. Of course,
the house had to be enlarged in order to be suitable for a royal
residence, but it was not altogether demolished, and there are parts of
the original Nottingham House still standing, probably the south side of
the courtyard, where the brick is of a deeper shade than the rest. King
William's taste in the matter of architecture knew no deviation; his
model was Versailles, and as he had commissioned Wren to transform the
Tudor building of Hampton into a palace resembling Versailles, so he
directed him to repeat the experiment here. The long, low red walls,
with their neat exactitude, speak still of William's orders; a building
of heterogeneous growth, with a tower here and an angle there, would
have disgusted him: his ideal would have found its fulfilment in a
modern barrack. Wren's taste, later aided by the lapse of time, softened
down the hard angularity of the building, but it can in no sense be
considered admirable. Thus Kensington Palace was built, and its walls
and its park like gardens were to be as closely associated with the
Hanoverian Sovereigns as the building and park of St. James's had been
associated with the Stuarts whom William had supplanted.

The Palace was not finished when Queen Mary was seized with small-pox
and died within its walls, leaving a husband who, though narrow and
austere, had really loved her. He himself died at Kensington eight years
later. Good-hearted Queen Anne, whose last surviving child had died two
years before, took up her residence at the Palace, of which she was
always extremely fond. The death of her husband in 1708 left her to a
lonely reign, and she seems to have solaced herself with her garden,
superintending the laying out of the grounds. She had no taste, and
everything she ordered was dull and formal; yet she could not spoil the
natural beauty of the situation, and she still had Wren to direct her
in architectural matters. The great orangery which goes by her name, and
now stands empty and forlorn, is seen on nearing the public entrance to
the state apartments of the Palace, and is in itself a wonderful example
of Wren's genius for proportion. The private gardens of the Palace must
not be confounded with the larger grounds, which stretched up to Hyde
Park. The whole place had a very different aspect at that time: there
were King William's gardens, with formal flower-beds and walks in the
Dutch style, and northward lay Queen Anne's additional gardens, very
much