Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors
Page 50
Upon the first Henry Hoare’s death in 1725, his son, also called Henry, completed the work of house-building.
And it was he who, until his death in 1785, made the house and garden what it is today. Well-travelled and well-read—he was travelling and/or living on the Continent until 1738. It wasn’t until 1741 that he finally made his home at Stourhead.
After the death of his wife in 1743, and even as he continued to work on the house and purchase paintings and sculptures for it, he began work on the garden—but again, unlike his contemporaries, he didn’t hire a master gardener like Capability Brown.
No, Hoare did it himself.
And basing his work on the idealised landscapes he loved by Claude Lorrain, Poussin and especially Gaspar Dughet, Hoare made his garden by painting with nature. “The greens should be ranged together in large masses,” he wrote, “as the shades are in painting: to contrast the dark masses with the light ones, and to relieve each dark mass itself with little sprinklings of lighter greens here and there.”
He had the vast lake that is such a striking feature still today created in 1754 by damming a small stream. (For the trivia seekers among you, the lake is the source of the River Stour—one of five rivers in England so named—which flows through Wiltshire and Dorset, reaching the English Channel at Christchurch. In at least one early map of Dorset, it is shown as the River Stower, as it is pronounced to this day. Stourton, on the other hand, is pronounced “Sterton”.)
Writing of the garden in 1755, Hoare said:
Whether at pleasure or business, let us be in earnest, and ever active to be outdone or exceeded by none, that is the way to thrive.... What is there in creation [at Stourhead]...those are the fruits of industry and application to business, and show what great things may be done by it, the envy of the indolent, who have no claim to Temples, Grottos, Bridges, Rocks, Exotick Pines and Ice in Summer.
Like many of his class, Hoare sought to illustrate his classical education and erudition through classical references and allusions in his building and the decoration of the garden. So he had a Pantheon built that same year based on the Pantheon in Rome, and the whole trip around the lake—it feels like a good two to three miles up and downhill—was based on the journey of the classical hero, Aeneas.
Within a few years, the garden was renowned, not only for Henry Flitcroft’s temples around the lake, but for the wide range of plants which had been gathered from around the world and coaxed into growing in this very English landscape.
Indeed, visiting Stourhead became such a late 18th century craze among polite society (similar to visiting Derbyshire and Chatsworth) that Hoare had an hotel built, the Spread Eagle, only a few hundred yards from his gatehouse. Though when Mrs. Libby Powys—a prolific garden visitor and arbiter of garden taste—came for a visit in 1776, she found the inn full....
Over the years, the house was expanded—notably by Henry Hoare’s grandson, Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838) who became a noted county historian and an omnivore of a collector. It was he who had built the two side wings—the one to house his library and the other to house his Picture Gallery. It was he also who employed the younger Chippendale to make furnishings for the two new wings and invited a young unknown watercolourist, J.M.W. Turner, down to Wiltshire to paint.
Today, the house and gardens too have seen many changes. The house was gutted by fire in 1902—though because it was slow to spread, the furnishings and paintings from the ground floor were able to be rescued. And within months, it was being rebuilt.
More distressing still to the then owner, the 6th Baronet, Henry Hugh Hoare, was the death of his only son in 1917, while he was serving in Palestine. Thus, by 1938, Hoare had decided to give the house and gardens to the National Trust, and in 1946, he did so.
And thus Stourhead, the great visitor attraction of the eighteenth century, came full circle. The Spread Eagle now serves excellent pub lunches; Hoare’s estate workers’ cottages now provide holiday lets. And the landscape garden designed by a banker, now moulded timelessly into Wiltshire’s landscape, continues to paint with nature as season gives way to season.
The Pursuit of the Picturesque
by M.M. Bennetts
Eh? The picturesque? What’s that twaddle, you say? Let me explain....
The Oxford English Dictionary defines picturesque as “like or having the elements of a picture; fit to be the subject of a striking or effective picture; possessing pleasing or interesting qualities of form and colour (but not implying the highest beauty or sublimity): said of landscapes, buildings....”
Furthermore, the OED tells us that the word didn’t enter the English language until 1703 (which is quite late). But by the mid-18th century, the picturesque was well on its way to being all the rage, and the concept would hold British society rapt until well into the 1830s...which is a very long time for matters of taste and style.
The whole concept can be traced—sort of—to the Italian landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Nicolas Poussin—these same painters who were so influential in formulating the ideal of English Landscape Gardening. Yet these painters and their works also wholly engaged the imaginations of two 18th century British poets, James Thomson (1700-1748) and John Dyer (1699-1757).
It may seem hard to believe, but before these two, poetry just wasn’t about nature. It didn’t extol the beauties of nature, and the idea of poetically rendering the sights, scents, or colours of the natural world—well, you can just forget that.
