CHAPTER VIII.

HAMPTON COURT TO RICHMOND.

Hampton Court--Thames Ditton: The "Swan"--The Church--Surbiton--Kingston: The Coronation Stone--Teddington--Twickenham--Eel Pie Island--Petersham--Richmond Park--Approach to Richmond.

Hampton Court is not the stateliest pile upon the banks of Thames. It is less splendid than Windsor, less historic than the Tower; yet it possesses a meed of human interest unique in English palaces. Windsor has its memories of the births and deaths of kings; of proud embassies from Popes and Kaisers while yet the censer was swinging through all England; of sweet brides wedded to the misery which is always lurking behind a throne. The Tower is the most historic building which the world still looks upon--the very kernel of England's history, even as the Chapter House of Westminster is the birthplace of her liberties; in the darkness and silence of its dungeons was matured that intolerance of despotism, that resolve for freedom which began early to mould the modern England; it is a fortress of unending tragedies. Yet Hampton Court, which is newer than either and less historic than either, enjoys a popularity and exercises a charm far beyond that of the two feudal fortresses. The explanation of this which fashions itself when one is in romantic mood, is that the popular imagination is touched by the sidereal rise, the brief glory, and the sudden fall of Cardinal Wolsey--a fall which even the gift of the stately palace itself could not avert. But the footprints of Wolsey at Hampton Court are hard to trace; and it is probable that to the Bank Holiday masses, and to the crowds which stream through its galleries every fine Saturday and Sunday in summer, the most abounding charm of the place is that which Nature, with some assistance from Art, has provided. The terraces, the gardens, the maze, the trim vistas cut through long lines of trees, the Dutch primness and precision of the grounds, and above all the thousand acres of Bushey Park, with its renowned avenue bursting with the tinted blossom which in summer perfumes the air like "an odour sweet of cedar log and sandal wood," are the true delights of Hampton Court.

The old Tudor palace is a significant landmark of the river-side, for it indicates the spot where suburban London may be said to begin. London has a long arm, and the voyager on the silent highway from its source on towards the sea finds, as he nears Hampton Court, unmistakable signs that he is reaching the fringe of a giant population. There is a greater frequency of white villas, glistening in the sunlight, shaded and cooled by the ample foliage which is rarely so green and prolific as on the banks of the southern Thames, the water gently lapping the edges of the shaven lawns. The river is dotted with boats, where before the dinghy and the outrigger had been but occasional; the towing-path is more populated; and--it is a melancholy story to tell--the water begins perceptibly to lose its limpidity. The pollution of the great rivers of the world seems to be one of the ultimate aims of civilisation. Is the Scheldt pure--the weird mysterious Scheldt of the "Flying Dutchman"--the storied Rhine, the classic Tiber, the "blue" Danube? Its immense navigation and the multitudes on its banks put the Thames into worse case than them all; but we trust the time is coming when we shall be more mindful of Nature's lovely heritage, and that if we may never again see salmon taken at London Bridge, neither shall we see banks of festering mud on the very limits of the tide.

Hampton Court has been frequently described as the English Versailles, and there is much reason in the comparison. Alike in history and in human interest, however, Hampton Court is far more attractive than the splendidly frigid palace of Louis Quatorze. It is true that it has few pretensions to magnificence; but it is a compound of history, and the history of people rather than of events. The shades of Wolsey and Charles I. eternally haunt the portals through which so many historic figures have passed. But the ghost of the magnificent cardinal finds everything unfamiliar. Even the Great Hall, so often ascribed to him, was not built until after his death; Sir Christopher Wren's new west front is all strange to him; only in a little wing here and there can he recognise the handicraft of his own architect. Maybe the capacious cellar, with its wine-casks stuffed with broad pieces of gold, which, if we are to believe tradition the cardinal used for a treasury, is still untouched; but where are the five "fair courts" round which the palace was grouped by its builder? Had Hampton Court remained to our day precisely as it left the hands of the Tudor artificers, it would have been a priceless relic of the architecture and the methods of life affected by an English prince of the Church in the early years of the sixteenth century. But Wren has done his incongruous and Nash his clumsy work upon what Henry allowed to remain of the cardinal's design, and Hampton Court, as we know it, has, architecturally speaking, a blind side and a smiling side. There is no doubt a certain stateliness about the East Front and the Fountain Court; but it is a heavy and monumental stateliness which ill accords with the really picturesque portions of the old palace. Classical symmetry and Palladian regularity are sadly misplaced when joined to Tudor red brick. The style which Wren chose for his additions requires greater space for its effective display than he had at disposal; consequently, the buildings round the Fountain Court suffer from the contracted area of the quadrangle. English brickwork was never better than in the early part of the sixteenth century, and in the buildings erected by Wolsey and Henry VIII. at Hampton Court we have this Tudor brickwork at its best. The cardinal's buildings have upon the outer walls the geometrical patterns which were not uncommon at the time, formed by the insertion of those stout blue bricks which are so potent to resist damp. Of the strictly modern additions and re-buildings, the work of the last hundred and fifty years, it were better to say nothing more than that they, lamentably, still exist.

It is difficult to obtain a comprehensive view of the palace save from the river. Thence, however, the glimpses of the pile are very varied, the view of the western front being especially charming. The multitude of towers and mullions diversifies the _façade_, very greatly to the disadvantage of Wren's monotonous eastern front; while the interlaced and arabesqued chimneys, the graceful clock-tower, and the high-pitched roof of the Great Hall break the sky-line with a cunning which, although apparently undesigned, is as effective as it well could be. There is something peculiarly appropriate in approaching Hampton Court from the Thames, for in the day of its pride, when the cardinal and his thousand retainers abode there, when Henry retired to it with one or other of his wives, or when his dour daughter Mary passed there her honeymoon with the darkling Philip, snatching a brief leisure from his "Acts of Faith" in Spain and the Netherlands, the river was the silent highway upon which all the world travelled, whether from the Tower or from Westminster. But the approach from Bushey Park, although its historical savour is small, is more attractive almost than that from the water. I never traverse the Chestnut Avenue without regretting that the venerable towers and turrets of the palace do not close in the vista. Such an avenue ought, for the sake of picturesque completeness, to have for objective an ancient country house, gabled, ruddy, and peopled with historic shades. The Diana water is very pretty in its way; but it is not the most effective climax. There are some beautiful avenues in the little park of Hampton Court itself; but there is a Dutch flavour about them which causes them to look less natural and spontaneous than the Chestnut Avenue, which is really only the central of a series of nine, four on each side. Bushey Park, like all other parks, is pretty, but flat; it happily still contains a good head of fallow deer. For nearly fifty years--since the palace was thrown open to the public--Bushey has been a spot of inexhaustible delight to myriads of Londoners, the great majority of whom choose the route through the park to Hampton Court. The novice in woodcraft might imagine that many of the trees had attained a good old age; but so far as those in the nine avenues are concerned, all were planted by William III., the tutelary genius of latter-day Hampton Court, and outside the avenues the timber is neither luxuriant nor remarkable.

