Hatfield Royal Upstairs Downstairs

Just what do you have to do when a queen decides she's going to pop in to see you?

Not just any old queen, Victoria.

Like a pair of obsessed Victoria groupies,

we're pursuing her around the country to the posh pads she visited.

We'll be delving into her personal diaries to reveal what happened behind closed doors.

Today, the former home of Elizabeth I, Hatfield House,

where our odyssey in the footsteps of Victoria brings us

to the very outskirts

of Greater London.

And as someone who's spent a lifetime getting excited by antiques, I'll be looking for things

that would have impressed Her Majesty on her visit here.

And here it would have sat, groaning with food for Victoria's luncheon.

And, as a chef who loves food, I'll be getting a flavour of work below stairs and creating

a super 19th century recipe that was served to Victoria.

I'm so excited about this pie.

-And tantalising Tim's taste buds with this magnificent Victorian treat.

-Oh, my lord.

In 1846, Victoria and Albert came to Hatfield House.

Victoria was 27 years old and had been on the throne for nine years.

Renowned as a great political and social centre,

Hatfield also had a very special connection to royalty.

You know, when it comes to Hatfield, Queen Victoria isn't the first queen that springs to mind

because nearly 300 years earlier, this was the home

to another celebrated queen, Elizabeth I.

She spent chunks of her childhood here, but, at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, it became home

to the earls and marquesses of Salisbury

and it's still their family home.

And it was the second marquess who was in residence when Queen Victoria and Albert came to stay.

But, by jingo, he did not have the easiest of times

getting ready for their visit, oh, no.

Victoria's advisers told the marquess two years before that she planned to come

and stay for two nights, but nothing was formally agreed

and in the end, confirmation of her visit only reached the marquess

just ten days before she actually arrived.

After all that waiting, the sudden panic. I can just imagine, which is my cue to find out

how those hasty preparations went on as I head downstairs.

And that's my cue to stay upstairs

and make sure that the arrangements for Victoria's arrival were set fair.

As Victoria and Albert travelled to Hatfield, they were greeted by well-wishers.

The Illustrated London News reports the scene as "truly exhilarating.

"Bands played and the streets were filled with groups of delighted and loyal people."

But not everything went according to plan.

As the royal carriage thundered towards the entrance, it was found

that the gates were locked and no-one could find the keys.

The Times newspaper reported that a last-minute panic ensued and just before

they rounded the corner, the gates had to be taken off their hinges. Oh, dear.

Now, as Victoria entered through this door,

all was calm and serene and regal.

The Royal Standard was flapping on the roof.

And the Queen was greeted here in what is called the armoury.

She was met by her host's two daughters,

Lady Mildred Hope, the eldest, and Lady Blanche Balfour, who, by all accounts, was a bit of a stunner.

Even Victoria said, "She was so pretty."

So far, so good, but the last-minute hullabaloo to get things ready

had prompted the marquess to write to the Queen in advance to ask

"that she and the prince will have the goodness

"to excuse any imperfections they may find in their reception."

Little wonder.

In the ten days that the house had to prepare before Queen Victoria

actually got to stand here, it was absolute chaos.

Iron gates had to be welded, gate piers repaired, furniture ordered, so much so that the marquess himself

took direct control, urging everything on, on, and he says, "with the greatest of vigour."

We know this detail, thanks to the Rev Arthur Starkey, the tutor to the Salisbury children.

The marquess himself asked the good reverend to record Victoria's visit and in his journal, he tells us,

"The time was so short, it was almost thought incredible that everything should be ready.

"All, however completed in time.

"Though with so little to spare, that the coverlet for the royal bed

"was only put in place as the royal carriages drove into the park."

And the family motto, sero sed serio, late, but earnest, must have felt rather appropriate.

No doubt, the Queen was blissfully unaware of the chaos as she moved through the house with her host.

Not only do we have Rev Starkey's journal of what was going on upstairs during the visit,

we also have the impressive accounts book that tells us what was going on downstairs, and boy, what a book!

