(Updated, December 2019) This is a liquid oil sketch by Holland (not watercolour as previously recorded) though mounted as a drawing rather than as a canvas.

William and Queen Adelaide made several visits to Greenwich during his reign, both to see Governor Keats (a particular friend) and Hardy, his successor from 1834. William was a popular king after his deeply unpopular brother George IV. He was especially so with seamen, since he had been a professional Naval officer (albeit not a very successful one, and he later became very tiresome as far as senior ranks and naval politicians were concerned). Despite, or perhaps, because of the informality of his movements - for which he was regularly upbraided by courtiers and politicians - crowds invariably turned out to see him. Holland has caught this well. The visit shown here may be a private one as the inscription indicates. However, it could show the end of the river procession, celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile in 1798, that brought William and Queen Adelaide down on Saturday 1 August 1835. This public event drew a loyally enthusiastic crowd. 'The Times' report of 3 August, estimated that the size of the crowd was about 10,000 by the time the royal party re-embarked for London in the late afternoon. Their departure may be recorded in Holland's much later oil of 1854, also in the collection (BHC1830). 'The Times' of 9 October 1835 also noted that the King and Queen had attended Chapel at the Hospital on 1 June to mark the anniversary of Howe's action of 1794. They did so again on Sunday 11 October (by road) for that of the Battle of Camperdown in 1797, and on that occasion they met about 100 Pensioner veterans of the action. As Ellen Dobie, the daughter of E.H. Locker - senior commissioner of the Hospital to 1844 - later recalled, it was a general practice of William's during his short reign (1830-37) to attend Chapel at Greenwich whenever an anniversary of one of Britain's great naval victories happened to fall on a Sunday.

The tall building on the extreme right, which appears in other images of this period, is the four-storey Hospital brewery built in the early 1830s, of which only a small part and cellars beneath now survive.