Queen's House (14 page)

By the time George IV became King, his passion for creating palaces was waning: his fantastic Pavilion at Brighton was losing its charm, and
he was becoming tired of the ‘Mahomet's Paradise' he had created in Carlton House. A lifetime of self-indulgence had left its mark: crippled by gout, increasingly obese, he had become the butt of satirists and cartoonists. His extravagance in times of war and poverty, and his treatment of his eccentric wife, Queen Caroline, had made him deeply unpopular. To his enemies Carlton House, his London home, had become the symbol of the decadence of the British monarchy.

Carlton House had been bought by the King's grandfather, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his grandmother, Princess Augusta, had lived there until her death in 1772. When Prince George came of age in 1783 he was given Carlton House: for the next thirty years, with the help of five successive architects, the Prince had spent vast sums, altering and improving, furnishing and refurnishing with manic energy, forever changing his plans. The waste and extravagance had been scandalous, although it must be said that he accumulated a superb collection of paintings and a priceless hoard of treasures and furniture, silver, china and
objets d'art,
many of which grace Buckingham Palace today.

He must have sorely tried his first architect in 1783 – Sir William Chambers – who was succeeded in the next year by Henry Holland. Nevertheless Chambers's love of Chinese art and architecture left a lasting impression on the Prince. Four years later, he created a Chinese Room at Carlton House. Thirty years later its furniture was to be transferred to the Prince's second and even more fantastic palace, the Brighton Pavilion.

When, in 1811, the Prince became Regent, Carlton House became the centre of Court life, where he held his levees, receptions, and fabulous fêtes to celebrate victories in the Peninsular War, and in honour of Louis XVIII on his return to France after the Battle of Waterloo. In July 1814 an even more extravagant celebration was held in honour of the Duke of Wellington. John Nash, appointed in 1813 as architect for Carlton House, created mirror-lined tents and pavilions in the garden for these festivities.

However, by 1819, the Prince was growing tired of Carlton House: there was not enough room for his vast assemblies, and it had no gallery
suitable for his growing collection of paintings – over 250 had to be stored on the attic floor.

George IV was one of the great Royal collectors, comparable with Charles I. He undoubtedly was genuinely interested in art and showed real discrimination in his purchase of paintings. However, he accumulated pictures with obsessive greed, buying and selling almost until his death. But he was a generous patron: he bought pictures from Reynolds, Gainsborough, Beechey and Hopper, and commissioned many more, including narrative paintings from David Wilkie. George Stubbs was a particular favourite. Eighteen of his pictures, now in the Royal Collection, belonged to George IV.

During his Regency he had collected mainly Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century pictures. Perhaps their cool order brought peace to his restless mind. Surprisingly the extravagant Regent took pleasure in van Ostade's painting of a child being fed in a cottage. This was part of a collection of eighty-six paintings he bought from the banker Sir Thomas Baring in 1814: also included were Jan Steen's rollicking
Twelfth Night Feast: the King Drinks
and a luminous evening landscape by Aelbert Cuyp.

Now that he was King he could find a new home not only for his paintings, but for his richly decorated French furniture, his chandeliers and massive candelabras, his clocks and Sèvres porcelain.

However, he could not at first decide what kind of palace he wanted. There were many suggestions offered. The architect Sir John Soane had already produced detailed plans for a splendid residence for the new King. Mrs Arbuthnot, wife of the Commissioner for Woods and Forests, Charles Arbuthnot, records that at a house party at Stratfield Saye in October 1825, Colonel Trench MP had shown the Duke of Wellington his own plans for a new building.

