Kew Gardens

Shocked at a question impossible to answer, yet a little assured by the mild tone of his voice, I instantly forced myself forward to meet him, though the internal sensation which satisfied me this was a step the most proper to appease his suspicions and displeasure, was so violently combated by the tremor of my nerves, that I fairly think I may reckon it the greatest effort of personal courage I have ever made. The effort answered: I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of countenance, though something still of wildness in his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders and then kiss my cheek! I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when I saw him spread out his arms! Involuntarily, I concluded he meant to crush me; but the Willises, who have never seen him till this fatal illness, not knowing how very extraordinary an action this was from him, simply smiled and looked pleased, supposing, perhaps, it was his customary salutation. She was soon relieved to find the King talking reasonably enough, though with a certain flightiness, not very different from his ordinary manner. He insisted on prolonging the interview, after the Willises in vain tried to cut it short. He talked of Mrs. Schwellenberg, seeming quite well aware of what Miss Burney had to bear from her “Cerbera”; of the lady’s own father, author of the _History of Music_; of his favourite composer, Handel, snatches from whose oratorios he tried to hum over with painful effect. As they walked on together, he asked endless questions about his friends, expressed his intention of appointing new officials, complained angrily of his pages. At last he was persuaded to part from this reluctant confidante, promising to be her friend as long as he lived; then she went off to the Queen with a report which ensured forgiveness for that innocent adventure. The favourable symptoms continued, little to the satisfaction of the Prince and his friends, who are credited with passing brutal jests on the King’s condition. Just as power seemed to be within their grasp, the Regency Bill was shelved, after an audience given by the King to the Lord Chancellor, Thurlow, though that shifty Polonius is said to have remarked that His Majesty had been “wound up” to talk to him. Miss Burney, who now confined her walks to the roadside, had the happiness of thence seeing the royal pair walking arm-in-arm in Richmond Gardens. Next day, the King came to tea with his family in the drawing-room; then, a few days later, meeting Miss Burney in the Queen’s dressing-room, he said that he had waited on purpose to tell her--“I am quite well now--I was nearly so when I saw you before--but I could overtake you better now.” After four months of royal misery and public excitement, the evergreen sneerer, Horace Walpole, could note--“The King has returned, not to what the courtiers call his sense, but to his non-sense.” The news called forth an outburst of public joy, that hit the Prince’s party hard. A thanksgiving prayer was read in every church; and later on the King, to the dread of his advisers, would not be satisfied without the excitement of attending a solemn service at St. Paul’s, where he and the princesses were moved to tears, while his graceless sons attracted attention by their irreverent chattering. There is some slight palliation for the Prince of Wales’s conduct throughout this trying time, in the fact that the King had showed a dislike to him, and even a want of fairness to his shortcomings; but the Duke of York, always the father’s favourite son, has no excuse for backing up his undutiful brother. Soon after the recovery was announced, London had hailed it with a general illumination, from rushlights in the humblest cottage window to blazing devices on the clubs. It was witnessed by the Queen and all her daughters except the youngest, while, in their absence till the, for them, most unwonted hour of 1 A.M., Kew House too was lighted up and adorned with a transparency displaying _The King--Providence--Health--Britannia_; and on either side of the gates, in gold letters on a purple ground, shone these most loyal lines:-- Our prayers are heard, and Providence restores A patriot King to bless Britannia’s shores. Nor yet to Britain is this bliss confined, All Europe hails the friend of human kind! If such the general joy, what words can show The change to transport from the depth of woe, In those permitted to embrace again The best of fathers, husbands, and of men? Inside the house also the Muse was not silent. His darling Princess Amelia came to kneel before him, presenting her father with verses in the Queen’s name, from the pen of her novelist-attendant. [Illustration: THE WATER LILY POND] Amid a rapturous Nation’s praise That sees thee to their prayers restored, Turn gently from the general blaze,-- Thy Charlotte woos her bosom’s lord. Turn and behold where, bright and clear, Depictured with transparent art, The emblems of her thoughts appear, The tribute of a grateful heart. O! small the tribute, were it weigh’d With all she feels--or half she knows! But noble minds are best repaid From the pure spring whence bounty flows. P.S.