Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/174

112 of the Palace in the eighteenth century is at least as much literary as it is historical, and it may appropriately be treated in another chapter. Of its vicissitudes as the dwelling-place of English sovereigns, Defoe very happily writes: —

"Since the death of King William, Hampton Court seemed abandoned of its patron. They have gotten a kind of proverbial saying relating to Hampton Court, viz., that it has been generally chosen by every other prince since it became a house of note. King Charles was the first that delighted in it since Queen Elizabeth's time. As for the reigns before, it was but newly forfeited to the Crown, and was not made a royal house till King "Charles I., who was not only a prince that delighted in country retirements, but knew how to make choice of them by the beauty of their situation, the goodness of the air, &c. He took great delight here, and, had he lived to enjoy it in peace, had purposed to make it another thing than it was. But we all know what took him off from that felicity, and all others; and this house was at last made one of his prisons by his rebellious subjects.

"His son, King Charles II., may well be said to have had an aversion to the place, for the reason just mentioned—namely, the treatment his royal father met with there—and particularly that the rebel and murderer of his father, Cromwell, afterwards possessed this palace, and revelled here in the blood of the