The Queen’s House Read online

  The

  Queen’s

  House

  Edna Healey

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE The Duke of Buckingham

  CHAPTER TWO George III and Queen Charlotte

  CHAPTER THREE George IV

  CHAPTER FOUR William IV

  CHAPTER FIVE Queen Victoria

  CHAPTER SIX Edward VII

  CHAPTER SEVEN King George V and Queen Mary

  CHAPTER EIGHT King Edward VIII

  CHAPTER NINE King George VI and Queen Elizabeth

  CHAPTER TEN Queen Elizabeth II

  Notes

  Sources and Select Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply grateful to Her Majesty The Queen for gracious permission to quote from documents and letters in the Royal Archives, and for giving me the privilege of access to Buckingham Palace.

  I am indebted to HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother for allowing me to publish some of her hitherto unpublished letters now in the Royal Archives. I am particularly grateful that she spared time to see me. HRH Princess Margaret also kindly gave me some valuable insight into the history of Buckingham Palace.

  I am deeply indebted to Lady de Bellaigue, the Registrar of The Queen’s Archives, and to Oliver Everett, Assistant Keeper of The Queen’s Archives, for their guidance and assistance.

  I give my grateful thanks to the librarians and their colleagues of the House of Lords Library, the British Library, the Westminster City Library and Archives and the East Sussex County Library. As always, I owe a great debt to the librarian and staff at the London Library. Jessica Rutherford, Director of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, has been particularly helpful.

  I have been given every encouragement from many members of Her Majesty’s Household. I am most grateful to the Lord Chamberlain, the Rt Hon. the Earl of Airlie; Her Majesty’s Private Secretary, the Rt Hon. Sir Robert Fellowes; the Master of the Household, Major General Sir Simon Cooper; the Director of Finance and Property Services, Michael Peat; and the former Press Secretary, Charles Anson, and other members of the Royal Household for their friendliness and unfailing courtesy.

  I am deeply conscious of my debt to Hugh Roberts, Edward Hewlett, Christopher Lloyd and Sir Oliver Millar, and all the members of the Royal Collection, not only for the time and encouragement they have given me but also for their written works. They have contributed superb introductions to the catalogues of exhibitions in The Queen’s Gallery, many of them modestly unsigned. I am aware that in this book I have been able only to touch the surface of subjects to which they have given long years of profound study. They bear no responsibility for my shortcomings.

  I am most grateful to all at my publishers, Michael Joseph Ltd, particularly to my editors, Susan Watt and Anne Askwith, for their patience, constant support and encouragement, and to my picture researcher, Lily Richard. Barbara Peters has given me invaluable advice and assistance.

  My secretary, the late Mary Morton, continued to work with dedication until her untimely death. Cheryl Lutring has competently finished her work.

  List of Illustrations

  COLOUR

  1. The Duke of Buckingham’s Levée by Marcellus Laroon the Younger (1679–1774) – (Private Collection – photo: John Webb)

  2. George III (c. 1763) by Allan Ramsay (1713–84) (The Royal Collection)

  3. Queen Charlotte (1782) by Benjamin West (1738–1820) (The Royal Collection)

  4. Princesses Louisa and Caroline Matilda (1767) by Francis Cotes (1725–70) (The Royal Collection)

  5. The Illuminations at the Queen’s House for George Ill’s birthday 4 June 1763 by Robert Adam (1728–92) (Bridgeman Art Library/Agnew & Sons, London)

  6. The Great Staircase at Buckingham Palace (1818) by James Stephanoff (c. 1786–1874) (The Royal Collection)

  7. The Apotheosis of Prince Octavius (1783) by Benjamin West (The Royal Collection)

  8. The Queen’s Breakfast Room (1817) by James Stephanoff (The Royal Collection)

  9. The Octagon Library (1818) by James Stephanoff (The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle)

  10. Breakfronted mahogany bookcase by William Vile (The Royal Collection)

  11. Ivory chair (c. 1770) (The Royal Collection)

  12. Chelsea porcelain service (1763) (The Royal Collection)

  13. Fanny Burney (Frances D’Arblay) (c. 1784–5) by Edward Francis Burney (1760–1848) (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

