very neat villa, having to it the park and a straight new way through this park. At that time a large gravel-pit occupied the ground between the north of the Palace and the Bayswater Road; the Round Pond and the Serpentine did not exist. The straight carriage drive which Evelyn mentions led from the Palace into London, and used to be lighted with lanterns on dark nights when the Court was at Kensington. No sooner had William completed his purchase than he was obliged to leave for Ireland and take the field against James the Second. Mary remained in England and spent her time between Whitehall and Kensington, urging on the bricklayers and painters; for William had set his heart

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finding the Palace ready to receive him in the autumn. The progress of the works may be traced in her letters to her husband, which were found, after his death, carefully preserved in his room in Kensington Palace. Sir Christopher Wren was the architect, and one Nicholas Hawksmoor, a disciple of the great man, held the place of clerk of the works, and superintended subsequent additions under Anne and George the First. Mary's letters are a strange combination of love and politics, mixed with the usual troubles of those who have to do with bricklayers and builders. In one she deplores their slowness, and tells William how his room smells of paint, for which she will ask pardon when she sees him. In another letter she writes: 'I writ you word in my last how I thought you might shift at Kensington without my chamber; but I have thought since to set a bed (which is already ordered) in the Council Chamber; and that I can dress me in Lord Portland's and use his closet. M. Neinburg is gone to get other rooms for him; thus, I think, we may shift for a fortnight, in which time I hope my own will be ready; they promise it sooner.'

In spite of Mary's fears, the work was done before William returned from his Irish campaign, and she amused herself with some concerts, at which her favourite poet, D'Urfey, had the honour of singing some of his anti-Jacobite compositions. William arrived at Kensington in September, and there the Court settled for the remainder of the autumn.

A serious fire broke out soon after in the newly finished Palace, and the King and Queen bad a narrow escape of being burnt in their beds. William, who was suddenly awakened by the roar of the flames, rushed out of his room calling for his sword, thinking a Jacobite mob had attacked the Palace.

Under William and Mary many Councils were held in Kensington Palace, at which William planned his campaigns against James the Second and Louis the Fourteenth. Here the King held his Levees and the Queen her Drawing-rooms. Hither came Lord Marlborough to receive an audience of thanks after his victories in Ireland, and Ambassadors were received from foreign Courts before making their public entries into London. William was only once more than four months in England, and during his absences Mary used to preside at Kensington at the Council-table, round which sat the 'junto of nine kings.'

There were many complaints from courtiers and Ministers of the inconvenience and danger of travelling from London to Kensington. Under George the First, the chaplain, Richard Bently, was afraid to go home to St. James's, where he lived, after evening prayers at Kensington, as the road was unsafe from the footpads and highwaymen. Under George the Second, Lord Hervey writes terrible accounts of the badness of the road to town. Within the memory of Mr. Thomas Walker, who published 'The Original,' and died in 1836, the road to London was so dangerous that on Sunday evenings a bell used to be rung to summon people together that they might set out in parties numerous enough to ensure mutual protection on the way home to town.

It was at a Drawing-room at Kensington Palace that the quarrel between Queen Mary and her sister Princess Anne (over the dismissal of Lady Marlborough, which the Queen had commanded) became plain to the world; and Lady Marlborough has described the scene when the Princess made her Majesty all the professions imaginable, to which the Queen remained as insensible as a statue.

Meantime, the young Duke of Gloucester, Anne's child and heir presumptive to the Throne, was living at his nursery-palace, Campden House, whence he was often taken to wait upon the Queen at Kensington Palace. He was a wretched little hydrocephalous infant, who could scarcely walk at four years, and was never destined to live. But both William and Mary seem to have encouraged his visits, and found diversion in his conversation. His great interest was the workmen who were still decorating the interior of the Palace. Mary gave him a box of tools which cost 201., as the Gazette of the day pompously announces. One day, just before the campaign of 1694, the little Duke had a great field-day in the gardens of Kensington Palace, and William inspected a troop of urchins, dressed in uniforms, and called the Duke's Body

guard. The Duke promised the assistance of himself and this regiment for the next Flemish war; then, turning to the Queen, he suddenly asked why his mother had been deprived of her Guards. William hastily presented the drummer of the troop with two guineas, and the loudness of his music prevented any more awkward questions being asked.

At Kensington Palace, on December 28, 1694, Queen Mary died in the sixth year of her reign and the thirty-third of her life. The room in which she breathed her last is still preserved; a small, square, gloomy, unfurnished apartment, with panelled walls and windows looking out on the courtyard. Here, when she felt the gravity of her illness, she sat up all one December night burning letters and documents on which she did not wish posterity to pass judgment. Towards morning she ended by writing a letter to her husband on the subject of Elizabeth Villiers, her rival in love, which she endorsed: 'Not to be delivered excepting in case of my death,' and placed in an ebony cabinet. Next day her illness, which had been called measles, was pronounced small-pox, and the doctors soon gave up all hope. William, usually so cold and stiff, had his camp-bed brought into the sick-room and never left his wife. Messengers from Berkeley House, where Princess Anne was living, came to effect a peace but were not admitted, and the sisters died unreconciled. William's grief was so great that he swooned repeatedly, and the attendants thought he would die first. The moment the breath was out of Mary's body, the Lord Chancellor broke the Great Seal, and the Jacobite spies, who were lurking round the Palace, started with all speed from Kensington to the Court of St. Germains.

