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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
For more than 300 years, Kensington Palace has played host to a colourful cast of kings, queens and assorted aristocratic hangers-on. A stone's throw from the bustling streets of central London, this grand building has served as the stage for some of the most dramatic and bizarre events in the history of the royal family. It was here that the young Queen Victoria was held a virtual prisoner for eighteen years; and it was here that George II installed both his wife and his mistress, giving the latter rooms so damp that there were said to be mushrooms growing on the walls. More recently, the palace has witnessed an extraordinary series of scandals, from Princess Diana's bombshell TV interview with a journalist smuggled into the palace disguised as a salesman, to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's shock departure – first for Frogmore Cottage, and then for America – amid rumours of a rift with William and Kate. With exclusive interviews with palace staff past and present, fascinating historical details and a fully updated postscript considering what life after Kensington holds for Harry and Meghan, Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle offers a rare behind-the-scenes insight into one of Britain's most iconic residences.
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
‘It has been said … with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every hereditary monarch in Europe was insane.’
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867
‘What is she for?’
Willy Hamilton MP on Princess Margaret
Kensington Palace was the centre of court life in England from 1690 to 1760. During those years, anyone who wanted to influence the monarch or obtain favours from him (or her) for themselves or for relatives and friends had to live near or at Kensington Palace. Ministers and aristocrats, friends and relatives, those in search of work or preferment, had no choice but to travel down the Kensington road to what was then a small village west of London.
After 1760 the court left Kensington never to return, and Kensington Palace became home to the relatives and friends of succeeding monarchs. Some of its residents were part of the immediate royal family; viiiothers were more distantly related. Many residents were simply aristocrats who were deemed to have served the royal family in some capacity.
Rows and scheming, family disputes, petty squabbles over precedence, ancient feuds and bitterness – for the royals and others, these have always been part of life at Kensington Palace.
When the court was at Kensington, the palace was the centre of political power as it was where ministers met and consulted with the monarch, but it was also the centre of the royal family’s lives; today, though the court is no longer at Kensington and royal power has ebbed away, the palace remains very much central to the lives of the coming generation of royals, especially William, the future king.
This book provides a unique, intimate look at the lives of today’s young royals, and also charts the lives of those who have lived at the palace throughout its history; but this is not a record of what, officially, went on. It is a history, if you like, of personal relationships. Bland official accounts often skim the surface of troubled lives and difficult relationships; they tone down tales of the mad, the bad and the dangerous to know. This book does the opposite by looking behind the scenes at the lives and loves of Kensington Palace residents and their servants down the ages, all viewed within the context of an ancient building that has only ever been partly open to the public.
In the seventeenth century, for example, when King William III and his wife Mary lived at Kensington, they got on very badly with Mary’s sister Anne, who hated the fact that William and Mary viewed Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, as a complete nonentity. They lived together at Kensington Palace and were formally and superficially polite to each other, but it is easy to imagine the tears and tantrums behind the facade. More recently, in an echo of that long-vanished ixrelationship, the sisters-in-law – Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex – found themselves caught up in a similarly complex dynamic of kindness mixed with bitterness and jealousies. At Kensington there is nothing new under the sun.
Down the long years between 1760, when the monarch moved away from Kensington to Buckingham Palace, and the present era, the story of Kensington is the story of the minor royals, the more distant relatives and their countless servants who lived and died at the palace; rowing with each other, squabbling over precedence and position, but all the while keeping a beautiful and interesting building alive.x
INTRODUCTION
‘She will have to walk behind the angels – and she won’t like that.’
Edward VII on being asked if his mother would be happy in Heaven
‘You can’t treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.’
Tom Stoppard, Rosencr antz and Guildenstern Are Dead
At various times in its history, Kensington Palace has come under real threat of demolition. The most serious threat, during the second half of the nineteenth century, was averted only when Queen Victoria insisted that her birthplace should not be destroyed. But her motivation was not entirely based on sentiment. She was shrewd enough to realise that without Kensington Palace there would be nowhere suitable in London to house all those near and distant relatives she wished either to patronise or to control (or both). It was this role – as the ‘house of the hangers-on’, as one journalist put it – that Edward VII famously echoed when he described Kensington Palace as ‘the aunt heap’.xii
In a sense this book is an account of the aunt heap. Here you will discover the stories of those aunts and many others who have been forgotten for too long in the effort to focus always on the immediate royal family; as the journalist Peter Mahone put it, here you will find the ‘dotty and the potty’, in a story that takes us from the early seventeenth century right up to the tempestuous years when Princess Margaret lived at the palace, and beyond, to the present day.
