However, parliament was disappointed with the sale’s initial revenue. Times were hard, republicans were reluctant to buy “tainted” royal goods, and royalists were keeping a low profile. At the same time, calls grew for compensation for those who lost out under Charles I and the recent war. Radicals such as Samuel Chidley thundered that those owed money “panted a long time for justice concerning the monies due unto them”. In response, parliament agreed to give away pictures in settlement of royal debt. On one day in 1651, 700 pictures were shared out among nearly 1,000 people: war widows were given Giulio Romanos, glaziers received Holbeins, brewers and tailors collected Dürers and Titians valued at hundreds of pounds.
The distribution was not without its ironies. Elizabeth Hunt, who lost her husband in the war, cannot have felt much better receiving a picture of three baboons valued at £2 10s.
The king’s former plumber received a painting by the Italian master Bassano entitled The Flood. The aptly named John Rivet, a brazier from Holborn, collected the statue of Charles I that now stands at the top of Whitehall, on condition he melt it down “for the rate of old brass”. Instead, he buried it in his garden and sold it for a tidy profit to the late king’s son, Charles II, when the monarchy was restored. Others set up art galleries. A Dutch immigrant showed Bernini’s bust of Charles I alongside Titians and Van Dycks in his front room near London’s present-day Liverpool Street.
What really shocked me was the discovery of what happened to the art collection at the restoration of the monarchy. Charles II passed legislation demanding the restitution of his father’s art collection. Embarrassed royalists who switched sides under the Commonwealth sheepishly returned pictures that they admitted “might” have belonged to the former monarch (the royal brand on the back of each picture was a bit of a giveaway). To Charles’s surprise, Cromwell had kept some wonderful pieces for the state’s use, including Mantegna’s Triumphs and Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles.
Charles let loose a team of royal enforcers to repossess the rest of the collection. Their activities quickly turned into a witch-hunt. Republican households were raided, their possessions destroyed or confiscated. Oliver Cromwell’s widow, Elizabeth, complained of repeated harassment and denied ownership of any of the king’s possessions. Others objected that the new king was repossessing goods given to loyal royalists owed money by Charles I. Refusing to compensate people, Charles II alienated and beggared his own family’s royal supporters. It was one of the uglier episodes of the Restoration, but it worked. More than 1,000 pictures came back into the collection, as well as gifts and works “repossessed” from republican sympathisers.
The myth of the sale as a national cultural disaster was soon established. Charles I was portrayed as the doomed, romantic royal martyr, brought down by an ignorant, philistine rabble. As successive Georgian monarchs expanded the collection with Canalettos and Vermeers, connoisseurs looked back on the overthrow of the monarchy and its redistribution of royal possessions as one big lapse of taste on the part of the nation. Today the Royal Collection website claims that “the greater part of the magnificent collection inherited and added to by Charles I was dispersed on Cromwell’s orders”. What I found as I combed through archives and inventories refuted this. Charles I owned about 1,300 pictures before his death. Inventories taken after 1660 reveal that the royal palaces held 1,100 pictures. This is hardly the catastrophic loss some would have us believe.
Besides, the sale meant that more people than ever before saw, and even owned, Renaissance art, and this interest created a booming art market in Restoration London.
As the Georgians expanded Charles I’s collection, some of the finest pieces in the royal households fell into neglect following decades of minimal conservation, eccentric restoration, smoke, fires and damp. The Mantegnas and Raphaels particularly suffered. In 1839 one art-loving republican complained that the Raphaels should not be allowed to “moulder on the walls of Hampton Court” but should be seen by the public. The growing chorus for greater public access to art owned by the crown led to the creation of the National Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in the 19th century.
But still the royal family clung onto their pictures. Many people sneer at the collection as full of Landseers and portraits of the late Queen Mother’s racehorses. Not true, says the art critic and journalist Jonathan Jones. He regards it as “one of the world’s great art collections”, with important paintings and drawings by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and others. As he says, Charles I was also the first monarch to appreciate old-master drawings as art. The problem is that they’re just not seen. The art critic Brian Sewell agrees. After he left the Courtauld Institute in the late 1950s, where he studied under its director and surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, Anthony Blunt, he worked at Windsor Castle cataloguing its vast collection of drawings. “If you were to chop off the heads of the Windsors,” he argues playfully, “the nation would have a collection that’s world standard.”
Instead, we have a situation of murky ownership and dubious public access. The official line is: “the Royal Collection is held in trust by the Queen as sovereign for her successors and the nation, and is not owned by her as a private individual”. Nobody I spoke to could explain satisfactorily if this meant the collection was public or private. There is an unspoken sense that this is their collection: public access is endured and we should be grateful – and pay – for whatever the royal panjandrums allow us to see within the royal residences.
What we can (or cannot) see is a huge problem. Many of the works are poorly displayed or obscured by palatial knick-knacks, with no explanation of their history. Others are held in store or in publicly inaccessible residences such as St James’s Palace. It is impossible to say how many pictures are not on public display at any one time, as the collection does not have a complete inventory. But there are scores of important 17th-century portraits, Renaissance religious pictures and more recent landscape paintings that are not on show, or arbitrarily move in and out of public display. Only a fraction of the 600 da Vinci drawings are ever put on show, not to mention the hundreds of other old-master drawings held at Windsor.
In 2004, in an attempt to find answers to the ambiguous status of the royal pictures, I went to see Christopher Lloyd, then surveyor of the Royal Collection, who had overall curatorial responsibility for it. “What more is there to say about King Charles I’s art collection?” was his terse greeting as I settled into a chair in his room in St James’s Palace. For him, the Commonwealth sale was a “tragedy”. He claimed that on state visits abroad, the Queen’s eyes “glaze over” when shown a painting that once belonged to her royal predecessor. My growing discomfort turned into alarm when he told me that as my forthcoming book was with a “nasty, commercial publisher”, the Royal Collection Picture Library would “screw” me for the cost of reproducing their pictures. I was told there was no complete inventory of the collection because it changes so quickly. So has anything significant been acquired in recent years? Apparently not. Why were permissions to reproduce some of the most expensive in the world? What about broadening public access? All of this was greeted with curt replies and frosty stares.
