CASTLES OF THE WORLD

WINDSOR CASTLE, Great Britain

Windsor Castle is an official residence of The Queen and the largest occupied castle in the world. A royal palace and fortress for over 900 years, the Castle remains a working palace today. Visitors can walk around the State Apartments, extensive suites of rooms at the heart of the working palace; for part of the year visitors can also see the Semi State rooms, which are some of the most splendid interiors in the castle. They are furnished with treasures from the Royal Collection including paintings by Holbein, Rubens, Van Dyck and Lawrence, fine tapestries and porcelain, sculpture and armour.

Within the Castle complex there are many additional attractions. In the Drawings Gallery regular exhibitions of treasures from the Royal Library are mounted. Another popular feature is the Queen Mary's Dolls' House, a miniature mansion built to perfection. The fourteenth-century St. George's Chapel is the burial place of ten sovereigns, home of the Order of the Garter, and setting for many royal weddings. Nearby on the Windsor Estate is Frogmore House, an attractive country residence with strong associations to three queens - Queen Charlotte, Queen Victoria and Queen Mary.
In celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty The Queen, a new landscape garden has been created by the designer and Chelsea Gold Medallist Tom Stuart-Smith. The garden, the first to be made at the Castle since the 1820s, transforms the visitor entrance and provides a setting for band concerts throughout the year. The informal design takes its inspiration from Windsor's historic parkland landscape and the picturesque character of the Castle, introduced by the architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville for George IV in the 1820s.

There has been a castle at Windsor for over 900 years. William the Conqueror chose the site, high above the River Thames and on the edge of a Saxon hunting ground. It was a day's march from the Tower of London and intended to guard the western approaches to the capital. Since those early days Windsor Castle has been inhabited continuously and improved upon by successive sovereigns. Some were great builders, strengthening the Castle against uprising and rebellion; others, living in more peaceful times, created a palatial royal residence.

Nine centuries after its foundation, the castle continues to perform its prime role as one of The Queen's official residences. Pivotal to this role are the State Apartments, which are the formal rooms used for Court ceremonial and State and official occasions. They range from the smaller intimate rooms of Charles II's Apartments to the vast area of the Waterloo Chamber, built to commemorate the famous victory over Napoleon in 1815.
Windsor Castle provides a step back into history, and within its precincts stands St George's Chapel, the resting place of ten sovereigns. Founded by Edward IV in 1475 and completed by Henry VIII, the Chapel is dedicated to the patron saint of the Order of the Garter, Britain's highest Order of Chivalry, and ranks among the finest examples of late medieval architecture in the United Kingdom. In recent history, one event stands out. On 20 November 1992 a fire broke out in Windsor Castle. It began in the Private Chapel when a spotlight came into contact with a curtain over a prolonged period and ignited the material. It took 15 hours and a million and a half gallons of water to put out the blaze. Nine principal rooms and over 100 other rooms over an area of 9,000 square metres were damaged or destroyed by the fire, approximately one-fifth of the Castle area.

Windsor castle and the history of the English Crown

The Stuarts were the first kings of the United Kingdom. King James I of England who began the period was also King James VI of Scotland, thus combining the two thrones for the first time. The Stuart dynasty reigned in England and Scotland from 1603 to 1714, a period which saw a flourishing Court culture but also much upheaval and instability, of plague, fire and war. It was an age of intense religious debate and radical politics. Both contributed to a bloody civil war in the mid-seventeenth century between Crown and Parliament (the Cavaliers and the Roundheads), resulting in a parliamentary victory for Oliver Cromwell and the dramatic execution of King Charles I. There was a short-lived republic, the first time that the country had experienced such an event. The Restoration of the Crown was soon followed by another 'Glorious' Revolution. William and Mary of Orange ascended the throne as joint monarchs and defenders of Protestantism, followed by Queen Anne, the second of James II's daughters.
The end of the Stuart line with the death of Queen Anne led to the drawing up of the Act of Settlement in 1701, which provided that only Protestants could hold the throne. The next in line according to the provisions of this act was George of Hanover, yet Stuart princes remained in the wings. The Stuart legacy was to linger on in the form of claimants to the Crown for another century.

The Hanoverians came to power in difficult circumstances that looked set to undermine the stability of British society. The first of their Kings, George I, was only 52nd in line to the throne, but the nearest Protestant according the Act of Settlement. Two descendants of James II, the deposed Stuart King, threatened to take the throne and were supported by a number of 'Jacobites' throughout the realm.
The Hanoverian period for all that, was remarkably stable, not least because of the longevity of its Kings. From 1714 through to 1837, there were only five, one of whom, George III, remains the longest reigning King in British History. The period was also one of political stability, and the development of constitutional monarchy. For vast tracts of the eighteenth century politics were dominated by the great Whig families, while the early nineteenth century saw Tory domination. Britain's first 'Prime' Minister, Robert Walpole, dates from this period, while income tax was introduced. Towards the end of the reign, the Great Reform Act was passed, which amongst other things widened the electorate. It was in this period that Britain came to acquire much of her overseas Empire, despite the loss of the American colonies, largely through foreign conquest in the various wars of the century. At the end of the Hanoverian period the British empire covered a third of the globe while the theme of longevity was set to continue, as the longest reigning monarch in British history, Queen Victoria, prepared to take the throne.

The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha came to the British Royal Family in 1840 with the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, son of Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha. Queen Victoria herself remained a member of the House of Hanover.
The only British monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was King Edward VII, who reigned for nine years at the beginning of the modern age in the early years of the 20th century. King George V replaced the German-sounding title with that of Windsor during the First World War. The name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha survived in other European monarchies, including the current Belgian Royal Family and the former monarchies of Portugal and Bulgaria.

The House of Windsor came into being in 1917, when the name was adopted as the British Royal Family's official name by a proclamation of King George V, replacing the historic name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It remains the family name of the current Royal Family.
During the twentieth century, kings and queens of the United Kingdom have fulfilled the varied duties of constitutional monarchy. One of their most important roles was national figureheads lifting public morale during the devastating world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.
The period saw the modernization of the monarchy in tandem with the many social changes which have taken place over the past 80 years. One such modernization has been the use of mass communication technologies to make the Royal Family accessible to a broader public the world over. George V adopted the new relatively new medium of radio to broadcast across the Empire at Christmas; the Coronation ceremony was broadcast on television for the first time in 1953, at The Queen's insistence; and the World Wide Web has been used for the past five years to provide a global audience with information about the Royal Family. During this period British monarchs have also played a vital part in promoting international relations, retaining ties with former colonies in their role as Head of the Commonwealth.