The Prince Regent, later George IV
When his father died in 1820 and the first public proclamation of the new King was made on the steps of Carlton House, the new King George IV began immediately to foster his architectural ambitions. The ‘disgraceful littleness’ of the royal palaces in London had been much commented on. There was nowhere suitable to house visiting royalty and other important guests, particularly after a fire in 1804 had destroyed a large part of St James’s Palace. In Tour of a Foreigner in England, published in 1825, the author wrote:
‘Though the royal or government palaces are among the most remarkable in London, they serve to show how little the dignity of the sovereign is respected in England in comparison with other countries of Europe. To say nothing of St James’s Palace (which the present sovereign has not thought fit for his residence) there are in Paris many hotels preferable to Carlton House.’
Mindful of these slights and the need for the British monarch to have a palace commensurate with his status, George IV first tried to rebuild Carlton House and Nash duly produced plans for a vast palace in both Gothic and Classical styles. A wary Treasury, knowing ‘there appeared to be no limit to his desires, nor any restraint to his profusion’, as one venomous biographer said of The King, refused the finance so St James’s Palace was accordingly upgraded to provide more state rooms for entertaining in the grand manner.
The interior of Carlton House, early 1800s
Before work had been completed The King had been diverted by the prospect of redeveloping The Queen’s House. When he was informed that £150,000 (approx. £10.5 million today) over three years was ‘the utmost sum’ that could be found by Parliament from public funds, George, true to form, retorted that this was ‘wholly inadequate’ and that ‘it will be safer to reckon on £450,000 [approx. £31.5 million today]’. In 1821 the new King appointed Nash as the architect for Buckingham House and building began a few years later. It was Nash who proposed the demolition of Carlton House and the redevelopment of the site and reuse of its fabulous contents to help defray the costs of the new works, which were nonetheless to be subject to Treasury scrutiny.
Because of the paucity of funding Nash was required to remodel and enlarge the existing house rather than start afresh, although the scope and ambition – and cost – of the new works increased significantly as time went on. Originally a brick-built house with colonnaded quadrants linking modest, matching pavilions joined by simple iron railings, Nash demolished the old pavilions and constructed wings in their place. The right hand, or north wing, housed the royal apartments and the one opposite was devoted to the household staff. Closing off the fourth side and enclosing the courtyard was the Marble Arch. In the centre, the hall of the old house remained, long galleries were built behind it, one above the other, and a new garden range was added beyond them. A new scheme to enrich the exterior with an extensive range of sculpture to commemorate the victories over Napoleon. Little by little, from what had begun as a grand gentleman’s residence, The King, his architect and a band of artistic advisers had created a state palace, a monument to the glory of Britain and its monarchy.
Carlton House, 1809
The complexity of the exterior elevations was more than matched by the opulence of the interiors, commissioned from the leading craftsmen of the day. Moulded plaster, scagliola, marble in abundance, gilt bronze, mahogany as well as a variety of other decorative hardwoods, mirror-glass, opulent draperies in damask and other fine stuffs and gold leaf by the yard gleamed in gorgeous profusion. But all that was to be in the future. At the time of the disgrace of Nash and the death of The King in 1830 the works, although well advanced, were still not finished.
The ailing George IV died in January 1830 and immediately, with his patron and protector removed, Nash’s enemies pounced, as The Duke of Wellington remarked with relish: ‘to make a hash of Nash’. Nash was summarily dismissed from his contract and also from his position as architect to the Board of Works.
William IV
George IV’s brother, The Duke of Clarence, succeeded him as William IV. The new King had spent a great deal of time in the navy, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. He had been a great friend of Admiral Nelson under whom he had served, but speaking against the war with Napoleon in the House of Lords cost him any further command, despite his eventual titular rank of Lord High Admiral. He was also celebrated for his 20-year sojourn with the Irish actress Dorothea Jordan.
Although he had been born at Buckingham House, William IV, a rather ascetic individual, derided his brother’s building mania and refused to move into the new palace, remaining at Clarence House (which had also been built by John Nash between 1825 and 1827), using St James’s Palace for state occasions. Nonetheless the building works at the new palace continued, in a somewhat plainer style, under the new architect, Edward Blore. Twice William tried to rid himself of the building, once proposing it as an army barracks and secondly as the new Houses of Parliament after the disastrous fire of 1834. It was not easily adapted to a barracks and Parliament preferred the historic links to its traditional location. And so Buckingham Palace remained empty, a building site for most of William’s short reign. After not quite seven years as King, William died at Windsor Castle, where he was buried. He was succeeded by his niece, until that point Princess Victoria of Kent, and the palace became at once the location for the extravagant presentation of monarchical display, for which it had been intended.
A map of Buckingham Palace and the surrounding area, 1869
The race to provide an heir
The very existence of Queen Victoria was a direct result of the potential constitutional crisis precipitated by the death of Princess Charlotte, the sole child of The Prince Regent, in childbirth in 1817, three years before the Regent assumed the throne as George IV. There were no other legitimate heirs of her grandfather, George III, in the second generation now extant and so the spotlight of national expectation was turned on his numerous children, and an unseemly race to produce an heir began. The runners in this race to procreate were not necessarily particularly sound in wind and limb, nor young.
