The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  Burke did not win the vote, but he won the argument and his arrows struck home. The King secretly looked to private bankers to service his debts.

  Nathaniel Wraxall, a contemporary, noted the effect of Burke’s blast. Many persons of high rank reluctantly disappeared from about the King’s person and Court in consequence of Burke’s Bill. The Earl of Darlington quitted the Jewel House and Lord Pelham the Great Wardrobe; the first of which offices owed its institution to Elizabeth, while the latter remounted to the times of the Plantagenets. The Earl of Essex laid down the Stag Hounds, as did Lord Denbigh the Harriers.

  Many other sinecures were blown away.

  Treasurer of the Chamber, Cofferer of the Household and six clerkships in the Board of Green Cloth. The valuables of the Jewel House and Great Wardrobe were put in the care of the Lord Chamberlain. From this year, too, the appointments of Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward ceased to carry cabinet rank. Mysteriously, the Master of the Buck Hounds survived the purge.27

  And economies were made in the royal Household, much to the indignation of the higher ranks among the equerries. Mrs Papendiek watched with anger, as cheaper newcomers were employed ‘who felt no interest – neither duty nor respect; and as to fidelity, such was not understood’. She wrote:

  It is a dangerous expedient to call the attention of the public to economies practised in the Royal Household. It degrades every regulation and as the inferior classes always look with a jealous eye upon the great, any changes that may be deemed absolutely necessary should be accomplished as quietly and privately as possible. It is not improbable that the wonderful change in our Royal Household was brought on by Edmund Burke’s reform in the Civil List; and that this led through many trifling channels to the destruction of the French king, for in his country also the cry for economy was raised and soon spread far and wide.28

  ‘The Damnedest Set of Millstones’

  Added to the King’s political difficulties was the deep disappointment and concern that his family caused him. The Prince of Wales in particular was almost as hostile to him as his father had been to George II. The Prince’s wild extravagance, debts and mistresses had caused the King great distress from when the Price was sixteen and even more so when he came of age and moved from the Queen’s House to his own residence, Carlton House. Here his riotous behaviour and his alternative court were a constant humiliation to the abstemious King, who had hoped to bring in a reign of virtue. The pain was even greater when the Prince lured the King’s favourite son, the Duke of York, into his circle. When the Prince secretly married the charming Mrs Fitzherbert he was doubly breaking the law – by marrying a Roman Catholic, forbidden by the Act of Settlement, and by marrying against George Ill’s law forbidding any royal marriage without the King’s permission. Furthermore the Prince, seduced by the politics of the King’s enemy, Charles James Fox, actively canvassed in elections for the Whigs.

  During these years there were other family worries. On 17 September 1767, the King’s brother, Edward, Duke of York, the much loved companion of his youth, died at Monaco. The Duke, a ‘silly and frivolous’ young man, had lost the King’s favour; so much so that when, in 1765, the King was drafting a Regency Bill in case of his death, he deliberately left out the Duke, appointing the Queen as Regent. Nevertheless, the King was deeply distressed at his death and ‘cried his eyes out’.

  The death of the King’s mother in 1772 was yet another sharp blow. She had been an important influence in his early life, and even after his marriage he had kept closely in touch.

  Then he was deeply concerned about his sisters. Princess Augusta was unhappily married to the difficult and unfaithful Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. She was widowed in 1806 and the King brought her back to England and settled her in Blackheath, and she died at her rented house in Hanover Square in 1813. Her daughter, Princess Caroline, was to become the scandalous wife of the Prince of Wales, and for the sake of his sister, the King and Queen made great efforts to have patience with that difficult lady.

  Another sister, Princess Caroline, was even more tragic. She was married at fifteen to her cousin, the diseased and wretched Christian VII of Denmark. She consoled herself with the Court doctor, Struansee, was condemned for adultery and was banished to a fortress, after being forced to watch the execution of her lover. George III persuaded the Danes to allow her to go to Celle in Hanover, where she died in 1775 at the age of twenty-four. She is remembered in Denmark as ‘the Queen of Tears’: portraits of her and her husband hang in Buckingham Palace today – a sad reminder of the harsh fate of many royal brides.

