The Queen's Houses Read online

  Over the next few years, in deference to its renewed royal status, the castle was slowly spruced up, the old moats and ditches filled in and the drawbridge – last raised as a precautionary measure in 1765 – dismantled. On Sunday evenings in summer the royal family would walk through the crowds (anyone could attend) on the terrace as a band played. The choir of the chapel was restored.

  Le Retour de Windsor, a sonata composed for George III in 1808

  In 1796 James Wyatt was appointed surveyor to the castle and began to remodel Charles II’s apartments in the Gothic idiom. However, after a few years, with the expense of the Napoleonic Wars, work ceased. By 1804 sufficient remedial work had been undertaken for the royal family to move into the castle proper, where The Queen wrote to a friend, ‘I have changed from a very comfortable and warm habitation to the coldest house, rooms and passages that ever existed.’

  The same year two guards’ barracks were built to serve the castle and protect the monarch but the large numbers of soldiers quartered there had, within a few years, led to a major problem of prostitution in the town. George Street and Peascod Street, opposite the castle, were full of boarding houses of ill repute and there were even reports of soldiers selling their services along the Long Walk. The areas with the worst reputation were knocked down in 1839 and a decade later the Royal Mews and Windsor Central Station were built over them. Combermere Barracks is today the headquarters of the Household Cavalry Regiment.

  Despite the simplicity and strict regularity of his day-to-day existence King George III held a glittering house-warming party in 1805 and on St George’s Day that year installed seven new knights, the first installation for over 30 years – it was to be the last for the next 150. After the traditional feast the leftover food was taken out to trestle tables set up in the Quadrangle and the castle gates opened to an onrushing horde of hungry townspeople.

  A view of Windsor Castle from the Thames, by William Raymond Dommerson, c1880

  The King’s Golden Jubilee was celebrated in Windsor in 1809 with fireworks, feasts, illuminations and a spectacular water pageant on the lake at Frogmore. The King, by now blind and going deaf, did not attend and shortly afterwards was stricken with insanity – now thought to be caused by a genetic disorder called porphyria – which virtually confined him to the castle for the next ten years, at times constrained by being ‘wrapped in a winding sheet’. In 1820 he was the first sovereign to die at Windsor and his heavy casket was propelled along a specially made trackway to the new Royal Vault he had commissioned where he would lie beside his Queen and four of their fifteen children.

  George IV and late Georgian taste

  George IV, who had been Prince Regent for nearly a decade before becoming King in 1820, was a very different animal to his father, George III. A big man in every sense he was an architect manqué, a collector of art and furniture and a man of refined but flamboyant sensibility possessed of great taste and energy. He had already built, in the 1780s and 1790s, Carlton House, a spacious and opulent palace beside St James’s Park. At roughly the same time he had begun the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, an extraordinary pleasure palace with an amalgam of Moorish or ‘Saracenic’ exteriors and Chinese interiors. He also began the ambitious remodelling of his father’s Buckingham House to turn it into the palace that would become the primary residence and workplace of successive reigning monarchs. It is no wonder then that after a two-month stay, following his first visit in 1820, he decided extensive works were required at Windsor.

  George IV

  Following a competition Jeffry Wyatt, the nephew of James Wyatt who had worked with George III at Windsor, was selected. In 1823 work began. A Grand Corridor over 150 metres (500 feet) long was designed to ease circulation, a new gateway was opened centred on the Long Walk and buildings were raised and crenellated (including the Round Tower which was doubled in height and increased in girth). Towers were taken down and rebuilt and the Hugh May interiors dating from Charles II, the apogee of the baroque style in interior decoration, were destroyed, apart from three rooms. The chapel was demolished and added to the once-magnificent St George’s Hall to make one enormously long, and unsatisfactory, room. Nonetheless the silhouette of the castle – now so instantly recognizable – benefitted enormously from Wyatt’s changes. He changed his name, too, in 1824, to Wyatville to distinguish himself from a plethora of family members in the building trade with the same name. He was knighted in 1828.

