What is to be done with Buckingham Palace? According to the Sunday Times, Queen Elizabeth has moved permanently to Windsor Castle—the first time the Palace has been abandoned by a monarch.
That leaves its future in the hands of Prince Charles, the future King Charles III. He has a dilemma. On the one hand he is committed to downsizing the monarchy, and the Palace is not only vast but in the middle of a lavish refurbishment. On the other hand Charles believes that living there with Queen Camilla is essential to establishing his authority as monarch.
With the queen frail but still very much alive, the heir cannot talk about any of this. The most consequential issue, the timing and nature of Charles’s succession, remains unresolved. The queen has said that she wants to stay on the job as long as she feels able, but knowing when that will be has been made more difficult by the obvious decline in her energy.
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Nobody needs to tell Charles that the monarchy needs a reboot. He knows that, if it is to seem relevant to the age, it cannot go on living in the style and scale that his mother was comfortable with. Of course, he can’t get into the details of that without implying criticism of her.
Buckingham Palace is itself by far the most salient example of Elizabeth II’s belief in what level of scale and style is appropriate to her reign. Although she never regarded the Palace as a home—Windsor Castle was always her favorite—she felt that maintaining its opulence was at the core of the crown’s stature and allure, the center stage of the theater that it presented to the world with such compelling effect.
After all, she grew up there. The most formative passage of her life from childhood to monarch was during World War II when she saw her father, George VI, and her mother deliberately sit out the London Blitz in the Palace (one bomb did fall on it) to boost the morale of the city when it was taking brutal punishment and the outcome of the war was far from certain.
The effects of that experience on her sense of personal mission were still evident in 2020 when, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, on Palm Sunday, she invoked the Dunkirk spirit in a broadcast to the nation: “I hope in the years to come…those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humored resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.”
And, at the end of the war, on Victory in Europe Day in 1945, the balcony of Buckingham Palace became the place where the royal family, plus Winston Churchill, appeared to consummate the deeply felt bond between them and the people—both the ecstatic crowd massed below and millions more who would see the iconic moment on newsreels.
As a result, Elizabeth remained unrelenting in her belief in the magical importance of the Palace to the aura of her dynasty, and the need to sustain it whatever the cost.
However, in the 1980s she realized that the staffing, systems and administration were dysfunctional and unsustainable. One hair-raising episode was enough to prove the point: In what should have been the most secure home in the nation, overseen by a military regiment and layers of police protection, the queen was awakened at 7.15 am on the morning of July 9, 1982, by a slamming door—something totally alien to her domestic regime.
Opening her eyes, she saw a stranger opening her curtains, barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. For 10 minutes, during which she remained remarkably composed, she talked to the intruder, Michael Fagan, about families and children. Eventually she was rescued by her dog-walker, who arrived with her pack of corgis. More effective than all her guards, the dogs growled and Fagan froze as the cops finally showed up.
The queen approved a root-and-branch audit of the stately pile by an outside management expert and agreed to 162 of his recommended reforms. That, however, did nothing to fix the key problem, that the physical structure of the Palace was aging badly—the plumbing was notoriously ancient, the cooling and heating primitive, and much of the roofing leaked. In 2010, the cost of refurbishment was put at 10 million pounds. By 2016 it had risen to 50 million. The work now underway is costing British taxpayers an eye-watering 359 million pounds.
Charles accepted all of this as an inevitable part of his mother’s legacy. He was known to refer to the queen when she was in residence at the Palace as “mama down the road”—as he gathered his own personal court together just a short walk away along the Mall, at Clarence House, his home with Camilla and his base of operations. And it is there where his project for modernizing the monarchy has long been planned and rehearsed.
What Charles actually intends by downsizing is unknown—whether it means body count as well as real estate assets will be interesting, since the Windsors in the immediate line of succession have been good breeders and their number, including children, has now grown to 34.
Of the real estate challenges, Buckingham Palace is obviously the most sensitive and the most challenging. Charles as King will want to continue using it for keynote events like state banquets, receptions for foreign leaders and ambassadors and the investitures where medals and honors are personally bestowed by the monarch. All of that, though, involves the kind of pomp that distances the Palace from the people rather than opens it up to them.
One of the few gestures the queen made to make the Palace more accessible came about after she made a rare blunder in misreading the public mood. In 1992, the year she named her “annus horribilis” because of various family calamities, a fire consumed a large part of St. George’s Hall, within Windsor Castle. The queen assumed that the restoration would be paid for out of public funds, but the response was pithily summed up by then-Times columnist Janet Daley: “When the castle stands it is theirs, when it burns down it is ours.”
Reversing course, the queen raised the money from entry fees from opening up a gallery at Buckingham Palace to show paintings from the royal collection. Norman Baker, a vigilant watchdog of the royal purse, pointed out that only 0.1 percent of the collection is actually on display at any one time. He estimated that its total value could be as much as 20 billion pounds, including 600 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that alone are worth about 5 billion. Long after the costs of the fire had been covered, the revenue from entry fees was being used to restore art works.
In fact, that small step in public accessibility at the Palace suggests a larger idea. King Charles could do two things that would transform its use.
First, the royal art collection is one of the finest and most broad-ranging in the world, and yet the one of the least-seen. It began in the 17th century with Charles I, who had a real eye for the great portrait painters of the day—van Dyck, Rembrandt, Rubens. When he was executed in the short-lived republican revolution led by Oliver Cromwell his collection was sold off and dispersed throughout Europe. It has since been traced to more than 60 public galleries and as many private ones.
The present royal collection began after the restoration of the monarchy and grew rapidly in a fever of acquisitions by the Georgian monarchs. It now includes more than 2,000 treasures. Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, were avid and sophisticated collectors of everything from old masters to Indian manuscripts, as well as priceless gems and jewels.
Unfortunately, unlike them, the Windsors are philistines. They have never shown any connoisseurship or engagement in the motherlode of masterpieces kept in 13 of their homes and palaces, the majority in Buckingham Palace. The ownership is the characteristically ambiguous “held in trust by the monarch” but for her family and descendants, not the public.
If Charles is really serious about breaking down the barriers between the monarch and the people nothing could be more worthwhile than transforming part of Buckingham Palace into one of the world’s great art museums, if not the equal of the Prado or the Louvre at least the equal of London’s other great galleries. There is plenty of space to do this in a place that has 775 rooms, 52 bedrooms and 92 offices, as well as lavish and underused state rooms.
The second thing Charles could do to transform the Palace would be to open up its 39-acre private garden, by far the largest in London and, at the same time, put his money where his mouth is on the environment. The garden could become a public park dedicated to the study of endangered plants and trees—since it sits in the heart of London it could be used by botanists to record the effects of urban pollution, as well as host botanical classes for students.
In defending his green credentials, Charles tends toward easy tokenism: running his vintage Aston Martin on fuel derived from grape juice; putting a few solar panels on Clarence House and farm buildings at Highgrove, his 347-acre country estate. Buckingham Palace could field an array of solar panels large enough to power the whole complex, as could other palaces.
This is certainly a moment of reckoning for the Windsors. It will take a lot more than a few cosmetic changes to realign the size and purpose of the royal entourage to be fit for purpose in this century.
On May 19, 2018, that balcony at Buckingham Palace presented what looked like a large and united family as they celebrated the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. That unity has gone, but the image of that day repeatedly plays in clips on television news and social media, focused on two princes in their scarlet dress uniforms, breasts hung with medals: Charles and Andrew. The heir has a lot on his mind.
