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of control, running through wall-spaces, licking and devouring the beams in St George’s
Hall, setting the sky alight with a huge red glow which silhouetted the ancient towers
against the night sky. To those watching the scene on television, it seemed almost
unbelievable: Windsor Castle, the symbol of the monarchy, on fire. Fortunately Prince
Andrew was there and with his naval training organized a successful rescue operation.
As a result, very few works of art were lost, but the damage to the Castle and
particularly to the great St George’s Hall was serious. Elizabeth was at Buckingham
Palace; alerted by Andrew she rushed down to Windsor, where, a small, bowed figure in
headscarf and mackintosh, she inspected the dreadful scars in the heart of her childhood
home. She was, in her son’s words, ‘absolutely devastated’. She loved Windsor more than
anywhere else; for her it was particularly associated with that happy childhood which
now seemed like a lost paradise. It was not just memories that had been destroyed but a
part of the royal heritage which had been entrusted to her; the fire hurt her not only as
a person but as monarch, enhancing the sense of bewilderment and even of failure
which she felt in the face of the ruin of her children’s marriages. Charles drove over
from Sandringham on Friday night to inspect the damage, but returned to join his houseparty
in the early hours of Saturday. With her husband in the Argentine and her family –
apart from Andrew – elsewhere, Elizabeth was left alone to contemplate a disaster
which was not only real but symbolic.
The reaction of the public to the televised statement by the Secretary of State for the
Department of National Heritage, Peter Brooke, pledging public money to pay for the
damage, then estimated at £60 million, was a further slap in the face. The Daily Mail, a
widely read, middle-of-the-road newspaper, which usually opposed the anti-monarchist
line taken by the Murdoch press, voiced the general feeling in a front-page editorial
headed, ‘Why the Queen must listen’, asking: ‘Why should the populace, many of whom
have had to make huge sacrifices during the bitter recession, have to pay the total bill
for Windsor Castle, when the Queen, who pays no taxes, contributes next to nothing?’
The issue of the tax exemption on Elizabeth’s private income had been gathering
strength, fuelled by Britain’s severest recession since the 1930s, since the last settlement
of the Civil List in 1990. A hostile editorial in the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times written
on 10 February 1991 by the republican editor, Andrew Neil, at the time of the Gulf War,
attacked the behaviour of the younger royals for carrying on a privileged lifestyle
financed by the public while the British people were losing their jobs and homes and,
some of them, even their lives at war for their country. A World in Action TV programme
in June 1991, based substantially on the work of Philip Hall, whose book on the subject,
Royal Fortune, was published in January 1992, had revealed the circumstances of the
royal tax exemption. Hall’s important argument based on ten years’ research was that
there was no justifiable historical basis for the exemption and that income tax had been
paid by all Elizabeth’s predecessors except her father, who had been the first monarch to
enjoy such exemption. Nearly ten years later the same author discovered that, after her
accession in February 1952, Elizabeth obtained a further concession which exempted her
from paying tax on the income derived from her investments, something which her