by Bill Bryson
Even when things were moving along, Vanbrugh and the duchess squabbled endlessly. She thought the palace “too big, too dark and too martial.” She accused Vanbrugh of extravagance and insubordination, and became implacably convinced that he was a bad thing. In 1716, she dismissed him altogether—though at the same time instructing the workmen to stay faithful to his plans. When Vanbrugh came with his wife in 1725 to see the finished building—a building on which he had lavished some two-thirds of his architectural career and one-third of his life—he was informed at the gate that the duchess had left standing instructions that he was not to be admitted to the grounds. So he never saw his finished masterwork except as a shimmer in the distance. Eight months later he was dead.
Like Castle Howard, Blenheim is in a baroque style, but even more so. Its roofline is a festive eruption of orbs and urns and other upright embellishments. Many people hated its monumental scale and ostentation. The Earl of Ailesbury dismissed it as “one mass of stone without taste or relish.” Alexander Pope, after exhaustively enumerating its failings, concluded: “In a word, it is a most expensive absurdity.” The Duke of Shrewsbury dismissed it as “a great quarry of stones above ground.” A wag named Abel Evans wrote a mock epitaph for Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
Blenheim is a gloriously overwrought piece of work without question, but transfixing nonetheless, and the scale is so off the chart that it can hardly fail to awe the first-time visitor. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to live in such an oppressive vastness, and in fact the Marl-boroughs barely did. They didn’t move in until 1719, and the duke died just two years later.
Whatever one thought of Vanbrugh and his creations, the age of the celebrity architect had begun.*
Before Vanbrugh’s day, architects weren’t much celebrated. Generally, fame went to those who paid for the houses, not those who designed them. Hardwick Hall, which we encountered in Chapter 3, was one of the great buildings of its age, yet it is merely supposed that Robert Smythson was the architect. It is a pretty good supposition, for all kinds of reasons, but there is no actual proof of it. Smythson was in fact the first man to be called an architect—or nearly to be called an architect—on a monument of about 1588, in which he is described as “architect or and survayor.” But as with so many others of his era, very little is known about his early life, including where he was born and when. He makes his first appearance in the records at Longleat House at Wiltshire in 1568, when he was already in his thirties and a master mason. Where he was before that is completely unknown.
Even after architecture became a recognized profession, most practitioners came from other backgrounds. Inigo Jones was a designer of theatrical productions, Christopher Wren an astronomer, Robert Hooke a scientist, Vanbrugh a soldier and playwright, William Kent a painter and interior designer. As a formal profession, architecture was actually very late developing. Compulsory examinations were not introduced until 1882 in Britain, and architecture wasn’t offered anywhere as a full-time academic discipline until 1895.
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adam was the greatest. Born in 1728 in Scotland, the son of an architect, he was one of a quartet of brothers who all became successful architects, though Robert was the undoubted genius of the family and the one remembered by history. The period from 1755 to 1785 is sometimes called the Age of Adam.
A painting of Adam in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made in about 1770 when he was in his early forties, shows a kindly looking man in a powdered gray wig, but in fact Adam was not a particularly adorable fellow. Arrogant and egotistical, he treated his employees poorly, paying them little and keeping them in a kind of perpetual servitude. He fined them severely if they were caught doing any work other than for him, even a sketch for their own amusement. Adam’s clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply couldn’t give him enough work. The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.
Adam’s designs were intense—sometimes overwhelming—and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for overdecoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him “a Pastry Cook.” By the late 1780s, Adam was being denounced as “sugary and effeminate” and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn’t mention him at all. The banishment didn’t last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture.
The one thing all buildings had in common through Adam’s day was a rigorous devotion to symmetry. Vanbrugh, to be sure, didn’t entirely achieve symmetry at Castle Howard, but that was largely accidental. Elsewhere, however, symmetry was adhered to as an immutable law of design. Every wing had to have a matching wing, whether it was needed or not, and every window and pediment to one side of the main entrance had to be exactly mirrored by windows and pediments on the other side regardless of what went on behind them. The result often was the building of wings that no one really wanted. Not until the nineteenth century did this absurdity begin to end, and it was a remarkable property in Wiltshire—one of the most extraordinary ever built—that started the process.
It was called Fonthill Abbey, and it was the creation of two strange and fascinating men: William Beckford and the architect James Wyatt. Beckford was fabulously rich. His family owned plantations all across Jamaica and had dominated the West Indian sugar trade for a hundred years. Beckford’s doting mother made sure her son enjoyed every advantage in his upbringing. The eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart was brought in to give him piano lessons. Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, taught him to draw. Beckford’s wealth was so inexhaustibly great that when he came into his inheritance on his twenty-first birthday, he spent £40,000—an obscenely colossal sum—on the party. Byron in a poem called him “England’s wealthiest son,” probably rightly.
