James's Palace Research Articles

Bereavement Care – Tribute to Colin Murray Parkes

Colin Murray Parkes with Cruse patron Her Majesty the Queen at St James Palace, celebrating Cruse’s 60th anniversaryI was honoured to be asked to write something at this time, as Colin steps down a...

The SOC is Dead, Long Live the SOC!

Abstract The traditional tiered security operation centre approach is flawed, writes Matthew Smith, Global Head of Cyber Security, St. James's Palace - simply because we are human. We must leverage the benefits of machine learning, user behaviour analytics and security automation to deliver effective detection and response in 2020 and beyond.

The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Two: 1933–1952 by Steve Nicholson, and: The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Three: the Fifties by Steve Nicholson, and: The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Four: the Sixties by Steve Nicholson

Reviewed by: The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Two: 1933–1952 by Steve Nicholson, and: The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Three: the Fifties by Steve Nicholson, and: The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Four: the Sixties by Steve Nicholson Melissa Dana Gibson The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Two: 1933–1952. By Steve Nicholson. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005; pp. 400. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Three: the Fifties. By Steve Nicholson. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011; pp. 288. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Volume Four: the Sixties. By Steve Nicholson. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2015; pp. 368.1 Official theatre censorship in England was instituted in 1737 and lasted until 1968. All plays intended for public performance were vetted by readers in the Lord Chamberlain’s offices in St. James Palace. Wielding their blue pencils, readers could demand cuts or changes to dialogue or stage directions; they [End Page 494] could even ban a play outright, although this was a rarity. While negotiations over changes often occurred between the Lord Chamberlain’s officers and theatre managers or playwrights, there was no appeal process; issues of particular controversy were referred to the Lord Chamberlain himself and his decision was final. One unexpected legacy of this centralized bureaucratic system is a huge trove of documents, first made public in 1999, tracing the history of drama censorship in Britain. Since the 2003 publication of the first volume in this series, Steve Nicholson has performed the herculean task of mining the 50,000 files in the British Library and another mountain of information in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle to provide a comprehensive history of twentieth-century theatre censorship. The thoroughness of his accomplishment is clear in the ballooning size of the series—originally intended for two volumes, it has grown to four (plus another book reprinting primary documents, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, published by the British Library, which Nicholson coedited with Dominic Shellard and Miriam Handley). The result of this expansion is a telescoping survey: volume 1 covers thirty-two years; volume 2, twenty-one years; and volumes 3–4, only eight years each. Nicholson has impressively shaped a pile of bureaucratic policy memos into an engaging narrative through his clear, lively prose; his text is more accessible, for instance, than the specialist’s Theatre Censorship from Walpole to Wilson by David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne, which focuses on the legislative history of censorship. Nicholson also has a keen eye for the telling detail or entertaining quotation: a play that imagined a black US president was allowed only “on the understanding that the ‘United States’ is changed to ‘Utopia’” (3:164); on the issue of sexual perversion in Giraudoux’s Judith: “We must draw the line at a donkey” (3:181). Volume 2 covers the years 1933 to 1952. It is slightly disappointing that, given the political tensions of the era, this volume lacks the spirited jousting between committed playwrights and the Lord Chamberlain’s office that animate volume 1, encompassing the years 1900 to 1932. Instead, Foreign Office policies practically dictated censorship decisions, quashing any debate. In this absence, the most interesting part of the second volume concerns the culture wars of the era, particularly the Lord Chamberlain’s dealings with the Public Morality Council (and fellow travelers like “the terrifyingly named British Women’s Total Abstinence Union” [2:75]). Staffed largely by clergy though also politically well-connected, the council, which lasted through the 1960s, could not be entirely ignored, although the Lord Chamberlain clearly regarded it as a nuisance. Reading their correspondences gives some credence to fears later expressed by theatre producers in the 1960s that the abolition of official state censorship would expose productions to even harsher local censorship bodies: the assessments issued from St. James Palace are certainly more sophisticated and liberal than the narrow-minded, racist, and homophobic letters from the Public Morality Council and its ilk complaining of lax censorship standards. These tensions heat up in volume 3, “The Fifties,” which is anchored by the complicated battle over the policy on representations of homosexuality. Although...

