The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  The sarcophagus was now to be raised five feet above its base rather than two and, instead of four pillars, it would have eight ten-foot high pillars adorned with the figure of an apostle. A further eight, nine-foot tall pillars would act as candlesticks. The intricate and opulent design incorporated a canopied altar with myriad cast and gilt figures of angels and children, the whole ‘all in copper carven and curiously inlayed’. A life-size statue of Henry VIII on horseback under a triumphal arch was to stand beside it. The work went ahead slowly, though Henry’s will assumed it would be completed and that masses would be said there daily ‘as long as the world shall indure’.

  It was not to be. The King’s body, when he died in 1547 at Whitehall Palace, rested there, embalmed and encased in lead, for two weeks before being taken with due pomp and ceremony in a chariot drawn by eight horses to Windsor for burial, the train of mourners trailing for four miles behind the bier. As was usual at the time a life-like effigy of the dead King, dressed in his robes, was placed on top of the huge coffin. At Syon House, previously a monastery suppressed by Henry VIII, the cavalcade stopped for the night. It is alleged that Henry’s body, in an advanced state of putrefaction and bloated with gas, burst, opening the seams of the lead coffin and allowing his blood to pool on the floor. This description was apparently repeated by the plumber called in to mend the coffin and another eyewitness, William Greville, though most scholars attribute this course of events to the body of William the Conqueror.

  Admiral Lord Nelson

  At Windsor, a magnificent coffin bearer was already positioned over the opened vault where Jane Seymour had been interred. The next day, after due ceremony, 16 Yeomen of the Guard ‘let down the coffin into the vault (near unto the body of Queen Jane Seymour)’. The grandiose tomb, for whatever reason, was never finished. A hundred years later, when Oliver Cromwell’s men took over Windsor Castle in 1649, they sold off all the cast bronze and brasswork. One of Henry’s great candlesticks, dated 1530 and bearing the Tudor rose, still survives in St Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, and a pair, copied from the originals, was presented to St George’s Chapel in 1930 by King George V and Queen Mary and now flank the high altar. At the same time as Cromwell’s men were removing ‘scandalous monument and pictures’ from the chapel, they also unceremoniously dumped the coffin of the decapitated body of Charles I in the same unmarked vault as Henry VIII and Jane Seymour.

  In 1804, when George III commissioned a royal burial vault to be excavated in ‘Wolsey’s tomb house’, the great black sarcophagus and its marble base were removed. The next year Admiral Lord Nelson died on HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, and about ten years after his interment in St Paul’s, Wolsey’s – and Henry’s – sarcophagus was taken from Windsor and placed on top, surmounted by a marble cushion holding Nelson’s viscount’s coronet. The connection between Nelson and Windsor was furthered in 1842, when the family of William Beatty, the surgeon on Nelson’s HMS Victory, presented Queen Victoria with the musket ball that had killed Nelson. It is now amongst the treasures at Windsor Castle and can be seen in a glass case at the top of the main staircase.

  Nelson’s tomb at St Paul’s Cathedral

  The subsequently unmarked vault at Windsor bearing the coffins of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, Charles I and an infant child of Queen Anne was discovered in 1813 – the skeleton of Henry VIII clearly visible. On the orders of William IV in 1837 the tomb was covered with a slab of black marble.

  The reigns of Henry VIII’s children

  The young King Edward VI – he was nine when his father Henry VIII died in 1547 – did not care for Windsor. When rebellion threatened he was hurried from the indefensible Hampton Court to the security of Windsor by his uncle, Protector Somerset. Edward wrote in his diary: ‘Methinks I am in prison … here be no galleries, nor no gardens to walk in.’ A year after his accession the Garter ceremony was purged ‘of all papistical and superstitious practices’ and greatly simplified. The lavish feasts at Windsor on St George’s Day were discontinued; in future they were to take place wherever the monarch happened to be.

