Queen's House (15 page)

From 1815 to 1823 Nash was in charge of the Brighton Pavilion, a monster of a building that changed its shape as the Regent became possessed by a new fantasy. The cost was prodigious, paid for, supposedly, out of the Regent's Privy Purse. By 4 May 1820 the estimates totalled £134,609 16s. 5d. But Nash exceeded these by £11,109. There were also constructional problems, which sometimes occurred in Nash's buildings: the roof of the Pavilion, covered in his experimental ‘Delhi Mastic', leaked. However, it was repaired and by 1823 the Brighton Pavilion, in all its oriental mad glory, was finished. Many mocked, but its sheer exuberance would amaze generations of visitors to come. Typically, George IV – as he now was – lost interest and he rarely visited the Pavilion after 1823.

In the first years of his reign he had other things on his mind. His estranged wife, Queen Caroline, returned to England, determined to
attend the Coronation and take her place as Queen. The King's enemies welcomed her, and the mobs cheered her and booed the King, whose extravagance and self-indulgence made him unpopular. Queen Caroline's eccentric career ended in tragedy. Barred from Westminster Abbey on the day of George IV's Coronation, 19 July 1821, she returned home in deep distress, was taken ill on 30 July and died on the night of 7 August 1821.

The King now turned his attention to the deserted Queen's House. When in 1821 Nash was commissioned by the King to ‘repair' the Queen's House Nash was fully extended. He was getting old, but he had not lost his phenomenal energy. He led the life of a hospitable country gentleman at the castle he built at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where in 1817 the Prince Regent visited him. He was described by one of his guests, Mrs Arbuthnot, as ‘a very clever, odd, amusing man … with a face like a monkey's but civil and good humoured to the greatest degree'.
⁵
John Nash certainly knew how to charm the ladies.

The Queen's House was in fact in the area allotted to one of the King's other architects, Sir John Soane, who was at this time building a new entrance to the House of Lords but expected to be the architect for the new Buckingham House. Nash's amusing and conciliating letter of 18 September 1822 is typical of a man whose gift for laughing at himself could disarm opponents.

… it occurred to me that our appointments are perfectly constitutional, I the King, you the Lords, and
your
Friend Smirke [Sir Robert Smirke, the third of the King's architects], the Commons, and the blood instantly rushed to my face seeing or fancying that you wanted to dethrone me. It then struck me that you wanted to be both King and Lords and in fancy I heard you cry out – ‘Off with his head, so much for Buckingham', and I sighed ‘why should he so long for my empty chair when a few years would give him that without offence which has occasioned in him so offensive an act,' for I am old, but feeling my head on my shoulders I marched off to Buckingham House.

He concluded:

… I have your figure now before my eyes, a thick black shadow standing on the foundation walls of the new arcade … Oh … that some friend could
describe my thick, squat dwarf figure, with round head, snub nose and little eyes in such an act of contemplation, but I must be shot flying.
⁶

He addressed it to ‘J Soane Esq. Architect to the whole Peerage of England'.

In May 1825 readers of
The Times
were informed:

Buckingham House is to be converted into a palace, for the residence of the King. The centre building will ostensibly remain, but the interior of it will be entirely renovated. Two magnificent and tasteful wings, which have been projected by His Majesty himself, upon a very large scale will be added to the centre. The domestic offices, suited to the luxury of these times, and replete with every convenience, will be concealed from the public eye by an ingenious artifice. The workmen have already commenced their labours; the whole will be finished in 18 months.
⁷

In June
The Times
reported again:

In consequence of the extensive alterations that are [being made] in this palace there are nearly 400 artisans of every description at work on the premises, amongst whom there are no fewer than 120 carpenters. These men are satisfied with the usual pay of 5 shillings a day, and accordingly they have given offence to their fellow-workmen who have struck for an increase. On Tuesday a number of these non-contents surrounded the palace, and threatened the men unless they left their work. They were provided with sticks, and one who was armed with a sword flourished it about in a menacing manner. Finding they could not prevail upon the men to quit their work, they entered the building, where they repeated their threats to the workmen … Mr Firth the superintendent had to call in a party of the Coldstream Guards to force them to leave.
⁸

In June 1825 the work was proceeding. Nash appointed an old friend, William Nixon, as general Clerk of the Works, with three clerks under him, each responsible for one third of the work, to be carried out at the same time. The Treasury obligingly agreed his estimate of £200,000 for ‘repairs' – before it knew what it was getting. Nash had still not presented his complete estimate, nor had he finished the plans. Parliament was taking him on trust, as it later learned to its cost.

