‘If their royal highnesses will have everything stand as it is, furniture and pictures, I will have 3,000_l._ _per annum_. Both run hazard of being spoiled; and the last, to be sure, will be all to be new bought, whenever my son is of age. The quantity the rooms take cannot be well furnished under 10,000_l._ But if their highnesses will permit all the pictures to be removed, and buy the furniture as it will be valued by different people, the house shall go at 2,000_l._ If the prince or princess prefer much the buying outright, under 60,000_l._ it will not be parted with as it now stands; and all his Majesty’s revenue cannot purchase a place so fit for them, nor for less a sum. The princess asked me at the drawing-room if I would not sell my fine house. I answered her, smiling, that I was under no necessity to part with it; yet, when what I thought was the value of it should be offered, perhaps my prudence might overcome my inclination.’ At the period when Caroline expressed some inclination to possess this residence, on the site of the old mulberry garden, there was a mulberry garden at Chelsea, the owner of which was a Mrs. Gale. In these gardens some very rich and beautiful satin was made, from English silkworms, for the Princess of Wales, who took an extraordinary interest in the success of ‘the native worm.’ The experiments, however, patronised as they were by Caroline, did not promise a realisation of sufficient profit to warrant their being pursued any further. The town residence of the prince and princess lacked, of course, the real charms, the quieter pleasures, of the lodge at Richmond. The estate on which the latter was built formed part of the forfeited property of the Jacobite Duke of Ormond. The prince and princess kept a court at Richmond, which must have been one of the most pleasant resorts at which royalty has ever presided over fashion, wit, and talent. At this court the young (John) Lord Hervey was a frequent visitor, at a time when his mother, Lady Bristol, was in waiting on the princess, and his brother, Lord Carr Hervey, held the post of groom of the bedchamber to the prince. Of the personages at this ‘young court,’ the right honourable John Wilson Croker thus speaks:-- ‘At this period Pope and his literary friends were in great favour at this “young court,” of which, in addition to the handsome and clever princess herself, Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Selwyn, Miss Howe, Miss Bellenden, and Miss Lepell, with Lords Chesterfield, Bathurst, Scarborough, and Hervey, were the chief ornaments. Above all, for beauty and wit, were Miss Bellenden and Miss Lepell, who seem to have treated Pope, and been in return treated by him, with a familiarity that appears strange in our more decorous days. These young ladies probably considered him as no more than what Aaron Hill described him-- Tuneful Alexis, on the Thames’ fair side, The ladies’ _plaything_ and the Muse’s pride.’