The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Today the ancient castle, which has provided the stage for so much of England’s history, is not just home to The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh but also either home or office to some 500 people; and a huge tourist attraction with approximately a million people visiting annually. It is open almost every day, when visitors can admire the state and semi-state apartments and, sometimes, even the historic kitchens.

  The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, 2013

  The Great Park is a remarkable example of an ancient deer park and driving through it gives some idea of its scale: at 5000 acres (2020 hectares) it is an open space that, at its highest parts, offers views of far distant London.

  The Duke of Edinburgh planted an oak avenue in the private Home Park, which consists of 655 acres (265 hectares) and was formerly known as the ‘Little Park’. Finding that the royal family had nowhere to sit out close to the castle, he also created a ‘sitting-out garden’ by having a road along the South Slopes moved and laying out a small garden under the south wall of the East Terrace. He later planted a hornbeam avenue in the Home Park.

  The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, 1974

  The Great Park itself offers welcome respite from the duties of monarch and The Queen rides there regularly in the company of her groom, Terry Pendry, during the kinder months of the year – in a headscarf rather than a hard hat. The Royal Windsor Horse Show is staged in the Home Park directly under the castle ramparts annually in May, when The Queen can be found, usually in headscarf and mac, quietly walking among the other visitors and watching the competitions in the equestrian arenas. The Duke of Edinburgh, stopwatch in hand, will most likely be timing competitors at the water-splash on the carriage-driving course. This informality – and the relaxed attitude of the monarch and her consort – surprises many visitors to the show, but then, as The Duke once told me, ‘This is our back garden.’

  The young Princesses and their nannies

  TODAY’S ROYAL SERVANTS (though the term ‘staff’ is now more usually employed) are a highly efficient and modern body of men and women whose working lives are regulated by contemporary management practices and the most up-to-date communication systems available, but they retain titles with a decidedly archaic ring. Look at any list of royal functionaries and then try to guess what each does. You will quickly drown in a sea of historical obfuscation. Many of the titleholders of the first rank are honorific, or political appointments, or have them by virtue of inheritance or by some historical anomaly, the actual work being carried out by professional ‘deputies’. Walter Bagehot, the economist and political commentator who first turned a spotlight on the nature and practices of Parliament and the monarchy in the 1860s, famously wrote, ‘Royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it … In its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon its magic.’ Royal servants and their historic titles are perhaps part of that mystery too, but with a bit of digging around it is possible to trace them from their emergence in the mists of antiquity.

  The young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret with Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald

  A good place to start is 1483, when Richard III appointed The Duke of Norfolk to be Earl Marshal with instructions to prepare Westminster Abbey for his coronation, a job The Dukes of Norfolk were to retain over the centuries. Four hundred and seventy years later, in 1953, Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk, took charge of Westminster Abbey to organize the coronation of the present Queen. An historic title it may be, but in the case of the 16th Duke it was blessed by a man with a formidable organizational ability. The schedule devised by The Duke called for The Queen to be crowned at 12.34 p.m. on 2 June. When the crown was placed on Her Majesty’s head by the Archbishop of Canterbury the time was noted at 12.33.40, 20 seconds early … Even as you read this the 18th Duke of Norfolk will have to hand a number of alternative plans for the coronation of the next monarch; it’s what he does. As well as being hereditary Earls Marshal, The Dukes of Norfolk are also hereditary Marshals of England, in charge of all heraldry and grants of arms.

  Edward VII with his Lord Chamberlain, the Marquess of Cholmondeley, 1902

  The Earl Marshal was the third of the ‘great offices of the realme’ listed by an Act of Henry VIII in 1539, which included, in order of precedence, ‘the great chamberleyn first, the constable next, the marciall third, the lorde admyrall the fourth, the grand maister or lorde stewarde the fiveth, and the Kinges chamberleyn the sixt’. In medieval times, when the business of ruling the country was more precarious, the monarch would surround him- or herself with supporters from the more powerful families who would take charge of the organization of the household. The Great Officers of the Household – as opposed to the Officers of state – in due course were reduced to three.