William refused to leave the Palace after Mary's death, and became more attached to Kensington than before. Here Lord Somers found him sitting in his closet, absorbed in an agony of grief more acute than could have been expected from his disposition, and obtained leave to arrange a meeting of reconciliation between him and Princess Anne. In the empty hall of the Palace, Queen Anne's sedan-chair still stands, and it may be the same one in which she was carried upstairs into the Presence Chamber at this memorable interview.

In the lonely state apartments King William passed much of his widowerhood, becoming daily more gloomy and silent, more given to drinking Dutch spirits in his solitary hours, finding no company congenial but that of his Dutch followers, and thrashing

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his Dutch servants if they neglected his orders. Yet he had his moments of good humour, and Horace Walpole recalls the story how little Lord Buckhurst, aged four, knocked at the door of his private closet and invited the King to be a horse to his coach; and how the King dragged the toy carriage up and down the long gallery at Kensington till the child was satisfied.

At Kensington Palace, William was often visited by Peter the Great, who spent three months of the year 1698 in London. The Hero of Nassau and the Czar of Muscovy found each other excellent company, and spent many an evening over their gin and clay pipes. The Russian, we are told, thought the King's liquor more palatable when he flavoured it with a liberal addition of pepper. Over the chimneypiece in the gallery there is a large dial, painted with a map of the British Isles and the points of the compass, on which a hand, like that of a clock, shows the shiftings of the wind. With this ingenious device the nautical mind of Peter was more delighted than with all the pictures and objects of art which filled the state apartments. The barbarian was so averse to crowds and the curiosity of the mob, that he generally drove out to Kensington in a hackney coach and was admitted by the back door to the King's private apartments. On Princess Anne's birthday a great ball was given at the Palace, and Peter only consented to be present if he might hide himself in a closet and peep out through a chink at the dancers and the gay scene.

After William's horse had tripped over the molehill Hampton Court and broken his rider's collar-bone, the King insisted on going to Kensington, and arrived at the Palace in great pain from the jolting of the carriage. Some days later he got better and walked for exercise in the same long gallery where he had played with Lord Buckhurst. Feeling tired, he went to sleep on a couch near one of the windows which look over Kensington Gardens, and woke chilled and shivering. Lord Jersey sent messages to Princess Anne at St. James's that the King's breath grew shorter every half-hour. Anne sent in return,

. entreating to see the King in his bedroom; and the Prince of Denmark made great efforts, in vain, to obtain admission. The King cared to see no one but his Dutch friends, Bentinck, Lord Portland, and Keppel, Lord Albemarle. The latter in his travelling boots, fresh from a journey to Holland, hastened to the King's bedside, and was rewarded with 20,000 guineas which William kept in the writing-desk.

'Je tire vers ma fin' were the King's last words; and on Sunday morning, March 8, 1702, just as the Palace clock struck eight, he expired in the arms of Sewel, the page, who was supporting his pillow. Many courtiers hurried in to London from Kensington Palace to announce to Queen Anne her accession, and 'the little gentleman in black velvet' became the favourite toast of the supporters of the house of Stuart.

The body of King William was at once removed from Kensington Palace to Westminster, and there was much murmuring among the Dutch household when Anne and her consort came and took immediate possession of the royal apartments. The room where the King died was, however, for many years of the eighteenth century left in the same state as when he breathed his last, and the funeral procession started from Kensington Palace as though the royal corpse had been there.

Queen Anne at once devoted her attention to improving and enlarging the gardens of the Palace. A hundred gardeners were employed in transforming the gravel-pits. And Addison wrote that it must have been a fine genius for gardening that could have thought of forming such an unsightly hollow into so beautiful an area. The charming orangery, designed by Wren, which till recently stood neglected and disfigured to the northeast of the Palace, was built, and Defoe wrote how, after the Queen had built her greenhouse at Kensington Palace, she was pleased to make it her summer supper-room. The gloom which had hung heavy during William's last years was swept away, and balls and concerts, illuminations and garden fêtes took its place. The populace was admitted to gaze from a distance at the genteel crowds which moved through the gardens in brocaded robes, hoops, fly-caps, and fans.

Queen Anne usually left St. James's Palace for Kensington. soon after the Easter recess for occasional breathings of fresh air, and settled there in April or May, according to the weather. After the summer prorogation of Parliament she left for Windsor and Hampton Court, and returned to Kensington Palace for a couple of months when Parliament met again in October.

Abigail Hill has recorded the daily Palace routine at Kensington. The Bedchamber Woman came into waiting in the morning before the Queen's prayers, and before her Majesty rose. If any Lady of the Bedchamber was present, the Bedchamber Woman handed her the Queen's linen and the Lady put it on her