Kensington Palace.]

WILLIAM III. AT KENSINGTON.

stood; our national manners they hardly attempted to acquire. The most important part of their duty they performed better than any ruler that had preceded them for they governed strictly according to law; but they could not be the first gentlemen of the realm-the heads of polite society. If ever they unbent, it was in a very small circle, where hardly an English face was to be seen; and they were never so happy as when they could escape for a summer to their native land. They had, indeed, their days of reception for our nobility and gentry; but the reception was a matter of form, and became at last as solemn a ceremony as a funeral." To the head-quarters of the Court at Kensington these remarks are to be applied quite literally.

William III. usually held his Courts at Kensington, and the decoration of the apartments of its palace was one of the chief amusements of his royal consort. And yet, fond as he was of Kensington, King William would often say that he preferred to be hunting on the shores of Guelderland rather than riding over the glades of this place or Hampton Court-a taste in which he was followed by George II. Indeed, with a natural love for his Dutch home, William made this palace and the gardens surrounding it look as much like his native country as he could.

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who came to England in order to import the art of shipbuilding into his dominions in his own proper mechanical person." Peter is stated to have frequently dined at Kensington Palace; and it has been wondered how the two sovereigns got on so well together. Leigh Hunt tells a story how that one day the king took the Russian monarch to the House of Lords, when the latter, owing to a natural shyness, made the lords and the king himself laugh, by peeping strangely at them out of a window in the roof. He got the same kind of sight at the House of Commons; and even at a ball at Kensington, on the Princess Anne's birthday, he contrived to be invisibly present in a closet prepared for him on purpose, where he could see without being seen.

Here, when William was ill with the dropsy, he called in the Court physician, Dr. Radcliffe, to pay him a professional visit. Showing him his swollen ankles, he exclaimed, "Doctor, what do you think of these?" "Why, truly," answered Radcliffe, "I would not have your Majesty's two legs for your three kingdoms." With this ill-timed jest, though it passed unnoticed at the moment, it is needless to add that the doctor's attendance on the Court at Kensington ceased. It is true that in 1714 he was sent for by Queen Anne upon her death-bed; but he was too ill to leave his house at Carshalton. His refusal, however, nearly exposed him to "lynch law," for the mob at the West End threatened to kill him if he came to London. The mob, however, was disappointed, for a few months later he died of the gout.

Although William was not over-fond of his new subjects, and his Court, for the most part, was as gloomy as his gardens, yet there still might occasionally be seen here some of the liveliest wits and courtiers that have left a name in history. Here came the Earl of Dorset, Prior's friend, who had The following story, relating to a scene which been one of the wits of the Court of Charles II.; happened in the royal apartments here, we tell in Prior himself, too, was there, and succeeded in ob- the words of Lord Sackville, as they stand recorded taining an appointment as one of the "gentlemen in the gossiping pages of Sir N. W. Wraxall :of the king's bedchamber;" Congreve, whose plays "My father, having lost his own mother when very were admired by Queen Mary; Halifax, who is young, was brought up chiefly by the Dowager spoken of as a "minor wit, but no mean states- Countess of Northampton, his grandmother, who man;" Swift, and Sir William Temple; Burnet, the being particularly acceptable to Queen Mary, she gossiping historian, who afterwards became a bishop; commanded the countess always to bring her little the Earl of Devonshire, "whose nobler zeal," as grandson, Lord Buckhurst, to Kensington Palace, Leigh Hunt puts it, "had made him a duke, one though at that time hardly four years of age; and of a family remarkable for their constant and happy he was allowed to amuse himself with a child's combination of popular politics with all the graces cart in the gallery. King William, like almost all of their rank." Among other visitors here at this Dutchmen, never failed to attend the tea-table period, too, were Lord Monmouth, afterwards Earl every evening. It happened that her Majesty of Peterborough, "the friend of Swift and Pope, having one afternoon, by his desire, made tea, and conqueror of Spain, and lover, at the age of seventy, waiting for the king's arrival, who was engaged in of Lady Suffolk;" Sheffield, afterwards Duke of business in his cabinet, at the other extremity of Buckinghamshire, "a minor wit and poet, in love the gallery, the boy, hearing the queen express her with (the rank of) the Princess Anne;" and last impatience at the delay, ran away to the closet, not least, Peter the Great, the "semi-barbarian, the dragging after him the cart. When he arrived at premature forcer of Russian pseudo-civilisation, the door, he knocked, and the king asked, 'Who

is there?' 'Lord Buck,' answered he. 'And Queen Mary, consort of William III., died here what does Lord Buck want with me?' replied of the small-pox, and the king's attachment to the his Majesty. You must come to tea directly,' palace is said to have increased, from the circumsaid he; the queen is waiting for you.' King stance of its having been the scene of the last William immediately laid down his pen, and opened acts of the queen, who was justly entitled to his the door; then taking the child in his arms, placed affection. It was here that the king also died, in Lord Buckhurst in the cart, and seizing the pole, consequence of an accident in riding at Hampton drew them both along the gallery, quite to the room Court a few days previously. The readers of

QUEEN CAROLINE'S DRAWING-ROOM, KENSINGTON PALACE.

in which were seated the queen, Lady Northampton, | Macaulay will not have forgotten the picture which and the company.