Vicky Perry, the archivist, is going to tell me more.

This is the biggest account book I have ever seen.

Well, this is the account book dating from 1846, which shows

the household expenses, and we've got it open on the week of the royal visit.

So you can see along here are all the provisions

that were purchased and details of game that were caught that week as well.

Oh, fantastic, so let's look at some of this up here.

They had a ball and dinner on the Friday night, the 23rd of October,

and you can see that they fed 550 guests.

-That was a lot of people.

-It was.

-Take us through what they were having.

These show the provisions that were purchased for the visit,

so there were 709 bottles of wine that week.

They did enjoy their drink.

-It is more than one each.

-That's more than one each!

And this shows the ox that they purchased and they roasted it outside for all the estate workers.

Amazing, they roasted a 96-stone ox in the grounds for the estate workers.

That's quite a barbecue.

But what was on the menu for the royal guests upstairs?

No menus have survived so we don't know exactly

what they ate during the royal visit, but we do have a few clues.

-Right.

-Over the page...here,

the week before the visit, they spent £13 on turtle,

which would almost certainly have been made into turtle soup.

That was very popular, wasn't it?

It was very popular and it was a bit of a status symbol, too, turtle soup, because it was so expensive.

Expensive, and of course, nowadays, illegal.

I love this, the turtles came to £13/five/eight.

That would be an incredible £800 today.

Well, they certainly pulled all the stops out for Queen Victoria's visit.

They did, they spent over £1,200 during the week on food.

That's some food bill. In fact in today's money, that is over £70,000.

Ivan Day, our food historian, is in the kitchen

and has more clues about just what the royals would have eaten.

And it's not just the accounts book that reveals

what was on the royal table.

We have an amazing watercolour

of the dinner served on the second night of the visit,

which shows a very special game pie.

If you look at it very carefully, you will see

that it's actually emblazoned with the initials "V" and "A",

Victoria and Albert, and it was made certainly especially for the occasion.

And that's the dish we're going to make today.

Ivan's brought some amazing Victorian pie moulds to do the job.

Originally they used cardboard to do this

and the fashion was to have a pie that looked a bit like a corset.

-You see, it's waisted just like a Victorian corset.

-Yes.

And amazingly, originally this cardboard corset you made to put round your pie

even had laces on the back to pull tight, so you got that shape.

But by the 1820s, they were making these things.

-They're beautiful, aren't they?

-Yes, some of them are extraordinary.

'We get started using a special pastry which contains egg yolk to make it firm.

'Our game pie is known as a raised pie

'because the pastry holds it together rather than a pie dish.

'To start the lining, Ivan's cutting the pastry.'

OK, and we open it up like that

and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some flour inside that

and then I'm going to put it down on here.

With the rolling pin, I'm going to knock it out and roll it

so that I can make a pocket.

By doing this, we can make kind of a wallet-shaped structure which we can then...

You see, it's got a nice hollow. We just put that inside to drop in.

then it's a case of drawing up the pastry.

'I think it's time for me to have a go.'

I'm just going to get another little tool that we need.

-Now, this is really being used just to flatten the base.

-OK.

'As we toil away downstairs,

'Tim is still on the trail of Her Majesty as she was shown around the house.'

Upstairs, Victoria's tour continued.

She records in her journal that, having been in the armoury, she actually walked up this staircase.

And it's this staircase which so amply illustrates what a wonderful early Jacobean house Hatfield is.

This staircase was put in some 250 years before Victoria's visit.

But this rib-vaulted ceiling above me is much more modern.

And this was created in 1846 specifically for Victoria's visit by the second marquess

who wanted a decorative scheme that looked like the early Jacobean.

The marquess was keen to restore the Jacobean style throughout the house and had refurbished the east wing

to the tune of £1 million,

spurred on to complete it just before Victoria's visit in 1846.

The west wing had already been refurbished in the 1830s after a huge fire.

