In 1684 Charles II decided to build a new royal house on the site of the ancient medieval castle at Winchester. Why he wanted to build at Winchester need explanation; after all his principal country retreat was at Newmarket where he had a large residence and where he loved the racing. Yet by the 1680s Newmarket was cramped and old fashioned and in 1683 there was a devastating fire that reduced half the town to ashes. Worse still was the fact that most of the surrounding landowners were Whigs hostile to the king’s policies and, as he left the burnt town, he was subject to not one but two plots to capture and assassinate him. It was not surprising then, that Charles moved the court to Winchester where he received an enthusiastic welcome.
In the early 1680s not only had Newmarket lost its shine but there were good reasons for avoiding Whitehall itself. The exclusion crisis engendered by parliament’s attempts to exclude the king’s Roman Catholic brother, the future James II, from the throne led to huge instability and violence in London. In order to isolate parliament from London the king caused it to meet in Oxford in 1681. Thus when Sir Christopher Wren received orders from Charles to design and build a new palace at Winchester, it was not only to act as a replacement for Newmarket, but to be a place where he could move the whole of his government when required.
Wren must have been delighted with the commission. Each of his attempts to build a new palace for Charles had been thwarted and the Winchester commission finally gave him the opportunity to use the knowledge he gained during his trip to France in 1665. His design was nothing if not French, influenced by his first hand experience of the architecture of Louis Le Vau.
Winchester was approached by a large Cour d’honneur and the main block was made up of a series of receding stages focussed on a central portico surmounted by an octagonal cupola. Two pavilions sited at the angles of the narrowest part were also topped with cupolas. Wren intended to make the most of the palace’s position on top of the ancient castle hill to the west of the town. The cour d’honneur was sited lower down the hill and from here Wren planned to drive a great boulevard through the densely populated streets of medieval Winchester to align on the west front of the cathedral.
The palace itself went ahead, at speed. When asked, by the king, how long the palace would take to complete Sir Christopher answered that it would be two years to do the job properly and one year ‘with great confusion, charge and inconvenience’ Charles replied, ‘If it is possible to have it done in one year, I will have it so, for a year is a great deal in my life’. It was and Charles II died in February 1685 the very month the lead was laid on the roof of his new palace. The interiors were not yet designed and furniture remained un-ordered.
During his short reign James II turned his attention to the rebuilding of Whitehall and William and Mary concentrated on Kensington and Hampton Court. Neither Queen Anne nor the first two Georges showed any interest in the building. In fact it was used for housing prisoners of war during the seven years war. It was finally handed over in 1793 to be a barracks for troops fighting the Napoleonic wars and in December 1894 a fire broke out in the old palace gutting it and leaving it beyond economic repair.
Charles’s Winchester palace was far more than a replacement for Newmarket. Wren designed a full and magnificent suite of state rooms for Charles and Catharine of Braganza and space for the Duke and Duchess of York. Rooms were also provided for the king’s mistresses. Importantly one side of the palace was set aside for the king’s council chamber and ancillary rooms including space for the clerks and a waiting room for petitioners. This signified Charles’s determination to use the house as a principal residence from where he could govern – something that he had never done at Newmarket, nor indeed even at Windsor. In fact Winchester had all the elements needed to be a replacement for Whitehall itself.