The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Top: Edward VII’s sons Prince Albert Victor and George (later King George V)

  Above: The young children of George V in 1907. Back row from left to right: Prince Henry, Prince Edward, Princess Mary. Front row, left to right: Prince Albert, Prince John and Prince George

  After the death in 1892 of his brother during a flu epidemic, Prince George proposed to Eddy’s fiancée, Princess Mary of Teck, and they were married the next year. The Duke of York, as he had now become, settled into life as a country gentleman in York Cottage on the Sandringham estate where he could indulge his passion for shooting, becoming one of the best shots of his generation. He and Mary had six children and the two eldest, Prince Edward, known as David (later Edward VIII), and Prince Albert (later George VI), born 18 months apart, grew up together. After a gap of five years, four more children followed: a girl, Princess Mary, and three boys, Prince Henry, later Duke of Gloucester, Prince George, later Duke of Kent, and Prince John, who was to die aged 14.

  The children made the traditional round of royal homes used by the heir to the throne: Frogmore when at Windsor, Abergeldie when at Balmoral, York Cottage at Sandringham and Marlborough House when at Buckingham Palace. York Cottage at Sandringham was nonetheless ‘home’ for most of their childhood, with the nursery and night nursery created on the first floor of the ever-expanding house, close to their parents’ rooms. A nurse engaged to look after the two older boys proved a psychological nightmare: apparently jealous of their parents’ affection, she would pinch the two babies to make them cry just as they were being taken down for their evening visit. Confronted by bawling babies The Duke and Duchess would tell the nurse to take them away again. It was three years before her secret was discovered when she was summarily dismissed. In slight mitigation it was also discovered she had not had a holiday during her years of employment. The under nurse took over and proved a more affectionate carer. The Duke of Windsor (as Edward VIII became after his abdication in 1936) recalled those early years: ‘when there were only three of us children we all slept in this one room with a nurse. There we were bathed in round tin tubs filled from cans of water, brought upstairs by servants from a distant part of the house. Our windows looked out over the pond, and the quacking of wild duck that lived there’. When he was seven a valet was appointed to look after the clothes – and the cleanliness – of the two eldest boys. Following tradition a tutor was engaged and he tried to recreate, as far as he could, the conditions of a typical classroom on the second floor. The Duke of Windsor in his autobiography remembered:

  Top and second from top: The naval training of the young Princes, Albert Victor and George

  Above: George V, his wife Mary and their children Prince Henry, Prince Edward, Princess Mary, Prince Albert, Prince John and Prince George, c1905

  ‘He imported two standard school desks with hinged lids and attached chairs, with hard wooden seats and straight backs. A blackboard, a set of wall maps … Next he drew up a daily timetable of work designed to make us follow the regime of ordinary school boys. Finch woke us at seven and saw to it that we were dressed and at our desks half an hour later for three-quarters of an hour’s “preparation” … before breakfast … at 8.15 Mr Hansell would appear to take us downstairs for breakfast, and by nine we were back at our desks to study until lunch, with an hour’s break in the forenoon for play. After lunch he would take us out, perhaps for a walk in the woods or to kick a football on the lawn. Then we would go back to our lessons for another hour, always stopping at tea-time for muffins, jam and milk, our last meal of the day.’

  The future King Edward VIII was taken on his first shooting expedition aged 12 and, using the gun first used by his father and grandfather, he proudly recorded he shot three rabbits. In an effort to ‘normalize’ their lives, their tutor rounded up local boys to make up a football team and they were allowed to cycle into the local village to buy sweets. A local schoolmaster took them round the estate giving them lessons in nature studies.

