Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (7 page)

One person who saw it early on was Voltaire. As a Frenchman he might perhaps have been expected to dislike its bombastic triumphalism. His reaction was instead one of amusement. ‘What a great heap of stone,’ he commented, ‘without charm or taste.’ It was also remarked at the time that the house – both inside and out – resembled a stage set, and this may not have been coincidental, given the architect’s other occupation. It does indeed seem like a film set, and has been used as one: it featured as the Castle of Elsinore in Kenneth Branagh’s production of
Hamlet
(1996). The present Duke of Marlborough enjoyed the experience so much that he took part in the film himself.

Vanbrugh’s third and final design was also created for a military hero. Seaton Delaval in Northumberland is considerably smaller than Blenheim, as befits a more modest victory. It was begun in 1718 for Admiral George Delaval. Once again it resembles a fortress, though this time a more intimate family dwelling than a major defensive work. Its style is rather more austere, as perhaps befits a house set in the barer landscape of north-east England, though ironically it owes more to European influences – it borrows heavily from Palladio’s Villa Foscari – than do Vanbrugh’s other designs.

One thing that makes British country houses such a pleasure to study or to visit is the sense of humour, playfulness and sheer daftness that is often displayed by their owners and builders. This is not an area in which they can claim to be unique, for similar examples abound throughout Europe and the world. The site of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was at one time destined to be occupied by a giant statue of an elephant, which visitors could climb, and the gardens of Versailles and Tivoli and Peterhof contain trick fountains that squirt the unwary. Yet among the British upper class there is a long tradition of eccentricity, and this has sometimes found expression in their houses.

‘The Pineapple’ is in Scotland, near the town of Falkirk. It is on an estate formerly owned by an aristocratic family: the Murrays, Earls of Dunmore. In 1761 they had a hothouse built in the Palladian style on the edge of a walled garden. It was a long structure on two storeys, the lower of which was for the growing of the exotic fruit in a tropical climate provided by furnaces and air-ducts. The floor above was for the accommodation of the gardeners. When the 4th Earl, who served as Governor of New York until the outbreak of the American Revolution, returned to Scotland he commissioned an addition – a stone pineapple some 46 feet tall, with a room inside that would form a cupola and act as a summerhouse. No one is entirely sure who designed and built it, though opinion favours Sir William Chambers, an architect who contributed much to the beauty both of Scottish country houses and to the New Town of Edinburgh. The Pineapple is perfect in its botanical detail – as is to be expected, when specimens of the fruit were growing only feet away in the hothouse beneath. It is built of the same limestone as the rest of the building, and sits like a crown over the entrance arch, perfectly symmetrical with the rest of the building, and looking as if it had always been intended to be there. It is so cleverly contrived that water cannot collect anywhere on the segmented surface or among the leaves, to form ice and thus crack the stone in cold weather. One of the most splendidly exotic buildings in Europe, the Pineapple is a tribute both to the man who commissioned it and to the one who created it. It now belongs to the National Trust for Scotland but can be rented by members of the public as a holiday home (they stay in the gardeners’ cottages to either side of the actual fruit).

Because it has always been a trading nation, Britain has for centuries been open to influences from all parts of the world. It is commonplace in British country houses to find a mix of styles recalling the travels of a past owner, who brought back drawings, plans or even stonework and architectural features to beautify his family home. This was especially the case during the heyday of the Grand Tour (
c
.1660–1840s), when young aristocrats, after finishing their studies at school or university, were sent on a circular tour of the European continent to make what they could of the treasures of antiquity. From Paris they travelled to Rome, then to Naples and Herculaneum to view the ruins of Pompeii. They returned via Germany and the Low Countries. In an age of difficult and expensive travel this was a once-in-a-lifetime look at the world before they settled down, to run their estate or sit in Parliament. It was not only an education but a shopping trip, for they brought home antiquities by the shipload. (Literally, in some cases. If a young man had bought some large and cumbersome statuary he might be able, through parental influence or the good offices of a British Consul, to have it conveyed by any naval vessel conveniently in port.)

