BOOKS Seats, properties and homes
NIGEL NICOLSON
The Country Life series on English country houses is not completed by James Lees- Milne's English Country Houses: Baroque, 1685-1715 (Country Life 8 gns). There must be at least one 'more to come, on the Eliza.1 bethans, with whom the house emerged from its mediaeval chrysalis. The series is a wonderful documentation of the only art (except gardening, which is its complement) in which the English excelled. This volume covers only thirty years—let it be admitted thirty particularly rich years, roughly from Wren to William Kent—and James Lees- Milne has been able to describe nearly two hundred surviving country houses, every one grander than a mere manorhouse.
How has one hitherto missed more than half of them? One reason is that even of the twenty-eight starred houses for which he re- serves the full treatment, fourteen are never on view to the public. Another is that they are country houses in the full sense, buried in leaves and lanes, the privacy of their approach leading in the English manner to sudden display. This volume not only identi- fies the houses for us. It opens to us doors which are legitimately barred. If you cannot visit Boughton or Cottesbrooke, the pictures of them are splendid substitutes for the reality. The pleasure of opening the book on photographs of Iver Grove or Bramham Park is doubled by the discovery that both of them can be visited, the first by previous appointment.
All publishers and editors know that pic- tures kill text. That is the fate of most archi- tectural articles in Country Life itself. The photographs and captions summarise too well what the text describes, and the text is often more erudite than the normal reader can stomach. The conventions of this famous series of articles have not been followed by Mr Lees-Milne, except in the subtle grading of houses as seats, properties or homes, in a descending scale of dignity. He is a scholar. He can match any academic in the sport of attribution and influence. But he is also a writer, the author of Another Self, one of the most engaging of recent autobiographies, and he is not shy of expressing the pleasure that he feels. He loves his houses. His written description of a house is the meat which the illustrations sauce. One is incomprehensible without the other, and all are tied together by his long introduction, where every picture is found on the page which refers to it, a convenience too often overlooked in other books of this nature and price.
The term Baroque as applied to a period of English domestic architecture is, as Mr Lees-Milne admits, rather misleading. It should be understood 'chronologically rather than stylistically'. The name was quite un- known to contemporaries. There was no real equivalent in England to the overflowing exuberance of the true Baroque in Italy, South Germany and Austria. Occasionally one finds an architectural echo of it, in Pet- worth's chapel, in the hall at Castle Howard ('more like the transept of a Baroque cathe- dral than a room in a private dwelling), or in Thomas Archer's lovely water pavilion at Wrest Park. The nearest we came to the full Baroque was in the wall-paintings of Verrio, Laguerre and our native Thornhill, of which the Heaven Room at Burghley is the supreme example.
The fashion did not last long. It did not suit the English temperament to represent their reigning monarch as Mars sleeping naked in the lap of Venus. (To find in a book boldly titled 'Baroque' such very English houses as Antony, Bradboume or Tadworth, lovely examples of what we mean by Queen Anne, or Winslow Hall. the only country house which Mr Lees-Milne can confidently attribute to Wren, is straining the idiom too far.) It did, though, have in common with European Baroque the excitement of con- trolled experiment. It was a 'lively and in- ventive' period, immensely variable. 'The visitor never knows what next to expect as he moves from one county to another.' It may be the restfulness of Stanford Hall, the castellation of Kimbolton, the theatricality of Seaton Delaval, or the miniature state- liness of Hawksmoor's Easton Neston, the house in all England which I should most like to own. There are few repetitions, few conventions, much brio. Architectural rules are broken within the confines of the utmost regularity. Here are the English at their most adventurous, their least imitative, their most extravagant, and every one of these houses except possibly Boughton (which could be French) proclaims itself struck from our native die.
One man stands out from these pages: Vanbrugh. His four great houses, Castle Howard, Blenheim, Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe, occupy like interlocking court- yards the central pages of the book. With Mogul audacity 'he evolved, on an enormous
scale and to an integrated design, the spread palace.' His cyclopean buildings occupy not sites but areas. Their garden accessories, like the temple at Castle Howard or the bridge at Blenheim (which crossed nothing more than a slim canal but was designed, to the fury of the Duchess, to contain thirty-three wholly unnecessary rooms), are major works.
Mr Lees-Milne is surely right to see Van- brugh as a romantic. His houses were quasi- feudal declarations of independence, but (as Laurence Whistler sums up Grimsthorpe), `it is a grandeur that proceeds not from violence but from repose'. He could be gentle. The receding lines of arches in his corridors, the stables at Seaton Delaval, are affectionate caresses in stone. Vanbrugh had no imitators, and apart from Hawksmoor, no pupils. He did not found a style. But to him almost alone is due England's claim to have had a Baroque period at all. Blenheim, Mr Lees-Milne claims with justice, is 'the most imaginative Baroque palace in Europe.'
It is in fact the only named palace in Eng- land which is neither royal nor episcopal. Philip Howard's book The Royal Palaces (Hamish Hamilton 63s) takes us round the royal palaces, both the poor remnant (Buck- ingham Palace, Holyroodhouse and Wind- sor) and those •that have been either institutionalised like Westminster, Greenwich, the Tower and Brighton Pavilion, or grace- and-favoured like Hampton Court, St James's, Kensington and Osborne, or have entirely disappeared, like Woodstock, Rich- mond, Whitehall and Nonsuch. It is a good theme. Not only were these monster houses expressions of what subjects expected from their sovereigns in different ages, but more is known about them than about lesser houses, since court life has been succulent material for generations of gossips and diarists, and many of the most dramatic events in English history have had a palatial setting.
They were also vast architectural under- takings and repositories of the best in con- temporary art. A note of comedy runs through Mr Howard's pages, and it tends to conceal what he would certainly admit, that the palaces have been unequalled influ- ences on national taste. Mr Howard is not much interested in architecture (an excep- tion is his account of the building of Non- such by Henry VIII), and only in passing does he acknowledge, for instance, that at two of the palaces, Greenwich and White- hall, the English were first introduced to the Italian Renaissance. He is more interested in life above, but not below, the stairs once they were built. With meritorious energy he has plundered history of its best stories, ex- tracted the anecdotal plums from a hundred books of memoirs, adding to them his own witticisms, some of which ('few criminals came out of the Tower of London except head first') are not at all bad. His book will be a treasure-house for guides.
In a concluding chapter he speculates on what the next royal palace will be like, for he has no doubt that there will be one, and Buckingham Palace ('an undistinguished but inoffensive pile of masonry') cannot last for ever and Windsor as a residence is cold. He regretfully foresees 'the first vertical palace, after two thousand years of horizontal palaces', equipped with carefully planned office floors, broadcasting studios, a compu- ter and closed-circuit television. Perhaps. But why a Hilton, when a huge inalienable site stands ready at the end of the Mall? Prince Charles need not abandon the splendid char- acteristic of monarchy to speawl.
Previous page
