The Queen’s House Read online

  On the night of her arrival the King took Princess Charlotte to see an Aladdin’s cave of fabulous jewels, among them those she was to wear at the marriage ceremony, ‘a stomacher of diamonds, worth three score thousand pounds’; ‘a little cap of purple velvet quite covered with diamonds, a Diamond aigrette in form of a Crown, 3 dropped diamond ear rings & Diamond necklace’. George II had bequeathed the Hanoverian jewellery to be shared between George III and his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, and the King had bought the Duke’s share.

  So, arrayed in a gown of white and silver, weighed down on a stifling hot night by ‘an endless mantle of violet coloured velvet, lined with ermine, fastened on the shoulder by a bunch of large pearls’ and accompanied by ten bridesmaids glittering in gowns of white silk embroidered with diamonds, Princess Charlotte was led by the King’s brothers, the Duke of York and Prince William, later Duke of Gloucester, to meet her bridegroom, a handsome figure in ‘a stuff of a new manufacture, the ground silver with embossed plate and frosted silver’.2

  She had come through three disturbing months, during which she had endured with astonishing equanimity the death of her mother, her farewell to her home, her stormy voyage and now the glittering Court at the Palace of St James. Not surprisingly she trembled on her arrival. ‘You may laugh,’ she whispered to the Duchess of Hamilton, one of her Ladies of the Bedchamber; ‘you have been married twice; but it is no joke to me.’

  Even that well-informed old gossip Horace Walpole was impressed. In a letter to his friend, the British Envoy at Florence, he praised her good sense and charm.

  Is this bad proof of her sense? On the journey they wanted to curl her toupet. ‘No, indeed,’ said she, ‘I think it looks as well as those of the ladies that have been sent for me: if the King would have me wear a periwig, I will; otherwise I shall let myself alone.’ The Duke of York gave her his hand at the garden-gate: her lips trembled, but she jumped out with spirit. In the garden the King met her; she would have fallen at his feet; he prevented and embraced her, and led her into the apartments, where she was received by the Princess of Wales and Lady Augusta: these three Princesses only dined with the King. At ten the procession went to chapel, preceded by unmarried daughters of peers, peers, and peeresses in plenty. The new Princess was led by the Duke of York and Prince William; the Archbishop married them; the King talked to her the whole time with great good humour, and the Duke of Cumberland gave her away. She is not tall, nor a beauty; pale, and very thin; but looks sensible, and is genteel. Her hair is darkish and fine; her forehead low, her nose very well, except the nostrils spreading too wide; her mouth has the same fault, but her teeth are good. She talks a good deal, and French tolerably; possesses herself, is frank, but with great respect to the King. After the ceremony, the whole company came into the drawing-room for about ten minutes, but nobody was presented that night.3

  In three short months Charlotte had been transformed from a quiet and plain princess of an obscure and remote German dukedom to be Queen of England, with her own two dower houses, Somerset House in London and the White House at Kew.

  She had an immense household of her own. The Duke of Manchester was her Lord Chamberlain, the Duchess of Ancaster her Mistress of the Robes. She had

  two vice-Chamberlains, two Gentleman Ushers of the Privy Chamber, three gentleman ushers daily waiters, three gentleman ushers quarterly waiters, two pages of the Presence Chamber, four pages of the backstairs, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, ‘an operator for the teeth’, six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six Women of the Bedchamber.4

  Her ‘mistress laundress, sempstress & starcher’ was an elderly daughter of a nobleman.

  Since Queen Charlotte spoke no English, it was with great relief that she turned to the two ladies she had brought from Germany, the ferocious Elizabeth Schwellenberg and Louisa Hagedorn. Although the King had discouraged the introduction of foreign attendants, he did allow her to bring one of her household, Frederick Albert. This highly intelligent and cultured man was to remain her faithful servant for the rest of his life.