  A chromolithograph of Windsor library, designed by Jeffry Wyatville, 1838

  The internal decorations, painting, plasterwork, gilding, woodcarving, carpets and furniture, were not Wyatville’s responsibility although he contributed some lavish plaster ceilings for the principal reception rooms. The decorating and furnishing of the new interiors was personally supervised by The King (who had already worked with a trusted team of artists and craftsmen at his other major building projects) with the help of cabinet makers Nicholas Morel and George Seddon, a partnership formed to take on this daunting task. Among their workforce was the precociously young Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who at the age of 15 designed furniture and fittings in the Gothic style for the castle.

  Carlton House was demolished in 1825 and the huge collection of paintings, furniture, fixtures and fittings, which had accumulated in over 40 years of ceaseless collecting, was divided between Buckingham Palace and Windsor, and many of the interior schemes were designed to accommodate particular pieces or suites. The results of these labours was summed up by Hugh Roberts in his submission to the Options Report after the Great Fire of 1992:

  ‘The area that Wyatville remodelled presented, before the fire, a superb and unrivalled sequence of rooms widely regarded as the finest and most complete expression of later Georgian taste. The three styles of architecture selected by Wyatville and King George IV – Classical, Gothic and Rococo – were deliberately and carefully orchestrated throughout the building to emphasize the function of the different rooms and to harmonize with the furniture chosen or designed for them.’

  As Guy Francis Laking, Keeper of The King’s Armoury, noted in The Furniture of Windsor Castle (1905), ‘it is to King George IV’s fine taste and appreciation that the nation must be ever grateful for the real treasures now existing at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace’. Many of these treasures are of French origin – gilded and decorated in extravagant style and still adorning the state rooms of the castle. They were acquired after the Revolution by a King well aware of their beauty and the quality of their craftsmanship and of their ability to impart a richness and grandeur synonymous with that of a reigning monarch. Furniture from the reign of Louis XVI was especially favoured, and French royal cabinet makers were also shipped over the Channel to work directly for the British King.

  George IV towards the end of his life was a vastly fat, heavily rouged, blind old man addicted to laudanum to combat constant pain and prone to fantasy. At his death in 1830, much was still to be completed and the work was carried on by his successor, his younger brother William IV. Where George IV, the artist-king, was described as ‘capricious, luxurious and misanthropic’, William IV was ‘a plain, vulgar, hospitable gentleman, opening his doors to all the world, with a numerous family’.

  William IV took possession of Windsor the day after his brother’s funeral, arriving in a carriage with his wife Queen Adelaide and two of his illegitimate daughters by the actress Dorothea Jordan. William and Dorothea had five boys and five girls in the 20 years they were together (1791–1811). William was then Duke of Clarence and all the children were given the surname FitzClarence. By 1837, when William IV’s young niece Victoria inherited the throne (as a young girl she called William ‘Uncle King’), the great works initiated by George IV at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle were virtually complete. William IV’s contribution was to turn the Long Gallery of Elizabeth I into the Royal Library. Both brothers were buried in the new Royal Vault in St George’s Chapel.

  A chromolithograph of the gardens at Winds
or Castle, by J. B. Pyne, 1838

  The Victorian castle

  Victoria took possession of the castle in August 1837 (where she was to encounter two of her uncle’s bastards, the FitzClarences, as one was Constable of the Castle and another Ranger of Windsor Little Park). Her cavalcade approached via the Long Walk through a triumphal arch and under the new King George IV Gateway. That evening a Mrs Graham, ‘the only English female aeronaut’, provided the entertainment by ascending in a balloon named ‘Victoria’ to mark the auspicious occasion. Margaret Graham was an intrepid woman. In later balloons she survived several falls (‘although the ground was very hard there was an evident impression of her form upon it’) and a fire, severely injuring herself and becoming as famous for her near-death escapes as her aeronautical skills. She lived nonetheless to old age.