  The most important is the Lord Chamberlain who is always a Privy Councillor as well as being a peer and is now the part-time chairman of the executive committee that runs the Royal Household. In the past, his department dealt with the ceremonial and social life of the court, organizing royal ceremonies and, until 1968, administering the licensing of theatres and theatrical performances countrywide, ensuring they were ‘fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace’.

  Vice Admiral Sir Peter Ashmore, Master of the Household of Queen Elizabeth II 1973–86

  The Lord Steward’s department dealt by contrast with domestic and culinary matters (often described as ‘below stairs’) – provisioning, feeding, cleaning and security – and was the ‘engine room’ of the household. The Lord Steward, together with the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Master and the Cofferer of the Household, with their clerks, constituted the ‘Board of the Green Cloth’, a committee that regulated the workaday parts of the Royal Household. They took their name from a table or ‘board’ covered with a green cloth, around which their predecessors had met since it was constituted in the reign of King Edward IV in the fifteenth century. The Board of the Green Cloth made the contracts with suppliers and paid their bills. Provisioning accounts were calculated by using piles of tokens, which were pushed backwards and forwards across the table, representing goods in and out. The board was also responsible for maintaining discipline with judicial responsibility for all offences committed in, or within a prescribed distance from, the court, wherever it might be. Typically it might concern itself with disobedient or dishonest servants or pickpockets and prostitutes who haunted the palace courtyards.

  Sir Henry Guildford, Master of the Household for Henry VIII

  Punishments could be harsh for servants caught stealing from the royal palaces. In 1731, a servant named as Sarah Matts was imprisoned for ‘feloniously stealing a quilt’ from a palace guard room. A servant of long standing, Catherine Pollard, who had been for 30 years in the silver scullery at Kensington Palace, was found guilty at the Old Bailey and condemned to death for stealing four silver plates and of selling them on to a dealer. In her defence she protested, ‘I believe there was a spell set upon me, or else I was bewitch’d.’

  The last of the reduced Great Officers of the Household is the Master of the Horse, one of the ‘officers of the Household Without’ and his remit originally encompassed being in charge of the royal stables and for arranging for horses in time of war as well as for transport for the sovereign and the Royal Household (see ‘The Royal Mews’). He was the personal body servant of the monarch once he or she was outside the palace walls. All three titles now, largely, have ceremonial roles only and appear in a splendid uniform on state occasions, the Master of the Horse – currently Lord Vestey – shadowing the monarch, as of old.

  So much for the first rank of royal servants. It is a much more difficult business to throw light on the lives of individuals lower down the scale. But there is one tantalizing glimpse of the actual faces of past royal servants who still look down on us today. In the 1720s William Kent painted the portraits of 45 of them (includin
g himself) looking over a painted balustrade on The King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace. They included some of the Yeomen of the Guard, the comedian Ulric Jorry, a Polish dwarf who entertained the court, The King’s two Turkish grooms of the chamber, and a ‘Wild Youth’ who was found in the forests of Hanover and brought over as a curiosity in 1726.

  William Kent’s painting of servants at Kensington Palace peering over The King’s Grand Staircase

  Staff of the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace

  Another rare glimpse comes from Gabriel Tschumi, who was appointed in 1898 at the age of 16 as an apprentice in the royal kitchens and worked for the royal family for over 40 years. He left a rare first-hand account of his time in royal service. On his first day he was surprised to find ‘only thirty or forty’ servants at dinner in the servants’ hall at Buckingham Palace. When he was despatched to Windsor Castle the next day, where Queen Victoria was in residence, he felt he had ‘never seen such a vast collection of people … it took me a long time to discover what the duties of many of these servants were, and in some cases I did not ever find out’. At that time there was ‘an indoor staff of more than three hundred, and a permanent kitchen staff of forty-five’. He felt that with such a number supervision was lax and ‘a good deal of laziness resulted’ – except in the kitchens which were run by the Royal Chef, M. Ménager, a Frenchman who was ‘a stickler for perfection’. He never did find out the duties of many of the staff as there was a complete reorganization of the Royal Household after the death of the old Queen in January 1901.

