by Uglow, Jenny
8 Whitehall
Ill built and nothing but a heap of houses, erected at divers times and of divers models.
SAMUEL SORBIÈRE, Visit to England, 1663
WHEN CHARLES ARRIVED, he planned to transform the dilapidated palace at Whitehall into a royal residence that would rival the Louvre and the Escorial. But Whitehall defeated him. This palace with its shadowy corridors and hidden stairs was almost a character in his story, shaping his life.
Driving from the City, down the Strand, past the new square of Covent Garden and the streets stretching up to Holborn and St Giles, coaches swooped around the corner at Charing Cross, straight into the long paved space that led to the jumble of Whitehall. On the northern side a long wall, built by Cromwell, hid the trees of the park and the sheds the Protector had built for his troops, which now housed the Royal Horse Guards. On the river side, behind a row of Elizabethan buildings, the spaces of Scotland Yard rambled down to the wharves, a clutter of timber yards and cider-press houses, heaps of coal and timber, bricks and tiles. Here lay the offices of the Lord Steward’s department and the busy Office of Works.
Next came the Great Gate, giving a glimpse into the courtyard behind, and then the Banqueting House where Charles I had met his fate. Past this, the road squeezed beneath the Holbein Gateway. Designed by Hans Holbein for Henry VIII, the gate arched over passers-by like a misplaced Tudor castle, crowned with red-brick turrets. Then the paved way narrowed until it ducked through a second gate. This short stretch was King Street, or ‘The Street’, the main highway through the maze of Whitehall. Carts clattered over the cobbles, and the gables of inns hung over the way. A web of alleys led off into small courts and gardens – Gardiner’s Court, Cherry Tree Court, Bowman’s Lane – and the grander lodgings of courtiers squeezed next to ordinary houses.
Whitehall was less a palace than a sprawl of separate buildings, a royal village, with tiled roofs and thatched roofs, paving and cobbles, and as many rats as the tenements nearby. A narrow public right of way snaked behind the Banqueting House, across the Great Court and between the palace buildings to the river, where boatmen waited for their fares at the wooden landing stage of Whitehall Stairs. Just upstream a long jetty with a gallery above, called a ‘bridge’, ran out into the Thames so that the royal family and their courtiers could enter their barges, whatever the tide. Standing on the bridge, gazing downriver, Charles could see the heavy, greenish waters of the Thames curving round the bend, sucking at the walls and watergates of the old mansions – Arundel House, Worcester House, Somerset House – flowing on until it rushed under the arches of London Bridge, hidden from view.
Whitehall stairs, looking upriver to Lambeth on the opposite bank, with the sloping public landing-stage and the covered royal ‘bridge’ beyond
The place was a mess, a mix of styles, from the elegant Renaissance Banqueting Hall to old timbered gables and Dutch-style hipped roofs. Over the years courtiers had built rooms and apartments, higgledy-piggledy, clustering like barnacles along the side of the long Privy Gallery that ran from the road to the river and filling up the corners of the squares. One of Charles’s first acts was to divide the buildings around the Cockpit, across King Street on the western side of Whitehall, known as ‘the Parkside’, into yet more lodgings. Albemarle was given the Cockpit itself and the buildings next to it, and Ormond the Tiltyard Gallery and neighbouring houses. When Wren commissioned the mathematician Ralph Greatorex to do a survey in 1670, he found that fifteen hundred rooms were available for courtiers, rented out to around a hundred different people.1
The royal apartments were a warren in themselves. Facing the river, they were traditionally reached by crossing the courtyard from the Great Gate and then progressing through rooms that marked increasing stages of intimacy, from Great Chamber to Presence Chamber, to Privy Chamber, and then to smaller rooms like the ‘Lords’ Chamber and Vane room (where James I had installed a weather vane on the roof, linked to a system that showed the wind direction from inside). Then the route turned right into the King’s Bedchamber – this was the most private space, but even so it was often crowded. The habit had grown up, however, of reaching the Bedchamber by taking a shortcut from the stairs into St James’s Park, and walking down the long, covered Privy Gallery that stretched across from the Holbein Gate. So the Bedchamber was under attack, as it were, from both sides.