  It was an exceptionally happy marriage, for which the King thanked his ‘dearest friend’ Bute most effusively. Now it was Queen Charlotte who took his old mentor’s place. After a brief, unsuccessful spell as the King’s Prime Minister, Bute retired and the Queen gave the King the warm companionship that his affectionate nature demanded. Years later, during the black period of his ill health, he could say, ‘The Queen is my best friend.’ And though, when illness loosened his tongue, he revealed a suppressed lust for Lady Pembroke, whom he called Queen Esther, he remained steadfastly faithful and doting.

  The King’s choice of a palace was equally happy – at least for the first years. There were a number of alternatives. There had been, in the past, plans to build a new palace in St James’s Park – one architect even suggesting diverting the canals around Buckingham House so that there could be a ceremonial water approach. The old Whitehall Palace on the Thames had been destroyed by fire in 1698, and only the Banqueting House remained, and it could have been rebuilt; Somerset House on the Strand, with a superb terrace overlooking the Thames, the traditional dower house for royal consorts, could have been enlarged. As a bachelor the King had lived at Savile House next door to his mother’s mansion in Leicester Square, and his father, when Prince of Wales, had also bought Carlton House in London. Then there was Hampton Court, beloved of William III and Queen Mary, but George III, it was said, had never forgotten unhappy times there when his grandfather, George II, had boxed his ears. Windsor Castle was not in good condition at this time, as a visitor reported on 16 August 1766: ‘the castle furniture was old and dirty, most of the best pictures removed to the Queen’s Palace and the whole kept so very unneat that it hurts one to see almost the only place in England worthy to be styled our King’s Palace, so totally neglected’.5

  The same was said of the official London royal residence, St James’s Palace, which George III disliked intensely: he said it was a ‘dust trap’, and ‘too near the road’. And there were so many disturbing echoes from the past: those ‘leper maydens’, the tragic Anne Boleyn whose initials were still there, entwined with Henry VIII’s in the brickwork. From here Charles I had taken his last walk through the park to his execution in Whitehall. The Palace had been neglected since the death of his grandmother, Queen Caroline; the room in which she had died was still untouched, the dead wood still in the grate. George II’s mistress, the Hanoverian Countess Walmoden, still lived in the room next to the old King’s. This was no home for a young bride.

  But it had to serve for the first year. The King pensioned off the Countess, turned her room into his library and refurbished a suite of rooms for Queen Charlotte in delicate blue and white. Their first child, Prince George – later George IV – was born at St James’s Palace (Prince Alfred, their youngest son, and Princess Amelia were born at Windsor, but the rest of their fifteen children were to be born at Buckingham House). Henceforward St James’s Palace was used for official entertaining – for the levees and drawing rooms that were regular features of Court life. Foreign ambassadors are still today accredited to the Court of St James.

  Then the King gave all his attention to their new home, the elegant, red-brick Buckingham House at the end of the Mall. He wanted a new home away from his official residence. Buckingham House, he hoped, would be his retreat, his ‘rus in urbe,’ where he could live the life he really wanted – that of a cultured gentleman with books, paintings, music and gardens, amid a large, happy family.

  In the first two years of their marriage the King and Queen slipped away as often as possible to supervise the refurbishment of Buckingham House, or ‘the Queen’s House’, as it was now called. Horace Walpole wrote to a friend: ‘The King & Queen are settled for good & all at Buckingham House: and are stripping the other palaces to furnish it … they have already fetched pictures from Hampton Court, which indicates their never living there.’6

  When George III bought Buc
kingham House it was much as it had been left by the Duchess of Buckingham. Contemporary illustrations show the elegance of the entrance to the red-brick house. As Buckingham had described:

  The Avenues to the house are along St James’s Park, through rows of goodly elms on one hand and gay flourishing limes on the other, that for coaches, this for walking; with the Mall lying between them. This reaches to my iron palisade that encompasses a square court, which has in its midst a great basin with statues and water works.

  Two wings enclosed the courtyard, which joined the house by corridors supported on Ionic pillars. These wings were for kitchens and storehouses with rooms above for servants. ‘On top of all a leaden cistern holding fifty tuns of water, driven up by an engine from the Thames, supplies all the waterworks in the courts and gardens, which lie quite round the house …’ The roof of the house, ‘which being covered with smooth mill’d lead, and defended by a parapet of ballusters … entertains the eye with a far distant prospect of hills and dales, and a near one of parks and gardens’.

