But what most people don’t know is that the nucleus of the collection of 1,300 old-master pictures belonged to King Charles I, and was sold off following his execution in 1649. Many of the paintings that hang in Windsor, Hampton Court and Buckingham Palace were sold or given to plumbers, tailors, brewers and war widows by the republican parliament in one of the most extraordinary attempts at public redistribution of wealth. This, and the royal repossession of that art, is a story you don’t hear when you go to any of the royal palaces. After all, it could be argued that the royals had no right to repossess, without financial compensation, works that had been sold on the open market.
But it’s a story that has fascinated me since I first heard it while studying the history of the civil war at university. Growing up as a state-educated teenager in Leeds in the 1980s, I became interested in art, but was intimidated by galleries and museums (never mind palaces), which held the marvellous pictures I could see in library books. It seems it was the first time that some of the world’s great art was seen outside the charmed circle of the royal palaces, and art for the people, albeit briefly, really meant something.
As I began to research the history of King Charles’s art, I realised that problems of public access continue to plague the Royal Collection. Officially, it’s held in common by the monarchy and the public (after all, most of it was bought over the centuries with our money). But I discovered that many pictures remain hidden away in private residences or are held in store. Privately, several museum curators confessed to me their concerns about access to royal paintings and drawings, and the “difficulty” and “impossibility” of dealing with the collection’s administrators, but refused to go on the record for fear of incurring their wrath.
My story of growing disillusion starts not in the royal galleries of Windsor, nor Hampton Court, but in the National Archives (TNA) in Kew. Like most republican administrations, the Commonwealth left a mountainous paper trail of how it disposed of King Charles’s possessions after his execution. As I followed the twists and turns of the sale in the inventories, bills of sale and depositions in the archives, I began to see a different, more democratic story from the one created by most royal historians.
Royal folklore insists that Charles I was royalty’s great connoisseur king, amassing some of Europe’s finest pictures, statues and drawings during his 24-year reign. But he was never meant to be king. His elder, charismatic brother, the dashing Prince Henry, had been groomed to take over the throne until his sudden death from a fever in 1612. The tiny, frail Charles was a poor replacement. Notoriously shy, he had bandy legs and a stammer he tried (and failed) to cure by talking with pebbles in his mouth. Lacking the intellect of his father, King James, or the athleticism of his elder brother, he turned to his advisers and to art as a way of creating for him a suitably enigmatic but majestic image.
After the religious cold war endured by Elizabethans, the accession of the more open-minded Stuarts encouraged travel into Catholic Europe for the first time in decades. Peace was signed with Spain, and educated young men travelled across Europe, looking at the glories of the past and laying the foundations for the Grand Tourists of subsequent generations. The English court learnt how the royal courts of Europe used their art collections to show off their wealth, power and good taste. Charles’s courtiers advised him to catch up as quickly as possible. Throughout the 1620s and 30s, the king embarked on an extraordinary artistic spending spree. He went to Madrid to marry a Spanish princess, and returned without a wife but with a clutch of fashionable Titians, seen for the first time in England. His advisers recommended he buy the Gonzaga collection from the bankrupt duchy of Mantua for just £18,000. It contained hundreds of pictures and classical statuary – Titians, Raphaels, Caravaggios, and Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar, one of the most important art works of the Italian Renaissance. Although his army, fighting in France, needed £18,000 to maintain its siege of La Rochelle, Charles chose instead to spend public money on paintings.
However, his taste was circumstantial and followed personal advice and prevailing fashions, with little understanding of artistic quality. His advisers had a better understanding of how art could magnify the king’s authority, luring the best artists in Europe to London. Rubens, Van Dyck, Orazio and his daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, all worked for Charles. Rubens, who praised him as “the greatest amateur of painting among the princes of the world”, got to paint the Banqueting House ceiling. Charles dissolved parliament and commissioned Van Dyck to portray him like a Roman emperor on horseback. It looked wonderful hanging on the walls of St James’s Palace, even though in reality Charles was just over 5ft tall, and his disastrous personal rule was causing financial and religious meltdown throughout the country.
Seven years of civil war brought the country to its knees, and after Charles’s execution there were calls for reparations for those who lost livelihoods and loved ones. In response, the new Commonwealth passed legislation ordering “the sale of the late king’s goods”. The royal palaces were inventoried and the collection put on sale at Somerset House on London’s Strand. Da Vincis and Raphaels, as well as Charles’s curtains, armour, the crown jewels – even the palaces’ pots and pans – went on sale, to raise money for the new regime and to settle the debts incurred by the king’s lavish court. But the sale was also designed to diminish the power of the symbols of monarchy. What better way of devaluing monarchy than putting a price tag on it, and in the process, bringing in much-needed revenue?
Raphaels went on sale for £2,000, a Titian for £500. Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar was valued at £1,000, and £150 bought a Caravaggio. These were hardly cheap, considering that most MPs earned around £500 a year.
Other painters didn’t fare as well: few buyers wanted to be associated with Charles’s favourite painter, Anthony Van Dyck, whose portraits went on sale for a tenner. Rubens fared a little better, selling for £80. Rembrandt’s Old Woman was the great bargain: the sale’s trustees sold it for just £4.
Buyers came from all walks of life. One was the republican Colonel John Hutchinson. A close ally of Cromwell, he defended Nottingham against the royalists and signed Charles I’s death warrant. He spent over £2,000 on paintings. His wife, Lucy, explained that her husband was “loath that the land should be disfurnished of all the rarities that were in it”. He was particularly taken with the king’s erotic Titians, paying £600 for one naked Venus. After hanging in the palaces of Madrid and Whitehall, Titian’s Venus found herself in the humbler surroundings of the Hutchinsons’ estate in Nottinghamshire. One can only imagine what the neighbours thought.
There are no records of any pictures being destroyed on the grounds of religion. Contrary to popular belief, Puritans made a distinction between pictures in churches and in private galleries. In a church, pictures of the Virgin were idolatrous and could be attacked. In a gallery, they were objects of artistic contemplation.
