Early Reminiscences; a Prelude - by Charles Knight
Published in Windlesora 18 (2000)
© WLHG
”On the night of the thirty-first of December 1800, I had gone to bed with a vague fear that I should be awakened by a terrific noise which would shake the house more than the loudest thunder-clap, and would produce such a concussion of the air as would break every window-pane in Windsor town. The house in which my father lived, and in which I was born, was close to the great entrance to the lower ward of Windsor Castle, called, after its builder, Henry the Eighth’s gateway. I crept down in the dawning of that first day of the year to a sitting room which commanded a view of the Round Tower. The aspect of that room was eastern. I watched the gradual reddening of the sky; and I momently expected to see a flash from one of the many cannon mounted on the Tower, and to hear that roar from those mighty pieces of ordnance which was to produce such alarming consequences. I knew not then that these guns were only four-pounders, and that if all the seventeen had been fired at once the windows would most probably have been safe. I watched and watched till the sun was high. It was then reported that the King had ordered there should be no discharge of the cannon of the keep, for the new painted window by Mr. West, at the east end of St George’s Chapel, might be broken by the concussion. There was no boom of artillery; but the bells of the belfry of St George’s Chapel and the bells of the parish church rang out a merry peal – not so much to welcome the coming of the new year and the beginning of the new century (for the learned had settled, after a vast deal of popular controversy, that the century had its beginnings on the Ist of January 1801, and not on the Ist of January, 1800), but to hail the legal commencement of the Union with Ireland. The sun shone brilliantly on a new standard on the Round Tower. I had often looked admiringly upon the old standard, tattered and dingy as it sometimes was, but I now beheld that this new standard was not only perfect in its shape and bright in its colours, but was wholly of an unaccustomed pattern. There were the arms of England in the first and fourth quarterings; the arms of Scotland in the second quartering; and the arms of Ireland in the third. But where had vanished the fleur-de-lys? Was his gracious majesty no longer King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, as his style had run in all legal instruments in the memory of man, and a good deal beyond? The newspapers said he was now to be styled “George the Third, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith”. The good folks of Windsor argued that the change was ominous of the departing glory of Old England.”
(Web editor note February 2024 ”On the night of the thirty-first of December 1800…….” has a illustrative drop cap – see below)
Windsor Local History Group 