I have included some anecdotes that are not directly related to Kensington simply because they are funny or extraordinary or provide a neat insight into the lives of the early Hanoverians who loved the palace. Some of these stories are bizarre, at least by today’s standards – we forget, for example, that royal couples were public property in earlier centuries in a way that would be unthinkable now. So it was not strange at all when George II and Princess Caroline of Ansbach, on their wedding night, dressed only in their nightshirts, found themselves surrounded by courtiers, lords, ladies, servants and even strangers who watched the couple climb nervously into bed and then made extremely bawdy remarks until ushered out of the room. Or take the fact that Queen Victoria sent a telegram each month to her doctor informing him that ‘the bowels are acting fully’.
For a writer, the Hanoverians and their favourite palace are almost too good to be true – and this is especially so when one considers the outliers, those most likely to find themselves tucked away at Kensington. George III’s daughter Elizabeth, for example, was married aged forty-eight to a massively obese German widower called Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse-Homburg (known to all and sundry as Humbug). According to Karl Shaw in Oddballs and Eccentrics, Frederick was xiiiforced to wash immediately before his nuptials as he stank, and as he and his bride drove away in their coach after the wedding, he threw up all over her.
Much of my information about the past fifty years of Kensington Palace’s history comes from a series of interviews I conducted with servants at the palace. In the 1970s, servants were willing – sometimes positively eager – to talk about their lives, and this situation lasted well into the 1990s. It has been more difficult to source information in recent times, as those who work for the royal family now have to sign confidentiality agreements, but people still like to talk off the record about their lives, especially their working lives, whatever the barriers and risks. This book is the result of that desire to talk.
Kensington Palace’s history is as much to do with the characters who lived and worked at the palace as it is to do with bricks and mortar, and this is especially true of the palace’s most famous resident, the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Her disastrous marriage to Prince Charles was played out in all its horror at Kensington. The bitterness of that relationship has echoes of other ancient and not-so-ancient royal couplings.
These unhappy marriages, based largely on the absurd idea that royals should marry only other royals (or at least aristocrats), have had at least one positive outcome. The royal family has explicitly acknowledged that the world has changed, and that welcoming commoners and divorcees into the family in a way that would have been unimaginable xiveven half a century ago has created a more open institution, which has helped to deflect republican criticism. Of course, allowing outsiders to marry in also suggests a royal family that is prepared to live dangerously. The divorced, mixed-race Meghan Markle is testament to a remarkably changed world. But then American divorcees, as history teaches us, can lead to royal disasters.
This book developed out of a conversation with a friend who had worked for a short time in the kitchens at Kensington Palace. He was an ardent socialist and had taken the job only out of desperation. Inevitably he was outraged at the starvation wages he was paid and at the luxury in which those he served lived. His tiny wage packet was taxed and, in his eyes, it meant he was paying for a bunch of ‘layabouts and dozy hangers-on’ to live the sort of life about which he could only dream.
My friend neatly points out the difficulty with writing about the royal family and the places where they choose to live. Books on any and every aspect of the royals’ lives tend to be split starkly into two categories: those that are embarrassingly deferential and those that attack and ridicule. As my friend would put it, ‘Why in God’s name is a dustman in Middlesbrough paying his taxes so that a large extended family of German extraction can be looked after by footmen, dressers, pages (including pages of the backstairs), ladies of the bedchamber and numerous other domestic servants and skivvies?’
It’s an impossible question to answer other than to say that the dustman may very well be more than happy to pay for this dream world. xvThe royal family is like a complex mechanical toy, kitted out with fictional characters living in a world that has largely vanished. They have to live like this, or we will lose a much-loved fantasy; a fantasy that has replaced the supernatural belief once reserved for the church. As the great political writer Walter Bagehot put it, ‘Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it … Its mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic.’
