Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, vol 1 | Page 6

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the inheritance of her young son. The couple returned to England that
their child might be born there. The Duke had a strong impression that,
notwithstanding his three elder brothers, the Crown would come to him
and his children. The persuasion, if they knew it, was not likely to be
acceptable to the other Princes. Certainly, in the face of the Duke's
money embarrassments, his kinsmen granted no assistance to enable
the future Queen of England to be born in her own dominions. It was
by the help of private friends that the Duke gratified his natural and
wise wish.
Apartments in Kensington Palace were assigned to the couple. The old
queen had died at Kew, surrounded by such of her daughters as were in
the country, and by several of her sons, in the month of November,
1818. George III. was dragging out his days at Windsor. The Prince
Regent occupied Carlton House.
The Kensington of 1819 was not the Kensington of today. In spite of
the palace and gardens, which are comparatively little altered, the great
crowded quarter, with its Museum and Albert Hall, is as unlike as
possible to the courtly village to which the Duke and Duchess of Kent
came, and where the Queen spent her youth. That Kensington consisted
mainly of a fine old square, built in the time of James II., in which the
foreign ambassadors and the bishops in attendance at Court
congregated in the days of William and Mary, and Anne, and of a few
terraces and blocks of buildings scattered along the Great Western
Road, where coaches passed several times a day. Other centres round
which smaller buildings clustered were Kensington House--which had
lately been a school for the sons of French emigres of rank--the old

church, and Holland House, the fine seat of the Riches and the Foxes.
The High Street extended a very little way on each side of the church
and was best known by its Charity School, and its pastrycook's shop, at
the sign of the "Pineapple," to which Queen Caroline had graciously
given her own recipe for royal Dutch gingerbread. David Wilkie's
apartments represented the solitary studio. Nightingales sang in
Holland Lane; blackbirds and thrushes haunted the nurseries and
orchards. Great vegetable-gardens met the fields. Here and there stood
an old country house in its own grounds. Green lanes led but to more
rural villages, farms and manor-houses. Notting Barns was a farmhouse
on the site of Notting Hill. In the tea-gardens at Bayswater Sir John Hill
cultivated medicinal plants, and prepared his "water-dock essence" and
"balm of honey." Invalids frequented Kensington Gravel pits for the
benefit of "the sweet country air."
Kensington Palace had been bought by William III. from Daniel Finch,
second Earl of Nottingham. His father, the first Earl, had built and
named the pile of brick-building Nottingham House. It was
comparatively a new, trim house, though Evelyn called it "patched up"
when it passed into the hands of King William, and as such might
please his Dutch taste better than the beautiful Elizabethan Holland
House--in spite of the name, at which he is said to have looked, with
the intention of making it his residence.
The Duke of Sussex, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had
apartments in the palace. He dwelt in the portion of the southern front
understood to belong to the original building. His brother and
sister-in-law were lodged not far off, but their apartments formed part
of an addition made by King William, who employed Sir Christopher
Wren as his architect.
The clumsy, homely structure, with its three courts--the Clock Court,
the Princes' Court, and the Princesses' Court--had many interesting
associations in addition to its air of venerable respectability. William
and Mary resided frequently in the palace which they had chosen; and
both died under its roof. Mary sat up in one of these rooms, on a dreary
December night in 1694, after she felt herself stricken with small-pox,
seeking out and burning all the papers in her possession which might
compromise others. The silent, asthmatic, indomitable little man was
carried back here after his fall from his horse eight years later, to draw

his last breath where Mary had laid down her crown. Here Anne sat,
with her fan in her mouth, speaking in monosyllables to her circle.
George I.'s chief connection with Kensington Palace was building the
cupola and the great staircase. But his successors, George II. and Queen
Caroline, atoned for the deficiency. They gave much of their time to the
palace so identified with the Protestant and Hanoverian line of
succession. Queen Caroline especially showed her regard for the spot
by exercising her taste in beautifying it according to the notions of the
period. It was she who caused the string of