  The one advance made at Windsor during Edward VI’s reign was the piping of water from Blackmore Park, five miles away. Until this point in its history the castle had depended on wells and rainwater cisterns to cater to the considerable body of men and animals housed there. The conduit, completed in 1555, two years into Queen Mary’s short reign, used pipes fashioned from lead salvaged from the dissolved monasteries of Woburn and Reading, and stone intended for further works to St George’s Chapel. The resulting fountain sounds spectacular – in the middle of the Quadrangle, according to William Harrison Ainsworth writing in the mid-nineteenth century, a canopy was ‘raised upon columns, gorgeously decorated with heraldic ornaments coloured and gilt, and a dragon, one of the supporters of the Tudor arms, casting the water into the basin underneath’.

  Edward VI

  Edward VI died aged 15 in 1553 from tuberculosis. The next year his sister, now Mary I, married her cousin, King Philip II of Spain, at Winchester and set out on the ten-day journey from there to Windsor, where Philip was invested with the Order of the Garter and was declared joint sovereign. In 1558 her royal arms were joined with those of the Hapsburg arms of Philip, carved in a decorated panel on a tower in the Lower Ward. She also added some further lodgings there for the Poor Knights made from stone quarried from Reading Abbey.

  By the time of her accession in 1558, Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth I found Windsor Castle cold and ruinous and began to make some necessary changes. By the end of her reign in 1603 she had spent more money on Windsor than any of her palaces (an echo of the reign of Edward III 200 years earlier), using it as a centre for diplomatic entertainment. She replaced her father’s rotted timber deck with a vast stone terrace, built a new picture gallery and gateway and spent months there at a time avoiding the plague, on one occasion translating ‘one of the tragedies of Euripides for her own amusement’.

  Elizabeth I

  Elizabeth I was a considerable scholar and fluent in six languages. We know she attended many theatrical entertainments, including a number written by William Shakespeare, reputed to have been a member of the Royal Household. Towards the end of her reign, somewhere between 1598 and 1601, it is thought she commanded Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, packed with local allusions and names, which was first performed in a hall built in the early fifteenth century and which, from 1693, has been used as the library of St George’s Chapel.

  The Stuarts and the Interregnum

  James I of England and VI of Scotland

  When Elizabeth I died childless the Tudor dynasty became extinct and James VI, King of Scotland since 1567, as a great-great-grandson of Henry VII through his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, had the best claim to the English throne. In 1603 the two kingdoms were united and James became James I of England and the first of the Stuart dynasty. James used Windsor for hunting – his favourite sport – and repatriated the Garter Ceremony to the castle. Some jostling for accommodation between the Scots and English members of court was reported as a result. Neither James nor his son Charles I left their mark upon the castle. Charles spent some time there as the spectre of civil war loomed. He returned only as a prisoner in 1647 and 1648, and the next year as a headless corpse.

  The death warrant issued for Charles I in 1649.

  Oliver Cromwell

  In 1642 the castle was commandeered by the Parliamentarians, followed by looting and some destruction. The Dean and canons were ejected, treasures were removed – including the plate from the chapel and the coat of mail encrusted with gems hanging above the tomb of Edward IV – and statues and some painted windows smashed. The same year Prince Rupert, the senior Royalist general, attempted to recapture the castle, his cannon pounding the wall for seven hours, but was rebuffed. A year later the castle became a prison for captured Royalists who were crowded into the towers, gatehouses and dungeons. Many of them scratched their names and dates on the stone walls, still t
o be seen today.

  A few years later, as Parliament sought to raise money, statues and other objects were sold, including an equestrian statue of St George and the candlesticks and other brass, enamelwork and copperware from Wolsey’s tomb. After an attempted mutiny in November 1647, the Council of the Army based itself at Windsor, whilst negotiations were held between Parliament, the Parliamentary Army and The King. Charles I spent Christmas 1648 at the castle and on 30 January 1649 he was beheaded. The second shirt he wore that day – to prevent shivering that might make onlookers think he was afraid – is now kept in the Royal Library at Windsor.

  Charles I

  The body was taken to Windsor and laid on an oak table in the Deanery – the table is still preserved there – and in due course taken through a snowstorm to the chapel where it was buried in the vault next to the coffins of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour.

  A map of Windsor Castle in 1650

  A map of Windsor in 1709

  In the 1650s, the House of Commons, always short of money, considered selling the castle but abandoned the idea and the Parliamentary Army used the castle as its headquarters throughout the Interregnum. The parks, however, were sold. The Little Park was bought back for Oliver Cromwell’s exclusive use, and was returned to the Crown at the Restoration of the monarchy. The Great Park had been divided up and sold off in lots, and it was many years before it once again became Crown property.