In 1784, Beckford became the centerpiece of the most spectacularly juicy scandal of his age when it emerged that he was involved in a pair of tempestuous, wildly dangerous dalliances. One was with Louisa Beckford, the wife of his first cousin. At the same time, he also fell for a slim and delicate youth named William Courtenay, the future ninth Earl of Devon, who was generally agreed to be the most beautiful boy in England. For a few torrid and presumably exhausting years, Beckford maintained both relationships, often under the same roof. But in the autumn of 1784 there was a sudden rupture. Beckford received or discovered a note in Courtenay’s hand that threw him into a fit of jealous rage. No record exists of what the note said, but it provoked Beckford into intemperate action. He went to Courtenay’s room and, in the slightly confused words of one of the other houseguests, “horsewhipped him, which created a noise, and the door being opened, Courtenay was discovered in his shirt, and Beckford in some posture or other—Strange story.”
Indeed.
The particular misfortune here was that Courtenay was the darling of his family—he was the only boy among fourteen siblings—and shockingly youthful. He was sixteen at the time of the incident, but may have been as young as ten when he fell under Beckford’s unwholesome sway. This was not a matter that Courtenay’s family would ever let drop, and we may take it for granted that Beckford’s cuckolded cousin was less than
jubilant, too. Disgraced beyond any hope of redemption, Beckford fled to the continent. There he traveled widely and wrote, in French, a gothic novel called Vathek: An Arabian Tale, which is virtually unreadable now but was much admired in its day.
Then, in 1796, his disgrace nowhere near over, Beckford did a wholly unexpected thing. He returned to England and announced a plan to tear down the family mansion in Wiltshire, Fonthill Splendens, which was only about forty years old, and build a new house in its place—and not just anyhouse but the largest house in England since Blenheim. It was a strange thing to do, for he had no prospect of ever filling it with company. The architect he selected for this slightly demented exercise was James Wyatt.
Wyatt is a curiously neglected figure. His only substantial biography, by Antony Dale, was published over half a century ago. He would perhaps be more famous but for the fact that so many of his buildings no longer exist. Today he is remembered more for what he destroyed than what he built.
Born in Staffordshire, the son of a farmer, Wyatt was drawn to architecture as a young man and spent six years in Italy studying architectural drawing. In 1770, aged just twenty-four, he designed the Pantheon, an exhibition hall and assembly room, loosely modeled on the ancient building of the same name in Rome, which occupied a prime site on Oxford Street in London for 160 years. Horace Walpole thought it “the most beautiful edifice in England.” Unfortunately, Marks and Spencer didn’t and in 1931 tore it down to make way for a new store.
Wyatt was an architect of talent and distinction—under George III he was appointed Surveyor of the Office of Works, in effect official architect to the nation—but a perennial shambles as a human being. He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover.
Despite his shortcomings, he became the most sought-after architect of his day. However, he took on more commissions than he could manage and seldom gave satisfactory attention to anyone, to the endless exasperation of his clients. “If he can get with a large fire and have a bottle by him, he cares for nothing else,” wrote one of his many frustrated customers.
“There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion,” observed his biographer Dale, “that Wyatt had three outstanding faults: an entire lack of business capability, the complete incapacity for constant or intensive application . . . and utter improvidence.” And these were the words of a sympathetic observer. Wyatt was, in short, feckless and impossible. A client named William Windham stuck it out for eleven years on a job that should have taken a fraction of the time. “A person has some right to feel impatient,” Windham wearily wrote his absent architect at one point, “finding the principal rooms of his house near uninhabitable because he has not been able to obtain from you what would not be the work of a couple of hours.” To be a Wyatt client was to be long-suffering.
Yet Wyatt’s career was both successful and remarkably productive. Over a span of forty years, he built or refashioned a hundred country houses, extravagantly reworked five cathedrals, and did much to change the face of British architecture—not always, it must be said, for the good. His treatment of cathedrals was particularly rash and sweeping. A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt’s predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him “the Destroyer” and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman’s Magazine—essentially his whole career—to attacking Wyatt’s style and character.
At Durham Cathedral, Wyatt had plans to surmount the building with a mighty spire. This never came to pass, which is perhaps no bad thing, for at Fonthill Wyatt would soon show that there were few places more dangerous to be than under a Wyatt tower. He also wished to sweep away the ancient Galilee Chapel, the last resting place of the Venerable Bede and one of the great achievements of English Norman architecture. Happily, that plan was rejected, too.
