Prince Edward Examines The Royal History Of London's Palaces | Crown & Country | Real Royalty

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] even before London became the recognized capital of England the crown had realized its potential 950 years ago in the days of King knut a Royal Palace was built on a marshy Island to the west of the old city of London later it was added to by Edward the Confessor who founded a church or Minster next to it such was its prominence that it quickly became known as the Minster to the west of London or Westminster [Music] today Westminster is a city in its own right the Royal Church on the Royal Palace still exist in fact they are two of the most important buildings in the entire story of crown and Country for one is where the Sovereign is crowned and the other is where the Sovereign rules [Music] foreign [Music] Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster provide the backdrops and settings to some of the greatest statications in Royal pageantry in our nation's life [Music] thank you throughout the Pomp and ceremony of events such as the coronation service and the annual state opening of parliament there are numerous images symbols and messages depicting the relationship between the crown and the country [Music] of the two buildings we can see today Westminster Abbey is in fact the older it was started by Edward the Confessor in the 11th century Edward had wanted to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Peter in Rome but had been prevented from going by his advisors who feared disorder in his absence so instead he built a great church here in London dedicated to Saint Peter which would be used as his burial place the confessor's church was actually built on the site of one that had been here since the 7th century and there's a legend about the consecration of the original Saint Peters [Music] The Story Goes that one evening as the sun started to dip behind the hills two fishermen were casting their Nets from the Thames when they were beckoned to by a shadowy figure on the southern Shore slowly they rode over to him he asked them for a passage across to thorny Island [Music] history hit is a streaming platform that is just for history fans with fantastic documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world we've got unrivaled access to the world's leading historians with hundreds of documentaries featuring everything from Boudicca to the British royal family we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and real royalty fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use code real royalty at check on the journey The Stranger revealed that he too was a fisherman and that he had come to dedicate the church that was to bear his name [Music] the two locals were dubious of the stranger's tale until he left their boat and entered the church at that point they were bathed in a Heavenly light because it was claimed the stranger was Saint Peter coming back to Earth for the dedication service soon after this event edric one of the fishermen was rewarded with a prize catch salmon [Music] the monks of the Old Abbey made much of this story and used to demand attacks on all fish caught on the River Thames near thorny Island nowadays there is a Festival held each year on the 30th of June in the Abbott's dining hall everyone is in ceremonial dress and the local fishmongers present a salmon to Mark Saint Peter's Day Edward the confessors church was designed in the Norman Style and his mother was from Normandy and he spent much of his early life in Exile there however it was also perhaps a sign of things to come when Edward died in January 1066 he left neither a successor nor instructions on who should succeed one of the claimants to the throne was William Duke of Normandy [Music] in September 1066 William landed at pevency Bay defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was duly acknowledged as king thank you William then deliberately chose to be crowned in the church Edward had so recently consecrated thus beginning an unbroken tradition for all English and British monarchs 150 years later and with the confessor's recognition as a martyr had reached cult status among his greatest Advocates was the King Henry III he embarked on an incredibly ambitious plan to rebuild the church he virtually bankrupted the nation and nearly plunged the country into Civil War in the process but what he created can still be enjoyed and marveled at today [Music] laughs [Music] a magnificent nude tomb was constructed for the confessor's body it is decorated in gold and rests on a purbeck marble and Mosaic base though badly defaced it remains one of the greatest treasures of English History it is also unique for it is the only Shrine in the country which still contains the body of its saint [Music] this is the shrine to Edward the Confessor it's the most sacred place in the Abbey and pilgrims have come to pray at this spot for centuries indeed there are even Hollows made by the countless knees which have knelt here [Music] it became the principal burial place only in the 14th century when Henry III had rebuilt the entire Abbey most magnificently and gloriously in honor of his Royal Saint predecessor Edward the Confessor and there'd been 200-year gap between the burial of the first king who was Ed with the Confessor himself and then the next king to be buried there was Henry III and then an entire sequence of medieval Tudor and Stuart monarchs ended up being buried in the abbey [Music] foreign the Death Masks was a habit imported from France where there was a tradition of having very elaborate ceremonial on the occasion of a royal death the advantage of this was partly political that to have a grand procession in public and Grand mourning in a public place asserted the unity of church and state with