But these two changed all that—these men were landscape painters in verse, displaying all the delights of sunrises and sunsets and panoramic views as much as if they’d been daubing oils on canvas.
And this change in poetic emphasis and vision played into the 18th century Enlightenment ideal of the purity and goodness of the natural world as extolled by authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Which in turn fed into the nascent Romantic movement and the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge Taylor.
Hence nature, once just there and untameable, was now viewed as if it might be an infinite sequence of subjects that would make up “a striking or effective picture” with paint, poetry, or in the case of the landscape gardeners, plants and “picturesque” ruins.
Here’s Wordsworth’s offering from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (written July 1798).
...Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
And reading about it, reciting it, viewing the paintings of these landscape painters, all encouraged the 18th century population to look at nature and to embrace the landscape with an artistic eye and a new-found sense of gusto.
So what do they do? They start touring the country like mad...some visit the many famous landscape gardens, some make walking tours of the Lake District (Wales was popular too), and some travel farther to see the beauties of Scotland as did Dr. Johnson.
Obviously, it’s not just the landscape of Great Britain which has travellers so entranced—up until 1789 the beauties of France, Italy, and Greece are well within the well-heeled tourists’ reach. But with the com
ing of the French Revolution in 1789, and France’s rapid descent into turbulence and war, the natural wonders of the Continent cease to be viable destinations, and the British travellers turn inward, their journeys confined to their own little island.
Jane Austen writes of Elizabeth Bennet and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner visiting the Peak District of Derbyshire, an activity many of her readers would have considered quite normal. She likewise sends Anne Elliot down to Lyme Regis to visit the seaside and walk along the Cobb to view the seething grey waves of the Atlantic coast. What are they doing? They are indulging in a very British pastime; they are—like everyone else of taste and discernment—indulging their passion for the picturesque.
And so much a part of the English psyche was this hobby of seeking out the lofty peaks, cascades, cliffs, woods, ruined castles by midnight, and other such scenic prospects, that beginning in 1809, William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson published a verse parody with pictures of the whole pastime in The Poetical Magazine, called The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque.
The verse story tells the tale of Dr. Syntax—a down-at-heel scarecrow of a curate and schoolmaster in a rusty black suit and scratch wig—who conceives of a trip round England. Penny-pinched and hen-pecked, he aims to make money out of recording his experiences and the sights he encounters. As Syntax describes his plan:
I’ll make a TOUR—and then I’ll WRITE IT.
You well know what my pen can do,
And I’ll employ my pencil too:—
I’ll ride and write, and sketch and print,
And thus create a real mint;
I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there,
And picturesque it ev’ry where.
I’ll do what all have done before;
I think I shall—and somewhat more….
Syntax’s subsequent adventures bumbling through the English countryside on Grizzle, his equally dubious horse, make Don Quixote look like James Bond. The illustrated comic poem was a runaway success.
Still, even amidst the well-aimed mockery, the fashion for the picturesque was far from running its course. On the contrary. The new generation of Romantic poets—Keats, Scott, Shelley, and Byron—were busily adding to the picturesque canon in poetry.
And the new star of the artistic firmament, J.M.W. Turner, capitalised on the craze, embarking on painting a series of commissioned watercolours for Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England (completed in 1826). In 1818, he was again commissioned to paint a series of watercolours of Italian subjects for A Picturesque Tour in Italy.
Still later, from 1827-1838, he painted another 96 views for Picturesque Views in England and Wales. And all of the above were turned into engravings, which sold in their thousands—making Turner a very rich man...though this last group of works really signalled the end of the dominance of the picturesque.
Britain had a new, young queen, and, it would seem, a new outlook. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Rowlandson were old hat, remembrances of a bygone age. So at last, the craze that had captivated generations was at an end.
(Except, of course, we’re still at it...just ask to see the visitor numbers of the National Trust or English Heritage....)
The Must-have Garden Accessories for the Rich and Richer? A Glasshouse and Pineapples!
by M.M. Bennetts
Oranges and lemons first made their way to the English plate and palate sometime during the reign of James I. They were the preserve of the rich. Obviously. Unsurprisingly, within a very short space of time, these citrus fruits—which we take quite for granted—were the status symbol.
In order to grow the fruits then, small conservatories were built to protect the potted trees over the cold English winter months. And they weren’t called conservatories. They were known as orangeries or orange houses.
They had solid roofs because the plants are dormant in the winter months anyway, and featured glass windows (or French doors as we’d call them) along one side—usually the south side—so that the sunshine through the windows from February onwards would help restart the growth until the trees could be taken out into the garden once danger of frost had passed.
Queen Henrietta Maria had such a structure built at Wimbledon Manor House in the 1630s.
