by Edna Healey
The Queen’s private finances and those of many members of the royal family are dealt with still mostly by Coutts & Co. When in December 1978 The Queen opened their new bank in the Strand, she said
Members of my family, for generations, have had to acknowledge the wisdom and prudence of the advice they have received from Courts … even if they have not always been grateful for it. Advice is, however, always easier to accept if it is delivered with that old-fashioned courtesy for which this institution is renowned and backed up by authority and expertise.37
The Queen was referring to the fact that Thomas Coutts himself had had the unenviable task of rescuing George IV and his brothers time and again from their vast debt. Without his aid the extravagant George IV could not have bequeathed such a magnificent collection to the Crown.
Buckingham Palace, like the other occupied Palaces, is now administered by the heads of the six departments under the chairmanship of the Lord Chamberlain. He ‘oversees … the implementation of common procedures and policies and involves himself with all senior appointments to the Household’.38 He still undertakes ceremonial duties and is the link between The Queen and the House of Lords.
Each head of the six departments is responsible for his own area and has direct access to The Queen. The Lord Chamberlain’s regular meetings with the six heads strengthen their sense of a common purpose.
This structure works. Like the Commonwealth, it depends for its success on the combination of independence, co-operation and mutual understanding. As the present Lord Chamberlain says, ‘The inspiration comes from the top, the Queen herself.’39
The heads of departments are: the Private Secretary, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Master of the Household, the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the Crown Equerry and the Director of the Royal Collection.
The Private Secretary is assisted by a Deputy Private Secretary and Assistant Private Secretary. He is also responsible for the Buckingham Palace Press Office, with its Press Secretary, Deputy and two assistants. He is the Keeper of the Royal Archives, which are in the care of the Librarian of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
The Keeper of the Privy Purse is The Queen’s Treasurer, responsible for The Queen’s Civil List. Among his many responsibilities is the care of the Royal Philatelic Collection established by King George V. He is assisted by the Director of Property Services, who is responsible for the refurbishment of buildings and utilities (gas, water, electricity and telephones), for the gardens and for fire prevention. The fire prevention department has become increasingly important since the fire at Windsor Castle and is under a Director of Fire, Health and Safety.
The Master of the Household has a large and varied department, responsible for staff and domestic arrangements, The Queen’s official entertaining, the Court Post Office, security, and the oversight of visitors to such ceremonies as the Changing of the Guard.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Office is not to be confused with that of the Lord Chamberlain himself. The Comptroller of this department arranges state visits, presentation of credentials, garden parties, royal christenings, weddings and funerals.
The Crown Equerry is in charge of the Royal Mews, arranges transport on ceremonial occasions and provides cars or horses for members of the royal family.
The Director of the Royal Collection heads a department which co-ordinates the work of the Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, the Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art, and the Librarian of the Royal Library. The Royal Collection of pictures and works of art is in his care. He has overall responsibility for all items in the Royal Collection, including restoration, hanging and security, for initiating and assisting research into the history of the Royal Collection and for making it accessible to the public, either by display in the State Apartments or in The Queen’s Gallery, or by loans to exhibitions.
The Royal Collection
One of the most important results of the reorganization of the Buckingham Palace royal Household at the end of the 1980s was the fundamental change in the administration of the Royal Collection.
In 1987, this department was set up, with its own offices in Stable Yard House, St James’s Palace. It is run by a Director, assisted on the curatorial side by the Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, the Deputy Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art and the Librarian, and on the financial side by the Managing Director of Royal Collection Enterprises and a Finance Director. Together they manage ‘the conservation, presentation, cataloguing and research, and relations with the public’. The Director of the Royal Collection, in collaboration with the Keeper of The Privy Purse, plans the budget of the Royal Collection department and meets with other departmental heads at the Lord Chamberlain’s monthly meetings. He, like the other heads of department, has direct access to The Queen. From 1993, the income from opening the Palaces to the public and from the commercial activities of Royal Collection Enterprises has been administered by the Royal Collection Trust, chaired by the Prince of Wales.
To care for such an immense collection demands exceptional qualities of scholarship and expertise, and also of practical common sense. The first Director, Sir Oliver Millar, was succeeded on his retirement in 1988 by Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, who in turn was succeeded in 1996 by Hugh Roberts. All three directors have written works of high academic and specialist interest; they have modestly left unsigned many of their scholarly contributions to catalogues of exhibitions in The Queen’s Gallery and elsewhere.
In the past the care of the Royal Collection had depended very much on the interest of the monarch. Charles I, that most discriminating of the royal collectors, had appointed the Dutch expert Abraham Van der Doort as overseer ‘of all our pictures’. As Sir Oliver Millar wrote, his ‘job description’ might well be applied to the Surveyorship today: ‘he was to prevent the pictures from being damaged or defaced, he was to order marke & number them to keep a Register of them & dispatching them. He was to organise the makeing & copying of pictures.’40
Charles II had ‘a Keeper and Surveyor’ of his pictures, Parry Walton, who was retained by William III and Queen Mary, and was followed by his son, Peter, as Surveyor and Keeper of Pictures.
