The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (16 page)

Royal Travel was one of several Palace departments that had been farmed out to government over the years and until
Peat’s report, which recommended radical cost cutting and bringing it back under Palace control, Travel had been shared between the Department of Transport, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This was partly to mask the amount of money the Palace was spending by hiding it in governmental departments. It is still paid for by the Department of Transport as Grant-in-Aid but since April 1997 it has been back within the household and a series of leasing deals negotiated. The Sikorsky is halfway through a ten-year lease and if they need extra capacity they charter helicopters. The fixed-wing aircraft that the family uses belong to 32 Squadron of the RAF, for which the household pays just over £2000 an hour, about half what it would have to pay commercially. And if any members of the family use an aircraft for private business they pay for it at the commercial rate.

32 Squadron has two BAe 146s, which can carry twenty-one people but have a flying range of only 1500 miles; they are very useful for getting in and out of small landing strips, but alas there are only two of them and although the royal household has first call, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary also use them. Actually, so too do the RAF. The aircraft’s primary role is moving operational commanders around theatres of war and if they are needed in a war zone – as they were in Iraq in 2003 – the Armed Forces have very first call on them.

The other planes belonging to 32 Squadron to which the household has claim include six HS 125s, which have a range of 2000 miles but only carry seven passengers, and have no hold, and the same rules of precedence apply. Every other plane the family flies in these days – ranging from a huge 777 to a small Lear Jet – is chartered. The big ones, like the 777 chartered for the Queen’s trip to Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand a few years ago, come from British Airways who put
in a couple of divan beds for the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, knowing that two legs of the journey were over twelve hours long. The real cost of that was £661,300, but the governments of New Zealand and Australia contributed, which reduced it to £304,667. Since then the Palace has repeatedly taken its business back to British Airways. (Virgin was invited to tender but didn’t respond.) Tim Hewlett says British Airways give them such good service that if it wasn’t for the accountants he wouldn’t bother to tender. He charters the smaller planes – such as the Lear Jet that he organized to take Prince Harry and his friends from Cape Town to Botswana during his gap year – through a broker. There were suggestions he might travel on Air Botswana but, knowing its chequered history, Hewlett advised chartering a Lear. ‘The Prince of Wales had to put his hand in his pocket to pay for it,’ he said, ‘but it was the only sensible way to go.’

The Queen is not hard up by any stretch of the imagination but she’s not the richest woman in the world either – despite what you might read in the magazines that monitor and publish such things. The mistake they make is to assume that she owns the vast and priceless collection of art that furnishes Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and all the other royal residences. The Royal Collection was put together by generations of monarchs over the centuries and belongs to the Queen in title, but is no more part of her personal wealth than Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. The Royal Collection, as it is officially known, is held in trust for the nation. And the Royal Collection was another department that was radically restructured after Peat’s 1383-page report.

The Royal Collection had previously been part of the Lord Chamberlain’s huge and unwieldy empire but in 1987 it became a department in its own right, and was the first and only department within the royal household to be entirely and independently self-financing. At Michael Peat’s recommendation, a subsidiary, called Royal Collection Enterprises, was set up which was effectively the trading arm of the business; it became responsible for managing public access to the palaces and galleries, and the money it earned from ticket sales and
other retail activity – legally the Queen’s money – was ploughed into the Royal Collection to pay for restoration, conservation and the costs involved in maintaining and displaying the treasures. But this was at a time when the Queen was paying no tax on her income. When that changed and she started paying tax in 1993, Peat set up the Royal Collection Trust, a charitable trust, under the chairmanship of the Prince of Wales, to administer the entire business and prevent 40 per cent of the money earned by Royal Collection Enterprises going to the taxman. This brought it into line with most galleries and historic houses that for tax purposes are run by charitable trusts.

The current director of Royal Collections, and also Surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art, is Sir Hugh Roberts, a friendly man who is as passionate as he is knowledgeable about his empire. From a modest office in St James’s Palace he looks after one of the largest and most valuable art collections in the world. It runs to many hundreds of thousands of
objets
, from very well-known paintings by artists such as Van Dyck, Canaletto, Rembrandt, and Tintoretto to more pedestrian items like the chairs in his office. The vast majority in all the palaces – a total of thirteen residences, including those that are unoccupied, such as Hampton Court and Osborne House – belongs to the Collection and much of it goes out on loan to exhibitions and museums all over the world.

The Queen is not the first monarch to lend treasures from the Royal Collection; Queen Victoria was also a great lender. It is part of the tradition of the Collection that it be made accessible through loans – it is not unusual even for pieces to be lent from the Queen’s private rooms – but what is new to this monarch’s reign is the extent to which it has become accessible to the public.

