Anna Maria had finally established a close, loving relationship with her son. She would never be able to reclaim those lost years of his childhood, but she had shown Charles the extent of her regret and her resolve to behave respectably. We can assume that a similar reconciliation was achieved with her younger son, Jake. This renewed connection with the Talbot family provided Anna Maria not only with emotional comfort but also with some political and financial stability, as Charles was Shrewsbury’s heir. Her next aim was to orchestrate her return to England and reception at court. She asked Charles to convey her desire for forgiveness to the Talbot family, hoping that their support would smooth her transition back to society. She was a woman who usually got what she wanted, and, early in 1677, she was received back at court. Her reputation had not diminished during her absence, and she appeared in court satires as a jilted, inveterate, disease-ridden wench. One poem, circulated in 1679, imagined her and a succession of other ‘Ladies of the Town’ applying to buy the role of king’s mistress from the Duchess of Portsmouth. The poet implies that Anna Maria had previously given the king venereal disease that she had contracted from Richard Talbot, one of her husband’s relatives, and casts the Earl of Danby as her pimp:
Shrewsbury offered for the place,
All she had gotten from his grace;
She knew his ways and could comply,
With all decays of lechery;
Had often licked his amorous sceptre,
Until the jaded stallion leapt her;
But long ago had the mishap,
To give the King Dick Talbot’s clap.
Though for her all was said that can be,
By her drudge the Earl of Danby,
She was dismissed with scorn and told,
Where a tall page was to be sold.11
Meanwhile Buckingham, the ‘jaded stallion’, was left to lay the first bricks of his palace at Cliveden, without the woman for whom it had been conceived.
Designs for Cliveden, as they appeared in Colen Campbell’s popular handbook of neo-Palladian architecture, Vitruvius Britannicus.
During his youth, the 2nd duke of Buckingham spent much time in Italy; guests later commented on the similarities between Cliveden’s southern façade and the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, just east of Rome.
Chapter 9
CONSTRUCTION
DESPITE, OR PERHAPS because of his heartbreak, Buckingham made it his mission to oversee every aspect of the construction of Cliveden. The first phase involved the redistribution of large volumes of earth from the north to the south of the site in order to create the 433-foot platform on which the house would be built. Scores of labourers lumbered to and fro with their wheelbarrows. Brian Fairfax, who became Buckingham’s agent and later biographer, compared the audacious plans for Cliveden’s foundations to the Capitol in Rome, which was perched on a precipitous rock. He quoted Cicero to suggest that Cliveden, like the Capitol, had ‘insanae substructiones’ (crazy foundations).1
The main structure of the house was made of brick, which, prior to industrial methods, took months to craft. Each brick had been painstakingly made – earth had been dug up the previous autumn, left over winter in the frost, and then formed in an open-frame mould before being fired in a kiln. The early stages progressed rapidly, and although work on the estate – which Winde had designed in accordance with Buckingham’s original vision – carried through into the following decade, a habitable building was in place by 1678. In the spring of that year, beds, soft furnishings and wall hangings were already being put in place, and shortly after, the house was ready to receive guests. Among the early visitors was one of the king’s mistresses, Louise de Kéroualle, whom Buckingham entertained in an effort to improve relations with Charles.2
From the late 1670s until the mid-1680s, Buckingham continued to add to the existing house and develop the surrounding land. Barges laden with stone and timber regularly docked at the riverside, while carts piled high with building supplies arrived from nearby towns like Cippenham and Lullebrook, as well as from further afield. Winches were used to haul heavy materials up the steep incline from the river to the house. Woodcutters had been employed to clear an avenue through the woods and, elsewhere, other trees were trained to create shaded walkways. Buckingham had cherry trees planted and also created a vineyard, which he later surrounded with hedges to protect it from winds on the exposed hillside. In the newly constructed parts of the house, doors were being hung, walls panelled, windows framed with fir wood. In the roof of the house, plumbers laboured on the water cistern.3
Buckingham’s project required the services of a number of different craftsmen. To sculpt a series of ‘statues bigger than the life’, which would stand in the centre of each of the 26 alcoves beneath the terrace, he employed Edward Pierce, a mason and stone-carver who had worked with Sir Christopher Wren on the rebuilding of London churches in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London.4 The father-and-son team of Jonathan and Edward Wilcox, who had also worked with Wren in the building of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, were appointed as carpenters. Edward Gouge, whose work was considered to be the best in the country, was brought in to create the plasterwork that covered the ceilings, and John Bellingham, who described himself as ‘expert in the art or mystery of making looking-glass plates’ was engaged to make mirrors for the house.5 Most extravagantly, Buckingham summoned the Flemish painter Jan Siberechts to England to create local landscapes to adorn the walls of the house. Siberechts took four years to complete his task and his work at Cliveden earned him several further commissions from English nobles.
Strong and brilliant colours adorned the house – there was an abundance of purple, gold, emerald green and crimson. One ‘closet’ – which at the time meant ‘study’ – was hung with gilt leather. Fabrics such as velvet, silk and brocade were used to line the walls of the grander bedrooms, and the sleeping quarters of the staff were furnished with flock beds and coloured rugs. Flemish tapestries, Oriental rugs and marquetry furniture were all popular decorations in the decades after the Restoration. Such ornamentations would have reflected well Buckingham’s flamboyant personal style. But all of these items came at a cost.
