Books
Mid pleasures and palaces
Gavin Stamp
Royal Residences John Martin Robinson (Macdonald £12.95)
The historian of the residences of the British monarchy, living vicariously for pomp and splendour, must share the disap- pointment of 18th-century foreign am- bassadors presented (as they still are) to the `Court of St James's' and finding that the King of England in his capital lived in an old-fashioned and undemonstrative muddle of a palace. Queen Anne and the first three Georges had nothing to compare with the seats of the aristocracy — palaces like Chatsworth, Castle Howard, Blenheim let alone with Versailles, Schonbrann, Caserta or Tsarskoe Selo. As Dr Robinson observes sadly, 'It is one of the ironies of history that Britain's attainment of world Power status and unequalled economic pro- sperity should have coincided with the ac- cession of a minor German electoral dynas- ty to the English crown and the architec- tural nadir of royal palace building in England.'
Yet it is surely not without significance that St James's Palace is still royal and still used for its proper purpose while those con- tinental splendours are but museums. The reluctance of the British monarchy to build On a grand scale since the 17th century and Its slow identification with middle-class family life rather than continental autocracy may well account for its survival. Perhaps a lesson was learned from poor Charles I, that remarkable and refined Patron of the arts, when he stepped to the scaffold from his superb Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace, built by Inigo Jones for his father. The best rulers may not be the best builders; the nastiest often are: Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine the Great, Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies, Hitler. What suffering they caused; what wonders they left for us to enjoy. The principal hero of Dr Robinson's book, not surprisingly, is the king whose extravagance, vanity and absurdity did much to undermine the institution of monarchy itself. To him, whether as Prince of Wales, Prince Regent or George IV, we Owe Buckingham Palace, the Brighton Pavilion and the present castellated state of the most venerable of royal residences, Windsor Castle — let alone the transforma- tion of the West End carried out by his ar- chitect John Nash. George IV was deter- mined to give Britain palaces worthy of a great and victorious power in which he need not be ashamed to entertain emperors and tsars, and, despite economies and changes
'of mind, he succeeded. He alone redeems the generally depressing history of the Houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg- Gotha as patrons of the arts.
But the history of royal residences is far from simple, as John Robinson shows in his succinct and entertaining survey. (For many, many more facts there is the magisterial History of the King's Works in six volumes). If the Hanoverians built no palaces it was not for want of trying. Van- brugh, Gibbs, Kent, Chambers, Adam and Soane all designed palaces; all remained on paper. But set against the parsimony which resulted in old palaces like St James's, Ken- sington and Hampton Court being retained and modernised, there have been so many palaces destroyed, whether by accident or design, that it looks like extravagance, if not carelessness. There is today remarkably little to show for eight centuries of prodigal royal building since 1066. The list of lost houses is long and haunting: Woodstock, Clarendon, Sheen; Henry VII1's .extraor- dinary Nonesuch, James I's Newmarket. Despite all of Wren's elaborate plans, nothing ever replaced Whitehall Palace after the fire of 1691 as that narrow and nasty Dutchman, William III, disliked Lon- don. Two illustrations in the book of Charles II's palace at Winchester are sad- dest of all, for Wren's building survived as a barracks into the era of photography, only to be burned in 1894.
Other palaces had scandalously short lives. Wyatt built a castle at Kew for George III which was destroyed, unfinished, by his son who also destroyed Carlton House, having spent a fortune on it, when he decid- ed to build Buckingham Palace. And it is a
mercy that Victoria, hating her wicked un- cle, sold Brighton Pavilion rather than simply demolishing it. Mediaeval kings were even more prodigal with their buildings. Henry III maintained 20 houses and 50 chapels, but pathetically little sur- vives today and most of that is of interest only to archaeologists. The extravagant im- provements at Westminster, where Edward III spent £29,000 and put in plumbing, largely went up in smoke in 1834. Windsor is now essentially early 19th century (so sad that Wyatville swept away even Charles H's Baroque interiors). There is nothing today at Sheen; Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, swept away the remains of Woodstock just to spite Vanbrugh. There is only the re- mains of Edward IV's palace at Eltham, with its Great Hall — so little known and seldom visited.
Royal Residences is not, could not be, pure architectural history, for it describes the changing functions of palaces: the organisation of the court and the household, the changing structure of for- mal audiences and the slow separation be- tween public and private lives of monarchs. This last was a process which ended with Queen Victoria building Osborne and Balmoral at her own expense, to get away from the formal duties she disliked and so reflecting the decline in real power of the monarch. And the story ends soon after. Edward VII disproved the precedent set by George IV that voluptuaries necessarily have taste, for he did his best to spoil the in- teriors of Buckingham Palace (damage un- done by his very civilised daughter-in-law, Queen Mary, to whom we probably owe the survival of Carlton House Terrace). The last piece of significant royal building was the refacing of the Buckingham Palace façade in Portland stone by George V (who, disliking frills, eliminated the urns and sculpture planned by his architect). This work, carried out in three months by day and by night under arc-lamps, was ready in 1913 when the Victoria Memorial was dedicated in the presence of her grandson, the Kaiser. A year later Aston Webb's new balcony was used to announce the declara- tion of war.
That is a fitting end, but the story might have been taken a little further. Sir Giles Scott was summoned to Fort Belvedere in 1936 to design new kitchens for Edward VIII (Sir Giles was in formal dress and he was disconcerted to find the King in shorts, digging in the garden. It was characteristic that the King did not ask the unfortunate architect tb sit down, or to take off his top- per); and I am told that Sir Hugh Casson has designed some interesting modern fur- niture in the private apartments at Wind- sor. A new guest wing, indeed, has been built at Sandringham; but perhaps it is as well that this is not illustrated.
My one complaint about this admirable book concerns the illustrations. John Robinson has found some very interesting prints and photographs, but the publisher has provided inadequate captions and no list of sources.
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