A more moving loss in the preceding year had been that of the Princess Charlotte, upon whose young life so much seemed to hang, while bitter hatred kept her parents apart. She died in childbirth at Claremont, wife of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, future King of the Belgians, who else might have taken in England the part afterwards filled by Prince Albert. When thus King George’s family of fifteen seemed like to die out, unless through the detested Ernest of Cumberland, three of the now elderly princes were hastily married in the same month--the Duke of Cambridge, the Duke of Clarence, and the Duke of Kent. These weddings, that might come close on funerals, were performed privately in the drawing-room at Kew Palace, the two latter on the same day, but at different hours. We know which of the branches took root. Next year was born the Princess Victoria, whose father died at Sidmouth about the same time as the King. The cause of his death is said to have been sitting in wet clothes after a long walk; and similar carelessness seems to have been usually the prelude to George III.’s afflictions, but for which the place of Windsor might have been usurped by Kew, through this King’s favour. To the same favour was mainly due the rise and progress of the Gardens, that have been hitherto left too much in shade upon pages that bear their name. Now that nothing but the present “Palace” remains to block them out of our view, it is time to trace their development from a princely hobby into a national institution. III THE STORY OF THE GARDENS Gardens appear to be an old story in this neighbourhood. The Monastery of Sheen, that stood on the flats somewhere about the present Observatory, was equipped with its orchard, vineyard, and other enclosures, through which the holy fathers, like those of Melrose, would be able to make “good kail, on Fridays when they fasted”; and let us trust that suppressed spite never drove them, as in a certain Spanish cloister, to keep a brother’s pet flowers “close-nipped on the sly.”