This book tries to steer a middle course between deference and disapproval. No one can doubt that the royal family brings vast amounts of money to the UK via tourism, perhaps even more money than it costs the taxpayer to keep the family in the style to which they have long been accustomed. Through traditional ceremony and pageantry, the existence of the royal family also adds immensely to the gaiety of the nation and, astonishing though it may seem to some, there has never been a serious attempt to remove the British royal family in the way that so many other European royal families have been removed.
Despite the foolish belief among many royal apologists that the modern press is critical of the royal family in a manner quite unprecedented, the truth is very different. Modern attacks on the royals are actually rather mild compared to the savagery of the early eighteenth century, when a caricature was published showing the Prince Regent defecating over France.
It was only in the middle decades of the twentieth century that it became very bad form to criticise the royals – when, for example, John Grigg (later to abjure his right to sit in the House of Lords as Lord Altrincham) criticised the recently crowned Elizabeth II for surrounding xviherself with tweedy old Etonians, a man rushed up in full view of the TV cameras and punched Grigg in the face. No one protested in a similar way when crowds booed Queen Victoria for refusing to open Parliament on the grounds that she was still in mourning thirty years after Albert’s death; no one protested – or at least not much – when the mild-mannered Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, was regularly described as an ‘old hag’ (which she most definitely was not).
Most of the reforms suggested by John Grigg were gradually instituted – ironically, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the royal family’s insistence that all senior advisers and equerries should be tweedy aristocrats.
Make of it what you will, but to this day, not a single comprehensive school-educated man or woman has entered royal service as Master of the Household, Master of the Horse or in any other role as an equerry.
This book isn’t meant to be an entirely serious study of Kensington Palace and those who lived and worked there. Serious studies are legion. The minutiae of the process by which the palace came into being and was altered over the centuries are not the focus of this book. There will be some of this, but only if it is in some way out of the ordinary. I want instead to cover the odd and the eccentric, the hidden and the strange, as well as the work of Christopher Wren, William Kent and the other architects and artists who had a hand in creating the Kensington Palace we see now.
To some, this book will seem unashamedly gossipy and therefore frivolous. It doesn’t cover the slow process by which Lord Bute, for xviiexample, groomed the young George III; it doesn’t cover in any detail the endless political discussions of George II’s ministers at Kensington Palace; all this has been written about again and again. Instead, I have looked at what the servants – especially in more recent times – saw and how they functioned in the palace; I have looked at the whole idea of grace-and-favour apartments – essentially flats and houses that the monarch has always been entitled to give to near and distant relatives, favoured aristocratic servants and assorted hangers-on; I have looked most especially at the eccentric lives of lesser royals who lived, unknown and uncelebrated sometimes for decades, at Kensington Palace. I’ve looked through the eyes of the servants at the daily lives and machinations, pomposities and tendernesses of Charles and Diana, Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, Kate and William, Meghan and Harry.
I have always been drawn to eccentrics and nonconformists, and over the years Kensington Palace has housed them all; the lesser-known royals often turn out to be far nicer than more prominent members of the royal household. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were famously awful – they shouted abuse at each other throughout much of their time at Kensington. Their endless, hateful rows were played out for all to hear. In earlier epochs quieter souls prevailed: George III’s sixth son, the Duke of Sussex, spent decades hidden away at Kensington Palace with his vast collection of songbirds and dusty books and manuscripts – he was said to possess more than 5,000 volumes, xviiiincluding more than 1,000 early Bibles. Certainly, in the popular imagination, Kensington Palace was seen as a place to which the royal family sometimes sent its oddballs.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Kensington House, an old mansion on the opposite side of Kensington High Street from the palace itself, had been converted into a lunatic asylum and the joke among Londoners was that there was no way to tell whether the asylum was on the left or the right as you passed along the road.
When Edward VII described Kensington Palace as the aunt heap, he was nothing if not accurate, for here the forgotten and sometimes notorious royals have lived, loved and died over the centuries, secure in the knowledge that as cousins and aunts they deserved the grace and favour bestowed on them. But what were their lives like as the palace crumbled around them or was repaired, remodelled and reshaped? If you’d like to know, then this is the book for you.
In earlier times the opinions of ‘the lower sort’ were considered unimportant, but as the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson explained to a friend writing a biography, the best way to find out someone’s real character is to spend an hour talking to his servants.
