The Queen’s House

by Edna Healey

  His first comment was that Court appointments were

  great officers of state, who are always noblemen of high rank and political consideration and change with every Government. Since the year 1830 we find five changes in the office of the Lord Chamberlain, and six in that of the Lord Steward.

  Then there is another great inconvenience. It is, that none of the great officers can reside in the palace, and that most frequently they cannot even reside in the same place with the Court. Hence, an uninterrupted and effective personal inspection and superintendence of the daily details of their respective departments are made impracticable. Hence follows another bad consequence. Most frequently the great officers of State find themselves so situated, as to be forced to delegate, pro tempore, part of their authority to others. From want of proper regulations, they must delegate it, as it were, ex-tempore, and to servants very inferior in rank in the Royal Household; a fact which, almost daily, is productive of consequences injurious to the dignity, order, discipline, and security of the Court.45

  So Edmund Burke had complained in the reign of George III.

  Then there was no co-operation between departments responsible for the running of the Palace. At that time the government departments responsible were the Treasury, which provided most of the income, and the Department of Woods and Forests, which took care of the outside. The Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward and the Master of the Horse shared responsibility for the interior, but at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, no one was quite sure where the demarcation lines were.

  As Stockmar’s memorandum revealed,

  In the time of George III, the Lord Steward had the custody and charge of the whole palace, excepting the Royal apartments, drawing rooms, &c., &c. In George IV.’s and William IV.’s reign, it was held that the whole of the ground-floor, including halls, dining-rooms, &c., were in his charge. In the present reign, the Lord Steward has surrendered to the Lord Chamberlain the grand hall and other rooms on the ground-floor; but whether the kitchen, sculleries, pantries, remain under his charge … is a question which no one could perhaps at this moment reply to. The outside of the palace is, however, considered to belong to the Woods and Forests; so that as the inside cleaning of the windows belongs to the Lord Chamberlain’s department, the degree of light to be admitted into the palace depends proportionably on the well-timed and good understanding between the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and that of the Woods and Forests.46

  There was no general directing officer and the departments were in a ridiculous muddle. Stockmar gave examples.

  The housekeepers, pages, housemaids, &c., are under the authority of the Lord Chamberlain; all the footmen, livery-porters, and under-butlers, by the strangest anomaly, under that of the Master of the Horse, at whose office they are clothed and paid, and the rest of the servants, such as the clerk of the kitchen, the cooks, the porters, &c., are under the jurisdiction of the Lord Steward. Yet these ludicrous divisions not only extend to persons, but they extend likewise to things and actions. The Lord Steward, for example, finds the fuel and lays the fire, and the Lord Chamberlain lights it. It was upon this state of things that the writer of this paper, having been sent one day by Her present Majesty to Sir Frederick Watson, then the Master of the Household, to complain that the dining-room was always cold, was gravely answered, ‘You see, properly speaking, it is not our fault; for the Lord Steward lays the fire only, and the Lord Chamberlain lights it.’ In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them. If a pane of glass, or the door of a cupboard in the scullery, requires mending, it cannot now be done without the following process: A requisition is prepared and signed by the chief cook, it is then counter-signed by the clerk of the kitchen, then it is taken to be signed by the Master of the Household, thence it is taken to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, where it is authorised, and then laid before the Clerk of the Works, under the office of Woods and Forests; and consequently many a window and cupboard have remained broken for months.47

  The Palace also urgently needed improved sanitation. The Queen herself had a flushing lavatory, but even she suffered from the overflow of the room above her dressing room. Stockmar’s delicacy prevents us from hearing the full horror of the lack of sanitation in the royal Palaces. We are grateful to John Pudney for enlightening us.

  It took more than royal attacks of wherry-go-nimbles and the employment of ‘Artists’ [plumbers] … to improve conditions in Britain’s royal palaces. It took that enlightened and persistent reformer, Albert, Prince Consort. There was room for improvement. In 1844, no less than fifty-three overflowing cesspools were discovered under Windsor Castle. The Prince Consort with characteristic energy attacked the sorry state of affairs, replacing Hanoverian commodes with up-to-date water closets.48

  Perhaps it was as a result of his thorough investigation of the conditions in the royal palaces that Prince Albert included in the Great Exhibition of 1851 a wide variety of the latest water closets. But, alas,

  with his death there was a tendency to accept the status quo in sanitation as in everything else, so that all might remain as it had been in his lifetime, all in some degree part of one great Albert memorial.

