The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  1891 had not been a good year; it had been The Prince of Wales’s ‘annus horribilis’. Earlier he had been the subject of a great deal of bad press about his involvement in the ‘Tranby Croft’ affair when he had been staying with friends and playing baccarat – a card game played for stakes, then illegal – when one of the party was found to be cheating. The Prince’s continuing dissolute lifestyle and the virtual withdrawal of The Queen from public duties led, inevitably, to a period when the monarchy once again slumped in the nation’s esteem. The Prince wrote to his sister: ‘I cannot regret the year ’91 is about to close as, during it, I have experienced many worries and annoyances which ought to last me for a long time. My only happiness has been Eddy’s [The Prince of Wales’s eldest son] engagement and Georgy’s recovery.’

  Prince Albert ‘Eddy’ Victor in uniform, 1890

  The following year Colonel Robert William Edis was contracted to design and construct a new range of rooms above Teulon’s old conservatory. Edis had a mixed reputation; he had been proposed for fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects by the celebrated Gothic architect William Godwin, but the fashionable artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler said of Edis that he was not ‘fit to have sharpened Godwin’s pencils’. The ballroom was a huge, single-storey, barrel-vaulted room, over 18 metres (60 feet) long and 9 metres (30 feet) wide. Originally the walls had been covered with stamped leather, replaced later with wallpaper. Edis reused many elements from Teulon’s distinctive porch, which had been added to the old Georgian house some 30 years before and demolished when the house was rebuilt, in the new visitors’ entrance. Once these were completed the house had been enlarged to encompass a total of 365 rooms and from some aspects, with its many hipped roofs, now resembled a small village.

  The following year brought about a turning point in the line of succession. Back in January 1885 The Prince of Wales’s eldest son, Prince Albert Victor of Wales, known as Eddy, had celebrated his twenty-first birthday at Sandringham. The majority of the events were held in Edis’s new ballroom. Prince Eddy received addresses and deputations in the ballroom as well as reviewing a procession of retainers who gave him ‘hearty cheers’. Circus acts performed for children from the estate and from other local schools. In the evening a great ball for 600 was held, ‘the gentlemen in uniform, which looked extremely well’, wrote The Princess of Wales.

  Prince Eddy had been born two months prematurely, perhaps hastened by a skating party on Virginia Water attended by his mother. He was a lacklustre youth, mentally sluggish and with no great intellectual interests. One of his tutors, with singularly little restraint, described his mind as ‘abominably dormant’ though the tutor himself came in for some criticism for being an uninspiring teacher. As it happens, his father’s character as a boy had been described in almost identical terms by his tutors. A school report for Edward VII as a schoolboy read: ‘His intellect – alas! is weak … shocking laziness, which I fear has been far too much indulged … Very bad manners and great insubordination, all most dangerous qualities’ and ‘no reflective or inductive powers – never asked questions or read books’. Eddy was sent on a gap year abroad with tutors, a chaplain and equerries ‘of the highest character’ to stir some intellectual interest but it was deemed a failure. He had no interest whatsoever in art or classical history but was interested only in ‘gossip, dress and society’.

  After schooling in the Royal Navy with his brother George, 17 months his junior, and a stint at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he was excused taking exams), Prince Eddy joined the 10th Hussars. His grandmother, Queen Victoria, described his life as ‘dissipated’ although she set the bar pretty high in such matters. He was implicated by rumour, though his participation was never proved, in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 when a male brothel was uncovered by the Metropolitan Police. The prostitutes revealed the names of their clients who included personalities of high rank in British society, including Lord Arthur Somerset, an Extra Equerry to Eddy’s father, The Prince of Wales.

