KEW HOUSE 
13 
as witnessing the commencement of great activity there. It was in 
1759 that William Aiton, the author of the great Hortus Kewensis, 
was engaged by the Princess Dowager of Wales to act 
as head-gardener ; in 1759, Sir William Chambers began 
Princess of 
Wales, 1759. 
Earl of 
Bute. 
to embellish the gardens with the various temples and 
ornamental structures which are dealt with in some detail later, 
and several of which are still in existence ; and about this time, 
also, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, comes upon the scene. 
Lord Bute had been a member of the Prince of Wales’s household, 
and after the Prince’s death he became the confidential adviser of 
the Princess Dowager, a relationship which, during the 
subsequent unpopularity of Lord Bute, was made the founda- 
tion of malicious insinuations. Soon after the accession of 
George III., in 1760, Lord Bute became Prime Minister. What- 
ever his virtues or failings as a politician and statesman may have 
been — and for a short time he was the best-hated man in Britain — 
he was a genuine lover of plants. Botany, in fact, appears to have 
been his chief relaxation. He was the author of one of the rarest 
of botanical books. Of this work, which was in nine volumes quarto, 
and was entitled “ Botanical Tables, containing the Different Familys 
of British Plants,” only twelve copies were prepared. As early as 
1798 one of them was sold for £120. It was in pursuit of his* favourite 
study that Lord Bute is said to have brought his life to a premature 
end. It is recorded that, seeing a plant which was new to him on 
the cliffs near Christchurch, Hampshire, he in climbing towards it 
“ received a severe fall which brought on an illness of which he 
died ” in 1792. 
Of the early life of William Aiton, whose name, with that of his 
son William Townsend Aiton, fills so prominent a place in the annals 
of Kew for over eighty years (1759-1840), not much is 
known. What we know is based chiefly on a letter 
preserved in the library at Kew. From this we gather 
that he was bom at Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, in 1731, that he 
came south in 1754, that he was employed in the Physic Garden at 
Chelsea under the famous Philip Miller, and that it was Miller who 
recommended him in 1759 to superintend the botanic garden at Kew. 
Sir William Chambers was an eminent architect of his day, 
who is well remembered not only by his work at Kew, but still 
more generally as the architect of Somerset House. He was also a 
William 
Aiton. 
