The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Once the survivors had heaved themselves onto dry land, Orkney led them in an audacious uphill sprint towards the French lines. The ferocity of the English assault was such that Orkney’s infantry could easily have taken the villages of Offus and Autre-Eglise, and broken through onto the plain beyond. However, concerned that the British cavalry would not be able to support the drastic advance, Marlborough sent orders for Orkney to retreat. Despite his quiet, hesitant nature, Orkney had a reputation for singlemindedness that sometimes, amid the unconstrained brutality of battle, flared up into insubordination. Aware that the bloody advance would have left Orkney feeling belligerent, Marlborough dispatched not only ten aides-de-camp, but also his quartermaster, the Earl of Cadogan, to enforce his orders. Reluctantly Orkney withdrew and waited for the Allied forces to break through further south on the battlefield. When they did, he once again advanced, and the English dragoons ‘made terrible slaughter of the enemy’.3 The victory at Flanders was a turning point for the Alliance, which had experienced heavy losses that spring in northern Italy, in Alsace, and along the Rhine. By drawing the French army to the north of the field, Orkney had enabled Marlborough to break through further south. It was the moment that would consolidate Orkney’s reputation as a fearless general.

  Two hundred miles away, Elizabeth waited anxiously at Cliveden for news of her husband. ‘I have tired myself with fright,’ she wrote. Elizabeth’s letters on the subject of Orkney at war give a glimpse into the fear that military wives grapple with on a daily basis. Whatever her motivations for marrying Orkney, she had clearly grown to love him. Orkney, for his part, depended greatly on his wife. He admired her fortitude, resourcefulness and emotional resilience. They were a well-matched couple: Orkney, timid and reclusive as he was when not on the battlefield, showed no sign of turning his attentions to another woman, and Elizabeth made it her mission to create for him a nurturing home environment that was run with military precision. Orkney’s letters to his brothers show that Elizabeth was constantly in his thoughts during his dangerous military exploits. He often apologised for not having time to write to his brothers, but would say that his wife could always be relied on to relay his news. ‘The last letter I wrote to my wife giving her an account of the expedition of our little Army here,’ he wrote to Lord Selkirk in August 1708. ‘I had not time to write to you but bid her send you my letters which I doubt nothing but she has done.’4

  Being on the Continent did not stop Orkney from obsessing over Cliveden. His angst about his own beloved property rendered him particularly sensitive to episodes of looting and pillaging – especially when they involved the destruction of beautiful houses. By August 1708, the Alliance had advanced through Flanders to the fortress of Lille, which had been fortified in the previous century by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban – the foremost military engineer of his age – and could only be taken with a protracted siege. During the siege of the city, Alliance soldiers made violent raids on the Lille suburbs, which lay outside the city’s bastions and broad flooded ditches. In his letter of 1 August, written from a camp at Lens, about 30 miles to the southwest of Lille, Orkney wrote: ‘We burnt the faubourgs [suburbs] and about twenty villages in Picardy and brought off some hostages but not of consequence… They tell me they burnt a very fine house that was not yet finished and that the staircase was very fine this really vexes me to think such a thing can be done, I who am a-building.’5

  The chaos wrought by looting also troubled Marlborough’s conscience, although he seemed more concerned with its impact on people than on buildings. ‘We sent this morning 3,000 horse to his [the Elector’s] chief city of Munich, with orders to burn and destroy all the country around it,’ he reported to his wife Sarah during the 1704 spoliation. ‘This is so uneasy to my nature that nothing but an absolute necessity could have obliged me to consent to it, for these poor people only suffer for their master’s ambition, there having been no war in this country for 60 years. Their towns and villages are so clean that you would be pleased with them.’6 No doubt Orkney and Marlborough’s humanitarian concerns were greater in retrospect than they were during the violent daily struggle of war. In an age where the phenomenon of traumatic combat disorders was not recognised, the burden of such experiences must have weighed heavily on military wives like Sarah and Elizabeth once their husbands returned.

