Vanbrugh Revisited
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Stoker
And so the order went out from the editorial suite on the 51st level: “No more Trump”. And forty floors below, Stoker pulled up his green eyeshade, moodily pulled his half-written essay on Donald out of the battered Remington, and flung it at the waste paper basket, missing, as always, by a yard. Lolling back in the battered wooden chair which is standard issue to Only Connect scribblers, he surveyed the narrow view, blocked as it was by the soaring tower of Copper House, global headquarters of the Daily Beast. No inspiration there, for sure. Or was there? Stoker’s gimlet eye swivelled to the bookcase and the battered paperback set of Evelyn Waugh’s novels that he had saved so hard for. And to the most battered, Brideshead Revisited.
Ah yes, Brideshead. For, long ago, in another world, Stoker had dreamt of Brideshead again. No, no, wrong house, wrong writer*. But Stoker had in his time known well Brideshead, or at least Castle Howard, that great romantic madness of the English baroque, perched on an exposed ridge in the North Riding of Yorkshire. This is a special year for Castle Howard, the 300th anniversary of the death of its architect, Sir John Vanbrugh.
Vanbrugh was born in 1664, early in the reign of the restored Charles II. He lived through the reigns of five monarchs, and died on 26th March 1726, late in the reign of George I, the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain.
These were extraordinary times; the Civil War had established a new political order and if the return of a Charles Stuart made it look like the old order, in reality it was a case of everything changing so that everything might look the same. The years of Vanbrugh’s life saw an amazing flowering of life and culture and indeed wealth, a new Britain to rival that flowering of the first Elizabethan age.
Vanbrugh was the son of a cloth merchant whose early years are somewhat vague and perhaps a little romanticised by the secretive Van. After school he went out to the newly colonised India, then into the army. He was arrested by the French as a spy, imprisoned in the Bastille, released, and returned to England.
We know he had little fortune but an ability to make useful connections. He became a successful playwright with two satirical comedies, still occasionally revived, and very witty. In 1699 his connections came through – no, not as Ambassador to Washington, if you are drawing parallels. At dinner with the Earl of Carlisle, a leading politician, about to build a new mansion in Yorkshire who had just fired his architect, Vanbrugh sketched out a scheme for a great house. That sketch is still in the Castle Howard archives and startlingly resembles what was built. Startlingly because Vanbrugh had no architectural experience whatsoever, and also because it instantly created a new fashion in architecture. It was an utter novelty - constant movement and balance, swathes of carved decoration, great wings stretching out, long dramatic corridors, and a great dome, supported by six minor pups of domes (alas now only three, eroded by alterations and a fire). We must acknowledge Vanbrugh’s assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor, who was in day-to-day supervision, and a distinguished architect himself.
Carlisle was rich, but not that rich, and he built slowly, out of cash flow, not capital. When Vanbrugh died in 1726 about three quarters of the house was complete, but the west wing was a half-built shell, not to be completed for another fifty years. Carlisle stopped work and concentrated on his gardens, park, and woodlands, sprinkling them generously with columns, temples, bridges, pyramids, and follies, including the gigantic and dramatic Mausoleum, which together remain the largest collection of garden buildings in the world. The estate is still the property of the Howard family, who continue to be interred in the Mausoleum, a place, as Horace Walpole said, which tempts one to be buried alive.
Vanbrugh went on to litter the English countryside with a portfolio of similar stunning houses: the even larger Blenheim Palace, Kimbolton, Grimsthorpe (all for newly-created Dukes), Kings Weston, Eastbury, Claremont, Lumley, and his last and perhaps most dramatic, helped by its location half a mile from the North Sea, Seaton Delaval. Visit Castle Howard for the sheer exuberance of a playwright turned architect; then Seaton Delaval, a much smaller but even more dramatic late flowering of an extraordinary talent.
Castle Howard has become a star in its own right; a glamorous film star, starring in movies such as Lady L with the equally glamorous Sophia Loren, Barry Lyndon directed by Stanley Kubrick, and most of all, both the film and TV serial versions of Brideshead Revisited, the latter with a cast of all the talents, led by Laurence Olivier, and probably the best TV adaption of a book ever made. Brideshead was truly in Castle Howard’s blood; when Evelyn Waugh wrote his magnum opus in 1944 he was dreaming in wartime of the arcadian life of, and in, country houses. He knew Castle Howard, which is clearly the inspiration for Brideshead Castle, albeit moved to Wiltshire.
The book was published just after the war, into a world hungry for richness and glamour, anxious to bathe in the sybaritic luxuries of the great houses, and in the lives of their aristocratic owners, their devil-may-care attitudes, and endless extravagances. This lost romance, this uninhibited nostalgia, this affection for a semi-fictionalised upper-crust lifestyle, has become a staple of the British dream and an endless source of inspiration to writers and filmmakers. Of course, Daphne du Maurier had published Rebecca setting Manderley in her rented mansion of Menabilly in 1938, and Agatha Christe and Dorothy L Sayers set their crime novels often in country houses. But Brideshead was something different. So was Tomasi di Lampedsa’s The Leopard, published in 1958, and a huge best seller as readers fantasised over great Sicilian mansions and world-weary aristocrats adapting to revolution. These were great sighs for a departed life, tears for something which had only ever been the pleasure of a tiny minority. But many loved it, and go on loving it, as Julian Fellows demonstrated with his film of Gosford Park and even more so with six TV series of Downton Abbey – followed by three movies. Bridgerton, a slightly bizarre reinterpretation of early nineteenth century upper-class mores, indulges itself in many houses. Saltburn, another recent film of aristocratic weird loucheness made a star of Drayton House in Northamptonshire, a previously unknown but ludicrously romantic (indeed, Vanbrughesque) ancient house. The owner of Drayton has recently said that he so suffers, or at least his house does, from such obsessive interest from fans, he wishes it had stayed hidden in its bucolic pastures. And The Go-Between, more upper-class bad behaviour, centres around the pale red bricks of Melton Constable in Norfolk, coincidentally the “other house” (one needs two, dontcha know) of the Delaval Astley’s of Seaton Delaval. Melton has been empty, other than of film crews seeking romantic decay, since 1947, but is loved all the more for its cobwebby abandonment.
How we love the great house and its mad occupants. Few of us live like this, or ever will, but in our imaginations the country house is the pinnacle of our residential dreams. So salute John Vanbrugh, who turned the romantic madness of the country house up to swooning point and set a fashion which continues to grip. “Lie heavy on him earth, for he laid many heavy loads on thee” wrote the satirical poet Abel Evans at Vanbrugh’s death, but three hundred years later we should thank the man whose talent fuels so many dreams.
*Daphne du Maurier, of course, and Rebecca.
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