Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (8 page)

Beckford remained at Fonthill until 1822. His tenure ended not because of falling masonry but because he had to sell. In that year he was involved in a legal dispute over property in Jamaica, and was obliged to dispose of both his house and its contents. Though it might have been seen as a colossal white elephant – a single man’s dream that would not appeal to anyone else – he found a buyer in John Farquhar, an extremely wealthy maker of ammunition, who paid the colossal sum of £330,000 for the house. He was not getting much of a bargain. Three years later the central tower fell down again, wrecking one of the wings. The house was soon abandoned, and most of it demolished. Well before the death of its builder, Fonthill was a pile of rubble and dubbed ‘Beckford’s folly’. Its sheer scale made it too impractical to live in or to maintain. It is probably something of a mercy that it fell down. Though parts of it still exist, the cost of upkeep for the complete building would no doubt have proved ruinous.

Beckford’s grand project in a sense heralded the arrival of a new era. Never in Britain’s history would so many great houses be built as in the nineteenth century. Never had such an influx of newcomers been able to afford the symbols, and the pleasures, of immense wealth. The
nouveau riche
far outnumbered those already in possession of property and land. They could have swamped the existing landowning class, changed it beyond recognition, remade all the rules. Yet they did not. The vast shift of wealth towards the middle class was no revolution. It did not see a redefining of social norms as the values of one class were replaced by those of another, nor any widening of the interests of the upper class. What happened instead was that the new arrivals effectively attached themselves to the way of life already in existence, and followed – often with slavish devotion – the behaviour and habits of those already at the top.

With polite society travelling between London, Bath, Brighton and other centres of entertainment, country houses were seen as useful places in which to break a journey, and at the appropriate times of year large numbers of people did so. If you were well dressed enough to look like a member of ‘polite’ circles, you might expect to arrive at any house and be shown around it.

Calling at, and being shown around houses, whether they were occupied at the time by their owners or not, became an established pleasure of the polite tourist. The visit by Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to the home of Mr Darcy, with the customary tour conducted by the housekeeper (for whom the tips given by such callers would be an important source of income), is a well-known literary instance of this. From the 1790s, when war against the French closed the European continent to English travellers and ruled out the Grand Tour, houses that echoed the architectural glories of Greece and Rome, and contained archaeological and artistic relics of them, became an important source of education for those who could no longer see the originals. The country house, which in previous ages had been largely a place from which to run the estate or sit out the winter (it was the town house in which collections were displayed and much polite entertaining done), now became a place to visit on its own account. At the same time, the Agricultural Revolution had made farming more profitable and efficient. Not only were up-to-date, well-run estates instructive and pleasurable to visit, they were also places that absorbed the energies and roused the passionate enthusiasm of their owners.

With fast coaches and good roads, the age of country-house visiting had properly arrived, and these houses adapted to accommodate house parties. From the 1760s onward the bell-pull – a system that linked every room upstairs to the servants’ wing or hall – meant that maids and footmen could be summoned from distant quarters and need no longer hang about the corridors (in many houses the small wooden chairs they used, decorated with the family coat of arms, can still be seen), waiting to be called upon. The servants’ bell board made it possible to see at a glance in which room of the house they were required, but the bells went on ringing for up to ten minutes to encourage the slow or unwilling! By the latter decades of the eighteenth century a system of bells connected by a rope was commonplace in country houses, and the system became more sophisticated over the following century.

The house party was a largely informal affair. Groups of people, both old friends and new acquaintances, stayed together in a house for a matter of days or weeks or even months. Activities were unstructured, apart from meeting for meals and during sporting expeditions, so that guests were left much of the time to do as they liked. It was not considered necessary for everyone to participate in the same things. They could seek diversion alone or with any number of others. Above all they were free to be idle. The communal rooms of English country houses became places for relaxation, in which lounging was perfectly acceptable. A major aspect of them – and a prime preoccupation for many participants – was the chance they offered for courting: meeting and impressing members of the opposite sex, with a view to marriage. In these informal gatherings, in which people might be in each other’s proximity for a matter of weeks, it was easily possible to find oneself conducting a romance. This lifestyle was, once again, captured by Miss Austen, who described not only the pleasures of this life of endless leisure but the boredom and backbiting that so often accompanied it. Nevertheless the house party, a product of the nineteenth century’s opening years and, in keeping with the spirit of that time, a reaction against the formality of the previous century, became a British institution.

