SJ BENNETT’S GUIDE TO WINDSOR CASTLE

April 2021

 Windsor is special to me – but perhaps not in the way you might imagine. Alex, my husband, took me there on our first date away from home. We stayed in a hotel near the river and lay on the grass beside the Long Walk looking up at the sky, while he taught me how to recognise the jets landing at Heathrow by silhouette and sound. This is the reluctant party trick I gave to the Queen many years later. I don’t know if she was taught by an ex-naval-helicopter-pilot as I was, but I imagine it’s something she can do.

Years before, in 1992, I had been driving with friends from Cambridge to Wales for a weekend away from our research, when traffic ground to a halt on the M4. We eventually discovered why: Windsor Castle was on fire. From the road, we could see it lit up against the night sky as we crawled by. This was the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’ and the blaze looked absolutely devastating, but as I learned in my later visits, the project to put it back together gave skills to a new generation of craftsmen. The interiors, which had become a bit shabby – by royal standards – were returned to their pristine Regency and Victorian splendour. Some spaces were changed, and the beautiful Lantern Lobby was created where the old chapel had been. With time and patience, new achievements grew out of sadness and failure. It’s one of the abiding themes connected to the Queen’s life that I wanted to capture in this book. And as I happened to be writing it the year before a pandemic was about to strike, it’s a lesson that I’ve since been keen to learn.

When our children were little, Windsor mostly meant Legoland. It always struck me as strange that the Queen’s thousand-year-old castle sat within a stone’s throw of the Jolly Rocker and the Viking River Splash. When Prince Philip retired in 2017 they added a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign to the Buckingham Palace in Miniland.

At around that time, I visited the castle with our youngest, to make up for a missed school trip. He was keen on the weaponry and armour displayed in extravagant patterns on the walls; I was more interested in a passing comment by one of the wardens. We were in the State Dining Room, which is more intimate than it sounds. The table was laid as if for a dinner party and when asked why, the warden said, ‘Oh, this is as it would be for a dine and sleep’. He described what they were and from that moment, I dreamed about being able to spend the night at Windsor Castle as a guest of the Queen. When I looked them up later, the first one I found online mentioned Tim Peake, the astronaut. Others have included Helena Bonham Carter and Helen Mirren. Did they talk about The Crown or the film of The Queen? I’m dying to know.

Things you may not know about the castle:

·      William the Conqueror built the original fortress as one of three along the Thames to deter Anglo-Saxon rebels and to guard the western approach to London. He started construction in 1070. The location was attractive to monarchs because it was near a royal hunting ground and not too far from the capital. Good for riding and for popping into town. From that point of view, not much has changed.

·      I describe some of the interiors as ‘gothic style’ and by that I mean the architectural gothic revival of the nineteenth century. But the castle buildings were jazzed up in the original gothic style by Edward III in the 1350s. It has been ‘gothic’ for a long time.

·      Sir Geoffrey Chaucer lived there. In 1390, Chaucer was appointed by Richard II to superintend repairs at St George’s Chapel. Odd to think he did other things than write – but in fact he was very busy. In the St George’s Chapter Library, paw prints have recently been found across the Man of Law’s Tale in a sixteenth-century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. The prints look like those of ‘a very large cat or small-to-medium-sized dog’. Yes – Corgi-size. Nobody is quite sure when they were made.

·      Sir Christopher Wren was an inhabitant too. His father was made dean of St George’s Chapel in 1635 and young Christopher spent part of his childhood living in the Deanery next door and playing with the future Charles II. It could theoretically have been Christopher Wren’s dog, or very large cat, who made those paw prints. You decide.

·      Prince Albert died there in 1861. Queen Victoria believed his death was caused by typhoid – perhaps not surprising, as the castle sat on fifty-three overflowing cesspools, ‘too primitive and abominable to bear elaborate description’. Ten years later, their son Edward, Prince of Wales, fell ill with typhoid at Sandringham. It seemed all the royal residences had a similar problem that risked killing them off. At Sandringham, the Appleton Water Tower was built to provide fresh water to the estate and I mention this because you can stay there if you want, courtesy of the Landmark Trust. The views of the Norfolk countryside are reported to be amazing. By the way, today, the historian Helen Rappaport believes that Albert didn’t die of typhoid after all. Her theory, described in her book Magnificent Obsession, is that he had Crohn’s disease and a perforated ulcer. Albert’s life had not been made easy by Victoria, who insisted on no heating and open windows at all times. He used to work on his early-morning papers at Windsor wearing a wig and wrapped in a fur-lined coat. (Those cesspools are begging for a murder mystery, aren’t they?)

·      Many decades later, Princess Elizabeth and her sister put on plays and pantomimes at the castle to raise money for the troops during the Second World War. With echoes of Kate Middleton’s fashion show appearance at St Andrews University, Prince Philip watched Lilibet play Aladdin in December 1943, while he was on leave from the navy. She was 17 at the time, and had been keen on him for four years already. They would marry four years later, when she was 21.

·      One of the minor problems for any visitor to Windsor Castle used to be food and snacks. This always constitutes a key part of my days out at big attractions, and inside the walls of the castle – which takes ages to explore properly – the only venue seemed to be an ice-cream stall. But recently it opened its first visitor café in history, in the medieval Undercroft. This grand cellar beneath the State Apartments was originally built by Edward III (of gothic tastes) to store beer and wine Now it serves scones and vegan chocolate cake. What would Edward make of this, I wonder? It’s another thing that fascinates me about Windsor: it’s the oldest continuously occupied castle in the world and it’s constantly evolving. Built a thousand years before I was born, it hasn’t finished its story yet.

I get some of my research ideas and updates on what’s happening at the royal residences from the Royal Collection Trust. I recommend their website, www.rct.uk, if you want to explore some more. They have everything from 360-degree views of some of the rooms to the royal recipe for scones. You can access some of the links from my website too: www.sjbennettbooks.com.