the Garter. Blindness
came gradually on to increase his afflictions. In
1809 the nation joyfully celebrated his Jubilee,
with much feasting of the poor and the rich
relieving of prisoners for debt, pardoning of
military culprits, illuminations, libations, and
such memorials as the statue on the Weymouth
Esplanade, that records the townsfolk's gratitude
to the King, whose stay at his favourite bathing-
place had so often sent up the price of its
KEW IN FAVOUR 79
lodgings. We may be sure Kew, in its small
way, was not behindhand in such loyal doings.
But Kew was hardly again to welcome the
Father of his People. Repeated agitations went
to overthrow his reason for good the triumphant
marches of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British
arms not yet brightened by Wellington's victories,
the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the
death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia.
At the beginning of 1811, George had just wits
enough left to consent to the Prince's Regency.
A few months later, Charles Knight was one of
the Windsor crowd that saw their aged Sovereign
in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived
confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by
and by of deafness, cheered by music, by religious
exaltation, and by delusive memories of the past,
more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy
reason, in one of which he had the satisfaction of
learning Napoleon's downfall and the recovery of
Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind
old King with his white beard, only now and
then visited by those nearest to him. It is said
that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when
one day he overheard his father murmuring the
complaint of Milton's Samson :
80 KEW GARDENS
O dark, dark, dark ! Amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark ! Total eclipse
Without all hope of day !
O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word,
" Let there be light ! and light was over all,"
Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree ?
When George III. was laid with his fathers
in 1820, his stout-hearted 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 figure-
head 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 out-
burst 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.
KEW IN FAVOUR 81
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
82 KEW GARDENS
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.
Ill
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-
84 KEW GARDENS
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 STORY OF THE GARDENS 85
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 1
86 KEW GARDENS
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 1 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 1 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
1 Letting in Elizabethan English, of course, bore the opposite
meaning to ours, as in " let and hinder."
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 87
orangery and myrtetum are most beautiful
and perfectly kept." Other gardens in this neigh-
bourhood 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
88 KEW GARDENS
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 em-
ployment 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
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 89
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 mediaeval 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
Notre 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 ;
12
90 KEW GARDENS
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 agree-
able 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."
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.
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 91
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 Gardeners 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 Bridge-
man 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
92 KEW GARDENS
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 Homoeopathy. 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, jermes ornees, 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
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 93
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 some-
times into the park and distant country.
94 KEW GARDENS
Tliis 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'iily 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 wax-
work collection as well as the library of
which Stephen Duck was keeper ; a hermitage,
inhabited by busts of distinguished men ; a
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 95
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
96 KEW GARDENS
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 super-
intendent 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.
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 out-
landish erections, most of which have long
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 97
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,
13
98 KEW GARDENS
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 !
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 99
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 employes.
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 some-
times 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
100 KEW GARDENS
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 contribu-
tion 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 measur-
ing 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. W aiving the question as to whether
Adam, the first gardener, were not a Scot and
a Presbyterian, one finds it notorious that Scots-
men have renowned themselves in planting the
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 101
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.
Aiton was a son of the soil, driven out of
his own Lanarkshire Eden by poverty, who,
like so many other Scots unwelcome to Wilkes
and Johnson, came to seek fortune in London.
He got a place at the Physic Garden of
Chelsea, and thence, perhaps by patronage
of Bute, was put in charge of the Princess
Dowager's Botanic Garden, whose reputation
throve with his own. His functions must
have grown beyond the limits of the Botanic
Garden, then only a few acres, for this was
the Scotsman who set Cobbett to work, among
other jobs, at sweeping up leaves by the
Pagoda, on the farther side of the Kew
grounds. John Rogers, who worked in the
gardens at this time, says that on the death
102 KEW GARDENS
of the elder Haverfield, Alton came into the
entire management both at Kew and Richmond.
His first appointment was in the last year of
George II. A quarter of a century later, we
find him clearly head of the whole establish-
ment. Aiton certainly rose to be no mere
working gardener, who published a catalogue
of the plants at Kew. He held his post till
towards the end of the century, and was then
succeeded by his son William Townsend Aiton,
to rule at Kew for half a century more ; while
another son, John, had charge of -the royal
gardens at Windsor and at Kensington.
In the Aiton succession, we come across the
fact that a talent for the study of plants is
apt to be hereditary. There were two Linnes,
not equal in fame, four De Jussieus, three De
Candolles, three Darwins of different degrees
of note in science ; and for more than a century
Kew Gardens were under the two dynasties of
Aitons and Hookers. In the reign of William
Aiton the second, among Scotsmen finding
employment in Kew Gardens was a William
Macnab, who rose to be foreman here, and in
1810 went to the Edinburgh Botanical Garden
as curator or principal gardener. One cannot
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 103
propitiate Dr. Johnson's Manes by describing
the Edinburgh Garden as a branch from Kew.
It is, in fact, an older institution, founded in
Charles II. 's reign, and now grown into a model,
both of utile and duke, worthy the Modern
Athens. The point I have to make is that
William Macnab was succeeded at Edinburgh
by his son James Macnab, godfather of the
Cupressus Macnabiana, etc., who managed this
garden till his death, 1878, and whose only son,
William Ramsay Macnab, bade fair, through
a too short life, to continue the family distinc-
tion in the botanical world.
This botanist by birth and birthplace was a
schoolfellow of mine, whose early career deserves
notice. His masters could have seen little
promise in such a scholar, for, under the regime
then styled education, our lessons simply did not
interest him, and I often wondered how he
picked up the quantum of Latin necessary for
his medical examinations. But at fourteen he
printed a monograph, either on ferns or on sea-
weeds, of which I had a copy but cannot lay
hands on it. At the same age he gave a lecture
on plant life, illustrated by diagrams prepared by
himself. He also excited the wondering admira-
104 KEW GARDENS
tion of his schoolfellows by practising the then
young art of photography. Before reaching
school days, he had bought his first microscope.
Not yet out of his teens, he had what I had
heard called the best collection of beetles in
Scotland. About this time I accompanied him
and some older scientific adventurers on a
natural history expedition to the Bass Rock,
when, unfortunately, all the pundits were so
overcome by sea-sickness, that nothing could
then be added to the stock of knowledge.
Macnab left our school in dudgeon against
a master who, having prescribed an essay
on starch, not unnaturally accused him of
plagiarising an elaborate composition based on
original experiment. From another school he
went early to Edinburgh University, and if I
am not mistaken, to Germany, where he used
his time so well that he had to wait some
months to come of age for taking his M.D.
degree at twenty-one. After a short digression
into lunacy practice, he followed his bent in a
professorship of Natural History at the Agri-
cultural College of Cirencester, and soon became
Botany Professor at the Royal College of
Science, Dublin. There he died prematurely,
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 105
else his life would surely have figured on some
more authoritative pages than mine. The last
time I saw him, if I remember right, he was
staying at Kew, engaged in some work or study
in the Gardens where his grandfather had been
foreman. The above digression relates to the
fact that the Kew gardeners were apt to be
kinsmen, or at least kindly Scots. Macnab,
Lockhart, Begbie, Kerr, Fraser, Morison these
are only some names occurring early among the
staff to show how the Aiton dynasty did not over-
look their countrymen's claims to employment.
If not scientific men themselves, the Aitons
had the advice and help of the best naturalists
of their day, specially of Sir Joseph Banks,
Captain Cook's companion, who introduced to
this country the fuchsia, the hydrangea, and
other exotic plants. Under this President of
the Royal Society, less distinguished collectors
were sent out to all parts of the world, some-
times in ships of war, to procure specimens for
Kew. Two such emissaries were on board the
Bounty on its celebrated voyage, one of them
sticking by the commander, the other going off
with the mutineers. To the honour of Banks,
it is told that when consignments of rare
14
106 KEW GARDENS
specimens intended for the royal gardens at
Paris were captured by our cruisers, he several
times used his influence to have them sent on
intact, a scientific courtesy that repaid the
orders of the French Government to treat
Cook's vessels as neutral, when war with
England broke out during his last expedition.
Banks, indeed, a wealthy man who sought no
salaried post, appears to have been practically
the scientific authority of Kew Gardens in his
lifetime, well deserving the royal confidence,
though he came in for his share of caricaturing
as a Court favourite. His picture, and those of
other noted botanists, are treasured in the Kew
Museums, where the mere literary man will
often be put to shame to find how many names
he never heard, live not forgotten among the
votaries of a special study.
Under Aiton the second, Kew Gardens
began to fall off, lying as they did in the shade
of royal neglect. George IV. began by showing
some interest in them, which soon withered
away. They were opened to "all well-dressed
strangers" on Sundays in summer, the Botanic
Garden being accessible at other times to those
who took an interest in it ; but the empty
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 107
palace no longer attracted people of fashion,
and for the ordinary citizen Kew was still
rather out of the way, though "stages" left
Piccadilly every quarter of an hour in the
season, and in 1808 there were already " houses
of entertainment" on Kew Green, as we find
particularised in a guide-book of that date.
Later on, the Gardens were open every day
except Sunday. But by this time they were
ceasing to be attractive. Aiton had been
appointed director of all the royal parks and
gardens, employment which appears to have
taken off his attention from Kew, where money
as well as interest ran short. The part kept up
shrank to the dozen or score acres of the original
Botanic Gardens, the rest relapsing into thickets
that made a game preserve for Ernest, King of
Hanover. A formidable rival was the Horti-
cultural Society's Garden at Turnham Green,
recently removed to Wisley Common. By the
beginning of Victoria's reign, the Kew Gardens
had fallen so low that there was a talk of
breaking them up and dispersing the collection,
to the indignation of the inhabitants, who had
an old grievance that they had given part of
their Green to enlarge this royal property, on
108 KEW GARDENS
the understanding that they were to be freely
admitted to its amenities.
From such extinction Kew was rescued in
1840 by the report of a parliamentary committee,
upon which steps were taken and funds provided
for bringing the Gardens to their present position
at once as a popular resort and as a national
scientific collection, while still they remained
nominally a royal demesne. Aiton being
pensioned off, Sir W. J. Hooker, formerly
Botanical Professor at Glasgow, was appointed
Director. Here appears another case of heredity,
for Hooker was the son of a botanist, and came
to be replaced by his own son.
Under his management the Gardens grew
apace, the botanic part being much enlarged,
while the Museums of Economic Botany were
now set on foot. Decimus Burton, the fashion-
able architect of his day, was called in to design
new buildings like the Palm House, unrivalled
in England unless by Paxton's Great Conserva-
tory at Chatworth, which was the model of the
Crystal Palace. To make room for such useful
structures, a sweep had to be made of many of
the fanciful " temples " and other gimcrackeries
of the Georgian age, specimens of which are
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 109
still dotted about the grounds, now laid out on a
principle of compromise with formality, " the aim
being to weave the various collections of trees
and shrubs into a whole, which should avoid an
artificial and yet yield an agreeable effect, while
still subserving a definite purpose."
In 1865, Sir W. J. Hooker was succeeded by
Sir J. D. Hooker, who in his younger days had
made adventurous journeys to the Himalayas
and elsewhere in the interest of botanical science.
He still lives at a good old age, after twenty
years' service having given place to his son-in-
law, Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, who also has
gone on the emeritus list ; and the present head
is Colonel Prain, whose experience in India
should give a new strain of efficiency.
Sir Joseph Hooker's management was marked
by a vehement quarrel between him and his
official superior, Mr. Ayrton, head of the Board
of Works, a Kew man by birth, who perhaps
for that reason felt himself the more moved
to aggressive interference. The scientific world
warmly took up the cause of its confrere ; and
Ayrton earned general unpopularity by his over-
bearing tone ; but Sir Algernon West, then
Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Glad-
110 KEW GARDENS
stone, after having had a good deal of trouble
over arranging the dispute, gives us his opinion
that there were faults on both sides.
It is understood that in the management of
the Gardens there has been sometimes a certain
friction between the demands of a scientific
establishment and of a scene for popular recrea-
tion. But these two ideas seem now fairly har-
monised. With the exception of isolated pene-
tralia, the Gardens are open from 10 or 12 A.M.
till sunset, and on Sunday afternoons. This
was one of the first of our public institutions
to be thrown open on Sunday, by the influence,
it is said, of Prince Albert prevailing over
the Sabbatarian austerity that dominated Mrs.
Proudie's generation.
As the Kew Gardens flourished, those of
Richmond had withered away. The royal
pleasure-grounds on that side were turned into
George III.'s model farm, then into a park, which
has become a golf-course and a recreation-ground,
though it was only the other day that its quasi-
public character came to be fully recognised by
a foot-bridge thrown over the muddy moat
cutting off this enclosure from the river-bank.
