Queen Victoria’s Life in Brighton and the Royal Pavilion 1837–1845

Abstract

Queen Victoria’s five visits to Brighton in the first eight years of her reign have not perhaps received the scholarly attention they deserve, and it has often been suggested in the literature on the Royal Pavilion and on her life with Prince Albert that her two visits before her marriage and her three visits afterwards showed a progressive dislike of the town and of the Royal Pavilion itself. By an examination of many of the Queen’s journal entries as well as the opinions of some of those who visited her there or passed their opinions on the building when the Court was in residence at the Royal Pavilion, this article attempts to document these visits in greater detail, and to demonstrate that in fact the Queen’s opinion of both the town and her uncle George IV’s oriental palace had a tendency to fluctuate. The increasing desire by the Queen and Prince Albert to separate the royal family’s private life from their public life, and the realization that the money the palace would sell for would be more use funding, and the contents of the Pavilion of use furnishing, a new wing at Buckingham Palace was enough to seal the fate of the Pavilion in the life of the court as the Queen’s love-hate relationship with Brighton and the Pavilion took a final negative turn

Notes

1 Royal Archives, Windsor Castle, Queen Victoria’s Journal [hereafter QVJ], accessible at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do accessed 28 June 2023, entry at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 4 October 1837.

2 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Thursday, 5 October 1837.

3 John Ashton, Florizel’s Folly (London, 1899), p. 305.

4 Stephen Conrad, ‘The Chamber Floor of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton 1815–1845’, The Burlington Magazine 164, no. 1435 (October 2022), pp. 986-99.

5 Jessica Rutherford, ‘Queen Victoria and the Royal Pavilion: “A Strange, Odd, Chinese Looking Place”’, The Royal Pavilion & Museums Review, no 2 (1991), p. 1. The furnishings would actually have been moved by Henry Saunders, tapissier at the Royal Pavilion 1819–45; his office was opposite the Billiard Room on the west front of the palace.

6 John Morley, The Making of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (London, 1984), p. 7.

7 For example, David Duff (ed.), Queen Victoria’s Highland Journals (London, 1980); Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection (London, 2000); Karen Dolby (compiler), My Dearest, Dearest Albert: Queen Victoria’s Life Through Her Letters and Journals (London, 2018). The standard issue of the Queen’s correspondence is A.C. Benson et al. (eds), The Letters of Queen Victoria, 9 vols (Cambridge, 2014).

8 MSS Housekeeper’s Book: ‘Memorandoms 1837’, Brighton Reference Library, NO. 2300 3 SB 9.MSI. Amongst other things she recorded, the carpets in the Music Room and Saloon, and the two end pieces of carpet in the Banqueting Room were sent to Wilton to be cleaned and sheared, and the cabinets in the Long Gallery had all their doors re-silked.

9 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Monday, 9 October 1837.

10 Quoted in Delia Millar, The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London, 1995), vol. II, p. 826.

11 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Saturday, 7 October 1837: ‘Played at Chess with Lord Conyngham and beat him. I am proud of this, as it was without any assistance.’ She recorded that she beat him again on 14 October.

12 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 4 October 1837.

13 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Sunday, 8 October 1837.

14 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Tuesday, 24 October 1837: ‘Before I left the painting room, I sent for Lord Melbourne to see the Picture, with which he was much pleased. It is to be my First Council, and a great many Portraits will be introduced into the Picture; Lord Melbourne will be painted standing near me.’ Melbourne himself would sit to Hayter for his portrait during this visit and the Queen saw this on 27 October when she wrote in her Journal that the work ‘ … is like, but not near soft and pleasing enough’.

15 QVJ, Royal Pavilion Brighton, Sunday 22 October 1837. The Princess was born in Hanover in 1822 to George III’s seventh son, Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, and was married in 1843 at Buckingham Palace to her first cousin Frederick William of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She died aged 94 in 1916.

16 Ibid. The Queen recorded that she gave the Princess a bracelet. Princess Maria Augusta of Saxony (1782–1863), was the only child of Frederick Augustus, King of Saxony, to reach adulthood. She was actually ineligible to inherit the kingdom of Saxony due to Salic law, and none of the contemporary powers wanted her to marry a Polish prince thus strengthening the claims of Saxony and the restoration of Poland after the partition of Poland to their advantage in 1793–95. She remained unmarried.

17 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Friday, 19 October 1838.

18 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Tuesday, 13 November 1838.

19 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Thursday, 6 December 1838.

20 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Thursday, 13 and Friday, 14 December 1838.

21 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Tuesday, 18 December 1838.

22 ‘Memorandoms 1837’. Mattresses were remade and their cases cleaned in guest bedrooms and in the dormitories, and in July 1838 a number of washstands on the west front were repainted, and worn carpets were lifted in some minor rooms and cut to fit service corridors.

23 The letter, a copy of which Millar, Victorian Watercolours, says is in the Royal Archives, was written on 20 December 1838.

24 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Thursday, 20 December 1838.

25 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Saturday 22 December 1838. For the most recent research on William Porden’s stables see Geoffrey Tyack, ‘A Pantheon for Horses: The Prince Regent’s Dome and Stables at Brighton’, Architectural History 58 (2015), pp. 141-58.

26 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Friday, 21 December 1838.

27 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Thursday, 27 December 1838.

28 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 26 December 1838.

29 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Monday, 31 December 1838.

30 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Sunday, 30 December 1838: ‘Talked of Clark’s being annoyed at my leaving this place … ’

31 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Thursday, 3 January 1839.

32 QVJ, Buckingham Palace, Friday, 12 July 1839.

33 QVJ, Buckingham Palace, Friday, 9 August 1839.

34 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Thursday, 31 December 1840.

35 ‘Memorandoms 1837’. The clock mechanism was removed by Vulliamy on behalf of the Woods & Forests in 1848 (see The National Archives, Work 19/1/2/271) and the four faces installed in the tower at the end of the Household Wing at Osborne, whilst the clock mechanism itself as placed on the quadrangle façade of the East Wing at Buckingham Palace (RCIN 2965).

36 ‘Memorandoms 1837.’

37 ‘Memorandoms 1837.’

38 Georgiana, Baroness Bloomfield, Reminiscences of Court and Diplomatic Life (London, 1883), vol. I, p. 42.

39 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Thursday, 10 February 1842.

40 Bloomfield, Reminiscences, vol. I, p. 42. The Maids of Honour had rooms on the Chamber Floor in what had been the upper floor of house of the factotum of George IV when he was prince of Wales, Louis Weltje, which Nash had incorporated into the service wing on the West front of the Pavilion; they accessed the Queen’s private rooms via the South Wing Passage to the Small South Lobby at the top of the South Stairs of the Long Gallery. See Conrad, ‘Chamber Floor … ’, figure 3 and pp. 992-3.

41 Bloomfield, Reminiscences, vol. I, p. 42.

42 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Friday, 11 February 1842.

43 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Saturday, 12 February 1842.

44 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 16 February 1842.

45 For further details see: George Pottinger, Sir Henry Pottinger: First Governor of Hong Kong (Stroud, 1997).

46 Bloomfield, Reminiscences, pp. 42-3. Liddell writes this as if she had done so on 12 February 1842, but as she goes on to say that she visited the Royal Chapel and heard James Anderson preach ‘yesterday’, and this actually took place on Sunday, 13 February (as the Queen recorded in her Journal), she must have been writing this on 14 February. Liddell’s first term as Maid of Honour ended on Thursday, 17 February.

47 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Friday, 18 February 1842.

48 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Friday, 25 February 1842.

49 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Sunday, 6 March 1842.

50 RCIN 2932488. The first daguerreotype was apparently not successful and the twenty-two-year-old Prince returned to Constable’s studio on 5 March 1842 to sit again resulting in this photograph. See Frances Dimond and Roger Taylor, Crown & Camera: The Royal Family and Photography, 1842–1910 (Harmondsworth, 1987), pp. 10-11, who mistakenly says it was taken on 7 March 1842.

51 QVJ, Buckingham Palace, Tuesday, 8 March 1842.

52 ‘Memorandoms 1837’.

53 QVJ, Windsor Castle, Tuesday, 1 November 1842.

54 Ibid.

55 QVJ, Walmer Castle, Monday, 28 November 1842.

56 ‘Memorandoms 1837’. The National Archives, Work 19/1/2/152 confirms that Reid was at the Pavilion on 22 November 1844.

57 ‘Memorandoms 1837.’ Joseph Good (1775–1857) had replaced John Nash (1752–1835) as the Pavilion’s architect in 1830.

58 Tyler Whittle, Victoria and Albert at Home (London, 1980), p. 4.

59 Copy of a letter to Sir Robert Peel regarding Osborne, November 1843, Royal Collection Trust https://www.rct.uk/copy-of-a-letter-to-sir-robert-peel-regarding-osborne [accessed 12 July 2023].

60 ‘Memorandoms 1837’.

61 ‘Memorandoms 1837’, and QVJ, Blair Castle, Friday, 13 September 1844: ‘ … good news of the Children, who have arrived safely at Brighton.’

62 QVJ, Stratfield Saye, Monday, 20 January 1845.

63 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Friday, 7 February 1845.

64 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Saturday, 8 February 1845.

65 Punch, vol. 8 (1845), p. 108. The cartoon is reproduced in Henry D. Roberts, History of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (London, 1939), p. 168.

66 Clifford Musgrave, Royal Pavilion: An Episode in the Romantic (London, 1959), p. 122.

67 The sleigh was built by carriage makers Hooper & Co. and still exists in the Royal Mews at Windsor (no known inventory number). See Louise Cooling, A Royal Christmas (London, 2018), pp. 117-118. It was exhibited at Windsor Castle from 9 December 2008 to 6 January 2009 (no catalogue or hand list was issued).

68 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 12 February 1845.

69 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Sunday, 16 February 1845.

70 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Wednesday, 19 February 1845.

71 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Sunday, 16 February 1845.

72 QVJ, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Monday 10 February 1845.

73 See Geoffrey de Bellaigue, ‘Chinoiserie at Buckingham Palace’, Apollo CI, no 159 (May 1975), pp. 380-91. The author only discusses the major rooms in the new East Wing decorated with Pavilion objects arranged by Prince Albert: The Yellow Drawing Room, Centre Room, Chinese Luncheon Room and Principal Corridor, but in fact most of the rooms received furniture formerly in the Pavilion, much of which had come from the Pavilion’s Chamber floor, and of course most of the marble fireplaces which were removed by Cubitt before 23 June 1848 for reinstallation in Buckingham Palace.

74 Musgrave, Royal Pavilion, p. 122.

75 Ironically, the royal couple called this wing the Pavilion, and it was whilst staying at Osborne on Saturday 15 August 1846 that the Queen wrote in her journal: ‘We heard that the Vote of £20,000, for an addition to Buckingham Palace, (the selling of the Pavilion at Brighton, making up the rest) was passed yesterday. The Debate was most satisfactory. Some few had objected, merely on the ground that an entirely new & handsome Palace ought to be built, & M^r. Williams, a very ill conditioned man, was the only one who objected, on the ground of extravagance.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Conrad

Stephen Conrad

Stephen Conrad MA FRSA is an independent art historian with a focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and French art and architecture. He has long been interested in the history of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.