The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (39 page)

What is it about the new architecture that will excite you most?
Externally it will be the classical proportions of the building as a whole and the elements within its façade, especially the use of features such as sculptural figures, cupolas, recesses and porticoes, and the orders of columns and capitals: Tuscan, Ionic, Doric, Corinthian and Composite. Internally it will undoubtedly be the light that astonishes you. In old houses without glass the windows have to be small; consequently the rooms are dark. Indoor light is therefore synonymous with wealth, and sunlight streams in the huge glazed windows of these new houses. The old line that Hardwick Hall is ‘more glass than wall’ could be applied to almost any newly built house in Elizabethan England. Holdenby Hall has twice as much glass as Hardwick.

Sir Francis Willoughby’s great house, Wollaton Hall, is built on a hill overlooking its park. It is a revolutionary building in many respects, not least because it has no courtyard: it looks outward, not inward. You enter along a corridor that leads through the building into the screens passage and then …
Voilà
! Suddenly, just as your eyes have adjusted to the dim corridor, you find yourself in a high hall of splendour and light, with huge windows and the walls wainscoted. Two great fireplaces stand on either side and between them two long oak tables stretch the length of the room, where all the servants dine. Mounted on the walls are halberds and poleaxes – parts of the armour that Sir Francis is required to provide by law for the militia.
⁸
Look up and you will see a splendid roof of painted beams. These are not actually beams, for they do not hold the roof up; they are suspended from the floor of the prospect room high above. It is an astonishing design for 1588, a triumph from the pen of the greatest architect of the age, Robert Smythson.

Sir Francis does not usually dine in the hall, but in the dining parlour which is off to one side, overlooking the garden. If invited to share a meal with the family, you will here eat at a linen-covered table in front of a large stone fireplace, on chairs and benches covered with green cushions. The walls are panelled, but otherwise quite bare; there are just two maps of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire and no paintings. The vogue for collecting art is only just beginning in the sixteenth century, and most owners of stately homes have all their pictures displayed in one space, normally the long gallery. Here the family walk together as a leisurely form of indoor exercise when the weather is inclement. Guests are frequently invited to join them, to view the likenesses of the queen and great
men of the day; the display of such portraits implies that your host is well connected to the sitters. In some great houses figures from history are placed in the long gallery. Portraits of past kings and busts of Roman emperors provoke discussion of their characters as the guests walk to and fro, comparing Caesar and Augustus, Charlemagne and Alexander the Great.
⁹

The hall is still an important space for the household, but it is no longer the focal point for the family; the great chamber has surpassed it. This room, which is normally reached by a staircase from the upper end of the hall, is the nearest thing the Elizabethans have to the modern living room. The windows are large, allowing in plenty of light for reading. The ceiling is made of elaborately moulded plaster, the walls are panelled or hung with an arras (tapestry) and the floor is covered with squares of woven rush matting. Some great chambers have elaborate paintings above the wainscot. Here you will find the best furniture: court cupboards, buffets and tables covered with Persian carpets, occasionally even a table made of inlaid marble or a portable chamber clock. If there is no separate dining parlour, the family will eat here, attended by servants and with musicians playing through the meal. This is also where they will relax and perhaps play a tune on the virginals. Dancing takes place here, and plays might be performed to a small audience if there is a company of players in the vicinity. The great chamber is also where you will play chess, dice and cards and drink and talk late into the night.

The number of people in a rich man’s household varies enormously. Aristocratic families normally have between 100 and 200 servants and gentleman companions: the earl of Derby has 115 in 1585.
¹⁰
The cost of maintaining these old-style establishments is another reason why the old nobility cannot afford to build splendid palaces. The new stately homes tend to have smaller, pared-down households. Sir Thomas Tresham, builder of Rushton (Northamptonshire), has fifty-two servants; Bess of Hardwick fifty; Lord Paget has only twenty-nine.
¹¹
At Wollaton, Sir Francis Willoughby has thirty-six, including a steward, an usher of the hall, grooms of the hall, a butler, an underbutler, yeomen of the chambers, a clerk, a cook, a carter, a slaughterman and grooms of the stables and pages. All of these are men: the only women in a large Elizabethan household are gentlewomen serving the lady of the house or her daughters. Other women are employed from outside the household for tasks like needlework and laundry,
but they do not eat in hall or form part of the official household. Only the royal household has a significant number of women, but even in that establishment there are only the four gentlewomen of the bedchamber, the seven gentlewomen of the privy chamber and a few maids of honour and chamberers.