the Monarch asserted The Establishment solidarity and was a tremendous deterrent to would-be usurpers or Pretenders to step into the throne these ceremonies obviously took time bodies after death Decay Henry V who died in France in August 1422 his funeral procession took over two months to reach the Abbey and you cannot therefore possibly consider using the original corpse for the ceremonies that were demanded by ritual so the tradition was established of making in wooden plaster an image of the edmonarch of parading it on a carriage in front of the coffin in the funeral procession and then displaying it magnificently for 30 days in Westminster Abbey on a hearse [Music] by far the greatest effect of the Crown's close association with Westminster Abbey has been to make it the nation's Church while countless events in the nation's life are celebrated Within These spectacular vaulted arches the most Vivid demonstration of this role is the coronation service [Music] the other effects of having such a close association with the crown is that many of the Abbey's most historic features from its monastic past have uniquely survived the ravages of time and reform what many forget is that for more than half of the Abbey's 1 000 year life it was one of the greatest medieval monasteries in Christendom beneath us here is a room called the Pix chamber which is the oldest area of the Abbey the Pix chamber is a vaulted room dates from the 11th century and it was originally used as a chapel and it is in the picks chamber that we have one of the earliest altars of the abbeyan early Stone altar after that though from The 14th Century it was used for the monastic Treasury and also there a large chest called the Pix which gave the room its name was also kept in this chamber the pics used to contain all the standard gold and silver coinage of the realm and so obviously this room had to have a very good security system to keep it all safe the huge oak door to the Pix chamber has six locks in it each one had a separate key and each key was looked after by a separate person so it was pretty secure in that aspect because you had to have all those six people together to enable you to open the door and on the outside of the door in The Cloister there is a stone sill which is in the floor and it means that the door to the picks chamber can't open fully it will only open enough to let a person go in and out of the room but not sufficiently to let those huge wooden chests come in and out so it was pretty Fail-Safe as far as Forest security was concerned [Music] oh foreign Garden is said to be the oldest Garden in this country it's thought to have been under continuous cultivation for 900 years and it's where the infirmerer of the Abbey or the physician of the Abbey when it was a monastery would have grown plants and herbs for the care of the sick in 1413 Henry IV stopped to pray here at Westminster Abbey on his way to a crusade in the Holy Land now a fortune teller had predicted that he would die in Jerusalem which he took to mean the great City ironically he never made the journey but died soon after of apoplexy here in the Jerusalem chamber [Music] The Abbey has been a place of people finding Sanctuary really since the end of the 12th century and criminals could come to The Abbey precincts and they could claim Sanctuary they could take refuge from the law as long as their crimes were not anti-church and they were not treasonable and even though the laws of sanctuary were abolished in the early 17th century even by 1830 the whole area around the Abbey was still known as the devil's acre because of the rather undesirable people who lived in the area there is another part of London whose name is the only clue to its connection with Westminster Abbey Covent Garden used to be Convent Garden and was where the monks from The Abbey kept their livestock and grew everything from fruit to vegetables to cereal crops [Music] this room is known as the chapter house it's the second largest in England after Lincoln and is possibly the most important Administrative Building in the Abbey's story [Music] the name derives from the practice whereby the monks would gather here after Mass to hear a chapter of the Benedictine rule read aloud [Music] however this was also where for 200 years from The 14th Century that Parliament met it was Edward VI who first made the old chapel of Saint Stephen in the Palace of Westminster available for their use from then on it was the palace which increasingly became associated with Parliament [Music] until then the Palace of Westminster had been a royal residence indeed the oldest royal palace in London for nearly 500 years from the Confessor to Henry VII the crown and Parliament had existed within the same set of buildings from now on the two institutions were to grow further apart indeed to the point at which Parliament summer the king here to be tried and convicted of high treason there have been three palaces on this site but sadly nothing remains of the first which dated back to the days of King knut there's also hardly anything left to the second built by Edward the Confessor the present Palace was built after a terrible fire destroyed the old Palace in 1834. in those days the extracta used notched tally sticks as a form of account which every now and then had to be destroyed on this particular occasion the heat in the furnaces burning the tally sticks became so intense that it set light to the old wooden Palace I was probably a blessing in disguise for the confessor's old Palace was not really designed for the Machinery of parliamentary government Sir Charles Barry won the ensuing competition to design the new houses of Parliament selecting a perpendicular Gothic style and keeping with Westminster Abbey [Music] the foundation stone of the new Parliament House was laid in 