The site of Richmond Lodge is approximately
THE STORY OF THE GARDENS 111
marked by the Observatory, built for George III.
by Sir William Chambers, with a special view to
the transit of Venus observed by Cook and
Banks from Tahiti. When Kew Gardens were
taken under the wing of Parliament, the Royal
Society refused a free gift of this building ; but
it was kept going by subscriptions, then under
the auspices of the Board of Trade became
a Meteorological Station, with the important
function of testing instruments like barometers,
thermometers, and sextants, to be hall-marked
with the initials of Kew Observatory. But of
late years it proved not secluded enough for
this work, the electric currents induced by tram-
ways threatening its most delicate operations, so
that the magnetic branch was recently trans-
planted to the wilds of Dumfries, where also,
one hears, it had a narrow escape from inter-
ference in being housed in walls at first chosen
from an ironstone quarry. Other parts of the
work are now carried on at the new Physical
Laboratory in Bushy Park.
A ha-ha fence cuts off Richmond Old Deer
Park, as it is called, from Kew Gardens, which
in all cover a space of some 250 acres. The wire
fence has gone that marked the now hardly valid
112 KEW GARDENS
distinction between the Botanic Garden proper
and the former pleasure-grounds. Queen
Victoria showed her interest in the institution
by granting successive stretches of private garden,
to be added to what had become practically a
public one. At the end of her reign the so-called
Kew Palace, the old " Dutch House," was given
up to be opened as a museum of pictures and
other relics of its history. This is soon reached
by the broad walk leading straight on from the
chief entrance gates on Kew Green. The
Victoria Gate, on the Richmond Road, is the
approach for visitors coming from Kew Station.
There are other entrances both from the Rich-
mond Road and from the riverside, where,
opposite Brentford's wharves, one closed gate
reminds us how this was once a royal home.
IV
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT
KEW itself does not stand in the forefront of its
own story, for long remaining little more than
an obscure river-side hamlet, half a dozen miles
out of London, connected by a ferry with Brent-
ford, and with its quaint little neighbour Strand-
on-the-Green, which might have risen to equal
note had Gunnersbury or Chiswick taken a
king's fancy. It was not till the eighteenth
century that Kew began to burgeon under royal
favour ; and for the first half of that century,
Richmond lay basking on the sunnier side of
patronage. When George III. left Richmond
for Kew, the quiet village blossomed forth as in
a forcing-house, to grow into a banyan grove of
princely dwellings.
The first distinguished resident mentioned is
Sir Peter Lely, as having a country house on
113 15
114 KEW GARDENS
the Green, where the Herbarium now stands.
From first to last he may have been a good deal
in this neighbourhood, for he painted Charles I.
at Hampton Court, and after doing the same
service for Cromwell, he became the fashionable
artist of Charles II. 's Court, whose frail beauties
still live on his canvas. His successor in vogue
was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who contributed to
artistic vocabulary in his portraits of the Kit-Cat
Club, that had its rendezvous at Barn Elms,
now the Ranelagh Club. He also settled not
far off, in the house behind Twickenham named
Kneller Hall, that, after various vicissitudes, has
become the Army School of Music.
Swift, in his letters to Stella, mentions dining
with the Duke of Argyll at Kew in 1712. I do
not find any other allusion to this residence :
perhaps Swift landed at Kew and went on to
Sudbrook Park, where the Duke had a seat,
that should rather be reckoned as belonging to
Petersham, united with Kew as one dependent
district of the Kingston parish. This mansion
was near the famous avenues of his birthplace,
the Duke of Lauderdale's Ham House, said to
have been originally intended for Prince Henry,
son of James I., and chosen by the Lords of the
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 115
Council as a fitting retreat for James II., when
the Prince of Orange was about to enter London.
It would be the convenience of water transit
that had dotted the Thames side with lordly
mansions and villas ; and of course it should be
borne in mind how, at a time when the Court
could be spoken of as moving from Kensington
to London, places like Kew and Richmond were
practically as far from town as now are Haslemere
or Missenden, while the champaign rusticity of
the former would be more to the taste of Cowley's
and Pope's generations.
Kew is said to have had some sort of chapel
before the Reformation ; but it was not till 1714
that its church was built, the brick building on
the Green, that, with additions and dubious
ornaments, has mellowed into a specimen of
what may be called the ugly picturesque. The
excrescence at the east end marks the sepulchral
chamber containing the Duke of Cambridge's
tomb. The organ is understood to have been
Handel's, and to have been played on by
George III. The gallery, added in 1805, still keeps
its dusty state as a royal pew, though now used
on occasion for less illustrious worshippers. Both
inside and outside are many memorials to persons,
116 KEW GARDENS
famous or forgotten, some of whom must presently
be mentioned. In the close -packed church-
yard an unusual number of foreign names
seem related to the German colony of Queen
Charlotte's attendants, and to the Hanover
connection long kept up through the Dukes of
Cambridge and Cumberland, the former of these
princes having acted as regent or viceroy of
Hanover till the Salic law put his unbeloved
brother on its throne.
One of the early ministers at Kew was that
Stephen Duck, already mentioned, who began
life as a Wiltshire labourer, then by dint of self-
education came to be known as the " thresher-
poet," taken up by Queen Caroline, to the
jealousy of unpatronised poets like Swift. She
settled a pension on him, made him first a
Yeoman of the Guard, then, as a post more suit-
able to the poet than to the peasant, Keeper of
her library at Richmond. He married her house-
keeper at Kew ; and one takes to be his daughters
the Misses Duck, who half a century later are
found in charge of the Dutch House, the last of
them living till 1818. The father's ambition led
him on to take Orders ; and he preached with
much acceptation at Kew Chapel. Before long
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 117
he had been put into the Rectory of Byfleet
under St. George's Hill ; then, a few years later,
only fifty years old, he drowned himself in a fit
of dejection. But for the merit of being able
"to burst his life's invidious bar," he hardly
deserved patronage, his verses being a mere echo
of the epithetical commonplaces of a generation
whose rhyming shepherds hardly knew a crook
from a flail. Perhaps the most readable of his
effusions is The Threshers Labour, an account
of a farm-servant's life, in which now and then
he drops pseudo-Arcadianism for touches of
human nature and actual experience.
Soon as the rising Sun has drank the Dew,
Another Scene is open to our View :
Our Master comes, and at his heels a Throng
Of prattling Females, armed with Rake and Prong ;
Prepared, whilst he is here, to make his Hay ;
Or, if he turns his Back, prepared to play ;
But here, or gone, sure of this comfort still,
Here's Company, so they may chat their Fill.
Ah ! were their hands so active as their Tongues,
How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs !
Ill 1769, the Kew Chapel of ease was promoted
to be a parish Church. Some ten years before
this, Kew had another rise in life by the building
of a bridge, under an Act of Parliament obtained
by the owner of the ferry. There had also been
118 KEW GARDENS
a ford at low water. The first wooden bridge
was a somewhat makeshift structure, which after
a quarter of a century or so became replaced by
another, standing to the beginning of the present
century, when a new Kew Bridge was opened
by Edward VII., the old one condemned as too
steep of access.
Its bridge gave Kew an advantage not easily
realised by our generation. Putney Bridge was
only a little older, though a bridge of boats had
been thrown across the river there at the time of
the Civil War. Westminster Bridge was not
built till 1738, an improvement hotly opposed
by various vested interests, the cry being that it
would ruin the City as well as the watermen.
For centuries, unless by water, the Thames
could not be crossed between London Bridge
and Kingston. This fact explains the round-
about manner of Sir Thomas Wyatt's attack
upon the City in that ill-managed insurrection
against the Spanish marriage that cost Lady
Jane Grey's head as well as his own. In my
youth, at least, one was apt to take one's notion
of his proceedings from Harrison Ainsworth's
Tower of London, where a desperate storm of
the Tower is described, with fierce hand-to-hand
THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT 119
fighting, on the model of a like scene in Ivanhoe.
But this was all imagination. As a matter of
fact, Wyatt failed to get across London Bridge,
the drawbridge in the middle having been taken
up and the gate beyond being stoutly guarded
against his advance. The Southwark people,
who had welcomed him to the Borough, begged
him to be gone when the Tower guns were
turned upon their homes. Setting out in the
morning, hampered by cannon to be dragged
along through miry ways, he did not get to
Kingston till well on in the afternoon. Here,
too, the bridge had been broken, but its defenders
fled from his guns ; some sailors swam across to
fetch back barges moored on the farther side;
the gap was hastily repaired with planks ; then
before midnight he was able to continue his
march. A gun breaking down delayed him at
Brentford, then perhaps the Kew people were
for the nonce rather thankful not to have a
bridge, as that force passed by to assail London
on the Middlesex side. So must they have been
in the next century, when across the river they
could hear the shouts and shots with which
Royalists set Roundheads flying through the
narrow streets of Brentford.
120 KEW GARDENS
The bridge put Kew upon improving its roads.
The King, at his own expense, to give work for
the unemployed in winter, had a carriage-way
made to Richmond, hitherto reached directly
by a rough lane. Then the inhabitants of sur-
rounding parishes got up a subscription to mend
the ways on the Surrey side from Putney Bridge
" in order that His Majesty may not be obliged
to take the dusty road from Brentford when he
honours them with his residence in summer.'
So now we come to Kew's palmy days, in the
seventies of the eighteenth century, while George
and Charlotte lived much here, before their
flitting to Windsor ; and many new houses
were built to accommodate the attendants and
hangers-on of the rustic Court. Mrs. Papendiek,
who was brought up at Kew, gives us glimpses
of the village in its state of transformation,
among them such a curious one as this :
The farmhouse, now Hollis's, was Mrs. Clewly's, who
supplied the inhabitants with milk, butter, eggs, pork and
bacon. She, becoming a widow, married a Mr. Frame,
whose son, by a former marriage, lived upon housebreaking
and footpad robberies. Upon his father becoming an
inhabitant of Kew, the question was inquired into, when
he said : " I always take care to act so as to escape justice.
Blows and murders belong not to my gang ; and if I am
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 121
allowed to take my beer on the Green, and sit with my
neighbours, without being insulted, I shall take care that
no harm happen here. I am well aware of the bearings
of the place." We all spoke with him as a friend when
we met; and of my father he asked for any trifle he
wanted, and was never refused.
This diarist had not always such a friendly
experience of highwaymen, for on their way
back from Vauxhall to Kew, her party was
stopped and robbed at Mortlake. The encounter
was so little expected that Mr. Papendiek had
laid away his new watch in a corner of the
coach, and when our schoolgirl, as she then was,
heard the robbers say that the ladies should not
be molested, she hid the watch for him ; then, on
her giving it back to its owner, the danger past,
he rewarded her by making sheep's eyes, which
in time brought about a marriage.
But it was soon not necessary for Kew folk
to seek amusement so far off 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
16
122 KEW GARDENS
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 new-
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 123
comers 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 Caesar and Pennell Hawkins, the
royal surgeons, " for the Queen would have two
of them always on the spot to watch the con-
stitutions 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
124 KEW GARDENS
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.
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
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 125
counterweighed by custom and flunkeydom. Mrs.
Papendiek, brought up in the air of the back-
stairs, 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, ne M'Call, a form which this canny
Aberdonian, in view of his countrymen's un-
popularity, 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
126 KEW GARDENS
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 him-
self 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 re-
lapse 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
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 127
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 dis-
criminating, 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 sub-
ject, he seems to have lost the royal favour.
128 KEW GARDENS
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 wander-
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 129
ings 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 Gains-
borough, 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 as 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
130 KEW GARDENS
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 neighbour-
hood, 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
THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT 131
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 com-
forts 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 Baling, 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
132 KEW GARDENS
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 com-
mend himself to Mrs. Trimmer. Her future
home, indeed, was at Old Brentford, now being
swallowed up in Baling.
The Brentford political parson was John
Home, afterwards better known as Home Tooke.
Son of a London poulterer, whom he styled to
his Eton school-fellows "a Turkey merchant,"
Home 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
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 133
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 Home pointed an acrimonious
pen, to the chuckling delight of their political
opponents. He started a newspaper for publish-
184 KEW GARDENS
ing 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 circum-
stances took him into Surrey. A Mr. Tooke of
Purley had invoked his assistance for a dispute
about common rights in that neighbourhood ;
and Home 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 affec-
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 135
tion, for Mr. Tooke left his supposed heir only a
small legacy, along with the welcome opportunity
for a lawsuit. But Home Tooke's real father
had left him means to live comfortably at Wim-
bledon 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 " elec-
tion" 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 Home Tooke had loudly ad-
vocated 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 Home
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
136 KEW GARDENS
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
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 137
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 neiv 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 con-
sidered 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
18
138 KEW GARDENS
himself took notice of the young rustic as carry-
ing 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.
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
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 139
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 now-
adays 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
140 KEW GARDENS
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 over-
shadow 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 immi-
grant noblesse lucky enough to be able to rent
THE VILLAGE: IN AND ABOUT IT 141
houses in such a choice vilk 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.
