Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/223

Rh very happily with William's life, and his taste in it did not agree with that of the historical Church of England. He would wear his hat in Hampton Court chapel, and his wife must needs turn out the fiddles and flutes and bass viols from the service. They set themselves against the old customs. They would not touch (and the Jacobites said they could not) for the King's evil; and so the quaint and solemn office was laid aside till "good Queen Anne" succeeded.

Anne had not her brother-in-law's delight in destruction; she contented herself with redecorating the whole, and adding the carving now at the top of the panels, the delicate designs of which are from the hand of Grinling Gibbons. At the same time the royal pew assumed its modern aspect of decorous comfort, and the ceiling above it received the painted cherubim who support the crown over the initials of Anna Regina. A new organ too was added, which with some changes still survives. A later restoration of the roof in 1847 cannot be remembered without suspicion; but on the whole, we may be thankful that the chapel bears such clear marks of its history. The Tudor and Stewart sovereigns had been content to worship, often daily, in church like their subjects; but the Hanoverians were accustomed to take their religion more easily, and under the Georges there appears the quaint little private chapel for the Queen, still pointed out, and filled now with the most inappropriate pictures (as indeed it is said to have been in George II.'s day), in which the chaplains read