When it was announced last week that William and Kate were to move with their three children from Adelaide Cottage, their rather pokey digs in Windsor Great Park, to the imposing eight-bedroomed Forest Lodge, much was made of the idea that it will remain the family residence when William ascends the throne.
Indeed, they are already so attached to the place that it has even been said it will be their ‘forever home’.
But how much due diligence did the couple do when it came to the history of their 18th-century pile before agreeing to move in?
Not too much, it would appear. For I can reveal that Forest Lodge is a house full of dark secrets.
To discover what these are, we must go back to the late 1700s when the lodge was built by Sir Jeffry Wyatville, the architect who rebuilt parts of the ancient Windsor Castle during the reign of King George IV.
The lodge’s gardens have an equally distinguished pedigree, as they were laid out by Humphry Repton, who was considered the successor to Capability Brown, the father of the famed English landscape garden style.
Sir Jeffry was so taken by his creation, which was originally adorned with an Indian-style cupola, that he considered making it his own home. Instead, the Georgian mansion was bought by a rather less distinguished character, a London-based Scot called Spencer Mackay.
Unlike Wyatville, who plied his trade in his homeland, Mackay made his money from coffee and rum plantations in Guyana, South America, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Slavery is not the only story attached to the house once known as Holly Grove, but since renamed Forest Lodge (pictured)
In 1823, there was a slave rebellion in the Guyanese region of Demerara, triggered by a mistaken belief that the British parliament had abolished slavery and their freedom was being blocked by colonial rulers. PIctured: a scene from the 1970s miniseries Roots, featuring actor Levar Burton as a slave
Many other Forest Lodge tenants have come and gone, each with a story to tell – but none has been so famous as its new occupants, the future king and queen (pictured)
Mackay’s priority was to extract as much profit as possible from his lands half a world away and, to this end, he bought hundreds of slaves.
They experienced horrendous privations during their long journey by sea from West Africa and, once they arrived on Guyana, even worse horrors awaited them.
Brutal whippings were common, as plantation managers sought to force the maximum amount of labour out of exhausted slaves.
In 1823, there was a slave rebellion in the Guyanese region of Demerara, triggered by a mistaken belief that the British parliament had abolished slavery and their freedom was being blocked by colonial rulers.
Between 9,000 and 12,000 slaves joined the uprising, dozens of them from Mackay’s plantations. But it proved to be short-lived. Within just two days, the rebellion had been brutally crushed.
Mackay’s estate manager later gave a chillingly frank account of events in a letter to his boss. ‘From fifty to one hundred [slaves] have absented themselves for some time to the back lands, near Mahaica, but particularly from the estates of Beehive and Greenfield, alleging that the manager had exacted too much labour.
‘The Greenfield [slaves] having returned, on condition that the manager should be discharged, and other [slave]-drivers appointed, the remaining [slaves] were occupied during the nights in carrying into the woods plantains and a good many cattle.’
One group which had fled the plantation turned on the men hunting them down, wrote the estate manager.
Forest Lodge went to an old-school courtier and Scottish grandee, the 14th Lord Napier. After service in the Scots Guards, Napier had joined the royal court, rising to be Princess Margaret’s (pictured, left) private secretary in 1975
Seasoned royal observers doubt William and Kate meant it literally when they described Forest Lodge as their ‘forever home’
Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel Alice In Wonderland, visited the house during the time it was occupied by her uncle, Colonel Augustus Liddell, groom-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and deputy ranger of Windsor Great Park
‘Young Van Baerle, and another young man on the estate, had repeatedly attempted to bring home the runaways, and partly succeeded.
‘But, finally, these young men were decoyed by a party of the estates’ slaves who had not absented themselves, and in this affair they were murdered in the most savage manner.
‘Their bodies were mutilated, and their heads and limbs carried in triumph round the camp. Every attempt is now being made to send a formidable party of whites and Indians in an endeavour to destroy them.’
In the process of putting down the rebellion, up to 500 slaves were killed.
And after the insurrection had been defeated, a further 27 slaves were executed on the orders of the British governor, John Murray, with their bodies left to rot in the sun for months as a deterrent to any other slaves considering a fight for freedom.
Despite this butchery, when slavery was abolished in 1834, Mackay was compensated for the loss of his slave workforce to the tune of £10 million at today’s prices.
Nobody knows how many died on his watch but, by the time he received the money, he’d moved on from Holly Grove House (the original name of Forest Lodge) to a smart London residence in Harley Street.