142 KEW GARDENS
He was convicted and hanged on Kennington
Common, along with the notorious highway-
man, 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.
Notices of Kew naturally become rarer after
the poor old King had been shut up at Windsor.
In 1813, Sir Richard Phillips made his Morning's
walk from London to Kezc, where he did not
admire George III.'s unfinished " Bastile," then
cumbering the ground. He is not the only writer
of the period to mention a singular exhibition,
not quite obliterated a dozen years later, a fresco
on a scale unsurpassed by Raphael or Michael
Angelo. "As I quitted the lane, I beheld, on
my left, the long boundary- wall of Kew Gardens ;
on which a disabled sailor has drawn in chalk
the effigies of the whole British navy, and over
each representation appears the name of the
vessel, and the number of her guns. He has in
this way depicted about 800 vessels, each five or
six feet long, and extending, with intervening
distances, above a mile and a half. As the
labour of one man, the whole is an extraordinary
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 143
performance ; and I was told the decrepit
draughtsman derives a competency from passing
travellers."
A sight that lasted longer was the City State
Barge, the Maria Wood, rotting at Kew Bridge
almost to our own day, till it had to be broken
up ; but well on in the nineteenth century it
still made a scene of junketings, and earlier it
had cruised with aldermanic guests as far as
Richmond and Twickenham, not to speak of
that famous voyage to Oxford described in the
Middlesex volume of this series. Another lion
of Kew in the early part of the last century was
a pretentious modern structure, said to have
been built from the materials of George III.'s
unfinished palace, but as Sir R. Phillips notes
them both on his walk this statement seems
doubtful. It took the name of the Priory, that
has been spread over a district of the present
suburb.
The Priory was built by a Catholic parishioner.
Romanists and Dissenters would have every
chance of making way at Kew, when its living,
still conjoined with Petersham, was held for ten
years, from 1818, by Charles Caleb Colton, a
parson who might well speak of himself as only
144 KEW GARDENS
a " finger-post " on the road to heaven. This
eccentric divine was more concerned about
angling in the Thames than to be a fisher of men.
He did not live at either of his cures, but in
shabby lodgings in Soho, going down to Kew
only for necessary services, and spending the
week-days after the manner of a Bohemian
author, perhaps not unknown to Thackeray. At
one time he carried on business, sub rosd, as a
wine-merchant, in cellars underneath a Methodist
chapel, a possible hint for Mr. Sherrick's dealings
at Lady Whittlesea's ; but Colton had none of
the Rev. Charles Honeyman's suave humbug,
while in some respects he may have sat as model
for the coarser reprobate who blackmailed
Philip Firmin's father. His most unclerical
pursuit was gambling, through which he got into
some difficulty that packed him off to America
in haste. He returned to put in an appearance
at his living, which, however, seems now to have
lapsed out of his incumbency. He next went
to Paris, plunged head over heels into gaming,
and blew out his brains in 1832. Yet this was
the author of that once popular book Lacon, that
among other edifying and sententious sentiments
denounces the desperate gamester as doubly
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 145
ruined : " He adds his soul to every other loss ;
and by the act of suicide renounces earth to
forfeit heaven." The cure of souls he had filled
so unworthily passed into the hands of the
Rev. R. B. Byam, who held it for forty years,
in favour with all classes and especially with
his chief parishioners, the royal dukes who still
from time to time showed themselves in Kew
Church.
When Kew had been deserted by kings and
courtiers, its gardens being turned into a public
institution, the keepers of them grew to be
important personages, of whom more has been
said in the last chapter. For a time names of
note are less often met with in this neighbour-
hood. One long link with the past was the life
of Mrs. Gwyn, who died here in 1840, the year
of Madame d'Arblay's death, in whose Diary
this lady's name appears. She was the widow
of Colonel Gwyn, one of the royal equerries in
that time of trouble which Fanny Burney passed
through half a century before. She had been
the beautiful Mary Horneck, "the Jessamy
Bride" whom Goldsmith loved in vain; and
there may be those still alive at Kew that heard
her memories of Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds,
19
146 KEW GARDENS
of the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, and
the first fame of the Vicar of WakefieM.
About the same time as Mrs. Gwyn, died
Francis Bauer, a half-century resident at Kew,
brought there by Sir Joseph Banks to exercise his
remarkable skill as a natural history draughtsman.
At the end of the eighteenth century lie had
brought out a volume of delineations of the
exotic plants in the Gardens ; and many of his
plates lie still unpublished at South Kensington.
It is said that in 1827 he laid before the Royal
Society a paper by J. N. de Niepce, another
foreigner living at Kew, who sought in vain to
draw attention to some such process as was after-
wards developed by Daguerre, so that Kew may
claim to be a cradle of photography. While
we are on the head of art, Hofland the painter
should be mentioned as having been brought up
at Kew ; also his wife, the once popular novelist
Barbara Hofland, who wrote a book about
the Richmond neighbourhood, sumptuously
illustrated in the style of its day (1832), with
much the same aim as the present volume, but
containing a larger proportion of fine words to a
smaller stock of matter.
We now approach our own time, in which
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 147
Kew seems more favoured by authors than by
artists. An inhabitant still remembered is Sir
Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council, and
recorder of those " Friends in Council " who
were so familiar to readers of the last generation ;
nor does the mild wisdom of "Milverton,"
" Ellesmere " and the rest, deserve to seem out
of date. Perhaps his most enduring work will
be the narratives in which he told the dark story
of Spanish American conquest, with its dubious
heroes. He acted as editor for Queen Victoria's
first confidences in print ; and she granted him a
residence at Kew Cottage, near the chief gates.
To a member of his family whom I count among
my friends, I am indebted for threads of informa-
tion woven into these pages.
I can speak from acquaintance of another
Kew resident, Richard Proctor, the well-known
writer and lecturer on astronomy, editor of
Knowledge, and a high authority upon whist,
to which his devotion was so sincere that he
never would play for money. Yet he won a
prize at the card-table, for, as he remarks in one
of his disquisitions on the relation of skill and
chance, "the lady who was my partner in this
game is now my partner for life." He was
148 KEW GARDENS
destined to end his busy life lamentably, far
from Kew, when, having in latter days married
an American lady, he transplanted his household
gods across the Atlantic. In passing through
New York from the South, he had an attack of
fever, mistaken, it seems, for the terrible " Yellow
Jack " that from time to time scares Uncle Sam,
so poor Proctor was turned out of his hotel, and
packed off to die in a hospital.
One could tell of other noted authors living
at or about Kew, not always in such enviable
quarters as that " cottage of gentility " at which
Queen Victoria visited Sir Arthur Helps, but
perhaps the general reader, who, even in these
Radical days, likes to hear about great folk, would
take more interest in an aftermath of princely
memories.
Our late Queen came to Kew only as a visitor.
The widowed Duchess of Kent had quarters
given her at Kensington Palace, where she de-
voted herself to educating her daughter for the
crown that would be her almost certain inherit-
ance ; and the Princess was carried about on
temporary sojourns in different parts of the king-
dom, to the marked displeasure of William IV.,
who did not like to be reminded how he was only
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 149
a caretaker of the throne. But more than one
of the royal family still kept residences at Kew,
which, along with her interest in the Gardens,
made Queen Victoria no stranger here.
William IV. did not live at Kew after his
boyhood, though he showed his favour for the
place by enlarging the church. Between his
naval service and his accession, he had homes not
far off, first at Richmond, then at Bushey Park,
in the house turned into a National Physical
Laboratory by almost the last public act of
Queen Victoria. During the scare of the French
invasion, we find the Sailor Prince enrolling him-
self as a private in the Teddington Volunteers,
perhaps a mere honorary enlistment, as elsewhere
he is spoken of as commanding a Volunteer force
styled the Spelthorne Legion, Spelthorne being
the south-western Hundred of Middlesex. Loyal
Kew did not fail to have its own company, with
the chief gardener as lieutenant, and John Haver-
field as Chairman of the Committee appointed at
a general meeting of the inhabitants, August 3,
1803. The strength of the company was
sixty men, with two drummers, two fifers, a
fugleman and an armourer ; and there appears
to have been no lack of recruits, one of the rules
150 KEW GARDENS
providing that vacancies should be filled up
" from those who have offered their services,
according to their character and permanent con-
tinuance in the Parish." Discipline was main-
tained by fines, as in the case of " Every person
appearing intoxicated at drill or exercise shall
immediately quit the ranks, and be fined one
shilling." This made part of what is spoken of
as the King's Own Regiment, and doubtless it did
not want for royal countenance.
When Victoria came to the throne, it is
understood that some bigoted Tories inclined
towards a plot for raising the cry of "No
Popery ! " as excuse for giving the Crown to
Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who, without
question, succeeded to Hanover. This bigoted
and bitter-tongued Prince was the most unpopular
of the whole family, so that, on William's death,
the Duke of Wellington advised him to clear
out of England as fast as possible, "and take
care you don't get pelted." He offended his
mother by marrying a divorced princess, on whom
the moral Queen looked coldly ; the scandal-
loving Charles Greville reports that one of Her
Majesty's latest seizures was brought on by her
wrath when she heard how the Duchesses of
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 151
Cumberland and Cambridge had embraced each
other in Kew Gardens. Ernest was by no means
a fool, and seems to have had a good deal of
character and courage, but also a perfect itch for
rubbing people's sore points. In his German
kingdom he ruled with a high hand, getting his
own way more easily than in England, and play-
ing the bully not only with those who opposed
him, but with his subservient courtiers, as
appears in the reminiscences of his chaplain,
Mr. Wilkinson.
The hatred for him in London had come out
at the time of a mysterious tragedy enacted
(1810) in his apartments at St. James's, when the
Duke was found bleeding from several sword
cuts, and in an adjoining room, locked inside, his
Piedmontese valet, Sellis, lay dead with his throat
cut. The coroner's jury gave a verdict that
Sellis had committed suicide after trying to
assassinate his master ; but many were inclined
to believe that the murder had been " the other
way on " ; and an unfortunate printer went to
prison for publishing such suspicions. A genera-
tion later, heads were again shaken over a strange
robbery of the registers from Kew Church : men
whispered the name of one illustrious parishioner
152 KEW GARDENS
who might have an interest in hiding some
record of his youth. Nothing seemed too bad
to be believed of this Prince, whose ambition
to reign over us, if attained, would probably
have turned the kingdom into a republic.
The Duke of Cumberland had a house at
Kew, which stood at the north-west corner of
the Green, and became adapted as the present
Herbarium and Library, the new block built
after his death in 1851. Here he lived occasion-
ally even while King of Hanover ; and here was
born his son Prince George, whose birthday was
long kept on the Green, as an old inhabitant
tells us : " We used to have the climbing-pole,
the jumping in sacks, the grinning through horse-
collars, the running for shifts, and the pig with a
soaped tail, to the infinite delight of the laughter-
loving section of the parish." This British-born
Prince was the blind King of Hanover, who, so
sadly inheriting one of his grandfather's infirmi-
ties, lived to be dethroned by the Prussian
armies, and to retire to a paradise exile among
the Austrian lakes, its lovely scenery lost on him,
while, like his grandfather, he found comfort in
music. I can recall a touching glimpse of him
in his latter days as he came out of a London
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 153
hotel leaning on the arm of an equerry or
some such attendant, whose duty, one supposes,
would be to nudge his master when any saluta-
tions had to be done. A small crowd of butchers'
and bakers' boys and the like had gathered to
stare at the equipage, and the blind King bowed
graciously right and left to an unappreciative
public, that simply stared at him without the
least sign of respect.
The one branch of the royal family that kept
up closer connection with Kew, till quite lately,
was the Cambridges. The good-natured and
popular Prince Adolphus had his town residence
at Cambridge House, Piccadilly, afterwards
occupied by Lord Palmerston, now the Naval
and Military Club, known to cabmen as the " In
and Out," from the drive behind which it stands
back from the street. The Duke of Cambridge
held also Cambridge Cottage, marked by its
portico, on the west side of the Green ; and it
was in the church here that he gave amusement
and scandal by his habit of talking aloud to
himself, after a trick of his father's. When the
parson read out " Let us pray," the Duke would
respond, "With all my heart," but when the
prayer for rain came on, he audibly remarked
154 KEW GARDENS
" No use till the wind changes ! " Then on the
story of Zacchaeus being read, " Behold, the half
of my goods I give to the poor," his Royal
Highness's outspoken comment was " No, no !
that's too much for any man no objection to
a tenth!" The Rev. Mr. Wilkinson, in the
Reminiscences above-mentioned, asserts that one
nervous curate was driven out of the parish by
princely interruptions to the service, not to
speak of criticisms on the sermon. " A damned
good sermon ! " was the remark Sir William
Gregory heard him make, coming out of a
London chapel where the preacher had eloquently
held forth against swearing. The Duke was
buried in Kew Church, while his brother of
Sussex chose to "lie among the people" at
Kensal Green, where indeed he lies among such
mere " people " as Thackeray, Leigh Hunt, Tom
Hood, Sydney Smith, Isambard Brunei, George
Cruikshank, John Leech, and a whole academy
of R.A/S. In Kensal Green Cemetery also was
buried the last Duke of Cambridge, beside his
wife Mrs. Fitz-George, who seems to have won
love as well as respect in her anomalous position.