Consider the starters: Charlotte’s father, The Prince Regent, despised his wife Caroline of Brunswick, who was approaching 50, therefore both were highly unlikely to produce further children. So he was out of the race to father a future monarch.
The next in line, Frederick, Duke of York, had married Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia some 26 years before. They had had no children and she now lived apart from her husband in Weybridge and had turned 50, so he was out of the race.
Next up was William, Duke of Clarence, who in due course, following the deaths of his two older brothers, George IV and The Duke of York, would succeed to the Crown at the age of 64 as William IV. William was certainly fecund: he had produced ten FitzClarence children from his 20-year liaison with the Irish actress Mrs Jordan. After an abortive search for a wife he finally married 25-year-old Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg Meiningen in July 1818. Despite being half his age they were married happily for nearly 20 years. She accepted the numerous illegitimate FitzClarences and helped him sort out his straightened financial situation. But alas five pregnancies produced two short-lived daughters and three miscarriages. So William was, in effect, retired from the race.
The next potential runner was The Princess Royal, Charlotte, who had married the obese Frederick III, Duke of Wurttemberg, some 20 years before. They had only one stillborn daughter the year after their marriage, and she was now in her fifties. So she could be ruled out.
The fifth of the 12 surviving siblings was Edward, Duke of Kent. At one time Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America he had been for a year Governor of Gibraltar, where he had put down a mutiny with some brutality, before settling in Hampton Court Park. For many years he lived openly with his mistress, Julie de Saint-Laurent, but she was dispensed with when he married, at the age of 50, the 31-year-old Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, in May 1818. She had
been married before to the late Prince of Leiningen, by whom she had two living children, so all looked set fair. A year after their marriage – on 24 May 1819 – they produced their only child, a daughter named Alexandrina Victoria, known as she was growing up as Drina. Some of George III’s younger children did manage to have progeny who lived to reach their majority, but Drina became the rightful heir of her generation. Drina is better known as Victoria, Queen of England.
Princess Alexandrina Victoria, with her beloved dog Dash, 1833
A ball at Buckingham Palace, 1856
Victoria’s grand state palace
Queen Victoria, unlike her ‘Uncle King’, William IV, who never lived there, embraced Buckingham Palace, moving in from her childhood home, Kensington Palace, in July 1837, two weeks after her proclamation. Within a very short time after she had taken possession of the unfinished new palace, what had been a vastly expensive white elephant had come into its own, a centre of court life and ceremonial, alive with dances and concerts. The young Victoria loved music, a good party and, most of all, to dance. At her behest it became known as Buckingham Palace, after the builder of the original house, parts of which, now altered out of all recognition, were buried deep within the new palace. To mark her arrival she gave a dinner party on her first night, followed by countless receptions, although many state functions were still held at St James’s.
In June 1838 Victoria left Buckingham Palace for her coronation in Westminster Abbey, returning, as any teenager might, to greet first her pet King Charles spaniel, Dash, and give him a bath before assuming once more her new royal persona and entertaining 100 guests for a coronation dinner followed by fireworks. In the previous month, as part of a series of entertainments leading up to her coronation, she had held the first state ball, dancing until four o’clock in the morning, no doubt including the waltz especially composed by Johann Strauss the Elder in her honour (The Times reported that this ‘new set of waltzes …were much admired by Her Majesty’).
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in fancy dress, 1851
Successfully set up by her Uncle Leopold, less than two years later she married Prince Albert in the chapel at St James’s Palace and returned to Buckingham Palace for the wedding breakfast, the first such celebration since the wedding of the first Queen Regnant, Mary I, to Philip of Spain in 1554. After a three-day honeymoon in Windsor Castle (Albert had proposed the honeymoon should be a longer one, but Victoria had retorted, ‘You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing’) the royal couple returned to the palace, miles of cheering crowds thronging the route.
Four months later, while driving from the palace up Constitution Hill in an open phaeton with Prince Albert, a young man named Edward Oxford fired two pistols at her from the side of the roadway, perhaps 5 metres (16 feet) away. The first missed and Prince Albert, seeing the second pistol raised, pulled Victoria down inside the carriage and the bullet whistled over her head. As Oxford was seized she is reported to have stood up to show she was unhurt. For several days afterwards the parks around the palace were awash with people lining the roads and escorting her back to the palace, acting as her voluntary bodyguard. Shortly after the event the Houses of Lords and Commons came to the palace in a column of carriages several hundred long to present an address of congratulation for her safe deliverance from harm. At intervals throughout her long reign, as she left or was returning to the palace she was to be the subject of four further attempts to shoot her by deranged men.