By far the most interesting portion of either the new or the old palace is the Great Hall, which, save that it has a new floor and that the painted glass in the windows is modern, is little altered since Henry VIII. built it. This magnificent apartment ranks with Westminster Hall and the Hall of Christ Church, Oxford, as one of the finest open-timbered interiors in Europe. What relation it bears to Wolsey's Hall, the site of which it is believed to occupy, we cannot tell, since no picture of the cardinal's banqueting-chamber has been preserved. But "The Lord Thomas Wulsey, Cardinal, Legat de Latere, Archbishop of Yorke, and Chancellor of Englande," had a nice taste in architecture; and it is tolerably safe to suppose that, beautiful though Henry's hall be, the cardinal's was better. Why the king saw fit to destroy what Wolsey had built there is no evidence to show; probably he was desirous that his own name rather than that of his upstart chancellor should be permanently associated with the place, and the lavishness with which his cypher, together with the rose and portcullis and other heraldic devices of the Tudors, are scattered about the palace, favours the idea. It is a little remarkable that the hall, with the adjoining withdrawing-room, should be disconnected from the other buildings, and that it should not be possible to reach it without passing into the open air. The best view of the hall is obtained, not from the sombre entrance beneath the Minstrel's Gallery, but from the daïs at the upper end, where the high table for noble and princely guests was wont to stand. Its proportions are majestic--106 feet by 40, with a height of 60 feet. The open-timbered roof is elaborately carved and arcaded, and springs, as though naturally, from massive corbels between the windows. At the extremities, where the corbels join the roof timberings, are the graceful pendants characteristic of the Tudor time. The windows blaze with painted glass, all a mass of heraldry and kingly pedigree, while beneath the eye finds rest in the more subdued tones of King Hal's tapestries of incidents in the life of Abraham. Who designed this arras and where it was woven are questions which have never been settled; but there is abundant internal evidence that it is either early Flemish or German work. In the gloomy vestibule beneath the gallery is a series of allegorical tapestries, the most curious of them representing the seven deadly sins in such guise as would suggest that the artist took the idea from the procession to the "Sinful House of Pride" in the "Faërie Queen." Spenser makes Gluttony ride upon "a filthy swine"; in this tapestry it bestrides a goat. All this arras is in beautiful preservation, particularly that which deals with the life of Abraham, in which the high lights are worked in gold.

The painted windows of the Great Hall deserve something more than a passing mention. Six alternate windows are filled with the arms and descents of the wives of Henry VIII.; and it is worth noting, as some indication of the commonness of a Plantagenet ancestry, that each of these ladies was descended from Edward I. The probabilities are, indeed, that even now a large proportion of the English people, above the lower middle class, have in their veins the blood of Longshanks. The seven intermediate windows are emblazoned with the badges of Henry VIII.--the lion, the portcullis, the fleur-de-lis, the rose, the red dragon of York, and the white greyhound of Lancaster. Upon each are his cyphers and the mottoes "Dieu et mon Droit," and "Dne. Salvum Fac Reg." The great eastern and western windows are likewise full of badges, quarterings, and impalements. At the upper end of the south side of the hall is yet another window more beautiful from its pendant fan-tracery than any of the others, and emblazoned with the arms and cyphers of Henry and Jane Seymour, and the arms and cardinal's hat of Wolsey. The daïs characteristic of old time, when distinctions of rank were very palpable, still remains; but the beautiful old flooring of these painted tiles so much used by Tudor builders has gone, although there is reason to suppose that it still existed eighty years ago. A finer apartment for a regal banquet or a stately pageant could hardly be conceived. One would like to believe the legend of Shakespeare representing, in this very hall, before Elizabeth and her somewhat flighty court, the story of the fall of Wolsey; but there is not a tittle of real evidence in its favour. The Withdrawing Room, or Presence Chamber, as it is sometimes called, entered from the Great Hall, is a large, oblong apartment which has apparently been little touched since Tudor times. It has a fine painted oriel, a moulded plaster ceiling, and an ancient oak chimney-piece, into which is let a portrait of the unlucky presiding genius of the place. This chimney-piece is a modern importation from an old house at Hampton Wick. The roughly-plastered walls are covered with tapestries of a wildly allegorical character, considerably older than those in the Great Hall, and less carefully preserved. Above them are Carlo Cignani's cartoons for the frescoes in the Ducal Palace at Parma.