  Charles II was proclaimed King on Mayday 1660. The castle was once more a royal palace and stronghold. The diarist Samuel Pepys visited in 1660 and proclaimed it ‘the most romantique castle that is in the world’. However, Pepys’s fellow diarist, John Evelyn, writing four years later, noted that romantic as it might be, it was ‘exceedingly ragged and ruinous’. Prince Rupert, who had attempted unsuccessfully to storm the castle 28 years before, was appointed Constable and Governor in 1670. He at once set about refurbishing the Round Tower and created much-admired arrangements of weapons and armour on the walls, which subsequently became the fashion.

  Charles II

  Prince Rupert and his first cousin, King Charles II, were Fellows of the Royal Society and, in the spirit of the times, both built laboratories at the castle and spent hours conducting experiments. Charles II enjoyed tennis and the country pursuits afforded by the parks but was only too aware of the ‘ragged and ruinous’ state of the castle and that his cousin Louis XIV was creating a vast baroque fantasy at Versailles. Accordingly he began work on aggrandizing the castle in the 1670s, principally altering the apartments and state rooms in the Upper Ward. The north front was rebuilt and the interiors of many of the rooms dramatically updated. The architect Hugh May collaborated with the celebrated Neapolitan artist Antonio Verrio and the wood carver Grinling Gibbons (‘the greatest master both for invention and rareness of work that the world ever had in any age’) to create some of the most revolutionary and dazzling interiors ever seen in England, a swirling mass of colour and gilding that in feats of baroque trompe l’oeil blurred the boundaries between art and reality. St George’s Hall and the adjoining chapel were the richest and most extravagant examples of this new decoration, which was finished by the early 1680s.

  The King’s and Queen’s royal apartments were comprehensively reworked but were preserved as before as parallel suites of rooms, The King’s facing north and The Queen’s south. Below The King’s suite a new apartment was fashioned for his mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, The Duchess of Portsmouth, and their son, Charles, 1st Duke of Richmond. A backstairs linked the two apartments. Outside the walls a grand house with orangery and extensive formal gardens was constructed for his other principal mistress, Nell Gwynn, and their son, the 1st Duke of St Albans.

  Other apartments were built for Charles II’s brother The Duke of York (later James II) and his wife, and various towers were repaired or rebuilt. The exterior of the castle was also given a facelift. Ditches were filled in, the terraces extended and the Great Avenue, or Long Walk, just under three miles in length, was created in 1680–5 through the park from the south front of the castle; 1652 elm trees were planted in a double row on each side of the walk. The castle also benefitted from a new pressurized water system, a pump invented by Sir Samuel Moreland, created Master of Mechanics by Charles II for his efforts. In July 1681 water mixed with red wine to make it more visible was pumped from the Thames 20 metres (60 feet) into the air above the North Terrace, watched by The King and Queen and an estimated 1000 spectators. A large reservoir to hold the pumped water was excavated under the North Terrace and this in time fed, via copper pipes, a marble bath for The Queen as well as providing a new pressurized supply for the castle. On top of the reservoir was placed an equestrian statue of Charles II on a huge marble base carved by Grinling Gibbons.

  Charles II on his accession determined to restore the pomp, glamour, music and colour of the monarchy, after the drab monochrome of the Commonwealth with its all-day prayer meetings. One of his first acts was to restore the choir of St George’s Chapel to its ‘former lustre and dignity’, to reinvigorate the Order of the Garter and its attendant ceremonies and feasts and to make the costume and regalia worn by its members even more spectacular. In April 1661, 13 knights were installed. Three-day feasts became the norm but soon proved a financial drain and were discontinued after 1674. As Celia Fiennes on visiting Windsor some 20 years later remarked sagely, ‘Some of these foolerys are requisite sometimes to create admiration and keep up the state of a kingdom and nation’. Elias Ashmole, the Windsor Herald, compiled a monumental record of the Order, its members, ceremonies, regalia and dress and commissioned Wenceslaus Hollar to illustrate it. It is from this record we draw so much of our knowledge of what the castle looked like before the changes wrought by Charles II and his architect Hugh May.

