Castle (32 page)

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the replacement window trade in England was booming, thanks to a minor revolution in the glazing industry. Glazed windows had been the norm for aristocratic dwellings since the thirteenth century, but glass could only be produced in small sheets, and was expensive to manufacture. Curiously, the sudden improvement in the later sixteenth century cannot be linked to any dramatic technological change (that came slightly later, in the early seventeenth century, when glaziers began to use coal-fire furnaces). The advances made in William Somerset’s day were due solely to the arrival of Continental artisans, equipped (it seems) with nothing more than greater
savoir-faire
than their English counterparts. Coming from Normandy and Lorraine, attracted no doubt by the prospect of untapped markets, these glaziers set up shop in Sussex and Staffordshire and promptly made a fortune. Windows were suddenly cheaper and bigger. For the less well off, this meant that they could enjoy the benefits of a product that had hitherto been restricted to only the very wealthy. For the very wealthy, it meant they could indulge themselves with fantastical amounts of glass. Elizabethan courtiers began to build great ‘prodigy’ houses, with hundreds of giant windows. At Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, such was the scale of the glazing job that locals coined the rhyme ‘more glass than wall at Hardwick Hall’. For castle owners, the new market in glass meant that the small narrow windows of yesteryear could be ripped out and replaced with grand new ones. At Kenilworth Castle, the twelfth-century keep had large windows inserted on the first floor. At Carew, a late thirteenth-century castle in Pembrokeshire, enormous ranges of glass were added to the original buildings. The great thirteenth-century tower at Chepstow (Marten’s tower) was flooded with light in a similar fashion.

Raglan’s fifteenth-century hall, with its sixteenth-century windows
.

At Raglan, William Somerset’s principal concern was his rather dingy great hall – one of the oldest parts of the castle. When he rebuilt its eastern wall, he provided the main body of the room with three large windows, while at the far end he treated himself to a grand oriel window (a window which projects from a building), better to illuminate his guests at dinnertime.

Tudor aristocrats were not simply content, however, with replacement windows. The courtyard style that was gaining popularity in the sixteenth century had led to the creation of a new species of room, and the availability of better, cheaper glass only encouraged the fashion. At aristocratic residences all over the country, masons and glaziers set to work to construct long narrow corridors, typically over a hundred feet from end to end. Such rooms were called (appropriately enough) long galleries, and every self-respecting homeowner had to have one.

Castle owners looked on enviously. The architecture of a castle could occasionally extend to indulge the private whims of its noblest inhabitants; some castles, especially later ones, were provided with private chambers, parlours and gardens. On the whole, however, castle architecture was predominantly functional. Halls were for dining and entertaining, kitchens for cooking, bedrooms for sleeping. The invention of long galleries suddenly raised the stakes in terms of frivolous opulence.

There was no fundamental need for a long gallery – it was not a covered walkway to link two other rooms; no one would sleep or dine in one; it did not, like the chapel, bring you closer to God; and it was certainly not provided with toilets. A long gallery, in the words of Roger North, a seventeenth-century authority on the subject, was ‘for no other use but pastime and leisure’. Its point was recreation. In North’s opinion, the idea had originated in Italy, where sophisticated members of society would pass their time in conversation while wandering along outdoor colonnades (columned walkways). Such architecture was fine for the villa-owning elite of southern Europe, but England was far too chilly for such
al fresco
chats. The obvious solution was to bring an equivalent amount of space indoors, and the long gallery was the result. It provided an interior area where genteel ladies could take a stroll without fear of catching cold. Gentlemen who needed to brush up on their fencing could repair to the gallery if rain stopped play outside. Both groups could convene in the gallery in order to rehearse their dance moves. But one did not need a specific reason; it was simply the nicest possible room for enjoyment and relaxation – a place to sit and while away the time, to make pleasant conversation, and to exhibit the trappings of wealth and taste. By the end of the sixteenth century, such was the popularity of galleries that people had even started to hang pictures in them.

Fitting a gallery inside a castle was no mean feat, but that of course did not stop fashion-conscious castle owners from trying. We have
already
seen how Danzig Willie’s designer struggled to squeeze one inside Craigievar, in spite of the overriding importance of making the castle tall and slender. The result just about works, but its position high up on the castle’s fifth floor would not have impressed gallery connoisseur Roger North. For him a gallery had to be down low, ideally on the first floor – off the ground, but easy to access. ‘Higher than the next floor it must not be, for such as are in garrets, as I have often seen, are useless, because none will purchase the use of them with paines of mounting.’ When you climb the stairs to the gallery at Craigievar, you can see what he means – the ascent in itself is exercise enough. Willie’s descendants evidently agreed with North’s estimation that it was ‘irksome to think of climbing so high’; the gallery was later converted to servants’ quarters.

William Somerset, faced with the challenge of adding a gallery to Raglan, managed to pull it off with considerably more panache, though the position of his gallery on the second floor would still have irked Roger North. He might, however, have been tempted up the stairs by the sheer scale of Somerset’s gallery. It stretched over the roof of the existing chapel, screens passage and buttery, and a brand new section of castle allowed it to extend further still; from end to end it measured 126 feet. North might also have been placated by the quality, both of the interior fittings and the spectacular views from the far end, where the gallery concluded with a grand set of windows looking out across the hills to the north. This magnificent room, however, did not even survive until North’s day; it is one of the most comprehensively ruined places in the castle. A few broken pieces of the great north window, and one half of a fine Renaissance fireplace, are all that remain of what was once Raglan’s most glorious room. However, some idea of its vanished splendour can be gained from contemporary equivalents. The gallery at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, for example, if hung with paintings, would look very similar to the one that graced Raglan.

