The Pictorial History of Buckingham Palace [antikvár]

THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OFBUCKINGHAM PALACEOLWEN HEDLEYSINCE the Norman Conquest four great London palaces, each in turn, have served as the seat of majesty. Westminster, founded by the last Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, yielded its authority to Whitehall in King Henry VIH's reign, and Whitehall to St. James's a century and a half later. In 1762 King George Ill's consort, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was granted Buckingham House as her private home, and on this mansion, the choice of a young and perceptive queen, the full sovereign power of the Crown ultimately devolved.Buckingham Palace today offers no obvious clues to its ancestry. Such as remain are embodied in the State Apartments on the West Front, which, like the gardens beyond, do not ordinarily come within public surveillance. It is the East Front with which the eyes of the world are familiar, and this is a later addition, masking the Quadrangle and Grand Entrance, but presenting a façade of august dignity to the approach along the Mall and St. James's Park. The north and south wings which it unites represent the original plan of the palace, which was built around three sides of a courtyard. Tradition maintains a tenuous but pleasing domestic trend on the north side, where the Private Apartments occupy the first floor, with windows overlooking Green Park. It was in the north wing of old Buckingham House that Queen Charlotte's children grew up, and here she had some of her private rooms and her flower garden.The earlier historical background of the palace places its site on the eastern edge of the manor of Eye, which soon after the Conquest became the property of Westminster Abbey. Eye was divided into the manors of Ebury, Hyde and Neyte, and the ground was in Ebury and on the bank of Tyburn, which rambled through meadow and marshland to the Thames and bounded Eye on this side. Today Tybum is one of London's buried rivers, but a sense of location emerges widi the know-ledge that it flows under the East Front of Buckingham Palace.The manors of Ebury, Hyde and Neyte were ceded to King Henry VIII in 1536. In 1623 King James I granted the freehold of Ebury to Lionel Cranfield, first Earl of Middlesex, reserving four acres which were to form the core of the forty acres now covered by the palace and its grounds, though at the time their destiny was unforeseen. The king's interest in them was based on an experiment dating from the earlier years of his reign, when he sought to copy the French culture of silk-worms and so "wean his people from idleness and the enormities thereof." In demonstration of his aim these four acres had been planted with Black Mulberries in 1609 and a waU built around them. So illusory had his hope proved that by 1623 die coimexion of the Mulberry Garden with silk-worms was ended, but by a happy decree of fate the Crown continued to possess it.Adjoining the Mulberry Garden on the south was a half-acre field called "Poules," which passed with the rest of the manor of Ebury to the Earl of Middlesex. It was enclosed in the same year by Sir William Blake, a London barrister, who built a house on it. He had no right to do so, because although he had purchased "half an acre of pasture" from the Earl, the half-acre conveyed to him was not "Poules." To cover his misappropriation he tampered with the deed of sale, a step that presumably commended itself when he became trustee for Hugh Audley, a fellow barrister and moneylender, to whom Lord Middlesex sold the manor in 1626.In 1633 Blake's son sold "Poules" and its house to George, Lord Goring, later first Earl of Norwich and one of King Charles I's generals in the Civil War. Audley's exposure of the elder Blake's malpractice, coupled with Goring's own improvidence, led to litigation duringBUCKINGHAM HOUSE Buckingham House from an engraving of 1710. The mansion was conspicuous for the Latin mottoes inscribed in gold on all four sides. On the front was : Sic siti laetantur LaresTAe Household Gods rejoice in such a situation.Page 3