  After Charles II died of a stroke at the age of 55 in 1685, his brother James II did little to the castle except substitute his own priests in place of the Dean and chaplains at St George’s Chapel, pay for expensive vestments, candlesticks and other accoutrements of the mass and introduce ‘Roman’ services. This unpopular move was compounded by his receiving a papal emissary, the Papal Nuncio, at the castle in 1686. The birth of a Catholic son – and heir – to James II was too much for a Protestant country. As a result of opposition on all sides James II threw the Great Seal of England into the Thames and fled abroad. His Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, James’s nephew as well as son-in-law, were offered the Crown as joint monarchs by Parliament, and were crowned in 1689, thereby becoming King William III and Queen Mary II.

  In 1692 William III ordered Sir Christopher Wren to make a survey of the castle and suggest proposed changes in its design, but Wren’s extensive work at Hampton Court and the new palace he was building for The King at Kensington absorbed most of William’s time.

  The lion of England, one of the heraldic Queen’s Beasts of Windsor

  Wren produced a series of dramatic plans, one for the reconstruction of the castle as an Italianate palace and the other, already produced for Charles II, of a beautiful domed mausoleum – a smaller version of the dome of St Paul’s – to hold the body of Charles I, still languishing in the simple vault beneath the nave of St George’s Chapel. Neither plan saw the light of day. Perhaps Wren’s only visual contribution to the castle was to advise on the taking down of the serried ranks of decaying heraldic beasts from their pinnacles above the chapel. These pinnacles remained unadorned for another 250 years.

  After the deaths of first Mary II and then William III, James II’s younger daughter Anne became Queen in 1702. Anne spent a great deal of time at Windsor but left little mark upon the castle apart from completing the grand staircase, preferring a little brick house beside the Rubbish Gate where she ‘daily withdrew from the royal lodgings’. In 1698 her stillborn son was placed in the vault with Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and Charles I.

  But Queen Anne has left one enduring legacy: she was responsible for the institution of the Ascot races. Horse racing was
The Queen’s favourite sport and, while driving through the countryside in the early summer of 1711, her eye alighted on the Common at Ascot. The London Gazette of 12 July that year announced: ‘Her Majesty’s Plate of 100 guineas will be run for round the new heat on Ascott Common, near Windsor, on August 7th next, by any horse, mare or gelding, being no more than six years old the grass before’. The meeting is now held in June, but Queen Anne must be credited for its very existence.

  The House of Hanover

  Queen Anne

  The early Hanoverians, beginning with George I after the death of the final Stuart monarch, Anne, in 1714, were occasional visitors to Windsor but preferred to live elsewhere. The keep became briefly a state prison but quaint customs were nonetheless maintained. Every year on Easter Sunday, as required by Charles I’s grant in 1632, two arrows were delivered to the Governor, by virtue of which gift Lord Baltimore held the province of Maryland in North America. On New Year’s Day 1753, two uncured and presumably smelly beaver skins were received on behalf of Richard and Thomas Penn, who held Pennsylvania from the Crown. By the 1760s, devoid of the lustre of royalty, the castle was shabby and neglected, divided into a warren of grace-and-favour apartments. A series of famous watercolours painted around 1770 by Paul Sandby show picturesque but clearly down-at-heel views of the castle.

  George III

  George III’s Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, whom he married in 1761, came to the rescue and fell in love with the castle. Initially Queen Anne’s old retreat was bought and enlarged by Sir William Chambers but as their family expanded (they had 15 children) George III bought, in 1777, Nell Gwynn’s old house in the Great Park from her grandson, the 3rd Duke of St Albans. By the next summer the royal family was established at Windsor, with Queen Charlotte especially favouring the house at Frogmore which was bought for her in 1792 (and which subsequently became the home of Queen Victoria’s mother, The Duchess of Kent). Fond of flowers and botany, Queen Charlotte had one of the principal rooms decorated by the artist Mary Moser to resemble a floral bower. Today Frogmore House is occasionally used by the royal family for entertaining and The Queen is especially fond of the gardens – dog bowls can be found in the summer house adjacent to the lake; an indication that it is a favoured spot.