But no sooner had he entered the apartment than, exhausted with the effort, which had forced the blood upon his lungs, and being naturally asthmatic, threw himself into a chair, and for some minutes was incapable of uttering a word, breathing with the utmost difficulty. The Countess of Northampton, shocked at the consequences of her grandson's indiscretion, which threw the whole circle into great consternation, would have punished him; but the king interposed in his behalf; and the story is chiefly interesting because (as serving to show how kindly he could behave to a troublesome child) it places that prince in a more amiable point of view than he is commonly represented in history."

he draws in the very last page of his history, when William, knowing that death was approaching, sent for his friends Albemarle, Auverquerque, and Bentinck, while Bishops Burnet and Tillotson read the last prayers by his bedside. After his Majesty's death, bracelets composed of the queen's hair were found upon his arm.

The Court at Kensington in Queen Anne's time was not much livelier than it had been in that of King William. Swift describes Anne, in a circle of twenty visitors, as sitting with her fan in her mouth, saying about three words once a minute to those that were near her, and then, upon hearing that dinner was ready, going out. Addison and Steele might have been occasionally seen at her

told by Horace Walpole, showing the lax and love and cherish her, she did but little to win the romping manners of the Court under the early respect and regard of either the Court or the Georges- "There has been a great fracas at Ken- nation at large. The hangers-on of the Princess sington (he writes in 1742). One of the mesdames would seem to have been of the ordinary type of (the princesses) pulled the chair from under Countess "summer friends." At all events, one of her Deloraine at cards, who, being provoked that her ladies in waiting writes thus, with a vein of unmonarch was diverted with her disgrace, with the conscious sarcasm: "These noblemen and their malice of a hobby-horse gave him just such another wives continued to visit her royal highness the fall. But, alas! the monarch, like Louis XIV., is Princess of Wales till the old king was declared mortal in the part that touched the ground, and too ill to reign, and the Prince became in fact was so hurt and so angry, that the countess is dis- regent; then those ladies disappeared that moment graced, and her German rival remains in the sole from Kensington, and were never seen there and quiet possession of her royal master's favour." more. It was the besom of expediency which The Countess of Deloraine was governess to the swept them all away." It appears, however, that young princesses, daughters of George II., and the Princess of Wales was well aware that her was a favourite with the king, with whom she hangers-on were not very disinterested. At all generally played cards in the evenings in the prin- events, she writes: "Unless I do show dem de cesses' apartments. Sir Robert Walpole considered knife and fork, no company has come to Kensingher as a dangerous person about the Court, for she ton or Blackheath, and neither my purse nor my possessed, said the shrewd minister, "a weak head, spirits can always afford to hang out de offer of a pretty face, a lying tongue, and a false heart."an ordinary.'" Lord Hervey, in his "Court Ballad," written in 1742, sarcastically styles her "virtuous, and sober, and wise Deloraine;" and in his "Memoirs," under date of 1735, he describes her as "one of the vainest as well as one of the simplest women that ever lived; but to this wretched head," he adds, "there was certainly joined one of the prettiest faces that ever was formed, which, though she was now five-and-thirty, had a bloom upon it, too, that not one woman in ten thousand has at fifteen."

George II. died quite suddenly as he sat at breakfast in the palace, on Saturday, October 25, 1760. The building underwent considerable alterations during his reign, and he was the last monarch who resided here, George III. having chosen as his homes St. James's Palace, Kew Gardens, and Buckingham House.

The palace, too, was the home of the Princess Sophia, the poor blind daughter of George III. Miss Amelia Murray, in her "Recollections," speaks of having constantly spent an evening with her in her apartinents here, and bears testimony to the goodness of her disposition, as "an example of patient and unmurmuring endurance such as can rarely be met with."

Here, too, the unfortunate Caroline, Princess of Wales, was living from 1810 down to 1814, when she removed to Connaught Place. Here she held, if we may so speak, her rival Court, and kept up a kind of triangular duel with her royal husband, and her wayward child, the Princess Charlotte, not at all to the edification of those around her, who were obliged to feel and to own that, injured as she undoubtedly was by one who had sworn to

The friends of the Princess formed a circle by themselves. It included Lord and Lady Henry Fitz-Gerald, Lady C. Lindsay, Lord Rivers, Mr. H. (afterwards Lord) Brougham, Lord and Lady Abercorn, Sir Humphry Davy, Lady Anne Hamilton, Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Gell, Mr. Craven, Sir J. Mackintosh, Mr. R. Payne Knight, Mr. and Lady E. Whitbread, Lord and Lady Grey, and Lord Erskine-a most strange and heterogeneous medley. Very frequently the dinners at Kensington were exceedingly agreeable, the company well chosen, and sufficient liberty given to admit of their conversing with unrestrained freedom. This expression does not imply a licentious mode of conversation, although sometimes discretion and modesty were trenched upon in favour of wit. Still, that was by no means the general turn of the discourse.

