Castle Howard Royal Upstairs Downstairs

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

And 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.

And today, one of the largest and most easily recognisable houses in the north of England, Castle Howard.

She came here in 1850 when she'd been queen for 13 years.

And as someone who has spent a lifetime getting excited by antiques, I'll be exploring upstairs

looking for things that would have impressed Victoria on her visit here.

What a dome.

And as a chef who is passionate about food, I'll be getting a flavour of life below stairs,

creating another 19th-Century recipe that was served to Victoria...

That is so strong.

'And trying to tantalise Tim's taste buds...'

Absolutely marvellous.

In our journey following in the footsteps of Victoria,

we've arrived in the summer of 1850

when she and Prince Albert were asked to stay here

in the fabulous home of the Howard family.

It was August and the royal family stopped here for two nights

on their way to Scotland for a summer break at Balmoral.

The 31-year-old queen was mother to seven children and she brought the eldest four with her.

Castle Howard is still owned by the Howard family.

They've been here for 300 years.

The man in the driving seat for Victoria

was George William Howard,

otherwise known as the 7th Earl of Carlisle.

The Earl was a close friend and confidante of the royal couple

and had suggested Victoria stop off at Castle Howard during one of his regular visits to Buckingham Palace.

Well, it's time for me now to go downstairs to see how the staff coped.

And as usual, I'm heading upstairs to see how the aristos were getting on.

Victoria and Albert came to Castle Howard in Yorkshire from London.

They arrived on a steam train that left from Euston Station

and this was the furthest north she had ever travelled by train.

This form of transport was still pretty new, but thanks to their host's interest in railways

they were almost dropped at the door because he had just opened Castle Howard's own station.

This picture in the Illustrated London News shows the royal party alighting.

No longer operating as a station, it's now a private house, but looks just like it did in Victoria's time.

They travelled the final two miles to Castle Howard by horse and carriage, a real clash of the old and the new.

In her diary, the 31-year-old queen recalls the moment she arrived that evening.

"We reached the house at half past six. It is a magnificent building."

The Earl recalls that as the carriage stopped,

he had to let down its steps himself, there being no-one else to do it.

Who knows if the queen was amused by her host's sudden demotion to footman,

but she certainly would have been impressed on entering one of Britain's most beautiful houses.

Wow, what a space.

So this is where Queen Victoria met the assembled dignitaries,

most notably the Earl's mother, the Countess of Carlisle.

The Earl remained unmarried throughout his life and was devoted to his old mum.

In 1700, Sir John Vanbrugh was the man tasked with designing and building Castle Howard.

But the scream is he had never designed or built any other building.

He was helped by Nicholas Hawksmoor, a leading architect who had worked

with Sir Christopher Wren, he of St Paul's cathedral fame, with its iconic dome.

And those connections explain why Castle Howard was the first

private house in the country to feature a dome.

What a dome.

And you can imagine that titchy Queen Victoria

coming into this entrance hall and literally standing, gaping,

taking in this extraordinary space.

And the Earl, of course, would want to show it off to best advantage

and I'm going to go and have a closer look.

From the very top of the house to the bottom,

where our historical food expert and chef Ivan Day is starting to prepare our Victorian dish of the day.

The kitchens at Castle Howard were destroyed in a fire in the 1940s,

but that's not going to stop us from creating another amazing dish.

So what are we making today?

We're going to make a dish which is called a salad of grouse a la Soyer.

Alexis Soyer, a celebrated chef, was invited by the Earl to cook

the ball supper for Victoria's visit to Castle Howard in 1850.

And this was his signature dish.

He won a competition in Paris with this salad.

Let's hope we can do it justice.

-Soyer instructs us to make a sauce first of all.

-Mm-hm.

And I've got a couple of egg yolks in the bowl here.

-Right.

-And what I'd like you to do is whisk those up for me...

-Yes.

While I pour in, very slowly...

some olive oil. Just a little bit at a time,

just a steady, very tiny stream like that.

'First, we're making the dressing for the salad.

'It seems a bit like mayonnaise at this stage.

'This is hard work.

'I think Ivan's got the easy job.'

-Today we'd use an electric whisk I think, if you were at home.

-We'd plug you in. Come on.

'If you think that's hard work, Rosemary, you should try these stairs.'

Oh!

Welcome to Castle Howard's dome.

Who's got the oxygen?

Not many people make it up here

and I tell you for one I am not going to get too close to this edge

with its vertiginous drop down to the great hall.

Ooh! Look at that.

On the evening of Victoria's arrival,

they had a pre-dinner reception down there in the great hall

and much to the amazement of the monarch and all the guests,

the Earl had arranged up here in the dome a coup de theatre.

He had had no less than 2,000 tiny gas lamps applied to the inside

of this banister all the way round, that when lit,

spelt out the words God Save The Queen...

..as this picture from the Illustrated London News shows.

There was even a valve that adjusted the brightness so as the guests left

the reception below and headed to dinner, the lights went down

and when they came out from dinner, as if by magic, by turning the valve, up came the lights.

Positively environmental, what?

And I'm still being environmental with my hand whisk.

Now look, that's absolutely perfect.

It's a wonderful unctuous ointment.

-Yes.

-A lovely emulsion, isn't it?

-Beautiful colour, too.

-Looks great.

To our salad dressing we add salt, pepper and sugar.

And once that's mixed in, we add the herbs and shallots.

-Two tablespoonfuls...

-Yes.

Of the chervil, the tarragon and the shallots.

How delicious.

And we're just going to put those into the bowl.

Look at this.

What a delicious herbal mixture and what a lovely colour, I mean, that's wonderful.

Monsieur Soyer instructs us to put the mixture on ice.

And there is one rather surprising ingredient to add - two tablespoons of chilli vinegar.

This recipe sounds rather contemporary, doesn't it?

It sounds very modern indeed.

Soyer actually said that he didn't think this dish was suitable

for the ladies because of the strength of the shallot

and I think the fieriness of the chilli vinegar.

Well, THIS lady likes it!

That's lovely. It really is special.

That is delicious. The sauce will stand on ice until we're ready to add the final ingredient.

Castle Howard was finished in 1811, just 39 years before Victoria's visit.

It had taken over 100 years to complete and work in the garden was still ongoing.

The current owner, Simon Howard, has agreed to tell me more.

Well, Simon, on the face of it, this looks to be an immensely grand room.

Is it thought that Victoria slept in this suite of rooms?

Well, we're certain she did. After all, we do have the record of the queen's visit

and here it says, the Queen and Prince in the green room,

the blue room and, of course, in the high saloon.

And they used this room which was a wonderful painted salon -

it was painted by Pellegrini in the original 18th-Century decoration.

Either side you have the bedrooms and, of course,

Prince Albert and the Queen would have used this room as a sitting room

and also for their dinners, lunches, breakfasts "a deux" rather than when they were with the whole family.

There were at least 14 members in the royal party's entourage,

including the Earl's sister, the Duchess of Southerland,

who was mistress of the wardrobe, and 15 other attendant servants such as governesses

and maids for the children and although Castle Howard looks enormous,

accommodation was surprisingly tight.

Would accommodating them have been a problem?

Well, it is extraordinary, how they managed to sleep them all I don't know,

but at the moment we could sleep 32 in the house if we tried.

It'd be a squash and I don't think we've got a dining room

big enough for them but even so, there were 16 bedrooms here.

Notably actually, the Earl of Carlisle stayed in

his own apartment, so he wasn't being kicked out of his room.

But quite a lot of rearranging anyway to get them all in and get them all comfy.

I would agree with that and I think the organisation

would have been tremendous and it would be today as well.

If one was to have the Queen or the Prince of Wales to stay

you have quite a large entourage following on.

Simon, the view is absolutely marvellous, but was the fountain here when Victoria was staying?

No, it wasn't. We think it was about to be constructed or they may have even had some

of the work going on, it may have been pegged out, we're not sure.

But ultimately, what happened was Nesfield,

having designed this fountain, put it in, it was completed about 1853,

and indeed we have a letter here from him to the Earl of Carlisle talking about doing some testing.

You must have a look at it.

Look at that. So it's dated October '53.

"My Lord..." I love it, don't you?

"The fountain is reported as being all ready."

This is having spent how much?

Rather a lot. In fact he went way over budget, but then that's normal these days too, isn't it?

But I think that's so sweet though, to do your own little ink drawing of the Atlas Fountain, and there it is.

I mean, it is what we see now, isn't it?

And it still works.

The Earl not only made the royals comfortable in his home,

but as a discreet friend, he made them feel comfortable talking about their eldest son,

Edward, the Prince of Wales, known as Bertie.

Victoria and Albert frequently consulted the Earl about Bertie

who was, in their minds, not very bright and proving almost impossible to teach.

The children's governess wrote of his constant interruptions,

getting under the table, upsetting the books and other anti-studious practices.

A year before the visit,

the royal parents had taken the Earl's advice to employ Henry Birch, a tutor from Eton.

But things were not going well and Albert had resorted to submitting Bertie's bumps

to the professional inspection of a phrenologist, Dr George Combe.

The Earl supported Albert's decision.

Like Albert, he was a big fan of this popular pseudo science which claimed

to be able to reveal a person's characteristics by examining the skull.

Bertie's bumps were duly examined and Combe gloomily concluded

that the organs of ostentatiousness, destructiveness,

self-esteem, combativeness and love of approval are all at large.

Gosh.

This came as no surprise to Albert who clearly didn't hold out much hope for his son

and moaned that such a brain could not have come from his side of the family.

Back downstairs, Castle Howard's curator, Christopher Ridgeway,

is here to tell me about the lengths the family went to to host the royals.

What are your favourite documents from the downstairs part of the house?

Well, the documents that are really revealing from downstairs and I like most,

are this memorandum between John Henderson, the resident agent, and the 7th Earl.

The agent, Henderson, would have been the Earl's right-hand man,

involved in all aspects of running the estate.

Henderson sends down a series of suggestions and prompts

to the 7th Earl and we get his comments alongside them.

So it's a dialogue on paper.

"Will the crimson cloth, which we can get here, have to be laid from the north door

"to the south and from the dining to the drawing room doors and down to the bottom of the great steps?"

'I love the fact that the Earl has answered yes, yes, yes, to these questions!'

They talk about whether the billiard room here should be dismantled

and turned into a drawing room and the Earl says, "No, I am quite against this.

"Four sitting rooms together would be monotonous and the billiard table is of much use in the evening."

They did keep a bit of an eye on the cost.

They did and in the final bill prepared there's a lot of things

that were simply hired for the occasion, perfectly normal, really.

-How very sensible.

-I think so. They didn't have to indulge in a massive outlay for all sorts of new things.

As you would for an event today, you hire it in.

So what sort of things would have been hired in?

Well, we have an expenses account for the visit, prepared afterwards.

-OK.

-And here we see things that were hired in and purchased

and this talks about, well, the hire of staff, waiters, cooks.

Then you'd have the hire of silver, of carpets too, they talk here.

Whether it's hiring carpets or cleaning them, I'm not quite sure.

Then there's the hire of candelabras, all sorts of things that you want,

and then you've got all the food supplies. Then you've got the carriage and delivery of

everything that comes here, and then you have a kind of rough figure of thumb for wines, spirits and so on.

So the whole lot comes to £1,594,

which was a lot of money at that time, but it was pretty light.

I mean, I think when she went to Chatsworth, it was probably nearly ten times that.

TIM: The Earl might have hired in the carpets, but he certainly didn't need

to hire in works of art or antiques - the place is stuffed to the gizzards.

Well, this is Castle Howard's antique passage,

lined with exquisite examples of Roman sculpture

dating from the first and second centuries, garnered by the 4th Earl

from various parts of Italy during his grand tour early in the 18th Century.

It would appear that Victoria's host, the 7th Earl, was no great expert when it came to these antiquities

but needless to say, Albert was incredibly interested.

Albert had been collecting art all his life, indeed he was part of a committee

that oversaw the purchasing of paintings and decorations

for the new Houses of Parliament and was described by committee members

as showing not only taste,, but considerable knowledge.

Which was not good news for his less knowledgeable host here at Castle Howard, who writes in his diary,

"Albert asks many questions about busts and statues I am quite unable to answer."

Poor old 7th Earl, he'd have been embarrassed.

Despite their host's artistic shortcomings,

there is no doubt the royal couple enjoyed the wonderful art on show.

Queen Victoria notes in her diary,

"There are fine prints, curious drawings and rare and beautiful antiques which enchanted Albert."

Well, while the royal party wandered the corridors admiring the views upstairs,

those below stairs would have been keeping the place running as if by magic.

Building and maintaining fires night and day was just one of the many tasks for the servants.

And talking of magic, this fireplace is a real optical illusion.

Directly above the fireplace there is no chimney,

it's just thin air.

This is a very clever piece of engineering because what happens is

the flue goes into the column on the right, leaving a clear space above where the statues seem to float.

I wonder if Her Majesty noticed.

Victoria certainly noticed the heat they gave out.

It was recorded that she asked that they be reduced and that the windows be opened.

On the second day of their visit, Victoria took a tour of the grounds

and headed for the last resting place of the Howard family.

It's a mile from the house and Victoria and the children walked there after breakfast.

The Castle Howard mausoleum, like the main building,

was the creation of the 7th Earl of Carlisle's great-great-grandfather.

Now, the queen was clearly fascinated at having the opportunity

of examining this building as part of her tour of the estate.

The Earl records that she examined every single foot

and expressed great interest.

As far as Victoria was concerned, the Earl was absolutely spot-on

because she records in her journal the mausoleum as being, "Most beautiful.

"The whole is a circular chapel with three little curious ones,

"it's just the sort of thing I might one day build for ourselves."

Morbid.

Just over ten years later,

the death of her dear Albert meant she did indeed need to build a mausoleum

and she hastily constructed the Frogmore mausoleum near Windsor.

And as you can see in this picture from the Illustrated London News,

it's a monument strikingly similar to the mausoleum at Castle Howard.

Back at the house, it's rather less gloomy with our colourful salad to cheer us up.

The first thing we need to do is to start putting in the salad stuff.

-OK.

-Now, in the Victorian period, they grew more salad varieties

than we have now and in fact I'm going to show you this one.

Now that looks a little bit like a rocket.

It's related, but it isn't. Try that.

Oh, my giddy aunt.

That is SO strong.

That is hot, peppery...

cressy.

It is, it's a cress. It's called land cress.

There's one other one I want to introduce you to,

which has been used in England probably since the Tudor period,

but which is completely out of favour now.

-Do I eat that?

-Yes, it's the pod.

Mmm.

Mild pea,

delicious, absolutely delicious. What is it?

They're radish pods.

-No!

-Yeah, yeah, if you let your radish...

-Seriously?

If you let your radishes grow and go to seed, that's what you get,

-which I think is better than the things underground, the roots.

-And there they are.

I love these salad leaves Ivan's introduced me to

and for Soyer's grouse salad, we line our dish with them.

We follow this with a layer of cooked, shredded grouse.

Onto our bed of salad.

Before we go any further, we have to go back to the fabulous egg,

oil and herb dressing that we put together earlier.

It has one final ingredient - whipped cream.

We make our dressing almost like cumulonimbus cloud.

Victoria's chef tells us to "mask" the salad with dressing.

Masking was a common Victorian term meaning to completely cover.

I think that's probably enough.

And now we build up the layers.

Right, that's the very last spoonful

-of that wonderful dressing.

-Delicious.

Ornamentation was everything in the Victorian period,

so to finish the dish off,

we're going to decorate it with what was called a garniture.

-OK.

-Which is a little surrounding of garnishes.

And this one is based on these quarter eggs.

But we're told by Soyer to put a little point of radish on the top.

As well as the eggs, Soyer tells us to ornament

with radishes and little diamonds cut from anchovies and gherkins.

It reminds me of a kaleidoscope.

It's wonderful.

-Now this man won the gold medal with this.

-Amazing.

-I just hope it is going to be appreciated by Tim.

-Well, so do I.

-You've got to take your time over this sort of cookery.

-You do.

You can't rush this, can you, Ivan?

-Not at all, no.

-No. When would this have been served in the meal?

-Well, from all accounts, very early on in the meal, possibly after the soup.

-OK.

-Possibly even before.

-That is early.

He may not be in his salad days,

but I rather hope Tim enjoys this offering.

We're eating in the long gallery where Victoria and Albert themselves would have been served.

Now...

-There we go.

-I say.

-Doesn't that look wonderful?

You have been naughty, girl, look at that.

Is that the most beautiful dish I have ever seen?

Isn't this stunning? Absolutely so.

It is called salade de grouse a la Soyer, which is Alexis Soyer

-who invented it, and he won awards with it.

-Did he?

We are sure that Victoria would have actually eaten this because it was the grouse season that she came in,

he was famous for this dish and this would be the dish.

It's absolutely beautiful.

But I just love the whole idea that you're eating a game bird,

the thing is wholesome and healthy, you've got all this greenery and delicious veg with it.

Absolutely.

With these exquisite shapes.

You can't help but take too much.

I want plenty, actually. And please may I have an egg, too?

-I love the decoration with these eggs.

-Well, you can. I'll just take it off.

You're a very good egg yourself.

-Oh, thank you.

-How lovely.

-I'm going to go for a bit of grouse, myself.

-Yes.

Find a little piece, just see how succulent this is going to be. Now...

-Oh, my gosh.

-My golly gosh.

-I tell you, girl, that's the business, isn't it?

-Oh.

I mean, Soyer or not, absolutely marvellous.

Now, there's one final story that I want to share with you

that relates to Victoria's departure from Castle Howard.

Four days after the queen departed,

more than 2,000 people travelled by rail from West Yorkshire to Castle Howard station.

They were keen to see the house where Her Maj had stayed.

Today's visitors are well catered for, but back then,

this was a completely new idea.

They only had two servants on duty and in the scrum that followed,

windows were broken and ladies swooned.

The Earl was so infuriated, he created a guidebook

outlining how one should behave if one wished to visit Castle Howard.

Well, I believe we've behaved appropriately, so here's to you and your delicious food, Rosemary.

To the cooks and to Ive.

-Well, I think so, definitely, to all the cooks.

-Good.

Join us next time on Royal Upstairs Downstairs

when we'll be heading for the Midlands to Stoneleigh Abbey...

So here it is, Stoneleigh Abbey.

..to discover some special legacies of a royal visit.

This is the dessert that was served to Queen Victoria, this is the shopping list for it.

-Really special.

-That is very, very special.

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