Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

  The old bogey of Jacobitism was a distant memory and lords and ladies whose ancestors had spurned the Stuart pretenders now masqueraded as the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had died in 1788, an alcoholic and wife-beater, unaware of his imminent metamorphosis. Thanks to Scott’s imagination, he and his followers had become central to a new self-image of the Scottish aristocracy, who were soon building mock Gothic castles, commissioning clan histories and wearing tartan fancy dress. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert would be manic converts to the cult of the Highlands and Balmoral became one of its most impressive shrines.

  Irish Jacobitism was never posthumously glamourised. It left sour memories which embittered the country’s history for the next two hundred years. In the spring of 1689 James had crossed from France to Dublin, where he called a parliament with which he hoped to undo the political and economic settlement established by Cromwell and Charles II. Down would come the Protestant ascendancy and up would go a Catholic one. Irish Protestants resisted, most famously holding out in Londonderry, and were rescued by an army led by William III. It decisively defeated James’s forces at the Boyne in July 1690, a victory which is still annually celebrated by Orange lodges in Ulster and parts of Scotland.

  The Protestant ascendancy was then upheld and reinforced by an exclusively Protestant parliament, militia, judiciary and administration, prayed for by clergy of the Anglican Church of Ireland and defended by a garrison of twelve thousand royal troops distributed in over one hundred and fifty barracks. Catholic clergymen were virtually outlawed, and Catholic landowners were elbowed off their lands by laws framed to expedite their extinction. When one died, his estates had to be divided among all his sons, unless the eldest converted to Protestantism, which qualified him to enjoy the right of primogeniture that applied to landowners in England and Scotland. In 1703 Catholics had owned 14 per cent of the land, by the 1770s 5 per cent. One particularly spiteful statute left the Irish squireen worse mounted than his Protestant neighbour, for Catholics were banned from owning a horse worth more than five pounds. No wonder Catholics called the Glorious Revolution the ‘Woeful Revolution’.

  Cultural, linguistic and religious barriers continued to divide the Anglo-Irish aristocracy from its tenantry. Irish peers were never tempted to dress up as Celtic chieftains, or entertain perceptions of themselves as inheritors of a Gaelic culture, genuine or fabricated. Distance provided a further gulf as an Anglocentric nobility copied its Scottish counterpart and headed for London. It was here that all the crucial decisions for Ireland’s future were made, for in 1720 the Irish Parliament was demoted by a Declaratory Act which placed ultimate authority over the island in Westminster.

  14

  Magnificence: Grand

  Houses and Grand

  Tours

  Great houses built between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries are the familiar, enduring face of aristocratic power. Some, like Hardwick Hall, built in the 1570s by the formidable Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, are landmarks deliberately sited to dominate the countryside as castles once had. Later architects strove for the same effect. Their plans and contemporary paintings show the great house at its most impressive, square-on. Vast landscapes were contrived with driveways and avenues of tree which drew the onlooker’s gaze towards the often distant but imposing building. A Tudor physician advised builders of a new house to consider first the ‘prospect’ and choose a site that was ‘pleasant, fair and good to the eye’.1 A perfect house was, he claimed, a jewel whose colour and brilliance were enhanced by its settings.

  By 1700 these settings were becoming increasingly elaborate and extravagant: there were disciplined lines of trees planted in geometric patterns, woodlands arranged so as to provide charming views, and artificial lakes. In the next century and in response to fashionable fancies, statues and mock temples were added, so that a nobleman might imagine himself as a Roman senator enjoying a carefree retreat from public duties in his Tuscan villa. Later, Romantic-Gothic themes were introduced with grottos (some with live hermits) and bogus ruins.

  Always the aristocracy were straining after the sublime. It was achieved through the satisfaction of the senses and the engagement of the intellect. Beyond the house, the eye and the mind were pleased by prospects of nature brought under human control to provide agreeable walks and idyllic vistas. Inside were paintings, sculpture, ornaments and collections of rarities and curios which aroused the imagination and stimulated conversation. The ensemble of house, contents and grounds were the highest expression of a civilisation which promised to surpass its Greek and Roman prototypes.