Because the gentry and aristocracy were spending more time in the country, the entertainments in these houses became bigger and grander. There was a distinct revival, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the practice of hosting large dinners for the local tenantry, to celebrate the usual family, local or national events. These were more than mere gestures of goodwill or charity. They served to demonstrate concern for the poor and thus to emphasize – in an era dominated by the French Revolution – that the English aristocracy were closer to their people and more aware of their needs than the haughty members of France’s
Ancien Régime
. For the upper class, at the same time, the country house acted as a sort of extended club, to which anyone in polite society might, given an introduction, gain admission.

Facilities also became better. Running water had been available in country houses since the seventeenth century. Before the middle of the eighteenth it was possible to have this on all floors thanks to efficient pumping. Baths and water closets were widely used. By the late eighteenth century there were small baths for individuals (as opposed to a large plunge bath) and efficient lavatories. Joseph Bramah’s water closet – if that can be taken as a general benchmark of comfort – was patented in 1778. They became ubiquitous in country houses after that date, though they were not, of course, installed for the servants’ use. The latter would probably have continued the immemorial custom, formerly practised by all classes, of simply going down the garden to do their business (‘going to pluck a rose’ was a phrase then equivalent to ‘powdering one’s nose’) – the results, of course, were useful as fertilizer. Lighting was, even by Jane Austen’s time, becoming a matter of oil lamps rather than candles, though these in turn began to be supplanted by gas within her lifetime. Steam heating arrived in the early nineteenth century and crude radiators were used, as at Stratfield Saye where the Duke of Wellington installed them in the 1830s.

In spite of this, there was a curious reluctance to adopt all the technological advances that were now available. On the other side of Europe, William I of Prussia had been appalled when told that flush lavatories could now be installed in his palaces, and exclaimed: ‘We’re having none of that new-fangled nonsense around here!’ The King also refused to have his own bathtub. Once a week he borrowed one from the hotel across the road. Though his is an extreme example, it illustrates the suspicion of both new technology and physical comfort that was characteristic of a certain northern European mindset.

The British in that era were intensely aware of their country’s power, wealth and greatness. They feared that this could be diminished through the moral softening caused by wallowing in luxury. This was one reason for the preoccupation of the upper class with vigorous sports such as hunting, stalking and shooting. Although they might be waited upon hand and foot, they would earn their ease through exertion and by acquiring sporting prowess. The country houses which they visited or in which they lived had, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, such advanced plumbing, heating and lighting that they were the wonder – and the envy – of aristocracies throughout Europe, enjoying a level of comfort that was at least a generation, if not half a century, away for many more modest English homes. Yet as Mark Girouard has written in his seminal
Life in the English Country House
: ‘In the next fifty years, advances in the available technology were not matched by equivalent advances in comfort. Luxury, to the Victorians, tended to be a suspect word.’ It is clear that, whereas our own definition of a ‘great house’ would be based on the comfort it offers and the facilities it can boast, for the builders and occupiers of these places it was sheer magnificence that counted most.

No activity is more completely associated with the country house than foxhunting, despite the fact that pursuing this animal on horseback is equally common in Ireland, Europe, America and Australia. As with so many sports and games, it is the British who have formalised, codified and refined it, however.

