Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (6 page)

The ramparts remain, of course, as a picturesque reminder of the Castle’s former strategic importance, but they were remodelled to add beauty and further quaintness by Robert Adam in the eighteenth century. The surrounding meadows were once forested for hunting, but were cleared and replanted by the great Capability Brown (1716–1783) to make a landscape that, though it is working agricultural land, looks as contrived as it in fact is. His work is to be found as far away as Russia (Munich still has an English garden). Inside, the building has naturally been modernized in keeping with domestic rather than defensive use. Its crude medieval might was early on counterbalanced by lavish State Apartments and elegant Georgian plasterwork. The Percys have not (like the Dukes of Rutland at their home in Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire) replaced the medieval fortress with a more comfortable, later version of a Gothic castle. They did not need to make such sweeping changes to their ancestral home because they had others – two major houses in and near London (their property at Syon in Middlesex was designed by the Adam brothers in the 1770s). Alnwick Castle, meanwhile, has become known throughout the world as a location for films, which not only helps publicize it to potential visitors but brings in useful extra revenue. Of the eight films that have to date been made in the grounds, the most well-known must be
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
(2001) and its sequel
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(2002), where the castle features as the exterior of Hogwarts School. New life for an ancient house.

The Berkeleys live in Gloucestershire. They have sometimes been titled – they were Earls of Berkeley – and sometimes not. Their Norman ancestor, Roger de Berkeley, died in 1193, and his descendants still live in the castle he built, with its circular keep and outer courtyard, overlooking the surrounding meadows. This family home, like Alnwick Castle, looks as if it could still withstand a siege, and many of its interiors are plain and feudal in appearance. It is easy to imagine this house as the setting for a medieval battle, but more difficult to picture an Edwardian ball going on there.

Country houses, in other words, are extremely varied in terms of size, appearance, facilities, sumptuousness. They may have been demolished and rebuilt, or altered out of recognition, or left more or less as they were originally built. Changes depend on the family’s wealth or upon its sense of fashion. Some – the socially or politically ambitious – wished to be at the forefront of current taste while others, devoted to their land rather than to prestige, allowed their homes to remain unaltered.

Blair Castle is in Scotland, set in Perthshire against the backdrop of the Grampian Mountains. It has been the home of the Earls, later the Dukes, of Atholl since the fifteenth century, though the oldest part of the building dates from 1269. Though large, undoubtedly imposing and conspicuous – its whitewashed walls are visible for miles against the dark, pine-covered hills – it is obvious at a glance that it was not planned but has evolved over the centuries from a much smaller structure. It has considerable vernacular charm but, despite having been extensively remodelled in the eighteenth century, it lacks the decorative touches so beloved of the Georgians. There are no Grecian-style columns, no balustrades, no splendid pediments, no statuary. It looks grimly defensive rather than built for pleasure or to show off art collections. It began as a fortress and remained one until the eighteenth century. Indeed in one of those quirks of history that make British country houses so much fun to examine, the Dukes are entitled to raise and maintain the only private army in Britain. The Atholl Highlanders, a splendidly kilted unit that parades in the Duke’s tartan, armed with archaic weaponry, is the last remnant of the bands of armed followers that were, until relatively recently, a necessity for all Highland chieftains. Again, this house is not short of historical romance, but it would not fit with the image of Victorian or Edwardian luxury that so often comes to mind when we imagine the world of the country house. Its interiors, it must be said in fairness, are very imposing. The dining room is a showpiece of the plasterer’s art, and the sporting facilities – the fishing, shooting and stalking so dear to the hearts of the upper class – are magnificent. It is undeniably a great house, but somehow looks too intimate to be a ducal estate.