The whole thing began with Prince Philip’s suggestion more
than forty years ago that the old private chapel at Buckingham Palace – bombed and destroyed during the Second World War – should be turned into a public gallery. This opened in 1962 and by the time it closed for refurbishment in 1999 nearly five million people had passed through its doors. Three years later, in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, a brand-new state-of-the-art gallery designed by John Simpson opened, with an extension that provided three and a half times the original space.

The earliest pieces in the Collection date from the reign of Henry VIII. Charles I was an avid collector. He bought Dürers and Titians, Rubenses and Van Dycks, miniatures, sculpture, silver, jewellery, furniture and tapestries, but his treasures were sold off after his execution and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. Although some of it was returned or bought back after the Restoration eleven years later, much was permanently lost, and some of its greatest masterpieces now belong in French, Spanish and Austrian collections. Like his father, Charles II was also a keen collector; he started the collection of Old Masters drawings by acquiring Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and his court, and six hundred drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and brought French and Huguenot craftsmen to England. William and Mary brought in more Huguenot artists, including cabinetmakers; Queen Mary collected oriental porcelain and Delft vases, while William III bought clocks and barometers. George III, whose sixty-year reign saw great advances in the arts, science and manufacturing, bought Buckingham House, as the Palace was then called, in 1762 for his young bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg, and commissioned a huge quantity of decorative arts to furnish it. He also bought a celebrated collection of paintings and drawings, books, manuscripts, medals and gems that had been put together by the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, among which was the finest group of Canalettos then in existence.

But the greatest collector in modern history was George IV. He had a voracious appetite for art, buying porcelain, jewellery, books, manuscripts, furniture,
objets d’art
, as well as Dutch, French and religious art, Rembrandts and Rubenses. He also acquired sculpture: French bronze statuettes, life-sized busts and giant Roman marble statues. He commissioned contemporary English artists such as George Stubbs, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough; and, inadvertently, he converted Buckingham House from a private royal residence into a magnificent royal palace. He had intended to turn it into a pied-à-terre for himself and commissioned John Nash for the purpose. Nash had built the Royal Pavilion in Brighton for him while he was Prince of Wales, as well as Carlton House and Royal Lodge. His plans for Buckingham House were so lavish, however, that George decided when they were finished that it should become the ceremonial centre of his court. And although he didn’t live to see it completed, between them they had created the most magnificent palace, and the state rooms that visitors see today, as well as the Grand Staircase, the marble, the chandeliers and the inlaid floors, are virtually unchanged since 1830.

William IV was good for porcelain and gilt banqueting plate; it was also he who established the Royal Library in its present form at Windsor Castle. Queen Victoria was knowledgeable and brought some Landseers into the Collection, but after her marriage Prince Albert became the prime mover in terms of what was acquired and how art was subsequently promoted during her sixty-three years on the throne. After his death in 1861, she lost interest, but as ruler of a vast empire as well as sovereign of the most powerful country in the world, she was on the receiving end of a never-ending stream of gifts from foreign rulers. This is how the Collection came by the famous Koh-i-noor diamond as well as countless other
precious stones, furniture, tapestries, metalwork, porcelain, curiosities and mementoes.

Edward VII wasn’t particularly interested in art, but through his wife, the Danish Princess, Alexandra, he did add to what was to become the finest collection of Fabergé in the world. Edward’s tours abroad as Prince of Wales on behalf of his mother, the Queen-Empress, resulted in more wonderful gifts including the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found, which was presented to him by the Government of the Transvaal on his sixty-second birthday.

George V wasn’t interested, but Queen Mary was the complete enthusiast. She was like a magpie, collecting everything that caught her eye; she had dozens of books on English furniture and loved going round sale rooms, fascinated by anything that had a royal provenance. She even commissioned books about the Collection. One of Prince Charles’s earliest memories was being taken by his nannies to have tea with Queen Mary, his great-grandmother, at Marlborough House and playing with priceless pieces of jade, crystal and silver that she had lovingly gathered from all over the world. Her collection was normally housed in the safety of splendid display cabinets. They had been strictly out of bounds to her children and grandchildren, but her first great-grandson was indulged. The Queen Mother took an interest in the Collection too; she enjoyed the company of artists and invited people like Augustus John and John Piper to Windsor and Buckingham Palace respectively, and commissioned paintings from them, but, overall, the volume of additions in the twentieth century pales in comparison with the art that was bought in the past. And the present Queen is no great collector.

‘The way the collection has been formed has been a matter of personal taste,’ explains Sir Hugh Roberts, ‘which is what makes it such a peculiar collection.’