  If servants had become somewhat towards the end of that very long reign, at the beginning things were a great deal worse. When Victoria inherited the throne in 1837 the way in which the household went about its business was decidedly shambolic. Servants were inexplicably absent when required and seemed to answer to no one. A typical example was the obstacle course encountered by those invited to Windsor Castle. As often as not there would be no servant to greet them, to take their coat and luggage or to direct them to their quarters. There were many instances of guests wandering the maze-like corridors of the castle trying doors at random in order to find someone to guide them. The premier of France on one such expedition opened a door to find, much to his consternation, The Queen having her hair brushed by a maid.

  Victoria’s uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, sent help to Victoria in the form of his trusted adviser and sometime physician, Baron Stockmar. A man with a rigorous, logical intellect he advised Victoria, and in due course Prince Albert (whom he had accompanied on his Grand Tour of Italy), on a range of issues, perhaps most importantly through his memorandum on the reform of the Royal Household, which he deemed ‘unpractical and confused resulting in disorder and discomfort’. His enquiries quickly uncovered the fact that ‘there is between departments no proper system of cooperation and concurrence, insuring unity of purpose and action. The work is parcelled out in a ridiculous manner among them … so as to impede the satisfactory progress of business’. His ‘Observations on the present state of the Royal Household’ was just the ammunition Prince Albert required and he immediately undertook the realization of the majority of Stockmar’s proposed reforms. So ingrained was the way things were done, or not done, among the servants of the household that it took him many years to effect the necessary reforms.

  Stockmar had realized that at the heart of the servant problem lay the fact that although the Royal Household nominally divided into three great departments under the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain and the Master of the Horse, these three luminaries, the highest court officials, were appointed for their political loyalty and not for their administrative gifts. What’s more they changed with every new government, so none of the main officers of the household remained permanently at court. Neither did they have a permanent deputy in post to whom they could delegate any responsibility in their absence. As a result there were no links to bind the departments efficiently together, and the respective limits of what they did and did not do were wholly arbitrary, and in many roles unspecified: ‘It is quite undecided what parts of the palace are under the charge of the Lord Chamberlain and which under the Lord Steward.’ Stockmar discovered more than two-thirds of all servants ‘are left without a master in the house. They can come and go as they choose, commit any excess or irregularity’, with no one to ‘observe, correct or to reprimand them’. With a degree of indignation he went on, ‘if smoking, drinking, and other irregularities occur in the dormitories, where footmen, etc., sleep ten and twelve to each room, no one can help it’.

  Christmas preparations in the kitchen at Windsor Castle, 1857

  Some of his more absurd discoveries of departmental inefficiencies are often quoted: ‘The writer of this paper, sent to complain by Her Majesty to Sir Frederick Watson, the Master of the Household, that the dining-room was always cold, was answered: “You see, properly speaking, it is not our fault, for the Lord Steward lays the fire only, the Lord Chamberlain lights it”’; and, ‘the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them’. The inside cleaning of windows was part of the Lord Chamberlain’s departmental responsibilities but anything outside was the responsibility of the Department of Woods and Forests, so an understanding between the two was required in order for any light to be let into the palace – the London air was laden with sooty particulates from coal fires which settled quickly on the outside of buildings.

  Things came to a head when one night a boy was discovered asleep under a sofa in a room next to The Queen’s bedroom. He had simply walked in, as had the French premier, and wandered around undetected. The subsequent enquiry could find no department had direct responsibility for security. Baron Stockmar laboured to make the point:

  ‘there was no person in the Palace on whom such responsibility could rightly be fixed; for it certainly did not fall on the Lord Chamberlain, who was in Staffordshire, and in whose department porters are not; nor on the Lord Steward, who was in town, and who has nothing to do with the disposition of the pages and other parties nearest the royal person; nor finally on the Master of the Household … On whom does it then fall? Entirely on the absence of system, which leaves the royal palace without any responsible authority.’