There will be complaints, no doubt, that the book does not itemise sources for every quotation and comment. Readers who enjoy such things will be able to find them in more formal histories. I have listed my sources at the back of the book but without detailed and (I think) often distracting notes. The bulk of the material in the latter part of xixthe book does not have acknowledged sources because my informants were adamant they would not speak to me about their time at the palace if any clue was given as to their identity. I have honoured my promise to them in order to ensure that their memories do not vanish into what Lytton Strachey called ‘the long oblivion of history’.
Certainly, until fairly recently the views of ‘ordinary’ people – and perhaps especially servants – would have been of no interest, but the world has changed and we now recognise that deep insights do not just come from the wealthy and powerful. For much of the period covered by this book, things were very different, of course. Just how different can be readily glimpsed through a story told by the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Russell recalled attending a meeting of pacifists in London in 1915. The meeting was stormed by a club-wielding gang of pacifist haters accompanied by the police. Many of those attending the meeting were assaulted and badly hurt and Russell was about to be similarly attacked when someone said to the police, who were standing by idly while the attack took place, ‘You really ought to do something. He [pointing at Russell] is a distinguished writer.’ The police did nothing. ‘He is also a distinguished philosopher.’ Still the police did nothing.
‘He is the brother of an earl.’ The police immediately intervened to save him from the mob.
The sense throughout most of the period covered by this book that working people were inherently inferior existed alongside the knowledge that the aristocracy could not survive without them. As the Quaker John Bellers (1654–1725) put it, ‘Regularly labouring people are the kingdom’s greatest treasure and strength, for without labourers xxthere can be no lords; and if the poor labourers did not raise much more food and manufacture than what did subsist themselves, every gentleman must be a labourer and every idle man must starve.’
In many ways, the idle rich – typically aristocratic landowners – were of less use even than the royal family, as the great nineteenth-century expert on the constitution Walter Bagehot suggested when he put forward the idea that the monarchy represents the ‘dignified’ element of government while the ministers and ruling party represent the ‘efficient’.
The problem in recent times is that, with the notable and highly laudable exception of HM Queen Elizabeth II, the modern monarchy has failed to be dignified. Three out of four of the Queen’s children are divorced and all of her children have become embroiled in embarrassing scandals: Prince Andrew had to explain away the fact that his former wife tried to sell access to him; far more seriously, in more recent times, he has had to give up all his royal duties following his failure to explain his long and apparently close relationship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, not to mention his alleged relationship with a number of young girls. One royal insider has said that Andrew is under pressure from the royal family to live abroad. The perception in royal circles is that he will never be able to rebuild public trust. Far less seriously, but still embarrassingly, Prince Charles has a history of trying to influence public policy (not to mention admitting to an adulterous relationship), while Edward used his royal status to further his career as a TV executive.
Of course, the Queen’s admirable policy of ‘never complain, never explain’ is by no means typical of the royals. With the exception, perhaps, of George III and Queen Victoria, all the Hanoverian monarchs xxibehaved in supremely undignified ways – fathering numerous illegitimate children, demanding huge amounts of money from Parliament for vanity projects and failing to pay their debts.
But, as we will see, it was ever thus.xxii
CHAPTER ONE
BRICKS AND MORTAR
‘I declare this thing open – whatever it is.’
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Those who write about architecture tend to be rather grand, with a few notable exceptions including the great Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–83), whose name has become synonymous with a certain kind of no-nonsense architectural writing. But then, Pevsner had been trained in the more vigorous, unsentimental German tradition. British architectural writers tend to talk rather pompously about the relationship between planes and volumes, as opposed to the more basic elements of building. No one, so far as I have been able to discover, has noted the simple fact about Kensington Palace that its bricks are laid in what is known as Flemish bond. This style would be obvious then and now to any bricklayer worth his salt.
Flemish bond was just coming into fashion when Kensington Palace was being remodelled by Christopher Wren towards the end of the seventeenth century. The technique for laying Flemish bond is 2as follows: a stretcher (a brick laid lengthways) is always followed by a header (a brick laid end on), then another stretcher and so on.