In France, the royal bedchamber was a key space in court life, even a place to receive ambassadors, and in 1660 Charles raised the Whitehall Bedchamber to similar status. He had the room decorated to resemble that in the Louvre, with the bed with its crimson damask covers set in a special alcove, separated from the rest of the room by a gilded railing with two gates for access and framed with ‘two great draperyes with two flying boyes in them’.2 The panelling above the chimney had moulded columns, the floor copied French marquetry, the walls were draped with hangings. The artist John Michael Wright painted a grand allegorical scene for the ceiling, showing Astraea, daughter of Zeus and embodiment of justice, returning to earth to bring a new Golden Age – with Charles himself floating in the clouds, and cherubs supporting a flying oak tree.
George Vertue’s engraving of the 1670 plan of Whitehall
Next to the Bedchamber were four smaller rooms, including a dressing room and a cabinet or closet, the inner sanctum that no one could enter without permission, where Charles kept his favourite paintings. (John Evelyn took some of his relations to court in October 1660 to see these rarities, which included miniatures by Peter Oliver, copying Raphael, Titian and other masters, fine cameos and intaglios, tapestries and books.) But the official Bedchamber was clearly no comfortable place for actual sleep, or for any privacy at all, with diplomats and petitioners arriving while you were dressing, so in 1662 Charles created a new, private bedroom in the ‘Turk’s Gallery’ overlooking the river. This was a long, draughty walk from his other great luxury, his bathroom beneath the Privy Gallery, with its tiled floor and sunken bath, filled with water heated in a copper in a small room next door. He had this thoroughly overhauled in 1663, with new panelling, carving and curtains and a painting over the chimney, as well as a little palisade in the Privy Garden to stop people peering in. It even had hangings of crimson Genoa damask, and a small feather bed.3
WHITEHALL PALACE, apartments and state rooms: 1 Castlemaine 1660–3, 2 Sandwich, 3 Tennis Court, 4 Albemarle, 5 Monmouth, 6 Prince Rupert, 7 Duke of York, 8 King’s Bedchamber, 1663, 9 Volary Buildings, 1667, 10 Castlemaine, 1663–8, 11 King’s Bedchamber 1660–3, 12 Bathroom and Laboratory (below), 13 Council Chamber (above) 14 Vane Room, 15 Queen’s apartments, 16 Privy Chamber, 17 Presence Chamber, 18 Guard Chamber, 19 Great Hall, 20 Chapel, 21 New Gallery, 1669
From the cluster of royal rooms the Stone Gallery stretched towards Westminster, with another above, known as the ‘matted gallery’. At the far end of this, overlooking the river, lay the apartments of James, Duke of York, and opposite were those of Charles’s cousin Rupert, who had been honoured at the Restoration with a pension of £6,000 a year and lodgings in the palace. Rupert’s windows looked out onto the great space of the Privy Garden, which stretched up to the street. (The one person Charles did not find a London home for was Rupert’s mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia, who arrived in 1661. Instead she moved into the house belonging to Sir William Craven, who had been her loyal companion in the Hague for many years, and was secretly rumoured to be her husband.)
In every courtyard and gallery, in corners and up staircases, were smaller rooms, perfect for secret meetings. The architecture, as the historian Ronald Hutton has put it, ‘was admirably suited to Charles’s style of kingship, at once very open and very devious’.4 Nothing could be more different from Versailles.
Everything was shabby, having been neglected during the Commonwealth even though Cromwell had used the palace for his base. A hasty, but expensive, redecoration began before Charles set sail: by June the royal apartments had already soaked up £1,200 worth of refurbishments. But to begin wi
th – even though he planned to sweep it away – Charles loved its chaotic informality, and rarely spent a night away. It took him back to the world of his childhood and youth, although it was not the place of his birth – that had taken place a few minutes away at St James’s Palace, a quieter spot altogether, set among the green, leafy surroundings of the park. But as a boy, Charles had watched the players gathering for the masques under the painted ceiling of the Banqueting House. He had played in the Privy Garden and on the Bowling Green with his brothers and sisters, Mary, James, Elizabeth and Henry. Only Minette had not known Whitehall. Before the war these royal childhoods had been happy, with winters at St James’s and summers moving from one royal palace to another: Greenwich, Oatlands, Hampton Court. And when Van Dyck painted the children in 1637, Charles I had taken the great canvas to Whitehall and hung it above the table in his breakfast chamber.
