Her Majesty (49 page)

Here is a particularly colourful illustration of that shift in balance between ‘her’ and ‘us’. Less than twenty-five years ago, this magnificent accumulation of great art and much else besides was in the hands of a tiny Palace office. In 1987, it was turned into a free-standing department within the Royal Household and is now the largest of the lot, with 320 full-time and 300 part-time staff every summer. It is the Royal Collection Department which brings the public through the royal doors, sells the souvenirs and uses all the proceeds to keep the treasures in one piece. Its mandate is not only to preserve its contents but to ensure that they are seen and enjoyed by as many people as possible. The modern Royal Collection will be one
of the Queen’s great legacies – a treasure chest of incalculable value which is now a charitable trust generating
£
38 million a year, all of which is ploughed back into the collection. Without a penny of subsidy, it must support itself. Although the Queen has always held it ‘in trust’ for the nation, it was often added to estimates of her personal wealth. The creation of the Royal Collection Trust in 1993 put that myth to bed. It underlined the fact that no monarch could sell a Rembrandt any more than he or she could sell Hyde Park or HM Prison Dartmoor.

That same year, the Royal Collection Department was charged with opening Buckingham Palace to the paying public for the summer to finance the restoration of Windsor Castle following the fire of 1992. There may have been opposition within the Palace but the Queen could see the financial and political point. Now it goes unquestioned, a hugely popular summer ritual. Between them, Windsor Castle and the Palace attract 1.4 million people and generate two-thirds of the Royal Collection’s income
£
17 million in admissions and
£
5 million in retail. The Prince of Wales is a diligent chairman of the whole operation. Not long ago, he admitted that, if he was given a sabbatical from being royal, he would like to spend his days researching the Royal Collection. It is unlikely the Queen would go that far. Her passions lie elsewhere. But she is proud and rightly concerned about every last teaspoon. ‘In terms of access and conservation, this reign has been a high point in the history of the collection,’ says Jonathan Marsden, Director of the Royal Collection. ‘It will be seen as significant as that of Queen Victoria.’

If she goes down in history as the ‘Curator Monarch’ – and it is, perhaps, preferable to being lumped in with that old rake George IV, arguably the greatest of the ‘Connoisseur Monarchs’ – then she will be happy. She is kept informed of all exhibition plans and personally authorises every loan of every work to every institution. Marsden has just sent up a list of items which the Canadian National Gallery wants to borrow. She will consider each one. It’s no rubber-stamping exercise, either. Once or twice, her curators have advised against a loan if there is the slightest chance that the work of art might not come back. But the Queen has not always shared their pessimism and has, on occasions, been happy to overrule them.

The Royal Collection is so huge that it rivals – and, in several areas, outshines – the world’s greatest collections. No other monarchy has anything like it. As for former monarchies, their treasures have all been dispersed or absorbed into national collections like the Louvre and the Hermitage. The Royal Collection would have a great deal more today had Oliver Cromwell’s republican cohorts not sold off great chunks of it – including the Crown Jewels – after the execution of Charles I in
1649. ‘Many of the most famous paintings in the Prado, in Vienna and in the Louvre, belonged to Charles I,’ says Jonathan Marsden. ‘We had to start all over again.’

There are, in fact, somewhere between 750,000 and a million items in the collection. ‘It depends whether or not you count the cup and the saucer separately,’ says Marsden. It includes mighty collections within a collection – of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Holbein, of Sevres porcelain, of Van Dycks and Canalettos. And it is unique in many ways. ‘There is no other collection of this sort which is what I would call “in the wild”,’ says Marsden. ‘By that I mean that many works are used for their original purpose – to provide a setting for the business of monarchy.’ There can, surely, be no comparable collection of antiques and treasures which are still used for their original purpose – for eating, for drinking, for sitting on or for putting things on.

What also distinguishes the Royal Collection from the collections in most national museums are the glaring oddities and gaps. It represents the amalgamated personal tastes of British monarchs and has never had a public duty to be comprehensive. It has the best collection of Canalettos in the world, for example, yet it does not include a single work by Turner or Constable.