The story goes that the marquess's eccentric 80-year-old mother, known as Dowager Sal,

caused the blaze when her hair caught fire while writing by candlelight.

Needless to say, like the west wing, she didn't survive.

Back downstairs, in the kitchen, our pie is really coming together.

What we've got in here is a mixture of veal...

It's rose veal so it's not that veal that's been locked away in cages, it's perfectly humane.

A little bit of suet, some herbs.

Which gives it the moisture.

Got to have fat in there, fat is flavour, isn't it?

And what we're going to do with that is we're going to put about half an inch of it

in the base of the pie.

'This is going to be a game pie with many layers.

'I'll be brushing each layer with an egg yolk, and seasoning with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.'

This egg yolk will stick everything together.

-Right.

-So the next thing is to put in a couple of these chicken breasts.

'This is followed by another layer of the strongly-seasoned ground veal or forcemeat.'

The next layer is the venison.

'We know from the huge accounts book that haunches of venison were indeed

'purchased for the visit and were likely used in the pie.

'It's not just meat that goes into the pie,

'cooked egg yolks are brushed with raw egg, rolled in parsley,

'and buried in the middle of the many layers.'

-It's beautiful.

-They remind me of little furry critters.

They do, they're lovely.

Green aliens.

These sort of pies, you know, everyone thinks they were sliced down the middle, but they weren't.

They used to take the lids off them and then cut the meat up.

'I think I'll stick to slicing, it seems a shame not to try the pastry too.'

We top this with a layer of pigeon breast and another layer of veal.

-To cook this, you'd have to cook it on quite a low heat to keep it nice and moist.

-Yes, that's right.

It would have been put in when the oven was quite low, in modern terms you're probably talking about 150.

We are finishing our pie with a layer of pheasant breast brushed with egg and seasoned.

They did love their meat, those Victorians.

There we go, OK, perfect.

The last thing

is to just get this little thin layer of forcemeat on top,

and then we're ready to put the lid on.

Back upstairs, the efforts of the marquess to impress his royal guests were clear.

Lord Salisbury definitely wanted this place to look at its best

for Victoria's visit though,

and shortly before she came here, he went out and he acquired a magnificent series

of four tapestries,

which were woven by Ralph Sheldon in the Sheldon tapestry works around 1611,

more or less exactly the right period for the building of this house.

Imagine trying to find something THIS special at such short notice.

But one piece that wasn't bought in is this magnificent table.

It is the origin of the sideboard, literally one enormous board of oak

laid on some trestle-type bases and made around about the time of the house, about 1600.

And here it would have sat, groaning with food for Victoria's luncheon.

And when it came to dining, the marquess had a trick or two up his sleeve for impressing the Queen

because Victoria in her journal notes, "Lady Mildred brought in

"the coffee after dinner and Lord Salisbury did the same for Albert."

So no servants served the coffee, the marquess did it himself.

I bet he didn't brew it though.

Meanwhile, back downstairs, it's time to put the lid on our pie.

'At the time of the visit, the man responsible for making this pie would've been a French chef,

'Casimir Tessier, who began working for the second Marquess of Salisbury a couple of years earlier.

'He was paid almost £40,000 a year in today's money and would have been expected

'to produce interesting delicacies with many seasonings and flavours.

'Cooking for Victoria was the highlight of his career.'

Now, this is the dodgiest bit of all

because we have got to get those two sheets

to join together perfectly,

-and in order to do that, we use one of these things.

-Which is called?

-A pastry jagger.

-Oh, jagger, OK.

And these little marks we make are known as crinklecranks

actually, they were called crinklecranks so there's a word for you.

So we crinklecrank

around the pie to really seal the pastry. It's important that our filling doesn't leak.

If we don't get this right, the pie will be ruined.

And a vent hole allows the steam to escape, we don't want our pie to explode.

-What do we do now?

-Well, we're going to ornament it, which is very important.

What I've got here is what is called a pie board.