One of the ladies of the Princess Caroline writes, under date of 1810: "The Princess often does the most extraordinary things, apparently for no other purpose than to make her attendants stare. Very frequently she will take one of her ladies with her to walk in Kensington Gardens, who are accordingly dressed [it may be] in a costume very unsuited to the public highway; and, all of a sudden, she will bolt out at one of the smaller gates, and walk all over Bayswater, and along the Paddington Canal, at the risk of being insulted, or, if known, mobbed, enjoying the terror of the unfortunate attendant who may be destined to walk after her. One day, her royal highness inquired at all the doors of Bayswater and its neighbourhood if there were any houses to be let, and went into many of them, till

Kensington Palace.]

CAROLINE, PRINCESS OF WALES.

at last she came to one where some children of a friend of hers (Lord H. F.) were placed for change of air, and she was quite enchanted to be known by them, and to boast of her extraordinary mode of walking over the country."

Her royal highness gave plenty of balls and parties whilst residing here, and amused herself pretty well as she chose. In 1811 she is thus described by Lady Brownlow, in her "Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian : "-"I had scarcely ever seen the Princess, and hardly knew her by sight. At the time of which I speak, her figure was fat and somewhat shapeless; her face had probably been pretty in youth, for her nose was well formed, her complexion was good, and she had bright blue eyes; but their expression was bold-this, however, might be partly caused by the quantity of rouge which she wore. Her fair hair hung in masses of curls on each side of her throat, like a lion's mane. Everybody, before the peace with France, dressed much according to their individual taste; and her royal highness was of a showy turn her gowns were generally ornamented with gold or silver spangles, and her satin boots were also embroidered with them. Sometimes she wore a scarlet mantle, with a gold trimming round it, hanging from her shoulders; and as she swam, so attired, down an English dance, with no regard to the figure, the effect was rather strange. The princess's parties themselves," Lady Brownlow continues, "were marvellously heterogeneous in their composition. There were good people, and very bad ones, fine ladies and fine gentlemen, humdrums and clever people; among the latter the Rev. Sydney Smith, who, I thought, looked out of place there.

Her royal highness made rather a fuss with us, and we both always supped at her table. On one occasion I was much amused at seeing my father opposite to me, seated between the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Oxford. Sure never were there more incongruous supporters; and my father's countenance was irresistibly comic. Methought,' said he, as we drove home, 'that I was Hercules between Virtue and Vice.""

The following anecdote of her royal highness shows how little of good sense or dignity she possessed :-"One day, the Princess set out to walk, accompanied by myself and one of her ladies, round Kensington Gardens. At last, being wearied, her royal highness sat down on a bench occupied by two old persons, and she conversed with them, to my infinite amusement, they being perfectly ignorant who she was. She asked them all manner of questions about herself, to which

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they replied favourably; but her lady, I observed, was considerably alarmed, and was obliged to draw her veil over her face to prevent betraying herself; and every moment I was myself afraid that something not so favourable might be expressed by these good people. Fortunately, this was not the case, and her royal highness walked away undiscovered, having informed them that, if they would be at such a door at such an hour at the palace on any day, they would meet with the Princess of Wales, to see whom they expressed the strongest desire. This Haroun Al-Raschid expedition passed off happily, but I own I dreaded its repetition."

On another occasion her royal highness made a party to go to a small cottage in the neighbourhood of Bayswater, where she could feel herself unshackled by the restraints of royalty and etiquette; there she received a set of persons wholly unfit to be admitted to her society. It is true that, since the days of Mary of Scotland (when Rizzio sang in the Queen's closet), and in the old time before her, all royal persons have delighted in some small retired place or apartment, where they conceived themselves at liberty to cast off the cares of their high station, and descend from the pedestal of power and place to taste the sweets of private life. But in all similar cases, this attempt to be what they were not has only proved injurious to them: every station has its price-its penalty. By the Princess, especially, a more unwise or foolish course could not have been pursued, than this imitation of her unfortunate sister-queen of France. All the follies, though not the elegance and splendour, of Le Petit Trianon were aped in the rural retreat of Bayswater; and the Princess's foes were not backward at seizing upon this circumstance, and turning it (as well they might) to effect her downfall.

"Monk" Lewis, under date November, 1811, writes: "I have neither seen nor heard anything of the Princess since she removed to Blackheath, except a report that she is in future to reside at Hampton Court, because the Princess Charlotte wants the apartments at Kensington; but I cannot believe that the young princess, who has been always described to me as so partial to her mother, would endure to turn her out of her apartments, or suffer it to be done. I have also been positively assured, that the Prince has announced that the first exertion of his power will be to decide the fate of the Princess; and that Perceval, even though he demurred at endeavouring to bring about a divorce, gave it to be understood that he should have no objection to her being excluded from the corona