46 KEW GARDENS 



with their tutors in what is now Cambridge 

 Cottage, and two of the younger boys in a 

 house at the top of the Green. Lady Charlotte 

 Finch, governess to the princesses, had a separate 

 house near the river ; then another is spoken 

 of as the "Princess Elizabeth's house." Kew 

 House itself was a scrimply inconvenient 

 mansion, for which the royal household made 

 a tight fit even in its state of reduced cere- 

 mony. Pictures of it when it was the Princess 

 Dowager's villa, show a square, plain front with 

 two one -storied wings, from which in all 

 thirty-two windows look straight out upon the 

 lawn. At that time it bore the alias of "The 

 White House." Miss Burney describes it as 

 a labyrinth of stairs and passages, where at first 

 she continually lost herself among the "small, 

 dark, and old-fashioned " rooms. 



It is in 1786 that a search-light comes to be 

 turned upon this semi-private life by the diary 

 of a then most popular novelist. At the end 

 of the year before, Fanny Burney had been 

 staying with her venerable friend, Mrs. Delaney, 

 at Windsor, when one afternoon into the draw- 

 ing-room walked, unannounced, a burly man in 

 black with a star on his breast. Even the 



