Subsequently when alterations on an extensive scale were made at Windsor Castle,[225] the people of Richmond, realizing they were in danger of losing their royal residents altogether, offered the land they had before refused; but it was too late, and the enclosure round the abandoned palace was given over to farming. [225] "George III restored the battlements and the windows of a considerable part to their appropriate forms, built a new porch, and constructed a Gothic staircase of great beauty and magnificence. He dismantled the old painted St. George's Hall, and intended to substitute for it a Gothic hall worthy of the proudest periods of the Plantagenets and Tudor. But the progress of improvement flagged, and his lamented illness stopped it. Before this his Majesty had been very attentive to the beautiful restorations in St. George's Chapel; his last work at Windsor was the formation of the Royal Mausoleum, which ultimately received his mortal remains."--Huish: _Public and Private Life of George III_. * * * * * "Soon after [the marriage] Buckingham House was purchased, and bestowed on her Majesty, St. James's not seeming a prison strict enough," Horace Walpole has written; and in this sentence may be read the key to the first years of Queen Charlotte in England, for during that period she was, indeed, little better than a prisoner, with a gaoler in the form of her duenna (who was also supposed to be a spy of the Princess Dowager) Katherine Dashwood,[226] the "Delia" of James Hammond, who had not been to Court for twenty-five years, when she was a Woman of the Bedchamber to George II's consort. "Except the Ladies of the Bedchamber[227] for half-an-hour a week in a funereal circle, or a ceremonious drawing-room, she [the Queen] never had a soul to speak to but the King," Mrs. Harcourt has recorded in her Diary. "This continued till her first child, the Prince of Wales, was born; then the nurse and governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, coming into the room was a little treat; but they had still for years no other society, till by degrees the Ladies of the Bedchamber came far more frequently, and latterly the society, for various reasons--the children growing up, the journeys, etc.--was much increased. Expecting to be Queen of a gay Court, finding herself confined in a convent, and hardly allowed to think without the leave of her husband, checked her spirits, made her fearful and cautious to an extreme, and when the time came that amusements were allowed, her mind was formed to a different manner of life." Seclusion in a dreary Court at the age of seventeen was not the way to bring out that which is best in a woman's character, and doubtless this had its effect in producing a certain bitterness and hardness that subsequently showed themselves, although some fifty years later the Queen expressed her belief that the course followed had been advisable. "I am most truly sensible of the