Monday, 15 June 2020

The private chapel of a family of ailing megalomaniacs

[The chapel at Sandringham] Not, as the books say, like an ordinary country church in the least, but more like the private chapel of a family of ailing megalomaniacs: the shrine of a clique.

....

To sum up: this is a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue, and everywhere were their [i.e., royal family] faces, painted, drawn or photographed: few pictures not directly related to themselves: ... Almost monastic in its seclusion with the added safety that where a monastery would have religious paintings they lived with nothing higher than paintings of themselves.

J. Pope-Hennessy, The Quest for Queen Mary, ed. H. Vickers (2018), 94, 100

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