reading response

Rank, Manners and Display: The Gentlemanly House, 1500-1750 Author(s): Nicholas Cooper Source: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 291-310 Published by: Royal Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679349 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 11:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Royal Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transactions of the RHS 12 (2002), pp. 291-3IO ? 2002 Royal Historical Society DOI: Io.IoI7/Soo8o44oio2ooolI7 Printed in the United Kingdom

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY: THE GENTLEMANLY HOUSE, 1500-1750

By Nicholas Cooper

ABSTRACT. In the early modem period the amenities of the upper-class house provided for approved modes of polite behaviour, while the initial, piecemeal display of antique ornament in the sixteenth century expressed the status and the education of the governing class. In the seventeenth century a more classically correct architecture would spread in a climate of opinion in which approved behaviour was increasingly internalised and external display less favoured. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in superseding archi- tectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not.

THE last few years have seen the rapid growth of what may be called 'country house studies'. There has been an increasing synthesis of a number of discrete study areas - architectural history, studies of power structures, of estate management and the economics of landowning, of family relations and upper-class recruitment, of household evolution, of education and of the concept of privacy, and country house literature. However, the architectural, economic and social dimensions of the country house are perhaps better established than the ways in which houses express their owners' aspirations and education, and the image of themselves as members of a elite that owners wished to project. While the culture of the class evolved as the corollary of its wealth and responsibilities, its expression in the country house paralleled other displays of manners in advertising the possessors' education, refinement and social distinction. While the appearance of the house was the public expression of its owner's status and culture, its plan evolved in response to the evolving demands of privacy, to the changing needs of household, community and peer-group relations, and to its owner's wish for cultural self-expression in the house's furnishing and decoration. The house was not only the scene where ideals of gentility and manners could be realised: it provided an essential display of gentility in itself.

The earliest printed plan of an English house is not in any archi- tectural publication but in Gervase Markham's The English Husbandman

291

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

292 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

aisle

1EE

' : . . . .. .

. . .. .. . .. .....

: . . .

"

. .. . . ... . .. .. ... .. ... .. . ... .-,; .

:. . .. . . . ... .. ... .. : .. . .. .. . . .. . . . . . . .. .

Plate I 'A Plain Man's Country House',from Gerwase Markham, The English Husbandman (1613). Reproduced by permission of the British Libray.

of 1613 (Plate I).' It shows a house with which his readers will have been very familiar and which remains widespread. One wing has polite rooms for entertaining, and the other, rooms for everyday functions and services; the layout is essentially hierarchical, and at the centre is a hall which mediates between the house's two ends. The rooms are those one would have found in any house of a rich yeoman farmer or of the lesser gentry, but in the accompanying text Markham carefully distinguishes between the two classes. He calls his plan 'the model of a plain man's country house', but describes in some detail how the outside might be embellished with turrets and decorative gables and other architectural ornament. 'But the scope of my book' he concludes 'tendeth only to the use of the honest husbandman, and not to instruct men of dignity.' It is clear that what is significant for Markham is that gentlemen's houses are distinguished visually from those of the lesser ranks of society, however prosperous individuals might be.

Architectural display based on rank is in any case well documented in the era when Markham was writing. Some Lancashire gentry have ornamental gables to their houses while their farming neighbours do

'Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (1613), sig. A4-B.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 293

not.2 In areas of timber building, gentry houses are often marked by an excess of structural ornament - itself a form of conspicuous con- sumption, and as such a display of rank that was the right and even the duty of the governing class in a well-ordered society. On the southern edge of the Cotswolds, the houses of village gentry have been noted as having stone window mullions, while yeomen's houses have mullions of wood.3 The widespread occurrence of such examples demonstrates the widespread acceptance of the principles of class-based display that Markham implied.

Concurrent with the growth in the numbers of the governing classes in sixteenth-century England was the increasing recognition on the part of the members of these classes of their duties as well as of their powers. Concern with the duties and privileges of rank and with recruitment to its higher echelons was of course pervasive, and if in the course of the seventeenth century social mobility came to be seen as less of a threat to civil order, there was no lessening of concern for the manners, behaviour and modes of display that were seen as appropriate to the classes of society. And while medieval codes of courtliness were gradually superseded by a humanist ethos of civility, ultimately civility would itself become frozen as rules of politeness and good breeding. What the owners of grand houses wished to express externally, and to realise in the internal arrangements of these houses, was their membership of a class that was distinguished by its behaviour, its growing responsibilities, its increasing education and its members' awareness of belonging to a recognisable and exclusive elite.

