GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
When Heathfield House was sold, in 1837, the gates were bought 
by the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who set them up at Chiswick 
House, where for sixty years they formed the principal entrance 
to the lovely grounds of the famous Villa, built by the Earl of 
Burlington, about 1730 to 1735. 
In 1897 the gates, and their handsome piers, were transplanted 
to the Duke of Devonshire’s residence in Piccadilly, where they 
still form one of the chief ornaments of that famous thoroughfare. 
The removal, I believe, gave great dissatisfaction to the in- 
habitants of Chiswick, who had taken considerable pride in the 
beauty of the gates which stood at the bottom of what is now 
known as Duke’s Avenue. 
When the old Jacobean mansion that preceded the existing 
Chiswick House, came into the possession of Richard Boyle, third 
Earl of Burlington—a nobleman notable for his patronage of art 
and artists, and his large building undertakings,—it had already 
had a chequered history. Many people more or less famous and 
infamous, had made it a place of residence ; indeed the rapidity 
with which it changed hands was remarkable. 
The Wardour family, to whom it originally belonged, sold it to 
that Robert Carre, made successively Earl of Rochester and 
Earl of Somerset, whose supposed share in the murder of his 
greatest friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, a poet, was one of 
the lurid sensations of the reign of James I. In the memor- 
able trial that followed the crash of discovery, the details 
of the whole horrible conspiracy were unmasked. The 
Countess admitted her guilt; her four chief accomplices were 
hanged, but, extraordinary to relate, the two principal offenders 
were pardoned. A short imprisonment, and the forfeiture of their 
estates, was their very inadequate punishment. A pension sufficient 
for their. needs was granted to them, and in 1624 an entry in the 
‘* State Papers domestic ”’ states ‘‘ that the Earl of Somerset is 
pardoned, and has taken a house at Chiswick, but promises not to 
go near Court.”” This was the original Chiswick House. It was said 
of the guilty pair that though they lived in one and the same build- 
ing, it was “only in an alternation of sullenness and chiding 
. . . they were a mutual torment in their old age as they had 
been a mutual snare in their youth, until they sank unregretted 
and unhonoured into the grave.” 
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