Traditionally, English brick buildings had been built using English bond where a line of bricks is laid end to end (stretchers) until the first line is completed. The next line (or ‘course’) of bricks are then all laid end on (headers) – i.e. at right angles to the first course. English bond is still considered stronger than Flemish bond and it is perhaps the use of the latter that has resulted, in part at least, in the endless repetition of the idea that Kensington Palace was jerry-built – in other words, built badly and too quickly using inferior materials. In fact, Kensington Palace was simply adopting the latest fashion in bricklaying. And much of the brickwork was putty jointed, which was very expensive. There were shortcuts, certainly – timber used and painted to resemble stone here and there, for example – but it was a mix of ‘no expense spared’ in some areas and ‘cheap and cheerful’ in others. The basic structure would have been little different from many other buildings of the time.
Architectural writers often talk about buildings being jerry-built when they don’t like them or wish to justify their demolition. John Nash’s magnificent Regent Street was destroyed in the 1920s on the grounds that so-called experts called it jerry-built – those same experts would no doubt recommend the complete rebuilding of Venice on the grounds that so many of its buildings are ‘jerry-built’ and sinking into the mud.
The ‘jerry-built’ criticism has been levelled at Kensington Palace over the years, and it almost led to the building’s complete destruction in the nineteenth century.3
Most of the stories of Kensington’s structural inadequacies stem from the speed with which the palace was enlarged for William and Mary and the fact that on one occasion in November 1689 part of a wall collapsed. This may well have stemmed from overly hasty building, but there were no safety standards at the time and new techniques could be used only on a trial-and-error basis.
At Hampton Court, where more money and more time was available for work taking place around the same time, another wall collapsed, killing two workmen. In fact, this happened just a month after the Kensington Palace accident. The truth is that all early buildings are poorly built in some respects – they usually lack what we now consider ‘proper’ foundations, for example – but well-built in others. Rather than cheap softwood timbers, early buildings usually have oak and other hardwoods, for instance.
As part of the research for this book I spoke to an elderly man who had worked as a labourer when, in order to modernise the apartment destined to be lived in by Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, Christopher Wren’s Stone Court at Kensington Palace was destroyed. Asked about the quality of the building work, John Fagan said:
It was incredibly solidly built; absolutely solid brickwork throughout and beautifully put together. The thing about a really good bricklayer is that his work improves the faster he goes because he lays light and accurate when he gets into a really good swing of work. Those early bricklayers really knew what they were doing.
In truth, then, Kensington Palace was built just as solidly as many grand houses of the time. The ‘poor quality’ argument has always 4been a simple and not entirely honest device to justify removing early historic work in order to create modern apartments. If the palace became dilapidated at various times in its history, it was because it was abandoned, often for decades. Any building left that long without maintenance will begin to fall apart. In fact, it is testimony to the skills of the original workmen – carpenters and bricklayers, tilers and roofers – that the building is still there today despite the various long periods of neglect.
The real problem with Kensington Palace, if there is one, is that the original house was built on boggy ground – a spring reached a conduit house in the grounds until the nineteenth century and a number of streams flowed across the area where the house was built. A bigger stream a little to the east (the Westbourne) was later widened and deepened to form the Serpentine lake we see today.
The water didn’t just create an unstable basis for Kensington (as it would for any house, however well-built); it also led to complaints that Kensington Palace, or parts of it, was unhealthy. The eighteenth-century diarist John Hervey recalled George II asking Queen Caroline to go to London from Kensington, ‘that house where she was having the reputation of being damp…’
Certainly, the basement rooms were very damp in the early days – George II’s mistress Henrietta Howard wrote to a friend that she could have grown mushrooms in her basement apartment at Kensington; but Henrietta would have known that putting her in those damp rooms was probably George’s way of making it clear that she was a mistress, not a wife. She was important, but she should not get ideas above her station.
Damp certainly damages brickwork, especially early bricks, which were softer than their modern equivalent, so by the late nineteenth 5century many of the walls at Kensington were leaning and had to be shored up thanks to the lowest courses of brick crumbling.
Very little of the original core of Kensington Palace remains today, not because it fell down as a result of shoddy workmanship or damp, but because the house bought by William and Mary – then known as Nottingham House – was remodelled and enlarged by Christopher Wren at the end of the seventeenth century in a rather odd way. Wren didn’t rebuild from scratch because the royals were in a hurry and wanted to show that they were prepared to be careful with money taken from the public purse. William, the new king fresh from the Glorious Revolution, wished to demonstrate that he was both frugal and prudent with the resources of his new kingdom.
