The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Queen Victoria attends the christening of Victoria, Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace, 1841

  Albert was to have a role to play in the establishment of Buckingham Palace as a grand state palace as opposed to a large domestic house, in much the same way as Edward III had at Windsor Castle exactly 600 years earlier. Everything about the ball was extravagant: The Queen insisted that the costumes should be as authentic as possible and James Planché, the author of a History of British Costume (1834), was engaged as adviser to all those invited – an astonishing 2000 people (he also contributed to the souvenir books, ‘with illustrations printed in colour by chromolithography … in 20 numbers forming 2 volumes’, published to commemorate the occasion). Planché stipulated: ‘Tissues must be woven expressly – spurs, weapons, and jewelry modelled and manufactured on purpose … boots, shoes, gauntlets, hose, nearly every article of apparel must be made to order.’ A commentator wrote:

  ‘The wildest rumours of the extent and cost of the ball circulated beforehand. It was said that eighteen thousand persons were engaged in it. The Earl of Pembroke was to wear thirty-thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds … He was to borrow ten thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds from Storr and Mortimer at one per cent, for the night. These great jewellers’ stores were reported to be exhausted. Every other jeweller and diamond merchant was in the same condition.’

  Queen Victoria in costume as Queen Philippa of Hainault, 1843

  The Queen’s dress was designed under Planché’s personal supervision and was copied from contemporary costumes worn by the effigies of Philippa and other women of the same period on their tombs in Westminster Abbey. Albert’s costume was similarly a facsimile of that worn by the funeral effigy of Edward III. Sir Edwin Landseer was commissioned to paint the scene: the royal couple, in the high crowns and very pointed shoes of the mid-fourteenth century, stand beneath a canopy emblazoned with the Plantagenet arms in silver. Behind them are two elaborate Gothic chairs of the period.

  The guests took The Queen and Planché’s dress code seriously. Some ‘appeared … in the very armour of their forefathers, others in costumes copied from family pictures, or in the dress of hereditary offices still held by the representatives of the ancient houses’. A writer some years later described the dazzling scene:

  An invitation to a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace, 1984

  ‘At the appointed time King Edward escorted Queen Philippa to her throne, and they awaited with their Court the arrival of Anne of Brittany, who, led by Louis XII and accompanied by a suite of one hundred and twenty courtiers from France, Italy, and Spain, was to be presented before them. About half-past ten, marshalled by the heralds, the procession marched up the grand white marble staircase, through the gilded state rooms with their reflecting mirrors and glittering chandeliers, to the throne-room. The meeting of the two Courts formed a magnificent living picture of one of the most interesting periods in modern history, portrayed by the highest, the wealthiest, the loveliest, and the most honourable in the land.’

  There was inevitably some comment about the extravagant cost, inappropriate at a time of economic hardship. The response from the palace was that by demanding that all the costumes should be British-made (Victoria and Albert’s costumes were made by Spitalfields’ weavers) those who could afford it were stimulating British commerce. The Illustrated London News, not usually noted later for its political or social comment, reported tartly in its first ever edition,

  ‘never did sovereign and Prime Minister coincide in their measures more happily … The latter taxes us to relieve the commonality; our gracious and lovely sovereign … amerces her nobles through their pleasures and … spend over £100,000 [approx. £8 million today] to revive languishing trade! This is the healthful ingredient which lies at the bottom of the overflowing cup of pleasure. This is one of the wholesome conditions by which affluence and rank should preserve their distinction amongst us.’

  The evening was judged such a success that it was followed in 1845 by the Georgian bal poudré (so-called because of the white powder used on wigs) where the dress code was of the period 1740–50. The diplomatic corps ‘adopted the uniform of their respective nations within the prescribed dates’ and the ladies wore ‘the greatest magnificence of embroidered and jeweled decoration consistent with propriety’. The last of the great series of costumed balls was the Restoration Ball held in May 1851 with costumes from the period of Charles II. In between these extravagant occasions, there were other parties, receptions, concerts – and balls.

