by Edna Healey
Perhaps at no other time has the Palace been such a centre of creative activity and excitement, except in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Throughout the reign of George III, the King’s own enthusiasm, and his tolerant acceptance of the oddities of the artistic world, are remarkable.
‘The King’s account’
It is impossible to estimate the exact cost of the rebuilding and furnishing of Buckingham House, but enough details are recorded to indicate the vast scale of the expenditure. Apparently £13,885 14s. 6 ½d. was spent on rebuilding in the years 1762–3 and later additional sums of £10,197 and £9,757. Since 1697 such expenditure was paid for out of the ‘Civil List’, voted by Parliament, at the beginning of each reign, and allotted for the expense of civil government. (The King was not expected to cover the cost of defence – the Navy, the Army, and a provision for foreign affairs were the responsibility of Parliament.)
In 1714 George I was granted £700,000 per annum and £100,000 for the Prince of Wales. Sir Robert Walpole secured a better deal for George II, who was given the full sum and its profits. George Ill’s father, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was granted £500,000 per annum and an extra £100,000 upon marriage.
However, because he followed the Hanoverian pattern of the son’s political opposition to his father, in 1747 Frederick, Prince of Wales, pledged that when he became king he would take only a fixed sum of £800,000 per annum. George III felt duty-bound to honour his father’s pledge, and the first legal Act of his reign was the granting of a Civil List of £800,000 fixed income. Had he adopted his grandfather’s system he would have become extremely wealthy, but because this was an age of inflation, and he had much greater responsibilities than his grandfather, the King was often in debt.
Out of the Civil List, the King was expected to pay for government expenses (apart from the armed forces), the running of the Court and allowances to the royal family. His private and personal expenses came out of the Privy Purse, for which he was allowed £48,000 per annum, increased in 1777 to £60,000. This came out of the Civil List, but was private: he was not answerable to the Treasury for details of this expenditure.
For the first three years of George III’s reign Lord Bute was Keeper of the Privy Purse. With the advice of Bute, the King appointed Thomas Coutts as his banker: ‘Coutts in the Strand is my banker,’ the King wrote; later he made him a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Totally discreet,* Thomas Coutts remained one of the King’s financial advisers until the political activities of his radical son-in-law, Sir Francis Burdett, infuriated the government and the King removed his account. George Ill’s sons, however, remained as customers, plaguing the upright banker with their debts. Loyally, Thomas Coutts destroyed his records of the King’s Privy Purse, so we shall never know exactly how this money was spent. But it is assumed that a large proportion was spent on private charities, the King being parsimonious in his own personal expenditure.
Out of the Civil List the King had also to pay allowances to his three brothers when they came of age, dowries to his two sisters when they married, the Coronation expenses and the Queen’s allowance.
As his family grew, so did his expenses; and in spite of his careful management, by 1769 he was in debt and asked Parliament for an additional grant of £573,000. In 1777 he had to ask again for an increase of the Civil List to £900,000. This Parliament reluctantly granted, reminding the King that this was a time of great distress and unrest. The opposition, as will be seen, constantly attacked the waste of money on King and Court.
‘The King’s on the road!’
Delighted though the King and Queen were with the Queen’s House they soon found it to be inadequate for their growing family. Queen Charlotte had been seven months pregnant with her second child at the time of the housewarming party, and an elegant nursery had been prepared. Princes George and Frederick – later George IV and the Duke of York – slept in identical, beautifully carved beds made by the joiner, Mrs Naish, and studied at identical little desks, establishing a lifelong empathy. But as each year brought a new baby, the Queen’s House became no longer suitable.
An infant Prince of Wales, as in 1763, would require a governess, a subgoverness, a dry nurse, a wet nurse, a necessary woman and two rockers.