  14. Queen Charlotte (1797) by Sir William Beechey (1753–1839) (The Royal Collection)

  15. Mrs Jordan and Two Children (1834) by Sir Frances Chantrey (1781–1841) (The Royal Collection)

  16. The Family of George III (1783) by Thomas Gainsborough RA (1727–88) (The Royal Collection)

  17. George IV (1791) by George Stubbs (1724–1806) (The Royal Collection)

  18. Queen Victoria and Princé Albert and the Bal Costumé of 12 May 1842 by Sir Edwin Landseer (1803–73) (The Royal Collection)

  19. Queen Victoria’s Sitting-Room (1848) by James Roberts (1800–67) (The Royal Collection)

  20. The New Ballroom at Buckingham Palace by Louis Haghe (1806–85) (The Royal Collection)

  21. The Family of Queen Victoria (1887) by Laurits Tuxen (1853–1927) (The Royal Collection)

  22. The Queen’s Garden Party 26 June 1897 by Laurits Tuxen (The Royal Collection)

  23. King Edward VII in Garter Robes (1907) by Sir Arthur Cope (1857–1940) (Private Collection – photo: Nathan Kelly)

  24. Queen Mary (1911–13) by Sir William Llewellyn (1858–1941) (The Royal Collection)

  25. George V and Queen Mary Enthroned at the Great Coronation Durbar, Delhi, 12 September 1911 by George Percy Jacomb-Hood (1857–1927) (The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle)

  26. George V with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret by T. P. Earl (1874–1947) (The Royal Collection)

  27. The Duke of Edinburgh marches on the fiftieth anniversary of VJ Day, 15 August 1995 (PA News)

  28. HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1948) by Cecil Beaton (1904–80) (Camera Press)

  29. The Prince and Princess of Wales on the balcony on their wedding day, 29 July 1981 (Rex Features)

  30. HM The Queen at the Buckingham Palace Garden Party (Rex Features)

  31. HM The Queen with President Nelson Mandela, 9 July 1996 (Popperfoto/Reuter)

  32. ‘The Greate Peece’: Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Their Two Eldest Children (1632) by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) (The Royal Collection)

  33. The Picture Gallery (The Royal Collection)

  All Royal Collection photographs are reproduced © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  BLACK AND WHITE

  1. Plan of Buckingham House (1743) (The Royal Collection)

  2. Arlington House (© British Museum)

  3. Mrs Papendiek and child by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1839) (Mrs Papendiek’s Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte, 1857)

  4. King George III at Windsor (c. 1820) (The Royal Collection)

  5. Leopold, King of the Belgians, (c. 1857) (The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle)

  6. Prince Albert plays the organ for Queen Victoria (1842) (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  7. A group of grooms with the little pony, Webster, Buckingham Palace (1842) (The Royal Archives, Windsor Castle)

  8. Queen Victoria with the Prince and Princess of Wales (1863) (Hulton Getty)

  9. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, and her youngest brother, Prince Valdemar of Denmark (c. 1870) (Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen)

  10. The Prince and Princess of Wale
s at the time of their Silver Wedding in 1888, with their children (Hulton Getty)

  11. King George IV, Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth photographed at Buckingham Palace (1942) by Cecil Beaton (Camera Press)

  12. King George and the Queen watch engineers at work following a time bomb dropped during a night raid (1940) (Topham Picturepoint)

  13. King George IV, Queen Elizabeth and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret on VE Day, 8 May 1945 (Hulton Getty)

  14. The Christening of Princess Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise at Buckingham Palace (1950) (Hulton Getty)

  All Royal Collection photographs are reproduced © Her Majety Queen Elizabeth II

  Prologue

  On 4 June 1763, in the third year of his reign, George III celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday at St James’s Palace. Two days later his young Queen, Charlotte, staged her own surprise present. She had persuaded her husband to remain at St James’s Palace from Saturday 4 June until Monday 6 June while she completed her preparations at their new home, Buckingham House. The King had bought the red-brick mansion at the end of Pall Mall in 1763* from Sir Charles Sheffield, who had possessed it since 1742, and they had spent the last year watching over the rebuilding and refurbishment.

