Cavalier, p.6
Cavalier, page 6
John Smithson steps forward to welcome the newcomers, and while the masons respectfully stand back, they climb down into the cellar of the Little Castle. After touring and approving the excavations and the half-finished rooms, Sir Charles and his son repair to the lodge close by that Smithson uses as an office.39 Here he has a table on which to make drawings or tot up quantities. Chairs are provided for the visitors, and Smithson begins to outline plans for the next phase of the work.
William's father is more than usually interested in building. He understands the language of classical architecture, with its secrets of harmony and proportion, and his discussions with his surveyor take the form of a conversation between two experts. So great is Sir Charles's expertise that he is consulted by aristocrats throughout the country. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England the passion for building has spread like an infectious disease. In 1577, the Essex clergyman William Harrison wrote that:
Every man almost is a builder and he that hath bought any small parcel of ground, be it never so little, will not be quiet till he have pulled down the old house (if any were there standing) and set up a new after his own devise.40
Smithson now outlines his preparations for the later stages of the building, and William listens closely, eager to learn. The project requires a plumber to shape soft lead into piping with his 'dresser', or mallet. Lead will also cover the Little Castle's flat roof, which is intended as an airy place for family and guests to walk while admiring the view or huntsmen in the park below.
Basic ironwork is bought from a local smith in Bolsover at piecework rates, while a superior smith at Norton Cuckney, six miles away, has the more highly skilled task of creating the door hooks, grates and glazing bars. Sir Charles also has his heart set on a profusion of sparkling windows. As Walter Gedde claims in his book for glaziers, 'cunningly wrought' windows are 'the principal beautie, and countenance of Architecture'.41 Until recently, glass has been a luxury item, and windows were taken down when a great house was shut up, either to travel to another residence or else to be stored out of the rain.42 In Sir Charles's youth there was an explosion in the demand for glass as the craze for houses with outsize windows undreamed of in medieval times took off. Smithson is something of an expert in glass production. In 1615, he will himself design a glass-production plant for Sir Percival Willoughby of Wollaton Hall, as part of a plan to develop the local glass-making industry to meet every gentleman's wish for windows. The Willoughby family's famous coal pits, which have provided them with great wealth for a century, are now running out. The glassworks is only one of their many madcap schemes for diversification.
Skilled glassmakers were in short supply in England until the enter prising Frenchman Jean Carre brought a group of them to England in 1567. A colony of French craftsmen developed in Sussex, holding their own religious services and annoying the locals by refusing to reveal the secrets of their glass-making methods.43 Once the supplies of fuel began to run low in the Weald, the glassmakers moved northwards and congregated in Staffordshire. Here they used coal instead of wood faggots as fuel. Two years from today, in 1615, a proclamation will be issued forbidding the manufacture of glass with wood fuel, ostensibly to preserve supplies of timber, but actually to enrich the powerful group of courtiers who hold the patent for making glass with coal.44 Such are the potential prizes of court life that William too hopes to win.
William now asks John Smithson to explain the process of making glass. Sand is heated in a furnace until a blob of molten glass can be lifted with the end of a long pipe and blown into a balloon by the glass-maker's strong lungs. The glassmaker blows a long cylinder that he then slices lengthways to create a flat rectangular sheet. This method produces characteristically uneven, green-yellow glass seeded with tiny air bubbles.45 During the construction of Hardwick Hall ('more glass than wall'), Bess set up her own glass-making plant, but for the Little Castle Smithson plans to commission a glazier to travel over from Mansfield.
In due course, the project will also need bricks to finish off the interior walls.46 The Cavendishes have scoured the eastern counties of England, where stone is scarce and brick common, for a skilled brick-maker, sending a servant named Edmund 'into norffoke for the brick-men' in 1601.47 Back in January of this year, a 'brickeman' came from Wollaton to Bolsover to discuss technical matters with Sir Charles.48 The method is simple, yet involves fine judgement. Clay is dug out of the ground and scattered across fields to be broken up by a winter's frost. In the spring, the pebbles are carefully picked out and the clay mashed and trodden underfoot. Then the brickmen press it into shape using wooden moulds and leave the uncooked bricks to stand in stacks for a month or more. Firing takes place either in a kiln or in a temporary construction called a 'clamp'.49 Coal, with its steadier heat, is better in the kiln than the traditional fuel of wood. The skill of the brickmen lies in selecting the right kind of clay and in supervising the making and firing of the bricks.50
Having dealt with the matter of materials, Sir Charles and John Smithson turn with enthusiasm to their great shared love, the sketches showing the next stages of the design. Despite their differing social status, Sir Charles and Smithson are linked by something of the convivial and classless freemasonry of designers working together: enlightened patron and dedicated servant united in their obsessive search for the most ingenious, most convenient, perfect house. As they now study the drawing for the fireplace in the Great Hall, perhaps, or the balustrade that will line the steps to the entrance door, William leans forward with interest, for he has already had plenty of opportunities to form his own views on design.51
William has learned much from his grandmother Bess, builder of great houses at Chatsworth, the two Hardwick Halls (the old one and the new one) and Oldcotes. She amassed the money that paid for her projects through a series of extraordinarily canny marriages. In the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole will quip waspishly of this 'costly countess' that
Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,
And ev'ry time so well perform'd,
That when death spoil'd each Husband's billing,
He left the Widow ev'ry shilling.52
William's grandfather was Bess's second husband, the first Sir William Cavendish, who gained his vast wealth through his work as one of the administrators of Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries and purchased the estate of Chatsworth in Derbyshire for his wife. His son Charles was born in 1553, the first year of Queen Mary I's reign, and the queen herself became his godmother. Four years later, in 1557, Bess's young family suffered a temporary but severe setback: Sir William died, his reputation irrevocably damaged by the whispered charges that he had fraudulently siphoned off royal revenues. 'I most humbly beseech the Lord to have Mercy and Rid me and his poor Children of our great Misery,' wrote his widow.53
Bess, always alert to the changing constellations of power at court, accepted that Mary I's Catholicism was the prevailing religion of the day. Nimble-footed as ever, though, she remained on good terms with the Protestant queen-in-waiting, Mary's half-sister Elizabeth. Cancer of the stomach killed Mary in 1558. On 2nd January 1559, Charles and his brothers had their hair cut in preparation for their attendance at Elizabeth's triumphant coronation two days later.54 And the court of Elizabeth I would prove to be a rich hunting ground for rewards, royal favour and husbands for Bess. Having already outlived two spouses, she would now marry twice more in quick succession: firstly the elderly and doting Sir William St Loe, and then George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury (1528?-9o).
In her old age beaky-nosed Bess became a formidable legend, and her Cavendish descendants in later centuries will continue to use their memory of 'the old Countess of Shrewsbury' as a yardstick of awesome power. The former jailer of Elizabeth I's dangerous cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, Bess was said to 'ruin all persons she had to do with'.55 With her red hair and whitened, skeletal face she closely resembled the aged Queen Elizabeth. Her fierce independence eventually estranged her both from her fourth and final husband and from her own youngest son Charles. After their marriage, Bess and the irascible George embarked upon a great quarrel that appears to have been a clash between two domineering personalities but that in reality revolved around the distribution of the glittering fortunes won by these two victors of a competitive age. Bess's youngest son now found his loyalties divided. While he owed affection to his mother, his stepbrother Gilbert (George Talbot's son) had become his best friend.56
Bystanders complained endlessly that 'the wars continue betwixt the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Countess', and that a mysterious episode involving money was at the root of their quarrel.57 On their reaching the age of twenty-one, Bess's second and third sons William and Charles Cavendish were entitled to some substantial sums of money from their stepfather. The earl had difficulty in honouring this and decided instead to sign a deed making over to William and Charles the lands that Bess had brought to the marriage. George would later bitterly regret, and attempt to revoke, his gift. Most unusually, he signed the deed without witnesses, and later claimed that his signature had been forged.58 He would die still holding onto the belief that Bess had somehow cheated him; Charles also took his stepfather's part against his own mother.
As well as learning about the rich pickings to be gleaned at court and the pain of quarrels between parents and children, William has also discovered the secret of commissioning the architecture of intimidation from his redoubtable grandmother. After her fight with her husband, she retired to Hardwick to build her palatial New Hall (Plate 5). On a sharp April morning in the year 1600, Bess had received a rare visit from six-year-old William and his little brother. The endless flights of stairs climbing up through the vast cold house to the Great Chamber and their ancient grandmother must have left a strong impression on the two boys.
Yet on the morning of their visit, Bess was in a genial mood. Her household accounts show that she gave 'little Will and Charles Cavendyshe' four angels in money on 15 th April, with a further gift to their nurse.59 (The coin called the angel-noble, with its device of the archangel Michael and the dragon, was worth about eight shillings.) William still remembers the lesson he learned at his grandmother's: that height above the ground is proportional to social status. Her new house's ground floor contained the offices and Great Hall. The first floor contained rooms for Bess: her chamber, the neighbouring chamber of her granddaughter Arbella Stuart (who, through her Scottish father, had a claim on James I's throne) and her business room. The wide staircase from the Great Hall, however, led the most important visitors straight up to the second floor, where they entered some of the grandest rooms in Elizabethan England. Here, a Great Chamber was intended for a visiting Elizabeth I to sit under a cloth of state in order to receive homage from all the nobles of Derbyshire. Adjacent to it were the stupendous Long Gallery and bedchamber. These were rooms only to be used on the most splendid occasions; William's cousin the young Arbella Stuart, for example, was warned not to play on the matting in the Long Gallery because it had to be saved for visiting courtiers. Hardwick Hall's design is intended to intimidate: to separate the servants from the masters, the worthy from the unworthy.
Bess's Hardwick Hall may have been an ambitious statement of power by a semi-royal family, but it was also a story in stone about a remarkable sixteenth-century life. William would have been told that the plasterwork over the fireplaces at Hardwick Old Hall, including gargantuan trees modelled around real tree trunks, reveals the narrative of Bess's stormy relationship with her fourth husband. The title to the source engraving used for one scene explains that it depicts 'Desire' beckoning forth 'Patience' on a triumphal cart. It is clear that Bess, depicting herself as a patient wife, desired to triumph over her cruel husband at last.60
This hidden message in Bess's Great Chamber was intended for her family, household and the tenants of her estates who kept the quarrel between Bess and her husband alive throughout the countryside. The clash was between two households, as well as between the blood families of Hardwick and Talbot. Buildings such as Hardwick Hall are not the work of individual architects, dreaming up schemes and executing them exactly according to their wishes. They are the work of households, and as such reflect the passions, factions, quarrels and preoccupations of their creators. Bess's son carried on in the same fashion, and her grandson William will maintain the family tradition.
Bess brought together expert craftsmen for her projects through the recommendation of friends around the country, and aristocratic patrons at home and even abroad also exchange architectural ideas in letters and plans. The slavish following of a plan explains how the 163os house at St Nicholas's Abbey in Barbados will come to contain fireplaces that are completely unnecessary in that island's climate.61 Yet these well-born would-be architects, following a serious hobby rather than a profession, are not architects in the later sense of the word. In his Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionary (1580), James Baret defines an architect as 'the maister mason, the maister carpenter, or the principall overseer and contriver of any work'. The word 'architect' or 'architec-tor' is still used to describe carpenters or craftsmen - or surveyors like John Smithson - without suggesting a professional role that focuses purely on design.62
At the very time that the Little Castle is under construction, the birth of the architectural profession is also taking place. Renaissance ideas, with their emphasis on following the precedents of the ancient Greeks and Romans, are arriving in England. The art of design was gradually metamorphosing into something that could be learnt from books or observation rather than from the accumulated years of practical experience that formed the training of a master mason. In due course, architecture will become a 'liberal art', fit to be practised by gentlemen, while masons will have a lesser status as practitioners of a 'mechanical art'. James Cleland writes in 1607 of the 'principles of Architecture: which I think necessary also for a Gentleman to be known'.63 Many craftsmen acquire books and drawings of the new Renaissance motifs, but lack the learning to read and apply the principles of proportion that the new style requires. This will be the preserve of the 'gentleman architect', with the result that by 1624 the word 'architect' comes to be defined as the person 'whose glory doth more consist, in the Designment and Idea of the whole Work'.64 However, in 1613, the new state of affairs has not yet crystallised. Sir Charles and his son are slightly ahead of their time in being passionately interested and involved in architecture.
How would Sir Charles describe his perfect house? Fortunately, he wrote a letter outlining his ideas to his sister at a time when she was contemplating a new house of her own. Sir Charles makes rough sketches of his designs, which are then translated into proper drawings by professionals like John Smithson. In his letter, Sir Charles advises his sister to study his designs, for 'there cannot be a sweeter house'.65 He is somewhat xenophobic in his architectural tastes, speaking with scorn of a house with a draughty hall and a dining room fit only 'for an Italian gentleman [. . .] their diet being but salads and frogs'.66 William's father holds this very English opinion of foreign cuisine despite having travelled round Europe in his youth. Yet by now, 1613, Italian designers are even at work in chilly England: only two years ago Costantino de' Servi arrived from the lavish court of the Medici in Florence in order to make 'fountains, summerhouses, galleries and other things' for the royal palace at Richmond.67 William has already developed important connections at court: he used to share riding lessons with de' Servi's patron, the young Prince Henry, who suffered an untimely death last year.
In fact, Sir Charles's ideal home is rather old-fashioned. Behind his description of suites and galleries glimmers the blueprint of another type of building altogether: a monastery. Many of the grand and sprawling mansions of Sir Charles's youth were converted from the former monasteries that lost their original purpose when Henry VIII expelled the monks and confiscated their land in the early sixteenth century.68 Sir Charles's dream house has, with its two suites of lodgings for king and queen, a central courtyard like the cloister of a monastery. The plans of many great houses - Audley End, Welbeck Abbey, the Cavendishes' London home Newcastle House, and others - are determined by the remains, and the cloistered court, of medieval monastic houses.
The household required to maintain a house big enough to receive both king and queen is immense, noisy and nosy. Yet scholars like Sir Charles are becoming more familiar with the idealised lives of cultured Roman scholars and writers. It is becoming fashionable to spend time alone, accompanied only by books, absorbing ancient wisdom, as Pliny wrote of doing in his Tuscan or seaside villas. At Burghley House near Stamford, Thomas Cecil, first Earl of Exeter (1542-1622), has a lodge with four towers, rather like Bolsover's Little Castle, to 'retire to out of the dust while his great house was a sweeping'.69 This is the role - a holiday home, a private and personal place for study - that the Little Castle will perform.
Sir Charles's Little Castle is at its heart a Gothic building. This afternoon in 1613, he and John Smithson visualise it as a neo-medieval masterpiece with split levels, four staircases, fantastic vaulting and fireplaces adapted from continental designs but overlaid with northern Gothic influences. Sir Charles chooses the foreboding, ancient Northumbrian castles of his wife's family and their medieval barony of Ogle as his inspiration. This is not least because the archaic style has become fashionable as a chivalric craze sweeps through the court.
Despite a Cavendish nouveau riche fondness for the antique, James I's court has a mania for chivalry that also helps to explain Bolsover's fanciful, impractical turrets, battlements, lodges, twisting staircases and outsize arrow slits, which make it more like a stage set for a whimsical courtly masque than a defensive fortification or a comfortable country residence. Its fountain, gardens, battlemented walkway and balconies, beneath their veneer of continental sophistication in the form of classical door cases and wall paintings, will invite the visitor to imagine that knights are still bold and that their ladies laughingly retreat beyond every turn of the twisting staircases.
