The multibillion-dollar royal real estate portfolio is a tangled web of different residences, technically owned by differing entities. Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, St. James’s Palace, Kensington Palace, and Clarence House are owned by the king, in right of the crown. Others like Balmoral and Sandringham are privately owned by the king, while some, like Adelaide Cottage and Frogmore Cottage, are owned by the Crown Estate. Overall, King Charles is estimated to control around 100 grace-and-favor residences.
Kings and queens have always been charged with housing their family, courtiers, servants, and the odd illegitimate child. But the idea of “grace and favor” residences, per Historia Magazine, seems to have cemented in the 1700s, when King George II abandoned the rundown Hampton Court Palace, 12 miles away from central London. Putting the massive palace to use, he gifted suites to lesser family members and those who had been of service to the crown.
“Many of them were aristocratic widows in straitened circumstances, who were offered free accommodation in return for their husbands’ services to the monarch,” the website for Historic Royal Palaces notes. “The various apartments, although extremely grand, were not always the most comfortable places to live. Residents regularly complained that the palace was ‘perishingly cold’ and damp, and some had no access to hot water.”
Nicknamed a “quality poorhouse,” the Victorian-era Hampton Court Palace boasted roughly 100 residents, and double the amount of servants, with a reported waitlist of up to 20 years, per Historia Magazine. The apartments were awkwardly laid out and accessed by several flights of treacherous staircases. Dignified matrons could be seen heaving heavy luggage up with a rope and pulley. Housekeeping was provided, and there were small plots allotted to garden clubs and lawn tennis and croquet clubs, and afternoon teas.
The residents included everyone from minor royals to military widows. They included suffragette princesses Bamba, Sophia, and Catherine, the daughters of the deposed Maharaja Duleep Singh; Lady Emily, widow of explorer Ernest Shackleton; and Olave, Lady Baden-Powell, leader of the Girl Guides and widow of the founder of the Boy Scouts.
Important royal family members would never have to live in the down-market Hampton Court Palace (the last leases were issued in the 1960s). But what to do with so many relations became a headache for many monarchs. And mistakes often happened. At one point, Amelie, favored mistress of George II, was given a “damp” and “unwholesome” apartment in a nearly deserted Kensington Palace.
“Amelie herself was philosophical on the subject,” Lucy Worsley writes in The Courtiers: Splendor and Intrigue in the Georgian Court at Kensington Palace. “‘There may well have been better apartments,’ she said, ‘mais pas pour moi.’”
King George III (and later his son George IV) was constantly trying to find suitable royal residences for his 13 children and other members of the House of Hanover. Some royals who were dissatisfied with their grace-and-favor residences simply squatted in choicer digs. One such royal was Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent. “After the Duke of Kent’s early death, his widow, her household, and his daughter crept discreetly upwards and began to colonize the state apartments at the top of the King’s Grand Staircase (the duchess’s brother-in-law, King William IV, was extremely annoyed when he found out),” Worsley writes.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.vanityfair.com ’
