Crown And Country - London's Palaces - Whitehall to Buckingham

Buckingham Palace is perhaps one of the most famous buildings in the world and the well-known official residence of the monarch in London but its role in the story of crown and country is remarkably recent in fact it stretches back less than 250 years but how the sovereign came to live in this palace is not as straightforward as you might think the story begins in the 16th century with Henry the Eighth by the time of his death he had accumulated more than 60 residences that's more than any other monarch has ever owned only a few have survived the test of time and in one case just a small part this is the banqueting house in London and it's pretty much all that's left of what was once the largest palace in Europe the Palace of Whitehall [Music] [Music] the most extraordinary event to have taken place here at the banqueting house was the execution of Charles the first in 1649 he was the only King of England to ever die in such a manner under fairly bizarre circumstances the King had been tried and convicted of high treason in Westminster Hall by Oliver Cromwell's Puritans he was held under house arrest at San James's Palace while the location for his execution was set outside the banqueting house of the Palace of Whitehall the King was to suffer at his own door [Music] the building epitomized in a sense the spirit of Charles and the stewards Charles the first had built up a magnificent art collection here with over 460 paintings which were later disbursed during the Commonwealth era but the banqueting house still contains the largest and most spectacular work by Rubens [Music] and it was in this room that the king staged expensive and spectacular masks the theatrical experiences of the day the accounts for one such mask show expenses of over five hundred pounds for the Kings costume alone that equates to around seventy five thousand pounds in today's terms now it was to be the back loss for a scene very different to the dramas which had previously taken place here the day before the execution his two youngest children 13 year old Princess Elizabeth a nine year old Henry Duke of Gloucester were brought to Charles at st. James's Palace to say goodbye on the day of the execution the barrier around the scaffold was draped in black cloth so that the cry would see nothing but the Swift descent of the axe [Music] meanwhile a small procession set out to cross in James's Park to Whitehall the king was surrounded by an escort of soldiers carrying pikes it was a bitterly cold day and crowds gathered to watch silently some on neighboring rooftops and marveled at the Kings courage and dignity Charles wore three shirts to prevent him from getting cold and shivering which the crowd might mistake for fear he was brought into this room and then walked the length of it under the ceiling he had commissioned he stepped out onto the scaffold from a window he instructed the executioner to wait until he was ready when he would stretch out his arms when the axe fell the crowd let out a terrible man [Music] Whitehall was the largest palace Europe had ever seen it covered some 23 acres and stretched the length of modern Whitehall and Princeton James's Park in the West to the Thames in the east the banqueting house where Charles was executed dominated the palace and was the first purely Renaissance building in London it was the prototype of tens of thousands of buildings all in the classical style and was seen as one of the wonders of Renaissance Europe it was designed by one of the greatest architects Britain has produced Inigo Jones the banqueting house that we see today is in fact the third this version with its Rubens ceiling and finery was begun in 1619 on the same site as the previous house and is almost exactly the same size its modern appearance dates from the early 19th century when it was reef aced the palace started as the London residence of Henry the eighth's first Archbishop of York otherwise known as Cardinal Wolsey Wolsey was one of Henry's closest advisors and the Chancellor for 14 years during which time he became one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the kingdom Wolsey furnished York place with lavish splendor but in a way he did too good a job and made it a most desirable residence and although King Henry was renowned for only more palaces than any other monarch he was actually in need of a central London base well Harry gave it a terrible crisis in 1512 because his principal Palace burned down that was Westminster Palace and they've got nowhere to go and it was a crisis that he could only resolve by actually staying over the river with the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace and this went on for about 15-20 years until eventually Cardinal Wolsey who had been made Archbishop of York was forced to leave his house York Place which subsequently became Whitehall palace and what Henry the 8th did was took your place from the as he fell and turned it into his own palace thus solving the problem that he'd had since 1512 Wolsey was renowned for serving the very best wines which would have been kept in this cellar it's one of the few or many parts of the original palace and now lies in the basement below the present Ministry of Defense building this was really the the undercroft to a building built by Cardinal Wolsey has his guard chamber where his but his outer servants waited to make sure that unauthorized people didn't come into his private rooms and the room above this survived in that function really right the way through until the end of the palaces life but the room down here that we're now sitting in was actually a wine cellar and was used as such by monarchs right up to the reign of charles ii after the death of queen elizabeth white all had become really quite rundown her later years Elizabeth will more or less ignored altered building maintenance and James the first came from Scotland he was staying in a very small very unglamorous palace actually Scotland he came down he must have thought he'd won the jackpot and it's unbelievable he can does incredible Paris huge wonderful building sucky decayed but what he thought he'd do is start to develop it and actually start to turn it into something even more magnificent and the banqueting house was the very first part of that when James the first built the banqueting house he really intended to be the first part of a complete scheme to totally rebuild white or Palace but there were terrible financial problems in his reign and he was unable to do it and when