  Now, on a warm June night Queen Charlotte took her husband through the darkened great house up the grand staircase to the Queen’s rooms overlooking the garden. Then, at a signal, the shutters were opened and below them the terrace and lawns were suddenly, amazingly, revealed, brilliant in the light of 4,000 glass lamps. Over the shining long canal, a delicate bridge had miraculously appeared. Pavilions and a splendid colonnade had arisen, and graceful figures linked huge screens lit from behind, like magic lanterns, showing images of the King bringing peace to the world, and his enemies, envy, malice and destruction falling headlong to perdition. The Queen had commissioned the architect Robert Adam to design this magnificent display, which dazzled the throng of glittering guests and delighted the King.1

  Queen Charlotte’s German band played ‘God Save The King’ and then, while the band played music by George Frideric Handel, the King and Queen joined the assembly for a ‘supper of a hundred cold dishes followed by an illuminated dessert’. Apparently at this party a new court dress was introduced, of stiff-bodiced gowns and bare shoulders. ‘The old ladies will catch their deaths,’ the gossip Horace Walpole wrote maliciously. ‘What dreadful discoveries will be made, both of fat and lean. I recommend to you the idea of Mrs Cavendish going half stark!’2

  There have been many parties since then in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, as Buckingham House is called today, but probably none has pleased a monarch more. The King’, so it was said, ‘was delighted with this unexpected testimony of his consort’s love and respect.’ It was no small achievement for a nineteen-year-old girl, recently and unexpectedly plucked from the obscurity of a small German dukedom, Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

  The King, in love and gratitude, gave Buckingham House to Queen Charlotte; the gift was officially confirmed by Parliament on 26 April 1775. During her lifetime it was known as ‘the Queen’s House’ and here twelve of their fifteen children were born.

  The palace on this site was to be rebuilt and altered many times, but it has remained at the centre of the royal family’s life and, since 1837, has been the monarch’s official London residence.

  * Negotiations began in 1760 but the contract was not finally signed until April 1763.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Duke of Buckingham

  ‘Sic situ laetantur lares’

  [The Household Gods delight in such a situation]

  Inscription around the roof

  of the Duke of Buckingham’s house1

  Palaces and Predecessors

  George III was the first monarch to take up residence in Buckingham House, but the site had had royal connections since the Tudors and each of his predecessors had added something to the history of Buckingham Palace.

  Every king or queen, past and present, has had a different concept of the purpose of a palace: an outward sign of power and dominance, a symbol of mystical status, or an expression of the monarch’s own whims and fantasies. George III, essentially a simple man, wanted, in addition to his official residence, St James’s Palace, a family home where he could live with his adored young wife, bring up a family and lead the life of a cultured country gentleman with his books, his pictures and his music.

  Henry VIII was the first monarch to acquire the land adjoining the site of the Palace. His father, Henry VII, had made the medieval Palace of Westminster* both home and royal headquarters. His law courts and Parliament were here and here he held Court in the Painted Chamber, his great bedroom.†

  Henry VIII had been king for only three years, when in 1512 fire destroyed much of the old palace. In 1529, when Cardinal Wolsey fell from grace, the King took the opportunity to seize York Place, the Cardinal’s magnificent palace on the bank of the River Thames. The Palace of Westminster still housed Parliament and the law courts but was no longer the royal residence. It has retained, however, the old name and is still the Palace of Westminster. York Place became the Palace of Whitehall and for a century and a half was the headquarters of the Court until it, in turn, was destroyed by fire.