This Duke, the Commander-in-Chief of our
day, was born and partly brought up in Hanover,
THE VILLAGE : IN AND ABOUT IT 155
of which his father had been Regent. He had
there two English nurses, Mrs. Page and Mrs.
Ford, names that gave George IV. the cue for a
jocular remark, " The Merry Wives of Windsor."
It was after King William's death, when Ernest
succeeded to Hanover, that the Cambridge
family came back to live at Kew, of which their
eldest son is found remarking in Olendorffian
style, " The houses we occupy are very bad, but
the place itself is very cheerful." It is not
recorded of him that he interfered with the
Church service, though his everyday language
was criticised as too much borrowed from its
comminatory forms. In 1866, his sister, the
Princess Mary of Cambridge, was married at
Kew Church to the Duke of Teck, to whom
was given the White Lodge in Richmond Park,
whence came a bride for our present Prince of
Wales.
The last quasi-royal function at Kew was
the marriage in 1899 of the Princess Marie,
grandchild of the Dowager Grand Duchess of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who, as daughter of the
former Duke of Cambridge, is the sole surviving
grand-daughter of George III. At the parish
church, in presence of the Prince of Wales and
156 KEW GARDENS
several other members of the royal family, the
young Princess was married to Count Jametal,
by a bevy of clergymen, among whom the Rev.
F. F. Reavely, Rector of Lexham, took a chief
part at the Grand Duchess' special request.
The wedding breakfast was given at Cambridge
Cottage, which, till the death of the late Duke,
remained a link between Kew and royalty.
It is understood to have been since offered to
various members of the royal family, who
declined it as involving too much expense in
repairs and upkeep ; and it now seems likely to
be in some way turned to public use, like the
rest of King George's property here.
VISITING THE GARDENS
KEW has grown out to run into Richmond by
blocks of commonplace suburban houses, some
of which boast to stand on a dozen feet of
gravel. The quaint Georgian mansions have
mostly sunk in relative importance; and the
homely cottages that once neighboured them
have gone, or are like to go, though some of
them still do a trade in refreshments, notably in
sixpenny and ninepenny teas served to holiday
parties. One side of the Green, turning from
the Bridge to the main gate, is a row of houses
and gardens of entertainment, at the doors of
which, on a Sunday afternoon, clamorous touts
strive to draw in the coming and going streams
of sightseers, thus admitted to dwellings where
celebrities of the past may once have been at
home. This is a sign how as Kew waned in
157
158 KEW GARDENS
aristocratic favour, it waxed as a scene of
popular resort, through the attractions of its
oasis in Greater London's desert of brick and
mortar.
From all parts of London it is easy to get to
Kew, by railways from north and south to
either side of the river, by tramways to the
Brentford end of the Bridge, by omnibuses, of
which specimens may soon be worth preserving
in museums along with fossil trees and Ichthyo-
saurus skeletons ; and by steamboats plying in
summer time up the devious reaches of the
river. The Gardens are open at all reasonable
hours of daylight, and their hot-houses after
midday. It is on Sunday and holiday after-
noons, naturally, that His Majesty's subjects take
most advantage of their privileges, and, of course,
fine weather will help to waft abroad the poet's
invitation to "Come down to Kew in lilac-
time"
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's
wonderland.
The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you'll hear
him there,
At Kew, at Kew in lilac- time (and oh, so near to London !)
VISITING THE GARDENS 159
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long
halloo,
And golden-eyed tit-whit, tu-ivhoo of owls that ogle London.
For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard
At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to London !)
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires
are out
You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for
London.
This minstrel, as is the way witli his order,
has an eye upon one sweetest season and upon
one frequent class of visitors, who, when they
get to Kew, might almost as well, it seems, be
anywhere else. Noah, whose ornithological
experience should have been larger than Mr.
Noyes contemplates, was familiar with a pheno-
menon often seen at Kew, of visitors going in
couples, all eyes for one another, with no more
regard to their leafy and flowery surroundings
than may suffice to give a vague sense of tread-
ing primrose paths. Such pairs are observed to
seek out retired nooks, where perhaps they light
on a wonderland hidden from more curious
survey. I can tell of a blind man every day
taking a walk in those spacious gardens. One can
see spectacled gentlemen peering into the hot-
houses and museums, who may be suspected of
160 KEW GARDENS
a studious intent. But by far the majority of
holiday visitors come clearly in a true holiday
spirit, roaming here and there like butterflies
from clump to clump of bloom or greenery, to
carry away a general impression of something
bearing the same relation to their own familiar
back gardens as Windsor Castle or Chatsworth
to a semi-detached suburban villa.
The visitors make as miscellaneous a collec-
tion as the plants. Exotic promenaders will be
common on Sundays, when our foreign guests
are apt to complain of a want of public amuse-
ments. All classes are represented, from dis-
guised millionaires perhaps seeking a hint for
their own newly laid out grounds, to servant
girls fondly persuaded that the lilies of the field
can show nothing to match the glories of their
holiday array. Family parties are much in
evidence. There is always a large proportion of
youngsters, whose parents and guardians may be
tempted to improve the occasion with useful
information, more or less correct. Here would
be a chance for Mr. Barlow to open the minds
of Masters Sandford and Merton, or for the
tutor of Evenings at Home to lecture his in-
quisitive pupils. But the reader need not be
VISITING THE GARDENS 161
afraid of me as likely to abuse an opportunity of
being dull and dry, if I were qualified to play the
botanic pedagogue. I shall not even attempt to
be a guide to the Gardens, which have their own
official hand-books sold at the entrance ; I only
invite the visitor to stroll about with me in a
desultory manner, while together we make a few
observations and reflections on this great national
collection.
Kew Gardens have been boasted the finest
and most complete botanical collection in the
world, as they certainly are if a handicap be
allowed for a climate suggesting the antipodes
of Eden. Their chief rival is perhaps the
Buitenzorg Gardens of Java, where the Dutch
turn for horticulture has full play upon the
glories of tropical vegetation brought as it were
to a focus. A thousand feet above the sea,
amid magnificent volcanic forest-clad scenery,
Buitenzorg, Sans Souci, the Richmond of
Batavia, basks under a sunny sky that yet is by
no means parching, for Miss North was inter-
rupted at her easel here by rain coming down
regularly each afternoon in such sheets and
torrents that five minutes would turn the roads
into streams a foot deep. The gardeners need
162 KEW GARDENS
be at little trouble or expense for watering this
exuberant greenery, through which runs an
avenue of foliage arched a hundred feet above
the ground, each tree wreathed with a different
creeper, "sending down sheets of greenery and
lovely flowers." Here, amid a court of "all the
gorgeous water-lilies of the world," the Victoria
Regia flourishes in the open air, as at Kew only in
its hothouse shelter. Here grows the Rafflesia,
named after Sir Stamford Raffles founder of
our Zoological Gardens, as of Singapore called
the largest flower in the world, at Kew re-
presented only by a wax model, which seems
just as well, since this vegetable monster,
measuring some yards across, soon becomes
foully infested by insects, so as to putrefy with
a disgusting smell. Here, too, a palm like a
gigantic primrose is said to have the largest fruit
and the largest leaves of any tree in the world,
the former two, and the latter ten feet in
diameter. For Javan curators, indeed, the
trouble is to provide in coo/-houses such shelter
as artificially heated conservatories are under our
scrimped sunshine ; and a separate Garden, some
thousands of feet higher up, makes an asylum
for our familiar plants carefully cultivated as a
VISITING THE GARDENS 163
pigmy show of exotics in the East. Our most
tenderly nursed enclosures might cut a poor
figure in a climate that does its own gardening.
With all the money spent at Kew, one can
imagine what results might be produced, where,
outside of the Gardens, Miss North could draw
a picture far more highly coloured than anything
fairly to be said for Kew Green, or for the
Thames bank at Brentford.
The view from the bridge in the very High Street of
Buitenzorg was the richest scene I ever saw. A rushing
river running deep down between high banks, covered
with a tangle of huge bamboos, palms, tree-ferns, bread-
fruit, bananas, and papaw trees, matted together with
creepers, every individual plant seeming finer and fresher
than other specimens of the same sort, and the larger such
plants were, the grander their curves. Then they had the
most exquisite little basket-work dwellings hidden away
amongst them, and in the distance was a bamboo bridge
a sort of magnified human spider's web. Looking
straight along the street from the bridge was another
pretty view little shops full of gaily coloured things,
such as scarlet janiboa fruit, yellow bananas, pomelas,
melons, pines, and hot peppers of the brightest reds and
greens. Pretty birds in bamboo cages, people in every
shade of purple, scarlet, pink, turquoise blue, emerald
green, and lemon yellow ; small copper-coloured children
carrying all their garments on the tops of their heads,
grass-cutters carrying inverted cones of green fastened to
their bamboos and almost hiding them. Long avenues
164 KEW GARDENS
of huge banyan trees bordered the principal drive to the
palace, with large birdVnest ferns growing on their
branches, each tree forming a small plantation of itself,
with its hanging roots and offsets from the branches.
Herds of spotted deer used to rest in the shade under
these trees, and parties of the great crested ground pigeon,
as big as turkeys, were always to be found there.
The Botanic Garden near Rio de Janeiro,
also, has tropical features we can hardly match,
such as its colonnade of palms, a living temple
overtopping the suburban avenues in which tram
lines have been planted by foreign capital. Then
the Gardens of Peradenia in Ceylon gather such
a bouquet of choice flora as an enraptured
traveller compares to " the paradise of some
Eastern tale, designed and inhabited by invisible
genii." Our Australian colonies, so well off for
sun, if not for water, are undertaking to show the
Old Country what can be done in this way by
children freed from some of her disadvantages.
Sydney, besides its rich Botanic Gardens, can
afford to keep stretches of wild scenery preserved
in all their unkempt luxuriance ; and behind
Melbourne Nature itself has a giant grove of
gum-trees, rising from the undergrowth of ferns
that with us would rank as tall trees. And, of
course, in many other parts of the world, com-
VISITING THE GARDENS 165
paratively little expense can bring together a
collection of our rare and delicate blooms, there
ranking as weeds.
AVe are better off for money and skill, that at
Kew have done so much to acclimatise or safe-
guard the productions of more favoured climes.
What may be called the heart of the Gardens,
on the side towards the Richmond road, is the
Great Palm House, hardly great enough, as
from time to time some of its pushing guests
have to be turned out or snuffed down for fear
of their prising off the roof. This huge hot-
house enshrines a medley collection of tropical
forms, grand and graceful, brought together from
Africa, Asia, America and Polynesia, getting
their fill of heat and moisture, if not of sunshine.
One guide-book says that almost every variety
of palms is represented in the exotic jumble,
which is rather too much to say, as their species
are counted by hundreds, about a hundred in
the woods of the Amazon alone. The most
striking trees here, looking ill at ease in the
confinement of their tubs, are specimens of the
pandanus or screw -pine, with its sword -like
leaves and its stilt-like roots, propping the top
in the air "with its trunk hid for repairs, as
166 KEW GARDENS
it were, among an enclosure of scaffolding."
Young and eupeptic visitors will inquire for the
coco-nut, whose fruit reaches them only in a
dry, curdled, shrunken state, poorly representing
its fibrous green globes filled with soft butter
and refreshing milk. The double coco -nut of
the Seychelles to be seen here is only a distant
relation, whose nuts, like a pair of giant's boxing-
gloves joined together, grow " full of white jelly,
enough to fill the largest soup-tureen." It was
one of General Gordon's crotchets to regard this
as the forbidden fruit of Eden ; but at Kew, Eve
could surely have found apples more tempting
of aspect for example, the Japanese date-plum
in the Succulent House. One must not, how-
ever, attempt a catalogue of all the vegetable
strangers coaxed and coddled to grow in an
asylum, which might have taken a larger scale
had a proposal been carried out to transfer
the Crystal Palace to Kew rather than to
Norwood.