  It was not until ten years after his death that the typhoid of the heir to the throne awakened the national conscience to the perils of its smallest rooms and its noisome drains, the reform of which had for years been strenuously urged by such sanitary pioneers as Edwin Chadwick.49

  Because the great nobles who held the high offices in the royal Household lived elsewhere, often out of London, there was no supervision, except by the one resident officer, the Master of the Household, who belonged to the Lord Steward’s department. But he had no authority over the housekeepers, pages and housemaids, who worked in the Lord Chamberlain’s department. Consequently,

  As neither the Lord Chamberlain, nor the Master of the Horse, have a regular deputy residing in the palace, more than two thirds of all the male and female servants are left without a master in the house. They can come on and go off duty as they choose, they can remain absent for hours and hours on their days of waiting, or they may commit any excess or irregularity: there is nobody to observe, to correct, or to reprimand them. The various details of internal arrangement, whereon depends the well-being and comfort of the whole establishment, no one is cognisant of or responsible for. There is no officer responsible for the cleanliness, order and security of the rooms and offices throughout the palace. These things are left to providence; and if smoking, drinking, and other irregularities occur in the dormitories, where footmen, &c., sleep ten and twelve in each room, no one can help it.50

  Most dangerous of all, there was no one authority responsible for the security of the Palace. The Lord Chamberlain did not control the porters, the Lord Steward had ‘nothing to do with the disposition of pages’, etc. Nor was security in the care of the Master of the Household. Security at the Palaces had always been notoriously lax, though for generations espionage and counter-espionage had been flourishing trades. In the time of Charles II, Pepys had wandered round the old Palace of Whitehall for hours unchallenged. In the reign of George III, biographer James Boswell had chatted easily to ‘the old soldiers on guard outside Buckingham Palace, listened to their tales of the battle of Dettingen, “Where,” said one he saw, “our cannon make a lane through the French army as broad as that,”’ pointing to the Mall. Then Boswell treated them to a pint of beer and they ‘talked on the sad mischief of war and on the frequency of poverty’.51 It was comparatively easy for intruders to get into a building which for two decades had been unoccupied by the royal family, and where for most of that time hundreds of workmen and officials had been working constantly. It was, too, astonishingly easy to attack the Queen, even immediately outside the Palace.

  One such attempted assassination was described by Prince Albert in a letter to his father. On 29 May 1842 he and the Queen were driving along the Mall back to Buckingham Palac
e when he ‘saw a man step out from the crowd and present a pistol full at me’. The Prince heard the trigger snap but there was no shot. However, the next morning a boy came to report to him that he had seen the man presenting the pistol. Nevertheless, although ‘we were much agitated and Victoria nervous and unwell’ they resolved not to allow their ‘miscreant’ to deprive them of their necessary exercise. They felt sure he would come skulking about the Palace again, as indeed he did. The next day, when the ‘weather was superb and hosts of people on foot’, they drove out to Hampstead. On returning, they were just approaching the Palace when ‘a shot was fired at us about five paces off. It was the same fellow with the pistol – a little swarthy ill-looking rascal.’ The shot passed under the carriage and ‘we thanked the Almighty for having preserved us a second time from so great a danger.’ The man – John Francis – ‘was not out of his mind, but a thorough scamp’. On 3 July 1842, there was another attack, again in the Mall, when a hunchback named Bean tried to shoot at ‘the carriage in which Victoria, myself and Uncle Leopold were sitting’.52 Both John Francis and Bean were tried and sent to jail.