The desire for architectural display was not new. Under the Yorkists and the first Tudors, architectural display had reached formidable levels of excess. Such display implies recognition that political status demanded visible expression, whether through squads of liveried retainers or through the impressiveness of the magnate's seat of power, and was justified by a sense of the magnificence appropriate to the great man.4 Both in England and abroad, the greatest houses of the late fifteenth century were inspired by chivalry as they recalled the genuinely fortified castle. But in the course of the sixteenth century, a growing concern for the character of display followed from the changing character of the ruling class itself - from one in which power was the consequence of military might or feudal lordship, to one in which power comprised

'Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Rural Houses of the Lancashire Pennines, 156o-176o (1985), 46-9.

3Linda Hall, 'Yeoman or Gentleman? Problems in Defining Social Status in Seven- teenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century Gloucestershire', Vernacular Architecture, 22 (1991), 2-19.

4 Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England [hereafter Thurley] (New Haven and London, 1993), 11-13.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

294 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the wise exercise of responsibilities and privileges bestowed by the state. Such exercise still deserved visible distinction, but rather a display of the qualities appropriate to the possessors of these powers. And in such a display, the introduction of classical ornament played a significant part.

'Antic' ornament was appearing on luxury goods, in interior dec- oration, on coats of arms and on tombs from the 1520S onward, in contexts where it was immediately associated with the individual concerned. In the furnishing and decoration of the house, its expense and its association with alien products and craftsmen linked it clearly with wealth, with comfort and hence with elite status.5 It is tempting to see the English use of classical ornament on a par with other types of intellectual symbol: with the heraldry that proclaimed lineage and gentility, and with imprese, the personal and often cryptic devices expressive of private circumstances and values, the very reconditeness of which could be seen to increase their value. When classical architectural details first appear in England, they seem to be seen as cultural statements, not as architectural forms. Not infrequently, classical and more personal symbols are combined, as at Lyveden New Build where the triglyphs of a Doric frieze alternate with the instruments of the passion, placed there by the recusant owner, Sir Robert Tresham; or at Moreton Corbett in Shropshire where a riotous conjunction of classical, heraldic and personal emblems in part defies analysis.

With the demand for an educated ruling class, it is tempting to believe that classical ornament was seen as appropriate to the sophisticated ruler who could not only afford to keep up with fashion but had studied the exemplars of society, of public duty and statesmanship to be derived from Plato and Cicero, and modern writers such as Castiglione and Sir Thomas Elyott. No contemporary English statement explicitly identifies classical ornament with the house of the governor, but it is at least implicit in the introduction to John Shute's First and Chief Groundes ofArchitecture of I554. Recounting how he had been sent to Italy by the duke of Northumberland to study architecture there, Shute describes how in doing so he was 'as it were stirred forward to do my dutie unto my Countrie wherein I live and am a member'.6 The sentiment of duty to the commonwealth is conventional, but none the less real; the introduction of classical forms drawn from the fountainhead is here presented as a patriotic service. John Shute died with little to show from his visit, but sources of such ornament were coming to be available, both through the recruitment of foreign craftsmen - a very few Italians, more French - and through continental engravings and such writers

5 Maurice Howard, The Early Tudor Country House (1987), 120-35; Thurley, 207-46. 6John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1554), sig. Aiii.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 295

as Alberti and the commentators on Vitruvius that only the rich and the educated could either afford or understand. When comparing the elaboration of late Elizabethan houses to the austere correctness of Palladian, it is perhaps difficult to see both as manifestations of an essentially classical culture. But on the portico of Hardwick Hall, of the 1590s, two lines from Ovid appear in contemporary graffiti, by which the house is compared to a heavenly palace,7 and one must see Hardwick against a background where even grammar school boys will have known great chunks of Ovid by heart.

In the sixteenth century, polite attitudes towards the building craft were ambivalent. It is clear that too close a knowledge of the skills of the artisan was considered inappropriate for members of the upper classes.8 Yet from the middle years of the century onwards, increasing numbers of the aristocracy were taking an active interest in the form and detail of their houses, and it is significant that those at the forefront of such interest were among the most highly educated and the most prominent of their time: men such as Sir John Thynne of Longleat, the most revolutionary house of its age; William Cecil, the creator of the barrel-vaulted, stone stair at Burghley, without English precedent or parallels and possibly imported ready-made; Cecil's brother-in-law the diplomatist Sir Thomas Hoby who placed a line of precocious, pedimented windows along the front of his brother's medieval house at Bisham; travellers such as Sir Robert Corbet of Moreton Corbet, whom Dugdale described as 'carried away by the affectionate delight of architecture';9 and Sir Thomas Smith who owned six editions of Vitruvius. Smith's nephew described his uncle's house, built in the

I56os and among the most architecturally advanced of its day, as having been 'answerable to that honourable estate and calling wherein he served under the Queene's most excellent majesty'.'" It was proper that the house of the governor should be suited to his place in the commonwealth, and that its ornament should satisfy the ideas he had derived from his learning. The Vitruvian rules for the hierarchical composition of the classical orders were a paradigm of other ideals of civic virtue and civil order, while for those who could master Pythag- orean proportional systems, architecture was assimilated to the har- monies of the universe.