  In April 1849 the Strauss orchestra performed once more at a state ball for 1600 guests. Johann the Elder (in one of his last public performances, he died that September) performed the ‘Alice Polka’ for the first time, in honour of the six-year-old Princess Alice, Victoria and Albert’s third child. On three occasions in the 1840s the composer Felix Mendelssohn played at the palace. After a dinner in 1842 he enraptured the royal couple with a rendition of the Austrian national anthem with his right hand whilst playing ‘Rule Britannia’ simultaneously with his left. The elaborate marquetry-decorated piano Mendelssohn played is still displayed in the White Drawing Room. On another occasion the couple played and sang together on the organ and piano (Albert played the organ and Victoria the piano) and Mendelssohn reported, ‘the only really nice, comfortable house in England … where one feels completely at home, is Buckingham Palace’.

  An invitation to a Children’s garden party at Buckingham Palace, 1909

  Comfortable it was not, in reality, given the growing royal family (Victoria and Albert were to have nine children between 1840 and 1857), entertainment on a vast scale, and the sheer number of retainers and courtiers required to service the new court. The Queen petitioned her Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in 1845 for its enlargement. She wrote to him of the ‘urgent necessity of doing something to Buckingham Palace’ given:

  ‘the total want of accommodation for our little family, which is fast growing up … A room capable of entertaining a larger number of those persons whom the Queen has to invite in the course of the season of balls, concerts etc is much wanted. Equally so, improved offices and servants’ rooms, the want of which puts the departments of the household to great expense yearly.’

  Space was not the only problem. The chimneys smoked, the drains were badly laid and a revolting smell pervaded many of the basement rooms, notably the kitchens. The plumbing was inadequate. When Victoria’s uncle George IV had died in 1820 and John Nash was sacked for gross overspending, the job of finishing off the remaining works was given to an architect known for his careful, detailed, unspectacular work. Edward Blore was at the opposite end of the spectrum to the theatrical talents of John Nash – his professional work was briskly dismissed by the celebrated architectural historian John Martin Robinson, who wrote the official guide to Buckingham Palace, as exuding ‘a dull competence, healthily free from any spark of genius’. Blore had worked his way through the palace in the main using a simplified version of Nash’s plans but also adding an attic storey to the central block to provide more space. On the front face of this new storey he embedded some of the carved triumphal reliefs destined for the Marble Arch, which was in consequence much simplified (other reliefs, together with the victory statues, were used on William Wilkins’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square). His attic storey also abolished Nash’s much-derided central dome, which became the roof to the Music Room.

  Buckingham Palace as seen from a hot air balloon, 1905

  When Sir Robert Peel received The Queen’s plea for more space Parliament voted £150,000 (approx. £13 million today) for modifications to the palace, but that was not enough to provide the scale of accommodation now required, so she looked for an additional source of income.

  The Queen had never liked the Brighton Pavilion – it was cramped and was too open to public scrutiny. Instead she purchased land on the Isle of Wight and between 1845 and 1851 Albert supervised the building of Osborne House to replace it as the royal fam
ily’s rural retreat. The Pavilion was sold in 1850 to the town of Brighton. The house was converted into assembly rooms and the adjacent stables became a concert hall – the Dome. The interior furnishings, fittings and fireplaces were removed and stored in Kensington Palace for reuse. The selling price of over £100,000 (almost £10 million today) was added to the government grant to complete the work at Buckingham Palace.

  Work had already begun at the palace in 1847 on a new east range joining the two wings and closing off the old open court, converting it into a closed courtyard. As a result Nash’s Marble Arch, standing in the centre of this new planned range, was dismantled and rebuilt by Thomas Cubitt – by now the preferred royal builder – as a ceremonial gateway to the northeast corner of Hyde Park. There it has remained but the widening of Park Lane in the early 1960s has marooned it incongruously in the middle of a large traffic island.

