Edward Thomas

“ George's Chapel and the Curfew Tower, on the other side the cliffy, long front of the State Apartments. Even thus clear, the buildings are as remote as a cloud in a mental atmosphere of time and undefined associations. For these green meadows of Clewer belong to to-day. Behind their cheap fences they seem to expect the builder; they are edged by lowly and modern houses which vote Liberal and flutter white linen on the grey air. And on every hand the country is what it has been made within recent times. ”

“ He was stricken therewith to the heart with a sparkle of fine love that endured long after: he thought no lady in the world so worthy to be beloved as she. Thus they entered into the castle hand in hand: the lady led him first into the hall and after into the chamber, nobly apparelled. The king regarded so the lady, that she was abashed: at last he went to a window to rest him, and so fell in a great study. The lady went about to make cheer to the lords and knights that were there, and commanded to dress the hall for dinner. ”

“ I envy people maunching and maunching peaches and grapes, and I not daring to eat a bit. My head is pretty well, only a sudden turn any time makes me giddy for a moment, and sometimes it feels very stuffed; but if it grows no worse, I can bear it very well. I take all opportunities of walking; and we have a delicious park here just joining to the castle, and an avenue in the great park very wide, and two miles long, set with a double row of elms on each side. Were you ever at Windsor? ”

“ The very dogs are wearing Conservative ribbons as they trot between their slouching red-faced masters and their delicately stepping indolent mistresses. The roads are many and excellent, and the beat of carriage horses' hoofs is a constant music, though interrupted by the motor car's hoot and throb and hiss. Every road is "as smooth as a die, a real stockjobber's road". For centuries the roads to Windsor must [7] have been exceptionally good; in Swift's time it was little more than a three-hours' journey from London. ”

“ There are a thousand excellent or notable things—some due to chance and antiquity, some to deliberation and design—but the Park as a whole has no supremacy over others of the same or even less extent. I have no sooner admired the exquisite giant birches, or the craggy vast oaks, or the perfectly formed younger ones, than I come to lines of rhododendrons, the symbols of very modern riches, or to lines of venerable stately trees which are not satisfying except on the rare occasions when they overhang some human stateliness or splendour. ”

“ John Evelyn was at Windsor on June 8, 1654, and found the Castle rooms "melancholy and of ancient magnificence", but walking on the terrace, he thought that "Eton, with the park, meandering Thames, and sweet meadows yield one of the most delightful prospects". Ten years later, Pepys exclaimed: "Lord! the prospect that is in the balcony in the Queen's lodgings, and the terrace and walk, are strange things to consider, being the best in the world, sure". Swift told Stella that Windsor was "a delicious place". ”

“ It was probably the greatest work of George IV, with the help of the architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, to make Windsor Castle as young as the Brighton Pavilion. He made it fit for a king of taste to live in. His raw material was not a mediæval castle slowly [18] accumulated by Angevins, Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Tudors, but a mediæval castle which had been iced or Italianized for Charles II by Wren. Edward III had been as sweeping, but he destroyed the old and built the new in the living fashion of his own time. ”

“ This is now eighteen hundred acres in extent, and holds a thousand fallow deer and a hundred red deer, Cranbourne Park holding a small herd of white deer.
Though crossed by public footpaths and roads, it is at most times and places clear that the Park is the front garden of Windsor Castle. There is even a sense of privacy unintentionally disturbed at spots here and there where the family grief or rejoicing of royalty has been celebrated by planting a tree—as when Queen Victoria planted an oak to mark the place where the Prince Consort finished his last day's shooting, November 23, 1861. ”

“ Doubtless the jackdaws, gliding straight out into the clear air from the Round Tower, have been there since Creçy, but the stonework is new. That also is the work of George IV. Except St. George's Chapel, the timber and herring-boned brick of the Horse-shoe Cloister, and the stone houses of the Military Knights where men obviously live, and the tranquil and leafy Canons' Cloister at the top of the Hundred Steps, most of the exterior of Windsor looks and is new. ”

“ There is no Elizabethan or true Jacobean work, because the furniture was continually renewed and kept up-to-date in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nothing has come down from the time of Cromwell's occupation, but much of Charles II's, William and Mary's, Anne's, and George IV's. George IV was also the first considerable collector of ancient arms at Windsor. The armoury is the Prince Consort's. Neither Henry V's "harnois de teste" worn at Agincourt, nor the white armour of Joan of Arc, said to have been sent to Henry VI, is anywhere to be seen. ”

