CHISWIGK HOUSE 



Somerset made some futile attempts to regain favour with the* 

 King by gifts of fruit from the Chiswick garden " peaches con- 

 ceivably good, and all that was left of his plums ; " and he said that 

 if His Majesty would supply him with a good gardener, he would 

 send him yearly a tribute of the produce of his garden. 



Thus we get a favourable report of the famous grounds of Chiswick 

 House, as early as 1631. The disgraced Countess died the following 

 year. The child of this unfortunate marriage, the Lady Anne, was 

 betrothed to a son of the Earl of Bedford, who, not unnaturally, 

 appears to have objected somewhat to the match, and Somerset, to 

 endow her with 12,000, had to sell or mortgage his Chiswick pro- 

 perty, with all his plate and household belongings. Her son was the 

 famous Lord William Russell, who in 1683 perished on the scaffold. 



In 1664 Chiswick House and its contents were granted by 

 Charles II. to his son, the Duke of Monmouth ; a transaction that 

 cost the King 6,000. Four years later the Duke parted with it 

 to Lord Gerard of Brandon, in exchange for an appointment as 

 Captain of the King's Life Guard and 4,000. Lord Gerard sold 

 the house to Sir Edward Seymour, Speaker of the House of Commons,, 

 who, in his turn in 1682 or thereabouts disposed of it to the 

 first Earl of Burlington. 



Richard Boyle, the third earl, was a famous building nobleman, 

 and patron of art and letters. During his travels in Italy, from 

 which he returned in 1716, he had made it his business, as it was 

 also his pleasure, to collect pictures and statuary, and had greatly 

 admired the works of Palladio. 



The villa that so much attracted the young Earl that he ultimately 

 made it the model for the house that he built on his Chiswick 

 estate, was the Villa at Vicenza, designed by Palladio for the 

 Marquis Capra. The architect whom Burlington employed to 

 carry out his ideas was William Kent, who claimed to be painter, 

 architect, and landscape gardener. Horace Walpole in his " Anec- 

 dotes of Painting," styles Kent " the father of modern gardening," 

 and certainly the mark Kent left upon the gardening of the eigh- 

 teenth century is so definite, that no apology need be made for 

 dwelling at some length upon his history. 



Born in 1685, in Yorkshire, and apprenticed to a coach-maker, 

 Kent soon came to London fired with the ambition to become 

 a painter. London in those days, over sixty years before the 



161 II 



