Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (11 page)

By the end of the century the country house – as can be seen from the examples built by Lutyens or Sir Reginald Blomfield – was a less rigidly organized, punctilious and formal, and a more relaxed, place. There had been a rationalizing of design and function so that the new country houses being built were designed primarily for the comfort of those who often did their work elsewhere and came to them only for relaxation. The architecture of a house like Chatsworth, for instance, would have been equally appropriate in the midst of a city, and its elegant, embellished façade may look splendid but stands in contrast to, rather than fitting in with, the adjacent landscape. Later houses were more consciously harmonious with their surroundings. As well as looking as though they had been there for centuries, their vernacular styles were intended to reflect the virtues of the countryside, the simplicity of life there, the sense of deep cultural roots, the closeness to nature and the rhythm of the seasons. There was about them a staged unpretentiousness that sometimes became pretentious. They were also designed to catch the sun, their surfaces were simplified by plain oak fixtures and areas of white paint. As is often the case, this move towards simplicity occurred at the same time as a downturn in the fortunes of many landowning families.

The arrival of cheap imported corn from North America led to a lasting depression in British agriculture, and suddenly the prestige associated with land ownership – or at least the power that had always accompanied it – was gone. Many families, who had invested generations of time and effort in their estates, found themselves having to sell. A number of estates went to the new plutocratic class that had gradually wrested control of real power and wealth from the oldest aristocratic families. Other houses, inconveniently large or not aesthetically pleasing, failed to find a buyer. What some observers find surprising is that, throughout history, so many country houses have been demolished. This is not a fate that usually befalls more modest rural homes when they lose their original owners or purpose. An old yeoman’s house, a stable block, a former windmill . . . new functions can be found for all of these, and they can be converted without great difficulty. A country house is different. It is usually too big for a single family, who do not need the space and cannot afford the upkeep. It is difficult to get to, surrounded as it should be by acres of park or farmland. The bills for heating it, without which the damp could be catastrophic, can be immense, and so can the maintenance of huge expanses of roof, which cannot be allowed to leak. Many families who inhabit such structures retreat to one part of them – a single wing, or even a few rooms – because that is all they can afford to inhabit. The bigger the house, the more acute these difficulties are, and the more thoroughly uneconomical it is to maintain. So the image of a placid, timeless way of life going on amid archetypal English surroundings is, in the majority of cases, a sham. This was just as true in the Victorian and Edwardian eras as it is today. Beneath the tranquil surface there were usually grievous economic problems to be solved by each new generation.

One very obvious solution, during the black years of the nineteenth-century agricultural depression, was to marry money. This could mean the daughter of a millionaire soap-manufacturer, though there would be a danger of the aristocratic family which accepted her losing caste. The United States, whose economy had been one of the strongest in the world even by the time of the American Revolution, had now surpassed any other country in the world in wealth, displacing the United Kingdom which had previously occupied that position thanks to the Industrial Revolution. America was, after its Civil War (1861–5), enjoying a so-called ‘Gilded Age’, in which individual fortunes were made on a scale that dwarfed anything seen before. Steel and railroads, shipping lines, and even exported grain that was causing distress to British agriculture meant that the US dollar could buy the world. To make an alliance with a successful American family, whose members were often socially ambitious, seemed a simple solution to impecunious English aristocrats.

In Edith Wharton’s novel
The Buccaneers
(1938) she somewhat ruthlessly depicts the young women of eastern America whose mothers want them – and indeed who themselves want – to make good marriages and to rise in Society. This proves extremely difficult – even humiliating – in a country then in the process of forming its own aristocracy. The newer the institution, the more snobbish and restrictive it seems to be. Failing to make headway at home, the girls come to England, where they are resented as upstarts by some, and hated by the British girls with whom they are competing for husbands. Nevertheless they find fewer barriers to advancement in an older society that is willing to accept wealthy incomers, and they succeed in marrying, not least because the men find their company more amusing than that of conventionally brought up young Englishwomen. One girl becomes a duchess, though she quickly finds that her marriage is a matter of surface affection only and her husband is in fact homosexual.

In reality, American girls of precisely this sort crossed the Atlantic and successfully joined the British aristocracy. In most cases a marriage was arranged in which their primary role was to shore up, with the parental dollars, the crumbling home of a titled family. But not invariably . . . Mary Leiter, the daughter of a millionaire from Washington DC, became engaged to Lord Curzon in 1891. Theirs was a love match, and the couple remained happy together until her death in 1905 (from the effects of the drains at their official residence). Her money was to fund Curzon’s political career – he became Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, and very nearly Prime Minister.

Another instance, far better chronicled, was the straightforward money-for-title alliance of Consuelo Vanderbilt with ‘Sunny’, 9th Duke of Marlborough, which took place in New York in July 1894. The choice of husband, after several possibilities had been considered, was made by Consuelo’s mother, Alva. She dragooned the reluctant girl into marrying (Consuelo was in love with another man, who had been forced from the scene). Marlborough himself was indifferent. He too had already cast his affections elsewhere and was interested only in furthering his family and saving the enormous Blenheim Palace from decay. The marriage was a pretence and it ended in divorce within a decade. Consuelo moved abroad and created another life for herself.

It is worth remembering that it was not only taxes and the cost of maintenance that could threaten the continuity of a country house and its way of life. There was the same danger that had always existed: that the extravagance of an owner, or of his eldest son, would cause the family to have to sell. As always, the first things to go would be possessions – the contents – and the actual structure would be sold only as a last resort. In the library at Blenheim Palace is an immense organ, installed in Victoria’s reign. One reason for putting it there was to make the room look less bare, for more than 200 paintings had had to be sold by the eighth duke to pay off debts.