Buckingham, of course, took little account of expense during the building works. In 1677, a year after construction started, he wrote to the king that ‘a little mistake in my builders at Cliveden may cost me above £10,000 because I shall certainly pull it down again if it be not to my own mind’.6 Soon after, Buckingham was able to live in the house. By default, Mary had become the first mistress of Cliveden. The couple employed a full retinue of staff, including a number of footmen, stable-hands, a coach driver, a cook, and an usher of the hall called Jasper Eaton. Edward Manfield, from whom Buckingham had bought the estate, was kept on as gentleman of the duke’s horses on a board wage of £100, and his wife was paid to help with the interior decoration.7
The great hall was the centre of the social activities of the house, and among Jasper Eaton’s duties would have been waiting on Buckingham and Mary’s guests. Entertaining was built into the fabric of the house. Beneath the great parlour, Buckingham had built a domed chamber, joined to the garden by an anteroom that could be accessed through an arch in the middle of the terrace. It was also joined to the ground floor by a brick staircase. The room, known as the Sounding Chamber, had been designed so that music played in the room would be transmitted upstairs into the hall without diminishment or distortion. The acoustics work just as well today as they did in the 17th century: a radio played in the room can be heard upstairs in the main hall with perfect clarity.
Music was a large part of Restoration culture, and in building a sounding room at Cliveden, Buckingham equipped himself to compete with the grand entertainments at court. Charles II often commissioned recitals of the music of his favourite composer, Giacomo Carissimi, and brought a range of virtuoso performers from the Continent, including a troupe of Italian opera singers, whom he paid £200 each – four times the salary of an ordinary cou
rt musician. Buckingham’s musical interests were not exclusively Continental. During his turn as a street entertainer in Commonwealth London, he had become familiar with a variety of ballads and he admired folk tunes as well as arias.
Although Buckingham entertained in the 1680s, the surviving accounts give the impression that his lifestyle was not as decadent as it had been at the start of his affair with Anna Maria. Accounts from Cliveden include infrequent bills of up to £366 on meat, whereas the Clayton and Morris accounts of the 1660s record several bills of £500 a time or more to butchers and poulterers (the equivalent of over £40,000 in today’s money). Surviving records show that while Mary took charge of the more mundane aspects of domestic chores, purchasing butter, cream and whey, Buckingham concerned himself with procuring more lavish goods: one bill to tradeswoman Jane Scarf for ‘Oranges, Lemmons, Apples & Oysters and all manner of herbs & flavours’ amounted to £239.19.11 (£20,000 in today’s money).8 But it was clear that Buckingham’s money worries had done something to curb his spending. Perhaps Mary also proved a sobering influence during her time as mistress of Cliveden.
Meanwhile, Cliveden’s lost chatelaine had begun her life anew. Buckingham’s loss of Anna Maria became irreversible on 23 June 1677 when she married Captain George Rodney Bridges. The duke fell into an oubliette of misery. The Lost Mistress, a poem he wrote around this time, expresses his despair at losing Anna Maria, in the form of a pastoral lament spoken by the spurned shepherd, Strephon: ‘She had the power to make my bliss or woe / And has given my heart its mortal blow’. He also claimed that he would rather suffer than think poorly of Anna Maria: ‘My suffering heart can all Relief refuse, / Rather than her, it did adore, accuse’. The poem also suggests the extent of Buckingham’s indifference to Mary, and her failure to console him in the absence of Anna Maria. ‘I have no Hope, no second comfort left… I lov’d not at a rate to love again… No Change can Ease for my sick Heart prepare / Widow’d to hope, and wedded to Despair.’9
Unsurprisingly, in view of the sentiments expressed in the poem, by this time Mary and Buckingham were living virtually separate lives and their daily routines at Cliveden did not intersect. Mary had some responsibilities in running the estate – 20 cows were kept for her use at the estate dairy at Cippenham – but it seems that the shame of being an unwanted wife may finally have become too great for her to bear. Mary’s health started to suffer. A bill of £20 to the apothecary Moses Bratch documents the purchase of ‘Physic by my Lady’s order’ and another, to Henry Cleaver, the purchase of ‘spirits for my Lady’s use’.10
Buckingham, meanwhile, immersed himself in his studies and in spite of his own sporadic ill-health, he continued to hunt. Some 30 horses, 36 hounds and 16 whelps were kept on the estate and, judging by a payment to Andrew Smith, who was given £5.10 shillings ‘for potting venison’, it appears that the duke may still have had some success at his favourite sport.11
The hunting grounds had been remodelled since Buckingham had hunted there with Anna Maria when he first acquired the land in the 1660s. Before the 17th century, deer parks had formed a separate and adjacent part of country estates, connecting to a hunting lodge rather than the main house. Cliveden had been built with hunting in mind, so it was only natural that the house would connect directly to the deer park; this had been achieved by the construction of an ‘august and stately’ avenue leading from the mansion, through the formal gardens, and into the woods. Such avenues, which had appeared 100 years earlier in Italian Renaissance landscaping, were fashionable at the time: during the 1670s, they were planted at Hyde Park, Buxted and Audley End.12
The formal gardens were an integral feature of Winde’s design for Cliveden, spreading out along the great artificial platform to the south of the mansion, and descending towards the river in terraces linked by a succession of steps.13 The grand villas of Italy, where he had spent so much time in his youth, had made an indelible mark on Buckingham’s architectural predilections, and guests commented on the similarity between Cliveden’s southern façade and cascading gardens and the front of the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, just east of Rome.14
Despite breaking with convention in terms of its location, Cliveden was remarkably on trend in terms of its garden design. The house’s position on an exposed hilltop gave the formal gardens an arresting view. In Tudor and early Stuart houses, which were conventionally built on lower, flatter land, there had been a fashion for special viewing mounts, which gave visitors the opportunity to appreciate the intricate planning of gardens from a high vantage point. At Hampton Court, Henry VIII had used 250,000 bricks to construct an enormous elevation overlooking the entire garden.15 Buckingham’s choice of site cannily provided a natural viewing mount south of the mansion. From here it was possible to see the village of Maidenhead, the river and the deer park to the east. But the mesmerising view was now a painful reminder of everything he had hoped for.