1840 and the last part the Victoria Tower then the highest tower in the whole world was finished in 1860 the completed building was allowed to retain its old name and status as a royal palace it had 1 100 rooms a hundred staircases and three miles of corridors and covered an area of eight Acres it cost over 2 million pounds in total or 91 million pounds in today's money [Music] the clock time or big Ben as it's better known was completed in 1859 the nickname comes from this huge bell which Chimes the r and just to give you a sense of the scale of this thing this is seven foot six High nine feet across and weighs 13 and a half tons the original Bell came from time teas but broke before it was hung in the tower so it was recast at the eldest Factory in London the White Chapel Bell Foundry The Clapper was too big and within a couple of months it had cracked the Bell they modified The Clapper re-hung the bell and it still Chimes to this day complete with crack [Music] very few people know that a third of the way up this famous Clock Tower is a Prison Room known as the number one room members of either the House of Commons or the Lords or anyone else for that matter who misbehaved during a debate could well have found themselves locked up in here the suffragette Emily Pankhurst was incarcerated here for a brief spell and although people are still threatened with it today it was perhaps surprisingly last used for an MP over a hundred years ago in 1880 the two houses of Parliament the Lords and the commons evolved over many centuries the word Parliament simply means an assembly or Council and in this case it referred to a mixture of Nobles and Lords gathered at the behest of the monarch [Music] interestingly the name of the commons does not signify the common people it actually refers to all the local communities in counties and towns in the Kingdom which the House of Commons explicitly represents the opening ceremony of parliament customarily took place in the king's presence in the painted chamber in spite of all the upheavals of History it still takes place today and is one of the most spectacular but also one of the least understood pieces of Royal pageantry the state opening of Parliament Parliament has no idea theoretically why it has been assembled and if you look back over the centuries when Parliament gathered representatives from all over England and they arrived in London they had no idea why their King had summoned them they'd received this writ saying under pain of death you will attend upon me at my Palace at Westminster where I will tell you as your Sovereign what I want you to do and these representatives were often in a great deal of all of that document and they had no idea whether we're going to be asked to raise ridiculous amounts of money for sovereigns to go off and claim more and more Thrones around Europe which were extremely expensive they would arrive at Parliament and The Sovereign would arrive in state sit on the throne and say I have summoned you here because and right up to today the tradition goes on but now we have a constitutional monarchy there's still a state opening of parliament the crown has still summoned her representatives to Parliament and they're still coming into the Chamber of the House of Lords to hear why the Sovereign has called them but the Sovereign now speaks with the words of her prime minister and her Covenant in the early times when kings went to war and they had around them sergeants at Arms people who stayed extremely close with arms which were large club-like weapons called Macy's and with those Macy's they would make sure that anyone who tried to get close to the Monarch could be clubbed on the head and sent packing the maze is derived from a medieval close-quarter battle weapon such as this and from as far afield as Spain to Mogul India it became accepted as a symbol of office and ceremonially represented the power delegated by the ruler to the person who carried it at the start of each sitting day in the House of Commons the speaker enters the chamber preceded by the sergeant-at-arms carrying the mace without the mace being present on the table of the commons the house would not be properly constituted [Music] for all the gothic Splendor of Barry's Palace of Westminster perhaps one of the least known Treasures a most important surviving parts of the original Palace is Westminster Hall it was built around 900 years ago when William Rufus William the conqueror's son was King it was thought to be the largest Hall in Europe but staggeringly the King was disappointed with its size protesting the Great Hall to be a mere bed chamber the hammer beam roof is slightly more recent it dates from Richard II's Reign at the end of The 14th Century but that doesn't detract from the scale and impressiveness of its original achievement it's a magnificent 240 feet long and has the widest unsupported ceiling Span in the country the hole is often used for great ceremonies since 1099 monarchs have held coronation festivals here a banquet would be held in a hall when traditionally the king's Champion a knight on Horseback would ride to the center of the hall in full armor there he would throw down his Gauntlet to challenge anyone to single combat who disputed the king's right to succeed the last time that actually happened on a coronation Festival was held here was in 1821 for George IV [Music] not surprisingly it was the scene of many famous trials including perhaps the most extraordinary of all that of King Charles the first seven years after his attempt to arrest five members of parliament on charges of treason against him he found himself being brought to trial for treason against the state the trial lasted for seven days in January 1649. his judges were Commissioners appointed by The Commons but Charles refused to accept the