The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The Prince of Wales has two Aston Martins for his own personal use – one of which the Queen gave him as a twenty-first birthday present – and sometimes drives a Bentley, which is not his. It is heavily armoured and belongs to the police and when he drives it, it is at their insistence when they think security demands it. The cars he uses for engagements are leased, as are most of the Queen’s fleet. Even the helicopter that the Royal Family use is now leased. They used to fly in two big, bright-red, noisy Wessex helicopters, which belonged to the Queen’s Flight, something Peat disbanded in the interests of cost cutting. The Queen hated the Wessex, and helicopters are still not her favourite means of travel, but they now have just one, a little maroon six-seater Sikorsky (based at Blackbushe Airport) which is quieter and faster but smaller, with very little luggage space, and if it is fully laden is too heavy to take off from small fields. Hewlett is keen to encourage the Queen to make more use of the helicopter, but she is much happier in a car.

  The Queen’s official car is a specially adapted Bentley, a gift from the company for her Golden Jubilee in 2002; the oldest car in the fleet (of eight state limousines) is a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV built in 1948 – 5.76-litre with a straight-eight engine and a Mulliner body (for vintage Rolls-Royce lovers). There’s also a Phantom VI which she was given in 1978 for her Silver Jubilee and a 1987 Phantom VI. Privately the Queen drives a Daimler Jaguar, and in the country a Vauxhall estate. The Duke of Edinburgh has a Land Rover Discovery and when he’s in London gets about in his own black Metrocab, which looks like any other taxi on the road.

  Cars, curiously, are not in the director of Royal Travel’s brief; they belong in the Royal Mews along with thirty-two or so carriage horses and a collection of state coaches under the control of the Crown Equerry. His duties were once performed by the Secretary to the Master of the Horse, and the post has traditionally been held by experienced horsemen. Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller, who is president of every horse society you can think of, was Crown Equerry for twenty-six years – from 1961 to 1987 – and played a big part in the Royal Family’s horse activities and was much loved by the Queen. He was a keen huntsman and polo player and very much in the picture when Charles and Anne were in their teens and beginning to hunt, play polo and, in Anne’s case, to show an interest in three-day eventing. He was still in place when Prince Philip switched from polo to carriage driving. Miller retired at the age of sixty-eight and, now in his nineties, is still an Extra Equerry to the Queen; it was he who flew to California in 1989 on the Queen’s instructions to investigate a horse trainer called Monty Roberts (about whom, more later). Colonel Miller’s successor, Lieutenant Colonel Seymour Gilbart-Denham, is equally at home in the Mews. Now in his midsixties, he a carriage driver like the Duke, and, after a career in the Life Guards and the Cavalry, is suitably horsy for the post. Not surprising, then, that Michael Peat, when making his recommendations about bringing travel back within the household, decided that trains, planes and helicopters should go into a separate department and be run by someone with fixed-wing flying experience.

  So Hewlett comes up with the options for getting from A to B, printed on a form with the costs and justification for the journey, which he passes on to Paul Havill at the Coordination and Research Unit. Havill looks at them from the public servant’s point of view – wearing his taxpayer’s hat, he says – and if he is happy with it all, the form goes to the Queen; she personally authorizes every journey made by a member of the family. If the cost is above a certain threshold, however, before the Queen sees it it has to be approved by the director of finance and if it is a serious expense, such as a foreign tour, it has be passed first by the Keeper of the Privy Purse.

  ‘A member of the Royal Family can’t say “I fancy doing that trip by helicopter”,’ says Havill. ‘There are tough criteria to be met. I often turn things down or say I need more information, fill in the form properly. We are more open than government or anyone else. Every single journey is in the public domain so it has to stand up. You can only have a helicopter or plane if you’ve got enough engagements or you’ve got to come back for an evening engagement; not just because it’s easier to fly. There are rules.’