“ Henry II held his court at Windsor at Easter, 1170, accompanied by William the Lion of Scotland and his brother David; there he held a parliament in 1175, and often resided; he knighted his son, [22] Prince John, within its walls; and it is said that one of the apartments was decorated with a picture of a dying eagle attacked by four eaglets, to represent himself and his rebel sons. When Richard I lay in prison, on his way home from the Crusade, John seized Windsor, but was forced by the barons to give it up. ”

“ There Henry VII and Philip of Castile killed deer "with their own hands, with their crossbows"; even so early was it a notable thing for a sovereign to do what many a man does without thinking about it. Henry VIII loved the chase, and hunted in Windsor Forest all day, from morning until nightfall. He also shot, hawked, fished, and played tennis, and having killed the deer, watched the men who ate quantities of venison for a wager. Elizabeth hunted at Windsor, attended by half a hundred ladies on hackneys, and once, in 1602, shot a great fat stag, and sent it to Archbishop Parker as a gift. ”

“ Gifts of timber for building were frequently made to religious houses in the neighbourhood and to private men. Six oaks were sent to the Tower in 1276, wherewith to burn lime for the masonry; and the builders of Windsor Castle in William I's, Henry II's, Henry III's, and Edward III's time must have drawn abundantly from the oaks in the clay of the lower lands. The game in the Forest was of many kinds. The red deer was the noblest in appearance, in speed, and in esteem. ”

“ But the charm is faded and the grandeur confounded, and the Park should either be artistically treated as a whole, or allowed a century of nature and wise neglect, if these qualities are to return in a measure worthy of its repute and history. ”

“ Even if searched for, ancient buildings are not numerous or easy to find. Part of the lower story eastward from the Devil's Tower, and some foundations, are of Henry II's time. From Henry III's more survives—the outer wall on the west and its three towers, the wall of the South Ambulatory in the Dean's Cloister, a door behind the altar of the chapel, the remains of the Domum [16] Regis on the north of the chapel in one of the Canons' houses, and the King's Hall, now a library. The work of Edward III and William of Wykeham gives its form to the Castle as a whole. ”

“ This advantage of singular eminence above any other place upon the Thames and near London was strengthened and served both by the river, which flows on the north along a winding shore (which was perhaps the origin of the name Windsor) , and by the dense, broad tracts of forest extending far to the south and west. It lay within a few miles of Staines, and so was only a long day's march from London, by the Roman road from Winchester and Silchester which crossed the Thames at that point. ”

“ There are many other instruments of civilization—railway stations, boathouses, Wellington College, the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the Royal Holloway College for Women, not to speak of the racecourses at Ascot and at Windsor, and the Criminal Lunatic Asylum at Broadmoor, while Aldershot itself is really in the same district. ”

“ A large number of hands were employed for a few weeks to collect materials, dig out stone, fell trees in the forest, prepare lime-pits and sand-pits, and all things necessary for a great work to be done in a short time. Many were employed in the royal quarry at Bisham, near Marlow, on the Thames, a few miles above Windsor, in digging out the chalk or soft stone there, of which the bulk of the wall consists ”

“ These are not the only great men connected with Windsor and the neighbourhood in the days of its transformation. Cowley, the eagle Cowley, came to the Porch House at Chertsey for his last years, and died there in 1667. Colley Cibber, the famous Laureate, was drawn into the charmed land at Hill House, White Waltham. Later came Thomson to Richmond. Beaconsfield was the home and burial place of Burke, where Johnson and Mirabeau talked [12] with him. At St. Anne's Hill, near Chertsey, Charles James Fox, that lover of nightingales, lived for five years at the end of his life. ”

“ George III also restored the ruined Tomb House and dug a royal vault beneath it. Under George IV the monument to the Princess Charlotte of Wales was placed in the chantry at the west end of the north aisle. Two years before, Wyatville (né Wyatt) began to rebuild the Castle. The incongruous buildings and external additions of the Restoration were removed. The entrance gateway to the upper ward, with its two towers of Lancaster and York, was made. The height of the Round Tower was increased by thirty-nine feet and a flag turret added. ”

“ The Bray Wood oak trees that sprouted in the Middle Ages were suddenly modernized by being named after Queen Anne and Queen Charlotte.
THE LOWER WARD, WINDSOR CASTLE
When Hazlitt went to see the pictures at Windsor, he said: "Pope's lines on Windsor Forest suggest [13] themselves to the mind and make the air about it delicate". It looks a little odd to attribute to such a poem the effect of making the air delicate—Banquo having observed to Duncan that where the martlets "most breed and haunt ... the air is delicate". Yet it has a truth. The delicacy is sophisticated ”