The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  In 1650 Speaker Lenthall’s son vacated Goring House, which was once more used by the Parliamentary Army as a barracks, eventually leaving after seven years of occupation. The ramparts were demolished – but not all traces vanished. In the 1670s the garden is described as ‘having therein a mount set with trees’, the remains of the old Great Goring Fort. A plan of 1675 shows this feature just beyond the garden terrace, which would place it in the back garden of Buckingham Palace today. In 2006 a survey by Channel 4’s Time Team with Oxford Archaeology using a gradiometer survey found anomalies west of the palace ‘that may be associated with the Civil War defences and the Goring Great Garden’.

  In 1653, the Great Audley, after years of patience as befits a master property speculator, finally bought Goring House and repossessed the land he had sold to Goring but for which he had never been paid. With all tenants finally removed he set about restoring the dilapidated house so ‘meanly and improvidently built’ and ‘in so great decaye that £1500 [approx. £210,000 today] would not putt itt in repayre’. By the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, repairs were complete and Audley began to let out the house as a venue for weddings and parties of all sorts. Pepys records in his diary attending a wedding there that year. By 1662 Audley was dead.

  So much for the house. But what of the mulberry garden that lay immediately behind it? During the Commonwealth it had been sold, along with so much Crown property, to a private individual to aid the state coffers. In the 1650s it devolved on a Mr Chipp who opened it as a ‘place of entertainment’ where John Evelyn, the diarist, records in 1654 it was a place ‘for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at’. In 1660 the lease reverted to the Crown and Mr Chipp was confirmed as lessor. In 1668 Pepys described the garden as ‘a wilderness, somewhat pretty but rude’ – inferring that by night it was a haunt of prostitutes. So successful was this pleasure garden that Mr Chipp leased further land from what had been Goring’s Great Garden.

  Audley’s nephew inherited Goring House, which he leased to Sir Henry Bennet, a leading minister and a friend of King Charles II. In 1665 the indefatigable Evelyn went to visit and records: ‘went to Goring House now Mr Secretary Bennet’s, ill-built but capable of being made a pretty villa’. Bennet, having obtained the title Lord Arlington, married in 1666 and thereafter seems to have kept a splendid house Pepys described as ‘a very fine house and finely furnished’. Alas, all was to perish in a fire in 1675, which entirely destroyed the house and all its rich contents.

  Outside the house, work was going on to transform St James’s Park, now fast becoming a playground for the new court. A canal was dug to help drain the swampy land in 1660 (the precursor of the present informal lake), and The Mall was constructed not long afterwards. It was a good time to purchase, as fashionable London began to surround the site of old Goring House. Arlington duly bought the freehold in 1677 and rebuilt the house with some speed, with steeply pitched roofs and a central cupola as was then the fashion. He turned ‘Arlington House’ 90 degrees from the old, and it now looked east over St James’s Park, as Buckingham Palace does today. It had a long gallery which overlooked the park with nine tall sash ‘picture’ windows for strollers to enjoy the view. He was also granted a 99-year lease on the old mulberry garden site by The King, so at last the house and garden were united, with consequences for the future. In 1682 Arlington diverted the Westminster-Knightsbridge Road further away from what were now his front windows and enclosed the old verge and the wasteground beside it to form his forecourt – an illegal act for which he was never challenged. Arlington died in 1685.

  Buckingham House in 1705

  Buckingham’s house

  John Sheffield, who would become The Duke of Buckingham in 1703, bought Arlington House from Lord Arlington’s grandson in 1702. Buckingham was a remarkable, multi-talented man, who cleverly married three times, each time to moneyed women. He was also a notorious womanizer, despite being described as short, sour, lofty and shallow. In 1704 he married his third wife, Lady Catherine Darnley, the daughter of James II by Catherine Sedley.

  Prior to this last advantageous marriage, he quickly began laying out the formal gardens, which would form the setting for his new house. The new ground plan determined that, for the first time, a house on this plot would be built over the old mulberry garden site, for which he did not own the freehold. The freehold and the leasehold were to become inextricably mixed, with disastrous consequences for the future with the Crown lease due to revert some 50 years hence.