  Prince George and his wife Princess Mary of Teck, 1909

  A good wife was seen as an essential antidote to dissipation and Bertie, in an uncanny echo of his own circumstances three decades before, told The Queen: ‘His education and future have been a matter of some considerable anxiety to us, and the difficulty of rousing him is very great. A good sensible wife with some considerable character is what he needs most, but where is she to be found?’ After several dalliances, in December 1891 in what was virtually an arranged marriage in which his grandmother, The Queen, played a prominent part, Eddy proposed and was accepted by Princess Mary of Teck, the daughter of his grandmother’s first cousin, and the wedding was immediately set for the following February. However, an influenza epidemic was in full spate and Eddy fell ill. The family gathered at Sandringham to prepare for the celebrations to mark his twenty-eighth birthday on 8 January. A shoot was held over three days when nearly 6000 head were accounted for. On 7 January Eddy returned from shooting feeling unwell. Within two days he had contracted pneumonia and, never physically very strong, he died on 14 January 1892.

  In the tradition of her mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, Eddy’s mother Alexandra kept the room at Sandringham where he died as a shrine throughout her lifetime. He was buried in the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor, his fiancée placing her bridal wreath of winter-flowering orange blossom on his coffin. He lies under a beautifully executed effigy in bronze by the celebrated sculptor Alfred Gilbert (also responsible for the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus), depicting him in his Hussar uniform. At Sandringham Church a brass plate is affixed to the royal pew which reads: ‘This place was occupied for twenty-eight years by my darling Eddy next to his ever sorrowing and loving Motherdear, January 14th, 1892.’

  His brother George, after a hesitant courtship, proposed to Princess Mary in May 1893 and married her in July at the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. They were to become a devoted couple; it was to be a very successful and happy marriage. Although christened Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, the future Queen Mary was always known within the family as May ever since her mother had first referred to her as ‘my May-flower’ on account of the month of her birth.

  Sandringham winners

  Besides shooting and the pursuit of women, the other great passion of Bertie, the future King Edward VII, was horse racing. He also had other interests, with the preface to King Edward VII as a Sportsman, published in 1911, describing him thus:

  ‘Most country gentlemen hunt or shoot, perhaps visit Scotland and use the rifle as well as the gun; some keep racehorses or steeplechasers, others are yachtsmen, and a limited number have shot big game in other continents. Very few have ever gained distinction in all these sports alike: there is no record of any one who has approached the wide range and high degree of success achieved by King Edward VII’.

  George IV watches the horse racing at Ascot in the early nineteenth century

  However, it was the turf which was possibly his first love. Queen Victoria was ambivalent. ‘Such success,’ she remarked, ‘only encourages gambling by others and the Prince Consort was so against it. But, if it makes the Prince of Wales happy, it is, perhaps, a better excitement than others!’ A telling remark from a somewhat resigned mother. On the other hand, as he grew older, the nation loved him for his passion for racing, and his winning horses were greeted with adulation – a welcome relief, given the low esteem to which his reputation had sunk in earlier years when he had been enmeshed in so many public scandals. But then Edward VII’s reputation as monarch far outstripped that which had been expected of him, and his brokering of the entente with France in the early twentieth century has only recently been fully recognized (having been unfairly credited solely to his prime ministers).

  Edward VII with his Derby winner, Minoru, 1909

  As King, Edward VII worked hard, but in the years preceding his accession he played hard too. In 1886, he established the Royal Stud at Sandringh
am with ten foundation mares. Purchasing wisely – he was a regular visitor to Tattersalls sales, accompanied by expert advice – he bought a mare that year which gave birth to a string of classic winners, and the Sandringham Stud became important in the development of thoroughbred bloodstock nationwide. The eight-year-old mare, Perdita II, produced two of racing’s legends. The first, Persimmon, won the St Leger and the Derby in 1896, and the Ascot Gold Cup in 1897 (the horse’s lifesize statue stands in front of the Sandringham Stud and his stuffed head is mounted in the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket). The second, Persimmon’s brother, Diamond Jubilee, won the 1900 Triple Crown – the 2000 Guineas, the St Leger and the Derby – as well as the Newmarket and Eclipse Stakes. The same year Bertie won the Grand National with Ambush II. A later horse, Minoru, won the 2000 Guineas and the Derby in 1909.