  It was this rural site that Dryden had praised and that so attracted the King. The gardens at the rear were as the Duke had left them: formal in the French manner, with avenues and arbors and a long canal bordered by limes. At the rear of the garden was a terrace,

  400 paces long, with a large Semicircle in the middle, from whence are beheld the Queen’s two parks, and a great part of Surry; then going down a few steps you walk on the banks of a canal 600 yards long and 17 broad, with two rows of Limes on each side.

  On one side of this Terrace a Wall covered with Roses and Jassemines [sic] is made low to admit the view of a meadow full of cattle just under it, (no disagreeable object in the midst of a great city) and at each end a descent into parterres with fountains and water-works.

  Inside all was magnificence. From the courtyard, as the Duke of Buckingham had written,

  we mount to a Terrace in the front of a large Hall, paved with square white stones mixed with dark-coloured marble, the walls thereof covered with a sett of pictures done in the school of Raphael. Out of this, on the right hand, we go into a parlour 33 foot by 39, with a niche 15 foot broad for a Buvette, paved with white marble, and placed within an arch, with pilasters of divers colours, the upper part of which as high as the ceiling is painted by Ricci.

  From hence we pass through a suite of large rooms, into a bedchamber of 34 foot by 27, within it a large closet which opens out into a green-house.

  The King was to take the ground floor for himself, giving Queen Charlotte the whole of the first floor. As the Duke described, it was reached by

  eight and forty steps, ten foot broad, each step of one entire Portland stone. These stairs, by the help of two resting places are so very easy there is no need of leaning on the iron balluster. The walls are painted with the story of Dido.

  The roof of this staircase, which is 55 foot from the ground, is of 40 foot by 36, filled with the figures of Gods and Goddesses. In the midst is Juno, condescending to beg assistance from Venus, to bring about a marriage which the Fates intended should be the ruin of her own darling Queen and People …

  From a wide landing place on the stair head, great double doors opened into a succession of rooms, some overlooking the gardens at the rear with a distant view of Chelsea fields, others with a splendid view from the front of St James’s Park, the Banqueting House and West-minster Abbey.

  The first room on this floor has within it a closet of original pictures [the Duke of Buckingham’s], which as yet are not so entertaining as the delightful prospect from the window. Out of the second room a pair of great doors give entrance into the Saloon, which is 35 foot high, 36 broad and 45 long. In the midst of its roof a round picture by Gentileschi, 18 foot in diameter, represents the Muses playing in concert to Apollo, lying along a cloud to hear them. The rest of the room is adorned with paintings relating to the Arts and Sciences; and underneath divers original pictures hang all in good lights, by the help of an upper row of windows which drown the glaring.

  Above were rooms for children and servants, ‘the floors so contrived’, wrote the Duke, ‘as to prevent all noise over my wife’s head’.7

  The King had chosen well. The site alone was well worth the £28,000 he had paid and was to be one of the main attractions of Buckingham Palace in years to come. Though George III was to alter and rebuild, the core of Buckingham Palace today is the Duke of Buckingham’s house.

  Unfortunately Buckingham House had never been designed for a large family, each with a household of its own – as Queen Victoria would later discover. Year after year, Queen Charlotte produced another prince or princess with astonishing ease, and before long she and the King would go further afield for their country air, to Kew and Richmond and later to Windsor.

  ‘The Apollo of the Arts’

  Now, though, with great enthusiasm, the King began furnishing and rebuilding his new house. Though he was young, he had been unusually well prepared for this work. His parents had encouraged his love of the arts. His father, the much-maligned Frederick, Prince of Wales, had been a discriminating collector. His mother, Augusta, Princess of Wales, an intelligent and cultured woman, had helped to create the pleasure gardens at Kew, and had supervised the rebuilding of Carlton House, which stood on the Mall on the site now occupied by the Athenaeum Club, the Institute of Directors and the road between them, and which Prince Frederick had bought in 1732.

