10 KEW GARDENS 



her taste as "braw rich feeding for the cows." 

 Sir Walter must have had the White Lodge in 

 view, yet without considering that it is half 

 an hour's walk from the Richmond Hill edge 

 of the Park. 



George II. and Caroline sometimes lived at 

 Hampton Court, as when their eldest son gave 

 them deadly offence by secretly carrying off his 

 wife thence to lie-in at St. James's. And it 

 was there that, in Frederick William fashion, 

 the King once struck his eldest grandson, a 

 memory that is said to have given George III. 

 his dislike to this palace. He let it fall to its 

 present position as a mixture of Cockney show- 

 place and aristocratic almshouse, while he much 

 affected Richmond Lodge, till he got possession 

 of his boyhood's home at Kew. 



So at last we come to the Kew mansion, 

 whose connection with royalty was comparatively 

 a late one, and lasted only for two generations. 

 The reader must bear in mind that this was not 

 the present Kew Palace, which hardly seems to 

 deserve such a title of pretence. The latter had 

 belonged to Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was 

 sold by him to Sir Hugh Portman, a rich 

 Holland merchant, who rebuilt or altered it in 