  The most notorious intruder was ‘the boy Jones’. In December 1838 Edward Jones, then a lad of fourteen, small for his age and inconspicuous, slipped into the Palace and wandered round until he was caught. He was tried and acquitted by a jury. He was back again in December 1840, and was in the Palace for a whole day. He got into the kitchens, as The Times reported, ‘leaving his finger marks on a cauldron of stock for soup’. He claimed that he sat on the throne, saw the Queen and heard a baby ‘squall’. He said at first that he

  got in by scaling the garden wall from Constitution Hill and then through the French Windows opening on to the lawn. Whenever he saw someone he hid behind a pillar or furniture. Later he changed his story and said he ‘came over the roof and down a chimney’. But since there was no evidence of soot this was not believed. Finally he was found under a sofa in the centre-room in which the Princess Royal and Mrs Lilley her nurse sleep.53

  This time he was imprisoned in Tothill gaol for three months. When he was asked, after a morning on the treadmill, how he liked his punishment, he answered that he ‘had got into a scrape and must do as he could’. There was no evidence that he was insane.

  He was released from prison on 2 March 1841 and on 17 March The Times reported ‘that the urchin Edward Jones was found again in the palace on Tuesday between 1.00 and 2.00 a.m. This time when caught he said curiosity was his motive; he had always been a great reader and he wanted to listen to the Queen and Prince Albert talking – then he could write a book about it and it would sell well.’54 He was now seventeen years of age, very small for his age and of a sullen countenance. Once again he had visited the kitchen and claimed that he could get into the Palace at any time he wanted.

  Again he was sent to Tothill for three months as a ‘rogue and a vagabond’. On 23 March 1841 his father, obviously a respectable Methodist, wrote to The Times complaining that he had not been allowed to communicate with his son. He was clearly worried because the last time his son was released he was ‘very thin and worn out’.55

  Charles Dickens visited him in prison, anxious to interview the boy ‘because he strongly doubted the popular belief in his sharpness of intellect’.56 The boy is now immortalized in the quip of Lady Sandwich, who thought his ‘name must be “In-I-Go” Jones’. ‘Supposing he had come into the bedroom,’ the Queen remarked. ‘How frightened I should have been.’57 And how impressed she would have been could she have known how composed her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II was to be in similar circumstances.

  Eventually, as Stockmar’s son recorded,

  The reform of the royal household was undertaken according to these principles by the Prince Consort and carried out with firmness and prudence. The Master of the Household, who, as we have seen, had been until then a subordinate official of the Lord Chamberlain and possessed of very undefined power, was named delegate of the three departments.

  Stockmar proposed to keep the three great officers of Court

  in their connection with the political system, but to induce them … to delegate as much of his authority as was necessary to the maintenance of the order, discipline and security of the Palace, to one official, who should always reside at court and be responsible to the three departmental chiefs, but… be able to secure unity of action.58

  On 24 June 1842 The Times reported that ‘strictest precautions’ had now been taken ‘to guard against intrusions of improper persons into the palace’.59 At 10.00 p.m., when livery porters went off duty at the lodges, night porters were to relieve them and stay until morning. A strong party of ‘A’ Division of Police was to be on duty always in the interior during the night, patrolling the corridors; and at the tradesmen’s entrance there would be one police constable in plain clothes. But, as later history was to show, there is little defence against madmen.

  It needed all Stockmar’s tactful advice to get the reforms accepted. Melbourne’s Whig Government had finally collapsed in 1841 and he was replaced as Prime Minister by the Tory, Sir Robert Peel, whom Queen Victoria disliked at first. He was shy and therefore cold in manner – so unlike Queen Victoria’s ‘dear Lord M’. But Peel’s intelligence and honesty appealed to the Prince, who eventually persuaded the Queen to share his respect for a politician who was always prepared to put principle above party. Peel was most reluctant to ‘decrease the value of the appointments held by the three great officers of State’. It would make them ‘less an object of ambition than they are at present to very distinguished members of the House of Peers’.60 Then the recipient of 35s. a week for ‘Red Room Wine’ was offended when his perquisite was removed. The ‘Red Room’ had been closed since the death of George III. The footmen who lost their daily gift of the candles from the public rooms, whether they had been used or not, were incensed. Eighty housemaids who worked only six months of the year had their wages cut from £45 to a minimum of £18 a year and were disgruntled.