  Their father George V was much less tolerant than his own father, Edward VII. He expressed his feelings ‘instantly and without reserve’. He had a loud voice, a gruff manner and indulged in chaffing, sometimes sarcastic banter, none of which was likely to endear him to his children or make them feel at ease. The Duke of Windsor recalled, ‘My father had a most horrible temper,’ and ‘My father was a very repressive influence [on their mother] … we used to have the most lovely time with her alone – always laughing and joking … she was a different human being away from him.’ All the children were subject to George V’s broadsides. Prince Albert (George VI) grew up a very shy and sensitive boy and by the time his schooling started had acquired a severe stammer that was to take many years of work by the speech therapist Lionel Logue to mask. Both Prince Henry and Prince George went to a preparatory school in Broadstairs, the first sons of a reigning monarch to do so. Prince Henry went on to Eton, another first, whilst Prince George took the usual route into the Royal Navy via Dartmouth Naval College.

  145 Piccadilly, London

  When George V was in his last years, one of the tonics prescribed for his health was the presence of his granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, the present Queen, to whom he was devoted – referring to her by the family name of ‘Lilibet’.

  A magazine provides an insight into the interior of 145 Piccadilly

  The alternating hard and soft approach to bringing up children, which seemed to be the pattern characterizing each generation from Victoria and Albert onwards, continued with the children of George VI. He had a supremely happy life with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, somewhat tempered by his unexpected call to the throne following the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936. They had two children, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. Based at 145 Piccadilly and Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, the children had a happy upbringing, at first looked after by their devoted nanny Mrs Knight, known as Alah, and latterly their equally devoted governess, Marion Crawford, dubbed Crawfie by the future Queen Elizabeth II.

  Top: A smiling Princess Elizabeth, and an unhappy Princess Margaret pose in 1933

  Above: The young Princesses and their beloved nanny ‘Bobo’ MacDonald, 1931

  Behind the house on Piccadilly was a communal garden which, for the two sisters, was their London playground – consorting with other children was discouraged – where they played hide and seek and sardines with Crawfie in the ‘smutty bushes’ (covered in soot from the pollution then so prevalent). On the top landing, under a glass dome through which a bomb would fall during the war, Princess Elizabeth kept her stable of toy horses and ponies, some 30 of them, all neatly marshalled, their reins and saddles immaculate. Their relationship with their parents was close and Princess Elizabeth was taught to read at the age of five, not by a tutor, but by her mother. Neither princess went to school. They were schooled at home, the last generation of the royal family for which this was so.

  Prince Charles plays with friends at prep school, 1957

  The children of Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, followed after a gap by Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, had a more structured school upbringing. Prince Charles’s nanny was Mabel Anderson, to whom he was greatly attached, calling her ‘a haven of security’. She was recruited in 1949 and retired from royal service after 32 years in 1981 although she was lured out of retirement to help Princess Anne look after her son Peter. In 2006 Prince Charles hosted her eightieth birthday party at Clarence House. Charles acquired a governess just before his fifth birthday in 1953 and just before his eighth was sent for a year to Hill House pre-preparatory school, followed by his father’s old preparatory school, Cheam, as a boarder. From there he went on aged 13 to Gordonstoun, where his father had been at school in the early 1930s. The Duke of Edinburgh, who is recorded as saying he wanted to make Charles ‘a man’s man’, says he chose Gordonstoun because it was an institution that would ‘free the sons of the rich and powerful from the enervating sense
of privilege’. Prince Charles described his old school, which required cold showers at 6.45 a.m., with little affection as ‘Colditz with Kilts’. To further strengthen his self-reliance he was despatched to Timbertop, a bush outpost of the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia. Charles was the first heir to the throne to gain a degree, a 2.2 from Cambridge, before proceeding, as tradition demanded, into the Royal Navy.

  Princess Anne as a schoolgirl at Benenden, 1964

  Above: Prince Charles, Princess Diana and their two sons on Prince Harry’s first day at nursery school, 1987

  Right: Prince William on his first day at school, 1987

  Prince Charles, as a child more sensitive than his no-nonsense sister Anne (who was sent to Benenden School in Kent, another royal first), was less able to cope with his father’s brusque manner, perhaps another hangover from a naval career. So his relationship with his own children, Princes William and Harry, has been warm and supportive. Their mother Diana, Princess of Wales, the first royal mother to give birth in hospital, gave them their baths and read to them, taking William on trips abroad before Harry was born, just as William has in his turn taken Prince George on his first overseas state visit. In another departure from tradition, The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge intend to share the rearing of their children between them. They have hired The Queen’s housemaid, Antonella Fresolone, not as a nanny for Prince George, but as a ‘general housekeeper’. Perhaps the alternating hard-soft royal approach to parenting has at last been broken.

