The Queen's Houses Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction: The Houses of Windsor

  Windsor Castle

  Royal Servants

  Buckingham Palace

  A State Banquet at Buckingham Palace

  Balmoral Castle

  Royal Childhood

  Sandringham

  The Palace of Holyroodhouse

  The Royal Mews

  Further information

  Image Credits

  Bibliography

  Family tree

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  BALMORAL, WINDSOR, SANDRINGHAM, HOLYROOD and of course BUCKINGHAM PALACE. The five residences of the Queen and her family are icons of the British nation, and have been the setting for some of the most significant moments in our history. Wars have been started, men have been executed, laws made and broken, all within the walls of these castles and palaces.

  But they are also homes, where children have been born, where couples have fallen in love, where birthdays have been celebrated, and where families have gathered for Christmases for hundreds of years. So, if the walls could talk, what would they be telling us?

  In this book, Alan Titchmarsh attempts to find out, exploring the human stories behind these great historic houses, from the extravagant architects who built them, to the fires that have destroyed them; from the kings and queens who have grown up in them, to the household staff who run them. He takes us on a riveting guided tour of each one, combining new, meticulous archive research with his own personal experience and access to paint an intimate portrait of royal domesticity, and a fascinating history of the places they call home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALAN TITCHMARSH has written upwards of fifty gardening books, three volumes of autobiography and nine best-selling novels and presented such programmes as Gardener’s World, Ground Force and How to be a Gardener. He is gardening correspondent for the Daily and Sunday Express and has a weekly comment column in the Sunday Telegraph.

  Alan has presented his own chat show on ITV, broadcasts every Saturday morning on Classic FM and hosted the BBC’s Chelsea Flower Show coverage for thirty years. He has also presented the BBC Proms, natural history programmes and documentaries about The Queen, Prince Philip and The Prince of Wales and managed to ride with The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery without falling off. His book Elizabeth: Her Life, Our Times was written for The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and he has recently filmed a two-part documentary about the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

  Alan is an Ambassador for The Prince’s Trust and The Prince’s Countryside Fund as well as being a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire. In 2008 and 2009 he held the office of High Sheriff of the Isle of Wight. He was awarded the MBE in the Millennium New Year Honours list and divides his time between Hampshire and The Isle of Wight.

  WE KNOW THEM now as tourist attractions: iconic symbols of a state still governed, in name at least, by a monarchy. They are, in a way, architectural manifestations of a country’s pride in its history. But royal palaces in the past were even more the physical representations of the power and prestige of the monarch, and the political and administrative centres of the kingdom. The grander and more sumptuous they were, supposedly the grander and more powerful the monarch. They were the centres of diplomacy, as ambassadors shuttled backwards and forwards, reporting back to their masters on the latest developments in the shifting political allegiances of kingdoms. They were the centres of patronage – in return for support, titles and riches might flow your way. And they were the centres from which everyday life was influenced and directed, in political thought, religious belief (being burned at the stake if you stepped out of line), in scholarship and in culture. Ideas in architecture, gardens, painting and sculpture, in what you wore and how you spoke, all flowed outwards from the royal courts. And the monarch had to be seen, so the court moved from place to place. By the time of his death, Henry VIII, fuelled by the great wealth that came his way on the dissolution of the monasteries, owned over 60 great houses and palaces and during his lifetime over 1000 people thronged his courts.

  Today the great houses and palaces are no longer the power-bases of old – political power has passed to elected governments. But The Queen still has to represent the prestige of the country as head of state. Ambassadors and high commissioners from the nearly 200 foreign missions in London continue to present their credentials to her in a time-honoured ritual: they and their entourage and family are collected by state carriages from the Royal Mews, escorted by the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps in his splendid uniform complete with ostrich-plumed hat. On arrival the Marshal presents them to The Queen and then walks backwards from her presence (today only the Marshal and Her Majesty’s equerry have to walk backwards; for everyone else the ancient practice was abolished on health and safety grounds in 2009). The 20-minute audience with The Queen usually takes place in one of Buckingham Palace’s state rooms, the blue and gold splendour of the 1844 Room, before the carriages return. No doubt the ambassadors will then report back, suitably impressed, on the pomp and grandeur of the occasion.

  The first ambassador to present his credentials to The Queen in March 1952, during the first year of her reign, was the Ambassador of Mexico (fittingly, in 2012, The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, his great-grand nephew held the same position). Since then The Queen has received over 3000 diplomatic missions and each is accorded the same ceremony, no matter how large or small the country. It’s all a far cry from the practice in seventeenth-century France where how many steps down the special ambassadors’ staircase at Versailles The King chose to descend to greet a new ambassador was an indicator of his view of the status of that country. The French Ambassador in 1952 remarked on ‘the British genius of linking the past, the present and the future in one great pattern of continuity’. The royal houses play a key part in this ‘great pattern of continuity’, both publicly and privately.