  The young Queen Victoria receives guests at Windsor, 1844

  Victoria and Albert’s Uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, had much the same relationship with Victoria and Albert as Lord Mountbatten with the younger royals in the 1960s. It was Leopold who proposed his nephew Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as a prospective husband for Victoria. Albert’s initial visit in 1836 was followed by a second, to Windsor, in October 1839 and this time Victoria was smitten. Albert being of inferior rank it was she who had to propose, which she did five days after his arrival with the words, ‘Could you forsake your country for me?’

  They were married the following February, an event which gave her great joy: ‘he clasped me in his arms & we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband!’ The honeymoon was at Windsor. Nine months later, in November 1840, their first child, Victoria, was born and the following month they were at Windsor for Christmas. This was celebrated with Christmas trees and presents in the German manner – Queen Charlotte and Queen Adelaide had already introduced the custom decades earlier – which soon became fashionable. The Queen later wrote she was pleased that the custom had become ‘so generally adopted in this country’. Windsor became the preferred place to spend Christmas. In 1842 the future Edward VII spent his first Christmas there and afterwards was baptized in St George’s Chapel.

  Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consort, 1861

  Victoria preferred Osborne and Balmoral to Windsor, but she would rather be there than in London itself, which she hated, and it was close enough to the capital – particularly once the opening of the railway made the journey so much quicker – to make it useful. In this way Windsor became ‘the seat of authority, and an indispensable wheel in the machine of government’. Although Albert had made good use of the fledgling railway, he and Victoria made their first joint journey by train from Slough to Paddington in June 1842 – the Windsor line opened in 1849 – in a train driven by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had built the railway. The journey took half an hour. By 1852 the Privy Council was coming down to Windsor by special train.

  Albert was indefatigable. He was instrumental in the design and construction of both Osborne and Balmoral and in creating the formal and landscaped gardens that surround them. At Balmoral he diverted public roads to ensure greater privacy and he did the same at Windsor, turning his attention as Ranger of the Parks (he was also Constable of the Castle – thus replacing both FitzClarences) to the improvement of the parks and farms. In due course he divided the Home Park into public and private areas, the latter for the exclusive use of the royal family. Under his direction the old music room beside St George’s Hall was converted by Edward Blore, who also worked at Buckingham Palace, into a new Private Chapel. It was in this room that the disastrous fire started, just over 150 years later.

  Windsor was host to a spectacular series of state occasions and royal relations from most of the monarchies of Europe were constant visitors to the castle. In 1844 it was the Tsar of Russia, when 4000 soldiers were reviewed in the Great Park with the elderly Duke of Wellington attired as a Russian Field Marshal once more at the head of his old regiment. From 1842 the German court painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter spent several months of each summer at Windsor painting Victoria and Albert, their growing brood of children and scenes of court life as well as giving Victoria – a good amateur painter in her own right – lessons. In 1844 he painted the reception accorded Louis Philippe of France at Windsor. Victoria revived the full ceremonial of the Garter in Louis Philippe’s honour. In 1855 it was the turn of Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, England’s implacable enemy for so many years, to be inducted into the Order. Another military review took place in the Great Park and this time a Napoleon charged with the English cavalry, rather than against it. His Empress, Eugenie, chic and beautiful beside the dumpy Victoria – who had little dress sense – made a strong impression with her love of jewellery and her crinoline skirts, the first ever seen in England.