  Extravagance, a certain mayhem and periodic retrenchment were nothing new in the Royal Household. Go back almost 250 years to the Restoration in 1660 and you will find that the years of asceticism that had characterized the drab-suited Commonwealth were swept away in an orgy of excess by Charles II who was determined to bring back the gaiety and style of his father’s court. A massive number of new appointments were made, 1200 by October 1660, of which 800 were in the Lord Chamberlain’s department and nearly 300 in that of the Lord Steward. Two years later the complement had reached over 1350. The diarist John Evelyn commented that Charles II, ‘brought in a politer way of living, which passed to Luxurie and intolerable expense’. Amongst the list of appointments is a Royal Comb-Maker for Life and after the years of misrule a Master of the Revels makes his reappearance. A Printer for The Oriental Languages, a Flourisher and Embellisher, a Master of the Art of Defence, a Rat-Killer and a Mole-Taker, a Master for each of Harriers, Hawks, Staghounds and Buckhounds, a Marker of the Swans, three Distillers of Strong Water, a Periwig Maker, a Sempstress to the Person and a Strewer of Herbs were amongst the long list of those found essential to the household. The Strewer of Herbs was named as one Mary Dowle and her vital role was to walk before The King when in procession and scatter herbs, specifically known (or assumed) to counter the plague, in his path. Mary Dowle was still strewing herbs when William and Mary came to the throne.

  The Sempstress to the Person, Dorothy Chiffinch, was charged with making sure The King was well stocked with linen and had plenty of shirts into which to change to counter the constant smell of ordinary life in the mid-seventeenth century. Here is the list she was handed: ‘108 Shyrts, 54 half-Shyrts, 12 dozen of Pocket Hankerchers, 18 Night-Caps, 18 Pillow cases, 12 Pay
res of Great Sheets, 3 Payres of Tamise Sheets, 18 Payres of Lace Stockings, 3 Trunks to carry it’, and she was also required to give the whole lot a first wash.

  Not only did Charles II appoint such a vast array of servants and officers, he also granted them free ‘diet’ and very shortly the principal officers had begun to keep ‘open table’ for family and friends at the expense of the Crown, and other abuses were rife. The strain on the royal finances of this laissez-faire system could not last and free food for all, apart from The King and Queen and the immediate royal family, was rescinded two years later. The 90 cooks no longer required were sacked.

  Continuing fluctuations in household costs meant the Treasury stepped in and demanded a degree of control over budgets and expenditure. After years of part measures, in 1680 swingeing cuts were implemented. All salaries were reduced by at least a quarter and most by two-thirds; the budget for the Lord Steward’s department was sliced nearly in half. By the time James II came to the throne in 1685, action was once again needed and the staff totals were cut by almost a half with ‘useless offices’ being abolished and more productivity demanded from his remaining servants.

  There were mitigating forces that made it difficult sensibly to reduce the cost of maintaining the court. Alongside a need for economy was the requirement to keep the trappings of monarchy, the splendour of the court itself and the possibilities for patronage at a suitable level. In 1690 the new incumbents to the throne, William III and Mary II, despite their perceived frugality, needed urgently to establish their legitimacy by maintaining the royal state. They raised the staffing levels of the Royal Household once more, at the same time purging a large number of James II’s servants and officers because of their Catholicism or association with the old regime. This resulted in an influx of inexperienced servants and administrators, which in turn caused inefficiency, waste and, in due course, corruption. The state of royal finances was further exacerbated by the inadequate settlement granted the Crown by Parliament and the costs of prosecuting a war. Before long the household found itself unpaid. By 1691 servants below stairs were nine months in arrears and purveyors to the Crown were threatening to cut off supplies. Four years later servants were 16 months in arrears of pay and in ‘a starving and wretched condition’. By the time of his death William III owed his servants and suppliers a full year’s wages and payments.