  The King’s brothers, the Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland, had offended him by making secret marriages, causing him to introduce in 1773 the Royal Marriages Act.

  The deaths of the King’s own children, Prince Alfred in 1782, aged nearly two, and Prince Octavius in 1783, aged four, were successive hammer blows: he had said he did not wish to go to Heaven if Octavius was not there. In the scale of grief, the death of this much-loved son ranked with the loss of a continent.

  ‘I fear I am not in my right mind’

  It is worth remembering the appalling strain on the royal Household during the time of the King’s madness. They watched the King, for whom they had affection, beaten and confined in a straitjacket, lose his prized dignity and self-control and sink into degradation. Both Miss Burney and Mrs Papendiek describe these harrowing times. ‘The depth of terror during that time no words can paint,’ wrote Miss Burney, who was bid ‘to listen to hear what the King was saying in his delusions … Nothing could be so afflicting as this task … even now, it brings fresh to my ear his poor exhausted voice.’29

  Mrs Papendiek’s father and husband bore much of the burden at this time. The cutting of the King’s beard was a dangerous task which Frederick Albert could not face – though he had come from Germany as the King’s barber. Instead Mr Papendiek sent for sharpened razors and performed the delicate operation, chatting easily in his comforting German voice. It took two hours, while the Queen, hidden, watched in terror.

  It was Mr Papendiek, too, who tactfully dealt with the King when,in his madness on Christmas Day 1788 at Kew, he got under the sofa to ‘converse with his saviour’. His daughter wrote that her father ‘got under to him, having previously given orders … that the sofa should be lifted straight up … He remained lying by his majesty, then by pure strength lifted him in his arms and laid him on his couch, where in a short time he fell asleep.’

  Mrs Papendiek noted with understandable disappointment that the equerries and pages were not rewarded for their extra work and stress during the King’s madness. Their ‘perquisites’ were cut, as Mrs Papendiek wrote, ‘as part of the economies brought on by Edmund Burke’s reform in the Civil List’. Burke had not realized how much the pages and equerries relied on perquisites as part of their wages. For example, Bedchamber women had a share of the Queen’s clothes worth £200 per annum. Mrs Papendiek’s father was allowed

  table cloths, stove candles and pitcher wine; and from the Princesses’ rooms wax candles … and the remains of any meal served to them separately, with wine … Mr Papendiek observed the same rule with my father: whatever remained untouched he took, but anything that had been tasted, he allowed the page’s man to take.30

  Some disappointed members of the Household left the King’s service, including Mr Fortnum, who resigned to open up a grocer’s store in Piccadilly, now known as Fortnum & Mason.

  In the years following his recovery from this bout of madness, the King tried to avoid excessive stress. He took frequent holidays in Weymouth and elsewhere and avoided as much as possible the strain and the formalities at the Queen’s House. Indeed they were rarely there.

  But the political pressures remained. The war with France was renewed on land and sea. In 1805 the news of the victory at Trafalgar brought relief, but he had a relapse in 1806. Once again it was grief in the family that finally broke his mind. His beloved daughter Princess Amelia died on 2 November 1810.
From then on he became hopelessly insane, never to recover. After much argument and acrimony, on 5 February 1811 the Prince was sworn as Regent at a Privy Council.

  ‘The Queen’s House’

  The Queen was given the ‘care of the King’s royal person’ and his Household was to be managed by her. She was to be assisted by a Queen’s Council of eight Privy Councillors headed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. She was granted an increased allowance, and when in February 1812 the Regency Act was renewed, her four daughters were allowed an annuity of £6,000 each, for which they were immensely grateful. Princess Sophia wrote to thank the Prince Regent for his kindness to ‘four old cats’ – wondering that he ‘did not put them in a sack and drown them’.

