ite as much as she
valued her monkey, and much more than she valued her husband. [62] But
the new palace was embellished with works of art of a very different
kind. A gallery was erected for the cartoons of Raphael. Those great
pictures, then and still the finest on our side of the Alps, had been
preserved by Cromwell from the fate which befell most of the other
masterpieces in the collection of Charles the First, but had been
suffered to lie during many years nailed up in deal boxes. They were
now brought forth from obscurity to be contemplated by artists with
admiration and despair. The expense of the works at Hampton was a
subject of bitter complaint to many Tories, who had very gently blamed
the boundless profusion with which Charles the Second had built and
rebuilt, furnished and refurnished, the dwelling of the Duchess of
Portsmouth. [63] The expense, however, was not the chief cause of the
discontent which William's change of residence excited. There was no
longer a Court at Westminster. Whitehall, once the daily resort of the
noble and the powerful, the beautiful and the gay, the place to which
fops came to show their new peruques, men of gallantry to exchange
glances with fine ladies, politicians to push their fortunes, loungers
to hear the news, country gentlemen to see the royal family, was now,
in the busiest season of the year, when London was full, when Parliament
was sitting, left desolate. A solitary sentinel paced the grassgrown
pavement before that door which had once been too narrow for the
opposite streams of entering and departing courtiers. The services which
the metropolis had rendered to the King were great and recent; and it
was thought that he might have requited those services better than by
treating it as Lewis had treated Paris. Halifax ventured to hint this,
but was silenced by a few words which admitted of no reply. "Do you
wish," said William peevishly, "to see me dead?" [64]

In a short time it was found that Hampton Court was too far from the
Houses of Lords and Commons, and from the public offices, to be the
ordinary abode of the Sovereign. Instead, however, of returning to
Whitehall, William determined to have another dwelling, near enough to
his capital for the transaction of business, but not near enough to be
within that atmosphere in which he could not pass a night without risk
of suffocation. At one time he thought of Holland House, the villa of
the noble family of Rich; and he a