In the years following his split from Anna Maria, at the same time as supervising building works, Buckingham tried to distract himself by re-entering the political fray with renewed vigour. In 1675 he returned to Parliament, now determined to cause disruption to Charles II and his government. The Lord High Treasurer, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, was a vociferous opponent of both Catholic and Protestant nonconformity, while Buckingham was an advocate of broad toleration, and Buckingham threw himself into this principled cause. In October he spoke in the Lords requesting leave to introduce a bill for the toleration of Protestant nonconformists. In expectation that new elections would produce a Parliament more supportive of his bill, Buckingham also lobbied for the dissolution of Parliament. He was unsuccessful and without new elections to reorganise Parliament, Danby managed to get the bill defeated by two votes.
By 1677, Parliament was divided between the Country Party, which included Buckingham, Ashley, now Earl of Shaftsbury, and their supporters, and the Court Party, who supported Danby and the king. The most committed members of the Country Party formed the Green Ribbon Club, a private club that met at the King’s Head Tavern at the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane. The club was notorious for its radical politics – their green badge was an old Leveller symbol from the Civil War – as well as the informality of their meetings: they convened without hats or swords, smoked long clay pipes, and often removed their periwigs.
From this culture of debate and opposition emerged two political parties. The Tories included many Parliamentarians who had previously been allied to the Court Party. Their principles were traditionalist and conservative, they tended to exhibit High Anglican religious beliefs and they were sympathetic to the idea of a strong monarch. Their opponents, the Whigs, evolved from the Country Party that Buckingham had known in the 1670s. They were fearful and suspicious of absolute monarchy and most of them were in favour of greater toleration for Christian minorities. The conflict between these factions was to dictate politics for decades to come.
But Buckingham’s personal experience of fractured English politics was soon to come to an end. His involvement in the Green Ribbon Club and continued agitation for the dissolution of Parliament intensified the wrath of Charles. After one particularly forceful speech to the Lords, in which Buckingham made a thinly veiled suggestion that a rebellion might occur if a new Parliament was not called, the House decreed that he should make a formal apology. Buckingham steadfastly refused and in May 1677 was sent, yet again, to the Tower. His health had been slowly deteriorating and he pleaded to be taken there by coach rather than boat, fearing the damp would worsen his condition. It was a stark contrast to Buckingham’s journey to the Tower in 1667, when crowds had gathered to cheer him on. A decade later the streets were empty. Buckingham’s appeal to the people too had waned.
It was clear that, during this period, Cliveden preoccupied Buckingham. After several weeks in the Tower, he wrote to Charles begging for temporary release to visit his riverside mansion and inspect the ongoing building works there. He was let out for two days on 22 June, given temp
orary release in July and formally freed in August. His incarceration had served its purpose. Following his release, Buckingham ceased to antagonise the Court Party. He made a formal apology to the House of Lords and set about mending relations with Charles. It is unlikely that his view on Protestant dissenters had changed, but from the late 1670s onwards, Buckingham’s appetite for politics waned. In 1679 Shaftsbury and other members of the Country Party began lobbying for the exclusion of Charles’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the royal succession, in favour of the king’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth. It was a hugely controversial plan, which would lead to a decade of crisis, and bring the labels Whig (for supporters of exclusion) and Tory (for opponents) into popular usage. Buckingham, sapped of his vigour, did not contribute to the parliamentary debates. His failure to stand up for the cause discredited him in the eyes of the Country Party, and was damningly invoked by Dryden at the climax of his passage satirising Buckingham as Zimri. The duke’s caprice, suggested Dryden, led him to betray the Protestant cause, leaving Monmouth (Absalom) and Shaftesbury (Achitophel) to lead the fight against a Catholic succession.
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