The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Prince William and Prince Harry play football on Christman Eve, 2013

  The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh and many other members of the royal family – in 2013, 30 of them, including for the first time four generations – traditionally spend Christmas at Sandringham and stay on until the anniversary of the death of The Queen’s father, George VI, on 6 February when they return to Buckingham Palace during the week and Windsor at the weekends. Family members arrive the day before Christmas Eve in time for tea at 5 p.m. – each is given a timed slot so that they don’t all arrive at once. In recent years Princes William and Harry have taken part in the annual Christmas Eve football match between Sandringham estate workers and the neighbouring village of Castle Rising. In 2013 Prince Harry scored a goal in the 2–2 draw. Presents (following the Danish tradition of Queen Alexandra) are exchanged that evening.

  Children present The Queen with flowers for Christmas, 2013

  After presents it’s time for a glass of champagne or a cocktail in the hall (gin and Dubonnet for The Queen) before changing into evening dress for dinner. The women retire after dinner, and port and brandy are circulated among the men who remain at the table. The next day, after stockings and breakfast, it’s the Christmas Service at the Church of St Mary Magdalene, a brisk walk across the park or a short trip in the maroon state Bentley for The Queen. Christmas lunches are then served in relays through the late morning and afternoon for all the different grades of staff – it is said that 24 of the largest Norfolk turkeys are required to feed everyone. The royal family eats at 1.15 p.m., the head chef carving for the table.

  All must be over by 3 p.m. when The Queen’s Speech is relayed to the nation and Commonwealth via television, radio, the internet and even the headsets on long-haul flights. The Christmas message has been a tradition since 1932, when the first speech was written by Rudyard Kipling for George V and delivered live from his study at Sandringham. In 1992, the year of her ‘annus horribilis’ speech, The Queen reflected on what Sandringham meant to her: ‘I first came here for Christmas as a grandchild. Nowadays my children come here for the same family festival. To me this continuity is a great source of comfort in a world of tension and violence.’ Traditionally the speech is filmed in the week before Christmas and The Queen prefers to watch the actual broadcast on her own. Afterwards there are walks, board games, charades and then a huge Christmas cake for tea. The family reconvenes again at 8.15 for dinner. Non-family guests are invited for Boxing Day lunch and the traditional pheasant shoot.

  At Sandringham, steps are now being taken to provide accommodation for future heirs to the throne. In 2013 planning permission was granted to make changes to the internal arrangements and security of the ten-bedroom Anmer Hall on the Sandringham estate, about two miles from the ‘Big House’, as the country home for The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and baby George. Prince William has known the house since he was a child when it was leased to the van Cutsem family. Before that The Duke and Duchess of Kent rented it for nearly 30 years until 1990.

  The gardens at Sandringham

  The gardens at Sandringham are particularly welcoming. The park has existed in roughly its present form for over 200 years – in 1797 it was depicted on Faden’s map of the county which also shows The Avenue running for over a kilometre through Dersingham Wood, as it still does today. In 1862 a lady-in-waiting to Alexandra, The Princess of Wales reported on her first visit that Sandringham had ‘no fine trees, no water, no hills, in fact no attraction of any sort’. The extensive and beautifully maintained gardens and pleasure grounds covering an area of over 49 acres (20 hectares) that exist today are a testament to the taste and enthusiasm of four generations of the royal family, and in particular to the prize money and stud fees of Persimmon, Bertie’s spectacularly successful racehorse which won over £2 million in today’s money in the 1890s.

  The gardens date from the 1860s onwards, after the estate was purchased by The Prince of Wales (although some mature trees both in the gardens and the park survive from earlier owners) and were initially laid out to the designs of William Broderick Thomas with later help from Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, a friend of The Prince’s who owned Waddesdon Manor, a vast house built in the 1870s and 1880s in the style of a Loire chateau. It was around this time that over 100 gardeners were employed at Sandringham. The layout is largely informal, mainly grass and trees punctuated by walks or ‘rides’ with more formal terraces to the north and west.

  The main entrance is on the east front of the house and has a forecourt extending to a gravelled sweep, bordered by clipped yew hedges and lawns planted with commemorative oaks. There is a pleasing continuity to the oaks at Sandringham – in 2006 The Queen planted an oak tree to mark her eightieth birthday, which in turn was grown from the acorn of an oak tree planted in 1947 by Queen Mary to mark her own eightieth birthday. The most dominant feature of the garden extends for some distance to the north of the house.

  The Pulhamite rock garden, seen from across the lake

  George VI was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardener and in 1947 he commissioned Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe to create a garden that he could look out over from his own rooms. He and Sir Geoffrey had a close working relationship, with The King writing to him with suggestions throughout the design and construction stage. The resulting garden is a calm and peaceful series of hedged enclosures in a garden otherwise characterized by wide vistas. Extending from the north of the house, Jellicoe laid down a central path that divides a long rectangular garden laid out as formal ‘rooms’ of box-edged beds filled with herbaceous plants and flanked by pleached limes. The path is closed by a stone statue of Father Time brooding over the transience of life, bought by The Queen in 1951. Not far from Father Time an ancient Buddha squats, closing another pleached lime avenue. Dated to the end of the seventeenth century it was brought from Peking in 1870 aboard the battleship HMS Rodney as a gift from one of The Prince of Wales’s friends, Admiral Sir Henry Keppel. From King’s Lynn it was placed on a carriage and hauled by sailors the nine miles to Sandringham. Originally it sat beneath a pagoda, but this has rotted away.