George III had taken great care of his books and pictures and appointed his favourite painter, Benjamin West, as his Surveyor, cleaner and repairer. In the reign of George IV, William Seguier combined the post with that of director of the new National Gallery. His was a mammoth task, involving the supervision of the frequent moving of George IV’s immense collection. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been horrified by the neglect of the paintings at Windsor under William IV; even so the appointment of Surveyor was still considered to be ‘an honorary one with very slight duties attached to it’.41 Their Surveyor, Richard Redgrave, considered that the work had to be carried out with ‘more earnestness than had yet been brought to bear upon it’.42 He ruined his eyesight in compiling a record of over 1,900 of the pictures in the Collection.
The importance of the Surveyor’s task was still not recognized, and Sir Lionel Cust managed to combine it with the directorship of the National Portrait Gallery. It was with great reluctance that Kenneth Clark agreed to King George V’s insistence that he should combine his work as Director of the National Gallery with the Surveyorship of the King’s Pictures, recognizing that it was an impossible task for one man. The National Gallery was his main concern and he spent little time at the Palace.
His successor was Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s and subsequently of The Queen’s Pictures from 1945 to 1972. An art historian of great distinction and an inspiring lecturer, he was from 1947 to 1974 Director of the Courtauld Institute and was preoccupied with the definitive catalogues he and others were preparing of part of the collection of the Old Master drawings at Windsor.
His curious history meant that he did not often visit Buckingham Palace or attend meetings with his colleagues. On 23 April 1964 Blunt confessed to MI5 that he had been recruited, while under the influence of Guy Burgess at C
ambridge, as a spy for the Russians. During the war, as the fourth man in an espionage ring, he had passed on a great deal of classified information to his paymasters. However, The Queen was advised through Sir Michael Adeane to retain his services as Surveyor. Blunt retired in 1972 and the story was concealed from the public until 1979, when the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, made it known to Parliament. Blunt was succeeded by Sir Oliver Millar, who, as the first full-time Surveyor, had the immense task of organizing the department on a new basis. A distinguished art historian and an authority on the work of Sir Anthony van Dyck, he is remembered by all who worked with him for his scholarship and infectious enthusiasm for the paintings in his care.
Now that the department had responsibility for the overall maintenance and surveillance of the Collection, as Sir Oliver wrote, ‘the collection provides its custodian with a unique and never wholly soluble problem. Apart from damaging atmospheric conditions and … the effects of central heating … there are many hazards. Workmen have sometimes not realized the delicacy of the paintings.’43
Labels have been stuck to the surfaces of pictures, electricians have altered picture lights when still on the pictures. The interference of members of the Surveyor’s team has to be tactfully organised … a flask of healing oil is as important a part of a Surveyor’s kit as his torch and measure: especially when he finds painters at work in a room that has four great pictures by Stubbs still hanging on the wall.44
Sir Oliver tactfully does not mention that since the Palace is both museum and family home, children are an additional hazard. So, too, were the problems caused both to the Director of the Royal Collection and to the Master of the Household by the summer opening of Buckingham Palace and the fact that work on conservation, repairs and redecoration has to be done when The Queen is not in residence. However, the work of the department has been made infinitely easier now that it is independent and that the six heads of the royal Household departments meet regularly and can discuss problems constructively.
The Royal Collection is already one of the greatest in the world. ‘There are 7,000 paintings, 3,000 miniatures, 30,000 Old Master drawings and watercolours, over 100,000 prints and hundreds of thousands of objets d’art.’45 It represents, as the Prince of Wales has written, the individual tastes and interests of successive sovereigns. Many of the paintings in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace are reminders of George III, a King who encouraged artists. George IV bequeathed to the Royal Collection some of the world’s finest paintings. It is to him that we owe the magnificent collection of Dutch, Flemish and French paintings in Buckingham Palace, at a cost that could not be countenanced today. Rembrandt’s The Ship Builder and his Wife, for example, is said to have cost him 5,000 guineas.
Although The Queen has not felt the need to find and bring back the best of European art in the way that George III and George IV did, she has, however, added to the Collection sculpture, silver, drawings, portraits and watercolours of distinction.
The Queen’s contribution in other areas has followed the example of Queen Mary and has encouraged the care, conservation and proper organization of the collection, authorizing the setting up of the Royal Collection department for this purpose. The love of order which Crawfie and Queen Mary noticed in the little girl is still present in The Queen.
Loans are frequently made to exhibitions and museums, and above all thousands of visitors to the summer opening of the Palace have been able to enjoy seeing superb pictures in their traditional settings.
To walk through the Picture Gallery is to walk back through history. Here the young Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, watched with Crawfie while the treasures brought back from their wartime hiding were unpacked; here King George VI and Queen Elizabeth heard the Blitz shake the Palace walls; here in the First World War Queen Mary defied fate and put a new glass roof over the Picture Gallery; here Queen Victoria and Prince Albert danced and entertained the crowned heads of Europe; here George IV planned a magnificent home for his beloved collection of pictures. Here on this site, in ‘the Queen’s House’ of George III and Queen Charlotte, the young Queen had her suite of rooms and from her windows had looked out and planned the King’s surprise birthday party. Here the Duchess of Buckingham, robed in black, had sat in solemn state and mourned on each anniversary of the execution of her grandfather, Charles I.