  The Queen’s House was now entirely just that, since the Prince Regent held court at Carlton House or at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Now that the Queen and Princesses had more money, they could refurbish the Queen’s House, which had been neglected during the last twenty years. Even in 1802, a reporter from the Gentleman’s Magazine was surprised that, in spite of the grandeur of the Duke of Buckingham’s frescos still on the walls, the King’s floors were ‘cold and hardrubbed’ and ‘without a carpet, a luxury of which his majesty denies himself in almost every room’. Princess Elizabeth had painted the velvet curtains ‘in shades of brown and maroon’ and embroidered delicate flowers on white satin chair covers. But the tables and chairs ‘are of a very plain and old fashion’. Even the materials

  are not always so … good, seldom so beautiful as would be required in the houses of many opulent individuals. Though old, the furniture bears no stamp of venerable antiquity. The damask of the curtains and chairs is much faded: the mahogany … is not beautiful: it is even so dull that it much resembles walnut; and the latter are made with curving legs, and clump or rather knob feet, not well carved.31

  The writer contrasts the Queen’s House with the ‘gold-mouldings, satin lined compartments and stately mirrors’ of the ‘opulent nobility’. In fact, he considered that many ‘opulent tradesmen would not envy these apartments’. The reporter, however, tried to make a virtue out of what he obviously considered a shabby house. Now that ‘fortunes are wasted’ in show, it ‘may be beneficial to many individuals to see … how much more easily their Sovereign is satisfied’. If the Queen’s House was shabby in 1802, how much worse it must have been in 1811 after years of neglect.

  Fortunately, in 1819 W. H. Pyne produced his Royal Residences, illustrated with glowing paintings of the Queen’s state rooms at this time, so we can see the results of the refurbishment. Pyne describes the courtyard and entrance hall in 1818 still very much as the Duke of Buckingham had left it. ‘On the ground floor the suite of His Majesty’s apartments are remarkable for their plainness.’ He describes the paintings throughout the House: the Canalettos, and in the King’s Breakfast Room portraits of William III and Queen Mary by Sir Godfrey Kneller, one of Queen Charlotte by Benjamin West, ‘a Vandyke portrait of James I’ and two ‘full length portraits of ladies by Lely’. More Sir Peter Lely ladies were in the King’s Dining Room, together with the Zoffany portraits of Queen Charlotte and George III, and the famous Charles I by van Dyck.

  In the Saloon stood the ‘superb throne of Her Majesty of crimson velvet with embroidery and fringe of gold’,32 which had come from St James’s Palace during the Regency.

  The doors opened to the Crimson Drawing Room, where the walls were hung with crimson satin and gilt chairs and sofas were covered with the same. Next was the Blue Velvet Room, more in the cool, elegant style of the younger Queen Charlotte, the walls hung with pale blue silk, the curtains, chairs, sofas and table covers all in blue velvet. Here were landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Rubens of winter and summer.

  It was in the Green Closet on walls hung with green silk that Queen Charlotte had placed her favourite Gainsboroughs: a collection of portraits of thirteen of her children – their heads only. Like the Blue Velvet Room, this room had matching green velvet curtains and chair and table covers.

  The Queen’s Breakfast Room was still panelled with japan, as the main Saloon had been in the time of the Duke of Buckingham. This room, warmly carpeted in red, was Queen Charlotte’s Music Room: here was her ‘fine toned organ with the bust of Handel’. From the windows of this room she and the King had watched the ‘brilliant scene’ on the June night in 1763 at her surprise housewarming party.

  On the ground floor the King’s Octagon Library was still lined with books. But now his voice was silent and Dr Johnson’s voice boomed no more.

  The Queen was seldom now at her London house but there were happy occasions when the old splendour was revived. On 22 July 1816 her daughter, Princess Mary, married her cousin William, Duke of Gloucester, son of the King’s brother. The marriage ceremony was held in the Saloon at the Queen’s House, now richly furnished with crimson velvet, before a temporary altar draped with old lace and heavy with massive silver communion plate. Staff attendants, ambassadors in full ceremonial dress, the great officers of state and an immense glittering throng swept up the Grand Staircase past the Yeomen of the Guard to the brilliantly illuminated Salon. A contemporary described it in detail:

  The foreign Ambassadors, with their ladies, entered the saloon first, then followed the Cabinet Ministers and their ladies, and proceeded to the right. The great Officers of State, and those of the Royal Households, went to the left. The Queen took her station at the left side of the Altar, where was a state chair placed for her, the Princesses Augusta and Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Princess Sophia of Gloucester, were on her left and their female attendants after them; while the Prince Regent was on the right side of the Altar, and his Royal brothers near him.