The story of the original house has often been told, but a brief account may be in order. Around 1610, Sir Walter Cope was offered the lucrative job of Keeper of Hyde Park. It was largely a sinecure and Cope did not expect to have to do any work himself. He kept his large annual salary and paid small sums to others to guard the gates and maintain the fences. By the time he had been made keeper, Cope already owned the land where Kensington Palace now stands. But when he died in 1614, he owed so much money that his widow was forced to sell some of his estate. The land where the palace is now was sold to Sir George Coppin. By 1618 Coppin had built a simple though probably rather beautiful house, of which a single drawing survives. Historians describe it as small, but by today’s standards it was by no means small. It was a roughly square house with a central entrance leading to a large hall that ran from front to back. At either side of the great hall were other reception rooms – a parlour, for example. In the basement were servants’ rooms, a kitchen and various storerooms. 6The first floor was divided into a series of bedrooms and there were more servants’ bedrooms in the attic. The house had bay windows and stepped or Dutch gables. The architect was almost certainly John Thorpe, who was famous for designing houses with corridors rather than adhering to the older system of building rooms that opened into each other. Thorpe also designed Lord Cecil’s huge house at Audley End in Essex and Cope Castle, later known as Holland House, built just a mile or so west of Kensington House. Holland House was severely damaged by German bombs during the Second World War and only one wing now survives.
Sir George Coppin died in 1620 and the house passed to his widow, who sold it to Sir Heneage Finch in 1628.
Finch, a lawyer and later speaker of the English House of Commons, whose son was to become Lord Chancellor and Earl of Nottingham, enjoyed his new purchase for just three years before he died in 1631. His widow, Elizabeth, lived on in the house, which was considered to have been designed in the latest fashion at the time, for thirty years. When she died in 1661 the house was bought by Sir Heneage’s eldest son, who, confusingly, was also called Heneage.
Samuel Pepys visited the house in 1664. In 1682, when the second Sir Heneage Finch died, the house – by now known as Nottingham House – was inherited by another Finch, Daniel, second Earl of Nottingham, who then sold it to King William III in 1689. Finch decided that his family and staff – more than sixty in all – needed more space than Nottingham House could provide. He was no doubt delighted to find a ready buyer in King William, who paid 18,000 guineas (around £20,000) for the house and grounds. But why was William so keen to buy a house just two miles from his far grander palace at Whitehall? 7Apparently William, who suffered from asthma, hated the rambling, damp, smoky palace of Whitehall. Nottingham House would have seemed a rural idyll – surrounded by fields and meadows, unpolluted by tens of thousands of coal fires and a river reeking of sewage. The village of Kensington was at that time little more than a hamlet.
A newly built house away from the river but still in London might have offered a different solution, but apart from the fact that William did not want to be seen as profligate, there simply wasn’t room. According to the architect John James, writing in 1712:
A late years the town is so increased and tenement buildings so much run on that most of the great houses that belonged to people of quality are thrown down and turned into tenements and there is hardly to be got ground about the town fit for people of quality to build houses in.
Kensington appealed to William and Mary because it was close enough to London without being hemmed in (or bordered by a dirty river) and it reminded them of Het Loo, their palace in the Netherlands. But if Nottingham House was delightfully situated, it was also far too small for a king.
So William employed Christopher Wren, then at the height of his fame, to make the house bigger. This was quicker and cheaper than pulling the old house down and rebuilding. Wren came up with an ingenious solution. He built four small square houses (or pavilions) at each corner of the original house. Like most architects, he would probably have preferred to start from scratch and demolish the old house, but William would have none of it and insisted that the house must simply be enlarged. Adding four corner houses was a neat solution that 8satisfied the king’s desire for a speedy enlargement. It also meant that at a later stage the central part of the palace – the original old house – could be rebuilt while the corner pavilions continued to accommodate the royal household.