William Somerset’s additions to Raglan were not confined to the infrastructure of the castle. He also began a redevelopment of the grounds and gardens that was continued by his son and grandson, transforming his home from a castle into a pleasure palace. By the time we finally catch up with Henry Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, who inherited his father’s estate in 1628, the castle was, in the words of a contemporary, ‘accounted one of the fairest buildings in England’. The moat about the great tower had been ringed with a walkway, complete with niches containing the busts of Roman emperors. From the water rose a great fountain, its plume leaping to the same height as the castle walls. To the west lay a bowling green, admired for its situation and fine views. Beyond lay gardens and meadows, ‘fair built with summer houses, delightful walks, and ponds’. Into the distance stretched ‘orchards planted with fruit trees, parks thick planted with oaks and richly stocked with deer’.

No one arriving at Raglan in 1640 would have been in any doubt that they were in for a good time. The marquis of Worcester, with an income of £24,000, was accounted one of the richest individuals in the kingdom. His household extended to some five hundred persons; besides him and his large family, there were the steward, the comptroller, and the cook; the master of arms and the master of hounds; the wardrober and the secretary; brewers, bakers, and bailiffs; footmen, grooms, ushers, and doormen; chaplains, foresters and falconers; waiters, parkers and pages.

We also have some sense of what the marquis of Worcester was like at this time, thanks to one of his chaplains, Dr Thomas Bailey. Later in life, Bailey collected a number of his former master’s favourite stories and reminiscences, and published them under the rather misleading title
Wittie Apophthegmes
. Few are genuinely clever or funny – for the most part they are the self-indulgent tales of an old man, doubtless much improved by constant retelling. Nevertheless, Bailey claimed to have compiled them with ‘exactness and choice’, and they provide us
with
a portrait of a kindly, good-natured man, with a nice line in self-deprecating humour, and much liked by his family and household.

For over two hundred years, the marquis and his family had lived at Raglan castle, making it bigger and better with each year that passed – more opulent, more brilliant, more lavish. They could afford to do so because England was a peaceful place. The biggest danger to the marquis was gout; according to Dr Bailey, he was more than partial to a drop of claret. (‘Give it to me, in spite of all physicians and their books,’ he once quipped. ‘It never shall be said I forsook my friend to pleasure my enemy.’)

But the days of small talk in long galleries were drawing to a close. For the first time in its history, Raglan was going to experience war. It only remained to be seen whether the marquis and his ancestors, by customizing their castle, had compromised its defences.

The war was the English Civil War, or as some historians more appropriately call it, ‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. To say what sparked the conflagration is difficult. A complicated mixture of causes combined to bring society to its knees in the 1640s. Some were long-term, deep-rooted problems that had existed for many decades; others were catastrophes brought about by particular individuals and specific events at the time.

Certainly one of the major causes was religion. The three kingdoms had been moving in different directions for a hundred years since the Reformation. Ireland, although it had been settled by a powerful minority of Protestants, remained a Catholic country. Scotland, by contrast, had become fiercely Protestant, having adopted an uncompromising form of worship known as Presbyterianism. It was England, however, that had ended up with the strangest arrangement of all. The Anglican Church was a curious blend of contradictory positions: a lot of the doctrine was Protestant, but the Church itself was still governed along traditional Catholic lines. Most of the population in England
were
regular attendees of Anglican services, some of them zealously so. There remained, however, a small but powerful Catholic minority who were not. They tended to be aristocrats, who had both the chapels in which to practise their religion privately, and the money to pay the fines that the government imposed for non-attendance at Protestant services.

The marquis of Worcester was one such Catholic aristocrat. In his chapel at Raglan (of which very little remains) he would have continued to listen to mass surrounded by gold and silver plate, and the icons and crucifixes that many of his fellow countrymen would have considered idolatrous. But despite being a member of a small religious minority, penalized if not persecuted, the marquis himself does not appear to have been a zealot. He was a godly man, certainly; Dr Bailey recalled that in all the years he spent in the marquis’s household, he ‘never saw a man drunk, nor heard an oath amongst any of the servants… very rare it was to see a better ordered family’.

But the marquis could not see much point in arguing about religion.

‘Men are often carried by the force of their words further asunder than their question was at first,’ he once said. ‘Like two ships going out of the same haven, their journeys’ end is many times whole countries distant.’

This tolerant attitude was no mere pose; the marquis applied his philosophy when recruiting his domestic staff.

‘What was most wonderful,’ Bailey recalled, was ‘half of them being Protestants and half Papists, yet never were at variance in point of religion.’

Under the marquis’s roof at Raglan, Protestant and Catholic worked side by side, with the marquis – genial, tolerant and wise – presiding over all like a good father.

If only as much could have been said for his king. Charles I, son of James I (James VI of Scotland) had come to the throne after his
father’s
death in 1628. A silly and stubborn man by nature, Charles contrived to make himself even more unpopular by his stance on matters of religion. The king and his court hankered after bells and smells in their church services, despite the fact that many Protestants saw this as Catholicism creeping in by the back door. Charles had also further compounded his error in the opinion of his subjects by choosing to take a Catholic as his queen.