CHISWICK 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 Karl 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 
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