-Now, you won't have seen one of these before.

-I haven't.

They're amazingly rare. So I'm going to show you

how to make the leaves. I'm going to cut out two leaf shapes,

if you'd like to take that one.

'This time-consuming Victorian ornamentation

'could only be achieved because of the huge numbers of staff in the kitchen.'

Now, the thing is, in order to ornament this very large pie,

-we're going to need about 60 of those.

-Right.

'Fortunately, Ivan's already been busy.'

What we've got to do is to wet

the whole pie lid.

'A pie like this would have been a real collaborative effort on the part of the servants.

'The gamekeeper would have caught the game, the housemaids would have plucked it, the housekeeper

'would have been in charge of the pastry, and the chef would have been responsible for the filling.'

Now, Ivan, I'm so excited about this pie, I cannot tell you.

This is incredible.

After lunch on the second day of the visit,

Albert couldn't wait to get out onto the estate to do some shooting.

Victoria herself paid little attention to this event,

she simply says in her diary, "Albert went out shooting."

But you wait till you hear what our Rev Starkey has to say about it.

Well, for a kick-off there's the party itself.

We've got the prince, we've got the Marquess of Salisbury,

we've got the Marquess of Exeter, we've got the Duke of Wellington -

he of Waterloo fame -

we've got Earl Spencer.

So it's a pretty top-notch party and it would appear

that they were pretty serious about their business too.

Rev Starkey states that "Albert had four guns,

"more guns on this occasion than he had ever had before."

DOG BARKS

Quite barking.

The whole head of game killed was as follows,

the Rev continues, "Lord Spencer - 80; Lord Exeter - 50;

"Lord John Russell - 30; the Duke of Wellington - 16;

"Prince Albert, 150 head, being at a rate of a head of game per minute

"for the whole time he was out."

Hah, double the bag of anybody else. He was machine-gunning them down.

While the privileges of the royals and their pals were unending,

below stairs, the harsh realities of life could also be unending.

One servant's tale at Hatfield reads like a storyline from a costume drama.

Vicky Perry is going to tell me more.

One of the most interesting things that we have in the archives

is a series of letters from John Mott who was the porter at the time of the royal visit.

He'd worked here for about 18 years at that time, but, in 1848, he was sacked

-after he was accused of stealing beer from the marquess.

-No!

What does he say?

In this letter, he says, "I have nothing, but poverty and distress before my eyes.

"I have now my wife on the bed of sickness and son out of employ, and nothing to help myself with.

"I do hope, my lord, that you will take it into your consideration and not send me away so disgraced."

Oh, that is really...

That's really quite sad.

He did write a few letters to the second marquess claiming

that he didn't steal the beer and he says here,

"I have served your lordship upwards of 21 years and to be

"disgraced to leave your lordship for a fault I'm not guilty of, it is too much for me to bear."

So when the second marquess replied to his letter he said, "I am exceedingly sorry

"that it is impossible for me to requite you of any guilt in the pilfering of which I complained."

And we do know from the letters that he never managed to find another job and died in poverty in London.

So just two years after Victoria's visit, the porter was sacked.

What a hard life if you fell out of favour below stairs.

Back out in the grounds,

Prince Albert put down his gun and joined his wife for a romantic tour

of the grounds in a phaeton, a small carriage built for two.

Victoria and Albert's destination on their carriage drive was this spot.

You have to imagine that Victoria would have had a frisson

of excitement, a little tingling of the spine when she arrived here because it's extremely special.

In 1558, nearly 300 years to the day before Victoria's visit,

the then Princess Elizabeth,

the 25-year-old daughter of Henry VIII

and Anne Boleyn, discovered that she was to become Queen Elizabeth.

The great oak under which Elizabeth sat when she received

this momentous news was still alive during Victoria's visit, but only just.

This picture in the Illustrated London News shows it on its last legs.

Victoria was given the only acorn that could be found on the tree

before it died, but her gardeners were unable to propagate it.