  Around the north and north-west boundary wall just beyond this formal garden, mixed woodland shrubberies include rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias – the sandy, acid soil suits them well. In the 1960s Sir Eric Savill was asked by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh to redesign this area of the garden. Savill had earlier been commissioned by George V to create the famous woodland garden in Windsor Great Park, completed in the 1930s, which now bears his name. At Sandringham, he used many of the rhododendron and azalea species he had been breeding at Windsor where he was deputy ranger, and in the spring this part of the garden is ablaze with colour.

  Part of the garden designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe

  The west front terrace originally faced a complex, formal parterre of bedding, fashionable at the time, which had replaced the old lake. These were dug up during the Second World War and never replaced. Now the terrace looks onto a simple expanse of lawn, cross-cut like the weave of a tartan in spring and summer and dotted with specimen trees (there had been many more, which interrupted the views from the house, but they were removed by George VI). Directly south of the lawn lies the irregular Upper Lake. When The Prince of Wales purchased the house in the 1860s there was an L-shaped expanse of water almost directly in front of the old house which The Prince filled in, creating the ornamental Upper Lake in the 1870s with a nineteenth-century Pulhamite rock garden (named after James Pulham who had invented a convincing artificial stone) and a boathouse on the house side. On the opposite side is a summerhouse known as ‘The Nest’, erected in two months in 1913 by the Comptroller of the Household, Sir Dighton Probyn, as a surprise for Queen Alexandra, to whom he was devoted.

  From the Upper Lake a meandering waterway leads into the larger Lower Lake with its tree-covered island. Grassland borders the lakes, kept long to encourage wild flowers and planted with a variety of trees and shrubs. A small stream running from the
north-east feeds into the eastern end of Lower Lake. This, now known as the Stream Walk, is edged with rocks and in 1996 was planted with moisture-loving plants by the then head gardener, Fred Waite. Various other walks meander through the woodland: the Dell Walk leads west from the lake and north up through the woodland to join the Church Walk, which leads to the church of St Mary Magdalene, replete with so many royal associations.

  The highly ornamental walled kitchen garden, over six acres in extent, once had seven enormous glasshouses – extending to 213 metres (700 feet) – one of the great attractions of the garden and a must on every guest’s compulsory perambulation through the grounds on a Sunday. The glasshouses were filled mainly with exotic fruits and flowers, and one was devoted solely to pink carnations. The entrance doors to this great range of vanished glasshouses still exist. Set in a glazed, pedimented wooden frame inset into a brick wall they now frame a vista of the sky and garden beyond.

  Lying about 300 metres (1000 feet) from the house the kitchen garden was begun at the same time but was very much enlarged in the twentieth century when the gates, piers, pergola and dairy were added and the paths enlarged to allow the passage of carriages for guests. At the west end, curved entrance gates and piers lead directly onto a rose pergola built of brick piers that once carried oak cross beams and that leads onto the main east-west path within the walled garden. This area, which once provided the fruit, vegetables and cut flowers for the house in an ornamental arrangement of beds, is now laid to grass divided into quarters, which provide pasture for the stallions in the stud nearby. Fenced gravel paths converge on a central circular pool with a fountain, and old pear trees are still trained on the south wall.

  Looking back towards the house from the garden designed by Sr Geoffrey Jellicoe

  The house viewed from the Lower Lake

  The Duke of Edinburgh confesses that when it came to making alterations to the garden at Sandringham he ‘left well alone’. However, he did plant an avenue of copper beeches leading up to the Norwich Gates to the north of the house and created a vista to the woods to the west of the Visitor Centre.

  At the end of July the traditional Flower Show, first inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, is held at Sandringham, complete with show gardens and floral displays. The Queen Mother was a regular attendee and it is now under the patronage of The Queen and The Prince of Wales.

  I have been lucky enough to be a house guest of The Prince of Wales at Sandringham during Flower Show week, and can only say that the hospitality and company are second to none. The Prince of Wales is an attentive host who works harder at his despatch boxes than most people realize, and the Flower Show itself has a charm equalled by few others. I love Sandringham for its friendliness and its country-house atmosphere – probably as much as King George V.

  The Palace of Holyroodhouse, 1845

  ‘Holyrood is a house of many memories. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chamber.’

  Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878

  IT IS SOMEHOW fitting that the Palace of Holyroodhouse lies at the end of the steep slope known as the ‘Royal Mile’, which climbs up to Edinburgh Castle. To the Scots it is The Queen’s official house, and its regal roots go back to the twelfth century, since within its grounds are the substantial remains of an abbey originally founded by King David I of Scotland in 1128. The Augustinian community of Canons Regular – priests living together in an open community – flourished and in due course guest lodgings were built for the use of the sovereign as its location in parkland, secluded from the public gaze unlike the exposed castle, made it a favourite lodging for successive Kings.