Moving Toward High-Performance Buildings

attendance at the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, including U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, declared that, to prevent irreversible damage to the world’s climate, worldwide carbon emissions must begin to decline in just six years and be reduced by 50% by 2050. They believe that damage will occur if average global temperatures increase by more than two degrees centigrade. In developed countries like the U.S., the carbon footprint is stabilizing, but rapid growth in the use of fossil fuels in developing countries means the worldwide footprint has been increasing steadily by about one percent per year. Between 1980 and 2006, the U.S. share of the world’s climate footprint decreased from 26% to 20% while the Asian share, led by China, doubled to 37%, with the largest growth in energy use in Asia and the Middle East. The United States is currently a heavy and wasteful energy user, but not as unique as some would have us believe. In 2006, the United States was second to China in total carbon footprint and 13th out of 207 nations in its per-capita carbon footprint. The St. James Palace group concluded that even a rise of two degrees centigrade in the global temperature will have adverse consequences, but that a bigger increase would create “unmanageable climate risks”; if total carbon emissions worldwide continue to rise after 2015, the cuts required to keep temperature increases at just two degrees centigrade would likely become unachievable. In light of these sobering facts, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the

Homeopathy: Holmes, Hogwarts, and the Prince of Wales

Homeopathy: Holmes, Hogwarts, and the Prince of Wales

John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit by Jeanne Shami (review)

MLR, ioi.i, 2006 223 Undoubtedly, in terms of disseminating that 'basic information', the volume is a success: with the publication of this collection, a foundation stone has been set down. The volume divides into five sections: a consideration of the material conditions of writing, reading, and publishing, and then four chronological slices from the Tudor era until the Common wealth. Within each section, chapters consider the institutions of literary production: the court, London, the Church, the theatre, the household. There are no chapters on single authors; instead, each chapter ranges across a diver? sity of material?literature is understood in its broadest sense as 'all knowledge [. . .] transmitted in written form' (p. 6)?and so authors recur across various discussions. Old friends crop up in new places. The chapters are, almost without exception, cogent, sometimes masterful, sum? maries of the state of scholarship, written by the scholars one would hope to see in? volved (Martin Butler, David Scott Kastan, Barbara Lewalski, Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Nigel Smith). There are absolutely no surprises: indeed, many ofthe chap? ters are synopses of their authors' longer works. Lawrence Manley's 'Literature and London', forinstance, is his magnificent Literature and Culture in Early Modern Lon? don (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in miniature. But it is not really the function of this volume to surprise. As a register of early modern literary studies at the turn of the century?like those epitomes of history and classical learning pub? lished in the seventeenth century?this Cambridge History is a valuable resource. If the collection succeeds in 'general coverage' (p. 1), the ambition to read literature as 'at once [. . .] agent and [. . .] product' is less systematically achieved. Mueller's chapter on the Church demonstrates how productive this methodology can be, as she shows an acute sensitivity to the particular languages of the religious prose of William Tyndale, Simon Fish, and others?demonstrating how texts both 'giv[e] ex? pression to and tak[e] expression from'. Other chapters, however, defy this ambition, and read literature as a passive register of context, an adornment to a pre-textual reality. David Loades on national identity presents a narrative of high politics driven by rulingpersonalities. When Loades makes the magnificently problematic claim that "The partnership between the realm and the monarch was a little like that between a horse and a rider' (p. 214), it feels a long way from the editors' assertion that the 'Cambridge History [. . .] breaks down the background/foreground dichotomy' (p. 4) 'to [. . .] challenge monolithic views of power' (p. 8). In collaborative projects there is inevitably a gap between theoretical claims and contributing chapters; while these inconsistencies do not fundamentally undermine the achievement of this state-of-thenation collection, they are significant since the editors' stated ambition is to embody 'recent [. . .] methodological developments in English literary studies' (p. 1). University of Reading Adam Smyth John Donne and Conformityin Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit. By Jeanne Shami. (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 13) Cambridge: Brewer. 2003. ix + 318 pp. ?50; $85. ISBN 0-85991-789-4. The author of this magnificent book, Jeanne Shami, shot to international scholarly fame with her discovery in December 1992 that the anonymously catalogued British Library MS Royal 17. B. XX was a rare contemporaneous scribal copy of John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon. The real significance of this discovery was Shami's definitive attribution of the correcting hand to Donne himself. Shami makes clear in the book under review how much we lose in approaching any sermon in a printed edition, for of course all sermons originated as performances. Her biblio? graphy alone, listing manuscript and printed primary sources, published secondary 224 Reviews material, and unpublished Ph.D.s and papers, is staggering. Shami furthermore pro? vides an exemplary general index as well as indexes of references to Donne and to his sermons. Shami focuses on 1621-25, the final turbulent years of the reign of James VI & I, concluding with a brilliant account of the firstsermon Donne preached before Charles I, on 3 April 1625 at St James's Palace. There are good grounds for this focus. The Synod of Dort had met in 1618-19 with James's delegation of the...