Such arrangements often worked for a generation or two, preserving the house and its treasures for half a century or so, but they could not usually provide a permanent solution, and later members of the family would have to resume the same process. In the drama
Downton Abbey
, the Earl of Grantham belongs precisely to the generation of young English landowners who married into America’s dollar aristocracy in order to maintain an ancestral home and pass it on to future generations. His wife has always been well aware of her role in this process, yet they have a fortunate marriage (in everything except the birth of a male heir) and a good deal of mutual affection. This was a not untypical situation. The culture shock for the new brides was often shocking, though the etiquette they encountered in Britain was as nothing to what they would have found in some other old European societies, such as Spain or Austria–Hungary. The British aristocracy proved flexible enough to absorb these newcomers, and the women in turn revitalized to some extent the world that they joined, so that the mix was on the whole a healthy and a positive one. Some went on to make great contributions to national life. Lady Randolph Churchill, another American trophy-bride, paid for and ran a hospital ship during the Second Boer or South African War, as did her compatriot and relative, the Duchess of Marlborough. These ladies were also credited with defusing political tension when in 1895 Britain and the United States almost went to war over a territorial dispute in Venezuela.

There was in fact nothing unheard of in the notion of new fortunes coming to the rescue of old ones, of the newly rich putting up monuments to their own success, or indeed of the public ridiculing them for doing so. Piccadilly, the quaintly named street in London’s West End, derives its name from one such case in the seventeenth century. Robert Baker was a manufacturer of piccadills, the type of starched, stand-up linen collars that were in fashion for both men and women in the time of Shakespeare. Having made a fortune from them, Baker bought land to the west of London in what was then open countryside and built a large house. Since the English love a lord but are guilty of a good deal of vicarious snobbery, they laughed at his pretensions and christened his home ‘Piccadilly Hall’. The nearby thoroughfare acquired the same name by association, and an official attempt, later in the seventeenth century, to rename it Portugal Street came too late. The original name had already stuck.

With the advent of international money to Britain and a new breed of successful tycoons, rich enough to live in a grand country house only at weekends, the role of the old landed aristocracy might have been threatened – but for one thing. The landowning class may have been losing money, just as earlier in the century it had lost political power, yet because the lifestyle it enjoyed was seen as the best that a wealthy, influential and historic country could offer, the established forms of aristocratic country life were eagerly seized upon and emulated by others, who did their best to keep up customs and standards of behaviour. From the outside, the privileged world of the English country house could seem quite unchanged.

In January 1897 the magazine
Country Life
was published for the first time. It captured, through sympathetic articles and evocative pictures, the world of traditional rural certainties that had in fact all but vanished, while simultaneously becoming the focus of widespread longing. This periodical, which continues to flourish today, was read by rural gentry and nostalgic ‘townies’ in equal measure. The British countryside had largely lost its role as provider of food for the nation, through the importing of cheap American corn, and beef and mutton frozen and shipped to its shores from as far away as Argentina and New Zealand. The rural landscape became, for the wealthy and the visiting townsman, a place of leisure and of sentimental quaintness. Commercial and industrial magnates, whose factories were shrouding the cities in grime and smoke, sought escape in their own rural idyll – complete with all the mod cons their new money could buy. It has been estimated that between 1835 and 1889 500 or so country houses were either built or restored. More than half of these were for the new class of wealthy families. To build one required the very considerable sum of £10,000. The cost of hiring servants for such a house was almost as much – about £8,000 per year to pay the wages of the 170 or so staff that would be necessary to run a medium-sized country seat.

The houses built for successful businessmen were frequently ugly, or at best unimaginative. This was because many of the owners had little aesthetic sense, and saw their homes only in terms of practicalities. These were men whose fortunes had been based on knowing what they wanted, and getting it. Instead of asking an architect for ideas, they laid down a series of demands that the building’s designer was obliged to incorporate, or else lose the commission. Few eminent or fashionable architects would have been willing to be bullied in that manner, and thus the ones who agreed to the work were either unremarkable or were unable to have much influence over the result. They gave their clients what they required, but the houses they built have not been cherished by posterity. Typical of them is the somewhat startling Overstone Hall in Northamptonshire, built by W. M. Teulon for Samuel Lloyd, a wealthy banker.

Where many derided these newer mansions as pure pastiche of past ages a number of them, because of the style in which they were built, have subsequently come to be regarded as treasures in their own right, examples of a time that saw significant achievements in building and decorating, and worthy of comparison with the great houses of other ages. Some of the finest properties in the keeping of English Heritage, Friends of Scottish Monuments or the National Trust in fact date from these years of late Victorian and Edwardian taste.

Widespread industrialization and the mass production of even artistic items by machinery, which had been celebrated at the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 as a wonder of technology and a source of national pride, had by the end of the century led to a reaction. This was expressed in the philosophy of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), and by one of his disciples, the socialist William Morris (1834–96), who had initially thought of becoming an architect himself but who instead developed into a polymathic creator who simply taught himself to work in any of the media he wished to practise. He became an extremely proficient artist and craftsman, and founded a loose endeavour devoted to precisely these things – the Arts and Crafts Movement. This sought to benefit both the creator and the consumer of artistic work. By restoring the practice of hand-made craftwork – by having furniture and fittings laboriously carved by experts rather than produced by machine, for instance – Morris sought to return to craftsmen the satisfaction and status of which mass production had robbed them, as well as giving the public artefacts that they could appreciate for their excellence. In keeping with Morris’s socialist views, he hoped that such works could be put within reach of the wider public, who would be educated by contact with them.