In 1824, the Duke and Duchess of Clarence had apartments in St. James’s Palace, where, however, they seem to have been as roughly accommodated, considering their condition, as any mediæval Prince and Princess in the days of stone walls thinly tapestried and stone floors scantily strewn with rushes. The Duke cared little about the matter himself, but he gallantly supported the claims of his wife. In a letter addressed to Sir William Knighton, the King’s privy purse, in 1824, he thus expresses himself--from St. James’s Palace:-- ‘His Majesty having so graciously pleased to listen to my suggestion respecting the alteration for the Hanoverian office at the palace, I venture once more to trouble you on the point of the building intended for that purpose. To the accommodation of the Duchess this additional slip at the back of the present apartments would be most to be wished and desired, and never can make a complete Hanoverian office without our kitchen, which the King has so kindly allowed us to keep. Under this perfect conviction, I venture to apply for this slip of building which was intended for the Hanoverian office. I am confident his Majesty is fully aware of the inconvenience and unfitness of our present apartments here. They were arranged for me in 1809, when I was a bachelor, and without an idea at that time of my ever being married, since which, now fifteen years, nothing has been done to them, and you well know the dirt and unfitness for the Duchess of our present abode. Under these circumstances, I earnestly request, for the sake of the amiable and excellent Duchess, you will, when the King is quite recovered, represent the wretched state and dirt of our apartments, and the infinite advantage this slip would produce to the convenience and comfort of the Duchess.... God bless the King and yourself, and ever believe me, &c.--WILLIAM.’ Though often as ungrammatical and inelegant, it was seldom the Duke was so explicit in his correspondence as he is in the above letter. Generally, he wrote in ambiguous phrases, very puzzling to the uninitiated; but when his Duchess Adelaide was in question, and her comfort was concerned, he became quite graphic on the ‘state and dirt’ in which they passed their London days, in the old, dingy, leper-house palace of St. James’s.