Apartments in Kensington Palace were assigned to the couple. The old
queen had died at Kew, surrounded by such of her daughters as were in the
country, and by several of her sons, in the month of November, 1818.
George III. was dragging out his days at Windsor. The Prince Regent
occupied Carlton House.

The Kensington of 1819 was not the Kensington of today. In spite of the
palace and gardens, which are comparatively little altered, the great
crowded quarter, with its Museum and Albert Hall, is as unlike as
possible to the courtly village to which the Duke and Duchess of Kent
came, and where the Queen spent her youth. That Kensington consisted
mainly of a fine old square, built in the time of James II., in which the
foreign ambassadors and the bishops in attendance at Court congregated in
the days of William and Mary, and Anne, and of a few terraces and blocks
of buildings scattered along the Great Western Road, where coaches passed
several times a day. Other centres round which smaller buildings
clustered were Kensington House--which had lately been a school for the
sons of French _emigres_ of rank--the old church, and Holland House,
the fine seat of the Riches and the Foxes. The High Street extended a
very little way on each side of the church and was best known by its
Charity School, and its pastrycook's shop, at the sign of the
"Pineapple," to which Queen Caroline had graciously given her own recipe
for royal Dutch gingerbread. David Wilkie's apartments represented the
solitary studio. Nightingales sang in Holland Lane; blackbirds and
thrushes haunted the nurseries and orchards. Great vegetable-gardens met
the fields. Here and there stood an old country house in its own grounds.
Green lanes led but to more rural villages, farms and manor-houses.
Notting Barns was a farmhouse on the site of Notting Hill. In the
tea-gardens at Bayswater Sir John Hill cultivated medicinal plants, and
prepared his "water-dock essence" and "balm of honey." Invalids