MEMORIES OF OLD RICHMOND.t WE are grateful to Lady Cave
for her book about Richmond, and to Mr. Alfred Noyes for the charming verses which stand at the beginning. The old Palace of Richmond, the scene of this romantic history, no longer exists as a whole, but Lady Cave
• . The Macedonian Campaign. By Luigi NAlsrI, M.C. London: T. Fisher tinwha. [25s. net.] t Memories of old Richmond. By Estella Cave. London : Murray. [Ns. lives in The Wardrobe House, which once made part of it.
She has seen no ghosts, but, living as she does " where these Kings and Queens and their Courts lived," she feels that great and long-dead personages have become very real to her. The reader is apologetically warned by the author not to take her history too
seriously. Such a book needs no such apology. It is enough that it is charming and picturesque and full of contemporary quotation. During Tudor times the walls of this suburban Palace were the constant scene of high comedy and tragedy, and our author knows well how to bring the drama before our eyes. We take
at random this description of one of Henry VIIL's marriage adventures :-
" Catherine put off her widow's weeds and put on her wedding gown. They were- married in the Queen's Closet at Hampton Court. His daughters, Princess Mary and Elizabeth, were present, and—I am sure—his humble sister' Anne of Cleves came over from Richmond in one of her own trousseau gowns and with her unusual breadth of mind made friends with her good brother's' newest wife and made her very welcome to Richmond Palace. And on many a fine summer's afternoon Catherine came down the waterway in the royal gilded barge to see Anne, the Lady of Cleves, who was just three years younger than herself."
Mary and Elizabeth were constantly at Richmond. " With the exception of Anne Boleyn, Mary seems to have liked her many stepmothers and to have got on with them." Later on she and Philip stayed at Richmond, and the Princess Elizabeth came to visit them from Somerset House, and we see Sir Thomas Pope and all the gentlemen-in-waiting—six boats full—who wore "russet damask and blue satin with caps of silver cloth and green plumes." Later on, playing in the Palace Gardens, we find Prince Henry, the son of James I., where, said his tutor,
" nothing was lacking fitting a young nobleman, so that he may learn more in this one place in one month than if he should run over France and Italy in a year. Yea, his Highness's dinners are another Solomon's Table where the wisest xnen of any country may come to learn of him."
But it was in Elizabeth's time that the glories of the Palace were at their height. Lady Cave shows us the Queen as she lived at Richmond with a great deal of skill. We feel as if we had seen the whole thing well mounted upon the stage when
we have shut the book.
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