  Edward VII with the winning horse at Epsom, 1896

  Bertie invested much of his considerable prize money in the Sandringham estate, creating the vast walled kitchen gardens, now used as the stud paddocks. When Persimmon won the Derby in 1896 the race was filmed for the first time and the resulting film became a great attraction at the Alhambra music hall in London’s West End and in due course was even being shown in Australia and New Zealand. A song, ‘The Prince’s Derby’, also became popular in the music halls.

  Bertie’s wife Alexandra, a keen archivist, kept the Sandringham Stud Book from 1887 to 1917, now on display at the Sandringham Museum. She herself had been an avid horsewoman, frequently riding to hounds at Sandringham. As a record of the horses and mares associated with the stud, she compiled and wrote, in her own hand, a biography of each horse, its dams and sires and progeny – and successes where appropriate. On one of the pages she notes that as he lay dying, one of The King’s horses had won, and he had gained solace from the result.

  It is fitting perhaps that The King’s last words should be about one of his horses, so dear to his heart. After a period of illness, on 6 May 1910 he suffered a number of heart attacks, but refused to be put to bed. In the afternoon the outsider Witch of the Air won at Kempton Park and George, The Prince of Wales relayed the news to his father. He replied, ‘Yes, I have heard of it. I am very glad’, the last words he ever spoke. He died later that evening.

  The Queen and Princess Anne with Anne’s then husband Mark Phillips on the racecourse at Ascot, 1976

  Knowing The King lay stricken, the subdued crowd at Kempton Park, noting that his purple and gold colours had been entered for the race, regarded the filly as ‘a beacon of hope’. When she won after a tremendous tussle, the New York Times reporter described what happened next:

  ‘then ensued a scene which no one present is ever likely to forget. It was no ordinary ovation to the royal winner simply because she was a royal winner. One recalled afterwards the scenes enacted at Epsom when the King won the Derby … They were all very wonderful scenes, a noisy, frenzied acme of loyal enthusiasm, but they had little in common with today’s outburst. It was now a subdued note of sympathy. Never before probably had a racecourse crowd been so stirred to the bottom of their hearts.’

  The Queen with her Gold Cup winner, Estimate, 2013

  Edward VII’s son, George V was also involved in racing and breeding at Sandringham but major success eluded him until 1928 when he won the 1000 Guineas with Scuttle. In turn, George VI won the same race in 1946 with Hypericum, a Sandringham-bred horse. Queen Elizabeth II, from the time in 1942 when she attended her first Derby at Newmarket, the only classic race she has yet to win, has had a particular interest in bloodstock breeding – choosing all matings and the names of the resulting foals – and has had considerable success on the racecourse. Her first classic winner was in 1957 when she ended the season as Leading Owner. However, no horse bred at the Royal Stud has won a classic race since 1977 when Dunfermline won the Oaks and the St Leger. There are currently two stallions standing at Sandringham, happily spending their days in the paddocks in the old Walled Garden built with the proceeds of Persimmon’s prize money, and a number of primarily flat-racing mares.

  An early image of York Cottage

  George V and York Cottage

  On the announcement of the engagement of Prince George, now Duke of York, and Princess May of Teck in 1893, they were granted a London base in part of St James’s Palace, which was renamed York House, and at Sandringham they were given the old Bachelor’s Cottage. Renamed York Cottage and situated to the south of Sandringham, the cottage and Park House to the west had originally been built by Bertie as overflow accommodation when the original Sandringham House was found to be too small to accommodate all his guests and their many servants.

  In due course it was to York Cottage that the couple came on honeymoon after their wedding on 6 July 1893 at the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace. The Duke wrote: ‘I am intensely happy … we are spending our honeymoon here in this charming little cottage which my father has given me & it is most comfortable & the peace and rest after all we went through in London is indeed heavenly.’