--The little bearer begs a kiss From dear papa, for bringing this. In the middle of March, after their unusually long stay at Kew, the royal family moved to Windsor, the King riding on horseback, to be received by the townsfolk with an ovation of welcome. In June, to complete the cure, he went to Weymouth for sea-bathing, everywhere on the journey hailed with acclamations and demonstrations that might well have turned a weak head. At Weymouth, the exuberant loyalty of the people was embarrassing. All the shops and bathing-machines placarded _God Save the King_, a device repeated on the bonnets and waists of the bathing-women, as indeed on dresses all over England. “All the children,” reports Miss Burney, “wear it in their caps--all the labourers in their hats, and all the sailors _in their voices_; for they never approach the house without shouting it aloud--nor see the King, or his shadow, without beginning to huzza, and going on to three cheers.… Nor is this all. Think but of the surprise of His Majesty when, the first time of his bathing, he had no sooner popped his royal head under water than a band of music concealed in a neighbouring machine struck up ‘God save great George our King!’” It was now that occurred the ludicrous incident of the wooden-legged Mayor presenting an address, and not being able to kneel, to the scandal of the officials. And here, the “Royals” having gone on a day’s visit to Sherborne Castle, for the first time in three years Miss Burney had a holiday, which she spent with a friend in a “romantic and lovely excursion” to the ruins of Sandsfoot Castle near the neck of Portland Island, a peep into which she might have found more romantic, had some couple of miles not been a Georgian lady’s limit on foot. After a tour through the loyal West country, the Court returned to its routine of London and Windsor life, with halts at Kew in the summer. But henceforth Miss Burney’s diary has little to say about Kew; and after another year we lose that peep-hole into royal domesticity. The life of a glorified waiting-maid began to tell upon her health and spirits: “Lost to all private comfort, dead to all domestic endearment, I was worn with want of rest and fatigued with laborious watchfulness and attendance.” Her chief comfort had been a sort of intermittent philandering with the Queen’s Vice-Chamberlain, Colonel Digby--the “Mr. Fairly” of her journals--a favourite with the King, too, to whom he could “say anything in his genteel roundabout way.” This gentleman the lady clearly admired none the less when he became a widower, though to us she presents him rather too much in the character of a priggish novel hero, full of edifying reflections and opinions. But the sentimental friend turned out not impeccable, for he married Another, the “Miss Fuzilier,” about whom his fellow-servant had often rallied him; and she cannot conceal that this choice seemed unworthy of him. Her health was so evidently breaking down that her literary friends cried out on the sacrifice; even the newspapers gossiped about her condition; and the meddlesome Mr. Boswell declared that he would set the whole Club upon Dr. Burney, if she were not allowed to resign. This she was most loth to do. She tried taking “the bark,” but that did little good. The Rev. Dr. Willis volunteered a prescription which she found “too violent” in its effect, while grateful to him for his interest in her. “Why,” said he, “to tell the truth, I don’t quite know how I could have got on at Kew, in the King’s illness, if it had not been for seeing you in a morning. I assure you they worried me so, all round, one way or other, that I was almost ready to go off. But you used to keep me up prodigiously. Though, I give you my word, I was afraid sometimes to see you, with your good-humoured face, for all it helped me to keep up, because I did not know what to say to you, when things went bad, on account of vexing you.” Every one noticed her miserable plight, yet the Queen showed herself too blind to the fact of a life being wasted in her service. Even the ill-tempered Mrs. Schwellenberg was kind in her way, who seems to have found this subordinate a pleasingly submissive victim, and occasionally spoke well of her behind her back: “The Bernan bin reely agribble!” This “Cerbera,” whatever her faults, had the virtue of devotion to her lifelong mistress, and could not understand living by choice out of sunshine of Court favour. She tempted Miss Burney with the dazzling prospect of her own post in reversion. But the novelist was sick of her gilded cage. With trembling knees, after long hesitation, as if it were a crime, in the form of a petition she offered her resignation, not over-graciously received. The Queen