In the dignified, ceremonial days of Charles I, access to Whitehall was carefully controlled. But his son opened the palace to all. Anyone could wander through the Great Gate, although porters stopped ‘those who pressed with rudeness or disorder, carried unfit weapons, divines not wearing their robes and those of inferior quality who came muffled, masqued or otherwise disguised’.5 And because people now often approached the palace from the park, Charles also built a grand outside staircase on that side.
In the early years he handed out keys like sweets: 150 double keys, for entry to the ordinary rooms, were cut by the royal locksmith in 1661, and at least ten treble keys, opening the state rooms and the King’s Bedchamber.6 Outside these inner sanctums, it was easy to stage casual meetings in the crowded corridors: well-connected members of London’s great companies hovered here, listening for news and cornering those who might forward their aims. Charles hoped that such easy access would make people of all views feel they might reach him, preventing conspiracies and hardening of discontent. By the end of 1661 however, it was clear that this was not the case, and he gradually grew more circumspect, rearranging the rooms and making it more difficult to reach him.
When he thought of redesigning Whitehall, Charles remembered the great buildings he had seen abroad, particularly the Louvre, a model of an urban riverside palace, regular in plan and formal in style. Almost straight away the architect John Webb, the nephew and former assistant of Inigo Jones, presented him with plans that involved demolishing all the old buildings except the Banqueting House. As his surveyor, Charles appointed Sir John Denham, well known as poet, playwright and gambler, and a busy courier for the exiled court in Paris, but hitherto no architect. Beneath him worked ranks of officials, from the comptroller to the master carpenter, down to mason, glazier and wood carver.
Every morning the officers met in Scotland Yard to decide on work for the day. The labourers had to turn up when the bell rang, and set to work, with half an hour for breakfast. Much of Whitehall was a perpetual building site, with ropes and bricks, scaffolding and tubs and half-built walls. Like all Charles’s offices the ‘King’s Works’ was always strapped for cash, and every year they ran over their budgets, both the ‘ordinary’ allowance, set at £10,000 in 1663 for regular maintenance, and the ‘extraordinary’ allowance for new building projects.7 Loans were raised against various tallies and taxes, but the cash arrived in ‘driblets’ and craftsmen and workmen were owed large sums, sometimes for years. Within a year, partly because of lack of money and partly because of the difficulty of moving all the courtiers from their various apartments, Charles abandoned his plans and set Webb to work instead on ideas for a new palace in Greenwich.8 The rambling corridors and galleries of Whitehall remained unredeemed. The walls were covered with tapestries and hangings but still the wind whistled round corners and made the candles splutter. When it rained, the yards were full of mud and puddles, and in stormy weather, when the tide was high, the Thames lapped into the cellars and flooded the kitchens.
When people spoke of ‘Whitehall’, they could mean the place or its inhabitants, ‘the court’: high-ranking servants of the crown, families of dukes and earls, whose rank entitled them to a place within royal circles, or the King’s own cronies, his companions in drinking and womanising, at the races and the theatre. But the court was also a great unwieldy structure of officials and servants, so elaborate that no one was very sure how it worked. Technically, it was divided between the ‘Chamber’ (the household ‘above stairs’) and the ‘Household’. The Chamber was under the sway of the Lord Chamberlain, Edward Montagu, Lord Manchester, assisted by the vice-chamberlain, Sir George Carteret, who had played host to Charles in the early years of exile in the Channel Islands. Their staff was huge, almost nine hundred people, and they were responsible for ceremonial and security, and for all the state rooms – the Banqueting Hall, Great Hall, Presence Chamber and Privy Chamber, and the Chapel Royal.
