Little used as a royal residence since the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Windsor Castle was in a state of disrepair by the accession of George III in 1760. The new king, disliking Hampton Court Palace, the favoured country residence of his grandfather, George II, resided instead at Richmond Lodge and, after 1773, at Kew Palace. However, as the Royal Family grew, in 1776, he took up residence at Windsor and while works began in the Castle proper lived in a building nearby known as the Garden House, renamed the Queen’s Lodge. The Royal Family soon spent increasing amounts of his time at Windsor, reserving Kew for weekend retreats or stopovers to and from London. Soon after the arrival of the King, rooms in the Queen’s Lodge were set aside for books, laying the foundation for the second largest of his three main book collections. The library at Windsor, like the smaller collection at Kew Palace, reflected the King’s interests and served as a more personal collection when compared to the vast scholars’ library kept at Buckingham House (the King’s Library—now part of the British Library).
In 1780, the librarian, Frederick Augusta Barnard compiled inventories of each of George’s libraries, listing the books by subject and recording their shelfmarks. This is one of two copies of the inventory for the Windsor library. One copy (RCIN 1028949) was kept at Windsor for the King’s personal use and contains additions to the collection, made up to 1812, several of which were added in George III’s own hand. This copy appears to have been reserved for use in London and was likely made at a later date: a note on the title page states that the pagination of the two volumes was different necessitating cross-references to the Windsor version to be added in pencil.
Evidence in the various inventories shows that books were taken to and from George’s libraries during his reign. Several pages listing books on natural history and agriculture in the inventory of the Kew library (RCIN 1028954) as well as a number of sermons were scored through with notes in ink stating that they were now at Windsor. Such a movement likely happened in the 1790s when George III began land improvements in Windsor Great Park and it required additional pages to be added to the inventories. Also in the 1790s, the King began fitting out a larger library space in Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park as the Queen’s Lodge was no longer able to accommodate the sheer quantity of volumes added to his collection. Once the books were moved, the inventories were updated with the shelfmarks of their new location.
At the onset of his final illness, George III was confined to a suite of rooms recently completed in the Upper Ward of the Castle (now part of the Print Room and underneath the present Royal Library) and a small selection of books were taken up to him. Following the accession of George IV, the King’s Library in London was graciously presented to the nation in 1823. George III’s personal collections were not included in the gift and when William IV came to the throne in 1830, it was decided that they would form one of the core collections of his new Royal Library. The librarian, John Glover gathered this and other disparate collections (including the library at Kew, taken in 1822 to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, and George IV’s library at Carlton House) and began to compile a new inventory (RCINs 1028960-3) using the Windsor catalogue and other volumes for reference. In the books he identified as coming from this collection, Glover marked on a flyleaf the letters ‘WL’ and the corresponding page number in the inventory.