proposed a six weeks’ holiday, a change of air. When this was declined, the Schwellenberg raged against Miss Burney and her father as almost guilty of treason. “I am sure she would have gladly confined us both in the Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves from a daring so outrageous to imperial wishes.” She held on some months longer to let the Queen find a successor, secured in the person of a Hanoverian pastor’s daughter, Mdlle. Jacobi, who, for sign of family poverty, brought a niece with her in the disguise of maid. Miss Burney’s last King’s birthday ball under the royal roof was marked by a visit to Mrs. Schwellenberg’s room from the young Duke of Clarence, our future sovereign, of which the diarist jotted down a long and most amusing description, though she has to apologise for not giving a full “idea of the energy of His Royal Highness’s language.” He insisted upon them all drinking the King’s health in champagne so often that some of the courtly attendants were a little shaky on their legs; and as for the Sailor Prince, he got so drunk that, as he told his sister next morning, “You may think how far I was gone, for I kissed the Schwellenberg’s hand”--and he might have added, bid her “Hold your potato jaw, my dear!” If this be a true sketch from high life, the novelist need not be accused of exaggerating the manners of her Braughtons and Captain Mirvans. Among her last duties was expounding to the inquisitive King and Queen the allusions in Boswell’s _Dr. Johnson_, in 1791 the book of the day, which Miss Burney hardly approved of, being one of the few who “by acquaintance with the power of the moment over his unguarded conversation, know how little of his solid opinion was to be gathered from his accidental assertions.” Now she was at pains to vindicate to her royal patrons “the serious principles and various excellences” of her famous friend. The year before, when Boswell visited her at Windsor, he had in vain pressed her to contribute “personal details” to his work. “You must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor’s; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam--all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam: so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself.” The last day of Miss Burney’s five years’ slavery dawned at Kew, from which she attended Her Majesty to St. James’s, and there took leave of her with deep emotion. Freedom, congenial society, and country air soon restored the lady’s health; and the faithless Colonel Digby’s place in her heart became more than filled by General D’Arblay, one of a colony of French _émigrés_ settled at Juniper Hill above Mickleham, near her sister’s house, and her friends, the Lockes of Norbury. Lessons in one another’s language gave excuse for meetings, at which Cupid was soon of the party. The not-over-young couple married in haste and privately, but seem never to have repented. With the proceeds of the bride’s next novel, _Camilla_, they built Camilla Cottage, still conspicuous, as Camilla Lacey, on the slopes above Box Hill station; but at the peace General D’Arblay went back to France, where his wife became for years an involuntary exile. Mrs. Papendiek has a mischievous statement that Miss Burney was dismissed on account of the Queen’s displeasure that she used her spare hours for writing a novel in the palace; and that the authoress was much mortified by the loss of her post. But this seems mere scandal. Madame D’Arblay owned to writing an unsuccessful tragedy at Kew and Windsor; and some years after, when _Camilla_ was published, she confessed to the King and Queen that the “skeleton” of it had been jotted down under their roof, at which they expressed no displeasure, but graciously acknowledged the dedication with a gift of a hundred guineas. The same gossiping authority says that Miss Jacobi did not recommend herself to the Queen, nor to “old Schwelly,” who refused to allow that niece-maid to dine at her table. A few years later Mrs. Papendiek herself succeeded to the post once held by the novelist, for which she was much fitter, to judge by the space given to dress in her journals. But these records end before she entered upon her duties; and we know little more of her Court life but that she gained promotion in the royal household, from which she retired to spend her old age at Kew. In 1805, another literary lady came into the service of Queen Charlotte, Miss Cornelia Knight, afterwards companion to the Prince Regent’s daughter. Her journals are much more discreet about the royal family than Miss Burney’s; and there is a hiatus in them for most of the period of her living at Windsor, where she gives little more than hints of dissensions and grudges in the highest circles, and a general impression that Kew had fallen out of its old favour. All these three writers had a common point, in being able to boast of Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance, most