Sir Francis’s thirty-six servants might seem like a small number to be rattling around in a large hall like Wollaton. Sometimes, however, it is full to bursting. One occasion is 11 November 1588, when Sir Francis entertains the earl and countess of Rutland and several local gentlemen and their retinues, and no fewer than 120 men and women fill the hall for a feast.
¹²
If you think that sounds onerous, have some sympathy for those blessed with a visit from the queen. When she arrives at a country house the owner is expected to provide accommodation for twenty-four courtiers and their households, her principal secretary, a number of government officials and all their servants – several hundred of them. When Elizabeth arrives at Theobalds in 1583 she takes Sir William Cecil’s hall as her great chamber, his parlour as her presence chamber and his great chamber as her privy chamber. Sir William ends up having to eat in a gallery and his servants have to sleep on straw mattresses in the attic of a storeroom. Nevertheless, the visit is a great success. Over the years the queen visits him thirteen times.
¹³

Presuming you arrive at a country house when the queen is not in the neighbourhood, you will have your own bedchamber. Expect to find woven rush matting on the floor and brightly coloured tapestries on all the walls, these being cut away around the door and windows to admit light. You should find curtains and curtain rails in the bed chambers.
¹⁴
Elizabethan bed frames can be large, so the bed will dominate the room. The Great Bed of Ware, mentioned by Shakespeare, is 11ft square, but this is unique: six feet by seven is more usual. Beds can be just as impressive for their carving and fabric as for their dimensions. Stay the night at Fulford in Devon and you might sleep in a four-poster bed with a carved frame of semi-naked Native Americans, these being all the fashion in 1585. Some beds have elaborately carved testers commemorating a marriage. Some are lavishly hung with taffeta curtains; others have silk-embroidered cloth-of-gold curtains. The featherbed mattresses are piled on top of one another, with a down-stuffed one on top; beds in stately homes are therefore very soft. Pillowcases and sheets are normally of holland, and the pillowcase
might have a coat of arms embroidered on it.
¹⁵
Chests of drawers are very rare – they are mainly used for storing documents at this period – so if there is storage for your clothes, it will probably be a three-panelled chest with an elaborately carved front.
¹⁶
If covered with a Turkish or Persian carpet and cushions, this may double up as a seat. Adjacent you may have a withdrawing room, where your servant will be expected to sleep.
¹⁷

With regard to personal grooming in the morning, you may find a mirror or ‘looking glass’ in your chamber. It might be a small round one mounted on the wall or a rectangular one set in an adjustable silver frame and placed on a table (like the one mentioned by Lady Ri-Melaine in
chapter 6
).
¹⁸
Alternatively, you could ask your host if you may borrow a hand-held mirror: these are common in good houses. A second table or high cupboard will have a silver or brass ewer and basin, with linen towels for washing your face and hands. As for the loo, you may find a latten or pewter chamber pot in your room or a close stool, and maybe a glass urinal (if you wish your physician to inspect your urine). As Horman puts it, ‘see that I lack not by my bedside a chair of easement with a vessel under and a urinal by’. You will have the option of wiping your ‘nether end’ with blanket, ‘cotton’ (fine wool), linen or, in some places, paper bought especially for the purpose.
¹⁹

Every great house should have a
pièce de résistance
, some specific marvel that everyone who sees it will talk about long afterwards. At Wollaton it is the prospect room: a huge light room built on top of the hall, looking down on the towers of the rest of the building and across the surrounding park. Nor is it intended just to be used on a fine day: Sir Francis is interested in astronomy and so invites his guests up to the upper roof to view the stars. At other places the gatehouse is the most imposing spectacle. At Tixall in Staffordshire Sir Walter Aston adds to his father’s recent timber-framed manor house an elegant three-storey stone gatehouse (where, incidentally, I am writing this chapter), with Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns on each face, extensive large windows and a roof walk. At Longford Castle, the triangular nature of the whole design provides the talking point; at Rushton, the triangular lodge in the grounds similarly provokes admiration. Other places have unusual banqueting houses in the grounds or on their roofs, designed to amuse and impress.