  The great house and its surroundings were statements of political and economic power. They represented stability, the security of property, dynastic continuity and dominance of the landed interest. All were underpinned by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, which had ended fifty years of political discord and uncertainty to discourage building on a grand scale. Aristocratic confidence returned and expressed itself in a grandiose manner; Chatsworth, Castle Howard and Blenheim celebrated tranquillity restored and the Whig ascendancy. Baroque exuberance suited this triumphalist mood, but within fifty years it had been discarded by the Whig aristocracy because it smacked of Continental and Stuart absolutism. August, Palladian restraint now reflected the temper of the times and cognoscenti sneered at the tastes of their fathers and grandfathers. Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford, dismissed the work of Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim, as ‘execrable within, without and almost all round’.2

  The evolution of architectural fashion styles is not relevant to this narrative beyond the fact that the speed with which they gained popularity was a measure of the aristocracy’s infatuation with whatever was new. In any case, general terms such as ‘Baroque’ and ‘Palladian’ are simplifications which ignore the overlap and fusion of styles. What is beyond question is that in the early 1600s there was an architectural revolution which had far-reaching consequences for the aristocracy: the adoption of the Italianate style. Its sources were Greek and Roman and it was promoted by Inigo Jones and patronised by James I and Charles I and the nobility of their courts. For the next two hundred years the aristocracy took its architectural taste from antiquity as interpreted by Italian artists and designers.

  Understanding the Italian schools of architecture and the Classical examples which inspired them required the first-hand experience of the Grand Tour. Inigo Jones had travelled to Italy in the entourage of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and sketched what he had seen there, giving his designs the authenticity his patrons wanted. Noblemen and architects unacquainted with the originals resorted to the text and engravings of Sebastiano Serli’s Architettura, published in 1584 and translated in 1611. Other architectural handbooks followed and their engravings and texts were pored over by patrons and architects who wished to keep abreast of the Italian innovations which were the touchstone of all that was fashionable.

  Aristocrats also looked to each others’ houses for inspiration. In the 1570s William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was overwhelmed by the ‘largeness and lightness’ of Holdenby House, then being built by his fellow councillor Sir Christopher Hatton. Hatton, too, was impressed by Burghley’s Hertfordshire seat, Theobolds. Its scale and design also caught the imagination of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, as he began to construct his new house at Syon in Middlesex. ‘I must borrow of my knowledge of Theobalds,’ he told Burghley’s son in 1603. Northumberland also consulted illustrated books on European architecture and called in the maestro, Inigo Jones.3

  Illustrated guides were poor substitutes for experience, which was why every young nobleman with cultural pretensions and a desire to be ahead of fashion (the two were virtually inseparable) had to make his way southwards and undertake the Grand Tour of the Continent. It was a journey of discovery in which the traveller inspected classical architecture in its original and recent forms and examined paintings and statuary in the galleries of foreign princes and no
blemen. At the same time, the tourist learnt foreign languages and acquired that social finesse and swordmanship for which the French aristocracy was famous. He returned home acquainted with both Raphael and the rapier, and an urge to surround himself with Classical grandeur. During his expedition, what he saw was explained and interpreted by his tutor. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes accompanied his pupil, the future second Earl of Devonshire, during extended peregrinations between 1634 and 1637 and purchased books for his master’s library.

  It would be impossible to overstate the importance of the aristocratic Grand Tour to the cultural history of Britain. It was a conduit which irrigated all the arts and kept the country in constant and fruitful contact with the artistic and intellectual movements of Europe. Look around any country house and there are mementos of the Grand Tours undertaken by previous owners. There are books, Old Masters (genuine and ‘attributed’), the busts of Greek and Roman worthies, cabinets of coins, medallions and cameos and walls hung with almost mass-produced canvasses of scenes from classical mythology, or Italian landscapes with picturesque ruins. Like all forms of tourism, the Grand Tour generated a market in souvenirs, many of them hack work, or fakes.