In the early afternoon of 21 November 1841 the first of Victoria and Albert’s nine children was born at Buckingham Palace, a girl who would be named Victoria, The Princess Royal. Less than a year later, to great rejoicing (but not by Victoria as she was not keen on babies, nor on giving birth so frequently: ‘quite disgusting’ – ‘more like a rabbit or a guinea-pig than anything else … not very nice’) a prince was born, the future Edward VII.
The same year the royal couple gave the first of their famous fancy-dress balls at the palace. In 1842 the theme was the meeting between the two courts of Anne of Brittany and of Edward III and his Queen (and, of course, cousin) Philippa of Hainault. It was an impossible encounter – the two lived a century apart – but that did not seem to matter. Prince Albert naturally assumed the role of Edward III and Victoria that of Queen Philippa. The Princess Augusta of Hesse-Cassel, who had married Victoria’s uncle, The Duke of Cambridge, impersonated Anne.
The Saxe-Coburg clan and the British royal family
As a child, Queen Victoria had been brought up by her mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld after the death of her father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, fourth son of George III (whose mother was Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg), before her first birthday. The Saxe-Coburgs were a peculiarly invasive family from the forests of Thuringia who were created Dukes in the sixteenth century and whose territories achieved independence in 1806 with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1826 the house of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld changed its name to Saxe-Coburg and Gotha following the merging of the two duchies of Coburg and Gotha. In 1871 it became part of the German Empire. Largely orchestrated by the matchmaking skills of Victoria’s Uncle Leopold, by the early twentieth century Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was the name of the ruling families of Britain, Belgium, Portugal and Bulgaria as well as the original German duchy.
Prince Leopold and Princess Charlotte
In 1816 Princess Charlotte, the heir presumptive to the British throne as the only child of The Prince Regent, later George IV, married the 26-year-old Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, brother of Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield, who was three years later to give birth to the future Queen Victoria. Victoria’s Uncle Leopold (who was also her husband Prince Albert’s uncle) was to be an important mentor to Victoria in the years to come. Leopold was a handsome and dashing soldier who had commanded a cavalry division against the forces of Napoleon in 1813. Leopold and Charlotte lived at Claremont House near Esher and in London in a house on Oxford Street and were very popular with the London crowds.
As the only heir to the throne in the second generation any child Charlotte would bear would secure the royal succession. She was soon pregnant and after two miscarriages her most recent labour was followed with great interest by the British public. The eventual birth in 1817 was traumatic, after a prolonged two-day labour that was fatally mismanaged by her doctors. Charlotte died from post-partum haemorrhage and the child itself – a boy – was stillborn. Leopold was understandably distraught as The Princess was taken to be buried with her stillborn child amongst her royal relatives in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. News of her death was accompanied by an outpouring of national grief not seen again until the death of Princess Diana exactly 180 years later. Haberdashers throughout the country were stripped of black crêpe to make mourning ribbons, shops closed in her memory and tickets for her lying-in-state were fought over. Lord Byron wrote from Italy that her death ‘was a shock even here and must have been an earthquake at home’.
Leopold, although a minor German princeling, was now well known, both as husband of the late heir presumptive to the British Crown, but also for his military exploits. He was deemed capable and had excellent diplomatic and language skills; in due course he was offered the throne of Greece, which he turned down, and then in 1831 was chosen to be the first King of the Belgians by the National Congress formed after the Belgian revolution. The next year he married as his second wife Princess Louise-Marie, daughter of the French King Louis-Philippe. He was to lose her too at a young age, to tuberculosis, but not before he had secured the succession to the Belgian throne.
After Princess Charlotte’s death there ensued a race among the brothers of George IV to marry and beget an heir – a race that would be won by the fourth son of King George III – Edward, Duke of Kent – whose daughter would become the longest-reigning British monarch to date.
In 1840 Queen Victoria married her only first cou
sin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (they had even been delivered by the same midwife), second son of Ernest III, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfield and his wife – who was also his cousin – Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, with the considerable encouragement of their joint uncle, Prince Leopold. In retrospect it is quite clear that Albert was groomed by his uncle to marry Victoria, and to become The Prince Consort of the British Queen, the very role denied Leopold by the death of his wife Charlotte.
In 1844 Ernest, Albert’s elder brother, inherited the dukedom of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and in 1893 Victoria and Albert’s second son Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a career officer in the Royal Navy, succeeded his uncle as Duke. After Duke Alfred’s death in 1900, he was succeeded by his nephew, Prince Charles Edward, Duke of Albany, then at school at Eton, who was the only son of Victoria and Albert’s youngest son, Prince Leopold. A general in the German army during the First World War he was stripped of his British peerages and princely title in 1919 (and two years before, in deference to anti-German sentiment, George V had changed the name of the British royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor). After the November Revolution of 1918 and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhem II replaced the monarchy in Germany with a republic, the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha split into the two independent states of Coburg and Gotha. In 1920 they merged with the states of Bavaria and Thuringia respectively and thereafter ceased to exist. The current head of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is Prince Andreas, who was born in 1943 and is a great-great grandson of Queen Victoria. He has dual British and German nationality and was largely brought up in the United States by his mother and American stepfather.
The Queen's Houses Page 10