  The Queen and Prince Philip use five different houses throughout the year – Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House. Of these only Balmoral and Sandringham are privately owned and maintained, and passed by will through the generations, although King George VI had to buy out his elder brother Edward VIII on the latter’s abdication in 1936. The first two are the official London residence and the official country residence of the monarch, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the monarch in Scotland. Other palaces and houses – St James’s Palace (still the ‘senior’ palace, the Court of St James’s, the official name for the British court, is administered from there), Clarence House, Marlborough House Mews, Kensington Palace, the Royal Mews and Paddocks at Hampton Court and buildings in the Home and Great Parks at Windsor, are used by members of the royal family as houses and as offices for the Royal Household. The residential and office areas of these various buildings, together with the official residences in England, are all maintained by annual funding provided by the government to the Royal Household. The government in turn receives any revenues from this ‘Estate’, which comprises a staggering 360 individual buildings spread over 160,000 square metres (1.7 million square feet), plus a further 280 properties used mainly as residential quarters for staff and pensioners.

  The official residences are also known as the ‘Occupied Royal Palaces’, or the ‘Estate’ for short, to distinguish them from the palaces that are no longer official residences – the Palaces of Westminster and Whitehall (all that remains is the Banqueting House where King Charles I was executed in 1649), Hampton Court and Her Majesty’s Royal Palac
e and Fortress, more commonly known as the Tower of London. The official residences are held in trust for the nation by The Queen as sovereign and are used by her in fulfilling the role and functions of head of state – and that less definable but vitally important description ‘head of the nation’ that describes the emotional power of the monarchy – and by other members of the royal family in a support role. To ensure the Royal Household is run flawlessly and the vast Estate is kept in good order, over 1000 people work in the occupied palaces.

  The Queen’s role as head of state over more than 60 years has been epic in scale. Every year she invites the current crop of ambassadors and high commissioners, together with senior diplomats and their spouses or partners – around a thousand people – to the largest event held indoors in her yearly calendar, The Queen’s Diplomatic Reception at Buckingham Palace. Drinks are served in the Picture Gallery followed by a buffet supper in the Ballroom and then dancing in the Ball Supper Room.

  The Queen also hosts two ‘Inward State Visits’ a year when guests are invited to stay at Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, which is also the venue for other mass receptions, most of the annual investiture ceremonies and at least three great garden parties whose vast numbers dwarf any of the other receptions. Each year, 2500 people are granted honours and The Queen has held over 600 investitures, usually in Buckingham Palace ballroom but now also at Windsor Castle. Each of the garden parties is attended by 8000 people – millions have attended over the course of her reign. The annual garden party at Holyroodhouse at the end of June during her week-long stay at the palace is even larger – up to 10,000 guests throng the lawns.

  The Queen moves between her different houses in a set routine. Every week while in London she leaves Buckingham Palace on Friday afternoon for Windsor and returns from Windsor Castle after lunch on Monday. To avoid a terrorist attack (alas always something to worry about), her route varies and a tracking device is fitted to her car. This is monitored by the police post at Buckingham Palace for any deviation from the planned route.

  The annual routine starts around 20 December when, after a lunch party for her extended family (around 50 of them), The Queen takes over a first-class compartment on a morning train from King’s Cross to King’s Lynn. The famous Royal Station at Wolferton was closed in 1969, so a car now meets The Queen at King’s Lynn station and takes her on the short drive to Sandringham. There she stays for six weeks, presiding over a large family gathering plus house guests. The latter are treated to legendary hospitality, down to the provision of ‘wellies’ of the correct size for each guest. Accession Day, the anniversary of the death of The Queen’s father, King George VI, and her own accession to the throne, is 6 February, which usually marks her last day at Sandringham before the return to London and the beginning of a new round of investitures, audiences, a full diary of other engagements and a lot more handshaking.

  The newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II conducts her first public engagement in 1952

  For four weeks of the year, around Easter, The Queen moves full-time with her staff to Windsor Castle, known as ‘Easter Court’. During this period, in a tradition begun by Queen Victoria, distinguished guests are invited to ‘Dine and Sleep’ at the castle. The ‘sleep’ part is no more, but guests still dine with the sovereign. On Easter Sunday The Queen always attends the morning service at St George’s Chapel. At Windsor, she also celebrates her birthday on 21 April, privately (her ‘official birthday’ is celebrated around the middle of June, a tradition begun in 1908 by King Edward VII whose November birthday parade was inevitably beset by bad weather).

  The State Opening of Parliament, which formerly occurred in November, has since 2010 and the innovation of fixed-term parliaments, taken place in May. Escorted from Buckingham Palace by the Household Cavalry The Queen dons the 18-foot-long Robe of State and the Imperial State Crown and is preceded by a gentleman usher carrying the Great Sword of State, all symbols of royal authority. This is the only regular occasion when the three constituent parts of Parliament, the sovereign, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, meet on the site of the old Whitehall Palace to mark the formal start of the new parliamentary year.