Beyond the Great Hall, the apartments which are shown to the public have little architectural or personal interest. The rooms in which Henry, Elizabeth, and Charles I. lived are all in the Tudor portion of the palace; the series which has been converted into one great picture gallery is in Wren's building, and runs round the Fountain Court and along the eastern front. What this front lacks architecturally it gains to some extent scenically, since it overlooks the geometrical flower-beds, the straight avenues, the long and narrow Dutch canals, beloved of the Stadtholder, the like of which one may still see in the gardens of old world _casteelen_ in Holland. Some of the avenues, seen from these upper windows, are very charming and effective, notably that which is closed in by the red mass of Kingston Church. This is not the place to discuss the pictures with which the palace abounds. I shall not perhaps be committing treason if I suggest that they are remarkable more for their quantity than for their quality. There is a sprinkling of pictures of which any gallery might be proud, and some of the portraits, of no artistic importance, are valuable by reason of their personality. Kneller's "Hampton Court Beauties" have acquired a factitious fame, for whatever may have been the charms of the originals, they are assuredly not very obvious here. Poor, indiscreet Queen Mary got herself well hated by the other ladies of the Court whom she considered insufficiently attractive to be numbered among the elect. Perhaps the most famous of all the pictures at Hampton Court is Vandyke's equestrian portrait of Charles I., of which there is a replica at Windsor. Many of the paintings are true memorials of the old palace, and formerly hung in the ancient state apartments. They have the savour of old associations which the rooms in which they are hung lack--memories of times when life was more fitful, more spectacular, and, as it seems to us in this distant age, more romantic than it had become when Dutch William sowed _Je maintiendrai_ about the old place, as Henry had scattered his roses and greyhounds and fleurs-de-lis, and all the other heraldic bravery of a century when heraldry was a fine art. Hampton Court is rich in personal history, and many a romantic shade must haunt its Great Hall, there to recall the vanished banquet, when the wine-cup gleamed so red, and bright eyes danced more intoxicatingly than any vintage of Spain or France. Many, too, there be that must still weep out their historic sorrows, and the visionary axe must flash before many a ghostly eye. Here lived Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, as well as Bluebeard's more fortunate wives. Edward VI. was born, and Jane Seymour died here. Elizabeth kept her Christmases merrily indeed at Hampton Court; tradition says that she was here dining off a goose when the news came of the defeat of the Armada. It was a favourite residence of Charles I., who passed here some of his happiest and most miserable moments, and hence he fled to Carisbrooke. Both Cromwell and Charles II., who once played a renowned game of hide-and-seek, were fond of the water-side palace; William III. had a passion for it, and in its park met with his fatal accident. The first two Georges stayed here occasionally, but since 1760 it has not been a royal residence. William IV. and his unimportant Queen liked the neighbourhood, and spent much time in the heavy but doubtless comfortable red-brick house at the Teddington entrance to Bushey Park. So long as it endures, Hampton Court will be one of the most interesting of English houses. Attractive in every aspect, in some it is unique, and if it had no other claim to distinction it would always be remarkable as perhaps the very first country house built in England without a moat and drawbridge.

The park of Hampton Court is small compared with the vast chase, covering thirteen parishes, of which Henry made it the nucleus. It is somewhat flat, but is well timbered, and beautifies the towing-path all the way to Kingston. Of the palace from the river I have already spoken. It is in view for a considerable distance towards Thames Ditton; but the glimpse is not so striking as that obtained by the oarsman who shoots suddenly beneath Hampton Bridge and sees the grand old pile full in front of him. Between Hampton Court and Kingston the river is at its most charming hereabouts. Flowing between deep banks, over which the rushes and osiers bend, in summer it is studded to just beyond Thames Ditton with the cool Bohemian house-boat, a veritable desired haven to the heated oarsman. The coquettish window-curtains, the mass of flowers on the flat roof, the whisk of dainty muslin, all go to form one of the prettiest of Thames pictures. The Middlesex shore is fringed with luxuriant hedgerows, quick with life and bursting with blossom, so wide and tunnelled by the boughs of trees that one of Mr. Stevenson's nursery heroes might lose himself amid the interlacements, while imagining that he was stalking the red man in his native forests. On the Surrey side the meadows come down to the water's edge, fringed with rushes and alders. Soon above the trees peeps out the quaint wooden spire of Thames Ditton Church, topping a squat tower of the type beloved of the olden church builders of the Thames Valley. At the river's brink, and under the shadow of the church, is the famous "Swan," dear to the museful angler who delights not in crowds, and loves to make for a charming and unobtrusive stretch of river. With a kindly care for the welfare of the traveller, and not unmindful of other considerations, some olden landlord of the "Swan" procured the establishment of the ferry at his very doors. The "Swan" was an important hostelry in the days when Thames Ditton was more in fashion than it happily is now; and it still divides the honours of the spot with Boyle Farm on the opposite side of the road. Dark brown of hue, and not unpicturesque of contour, Boyle Farm stands amid effective masses of foliage, its sloping lawn dipping down to the channel formed by a miniature eyot which screens it somewhat from view. The ample cedars on the lawn contrast well with the older portions of the house which face the water. This pretty spot obtained its name from that Miss Boyle who became in her own right Baroness de Ros, and is mentioned in one of Horace Walpole's letters as having "carved three tablets in marble with boys, designed by herself ... for a chimney-piece, and she is painting panels in grotesque for the library." By her marriage with Lord Henry Fitzgerald, Lady De Ros became sister-in-law to that ill-starred pair, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and "Pamela." Time was when Boyle Farm rivalled Strawberry Hill as a centre of gaiety, and its famous "Dandies' Fête," given in 1827 by five young sprigs of nobility at a cost of £2,500, was long a dazzling wonderment to those who are tickled by such things. This was one of the hereditaments which fell into dispute upon the death, without a will, of the first Lord St. Leonards. To the angler it may be that the comfortable old inn is more interesting than Boyle Farm with its Walpolean memories. Many is the wit and the man of letters who, after a day of more or less make-believe angling, has refreshed himself at the "Swan." Theodore Hook delighted in Thames Ditton, and wrote some stanzas in its praise in a punt one day in 1834; it was natural that with so keen a lover of good living the "Swan" should come in for eulogy.

In the churchyard of Thames Ditton rests "Pamela" beneath a stone which records her original interment in the cemetery of Montmartre, and her re-burial here. Into the stone is let a portion of the marble slab, shattered by a German shell during the siege, which marked her resting-place in Paris. Close by is the grave of the first Lord St. Leonards. The tiny church possesses little architectural interest; but it contains a number of small but curious brasses, which have been removed from their original positions in the floor, and fixed upon the walls, a proceeding which, although it has divorced the memorials from the dust they commemorate, has no doubt tended to the preservation of interesting inscriptions, such as have, in too many cases, been destroyed. A brass which possesses a curious interest is that of Erasmus Ford, "sone and heyre of Walter fforde, some tyme tresorer to Kynge Edward IV., and Julyan, the wife." This worthy couple had a full quiver in all conscience, for the brass bears representations of six sons and twelve daughters. Erasmus died in 1533, and his wife six years later. An even more portentous family was given to William Notte, who died in 1576, and Elizabeth his wife--nineteen, all told. It is hard to imagine such a posterity dying out; yet Notte is assuredly an uncommon name. Few facts in human history are more astonishing than the rapidity with which names become extinct. Century after century the same names occur upon tombstones and in parish registers, and then there comes a blank which time, instead of filling up as before, only accentuates.