  On the advice of Stockmar and Prince Albert, Court etiquette was tightened. No one was allowed to sit in the presence of the Queen except in very special circumstances; Lady John Russell, the next Prime Minister’s wife, was allowed to sit when she visited the Palace soon after her confinement, ‘but the Queen took care when the Prince joined the company to have a very fat lady standing in front of Lady John Russell’.61 Ministers still had to learn the art of walking backwards in the Queen’s presence. It was all part of the transformation of the image of the monarchy from the lax incompetence of her predecessors to Queen Victoria’s famously moral court. But there were many who muttered with Melbourne ‘this damned morality will ruin us all’.

  In June 1843 a wedding was celebrated in the Palace that would link the past and the future. Princess Augusta, elder daughter of the Duke of Cambridge and the Queen’s first cousin, married the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Charlotte’s great-nephew. Princess Augusta’s niece Mary, who later became Queen Mary, was to spend many happy months in Mecklenburg-Strelitz and so developed a great sense of empathy with George Ill’s Queen.

  In April 1841 The Times reported that Her Majesty ‘wishes a path laid up the mound and a small pavilion built there’.62 The ‘mound’ at the end of the garden, thrown up in Nash’s time from the excavation for the lake, helped to screen the garden from the houses in Grosvenor Place. A ‘small Swiss looking edifice’ was built. Planned by Prince Albert and Professor Gruner, it was decorated by eight leading Royal Academicians, commissioned 1842–3.*

  However, by the time it was finished the royal family had found other and greater retreats from the increasing fog and dirt of London, where the Palace and gardens were blackened with soot which fell in black flakes. In 1844 they bought an estate at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, on which a house was built by the combined talents of Prince Albert, Gruner and the competent builder Thomas Cubitt (who was later to work on Buckingham Palace).

  Four years later they found an ev
en wilder remote retreat: they leased the Scottish castle and estate of Balmoral, which later became their own. It was the beginning of a love affair with Scotland which lasted all their lives. Osborne and Balmoral were their own properties, where Prince Albert did not have the frustration of asking Parliament for money for necessary repairs, as he did at Buckingham Palace.

  By the mid 1840s it became clear that Buckingham Palace needed major alterations. But each time Prince Albert tackled Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, on the subject he looked away and muttered that now was not the time for more expenditure on a Palace that had only been finished in 1837.

  There had been minor modifications in the building in the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign. She did not like the octagonal chapel on the south side of the Palace (originally one of George Ill’s Libraries). Blore was commissioned to convert one of Nash’s conservatories on the west garden front into a chapel. The roof had to be raised and considerable alteration was needed, but in 1843 it was consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  As far as expenditure on Buckingham Palace was concerned, Peel finally agreed that rebuilding was necessary and, though it was unpopular with his party, he asked Blore to present a report. Meanwhile the Queen wrote urgently and firmly from the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, on 10 February 1845:

  Though the Queen knows that Sir Robert Peel has already turned his attention to the urgent necessity of doing something to Buckingham Palace, the Queen thinks it right to recommend this subject herself to his serious consideration. Sir Robert is acquainted with the state of the Palace and the total want of accommodation for our little family, which is fast growing up. Any building must necessarily take some years before it can be safely inhabited. If it were to be begun this autumn, it could hardly be occupied before the spring of 1848, when the Prince of Wales would be nearly seven, and the Princess Royal nearly eight years old, and they cannot possibly be kept in the nursery any longer. A provision for this purpose ought, therefore, to be made this year. Independent of this most parts of the Palace are in a sad state, and will ere long require a further outlay to render them decent for the occupation of the Royal Family or any visitors the Queen may have to receive. A room, capable of containing a larger number of those persons whom the Queen has to invite in the course of the season to balls, concerts, etc., than any of the present apartments can at once hold, is much wanted. Equally so, improved offices and servants’ rooms, the want of which puts the departments of the household to great expense yearly. It will be for Sir Robert to consider whether it would not be best to remedy all these deficiencies at once, and to make use of this opportunity to render the exterior of the Palace such as no longer to be a disgrace to the country, which it certainly now is. The Queen thinks the country would be better pleased to have the question of the Sovereign’s residence in London so finally disposed of, than to have it so repeatedly brought before it.63