The hunting of foxes with dogs by the English is first mentioned in 1534, though it would be more than a century before packs of hounds would be in regular use, and it would not be until the eighteenth century that specially bred animals would be seen. The great English hunts: the Quorn in Leicestershire (1696), the Pytchely in Northamptonshire (1750), the Beaufort in Gloucestershire (1682) gained renown throughout Britain and beyond. The Midlands, the region more or less in the centre of England and a place ironically associated with heavy industry, became the mecca for hunting, centred on the town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. The landscape there – gentle hills and valleys given over to pasture – was ideal for the chase, and during the hunting season Melton played host to much of Society. Its streets were filled with horseboxes, grooms and men in ‘pink’ (the scarlet of the coats worn by huntsmen is correctly termed pink, perhaps in reference to the shirtmaker Thomas Pink, who made such garments). Ladies, who also hunted, wore not a coat but a collar in the livery of the hunt, and dressed otherwise in black.

A hunt was – as it still is – overseen by a Master of Foxhounds (MFH) who was the administrator as well as being in charge of the kennels. If he did not have time to do everything himself he might share the job and be a ‘Joint-Master.’ There was also a Huntsman, armed with a short, braying horn, who would control the hounds once the chase began. He would be assisted by ‘whippers-in’ or ‘whips’ who imposed order on the hounds and who have given their name to the parliamentary officials responsible for party discipline.

The hunt would meet at a prearranged place – the yard of a rural pub, or the lawn in front of a country house, to take a drink (a stirrup-cup) before setting off, and guests who wished to ride with it would at this point pay toward the costs. Then the hounds would set off, following the scent of any foxes they picked up, and the horsemen would follow. Naturally there might be more than one fox, so the pursuit could last for hours. The chase would cover many miles of countryside, testing the rider’s skill with fences, hedges, streams, and this exercise would be regarded as compensation even if no fox were killed. The quarry might otherwise be caught and dismembered by the hounds, or disappear into the ground, in which case a hunt servant would bring terriers to dig it out. Its carcass was given to the hounds – their reward for hard work. The brush (tail) and the mask (face) might be taken as trophies by the members of the hunt. It was customary that new members be ‘blooded’ – smeared on the face by the Huntsman with blood from the fox, as a rite of passage. This was a very common childhood experience for members of the landed aristocracy.

Why did hunting reach such a level of social prestige in Britain, between the mid-Victorian age and the Second World War? The British love horses, and this activity enabled both mount and rider not only to gain invigorating exercise but to experience excitement, tension, danger and great exhilaration. For a sedentary society, hunting was a release from the predictability of things, a chance for those whose lives contained little excitement – and perhaps little physical strain – to engage in a battle of wits with nature. The qualities needed by a medieval knight – courage and daring, skill in riding – were those found in a competent ‘rider to hounds.’ Cavalry officers were expected to hunt regularly because to do so sharpened their skills and trained them in assessing a landscape in which an enemy might hide. Men therefore engaged in hunting because it was manly. Women did so (sidesaddle of course!) because it offered them too an escape from the constraints of their class and its lifestyle. Their ‘role model’ – the most famous huntswoman of the nineteenth century and a regular visitor to the shires, was Elizabeth, Empress of Austria (1837-98). Possessed of great beauty and personal charm as well as being a highly-skilled horsewoman, she added even greater glamour to a sport that already carried more than a whiff of aristocracy.

Foxhunting was made illegal in Britain in 2005, at least partly because a sullen public disliked the notion of the rich conspicuously enjoying themselves. The law has proved difficult to enact, and legal challenges are still being mounted. In the meantime the hunts and the packs of hounds survive. They chase the fox but do not kill it, or they flush it out to be shot (which is legal), or they follow trails of scented rags. They retain the splendid liveries with their distinctive buttons, they still hold the annual hunt balls, and the social side of the sport continues. Though understandably associated with the upper class, hunting is surprisingly egalitarian. Many of those who assemble to ride, or to follow the hunt on foot, are farmers or countrymen or simply curious members of the public (the controversy of recent years has apparently led to an increase in membership of hunts). But not all packs have, in any case, been run by aristocrats. A highly successful one is the Banwen Miners’ Hunt, established in 1963 by Welsh miners who deliberately wanted to make the sport available to members of the working class. Their hunt, like the others, is still going strong, and its patron is the Duke of Beaufort.