  Henry VIII, with his superabundant energy, expected his palace to be more than a seat of state and a symbol of dominance: it was also to be a place of frolic and entertainment. He looked across Whitehall to a stretch of wasteland and saw it as a perfect hunting ground conveniently close to his palace. So in December 1531 he acquired from Roger Lupton of Eton College the 185 acres stretching from Whitehall to the site of the present Buckingham Palace. The land was, at this time, reedy marshland watered by two streams, the Westbourne and the Tyburn. Henry VIII drained the marshes, channelled the streams into a lake and laid out gardens. The area was to become St James’s Park, named after a twelfth-century hospice there, dedicated to St James the Less, which had originally been endowed by the citizens of London for the care of ‘fourteen leper maydens’.2 Since then monks and ‘maydens’ had brought scandal to the Hospital of St James, and plague and neglect had emptied the decaying buildings, which in 1449 Henry VI gave to Eton College. The Master of Eton kept the Hospital of St James as his town house but provided for the upkeep of four poor women there. In 1536 Henry VIII took it over, dismissed the four women with a pension of £6 13s. 4d. a year, demolished it and built a hunting lodge in its place. Later, enlarged and rebuilt, it became St James’s Palace. So, where once bell and clapper had sounded, the woods rang with hunting horns when Henry VIII and Queen Anne rode out on a May morning with ‘a goodly company to the fields of Kensington’.3

  Henry VIII acquired the land adjoining the site on which Buckingham Palace is built, but it was James I who first cultivated it. In 1608 he paid £935 for the ‘walling, levelling and planting thereof of mulberry trees’ on four acres of adjoining wasteland near the site of the north wing of the present Buckingham Palace. Impressed by the wealth created by the French silk industry, James I had decided to outshine the French King. In 1607 he appointed William Stallinge, an employee at the Customs House with experience of breeding silkworms, ‘to research and publish a book’ on Instructions for the planting and increase of mulberry trees, breeding of silkworms and the making of silk’. He also instructed deputy lieutenants to require landowners in their counties to ‘purchase and plant ten thousand mulberry trees at the rate of 6 shillings per thousand’.4

  Alas, Stallinge and, later, his son Jasper were to spend many years and thousands of pounds of the King’s money in the vain attempt to persuade silkworms to thrive on the leaves of the black mulberry trees they had planted. They had failed to realize that though the black mulberry produces delicious fruit, its leaves are rough and silkworms prefer those of the white mulberry.

  So in 1625 James I and Stallinge both died without embellishing the kingdom with the silk that the King so much desired: his scheme of a great English sil
k industry had never materialized. Stallinge’s son Jasper being equally unsuccessful, on 4 July 1628 Charles I granted his friend Lord Aston the right to ‘keep his mulberry gardens at St James with a yearly fee of £60 during his life and that of his son’.5 But when in 1635 Lord Aston was made ambassador to Spain all pretence of supervising the breeding of silkworms was abandoned and the weaving sheds and outhouses were neglected.

  There were, however, sharp men who realized that there were fortunes to be made not in silk but in property. As London expanded, a site in a rural setting with easy access to the Palaces of Westminster, Whitehall, St James and Kensington was of great potential value, and there were three men in particular who were eager to seize it: Lionel Cranfield, James I’s Treasurer, Hugh Audley, the most formidable property lawyer in London, and William Blake, his man of business. The story of the involvement of these men and others in the establishment of the site of Buckingham Palace was to continue for years, through civil war, the Commonwealth and successive reigns, and through a maze of complicated litigation.

  The Mulberry Garden was outside the walls of St James’s Park and was part of the freehold of Ebury Manor, an area which stretched from the present Oxford Street through to Chelsea. Henry VIII had acquired the freehold for the Crown, but Queen Elizabeth I had granted a long lease to Sir Thomas Knyvett which ran until 1675. He in turn had assigned his lease to two London merchants. When James I came to sell Ebury Manor, the Mulberry Garden was specifically excluded. These four acres were to remain Crown property throughout all the vicissitudes of the century, except for a short period when Cromwell sold it together with the rest of King Charles’s property.

  When in 1618 and 1622 the two leases for Ebury Manor owned by the merchants came on the market, Cranfield moved swiftly and secretly to buy them, using the names of two of his servants, although as the King’s Treasurer he ought to have bought them for the Crown. It was easy, he thought, to cheat James I in the last years of his dissolute life. A clever but unscrupulous minister who had risen from grocer’s apprentice to be the King’s financial adviser, Cranfield finally overreached himself and in May 1624 was impeached by Parliament for ‘bribery, extortion, wrong & deceit’. He was heavily fined, imprisoned and disgraced.