It doesn’t set out to be the national collection; it has extraordinary gaps: there are six hundred Leonardos, for example, and not a single drawing by Rembrandt. It’s hardly representative of Western art; it’s very much a personal collection with the personalities shining through. Some monarchs have been terrifically keen, others not. This Queen has added some interesting things. Part of my job is to inform her of what is available or coming up on the art market, and she’s always interested and occasionally goes for things. Last year she bought a porcelain service made to celebrate the recovery of George III in 1789. It had gone to someone else in the eighteenth century. She’s not like George IV, who thought the day wasted if he hadn’t bought several works of art, but she has a fantastic memory about things in the Collection and she is interested.

She is not, however, a great enthusiast and modern art by and large leaves her cold. The most striking modern addition is a portrait by Lucian Freud but that was not a purchase; it was a gift from the artist. She is said to have given Freud no fewer than seventy-six sittings – seventy-two more than most artists get – but she is typically noncommittal about whether or not she likes the portrait. However, Freud presented it as a gift for her Golden Jubilee and it is already worth a fortune, and she was delighted to have it for the Collection and for the opening exhibition of the new gallery.

Sir Hugh is responsible for everything pertaining to the Collection, and a large part of the job is overseeing the cleaning, conserving and repairing of the pieces – a task not unlike the painting of the Forth Railway Bridge. As well as the London gallery he runs the new Queen’s Gallery at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, which also opened in Jubilee Year. The Palace has been open to the public for the last
hundred years – and is among the most visited tourist attractions in Scotland – but there had never been a specific gallery space showing the art in modern conditions. And there had never been anywhere to sit down and have a cup of tea afterwards, either inside or outside the Palace … until now. The Queen has gone into the catering business. ‘Not specifically what the Royal Collections is about,’ says Sir Hugh, ‘but that part of Edinburgh is a gastronomic black hole and we are always looking at ways of improving visitor services – and of course increasing the amount people spend.’ There’s a café in the Farm Shop at Windsor, but this is the first in an occupied residence. ‘It was the Queen’s decision. Every other gallery now provides somewhere, and she said “Well, there isn’t anywhere for them to go here, is there? We’d better do it ourselves.”’

The Royal Library at Windsor Castle is also part of the Royal Collection, and for almost twenty years it was the province of Oliver Everett, an early casualty of the Princess of Wales’s curious behaviour. A former diplomat, he was her first Private Secretary and Comptroller to their household but was sent packing after just two years. He was given sanctuary in the Library, where it was always felt his talents were wasted, although this is no ordinary library. Housed in three rooms dating from the reign of Henry VII to that of Charles II, it is more like a museum of the British monarchy. Among its thousands of books is an important collection of illuminated manuscripts dating from about 1420; the original manuscripts of various poets and authors including Byron, Dickens and Hardy; more than 250 incunabula (the earliest and rarest Western printed books dating from before 1500); and the writings of several sovereigns, among them a signed copy of the book Henry VIII wrote against Luther in 1521, which earned him the title Defender of the Faith, and the description
of her father’s coronation that the present Queen wrote in an exercise book at the age of eleven. It houses Old Masters drawings, watercolours and prints, plus collections of fans, maps, coins and medals, orders and decorations and portrait miniatures. But it also has a collection of random objects ranging from the overshirt worn by Charles I at his execution in 1649 to the Duke of York’s flying gloves from the Falklands War in 1982.

None of this is financed by the taxpayer, as Sir Hugh is proud to boast. He has no Grant-in-Aid for his empire, and no money from the Civil List. The income that keeps them all afloat comes from the lucrative business of opening the palaces to the public (Buckingham Palace, the Royal Mews, Windsor Castle, Frogmore House and Holyroodhouse) – another of Peat’s recommendations – and from the galleries in London and Edinburgh, and a handful of shops at each of the above as well as online.

Nor do they get a brass farthing from the unoccupied palaces; Hampton Court, Kensington Palace State Apartments, the Tower of London, the Banqueting House, Kew Palace and Queen Charlotte’s Cottage all come under the Secretary of State for the Environment and are run by the Historic Royal Palaces Agency. And yet all furnishings and works of art on display – not to mention the Crown Jewels – are part of the Royal Collection. The unoccupied palaces have always been maintained by the government but the department was restructured after the fire at Hampton Court in 1986, which killed an elderly widow who lived in a grace and favour apartment. (The next day the minister responsible went to inspect the damage; he decided something had to be done when, on asking who was responsible for Hampton Court, individuals from about ten different departments put up their hands.)