Charles the first came to the throne he actually commissioned Inigo Jones to design a massive replacement for the whole of Whitehall palace but as we know Charles the first ran into a little bit of difficulty and was really completely unable to do anything but what's fascinating is that while he was an imprisonment in carisbrooke castle on the Isle of Wight he summoned Inigo Jones to his prison cell and in his prison cell he sat down with the architect and tried to design more buildings at Whitehall which really shows that really as late as that the King was thinking about coming back to Whitehall and rebuilding it charles ii had the same ambition he wanted to rebuild it as well and in fact eventually the only person who made had any success here was James a second and of course he left England in disgrace just as his buildings were rising from the foundations white old palace may hold the secret as to why Elizabeth the first never married Francois Duke domicile was the French ambassador to the English Court and profess to be longing night and day to sleep in the Monarchs great bed and show what a fine marriage companion he could be Elizabeth was at first quite smitten by the young French courtier but then had second thoughts I needed to find a way to tactfully retreat from the situation so one day while walking in the gallery at Whitehall with the French ambassador and one or two others Elizabeth kissed him drew a ring from her finger and announced that she would marry him but only under certain conditions Elizabeth took a gamble that the French King would never allow his ambassador to marry under such conditions and even if he did she was prepared to raise the stakes again and so it was the Queen was able to thwart the proposal without actually rejecting it and remained single sadly Whitehall is a lost palace for in 1698 it caught fire over 1,000 apartments were destroyed on a fateful day in 1698 a maid was drying linen over a charcoal brazier she left the room and the palace went up in flames and whatever they tried to do to stop it it failed they got big barrels of gunpowder and to blow up it to the building to make a fire break and all the Gunpowder did was actually set more bits of the building alight and ultimately the only part of the building to be saved was the banqueting house and this bit this was also saved this was saved because it's brick and stone and also it was partially below the ground and when this building was built it was realized that in fact the wine cellar was really something that was worth preserving and it's not actually in the same place as it was found no it's a bit of a fraud actually because this building is now about 15 foot deeper than it was originally in about 30 foot further south because when the original plans for building the Ministry of Defense were were put together and it was decided to keep this building they realized that it would be sticking out to the side and rather an awkward way and so it's moved bodily on rollers very very slowly and very carefully and down and dropped into a hole where it's it's really quite happily but rather rather oddly today the fire of 1698 damaged so much that it effectively ended the role of the palace in the story of the crown the court moved instead to another of Henry the eighth's residences here at st. James's [Music] originally the site of a leper hospital there are various theories as to why Henry built a palace here some say it was a hunting lodge for his new queen and Berlin others that it was for his eldest son the Prince of Wales Edward [Music] whichever it was a greenfield site conveniently close to the Palace of Whitehall [Music] the Magnificent Tudor gatehouse faces ups in James's Street rarely seen by many as the road is now one way up the hill and away from the palace however it gave access to and from the bustling commercial village which grew up around the court in the early days it was peddlers traders and farmers by the 1700s it was coffee houses and specialist shops sports and gaming clubs the layout subtly the courtyards are exactly the same as they were when Henry the eighth's built it it was the Stewart's who used it intensively Charles the first lived here and his sons charles ii and james ii played here as children there was no mal therefore they played in the park a great deal so that when Charles the first went to his execution he was able to point to trees in the park that his sons had climbed after the restoration charles ii came back here and it was in his in his heart i think to bring back those childhood memories of his games in the park and yet to erase the tragic memory of his father's walk across that part to his death that he created fantage walk it literally he had bird cages in all the trees all the beauties that we see in son James Park now were created by Charles and second almost in memory of his father in this way since James's Park became the first royal Park during the Civil War in 1642 the youngest son of Charles the first Prince James was captured at the Battle of Edgehill James was captured by Cromwell and he brought him back here as a prisoner now this was no ordinary boy he decided to play games with his jailers and the other children and they played hide and seek every evening gradually James made it last longer and longer found odd places to hide who would know that garden better than James for hiding and the jailers though that the Cromwell's men weren't at all perturbed when it took long long longer to find him and then one evening James locked up his dog in case it followed him got the key from the gardener slipped out of the gate into what is now the five lane mal and escaped down river and it was apparently half an hour before the jailers realized he wasn't just hiding in gone with his head start James was able to board a ship for the continent returning to England only when his elder brother charles ii had regained the throne during the commonwealth cromwell used the palace as an army barracks he began to sell the art treasures Charles had so carefully collected meanwhile the parks fortunes mirrored those of the rest of the country during this period it was largely neglected and some of the trees were cut down by the citizens for fuel then on the night of Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 a violent storm swept the country and uprooted many of the remaining trees and there lay abandoned as the rest of the country suffered a period of unrest and uncertainty as few were willing to accept cromwell sun as the next ruler after charge a second returned from