Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
VICTORIA’S PARTY PA LACE
This summer’s exhibition at Buckingham Palace reveals how the young queen filled it with fun
She will forever be known as the ‘Widow of Windsor’, but for the first two decades of Victoria’s reign she was undoubtedly the Queen of Buckingham Palace. Aged just 18 on her accession, she threw off the shackles of her repressive childhood and brought vitality and exuberance to her new role and her new home.
To mark the bicentenary of her birth in 1819, the theme of this year’s summer opening of the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace is Victoria’s relationship with the building, showing paintings, letters and costumes. Previously called Buckingham House, it had been the residence of Victoria’s grandmother Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, who gave birth to 14 of her 15 children there. When he became king in 1820, George IV asked architect John Nash to transform the house into a palace but it was unfinished when he died in 1830, and remained so under his successor William IV.
When Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837, she couldn’t wait to leave her childhood home at Kensington Palace. However, the layout at Buckingham Palace was poor and the decoration incomplete. Large areas lacked wallpaper, and fittings were missing. Victoria’s dining room was so far from the kitchen her meals never arrived hot. The lavatories didn’t work, the chimneys couldn’t cope with the smoke and the ventilation shafts were above the drains, giving off an unpleasant odour.
But keen to put her mark on the building, Victoria commissioned a throne, platform and canopy. At barely 5ft tall she must have been swamped by the elaborate chair, but she cut an undeniably regal figure surrounded by its carved acanthus and oak leaf design, with a gilt-wood crown and her ‘VR’ cypher.
As her coronation approached in 1838 she planned a series of state balls. For the first one she asked the Viennese king of waltz Johann Strauss Senior and his orchestra to play in the ballroom. Victoria, who was 12 days away f rom her 19th birthday, wore a white satin gown with the badge and ribbon of the Order of the Garter and a headdress of roses. Strauss played his sp e c i a l wa l t z , Hommage à la Reine d’Angleterre
– Tribute To The
Queen Of England. Victoria was delighted. ‘I never heard anything so beautiful in my life,’ she noted in her journal. ‘It was a lovely ball, so gay, so nice – and I felt so happy.’ She even climbed out on to the roof of the palace to see the dawn break over St Paul’s Cathedral.
In February 1840 Victoria married her first cousin Prince Albert of SaxeCoburg-Gotha. She gave birth to four children in the first four years of marriage but she still danced the polka, waltz and quadrilles, and her court was one of the most glittering in Europe. But by the late 1840s it was clear that the palace rooms were not ideal for the ever-expanding family as well as the regular balls. The writer John Ruskin was present at one function which was so horribly overcrowded that ladies were jostling for space in their elaborate gowns, and there was ‘the most awkward crush... with the ruins of ladies’ dresses, torn lace and fallen flowers’. Architect Edward Blore was asked to expand the palace. Marble Arch, the ceremonial entrance, was moved to its present site at the end of Oxford Street, and an East Front was added complete with a central balcony. The new ballroom was inaugurated in May 1856, followed by a ball to mark the end of the Crimean War, and Victoria recorded, ‘Albert, even, A portrait of Queen Victoria in her robes of state in 1859
who generally dislikes state balls, enjoyed it.’ A highlight of the exhibition is an immersive experience that re-creates that 1856 ball. A Victorian illusion technique, Pepper’s Ghost – which uses reflections to make objects appear and disappear – as well as projections around the room, will help visitors imagine the ballroom as Victoria would have known it.
In December 1861 the receptions came to a grinding halt with the death of Prince Albert. The queen withdrew to her more private estates of Windsor, Osborne House and Balmoral. She became a full-time grieving widow, and a poignant reminder of this time is in the exhibition – a copy of Sir Walter Scott’s classic Peveril Of The Peak, in which Victoria has inserted a black-edged piece of writing paper to mark the last page she read to Albert during his illness.
By 1861 Buckingham Palace was the focal point for ceremonies of state, and Victoria’s absence, coupled with her reluctance towards public duties, would escalate into a crisis. Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke expounded the case for a republic and demanded an enquiry into her finances. In 1864 a note was found pinned to the railings of the palace by a wag proclaiming, ‘These commanding premises to be let or sold in consequence of the late occupant’s declining business.’
By the end of the decade the queen was making occasional forays to the palace, even agreeing to host a summer garden party. In her final years she undertook more duties, and a rare photo from 1893 shows her on the balcony with her family for the departure of the newly married Duke and Duchess of York (later George V and Queen Mary) on their honeymoon.
The building became the focal point of two of the most lavish displays of her reign, her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, where troops from every corner of her empire joined her in a vast imperial parade through London to St Paul’s Cathedral.
Four years later, the queen died. In the next decade The Mall was widened and Sir Aston Webb redesigned the East Front of the palace, adding the Portland stone façade and the balcony we see today, as well as the Victoria Memorial, a reminder of the queen forever linked with Buckingham Palace.