  Concerns over how to finance the redesign of Cliveden had already led Orkney to become involved in a number of dubious colonial ventures. Since 1698, he had been the absentee governor of Virginia, the most profitable and populous of England’s American possessions. The colony had a lucrative tobacco-farming industry that was largely dependent on the labour of African slaves. Orkney, like most colonial governors, had money invested in his colony, and in 1707 attempted to recover a £1,000 return. However, as was often the case with transatlantic schemes, it was easy to invest, but fiendishly difficult to recover any profit. The same year, the new deputy governor of Virginia, who would have been responsible for tracking down Orkney’s money, was captured by pirates on his way from England and was taken to France as a prisoner; it would be 1710 before a new deputy governor arrived in Virginia and it is not clear whether in the meantime Orkney received his thousand pounds.

  Orkney had also invested in a much more speculative scheme to establish a Scottish colony in Central America in the region of modern-day Panama.7 The venture, the Darien scheme, was conceived in the 1680s and aimed to produce a source of colonial wealth for Scotland in order that the country could stay independent from England. The first expedition set sail in 1698 with 1,200 settlers and arrived in October that year. The settler population was soon decimated by fever and food shortages. Before news of the disaster reached Scotland a second expedition had already set sail. The second wave of settlers suffered a similar fate, and the few survivors were forced to return home when a more powerful Spanish flotilla arrived to seize the territory. Investors in the Darien scheme were compensated under the terms of the 1707 Act of Union, which unified England and Scotland, but at most Orkney would have recovered his original investment – he certainly didn’t make any money from the ill-fated scheme.8

  With a meagre military salary and unpromising Atlantic investments, Orkney’s last hope of raising money for Cliveden was the generosity of his mother, Anne, Duchess of Hamilton. It is clear from Orkney’s correspondence that he received from the duchess an allowance, which he variously referred to as ‘what my lady was pleased to give me’ and ‘my … provision’.9 Sound financial management was of particular significance in the Hamilton family, as the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton had gone to great lengths, in the late 17th century, to restore and protect the duchess’s inheritance. Anne’s father and uncle had contracted enormous debts during the Civil War, and the Hamilton estates had been broken up among Cromwellian commanders. The recovery took considerable effort and sacrifice: the couple only managed to repossess Hamilton Palace, where Orkney was brought up, by selling £7,000-worth of personal possessions. While Orkney was always grateful for whatever his mother sent him, he never asked for money. In part this was because he was loath to show any form of weakness, in part because he was intensely aware of his parents’ struggles, and wanted to present himself as a prudent and financially secure successor.

  The size and timing of his mother’s financial gifts varied: in May 1710, after receiving £1,500 from her, Orkney wrote that ‘this I think a blessing since I was not expecting it’.10 He usually asked for the money to be sent directly to Elizabeth, so she could funnel it into the costly building works at Cliveden. On several occasions the money went straight towards paying off debts, which he had managed to rack up despite his aversion to paying interest: in October 1707 Orkney wrote that ‘the chiefe work man was to have 12 hundred of it’, and the £1,500 he received in May 1710 went towards a debt of £3,000 that he was obliged to pay by 10 June.11

  By late 1712, Archer’s modifications to Cliveden had been completed. The hipped roof of Buckingham’s house, which the
diarist John Loveday described as ‘monstrous’, had been removed, endowing the new structure with more elegant proportions, and quadrant colonnades linked the main house to its newly built wings.12 The result was a model of the fashionable neo-Palladian architectural style that took hold in England at the beginning of the 18th century. The classical simplicity of this style was a reaction to ornate baroque architecture, which its detractors associated with French decadence. Most of Archer’s work was unmistakably baroque, and his redesign of Cliveden stands out as a rare example of neo-Palladianism within his corpus: maybe he decided that his usual high baroque mode would be inappropriate for a man who had made his name fighting the French. An illustration and description of the Orkneys’ house appeared in the 1717 edition of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, an influential account of the neo-Palladian movement in England:

