Why Horse Guards still holds a four o'clock punishment parade every day
Every afternoon at four, soldiers and horses line up for inspection at Horse Guards in London. The ritual began in 1894 when Queen Victoria reportedly caught the guards drinking and gambling, and decreed a daily inspection for a hundred years. The sentence ran out in 1994, but the parade never stopped.
The building stands between Whitehall and Horse Guards Parade, once the gateway to the Palace of Whitehall, which is why mounted troopers still guard it ceremonially. Charles II commissioned the first red-brick version in 1663 on the old palace tiltyard, with stabling for more than a hundred cavalry horses and an arch leading into what was then a private royal park. Courtiers needed ivory passes to go through. The passes survive in plastic form, and only the monarch may drive through the arch without one.
By the 1740s the old structure was crumbling, with falling stonework said to endanger sentries, so George II ordered a replacement from the architect William Kent. Kent doubled the interior on the same footprint but died in 1748 before building began; his assistants finished it for about 65,000 pounds over nearly a decade. Keeping a Baroque clock tower on a Palladian body produced an odd mix one writer dismissed as the ugliest building in London.
For well over a century the name Horse Guards meant the British Army's command itself. The Duke of Wellington worked there, his coffin lay in his old office the night before his state funeral in 1852, and his desk is still in the room. The last commander-in-chief based there, the Duke of Cambridge, was so attached to the place that Queen Victoria had to order him out in 1858. Royals now watch Trooping the Colour from the windows above the arch.
Before Big Ben started in 1859, the turret clock here was Westminster's main public timepiece. A dark mark near the two on its face is said to record the hour of Charles I's execution in 1649, carried out in the street outside. Each morning the mounted guard rides in from Knightsbridge to change over, with a larger escort when the monarch is in London.
Source: Horse Guards (building)