7'Hic locus est quem si verbis audacia detur / haud timeam magni dixisse palatia caeli', Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk I lines 175-6.

8Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 148o-68o [hereafter Cooper] (New Haven and London, 1999), 27-51-

9William Camden, Britain ... Translated into English by Philemon Holland (1637), 594- 'o Quoted in Paul Drury, 'A Fayre House, Buylt by Sir Thomas Smith: The Devel-

opment of Hill Hall, Essex, 1557-81', British Archaeological Association Journal, 146 (1983), 116.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

296 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Neither Vitruvius nor foreign renaissance models had any great impact on the overall form of the house until the seventeenth century; Gervase Markham's house is still traditional in its layout, with the hall mediating between the high and the low ends. Neverthless, the period between 152o and I580 saw a fundamental change in what upper-class houses looked like which was to have the most profound consequences for architectural development thereafter. The late medieval house was essentially an accretive one, which expressed externally the relative importance of each of its parts. By 1580 the most modern upper- class house was wholly symmetrical, and its internal arrangements undetectable by the outside viewer. The reason for this repudiation of external distinctions was not in itself stylistic, but rather lay in the image of its owner and of a changing household community that the house was intended to project. The late medieval household had been one of structured grades of service and dependency, and it may seem paradoxical that the rapid decline of external marks of status in the appearance of the house should coincide with Tudor sumptuary legislation and with other attempts to define the privileges of different ranks of society. But whereas the house had once expressed by its disparate parts the structure of the community it served, the whole building was now coming to express the status and cultivation of its owner in a way comparable to the use of classical ornament. The layout of the medieval, hierachical house can be read from the outside; the undifferentiated house could not be. The solution to this paradox is another paradox: that the symmetrical, undifferentiated house can be seen as expressing the cultivation of its owner by making a public display of privacy and exclusivity. And in a society that made extensive use of symbolic languages, the integrated, visually balanced house can itself be seen as a species of device, a symbol of harmony. External marks of differentiation could be sacrificed for the sake of an alternative image of gentility.

By the achievement of symmetry and the abandonment of the principal of hierarchical distinction as a basis for design, the appearance of the house could now be determined by purely formal and archi- tectural considerations. And while the requirements of knowledgeable owners were increasing, the craft-based expertise of masons was declin- ing with the collapse of gothic church building, further contributing to a shift in craftsman-client relationships, while novel requirements both in the layout and in the ornament of the house made demands on craftsmanship that traditionally trained workmen were less able to supply. The example of prominent builders, and Vitruvian claims for the standing of architecture that linked it expressly with mathematics and the classics rather than being the province merely of the artisan, were increasingly licensing a knowledge of it on the part of a class

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 297

whose education was advancing in both areas. The huge amount of new house building from the middle years of the sixteenth century - remarked on by contemporaries and clear in any analysis - was the result of the rapid increase in the numbers and wealth of the gentry class, but the inevitable prominence of these new houses itself drew attention to them, and must in itself have provoked thought about the form and appearance of the house on the part of a competitive and increasingly educated group. A further incentive for a reconsideration of the form of the house was the need to accommodate rooms and relationships between social spaces that were themselves the consequence of evolving manners.

Within the house, evolving civility showed itself in the desire for greater privacy and in the need for more rooms - in other words,in the provision of rooms with more specialist uses, and in developments in the plan that made for a clearer distinction betwen private and public spheres." Such distinction was in any case explicitly prescribed by Vitruvius.' In a sample of some 200 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inventories, Figure I shows the first occurrence of some of these rooms and, equally import- antly, of other cultural goods such as books and pictures. The sample is not large enough to take account of significant regional differences, or those ofwealth within the ranks of the upper classes, but sixteenth-century innovations that it shows include the progressive removal of beds from rooms of entertainment, and the appearance of rooms described as studies. In the seventeenth century the process continues, and both great chamber and dining parlour are superseded by dining rooms, so called, as names change to correspond to changing functions. The different functions of chambers would themselves become distinguished and their occupants' privacy further provided for, with the provision in the seven- teenth century of separate dressing rooms.

The figure does not show how the decline of the hall both as a functional and as a symbolic space made it the more acceptable to reduce its height to a single storey only and to place chambers - most frequently the great chamber, the principal room of polite entertainment - above it, in order to meet the demands of entertainment and hospitality by which the growing numbers of the gentry consolidated their position and their alliances. Nor does it show the process whereby the hall itself would become purely a room for formal entrance into the house or a saloon for the polite entertainment of visitors of equal rank with the owner, while servants' eating would be removed into a separate servants' hall. Indeed, in some seventeenth-century great houses there would be separate halls for upper and lower servants.