The influence of these journeys is everywhere to be seen in the ‘stately homes of England’. It is visible, for instance, in the entrance hall at Holkham Hall in Norfolk which, with its marble floors, alabaster columns and coffered ceiling, was modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. The paintings that decorate many houses also bear witness to the Grand Tour. Canvases by Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), showing fashionably dressed young men lounging against ancient statuary, are owned by a number of aristocratic British families. Even more well known are the Venetian views of Antonio Canal (Canaletto, 1731–85). These elegant paintings helped to form an idealized image of Italy for generations of Britons.

The Grand Tour, as a significant feature of aristocratic education, was brought to an end by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the subsequent war in which France and the United Kingdom fought on opposite sides. The conflict would last until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and would close the Continent of Europe to British travellers for a generation. Without the chance to look at foreign scenery, Englishmen were obliged to admire their own instead. The wilder corners of the British Isles had to substitute: Snowdonia for the Apennines, Bath or Edinburgh for Paris or Vienna. It helped Englishmen to realize that there were romantic landscapes to be seen in their own realm and to reawaken interest, and even pride, in what they had.

For nearly three and a half centuries Britain was involved with the Indian subcontinent, commercially, militarily and administratively. Hundreds of thousands of men served with the East India Company between 1599 and 1857, and many of them returned home with sizeable fortunes. One of these, Colonel John Cockerell, purchased the estate of Sezincote near Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire from the Earl of Guildford in 1795, and commissioned one of his brothers, Samuel Pepys Cockerell, to build him a house that would evoke the architectural and decorative style of India.

Samuel was a trained architect who had also served in the East, as Surveyor to the East India Company. He had already built a nearby house for another Indian ‘nabob’, Warren Hastings. At Sezincote, which was completed in 1810, he created a building that is still admired. It has a central block crowned by a Mughal dome and flanked by spindly minarets, and there is a single, sweeping wing that houses an orangery. The gardens were laid out in a Persian manner with many pools, though in the damp English climate this did not have the same luxuriant effect as in the Middle East. Sezincote is a jewel, a bastardized fragment of the Mughal world transported to a setting that is completely alien and unsympathetic, yet somehow it works. The house was to become the model for the famous Brighton Pavilion.

The Prince of Wales (later George IV) maintained a large home – Carlton House – in London, but wished to own a residence far enough from the capital to pursue his personal life in private, having secretly married a Roman Catholic. Brighton, a town on the Sussex coast some sixty miles south of London, was then becoming established as a fashionable summer resort under the patronage of his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland. In 1786 the Prince rented, and then bought, a farmhouse in the town, and the following year commissioned the architect Henry Holland to extend and beautify it. Holland would be the first of three architects to remodel a building that continued growing both in size and ornamentation as the prince became more and more committed to it. The farmhouse came to form one wing that was connected to a large rotunda that contained public rooms. A conservatory and a larger dining room were added in renovations in 1801–2, and at the same time a huge riding school was built on the other side of the garden.

A third round of expansion took place between 1815–22, this time under the direction of John Nash, who was later to build Buckingham Palace. The exteriors of Brighton Pavilion, as it became known after initially being named the Marine Pavilion, were a riot of Indian domes, cupolas, minarets. The interiors, though these also boast some Indian influence, were Chinese in style, echoing the fashion for ‘Chinoiserie’ that had dominated Europe in the eighteenth century. Brighton Pavilion was a structure entirely alien to its English setting, whimsy on a huge scale, a royal residence of such eccentricity that its equal would not be seen until the creations of King Ludwig II of Bavaria half a century later. The house passed eventually to the Prince’s heir, Queen Victoria, who did not like it (it was far too close to the public streets to offer any privacy) and created her own summer home on the Isle of Wight. It was bought from the Crown by the town of Brighton and used for public events, but during the Great War in the following century, in a highly ironic twist of fate, was converted into a hospital for . . . Indian soldiers.