An adult Prince of Wales might have a hundred officers and servants on strength. He would need four gentlemen, half a dozen grooms and four pages to see him to bed the year round. Besides a Chancellor, a Master of the Horse, Equerries and so forth he would require an Attorney-General, a Solicitor-General, two ‘Counsel learned in the law’ and a whole string of watermen.18
There was, besides, a restlessness in the King’s nature, symptomatic of his later illness, and once he had arranged the Queen’s House in London to his satisfaction he wanted to move on. So as the years went by he and the Queen, and their family, spent more and more time at their other homes at Kew and later Windsor, and their visits to Buckingham House became a duty, to be hurried through as quickly as possible so that the King could rush back to the country. In 1785 he wrote that he was hardly ever at the Queen’s House. As the King’s coaches rattled from palace to palace, the households went too, requiring transport, rooms and offices at each stage.
As the family and their entourages increased, new houses had to be built at Kew until there was quite a village round Kew Green. The King was always closely involved, and with the advice of his old teacher, Sir William Chambers, he planned the building and refurbishing with a frenetic excitement. In the 1760s he was planning a new palace at Richmond. In 1776 he had moved on to Windsor, planning the renewal of the Castle.
There were still duties and ceremonies in London. Each new birth meant an elaborate christening, when the Queen received her guests in Mrs Naish’s splendid bed, under a velvet canopy in a cloud of exquisite lace. Each child’s birthday was celebrated in elaborate fashion and new clothes were de rigueur for the children and courtiers. The King’s birthday on 4 June was always celebrated in high style. In the early years there were drawing rooms once a fortnight, when the Queen entertained ladies in the hot and stuffy rooms at St James’s Palace, and when the King gave levees for gentlemen, standing the day long, sometimes without food, talking, talking, questioning with his ‘famous What? What? What?’ and listening. As foreign observers noted, it was so unlike the cold formality of the French court.
At least the concerts given at the Queen’s House twice a week were a relaxation. J. C. Bach’s wife, the famous singer Galli, and their pupils often performed, and there were private quartet parties twice a week when the great flautist Johann Christian Fischer played. But all these occasions were time-consuming and exhausting, for the King involved himself entirely in everything he did. He allowed himself little rest: concerned to keep down his weight, he would often ride out from the Queen’s House for a three-hour gallop before breakfast.
He began to tire of a London now increasingly dirty and smokeladen. The great gale of 1779 gave him an excuse to spend more time in the country. As the writer Mrs Papendiek (daughter of the Queen’s page) remembered,
It took off the upper corner of the Queen’s House. This was the room next to the one in which the Princes Ernest, Augustus & Adolphus slept, which was over the bedroom of their majesties. The King was up, and with his children in a moment. The ceiling was falling fast & had already broken the bedstead of the elder Prince … but no harm happened to them.19
So the whirling, restless years went by, with the King, his family and household rushing from concerts and levees, or leaving London late at night to be at Windsor for the next morning’s hunt, or at Kew for supervision of the newest building project.
At the Queen’s House they often entertained visiting Germans – some distinguished, others, such as Sophie von la Roche, obscure. Writing in 1786 she recalled her visit.
The noble simplicity of the furnishings, the order and neatness, were marks of the character of the owner – marks of the wise humility upon the throne.
The library
occupies the largest apartment and embraces the entire treasure-house of human knowledge. Three rooms are given up to it [there were in fact four rooms]. Two are much larger and finer than the Versailles ones. Fine pictures by Van Dyck, a large number by Claude Lorrain, Guido Reni, Del Sarto, masterpieces by Angelica [Kauffmann] and some excellent miniatures render these simple damask hangings very valuable.
In a small cabinet off the bedroom are the portraits of the fourteen royal children – thus the first waking moments are dedicated to this sight and the emotions of true motherhood. May theirs be the reward of such tenderness, my heart softly murmured.
In one apartment I saw Raphael’s famous cartoons. Above the library is a room which the king, the Prince of Wales, the relatives of the Gibraltar Eliot must cherish very much since ports of such importance to England as Plymouth and Portsmouth are excellently modelled there, with all their buildings and gardens and ships and their manifold industries; Gibraltar’s rocky fastness, the Spanish encampment, all on a table ten feet long …
The concert hall contains a large organ, and this not merely because England happens to be particularly fond of this instrument, but also because the royal family holds private prayers to an organ accompaniment; for it has always been mainly associated with church music.