exile he asked Leonora the famous French landscape architect responsible for the chilly air and versailles gardens to lay out a design for the park however not her refused to disturb a place of such natural beauty so charles extended it by 36 acres and restored it to its former glory planting it with fruit trees stocking it with deer and he built a tree-lined Avenue with powdered cockle shells where he could play a game very similar to modern-day bowls called pell-mell no one plays pell-mell anymore but the name of one of London's most famous roads still bears its name the canal in the middle of st. James's Park became one of charles the second's favorite spots and he could often be seen accompanied by his mistresses walking his dogs around it and sometimes even swimming in it the present park and the layer to the mouth is largely the result of more recent times and the work of George the fourth but George also had huge plans to seriously change the face the capital by constructing a palace in Regent's Park and a triumphal route or Regent Street to his London residence Carlton House due to the huge rising costs Georgia forth was forced to abandon his grandiose plans which would have changed the nature of this part of the country instead he opted to turn Buckingham house into a palace the fort became a royal property that had already been 3 houses on the site the original house was built in the 1630s by noir goring he built little brick house facing Sykes not facing over the part that burnt down and then it was the site was bought by in law darling son who rebuilt the house after the restoration in the 1670s and he in turn so that house to the Duke of Buckingham the Duke of Buckingham was extremely ambitious and as well as the mulberry garden he wanted to lay out a great forecourt in front facing over the park just on the site of the present for cause of the palace and that was actually crown property because it was part of the park so he was squatting you know he was sort of film encroaching into the park but it was made bright and he was given a lease but the lease expired in the middle of the 18th century it was acquired for George the 3rd after he came to the throne and after his marriage in 1761 and it was a series of circumstances the part of the property was crowned lease and the lease came up at that time and that enabled the kind of state to acquire the whole property then Joseph third newly married wanted a private house of his own the prisms away from some James's Palace which was the old royal palace and this provided perfect opportunity it wasn't a large house I mean some of them or particularly grand I mean some of the money was spent making it less grand for instance the fortress in third acquired it there was a very laborat for court in front with a fine ching and railings they've all taken away and so on with the house and those statues on the roof which were taken off so it was made really more like modest private types George the third had no fewer than 13 children and obviously had to make room for them all but he also had a passion for his library he collected books and books tend to grow as well and so he kept adding libraries on so on one side of the palace on the north side he was adding rooms for the children an on-site site he was adding on rooms for the library he ended up with huge huge librarians at a sixty or seventy thousand books in for several rooms so the books had the better rooms and the children while it was a private house but it was one of those children George the fourth when he became King began the transformation from Buckingham house into the palace that we know today George the fourth started a major building program which was only completed after his death about the only part of the old house which still exists today is this wall and fireplace just inside the grand entrance [Music] the majority of the conversion was designed and carried out by John Nash although not completed by him he exceeded his budget by so much he was taken off the job the building has never been a particularly popular one William the fourth never liked it and when the old Palace of Westminster which had been used as a permanent home for Parliament since 1550 but down in 1834 the King offered Buckingham Palace as a new home Parliament refused and the palace became the accepted official London residence of the monarch William was therefore forced to carry on the work his brother George the fourth had begun Queen Victoria was equally unimpressed with the building and even more with the bureaucratic staffing arrangements for instance to have a fire required three departments the parks and foresters to supply the wood the housekeeper's to clean and lay it and the master the households to light it originally the palace had a three sided open courtyard and in the front was a huge gateway modeled on a famous arch in Rome much of the intended effects and grandeur of the palace was lost because during Queen Victoria's reign a new wing was built across the front of the courtyard creating a quadrangle so they removed the archway and had it placed at the top end of Hyde Park this is what we now call Marble Arch and of course it's still there today [Music] standing inside the quadrangle today the difference between the old and the new is very obvious [Music] the present facade is even more recent originally the palace had an Italian stucco stone facade which collapsed due to pollution and in 1913 George v commissioned Aston Webb to replace it with the familiar Portland stone facade which we know so well today at about the same time the railings Queens Gardens and Victoria memorial were completed to create a whole new frontage [Music] the completed effect the MAL the Victoria Memorial and Buckingham Palace is ideally suited to the monarchy's purpose and role it's regularly in spectacularly used for all occasions and stay processions we're also familiar with a layout that is hard to believe it's also relatively recent in the story of crown and country [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Documentary Base

Views: 83,097

Rating: 4.9166045 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, Documentaries. History, Crown, Country, Queen, Elizabeth, Prince, Princess, Duke, History, Estate, Royal, Monarchy, Regal, Palace, British, Wessex, River Thames, Windosr Castle, Castle, Battles, London, Guildford, Hertford, St Albans, Whitehall, Buckingham, Full, Length, History Documentaries, Crown And Country, Palaces

Id: ui7zfFkUlFc

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019