The most ambitious country house in Britain, as well as by far the most eccentric, took shape amid the Wiltshire countryside between 1796 and 1813. Fonthill Abbey was the home of William Beckford (1760–1844). To describe him as wealthy would be a considerable understatement. Indeed he was described as ‘the richest commoner in England’. At the age of ten he inherited a fortune derived from West Indian sugar plantations that would be the equivalent of more than £100 million today, and thus grew up unable to remember a time when he could not gratify any wish. He was, however, an unusual character with few friends. Suspected of homosexuality and the victim of what might now be termed a ‘hate campaign’, he was not regarded as acceptable by English Society and spent some years travelling on the Continent, absorbing its history and architecture. He was the author of a book, begun when he was twenty-one, called
Vathek
– one of the ‘Gothic novels’ in vogue in his lifetime – and this has given him a modest renown in English literature.

An admirer of the Gothic Revival architecture that had been used to such effect at Sir Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and which was to remain in fashion for a century, Beckford too wanted to live in a medieval fantasy. Though he could probably have found a Tudor country house of the Lacock Abbey sort – a converted monastic building – to adapt to his taste, he did not do so. He could with equal ease have rebuilt any number of genuine, pre-Reformation ecclesiastical ruins and made himself a home from them. He could have remodelled the family house he inherited – Fonthill Splendens. Instead he chose to build himself a medieval-style abbey, on a scale bigger than Glastonbury or Bury St Edmunds, from the ground up. He also wanted it built fast.

Though Beckford was in a tearing hurry to have it finished, the architect he employed, Thomas Wyatt, was notoriously slow and inefficient, wasting time to the extent that his projects might be whole years behind schedule, and frequently failing to turn up for meetings with his patrons or clients. During his periodic absences Beckford simply took over supervision of the work. The plan called for a massive structure that was not – like a real monastery – built around a cloister or a series of courtyards, but instead formed a cruciform shape with four long wings. These converged on a central octagonal space that was to be topped with a tower 300 feet high. Beckford was so committed to the project that he employed 500 workmen and had them organized into shifts that worked round the clock. When these proved insufficient he almost doubled their numbers by bringing in another 450, enticing them away from Windsor Castle where they had been working for the King. His tactic was simple – he promised them a more generous beer ration!

Like many later houses in the nineteenth century, when grand new homes would be thick upon the ground, Fonthill was deliberately designed to look as if it had stood for centuries by incorporating different architectural styles, suggesting changing fashions and the work of one generation overlaying or altering that of the last.

Wyatt had suggested for the central tower a material called ‘compo cement’ – timber to which wet cement was applied as a kind of stucco. This was not suitable for a structure so tall or so massive, and the tower collapsed. It was simply rebuilt, six years later, but this too fell down. Beckford, whose enthusiasm for the building seemingly could not be dented even by disasters on this scale, ordered it to be rebuilt immediately. This took a further seven years, but this time stone was used and the tower stayed up – until 1825, when it collapsed for the third and final time. Here was an intriguing instance of history repeating itself. As readers of William Golding’s novel
The Spire
will know, medieval cathedral builders had faced the constant danger that ambitiously tall towers would not stand up. They had understood far less about structural engineering, and had had to proceed by trial and error. If Fonthill had been a genuine medieval abbey, it might well have suffered the collapse of its central tower. For this to happen so many centuries later implied that construction techniques had not advanced greatly over the intervening years, but then no tower of this height had been attempted by builders of any era.

The house was finished, give or take the fine details, in 1813. As a largely friendless man, Beckford did not inaugurate it with a public celebration. He did not feast his neighbours, or invite royalty or aristocracy to stay. He lived there alone, occupying only a few of the numerous rooms, though his household staff would have filled the servants’ quarters. He dined alone, though he wished twelve meals to be prepared and sent in on each occasion, he chose one and the rest were returned. He hosted visitors only once; Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton were his guests. In that year Nelson, having defeated Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile and thus put an end to French control of Egypt (Britain feared this would threaten the Indian Empire), was the greatest celebrity – and therefore presumably the most sought-after dinner guest – in the land. Thus Beckford’s only venture into hospitality at least netted him the country’s biggest celebrity. One winter he announced that he would not eat Christmas dinner unless it had been prepared in the new kitchens he had ordered to be built. His workmen rushed the job – never a sensible thing to do, especially when dealing with building on this scale – and the dinner was duly ready in time, though the kitchens fell down as soon as he had finished the meal.