"Cooper, 273-316. 2 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Bk 6, ch. 5.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Parlour Parlour with bed Great chamber Great chamber with bed 015% of ccurrences in the decadeer Dinin5%-50% oarlourrences in the decade Dining50%100% of roomccurrences in the decade Study

Pictures

Books (>5)

0-15% of occurrences in the decade 15%-50% of occurrences in the decade 50%-100% of occurrences in the decade

Figure i Selected entries in 200 upper-class inventories, i5oo-68o

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 299

Until well into the seventeenth century the upper-class house still retained essentially the traditional, hierarchical layout shown by Gervase Markham, its appearance regularised almost as a species of intellectual conceit, enhanced by classical detail that expresses the credentials of its owner, and its plan progressively elaborated by comparable demands for more specialised and private space. However, demands for additional rooms and novel functional relationships were difficult to meet within the layout and the form of the traditional, hierarchical plan. The increase in rooms for entertainment could be met by building upward, as at Chatsworth, Worksop and Hardwick where the grandest rooms were on the second floor. The elaboration of the plan that was the result of these demands for more specialised spaces had been among the reasons for such vast, sprawling, late Elizabethan and Jacobean prodigy houses as Burghley, Holdenby, Theobalds, Hatfield and Audley End. These aristocratic houses retained tall, great halls; the wealth and status of their builders led them to perpetuate a form that had a traditional association with lordship, but the great hall was ceasing to be useful even as a symbol. The fact that after Audley End there were no more of these monstrous houses was not only because of their ruinous cost and because in inflating the traditional, hierarchical house to so huge a size it had expanded beyond what was practical; two of the greatest, Theobalds, Holdenby and half of Audley End were pulled down less than a century after they were built. Behind these demolitions lay not only economics and the obsolescence of the layout; underlying them also was an evolving attitude to display. Both the layout and the appearance of the house continued to reflect the need for accom- modation commensurate with the status, manners and way of life of the owner and for a house that appeared suitable to his rank; however, both the form and appearance of the house would change with a decline of the old-fashioned, hierarchical household of graded ranks of service, and with changes in the sense of what it was right to display.

The revolution of the seventeenth century was the appearance of novel, more compact forms of plan, and of simple silhouettes that made a total contrast with the extravagant outlines that had characterised the most ostentatious of Jacobean houses. Although the expense of these prodigy houses was one reason for their abandonment, and the fact that there were no longer statesmen like the Cecils to build them was another, it is clear that from the I620os there was a change in attitudes away from the demands of Aristotelian magnificence, towards a greater reticence. Whereas Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century would praise 'a middle-class person who is generous in spirit and who spends most of his money on his house','3 Henry Peacham in 1622 would quote

'3Myra Nan Rosenfeld, Serlio on Domestic Architecture (Mineola, 1996), 50.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

300 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

with approval Macchiavelli on Cosimo de Medici, whose 'buildings ... were princely ... yet so governed by wisdom that he never excelled the bounds of civil modesty'.'4 While Hatton and Burghley had com- miserated with each other about the huge sums they were both spending on their houses, Fuller's injunction of the 1650s is well known - that it was better to build a house that was too small for a day than one too large for a year.

The social credentials of the house with an unconventional hall had already been established in the aristocratic lodge, essentially a house for polite recreation away from the large and structured household of the principal seat. The most significant model for the new, compact house was, however, in the polite houses of London, the acknowledged centre of fashion and civility. London households were very different from those of the country estate, where the household was larger and where there was a constant fluidity at its edges where it interacted with the broader community. The upper-class, London house was less concerned with community - which did not exist in the sense of the rural estate - and more concerned with polite entertainment. Here, plan forms had already been developed that accommodated different patterns of social behaviour and a more sharply polarised household than that which had been accommodated by the hierarchical layout of the country house. The town house that made the most of a constricted site by having a plan of two rooms deep and in which the hall was no longer at the centre of a hierarchical layout provided a model for a house with a deep, rectangular plan without wings, a form that could be readily transplanted from the town to the suburbs and then to the country beyond.'5 The rapid growth in the numbers of the upper classes frequenting the capital, which led James and Charles I to issue increasingly frantic and largely futile proclamations ordering their return to their estates and duties in the provinces, had exposed ever more of them to the allurements of the City and to the architectural innovations of the inner suburbs - to the conveniences, both social and physical, of the compact, rectangular house that was being evolved there.'" And in admiring aspects of London houses and in due course reproducing them in the countryside, those who did so would adopt the setting for novel modes of elite behaviour.