This piece of history, if William doesn’t already know it, may come as an unwelcome reminder of the troubled West Indies tour, which he and Kate undertook in March 2022.
Between 9,000 and 12,000 slaves joined the Demerara uprising, dozens of them from Mackay’s plantations
During a stop at Trench Town, the district of the Jamaican capital of Kingston best-known for being the childhood home of the king of reggae Bob Marley, the royal couple were photographed shaking hands with local children as they pushed their hands through a chain-link fence. The optics were not good as, to some eyes, it looked as if they were greeting people in a prison camp.
It was criticised as a ‘PR misstep’ and a ‘white-saviour parody’ amid the ongoing debate over slavery reparations and increasingly vocal calls for Jamaica to throw off the monarchist yoke.
Indeed, the island’s prime minister told the royal couple in an awkward meeting that the country would become a republic, and a government committee in the Bahamas urged the royals to issue ‘a full and formal apology for their crimes against humanity’.
Slavery is not the only story attached to Holly Grove, which was renamed Forest Lodge in the 1930s. Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s children’s novel Alice In Wonderland, visited the house during the time it was occupied by her uncle, Colonel Augustus Liddell, groom-in-waiting to Queen Victoria and deputy ranger of Windsor Great Park.
Following the retirement of Sir Malcolm Murray as deputy ranger in 1936, the house was let, at the request of Edward VIII, to his long-time equerry, Sir John Aird. A decorated soldier and baronet, Aird was once described by King Leopold of the Belgians as ‘the perfect caricature of an English gentleman’. But he was no stuffed shirt.
In 1923, Aird was with the then Prince of Wales in Kenya’s Happy Valley when Edward and his brother the Duke of Gloucester shared the bedroom favours of the transatlantic Kenyan aviator Beryl Markham.
Aird also accompanied Edward on his official tour of South America in 1931 when far more energy was devoted to goings-on behind bedroom doors than to ribbon-cutting. ‘There was a wild streak in him – something he could not control,’ Aird once observed.
Sir John is also the man who could be said to have inadvertently triggered the 1936 abdication crisis. After all, it was he who organised the charter of the yacht Nahlin, whose cruise through the Adriatic that summer drew the world’s attention to the secret relationship between the King and Wallis Simpson.
After the ordeal that Kate, and the rest of the family, endured at Adelaide Cottage during her cancer treatment, it is time for a fresh start
The original plan had been for the royal party to take a chateau in the south of France, behind whose walls there would have been a measure of privacy. But Aird’s charter, it can be argued, altered the course of history.
Though while Aird turned a blind eye to the royal bed-hopping activities, he remained as a courtier rigidly in favour of public decorum. And when he saw his king ‘naked except for a pair of trunks’ disporting himself publicly on his Nahlin cruise, he threw in the towel. ‘That was my last crusade,’ he said dismissively. The abdication followed shortly after.
Unlike others close to Edward, who were tainted by the abdication, Aird remained in royal favour and continued to act as a courtier to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1973, diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, he told his wife to bring him a locked dispatch case. Within it was his old service revolver. In the bedroom of Forest Lodge, Sir John Aird shot himself dead. He considered it to be the gentleman’s way out. He was 75.
Many thought Forest Lodge was then destined to become the home of Princess Anne, who had married Captain Mark Phillips a week before Aird’s suicide, but the Queen instead gifted her daughter infinitely more elegant Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire.
As a result, Forest Lodge went to an old-school courtier and Scottish grandee, the 14th Lord Napier. After service in the Scots Guards, Napier had joined the royal court, rising to be Princess Margaret’s private secretary in 1975.
It was the unassuming Napier who was called in to adjudicate between the princess and her husband, Lord Snowdon, as they descended into drink, bad behaviour and angry recrimination.
When things finally came to a head at the end of 1975, it was Napier who was deputed to deliver the coup de grace. As Snowdon’s biographer Anne de Courcy recalls: ‘On 26 November 1975 Margaret sent Nigel Napier to inform Tony that in future he was not to accompany her on any public engagement, nor was he to be informed of any private invitations or activities. The drawbridge had finally been pulled up.’
Many other Forest Lodge tenants have come and gone, each with a story to tell – but none has been so famous as its new occupants, the future king and queen.
Seasoned observers doubt William and Kate meant it literally when they described Forest Lodge as their ‘forever home’ but surely everyone can agree that, after the ordeal that Kate, and the rest of the family, endured at Adelaide Cottage during her cancer treatment, it is time for a fresh start.