Over the years, as with most old houses, the palace was to be hacked about and remodelled; staircases were moved and whole areas of Wren’s work ripped out as late as the 1960s. But for William and Mary and, following their deaths, Queen Anne, Kensington Palace became an adored home and, despite changes to other parts of the palace, the great state rooms where they lived have survived, largely unaltered, to this day.
But what of the early inhabitants of the house transformed into a palace?
William and Mary seem positively sane in comparison with the royals who were to succeed them; for instance, Anne, whose loss of seventeen children – all stillborn or failing to survive childhood – made her decidedly odd and unhappy. Scandalously, she was rumoured to have enjoyed a close (possibly sexual) relationship with the Duchess of Marlborough. But the real madness sets in with the Hanoverians who followed Anne; they set a standard for eccentric and scandalous behaviour unmatched until recent times.
Kensington Palace was the scene of much of this eccentricity and the house itself was considered an outlandish choice for a monarch. Many thought it entirely unsuitable for a king even in its rebuilt form, but as Peter Thorold points out in his book The London Rich, ‘Kensington Palace can be seen in a sense as a replacement for the vanished Richmond and Nonsuch [Palaces] and the others … and it was more convenient especially in winter than Windsor and Hampton Court.’ 9Kensington’s great virtue was not its size, or its grand imposing rooms, or its magnificent grounds. It was simply a question of location.
Certainly, after the abolition of the monarchy in 1649 several palaces were entirely or partly destroyed, including Sheen and Nonsuch. Kensington was closer to London than those palaces that remained, as Thorold rightly explains, and it may be that, being smaller, Kensington also fitted rather better with the new idea of a monarch who could no longer spend almost unlimited amounts of money, just as he could no longer exercise almost unlimited power.
Complaints that Kensington (even with its pavilions) was not really magnificent enough for the dignity of the monarch reached a pitch in 1712 with a plan to build a much bigger palace in nearby Hyde Park – perhaps one rather like Versailles – but nothing came of it, probably because William was happy enough at Kensington House. This would have enhanced the image of him as a reasonable, modern monarch. Mary insisted in a letter to a friend that the king had originally bought Nottingham House as a way to appease the courtiers who wanted him to remain at Whitehall so that they would not have to travel far to see him – Hampton and Windsor were, they insisted, too far away. But once he was at Kensington there were still complaints. Sir Charles Sedley told the House of Commons that the courtiers kept William at Kensington Palace ‘as in a box’.
From surviving accounts, Queen Mary appears to have been central to Christopher Wren’s work at Kensington, perhaps because William was away much of the time fighting in Ireland and in France. William, it seems, only really felt at home when he was away from home. But Mary seems to have genuinely loved Kensington and she was concerned that Wren’s rebuilding should be well done. She lived at nearby Holland 10House while the work at Kensington continued and visited regularly to check progress.
William and Mary no doubt enjoyed what they would have seen as their rural retreat, but they also would have known that, for them, a genuine retreat was impossible. Several hundred courtiers, including the Lord Chamberlain, Master of the Horse, Groom of the Stool, Lord Privy Seal and countless others expected to be housed at the palace, along with their numerous servants.
Although the palace has been derided by some architectural historians as an unfortunate muddle, the lack of symmetry in its overall appearance is pleasing to the casual observer as Kensington has an almost organic quality – a sense, like many older English houses, of having been added to and altered over the years to create something unique and original rather than something strictly planned and coherent from the outset.
A passer-by will not mind that the East Front and South Front of the house are rather different from each other, nor that Wren added a long wing stretching westwards to house offices and kitchens. Stables were also added and remain to this day (although they were largely rebuilt in the twentieth century).
Interestingly, Wren asked another great architect of the period, Nicholas Hawksmoor – perhaps best known as the architect of London’s Christ Church, Spitalfields – to supervise the day-to-day progress of the work, and as a result we even know the names of many of the workmen, carpenters, stonemasons and bricklayers: Thomas Hughes and later Richard Stacey were in charge of masonry and brickwork; the chief plasterer was Henry Margetts; the carpenter, Matthew Banks. More famously, the woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) contributed 11to the palace and some of his extraordinary work survives there to this day. Despite the involvement of two of the greatest architects of the time, much of the decorative work was done quickly – doorcases and external carvings were cleverly made from timber painted to look like stone. But these attempts at cutting corners were largely concerned with decorative elements.