  Everything being arranged and ready, the Lord Chamberlain retired, and introduced the Duke of Gloucester and presented him to the Altar. He then retired again, and with the Duke of Cambridge, introduced the Princess Mary, and the Royal Duke presented her Royal Highness to the Prince Regent, who gave her away in marriage to the Duke of Gloucester.

  Her Royal Highness was dressed with her usual simplicity; she wore no feathers, but a bandeau of white roses fastened together by light sprigs of pearls. Her neck was ornamented with a brilliant fringe necklace, her arms with bracelets of brilliants formed into flowers, and her waist with a girdle to correspond with her bandeau.33

  Princess Charlotte: the Lost Heiress

  There had been many disagreements between the Queen and her eldest son, especially over the Regency Bill. But in her last years the Prince of Wales was once more her favourite son. Surprisingly, she was fascinated by the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, but then she had always loved the spectacular. She spent Christmas there in 1815 and enjoyed the celebrations for Princess Charlotte’s birthday on 7 January 1816.

  This was a particularly happy party and one with great consequences for the future of the monarchy. It was here that the heiress to the throne, next in line after the Prince Regent, Princess Charlotte, announced her engagement to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Blissfully happy, Princess Charlotte, the daughter of impossible parents, the Prince Regent and Caroline, could not wait to escape from her lonely and unsettled life. She wrote enthusiastically of her settlement, ‘The income is to be 50,000 a year. My pin money is to be 10,000 out of wh. I am to pay my ladies, maids etc.’ She was to have three or four ladies and ‘give them 500 a year each – which is enormous … and 8 footmen, town and country carriages, riding coachmen etc.’. As for Leopold, he was ‘very much talented with a 1000 resources – musick [sic], singing, drawing, agriculture farming and botany, besides all he is a capital Italian scholar so I have everything almost I could wish and desire’.34

  Prince Leopold was to be much involved in the history of the royal family and of Buckingham Palace. He and his friend Stockmar were to be major influences for decades to come on the lives of Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort and even on Edward VII. Prince Leopold was at this time an extremely handsome and popular young man of twenty-five. He
had shown interest in Princess Charlotte two years earlier when he was in London with the Tsar Alexander I, in whose army he was at that time serving. One of his sisters had married the Tsar’s brother, giving him an entrée into the Russian Imperial Court, where he was apparently a great favourite; another sister was Princess Victoire, who was to become the mother of Queen Victoria. When he met her, Princess Charlotte’s affections were otherwise engaged; but disappointed in that love, she now in 1816 accepted with enthusiasm Prince Leopold’s offer. The Prince Regent, who had wanted Princess Charlotte to marry Prince William of Orange, overcame his reluctance and gave his consent. The Queen very much desired the match and enjoyed preparing her trousseau.

  The year 1816 was one of hope. Queen Charlotte was delighted when, on 2 May 1816, her namesake, Princess Charlotte, married Prince Leopold. The Regent somewhat reluctantly gave his daughter away at a ceremony at his magnificent Carlton House and the wedding breakfast was held there in his extravagant style. Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold settled most happily after the honeymoon at the charming country house, Claremont, near Esher in Surrey, where Prince Leopold enjoyed replanning the garden and estate.

  With them at Claremont was his friend and adviser, Baron Stockmar. Stockmar was the son of a Coburg lawyer. His mother, a woman of great sense and intelligence, was a great influence in his life. His happy, secure childhood gave him the stability for which he became renowned. He had trained as a doctor, fought against the French and set up his own military hospital in Coburg, where he insisted on treating all soldiers alike, whether they were allies or enemies. Prince Leopold had been impressed by this fellow citizen, and on a visit to Coburg had persuaded him to give up his medical career and join him as a friend and adviser. So the quiet, small figure, in his comfortable, uncourtly garb, was always there, ready with wise advice whenever it was needed.