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Since the palace opened on Aug. 7 to less-than-capacity crowds -- 7,000 to 8,000 initially expected, yet actually drawing only 4,500 a day -- the English press has been quoting disappointed Americans and Japanese who felt entitled to a look at the Queen: at least Mickey Mouse, one kid complained, was always present in his Magic Kingdom of Disneyland. You can't expect her to pop out like a cuckoo on a clock, but there isn't even a painting of her on view -- only her ancestors. The burden falls on Queen Victoria, whose portrait en famille by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (who was to her and Prince Albert what Edwin Landseer was to their many dogs) must be the single most sentimental piece of kitsch in the palace and accordingly gets more attention from the visitor stream than any Rubens or Rembrandt. Now and again some palace functionary, neatly tailored and with a face like a silver teapot, glides through the crowd; and police murmur discreetly into cellular intercoms. But otherwise it's like being shepherded, en masse, through an empty stage set. Nobody here but us tourists. What you see is what you get. The only domestic trace is a mysterious table in the anteroom to the Ministers' Staircase, on which sit a bottle of Malvern water (unopened) and two glasses (turned upside down). What is the meaning of this Magrittean still life?
There are 600 rooms in Buckingham Palace, of which 18 are now open to the public. Quite enough. No tourists will see the royal bedrooms, and nobody but a sociologist would want to visit whatever remains of the tiny attic chambers where the housemaids -- whose salary Prince Albert, shortly after marrying Victoria, cut from about 45 pounds to 12 pounds a year -- used to sleep, and perhaps still do. What you get for your 8 pounds is a walk through the main formal rooms: the Throne Room, the Picture Gallery, the Green, Blue and White drawing rooms, the best of which were designed by George IV's architect John Nash, and the worst by his pupil, Edward Blore. "Blore the bore," as he came to be known, took over the decoration of Buckingham Palace after Nash was dismissed by George IV's successor, William IV, for his "inexcusable irregularity and great negligence." Blore was a beacon of probity, but not of talent. His lack of it is why the east front of the palace -- the backdrop to the Changing of the Guard -- looks like a bank that got too big for its boots. He specialized in bland, thick architectural effects coupled with the sort of mingy "good taste" decoration later imitated in Edwardian hotels.
He is the reason why the Throne Room, the red chamber where knights are dubbed beneath a plaster frieze of roly-poly figures enacting scenes from the Wars of the Roses, is so curiously ungrand. Not all of that is Blore's fault -- the squat thrones themselves, one with EIIR embroidered on it and the other with P for Philip, were done in 1953 and look Hollywood-Ruritanian, if not suburban. You can't help reflecting on the amount of lobbying from aspirant title seekers that has focused on this red room over the past century.