  The Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their children Victoria, Edward, Alice, Alfred and Helena

  The defining moment of Victoria’s reign was the death of her beloved Albert from typhoid fever in 1861. He died at Windsor in the Blue Room overlooking the park where both George IV and William IV had died. Thereafter she was submerged in grief and allowed the very Germanic cult of death to take her over. Albert’s body was stored in the Royal Vault at St George’s Chapel, while a large Italianate mausoleum was built in the corner of his favourite garden at Frogmore. His room, until her death 40 years later, became a shrine, kept exactly as it was when he died, with fresh clothes laid out and hot water provided daily. Every year on the anniversary of his death she would place flowers on his bed and the family would attend a memorial service in the mausoleum. Dressed from that moment in the deepest mourning she shut herself away and later became known, from Kipling’s poem, as ‘The Widow at Windsor’.

  Prince Albert’s tomb at Frogmore

  Still stricken with grief, she attended in 1863 the wedding of The Prince of Wales to the eighteen-year-old Alexandra of Denmark at St George’s Chapel. By all accounts it was a magnificent spectacle, which she watched hidden behind thick velvet curtains. The great west door was used and since this was before the construction of its imposing flight of steps in 1871, a temporary structure of oak in the Gothic style was constructed to provide an entrance way and separate rooms in which The Prince and Princess could wait before the service began. Later that year George Gilbert Scott began work in converting what had become known, despite its sequestration by Henry VIII, as ‘Wolsey’s Tomb House’ into a memorial chapel for Albert. A dazzling high-Victorian tour de force in coloured marble with a recumbent Albert clad in armour, it was completed in 1874.

  Frogmore Mausoleum

  While George Gilbert Scott was working in the chapel the architect Anthony Salvin was at work on various parts of the castle including the walls, repairing and restoring several towers including the ancient Curfew Tower, with its old clock tower that also doubled as the bell tower of St George’s. The characterful bell-cage and dome, dating from the time of Edward IV, was encased by Salvin in a replica of the Tour de la Peyre in Carcassonne, the Gothic architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s fanciful idea of what a medieval tower should look like.

  As the years passed so Victoria’s grief slowly abated and in due course acting companies and other entertainers were invited to Windsor to perform. She threw herself wholeheartedly into supporting the troops during the Second Anglo–Boer War, which began in 1899, giving up her holiday at Osborne to entertain the families of the troops at Windsor. The next year, aged 80, in an extraordinary whirlwind of activity, she went to Ireland, to thank her Irish troops for the part they had played in the war, welcomed The King of Sweden and the Khedive of Egypt on state visits, attended innumerable court functions and held her last Privy Council at Windsor.

  Edward VII

  In December 1900 she moved to Osborne and died there on 22 January 1901. Brought across the Solent on the ship Alberta, her body was then transported al
ternately by train and gun carriage to the railway station at Windsor, resting in St George’s Chapel before being interred in the mausoleum at Frogmore. The giant bell, taken from a church in Sebastopol at the time of the Crimean War and rehung in the Round Tower of the castle, tolled during the funeral, as did the bell of the restored Curfew Tower. The matching effigy Victoria had ordered to be carved at the time of Albert’s death was placed over her coffin in the huge granite sarcophagus she shares with her beloved husband – in her coffin various mementoes of Albert and in her hand a photograph of her faithful servant John Brown, placed there on The Queen’s express instructions by her physician Dr Reid.

  The twentieth century at Windsor

  Both Edward VII and George V preferred Sandringham to Windsor. Edward had little regard for the niceties of style and decoration, unlike George V’s consort, Queen Mary, who knew a great deal about furniture and paintings and their settings.

  Edward VII set about de-cluttering and updating the castle with unsophisticated zeal, thinning out furniture, sending ornaments to storage and recovering frayed curtains and worn upholstery, but not necessarily in quite the sensitive way they had been restored before – so diluting Jeffry Wyatville’s vision. He reopened the suite of rooms kept for so long as a shrine to his father, Prince Albert, redecorating them for his own use and including a smoking and billiard room, two of his favourite pastimes. Electricity, heating, bathrooms and telephone lines were installed and the castle drainage updated. An ardent admirer of women, one of Edward VII’s first acts was to revive the practice, dormant since medieval times, of admitting ladies to the Order of the Garter.