Lock your doors and close the windows, the Royal Family is coming to visit
Throughout history, a visit from the monarch and their family has meant nothing but chaos. Bronwen Riley investigates.
Any self-respecting country house numbers among its bedrooms one distinguished from all others. Details may differ — the size of the bed, the fanciness of the tassels, the richness of the silks (which may well now be in shreds) — but it matters not. What counts is that a royal personage once slept there. Even if it happened 700 years ago and your house has been rebuilt three times since, a room in which royalty once reposed is enshrined ever after.
This doesn’t mean that the visit was at all pleasurable for either host or guest. The presence of a royal bedchamber celebrates less the awe of majesty than the family’s ability to survive the often appalling jeopardy of welcoming a royal, which could all too easily result in financial ruin, social disgrace and even death. Unlike modern royals, who might show up with a maid or valet and the odd bodyguard, royal visits once meant vast retinues landing on your doorstep, including high-ranking courtiers and domestic staff, who all had to be accommodated according to their station. Edward I would even bring along a keeper of the royal cows, to ensure a supply of fresh milk.
'Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, stayed at Walmer Castle in Kent every July as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, preceded by a Harrods van full of her own furniture and such essentials as bowls and beds for her corgis'
Hosts effectively handed over their house to their royal guests, who were attended by their own staff and would often eat in a separate room with food prepared by their own cooks. Medieval manners lingered; at their coronation banquet in 1685, James II and his wife, Mary of Modena, sat alone at a table of about 170 dishes, including 24 cold puffins and four fawns, ‘two larded’. Lord Burghley had to double the size of Theobald’s, his house in Hertfordshire, all too conveniently situated a day’s ride north out of London, to accommodate Elizabeth I and her vast entourage on her annual summer progresses. Luckily for him, he was compensated by a high and lucrative office that allowed him to pay for it all.
Poor Sir Christopher Hatton, on the other hand, built palatial Holdenby in Northamptonshire with the express desire to entertain the Queen, but bankrupted himself in its building and Elizabeth I never visited. By contrast, she stayed for an unprecedented 19 days at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 with her favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who erected a building the size of a small country house with its own dancing chamber especially to accommodate her.
Nineteen days was nothing in comparison with the almost 19 years that Mary, Queen of Scots spent on the longest and unhappiest royal visit, as Elizabeth I’s prisoner. For 15 years, Mary was hosted by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, at the start of his wardship, was one of the richest men in England and happily married. Within weeks, he was complaining that Mary would ‘make me grey-headed’ and the burden eventually ruined his temper, wrecked his marriage and dented his finances. For reasons of security, Mary was initially housed at the Earl’s least desirable property, Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, a damp old hunting lodge where everyone got colds and the privies stank through lack of drainage. Elizabeth I sent up soft furnishings from the Tower of London, but her subs didn’t cover all Mary’s expenses and, in one month alone in 1575, the Earl spent £300 on her French wine, fine linen, live birds, sweets and writing paper.
In becoming Mary’s gaolers, the Earl and Countess had effectively become near prisoners, too, and whenever there was a plot to rescue Mary their entire household came under suspicion. Although relieved of the duty for her final period of captivity, the Earl was required to be an official witness at her execution, an event that left him devastated.
Muncaster Castle in Cumbria has hosted a series of royal visits, each more scandalous than the last.
Three hundred years later, another lodge with dodgy drains was almost the death of the future Edward VII when, as Prince of Wales, he and his wife, Alix, were guests of Lord Londesborough in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, for a grouse shoot in 1871. The house was filled with a ‘deadly vapour’ from the sewage backing up at high tide and many of the guests became ill with diarrhoea, including Alix. On his return to Sandringham in Norfolk, the Prince fell so ill with typhus that The Times reported his imminent demise. Although he eventually recovered, another guest, Lord Chesterfield, died. Londesborough Lodge later became a Turkish and medical baths and is now a Tibetan Buddhist centre, the pernicious drains and their deadly consequences quietly forgotten.
The monks of Lanercost Priory in Cumbria had their peace badly disturbed by the first King Edward when he unexpectedly descended on them in September 1306, taken ill en route to Carlisle. Used to living in near silence, they must have been driven mad by the five-month stay of about 200 people, including the Queen, her eldest son, government officials and a large retinue, not forgetting the royal cow keeper, as well as endless visitors bringing food, medicines, and the heads of Scottish rebels to add a positive spin to the progress of the King’s wars in Scotland. Although Edward added two churches to Lanercost’s endowment for his ‘long stay’, it was poor compensation for the trouble caused by the wars Edward started: in 1311, Robert Bruce, King of the Scots, stayed at the priory for three days doing ‘an infinity of injury’.
It wasn’t only human members of the Royal Household causing havoc. Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, stayed at Walmer Castle in Kent every July as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, preceded by a Harrods van full of her own furniture and such essentials as bowls and beds for her corgis. As her Tudor predecessors had done, she decorated the sparse interiors of the castle to her own taste and to the relief of the curators, whose furniture was spared the attention of her less than content corgis.
'His bodyguard in the corridor outside later confessed that he had spent the worst night of his life, "what with the draughts and a ghost that bothered him"'
In the 800 years or so of its existence, Muncaster Castle in Cumbria has endured several royal visits, none more hazardous than in 1464 when Sir John Pennington risked his life sheltering Henry VI from his Yorkist enemies after his defeat at Hexham during the Wars of the Roses. The King gave him a ‘curiously wrought glass cup’ with a blessing that so long as it remained intact, the family would keep the castle. ‘Henry VI’s visit here, and his gift of the Luck, is so central to our story,’ states Peter Frost-Pennington, the current owner, ‘that it infuses our whole ethos and for me is perhaps the reason we are still here.’
Was it the Luck offering protection when, in 1874, Queen Victoria’s son Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, stayed on his way up to Balmoral and was treated to explosive displays by the British Dynamite Company that blew a tree into the air, knocked over the esteemed guests and shattered the castle windows? Luckily, the Luck was spared. When the future Edward VIII stayed in the 1920s, he was naturally given the ‘King’s Room’. There is no record of how he slept, but his bodyguard in the corridor outside later confessed that he had spent the worst night of his life, ‘what with the draughts and a ghost that bothered him’.
It sounds as if he could have done with the discreet passage on the back stairs at Sandringham, where footmen enjoyed a quiet tipple of whisky, gin or vodka to help them get through long dinners. ‘In those days, we never thought of the hours,’ recalls John Hudson, a footman in the Royal Household in the 1970s. ‘I’d be up to do the ladies’ breakfast trays by 6.30am and not finish until 1am. If there was a state visit, I’d do the carriages, then lunch, then a banquet in the evening.’
Long gone are the days of the retinue. When the late Princess Margaret stayed at Glen in the Scottish Borders in the early 1970s, Anne Glenconner would hire a butler for the weekend and take on a few extra ladies from the village. ‘Princess Margaret thankfully travelled with her own maid and we were frightfully lucky to have the Incredible String Band living on the estate to come and play if we wanted to dance,’ she explains. For those anxious to avoid the disasters of the past, Lady Glenconner — who as lifelong friend and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret has 90 years of experience as host, guest and retainer to the royals — advises: ‘The trick... is meticulous planning and thinking of it like a stage set, really, with all the right details — which books they might like to read and favourite bath salts, which Floris scent — and a good mixture of guests and entertainments. Princess Margaret didn’t like surprises, and it very much helped to ask in advance what she might like to do.’
Sound advice, as much for her Elizabethan and Stuart counterparts as to the wise host today.
This feature originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