Coming from London, Thames Ditton is the first point at which, in summer, the house-boat, elsewhere ubiquitous, is met with. The charm of the lagoon-like life which the house-boat affords has not lacked eulogists; but who shall justly describe the calm delights of dusk upon the river? It is as undefinable as happiness. The red gleam of sunset is splendidly spectacular; the gloom of dusk upon the water is weird, and a world of mystery seems to reside beyond. The plash of oars continues until the last speck of light has been folded into night; the boats shoot out from the encompassing darkness, ripple past, and enter the farther shadows. Strange fancies enter the imaginative mind, and these gliding boats seem like phantom craft shooting from shadow-land to shadow-land. Sometimes there comes a hissing launch, its lights flashing meteorically across the stream, and throwing their beams in among the rushes and osiers like sudden electric jets, or the fitful gleam of a will-o'-the-wisp. The awakening on the river has something of the idyllic, especially on a Sunday morning, and if the moorings be cast within earshot of church bells. Ditton is a prime point for the disportment of small craft from Kingston and Surbiton, and on fine Saturdays and Sundays the river hereabouts is crowded. All this movement is of course unfavourable for the punt-angler, unless he be astir early or on a day when the water is more or less deserted. In winter, however, when boating possesses charms only for the hardiest of enthusiasts, a good creel can be made within a stone's throw of the "Swan."

Between Thames Ditton and Surbiton the river banks possess nothing of especial interest. The broad reach is, however, exceedingly pretty. On the Middlesex shore is a more than usually picturesque towing-path, broad and grassy, backed by the full hedgerow which bounds the park of Hampton Court. On the Surrey side the reeds and alders are profuse, and edge the water almost without break. The river front of Surbiton wears a decidedly foreign air, with its tall white houses, and winding walks and shrubberies along the bank. This esplanade, starting from the water-works, extends for some distance towards Kingston, and is an excellent hint to the local authorities of other water-side suburbs. Surbiton is an interesting spot to rowing men, for it is the head-quarters both of the well-known Kingston Rowing Club and of the Thames Sailing Club. Other interest it does not possess, and everything in and about it is painfully modern. But it is a pretty spot, and being within easy access of London is full of attraction to those who toil and spin daily within sound of the boom of Great Paul. Anything that Surbiton lacks in antiquity its ancient and dignified parent, Kingston, can supply. Kingston Bridge lies pretty well a mile farther down stream, almost at the opposite extremity of the town. The view from the facing bank still has something of the foreign air of Surbiton; but the aspect is Netherlandish rather than French, which the other is. The square red tower of the church, the congeries of tiled roofs, and the quaint little summer arbours in the sloping garden of the river-side hotel, contribute greatly to this effect. The not unhandsome stone bridge, the twin-brother of that at Richmond, which connects Hampton Wick with Kingston, is a modern successor of a long ancestry of bridges, the earliest of which dated from Saxon times. Civil war, rather than time, seems to have made an end of all the previous bridges save that which immediately gave place to the present. For centuries London Bridge was the only other permanent means of crossing the Thames; consequently, when there occurred one of the frequent commotions in which our ancestors delighted, there was a good deal of competition between the two sides to get Kingston Bridge destroyed first, and so prevent communication between Middlesex and Surrey. In the strifes of the Roses it fared ill, and during Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebellion it was broken down to prevent the passage of the insurgents. Since then, nearly three centuries and a half ago, the bridge has been more tenderly treated.

Kingston is a very interesting old town, and was an important place, and the scene of the coronation of Saxon kings a thousand years ago. It is remarkable as being the last municipal borough on the river, with the exception of the City of London itself. All the other places have to put up with local boards or vestries, or other undignified mushroomy governing bodies. Kingston possesses the real antique thing--mayor, aldermen, town councillors, mace, and all the other symbols of municipal importance, and is duly and rightly proud thereof. Few English towns can boast of such antiquity, and of fewer still can it be said that they have been boroughs since the days of John Lackland. It seems always to have been a loyal town--the result, perhaps, of its ancient regal associations--and much money appears to have been spent by the olden burghers for bell-ringing and other diversions when confusion had overtaken the king's enemies. When the Earl of Northumberland was taken, for instance, the Kingston ringers benefited to the extent of twenty pence--a clear exemplification of the saying that one half of the world lives upon the misfortunes of the other half. When Prince Charles returned from his Spanish expedition in 1624, the joy of the townsmen was so demonstrative that they must needs spend three and fourpence upon the clangour of joy-bells. Doubtless the young prince, who was much at Hampton Court, was well known in the town, and when, after his accession, his troubles pressed thick upon him, the townsmen were loyal to the core. The actual hostilities of the great rebellion began and ended at Kingston, singularly enough. There the first, armed force assembled; there, near Surbiton Common, Buckingham and Holland made the last stand for the crown, in which fight Lord Francis Villiers, who is buried in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, was slain.