The Windsor Beauties by Sir Peter Lely and the collection of paintings at St James's Palace, 1674

The Windsor Beauties, a set of ten portraits of ladies by Sir Peter Lely (1618–80), belongs amongst the most valuable contributions of royal art patronage of the early Restoration in England. Up to now most art historians have assumed the room with the Windsor Beauties to have been in the apartments of the Duke and the Duchess of York at Whitehall in the 1660s, but there is good reason for locating it at their residence at St James's Palace. This article includes a hitherto unpublished inventory which increases our knowledge of the ducal collection of paintings. The function of the collection and the iconography of the portraits within the ducal apartments are at the centre of interest of this study.

‘The Religion for a Gentleman’: The Northern Catholic Gentry in the Eighteenth Century

When, in 1834 Lord Macauley called on Cardinal Wiseman at the Venerable English College in Rome, he was most surprised to find the cardinal's room fitted out in the English style and very like the rooms of a senior fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. On the same occasion Macauley was introduced to Lords Clifford and Shrewsbury and thought them not at all what he imagined Catholics of old family to be: proud and stately and with an air of being men of rank but not of fashion. John Henry Newman, too, had a notion that the old English Catholic gentry moved silently and sorrowfully about and lived in old-fashioned houses of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, iron gates and yew trees, cut off from the populous world around them. On his entry into ‘the narrow community of the English Catholics’, the other future cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, said he felt as if he ‘had got into St. James's Palace in 1687. It was as stately as the House of Lords …’ These reactions show that Macauley, Newman and Manning cannot have come across many English Catholic gentlemen before and that they had gained very little idea of the social history of English Catholicism, however much they may have learned about its political and ecclesiastical past. This paper will point out what they should, and might easily, have picked up.

A Neglected Henrician Decorative Ceiling

Surprisingly little attention has been paid by scholars of Henry VIII to the heraldic ceiling of the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace (fig. 1). Study of its decoration has fallen somewhere in between surveys of Tudor architecture and painting. In this article specific problems relating to the ceiling will be addressed: when it was made, the iconography, the reasons for the iconography, the visual source of the ceiling and how it was transmitted, and who made it. The ceiling warrants attention because its programme of Henrician heraldry is a key to the understanding of the political iconography of the Royal Supremacy. In addition, the ceiling's dependence on a contemporary Italian architectural treatise for its design is unusual for its time.

The Interfaith Declaration. Constructing a Code of Ethics for International Business

Major adherents of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, who claim common religious roots, have worked quietly for years on an interfaith declaration which would identify shared ethical values to be applied in the conduct of international business. After a final meeting in Amman, Jordan, in 1993 the Declaration was officially promulgated at St James's Palace in London in 1994, and the author of this introduction was acknowledged as a major figure in its composition. Besides being Director of the British‐North American Research Association, Simon Webley has researched and written extensively on codes of conduct in business. Copies of the Interfaith Declaration, which is reproduced here with permission, are obtainable from The Interfaith Foundation, P.O. Box 4385, London SW1W 9XS.

