Most picturesquely situated opposite the famous Petersham meadows and the no less celebrated Eel Pie Island, the resort on summer evenings of hundreds of pleasure-seekers, Twickenham, the {286} name of which is supposed to have reference to the two streams that here flow into the Thames, was originally a hamlet of Isleworth that belonged, before the Conquest, partly to a monastery at Hounslow, and partly to the monks of Christchurch Abbey, Canterbury. On the suppression of the monasteries the property was added by Henry VIII. to the Hampton Court demesne; and later Charles I. gave the manor to Queen Henrietta Maria, to whom, after its temporary alienation by Parliament, it was restored on the accession of Charles II. The so-called manor-house of Twickenham, also known as Aragon Tower, occupies the site of an earlier building in which, according to tradition, Katharine of Aragon resided after her divorce; but the home of the Saxon owners of the property is supposed to have been in Twickenham Park, now built over, some authorities asserting that William the Conqueror himself lived in it for a short time. Whether this be true or not, there was not far from the first Sion House a mansion that belonged in the later sixteenth century to Lord Bacon, who entertained Queen Elizabeth in it in 1592. The brilliant prose writer was deeply attached to his Twickenham home, and grieved greatly when in 1601 he was compelled to sell it to meet his pressing necessities, receiving, it is said, only £1800 for it. During the next three centuries it changed hands again and again, and in 1803 its owner had it pulled down and sold the estate in plots for building. Its fate was later shared by many another historic home, but Cambridge House, named after the poet Richard {287} Owen Cambridge, who occupied it for some years in the early nineteenth century, Orleans and York Houses still remain to bear witness to the days when Twickenham was an aristocratic suburb. The former is named after Louis-Philippe, who occupied it for some time when he was Duke of Orleans; the latter was for some time the property of Lord Clarendon, who settled it on his daughter, Anne Hyde, when she became the wife of James, Duke of York; and in it were born the Princesses Mary and Anne, who were both to become Queens of England.