Charles I. and Cromwell, however, are mere personages of yesterday in the history of Kingston. Ten hundred and fifty years ago it was the seat of Egbert's brilliant Witenagemot, a couple of generations before ever a king was crowned here. These coronation memories, however, are Kingston's great pride, and almost the only passages in her history of which any material memorial still remains. This memorial is, of course, the famous coronation stone, an irregular mass worn smooth and shiny by a thousand years of rain and friction. It stands finally now in the market-place, railed off in the reverent fashion common to chairs of state by a massive _grille_ which tends greatly, no doubt, to its conservation. How many of our kings before the Conquest were crowned at Kingston, and that their consecration really took place upon this particular stone, tradition affords the only evidence. The genuineness of the stone is well enough authenticated for the ordinary believer who does not care to make himself miserable by a course of universal scepticism; but I believe there have been antiquaries (of course they were not born at Kingston) who have ventured to suggest that the evidence is insufficient. Tradition says that seven Saxon kings were certainly crowned here, and that probably others were. Here are the names of the seven, with the dates of their coronation, copied from the pedestal of the stone, with faithful adherence to the spelling affected by Mr. Freeman:--Eadweard, 901; Adelstan, 924; Eadmund, 943; Eadred, 946; Eadwig, 955; Eadward, 975; Ædelred, 978. Kingston is a bright, cheerful little town, and the inhabitants seem to bear up well beneath the infliction of their terrible Town Hall, of which the sole tolerable points are some very good oaken carvings and some quaint armorial glass, all removed from the old Town Hall when it was demolished. Before the iconoclasts of Cromwellian days wreaked their evil will upon it, the parish church of Kingston must have been internally very interesting. There is reason to suppose that it was rich in brasses; but all that now remains of them are the blanks in the floor left by their removal. There are a few fine monuments, and one ancient brass of considerable interest is to be seen still. It commemorates Joan, the wife of Robert Skern, and her husband. The lady was a daughter of Edward III. and the frail Alice Perrers. After the coronation stone and the church, the only other "sight" of Kingston is the Norman chapel of St. Helen, for many years only a ruin, which is believed to be the successor of a still older building in which "Saint" Dunstan is reported to have crowned King Ethelred. The crooked streets of this old town, which disputes with Winchester the glory of having been the ancient capital of England, are made picturesque by many fine old red-brick houses of Jacobean and Georgian date. A generation ago there were standing a number of even older houses irregularly gabled, half-timbered, and barge-boarded; but they have either been demolished or re-fronted. Some of the shops, with painfully modern fronts, have low panelled interiors and carved staircases.

At Kingston the towing-path changes to the Surrey shore, and the river takes a bold sweep towards Teddington. Between Kingston Bridge and Teddington Lock the path is by no means picturesque; but the wooded beauty of the opposite bank diverts attention from the more homely shore. Right away to Teddington, and indeed beyond, is an almost uninterrupted succession of lawns and shrubberies and cool-timbered pleasure-grounds, surrounding pretty riparian villas. Life in summer in these cool veranda-girt pleasure-houses is idyllic. There you may enjoy tennis and boating, fishing and sailing, and drink your fill of admiration of the gaily-cushioned craft as they skim past with their lightsome burden of coquettish muslins and gossamers. Nor is this river-strand to be despised when the winds of "chill October" have stripped the trees and left but bare branches, which look mournful and desolate to those who know only the Thames of sunshine and boating flannels. The stream runs brown, brimming, and turbid, as it swirls along laden with a burden of russet leaves. The angler, happily, can follow his museful sport in all seasons, and to him, as to other contemplative men, the river has attractions in autumn not smaller than those of summer, though different. The best English weather is a fine autumn, good alike for work and play, and the second half of autumn is a by no means inauspicious time for the Thames angler, for the river has ceased to be crowded with small craft, and the lumpy water suits better the fish then in season than if it were clear and limpid. A day's angling upon the bosom, or a long stroll by the banks of Thames, has many charms upon a sober October day; and a late autumnal sunset, with its glow fading from across the water and deepening into grey behind the bare poles of the trees, is a thing all of loveliness. Such a sunset, with the soft mist which clouds the banks directly afterwards, is well seen along this reach between Kingston and Teddington, where the thickly-wooded shores shut in the mist, and where the night seems to issue from the weird recesses of the woodland.

Teddington is but a couple of miles, as the river flows, from Kingston, and for the last half mile of the distance the murmur, one might almost say sometimes the roar, of the weir is audible. This same weir is the prime delight of the angler upon the more Cockneyfied portion of the river, and many is the patient piscator who perches himself thereon betimes, and sits at the receipt of finny custom until the gathering dusk renders the enterprise no longer profitable. The old-fashioned carp, that mysterious, long-lived fish which was once, like the peacock, an old English delicacy with which monastic fishponds swarmed, runs to a great size about Teddington Weir, while dace are almost as plentiful as minnows in a brook. Adjoining the weir is the lock, the first in the ascent and the last in the descent of the river. The lock and weir mark, to all intents and purposes, the spot, between sixty or seventy miles from the sea, at which the Thames ceases to be tidal. Henceforth the pilgrim, following the river on its way to the ocean, will see at low water, particularly between here and Kew Bridge, more mud-banks than he cares to count. At such times, too, the sense of smell will, at all events in hot weather, be found to have taken so keen a development that even chloride of lime would be accounted an odour sweeter than that given forth by the nude expanse of festering mud. At Teddington as yet there is happily little annoyance of this kind. To see the little of interest the village affords it is necessary to land at the ferry opposite the "Anglers," an old-fashioned inn which has long been popular with fishermen. At Teddington, be it remembered, is kept jealously locked up, in the custody of Mr. J. A. Messenger, the Royal Bargemaster, the State barge which has descended to her Majesty from early Jacobean times. In form it is graceful and elegant, and in the centre is a covered pavilion for shelter from the sun and rain. It is profusely gilded, and lavishly carved with mermaids and dolphins, while near the figure-head are emblazoned the coronet and plumes of the Princes of Wales, and the badge of the Garter. When he was at Hampton Court Charles I. delighted to spend an hour or two on summer evenings in this barge feeding the swans upon the river. It has not been used since 1849, when her Majesty rowed in state to open the Coal Exchange; but the public had an opportunity of seeing it in 1883, when it was shown at the Fisheries Exhibition. The village of Teddington lies away from the river, and stretches on westward to the gates of Bushey Park. At the head of the main street stands the parish church, a not unpicturesque amalgam of the new and the old. Its architectural interest is small, and the interior is whitewashed, but it contains the tombs of two or three notable people. Of these, "Peg" Woffington, the actress, is perhaps the best remembered. There is a marble monument to her memory which records that, "Near this monument lies the body of Margaret Woffington, spinster, born October 18th, 1720, who departed this life March 28th, 1760, aged thirty-nine years." She was buried in the grave of her infant nephew, Master Horace Cholmondeley, who had died seven years previously. At the end of her wayward career poor Peg could not have found a more peaceful resting-place. The oldest monument in the church is to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who died in 1674. This descendant and ancestor of a long line of Orlandos was lord of the manor and a legal luminary. He was Charles I.'s Commissioner for the treaty of Uxbridge; and under Charles II. was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. When the church was being overhauled in 1833 the Bridgeman vault was opened, and Sir Orlando's body was found lying in a lidless coffin. So skilfully had the embalmer done his work that the remains were perfect, even the pointed Jacobean beard being untouched. An express was sent off to fetch the then Earl of Bradford, Sir Orlando's descendant, who thus had the strange privilege of looking upon the features of a progenitor who had been dead 159 years. There are two old and uninteresting brasses, and a tablet to the memory of John Walter, the founder of the _Times_, who died at Teddington. The churchyard is beautifully kept, full of trees and shrubs and climbing plants, which latter have grown luxuriantly over some of the older tombs. Here lie buried Paul Whitehead, the poet, minus his heart, deposited in the Despencer mausoleum at High Wycombe, whence it was most reprehensibly stolen; Richard Bentley, who shares with Walpole the guilt of designing Strawberry Hill; and "Plain Parson Hale," the friend of Pope, who was for more than fifty years the incumbent of the parish.

