Before coming to the Gardens that are its present fame, we should understand how Kew, even in its days of obscurity, had all along to do with great folk. Almost every line of our kings has had a home in this Thames-side neighbourhood, a distinction dating from before the Conquest. Both Kew and Richmond began parochial life as dependencies of Kingston, the _King’s town_ that once made a chief seat of Saxon princes, whose coronation stone bears record in its market-place. The manor, included with that of Sheen--the modern Richmond--was held by the Crown at Doomsday. For a time it seems to have passed into the hands of subjects, but there are hints of the first Edwards having a country home at Sheen. Edward III. certainly died at a palace said to have been built by him here. Richard II.’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, also died at Sheen, to her husband’s so great grief that he cursed the building in the practical form of ordering it to be destroyed. Henry IV. left it in ruins, and is said to have had a house at Isleworth across the river; but by his son Sheen was restored to royal state. While Henry VII. occupied it, the palace was destroyed by fire; then in rebuilding it, this king changed its name to Richmond after his Yorkshire earldom, itself another of the beauty-spots of the kingdom. Yet the old name, probably a cousin of the German _schön_, long fitly lingered in poetry--“Thy hill, delightful Sheen!” is Thomson’s invocation--and it still survives in East Sheen, which, once a hamlet of Richmond, like Kew, now begins to count rather as a suburb of London. Sheen House here had a later connection with quasi-royalty, as it was for a time occupied by the Count de Paris, heir of the Orleans family, that has hereabouts found other temporary refuges. In Henry VIII.’s reign, the Crown gained a new seat in this neighbourhood, Hampton Court, too pretentious monument of Wolsey’s pride. At the first signs of the storm that was to wreck him, the swelling Churchman took in sail by giving up his palace to the king, who in return allowed him quarters in one of the royal lodges at Richmond, from which, as the king’s displeasure deepened, he was banished, first to Esher, finally to his archiepiscopal northern diocese. Within the hunting-park formed by Henry about Hampton, was a lodge at Hanworth that became the home of his wife Catherine Parr, when she had the luck to be his widow.