In 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 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 roundabout 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 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.

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 surrounding 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:—

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 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 newcomers—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 Cæsar and Pennell Hawkins, the royal surgeons, “for the Queen would have two of them always on the spot to watch the constitutions 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 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 counterweighed by custom and flunkeydom. Mrs. Papendiek, brought up in the air of the backstairs, 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, né M’Call, a form which this canny Aberdonian, in view of his countrymen’s unpopularity, 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 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 himself 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 relapse 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 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 discriminating, 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 subject, he seems to have lost the royal favour. 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 wanderings 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 Gainsborough, 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 at 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 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 neighbourhood, 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 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 comforts 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 Ealing, 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 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 commend himself to Mrs. Trimmer. Her future home, indeed, was at Old Brentford, now being swallowed up in Ealing.

The Brentford political parson was John Horne, afterwards better known as Horne Tooke. Son of a London poulterer, whom he styled to his Eton school-fellows “a Turkey merchant,” Horne 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 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 Horne pointed an acrimonious pen, to the chuckling delight of their political opponents. He started a newspaper for publishing 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 circumstances took him into Surrey. A Mr. Tooke of Purley had invoked his assistance for a dispute about common rights in that neighbourhood; and Horne 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 affection, for Mr. Tooke left his supposed heir only a small legacy, along with the welcome opportunity for a lawsuit. But Horne Tooke’s real father had left him means to live comfortably at Wimbledon 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 “election” 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 Horne Tooke had loudly advocated 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 Horne 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 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.

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 himself took notice of the young rustic as carrying 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 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 nowadays 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 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 overshadow 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 immigrant noblesse lucky enough to be able to rent houses in such a choice ville 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. He was convicted and hanged on Kennington Common, along with the notorious highwayman, 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 Kew, 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 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 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 rosâ, 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 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 neighbourhood. 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, of the first night of She Stoops to Conquer, and the first fame of the Vicar of Wakefield.

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 he 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 afterwards 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 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 information 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 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 devoted herself to educating her daughter for the crown that would be her almost certain inheritance; and the Princess was carried about on temporary sojourns in different parts of the kingdom, to the marked displeasure of William IV., who did not like to be reminded how he was only 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 himself 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 Haverfield 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 providing that vacancies should be filled up “from those who have offered their services, according to their character and permanent continuance in the Parish.” Discipline was maintained 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 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 playing 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 generation later, heads were again shaken over a strange robbery of the registers from Kew Church: men whispered the name of one illustrious parishioner 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 occasionally 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 infirmities, 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 hotel leaning on the arm of an equerry or some such attendant, whose duty, one supposes, would be to nudge his master when any salutations 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 “No use till the wind changes!” Then on the story of Zacchæus 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 Brunel, 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, 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 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.

V
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 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.