The oak that's here today is thanks to another monarch.

And there's one final chapter that relates to this replacement tree,

planted 25 years ago in 1985 by Queen Elizabeth II.

Three incredible monarchs reigning for more than 150 years between them,

linked by their femininity, Hatfield House, and a tree.

Back downstairs, the moment of truth has arrived.

Ivan, the moment has come.

-Yes, it's a bit like unveiling a statue.

-It is.

I cut the string and...

It's been cooling down for about two hours, so if I get this pin out...

..we can then gently reveal...

-..our pie!

-Fantastic!

That is fabulous!

Absolutely fantastic!

Well, I can't wait to take this to Tim.

The pie was served at what was to be the climax of the Queen's day

at Hatfield, as these pictures show.

On the second and final night of Victoria's visit,

dinner was served at 8pm. Meanwhile, up here in the gallery,

the preparations were being made for a ball that was to follow.

A great number of additional guests gathered, so much so that when Victoria ascended to the gallery,

there was a crowd of some 300 people to greet her to the strains of God Save The Queen.

The dancing commenced at 9pm and, as Rev Starkey's account records,

"it did not abate until 1am." In short, they had a rave-up.

Queen Victoria did the diplomatic thing and had the first dance

with her host Lord Salisbury, whilst Prince Albert, as Starkey

rather amusingly recorded, had his first dance with Salisbury's daughter, Lady Blanche.

After all, Victoria had recorded that Blanche was a bit of eye candy.

I'm not surprised the guests were able to stay up late and dance the night away, they had the most

amazing food and plenty of it, and there's plenty for Tim and me too.

Here's Rosemary. Gosh, that looks heavy.

Now, this is...

-quite weighty.

-That's a pie.

-Well, it IS a pie.

-Tell me about it.

This is a raised pie that Queen Victoria would have eaten,

incredibly ornate, absolutely beautiful, and there is so much in it.

Now, what I'm going to do, before I'd tell you what is in it, I'm going to open it up.

Are any blackbirds going to get out?

Well, that remains to be seen, Tim.

I'm going to move that little decorative rose there

and what I'm going to do, I'm literally going to saw through it.

Oh, this is a moment.

It certainly is.

It's like a chainsaw massacre, isn't it?

Can I hold the board for you because you've got to get through that bottom bit?

-Really, it's like the last bit of a log you're doing.

-Yeah.

OK, now...

Now, that is beautiful.

It's got veal forcemeat,

it's got chicken, it's got pheasant, it's got pigeon, it's got venison,

all layered up with a lovely egg yolk covered in parsley. So what I'm going to do now, I'm just going to slice.

Look at that jelly.

Can it be quite a big piece, please?

SHE LAUGHS

It's the only way to do this, I'm going to take it like this,

pop it on your plate there.

That's lovely. Oh, yes, look at that.

Would you like to have a little bit of condiments? This is horseradish.

-I love horseradish.

-This is a sweet plum.

A bit of horseradish.

So I'm going to just take it au naturel to begin with.

Does it get the seal of approval?

That is delicious.

I'll have that little morsel.

Oh, my lord.

Mm-mmm.

But there is one last story that our Rev Starkey observed

and that was there was a great furore because

somebody, after she got up from the table, nicked one of the glasses

that she had drunk from, so keen were they to have a royal memento at the end of this supper party.

Of course Her Majesty didn't nick any mementoes from the house to remind her of her visit, but we do know

that she left something behind -

gifts of gold bracelets for her host's two daughters wishing them well.

According to Rev Starkey, the trip had been a great success, commenting as Victoria left

that "she was in the highest health and spirits during the whole time."

Join us tomorrow on Royal Upstairs Downstairs at Castle Howard, where the royal couple's

high spirits were tempered by their eldest son and heir, naughty Bertie,

but also lifted by their fabulous surroundings.

You can imagine that titchy Queen Victoria coming into this entrance hall

and literally standing gaping.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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