The audience chamber is devoid of all splendour: one cabinet, however, is enhanced by the queen’s tapestry-work. In a side room looking on to the garden an artist was at work; and there, too, we found two lovely portraits of the youngest princesses …
There is a colonnade in the vestibule worthy of the dignity of this small palace’s mistress; but since it originally belonged to the Buckingham family, whose name, Buckingham House, it still bears, it also shows that the builder had a taste for greatness and nobility; since the stairs are also decorated with frescoes …
The choice of site for this palace is perfect, as it takes in the gradual incline, from which the royal park of St James’s and Green Park can be completely overlooked, and at the back of it a pleasant garden has been laid out in which to take a solitary stroll. The towers of Westminster Abbey, the coronation and burial-ground of British monarchs can be seen from here as well as from St James’s Palace.
We rejoiced on passing through the suites of apartments at being able to enumerate a series of virtues and accomplishments common to the lofty souls of the proprietors of this residence. While marvelling at the delightful order and simplicity reigning everywhere, Mr Vulliamy said, ‘The eye of the queen spreads this elegance in Buckingham’s house, just as her heart allows the king to savour the sweet happiness of purest love.’
Sophie von la Roche was not only conducted round the Queen’s House by Vulliamy senior: she also counted herself lucky to be received by the King and Queen. On Tuesday, 19 September 1786, she wrote,
I was full of excitement without feeling in the least afraid, for the queen was famed for her kindness and virtue; this made me just as confident as I was awed. The idea that I was to see and speak to Queen Charlotte of England, whom I had so long admired, at close quarters upon English soil, kept me awake for quite a long while.
She need not have feared: the King and Queen put her immediately at ease.
The king, a most distinguished and handsome man, listened with kind attention while I spoke with his worthy consort, and addressed me very graciously, adding, however, that as ‘an authoress they should not speak to me in German.’ I replied that ‘I rejoiced for my Fatherland that their Majesties still loved its language.’ Thereupon he laid his hand upon his breast with fine, manly frankness, saying, ‘Oh, my heart will never forget that it pulses with German blood. All my children speak German.’
At that moment the princesses approached. Her eldest Highness, a really lovely princess; Princess Augusta, lively and attractive; the two youngest ones very innocent and sweet. They all addressed me in German; are all kindly disposed, and their beauty proves that they are children born of purest love.20
Queen Charlotte was happiest in the country; when at the Queen’s House, she longed for her quiet flower garden in the country lane at Kew, or for the informality and easier clothes of Windsor, where they could drop in on their subjects casually. One contemporary, Lieutenant Colonel Phillip, remembered the Queen calling on Mrs Garrick at her home in Hampton without notice. ‘Mrs Garrick was much confused at being caught in the act of peeling onions for pickling. The Queen however, would not suffer her to stir; but commanded a knife to be brought… & actually sat down … & peeled onions.’21 She could not have done this at the Queen’s House in London.
There was little rest – a day or two among her flowers and then the headlong rush. Her household would pack up her gowns, Mrs Naish would pack the close-stools and the chamber pots, and the younger children would be bundled into carriages. The cry would go up: ‘The King’s on the road!’ and his subjects would flatten themselves against the hedges as the royal cavalcade swept by at breakneck speed.
The King was indeed ‘on the road’ – a road that would eventually, in 1788, lead to a complete mental breakdown. It is tragic that George III is remembered chiefly as the King who went mad (as it was then thought he was; his illness is now thought to have been the side effect of the metabolic disorder porphyria). In fact Court life for the first three decades of his reign was more culturally and intellectually rich than at almost any other period in our history.
Court Life
It is fortunate that we have the memoirs of two intelligent women who brilliantly portray the pleasures and pains of Court life in the reign of George III. The Queen had appointed Fanny Burney, a distinguished novelist (author of Evelina) much admired by Dr Johnson, as Keeper of the Robes, and she was with the Queen during the nightmare period of the King’s first spell of apparent madness.