intimate in the case of Miss Burney. Thorne, in his _Environs of London_, as also the official guide, have it that the King was confined, during his first illness, in the present palace, apart from his family; and this statement is followed by a mob of guide-books, _servum pecus_, that often go tumbling after one another into the same ditch. But Miss Burney and other witnesses prove that it was not so; and Thorne has misled himself in his reference to George Rose’s _Diary_. Rose clearly refers to the next serious attack in 1801. It was whispered that in 1795 there had been a recurrence of the symptoms, passing off in a few days. But at the beginning of the next century, when the King’s mind was agitated by the resignation of Mr. Pitt on the Catholic Emancipation question, he caught a bad cold that ended as before. This time the illness began at Buckingham House; then, after His Majesty seemed fit to attend to business again, on his going to Kew a severe relapse took place, shown by his informing the Prince of Wales that he proposed to abdicate the English Crown and retire to Hanover or America. It was now that he came to be separated from his family, and confined in the “Dutch House” under charge of the Willises, to whom he had taken a strong dislike, and is said to have struck one of them before his removal could be effected by force. The father no longer appears as taking the leading part in the King’s treatment; but one of the sons for a time was the fly-wheel in the State, since through him all papers had to be presented for the royal signature. When the Lord Chancellor was admitted to the King’s sick-room, he vehemently declared, “as a gentleman and a king,” that he would sign no document nor perform any act of sovereignty unless he were that very day restored to his wife and daughters; and he was then taken back to the house over the way, to be still more or less closely watched by the Willises. Dr. Thomas Willis,[1] writing at this time to Mr. Rose in the King’s name, tells that his own quarters are on Kew Green, “a few doors below the _Rose and Crown_,” a tavern still standing in less transmogrified state than its neighbour, the _King’s Arms_, also mentioned in books of that period. Kings reign and pass away; kingdoms flourish and fade, mansions rise and fall, while public-house signs often seem to have more permanence in them than most human institutions. Yet of them too _transit gloria_, if we may believe the report that half the taverns of England at one time took Wilkes’s head for their sign, as to which evidence of popularity he himself used to tell how he overheard a loyal old lady’s remark, “Ah! he swings everywhere but where he ought.” The second avowed derangement lasted, by fits and starts, till the summer of 1801. A course of sea-bathing at Weymouth again completed the patient’s recovery; but the dread of fresh attacks remained. The next one came in 1804, when his repugnance to the Willises was so marked that the doctor of Bedlam was employed. It is, of course, a common symptom of insanity, the turning against its best friends. And now poor George showed intermittent symptoms of dislike to the Queen herself, so that they began to occupy separate apartments, and are found not even dining together. The old domestic happiness was gone, along with the uncomfortable Kew House, that had so often been its scene. Yet, had the King kept his health, there seems reason to believe that Kew might have become more of a home to him than ever. George III., returning to the plan set on foot in the early years of his reign, took a fancy for building a castle here, after plans prepared by Wyatt, the then esteemed architect, in the bad taste of the period. The design is to be seen in one of the rooms of the present palace. The other house was pulled down in 1802, to make way for the new structure, which would have stood nearer the river-side, looking over to the not very royal town of Brentford, that “town of mud,” so strangely admired by the Georges and reviled by their poets. But the works were interrupted by the King’s fresh attack in 1804, and this building never got further than the state of a pretentious shell, which stood idle for nearly a quarter of a century, and was then demolished by George IV. That monarch had no more love for Kew than his father for Hampton Court. He had spent freely upon his own whims, on Carleton House, and on the Pavilion, the latter gimcrack medley a laughing-stock even for contemporary taste, and a byword with irreverent writers like Byron-- Shut up,--no, not the King, but the Pavilion, Or else ’twill cost us all another million! His father, unless for saddling us with so many expensive sons, had lived so carefully and economically, that the nation need not have grudged him a “Folly” for once in a way. It was his spendthrift heir who began to restore Windsor Castle, demolishing the Queen’s Lodge there, and to rebuild Buckingham Palace in