  The building of the new east front was constantly disrupted by a parsimonious Treasury withholding the payment of bills, but despite that, the careful work of the architect Edward Blore and the efficiencies of Cubitt brought the new building to completion under budget. Built of soft Caen stone, which would prove to weather badly in the acidic air of a London of countless coal fires belching soot into the atmosphere, the new east facade was generally derided as being closer to the architecture of railway hotels than to the splendour required of the monarch of the most powerful nation on earth.

  Blore made no attempt in style and decoration to marry his new facade with Nash’s existing building. It had, however, one important innovation – a new ceremonial balcony placed in the centre at first-floor level. This was to become an emotional rallying point for monarch and people in the years to come. It was used for the first time in 1854 when Queen Victoria stood on the balcony to watch the Guards regiments march past on their way to the Crimea. She reported to her Uncle Leopold: ‘We stood on the balcony to see them …They formed line, presented arms, and then cheered us very heartily and went off cheering. It was a touching and beautiful sight.’ There was to be a reprise on the return of the survivors two years later.

  Prince Albert had taken a lead role in the modernization of the palace. In 1843, John Nash’s south conservatory had been converted into a chapel under his guidance (the chapel was destroyed by German bombs in the Second World War). Shortly after his marriage, recognizing that his wife lacked any knowledge of art history, Albert became involved, now that the initial structural work was nearing completion, in the decoration of the palace and the acquisition and hanging of pictures. He hired Ludwig Gruner, an expert in ornamental art, as a paid artistic adviser. Gruner was an accomplished engraver and an outstanding networker who had trawled the country houses of Britain in the early 1830s in search of paintings by Raphael to engrave. Gruner was to stay in The Prince’s service for 13 years from 1843 to 1856 and in 1845 he was given title of ‘Adviser in Art’to The Queen, a new post intended to regularize his position in the household, on £200 (approx. £17,000 today) a year. Known in England as Lewis Gruner, he was to have a strong influence on the decoration of state buildings and the display of public art. After his formal appointment he took over the direction of the new decoration commissioned by Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace.

  The old Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire in 1834 and after an architectural competition Albert was appointed President of the Royal Fine Art Commission overseeing the internal decoration of the new building being built to the designs of Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin. The new building was erected, as Lewis Gruner described it, ‘upon a scale of unusual splendour’. To further the design of the intended painted interiors the commission took the bold step of proposing the establishment of a British school of history painting using the fresco technique, portentously described as ‘in connexion with a great national monument … an affair of national importance’. Accordingly, in 1844 Albert and the painter and art historian Charles Eastlake (soon to be the first director of the National Gallery), under the direction of Gruner, created a Garden Pavilion in the gardens of Buckingham Palace as a laboratory for rediscovering this old technique. Eight British artists were chosen to decorate it in fresco – among them Daniel Maclise, Edwin Landseer and Eastlake himself. This jewel-like building unfortunately succumbed to dry rot and was demolished in the 1920s.

  In 1852 Thomas Cubitt was called upon once again (he had also by then built Osborne House) to build the new Ball and Concert Room and the Ball Supper Room nearby. The unfortunate Blore was dispensed with and Cubitt worked to the designs of James Pennethorne, who had served as an assistant to Nash during his work on the palace. The Ball and Concert Room was 37 metres (123 feet) long and 18 metres (60 feet) wide, a cavernous space that could hold several thousand revellers in comfort. Viewed from the lawns to the rear, its vast and inelegant bulk, resembling the fly tower of a theatre rearing up behind the southern conservatory, destabilized Nash’s delicate garden front.

  Queen Victoria attends Diamond Jubilee Dinner Party thrown in her honour, 1897

  The interior was a different matter: masterminded by the Albert–Gruner partnership, a team of artists created a rich, complex, polychrome scheme of sculptured plaster and painted panels. Gruner himself painted the enormous ceiling. The Ball Supper Room was in many ways more spectacular, with its domed ceiling painted to resemble a vast tent. Beneath these new buildings much-needed service rooms were contrived including a new kitchen. So avant-garde were these spectacular new rooms the palace was dubbed the ‘Headquarters of taste’by the magazine The Builder.