‘Any museum curator would be pacing up and down and agonising about that because acquisitions are the first thing most curators think about when they get up in the morning. But we don’t because that is not our principal mission,’ Marsden explains. ‘The collection reflects the enthusiasms of monarchs, not the collecting interests of curators. So we don’t say, “Oh no, the Umbrian School is under-represented.”’

Nothing is sold but from time to time there is some careful buying. Marsden points to the 1998 purchase of a little stand for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s broth basin as an example of the type of acquisition made by the Queen. These have often been items with strong royal connections. Unlike George IV, though, the Queen has never been accused of being a shopaholic.

Another unique aspect of the Royal Collection is that lack of public subsidy. Unlike so many of Britain’s other great galleries and museums, the Royal Collection has to depend on footfall, marketing and commercial activities to survive. It’s another royal paradox. We want royal enterprises like the Royal Collection to pay their own way but heaven forbid that they should trade on their royal connections. They have to tread carefully. Marsden points to the example of two books written to accompany an exhibition on Victoria and Albert in the Queen’s Gallery. One is a beautifully illustrated, dense academic work with a price tag
of £35. The other is a slimmer £9.95 book aimed at the general visitor. Marsden holds up the academic book. ‘It’s new research and an important piece of scholarship but the only way we can do this book is by getting sponsorship for the production costs and selling 10,000 copies of the other one.’ He has to do a lot more than balance the books of his books. The Royal Collection now has a vigorous retail arm selling 1,500 items ranging from cards, DVDs and biscuit tins to mock bearskins for toddlers, illuminated yo-yos and soap, all under the management of Nuala McGourty.

An experienced retail executive, formerly with Marks & Spencer and La Senza, she is keen to push into every section of the market. ‘Fine bone china and anything with a royal coat of arms works very well and we’re launching a range of ties with some of the architectural features of Buckingham Palace on them,’ she explains. ‘But we always try to have something a bit light-hearted, so we’ve got a dog range – liver-flavoured organic dog biscuits. We tried dog T-shirts with [the words] Prince and Princess on them, too. We want to appeal to everyone.’ What about cats? ‘No! We do corgis here.’ McGourty always makes sure the shops are showing a royal documentary on a screen. ‘It’s good for the atmosphere.’

Her latest project has been a cafe in the Buckingham Palace garden during the summer opening to cater for those at the end of their tour of the State Rooms. It’s not about making money – although it has to break even – but about improving the ‘visitor experience’. Every self-respecting stately home has a cafe, usually in an old stable block or orangery. But the Palace has no empty buildings so the Royal Collection has to build a temporary cafe on the West Terrace, overlooking the garden. Tea and scones are the predictable bestsellers. But McGourty has found that even some of the rubbish is popular. ‘We haven’t got the space for washing-up machines so everything is disposable,’ she explains. ‘But it’s amazing how many people want to take the cups away with them. They all have royal branding and people love them.’

It’s always a juggling act between financial imperatives and the bounds of royal good taste. McGourty, more than anyone, understands the importance of not devaluing the brand. In any case, there are plenty of opinions to be canvassed before, say, a remote-controlled corgi or an EIIR soapon-a-rope could ever see the light of day. As Vice-Chairman of the Royal Collection Trust, Lord Peel, the Lord Chamberlain, always keeps a wary eye out for any ideas which might backfire. ‘Sometimes, I might suggest looking at something in a slightly less corporate way – a softer approach,’ he says. ‘But it’s been an amazing achievement. They’ve borrowed millions
to build a new gallery in Edinburgh, all without public finance at all, and they’ve almost paid it all back.’

Without all this commercial activity, of course, there would be no pot to pay for new galleries, education programmes, travelling exhibitions and fresh investments. Marsden’s next project is to improve the online side of things, including a significant increase in the number of pieces on the Royal Collection’s website. Public appreciation is all part of its
raison d’être
and, if that happens to be via the internet, so much the better. There are even plans for online debates about the attribution of a particular work of art.

Indeed, since becoming a fully fledged department, the Royal Collection has started discovering works it never knew it had.

