The Queen’s House Read online

  Hugh Audley, who had picked up much property from such disasters, saw vultures gathering and pounced. Before Cranfield was imprisoned, he used his knowledge of his secret to blackmail him into selling Ebury Manor. On I March 1626 Audley paid him £9,400 for the whole Ebury leasehold, using William Blake as one of his trustees. Although there would be many tenants on and around the future site of the Palace in the coming years, Hugh Audley held the leasehold of Ebury Manor until his death in 1662.

  While William Blake was negotiating the purchase of Ebury Manor for his employer Audley, he was engaged in property speculation on his own account. Outside the south-west wall of the Mulberry Garden was half an acre of wasteland, the site of the old hamlet of Eyecross and the future site of part of the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. Blake illegally acquired it and built a simple house there for his son and daughter-in-law, to be named Blake House. Thanks to Audley’s patronage, Blake flourished: in 1626 he bought himself a knighthood and somewhat dubious title deeds to the new property, having avoided the law forbidding new building on the grounds that there had been dwellings there before.

  James I was succeeded by his son, Charles I. Sir William Blake entered the new reign an apparently prosperous citizen, with a house in Kensington and another on a site that the new King’s friend, Lord Goring, coveted. In fact Blake was deep in debt and after his death in 1630 his heir negotiated the sale of Blake House to Lord Goring, completing the sale in 1633.

  George Goring and Goring House

  George Goring was a survivor. He had served four monarchs: he was a favourite at the Court of Queen Elizabeth I. James I knighted him in 1608, and two years later made him a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to his second son Charles, who entrusted him with the negotiations in France for his marriage to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV of France. When she became Queen, Lord Goring became her Vice-Chamberlain and Master of the Horse. This close association with the Queen proved useful during the Civil War: it was Goring who was chosen to conduct the Queen to her old home in France. He served and fought for Charles I and lived to see Charles II restored to the throne. In his time he played successfully many parts: buffoon and statesman, lady’s man and tough soldier.

  His sturdy loyalty was rewarded, and he became exceedingly wealthy, well able to afford to build himself a handsome house on the site he had bought, though he ran himself into debt in the process. Instead of demolishing the existing building he appears to have enlarged and embellished Blake’s original house. From a contemporary print it would seem to have been a solid brick house – plain and unpretentious like its owner. Unlike the present Buckingham Palace, it faced south. He also appropriated more ‘waste’ land in order to extend his courtyard entrance and enlarge his garden. He had built, according to a contemporary survey, ‘a fair house and other convenient buildings and outhouses and upon the other part of it made the Fountain Garden, a Tarris [terrace] walk, a courtyard and a laundry yard’.6

  While Goring was establishing himself in his comfortable villa at one end of the royal estate at St James’s, Charles I, in the Palace of Whitehall on the bank of the Thames, was treading his disastrous political road to the scaffold. His Palace was then, in the words of historian Thomas Macaulay, ‘an ugly old labyrinth of dirty brick and plastered timber’. It was a huddle of disparate buildings: richly decorated apartments for the royal family, houses with low, dark rooms for courtiers and servants, and the great high-ceilinged Banqueting House, designed in 1619 by architect Inigo Jones in the Palladian style. There were galleries displaying statues and paintings, privy gardens where men and women of rank could walk unchallenged.

  Politically incompetent and uncomprehending though Charles I was, he had excellent artistic taste and during the first decade of his reign assembled a most spectacular collection of paintings.

  He owed some of his talent to the example of his mother, the shadowy Anne of Denmark, who was said to have cared more for paintings than for men, and who took great pleasure in the acquisitions of her royal predecessors, including the tapestries and Hans Holbeins of Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I’s exquisite miniatures. Charles I’s elder brother, Prince Henry, who had died of typhoid in 1612 aged eighteen, had also inherited a scholarly interest in art and had started his own collection.

  Charles I, according to the painter Peter Paul Rubens, even before his accession was ‘the greatest amateur of paintings among the princes of the world’. His passion had been fired by his visit to Madrid in 1623, when he travelled in disguise on a mission to Spain to woo Philip IV’s sister. He returned without a bride but inspired by Philip IV’s great art collection in Madrid.

