Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

226 HAMPTON COURT
there in the eighteenth century, with all its coarseness,
which, in spite of the early Hanoverian hatred
of everything English, has an air strongly national
about it.
" Hanover," says Lord Hervey in one of his
bitterest passages about George II., " had so completed
the conquest of his affections, that there was
nothing English ever commended in his presence that
he did not always show, or pretend to show, was
surpassed by something of the same kind in Germany.
No English, or even French cook, could dress a
dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert;
no English player could act; no English coachman
could drive, or English jockey ride; nor were any
English horses fit to be drove or fit to be ridden;
no Englishman knew how to come into a room, nor
any Englishwoman how to dress herself; nor were
there any diversions in England, public or private;
nor any man or woman in England whose conversation
was to be borne — the one, as he said, talking of
nothing but their dull politics, and the others of
nothing but their ugly clothes. Whereas at Hanover
all these things were in their utmost perfection." **
Yet King George might storm as he would,
Hampton Court, even in his time, was a thoroughly
English house. The pictures, the furniture, the
house and grounds, were, in the most obvious
manner, those of an English King, not a German
Elector. Space, and light, and decoration — thoroughly
1 Memoirs, vol.ii.p. 29.