Whether this is so or not, the details of the original estimate are interesting. The bricklayer’s charges came to £697; mason’s, to £102; “Glass windows, doors, and the window shutters, £340; Glazier for Crowne Glass, £74; Carpenter, £363,” etc.; added to which was: “More to be laid out the next year: The mason to pave it with stone fine-sanded, £246; more for stone steps to go up into it, £72; more for wainscoting and painting the Inside up to the top, £264.”
The last item is especially noteworthy, proving, as it does, that the woodwork was originally painted.
The beauty of Wren’s masterpiece of garden architecture seems to have been thoroughly appreciated in the time immediately succeeding its erection; but with the steady decline in taste during the Georgian epoch, it fell more and more into disregard, until, when the court deserted Kensington in 1760, it was abandoned to complete neglect. Britton and Brayley, writing in 1810 in their “Beauties of England,” refer to it regretfully: “The whole is now sinking into a state of unheeded decay.” Soon after this, however, it seems to have undergone some sort of repair, so, at least, wrote Faulkner, ten years after, who added: “It is now filled with a collection of His Majesty’s exotic plants.” He called it a “superb building,” and clearly regarded it with a much more appreciative eye than did its official guardians, who probably about this time perpetrated the barbarism of cutting windows in the north wall, right through the fine panelling and cornice!
Faulkner, nevertheless, was of course quite wrong in declaring, as he did, that “it was originally built by Queen Anne for a Banqueting House, and frequently used by Her Majesty as such.” There is absolutely no foundation whatever for either part of this statement, though it has often been repeated and was improved upon by Leigh Hunt, who asserted that “balls and suppers certainly took place in it.” Funny “balls” they must have been on the old brick floor! Hunt has nothing more to say of it than rather scornfully to call it “a long kind of out-house, never designed for anything else but what it is, a greenhouse.” In so great contempt, indeed, does it appear to have been held about this time, that it is said the idea was once seriously entertained by some official wiseacre of pulling it down and carting it away as rubbish! And this while the State was annually devoting hundreds of thousands of pounds to art education, art schools, art teachers, and art collections, leaving one of our most precious monuments to perish from decay! “Out-house” and “greenhouse” though it be, we would rather see it preserved than half the buildings of recent times.
Terrace of Queen Anne’s Orangery.
BEFORE examining the orangery in detail, let us stand a moment in front of it, on the terrace, platform, or estrade—by whichever name we may call it—of Portland stone, with steps going down from it in front and at both ends. Here formerly stood, in the summer, some of Queen Anne’s choicest exotics; and here Her Majesty doubtless often sat to have tea, gossiping with the Duchess of Marlborough or Abigail Hill. In front the steps led down into a formal parterre.
Now, however, the most prominent objects to the eye here, are the glass-houses, and the tops of the forcing frames, in which the whole stock for the bedding out in the park and gardens has been reared for the last thirty or forty years. It is truly an amazing thing that a piece of ground, situated as this is, close under the windows of the Palace, and opposite this orangery, should have been appropriated to so grossly disfiguring a use. This particular spot is the very last, one would have supposed, which would have been pitched on for the purpose. It will not be long, we trust, before the whole ground will be cleared, and devoted once more to an old-fashioned sunk formal garden, with such quaint devices as clipped shrubs, trimmed box, figured beds, sundials, leaden vases—such as still survive in many an old country house.
Nor do we see why such restorations should stop here, nor why much of the ground around the Palace should not be laid out in the old English style, with some, at any rate, of the many embellishments for which Evelyn pleaded as suitable for a royal garden: “Knots, trayle work, parterres, compartments, borders, banks, embossments, labyrinths, dædals, cabinets, cradles, close walks, galleries, pavilions, porticoes, lanthorns, and other relievos of topiary and horticulan architecture, fountaines, jettes, cascades, pisceries, rocks, grottoes, cryptæ, mounts, precipices, and ventiducts; gazon theatres, artificial echoes, automate and hydraulic music!”
Barring the last half dozen items, something in the antique formal style would, indeed, be a relief from the tedious monotony of modern “landscape” gardening.
Exterior of Queen Anne’s Orangery.