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CHAPTER II.

KENSINGTON PALACE.

"The Finches of the Grove"-William of Orange and his Wife Mary-Their Domestic Life-Mary's Death-The Assassination Plot-Death of William.

We are going to-day among kings and princes. Surely this announcement should be sufficient to arouse our readers' attention. We may talk and write democratically if we like, but we are worshippers of royalty none the less for all our prating and scribbling. The staunchest democrat from the other side of the Atlantic feels never so proud as when he attends a royal levee. The burgomaster of Winkelheim talks slightingly of kings and queens to his neighbours in private, and professes that they are no better, nay rather worse than other folk. But the worthy theorist will turn hot and cold and feel his heart in a flutter when his majesty condescendingly

addresses a few words to him, on the unveiling of the great War Denkmal. People affect to grumble because history deals so much with royalty, but when history takes up other matters and styles itself sociology, they style it dry. The chroniclers, indeed, have left us full accounts of what the great people did, and very little at all of what the common people (who indeed as is well known, were only invented to support the former) did. The court life is the only life of which in many centuries we have any accurate idea, and it is better that the annalists should have described it than have left no description at all, though we would willingly barter half the banquets and “tourneys" in Froissart, Monstrelet, Fabian or Hall, for a glimpse into the home life of Gobin Agace or of Wat the Tyler. This long digression, however, is apropos of the fact that to-day we purpose rambling about the "regal glory" of Kenna's Kingdom, Kensington Palace, and so without more ado let us leave our seat in the Flower Walk and wend our way along the Broad Walk thronged with nursemaids and perambulators until we are opposite the Palace. Now we must

ask you to close your eyes for a second. You can

imagine us saying "Hi, presto, change!" Open your eyes again. What a transformation! The Broad Walk is still under our feet, it is true, but the Round Pond has vanished. In its place is a straight avenue of trees, and a formal carriage drive, cutting the Broad Walk at right angles, and leading towards London. Turn your eyes in the direction of Bayswater. Between the spot where the Palace now stands and the High Street of Notting Hill, is a wild, untidy gravel pit. Now look toward Kensington. Just behind us a building is in course of erection; a substantial red brick mansion, at present veiled in scaffolding. Do you not ask, like the awakened sleeper in the Eastern tale, "Where am I?" Fellow Rambler, you are in Kensington Gardens, as they appeared in the year 1690, and the unfinished building behind you is the Earl of Nottingham's house, recently purchased as a royal palace, by our Dutch monarch and deliverer, King William the Third. But our fancy has carried us too far. We must return to sober facts, and trace the history of the Palace to its commencement.

We have already alluded to the tradition of the nursery that Henry VIII. established in Kensington

for his children. Perhaps the little Prince Edward may have passed some of his childish hours in the Old Court Suburb, playing with his sister, afterwards the good Queen Bess. Henry's eldest daughter, too, may have spent here some portion of her childhood; unfortunate and unhappy even then, we may be sure, and swayed doubtless by that weakmindedness and by that bigotry which afterwards earned her, somewhat unjustly, the fearful title of the Bloody Queen. We know not when the baby-house was broken up. But there were no baby princes or princesses for more than half-a-century, so the nursery became useless. The ground on which it stood was most likely granted on leases from one courtier to another, and, about the middle of the seventeenth century, came into the possession of the Finches, Earls of Nottingham.

The Finches are well known in history. One of their ancestors had been amongst the most servile instruments of the despotic Charles the First. But the Finches who lived at Kensington were much more honourable than their kinsman. The first of them, Heneage Finch, had become successively AttorneyGeneral, Lord Keeper, Lord Chancellor, Baron Finch,

and Earl of Nottingham. These dignities descended to his son Daniel. The second Earl of Nottingham inherited not only the dignities but also the talents of his father. Like him he pleaded eloquently. Like him he was distinguished as a statesman. Like him too, he was a Tory and a High Churchman. His younger brother, who bore the name of his father, Heneage Finch, and who afterwards became the third Earl, possessed the family qualities and the family predilections and prejudices in an equal, if not in a greater degree. His conduct as counsel for the Crown at the trial of Lord Russell, had shown that he was not deficient in that hereditary oratory which had distinguished his father and his brother, but he displayed at the same time too much of party rancour. His defence of the seven bishops in the following reign was equally eloquent and more honourable. He was, in fact, one of the first of those ministers whom James, in his mad attempt to force the Roman Catholic religion on the country, thought fit to dismiss from his service.

But these three " Finches of the Grove" were distinguished in more ways than one. They are termed,