  Buckingham made a second grand decision. The portly Queen Anne, always putty in his hands, informally agreed to let him alter his front boundary to encompass a portion of St James’s Park. He leveraged this agreement shamelessly, demolishing a royal lodge to the park and the boundary wall, pushing his forecourt into the park in a great semi-circle. The roadway was shifted away from his original boundary by some 20 metres (70 feet) or more. The new, illegal, forecourt was enclosed with baroque railings by the master smith Jean Tijou and a wildly extravagant ornamental central gate was surmounted by the ducal coronet and the Buckinghamshire coat of arms (Sheffield had been created Duke of Buckinghamshire to distinguish the title from earlier Dukes of Buckingham but this was widely ignored, not least by him). It was recorded ‘the Queen notes that the Duke of Buckingham hath gone further into the park than had leave … to do’. But she did nothing about it.

  The Duke and his wife, a descendant of royalty, held court in their new Buckingham House, completed in 1708, and it was described as ‘a new palace come to town’. The Duke died in 1720 but his wife, dubbed ‘Princess Buckingham’by Horace Walpole, who described her as ‘more mad with pride than any mercer’s wife in Bedlam’, kept a stifling, regal court at Buckingham House for the next 20 years. On the yearly anniversary of the execution of Charles I the whole house went into deep mourning and there she sat in a chair of state to receive equally mad Jacobites who felt it their duty to make obeisance to someone supposedly purified by Stuart blood. She made her ladies in attendance vow that on her deathbed they were to stand in her presence until after she was dead, even though she might be insensible. She duly died in 1743 and her ladies at last sat down.

  The legitimate son of the Buckinghams had died of consumption in Rome in 1735 and his half-brother, Edmund, inherited Buckingham House. Made a baronet by George II and adopting his father’s name, he became Sir Charles Sheffield (Samantha, Prime Minister David Cameron’s wife, is the daughter of the 8th Baronet). Moving into Buckingham House about 1745 and knowing that the Crown lease on the old mulberry garden site, now firmly buried under the new house, was due to revert in less than 30 years’ time, he opened negotiations with the Crown to purchase the freehold or extend the lease. The Surveyor General duly did his measurements and marked on a plan of the house where the old garden had been. It clearly showed that if no agreement was reached it made the whole property untenable. And no agreement was forthcoming.

  Knowing he was over a barrel, in 1761 Sheffield opened negotiations for sselling the whole site and a sale was agreed for a knock-down sum of £28,000 (approx. £3.8 million today).

  The Queen’s House

  George III bought Buckingham House for his wife, Queen Charlotte, settling it on her for life and by Act of Parliament changing its name to The Queen’s House. George III and his wife Charlotte lived in ‘The Queen’s House’, and all but the eldest of their 15 children were born there in the 20 years from 1763 to 1783.

  George III and Queen Charlotte

  The house they bought, as George III told a contemporary, ‘not meant for a Palace, but a retreat’, was a modest affair. The architect Buckingham had hired at the beginning of the eighteenth century is likely to have been William Talman with the actual construction under the control of William Winde. Talman was a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, with whom he had worked on the rebuilding of Hampton Court, and was Comptroller of the Royal Works under William III. He worked on many of the grand country houses of the late seventeenth
and very early eighteenth centuries, the most famous of which is Chatsworth House.

  Buckingham’s house was a simple, square-profiled, brick-built block with four giant pilasters framing the entrance door and with one at each end of the facade. These rose through the attic storey to culminate in six figures that broke the skyline. On either side, wings with hipped roofs culminating in centrally placed lanterns were joined to the main house by short, curved and columned arcades.