  There are plenty of narratives of individual Grand Tours and an excellent analysis of the phenomenon in John Stoye’s English Travellers Abroad which deals with the seventeenth century. After the signing of a peace with Spain in 1604, a steady flow of aristocrats and their trains of companions and servants proceeded through France towards Italy, which was always the magnet; letters of introduction and safe conducts were always carried. Tutors sent intermittent reports to fathers with details of their sons’ activities and welfare and accounts of incidents they considered pertinent or diverting. Letters written by John Schau to the seventh Earl of Mar between 1617 and 1619 revealed that one of the party had died from the ‘pox’ (syphilis) at Bourges and that his sons Henry and Alexander Erskine were making progress. The Earl was reassured that ‘There is very little time spent idly,’ and that Alexander ‘dances very properly’ and ‘plays prettily well upon the lute’. Tennis lessons were arranged, but proficiency in French was hindered by the pupils’ unwillingness to speak the language.

  Italy was full of potential snags for the stiff Presbyterian Schau and his charges. There was ‘no more danger of any Inquisition’, but fears remained that the boys could be seduced by cunning Jesuits. On returning to Paris early in 1619, Schau was relieved to tell the Earl that the ‘abominations’ of Rome had ‘confirmed your Lordship’s sons in [the] only truth of the reformed church. A detour followed through the Low Countries in which Schau promised ‘I will not be prodigal in nothing except buying books.’4

  Schau hints at those persistent anxieties that the Grand Tour, or any excursion on the Continent, had the potential for corruption and apostasy. Foreign perils were listed by Thomas Nashe in 1594 and repeated in various forms during the next two hundred years. Italy exposed a young gentleman to ‘the art of atheism, the art of epicuring, the art of whoring, the art of poisoning, [and] the art of sodomy’. In Paris he would learn only ‘to distinguish the true Bordeaux grape, and know a cup of neat Gascon wine from the wine of Orléans: yea, and peradventure this also, to esteem the pox as a pimple, to wear a velvet patch on their face, and walk melancholy with their arms folded’.5

  Henry and Alexander Erskine returned home untainted and unpimpled and were presented to James I, who remarked that their father ‘should be pleased with them’.6 This was a gratifying return on Lord Mar’s investment: his sons were now fit to move easily among the sophisticated and fashionable lords and ladies of the court and, if they had persevered with their French and Italian, were qualified to serve the Crown on diplomatic missions. The Grand Tour was a passport to a court where finesse, wit and cleverness counted as never before. Insularity was ignorance: the stay-at-home peer was ridiculed as a bumpkin whose horizons were his boundary markers and whose company was confined to rustic ignoramuses.7

  The Grand Tour was wholly beneficial for aristocrats. It served, in Sir Francis Bacon’s words, to ‘entertain minds with variety and delight’ and satisfied a natural and desirable curiosity.8 The diary of Charles Bertie, son of the second Earl of Lindsey, who travelled through France in 1660 is a catalogue of places and things observed, written for the most part without comment. He saw the royal apartments at St-Germain-en-Laye, inspected dog kennels and art galleries and recorded the height of steeples. He was particularly struck by the ‘rarest’ Italian paintings and ‘two women naked excellently painted’ in the Palais du Luxembourg.9

  Bertie was undertaking a reconnaissance. Noblemen on the Grand Tour rarely purchased what pleased their eye or captivated their imaginations. Rather, they were acquiring a corpus of knowledge that would be employed later when they embarked on collecting paintings and sculpture.10 Window shopping was the prelude to buying through agents based in Italy of whom one of the busiest and most obliging was Sir Henry Wotton, several times ambassador to Venice between 1604 and 1624.