The advent of the Tudor dynasty, which came to power in the person of Henry VII in 1485, brought to an end the decades of strife that had ravaged England through the fifteenth century. Houses built after that date gradually came to look less like fortresses and more like homes. There was a new symmetry in their outline; there were windows on the ground floor. In the sixteenth century, throughout the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, the country went through religious convulsions that amounted to a revolution, but this did not involve – as it did on the Continent – actual warfare. England’s architecture continued its peaceful development. A house like Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire (1565), for instance, not only displays no defensive features but boasts considerable variety of decoration, not least in the repeated motif of the initials ‘ES’ on its roof balustrade, proclaiming its owner to be Elizabeth Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury (more commonly known as Bess of Hardwick). It is difficult to imagine such fripperies being added even to a grand house a generation or two earlier.

After Henry VIII’s break from Rome, those men who were wealthy enough to buy monastic lands from the king very often acquired a title to go with them. An entire new class of aristocrats emerged. The names of their family seats often betray their architectural origins: the Dukes of Bedford live at Woburn Abbey, for instance; the Byron family, to which the poet belonged, lived at Newstead Abbey; Sir Henry Fox-Talbot, the pioneer of photography, lived at Lacock Abbey. Of these three houses, one – Woburn – has been rebuilt as a Palladian mansion that bears no resemblance to a monastery. The other two, probably because the families were not wealthy enough to demolish and rebuild, are the original monastic buildings and still look, from the outside at least, much as they did before the Reformation. Both of them still have cloisters. In the case of Byron, his ancestral home (which he had eventually to sell to pay off his debts) provided the perfect setting of Gothic romance for a man who revelled in the dissolute reputation that he had.

One of the grandest country houses ever built in England was Hampton Court, sited on the Thames some miles south-west of London. It was created for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1474–1530), Archbishop, Chancellor, and national administrator for the young King Henry VIII, between 1517 and 1520. The size of a Cambridge college and, with its chapel and great hall and brick-paved courtyard, looking remarkably similar to one, like its creator it proved too ostentatious for the king’s liking. Henry confiscated it when Wolsey fell from grace and, considerably added to in a later era, it has been a royal palace ever since. Its original core represents several things. First, it shows a distinctive type of architecture that is instantly recognizable as both English and Tudor, a style that first became established because of this building, though paradoxically a number of craftsmen were imported from other countries to help create it. Secondly, it was a triumph of domestic architecture, showing what glories could be created if one’s budget were large enough. Wolsey was the richest man in England after the monarch; he need spare no expense in purchasing land and materials, or in hiring the skills of those who used them. He thought on a grand scale, as can be seen from his other great surviving building project: Christ Church, Oxford. Hampton Court is the prototype for the purpose-built country house.

It was in the sixteenth century that architects first began creating country houses from scratch, in the grand manner, rather than adapting existing military or religious buildings into private dwellings, and it would be a further hundred years before such a practice fully got into its stride. The first Baroque house in England was Chatsworth in Derbyshire, built for the Duke of Devonshire by William Talman from 1687–96, and still lived in by the Devonshires today. Talman was rapidly eclipsed by another, untrained but highly gifted, architect, Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726). He was a surprisingly versatile man who not only created great houses despite his complete lack of architectural training (he collaborated with the great Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1661–1736, who could provide the necessary professional skills), but also earned an honourable place in the canon of English literature by writing comedies that are still performed,
The Relapse
and
The Provok’d Wife
being the most well-known. He had travelled widely, to both India and the Continent. Imprisoned for more than four years in Paris, he came to know and admire French architecture and was influenced by such buildings as the Louvre and the Château Fortress of Vincennes. He also educated himself in English architecture by making a tour of many of the grandest existing country seats.

A man of winning charm and ready wit, Vanbrugh won the friendship, and thus the patronage, of several extremely powerful men. In particular his membership of the Whig ‘Kit-Cat Club’ brought him into contact with the 3rd Earl of Carlisle (1669–1738) whom he persuaded to employ him as builder in the building of Castle Howard, the Earl’s seat in Yorkshire. Work there began in 1699, as soon as Vanbrugh had returned from his inspirational tour.