  Princess May had lived abroad for a while in the 1880s, including some time in Florence, where she became an habitué of the art galleries and museums. She was consequently knowledgeable about the decorative arts, of painting and the arrangement of furniture in particular, and it was a particular passion for her in later life to rearrange the interiors of the royal houses and palaces. Her husband’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, described her as ‘well read and interested in the arts … She was full of initiative, of intellectual curiosity, of energy, which needed outlets and wider horizons’. It apparently came as a bit of a shock therefore to find her new home had been completely redecorated and furnished by Heal’s, the famous furniture supplier on the Tottenham Court Road on the instructions of The Duke.

  York Cottage today

  When Bertie and Alexandra, The Prince and Princess of Wales, and their two daughters came to stay at Sandringham House a fortnight later, by all accounts May found herself at odds with her new relations. None of them shared her intellectual interests and her desire to know more about the world outside the immediate family circle and as a result they found her ‘dreadfully dull’.

  Each of George and May’s six children (the Dictionary of National Biography described George V as ‘scrupulously and contentedly monogamous’) was born at York Cottage between 1895 and 1905, except their eldest Edward, known to the family as David (the future Edward VIII), who was born at May’s parents’ house, White Lodge in Richmond Park, in 1894. As a result, continual extensions were required to be built to York Cottage. The first was a three-storeyed wing designed by a local firm, Beck’s of Norwich. A tussle ensued between Alexandra and May about the internal arrangements and decoration of the new wing. ‘Motherdear’, as The Princess of Wales was known within the family, kept up a proprietorial, even cloying, relationship with all her children during her lifetime.

  The Bachelor’s Cottage at Sandringham

  The Duke of York’s formal naval career came to an end a year before his marriage in 1893, although he continued in honorary rank until 1898 when for a short few weeks he was captain of the first-class cruiser HMS Crescent of the British Channel fleet. In 1892 George had been created Duke of York and after his retirement from the navy he became in effect a moneyed country gentleman, despite being ‘in the shadow of the shadow of the throne’, as an obituarist of his brother Eddy had written of the role of the eldest son of The Prince of Wales. He worked closely with his father on the management of the Sandringham estate – with one of the estate farms under his direct responsibility – and, as one of the most admired shots of his generation, he took a particular interest in the management of the autumn shoots. His job was ensure that the ‘preserves’ for raising game were in first-class condition.

  For The Duke, Norfolk, particularly Sandringham and for many years York Cottage, was his emotional home. In these leisured years before his father succeeded to the throne as Edward VII in 1901 and he took on the role of Prince of Wal
es and heir, his other major pastime became stamp-collecting and he devoted three afternoons a week to building up his collection of stamps of Britain and the Empire – a collection which has become, arguably, the finest in the world. He was a serious player in the philatelic field, often paying well over the odds for a rare specimen and paying a record price for a stamp in 1904. He declared to his philatelic adviser, ‘I wish to have the best collection & not one of the best collections in England.’ His collection today is housed in a strongroom at St James’s Palace in 328 albums of 60 pages each.

  On Victoria’s death in 1901, in preparation for the negotiations with the government over the new King’s parliamentary grant, Edward VII’s expenditure was itemized with the help of his friend, the financier Ernest Cassel. Sandringham was by far the most expensive of his private houses to maintain.

  A souvenir from the coronation of George V and Queen Mary, 1910

  When Edward VII came to the throne he attempted to persuade his son to vacate York Cottage and rent a larger house in the vicinity of Sandringham as befitted the status of the heir to the throne. Lord Esher made an expedition with The King to nearby Houghton and wrote afterwards: ‘I have been driving with the King most of the day. We went to Houghton, Cholmondeley’s place, a splendid house built by Walpole but frightfully neglected owing to poverty. A sleepy hollow of a park. Possibly the Duke of York may rent it’. Houghton had been offered to The Duke of Wellington after Waterloo but he had refused it, and it had failed to make its reserve price when it was put up for sale in 1884.