Fig. 130.—Window of Walterstone Hall.
Fig. 131.—Cranborne Manor-House.
The gatehouse at Tixall[153] has a plain front of three stories with a projecting bay over the portal, and angle towers. The window openings are all of the broad mullioned Elizabethan type, and the façade as a whole would be admirable if it had nothing more. But the Renaissance ideas led the designer to crown each story with an entablature, and to set a pair of classic columns on either side of the central bay, and in each tower angle. To cover these useless columns the entablature has to be broken into deep ressauts, and the three superimposed pairs carry nothing but a pedestal block above the main cornice, the several pedestal blocks being connected by a balustrade.
The gatehouse of Stanway[154] has a portal with a four-centred arch framed with a shallow Doric order, having a pilaster with a free-standing column in front of it on either side. The entablature has a double ressaut over each of these compound members, and a curved pediment over the entablature is likewise broken into ressauts. A rectangular tablet with an escutcheon, surmounted by a smaller pediment, breaks through the middle of the larger pediment, and acroteria are set on its sides, while a keystone in the arch carries a shallow ressaut in the entablature. The front of Westwood Park[155] is for the most part free from foreign elements, but it has a porch in the form of a Roman triumphal arch with three openings, and a Corinthian order of almost correct ancient proportions.
A remarkable illustration of the architectural taste of this time is afforded by the well-known Gate of Honour at Caius College, Cambridge. A triumphal arch scheme with an Ionic order, a Tudor arch, no openings in the lateral bays, and no attic, is surmounted with a Greek temple front of an engaged Corinthian order raised on tall pedestals connected by an engaged balustrade. This embraces in width only the central bay of the substructure, and solid abutments of concave outline are carried up over the side bays. A plain attic over the pediment of the temple forms the base for a square pyramid intersected by a tall hexagon, surmounted with a hexagonal dome. No voids, except the central opening under the Tudor arch, break the solid mass, but the wall surfaces are ornamented with disks, niches, entablatures, and small pediments in relief; and the pedestals of the temple order are carried on corbels and ressauts in the lower entablature.
Of the many English houses built at the close of the sixteenth century, few are more tasteless and pretentious than Wollaton Hall,[156] built by Sir Francis Willoughby “at great expense, it was said, for a foolish display of his wealth.” An order of coupled pilasters, broken in the middle by salient blocks, adorn each story, while vacant niches in the upper stories break the narrow wall surfaces between the pilasters on either side of the large mullioned windows. The chimney-stacks are, as in Longford Castle, shaped in the semblance of pseudo-Doric columns, and the square angle pavilions have their cornices adorned with false pediments of capricious outline and strap-work ornamentation, flanked by obelisks on tall pedestals. One other feature of this remarkable design is perhaps worthy of notice, namely, the portal of the north front. This portal has a low arch, and is sheltered by a porch in the form of a massive free-standing Doric order, the shafts of which are broken in the middle by a salient drum, and the middle of the entablature is supported by a heavy console which forms, at the same time, a monstrous keystone to the arch (Fig. [132]).
It is unnecessary further to multiply examples. While one great house of the period differs from another in unimportant ways, those in which ornaments are extensively applied are without exception disfigured by them. The Elizabethan architectural ornamentation is at once pretentious and grotesquely ugly. It was only in so far as they held to a straightforward provision for domestic needs, and avoided architectural pretensions, that the English people of the Elizabethan Age produced really good domestic architecture.