authority of the Court even keeping his hat on throughout the proceedings the King was found guilty of treason death by execution is the punishment and Charles was given no chance to speak against his sentence his death warrant was signed by Oliver Cromwell amongst others and the date for the beheading was set for the 30th of January 1649 outside the front of the banqueting house of Whitehall Palace for the first time in nearly 800 years the country was about to find itself without a monarch thank you Palace 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 VII by the time of his death he'd 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 Saint 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 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 dispersed during the Commonwealth era but the banqueting house still contains the largest and most spectacular work by Rubens [Music] Lord [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 500 pounds for the king's costume alone that equates to around 75 000 pounds in today's terms now it was to be the back cloth 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 say goodbye [Music] on the day of the execution the barrier around the scaffold was draped in Black cloth so that the crowd would see nothing but the Swift Descent of the ax [Music] while a small procession set out across Saint 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 king's carriage and dignity Charles wore three shirts to prevent him from getting cold and shivering which the crowd might mistake for fear was brought into this room and then walked the length of it under the ceiling he had commissioned [Music] 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 ax fell the crowd let out a terrible Moon [Music] Whitehall was the largest Palace Europe had ever seen it covered some 23 acres and stretched the length for modern Whitehall and from St James's Park in the west to the Thames of 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 has that we see today is in fact the third this version with its Ruben 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 refaced the palace started as the London residence of Henry VIII's first Archbishop of York otherwise known as Cardinal Woolsey Woolsey 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 owning more palaces than any other Monarch he was actually in need of a central London base well Henry VII did a terrible crisis in 1512 because his principal Palace burnt down that was Westminster palace and he 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 Woolsey who had been made Archbishop of York um was forced to leave his house York place which subsequently became White or Palace and what Henry VII did was took York place from the Cardinal as he fell and turned it into his own Palace thus solving the problem that he'd had since 1512. Woolsey was renowned for serving the very best wines which would have been kept in this Cellar it's one of the few remaining 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 Woolsey as his guard chamber where his I suppose 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 palace's 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 Whitehall had become really quite run down in her later years Elizabeth were more or less ignored all sort of Building Maintenance and James the first came from Scotland he was staying in a very small very um unglamorous Palace actually in Scotland he came down he must have thought he'd won the jackpot and it's unbelievable he came to this incredible Palace huge wonderful building slightly 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 first came to the throne he actually commissioned Inigo Jones to design a massive replacement for the whole of white wall 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 karisbrook 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 had any success here was James II and of course he left England in disgrace just as his buildings were rising from the foundations why tall Palace May hold the secret as to why Elizabeth the first never married Francois Duc dinosaur was the French ambassador to the English court and prefers to be longing night and day to sleep in the Monarch's 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 one thousand Apartments were destroyed on a fateful day in 1698 a maid was drying linen over a charcoal Brazier um she left the room and the palace went up in in flames and whatever they tried to do to stop it it failed they got big barrels of gunpowder and to blow up bits of 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 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 um 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 is that right 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 have been sticking out to the side in 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 sits 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 VII's residences here at tin 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 foreign [Music] Gatehouse faces up Saint 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 layouts at little Courtyards are exactly the same as they were when Henry VIII builted it was a steward who used it intensively Charles the first lived here and his sons Charles II and James II played here as children there was no Mel therefore they played in the park a great deal so that when Charles first went to his execution he was able to point the 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 path to his death that he created bad cage walk it literally he had bird cages in all the trees all the beauties that we see in Saint James park now were created by Charles II almost in memory of his father in This Way Saint James's part became the first Royal Park during the Civil War in 1642 the younger son of