Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (4 page)

Is it only the British who have this passion for country houses? Is it only they who dream of one day living in a castle or a manor house or a Palladian mansion? Absolutely not. The same desire is found in virtually every country, for the British have no monopoly on gracious rural living. In other cultures there are equivalent places: the
château
in France, the
schloss
in Germany, the
dvor
in Poland, the
estancia
and the
hacienda
throughout the Spanish-speaking world. All these terms mean the same thing: a castle or an estate. A house surrounded by land. They can be emotive terms in their different languages, encapsulating a concept that appeals to a common sense of nostalgia and tradition.

One thing that made British country estates significantly different from those on the Continent, however, was the custom of primogeniture. In other countries, all the sons of a count or baron would become counts or barons too. In Britain only the first son would inherit the title, while his brothers were awarded some lesser appellation. By the same token only the eldest son would inherit the family lands, while the others generally inherited none. However unfair from their perspective, this meant that estates remained intact, not diminishing in size through the generations and centuries, as was often the case elsewhere. The alternative, widely seen in other societies, was that estates dwindled through constant subdividing between siblings. The family’s holdings remained the same, but often could not be farmed in a coordinated manner because there was confusion or failure to agree between all the owners. This gave the great British country houses a majesty, a power and a wealth that their counterparts elsewhere often could not match.

There are many country houses built on the English pattern in the United States, especially along the eastern seaboard. The homes of older American families, in Virginia, Georgia, Massachussetts or upstate New York, tended to be relatively unostentatious and modest in scale, however, and the really great houses – such as the Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore in North Carolina – belong to a more recent era (it was built between 1888 and 1895). These newer houses were therefore able to exist in the ‘grand manner’ for no more than three or four generations before the age of splendour and large staff came to an end. Though they are undoubtedly pleasant to look at and interesting to visit, they cannot compete with their long-established counterparts across the Atlantic.

In Europe there are, naturally, houses as ancient and as famous. The
châteaux
of the Loire Valley in France exceed in grandeur all but the greatest of English country houses, such as Burghley House in Lincolnshire (1558–87) and Wilton House in Wiltshire (
c
.1630–55). But then a certain modesty and ‘homeliness’ is something that adds to the appeal of many British stately homes.

What makes them different is their informality. In the eighteenth century their grounds were laid out not in rigid, geometrical parterres on the French model but as ‘wild’ meadow-like spaces, suitable for hunting, riding, walking. They became places for relaxation and not a mere backdrop for display by strutting, strolling aristocrats.

The contents of many British country houses accumulated over generations because after the English Civil Wars (1642–51) the United Kingdom was largely peaceful. There were no events dramatic enough to disperse both occupants and their possessions, as happened so often on the Continent. It is somewhat surprising to reflect that, for a country so active in world affairs and one that has been for centuries a major military power, Britain has been internally at peace for over 250 years. The last battle to take place on mainland British soil was as long ago as 1746, and that was in the far north of Scotland. For centuries no wars, revolutions, peasant uprisings or occupations by foreign powers have disturbed the peace of British parklands, though estate walls have not protected the occupants of great houses from economic slump and punitive taxation, which have sometimes proved to be as dangerous as weaponry.

The same cannot be said for many other corners of Europe. Even Scandinavia, considered a peaceful region, received the attentions of Peter the Great, Napoleon and Hitler. Most of central Europe suffered widespread devastation in the Thirty Years War (1618–48), a level of destruction that was not to be seen again until the 1914–18 conflict. France and Belgium saw most material damage in those latter years, while Italy was extensively fought over in the Second World War. The one truly neutral country, Switzerland (though invaded by Napoleon) had no aristocracy.

In Poland, Russia and parts of the old Habsburg Empire in central Europe, the scale of destruction was often massive. In the Russian countryside the local manor house was frequently a target for revolutionaries, and the fact that these dwellings were often built of wood made them easier to burn. A member of one landed family, returning to look for his forebears’ home after the end of Communism, found the park in which it had been set but not a trace of the house itself. He discovered the ‘footprint’ of the building only because of the surviving flower beds that had once surrounded it. When a house was left standing, it was emptied of its contents, which, if valuable, were hived off to museums and State collections, for in these countries it was illegal for citizens to own antiques. One Czech member of a landed family walked through the empty rooms of his ancestral castle in the 1990s, telling a British interviewer that only Western countries could afford to take for granted a sense of continuity with the past. Over the centuries his family had, he remarked laconically, lost everything no less than seven times.

In Germany the area containing the biggest landed estates – the Junker heartland of East Prussia – was right in the path of the advancing Russian armies in 1945. Aristocrats there were doubly hated by the conquerors as both ideological (fascist) and class enemies. Those who stubbornly refused to flee their homes could do nothing to protect their belongings or their position, and faced the bleak choice between harassment and imprisonment or death. Typical of them was a daughter-inlaw of Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’, who stayed at her family estate of Varzin and made preparations to kill herself before the Russians reached the gates. Countess Marion Donhoff’s memoir,
Before the Storm
, records:

No amount of warnings and arguments would persuade her to leave Varzin. She had no illusions about surviving the entry of the Russians, nor did she want to witness it. She had had a grave dug in the garden, for she assumed that later on nobody would have time to do so. Her old butler . . . also refused to leave.

Even the Irish Republic, so close to Britain that it shares the United Kingdom’s only land border, has not been as peaceful. The War of Independence and subsequent Civil War (1918–23) saw the abandonment or destruction of country houses as conspicuous symbols of rule by a foreign aristocratic caste. Similar troubles during the nineteenth century had already put a number of rural houses into a state of siege (defensive rifle-slits can still be seen in the walls of some). The owners of many big houses, either burned out or feeling that they did not fit into the new Ireland, sold up and left. For many decades after Independence, the republican orthodoxy of the Irish Government prevented funds being used – or legislation passed – to preserve or protect country houses. Many were put to other uses, demolished, or simply left to fall down.