  In 1762 George III commissioned his favourite architect, Sir William Chambers, fresh from designing the magnificent baroque state coach (still to be seen at the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace), to undertake the ‘necessary works and repairs’ to turn Buckingham’s and Talman’s house into an up-to-date mansion fit for the monarch. Chambers had been appointed ‘architectural tutor’ to the 19-year-old George when Prince of Wales; Chambers and George II were friends, as well as architect and client, and had a close working relationship. Chambers was one of the towering figures of eighteenth-century architecture and from 1766, with Robert Adam, he was Architect to The King and then, in 1769–82, Comptroller of The King’s Works. Widely travelled and experienced, he had published his influential Treatise on Civil Architecture in 1759, and following his work on The Queen’s House, he would design Somerset House, his most famous building.

  George IV riding through Hyde Park, 1831

  At The Queen’s House over the next few years, Chambers simplified the house in a more austere neo-classical style to suit the unpretentious tastes of his patron. He toppled the statuary, refaced the house with smooth, new brick, rebuilt the north and south wings, added four libraries (George was an obsessive collector of books, maps, medals and coins) and a riding house, and altered much of the interior decoration. By 1774 nearly £95,000 (approx. £10.5 million today) had been spent in the transformation. The American Minister to England described the house in 1783: ‘In every apartment of the whole house, the same taste, the same judgment, the same elegance, the same simplicity, without the smallest affectation, ostentation, profusion, or meanness.’

  The four libraries, one of which was a two-storey octagon, were most impressive spaces and The King spent a great deal of his time there, poring over his collections, while Queen Charlotte was also an avid reader. The Royal Library, built up over several centuries, had been donated by George II to the British Museum and George III determined to replace it. At his death in 1820 his collection comprised some 67,000 volumes on which he had spent £120,000 (approx. £8.4 million today). It was removed to Windsor Castle and then donated to the nation by George IV. It has joined the earlier Royal Collection at the British Museum.

  The Queen’s House was not all an exercise in austerity. The Grand Staircase matched that at Chatsworth, and The Queen’s apartments were much grander, despite the fact that Queen Charlotte was characterized as frugal, ‘a severe and parsimonious lady’, fond of knitting.

  From the 1790s George spent less time at The Queen’s House and commuted on a weekly basis between Windsor, The Queen’s House and his mother’s old house at Kew.

  Now it was the turn of his son, The Prince Regent, soon to become King George IV, whose taste for art and architecture were extravagant in the extreme. Under his aegis, Buckingham House would, indeed, be transformed into a palace.

  From house to palace

  In January 1830, the view from the palace railings is of a building site, behind a new and elaborate arched entranceway still under construction. The railings curve round in two quadrants on either side to join the colonnaded wings of the palace. The palace under construction is wholly the work of the architect John Nash for George IV. He has been working on it for five years and it is not yet finished, and his patron is about to die. The new, bright-yellow Bath stone gleams, and the intricate detail of the carvings on the three pediments, one above the centre and two on each wing, are crisp.

  The building is certainly beautifully constructed, but despite its symmetry is not quite harmonious (unlike the beautiful garden front which remains to this day much as Nash designed it). A small central dome appears out of scale and the tall, thin, columned constructions breaking forward from the main facade are too dominant and top-heavy. The wings, originally single storey with what appeared to be a pile of children’s building blocks on top, have already been pulled down as wholly inadequate – shortcomings ‘which could only be remedied by demolition’. They have been rebuilt in three storeys to provide more accommodation and to align with the three storeys of the front facade.

  Very shortly a triumphal arch will rise from the building site, intended to commemorate the great British victories over the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte on land and sea. Already dubbed the ‘Marble Arch’ it is made of gleaming white Carrara marble and has three arches in the manner of a Roman triumphal arch. Above the attic storey a huge base is planned, with the winged angels of Victory at its corners and Britannia with her shield and trident seated in the centre. Atop this is to stand a great bronze statue of King George IV on horseback by Sir Francis Chantrey. (Given that towards the end of his life George IV, addled with too much laudanum and alcohol to the point he was convinced he had taken part in the Battle of Waterloo, had a 50-inch waistband and was a figure of general ridicule, the fine monument – the very model of martial hauteur – which now graces a plinth on one corner of Trafalgar Square, is a testament to Chantrey’s tact.)