  When he became King he sent his agents to bargain, and his ambassadors to look for great paintings. He bought through them the cartoons of Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci’s John the Baptist and many other treasures. His greatest triumph was the purchase in 1626 of the collection of the Gonzaga family in Mantua – ‘so wonderful and glorious a collection that the like will never again be met with’ – which included works by Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens.

  A generous patron, Charles I commissioned Rubens to paint the great ceiling in the Banqueting House in honour of his father, James I. It was finished in 1634. He commissioned Rubens’s pupil, Sir Anthony van Dyck, to paint some of the greatest paintings in the Royal Collection today: ‘The Greate Peece’: Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Their Two Eldest Children, Charles and Mary, dominates the Picture Gallery. He brilliantly portrays the unmartial character of the King, his diffidence and melancholy, and his spirited French wife, the Catholic Henrietta Maria, who was to fight tenaciously on the King’s behalf throughout the Civil War. She shared his love of art; and it was to her that paintings came as gifts from the Papacy, knowing that they would be passed to her husband. In 1636 the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Barberini, sent her a batch of paintings including ones by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto.

  While the King and Queen were filling their Palace of Whitehall with superb paintings, George Goring was enlarging the grounds of Goring House. He bought two large fields, known as Upper and Lower Crow, of twenty acres, from Audley, though he never completed payment for them. By 1634 Goring owned most of the land on which the present Buckingham Palace was built except the four acres of Mulberry Garden and the area now occupied by the eastern forecourt. In spite of the great fortune he made through the patronage of the King, he was constantly in debt and mortgaged Goring House to his wife’s relatives. Nevertheless he hankered after the Mulberry Garden, finally bought the lease after Lord Aston’s death in 1639 and at last, in July 1640, he persuaded the King to grant him the freehold, but the agreement never received the confirmation of the Great Seal. In 1642 the Civil War had begun and Charles I had more pressing worries. During the Civil War, Goring lost everything. He could not keep up payments to Audley, and left Goring House, which was requisitioned by Parliament. Charles I took his own Court to Oxford, and by 1643 Goring House was fortified by Oliver Cromwell’s troops. There was a large fort at Hyde Park Corner and ‘a redoubt and battery … at the lower end of Lord Goring’s wall’. For a while troops were stationed in Goring House; afterwards it was repaired and Parliament decided that the Speaker, William Lenthall, should be allowed to live there.

  Meanwhile in 1642 Goring joined the King’s army. He had made a fortune in his royal service and was now prepared to spend it and his life for the King. He sent for his son to join the King’s army, writing to his wife, ‘had I millions of crowns or scores of sons, the King and his cause should have them all’.7 Charles I repaid him by creating him Earl of Norwich on 28 November 1644. He was captured during the Civil War and imprisoned at Windsor Castle. On 10 November 1648 the House of Commons voted for his banishment, but on 6 March 1649 he was sentenced to death. However, he was reprieved by the influence of Speaker Lenthall, who interceded on his behalf.

  In January 1649, while the new Earl of Norwich was imprisoned, facing trial and possibly death, his master Charles I had bee
n condemned. On 30 January 1649 he took his last cold walk from St James’s Palace to the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall. He wore extra warm clothing in case the people should think he shivered from fear not cold. As he climbed to the scaffold outside the first-floor window, did he glance up to the great Rubens ceiling he had commissioned? It would have brought him some consolation if he could have seen into the future. When the great fire of 1698 destroyed the Palace of Whitehall, the Banqueting House and its Rubens was all that was saved.

  After the execution of the King, Parliament ordered a commission to be appointed to arrange the sale of the King’s property to pay his debts. The sale of his pictures, a total of 1,570, lasted from October 1649 to the middle of the 1650s. So one of the world’s greatest art collections was scattered. The paintings were eventually dispersed among private buyers, and are now in museums in France, Spain, Austria and the USA, and elsewhere. Cromwell, however, kept some for the empty walls of Hampton Court Palace – among them, significantly, the pride of the collection, Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar.

