The Princely Houses of Edward, Duke of Kent

Abstract

The younger sons of King George III personify fundamental change in the British monarchy. Unlike their predecessors, they were able to break free from the rigidity and etiquette of court life to establish independent public profiles. They often aligned themselves with radical political trends and supported charitable causes in a way which has become a readily identifiable characteristic of the modern Royal Family. The King’s fourth son, Edward, duke of Kent (1767–1820), the father of Queen Victoria, is a key example of how a prince with no real prospects of the succession, without land or fortune, nonetheless successfully positioned himself in society and maintained his rank. Despite limited financial means, he reinforced his outward status through architectural patronage and the creation of magnificence in three London residences. His efforts represent a preoccupation which brought him to the edge of bankruptcy, yet have been little studied. Two of the houses have disappeared without trace, while his apartment at Kensington Palace has been subsumed within the public exhibition areas and is now largely anonymous. This paper will attempt to retrieve and describe these residences through newly discovered documentary sources and physical analysis. They provide a rare insight into the domestic environment of a lesser member of the late Georgian royal family, while suggesting that the Duke reflected the modernity of his personal convictions with similarly advanced domestic tastes.

Notes

1 Roger Fulford, Royal Dukes (London, 1933). For the Duke of Kent see Erskine Neale, Life of Field-Marshal His Royal Highness Edward, Duke of Kent, With Extracts From His Correspondence and Original Letters Never Before Published (London, 1850). Mollie Gillen’s work represented the first new biography for over a century: Mollie Gillen, The Prince and His Lady (London, 1970). Also Mollie Gillen: Augustus, Duke of Sussex (London, 1975). Grace E. Moremen, Adolphus Duke of Cambridge: Steadfast Son of King George III, 1774–1850 (London, 2002).

2 H. van Thal, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover (London, 1936); G.M. Willis, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and King of Hanover (London, 1954). Also J. Wardroper, Wicked Ernest (London, 2002).

3 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London, 1915), p. 231.

4 W.E.H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1878), vol. 1, p. 214.

5 Gillen, Augustus, Duke of Sussex.

6 Neale, Life, p. 15. By the early nineteenth century the actual value of the income had also declined in the face of rising prices caused by the long wars with France.

7 Ibid., p. xii.

8 This man was Baron Wangenheim, described in W.J. Anderson, Two Chapters in the Life of F.M. H.R.H. Edward, Duke of Kent (Ottawa, 1869), p. 6.

9 From the earliest time, the prince began to borrow money, with increasing frequency, on the hope that his father would clear his debts. He did not. Elizabeth Longford, ‘Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (1767–1820)’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 17, p. 807.

10 F.A. Hall, ‘A Prince’s Sojourn in Eighteenth-Century Canada’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 19 (1989), pp. 247-66.

11 The cause was put down to a bilious attack by Erskine Neale, and a fall from a horse, but was likely to have been a pretext which backfired. Longford, ‘Prince Edward’, p. 807.

12 Neale, Life, p. vi. See also Dorothy Ellicott, Gibraltar’s Royal Governor (Gibraltar, 1981).

13 Gillen, The Prince and His Lady. McKenzie Porter likens it to the jerking of subordinate officers out of their lethargy: McKenzie Porter, Overture to Victoria (London, 1961), p. 31. See also Alvin Redman, The Rival Dukes. Who is the Dupe? Containing a Complete Refutation of the Calumnies which Mrs Clarke has Cast upon the Character of the Duke of Kent (London, 1810).

14 The Duke of York had spelled this out to him in 1808, when he asserted that the ‘unfortunate events’ of Gibraltar would ‘ever preclude the confidential servants of the King from advising His Majesty to permit you to resume your station there’. Letter from Frederick, duke of York to Edward, duke of Kent, 6 February 1808, quoted in Roger Fulford, Royal Dukes, p. 182, but the original manuscript source not located.

15 Neale, Life, p. 45.

16 See Porter, Overture to Victoria, p. 150-1. The Duke had actively sought the abolition of slavery in Canada and had used his influence to effect this.

17 James Denew, Library of Books, Castle Hill. A Catalogue of the library of the Duke of Kent, deceased (London, 1820).

18 The province of Prince Edward Island was named for him. Nathan Tidridge, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent. Father of the Canadian Crown (Toronto, 2013).

