GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
Countess du Roy, the same is pulling down in order to rebuild 
the house for His Grace ; and about a third of the garden lately 
in the occupation of the Right Honourable Henry Boyle, Her 
Majesty’s principal Secretary of State, is marked out in order to be 
annexed to the house of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough.” 
The lease, granted for a period of fifty years, was obtained on 
easy terms, but the Duke was abroad ; he was (to use a now familiar 
phrase) ‘‘ somewhere in France,”’ engrossed in the business of war. 
The business of building a house and settling into it, had, perforce, 
to be managed entirely by the Duchess, who showed her wisdom 
in employing Sir Christopher Wren as the architect, although he 
was then verging on eighty years of age. 
She herself laid the foundation stone on Tuesday, May 24th, 
1709 (O.S.), ‘“‘a fine warm day’ we are told. The stone was 
inscribed, ‘‘ Laid by her Grace the Duchess of Marlborough, May ye 
24th—June ye 4th, 1709.” The use of both the old and new style 
of chronology, was unusual, for though the new style had been 
accepted on the Continent, it was not adopted in this country 
until 1752. 
The Marlboroughs were thrifty people—history has called them 
parsimonious, but in using Dutch bricks for Marlborough House 
as they are said to have done, they were not blameworthy. Dutch 
bricks were redder, smaller, and also cheaper, than English ones. 
They were probably brought over as ballast, from Holland, in the 
picturesque “ bluff-bowed”’ and high-sterned transports plying 
between Deptford and Holland. Mr. Arthur Beavan, the author 
of ‘‘ Marlborough House and its Occupants,” points out that 
the names of these vessels—Elephant, Expedition and so on, 
are to be seen again and again in the records of the transport 
office in 1709, and that they might very well have conveyed 
““a cargo of the raw material for the house then building in 
Pall Mall.” 
However this may have been, “the third of the garden lately 
jn the occupation of the Right Honourable Henry Boyle” was 
by no means sufficient to content Her Grace of Marlborough. 
Therefore she obtained, under the Great Seal, a second lease, 
which cancelled the first, and gave into her possession a plot of 
ground about two acres in extent, next to the Friary and known 
as ‘the Royal Garden.” 
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