Near the Palm House stands the Tropical
Lily House, where now the Victoria Regia
should open in July its huge white flowers tinged
with royal red. This queen of water-lilies, that
first flowered in Britain at Chatsworth, has to
VISITING THE GARDENS 167
content itself here with a tank, as an exiled
sovereign may have to come down to hotel
lodgings ; but in its native Guiana, it blocks up
canals and spangles lake swamps opening in the
flowery woods. The leaves are often as broad
as a man's height, with upturned rims, so that
Indian women can cradle their children upon
them safely while the mother does her washing
in the river fringed with such weeds of truly
"glorious feature." In the same conservatory,
among other water-plants, are the papyrus reeds
among which Moses was set floating, in our day
crowded out of fertile Egypt, but they are found
growing lustily so near as Sicily ; while their
old economic importance, that naturalised the
name in our language, has dwindled now that
we can turn wood-pulp into cheap paper.
I lately found the Victoria Regia enthroned
in this, its original nursery; but a guide-book
locates it in what, I understand, was its quarters
for a time, the group of hot-houses numbered
from seven to thirteen, which stand not far from
the Cumberland Gate entrance. They have a
show of other aquatic plants, and freaks of Nature
like the pitcher-plants and living fly-traps, able
to feed themselves on insects lured to their
168 KEW GARDENS
intoxicating cups that act upon the drugged
victim like the digestive organs of an animal.
Here are billeted the delicate orchids, living on
moist warm air, which in our day have been
brought to flower in succession all through the
year, even by electric light under the smoky
glass of Birmingham, sought out for our hot-
houses so diligently that in their tropical wilds
some of the richest sorts begin to grow rare,
while of a thousand specimens gained perhaps at
the cost of felling as many trunks, but a few
may survive the trying journey, at the end of
which is worth more than its weight in gold
what ran wild as a parasite weed in the tree-tops
of the Magdalena or the Orinoco.
This group of hot -houses cools off into a
conservatory of South African plants, containing
potted heaths such as bloom over vast stretches
of Karroo, along with specimens of the curious
Japanese art of dwarfing trees. For a contrast
to these nurseries of tender exotics, one might
turn to the Rock Garden beside them, towards
the Cumberland Gate, where Alpine and other
hardy growths thrive in a hollow set with rockery
supplied by the destruction of one or more of
those fanciful structures of the Georgian age
VISITING THE GARDENS 169
that still dot the grounds here and there Temple
of ^Eolus, Temple of the Sun, and so forth.
Beyond the Rock Garden lies the Herbaceous
Ground's gathering of homely plants ; and at its
entrance, overshadowed by Museum II., a little
Alpine House accommodates Nature's hardy
dwarfs, needing no such costly shelter as her
tropical Brobdignagians.
But we have not yet done with the hot-
houses. Just beyond the egress of the South
African annexe, another group begins with the
Succulent House, holding a store of fleshy,
scaly, spiky and prickly forms of the cactus and
aloe tribes, having so many odd uses, as the
" vegetable cows " milked three times a day in
Mexico, that their juice may be fermented into
the national thin tipple pulque, tasting like
buttermilk with a dash of sulphur, while the
root of another aloe yields mezcal as a stronger
drink. One American cactus is not so carefully
cultivated as it once was to rear the cochineal
insect that dyed "England's cruel red," now
procured more cheaply from aniline dyes first
made under the group of tall chimneys below
Harrow Hill. In South Africa aloes grow
almost as tall as chimney stacks, so it would take
170 KEW GARDENS
the British Museum dome to house them. This
indeed is not the same plant as the American
aloe, better distinguished as the agave, whose
flowering stem may rise to the height of half
a dozen men, so here we must be content witli
miniature specimens to fit the Succulent House.
Beside this collection stands a greenhouse glow-
ing with bloom inside panes dimmed by frosty
fog ; then beyond open smaller nurseries of
tropical and filmy ferns. Outside, here, is sup-
ported a huge wistaria, once wreathing the
walls of a conservatory now removed.
Last comes, what may be visited first, as its
Grecian front almost faces the main entrance,
the Aroid House, describable as a chapel of ease
to the Palm House, close packed with a smaller
congregation of swollen greenery, sucking in the
edifying moisture that congeals on the glassy
walls, and blinds for a minute or two one's
spectacled eyes, suddenly brought from the
atmosphere of our zone to that of the Equator.
From such artificial snuggeries it seems
doubly dismal to turn out into the raw air of a
truly British November, in which a few forlorn
roses may still be struggling to hold up their
faded heads, and dank evergreens wear hardly
VISITING THE GARDENS 171
a more cheerful aspect than the sere leaves, " last
of their clan," that flutter down to be swept
off the glistening grass. And yet those repre-
sentatives of another climate, so carefully
gathered and preserved, give but a poor idea of
the teeming wildernesses that know no change
of season but from baking heat to swamping rain,
their rank vegetation always glowing under the
breath of a fierce spring, while decaying in ever-
lasting autumn beneath the richest mantles, and
if there be any winter it is the daily frost of
paralysing heat. The tropics come more truly
before us in descriptions such as one might quote
from a score of eloquent travellers, for example
this by an American writer, W. H. Hurlbut :
The wastes of Northern Cuba are jungles of closely
twining plants, gay with the myriad hues of strange,
magnificent flowers, and overtopped by gigantic trees,
whose trunks are not less gay with fantastic embroideries,
and from whose Briarean arms hang countless veils and
fringes of creeping plants, the names of which cause
upon the ear the same indefinite impression of savage
magnificence that is made by their blended, indistinguish-
able forms upon the eye. All things which to us of the
temperate zones are creatures of boxes and bales, creations,
we might perhaps as truly say, of the merchant and the
grocer, meet us here at every turn, wild and bold in the
woods ; the fan-like cacao tree, the spreading vanilla, the
172 KEW GARDENS
parasite tamarind, the gaunt and desolate guava. The
cactus no longer struggles for existence in the feeble sun-
shine of a three -pair back window with a southern
exposure, but, swollen to the size of a scrub oak, impedes
your way with its dull, hideous, prickly leaves, and flaunts
its great flowers in your face. You may cure your thirst
by day with the sweet clear waters of the cocoa-nut. You
may cool your heated eyes by night with such floods of
golden moonlight as would have driven Shelley mad.
The moon, which gives expression to the most tedious
landscape and the most unmeaning face, and converts the
delight of gazing upon beauty into a kind of frenzy, the
moon makes all men Endymions in Cuba.
But if, amid hints and samples of such
luxuriance, the well-clad visitor feels his spirit
" falter in the mist " and be inclined to " languish
for the purple seas " of the South, let him consider
how with a certain relief he escapes from the
damp, dripping, sticky heat of these glass-houses
into our untempered breezes, a little exercise
soon setting his blood in tune with a climate
that from the cradle goads one to be always
doing something, if only throwing stones, that
here would be a most objectionable pastime for
our versatile youth. It is the sons of a
temperate zone who are stirred into building
palm houses or setting out to hunt for treasures
of the tropics, when tired of hunting in play
VISITING THE GARDENS 173
wild animals kept for the purpose at home. As
further comfort, let a stay-at-home study the
reports of travellers to note how soon they grow
sick of tropical glare and glow, of the crude
and garish tints of rank evergreenery, of the
" chromo-lithograph midsummer" that wants
tenderness, sweetness, variety, and contrast, of
the endless monotonies of shade and the blinding
dazzle of perpetual sunshine chequered by a
"scorched darkness" that brings no rest how
they sigh for refreshing showers that come in
their season as a devastating deluge, for weeks
and months together turning into feverish mud
the choking dust and the soil cracked as if
gasping for breath, where masterful Nature, if at
least she knows her own mind, is always in
violent extremes. I was once in a desert oasis
when it had the prodigious experience of a wet
day, not in bursts of storm but in gently drop-
ping rain, and I shall never forget the satisfaction
with which the natives turned out to bask in
weather so familiar to us as to be hardly worth
grumbling at.
I, too, have peeped into those stifling Arcadias,
and have known what it is to hail a "mango
shower " or a sea breeze. But I quote for high
174 KEW GARDENS
and wide authority a Ulysses indeed, Dr. A. R.
Wallace, who after years spent in the richest
regions on both sides of the world, can tell us
that the luscious shows picked into a nosegay
in our hot -houses ill counterfeit those natural
jungles where blossoms are drowned in a flood
of sombre green, and the brightest flowers,
climbing upwards in the universal struggle for
light, waste their full blown beauty on the
parching sky, invisible to the wanderer, unless
in an airship he could surmount the lofty roof
of foliage beneath which he may have to push
and hew his tunnelled way through obstruction
of dense underwood. This explorer declares
that he has wandered for days in tropical forests
without coming on any bloom so gay as a haw-
thorn or a honeysuckle ; and he has never seen
in Brazil or Malaysia "such brilliant masses of
colour as even England can show in her furze-
clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her
glades of wild hyacinth, her fields of poppies,
her meadows of buttercups and daisies."
Sir E. Im Thurn bears out Wallace's view
with some qualification: "At no time is the
Guiana leafage as splendid as in an ordinary
English wood either in the early spring or in
VISITING THE GARDENS 175
the glorious golden autumn time. But on the
other hand, the tropical forest throughout the
year is more variously coloured . . . due partly
to the fact that without special season for the
bursting or the fall of the leaves, throughout the
year it has trees both putting out new leaves,
white, or brilliantly tinted with green, pink, or
red, and others from which drop leaves with red,
yellow, and bronze colours burned deeply into
them by the blazing sun ; and partly to the fact
that in it trees of innumerable kinds, each with
foliage slightly distinct in colour, grow inter-
mingled. . . . The whole amount of colour
afforded by flowers is probably not very different
in tropical and in temperate trees, but is differ-
ently distributed." But, to be fair to the tropical
woods, so often drowned in the exuberance of
their own greenery, it should be remembered
how river banks and other open edges may show
bright with hanging clusters of bloom and radiant
festoons climbing to the tree -tops, while the
ground, parched and swamped by turns, will lack
that carpet of sweet and humble flowers, spring-
ing among soft turf, that is the special charm of
an English spring.
" What can they know of England who only
176 KEW GARDENS
England know," seems at present the favourite
tag of imperially minded journalists. It might
be more truly said that only they who know
the world know how much England has to be
thankful for in the climate we are so ready to
abuse. Their eyes are opened to see how Nature
in our island has all the loveliest tints on her
palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe
their chief charm to the supposed defect of
uncertainty, even as your Didos and Cleopatras
varium et mutabile would less surely enchant
in the form of stereotyped models of the most
admired virtues.
Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which
travellers are emphatically in one tale, is the
innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we
imitate at Kew here filtered from its hostile
engenderings the maddening mosquitoes that
swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic tundras ;
the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that
prey upon the traveller's kit and torture his skin
like a shirt of Nessus ; harpy moths that have
to be driven from one's food ; swarms of earwigs
which some African adventurers have found the
hatefulest enemy of their march. Kew breeds
no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural
VISITING THE GARDENS 177
paradises where the blaze that scares away lions
or leopards only attracts darting spiders and
scurrying scorpions to a couch already made
restless by buzzing and biting pests ; where the
ground hides flesh-burrowing ticks and fleas, and
the air is thick with invisible stings, and the
trees bear venomous caterpillars ; where one
durst not smell a flower for fear of inhaling
some noxious parasite, and our loathsomest
bugs would seem hardly worth noticing among
bloated cockroaches and hideous centipedes ;
where countless flies lay seeds of death in man
and beast, not to speak of clouds of locusts that
sometimes darken the sky like a snow-storm,
and if they could cross the Channel, might fall
on this Thames-side garden to eat up its greenery
in an hour.
And the noises of those sweltering thickets,
which at night a new-comer in South America
compares to some factory worked by whirling,
whistling and hissing demons ! Even the gloomy
stillness of noon, broken by the fall of some big
fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball,
or by some seed-capsule exploding with a report
like a shot, even this heavy siesta of Nature is
not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as Hum-
23
178 KEW GARDENS
boldt says, one can catch a faint stifled under-
tone, a buzz and hum of insects that crowd the
earth and the lowest strata of air, a confused
vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from
the cracked bark of trees, from the soil burrowed
by creeping things, proclaims life audibly manifest
to him who listens. But it is the evening, our
emblem of peace, the welcome twilight through
which the ploughboy goes whistling home, that
wakes tropical shades to an untuned concert of
croaking, screaming, chattering, wailing, howling,
and humming, when the darkness seems alive
with invisible cracklings, patterings, scratchings,
skippings and rustlings, silenced for the moment
by the blood-curdling growl and crashing spring
of some beast of prey, and the piercing death-
screech of its victim echoing far where every
foot of ground is scene for nightly tragedies.
One need be no Macbeth to have one's sleep
murdered by alarms and excursions for which
heated imagination acts as a megaphone. " The
clamour of the jackals over a carcass suggests
a band of hungry wolves. A mongoose having
it out with a rat beneath the floor is like an
animal Armageddon. Does your faithful dog
growl in the verandah, you make sure a leopard
VISITING THE GARDENS 179
is about to pounce upon him. A restless horse
seems to be trampling like a must elephant
And perhaps over all comes the roar of the
tiger, nothing indeed to be afraid of, as he would
go silent enough if attending to his bad business.