  The houses and land of Charles I were also sold, including the Mulberry Garden, which was still Crown property, and as such it was sold to Sir Anthony Deane, who in turn sold it to a Mr Chipp, who turned it into a place of entertainment. It was described in the Parliamentary survey of 1651, made when the King’s estates were sold, as including ‘a bowling alley, a part planted with several sorts of fruit trees and another part planted with whitethorn in the manner of a wilderness or maze walk’. Throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1653–60, when other places of entertainment were closed, the Mulberry Garden behind its high red-brick wall remained open – and notorious. It was often referred to in Restoration plays: for instance, in his play The Mulberry Garden, Sir Charles Sedley’s hero says, ‘These country ladies … take up their places in the Mulberry Garden as early as a citizen’s wife at new play.’8 Sedley’s granddaughter was to become the chatelaine of the house and gardens he made famous.

  The diarist John Evelyn reported in his journal on 10 May 1654:

  My Lady Gerrard treated us at Mulberry Gardens, now the only place of refreshment about the Town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at: Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and closed Spring Gardens which until now had been the usual rendezvous for the Ladies and Gallants of this season.9

  Throughout the Protectorate, and after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Mulberry Garden continued to flourish until it was finally closed in 1675. During that time Mr Chipp created there a number of small booths, perfect for picnicking or courting. The diarist Samuel Pepys visited the garden in May 1668 and found it ‘a very silly place, worse than Spring Gardens, and but little company, and those of a rascally, whoring sort of people, only a wilderness that is somewhat pretty but rude’. The next year in April he took a party and enjoyed ‘a new dish called Spanish olio’, which was specially prepared for them in one of the eating booths. This mixture of meat and vegetables was so tasty that he asked the cook to keep it ‘till night’ when, after a walk, they returned ‘to supper upon what was left at noon … and we mighty merry’.10

  The merriment cannot have been very agreeable to the tenants of Goring House on the other side of the high brick wall. Battered by the troops who occupied it during the defence of London in the Civil War, and its gardens wrecked by the fortifications dug around it, the property had been abandoned by the Earl of Norwich, who, on his release from prison after the execution of Charles I, had gone into exile with his young King. Nevertheless Hugh Audley, a major creditor of Norwich and owner of the freehold, had kept an eye on the property and seen the fabric of the house decay. He undertook some repairs and refurbishments and by the Restoration Goring House appears to have been rented out for social events. Pepys took his wife there in July 1660 to ‘a great wedding of Nan Hartlib to Mein Herr Roder, which was kept at Goring House with very great estate, cost and noble company’.11

  Two years later, on 23 November 1662, Hugh Audley died, leaving, as Pepys recorded, ‘a very great estate’, which included the freehold of much of the present Palace site, except the Mulberry Garden. The Ebury estate went to one of his great-nephews, Alexander Davies, and after him to his daughter. All that is now remembered of the powerful lawyer and his heiress Mary Davies are the London streets named after them. (Mary married Sir Thomas Grosvenor in October 1677, and between them they founded the great property empire now belonging to the Duke of Westminster.)

  After the Restoration, Norwich had returned from Holland and tried to regain possession of Goring House. Failing in this, he begged Charles II at least to recognize the hurried, and unsealed, grant of the Mulberry Garden that his late lamented father had agreed in 1640. The King was about to compromise and grant him a lease of the garden when Mr Chipp appeared on the scene with his title, which had been bought in good faith. It is possible that Charles II welcomed an excuse not to part with such a useful parcel of land. George Goring, 1st Earl of Norwich, died at Brentford in January 1663. His son, the 2nd Earl of Norwich, continued the legal battle but the King announced he would retain the freehold and compensate anyone who could prove a right to it. No one could. Mr Chipp continued to run his ‘entertainment’ business, but now he paid rent to his landlord, the King. Charles II’s decision to keep the freehold of the four-acre Mulberry Garden would later have important consequences.