The result was highly impressive. Castle Howard became the most continental-looking house in Britain, a Baroque masterpiece that was, however, very English in its comparative subtlety and understatement. The same was said, incidentally, of Christopher Wren’s rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, a project that was its near contemporary (1675–1708). It was not the cathedral but the great house, however, that was to make the Baroque suddenly fashionable in England. Castle Howard was undeniably grand, if less flamboyant than its counterparts in Europe. The house had a domed central block to contain the family’s rooms for living and receiving in, as well as for displaying their notable collections of paintings, antiquities and bronzes. This central building was flanked by two matching wings housing the more prosaic elements of life – the servants’ quarters, laundry and stables.

Lord Stanhope, observing Castle Howard from a distance in its setting of parkland embellished with the works of man and nature – gazebos, lawns, stands of trees – was deeply impressed by the ‘temples on high places, worthy of being each a metropolis of the Druids . . . the noblest lawn in the world fenced by half the horizon, and a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive. I have seen gigantic palaces before, but never a sublime one.’

Castle Howard gave Vanbrugh such pre-eminence that, only five years after starting on the Yorkshire house, he was granted the most prestigious architectural commission in the land. Blenheim Palace was to be built by the nation in thanks to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill was a military commander who had defeated the mighty forces of King Louis XIV at the Bavarian village of Blindheim (anglicized to Blenheim). The Government was to bear the cost, and the house was to be a national war memorial as well as a family home. The former function, in fact, was to become the more important, and Blenheim would never be a comfortable place in which to live. The Duke’s wife Sarah, a woman of formidable personality, disliked Vanbrugh’s design from the beginning for that precise reason, and their quarrels would eventually lead him to resign before the project was completed.

The Duchess had wanted Sir Christopher Wren to undertake the work, but it was the Queen and the Government, not Sarah herself, who decided how big the house should be. Though she was not paying for it, the Duchess objected to the soaring cost and to the architect’s extravagance. (Her husband, equally tightfisted, was said never to dot his ‘i’s when writing, as a way of saving ink.) After quarrelling with the Queen and falling from favour, the Duchess and her husband went to live abroad, returning to England only after Queen Anne’s death. The rift meant that the sovereign ceased to pay for work on Blenheim, and it must therefore be completed at the Marlboroughs’ own expense. Costs were immediately cut, new – and allegedly less skilled – workmen were employed, and after a major argument Vanbrugh walked off site and abandoned the project, which had to be finished by his colleague Hawksmoor. The Duchess did not forgive him, and when in 1725 he attempted to visit Blenheim, paying like any other member of the public, he was forbidden to enter even the grounds, let alone the house.

Blenheim became the largest non-royal residence in Britain. It looms from a distance out of its parkland like a great golden citadel. It has been described, both at the time and since, as looking more like a fortress – or indeed a fortified city – than a country house. In the manner of Castle Howard it comprises a central block for the family with, rather than wings that sweep into the distance, two rectangular blocks for the servants and their activities, built around courtyards. There is another very imposing entrance courtyard that visitors only see after they have passed through a massive stone triumphal arch. The scale of the house is so massive that anyone reaching it must feel diminished. It is a memorial not to a great family but to one man. The focus within the grounds is the column from which the 1st Duke’s statue looks down on his domain, and even in the chapel where he is buried, the interior is dominated not by religious emblems or by statues of saints but by another carved stone likeness of him. Blenheim, the apotheosis of Baroque architecture in Britain, was the biggest, the grandest, the most overwhelming country house in English history.

The homes given to other, later great commanders – for this became the traditional reward for military valour – have never been so overwhelming. Over a century after Vanbrugh worked on Blenheim, the Duke of Wellington was given the house of Stratfield Saye. Nelson, though killed in his moment of triumph, had already been given Merton Place on the outskirts of London. Though grand enough to house a member of the aristocracy, neither was as glaringly, deliberately awe-inspiring as Blenheim. Though admired by some, the house did not provide a popular model to be followed by other architects or landowners.