WINDSOR CASTLE

Kings and Queens usually have several palaces, but Windsor is so much the home of the British Royal family that they have adopted it as their surname. William the Conqueror had already made a note of this commanding height, where a high chalk ridge overlooks the Thames Valley, though much of what he built on the mound was wood. A more permanent round tower of stone was erected on the same site by Henry II; but Edward III’s work at Windsor was the most expensive building project undertaken anywhere in England during the Middle Ages. This cost nearly twice the Crown’s total annual income. To finance the work, the king borrowed vast sums from continental bankers- several of whom he failed to repay, making them bankrupt! Perhaps the most interesting of the many buildings which form the Windsor complex is St George’s Chapel; a 15th century Gothic royal building which has suffered surprisingly little damage over the years. Henry the Eighth was buried in St George’s, but they then forgot exactly where they had put him. When it came to burying Charles I, they rediscovered the Tudor burial, and since Cromwell was in power at that time, they buried the decapitated king next to his predecessor so quietly that at the Restoration there was doubt as to whether the murdered monarch was in fact interred at Windsor. Under Charles II a big programme of modernization was begun at Windsor Castle, with Hugh May as architect, employing Grinling Gibbons to carve amazing limewood decorations- though the king ran out of money before the scheme was complete. When the Prince Regent became king as George IV, he dreamed of re-living the Middle Ages, and employed Jeffry Wyatville to give Windsor a Gothic style throughout, with that silhouette we all know from the motorway. This work cost a million pounds, (which would be many millions by today’s values) yet by the time of the recent fire (November 1992) early nineteenth century Gothic was poorly regarded, so St Georges Hall was rebuilt with some twentieth century changes . However the very process of making good the damage caused by the fire has revealed much that was unknown about the building and its long history