  By this point, the building had already come in for a great deal of criticism, both for its suitability and its vast cost. Answerable to the Treasury for its expense but to his patron for his architectural ambitions, Nash had chosen to obey his patron and by 1828 the work was already vastly over budget. Three Parliamentary select committees met in successive years to investigate and Nash came in not just for severe criticism but his professional competence was questioned. A contemporary Thomas Rowlandson cartoon shows a glum John Bull reading a list of charges to Nash, imprisoned in the forecourt of his palace.

  The eye-watering expense of the building was also queried in a time of national stringency, when ‘poverty and distress abounded in the country’. An interesting and ingenious riposte was published in the new Frasers Magazine in May 1830. After acknowledging that ‘the completion of so costly a pile might have been postponed till a happier period’, the writer goes on to say the erection of the building was a moral duty, not for the ‘personal comfort of the King’, but in order to employ the craftsmen ‘not one of which … could find employment if the works were suspended’. The writer then invokes the future: ‘Can it be disputed that public edifices are the monuments of nations? Can it be denied that they are the only memorials by which posterity is enabled to estimate the worth and greatness of a people? What awakes the wonder and admiration of the traveller in Egypt, but the vast piles of human effort and ingenuity which he sees there?’ It was – and is – a fair point.

  Marble Arch, early 1800s

  Architect John Nash

  John Nash was an energetic and visionary architect, first apprenticed in his teens to the sculptor and architect Sir Robert Taylor, then Architect of The King’s Works. By sheer hard work and competence Nash attained celebrity status in London. He was in his sixties when The Prince of Wales (later George IV) was made Regent in 1811. Nash, in competition with others, was instructed to prepare plans for the development of a new road from Marylebone Park (an old royal hunting ground to be re-landscaped as Regent’s Park) to The Prince’s magnificent palace, Carlton House. The master plan he created involved the bold curve of Regent’s Street linking twin circuses, to become Oxford and Piccadilly, and was regarded as both original and brilliant. The Prince Regent was suitably impressed – ‘it will quite eclipse Napoleon,’ he said – and thereafter Nash became his confidential adviser not just on architecture but on a wide range of the issues of the day. Nash’s grandiose and very expensive scheme was accepted in 1813 and work continued until 1825 when the money ran out and the full objective was never achieved. Nonetheless, to Nash we owe one of the
few wide processional routes in London, in the style of the boulevards of Paris, as well as a host of much-loved London buildings. He was also responsible for laying out what became in due course Trafalgar Square.

  Nash was the perfect architect for The Prince Regent and after about 1810 worked almost exclusively for him. They shared an ambitious, grandiose and very showy vision for everything they conceived. Prior to Buckingham Palace, Nash had already worked on Carlton House (which had earlier been subject to a parliamentary commission to investigate the cost overruns in its construction) and a temporary polygonal ballroom with a tented roof, to house The Prince Regent’s grand fête of 1814.

  Nash’s next task for The Prince Regent was to transform, from 1815–22, a large villa in Brighton into a palace in the style of an ‘Eastern pleasure pavilion’. The result, the Royal Pavilion, is an extraordinary blending of the Classical, European Gothic, Mughal and Chinese traditions, its roof sporting a thicket of minarets and onion domes. Not everyone was ecstatic. The wife of the Austrian Ambassador was decidedly baffled, writing ‘How can one describe such a piece of architecture? The style is a mixture of Moorish, Tartar, Gothic and Chinese. It has already cost £700,000 [almost £50 million today] and it is still not fit to live in.’ Despite its exotic appearance, the building was technically advanced, with cast iron used to support the weight of the many domes and minarets and with gas lighting throughout as well as running hot and cold water, not then a usual attribute in domestic arrangements. Nash also rebuilt for The Prince Regent, with money provided by the Treasury, Lower Lodge in Windsor Great Park. It was transformed as Royal Lodge, a stuccoed, thatched and rather overlarge ‘cottage orné’, its disguise perhaps spoilt by its forest of chimneys.