  Under the great Court in Front are arched Corridors that communicate from one side of the Offices to the other; a thing of great Use and Conveniency: Here is also a curious Grotto with a great Number of large and spacious Vaults and many other subterraneous Conveniences. The second and third Storeys contain many fine Apartments, magnificently furnished. The second Plate is the chief Front to the North, having the Offices joined to the House by Corridors of the Ionic Order, designed by Mr Archer. The third Plate is the South Front with the forenamed Terrace, which affords one of the most beautiful Prospects in the Kingdom.13

  Inside the house, the rooms were panelled with Spanish oak and the landings on the staircase were inlaid with walnut-tree wood. The Orkneys were known for their good taste in art and furniture and visitors came to see the portraits and tapestries that adorned the walls. ‘I know no tapestry that excels Lord Orkney’s,’ Loveday enthused.14

  In the first decades of the 18th century, interior design became increasingly important. The boom in England’s commercial trade, coupled with the declining price of food, meant that a larger chunk of aristocratic household budgets could now be allocated to decorating the inside of houses. Home-spun silks, available from the mercers in Cheapside, Covent Garden and Ludgate Hill, were used as curtains, wall hangings and bed coverings. A steady stream of exotic luxury imports – Chinese porcelain, silks, wallpaper and lacquerware furniture – made their way into stylish halls, closets and bedchambers. By the 1730s a ‘Chinese room’, decorated with imported paper and screens, porcelain vases on the mantelpiece and blue and white plate lining the walls, was an essential component of an elegant country house. Lightweight patterned Indian chintzes were liberally deployed as furnishing fabrics, providing a breezy contrast to the heavier silks and brocades of the previous century.

  Queen Mary had been a great aficionado of what was generically known as ‘china’, which comprised many types of porcelain from the East, and the blue and white variety from Delft in Holland. This royal craze spawned its own microculture of competitive collecting – aristocratic women vied with each other over who could accumulate the most china, sometimes to comic effect. Daniel Defoe noted with amusement the ‘strange degree’ of china ‘piled upon the Tops of Cabinets, Scrutons, and every chimney-piece.’15 The Duchess of Somerset was famed for her pair of ‘India Cabinets’ surmounted by ‘22 pieces of China’, and the 45 pieces of china displayed in her closet over the door and chimneypiece.16 Elizabeth’s time in the Dutch Republic had given her a head start in the craze for acquiring Delft imports, and her own collection of china, which was proudly displayed on the mantelpiece and in the corner cupboards of the great hall, became a popular talking point and inspired many people to journey to Cliveden just for a viewing.

  In December 1712, the Orkneys spent Christmas at Cliveden. Previous Christmases had been overshadowed by Orkney’s impending return to the European campaigns, but peace was now imminent. In January 1712, following the sensational popularity of Swift’s pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies, the House of Commons had resolved by a margin of over 100 votes that the Duke of Marlborough’s conduct had been ‘unwarranted and illegal’. In the same month peace negotiations began in Utrecht, but Harley and Queen Anne had already held secret talks the previous year, leaving Marlborough’s successor, the Duke of Ormond, with little power of his own. By August, a ceasefire had been agreed. Orkney would not have to return to the Continent in the spring of 1713.

  Determined to make the most of the celebration, Elizabeth threw herself into planning every detail. She decked the entrance of the house with laurels, rosemary, ivy and any greenery that she deemed sufficiently ornamental. In the kitchen the family cooks prepared the traditional festive food – Christmas porridge, a rich broth of dried raisins, plums and spice, livened up by a generous slug of wine; seasonal pies stuffed with chopped meat, currants and beef suet; and plum pudding. On Christmas Day, the Orkney family attended church, then returned to Cliveden to feast on roast beef, with potatoes and turnips. After Christmas dinner, the family retired to the drawing room, drank tea and played cards. Elizabeth had arranged a puppet show to entertain the children. Gifts of rosemary, gingerbread, marzipan and wine were exchanged, while servants were given their annual ‘Christmas box’. For Orkney, it was an idyllic end to a decade fraught with worry and warfare, and Elizabeth was relieved that her husband, unlike so many others, had survived the brutal battles in Europe.