Colonel Trench wants to have a palace in the Park on what is called Buck Vine Hill, and the execution of his plan would cause half Hyde Park to be occupied by buildings, courts and gardens. It is the worst plan of a house I ever saw, and quite colossal, for he proposes a statue gallery 500 feet long, a drawing room 190, and other rooms in proportion. It is the most ridiulous plan I ever saw for, added to it, is the idea of a street
200 feet wide
extending from the end of
Hyde Park opposite the New Palace to St Paul's!! The King and the Duke of York are madly eager for this plan; but the former says he supposes his d—d ministers won't allow it … Colonel Trench has persuaded him that Buckingham House will always be a damp hole unfit for him to live in; and the ministers, in consequence of the King's determination to have no other place, during the last session obtained money from Parliament, obtained the King's approval of the plan and immediately set to work to build there for him. All the rest of us laughed at Col. Trench and his plans; we advised him to put his palace in Kensington Gardens and not to touch the ‘lungs of the people of England', as the newspapers call the parks.
²

However, the King, rejecting all alternative plans, decided to rebuild Buckingham Palace and demolish Carlton House. The Riding School next door was converted into a store for his furniture and possessions.

The King solved the problem of storing at least some of his vast collection of paintings: he lent 164 in 1826 and a further 185 in 1827 for exhibition in the British Institution in Pall Mall, of which he was the patron. The foreword in the catalogue recorded His Majesty's ‘desire to interest the public feeling in the advancement of the fine arts'. When Prince Regent he had shown a genuine interest in supporting British artists and took great interest in the proposal for a National Gallery. Ten Corinthian pillars from the front of Carlton House were saved and, according to Clifford Smith, used in the façade of the new National Gallery when it was built in 1838.

Nash had already given much thought to a new palace and tried to persuade the King to build higher, in line with Pall Mall. He did not like Buckingham House's northern aspect, and rightly considered it too low and damp. However, the King was adamant. In the presence of Lord Farnborough he warned Nash not

at his peril ever to advise me to build a Palace. I am too old to build a Palace. If the Public wish to have a Palace, I have no objection to build one, but I must have a pied-à-terre. I do not like Carlton House standing in a street, and moreover I tell him that I will have it at Buckingham House; and if he pulls it down he shall rebuild it in the same place; there are early associations which endear me to the spot.
³

He had had a happy childhood there with Queen Charlotte.

The idea that George IV would be satisfied with a
pied à terre
was preposterous. His feet were never wholly on the ground. Even in 1819, before he became King, he had considered rebuilding Buckingham House on a grand scale. But, as he told the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, that would cost around £450,000. The government, however, had refused to allot anything more than £150,000. These were days of distress and riots. So it was not until 12 July 1821 that the King told his Surveyor-General Stephenson ‘to put all plans relating to Buckingham House in the hands of Nash', and work did not begin until 1825.

If the new King did not know what he wanted, John Nash did. The new palace should be part of his grand scheme for London. He had already designed Regent's Park and the great sweeping arc of Regent Street leading from the Park down to Carlton House. Now he was planning to clear away the jumble of little streets round the King's Mews on the site of the present Trafalgar Square and create an open space where the Battle of Trafalgar could be commemorated, reveal the church of St Martin's-in-the-Fields, unite the roads from Whitehall, the Mall and the Strand, and link with the great road to Regent's Park. Buckingham Palace would then be the climax of the long avenue, the Mall. He also had plans for a West Strand development, but by this time he was fully engaged in his work on the palace, so the building with the round turrets that he designed, now the bank of Coutts & Co., was built by other architects. In many respects his vision was realized: Trafalgar Square was created and Regent Street and Regent's Park remain an elegant monument to him. The King's Mews was removed to the Grosvenor Place end of the palace garden.

In June 1825 a bill was passed in the House of Commons authorizing work to begin on the ‘repair and improvement of Buckingham House' with a grant of £200,000.

On 23 January 1826
The Times
reported:

The new palace is to be called ‘The King's Palace in St James's Park'. A large artificial mound has been raised near the lower end of Grosvenor Place to hide
the stables, behind it a fish pond will be constructed. The centre will remain as a parallelogram, from each side of which a circular range of buildings will end in pavilions.

The entire pile will be of immense magnitude.

All the principal and state apartments will face west.
⁴

This is one of the earliest references to the ‘Palace'.

In May 1826
The Times
reported that, on the advice of his doctors, His Majesty was not to return to Brighton and that the Pavilion was to be stripped inside and out; some items were to be used at Buckingham Palace. The truth was that the King was no longer the Prince Charming of his youth, and he had grown so immensely fat that he was unwilling to be seen in public. The house and garden at the end of the Mall would be a retreat, a ‘
rus in urbe
', again. But the retreat was to become an ‘immense pile', thanks to the co-operation of a king who could not rid himself of the
folie de grandeur,
and an architect who was only too ready to oblige him.