  BEFORE HE DIED of typhoid in 1861, Prince Albert had two things on his increasingly fevered mind that he thought might help settle his wayward eldest son Bertie, The Prince of Wales, then approaching his majority. The first was marriage to a suitable foreign princess and the second was a country house far away from the temptations to which Bertie seemed inexorably to gravitate. Accordingly he entrusted the search and negotiations to Sir Charles Phipps, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and Edward White, the Crown Solicitor, who investigated 18 estates in 13 different counties before Sandringham was settled on. Towards the end of November 1861 White wrote to Phipps that he had heard that Spencer Cowper’s place, on the east coast near Lynn, was ‘likely to be in the market’. He visited Sandringham on 28 January 1862, making a report on the house (which had 29 bedrooms) and the 7700 acres that comprised the estate, and on 3 February they took The Prince of Wales to see it. Ten days later the sale had been agreed for £220,000 (approx. £18 million today) and by October completed. Phipps reported that no one was quite sure why The Prince had settled on the Sandringham estate and wrote to The Queen, the day after The Prince’s visit, that the house externally was ‘very ugly – a white washed house with redbrick chimnies and a fanciful brown porch’.

  The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh arrive at King’s Lynn station, 2013

  The early Norfolk estate

  The estate dated back many centuries and is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Sant Dersingham’ – the sandy part of Dersingham. The earliest house on the site can be traced back to 1296, but a more detailed history begins in the sixteenth century by which time the name had been shortened to Sandringham. The Cobbe family had acquired it in 1517 and in due course a large Elizabethan house was built where the present house now stands. A mid-seventeenth century owner, Colonel William Cobbe, was, appropriately, a Royalist through and through and fought against the Parliamentary Army. In due course he fell foul of the ‘Ordinance for Sequestering Notorious Delinquents’ Estates’ announced by the Lords and Commons in March 1643. Sequestration (the forcible repossession) of ‘papist’ estates was used by Parliament as an easy source of revenue. Commonly two-thirds of the estates of those found guilty of ‘recusancy’ – the refusal to attend Church of England services – was sequestered. Cobbe was clearly regarded as a committed Royalist and the whole of his estate was sequestered.

  Charles Spencer Cowper, original owner of Sandringham

  Somehow, ‘by humbly confessing his recusancy’, by 1653 he had managed to retain his mansion house and one-third of his estate. He had to raise substantial mortgages on his properties to provide an income to live on and the estate became so heavily indebted that after his death in 1665 his son Geoffrey struggled to keep his inheritance and was forced to sell in 1686 to a James Hoste, a local landowner whose family had originated in Flanders (the family name had originally been Hoost). Three generations of Hostes and their descendants lived at Sandringham and in 1771 the Georgian house, much altered, that was bought for The Prince of Wales was erected by Henry Cornish Henley, whose wife Susan was a Hoste. The children of the last Hoste heir, Henry Hoste-Henley, all predeceased him, and the house and its estate of 5500 acres was again sold in 1836.

  The new owner, John Motteaux, a wealthy bachelor and director of the East India Company, lived on a large estate at Beachamwell, some 17 miles from Sandringham. John Motteaux’s grandfather had fled Rouen in 1698 after the Protestant persecution following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and become a tea merchant in the City of London. Although John Motteaux enlarged the Sandringham estate to 7000 acres and set out the formal gardens there, strangely, he chose not to live in the house. A close friendship with the 5th Earl Cowper, his family and his wife, a sister of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, induced him to leave Sandringham and Beachamwell in his will in 1843 to Charles Spencer Cowper, their third child and his particular favourite. And it was from him, nearly 20 years later, that Sandringham was bought for The Prince of Wales.

