It is sometimes said that Windsor Castle is the oldest continuously occupied building in England; what is certainly the case is that it is the longest occupied royal residence in Britain. It is also, with the Tower of London, the premier fortress of the realm.
Nobody knows what was on the site of the Castle before William the Conqueror built his great motte and bailey on a high chalk bluff above the Thames, but it is possible that a Saxon royal building pre-dated it. In the 1160s and 70s it was King Henry II who transformed these timber fortifications into a splendid residence. In the lower bailey he built a stone great hall for public and state use, in the upper bailey there was a smaller but more magnificent everyday residence.
Henry II’s buildings in the lower ward were replaced, on a much grander scale by Henry III (1216-72) who added to them a large chapel. The residence in the upper ward was also rebuilt and extended at this time – his works totalling a huge £15,000. Edward III put the building works of his predecessors into the shade founding the Order of the Garter in 1348 and giving the chapel and hall in the lower ward to the new college of St George. For himself there were new lodgings on the motte, ‘the round tower’, and the greatest royal palace built yet in England in the upper ward, the bones of which survive to this day. The whole enterprise was the most expensive architectural project of the entire Middle Ages costing some £50,000.
The castle remained the focus of major architectural investment in the fifteenth century and King Edward IV demolished the old hall in the lower ward and started the splendid new chapel that remains today. Accompanying it were new buildings for the College of St. George. Henry VII added a fine tower to the medieval royal lodgings to give himself more privacy and security and Elizabeth I added to that a beautiful long gallery.
The first half of the seventeenth century saw no new developments and during the Civil War and Commonwealth the castle again took on a military role. At the Restoration the castle and its hunting parks were at a low ebb, but they were revived by Charles II who in the 1670s was keen to move the court out of London. Under his architect Hugh May the castle was drastically and magnificently modernised.
The high Baroque taste of Charles II was not to the liking of George I or II and it was not until the 1790s that royal attention turned back to the fortress. James Wyatt, on behalf of George III, began to wipe out the work of Charles II and re-gothicise the castle. This took a megalomaniac turn under George IV and his architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville from 1824. The castle today owes a great deal to their medievalising vision outside and high French tastes within. By 1840 works had cost some £800,000.
A serious fire in 1992 led to a reconstruction of several of the state rooms and the rebuilding and redesigning of St George’s Hall and the private chapel, one of Queen Elizabeth II’s few major architectural projects.
Apart from the long sleep of the mid-eighteenth century Windsor has been at the centre of English and then British court life for more than a thousand years performing a variety of functions from the glittering state ceremonials of Edward III and Charles II to the private country retreat of Queen Anne and Elizabeth II. Part of its attraction remains its setting, the extensive parks and grounds dotted with subsidiary residences for members of the royal family. Some of these such as Bagshot, Frogmore House, Cumberland Lodge, Adelaide Cottage and the Royal Lodge are important enough to have entries on this website.