19 Anderson, Two Chapters, p. 10.

20 This was known as Haldimand House after the Anglo-Swiss officer who built it, which was later described as a sad, abandoned wreck.

21 William D. Naftel, Prince Edward’s Legacy. The Duke of Kent in Halifax: Romance and Beautiful Buildings (Halifax, 2005). The name ‘lodge’ had echoes of his later renaming of the Ealing estate in west London.

22 Nova Scotia Archives Map Collection: 15:1 Woolford’s Surveys; the roads from Halifax to Windsor and Truro 1817-18: Ruins of H.R.H the Duke of Kent’s, Bedford Basin, near Halifax, Nova Scotia from an oil painting. Nova Scotia Archives Photographic Collection: Place: Prince’s Lodge.

23 His younger brother Augustus had been ennobled at the same time, but at the much younger age of twenty-eight. Adolphus too only had to wait until he was twenty-seven for his royal title and allowance. Longford, ‘Prince Edward’, p. 808. For Prince Adolphus, Alan Palmer, ‘Adolphus Frederick, Prince, first duke of Cambridge (1774–1850), viceroy of Hanover, army officer, and son of George III’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 1, 350-2. For Augustus, T.F. Henderson and Johan van der Kiste, ‘Augustus Frederick, Prince, duke of Sussex (1773–1843)’, Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 950-1.

24 J. Greenacombe, The Survey of London: Vol 45, Knightsbridge (London, 2000), pp. 134-5. The Prince was also entitled to an official residence at the Pavilion, Hampton Court, as part of his rangership of the park, but he seems to have shown little interest in it and spent little time there. The subject of the residence of Madame de St Laurent is alluded to by Lady Spencer, who stated that the King had expelled her and that she was ‘very glad of it’. The Hon Mrs Hugh Wyndham (ed.), The Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttleton, 1787–1870 (London, 1912), p. 64.

25 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors; At Home in Georgian England (London, 2009); Caroline Knight, London’s Country Houses (London, 2009). For greater houses, see David Pearce, London’s Mansions: The Palatial Houses of the Nobility (London, 1986) and James Stourton, Great Houses of London (London, 2015).

26 Julius Bryant, Finest Prospects: Three Historic Houses — A Study in London Topography (London, 1986), p. 15.

27 A watercolour of Frederick Augustus Wetherall’s Castle Bear Hill survives at the British Library (‘Drawn view of the Seat of … . Smith Esq. At Castle Bear near Ealing. British Library, King’s Topographical Collection, XXX, 26a).

28 T.F.T. Baker (ed.), A History of Middlesex, vol. VII (Oxford, 1982), pp. 128-30.

29 Knight, London’s Country Houses, pp. 128-30.

30 The Times, 10 March 1808, p. 4.

31 An Inventory of the Household Furniture, Fixtures, and Effects, the Property of His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent as Taken at the Lodge Castle Hill Near Ealing, Middlesex by Mr Sheridan, Clerk to Messrs Tatham and Baily, on behalf of H.R.Highness’s Trustees and Subsequently Valued by Mr James Denew. Lewis Walpole Library, LWL Mss Vol. 180. The document complements three other auction catalogues which survive in apparently unique copies: of the house (London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], Acc 1028/44); the contents of the house (Royal Library, Windsor: RCIN 1154691 (A catalogue of the costly effects of His late Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, removed from the palace of Amerbach, in Germany … J. Mallett, London); and his library at Castle Hill (British Library SC11/1242).

32 Howard Colvin, The History of the King’s Works, volume VI: 1782–1851 (London, 1973), pp. 339-49. Colvin’s work was later much expanded on by the unpublished 1989 manuscript ‘A History of Kensington Palace’ by Peter Gaunt and Caroline Knight, which is held in the curatorial archive at Historic Royal Palaces.

33 The tradesmen’s pay books in the Lord Chamberlain’s Accounts at The National Archives [hereafter TNA] (LC11/8) onwards is of particular relevance to the age. Between them they amount to some ten thousand pages covering the last twenty years of the reign of George III.