  Every journey costing £500 or more is indeed in the public domain – which member of the family made it, where they went, why and how much it cost. Overall, the bill for helicopters in 2003–04 was £2,270,000; for fixed-wing air travel, £534,000; and for use of the royal train and other rail journeys, £782,000. The Palace publishes Annual Reports – also available on the internet – on every area of its activity and expenditure, and they make fascinating reading. Everything is there, from Sir Robin Janvrin’s salary (£151,131 in 2003–04) to the cost of food (£432,000), garden parties (£514,000), housekeeping (£279,000), stationery (£152,000) and legal advice (£117,000). ‘We even publish how many glasses were broken during a reception,’ says Havill. ‘I don’t know any other organization that is so transparent.’

  Royal Travel was one of several Palace departments that had been farmed out to government over the years and until Peat’s report, which recommended radical cost cutting and bringing it back under Palace control, Travel had been shared between the Department of Transport, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This was partly to mask the amount of money the Palace was spending by hiding it in governmental departments. It is still paid for by the Department of Transport as Grant-in-Aid but since April 1997 it has been back within the household and a series of leasing deals negotiated. The Sikorsky is halfway through a ten-year lease and if they need extra capacity they charter helicopters. The fixed-wing aircraft that the family uses belong to 32 Squadron of the RAF, for which the household pays just over £2000 an hour, about half what it would have to pay commercially. And if any members of the family use an aircraft for private business they pay for it at the commercial rate.

  32 Squadron has two BAe 146s, which can carry twenty-one people but have a flying range of only 1500 miles; they are very useful for getting in and out of small landing strips, but alas there are only two of them and although the royal household has first call, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary also use them. Actually, so too do the RAF. The aircraft’s primary role is moving operational commanders around theatres of war and if they are needed in a war zone – as they were in Iraq in 2003 – the Armed Forces have very first call on them.

  The other planes belonging to 32 Squadron to which the household has claim include six HS 125s, which have a range of 2000 miles but only carry seven passengers, and have no hold, and the same rules of precedence apply. Every other plane the family flies in these days – ranging from a huge 777 to a small Lear Jet – is chartered. The big ones, like the 777 chartered for the Queen’s trip to Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand a few years ago, come from British Airways who put in a couple of divan beds for the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, knowing that two legs of the journey were over twelve hours long. The real cost of that was £661,300, but the governments of New Zealand and Australia contributed, which reduced it to £304,667. Since then the Palace has repeatedly taken its business back to British Airways. (Virgin was invited to tender but didn’t respond.) Tim Hewlett says British Airways give them such good service that if it wasn’t for the accountants he wouldn’t bother to tender. He charters the smaller planes – such as the Lear Jet that he organized to take Prince Harry and his friends from Cape Town to Botswana during his gap year – through a broker. There were suggestions he might travel on Air Botswana but, knowing its chequered history, Hewlett advised chartering a Lear. ‘The Prince of Wales had to put his hand in his pocket to pay for it,’ he said, ‘but it was the only sensible way to go.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Beyond the Dreams of Avarice

  The Queen is not hard up by any stretch of the imagination but she’s not the richest woman in the world either – despite what you might read in the magazines that monitor and publish such things. The mistake they make is to assume that she owns the v
ast and priceless collection of art that furnishes Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and all the other royal residences. The Royal Collection was put together by generations of monarchs over the centuries and belongs to the Queen in title, but is no more part of her personal wealth than Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. The Royal Collection, as it is officially known, is held in trust for the nation. And the Royal Collection was another department that was radically restructured after Peat’s 1383-page report.

  The Royal Collection had previously been part of the Lord Chamberlain’s huge and unwieldy empire but in 1987 it became a department in its own right, and was the first and only department within the royal household to be entirely and independently self-financing. At Michael Peat’s recommendation, a subsidiary, called Royal Collection Enterprises, was set up which was effectively the trading arm of the business; it became responsible for managing public access to the palaces and galleries, and the money it earned from ticket sales and other retail activity – legally the Queen’s money – was ploughed into the Royal Collection to pay for restoration, conservation and the costs involved in maintaining and displaying the treasures. But this was at a time when the Queen was paying no tax on her income. When that changed and she started paying tax in 1993, Peat set up the Royal Collection Trust, a charitable trust, under the chairmanship of the Prince of Wales, to administer the entire business and prevent 40 per cent of the money earned by Royal Collection Enterprises going to the taxman. This brought it into line with most galleries and historic houses that for tax purposes are run by charitable trusts.