These new great houses all tend to have one other particular feature
that their medieval predecessors lack: a formal garden. Whereas the medieval garden used to be a place where noblewomen could go to read, pick flowers or otherwise just escape the hustle and bustle of the household, an Elizabethan garden is a place for both sexes, an area in which Renaissance and aesthetic ideas about architecture, nature and order come together. Henry VIII’s gardens at Hampton Court, Nonsuch Palace and Whitehall provide the original patterns for the English pleasure garden. Glass windows are another reason why pleasure gardens have caught on so quickly: while you would hardly glance out of the small draughty windows of an old castle, you might regularly sit in the wide glass-filled windows of a new house and admire the view. Much use is made of heraldic symbols, sundials and sculpture around these gardens, but it is the use of the square that predominates. It can be found in every great garden, whether marked out in stone, water or a box hedge. Within each square you will find a design in the shape of an elaborate knot (hence ‘knot gardens’). ‘Open knots’ are patterns of rosemary, thyme, hyssop and other herbs, the spaces between the plants being filled with sand or brick dust or different-coloured earths; in ‘closed knots’ these spaces are filled with different-coloured flowers.
²⁰
The borders of these squares are formed by shrubs and hedges, including hawthorn, bush firs, ivy, roses, juniper, holly, elm and box. In some places, feats of topiary are worked in rosemary, yew or box. In the privy garden at Whitehall you may see shapes of men and women, centaurs, sirens and serving maids with baskets, created by interweaving dry twigs with the growing shrubs.
²¹

Pleasure gardens are quickly taken up by the owners of stately homes who hope – or fear – that Elizabeth will visit them. At Kenilworth, Robert Dudley lays out eight knot gardens in a rectangle within the outer wall, adding a fountain at the centre and a terrace alongside the keep from which the garden might best be viewed. Lord Lumley redesigns the gardens of Nonsuch Palace with square knots, topiary, obelisks, marble basins and sculptural fountains. You will see a pelican spouting water into a wide stone dish and admire a marble Venus whose nipples gush forth jets of water. At Wollaton, Sir Francis Willoughby and his architect Robert Smythson take the Elizabethan obsession with squares to new heights, treating the whole house as the central square of a plan of nine, with eight square gardens arranged around the house, several of which are divided again into smaller knot gardens.
²²

Perhaps the most interesting set of gardens is at Theobalds. In addition to his many duties and other interests, Sir William Cecil is a passionate gardener and garden designer. A German visitor to Theobalds, marvelling at the hall of the house and its design of six trees on each side, is astounded when the steward opens the windows overlooking the gardens and birds fly into the hall, perch themselves in the artificial trees and begin to sing.
²³
Sir William’s formal garden is actually divided into a privy garden and a great garden. The privy garden is a large square enclosed by a wall. Inside this runs a gravel path with a topiary hedge cut into shapes and interspersed with cherry trees on the inner side. Flights of steps run down to a grass walk where there is another small hedge and then a third inner square. At the heart of this you will find the knot garden, with tulips, lilies and peonies planted in the borders of the ascents. The great garden alongside it extends to more than seven acres, containing nine square knot gardens in one great square. Each of these knot gardens measures seventy feet by seventy feet, with a path twenty-two feet wide between each one. In the middle of the central knot is a white marble fountain. In other knots are sculptures and obelisks, and even a small mound set within a maze dedicated to Venus. Elsewhere there is a summer-house with busts of the first twelve Roman emperors.
²⁴