By the 1650s, despite the deteriorating political situation which might have taken their attention off such frivolities, the well-heeled were for the most part installing heating into their orange houses, usually in the form of free-standing charcoal-burning stoves. Which occasionally proved unreliable and sometimes poisoned the plants with charcoal fumes.
So the famed garden writer John Evelyn suggested a new kind of stove—this was fixed outside the glasshouse and the heat was conducted into the conservatory through pipes. It sounds obvious to us, but to them, this was innovation! Not only that, but Evelyn was the first to call these orangeries “conservatories”.
Within fifty years, even as the range of plants and fruits to be grown in them had expanded, so too the technology had advanced. In 1710, the Duke of Chandos’ new conservatory was heated by flues, with the central glass section flanked by two walls into which were built coal fireplaces.
Which meant that through the winter months, the tables of the rich and nobles featured not only the citrus fruits, but a wide range of vegetables. And, as well as stocking their conservatories with other plants such as jasmines and pomegranates, they were producing the ultimate symbol of status—largely because they did require a conservatory and were so difficult to grow—the pineapple.
Which incidentally weren’t just eaten. Generally, for at least a fortnight or so before eating, the pineapple would be on display on the dining table as part of a centrepiece.
But, by this time, the conservatory had outgrown its simple original function and was being viewed more as an architectural accessory rather than a horticultural one. They were garden features now and were often being built as a focal point in a garden, rather like the Tudor banqueting houses had once been. Hence, they now often contained a degree of furnishing and, like at Dyrham Park near Bath, were used during the summers as an extra room, when all the plants were outside.
Lady Hertford wrote in 1739 of the Earl of Bathhurst’s greenhouse at Riskins in Buckinghamshire, describing it as “a very agreeable room; either to drink tea, play at cards, or sit in with a book, in a summer’s evening...” for it was filled with a “collection of orange, myrtle, geranium, and oleander trees”.
As the range of available seeds grew, so too did the building of specialist greenhouses. By the early years of the 19th century, it was not unknown for larger households to have a specialist “melon house” which was also used for growing cucumbers, strawberries, and salad greens year-round in raised hot beds.
The technology for heating the glass structures continued to advance, though it remained somewhat experimental. And by the end of the 18th century (due to the wars with France), glass was heavily taxed, so on the whole glasshouses remained prohibitively expensive.
Yet the true test of a skilled horticulturist remained his ability to grow pineapples. (It was also a measure of one’s wealth that one could afford the wages of a head gardener who could grow pineapples.) So in addition to the melon houses and the conservatories which were now attached to the house and used as a summer room, special “pineries” were built.
In 1777, “two hothouses full stocked with pine apples and plants” were built at Knole for the sum of £175.
By 1805, garden designer and painter Humphry Repton was outlining his plans (in paint) for vast greenhouses for Woburn Abbey which he called “The Forcing Garden” and that promised fresh exotic fruit and vegetables throughout the winter. It was also Repton who suggested that the conservatory should be connected to or built off the library (which was by the early 19th century the most used public space of a house) as a natural transiti
on between the house and the garden outside. And it was this which gave rise to the Victorian tradition of building conservatories for the next several generations as garden rooms attached to libraries.
Still, the prize for the greatest pineapples—and thus the greatest conservatory building and the most lavish spending—probably goes to the Marquess of Hertford in 1822. For it was his gardener, Thomas Baldwin, who sent several pineapples to an anniversary dinner of the Royal Horticultural Society—the largest of which weighed 8lbs 14oz.
Late Georgian and Regency Era (1800-1837)
The Extraordinary Clandestine Activities of a Nineteenth Century Diplomat
by Maggi Andersen
Part diplomat and part spy, relatively little has been written about Charles Stuart, Lord Stuart de Rothesay, later 1st Baron Stuart de Rothesay (1779-1845). In his book Private & Secret, Robert Franklin writes:
Headstrong, daring and never lacking personal courage or conviction, Charles Stuart was in many respects a product of his age, but in others he, and his like, also helped to shape that age, and consequently the face of Europe as we know it today.
Sir Charles Stuart, as he was known from 1812 to 1828, was no ordinary diplomat. His story is also the story of the British intelligence service coming of age in the modern era. Although as old as time itself, and reaching unparalleled sophistication under Walsingham in the late 16th century and again under Charles II in the 17th, Britain’s modern secret service came of age in the 19th century, when it was developed as a key weapon against French power in both politics and war.
It’s not difficult to understand how Stuart chose his profession. His paternal grandfather, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was one of the two Secretaries of State in the days when those great functionaries controlled the country’s Secret Service, chiefly through the agency of the Post Office. As Prime Minister, Lord Bute’s greatest achievement was to bring the Seven Years’ War to an end, bribing Members of Parliament, it’s reputed, from secret funds. (All secret service funds were discretionary at this time.)