The London house provided a formula which could be expanded to almost any size. The deep, compact plan is known to architectural historians as a 'double pile', a term derived from Sir Roger Pratt who

'4Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Chicago, 1962), 17. '5 Cooper, i55-94. '6 Lawrence Stone, 'The Residential Development of the West End of London in the

Seventeenth Century', in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. B. Malament (Manchester, 198o), 167-212.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 301

around 166o summed up its practical advantages as economy and regularity.'7 Pratt's arguments in its favour have sometimes been taken as explaining how it originated; that is not the case, but they were a powerful recommendation once London had established its acceptability for the houses of the upper classes. Aesthetically, too, the rectangular plan had much to recommend it. Already by 1580 a form of house had emerged that had a strictly symmetrical facade, but whereas the emergence of the symmetrical house may have been prompted by symbolism, once achieved, regularity had rapidly become a basic design formula, capable of almost infinite variation. Symmetry was a principle as easy to grasp as a rectangular plan. By the end of the seventeenth century, Roger North could write that 'uniformity ... is what all expect to find, and blame if not observed ... I add that the most knowing enjoys no more."'8

In style as well as in planning these innovations were metropolitan. From the confusion of styles that Sir John Summerson so well named 'artisan mannerism' there was emerging by the 1630s, under the influence of Inigo Jones and of the Commission on New Buildings of which Jones was a member, a plainer style of house building that was characterised by hipped roofs, by simple, repetitive decorative elements or else which lacked any ornament at all. These stylistic characteristics would gradually spread from London and the home counties to become perhaps the first national style of architecture since the middle ages, and by their association with the new plan forms evolving at the same time and in the same area, new layouts and the new building style would spread together.

Among these houses is John Aubrey's house, Easton Piers (Plate 2), probably built in the late I650s, and perhaps the first English house to have been described as a villa, a term and a concept familiar to contemporaries as the ancient Roman house of cultivated retirement.'9 The taste for architectural simplicity is an aspect of a broader and deeper change in the mental climate of the seventeenth century. Underpinning the evident extravagance of the Elizabethan prodigy houses had been a humanist ideal that laid stress on the nobility of public service and that justified a display of magnificence as the duty of the suitably qualified public servant. The notion would persist, but it was also in profound contrast to a very different notion of virtue that would develop in the course of the seventeenth century and which also found its inspiration in the classics: the idea that virtue resided not in

'7 R. T. Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt (Oxford, 1928), 24. '8 Roger North, Of Building: Roger North's Writing on Architecture [hereafter North], ed.

Howard Colvin andJohn Newman (Oxford, I98I), 149. '9 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 17f.2.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

302 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

. . . 1I

Plate 2 John Aubrey's house at Easton Piers in Wiltshire. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Aubrey 17f5r.

a wise engagement with the world but in a contemplative withdrawal from it, and that the vanity of display and the turmoil of public affairs were a detraction from the inner peace whose attainment was the proper goal of the wise man. Abraham Cowley put it explicitly: for him the most enviable class of people was

the men placed in the Countrey by their Fortune above an High- Constable, and yet beneath the trouble of a Justice of the Peace, in a moderate plenty ... and with so much knowledge and love of Piety and Philosophy (that is of the study of God's Laws, and of his Creatures) as may afford him matter enough never to be Idle without Business, and never to be Melancholy though without Sin or Vanity.'2

There is any amount of literary and anecdotal evidence for this greater taste for retirement. Take, for instance, the great earl of Arundel, in the 1630s increasingly preferring what he called his 'darling cottage' at Albury to the life of town or even that of his lodge at Highgate, and whose grandson Charles, probably in the 1650S, went still further to build at the Deepdene what John Aubrey called 'his cottage of retire- ment, where in the troublesome Times, he withdrew from this wicked World, and enjoy'd himself here, where he had only one Floor, his

"Abraham Cowley, Essays and Other Prose Writings [hereafter Cowley], ed. A. B. Gough (1915), 121.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 303

little Dining Room, a Kitchen, a Chapel and a Laboratory'." Hollar's elegiac engravings of Albury and the country around capture the mood perfectly."

Just as the involvement in public affairs advocated in the previous century is in the clearest possible contrast to the philosophy of with- drawal advocated by Cowley, there is an equally obvious difference between the well-known 'country house' poems of the early seventeenth century and the poetry of retirement and privacy that rapidly grew in popularity from the second quarter of the century onwards. Poems such as Jonson's Penshurst had invoked a stratified, hierarchical and beneficent community of lords and dependants which is idealised and backward-looking in defiance of all the trends of the times. But Jonson also translated Martial's Epigram 47 of his Tenth Book - a text which has been described as 'the key poem of English literary classicism'.23 Jonson's translation begins

The things that make the happier life, are these, Most pleasant Martial; Substance got with ease, Not labour'd for, but left thee by thy sire; A soyle not barren; a continewall fire; Never at Law; seldom in office gown'd; A quiet mind; free powers; and body sound; A wise simplicity; freindes alike-stated; Thy table without art, and easy-rated.

