The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  If you visit in the last two decades of the century you will find many houses showing traces of May’s and Pratt’s ideas. People living in villages near these mansions quickly become used to seeing the architectural novelties of brick walls and Palladian architraves and pilasters, which might look quintessentially British to you but are utterly foreign in their eyes. The new aesthetic reaches Scotland too, when Sir William Bruce designs Kinross House in the Palladian style in 1686, drawing much inspiration from Clarendon House. But arguably the most important private building of the whole period is a piece of work that looks beyond the achievements of May and Pratt and their contemporaries and anticipates the English baroque of the next century. It is designed by the irascible, curmudgeonly and supremely arrogant William Talman, who falls out with all his patrons, tries to steal Sir Christopher Wren’s job and is capable of producing work that barely passes as mediocre. Yet Talman also produces the sublime design that captivates the imagination of the whole country, creating Britain’s most-loved stately home: Chatsworth, in Derbyshire. Here, in 1686, the earl of Devonshire asks him to remodel the south front of the Elizabethan house. Talman builds in stone, positions his pilasters not in the centre of the front but at the corners, and raises the balustrade in such a way that he conceals the roof entirely, creating a house that is at once majestic, beautifully proportioned and welcoming. The earl is so impressed that he asks him to do the same to the east front. This is completed by 1696. Celia Fiennes drops by a year later, while work is in progress on the west front; she devotes more space to describing this property than to any other house she visits. She is especially struck by the large panes of glass employed, as window glass can normally be made only in small sections; someone tells her the panes at Chatsworth cost 10s each.14

  The effort that goes into these buildings extends to the grounds as well. The underlying philosophy is to combine house and estate in one design. Look at the careful way the windows are positioned in relation to the whole front: everything is symmetrical, laid out in carefully calculated ratios. You will find the same attention to order in the gardens. These are all formal squares – squares within larger squares, in many cases – and the lakes are often rectangular, with cupids spouting an arc of water. Lawns are set in squares and, while on the subject, just think how much effort it is to maintain a lawn when all the tools you have are scythes, shears and rollers. There is a real determination to design and control everything. Even parkland is laid out in straight lines. Long, straight avenues of trees lead from the house as far as the eye can see, often ending in an obelisk on the horizon. At Coleshill, Celia Fiennes remarks that

  all the avenues to the house are fine walks of rows of trees. The garden lies in a great descent below the house, of many steps and terraces and gravel walks with all sorts of dwarf trees, fruit trees with standing apricots and flower trees, abundance of garden room and filled with all sorts of things improved for pleasure and use.15

  She finds a similarly satisfying layout at Wilton, which has ‘many gravel walks with grass squares’. But she is even more impressed by the water features there. As the success of Sir Samuel Morland makes clear, there is a fashion for all things to do with pumps and water displays. At Chatsworth, Celia goes into ecstasies when she sees the fountains:

  There is a large park and several fine gardens one without another with gravel walks and squares of grass with stone statues in them and in the middle of each garden is a large fountain full of images – sea gods and dolphins and seahorses – which are full of pipes which spout out water in the basin, and spouts all about the gardens … there is one basin in the middle of one garden that’s very large and, by sluices beside the images, several pipes play out the water, about thirty large and small pipes altogether. Some flush it up that it froths like snow … there is another green walk and about the middle of it by the grove stands a fine willow tree: the leaves, bark and all look very natural … and all on a sudden by turning a sluice it rains from each leaf and from the branches like a shower, it being made of brass and pipes to each leaf but in appearance is exactly like any willow.16

  Elsewhere she praises the introduction of greenhouses, orange trees and lemon trees, aviaries, sculptures and grottoes. Most great houses have at least one deer park, and many have two (one for red deer, one for fallow). When John Evelyn visits Swallowfield in Berkshire (another house designed by William Talman), he is most impressed by the number of the trees: ‘there is one orchard of 1000 golden and other cider pippins; walks and groves of elms, limes, oaks, and other trees … [and] two very noble orangeries …’17 The reason he can count so many trees is, of course, because they are laid out in straight lines.

  Gradually you start to realise there is more going on here than just a lot of extravagant gardening, with a preference for regularity and extravagant water features. There is a deliberate attempt to control nature – just as merchants are attempting to improve rivers so that barges can reach large towns, and scientists are trying to determine how the world really works mechanically. Look in the libraries of these gentlemen and you will find books on how to fertilise land, how to prune fruit bushes, how to maintain orange trees in a cold climate, and so on. Many of them are Fellows of the Royal Society and look at the manipulation of nature as part of the scientific progress of mankind. You can see the same desire in the range of flowers they employ in their formal gardens: roses, daffodils, tulips, violets, lilies, sunflowers, hollyhocks, lupins, pinks, marigolds, peonies, poppies, anemones, hyacinths, carnations and primroses.18 Any botanical intruders are identified as weeds and swiftly removed. A great house is thus a design set in an ordered environment, where everything is established according to a perception of divine harmony: nothing is left to chance. The father of English landscape design, William Kent, is only born in 1685, and several decades have yet to pass before he proposes a more ‘natural’ landscaping. In the meantime, the task of laying out a formal garden is dominated by the Brompton Park Nursery, run by George London and Henry Wise. It is they who design the gardens at Chatsworth and Hampton Court. And it is they who construct the maze at Hampton Court. Other places (such as Patshull Park) are beginning to experiment with topiary. As you can see, the gardens of a rich man’s country house are a work of art in every sense.

  Let us turn now to the interiors of these houses. Some of them include some of the most lavish decoration that any age has ever seen.

  You might not be familiar with the name of Antonio Verrio but, as far as dramatic painting goes, he is without rival as ‘the best hand in England’, to quote Celia Fiennes.19 She is not alone in thinking so. At Windsor, John Evelyn goes to see St George’s Hall, lately built to the design of Hugh May, and it is not the architecture that blows him away so much as ‘the stupendous painting of the hall’.20 The scale and skill of his ceilings will astound you. So too will their sensuality – not even Charles II has seen so much naked female flesh. Verrio works in his native Italy and in France before coming to England in 1672, at the invitation of Lord Montagu, to paint the staircase and great chamber of Montagu House. That leads to his work at Arlington House, Ham House and, from 1674, Windsor Castle, where he spends twelve years painting twenty ceilings and three staircases, in addition to St George’s Hall and the king’s chapel. In James II’s reign he paints the chapel at Whitehall and lays out the gardens there. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 he leaves the court to decorate Burghley and Chatsworth. His finest work is undoubtedly the Heaven Room at Burghley, probably the most astounding chamber in any private house in Great Britain. Stand in the middle of the room, look around and be amazed: gods and goddesses cavort amidst garlanded classical columns; caped warriors charge down on you from the heavens on horses; naked nymphs float effortlessly above the gazes of their bewitched menfolk … The whole effect is like standing inside a temple of love watching a divine orgy in mid-air, discovering that you too can fly – and casually being invited by all the gods and goddesses to join in.

  The great castl
es and stately homes of Britain also display a large number of pictures with which we are familiar – true Old Masters. In this matter too, things are changing, but in ways that might not immediately be noticeable. Our eyes are used to seeing paintings from the Renaissance through to our own time, so we forget that decorating houses with pictures in frames is a comparatively recent thing. In Elizabethan times it was not unusual for an aristocrat to have a long gallery where he displayed portraits of royal and historical figures as discussion points, and family portraits for reasons of pride. However, even the very wealthy had very few pictures in any other rooms. This changes in the seventeenth century: Sir John Brownlow has 153 pictures of various sorts at Belton in 1686; Sir John Lenthall has 145 paintings at Besselsleigh Manor in 1682; and Lord Bedford has 103 portraits at Woburn Abbey in 1700. And although most gentry families don’t have quite so many, most still have forty or more by the 1680s. Sir Thomas Spencer of Yarnton Manor, Oxfordshire, has fifty paintings: his family portraits hang in his two parlours and an adjacent withdrawing room; his long gallery is stuffed with portraits of kings, queens and renowned ministers in the traditional fashion; and the grand staircase is where he hangs fifteen paintings whose subjects include Covent Garden, a parrot, a Dutchman, a Dutchwoman, two magpies, an ass, a horse and a mare, James II, a woman milking a goat, and a landscape. The sudden demand for Old Masters of course pushes up the price: some collectors, especially the royal family, pay huge amounts for great works of art. Sir James Oxenden of Dene, Kent, has a collection worth more than £2,000, including a battle scene for which he pays £310 and a painting of ‘Christ arguing with the lawyers’, which costs him £250.21 But this only inspires the aristocracy to acquire further paintings. The more expensive an artwork is, the more it is admired and desired.

  When it comes to decorative art, one name calls out to be mentioned above all others: Grinling Gibbons. He is the most renowned and sought-after woodwork sculptor of the age – or of any age, for that matter. Born in Rotterdam to English parents, he trains in the Low Countries and comes to England in 1667. Three years later John Evelyn is out for a walk in the wintry countryside around Deptford when he notices a poor solitary thatched cottage. Being of a curious disposition, he looks in the window. Inside is young Grinling, now twenty-two years of age, carving a copy of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion. No mere symbol, this work has more than one hundred figures gathered around the cross. Evelyn is astonished. Soon it becomes clear that Gibbons’s real talent lies not in religious scenes, but in decorative and high-relief ornamental work: fruit and acanthus leaves are sculpted to stand out in an extraordinarily lifelike way. In 1672, while living in an inn in London, he carves a pot of flowers in wood ‘so thin and fine that the coaches passing by made them shake surprisingly’.22 Hugh May employs him along with Verrio to create decorative panels and overmantels for Cassiobury Park and Windsor Castle. Later Gibbons moves on to produce incredibly lifelike figures of gamebirds and fruit tumbling down the walls of dozens of great houses, including Belton and Chatsworth. He surpasses himself in the Carved Room at Petworth House in Sussex, sculpting musical instruments, vases, royal regalia and even sheets of Purcell’s music, out of limewood.

  As you may have gathered, much of this incredible richness in design and decoration is due to foreign influence. You’ve already come across foreign styles changing the direction of fashionable clothing; almost everything in the foregoing passages about the magnificence of great houses also depends on foreign innovations. The introduction of Palladian architecture may owe much to Inigo Jones but it needs to be remembered that its origins lie with Palladio in sixteenth-century Italy. Verrio too is an Italian, and Gibbons trained in the Low Countries. The sense of order in garden design is very much a French style. This openness to foreign influences is to be noted in other decorative arts too. The leading ironwork master of the day is a Frenchman, Jean Tijou. Arguably the most important architectural sculptor is Caius Gabriel Cibber, from Schleswig-Holstein. Charles II’s and James II’s long exile in France has left them with a taste for all things French, not just Catholicism; William III’s origins similarly open the door to many Dutch influences. The new styles gradually seep through the layers of gentility so that all gentlemen adopt them. This international character of the design, layout and decoration of the English country house is unprecedented.

  All this rebuilding is not cheap. Evelyn hears a rumour that the total cost of Berkeley House in London is £30,000.23 Ramsbury Manor costs Sir William Jones and his executors £17,257.24 Belton costs £10,000 to build and £5,000 to decorate. Charles II pays Verrio more than £7,000 for his ceilings and staircases at Windsor Castle.25 A normal gentleman’s seat will cost much less – in the region of £3,000–4,000 – but, even so, it is a huge outlay, underlining yet again the difference between the rich and the rest.

  So, if you are lucky enough to stay at one of these places, what will it be like? Are you going to find yourself in a cold architectural museum? Or will it be warm and comfortable? What facilities might you expect? What furnishings, conveniences and delights?

  If you are being put up in a top-notch state bedroom, you won’t be shown to your ‘room’ so much as your apartment, consisting of a reception room, an antechamber, a bedroom, a garderobe and a closet – a style of living first modelled in France and brought to England after 1660.26 On a smaller scale, your apartment might consist of just a bedroom, garderobe and closet (the closet being a small chamber to which you might retire to read in private, rest on a daybed or write letters). As your servant opens each of the doors for you, you will notice that he turns a handle of brass and does not lift an iron latch, as in the past. Inside, the walls are covered in brightly coloured wool-and-silk tapestries: these exclude draughts and are warmer than painted plaster. More often than not, the hangings in question are from Flanders or France but you may have a set from the English tapestry works at Mortlake. Below the tapestry there is normally a low section of exposed panelling, which acts as a sort of lavish skirting board. Floor coverings are fitted rush mats at the start of the period but increasingly these go out of fashion as people start to employ rugs and even carpets on the floor (previously carpets were only used to cover chests and tables). Heating in each room is provided by a marble fireplace, artificial lighting by gilt candlesticks. If you want a continuous night-light, stone mortars are available. Once your servant has departed, you will be able to gaze at yourself in a large mirror hung on the wall and sit on one of the silk-covered upholstered chairs with low seats and high backs. As for the bed, this will be a good feather bed with a very-high-canopied four-poster frame, silk damask curtains, silk quilts and a matching valance. A new fashion at the end of the century is for the bed not to be a four-poster one with curtains all round, but a half-tester, with a canopy only above the head end and the curtains swept back. Sheets are made of holland. The fabric of the bed hangings may be ‘chintz’: brightly coloured hand-painted and -dyed cotton, often from India rather than China, which comes to England at the end of the century. You might have window curtains made of a similar material or dyed muslin. There may be a cupboard or chest of drawers in the room for important personal possessions. Towards the end of the century, tables are placed in front of mirrors to serve as dressing tables. Washing facilities include a jug of water and a basin in which to rinse your face and hands. In the garderobe you will find your close stool: a large wooden box with a top that, when lifted, reveals a velvet-covered seat with a hole in the middle and a removable pan underneath. Toilet paper is available for wiping; alternatively you might be provided with disposable pieces of woollen cloth.

  As you sit in your bedchamber you will inevitably start to think that this is not so different from the modern world. True, the artificial lighting here is still entirely done by candles, and the tapestries particularly date the room, but in terms of the general level of comfort – the softness to be found in the textiles, for example, and not just the bed – you will feel at home. Much the same applies
to the rest of the house. There is a balance between comfort and splendour in a fashionable Restoration home. Walk into a dining room and look around: in all probability it will have a symmetrical, moulded plaster ceiling and finely carved panelling. The marble fireplace will be furnished with firedogs and a cast-iron fireback, or perhaps a fire basket. The classic seventeenth-century floor is made of large squares of black-and-white marble. Portraits in gilt frames hang on the walls. A longcase clock ticks away in the corner. The table, covered with a white linen cloth, may well be set for dinner, with candelabra, plate warmer, plates of silver, pewter or china, wine glasses, white linen napkins, silver salt cellar, spoons and even knives and forks. You might see musical instruments hung on the walls: Pepys plays his violin and his lute in his dining room, which is decorated with green cloth hangings and gilt leather.27 As you wander through to the parlour, you may well come across a set of upholstered armchairs and a couch or sofa – the ultimate benchmark of comfort. You might also find cane chairs and japanned (black lacquer) furniture, chests of drawers and screens, escritoires or desks (these being slopes placed on a table) and ornamental ceramics from the Far East.