After the execution of the king, Parliament granted the park to the City of London, but on the Restoration it reverted to the Crown, to which it has ever since belonged. The rangership became a much coveted office that was held at different times by distinguished statesmen, including Sir Robert Walpole, who did much to improve the property, and built the famous old lodge that was pulled down in 1837. In 1751 the appointment of ranger was given to the Princess Amelia, who made a very bad stewardess, for she treated the estate as her own private property, shutting out the public {261} entirely, and rendering herself so obnoxious that she was at last compelled to resign. She was succeeded by the Earl of Bute, and since his time the various restrictions to the enjoyment by outsiders of the beautiful park have been gradually removed, so that now all are free to wander at will amongst the woods and vales, or along the meandering Beverley Brook, to watch the grazing deer, that are no longer hunted, and to listen in the early spring to the songs of the nightingales or the harsh cry of the herons as they sweep down from their lofty nests to fish in the Thames. There are now six public carriage entrances to the park, and within its precincts are several old mansions standing in private grounds that are associated with interesting memories, amongst which the most famous is White Lodge, built by George II., and added to by the Princess Amelia, that was long the home of the Duchess of Kent, mother of Queen Victoria, and later that of the Duke and Duchess of Teck, parents of the present Princess of Wales, whose eldest son, the heir after his father to the English throne, was born in it. Close to Sheen Gate is a cottage once occupied by the famous naturalist Sir Richard Owen, and in Pembroke Lodge, once known as the Mole-Catchers, that was lent by George II. to the Countess of Pembroke, after whom it is named, the famous Prime Minister Earl Russell lived for some years and died. In the grounds of the Lodge are two mounds, one now called Henry the Eighth's, and marked in the oldest extant map of the park as the King's Standinge, {262} because the much-married monarch was long erroneously supposed to have watched from it for the signal that Anne Boleyn's head had fallen; the other known as Oliver's Mount, because of the equally unfounded tradition that Cromwell looked down from it on a battle between the king's forces and his own, though exactly where the apocryphal battle took place is not suggested. [Sidenote: Petersham]