Such are the torments of a sweltering Indian
night, that give an Englishman cause to thank
the goodness and the grace that made his birth-
place in a land where a caterwauling puss or a
scratching mouse would be the worst of nocturnal
bugbears."
We Britons, lulled to sleep by the tramp of
the policeman and the watch-dog's honest bark,
have some reason for calling "sour grapes" to
the products of those giant greenhouse regions,
East and South, where Nature appears to ex-
haust herself in labyrinths of swelling beauty and
grandeur. But if the tropical trees had tongues,
they might tell us that we do not judge them
fairly in this cramped setting, fettered beneath
roofs of glass, condemned to unnatural silence
and restraint; imprisoned along with strange
companions ; stinted from full meals of equatorial
storm to the trickling of a rubber hose that can
no longer clasp their trunks in creeping embraces ;
robbed of the sunshine that floods their native
180 KEW GARDENS
air with fiery gold, and given in exchange the
dull comfort of hot- water pipes ; deserted by the
radiant birds, the shining insects, and the glitter-
ing reptiles that should people their drooping
branches, among which the stir of missing
monkey - troops seems feebly aped by the
murmurs and movements of workmen hidden
in the galleries.
For another kind of more or less unfamiliar
vegetation we must seek the Temperate House,
further up the central walks towards the Pagoda.
In this, boasting itself the largest winter garden
in the world, are collected specimens of sun-
loving plants, from the acacias of Australia to
the cacti of Mexico. The most venerable growth
here seems a shoot of that now crumbled dragon-
tree at Orotava, which Humboldt renowned as
the oldest tree in the world. The most imposing
are the araucarias in the central aisles, one of
them the famous Norfolk Island pine, that in its
own home will reach a height of two hundred
feet. Some of these Antipodean strangers can be
won to grow in British soil ; some would flourish
under its sky, but for their rooted habit of being
most active in our nipping winter. For to their
native soil, the seasons, of course, come reversed
VISITING THE GARDENS 181
from ours, where colonial children must be
puzzled by our poets' view of January and of
July, as we are by allusions seasonable at the
other end of the world :
Perspiring round our Christmas fare,
In vain we long for snow :
Midsummer day, we fain would sit
Around the Yule-tide's glow.
The characteristic growth of Australia is the
eucalyptus or gum-tree, in its many varieties,
among which the blue gum is best known as
widely transplanted to thrive in Europe and
other parts of the globe. One species seems
entitled to the distinction of being the tallest of
trees, growing to a height of four hundred and
fifty feet and more, so as perhaps to look down
even upon the mammoth sequoia of California,
which we have so impertinently renamed the
Wellingtonia. The question of aerial precedence
between these two, indeed, depending upon
doubtful measurements, may be taken as not
quite settled, and Uncle Sam is loth to admit
anything of his as less than the greatest in
the world ; but he should know how Sir J. D.
Hooker is quoted by Grant Duff as setting
down his boastful mammoths for ugly trees,
182 KEW GARDENS
which is what no one can say of John Bull's
oaks.
The isolated specimens of Australian vegeta-
tion cabined and cribbed at Kew, give no fair
sample of the eucalyptus forests in which leagues
upon leagues of bare straight stems, standing
sullenly apart, will rise from a hundred to two
hundred feet before throwing out their scraggy
crown of dull and drooping foliage, that casts a
thin unchanging shade upon the ground littered
with peeling bark rather than with fallen leaves.
In this monotonous scenery one might be grate-
ful for our vernal woods and autumnal hedge-
rows ; and still more so when lost in one of the
" scrubs," packed close with malicious dwarf trees,
thorny bushes, spear-like grasses, and tangled
heaths, that are the dry jungles of Australia's
inland plains.
Australia, besides her tree-like flowers, has
trees rich in bright blooms : the " fire-tree " and
the "flame-tree" that make a blaze of red and
orange upon hill-sides miles away, the crooked
" honeysuckle " with its yellow " bottle brushes,"
the odd " grass-tree " bearing up a tuft of sharp
leaves from which springs several feet of flowery
stalk, the " miall-tree " with its streaming foliage
VISITING THE GARDENS 188
and scent of violets, and the other innumerable
acacias, here known as " wattles," that can light
up even the gloom of the scrub with their gay
blossoms. These growths are apt to run to
flowers rather than to fruit, the native berries
being sweeter to the eye than to the tooth ; and,
while the flowers lack perfume, it is the leaves
that are often fragrant, sometimes loading the
air with an aroma wafted leagues out to sea.
Then there are fine timber-trees, magnificent
cedars, the umbrageous blackwood, the funereal
casuarina or she-oak, whose dark branches droop
willow-like over the fitful streams ; the jarrah
and the karri belonging to the eucalyptus order,
the latter voted its most noble form. New
Zealand, too, has magnificent and beautiful trees
its kauri, king of conifers, its forests of tree-fern,
its jungles of flowering shrubs, its glowing rata
parasite, strangling the trunk that nursed it by
sucking the sap into its own masses of crimson
bloom, like a cuckoo of the vegetable world.
But our first Antipodean colonists would ex-
change a wilderness of such glories for a patch
of English turf; and their sons still love to
surround themselves with the humble garden
flowers and hardy blossoms of " home," yielding
184 KEW GARDENS
to no land in fresh and tender tints, however it
may be surpassed in gorgeous and gigantic
growths. Many of our familiar plants, indeed,
have been introduced at the Antipodes with
sometimes too much success. The branches of
apple and pear trees will there break down under
their teeming crop ; the thistles rashly imported
into Australia by some patriotic Scot have
thriven to the rank of a nuisance, like the
rabbits ; the sturdy British gorse and sweet-brier
outshoot their native modesty and the design
of colonists who thought to make them serve as
hedges ; and our weeds and hedge plants take so
kindly to New Zealand soil as to have overlaid
the native flora in some districts, where the
coarse indigenous grass soon gives place to
succulent meadows spangled with daisies and
primroses. Water-cress, transplanted to New
Zealand, has grown as troublesome as the
American weed in our canals, to the point of
causing floods by damming up the streams upon
which it takes a new exuberant life.
As measles or influenza fastens upon fresh
blood like a plague, so do many of our down-
trodden plants become bumptious and aggressive
in the stimulating air of a new world, wherever
VISITING THE GARDENS 185
they find a not forbidding environment, and a
fair chance to elbow a place for themselves in
the struggle for existence. In a less degree,
the same conquest is to be noted in America,
the old -settled Eastern States having been
largely colonised by imported growths, while
the indigenous flora retreated with the Red Man
to the inland woods and prairies. From the more
southerly regions of America, we Europeans
have got more than we give, in Indian corn, the
tomato, the pineapple, and the hardy potato,
that for our damp Western islands has come to
be the staff of life as it was on the dry sunny
heights of its native Bolivia, though in Britain,
as in some parts of the Continent, it had at
first to live down most pig-headed prejudices.
Besides naturalising the productions of other
climates, Kew has the less noted function of
exporting our seeds to try their luck abroad, as,
for instance, barrels of acorns hence sent to take
prosperous root in South Africa.
For the timbers, huge, rich, rare, beautiful
and useful, of these exotic trees, and for their
products, we turn to the Museums and Economic
Houses that are the most instructive part of this
exhibition. Here Masters Sandford and Merton
24
186 KEW GARDENS
might spend many days in enlarging their
mental prospects. The cane, for instance, chiefly
familiar to them on the seat of chairs, or perhaps
by a use that renders sitting a property of
uneasiness, they will learn from Mr. Barlow to
belong to a great race of arborescent grasses,
among which the young gentlemen may perhaps
be most interested in the raw and manufactured
products of the sugar-cane. Here their well-
instructed tutor can point out to them how the
bamboo, prince of this race, is beneficent to
many peoples, supplying them with paper, ropes,
hats, weapons, fans, baskets, umbrellas, tents,
mats, boxes, also houses, bridges, masts, sails,
ladders, fences, flutes, and other tools, weapons
and utensils, amply illustrated in the cases of
Museums II. and III.
Off the Rhododendron Walk there is a garden
of feathery bamboos that can make shift to stand
our open air. In the same quarter, a division
labelled Betula is also calculated to throw a
shade over the spirit of Master Merton, if not
of the blameless Harry Sandford, this in the
vernacular being a tree of knowledge too well
known to British youngsters of past generations
for its base use, frowned on by latter day
VISITING THE GARDENS 187
humanitarians, but a smiling jest to the poets
from Shakespeare to Swinburne
With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays,
For hapless boys to wince at and grow red,
And feel a tingling memory prick their skins.
Now that "the rod becomes more mocked than
used," birch sprays are most familiar to us in the
humble usefulness of a broom. Yet on the
other side of the world there were nations that
would have been hard put to it to do without
this tree, used for many offices, but not for that
above-mentioned, since your cruel Mohawk and
thick-skinned Huron had a strangely sentimental
abhorrence of chastising their impish youngsters,
which, notes a Jesuit missionary, "will hinder
our design to instruct their youth." But mani-
fold were other services of birch in the wigwam
life of the backwoods for walls, roof, furniture,
clothes, torches, powders, poultices, and what
not ; bark was the Red Man's cradle and his
coffin, and the material for his masterpiece of
skill, the canoe ; it even at a pinch filled empty
stomachs, that could hold out for days on the
inner scrapings of bark, when moss, roots, and
berries failed his improvident hardihood.
In other parts of the world, the coco-nut
188 KEW GARDENS
tree is of still more general utility, since it not
only "bears at once the cup and milk and fruit,"
but supplies salad from the young shoots and
toddy from the quickly fermented juice ; bowls
and lamps from its shells, and from its pulp, oil
to fill them ; cordage, mats, ornamental wreaths
and plaited armour from its fibre ; fans, baskets,
thatch from its leaves ; torches from the ribs, and
countless other articles of daily use. The Malays,
who train monkeys to run up the trees and bring
down nuts for their master, have contrived an
ingenious clock which Dr. Wallace saw used by
sailors : in a bucket floats a scraped half-shell
with a small hole bored in the bottom to let in
a thread of water at a rate so exactly calculated
that the shell sinks at the end of an hour. There
are South Sea islands where brackish water
makes the people wholly dependent on this tree
for drink. Then modern trade has given coco-
nuts a new value, dried in the form of copra and
shipped to Marseilles and elsewhere, to have the
oil pressed out for making soap and candles, not
to mention the "best olive oil" of commerce,
while the refuse goes as fattening food for cattle.
That is the main thing we get from Polynesia
and Micronesia in exchange for trousers, sewing-
VISITING THE GARDENS 189
machines, concertinas, and spelling-books. In
Museums I. and II. our young friends may
see what delicate and finely tinted cloth those
islanders could beat out of bark before they
learned to depend too much on our manufactures,
being often more healthy and moral without
the encumbering garments which the early
missionaries considered essential to godliness.
For some islands of the South Seas, the
pandanus, rather, fills the part of universal
provider. The same thing might be said of
other trees in their different regions ; but perhaps
enough has been said on this head, when one
mentions the Brazilian wax -palm (Copernicia
cerifera), which, though it makes no great show
here, according to Mr. J. W. Wells, seems to
be as much of a tree-of-all-work as any other
in the world.
It resists intense and protracted droughts, and is
always green and vigorous ; it produces an equivalent to
sarsaparilla ; a nutritious vegetable like cabbage; wine;
vinegar ; a saccharine substance ; a starch, resembling
and equivalent to sago ; other substances resemble, or by
processes are made to substitute maizena, coffee, cork,
wax, salt, alkali, and coco-nut milk ; and from its various
materials are manufactured wax-candles, soap, mats, hats,
musical instruments, water-tubes, pumps, ropes, and cords,
stakes for fences, timber for joists, rafters, and other
190 KEW GARDENS
materials for building purposes, strong and light fibres
which acquire a beautiful lustre ; and in times of great
drought it has supplied food for the starving inhabitants.
Specimens of those products will be found
chiefly in Museum No. II., illustrating the
economic uses of endogenous or monocoty-
ledonous plants, hard words which Mr. Barlow
might fancifully explain as denoting the gentler
sex of vegetable Nature, its members, from palms
to grasses, being inclined to softness, slenderness
and grace rather than strength. But perhaps
Sandford and Merton might, for once, do well
not to listen to their much-informed preceptor, as
he would probably be imbued with the Linnean
system of classification, now set aside for a more
natural one. The robust timber, better supplied
by sturdily growing exogens, is exhibited in
Museum III., the original "Orangery" built
by Sir W. Chambers, that now makes a world-
fetched show of huge sections of forest giants ;
polished slabs of ornamental wood ; specimens of
native ingenuity in workmanship, from bamboo
toys to an appalling totem post carved upon a
Queen Charlotte Islands cedar. Another feature
here is views and plans of the Gardens at
different periods, the localities often hardly to
VISITING THE GARDENS 191
be identified after successive alterations that
have brought them to their present state.
The largest, and, on the whole, the most
attractive of the Museums is No. I., whose red
face looks across the Pond to the Palm House.
Its staircase is adorned with a window that
reminds one of the rebus designs with which
mediaeval builders recorded their names in a
material pun, for this, removed from the Guild-
hall and presented to the Gardens by Alderman
Cotton, displays on stained glass the stages in
the growth and manufacture of cotton. The
catalogue contains over five hundred entries and
thousands of specimens, most of them capable of
instructing even Macaulay's schoolboy. A large
part of the collection was transferred here from
the India Museum at South Kensington ; but
all quarters of the world are represented. Here
we may see in various states, tea, coffee, cocoa,
wine, tobacco, hops, nutmegs, cloves and other
more or less familiar friends, with some not so
well known in Britain, such as mate, the
Paraguayan tea, which begins to be introduced
among us, while it -goes out of fashion in
Argentine cities, still drunk all day long on the
campos, where also the half-savage Gaucho takes
192 KEW GARDENS
too kindly to "square face" gin and to the
gramophone that drowns the notes of his native
guitar. Here we may indulge due disgust over
outlandish intoxicants : the hemp-plants yielding
"bang" and "hashish," which are in the East
what gin and absinthe are in the West; the
poppy, that is a drug to us but elsewhere a
ruinous dissipation ; the coca leaves, the chewing
of which gives a Bolivian Indian strength to go
on for leagues without food, " but thereof comes
in the end despondency and madness " ; the kava
root of the South Seas, which, first well chewed
by strong-jawed young men or girls, then
steeped in water, gives an infusion like soapsuds
flavoured with Gregory's powder, a luxury not
much appreciated by white men, especially after
seeing its preparation, and usually denied to
women and youngsters, but ceremoniously
presented in coco-nut shells to the grave and
reverend seniors, whom a skinful of it affects
with a peculiar drunkenness, in the legs rather
than the head.
Many medicinal plants here will give us new
ideas or old qualms : the liquorice root, yielding
what is still in our country districts known as
" Spanish juice " ; the senna shrubs, that flourish
VISITING THE GARDENS 193
hardily in deserts to furnish black draughts once
too much imported into British nurseries ; the
castor-oil plant, that bears such big clumps of
flowers blooming under a tropical sun " too fairly
for so foul effect " ; the precious quinine, which
by bold adventurers was stolen from Peruvian
monopoly to thrive on Indian hills and elsewhere.
Passing by such exhibits with a shudder, Masters
Sandford and Merton will be glad to learn how
many doctors nowadays do not much dissent
from O. W. Holmes's dictum that if all drugs,
except quinine and a few other specifics, were at
the bottom of the sea, it would be so much the
better for human health.
Young monkeys, still strong in jaw and
gastric juice, will pay more attention to the
different kinds of nuts, too reckless dealings with
which has often caused nauseous draughts to be
" exhibited " ; and they may be surprised to
learn how the triangular Brazil nuts of our shops
are not independent growths, but neatly packed
in parcels of two dozen or so in a shell like a
cannon ball, so hard and heavy as to crack a
man's skull on which it should fall. The youth
of this generation will not be so much interested
as an old fogey is in carob pods, believed to be
194 KEW GARDENS
the locusts that fed St. John, and that still feed
men and cattle in some parts of the world. The
other day I had a shock of mild surprise in seeing
dried locusts for sale in a back street shop-
window, from which I had supposed them long
vanished ; but in my period of unpampered
stomachs and scrimp pocket-money they had a
great sale among schoolboys, as giving for a
minimum of expenditure a maximum of sweet,
stiff chewing, with this additional recommenda-
tion, that the seeds, scrunched under one's mis-
chievous heel, made a squeaking noise subversive
of discipline a trick, let us trust, never tried on
Mr. Barlow. He will here find a cue to explain
how some fruits that are to us mere luxuries
more or less digestible, such as chestnuts and
dates, make the staple food of certain regions,
not only raw but dried, ground into flour and
baked into bread ; the stones of dates also being
crushed as fodder for North African cattle.
Then here we have the cassava, which in its
native state is deadly poison, but can be prepared
to feed wholesomely many tribes of Africans
and South Americans, and to supply us with our
toothsome tapioca. Here indeed are poisonous
preparations enough to kill all Kew, including
VISITING THE GARDENS 195
the juice of that upas tree of whose deadly
shade a cock-and-bull story took such deep
root in our language that it still affords a
fictitious trope for orators.
Mr. Barlow might find much to say on the
many useful or curious plants here represented,
notably the various trees and creepers whose
juice, once oozing to waste in leafy wildernesses,
now becomes more and more important through
the increasing demand for india-rubber in our
greedy manufactures. But his hearers might
begin to yawn before he had got through one-
tenth of over a hundred cases here laid out for
inspection ; so, as soon as the shower be over
that has driven us into this instructive refuge,
let us go forth into the open air, only pausing
to look respectfully on the portraits of botanists
and explorers, among which the tutor may
point to Sir Joseph Banks, or Baron von
Humboldt, while the pupils will want rather
to identify Captain Cook ; the general public
may be most concerned to see Charles Darwin
or Marianne North ; and those who have had
the patience to read through the foregoing
chapters can pick out George III., Lord Bute,
the Aitons, the Hookers, and other worthies
196 KEW GARDENS
there touched upon in connection with Kew's
history.
It would take one, indeed, from opening to
closing time to go through even the salient
features of these spacious Gardens. What one
turns to by choice will partly depend on taste,
and partly on the season. Early in the year, as
the official guide reminds us, we can look out
for the snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils that
" take the winds of March with beauty." Then
open the tulips about the Palm House, the blue-
bells in the remote corner marked by the Queen's
Cottage, the wild hyacinths beneath the budding
beech -trees ; and horse-chestnut flowers strew
the way to the blooming rhododendron walks ;
and next comes the turn of the azaleas and roses,
till the whole area is overspread by vari-coloured
blooms, in autumn dying with a pale sunset of
chrysanthemums.
There are some who seek out first the richest
flower-beds; others who love the chequered
shade of melodious groves, or the avenues of
cedar, larch, and cypress at the less cleared end
towards Richmond ; others will ask for famous
old trees like that horse-chestnut whose gouty
limbs are railed in near the river bank, a little
VISITING THE GARDENS 197
below the Syon Vista opening across the ferry
from the Palm House, beside the artificial lake
that might be mistaken for a river. Open-eyed
youngsters hang by the pond with its colony of
wild-fowl, on the other side of the Palm House.
Family parties stroll through the chambers of the
" Palace," empty but for a sprinkling of pictures
and relics of royalty. Certain visitors, on hot
days, one observes to spend much time in and
about the refreshment pavilion, towards which
Tommy Merton's eyes will be observed to
wander, while Harry Sandford listens attentively
to a lecture on the adjacent cedars, whose
seeds may have been brought home by Bute's
adventurous mother-in-law, and their branches
to-day wear no air of "sighing for Lebanon."
The official restaurant, not quite so "popular"
as those outside, stands beyond the Palm House,
in an open glade leading up to where the
Pagoda's towering intrusiveness marks the way
to the Lion Gate at the further corner on
the Richmond road. Perhaps fewest visitors
show the preference of Richard Jefferies, so
true a lover of Nature, who casts his vote
for what might strike some of us as the most
commonplace show of the Gardens, by the
198 KEW GARDENS
Cumberland Gate that old story of "Eyes
and no Eyes ! "
Within this enclosure, called the Herbaceous Ground,
heedlessly passed and perhaps never heard of by the
thousands who go to see the Palm Houses, lies to me the
real and truest interest of Kew. For here is a living
dictionary of English wild-flowers. The meadow and the
cornfield, the river, the mountain, and the woodland, the
seashore, the very waste place by the roadside, each has
sent its peculiar representatives, and glancing for the
moment, at large, over the beds, noting their number and
extent, remembering that the specimens are not in the
mass but individual, the first conclusion is that our own
country is the true Flowery Land. But the immediate
value of this wonderful garden is in the clue it gives to
the most ignorant, enabling any one, no matter how un-
learned, to identify the flower that delighted him or her,
it may be, years ago in far-away field or copse. Walking
up and down the green paths between the beds, you are
sure to come upon it presently, with its scientific name
duly attached and its natural order labelled at the end
of the patch. Had I only known of this place in former
days, how gladly I would have walked the hundred miles
hither. For the old folk, the aged men and country-
women, have for the most part forgotten, if they ever
knew, the plants and herbs in the hedges they had
frequented from their childhood. Some few, of course,
they can tell you ; but the majority are as unknown to
them, except by sight, as the ferns of New Zealand or the
heaths of the Cape. Since books came about, since the
railways and science destroyed superstition, the lore of
herbs has in great measure decayed and been lost. The
names of many of the commonest herbs are quite forgotten
VISITING THE GARDENS 199
they are weeds, and nothing more. But here these
things are preserved ; in London, the centre of civilisation
and science, is a garden which restores the ancient know-
ledge of the monks and the witches of the villages.
But whatever else at Kew be done or left
undone, the stranger must be pointed to what
is almost the latest and not least attractive of
its spectacles the North Gallery, that stands on
the Richmond road side, beyond the mound on
which a Douglas pine rears what boasts itself
the tallest flagstaff in the world, and near where
the walk is crossed by an imitation ruined arch,
overgrown with greenery, which in Sir W.
Chambers's time seemed an ornamental manner
of carrying a roadway out of the grounds. The
pretty building itself will at once invite atten-
tion ; then hours may be spent in examining
its contents, the gift and handiwork of Miss
Marianne North, who well deserved to stand
godmother to several plants brought to know-
ledge by her researches.
This lover of flowers, a descendant from the
Roger North remembered by his biography of
three notable brothers, was born at Hastings,
for which her father sat in Parliament. Her
desire to see and to paint the tropics was
200 KEW GARDENS
awakened at Kew when Sir William Hooker
gave her a glorious bunch from the first Amherstia
nobilis to bloom in England. With her father
she travelled much in Europe, and as far as
Syria and Egypt. Thrown on her own guidance
after his death and the marriage of her sister to
J. A. Symonds, she launched out for America
and the West Indies ; then took a tour round
the world and made some stay in India, bringing
back from time to time several hundred paintings
to be exhibited at South Kensington. When
she found her work appreciated, Miss North
resolved on presenting the whole collection to
the public, and at her own expense set about the
building of a gallery for it at Kew. Before this
was opened in 1882, she had been to Australasia
for fresh subjects ; then again set off to enrich
its contents from South Africa and the islands
of the Indian Ocean. The gallery had soon to
be enlarged, while its indefatigable founder made
her last expedition, this time to Chili. The
story of those peregrinations is told in her
Recollections of a Happy Life, that pass over
lightly the many hardships she braved in procur-
ing so much pleasure for her stay-at-home
countryfolk. But perilous climates and trying
VISITING THE GARDENS 201
exertions had told on her nerves ; and after a
year spent in finally arranging the Kew collec-
tion, she was fain to seek the repose of a
Gloucestershire garden, which many friends
contributed to adorn with such beauties as she
had followed far and near. Here, a few years
later, she died in 1890.
The North collection is unique, not only in its
scope and interest, but in its being the work of
one woman, whom Queen Victoria regretted
that she could distinguish by no mark of public
honour : in the next reign she might have been
rewarded by the new Order of Merit bestowed
on Florence Nightingale. Her legacy to the
nation, catalogued in more than a hundred pages,
pictures some thousand species of flowers and
plants, from nearly all parts of the world, for
the most part executed on the spot within little
over a dozen years. This is the sight no visitor
should miss ; and from whatever clime he comes,
he is almost sure to find some souvenir of it
blooming here under the dullest sky and the
chilliest influences, against which Kew Gardens
strive to carry out their aim of epitomising the
earth's vegetable life.
INDEX
Abel, musician, 125
Acorns exported from Kew, 185
Addison, quoted, 90
JEolus, Temple of, 169
Aiton, John, 102
Aiton, William, 100
Aiton, William Townsend, 102
Albert, Prince, 110
Amelia, Princess, 64, 79
Amelia's House, Princess, 30
Arch, the ruined, 199
Argyll, Duke of, 9
Aroid House, 170
Assassination, George III.'s
escape from, 36
Augusta, Princess of Saxe-Gotha,
13
Australian vegetation, 182
Ayrton, Mr., 109
Azaleas, 196
Bach, J. C., 40, 125
Bacon's Essay, Of Gardens, 85
Bamboos, 186
Bauer, Francis, 146
Birch, uses of, 187
Bluebells, 196
Bohemia, Anne of, 2
Boswell, 70
Botanic Garden at Kew, 95, 101,
107, 112
Botanists, portraits of explorers
and, 195
Bradley, Astronomer-Royal, 87
Brazil nuts, 193
Brentford, 8, 77, 113, 119, 132
Bridgeman, gardener, 91
Brown, "Capability," 95
Buckingham Palace, 27, 32, 78
Buitenzorg Gardens, Java, 161
Burney, Miss, quoted, 46, 59,
66,67
Burton, Decimus, 108
Bushey Park, 149
Bute, Earl of, 19, 23, 95, 123
" Buttonmaker," nickname of
George III., 31
Byam, Rev. R. B., 145
Cactus aloe, 169
Cambridge Cottage, 46, 123, 163,
156
Cambridge, Duke Adolphus of,
45, 81, 116, 153
Cambridge, Duke George of, 154
Cambridge, Princess Mary of,
155
Capel, Lord, 11, 87
Carleton House, 77
Carob pods, 193
Caroline, Queen, 9, 10, 94, 116
Cassava, 194
Castor-oil plant, the, 193
Cedars of Lebanon, 197
Chambers, Sir William, 96
Character of George III., 22
Charles I., 7
Charlotte, Princess, 80, 81
Charlotte, Queen, 24, 47, 52
68,80
203
204
KEW GARDENS
Chatterton, quoted, 98
Chelsea, Physic Garden of, 101
Chestnuts, 194
Chrysanthemums, 196
Church House, 123
City State Barge, 143
Clarence, Duke of, 45, 70, 81
Cobbett, William, 136
Coca leaves, 192
Coco-nut of Seychelles, 166
Coco-nut trees, uses of, 188
Colton, Charles Caleb, 143
Confucius, House of, 96
Cook's Voyages, 105
Copernicia ceriferu, a tree-of-all-
work, 189
Cotton window, the, 191
Cowley, quoted, 84
Crocuses, 196
Cuba jungles, 171
Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of,
45, 81, 116, 150, 151
Cumberland, William of, 12, 18
Daffodils, 196
" Dairy House," the, 11
D'Arblay, General, 71
Darwin, Erasmus, quoted, 98
Darwins, the, 102
Dates, 194
Deans, Jeanie, 9
De Candolles, the, 102
De Jussieus, the, 102
Diary, George Rose's, 74
Dictionary of National Biography,
quoted, 75
Digby, Colonel, 67
Dissertation on Oriental Garden-
ing, 96
Diversion* of Parley, the, 134
Doddington, Bubb, 20
Dowager Princess of Wales, 20,
95
Dragon-tree at Orotava, 180
"Drake, Peter," 95
Drawing-rooms at St. James's, 60
Duck, Misses, 116
Duck, Stephen, 94, 116, 117
Dutch House, the, 11, 29, 74
Edinburgh Botanical Garden,
103
Edward III., 2
Elizabeth, Queen, 5
"Elizabeth's house, Princess,"
46
Engleharts, the, 126
Ernest, King of Hanover, 107
150, 151
Ernst, the page, 126
Eucalyptus, 181
Evelyn, John, 86
Explorers, portraits of botanists
and, 195
" Farmer George," 31
Finch, Lady Charlotte, 46
Fischer, musician, 40, 125
Fitzherbert, Mrs., 45
Fortnum, 125
Frederick, Duke of York, .37,
43,46
Frederick, Prince of Wales, 11,
15,88
Gainsborough, Thomas, 129
Gardening, art of, 88
Gardens, celebrated, 87, 88
GARDENS, THE STORY OF THE, 82
Garrick, quoted, 96
George, Duke of Cambridge,
154
" George, Farmer," 31
George I., 8
George II., 8, 10, 24
George III., 13, 74, 76, 78, 1)5,
120
George III., accession of, 24
George Ill.'s character, 22
George III.'s escape from assas-
sination, 36
George III.'s illness, 51
George III. meets Miss Burney,
47
INDEX
205
George III.'s tutors, 17
George IV., 77, 106
George IV., Prince of Wales, 37,
40, 53, 55
George IV.'s intrigue with " Per-
dita" Robinson, 41
Giant gum trees at Melbourne,
164
Gordon, General, 166
Great Palm House, 165
Green, the gardener, 99
Greenhouse, the, 170
Greville, Charles, quoted, 150
Grey, Lady Jane, 4
Gwyn, Mrs., the "Jessamy
Bride," 145
Ha-ha fence, 93
Ham House, 87, ] 14
Hampton Court, 3, 8, 10
Hanover, Ernest, King of, 107
Hanover, George of, 152
Haverfield, John, 99
Hawkins, the brothers, 123
Helps, Sir Arthur, 147
Hemp plants, 192
Henry, Prince, 6
Herbaceous ground, 169, 198
Herbarium library, 152
Heroic Epistle, Mason's, 95
Hervey, Lord, quoted, 12, 14
Highwaymen, 121
Hill, Sir John, 96
Hofland, Barbara, 146
Hollow Walk, the, 123
"Honour, Maids of," 8
Hooker, Sir J. D., 109, 181
Hooker, Sir W. J., 108, 109
Home Tooke, John, 132
Horse-chestnut, old, 196
Horticultural Society's Garden,
107
Huntingdon, William, S.S., 138
Hurlbut, W. H., quoted, 171
" Improvers," 88
India-rubber plants, 195
Islay, Lord, 97
Italian Gardens,
Jacobi, Mdlle., 69, 72
James I., 5
Jeiferies, Richard, quoted, 198
Jones, Henry, 98
Jones, Inigo, 88
Juniper Hill, 71
" Junius," 134
Kava root, 192
Kent, Duke of, 45, 81
Kent, William, 88
Kew Bridge, 118
Kew Castle, 77
Kew Church, 115
Kew Churchyard, 129
Kew Cottage, 147
Kew Green, 75, 157
Kew House, 10, 29, 32, 46, 51,
54, 64, 76
KEW IN FAVOUR, 31
" Kew in lilac-time," 158
Kew Observatory, 9, 88, 97, 111
Kew, origin of name, 1
Kew Palace, 10, 78, 80, 112, 197
Kew Priory, 143
Kew Volunteers, 149
Kingston, 2
Kirby, Joshua, 129
Kit-Cat Club, 114
Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 114
Kneller Hall, 114
Knight, Charles, 79
Knight, Miss Cornelia, 73
Lacon, quoted, 144
Lake, the, 197
Langley, Batty, 91
Lauderdale, Duke of, at Ham
House, 87
Lebanon, cedars of, 197
Lely, Sir Peter, 113
Lennox, Lady Sarah, 26
Le Notre, 89
Levens Hall, 89
206
KEW GARDENS
Linnean classification, the, 190
Linnes, the, 102
Lion Gate, the, 197
Liquorice root, 192
Little, John, story of, 141
" Love Lane," 33
Macaulay, quoted, 47
Macnab, James, 103
Macnab, William, 102
Macnab, William Ramsay, 103
' ' Maids of Honour," 8
Mammoth sequoia, 181
Marvell, A., quoted, 93
Mary of Cambridge, Princess,
156
Mason's Heroic Epistle, 95
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Dowager
Grand-Duchess of, 155
Melbourne, giant gum-trees at,
164
" Merlin's Cave," 94
Meyer, Jeremiah, 126
Molyneux, Samuel, 11, 87
Monastery of Sheen, the, 83
Montague, Lady Mary Wortley,
123
Moor Park, Hertfordshire, 85
Murray, Miss Amelia, quoted,
124
Museums and Economic Houses,
185
New Zealand Vegetation, 183
Niepce, J. N. de, 146
"No Popery" riots, 34
North Gallery, 199
North, Miss Marianne, 161, 163,
199
Notre, Le, 89
Noyes, Mr. A., quoted, 168
Observatory, the, 9, 88, 97,
111
Old Brentford, 132
Old Deer Park, 36, 111, 141
Opium, 192
" Orangery," the, 190
Orotava, dragon-tree at, 180
Pagoda, the, 1, 96, 197
Palace at Richmond, proposed
new, 28
Palm House, 108
Papendiek, Mrs., Memoirs of,
34, 40, 43, 56, 72, 99, 120,
121, 123, 125
Papyrus reeds, 167
Pavilion, the Brighton, 77
Peradenia, Gardens of, 164
Petersham, 114
Phillips's Morning's walk from
London to Kew, 142
Physic Garden, Chelsea, 101
Pond, the, 197
Pope, quoted, 15, 89
Portraits of botanists and ex-
plorers, 195
Potato, the, 185
Prain, Colonel, 109
Prince Albert, 110
Prince Frederick of Wales, 11,
15,88
Prince George of Hanover, 152
Prince Henry, 6
Princess Amelia, 30, 64, 79
Princess Charlotte, 80, 81
" Princess Elizabeth's House,"
46
Princess Marie's wedding, 155
Princess Victoria, 81
Pringle, Sir John, 123
Proctor, Richard, 147
Queen Caroline, 9, 10, 116
Queen Charlotte, 27, 68, 80
Queen Elizabeth, 5
Queen Victoria, 112, 149
" Queen's Cottage," the, 29, 196
"Queen's Lodge" at Windsor, 32
Quinine, 193
Rafflesia, 162
Recollections of a Happy Life, 200
INDEX
207
Regency Bill, 53, 62
Regency, the Prince's, 79
Repton, Humphrey, 93
Richmond, 3, 5, 113, 140
Richmond Gardens, 94, 110
Richmond Lodge, 8, 10, 28, 32,
97, 110
Richmond Palace, 3
Richmond Park, 7, 30
Richmond, proposal of new
palace at, 28
Rio de Janeiro, Botanic Garden,
near, 164
Riots, " No Popery," 34
Robinson, " Perdita," 41
Rock Garden, the, 168
Rogers, John, Reminiscences,
34, 101
Rose, George, Diary of, 74
Roses, 196
St. James's Drawing-rooms, 50
St. James's Palace, 27
Saxe-Gotha, Princess Augusta
of, 13
Scholarship, George IV.'s, 37
Schwellenberg, Mrs., 49, 68
Scotsmen as gardeners, 100, 105
Senna, 192
Seychelles, coco-nut of, 166
Sharp, Granville, 122
Sheen, 2
Sheen Common, 94
Sheen, the Monastery of, 83
Snowdrops, 196
Somerset, Protector, 84
South African plants, 168
Spectator, the, quoted, 90
Spencer, Lady Elizabeth, 27
STORY OF THK GARDENS, THE, 82
Strand-on-the-Green, 113, 126
Strawberry Hill, 90, 91
Succulent House, 169
Sudbrook Park, 114
Suffolk House, 4
Sun, Temple of the, 169
Sunday opening, 110
Sussex, Duke of, 45
Swift, quoted, 114
Switzer, Stephen, 87, 91
Sydney, Botanic Gardens at, 164
Syon House, 4, 84
Syon Vista, the, 197
Tamerlane's garden, 100
Teck, Duke of, 155
Temple, Sir William, 87
Temple of .Solus, 169
Temple of the Sun, 169
Temple Grove, 87
Thackeray, quoted, 34
Theobald's Park, Enfield, 5
Thiselton-Dyer, Sir W. T., 109
Thomson, James, 140
" Thresher-poet," the, 116
Thresher's Labour. The, quoted
117
Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 62
Timber Museum, No. HI., 190
Tooke, John Home, 132
Topiarian art, the, 89
Trimmer, Mrs., 129
Tropical Lily House, 166
Tropics, plagues of the, 176
Tulips, 196
Turner, Dr. William, 83
Tutors of George III., 17
Twickenham, 21
" Two Kings of Brentford," the,
132
Upas tree, 195
Victoria Gate, 112
Victoria, Princess, 81
Victoria, Queen, 112, 149
Victoria Regia, the, 162, 167
VISITING THE GARDENS, 157
Wales, Dowager Princess of, 20,
95
Wales, Prince Frederick of, 11,
88
Wallace, Dr. A. R., quoted, 174
208
KEW GARDENS
Walpole, Horace, 9, 14, 15, 17,
18, 19, 21, 28, 45, 63
Wedding of Princess Marie,
155
Wells, Mr. J. W., quoted, 189
West, Sir Algernon, quoted,
109
Weymouth, 65, 76
White House, the, 46
White Lodge, 155
Whitton Place, 97
Wild hyacinths, 196
Wilkes, John, 26, 131
Wilkes's head, 76
" Wilkes and Liberty," 89, 133
Wilkinson, Mr., Reminiscences,
154
William of Cumberland, 12, 18
William III., 8, 89
William IV., 87
Willis, Rev. Dr., 56, 68
Willises, the, 75
Windsor Castle, 32, 50, 78
Wolsey, 3
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 118
York, Frederick, Duke of, 37,
42,64
Zoffany, John, 127
THE END
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