These examples serve to illustrate the progress of house design during the later years of the seventeenth century; they show how the fully developed classic manner had superseded the homely treatment of Jacobean times. Its further career of grandeur and stateliness demands a fresh chapter for its consideration.
Fig. 131.—MELTON CONSTABLE, Norfolk.
VIII
GREAT HOUSES AND GARDENS OF THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Twenty-five years after his restoration Charles II. died; James II. passed uneasily across the scene to his inglorious exit, and William and Mary succeeded him on the throne. But it is not to the sovereigns that we must look as pioneers in house building, although at Greenwich and Hampton Court fine work was accomplished. It is rather to the great nobles, or at least to aristocratic and wealthy families, that we owe the most notable specimens of domestic architecture of the time. At this period the gulf between the upper and lower classes was wide and deep: its widening was perhaps one of the reactions from the conditions of the Commonwealth when many persons of humble origin fought their way to eminence. The distance between the heads of a great household and their retainers had been increasing all through the century; the increase has already been indicated in the type of plan adopted by Jones and Webb. The great hall, where the whole family used to meet on common ground and with common objects, had disappeared. The great noble of Elizabeth’s time lived among his retainers; the grandee under William and Mary relegated his servants to a distant part of the building or to the basement. The great ones of the land now housed themselves in splendid buildings, and surrounded themselves with splendid gardens. Nobody grumbled; the whole community concurred in this exaltation of birth combined with wealth. Men whose names to us are household words sought the patronage of others whose names and doings are hardly recorded outside the pages of the “Complete Peerage.” Manners, customs, dress emphasised this condition at the time; architecture reflects it to-day.
Fig. 132.—Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Plan of the Upper Story, 1736.
From a Plan preserved in the house.
The front at the bottom of the plan faces north. The house lies to the right of the plan, the stables to the left. The entrance to the house is between the two wings on the north front. Remains of the original house are to be found in the great hall situated at the north end of the oblong court, and in the two sides of the same court.
Boughton House, near Kettering in Northamptonshire, is a good example of a home of one of the great nobles of the time of William and Mary. Ralph Montagu (afterwards Duke of Montagu) succeeded his father as Lord Montagu of Boughton in 1681. In 1669 he had been appointed ambassador extraordinary to France, and during his stay in that country he lived for a considerable period at Versailles. One of his biographers[60] says that “here it was his Grace formed his idea of building and gardening, erecting his seat at Boughton, in Northamptonshire, after the pattern, and as his Dimensions would allow, after the very model of Versailles.” In 1695 he entertained King William and Queen Mary at Boughton for fifteen days. He had been created Earl of Montagu by William in 1689, and in 1705 he was created Duke of Montagu by Queen Anne. He was, therefore, a great personage, and he made his house and its surroundings of a magnificence suitable to his dignity.