34 Anonymous, The Royal Kalendar, and Court and City Register for England, Scotland, Ireland and the Colonies for the Year 1819 (London, 1819).

35 Neale, Life, pp. 206-15.

36 The earlier history of the house is traced in detail by the Victoria County History: D.K. Bolton, Patricia Croot and M.A. Hicks, ‘Ealing and Brentford: Other Estates’, in T.F.T. Baker (ed.), A History of the County of Middlesex: vol. 7, Acton, Chiswick, Ealing and Brentford (London, 1982), p. 128. A small block of land belonging to the parish overseers was added at a subsequent date to form a contiguous block, but was later the source of much dispute, as the estate was sold with the land as an oversight, and the overseers tried to retrieve it.

37 LMA, ACC/1028/53: papers relating to the Duke of Kent at Castle Hill Lodge. There is no subsequent record of further payments.

38 John Martin Robinson, James Wyatt, 1746–1813 — Architect to George III (London, 2012). Wyatt’s records are patchy, but an eyewitness, the Rev George Hardinge, noted the work of Wyatt in a letter dated 1811. Neale, Life, pp. 206-14.

39 Charles Middleton, Picturesque and Architectural Views for Cottages, Farm Houses and Country Villas (London, 1793).

40 LMA, ACC/1028/079. Another copy, in a different hand, this time coloured, survives in the British Library (A coloured plan of Castle Bear Hill Estate, situate in the parish of Ealing, formerly the residence of H.R.H. the Duke of Kent: drawn by R.H. Jago).

41 Knight, London’s Country Houses, pp. 222, 250, 349. Inventory, passim.

42 John Morley, Regency Design (London, 1993), p. 222.

43 A Trihedral View of the Palace for the Exhibition of the Industrial Products of Mankind. Lithograph by C.P.B. Shelley and H.H. Treppass, published by Ackerman & Company, 1851. V&A Museum No. 106.A.26 (103).

44 The Times, 10 March 1808, p. 4.

45 Kensington Palace (New Haven and London, forthcoming). This is a comprehensive social and architectural history of the palace, to be published in 2018.

46 Colvin, History of the Kings Works, p. 340.

47 Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. IV (January 1799-July 1801) (London, 1970), p. 1148. Letter dated 26 January 1799.

48 The Duke announced the birth in a letter, now in the Royal Archives, Windsor (RA M3/3).

49 TNA LC11/8. These records comprise a series of 500-page bound ledgers, none of which are paginated.

50 These rooms now form the Clore Education Centre at Historic Royal Palaces but previously had been used by the housekeeper for Princess Margaret, countess of Snowdon, thus establishing a continuity of use from the early nineteenth century.

51 Olivia Bland, ‘The Duke of Kent at Kensington Palace’, History Today, 32 (1982), pp 28-34.

52 TNA LC11/9, account ending 5 April 1805.

53 Late nineteenth-century newspaper reports and picture postcards depicting the room reinforce this attribution, though Queen Victoria herself had no recollection of this tradition. The seemingly contradictory evidence of a future queen being born in a dining room may be explained by the circulation of the apartment, and the ancient need for ministers and witnesses to be present at a royal birth. The temporary fitting up of the dining room as a bedroom would have served two purposes: that of giving independent access for servants, while freeing up the adjoining drawing room as a space for gathering officials. The Duke and Duchess’s own bedroom would have been too far removed to allow this.

54 This staircase continued in use as a housekeeper’s stair, latterly serving the housekeeper of Princess Margaret, countess of Snowdon, who occupied the adjoining area to the west between 1963 and her death in 2002. It was removed in 2011 to allow for the installation of a lift but has been preserved in storage.

55 TNA LC11/17: account of quarter ending 5 January 1814. Also LC11/15 for the clock. The wind dial attempted to use the cogs and machinery which were already employed by the existing anemoscope in the upper room. The dial survives, in store at Historic Royal Palaces.

56 This title may merely have been a grandiose name for the guest bedroom. See T.E.B. Howarth, Citizen-King. The Life of Louis Philippe (London, 1961).