its present form. [Illustration: THE PALACE] When Kew House had disappeared, the sturdy “Dutch House,” now known as Kew Palace, became the occasional retreat of the royal family, its scant accommodations, no doubt, eked out by those other mansions held on Kew Green. It was here that Addington found the King dining rather before one o’clock on the simplest fare. His mind continued to be rather cranky, as shown by his strange freak of wearing a huge powdered wig in conjunction with the mediæval trappings of the Order of the Garter. Blindness came gradually on to increase his afflictions. In 1809 the nation joyfully celebrated his Jubilee, with much feasting of the poor--and the rich--relieving of prisoners for debt, pardoning of military culprits, illuminations, libations, and such memorials as the statue on the Weymouth Esplanade, that records the townsfolk’s gratitude to the King, whose stay at his favourite bathing-place had so often sent up the price of its lodgings. We may be sure Kew, in its small way, was not behindhand in such loyal doings. But Kew was hardly again to welcome the Father of his People. Repeated agitations went to overthrow his reason for good--the triumphant marches of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British arms not yet brightened by Wellington’s victories, the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia. At the beginning of 1811, George had just wits enough left to consent to the Prince’s Regency. A few months later, Charles Knight was one of the Windsor crowd that saw their aged Sovereign in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by and by of deafness, cheered by music, by religious exaltation, and by delusive memories of the past, more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy reason, in one of which he had the satisfaction of learning Napoleon’s downfall and the recovery of Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind old King with his white beard, only now and then visited by those nearest to him. It is said that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when one day he overheard his father murmuring the complaint of Milton’s Samson:-- O dark, dark, dark! Amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! Total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word, “Let there be light! and light was over all,” Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree? When George III. was laid with his fathers in 1820, his stout-hearted and narrow-minded Queen had gone before him. To the last she tried to do her duty, according to her lights. Reconciled, at least outwardly, to her eldest son--indeed it appears that all along the strict moralist had something of woman’s weakness for that rake--she exerted herself to play the figurehead of his Court, taking the place of his discarded wife; and she shared his unpopularity to such an extent as to be hissed by the mob on her way to hold a Drawing-room; then, after the death of the Princess Charlotte, she had to face an outburst of popular resentment in the City. By the autumn of 1818 she was hopelessly prostrated by dropsy. On the way from London to Windsor her state became so serious that a halt was made at Kew Palace; and there she died in a chair, in the room now marked by a brass tablet, her last looks, it is said, fixed on a picture of _The Dropsical Woman_. A more moving loss in the preceding year had been that of the Princess Charlotte, upon whose young life so much seemed to hang, while bitter hatred kept her parents apart. She died in childbirth at Claremont, wife of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, future King of the Belgians, who else might have taken in England the part afterwards filled by Prince Albert. When thus King George’s family of fifteen seemed like to die out, unless through the detested Ernest of Cumberland, three of the now elderly princes were hastily married in the same month--the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Clarence, and the Duke of Kent. These weddings, that might come close on funerals, were performed privately in the drawing-room at Kew Palace, the two latter on the same day, but at different hours. We know which of the branches took root. Next year was born the Princess Victoria, whose father died at Sidmouth about the same time as the King. The cause of his death is said to have been sitting in wet clothes after a long walk; and similar carelessness seems to have been usually the prelude to George III.’s afflictions, but for which the place of Windsor might have been usurped by Kew, through this King’s favour. To the same favour was mainly due the rise and progress of the Gardens, that have been hitherto left too much in shade upon pages that bear their name. Now that nothing but the present “Palace” remains to block them out of our view, it is time to trace their development from a princely hobby into a national institution. III THE STORY OF THE GARDENS