  The lodgings gradually grew in importance and size, and were rebuilt as a new Gothic palace by James IV, who ruled Scotland for 25 years from 1488, for his new bride, Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, King of England. They were married in the abbey church in 1503. In 1512 he added a building to contain his new menagerie of exotic animals – most royal gardens, it seems, began their lives as the precursors of zoos.

  Mary, Queen of Scots

  The earliest buildings to survive date from the late 1520s, when the palace was again remodelled, this time for James V, who had become King of Scots in 1513. Some 20 years later the palace was ransacked – the lead stripped from the roof, bells removed and the treasures plundered – along with much of the town by The Earl of Hertford when Henry VIII attempted to coerce the Scots into agreeing a marriage between his son Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. The period of conflict is known now as the Rough Wooing, a rather colourful description coined by Sir Walter Scott.

  James V’s daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, married not Edward VI of England but Francis, the Dauphin of France, as her first husband. Not long after he had succeeded as King Francis II he died, in December 1560, and Mary moved to Holyrood Palace (as the Palace of Holyroodhouse is still often called) eight months later. Her marriages to her second and third husbands – her first cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, in 1565 and The Earl of Bothwell in 1567 – took place at the palace, the first in the chapel and the second in the Great Hall.

  Top: Holyroodhouse, 1860

  Above: Holyroodhouse Palace Chapel

  It is thought that her close relationship with her Italian private secretary and ‘decipherer’, David Rizzio, and rumours of an affair with him, caused Darnley to be consumed with jealousy. In March 1566, he and Lord Ruthven and a posse of supporters found Mary and Rizzio with a group of five others at dinner in a private room off her bedchamber at the palace. Seven months pregnant with the future James VI of Scotland and James I of England, Mary attempted to shield Rizzio, but he was dragged screaming to the stairway outside. In a frenzied attack he was stabbed 56 times before his lifeless body was thrown down the staircase. A brass plaque now marks the spot where the body was left after the murder.

  Darnley himself died in an explosion in February 1567 and Mary married Bothwell, who was thought to have been responsible for Darnley’s death. The story is a salutary reminder that the lives of previous monarchs put those of our present-day Kings and Queens into a rather conservative perspective.

  David Rizzio and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1754

  Mary’s subsequent imprisonment and long exile in England meant that she never saw her son James again after he was ten months old. James became King of Scotland at the age of 13 months, after Mary was forced to abdicate in his favour. He was crowned not at Holyrood but at Stirling in 1567. In 1570 the choir and transepts of the old abbey at Holyrood, neglected since the looting and destruction of the Reformation and now ruinous, were demolished, leaving only the nave standing as the local parish church.

  James I of England and VI of Scotland

  Nine years later, in 1579, the 13-year-old James took up residence at Holyrood. In 1590 his consort, Anne of Denmark, was crowned in the nave of the old abbey church, marking what was probably the apogee of court life at Holyrood, with a Royal Household of some 600 thronging the palace. When James became James I of England 13 years later in 1603, the court moved with him and the old palace, no longer a seat of power and prestige, went into a long period of decline.

  Substantial renovations took place before the Scottish coronation of James’s son, Charles I, 30 years later in 1633, and the nave, the last remaining part of the abbey church, was again restored. Charles journeyed north with a large entourage that included 150 English nobles; 1000 horses pulled 200 carts loaded with the royal baggage including Henry VIII’s fabled silver-gilt 280-piece dinner service. But tragedy struck. All was lost when a boat, carrying the royal baggage on The King’s progress round Scotland following his coronation, overturned in a squall. It was blamed on witchcraft so several known witches were rounded up and subsequently died in prison.

  For the occasion of the coronation, Edinburgh was en fête. Fountains flowed with red wine and portraits of The King hung in the Royal Mile as he made his way from the castle to the Pal
ace of Holyroodhouse for his coronation. In 1646 Charles made James, 1st Duke of Hamilton, Hereditary Keeper of Holyroodhouse. The position remains in the family, for today the Keeper is Alexander, 16th Duke of Hamilton.

  Holyroodhouse in 1753

  After Charles I’s execution, Commonwealth soldiers in 1650 caused a fire in the eastern range of the palace. What had not been burnt, as so often with royal buildings, was used as a barracks, but in the 1670s, after the Restoration of the monarchy, the gentleman-architect Sir William Bruce rebuilt the palace for Charles II. One of the first to introduce the new Palladian style of architecture to Scotland, Bruce skilfully married the old parts of the building with new additions to create a symmetrical facade. The old sixteenth-century tower built by James IV of Scotland almost 200 years earlier was balanced with a matching tower. All was complete by 1679, in the form we see today, in time for the arrival of The Duke of Albany – the Scottish title given to The King’s younger brother. He was Duke of York in England, and became James VII of Scotland and James II of England in 1685. He remained in Scotland for several years, returning to England once the political climate had swung once more in his favour.