57 TNA LC1/40. Letter from James Wyatt to Lord Dartmouth dated 3 November 1804 setting out the scope of the works.

58 An album of photographs in the Royal Library depicts many rooms in the apartment in 1867 during the occupancy of Queen Victoria’s cousin, Mary Adelaide, duchess of Teck, and shows many rooms before alteration: Royal Collection, RCIN 2102101-2102113.

59 Several paintings and small objets de virtu are recorded and can be tentatively identified in the Royal Collection. For example a Chinese box recorded at Castle Hill which accords with a surviving example in the collection: RCIN 93390.

60 A surviving fragment of the Kew Palace wallpaper preserves a frame-mark and the date 1804 and is documented as coming from the same source. TNA, Work 5 and LC11 contain much useful information.

61 Geoffrey Castle, ‘The France Family of Upholsterers and Cabinet-Makers’, Furniture History, vol. 41 (2005), pp. 25-43. France has yet to be better appreciated, but he worked for a number of aristocratic and gentry clients, as well as the royal family, though the Prince Regent only rarely.

62 TNA LC9/369: ledgers.

63 TNA LC11/10, fol. 109.

64 TNA LC11/15, quarter ending 5 October 1813.

65 ‘In regard to the papering, I have this day caused inquiry to be made at the Chamberlain’s Office, relative to a precedent for its being done under that department; and if so, of course I shall get it done by their tradesmen, but if that should not be the case, then the Duke of Orleans will do it at his own expense and employ the same upholsterer (Mr Gillois), who is to furnish for him.’ This Gillois is otherwise unknown but may be the Mr Gilroy who worked for the Prince of Wales. Letter to William Ayton, dated at Kensington, 15 September 1807, quoted in Neale, Life, p. 350. The original manuscript has not been traced.

66 John Morley, Regency Design 1790–1840 (London, 1997), p. 229. In their influential Recueil de Decorations Interieures of 1812, Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine had noted that ‘furniture is too closely allied to interior decoration for the architect to remain indifferent to it’. See also Iris Moon, The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France (London, 2017).

67 Frances Collard, Regency Furniture (London, 1985), p. 274.

68 George Smith, Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1808).

69 Barbara Morris, ‘Textiles’, in Ralph Edwards and L.G.G. Ramsey (eds), The Regency Period (London, 1958), pp. 123-34.

70 Collard, Regency Furniture, pp. 11, 18.

71 Inventory, p. 20.

72 By contrast, the Orleans bedroom at Castle Hill was mostly decorated in chintz and printed cottons. TNA LC11/12; quarter ended 31 March 1809.

73 Royal Archives, Windsor 25124-25125. Similar simulated bamboo was installed at Ombersley Park, Worcestershire for the marchioness of Downshire in 1812.

74 The Hardinge letter quoted in Neale, Life, pp. 206-15, though no original manuscript has been located. See also Morley, Regency Design, p.45 and the associations of trellis or traillage with Antiquity.

75 TNA LC11/10, account ending 5 October 1807.

76 Described by Ackermann in 1812 as ‘a drapery of silk with a spring roller’. Ackermann, Repository, vol. X (1813), p. 42.

77 George Smith, Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1808), p. 21.

78 Inventory, p.15.

79 Sheraton, Combined Dictionary (London, 1803).

80 Collard, Regency Furniture, p. 104.

81 TNA LC11/13: quarter ending 5 July 1812.

82 A Roman monopod of exactly the same form survives at Sir John Soane’s Museum and elsewhere.

83 Country Life, vol. 168 (1994), p.82.

84 This extraordinary account was first printed in Neale, Life, pp. 206-14, and was repeated in local newspapers in the 1890s, when it seems to have been rediscovered. The original is dated Melbourne House, August 15, 1811, to ‘Richard’. The whereabouts of the original is not known.

85 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 7.

86 Amanda Goodrich, ‘Introduction’, in Moira Goff, John Goldfinch, Karen Limper-Herz and Helen Peden (eds), Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain (London, 2013), p. 10.

87 Susanne Groom and Lee Prosser, Kew Palace, the Official Illustrated History (London, 2006).

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Lee Prosser

Lee Prosser is Curator of Historic Buildings at Historic Royal Palaces in London. His responsibilities include the State Apartments at Kensington Palace and Kew Palace in the Royal Botanic Gardens.