it was less unacceptable and controversial

It is my curse to be a student of history. Once you know something you can't 'unknow' it. The British were well aware, and there was controversy. This excerpt from the BBC/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524:

In May 1866, it was no longer easy to ignore the mounting catastrophe in Orissa. British administrators in Cuttack found their troops and police officers starving. The remaining inhabitants of Puri were carving out trenches in which to pile the dead. "For miles round you heard their yell for food," commented one observer.

As more chilling accounts trickled into Calcutta and London, Mr Beadon made a belated attempt to import rice into Orissa. It was, with cruel irony, hindered by an overabundant monsoon and flooding. Relief was too little, too late, too rotten. Orissans paid with their lives for bureaucratic foot-dragging.

For years, a rising generation of western-educated Indians had alleged that British rule was grossly impoverishing India. The Orissa famine served as eye-popping proof of this thesis. It prompted one early nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji, to begin his lifelong investigations into Indian poverty.

India had enough food supplies to feed the starving - why had the government instead let them die? While Orissans perished in droves in 1866, Mr Naoroji noted that India had actually exported over 200m pounds of rice to Britain. He discovered a similar pattern of mass exportation during other famine years. "Good God," Mr Naoroji declared, "when will this end?"

It did not end anytime soon. Famines recurred in 1869 and 1874. Between 1876 and 1878, during the Madras famine, anywhere from four to five million people perished after the viceroy, Lord Lytton, adopted a hands-off approach similar to that employed in Ireland and Orissa.

By 1901, Romesh Chunder Dutt, another leading nationalist, enumerated 10 mass famines since the 1860s, setting the total death toll at a whopping 15 million. Indians were now so poor - and the government so indifferent in its response - that, he stated, "every year of drought was a year of famine."

It's hard for me, knowing about the famine(s) and the avarice of the Crown that precipitated such suffering, to appreciate the opulence of the Queen's estate.

I know, I know, I'm no fun :))) Can't help it, there it is. I feel the same about the grand plantations of the U.S. South. So romantic. So ideal, built with free labor, with lives stolen and lost.

Your blog is great. Your pictures fantastic. Your narrative clear and engaging. You are not responsible for history, but there it is. Sorry....