In recent years, Marsden’s distinguished predecessor, Sir Hugh Roberts, had the happy task of visiting the Monarch on several occasions with very great news. The Queen had acquired two Caravaggios and, in 2003, a priceless bronze satyr by Benvenuto Cellini. What’s more, it had all happened without going near an auction house or opening a chequebook. It was simply down to her curators and conservators. These masterpieces had always been somewhere in the collection but no one had identified them correctly before.

The most popular royal treasures of the lot are inside the Tower of London. The Crown Jewels also belong to the Queen ‘in right of Crown’ so, of course, she can never sell them. The Tower itself is run by a separate operation, Historic Royal Palaces, a charity which manages all the old royal residences no longer lived in by the Royal Family, such as Hampton Court Palace. It also runs the non-residential part of Kensington Palace. Its most famous attraction, by far, is the Tower which receives nearly 2.5 million visitors each year, more than double the figure for Windsor Castle. Like the Royal Collection, Historic Royal Palaces does not receive a penny of public money and must fend for itself. It’s that paradox again: it is
ours –
but do not expect us to pay for it. When the Coalition Government was planning to slash public subsidies for heritage organisations, attention turned to Historic Royal Palaces – until it was pointed out that it had never received a subsidy. Some of the Queen’s senior officials sit on the board of trustees but, being detached from the Royal Household, Historic Royal Palaces can afford to be a little more ‘corporate’. So the public can hire the Kensington Palace Orangery or the Hampton Court Garden Room for weddings and civil partnerships. Similarly, the whole tone of the organisation is a little less deferential, the atmosphere different from that of the Royal Collection. The organisation’s 2010 annual report featured a photograph of an enormous pair of
pants belonging to Queen Victoria. It’s unlikely that the Royal Collection would illustrate its publications with royal underwear. From blood and guts at the Tower to macabre courtiers at Kensington Palace, Historic Royal Palaces celebrates every aspect of royal heritage, good or bad.

The adventurous young team of curators, led by the historian and documentary maker Dr Lucy Worsley, are keen to broaden the appeal beyond the traditional coach parties to include the ‘cool rejector’ market. ‘They are the fifteen to thirty crowd who don’t normally come to places like this,’ she says. Hence the recent ‘Enchanted Palace’ tour of the Kensington Palace state apartments. Exploring the turbulent lives of seven Princesses who had lived there, its underlying message was: ‘It’s not easy being a Princess’ (it is not known whether Catherine Middleton did the tour). Among those included in the exhibition were two of the most famous former occupants of Kensington’s residential wing next door – Diana, Princess of Wales, and Princess Margaret. With its arm’slength status, Kensington Palace is ideally suited to handle more sensitive tasks like honouring the memory of Diana. It would feel contrived and uncomfortable if she was put on a plinth at somewhere like Windsor. But Princess Margaret’s old Kensington Palace home, Apartment 1
A,
has now been handed over to Historic Royal Palaces (the title is misleading: Princess Margaret’s ‘flat’ was actually a terraced house with some forty rooms, including a dog-washing room, an orchid room, a lift and a garden with a gazebo rescued from Ascot Racecourse). As part of the multimillion-pound transformation of Kensington Palace, it is being turned into a space which can properly reflect the lives of the Queen’s sister and former daughter-in law. The Queen follows it all closely. She knows that this is yet another subtle judgement call in getting the right balance between ‘her’ and ‘us’. And she is often less cautious than most people expect. This reign can be characterised in many ways, not least by the number of closed doors which are now open. It’s not been some great altruistic gesture. Nor has it been forced on her. It’s simply a case of being in the Happy People Business.

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European royalty were not the only ones sneering. Sir Harold Nicolson, the biographer of George V, observed that the furnishings in the ‘glum little villa’ were ‘indistinguishable from those of any Surbiton or Upper Norwood home’. Nicolson later complained that receiving a knighthood for his literary efforts had been a rather ‘middle-class’ honour. He reflected that he would have preferred a case of champagne or a carriage clock.

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Like most people, the Queen says ‘Jubil-eee’, as opposed to the supposedly smarter ‘Jooobly’. Neither can be said to be ‘correct’. It’s a matter of choice.