  The current director of Royal Collections, and also Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art, is Sir Hugh Roberts, a friendly man who is as passionate as he is knowledgeable about his empire. From a modest office in St James’s Palace he looks after one of the largest and most valuable art collections in the world. It runs to many hundreds of thousands of objets, from very well-known paintings by artists such as Van Dyck, Canaletto, Rembrandt, and Tintoretto to more pedestrian items like the chairs in his office. The vast majority in all the palaces – a total of thirteen residences, including those that are unoccupied, such as Hampton Court and Osborne House – belongs to the Collection and much of it goes out on loan to exhibitions and museums all over the world.

  The Queen is not the first monarch to lend treasures from the Royal Collection; Queen Victoria was also a great lender. It is part of the tradition of the Collection that it be made accessible through loans – it is not unusual even for pieces to be lent from the Queen’s private rooms – but what is new to this monarch’s reign is the extent to which it has become accessible to the public.

  The whole thing began with Prince Philip’s suggestion more than forty years ago that the old private chapel at Buckingham Palace – bombed and destroyed during the Second World War – should be turned into a public gallery. This opened in 1962 and by the time it closed for refurbishment in 1999 nearly five million people had passed through its doors. Three years later, in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, a brand-new state-of-the-art gallery designed by John Simpson opened, with an extension that provided three and a half times the original space.

  The earliest pieces in the Collection date from the reign of Henry VIII. Charles I was an avid collector. He bought Dürers and Titians, Rubenses and Van Dycks, miniatures, sculpture, silver, jewellery, furniture and tapestries, but his treasures were sold off after his execution and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. Although some of it was returned or bought back after the Restoration eleven years later, much was permanently lost, and some of its greatest masterpieces now belong in French, Spanish and Austrian collections. Like his father, Charles II was also a keen collector; he started the collection of Old Masters drawings by acquiring Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and his court, and six hundred drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and brought French and Huguenot craftsmen to England. William and Mary brought in more Huguenot artists, including cabinetmakers; Queen Mary collected oriental porcelain and Delft vases, while William III bought clocks and barometers. George III, whose sixty-year reign saw great advances in the arts, science and manufacturing, bought Buckingham House, as the Palace was then called, in 1762 for his young bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg, and commissioned a huge quantity of decorative arts to furnish it. He also bought a celebrated collection of paintings and drawings, books, manuscripts, medals and gems that had been put together by the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, among which was the finest group of Canalettos then in existence.

  But the greatest collector in modern history was George IV. He had a voracious appetite for art, buying porcelain, jewellery, books, manuscripts, furniture, objets d’art, as well as Dutch, French and religious art, Rembrandts and Rubenses. He also acquired sculpture: French bronze statuettes, life-sized busts and giant Roman marble statues. He commissioned contemporary English artists such as George Stubbs, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough; and, inadvertently, he converted Buckingham House from a private royal residence into a magnificent royal palace. He had intended to turn it into a pied-à-terre for himself and commissioned John Nash for the purpose. Nash had built the Royal Pavilion in Brighton for him while he was Prince of Wales, as well as Carlton House and Royal Lodge. His plans for Buckingham House were so lavish, however, that George decided when they were finished that it should become the ceremonial centre of his court. And although he didn’t live to see it completed, between them they had created the most magnificent palace, and the state rooms that visitors see today, as well as the Grand Staircase, the marble, the chandeliers and the inlaid floors, are virtually unchanged since 1830.