This situation, though serious, was not the whole picture, however. There had been no policy in Ireland of banishing or persecuting the aristocracy as there had been after Communist takeovers, and a number of titled men served the new Republic as Senators. Others have lived undisturbed in the country ever since – the Dukes of Devonshire and Westminster, for instance, continue to occupy their families’ Irish homes. Nevertheless ‘the Troubles’ saw a significant break with the past and the dismantling of many private estates through confiscation and nationalization.

So Britain became by default a rare, if not quite unique, place of stability within the context of European aristocracy. It is not simply this, however, that has cast the common perception of the British country house in such an idyllic light. The British have shown a particular genius for creating gardens and interiors that are elegant yet comfortable, ostentatious yet understated, which is envied – and copied – throughout the world, and only the British have made their country houses into a major literary genre.

And then there are their servants. It would somehow be unthinkable that in other countries a butler (and this functionary is an English invention; in Europe he would be called a steward) could achieve the status in popular culture enjoyed by Jeeves and his confrères. The notion of a servant – even a senior one – occupying a position of benevolent influence over his employer, in the way that P. G. Wodehouse’s character does, would be unusual to say the least in many other countries.

Interest in the British class system is responsible for much of the fascination that greets films and books in this genre abroad. Many equivalent societies in Europe or America are not nearly so structured, so precise, so preoccupied with social status. Some places, like Scandinavia or the Netherlands, are too easy-going to have developed the type of social stratifications the British have. In others, such as Germany or Austria, these would historically have been even more pronounced, but those countries officially lost their monarchies and aristocracies almost a century ago, and social changes since then have ensured that this class will never again exert power in what are now bourgeois republics.

Even in the Germany of Wilhelm II or the Austria of the Habsburgs there was, in any case, no particular accent that divided the upper classes from everyone else. In Britain speaking ‘correctly’ was a badge of belonging, as was being educated at a school for the privileged that might be hundreds of miles from one’s home. As were the sports and games one pursued, or the quality of world-famous English tailoring that one wore. In many aspects of gentility it was Britain that set the tone, while the rich and aristocratic of other countries either followed or shook their heads in despair at the lunacy of it. The United Kingdom was the fountainhead of much that was fashionable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but equally of much that was considered eccentric, peculiar, funny. People throughout the world continue to find the British upper class amusing, not least because it is so superbly good at making fun of itself. Of novelists who have successfully dealt with this subject, either satirically or as a cultural phenomenon, all have been Britons themselves except for one: Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese author of
The Remains of the Day.

And in other countries there is just not the same fascination with aristocratic concerns. A Dutchwoman once commented to me that in her country popular culture was only interested in the stories of ‘ordinary people’, while a Dane took the view that because class distinctions were so much less precise there, writers or producers simply could not create a dramatic enough plot.

For the United States, of course, British history is the prelude to its own, and after Independence it is a matter of peoples following different paths. America, committed from its inception to republican ideals, would not have allowed the emergence of an openly aristocratic class, despite the fact that it has had the wealth and the institutions and the opportunities to do so. Nevertheless, without ever wishing to have such a system of landowning based on feudal practices or all the complexities of ceremonial titles for themselves, many other countries and societies can enjoy these things at a distance through the country-house creations of British authors and dramatists.

The ‘stately homes of England’ have been a staple of fiction for centuries, from the days of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen to Evelyn Waugh in the early twentieth century and
The Remains of the Day
at the end of it.
Downton Abbey
, of course, is the twenty-first century’s take on this perennially fascinating topic. They have provided locations for plays, opera (Henry James’ short novel
The Turn of the Screw
was adapted by Benjamin Britten), and numerous body-in-the-library murder mysteries as well as more serious literary works such as
Atonement, The Shooting Party, The Last September, Brideshead Revisited, Good Behaviour
and
Troubles
. In the first half of the twentieth century there was even an entire theatrical genre – that of ‘drawing-room comedy’ – devoted to the behaviour of polite, upper-class folk in the surroundings of opulent houses. In other words, it is clear that during the very decades later regarded as the heyday of the country house, it was equally revered in contemporary culture. This great era of country-house living has, in our own time, been the subject of major films and television programmes besides
Downton Abbey
, and public interest shows no sign of flagging.

As we wander the rooms and gardens of houses that we visit, it tends not to be the present-day life of the household on which we dwell. Instead our imagination will often take us – by express lift, as it were – straight to the world of the Victorians and Edwardians. Even if the house itself is much older, it is this era that will command our interest, for the century before 1914 is seen as the golden age of country-house living, the time in which these splendid settings came into their own. It is this period with which we are most familiar, and of which we think at once when the notion of a grand house comes to mind because, as we have seen, it was in these eras that country houses achieved an unsurpassed level of opulence and formality.

There were more country houses during this period than ever before or since. Britain gained vast wealth in the nineteenth century. Though agriculture suffered a huge decline, industry and commerce produced an echelon of new millionaires who aped the lifestyle of the old aristocracy, among whom a country estate became an important badge of belonging. Encompassing every degree of taste from elegant to hideous, new baronial-style dwellings sprouted in every corner of the British Isles. Though it is the
English
country house about which one so often hears, it is worth remembering that many of the best examples – the most gracious, or extravagant, architecture, the most immense estates, the wealthiest families, the most historic or romantic houses – are not in England at all but in Scotland or Ireland, and that in these countries there are many more of them. In the Deeside region of Scotland alone there are 35 castles.