From Teddington Lock until close to Richmond the stream is undeniably less picturesque than in the reaches described earlier in this chapter. The river is less full of water, and when the tide is out the unsightly and unsavoury mud-banks are always in view. The towing-path becomes stony and arid; the hedgerows filled with poppies cease, and a very matter-of-fact embankment on the Surrey shore has to be reckoned with. Yet the reach between the lock and Eel Pie Island has always been popular, and often in the summer one may see here all sorts and conditions of notabilities disporting themselves at a little water-party. The spot is comparatively near to London, and your amateur boatman, with true wisdom, prefers not to get between two locks. We are coming now to classic ground, where wit and letters, fashion and frivolity, long have reigned. There is not another village in England with literary associations so numerous and august as Twickenham. Pope and Walpole are the presiding genii--neither of them, perhaps, the most genial of genii; but the fairy-like element is supplied by the hosts of feminine friends with whom the two bachelors were wont to philander. Whether as a letter-writer or as an architect, Walpole was vastly diverting; and it is a pity that so little of his brown stucco abode can be seen from the river. Strawberry Hill is the kind of place a mad architect might build in a delirium. We have a side not unlike the west front of Westminster Hall might have been had it been built of lath and plaster; then comes the keep of a Norman castle, flanked by a Renaissance _tourelle_ from Chambord; the whole crowned with crow-stepped Flemish gables from Antwerp, and the twisted and fluted chimneys of a Tudor farmhouse. Then there are wings which aim at imitating these imitations; these, it is fair to say, are due to Walpole's successors. But howsoever astounding the exterior of Strawberry Hill, the interior is far more remarkable. Within, as without, the place bears every mark of having been built by a man who learned his architecture as he proceeded. Walpole leaped gaily over an anachronism, and saw nothing unorthodox in copying a mediæval tomb and fashioning it into a chimney-piece, nor in taking the choir stalls of Old St. Paul's as the model for the bookcases in his library. The internal arrangements of Strawberry Hill are as wonderful as the events recounted in that very Gothic story the "Castle of Otranto." It is a mighty maze without a plan. A long, narrow corridor, leading apparently to nothing, debouches upon a door which, when opened, discloses a large and splendid apartment. It is, indeed, a house of after-thoughts; but, whatever be its crudeness, it is not devoid of value as an early forerunner of the real Gothic revival. Pseudo-Gothic of this pattern was almost as popular towards the end of the eighteenth century as houses built in the guise of Greek temples. Happily, most of the examples have fallen down, but a few, such as that terrible "restoration" of Windsor Castle, still remain. In literary and personal memories Strawberry Hill is far richer than many houses of greater antiquity and of real historical interest. Horace Walpole gathered all "the town" around him in these "enamelled meadows with filigree hedges;" and few are the great names of the last century and a quarter which have not some connection with "the castle," as its builder loved to call it. All the world's familiarity with this _chic_ abode of Walpoles, Damers, and Waldegraves excuses me from dwelling lengthily upon its peculiar but undoubted charm. Frances, Countess Waldegrave, made it almost as fashionable as it had been in Walpolean times; and although the bulk of the contents of the house were sold after her death, it is pleasant to know that Baron de Stern, who became the proprietor in 1883, purchased much of the furniture, and that, to some extent at least, the historic continuity of olden associations has not been broken.

A little nearer to Richmond, and so happily placed that it commands the river from below Richmond Hill to Teddington Lock, is the modern and very _bizarre_ successor of Pope's Villa. Only a specialist in architectural mania, or a member of the Société des Incoherents, could attempt a description of this astonishing building. It is said to have been erected by a tea merchant, and it certainly looks very much like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a house of cards. Its lawns and shrubberies are very pretty, and after all there is something to be said for having all the river-side monstrosities gathered into one parish. The house does not occupy the exact site of the original Pope's Villa which, thanks to a too common lack of sentiment, was demolished long ago. The famous Grotto, one of the works of embellishment of the "little crooked thing that asks questions," still remains, but in a damp and mouldy condition, and despoiled of all that rendered it interesting. Pope had no great love for gimcrackeries, and we can in some measure imagine the tenor of the lines in which he would have immortalised the tea merchant could he have foreseen the change a century would bring about. The associations of Pope's Villa and gardens are primarily literary, even as those of Strawberry Hill, at a later day, were fashionable, frivolous, and dilettante. In Pope's time Twickenham was the centre of literary interest in England, and if the Jove who dwelt in this Olympus was querulous and stinging, his genius went a long way towards making lustrous an age in which taste and manners slept. Taste, at least, was still slumbering when Lady Howe considered herself justified in demolishing one of the most famous abodes that have ever been connected with our literary history. It is in the neighbourhood of Pope's Villa that the injury which has been done to the Thames by the mass of sewage sludge that has been so recklessly poured into it of late years first becomes noticeable. Although the effects of the tide are not much felt above Richmond Bridge, the condition of the river hereabouts at low water is lamentable. A broad edging of slimy ooze stretches for some distance from the bank on either side, and when the weather is really hot, and there is a drought of any considerable duration, as happened in the summer of 1884, the odour is hardly that of frankincense. The Thames Conservancy embankment between Twickenham and Richmond will no doubt improve matters somewhat; but it is, to say the least, melancholy that it should have become necessary to so disfigure the Surrey shore. Nor does the presence of unwieldy dredges in these reaches enhance the picturesqueness of the stream, while the new towing-path made with dried mud from the river-bed is an agency of martyrdom.