  William IV was good for porcelain and gilt banqueting plate; it was also he who established the Royal Library in its present form at Windsor Castle. Queen Victoria was knowledgeable and brought some Landseers into the Collection, but after her marriage Prince Albert became the prime mover in terms of what was acquired and how art was subsequently promoted during her sixty-three years on the throne. After his death in 1861, she lost interest, but as ruler of a vast empire as well as sovereign of the most powerful country in the world, she was on the receiving end of a never-ending stream of gifts from foreign rulers. This is how the Collection came by the famous Koh-i-noor diamond as well as countless other precious stones, furniture, tapestries, metalwork, porcelain, curiosities and mementoes.

  Edward VII wasn’t particularly interested in art, but through his wife, the Danish Princess, Alexandra, he did add to what was to become the finest collection of Fabergé in the world. Edward’s tours abroad as Prince of Wales on behalf of his mother, the Queen-Empress, resulted in more wonderful gifts including the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found, which was presented to him by the Government of the Transvaal on his sixty-second birthday.

  George V wasn’t interested, but Queen Mary was the complete enthusiast. She was like a magpie, collecting everything that caught her eye; she had dozens of books on English furniture and loved going round sale rooms, fascinated by anything that had a royal provenance. She even commissioned books about the Collection. One of Prince Charles’s earliest memories was being taken by his nannies to have tea with Queen Mary, his great-grandmother, at Marlborough House and playing with priceless pieces of jade, crystal and silver that she had lovingly gathered from all over the world. Her collection was normally housed in the safety of splendid display cabinets. They had been strictly out of bounds to her children and grandchildren, but her first great-grandson was indulged. The Queen Mother took an interest in the Collection too; she enjoyed the company of artists and invited people like Augustus John and John Piper to Windsor and Buckingham Palace respectively, and commissioned paintings from them, but, overall, the volume of additions in the twentieth century pales in comparison with the art that was bought in the past. And the present Queen is no great collector.

  ‘The way the collection has been formed has been a matter of personal taste,’ explains Sir Hugh Roberts, ‘which is what makes it such a pec
uliar collection.’

  It doesn’t set out to be the national collection; it has extraordinary gaps: there are six hundred Leonardos, for example, and not a single drawing by Rembrandt. It’s hardly representative of Western art; it’s very much a personal collection with the personalities shining through. Some monarchs have been terrifically keen, others not. This Queen has added some interesting things. Part of my job is to inform her of what is available or coming up on the art market, and she’s always interested and occasionally goes for things. Last year she bought a porcelain service made to celebrate the recovery of George III in 1789. It had gone to someone else in the eighteenth century. She’s not like George IV, who thought the day wasted if he hadn’t bought several works of art, but she has a fantastic memory about things in the Collection and she is interested.

  She is not, however, a great enthusiast and modern art by and large leaves her cold. The most striking modern addition is a portrait by Lucian Freud but that was not a purchase; it was a gift from the artist. She is said to have given Freud no fewer than seventy-six sittings – seventy-two more than most artists get – but she is typically noncommittal about whether or not she likes the portrait. However, Freud presented it as a gift for her Golden Jubilee and it is already worth a fortune, and she was delighted to have it for the Collection and for the opening exhibition of the new gallery.

  Sir Hugh is responsible for everything pertaining to the Collection, and a large part of the job is overseeing the cleaning, conserving and repairing of the pieces – a task not unlike the painting of the Forth Railway Bridge. As well as the London gallery he runs the new Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, which also opened in Jubilee Year. The Palace has been open to the public for the last hundred years – and is among the most visited tourist attractions in Scotland – but there had never been a specific gallery space showing the art in modern conditions. And there had never been anywhere to sit down and have a cup of tea afterwards, either inside or outside the Palace … until now. The Queen has gone into the catering business. ‘Not specifically what the Royal Collections is about,’ says Sir Hugh, ‘but that part of Edinburgh is a gastronomic black hole and we are always looking at ways of improving visitor services – and of course increasing the amount people spend.’ There’s a café in the Farm Shop at Windsor, but this is the first in an occupied residence. ‘It was the Queen’s decision. Every other gallery now provides somewhere, and she said “Well, there isn’t anywhere for them to go here, is there? We’d better do it ourselves.”’