Part 5

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 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 gentleman and a king,” that he would sign no document 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 _Rose and Crown_,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the _King’s 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 institutions. Yet of them too _transit gloria_, if we may 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 himself used to tell how he overheard a loyal old lady’s remark, “Ah! 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 completed 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 employed. 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 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 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 mediæval 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 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:--

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 figurehead of his Court, taking the place of his discarded wife; and she shared his unpopularity to such an extent as to be hissed by the mob on her way to hold a Drawing-room; then, after the death of the Princess Charlotte, she had to face an outburst of popular resentment in the City. By the autumn of 1818 she was hopelessly prostrated by dropsy. On the way from London to Windsor her state became so serious that a halt was made at Kew Palace; and there she died in a chair, in the room now marked by a brass tablet, her last looks, it is said, fixed on a picture of _The Dropsical Woman_.

A more moving loss in the preceding year had been that of the Princess Charlotte, upon whose young life so much seemed to hang, while bitter hatred kept her parents apart. She died in childbirth at Claremont, wife of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, future King of the Belgians, who else might have taken in England the part afterwards filled by Prince Albert. When thus King George’s family of fifteen seemed like to die out, unless through the detested Ernest of Cumberland, three of the now elderly princes were hastily married in the same month--the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Clarence, and the Duke of Kent. These weddings, that might come close on funerals, were performed privately in the drawing-room at Kew Palace, the two latter on the same day, but at different hours.

We know which of the branches took root. Next year was born the Princess Victoria, whose father died at Sidmouth about the same time as the King. The cause of his death is said to have been sitting in wet clothes after a long walk; and similar carelessness seems to have been usually the prelude to George III.’s afflictions, but for which the place of Windsor might have been usurped by Kew, through this King’s favour.

To the same favour was mainly due the rise and progress of the Gardens, that have been hitherto left too much in shade upon pages that bear their name. Now that nothing but the present “Palace” remains to block them out of our view, it is time to trace their development from a princely hobby into a national institution.

III

THE STORY OF THE GARDENS

Gardens appear to be an old story in this neighbourhood. The Monastery of Sheen, that stood on the flats somewhere about the present Observatory, was equipped with its orchard, vineyard, and other enclosures, through which the holy fathers, like those of Melrose, would be able to make “good kail, on Fridays when they fasted”; and let us trust that suppressed spite never drove them, as in a certain Spanish cloister, to keep a brother’s pet flowers “close-nipped on the sly.”

Kew’s connection with botany is as old as the Tudor time, when Dr. William Turner had a garden here. Of this physician, our first scientific botanist, Chaucer could not have said, “His study was but little on the Bible.” He was a disciple of Latimer, and a hot-gospeller, among whose works figure titles like _The Spiritual Nosegay_, _The Hunting of the Romish Wolf_, _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poison of Pelagius_. Under Henry VIII. such a writer found the air of the Continent more wholesome than that of Hampton Court or Smithfield; and he spent some time in Germany, whence, along with Protestant theology, he brought home a collection of foreign plants. When it was safe for him to be back in England, he doubled the parts of chaplain and physician to the Protector Somerset, who built Syon House on the site of the convent that for him proved unlucky church plunder; this may account for his chaplain’s garden across the river. But Turner did not fall with his patron, rising to be Dean of Wells, though again for a time, under Mary, he had to extend his knowledge of foreign gardens. He is best remembered as author of a herbal which marks the planting in England of scientific botany; nor would this study seem so far aloof from his theological interests, if we consider a commonplace of our forefathers, thus versified by Cowley--

God the first garden made, and the first city, Cain.

The Kew mansion of Queen Elizabeth’s keeper was furnished with a garden, in which Her Majesty had delivered to her a nosegay, enriched with a valuable jewel and pendants of diamonds, worth four hundred pounds. This offering was only part of a series of handsome gifts that suggest how a visit from royalty in those days must have been indeed a visitation. In Bacon’s Essay, _Of Gardens_, we get some hint what a garden ought to be that seemed worthy of entertaining a queen; and after this model is said to have been laid out the garden of Moor Park in Hertfordshire.