In other words, a life of modest retirement on ancestral acres. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the new taste is the extraordinary

outburst of English translations of the works of the most important of classical writers on the theme of retirement, virtually from a standing start. Table I shows some of these, while retirement themes occur with increasing frequency in original poetry."4 These include a Horatian idealisation of the simple husbandman, a neo-Stoic idealisation of a Christian disengagement from the world, an increasingly naturalistic description of the real countryside in place of the artificial conventions of Elizabethan pastoral poetry and the contemplation of the ordered world of nature as a reflection of the Divine purpose, evolving with the Restoration into an Epicurean enjoyment of the delights of country life for their own sake.

One may associate this taste for retirement with an increasing interest in local topography, with a growing personal involvement by landowners

'John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (i949), lxxviii. " Repr. in John Harris, The Artist and the Country House (1979), 30-1. 23 Maren-Sofie Rostvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal,

16oo-i7oo [hereafter Rostvig] (Oslo, '954), 82. 24The table derives from Rostvig.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Decade Horace (13) Virgil (12) Martial (13) Claudian (5)

1620 1621 John Ashmore 1620 J. Brinsley 16xx Jonsont 1629 Sir John Beaumont 1625 Thomas Hawkins 1628 William Lisle 1621 John Ashmoret

1628 Thomas May 1629 Thomas May

1630 1631 Hawkins 1633 Brinsley 1633 Abraham Cowleyt 1638 Thomas Randolph 1635 Hawkins 1634 John Biddle 1635 Cowleyt 1637 Wye Saltonstall 1638 Thomas Randolpht 1638 Hawkins 1638 Henry Rider

1640 1649 John Smith 1649 John Ogilby 1648 Mildmay Fanet 1648 Mildmay Fane

1650 1652 Richard Fanshaw 1650 Ogilby 1656 R.Fletcher 1653 Holyday 1654 Ogilby

1660 1666 A. Brome 1665 Ogilby 1661 Owen Fellthamt 1663 Abraham Cowley 1668 Ogilby

1670 1678 Henry Vaughan

1680 1684 Thomas Creech 1684 Ogilby 1689 Thomas Cottont 1684 John Harington 1689 Henry Killigrew

1690 1697 Dryden 1691 Thomas Heyrickt 1695 Killigrew

Table i English translations of Horace, Virgil (Eclogues and/or Georgics), Martial and Claudian, i620-1700oo

tTranslations of Martial: Bk x, Epigram 47. New editions in italics.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 305

in estate management and improvement, with the taste for gardening, and in painting, with the growing taste for actual landscape and the depiction of real houses in their setting. These varied concerns can be explicity linked. William Habington, one of the most severely moral of the neo-Stoic poets, recommended that one should make oneself expert in what he called 'home cosmography' rather than reading about the wider world, and himself wrote the first history of Worcestershire, his native county."5 John Evelyn included a chapter on the villa (now lost) in his great unpublished work on gardening, Elysium Britanniae. Roger North, writing of the ideal house in around 1690, noted that 'it is no unseemly object to an English gentleman to see his servants and buissness passing at ordinary times'.'6 It is certainly tempting to see a connection between such mental attitudes and the growing acceptance of an architecture that was more restrained than that of earlier generations, and of houses which, if not actually smaller than their predecessors of a generation before, appeared from their compact outline to be so. Of houses, in fact, that were less ostentatious. To quote Cowley again: he writes 'I never had any desire so strong ... that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to them and the study of Nature.'7 Elsewhere he is explicit about what he has in mind: not 'a stately Palace, nor guilt rooms, or the costliest sorts of Tapestry; but a convenient brick house, with decent Wainscot, and pretty Forest-work hangings',"s together with, he says, an income of ?500 a year which would have placed him comfortably within the ranks of the gentry class.

Cowley has a clear picture in his mind of the kind of house that he wants: it is one like John Aubrey's. A type of house had emerged and was spreading from the London area that would satisfy the ethos of the age as well as meeting the exigencies of a time that was not propitious for extravagant building. The plain, rectangular house, refined by successive architectural fashions, would be the accepted model for the gentry house for the next hundred and fifty years. By introducing into the layout new spatial and functional relationships, and in rejecting the ancient, hierarchical sequence of low end and high end, it opened up new possibilities of planning. However, the form did not provide a wholly satisfactory model for the houses of men of higher rank. The appearance of the house had been in a sense democratised by the plain, rectangular model. Though at an earlier date the symbolism of

25William Habington, Observations upon History (1641); quoted in Rostvig, 126. '6 North, 129. 27 Cowley, 121. ' Cowley, 183-

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

306 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

heraldry and classical ornament had identified its owner with mem- bership of an elite, the plain house without external decoration no longer distinguished its occupant save by its size and setting, and in the later seventeenth century it becomes easier to find explicit demands for architectural display suitable to rank. Thus Lord Wentworth considered that Sir William Savile's houses were 'not suitable for [his] quality';"9 William Woolley condemned the house of Godfrey Clerk of Chilcot as 'not equal to his estate and quality, being Knight of the County',30 while Celia Fiennes found that at Shuckburgh 'in general all things were very well as any private Gentleman has whatever'.3' By implication, the nobleman's house should be further distinguished.

