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upon wave of bombers roared directly over the Castle en route to obliterate most of the
city of Coventry and bring a new verb into the German language, ‘Coventrieren’,
meaning ‘to obliterate’. Windsor, the home of her adolescence, came to have a special
place in her heart, which was why, when it was severely damaged by fire in 1992, it
seemed like a direct blow by a malignant fate against herself as much as against the
monarchy.
While Buckingham Palace is majestic and dull, Windsor is romantic, beautiful,
historic. Its great bulk rising above the flat surrounding countryside is a potent symbol
of past power and historical continuity. Almost every English king or queen has added
to the Castle since William I, the Conqueror, built a wooden castle on the chalk bluff
above the River Thames and moved from the old Saxon kings’ hunting lodge two miles
away by the river. By the time Henry III died in 1272, the broad outlines of the Castle
were fixed. They were, to quote the historian of Windsor, ‘a castle on a hill, a round
tower on a mound, two wards with walls and towers round them, all for power and
prestige; and to the south of the hill two parks, one large and one small, for pleasure.
For the next seven hundred years all that was to be done was to fill and re-fill this
outline.’ 6 The Castle changed as each monarch sought to reaffirm his or her personal
image of the monarchy. Edward III founded the chivalric Order of the Garter to bind the
most powerful nobility personally closer to him and created St George’s Chapel as the
theatre for the Order’s ceremony. As personal power passed from sovereign to people,
the Castle and the monarch who resided there became a symbol of the nation; in 1824
the Chancellor of the Exchequer justified the huge expense of the re-medievalizing of
Windsor as an expression of the power and prestige of the nation which had recently
triumphed in the Napoleonic Wars.
If Buckingham Palace is corporate headquarters, Windsor Castle is a village. Among
the huge medieval walls and towers later accretions huddle like swallows’ nests under
eaves: houses, offices, workshops and gardens dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth
centuries. The Castle covers thirteen acres and contains over 1,000 rooms for the royal
family and over 350 people who live and work there: the staff and the royal household,
the gardeners, policemen, firemen, carpenters, plumbers and archivists, the Dean and
his ecclesiastical circle centring on St George’s Chapel, canons, vergers and choristers;
the Military Knights and retired courtiers and their families with their grace-and-favour
houses, all of them like a colony of bees in their cells round the central figure of the
sovereign. From the age of thirteen Elizabeth lived with this weight of tradition around
her, the huge castle with its army of servants, quaint-sounding officials and colonies of
royal pensioners, seeming just a part of normal life to a teenager whose only real
communication with the outside world came through the media.
Windsor during the war was dark, the chandeliers taken down, the state apartments
muffled in dustsheets, the windows blacked out at night (a job which, one old man
grumbled to Crawfie, took all night to complete). By the autumn of 1941 fuel economies
were in force. There was virtually no central heating, only log fires, which were allowed
in the sitting-rooms, but not in the bedrooms. The number of boilers in operation was