The other was Charlotte Papendiek, the daughter of Frederick Albert, the German page whom the Queen had persuaded to come with her from Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where originally he had served as hairdresser/barber. Charlotte married Christopher Papendiek, a German page in the King’s entourage, and in the late 1830s, wrote her autobiography under her married name. It covers the period from before her birth in July 1765 to 1792. Her father, a fine, cultured man, and a competent musician, had sent her at the age of six to be educated at Streatham, south London, where she was well taught by two ladies, friends of Mrs Thrale and Dr Johnson. She, too, like Fanny Burney, had been flattered by Johnson. Her father, who had hoped that her training would qualify her to become one of the Queen’s household, unwillingly allowed her to become the wife of a courtier, knowing what a difficult life that was, as generations of courtiers’ wives have discovered. Mrs Papendiek flourished in the cultural life of the Court and eventually took Fanny Burney’s place, remaining with the Queen until her death.
Unlike Mrs Papendiek, Fanny Burney withered at Court and retired, broken in health. She had lived, she recorded, ‘in the service of Her Majesty five years within ten days from July 17 1786 to July 1791’. She had counted the days.
During her term of office, she spent most of her time with the Queen in the country, though she had a room in St James’s Palace and another in Buckingham House, where she slept when the royal family were in London. Unfortunately she gives little description of the Queen’s House in her journals – in any case Miss Burney was extremely short-sighted and Court etiquette did not allow her to wear glasses; but she is an admirable witness of life among the courtiers, which was much the same in all the palaces. Unlike Mrs Papendiek, who was bred to Court life and accepted the discomforts with cheerful resignation, Miss Burney could never rid herself of the sense of the indignity of her position. To be summoned by a bell, like a servant, was a ‘mortifying mark of servitude. I always felt myself blush, though alone, with conscious shame at my own strange degradation.’ Though she was charmed by the tact and gentleness of the ‘sweet queen’, she was uncomfortable in the ritual of dressing her. The Queen’s maid ‘hands the things to me and I put them on. ’Tis fortunate that I have
not the handling of them … embarrassed as I am, and should run a prodigious risk of giving the gown before the hoop, and the fan before the neck-kerchief.’ She was affronted, too, by the ferocious Mrs Elizabeth Schwellenberg, who had also come with the Queen from Germany and dominated the Queen’s household, and bullied and patronized Fanny Burney. But her pride was most hurt when Mrs Schwellenberg came to her in great secrecy, saying, ‘“The Queen will give you a gown! The Queen says you are not rich.” … There was something … quite intolerable to me & I hastily interrupted her with saying: “I have two new gowns by me, & therefore do not require another.”’
Such ingratitude was incomprehensible to Madame–but Miss Burney was adamant. ‘To accept even such a shadow of an obligation upon such terms I should think mean & unworthy; and therefore I mean always, in a Court as I would elsewhere to be open & fearless in declining such subjection.’ The Queen was ‘all sweetness, encouragement & gracious goodness to me, & I cannot endure to complain of her old servant … I could not give up all my own notions of what I think everyone owes to themselves.’
Nevertheless she continued to suffer the bullying, as when, on long coach journeys, Madame insisted on keeping the windows open, so giving Fanny a swollen face. Miss Burney endured the ‘slavery’ for the same reason that she had accepted the honour. Her father, Dr Burney, a distinguished musicologist who had observed royal patronage of musicians in his travels through German courts, was writing a history of music. She hoped he might, through her influence, gain some preferment at the English Court.
No one has caught better than Miss Burney the atmosphere of life among the courtiers, its longueurs and miseries. Generations of equerries have sympathized with her friend, Colonel Goldsworthy.
‘What a life it is? Well! it’s honour, that’s one comfort; it’s all honour, royal honour! One has the honour to stand till one has not a foot left; & to ride until one’s stiff, & to walk till one’s ready to drop – & then one makes one’s lowest bow, d’ye see, and blesses one’s self with joy for the honour.’