The Household, meanwhile, dealt with the supply of services under Ormond, as Lord Steward. (Within it, there was also the separate department of the Bedchamber, the intimate servants of the king, which operated independently.) The Household was a profitable place for sharp financial spirits like Stephen Fox, who had looked after Charles’s money in exile and was appointed clerk comptroller in 1660, in charge of the daily household expenses. Fox had joined the court twenty years ago when he was thirteen, and though he was only a servant, he had often played with Charles and James who were about the same age. In exile he had risen from page-boy to a Gentleman of Horse to Charles, taking over the accounts for the stables and organising the constant travel, (and lending money for his gambling debts). In 1661 he was given an additional role, as paymaster to the King’s Guards, eventually solving the problem of their erratic pay by undertaking the loans himself so that they would be paid regularly, taking a shilling in the pound commission, which eventually made him very rich indeed.9
Beneath the high officials and organisers like Fox, whom Charles valued because he was easy-going and sweet-natured as well as efficient, the Household as a working institution encompassed about five hundred people. It was essential, Charles thought at first, to keep up the lavishly appointed life suitable to a king, as grand as his cousin, Louis XIV. And while he ridiculed the elaborate formality of the Spanish court, where, as he put it, the king ‘doth nothing but under some ridiculous form or other; and will not piss but another must hold the chamber-pot’,10 he always travelled with an elaborate entourage. When Henrietta Maria and Minette visited England at the end of 1660, Charles dashed off a note asking Clarendon if he had time to visit Minette at Tunbridge Wells before parliament adjourned. The Chancellor reckoned he could: ‘I suppose you will goe with a light Trayne?’
‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’
‘Yes,’ scoffed Hyde, ‘you will not go without 40 or 50 horse!’
‘I counte that part of my night bag,’ replied Charles.11
Many Household posts were sought for status, and paid for with hard cash. This was quite accepted and indeed it was rare not to pay. Fox pocketed a hefty sum from selling posts, and the lists of places sold by Ormond as Lord Steward show that he raked in well over £15,000.12 Among the petitions which piled high, crinkling at the edges as the secretaries shuffled demands, were requests for positions with titles like something out of Arthurian romance: Yeoman of the Wood-yard, Elder Yeoman of the Slaughterhouse; Yeoman of the Confectionery, Brusher of the Robes, Comptroller of Tents and Revels. Sons and grandsons followed their forebears in the royal service as messengers, trumpeters, librarians, picture dealers, barge masters and watermen. Daughters and granddaughters also claimed their place on the grounds of loyalty to the royal cause. Joan Collins applied ‘for the place of Turn-Broach in the Royal Kitchen, having lost a leg at the battle of Edgehill’, while Bridget Rumney asked to be restored ‘to the office of providing Flowers and Sweet Herbs for the Court, granted by the late King to herself and her late mother, who, with her own two sons, was slain at the battle of Naseby’.13 A certificate notes that she was appointed ‘Garnisher & Trimmer of the chapel, pre
sence & privy lodgings’.
The cost of paying, feeding and housing such a staff was huge. Traditionally the whole court ate at about eighty communal ‘tables’ at the crown’s expense. These were looked after by the Board of Greencloth who supervised about twenty departments, like the Kitchen Larder, Buttery and Pantry, and also oversaw ‘Purveyance’, the royal right to buy supplies at cost.14 From time to time the amount of tables had been labelled an anachronistic magnificence, but Charles I had cast aside all attempts to restrict it. In 1660 all the court tables were fully revived, although the practice of purveyance was stopped, with the results that costs soared. Not that the food was good – courtiers familiar with the cuisine of France and the banquets of Italy lamented that English cooking was very dull, but it would be another century before sauces and ragouts transformed the much-vaunted ‘English plain fare’. The royal chef Robert May, now in his early seventies, published his own cook-book praising national cookery, looking back nostalgically to the grand feasts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, with sides of beef and elaborate tarts and custards.15 The only real changes were outside the court proper: the exotic fruits grown in the new Dutch glasshouses; the private suppers and French taverns where the meal was presented à la française with a whole array of dishes arriving at once; the coffee and chocolate in the coffee-houses and soon the arrival of tea.
Tradespeople also lined up for posts or presented ancient bills from the previous reign: clock-and watchmakers, printers, fishmongers, saddlers, tailors, upholsterers. Thomas Hooper applied to be ‘combmaker to his majesty, as he has been to the last two late Kings’, while Dr Robert Morison became botanical physician and chief herbalist, caring for the Privy Garden and the physic garden at St James’s. His herbal medicines shared space with the pots and leeches of four other physicians, and a royal chirurgeon, or surgeon, as well as two apothecaries.