  As tutor Lord Bute was to have a profound effect on George III and a lasting effect on Buckingham Palace itself. Introduced to Prince Frederick in 1747, Bute, a dedicated botanist, was appointed to supervise the gardens at Kew; later he was to encourage Queen Charlotte in her serious botanical studies. As tutor to Prince George from 1755, he gave him a lasting love not only of the arts, music and literature but also of science. He made sure that Prince George was prepared for kingship, inspiring him with a high idealism. Bute has often been criticized for his lack of political judgement, and his profound influence on the intelligent King has been underestimated.

  Bute brought to George III men of talent whose influence would be lasting. Many of them were Scots, such as Thomas Coutts, the banker of Coutts & Co., who are still the royal bankers; and Allan Ramsay, who became the King’s official artist. Robert Adam was to be one of the two architects appointed to rebuild the Queen’s House. Sir William Chambers, the other appointment, was even more important: some of his work can still be seen today in Buckingham Palace.

  William Chambers was born in Sweden to parents of Scottish descent who, like many seventeenth-century Scots, had emigrated to Sweden. After his education at Ripon in England, he began a career in the Swedish East India Company. On their behalf he visited India, journeyed to China several times and developed a profound interest in Chinese culture and gardens, and particularly in their art and architecture. This inspired him to change his career. He studied architecture in Paris, and spent some years in Italy, meeting Robert Adam in Rome. He was not impressed by the cocky young Scot: he found his work superficial and too pretty for his own strongly classical taste. When he returned to England his unusual knowledge of Chinese architecture and gardening brought him to the attention of Lord Bute. In 1757, Princess Augusta appointed Chambers as tutor in architecture to George, who, after the death of his father in 1751, had become Prince of Wales.

  An inspiring tutor and a congenial companion, Chambers shared Prince George’s taste for classical simplicity. He taught him for three mornings a week and gave him a lifelong love of architecture, which was to be his favourite hobby. In later years his disturbed mind was often quietened by the discipline of making architectural drawings or planning castles in the air.

  When Prince George became King he appointed Chambers as his architect for work on the Queen’s House, with Robert Adam as his colleague. In the event, Adam made little contribution to the Palace, although Queen Charlotte chose him to design her spectacular garden party for the King’s birthday. He also designed the chimneypiece for the Saloo
n and a ceiling for her Crimson Drawing Room. Neither Chambers nor the King appreciated Adam’s delicate arabesques. As the King later said, his work ‘had too much gilding which puts one in mind of gingerbread’.

  Chambers was now the architect in charge, but the King kept a close eye on the alterations, offering his own drawings for doorcases and windows. The King liked simplicity, so Buckingham’s ornate railings were taken down and plain ones now enclosed the courtyard. The east façade was simplified, giving the house a more restrained classical outline.

  The King’s greatest pride was in his libraries. George II, who had no taste for books or art, had, in 1757, given the old royal library of some 65,000 books to the newly founded British Museum. George III planned to add to his own considerable collection.

  Between 1762 and 1772 a series of library rooms were built on to the south-west corner, as well as a new bedroom for the King, which linked the library to the main block of the house. In 1767 Sir William Chambers’s superb Octagon Library was completed with a great octagonal table in the middle. It was characteristic of the King’s generosity that he allowed scholars to use his library, and he instructed his agents never to bid against a scholar, a professor or any person of moderate means who desired a book for his own use.

  John Adams, first American minister to Britain, admired the King’s library in 1783. ‘The books were in perfect order … chosen with perfect taste and judgment, every book that a King ought always to have close at hand.’8

  We hear of Dr Johnson, in February 1767, absorbed reading by the fire, surprised by the silent entrance of the King, who had instructed his librarian to let him know when the Doctor visited; of the famous voice, undiminished by awe of royalty, booming through the building; and of the old Tory, who usually had no good word for the Hanoverians, going away delighted with his conversation with a literate King.