  With the completion of Osborne House in 1851 and Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands in 1856, the royal family now had a chance to spend more time away from Buckingham Palace; it was a chance they took. After Prince Albert’s early death in 1861 at the age of 42 Victoria virtually abandoned the palace, preferring the seclusion of her new houses and, when needing to be in London, Windsor Castle. Twenty-six years later there was a very brief flowering of the glittering social life that had characterized the palace in the 1840s and 1850s when a galaxy of European royals came to stay to celebrate Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 and again ten years later. Victoria died at Osborne House in 1901. Buckingham Palace had been left as it had been before Albert’s death 40 years before. In the meantime the grimy, heavily polluted London air had slowly settled in every crevice and on every painted surface of the interior.

  Twentieth-century developments

  Edward VII, the new King, set about personally supervising the redecoration of Buckingham Palace. Referring to the Italianate marbling in the entrance hall – blackened by half a century of grime – as ‘a sepulchre’, he brought light into the palace, banishing tables overloaded with his mother’s beloved knick-knacks, and packing up Prince Albert’s mountains of books. King Edward VII was not a great reader.

  Queen Victoria and her son Albert (later Edward VII), and his son George (later George V), and his son Edward, the future King Edward VIII

  The King’s private apartments consisted of four adjoining rooms on the first floor looking out over the garden. His bed was vast and heavy, the walls of his chamber hung with portraits of his female relatives. In his sitting room, alongside his neatly ordered desk, his ill-tempered French bulldog, Peter, lay in its basket and two cages of canaries provided a musical accompaniment.

  He employed theatre designer Frank Verity under whose watchful eye plasterwork of the state rooms was painted white and the mouldings gilded. Crimson velvet was hung in generous swags. Critics compared the effect to that of the Ritz Hotel, but it suited The King who introduced evening courts (as opposed to those of his mother, held in the afternoon) at which he and The Queen would sit side by side on a dais in the ballroom as debutantes were presented wearing elaborate trains carried by pages. The first of these, on 14 March 1902, proved, without doubt, that glamour had come back to the palace.

  The Grand Staircase at Buckingham Palace, 1895

  In the period before the First World War the east wing of the
palace – the ‘front’ facade – was smothered by scaffolding as an army of masons refaced the old yellow Caen stone, crumbling badly in the acidic air of the sulphurous city, with the denser white stone from Portland, creating the monumental facade that has become so familiar. It was to be completed in a record 13 weeks. The Sphere commissioned an ingenious engraving of how the refaced palace would look, one wing as it was and the rest as it would be, though somehow it looked a bit more interesting than in reality it turned out to be.

  The architect, Sir Aston Webb, was commissioned to reface the facade erected by the architect Edward Blore in 1847 and to formalize the ceremonial approach to the palace in memory of Queen Victoria. Between 1911 and 1914 he designed and built the Admiralty Arch to provide a triumphal gateway leading to Buckingham Palace via the wide ceremonial roadway known as The Mall. Directly in front of the palace he placed the great statue by Thomas Brock of the late Queen sitting impassively on her great white obelisk surrounded by the swirling statues of lesser beings. The whole ensemble was very impressive, its architectural pomp echoing the might of empire.

  Private sitting room, Buckingham Palace, 1895

  But for Edward VII’s successor George V, King from 1910, the palace held little thrall, causing him to confess to Viscount Esher that he would happily pull it down and sell off its garden as a public park, using the money to rebuild Kensington Palace to his own less flamboyant taste. Content to use the palace as an office and headquarters, he was happier at Balmoral in autumn and Sandringham in winter. Queen Mary, too, betraying her German ancestry, remarked that ‘Buckingham Palace is not so gemütlich [cosy] as Marlborough House’, their previous London base. For a year after Edward VII’s death, the palace remained gloomy and silent, a victim of court mourning, Queen Mary gradually banishing what she referred to as ‘this surfeit of gold plate and orchids’. Comfort she enjoyed, but not extravagant luxury. On George V’s death in 1936 she moved into her much preferred Marlborough House to make way for King George VI and his consort Queen Elizabeth who were to live in the palace, most memorably, during the Second World War.