‘Nash, the state rooms you have made me are so handsome
that I think I shall hold my courts there'

It is time to take a closer look at John Nash, the architect mainly responsible for the Palace we see today, although there would be major alterations and additions in the reigns of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. It is important to remember that in 1825 Nash was seventy-three and was still an extremely busy architect, the Palace being only one of many projects in which he was concerned.

His early life is obscure, but it appears that he was born in Lambeth of Welsh parents in 1752. His father and cousins were millwrights and engineers with relations still working in Wales. Apparently his father was sufficiently prosperous to take a house in Spring Gardens, near Charing Cross, where he died when Nash was seven years old. Their neighbour Robert Taylor was one of the most successful architects of the day and may have taken an interest in the bright little boy. Certainly
he took him as an assistant, possibly in 1766 or 1767; and with him he would have served a seven years' apprenticeship. It is a pity we know so little of Nash's years with Taylor, for his influence was to remain with him all his life. Robert Taylor began in his father's trade as a mason and sculptor, studied in Rome and on his return found wealthy patrons in the city. He switched early from sculpture to architecture and became famous for his solid classical buildings, in town and country. He became architect to the Bank of England, received a knighthood and made a fortune, which he left for the teaching of foreign languages at the University of Oxford. This eventually resulted in the foundation of the Taylorian Institute. In Taylor's office the young Nash had an excellent grounding in the principles of classical architecture, and the energy which drove him all his life would have been harnessed and disciplined by a master who worked hard and demanded accuracy.

It is said that Nash was ‘a wild irregular youth' and his biographer, William Porden, records that he drove Taylor into a frenzy, upon which Taylor would ‘pinch John's ears and perform some sort of jigs with cries of “harum scarum'”. The qualities that marked his later work were obviously present as a boy – the talent and the energy which on one occasion drove him to stay up all night to complete a job which his colleagues said could not be done. Above all, if Robert Taylor could have looked down in after life at his pupil's work for the ‘Palace in the Park' he would have shaken the walls of heaven with his ‘harum scarum'.

There are various and differing accounts of the next stage of Nash's life, but some facts seem to be established. According to Porden, after ‘the term of his articles expired' Nash retired to a small country estate, where he led the life of ‘a gentleman keeping the best company of Bon Vivants'. In short, this was said to be a period of ‘harum scarum'. In April 1775 Nash married Elizabeth Kerr, a surgeon's daughter, by whom he had a son, baptized on 10 June 1776; and, it would appear, they lived in Lambeth.

His first building ventures – speculative building in Bloomsbury Square – set a pattern he would follow with the same mixture of success and failure in Regent Street and Carlton Gardens. The stucco for his
buildings was supplied by the firm of Robert, James & William Adam, who reappear in the history of Buckingham Palace later on. He lived in one of the houses and moved on to Great Russell Street. In 1782 he left his wife for a Welsh lady, became involved in a court case, and, in 1783, became bankrupt, describing himself as ‘John Nash, Carpenter, Dealer and Chapman'. He retreated to Wales and gradually established himself as an architect responsible, among other things, for Carmarthen Gaol. From then onwards he pursued an uneven course upwards, raising classical buildings and experimenting with iron work in construction. In 1795 the graceful iron bridge he built at Stratford-on-Teme collapsed.

Attracted by his lively personality and intelligence, the Prince drew him into his circle. He began to rely on Nash, not only as his architectural surveyor but also as a political supporter, intelligent enough to be sent on delicate missions to Westminster. Almost his first action as Regent was to set in motion again work on the Brighton Pavilion and when James Wyatt, his Surveyor-General, died in September 1813, he appointed Nash as Deputy Surveyor. For the next two years Nash concentrated on his work for Carlton House and London. For the peace celebrations of 1814 he was commissioned to build a fantastic pagoda over a bridge in St James's Park. It was brilliant but, like his bridge, was doomed: it caught fire and collapsed.