Around 1660 Roger Pratt had written that 'as there are three sorts of persons for whom houses are built of any consideration, viz. gentlemen, noblemen and princes, so are there so many kinds of buildings, which are to be formed according to the usual estates of men of such condition'.3" Pratt's prescriptions were largely theoretical, but they included progressively richer architectural decoration. The political stability that followed the settlements of 166o and 1688 was the background to a new period of architectural extravagance that climaxed in the grand gestures of the baroque, Chatsworth, Castle Howard and Blenheim. At the end of the century, Roger North condemned Melton Constable, one of the largest houses of the rectangular, hipped-roof type, as 'suburbian'. North considered its form inappropriate as the country seat of a baronet who was one of the largest landowners in the county. The earl of Carlisle, Castle Howard's builder, copied into his account book a passage from Leoni's translation of Palladio: 'an Architecte must chiefly observe, what Vitruvius recommends ... that when he builds for persons of quality, and more particularly those that are in public employment, he must Build their Palaces with Portico's, Galleries and large stately Halls richly adorn'd'.33 In strong contrast to the mid-century poems of retirement are verses such as Thomas Shipman's lines on Belvoir of 1679 which strike a new note in the approval of aristocratic consumption. 'See the rich furniture in all the rooms ! / Floors spread with carpets, weaved in Turkey looms ! / Beds soft, and costly, they may vie / With those whereon luxurious Asian princes lie!'3" The epitaph no less than the figures themselves on John

"' Quoted in J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (I969), 103.

30oWilliam Woolley, William Woolley's History of Derbyshire, ed. C. Glover and P. Riden, Derbyshire Record Society vi (I98I), 137. 3' Celia Fiennes, The Journal of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (1947), 117.

32 Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt, 29. 33 Charles Saumarez Smith, The Building of Castle Howard (1990), 26. 34Alastair Fowler, The Country House Poem (Edinburgh 1994), 359-

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 307 Nost's monument to the earl of Bristol strikes precisely the approved Epicurean note of retirement combined with distinction:

He was naturally inclined to avoid the hurry of a public life, yet careful to keep up the port of his quality;

was willing to be at ease, yet scorned obscurity: and therefore never made his retirement a pretence to draw himself within a narrower compass, or to shun such expense

as charity, hospitality, and his honour called for.35 Yet the baroque in England was always a half-hearted affair by comparison with Italy, Germany or France. The earl of Shaftesbury had in mind baroque extravagances when early in the new century he condemned 'edifices and gardens unknown to our ancestors and unnat- ural to such a state and climate as Great Britain' and called them 'the sacrifices made to wrong pride and ignorant self-esteem by one whose inward character must necessarily ... become as mean and ignorant as his outward behaviour insolent and intolerable'.36 Shaftesbury, pupil of Locke and philosopher of the Revolution of 1688, made express connections between patriotism, the aristocratic principle, reason, mor- ality and aesthetics. Properly ordered, houses and their surroundings were models of a higher mind set, connecting appropriate architectural display to both morality and manners. Though worked out by Shaf- tesbury, such an equation of aesthetics, morals and politeness was of course long established. The language of earlier writers is loaded with terms of moral opprobrium. Evelyn had written that 'it is from the asymmetrie of our buildings, want of decorum and proportion in our Houses, that the irregularity of our humours and affections may be shrewdly discern'd'.37 The themes of retirement that characterised the poetry of the mid-seventeenth century are repeated by Pope, and in the Palladian revival of the early eighteenth century and the widespread adoption of the villa model for the country house one can see a parallel revival and reinforcement of architectural restraint. In Shaftesbury such restraint is allied with manners and with the proper political interests of the landed order.

In the seventeenth century the image of the landed elite was being underpinned in a variety of ways. Pride of possession, and consciousness of place in the local community, underlies the origins in the mid- seventeenth century of written county histories, concerned largely with

35John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (I774), I1, 381; Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, West Dorset (1952), plates 169-72.

36Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 412.

37John Evelyn, A Parallel ofArchitecture, both Ancient and Modern, by Roland Freart de Chambray (1664), sig. b.(I).

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

308 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

celebrating the lineage and confirming the standing of leading families. The increasing inclusion of views of houses in published books, cul- minating with Jan Kip and Leonard Knyffs great national conspectus of 1707, are a visual confirmation of the centrality of the house to the estate, not only in a physical but in an ideological sense. Significantly, the title of their work is Britannia Illustrata; the nation is depicted in terms of the architectural decorum of its political leaders - a view which Shaftesbury would have applauded. Engravings of houses continued to be an integral element of published county histories throughout the eighteenth century, but in 1715 appeared the first volume of what was for England a new kind of architectural publication, Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus. Campbell's moral condemnation of un-English baroque echoed Evelyn and Shaftesbury in his evocation of the pathetic fallacy: 'How affected and licentious are the Works of Bernini and Fontana?' he wrote; 'How wildly extravagant are the Designs of Boromini, who has endeavoured to debauch Mankind.'38 And whereas earlier views had shown houses in their settings, Vitruvius Britannicus comprised plans and elevations - purely architectural representations that presupposed an ability and a willingness to understand this kind of formalised representation on the part of a lay public.