  On 29 March 1665, John Evelyn, then a civil servant, recorded in his diary, Went to Goring House, now Mr Secretary Bennett’s, ill built … but the place capable of being made a pretty villa.’12

  ‘Mr Secretary Bennett’ had leased Goring House after his first attempt to buy it had failed, owing to the early death of Alexander Davies in the plague epidemic of 1665. The new owner was the young Mary Davies. Her inheritance was in trust, so selling any part of it was difficult. Bennett was to build on the site of Goring House, not a villa but a palatial mansion.

  The Earl of Arlington and Arlington House

  When Charles II and his courtiers returned after the Restoration they brought with them French taste in architecture, furnishings and landscape gardening. Influenced by the French King Louis XIV’s great gardener, André Le Nôtre, Charles II redesigned St James’s Park. Now the occupants of Goring House could look out over the forecourt to a long, straight canal bordered by shady avenues. Here the King played the game ‘pall-mall’ or wandered with his courtiers and yapping spaniels to inspect his aviaries in Birdcage Walk. St James’s Park had ceased to be a hunting ground, and it was now the stage on which that most visible of kings could play his own distinctive royal role.

  The new owner of Goring House, Mr Secretary Bennet, at this time was one of the wealthiest and most influential men at the Court of Charles II. Henry Bennet, later made Baron with the title Lord Arlington, was educated at Westminster School and studied theology at Christ Church, Oxford, where perhaps he acquired the pompous manner for which he was later mocked. He fought with Charles I in the Civil War, and was wounded. Afterwards he always wore a black patch on his nose, perhaps as a reminder to the King of his loyal cavalier service. He escaped to the Continent and made himself a master of languages and foreign affairs. In 1657 he was knighted by the exiled Prince and the next year was sent by Prince Charles as ambassador and agent to Madrid, where he remained until after the Restoration. There he made many useful contacts who were only too ready to pay him handsomely for his services as a Spanish agent.

  When Charles II returned to the throne, Bennet turned to politics, becoming MP for Callington in Cornwall in 1661; the following year he became Secretary of State and a close adviser to Charles II. In 1665 the King created him Lord Arlington. In the same year he married a rich Dutch wife, Isabella de Broderode, who was the granddaughter of the illegitimate son of Prince Henry Frederick of Orange.

  His power grew, and with it came immense wealth. As his influence grew, so did the hatred of his enemies. The 2nd Duke of Buckingham called him an ‘arrant fop fro
m head to toe’. But he was much more than that. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay summed him up:

  he had some talent for conversation and some for transacting ordinary business of office. He had learned during a life passed in travel and negotiating, the art of accommodating his language and deportment to the society in which he found himself. His vivacity in the closet amused the King; his gravity in debates and conferences imposed on the public, and he had succeeded in attaching to himself, partly by services, partly by hopes a considerable number of personal retainers.13

  According to the Comte de Gramont, Arlington assumed to perfection

  the gravity and solemn mien of the Spaniards, a scar across the bridge of his nose, which he covered with a little lozenge shaped plaster, gave a secretive and mysterious air to his visage … he had an overwhelming anxiety to thrust himself forward which passed for industry … and an impenetrable stupidity which passed for the power to keep a secret.14

  But in fact, as Macaulay judged, he had the art ‘of observing the King’s temper and managing it beyond the men of his time’.

  Through his influence with the King, Arlington had secured the lease of Goring House and in 1677 a ninety-nine-year lease of the Mulberry Garden, which he later closed. The ‘rascally whoring sort of place’ was no fit neighbour for the King’s Secretary of State.

  In modern terms he was more than a millionaire but even so he was often in debt. His wife, Isabella, was as extravagant as her husband and soon filled Goring House with sumptuous furnishings, pictures and ornaments. Arlington’s mansion was becoming a palace fit for the entertainment of a king, and grand enough to impress the great nobles and foreign ambassadors who came to consult him, and sometimes to pay him. ‘Ambassadors using so noble a House with so much freedom, gives cause to conclude that they paid dear for it,’ wrote the anonymous author of a tract in 1671.