  The Queen is in residence again at Windsor in June, which coincides with the Royal Ascot racehorse meeting – which she has attended every year since 1945 – and the Garter Day ceremonies when the recipients of the Order of the Garter gather to lunch in the Waterloo Chamber and process in their robes to St George’s Chapel.

  Holyrood Week takes place at the end of June or beginning of July when The Queen is in official residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse and presides over the investiture ceremony and the great garden party. The Queen also attends a wide range of other engagements in Scotland including the service for the holders of the Order of the Thistle at St Giles’ Cathedral. Her arrival at the palace is always marked by the Ceremony of the Keys when the Lord Provost of Edinburgh hands her the keys to the city and bids her welcome to ‘your ancient and hereditary kingdom of Scotland’. One hopes that this will continue. At the end of July she and her household, and the few remaining corgis, are again in Scotland, at Balmoral Castle, where she spends the whole of August and September before returning to Buckingham Palace, with weekends at Windsor Castle.

  There are those who have little time for the institution of monarchy, seeing it as outdated, hidebound and irrelevant in the modern world. It will become clear from these pages that I am not of their number. It is not simply that I am dazzled by its pageantry, its power and its exalted position; neither is it simply because the history of the British monarchy is Our history, though that is certainly a part of it. There are two main reasons for my continued belief in its worth. The first is the profound commitment to the country and its people that I have witnessed at first hand in those members of the royal family I have been privileged to meet and to know just a little. That commitment is genuine, heartfelt and tireless in the face of criticism. It also involves much hard work and a capacity to undertake an endless round of activities that others would find at best wearying and at worst plain dull. The second reason is that compared with other forms of government the British monarchy has – barring the occasional hiatus (and there have been several) – proved its worth over the last century in both practical and spiritual terms. Today, more than ever, the key members of the royal family are deeply conscious of their responsibility to both the country and its people. Their loyalty is without question.

  The description of the role of sovereign on The Queen’s official website explains that she ‘acts as a focus for national identity, unity and pride; gives a sense of stability and continuity; officially recognises success and excellence’.

  Few would argue that Queen Elizabeth II has not lived up to that description. It is also clear to see that the sense of national identity, stability and continuity are assisted by and embodied in the great official palaces and private residences that have been for so long the backdrop to the affairs of state and refuges from the ‘press and pestilence’ of London life. They remain a sanctuary to the sovereign and a symbol of a country’s standing in the world, especially in the increasing turbulent and unpredictable years of the twenty-first century.

  Alan Titchmarsh

  The Queen, Prince Charles and young Prince Edward in the grounds of Windsor Castle, April 1969

  ‘Windsor, a spot favoured by nature with the richest and most variegated scenery, diversified with hill and dale, beautiful parks, a luxuriant forest, and verdant meadows, animated by the windings of a noble river, selected for the residence of the Sovereigns of England, and enjoying for centuries the presence and support of an illustrious and elegant Court …’

  Royal Windsor Guide, c.1880

  WINDSOR CASTLE IS most people’s idea of what a castle should look like: solid, imposing, battlemented and seemingly impregnable. The outline of its Round Tower, standing proud on an eminence high above the River Thames, is one of the most iconic images of royal Britain. Although Buckingham Pala
ce, with its daily changing of the Guard, may be more famous to the tourists who flock there, it is Windsor Castle that was the true centre of power for nearly a thousand years. It is justly celebrated as the largest inhabited castle in the world and the longest occupied of any royal palace in Europe – 40 monarchs have played out their lives within its walls.

  Windsor Castle was originally built under the orders of William the Conqueror soon after the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. The site was previously occupied by monks who were offered alternative estates and relocated to Essex. The fortification was the first of a chain of nine simple wooden forts around London, designed to help bring to heel the indigenous population, to consolidate territorial gains and in due course defend William’s men from repeated rebellions. Initially William used forced labour on a very large scale, construction often continuing at night by the light of torches and through bitterly cold winters.

  The typical form of a Norman castle was a wooden tower built on a circular raised mound known as a motte, either man-made – again, usually by forced labour – or using existing topographical features. Around this would be constructed a bailey, or flat area defended by a ditch, and a wooden palisade. At Windsor there was clearly a double bailey, still defined by the footprint of the present castle, roughly corresponding to what are now know as the Upper and Lower Wards, with the motte standing between the two. The castle’s setting close to the river and beside extensive forests, ideal for hunting, and its proximity to London meant that before long its purely defensive role would be subsumed by its function as a royal palace.

  Today, Windsor is where The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh go to relax on most weekends of the year, leaving on Friday afternoon and returning to the bustle and protocol of the office – Buckingham Palace – on a Monday. But the very stones of this weekend retreat are steeped in history, and act as reminders of the strong personalities who have stalked its towers and battlements and the dramatic events that have played out within its walls.