  The Marlboroughs’ Christmas was not so carefree. In June 1712, Treasury payments for the construction project at Blenheim had been curtailed. Given the state of Marlborough’s reputation, there was no way that the subsidy could continue. Privately, Queen Anne also linked the termination of funds to Sarah’s behaviour on vacating her Whitehall apartments, reasoning that ‘she would not build a house for one who had pulled down and gutted hers.’17 Without the royal allowance, work could not continue. By the end of the year Blenheim was an enormous, abandoned building site, daubed with anti-Marlborough graffiti.18 After the coronation of Anne’s successor, George I, Marlborough would try to restart work on the house from his own purse, but he could not offer the same pay to his craftsmen, and many deserted the project. The duke’s early field letters, with their excited talk about how to furnish the house – his Brussels hangings and Sarah’s buffet – faded into the realms of fantasy. Meanwhile the Orkneys, within the constraints of their limited budget, nurtured Cliveden from strength to strength.

  Chapter 8

  THE GREEN REVOLUTION

  IN THE EARLY 1700s, garden design was a male-dominated arena: aristocrats commissioned plans from landscape designers, or came up with their own designs in consultation with professionals; writers such as Alexander Pope toured their friends’ estates, and wrote articles about the principles and aesthetics of gardening. Only flower gardens and kitchen gardens were thought of as female domains, due to their association with domesticity. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, considered flowers to be ‘a very innocent pleasure’ and took pride in her kitchen garden, which she used for vegetables and home remedies.1 While Elizabeth enjoyed her own kitchen garden and certainly entertained herself by concocting various remedies, unusually she was also actively involved in the redesign of the gardens at Cliveden. As early as 1705, Elizabeth was supervising a workforce of ‘20 or 30’ men at work at Cliveden, ‘planting and other things doing’.2

  It was always Lord Orkney’s intention to remake the gardens at Cliveden once he returned from war. ‘As for the Ground behind the House, I have a plan how I should turn it,’ he wrote from the field in 1706.3 The parterre, with terraces leading down to the river, had been part of Buckingham’s garden, and Orkney wanted to enlarge and redesign the existing structure. The ‘plan’ he referred to in his letter was the parterre design drawn up for him in 1706 by Henry Wise, gardener to Queen Anne. The predominant style of garden design in early 18th-century England was French, although what was referred to as ‘French’ design was in fact a composite of French and Italian: from France came long straight avenues, jets d’eau and fanciful parterres; from Italy came the commanding position of the house at the centre of the garden, the cascad
ing terraces, strict symmetry and elaborate statuary. All of these Continental design elements had been deployed by Buckingham in the gardens he built at Cliveden. While the outlines of their work were still highly formal, Wise and his partner George London added various Dutch fashions, such as the use of walls and hedges to compartmentalise gardens. However, soon after Orkney returned from his last campaign season, gardening fashion was transformed thanks to an article by Alexander Pope.

  ‘We seem to make it our study to recede from nature,’ Pope wrote in the Guardian, ‘not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach of the art itself: we run into sculpture, and are yet better pleased to have our trees in the most awkward figure of men and animals, than in the most regular of their own.’4 The publication of Pope’s essay in 1713 would later be seen as a seminal moment in the shift against the bombast and symmetry of French garden design, and a move towards a new homegrown style. With this tide change came the rise of the young Charles Bridgeman. He had worked under Henry Wise on the very formal designs for the gardens at Blenheim, but in the 1710s began to take on commissions of his own. His own designs were characterised by simplified components – less ornate parterres, plain grass lawns and, occasionally, plots of agricultural land – arranged in a way that was intended to mimic a natural landscape. The anti-French implications of this nascent new style of garden resounded with the Whigs, who had championed England’s (and subsequently Britain’s) involvement in the Continental wars: one of Bridgeman’s first commissions was at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, the country seat of Viscount Cobham, a lieutenant general who had served with Orkney in the War of the Spanish Succession.