The contents ought not well to be under thirty acres of ground, and to be divided into three parts; a green in the entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, and the main garden in the midst, besides alleys on both sides; and I like well that four acres of ground be assigned to the green, six to the heath, four and four to either side, and twelve to the main garden. The green hath two pleasures: the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to enclose the garden: but because the alley will be long, and, in great heat of the year, or day, you ought not to buy the shade in the garden by going in the sun through the green, therefore you are, of either side the green, to plant a covert alley, upon carpenters’ work, about twelve feet in height, by which you may go in shade into the garden. As for the making of knots, or figures, with divers-coloured earths, that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys: you may see as good sights many times in tarts. The garden is best to be square, encompassed on all the whole four sides with a stately arched hedge; the arches to be upon pillars of carpenters’ work, of some ten feet high, and six feet broad; and the spaces between of the same dimensions with the breadth of the arch. Over the arches let there be an entire hedge of some four feet high, framed also upon carpenters’ work; and upon the upper hedge, over every arch, a little turret, with a belly enough to receive a cage of birds: and over every space between the arches some other little figure, with broad plates of round-coloured glass gilt, for the sun to play upon: but this hedge I intend to be raised upon a bank, not steep, but gently slope, of some six feet, set all with flowers. Also, I understand that this square of the garden should not be the whole breadth of the ground, but to leave on either side ground enough for diversity of side alleys, unto which the two covert alleys of the green may deliver you; but there must be no alleys with hedges at either end of this great enclosure--not at the hither end, for letting your prospect upon this fair hedge from the green--nor at the further end, for letting[2] your prospect from the hedge through the arches upon the heath.

In the next century Capel’s seat at Kew had a garden which, more than once, won high praise from that connoisseur, Evelyn. “The orangery and myrtetum are most beautiful and perfectly kept.” Other gardens in this neighbourhood called forth Evelyn’s admiration--the Duke of Lauderdale’s at Ham House, “inferior to few of the best villas in Italy itself”; and Sir William Temple’s, “lately ambassador to Holland,” whose East Sheen villa, Temple Grove, has long been a boys’ school--taken for the select establishment figuring in _Coningsby_--where his _Essay on Gardening_ might be read with more advantage than _The Battle of the Books_. Stephen Switzer, one of our first writers on gardening, mentions Lord Capel as distinguished in this pursuit, especially for “bringing over several sorts of fruit from France.”

Molyneux, heir of the Capels, had an interest in science, leading him to set up in his grounds a telescope, by means of which the Astronomer Royal Bradley began observations that led to his great discoveries of the aberration of light and the nutation of the earth’s axis. The site of that instrument is now marked by the sun-dial, some way off in front of Kew Palace, erected by William IV. as a memorial, which serves also to show whereabouts stood the vanished Kew House, often confused with its neighbour. The Observatory, in what used to be the Richmond Gardens, may be considered as another monument to the scientific work so early carried on at Kew.

When Frederick, Prince of Wales, came to occupy Kew, curbed in his martial and political ambitions, he took to improving these grounds, for which purpose he employed William Kent, a bad painter, better esteemed as an architect, and best remembered by his ideas of what he called landscape gardening. Inigo Jones had not disdained to design gardens; and the “improvers” who, throughout the Georgian age, came to be busy about English country-houses, were more often than not architects by occupation as well as professed artists in landscape, who had to design groves and flower-beds, but also temples, grottos, terraces, steps, statues, fountains, and other ornaments in the taste of their time. Such pretentious gardeners now found plenty of employment at lordly seats like Stowe, Badminton, Wanstead, Canons Park, and others aspiring to the celebrity of elaborate pleasure-grounds.

The art of gardening, like architecture, has had two main schools, that might be styled the Classic and the Gothic. The ancient model, flourishing longer on the Continent, dealt in straight lines and formal shapes, in parallel rows, accurate vistas and such trim patterns as the star and the quincunx. This prospered in England while our mediæval buildings were being replaced by Palladian structures. Our first great gardens of that period seem to have copied the conceits of the Italian style, with its terraces, balustrades, stairways, arcades, and stiff arbours among walls of clipped hedge. Le Nôtre in the seventeenth century headed in France a school of geometric gardening on a large scale, which spread across the Channel. William III. patronised among us the Dutch ideas of quaint formalism, especially shown in thickets of box and yew. Now came into great favour the Topiarian monstrosities of “verdant sculpture” still kept up here and there, notably in the Lakeland gardens of Levens Hall. So, in the age of Queen Anne, English gardens had fallen into the conventional affectation satirised by Pope.

No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suffering eye inverted nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; With here a fountain, never to be played, And there a summer-house that knows no shade.

About the same time the _Spectator_ complains: “Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.” But Addison rather surprises us by pointing abroad for better models “in an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.”

At all events, the revolt against that formal orthodoxy was raised under the standard of what came to be called the English school, whose principles suggest those of Gothic architecture. At first it was rather a Strawberry Hill Gothic which improvers practised in imitation of natural effects, heightened by art that clung to tawdry decorations. The cradle of this school was not far from Kew, at Twickenham, where Pope and Horace Walpole, “prince of cockle-shells,” set copies in a “more grand and rural manner,” advocated by a local author, Batty Langley, in his _New Principles of Gardening_. The rank of leader of the revolution has been claimed also for Stephen Switzer, who, though of foreign origin perhaps, was born in England, and from a working gardener became a nurseryman, then in 1715 published the _Gardener’s Recreation_, a work showing better education than might be expected from such a career, unless the writer got some literary craftsman to graft flowery tropes and classical tags upon his practical knowledge. Another gardener named Bridgeman is mentioned in connection with Kent, who designed ornamentation both outside and inside the Prince’s villa at Kew.

Kent is commonly called the father of the English or natural school of landscape gardening, and seems at least to have been its first exponent on a large scale. He was followed by rival doctors of the picturesque, very apt to differ, to accuse one another of quackery and of malpractice in the exhibition of clumps, belts, vistas and sheets of water. The _Picturesque_ and the _Gardenesque_ became watch-words like Allopathy and Homœopathy. One practitioner was judged to starve Nature, another to use the knife too freely.

To improve, adorn, and polish they profess, But shave the goddess whom they came to dress.

These artists in scenery, one of them insists, on a foundation of painting and gardening “must possess a competent knowledge of _surveying_, _mechanics_, _hydraulics_, _agriculture_, _botany_, and the general principles of _architecture_,” besides professing themselves _cognoscenti_ and _virtuosi_. They dealt with gardens mainly as one feature in a larger field of operations, the laying-out of parks, pleasure-ground, _fermes ornées_, and such fanciful paradises as Shenstone made famous at the Leasowes. Into the park, of course, the garden proper passes by transition over the lawn turf that is the special beauty of English culture, often separated from less trim outskirts by the invisible barrier of a sunk fence, said to have been Kent’s invention, but this statement seems dubious, as may be Horace Walpole’s story that the name _Ha-ha_ expressed a rustic’s astonishment at being brought to an unexpected stand. But for poets like Cowley and Marvell, who courted “a green thought in a green shade,” it was left for writers of our time to dwell lovingly on the garden they love, however small; the tasteful authorities of that century hardly condescend to notice anything below the pleasure-grounds that ran into lordly demesnes. Humphry Repton, doyen of a later generation of improvers smiled at by Jane Austen, in his proposals for Woburn Abbey, distinguishes the gardens about a country-seat under the following heads:---

The terrace and parterre near the house.

The private garden, only used by the family.

The rosary, or dressed flower garden, in front of the greenhouse.

The American garden, for plants of that country only.

The Chinese garden, surrounding a pool in front of the great Chinese pavilion, to be decorated with plants from China.

The botanic garden, for scientific classing of plants.

The animated garden, or menagerie.

And lastly, the English garden or shrubbery walk, connecting the whole; sometimes commanding views into each of these distinct objects and sometimes into the park and distant country.

This plan was much on the model of what had grown up at Kew, to which let us return, after recalling that before its grounds came into note, Queen Caroline had begun or enlarged the gardens about Richmond Lodge, extending them over an unkempt flat, as we understand from her private laureate, Stephen Duck. To poets of his school there was no beauty in heath and wild copses, like the rough patch of Sheen Common still left to the gratitude of our Bank-Holiday age.

Not so attractive lately shone the plain, A gloomy waste, not worth the Muse’s strain; Where thorny brakes the traveller repell’d, And weeds and thistles overspread the field; Till royal George, and heav’nly Caroline Bid Nature in harmonious lustre shine; The sacred fiat thro’ the chaos rung And symmetry from wild disorder sprung.

But Nature might not be trusted to shine here by her own unvarnished charms; and the Richmond Gardens were bedecked with “follies” in the taste of the time: “Merlin’s Cave,” that appears to have housed a waxwork collection as well as the library of which Stephen Duck was keeper; a hermitage, inhabited by busts of distinguished men; a menagerie, a maze, and, of course, a grotto, to gratify “heav’nly Caroline’s” admiration for what “royal George” bluntly denounced as “childish silly stuff.” Rival poets celebrated “the much sung grotto of the Queen,” one under the sly pseudonym of “Peter Drake, a fisherman of Brentford,” making fun of Stephen Duck, the so-called thresher-poet.