The problems that were to concern future monarchs had their roots at the beginning of the rebuilding of the Palace. The trouble was that
the King and his architect were two old men in a hurry. In 1825, the King's health was poor; he knew he had not many years ahead and he still did not know what he wanted. Nash had not the time, nor, for that matter, the inclination to work out careful plans.

But the fatal flaw in the construction was that the King could never decide the purpose of the Palace. Though at first he had thought of it as a
pied à terre,
when he saw how splendid Nash's rooms were becoming, he changed his mind. ‘Nash,' he cried, ‘the state rooms you have made me are so handsome that I think I shall hold my courts there.' Nash complained that the original plan had been to build a residence, and there were no more rooms planned for a queen nor offices for the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Steward. The King replied, ‘You know nothing about the matter; it will make an excellent palace, and Lord St Helens and myself have arranged the use of several apartments.'
⁹
They could meet the cost by pulling down St James's Palace, which he disliked. Instead, he took the decision to raze Carlton House and build mansions on the site. Being so near the Palace they could be let at enormous profit, or so he claimed.

As the Palace grew grander, the King saw it as a great monument to the victors of Trafalgar and Waterloo. In this Lord Farnborough encouraged him. He had been in Paris as an official during the peace negotiations and was impressed by the nobility of the French state buildings, the elegance of the work of French architects and Napoleon's arch in the Tuileries. Nash was delighted to design a great Marble Arch for the front courtyard, a Roman victory arch which would dominate the vista from the end of the Mall. On 4 September 1826
The Literary Gazette
described the plans with awe: ‘This is a portico of two orders of architecture, the lower is Doric copied from the Temple of Theseus at Athens. The upper is Corinthian like the Pantheon in Rome.'
¹⁰
Originally Nash had planned it to be, like the exterior of the Palace, made of Bath stone, but, carried away by enthusiasm, sent to Italy for the finest Carrara marble, to be chosen by his agent, Joseph Browne. It came by sea, was landed at Pimlico on the Thames and hauled to the Palace in great wagons.

The sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey was commissioned for 9,000
guineas to execute a statue of His Majesty to crown the Arch. Nash had intended to have three panels on the parapet commemorating Trafalgar, and a continuous frieze representing Waterloo. The sculptors engaged for the marble work were E. H. Baily and Richard Westmacott, and the estimate for the whole was some £50,000.

It was this vision that was enthusiastically described in
Fraser's Magazine
in 1830.

The whole of this gorgeous pile will, when finished, be about sixty feet high. The gates are to be of mosaic gold, and the palisade which is to connect it with the wings of the Palace are to be spears of the richest workmanship that has yet been executed for such a purpose in that superb metal.
¹¹

Those splendid gates, wrought by Samuel Parker and costing 3,000 guineas, were nearly ruined by last-minute penny-pinching. The beautiful semi-circular head was damaged during its transportation in a ‘common stage wagon'.

The Arch always looked out of place, jutting up like some great rock in a bay, but it remained in front of the Palace until 1850, when it was taken down and rebuilt on its present site at Marble Arch.

The Building of the New Palace

During the years from 1825, when the work on the new Palace began, to 1837, when it was finally completed, the peace of St James's Park was shattered. Buckingham's house could no longer be described as ‘
Rus in urbe
'. The air was thick with dust as Buckingham House was rebuilt and Carlton House demolished. The park resounded with the crash of falling masonry. Wagons laden with precious furniture or heavy with slabs of marble, loads of rubble, pillars and pediments rumbled along the Mall.