The renewed building boom of the late seventeenth century had already seen the emergence of a group of individuals best described as gentleman designers - Hooke, May, North, Pratt, Samwell, Talman, Vanburgh himself, Winde and Wren. In the sixteenth century, the intellectual credentials of architecture had prevented its dismissal as the exclusive province of the artisan but at the same time had created a gulf between theory and practice. Early in the seventeenth century, Inigo Jones's Baconian understanding of both had conformed to the scientific spirit of the time, while his role as a royal arbiter of taste had done much to establish the social credentials of his art. In the mid- century, exiles such as Pratt and Evelyn were acquiring architectural connoisseurship on their foreign travels, while those who retired to their estates at home were increasingly focused on their improvement. By its end, knowledge of architecture, of the theory of the classical orders, of a range of modem exemplars and enough practical knowledge to be able to produce finished designs that could be realised on the ground, was the province of a number of men of education, gentry by birth, with no background in the building trades. And just as the gentlemanly status of the early members of the Royal Society had given credibility to their researches, the architectural involvement of such men - including members of the Society itself - not only gave authority to their own work but must itself have enhanced the standing of

38Colin Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or, The British Architect (1717), I, sig. B.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

RANK, MANNERS AND DISPLAY 309

architecture and increased the demands for gentlemanly houses from those who, if they lacked such extensive knowledge themselves, were concerned that the architecture of their houses should do them justice.39

Vitruvius Britannicus was the primary text of neo-Palladian formalism, the codification of architectural correctness which was the development of a concern for classicism that had begun in the eclectic architectural symbolism of the sixteenth century. The subscription lists of Vitruvius Britannicus and of other folios include practising craftsmen as well as connoisseurs and the owners of houses illustrated, and the eighteenth century saw a host of cheaper books aimed at the practising artisan. The original reason for the adoption of classicism as a language of culture has gone, to be succeeded by pattern books that make archi- tectural good manners available to anyone whose joiner had William Halfpenny's or Batty Langley's books in his tool bag.40

Perhaps this marks a further parallel between architectural style and manners. The way in which artisans' pattern books like these diffused the Palladian rules is not unlike the way in which new fashions too were welcomed - the tendency that the diaristJohn Byng would deplore towards the end of the century when in his travels he would see country milkmaids aping West-End fashions. And no doubt the easy and universal availability of superficial architectural correctness was in part, at least, responsible for the snobbishness of Lord Chesterfield's recommendation to his son, in Italy in 1749:

If you read about one-third of Palladio's Book of Architecture, with some skilful person, and then, with that person, examine the best buildings by those rules ... you may soon be acquainted with the considerable parts of Civil Architecture; and as for the mechanical parts of it, leave them to masons, bricklayers, and Lord Burlington, who has, to a certain extent, lessened himself by knowing them too well.4'

Pattern books confirmed the democratisatisation of architecture that had initially been made possible by the simpler, architectural styles of the seventeenth century; and with the codification of architectural rules, architectural expertise would become increasingly the province of the professional rather than of the connoisseur.

But Chesterfield himself used architecture as a metaphor of good manners. Reminding his son of the plainness of the Tuscan order, he

39 See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994).

4 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989), 41-59; Eileen Harris, English Architectural Books and Writers, 1556-1775 (Cambridge, 1990), 32-7.

41 Letters of Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, ed. John Bradshaw (1892), I, 259-

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

3IO TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

went on

If upon the solid Tuscan foundation, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian Orders rise gradually with all their beauty, proportions and ornaments, the fabric seizes the most incurious eye, and stops the most careless passenger ... Just so it will fair with your little fabric, which at present, I fear, has more of the Tuscan than of the Corinthian Order ... The several parts which must compose this new front, are elegant, easy, natural, superior good breeding; and engaging address; genteel motions; an insinuating softness in your looks, words and actions; a spruce, lively air, fashionable dress; and all the glitter that a young fellow should have.42

Just as civility itself began as morality and tended in time to lose its ideological force and become frozen as rules of behaviour and etiquette, so creative styles can begin as experiment or inspiration and finish up as a set of rules. In the achievement between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries of a universal classicism, one may perhaps see this happening. Over the space of two hundred and fifty years, architectural expression has evolved from ideology to manners; from the Vitruvian man, the measure of the Renaissance scholars' universe, into Lord Chesterfield's model of formal correctness.

42Ibid., 273-

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 22 Feb 2014 11:22:00 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions