A Royal House

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31262, 7 January 1967, Page 4

A Royal House

Royal Lodge. Windsor. By Helen Cathcart. W. H. Allen. 188 pp. Bibliography.

Helen Cathcart’s talents as a writer are deployed at their best in describing historical rather than contemporary themes. This is not just a lefthanded compliment. Her book on Sandringham revealed her as a diverting historian, and the greater part of the present work shows her in the same happy vein. Royal Lodge is one of the “grace-and-favour” residences, situated in Windsor Great Park. It is the home of the Queen Mother, and one in which she and her husband and their two children spent their happiest and least troubled years before the abdication. As a house, Royal Lodge is of no great antiquity, though its setting, in the midst of the greatest of the Royal Estates, has seen nearly 1000 years of English history. A certain “Hill Lodge,” described as “a small decayed tenement” was acquired by a Cromwellian captain, John Byfield, who built a charming house on its foundations. Byfield died in 1857—before the Restoration, when King Charles H’s properties were unconditionally restored to him. As Windsor Castle was then in an abominable state owing to Roundhead depredations, King Charles spent a good deal at his time at Byfield House, and established there what in our sickening

modern idiom would be called a “love nest” for his various inamoratas.

It was not, however, till Queen Anne’s reign, nearly 50 years later that Royal Lodge was given its first real identity. Sarah Churchill, the Queen’s “dear, dear Mrs Freeman,” to whom the monarch could refuse nothing, secured the house, not only for herself, but for her two daughters (whom she survived) and set about remodelling it very capably to the designs of the architect Vanbrugh. She and her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, lived there and the Duke was appointed Ranger of Windsor Great Park, ordinarily a Royal prerogative. After the death of the widowed Duchess at the age of 84 the Lodge passed into the hands of George IPs brother, William Duke of Cumberland —“the Butcher of Culloden,” who succeeded one of Sarah’s favourite young relatives as Ranger. Helen Cathcart shows a remarkable grasp of her subject, and a detailed knowledge of the great messuage pertaining to Windsor. She sketches briefly the present social background of Royal Lodge, and successfully evades the pitfalls which make revelations about living Royal personages so often tedious, if not downright mawkish. Students of history, as well as of the modern world will find these pages delightful, and the Illustrations pleasing.