Behind Eel Pie Island--famous in the annals of angling and sweet in the memory of generations of picnickers--is seen the red tower of Twickenham parish church, architecturally much more interesting than the majority of Thames Valley churches. The ancient building fell down in 1713, and the fact that Sir Godfrey Kneller, who was at that time one of the churchwardens, had a hand in its rebuilding, albeit he was not the actual architect, may account for the excellence of the workmanship. The brickwork is almost as good as some of the best Tudor achievements in that line. Some famous and many interesting people lie buried here and in the churchyard. Pope's own tomb is hidden beneath the seats; but the marble monument which he erected to the memory of his father and mother, and in anticipatory commemoration of himself, is still to be seen on the east wall. In that part of the inscription which refers to himself Pope left blanks for his age and the date of his death; but such is the carelessness which prevails in such matters that these _lacunæ_ have never been filled up. Kneller, the courtly painter of so many beauteous coquettes, is also buried in the church. Here, too, sleeps Admiral Byron, the author of the once popular "Narrative of the Loss of the _Wager_," irreverently described by his grandson as "My Granddad's Narrative." Kitty Clive, the charming actress who lived at Little Strawberry Hill, and for whom Walpole had a platonic attachment, is buried in the chancel. Naturally, in a classic village where many tremendous personages have dwelt, Twickenham is full of fine and interesting old houses, mainly of that square red-brick order of architecture which, if not precisely picturesque, is suggestive of comfort and homeliness. The old houses at Twickenham are of the sort in which Thackeray's people lived--still redolent of the charming but indescribable odour of the days of good, harmless Queen Anne. Perhaps the most interesting of them all is York House, immediately opposite Eel Pie Island, in which Anne herself and her sister Mary were born. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Anne's somewhat plebeian grandsire, lived there, and it is one of the five or six houses in which he is said to have written that monstrous dull book, the "History of the Rebellion." For several years after their clandestine marriage the Duke of York--he who when king made so pitiful an ending of it--lived with Anne Hyde in this house, although it was undoubtedly called York long before then. In the second half of last century, Prince Stahremberg, Viennese Envoy Extraordinary, lived here, and achieved such fame as can therefrom result by a long succession of private theatricals in which a bevy of lovely and high-born dames took part. Orleans House likewise has royal associations, but of a somewhat melancholy kind, as memories of exile usually must be.

Twickenham might pleasantly detain us for a whole chapter; but the wooded slopes of Richmond rise beyond, and tempt us on to "Ham's umbrageous Walks," and the green meadows of Petersham. The river between Eel Pie Island and Richmond Bridge has a charm all its own, which owes much to the associations of the shores between which it flows. The meadows on the Surrey shore are sweet to look upon from the water; but until Ham is approached there is greater interest and variety upon the Middlesex bank. Ham, with its famous "Walks," lies low, and little of it can be seen from a boat. From the towing-path, however, there is to be had a very pleasant glimpse of Ham House, shaded, and, indeed, almost hidden, by splendid elms, some of which, against the pale which divides the grounds from the public path, throw in summer a cool and welcome shadow across the glaring footway. There is something solemnly picturesque about Ham House, as, indeed, there nearly always is about an old red-brick house closely surrounded by graceful, darkling elms. Ham is, in fact, so hemmed in by foliage that it but narrowly escapes being gloomy. Horace Walpole, who was nothing if not cheerful, declaimed terribly against its dreariness; and to Queen Charlotte it appeared "truly melancholy." It is shut in and almost surrounded by high walls; but a good view of the front may be obtained from the towing-path through the handsome iron gates in the centre of a dwarf wall. These gates are said not to have been opened for many years, and the house itself has the appearance of being rarely lived in. Ham is a good example of very early Jacobean architecture. It has a longish front with a slightly projecting wing at each extremity, and is approached by avenues on almost every side. Few country houses in the neighbourhood of London are more interesting either historically or architecturally. Neither within nor without has any restoration been attempted, and there has been only such renovation as was imperatively necessary to prevent decay. It was built, it is said, for Henry Prince of Wales, elder brother of Charles I., who died a mere youth. The actual builder of the house was Sir Thomas Vavasour, King James's Marshal of the Household, and the belief that it was extended for the Prince of Wales is strengthened by the _Vivat Rex_, which, together with the date, 1610, is carved over the principal entrance. Since 1651 it has belonged to the Earls of Dysart. The first Earl of Dysart was, in Hibernian phrase, a Countess, Elizabeth, daughter of William Murray, one of the owners of Ham, and the wife of Sir Lionel Tollemache. After Sir Lionel's death, the Countess married John, Earl of Lauderdale, who, within three years of his marriage, was created Baron Petersham, Earl of Guildford, Marquis of March, and Duke of Lauderdale. John Maitland, the "L" of the Cabal Ministry, and his Duchess, were two of the most infamous creatures of the Restoration. The Duchess was bad because it was her nature to be so; her second husband, whose relations with her before marriage and in the lifetime of their respective first partners had been at the least compromising, was too weak and too easily swayed to withstand his wife's imperious ways. She openly sold the places in the Duke's gift, and it was the opinion of Burnet that she "would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass her ends." The "Cabal" constantly held their councils at Ham House, the Duchess of Lauderdale often being present to sharpen their flagging wits, exhausted by the concoction of shameful schemes for replenishing their own and their master's exchequers. The house was magnificently decorated and furnished out of the spoils of politics, and internally it remains very much as the Duchess left it--full of pictures, portraits, tapestries, rich cabinets of ivory and cedar. In one of these cabinets is preserved a crystal locket containing a lock of hair from the ill-fated head of Elizabeth's Earl of Essex. It had been proposed to assign Ham House as the residence of James II. after his enforced abdication; but that courageous person found it expedient to take himself off, and to weep on a kindlier shore.

It is not alone in summer, when the trees are thick with foliage, and the sun shines cheerily in at the windows, chasing away the memory of Lauderdale, Arlington, Ashley, and their fellows, that Ham House presents a striking appearance. It is the very type of house to make a winter picture, and there is nothing more characteristic of an English winter scene than this historic pile, looked upon from the river-side. The gaunt, bare elms, black against the dull sky, save where the snow has left some traces on less sheltered boughs, the frosted turf, the great iron gates and their tall piers, topped with an edging of snow which has gathered in the corners of the ironwork, a white drift banked up against the rusty hinges and the rarely-drawn bolt, glistening fleecy masses lodged above the door and on every projecting frame and cornice, a long roof hidden in snow, particles of which adhere even to the chimney-stacks--all this makes a picture which should be painted. The village of Ham, with its classic "Walks," is haunted by the towering shades of Pope and Swift, and the gentle ghosts of Thomson and Gay, an appropriate connecting-link between Twickenham and Richmond.

Of Petersham, which adjoins Ham Common, little or nothing can be seen from the river. It has a church which, although architecturally uninteresting, is crowded with old monuments, and with famous and notorious dust. The Duchess of Lauderdale herself was both married and buried here; but she has no monument. George Vancouver, the circumnavigator and the godfather of Vancouver Island, lies here; so do the Misses Agnes and Mary Berry--Walpole's "favourite Berrys." Not the least distinguished of men who have been buried at Petersham within recent years is Mortimer Collins, who is still missed from among the ranks of lighter English writers.

Past Ham the gleaming river winds through the Petersham meadows, with their wooded background of Richmond Park, and the broken, furzy ground near the "Star and Garter." Here the Thames becomes as lovely as it is between Hampton Court and Kingston. The banks are profusely timbered, and a bushy little eyot in the centre of the stream adds to the charm of the view. Where the towing-path for a time ends, near Kew Foot Lane, there begins on each shore an irregular line of water-side villas buried in lilac and laburnum, surrounded by smooth lawns with edgings of geometrical flower-beds, those on the Middlesex side still in Twickenham, which extends quite up to Richmond Bridge. On the Richmond, or rather the Petersham shore, tower high up on the verdant bluff the towers and pinnacles of the "Star and Garter," looking in the distance not unlike a French villa on the heights of St. Cloud. Beyond is Richmond Hill, with its leafy Terrace, adding much to the foreign impress of the scene. The boldness with which "thy hill, delightful Sheen," rises up almost sheer from the water, recalls some more glorified Namur. There is a brightness and a vivacity about this little suburb of St. James's which are rare to find in this stolid island. It is a hard climb up the lovely lane from the river-side to the portals of the "Star and Garter," and the gates of Richmond Park. It is a sweet and toothsome spot this site of the "Star and Garter," which recalls cycles of flirtations and memories of iced champagne. "A little dinner at Richmond" is a heading very familiar to the persevering novel reader, and the scene of these pleasant symposia is of course always this aristocratic hotel at the top of the hill. The delights of Richmond Park, on the opposite side of the road, are of another order. Here we have a vast pleasure-ground, the nearest of its kind to London save Epping Forest. If anything, it is lovelier than Epping, since it has been better cared for, and there has been none of that reckless destruction which has so much marred the forest glades of Essex. Close by the Richmond gate is one of the sweetest bits in this thickly-wooded domain--the old Deer Park. A steep slope, green and timbered, divides this from the higher and more public portions of the park. In this undulating preserve, dotted with stately oaks, is kept a large herd of fallow-deer, tame almost to temerity. The old Deer Park has some retired nooks and lonely glades in which one may surprise the dreamy deer sheltering themselves upon a glaring day beneath the wide branches of the ancient oaks, up to the barrel in fern and bracken and bramble. Scattered here and there are plantations new and old, full of larch and fir as of more stately forest trees, in which abound game of all sorts, but more especially the hopping rabbit and the skimming hare.

The gates of the park open upon the very extremity of the Hill, close to Mansfield House, now an hotel, but formerly a residence of the Lord Chancellor of that name, who once had a redoubtable encounter with the mob, and to Wick House, where sometime lived Sir Joshua Reynolds. Immediately beyond is the Terrace, an umbrageous promenade, dear in morning hours to nurses and their lively charges, and later in the day somewhat of a Rotten Row or a ladies' furlong. From his seat beneath the trees the gazer looks down away to the west upon one of the most lovely sights that earth affords. Between edgings of quivering green, of lighter and of deeper hues, winds a glistening silver ribbon, in and out among villas and townlets, always narrowing, and when the limit of vision is reached, it seems to the straining eye as though meadow and woodland met and stayed all further passage. From this eminence the country lies mapped out as though seen from a balloon; and far away beyond all trace of the river there closes in a dark and swaying mass of foliage, like to one dense land of trees. A thin line of brilliant blossom marks in early summer the Chestnut Avenue in Bushey Park; and were it not that here and there the sun catches a high church tower, a gilded vane, or mayhap a turret of feudal Windsor, it would seem from here above that this wide and lovely stretch of country was still a vast untrodden forest. So great is the height that even immediately below the long, comfortable pleasure-boats loom tiny as toys, while the steamers, happily rarer in these waters than they are lower down, become almost picturesque in the distance. All this gleaming valley, stretching across to the west, is the way we have come; these are the woodlands past which we have rowed, and beneath whose shadow we have rested; those the bends and reaches where we have done some honest, straightforward pulling; those the shaded lawns where we have longed for tennis, the rather for the sakes of the muslin goddesses we furtively watched than for pure love of that Olympian game. That which remains of our course shoots us past the skirts of Richmond town, the river bank coloured and diversified with houses old and brown, and houses new and white, with here and there yet other lawns. One more embowered eyot comes round which the waters, parting, gently swirl. Here lie anchored a lazy barge or two, and as we plash past them into mid-stream again we are full in face of Richmond Bridge, grey, many-arched, and slightly bowed. Beyond the bridge there rises a chain of swelling uplands, all massy with foliage, and dotted with the red and white of lotus-eating villas.

/J. Penderel-Brodhurst/.