So at last we come to the Kew mansion, whose connection with royalty was comparatively a late one, and lasted only for two generations. The reader must bear in mind that this was not the present Kew Palace, which hardly seems to deserve such a title of pretence. The latter had belonged to Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was sold by him to Sir Hugh Portman, a rich Holland merchant, who rebuilt or altered it in the Dutch style, so that it was commonly known as the Dutch House. By some local inquirers it has been identified with the “Dairy House” also mentioned in old books. Opposite this, on the other side of a public road, in the seventeenth century stood a larger mansion, Kew House, as to the original date of which one is not clear, but it may have been at least on the site of a mansion at which her Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, entertained Queen Elizabeth. Under Charles II., when Evelyn calls it an “old timber house,” it came by marriage to Sir Henry Capel of the Essex family, afterwards Lord Capel, who died Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. From his widow, it passed into possession of Samuel Molyneux, described as secretary to George II., soon after whose death, in 1730, it was taken on a long lease by Frederick Prince of Wales. Thus the obscure name of Kew began to appear in the scandalous chronicles of the Georgian period. Frederick’s parents, it will be remembered, were much at the neighbouring Richmond Lodge; and when Queen Caroline took a lease of the Dutch House also, this not very affectionate royal family had a group of residences too close together, one might think, for their comfort. The official guide states that at one time Frederick, too, must have occupied the Dutch House, as shown by his cipher and the device of Prince of Wales’s feathers on the locks; but I can find no mention of his living here in memoirs of the period. It may be that he had it for a time before his marriage; but the other was the house occupied by him as a family man, and by his widow after him.