  The circumstances of the estate being put up for sale are unusual, to say the least. Charles Spencer Cowper had become a diplomat but immediately resigned his post on hearing of his inheritance. It is said that at this time he was being pursued by lawyers and was in the habit of ignoring all communications from attorneys, so it was some considerable time before he learnt of the bequest. He sold the Beachamwell estate but retained Sandringham, which he used for sport. He also rented a townhouse in London and as a single man took up an increasingly hedonistic and extremely expensive lifestyle, entertaining lavishly in both London and Paris, mortgaging Sandringham to the tune of £89,000 (approx £7.7 million) to do so. But within ten years, in 1852, he had met and married Harriet d’Orsay who had been involved in a scandalous ménage à trois. Harriet was the daughter of the 1st Earl of Blessington, who had married the fashionable French artist and dandy Count d’Orsay at the age of 15 in 1827. There is some evidence that both her father and stepmother, the celebrated author and beauty, Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, were also in a sexual relationship with d’Orsay. The marriage understandably didn’t last, and on their separation £100,000 (approx. £7.8 million) was paid to d’Orsay’s creditors on condition he made no claim on the Blessington estate. On The Earl’s death Lady Blessington set up a fashionable literary and artistic salon in London with d’Orsay and they are buried together in Chambourcy, in France.

  Sandringham House, 1880

  The royal children at Sandringham, 1907

  Charles Spencer Cowper and Harriet moved to Sandringham after their marriage and had their only child, a daughter, Mary Harriette, in 1853, but she died of cholera as an infant. In 1857 Harriet decided to restore the church at Sandringham in her memory, engaging the aggressive exponent of high Victorian Gothic architecture, Samuel Sanders Teulon, for the restoration and to make alterations and improvements to the house, then known as Sandringham Hall. It was he who added the forest of tall chimneys, some with a mock-Tudor look, an extraordinary two-storey porch with heavy buttresses and sixteenth-century strapwork detailing bolted to the front of the plain Georgian house. To one side he added a very large, squat conservatory with complicated, arched detailing to the garden elevation. Both structures were built of red brick and different types of stone including a dark carrstone found in a nearby quarry. The result was colourful – and a startling contrast to the plain white stucco of the old house.

  Lady Cowper, despite her rackety background, was pious and charitable, and established in 1858 an or
phanage for children of soldiers who had fallen in the Crimean War. A schoolroom for them and the children of the estate workers was converted from one of the old farmhouses where she herself taught some of the lessons. Surprisingly, she also published, in Paris in 1851, a novel in three volumes which was translated into English as Clouded Happiness: A Novel, in 1855. Probably autobiographical, it has been described as ‘a complex, almost Gothic tale of concealed identities, lurid coincidences, agonized death-beds, pronounced vice and virtue set mainly in Naples in 1830’. Clearly unputdownable.

  Her husband did not care for the seclusion of Norfolk, preferring the delights of Paris where he repaired as often as he could, so the sale of Sandringham and all its contents to The Prince of Wales in 1862 – and the means to pay back his mortgages – was no doubt a blessed relief. After the sale both he and his wife went to live in Paris where Harriet died seven years later. In 1874 Cowper bought all the property – a considerable estate – belonging to his late wife’s father, The Earl of Blessington, in Dublin. The Times obituary of Charles Spencer Cowper in 1879 concluded, ‘In many of the capitals of Europe, Mr Spencer Cowper was well known for his social charm and conversational talents.’

  A sporting estate for Bertie

  The Prince of Wales’s father, Prince Albert, had been, with Germanic efficiency, closely involved in royal income and expenditure. Albert had managed to nearly quadruple the annual income of the Duchy of Cornwall from £16,000 to £60,000 (approx. £1.3 million to £5 million today) per annum, and the purchase price of Sandringham House, its approximately 7000 acres and five farms came from ‘savings accumulated during the [his son’s] minority from funds accruing to the Duchy of Cornwall’. A further £60,000 was released for immediate improvements to Sandringham.