Van Dyck’s ‘Great Peece’ portrait of the sad-eyed Charles I with his French wife Henrietta Maria and his eldest children, his son Charles, who became Charles II, and his daughter Mary, dominates one wall. The portrait was painted in the old Whitehall Palace: behind the King, across the Thames, clouds gather over Westminster Hall, where later he would be condemned to death.
Walking among the portraits of kings and queens one is so often reminded that
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on Kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.46
Here in the Palace is Queen Charlotte, a slender girl at her Coronation, painted with such humanity by Allan Ramsay; and here, plump and sad, she is as Sir William Beechey saw her in her middle age. Here is The Apotheosis by Benjamin West of George Ill’s two beloved sons Princes Alfred and Octavius, who died young. In the Throne Room hangs Angelica Kauffmann’s portrait of George Ill’s sister, Augusta, Duchess of Brunswick, an unhappy wife and mother of Caroline of Brunswick, George IV’s notorious wife. Like the portrait of his other sister, the tragic Queen of Denmark, they are reminders of the sad lot of many a royal bartered bride.
The portrayal of royal families through the ages is in itself a fascinating study. At Windsor the happiness of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in their early days of marriage still shines from the Winterhalter portraits. One recalls Laurits Regner Tuxen’s immense family group of 1887, which was painted as she wished, not ‘stiff and according to etiquette, but prettily grouped’. Here Queen Victoria is indeed the ‘Grand Mother of Europe’ and Albert’s bust looks down on their international family.
Buckingham Palace holds not only some of the finest paintings in the world but also superb furniture. There is a fascinating history behind many of the objets d’art. The magnificent commode in the Green Drawing Room, for instance, with pietre dure plaques, has a tragic opera story. It originally belonged to Marie Josephine Laguerre, a singer at the Paris Opera, described as ‘a priestess of love’, who died young ‘exhausted by excess of every kind’.
Many items have made interesting journeys before settling in the Palace – ivory chairs from India, superb porcelain from Sèvres. One of the most spectacular examples is the table known as the ‘Table of the Grand Commanders’. Made for Napoleon, it was given to George IV, then Prince Regent, by Louis XVIII, the restored King of France. Painted in the form of cameo reliefs, it represents the twelve commanders of historical times surrounding Alexander the Great in the centre. It was one of George IV’s most prized possessions.
Visitors who walk through the State Rooms may well be overwhelmed by the superb paintings, the exuberance of George IV’s French furniture, the soaring pillars of marble, the glowing colours of carpets and furnishings, all reflected again and again in the mirrored doors. It is easy to miss the details, the delicate work of the craftsmen and sculptors – such as the handles of the great entrance gates, wrought in the shape of little cherubs, or the elegant urns of Coadestone on the outside walls of the Palace, or the beautiful capitals of the moulded pillars of the great double portico at the Grand Entrance, or, high above, panels in Coadestone celebrating the victories of Nelson and Wellington on sea and land.
Inside the Palace no one can miss Nash’s superb ceilings. Here the richness of the gilded ornaments is held in the balance and harmony of the design. However, much of the detail and beauty of the plaster decorati
ons – the work of Thomas and Alfred Stothard, Francis Bernasconi or William Pitts – is too high up to be appreciated. So too, some of the most exquisite workmanship in the Palace is underfoot. The parquet floor in the Music Room, inlaid with satinwood, rosewood, tulipwood, mahogany and holly, has few equals in the country. Designed by John Nash and made by Thomas Seddon, it cost £2,400 – a fortune at the time. It has survived the dancing feet of many a young Prince and Princess who took their lessons there.
The care and conservation of this vast collection is an immense task. Much of the specialist work is now undertaken in the workshops at Marlborough House, while the majority of the paintings are cleaned and conserved in the Royal Collection studios in St. James’s Palace.
The work of the craftsmen of the past may be unnoticed by the casual visitor, but it is much admired by those who today are responsible for the conservation of the Palace. Great care is taken to preserve even fragments of past workmanship. In the 1980s pieces of a stained-glass window, shattered during the war, were found in store. The window had been erected by Queen Alexandra in 1905 in memory of her beloved eldest son, Eddy, who had died aged twenty-eight. It had been hung on the Ministers’ Stairs and represented the Prince as a knight in shining armour – a somewhat improbable image of that lethargic Prince. Until recently the pieces had not been reassembled – perhaps Queen Mary had not wished to be reminded of her first fiancé. Though incomplete, it has been restored and lent to the stained glass museum in Ely Cathedral, where it can now be seen.
It is interesting that John Nash’s reputation stands high today among those who work on the fabric of the Palace. The beauty of his designs is appreciated; so is his practical ability. Today’s fire prevention officer claims that Nash was ahead of his contemporaries and of the present day in the precautions he took against fire. And how delighted Nash would be to know that his much criticized Palace has stood the test of time, wartime bombing and the tramp of thousands of feet during the summer opening! The building is regularly monitored to detect signs of movement. So far, there are none.