Beckford was enthralled by Wyatt’s dashing genius but driven to sputtering fury by his unreliability. Still, he somehow managed to keep the wayward architect focused enough to draw a plan, and work started shortly before the turn of the century.
Everything at Fonthill was designed on a fantastic scale. Windows stood fifty feet high. Staircases were as wide as they were long. The front door rose to a height of thirty feet but was made to seem even taller by Beckford’s practice of employing dwarf doormen. Eighty-foot curtains hung from the four arches in the Octagon, a central chamber from which radiated four long arms. The view down the central corridor stretched for over three hundred feet. The dining room table—Beckford its only occupant night after night—was fifty feet long. Every ceiling was lost in a distant gloom of hammerbeams. Fonthill was very possibly the most exhausting residence ever built—and all for a man who lived alone and was known everywhere as “the man on whom no neighbour would call.” To preserve his privacy, Beckford built a formidable wall, known as the Barrier, around the estate. It was twelve feet high, twelve miles long, and surmounted by iron spikes to deter trespassers.
The Great Western Hall, leading to the Grand Saloon or Octagon, at Fonthill Abbey
Among the additional, incidental planned structures was a mighty tomb, 125 feet long, in which his coffin would be placed on a dais 25 feet above the ground, so that, he believed, no worms could ever get to him.
Fonthill was deliberately and riotously asymmetrical—”architectural anarchy” in the words of the historian Simon Thurley—and rendered in an ornate Gothic style that made it look like a cross between a medieval cathedral and Dracula’s castle. Wyatt didn’t invent neo-Gothicism. That distinction goes to Horace Walpole for his house Strawberry Hill, in outer London. Gothick, as it was sometimes spelled to distinguish it from the genuine medieval stuff, originally signaled not an architectural style but a type of gloomy, overwrought novel, and Walpole invented that too with The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Strawberry Hill, however, was a fairly cautious, picturesque sort of thing—a more or less conventional house with some Gothic tracery and other embellishments attached. Wyatt’s Gothic creations were vastly darker and heavier. They had looming towers and romantic spires and jumbled rooflines that were studiously asymmetrical, so that they looked as if the whole structure had grown organically over centuries. It was a kind of Hollywood imagining of the past, long before there was a Hollywood. Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.* They dripped it.
In his obsession to get the project completed Beckford kept up to five hundred men working round the clock, but things constantly went wrong. Fonthill’s tower, rising to a height of 280 feet, was the tallest ever put on a private house, and it was a nightmare. Rashly, Wyatt used a new kind of rendering called Parker’s Roman cement, invented by a Reverend James Parker of Gravesend, yet another of that inquisitive breed of clergymen whom we encountered at the outset of the book. What impulse brought the Reverend Mr. Parker to the world of building materials is unknown, but his idea was to produce a quick-drying cement of the type once used by the Romans, from a recipe since lost. Unfortunately, his cement had little inherent strength and, if not mixed exactly correctly, tended to fall apart in chunks—as it did now at Fonthill. Appalled, Beckford found his mighty abbey coming to pieces even as it went up. Twice it collapsed during construction. Even when fully erect, it creaked and groaned ominously.
To Beckford’s boundless exasperation, Wyatt was often either away drunk or working on other projects. Just as things were literally falling apart at Fonthill and the five hundred workers were either running for their lives or tw
iddling their thumbs awaiting instructions, Wyatt was engaged in a massive, abortive project to build King George III a new palace at Kew. Why George III wanted a new palace at Kew is a reasonable question, as he had a very good one there already, but Wyatt went ahead and designed a formidable edifice (nicknamed “the Bastille” because of its forbidding looks), one of the first buildings anywhere to use cast iron as a structural material.
We don’t know what the new palace looked like, because no reproduction of it exists, but it must have been something. It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards—a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot. Unfortunately, as the building rose beside the Thames, the king began to lose his sight and his interest in things he couldn’t see. Also, he never liked Wyatt much. So, with the building half finished and more than £100,000 wasted, work was stopped ten years after it began and never resumed. The structure stood empty and uncompleted for years until a new king, George IV, finally had it pulled down.
Throughout their fractious relationship, Beckford bombarded Wyattwith outraged letters. “What putrid inn, what stinking tavern or pox ridden brothel hides your hoary and glutinous limbs?” ran one typical inquiry. His pet name for Wyatt was “Bagasse” (pimp). Every letter was a screed of rage and inventive insult. Wyatt was, to be sure, maddening. Once he left Fonthill to go to London, ostensibly on urgent business, but got only three miles, to another property owned by Beckford, where he fell in with another boozy guest. A week later Beckford discovered them there together, insensate and surrounded by empty bottles.