York House St. James's Palace London S.W.1

York House St. James's Palace London S.W.1

London's Spanish Chapel Before and After The Civil War

IN THE mid-seventeenth century the chapel of the Spanish embassy caused considerable concern to the authorities at Whitehall since they were frustrated in preventing scores of Londoners from attending it for masses and other Catholic devotions. This was a distinct issue from the traditional right of a Catholic diplomat in England to provide mass for his household or other compatriots,’ and from the custom of Sephardic Jews to gather in the embassy for Sabbath worship when they desired. While the practice of Londoners to attend mass secretly at the residences of various Catholic diplomats had developed early in the reign of Elizabeth and occasional arrests at their doors had acted as a deterrent, late in the reign of James I sizeable crowds began to frequent the Spanish embassy. John Chamberlain commented in1621that Gondomar had ‘almost as many come to his mass’ in the chapel of Ely House as there were attending ‘the sermon at St. Andrewes (Holborn) over against him’. Although Godomar left in1622and subsequently the embassy was closed for five years during the Anglo-Spanish War, it was later, from1630to 1655, that the Spanish chapel acquired not only a continuous popularity among Catholics of the area but also an unwelcome notoriety in the highest levels of government. This paper will suggest two primary factors which led to that development: the persistent ambition of the resident Spanish diplomats to provide a range of religious services unprecedented in number and character, and their successful adaptation to the hostile political conditions in the capital for a quarter of a century. The continuous Spanish diplomatic presence in London for this long period was in itself both unexpected and unique for it should be recalled that, for various reasons, all the other Catholic ambassadors, whether from France, Venice, Portugal, Savoy or the Empire, had to leave at different times and close their chapels. However, the site of the Spanish residence during these years by no means permanent since, as with other foreign diplomats, a new property was rented by each ambassador on arrival. There is, moreover, a wider significance in this inquiry because of the current evidence that by the eve of the Civil War the king was considered in the House of Commons to have been remiss in guarding his kingdom from a ‘Catholic inspired plot against church and state’, for while it has been well argued that a public disquiet over Henrietta-Maria's chapels at Somerset House and St. James's palace had by 1640 stimulated increasing suspicions of a Popish Plot, there were other protected chapels, particularly the Spanish, where scores of Londoners were seen to attend. Indeed, after the closure of the queen's chapels at Whitehall in 1642, the Spanish remained for the next thirteen years as silent evidence that Catholics seemed to be ‘more numerous’ and were acting ‘more freely than in the past’.

Staging at St James's Palace in the Seventeenth Century

St James's Palace, which was perhaps planned by Henry VIII to be the court of the heir to the throne, came into far more regular use under the prolific Stuarts than it had enjoyed under the Tudors. Under James, the various members of the royal family were assigned particular palaces and royal residences for their own households, and St James's became the London court of the Prince of Wales.

Blackie Foundation Trust Recital at St James's Palace. March 1984

Blackie Foundation Trust Recital at St James's Palace. March 1984

The Double Time-Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence

The Double Time-Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence DAVID BLEWETT Defoe's Roxana1 is a rare example of a novel set in two periods of time at once. Neither the title-page allusion to "the Time of King Charles II" nor the internal dating by which we can determine that Roxana is telling her story in 1724, the year of publication, tells the whole truth. The fact that Roxana exists simultaneously in two worlds fifty years apart in time is, as Paul Alkon points out, hard for modern readers to accept.2 Used to a stricter formal realism in fiction, we are apt either to accuse Defoe of a careless anachronism, or else to see the allusions to the earlier reign as "protective ambiguity,"3 a covering for his satirical thrusts at the reign and court of George I. But Roxana is complex rather than simple, or sim­ ply confused, and the novel possesses a double time-scheme for the ex­ cellent reason that Defoe wants us to see the moral parallel between the luxurious time of Charles II and the equally dissolute reign of George I. Roxana lives in two worlds at once because morally, in Defoe's eyes, they were the same. The case for an exclusively Georgian setting for the novel has been made by Rodney M. Baine, who provides a useful chronology of Roxana's life, allowing us to see clearly that by her own testimony Roxana is born in 1673, is therefore twelve years old at the death of Charles II in 1685, is about forty when she returns to England shortly before the accession of George I, and is fifty at the end of the novel when she is married to the Dutch merchant in the early 1720s. Moreover, as Professor Baine points out, by the publishing conventions of the time, the title page may well 19 20 / BLEWETT not have been composed, or even seen before publication, by Defoe.4 Be­ fore the introduction of the dust jacket, title pages, often rather sensa­ tional in tone, served as the publishers' advertisement for the book. What I want to do in this paper is to establish the evidence for the Resto­ ration setting of the novel, which is as extensive and as deliberate as the references to the early eighteenth century. Defoe may not—though he equally well may—have seen his own title page when the book was in press, but the publishers (if they were responsible for it) were certainly correct in thinking that the novel possesses a Restoration setting. I have on another occasion5 suggested that Roxana alludes to the reign of Charles II when she invites the reader to confuse her with Nell Gwyn by calling herself a "Protestant Whore," and by her friendship with Nell Gwyris financial adviser, Sir Robert Clayton, who was prominent in the reigns of Charles II and James II and who died in 1707, well before the time Roxana claims to have consulted him as her financial adviser after her return to London in 1714. Moreover, Nell Gwyn was given a house (the site of the present No. 79) in the Pall Mall close to St. James's Palace by Charles II. Similarly, Roxana tells us that she had "particular Reasons" for leaving her own house and moving into "handsome large Apartments in the Pall-Mall, in a House, out of which was a private Door into the King's Garden" (p. 204). It is in those apartments that she gives her splen­ did parties attended by the highest ranks of society, including the D____ of M____th, an unmistakable allusion to the Duke of Monmouth, Charles' illegitimate son by Lucy Walter, created Duke of Monmouth in 1663 and executed in 1685. And near the end of the novel when her daughter Susan insinuates that the Lady Roxana had been called to court to be the King's mistress, Roxana sarcastically replies, "To Court . . . why she was at Court wa'n't she? the Pallmall is not far from Whitehall" (p. 334). Such a remark refers to a time before 1697 when Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire. Susan's suggestion, of course, is that Roxana...

The London ‘Insurrection’ of December 1792: Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?

As the likelihood of war with revolutionary France grew at the end of 1792 and beginning of 1793, the pro-government press in England reported that a serious plan for an insurrection, scheduled for the first weekend in December 1792, had been nipped in the bud by the authorities. On December 3 The Times stated that, as it had not wished to create alarm, it had not previously mentioned the full facts of the seditious attempts being made in the country. These attempts, the newspaper maintained, had prompted almost daily meetings of the Cabinet climaxing in a meeting at Lord Grenville's house which had lasted until one a.m. on the preceding Saturday morning (December 1). It was from this meeting that the Cabinet had issued the royal proclamation which embodied part of the militia and which deplored the ineffectiveness of the May 1792 proclamation against seditious meetings and writings. Three weeks later, beneath the headline “Revolution Plans,” the World reported that two parties were involved in the projected insurrection: the “moderates” who sought first the destruction of the House of Lords, the Herald's Office, and the Horse Guards, and then the enlarging of the Commons; and those whose plans were “more extensive” and who would have gone on to destroy St. James's Palace, the Bank, the law courts, the prisons, the customs house, and excise office. A month later, under the headline “Project of an Insurrection,” the London Chronicle gave similar details of a plot “to overturn the government and the constitution of this country.”

John Vanbrugh and the Blenheim Palace Controversy

ON THE MORNING of zi August 1704, a Colonel Park, on his way to Windsor Castle and Queen Anne, stopped first at St. James's Palace and delivered to Sarah Churchill the news of her husband's victory over the French at Blenheim. Thus a truly significant military engagement began its movement from actuality onto the pages of history. As far as its political importance, the triumph of Marlborough's forces on the field outside Blenheim signalled, although only faintly, the beginning of the end to the War of the Spanish Succession. Anne believed she had gained another foothold in her paranoid struggle with France and the Catholic Church. From another view, however, the success of the campaign of 1704 set in motion a project, innocent enough on the surface, that would drone forward on the sluggish vehicles of personality clashes, charges of corruption, law suits, and a general waste of public money. On 17 February 1705, the Queen informed Commons that she would cede to John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and to his heirs, the old Royal Manor and Park in Woodstock, Oxfordshire; the entire grant comprised some I5,ooo acres and was reported to be worth approximately ?6,000 per year. In addition, Anne determined to plan and to build, at her expense, a magnificent palace at Woodstock that would bear the name of her general's victory at Blenheim. She appointed John Vanbrugh (1664-17z6), the playwright and architect presently completing the new Queen's Theatre (or Italian Opera House) in Haymarket, as the principal architect; since June 1702, Vanbrugh had been serving as comptroller of the Board of Works. He, in turn, selected Nicholas Hawksmoor as his assistant.

INTERNATIONAL COMMODITY CONTROL

THE second Inter–Allied meeting, held at St. James's Palace on September 24, fully justified the hope expressed by Mr. Eden at the conclusion of the first, held on June 12, that the meeting might represent the inauguration of a new phase by which peace will be maintained after victory. This second meeting indeed owes its chief significance, not to the accession of the Soviet Union to its counsels or to the adhesion of the Allied Governments to the common principles of policy set forth in the Atlantic Charter, affirmed at the meeting, important as these may be, but rather to the agreement on concerted action for reprovisioning Europe after defeat of the Nazi regime. That agreement, together with the support and interest of the United States indicated in the statement Mr. Eden was authorized to make on its behalf at the meeting, afford weighty evidence that this time the United States and the individual allies will collaborate in the peace after the war has been won. The importance of American collaboration was indeed confirmed very emphatically by Mr. Sumner Welles in a speech delivered on October 5, in which he discussed the urgent need for plans for reconstruction and condemned the policy of restricted trade followed by the United States during the period between 1918 and the outbreak of the War.

King George's Jubilee Trust

No social change of our time is more significant than the way in which leisure has ceased to be the privilege of a few and become the concern, if not indeed the lot, of the many. In the problems which leisure now presents, there is none more serious and pressing than those which it presents in adolescence. The Jubilee Trust inaugurated by the Prince of Wales at St. James's Palace on March 1 is designed specially to deal with such problems, and a further reference to its objects was made in an appeal broadcast by His Royal Highness on April 12. The main objects of the Trust are to provide more and better facilities for the recreation and guidance of the younger generation, to encourage the cultivation of abilities, craftsmanship and all those outdoor interests and activities which make for mental and physical fitness. The Trust will assist, strengthen and extend the work of the many voluntary organisations in existence, the work of which is to promote the welfare of the boys and girls of Great Britain. It will enable similar movements to be started in places at present untouched, particularly through lack of local resources and the need of help from a central source. It should encourage co-ordination of effort and prevent the waste of money and effort in overlapping.

King Edward's Hospital Fund: Radium Centres

King Edward's Hospital Fund: Radium CentresPublished Online:29 May 2014https://doi.org/10.1259/0007-1285-2-19-360SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail AboutAbstractThe annual meeting of the General Council of King Edward's Hospital Fund for London was held at St. James's Palace on June 11, the Prince of Wales being in the chair.The Chairman of the Distribution Committee (Sir Cooper Perry) presented a report of the committee on the allocation to hospitals of radium purchased with the gift of Sir Otto Beit, including the list of hospitals selected and the amounts of radium loaned to each, and moved that the allocation be approved. Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 2, Issue 19July 1929Pages: 323-370 © The British Institute of Radiology History Published onlineMay 29,2014 Metrics Download PDF