of George IV, with the help of the architect, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, to make Windsor Castle as young as the Brighton Pavilion. He made it fit for a king of taste to live in. His raw material was not a mediæval castle slowly accumulated by Angevins, Plantagenets, Lancastrians, Yorkists, and Tudors, but a mediæval castle which had been iced or Italianized for Charles II by Wren. Edward III had been as sweeping, but he destroyed the old and built the new in the living fashion of his own time. George IV had not the strength or purpose, though he had the money, to do the same. He lived at the beginning of an age that knew so much of other ages, what they did, and how they did it, that it had no trust in itself, seeing itself as but part of a process, and therefore incapable of acting freely and instinctively in that co-operation with past and future which makes a sane and hearty present. If he had lived later in this age, he might have restored Windsor with more knowledge and less temerity. But it is better as it is. Better to have what George IV really liked than what a generation of art critics timidly believes and vociferously asserts to be correct. He has left us a substantial building of roughly mediæval appearance which might still enable Burke to compare the British Monarchy to "the proud keep of Windsor". It is still national in its magnitude and position, in its history and reputation, as what Michael Drayton called "that supremest seat of the great English kings".

THE STORY OF THE CASTLE

The singular pride of Windsor Castle's position is clear to all who travel within a long sight of it by road, river, or rail. Windsor first owed its importance to its position. It stands upon a single blunt cone of chalk projecting through the clay of the surrounding low lands, which the Castle thus overlooks and commands, as from an island, like the castles of Corfe, Lincoln, Belvoir, and Montacute among others. This advantage of singular eminence above any other place upon the Thames and near London was strengthened and served both by the river, which flows on the north along a winding shore (which was perhaps the origin of the name Windsor), and by the dense, broad tracts of forest extending far to the south and west. It lay within a few miles of Staines, and so was only a long day's march from London, by the Roman road from Winchester and Silchester which crossed the Thames at that point.

There is no clear evidence of its importance before the Conquest, and in the Domesday Book Windsor is neither a parish nor a manor. But halfway between the chalk hill and Staines the Saxon kings had a palace at Old Windsor. It may have been close to the river, west of Old Windsor Church, where there used to be a farmstead having a river-fed moat; but not a sign of this palace remains. Edward the Confessor held his court there, we know, and the most vivid memory of it is connected with the year before the landing of the Conqueror. The king was at Old Windsor, and with him Earl Godwin's two strong sons, Harold and Tostig. Harold was drinking with Edward, when Tostig seized him by the hair and shamefully handled him, to the dismay of the household. Harold in return caught his younger brother up in his arms and dashed him to the floor. The guards then leapt forward from all sides and forcibly separated the fighters, while the mild king foretold God's anger and a fatal end to their violent ways.

Only five years after this, in 1070, the Conqueror held his court on the hill of what was then New Windsor. In the Domesday survey of 1086 a castle there is mentioned, but what it was we cannot be sure, and there are no visible remains of it. The position had struck and pleased the Conqueror as soldier and hunter, for he not only fortified the hill but recovered, to form part of a forest, some neighbouring lands which the Confessor had given to his Abbey of Westminster. The early Norman castles in England and Normandy were of timber, and consisted of a ditched and palisaded mound and a court, or several courts, also ditched and if possible moated with water. Under William the castle tended to become a high stone keep of rectangular form, with towers at the corners, depending for its strength upon the thickness of its own walls, not on a series of outer fortifications. In 1095 Windsor was used as a prison for Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, by the second William, but Old Windsor was still at times a royal residence while the new castle was being built. Henry I added "many fair buildings", including a chapel, and held his court there for the first time at Whitsuntide in 1110. At Windsor Henry married his second queen, Alice the Fair, and there also he kept Whitsuntide when David of Scotland and the English barons swore fealty to his daughter, the Empress Maud. At the time of the peace between Henry and Stephen the Castle was the second fortress in the kingdom, and its castellan, like those of London, Oxford, Lincoln, and Southampton, gave hostages for its surrender to Henry in the event of Stephen's death.

Henry II held his court at Windsor at Easter, 1170, accompanied by William the Lion of Scotland and his brother David; there he held a parliament in 1175, and often resided; he knighted his son, Prince John, within its walls; and it is said that one of the apartments was decorated with a picture of a dying eagle attacked by four eaglets, to represent himself and his rebel sons. When Richard I lay in prison, on his way home from the Crusade, John seized Windsor, but was forced by the barons to give it up. When John succeeded to the kingdom he frequently kept Christmas at the Castle, and there in 1210 he confined William de Braose of Bramber's wife and son, and the son's wife, in chains until they died of hunger and misery. A contemporary says that the captives were shut in a room with a sheaf of wheat and a piece of raw bacon, and that in eleven days the mother was found sitting upright between her son's knees, her head thrown back on his breast, and that she had gnawed his cheek, probably after his death, as he sat with his face bowed. From Windsor John rode out to Runnymede in June, 1215, to sign Magna Charta. When he broke his faith soon after, Louis of France and the English barons subdued all the south of England save Dover and Windsor. Windsor they besieged with a great force under the Count de Nevers; but John corrupted him to treachery, and was then free to gather an army from his garrisons and lay waste the eastern counties, in that furious and hasty course which led to his death in 1216.

THE HUNDRED STEPS

John's son, Henry III, was a great builder at Windsor. He raised the Bell, the Clewer, the Berners, and the Almoners' Towers on the north side, and on the south-west the Garter and Salisbury Towers, completed the ditch on the west and added a barbican, and in the upper ward made two great chambers for himself and his queen, and a chapel with painted windows. The King's Hall, in the Clewer Tower, is now the Library of the Dean and Chapter. In 1248 Henry received the Papal nuncios at the Castle. In 1261 he kept Christmas there with his queen and his daughter, the Queen of Scotland. It was a fine season, more like summer than winter, and Margaret of Scotland had come that she might bear her first child in her native place. She had been born at Windsor in 1240, and spent her childhood in the Castle with her brother, afterwards Edward I, who was a year older. Married as a child to Alexander III, she spent an unhappy girl-wifehood in