Charles the first Prince James was captured at the Battle of Edge Hill 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 well it took longer or longer to find him and then one evening James looked 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 Mao at Escape down river and it was apparently half an hour before the jailers realized he wasn't just hiding he had gone start James was able to board a ship for the continent returning to England only when his older brother Charles II had regained the throne [Music] during the Commonwealth Cromwell used the palace as an army barracks he began to sell the art Treasures childhood so carefully collected meanwhile the Park's 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 struck the country and uprooted many of the remaining trees and they lay abandoned as the rest of the country suffered a period of unrest and uncertainty as few were willing to accept cromwell's son as the next ruler after Charles II returned from Exile he asked linotra the famous French landscape architect responsible for the tulier and Versailles Gardens the layout a design for the park however Notre 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 palmell no one plays palmel anymore but the name of one of London's most famous roads still Bears its name the canal in the middle of Saint James's Park became one of Charles II'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 layout of the mall is largely the result of more recent times and the work of George IV but George also had huge plans to seriously change the face of the capital by constructing a palace in Regents Park and a triumphal route or Regent Street to his London residence Carlton house due to the huge Rising costs Georgia IV 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 before it became a Royal Property there had already been three houses on the site um the original House was built in the 1630s by Lord Goring he built a little Brick House facing south not facing over the park that burnt down and then it was the site was bought by Lord darling son who rebuilt the house after the Restoration in the 1670s and he in turn sowed that house to the Duke of Buckingham um the Duke of Buckingham was extremely ambitious and as well as the Mulberry Garden he wanted to lay out a great four Court in front facing over the park just you know on the side of the present full court 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 encroaching into the park but it was made right and he was given a lease But the lease expired in the middle of the 18th century it was acquired for George III after he came to the throne and after his marriage in 1761. um and it was a series of circumstances um the part of the property was Crown lease and the lease came up at that time and that enabled um you know the crown estate to acquire um the whole property then George III newly married wanted a private house of his own but wasn't away from Saint James's Palace which was the old Royal Palace and this provided a perfect opportunity it wasn't a large house I mean some of them were particularly Grand I mean some of the money was spent making it less grand for instance before George III acquired it there was a very elaborate four Court in front with a fine chain and railings they were all taken away and so on with the house I mean there was statues on the roof which were taken off so it was made more like a modest private house George III 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 um 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 and on the size side he was adding on rooms for the library he ended up with huge huge Library I mean sort of 60 or 70 000 books in four separate rooms so the books had the better rooms than the children while it was a private house but it was one of those children George IV who when he became king began the transformation from Buckingham house into the palace that we know today George IV 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 completely by him he exceeded his budget by so much he was taken off the job the building has never been a particularly popular one IV never liked it and when the old Palace of Westminster which had been used as a permanent home for Parliament since 1550 burnt 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 IV had begun Queen Victoria was equally unimpressed with the building and even more with the bureaucratic Staffing arrangements for instance to have a far acquired three departments the parks and Foresters to supply the wood the housekeepers to clean and lay it and the master of the households to light it [Music] originally the palace had a three-sided open courtyard and in the front was a huge Gateway modeled on a famous arch in Rome [Music] much of the inte 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 foreign [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 greens Gardens and Victoria Memorial were completed to create a whole new Frontage [Music] completed effect of the Mal the Victorian Memorial and Buckingham Palace is ideally suited to the monarchy's purpose and role it's regularly and spectacularly used for All Occasions and stay processions we're also familiar with the layout that it's hard to believe it's also relatively recent in the story of crown and Country

Channel: Real Royalty

Views: 165,489

Keywords: Aristocratic life, Buckingham Palace, Crown and Country, King and queens history, London history, Majesty secrets, Monarchy tours, Palace architecture UK, Palace treasures, Real Royalty, Royal architecture, Royal documentaries, Royal families, Royal family, Royal lineage, Royal lineage discovery., Royal traditions, Royalty tales, Tower of London, Westminster Palace, Whitehall tour

Id: hxAuYUpj4EU

Length: 49min 33sec (2973 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023