[ad_1]
From reports that King Charles III will evict his disgraced brother Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, from the 30-room Royal Lodge to the announcement that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were asked to vacate Frogmore Cottage (which Prince Andrew has reportedly been offered), talk of the royal real estate merry-go-round has never seemed juicier.
Prince Harry’s tell-all Spare didn’t make things any better either. In the best-selling memoir, Harry complains that his brother was given a bigger room at Balmoral, the late queen’s beloved 50,000-acre estate in the Scottish Highlands. He also writes of the embarrassment he and Meghan, then living in the relatively small Nottingham Cottage, felt when they visited Prince William and Kate Middleton at their museum-like four-story apartment in Buckingham Palace.
“We congratulated them on the renovation without holding back the compliments,” he wrote, “while feeling embarrassed of our IKEA lamps and the secondhand sofa we’d recently bought on sale with Meg’s credit card on sofa.com.”
But quarrels over choice housing are nothing new. “Royal children have always squabbled over who has the best or biggest house; no royal seems to be able to live in a house with fewer than ten bedrooms, but it is certainly true that the more important the royal—the higher up the line of succession—the bigger the house,” writes historian Tom Quinn, author of Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir and Scandals of the Royal Palaces.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were criticized for the £2.4 million in taxpayer money (which the Couple repaid when they resigned as working royals) that they used to renovate Frogmore Cottage. Reportedly the revamp was led by Vicky Charles, the former design director of ritzy private-members club Soho House and the visionary behind its branch Soho Farmhouse, supposedly a favorite getaway of Harry and Meghan’s.
“There has also always been an insane habit of each new royal resident insisting that their palace or house has to be completely refurbished, even rebuilt, before they can bring themselves to move in,” Quinn explains. “When Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon moved into their Kensington Palace apartment vast amounts of Georgian fittings were destroyed—Margaret insisted—according to one of her staff—that she had absolutely no intention of using a lavatory that had ever been used by anyone else!”
For centuries, monarchs have functioned as royal landlords, using their vast property holdings to punish and reward various members of their family, friends, and staff. Royal dwellings are often occupied for free or leased at a rate dramatically lower than market value, but this has not stopped royal tenants from consistently complaining about their designer digs, and sometimes they have had good reason to protest.
Before modern conveniences, where the monarch sent you to live could be a matter of life and death. In 1533, King Henry VIII, having just divorced his first wife, Queen Katherine, to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn, sent his defiant ex-wife to live in the rundown and remote palace of Buckden in Cambridgeshire.
According to Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Katherine, suffering from a variety of ailments, begged the king to relocate her, claiming “her present lodging was hopelessly damp and cold, and her health was beginning to suffer.”
As an alternative, the cruel king (apparently spurred on by Anne) then ordered Katherine to move to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, an even more decrepit and unhealthy royal property. Katherine refused, aware that the conditions of the castle could hasten her death. Furious, Henry sent the Duke of Suffolk to deal with Katherine.
“Suffolk told her he had come to escort her to Fotheringhay, at which—without further argument—she withdrew to her chamber and locked herself in,” Weir writes. “‘If you wish to take me with you, you will have to break down the door!’ she cried, and no threats or entreaties could persuade her to come out.”
Hearing of their beloved Katherine’s plight, locals gathered outside Buckden, waiting to attack if Suffolk forcibly removed her from the property. An exasperated Suffolk finally left, but Katherine was soon moved to Kimbolton Castle where she died in 1536.
[ad_2]
Source link
