Lucy is the Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces as well as a leading young historian.  She is presenting her own programme for the BBC this spring called If Walls Could Talk, with a book published by Faber to coincide with its release.  She is the author of Courtiers, the Secret History of Kensington Palace and Cavalier, a Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses.  In 2010 Lucy was chosen for the inaugural list of 50 'Women to Watch' compiled by the Cultural Leadership Programme.

Style and Splendour

Lucy Worsley unlocks London’s historic royal palaces

I work as Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity which looks after the five unoccupied royal palaces of London.  Yes, if you love history as much I do, this is a marvellous job.  (But no, you can’t have it - bribes have been offered and refused.)  Here, selected from our collection, are a few of my favourite things …

1 Peter Paul Rubens’s ceiling, The Banqueting House

The Banqueting House in Whitehall is a hugely significant building, yet thousands of people walk past it every day without giving it a second glance.  It looks like yet another imposing, classical cliff of white stone in a street-full of government buildings and ministries.  As England’s earliest ‘classical’ building, though, it was the forerunner of them all.  The Banqueting House was built for James I, the first of the Stuart kings, and its ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens show the king being apotheosised, or turned into a god.

But James I’s son, Charles I, pushed his own royal powers too far, and alienated his subjects.  When the Parliamentarians won the Civil War and captured the king, they further exploited the potent symbolism of this greatest building of the arrogant Stuarts.  They executed Charles I right outside his very own Banqueting House.

2 Vic’s knicks, Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace is best known as the home of Diana, Princess of Wales.  Before that, though, it was the childhood residence of Queen Victoria.   It was here that Victoria was born, grew up, and first set eyes upon Albert.  Here too, she was woken very early on the morning of 20 June 1837 to be told that her uncle the king was dead, and that she was now Britain’s queen.  She was just eighteen years old.

In our collection at Kensington Palace we have several dresses belonging to the teen queen, and they are uniformly tiny: Victoria herself was little over 5 feet tall and at eighteen was still slim.  But we’re always on the look-out for additions to our collection, and last year we greatly enjoyed buying some of Victoria’s underwear from a period much later in her life.  She was still slight in height, but considerably broader round the middle.  Here’s one of her shifts and a pair of divided drawers (split to make it easier to go to the loo).  We’re certain that they were hers because they’re marked with her special ‘VR’ monogram, Victoria Regina.

3 The Wine Fountain, Hampton Court

Hampton Court Palace will always be associated with King Henry VIII.  He used this pleasure palace for hunting, parties and honeymoons.  In 2009, while carrying out an archaeological excavation in the first courtyard of the palace, we discovered the remains of a Tudor fountain.  Instantly curatorial brains started whirring, and plans were put in place to create a modern fountain for our visitors to see.  But rather than re-instating the rather boring and functional fountain that we’d dug up, we decided instead to re-create the famous fountain constructed in a field near Calais in 1520 for a great party attended by Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France.  To celebrate the meeting of the two kings, a fountain freely flowed with both red and white wine for all comers to help themselves.  Our new fountain, a closely-researched replica, also supplies wine, but today it costs £3.50 a glass.

4 Ed’s Bed, Tower of London

People today often use the word ‘medieval’ to describe something primitive and dirty.  For those at the top of society, though, medieval life was clean and comfortable.   This is our recreation of Edward I’s bed in his bedchamber in the Medieval Palace at the Tower of London.  Visitors are often surprised by this room because they expect the Tower to be full of armour and torture instruments, not realising that it was also a luxurious medieval palace.  It’s hard to know exactly what medieval beds looked like, because early artists usually ran into difficulties with their scale or proportion.  We reconstructed this one with the help of Edward’s accounts, which listed payments for its green posts painted with gold stars and for chains linking the whole thing together.

The chains were necessary because the bed was demountable.  Edward I travelled constantly round his realm, and his bed and other furniture went with him in pieces.  This explains why the French call their furniture ‘mobiliers’, or removable items.

5 The princesses’ bedrooms, Kew Palace

Tiny Kew Palace in Kew Gardens is rather a sinister, melancholy place.  It was once the scene of happy family life for George III, Queen Charlotte and their fifteen merry children.  Later on, though, the king fell mysteriously ill.  Today we guess that he had porphyria, but his contemporaries thought he’d ‘gone mad’.  He was sent to Kew Palace to recover in private, and there he endured terrible pain.

Less well known are the difficulties faced by George III’s daughters, the Georgian princesses, who stayed with him during his ‘madness’.  I love the upper floor where the girls’ abandoned bedrooms still remain, uncarpeted, unfurnished, but otherwise untouched since Georgian times.  In these echoing, empty rooms, these unfortunate princesses lived out rather frustrated lives.  Because there was a general European shortage of Protestant princes for them to marry, they remained unwillingly single.  Princess Sophia eventually took matters into her own hands and had a secret illegitimate child with one of her father’s equerries, even though he was thirty years older than her and was described by his colleagues as a ‘hideous old devil’.  The sad ghosts of Princesses Augusta, Amelia and Elizabeth still seem to haunt these deserted rooms.

Lucy Worsley’s new book If Walls Could Talk, An Intimate History of the Home, is published in 1 April 2011 by Faber & Faber