  The aristocracy had first become addicted to collecting paintings in the mid-sixteenth century and at first showed a preference for portraits. According to the herald and portraitist Sir William Segar, they preserved for ever the memory of the ‘excellent actions’ of those who had ‘lived honourably and died virtuously’.11 Likenesses of ‘honourable friends’ hung in the gallery of Lord Howard of Bindon and it delighted him to stroll through it and contemplate them.12 Elizabethan statesmen acquired pictures of foreign princes, both allies and enemies. Their portraits hung in Lord Burghley’s gallery at Theobalds, and in the Earl of Leicester’s at Kenilworth, alongside likenesses of himself in full armour and his friends and family.13 These records of honour were comparatively inexpensive, for portraits cost between three and nine pounds, which was the cost of a hogshead of claret.14

  Elizabethan portrait painters knew what their patrons wanted. Honour and status were emphasised by the meticulous rendering of rich textiles, lace, embroidery, jewels and the insignia of office and heraldry. There were also private and allegorical images which were often enigmatic and intelligible only to the sitter or members of his intimate circle.

  The nature of aristocratic art patronage and collecting was changed radically by the Grand Tour and the examples set by the Stuart court. James I’s Queen Anne of Denmark, her sons Henry, Prince of Wales, and Charles I set the pace and course of picture buying. Britain entered the mainstream of Continental princely culture and the aristocracy was happy to be swept along by its currents. First among the cognoscenti was Thomas Howard, second Earl of Arundel, an austere and dignified figure whom some of his equals believed was the complete embodiment of aristocratic virtue. ‘Here comes the Earl of Arundel’, one remarked, ‘in his plain stuff and trunk hose, and his beard in his teeth, that looks more a noble man than any of us.’15

  This is confirmed by Daniel Mystens’s portrait of the Earl. He sits in his dark, fur-trimmed gown and holding his Earl Marshal’s baton at the entrance of his gallery lined with classical statues. He acquired thirty-seven of these, and over a hundred busts as well as Greek and Roman inscriptions, altars and sarcophagi, coins, medals and gems, and eight hundred paintings. Arundel had representatives active in Italy, Asia Minor and the Levant and had excavations undertaken in Rome to uncover sculptures. His collection rivalled Charles I’s, with whom he shared a critical aesthetic judgement that was often absent in other aristocratic collectors.16 Some were jealous; the third Marquess of Hamilton suspected that Arundel’s obsession had bred arrogance, rating him a ‘proud man who lived always within himself, and to himself’.

  Hamilton for his part confessed himself ‘much in love with pictures’, a romance that had started in 1620 when he was fourteen and first saw his father’s collection in his Whitehall lodgings, which included works by Caravaggio and Rubens. Young Hamilton preferred the Venetian school, and during the 1630s he retained Sir Basil Feilding, later the second Earl of Denbigh, the ambassador to Venice, as his agent. They ag
reed a scale for grading potential purchases and Feilding sent details of the titles, sizes and ‘stories’ (i.e. subjects) of the paintings he had found.17 Like all noble collectors, Hamilton had to show deference to Charles I, who assumed the right to choose items from consignments in return for suspending customs duties. (It was a latitude which in modern times extended to Queen Mary and her granddaughter Princess Margaret. Whenever they expressed admiration for an object in a private collection, its owner felt a deferential obligation to offer it as a gift.)

  By 1643 Hamilton had bought six hundred paintings, half of them Venetian. Why he and so many contemporary peers were willing to spend so much effort and cash on imported works of art was explained by William Cecil, the second Earl of Exeter. He had made two expeditions to Italy and considered himself qualified to advise fellow peers on what to buy and where. In 1609 he told the seventh Earl of Shrewsbury that the purchase of a major work by the Venetian Jacopo Negretti Palma il Giovane would ‘increase your magnificence’. This artist specialised in ‘large pictures’ of Classical subjects and one would be ideal for Shrewsbury’s ‘great chamber’. At the same time, Shrewsbury might consider a bronze made by a ‘little old man’ called John Bolognia, ‘who is not inferior much to Michaelangelo’.18 This was Giovanni Bologna, who had cast the equestrian statue of Cosimo I in Florence; unfortunately for Shrewsbury he had died the year before.