To add to the babel, St James's Park was undergoing a major transformation: sweeping curves were dug out, widening the old formal canal. In 1764 George III had appointed Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown
as his landscape gardener. His plans for a romantic lake bounded by sweeping banks, with an island in its midst, had never been adopted. Now George IV gave Repton (son of Humphrey Repton) the opportunity to reshape the Park. The gardener had worked closely with Nash for many years – indeed Nash often called him his ‘partner'.

St James's Park became part of Nash's vision of the new London, a romantic counterpart to Regent's Park linked by a graceful street. The new Park owed much to Brown's original plans, but Repton also widened the Mall to accommodate a carriage drive in a direct line to the Palace. The gardens at the rear of the Palace were transformed from ‘a meadow with a formal dingy canal … into a cheerful … pleasure ground'.
¹²
Redesigned in the new ‘picturesque' fashion, there were now winding walks and a serpentine lake. The earth excavated was used to build a great mound at the end of the garden.

Nash's plan followed the lines of the Duke of Buckingham's house. The main block was still flanked by two wings, but these were now changed and moved further out, giving an enlarged courtyard (and making more room for the servants). Sadly the Duke's graceful fountain was no longer there and the comfortable red brick was now clad in Bath stone. A flight of stone steps still led up to the entrance under the classical portico.

The design on the garden side of the Palace was simple and elegant. The long line of the house was relieved by a graceful central semi-circular bay and above it a corresponding dome. This latter was to be much mocked and later removed. Nash had not intended it to be seen from the front of the house, where it popped up like an upturned cup. Later he would cheerfully admit to a Commission of Enquiry that he had not realized how wrong the wings in the front courtyard would appear, nor how absurd the dome on the garden front would appear when seen from the front.

A wide terrace before the garden front was to be flanked by four garden pavilions, although eventually only three were built.
*
Today
visitors to the Queen's annual garden parties can still admire what Professor Richardson has called the terrace's

simple yet regal grandeur … The level lines of the façade emphasise the projecting curves of the central bow. Touches here and there, for example the ellipsoids with ornamental surrounds beneath the projecting portions of the cornice, recall the elegances of the Louis XVI style and pay a compliment to Sir William Chambers.
¹³

The two frieze panels on either side of the bow were sculptured in Coade stone. Inside the building there were major alterations. The Grand Hall and sweeping staircase follow much the same plan as that of the Duke's old house, but Nash lowered the floor of the Hall, making more dramatic the flight of stairs with its elegant wrought balustrade.

The garden side of the house was greatly altered. Queen Charlotte's long enfilade of state rooms opening off each other was swept into one long, wide gallery, and beside it Nash created a new line of state rooms looking on to the garden. Nash had admired galleries like this for paintings or statuary in the great country houses he had visited. In fact, he had built one for his own house in Regent Street.

As Nash's biographer, John Summerson, has written, he ‘was not and never had been a great interior designer … but to be faced now at seventy-six with the creation of a set of Royal Apartments of the greatest possible dignity and richness might have daunted a Mansart or an Adam'.
¹⁴
He succeeded: each salon had a ‘marked stylistic character'. It is not surprising that the King found the state rooms ‘handsome'.

In the Green Drawing Room and the Throne Room on the courtyard side the eye is drawn up by tall pillars to the intricate beauty of the coved ceilings. On the garden side, in the dignified White Drawing Room once again pillars with carved capitals support a ceiling of delicate design. Next is the Music Room, which is quintessential Nash: five tall windows overlook the garden and ten massive pillars support a ceiling where the half dome over the bay window sings in counterpoint with the dome in the centre. In describing Nash's work it is a musical analogy that comes most frequently to mind.

Although his work has all the grace of the period, Nash was prepared
to experiment. All the pillars throughout the state rooms were made of scagliola in rich, vibrant colours. Scagliola was an Italian technique which had been used in England since Charles II's time. It had a base of wood, covered with coarse grained plaster undercoat, which could be painted to look like marble of many colours. Sir William Chambers described the new process of manufacture: