CAROLINE CHESEBRO.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE IN ENGLAND.
The love for country life is, if possible, stronger in England now than at any previous period in her history. There is no other country where this taste has prevailed to the same extent. It arose originally from causes mainly political. In France a similar condition of things existed down to the sixteenth century, and was mainly brought to an end by the policy of ministers, who dreaded the increasing power of petty princes in remote provinces becoming in combination formidable to the central power. It was specially the object of Richelieu and Mazarin to check this sort of baronial imperium in imperio, and it became in the time of Louis XIV the keystone of that monarch's domestic policy. This tended to encourage the "hanging on" of grands seigneurs about the court, where many of the chief of them, after having exhausted their resources in gambling or riotous living, became dependent for place or pension on the Crown, and were in fact the creatures of the king and his minister. Of course this did not apply to all. Here and there in the broad area of France were to be found magnificent châteaux—a few of which, especially in Central France, still survive—where the marquis or count reigned over his people an almost absolute monarch.
There is a passage in one of Horace Walpole's letters in which that virtuoso expresses his regret, after a visit to the ancestral "hôtels" of Paris, whose contents had afforded him such intense gratification, that the nobility of England, like that of France, had not concentrated their treasures of art, etc. in London houses. Had he lived a few years longer he would probably have altered his views, which were such as his sagacious and manly father, who dearly loved his Norfolk home, Houghton, would never have held.
In England, from the time that anything like social life, as we understand the phrase, became known, the power of the Crown was so well established that no necessity for resorting to a policy such as Richelieu's for diminishing the influence of the noblesse existed.
In fact, a course distinctly the reverse came to be adopted from the time of Elizabeth down to even a later period than the reign of Charles II.
In the reign of Elizabeth an act was passed, which is to this hour probably on the statute book, restricting building in or near the metropolis. James I appears to have been in a chronic panic on this subject, and never lost an opportunity of dilating upon it. In one of his proclamations he refers to those swarms of gentry "who, through the instigation of their wives, or to new model and fashion their daughters who, if they were unmarried, marred their reputations, and if married, lost them—did neglect their country hospitality and cumber the city, a general nuisance to the kingdom." He desired the Star Chamber "to regulate the exorbitancy of the new buildings about the city, which were but a shelter for those who, when they had spent their estates in coaches, lacqueys and fine clothes like Frenchmen, lived miserably in their houses like Italians; but the honor of the English nobility and gentry is to be hospitable among their tenants.
"Gentlemen resident on their estates," said he, very sensibly, "were like ships in port: their value and magnitude were felt and acknowledged; but when at a distance, as their size seemed insignificant, so their worth and importance were not duly estimated."