what lies behind the Stuarts’ taste for extravagant buildings and interiors
On 7 May well 1603, James VI of Scotland and now James I of England rode into the funds of his new kingdom: the Stuarts experienced arrived. Hundreds of Londoners gathered to watch and, at Stamford Hill, the Lord Mayor was ready to present the keys of the city when 500 magnificently dressed citizens joined the procession on horseback.
There was a tiny specialized hitch. James ought to have been certain for the Tower of London right up until proclaimed and crowned but, in spite of frantic constructing perform, it was nowhere near ready. As Simon Thurley recounts—twitching apart a velvet curtain to expose the shabby backstage machinery—parts of the Tower, classic powerbase of English monarchs due to the fact William the Conqueror, were derelict. The excellent hall gaped open up to the skies and for many years the royal lodgings experienced been junk rooms. In the course of James’s continue to be, a monitor wall experienced been crafted to conceal a gigantic dung heap.
Art and architecture for the Stuart monarchs in England—an amazing period when the earth was turned upside down 2 times with the execution of just one king (Charles I in 1649) and the deposition of a further (James II in 1688)—were neither about retaining out the temperature nor solely about outrageous luxurious. The royal residences were elaborate statements of power, authority and rank. The architecture managed the jealously guarded access to the king and queen: in many reigns, almost anyone could get in to stand powering a railing and check out the king having or praying, and a remarkably vast circle was admitted to the point out bedrooms, but only a handful bought into the precise sleeping locations. The alternatives of fantastic and ornamental art from England, Italy, France or the Low International locations, who obtained to see it—whether an English Mortlake or a Flemish tapestry, a mattress designed of strong Tudor Oak or an opulent French one particular, swathed in wonderful imported gold-swagged silk—and wherever courtiers or mistresses ended up stashed, ended up all important conclusions and interpreted as these kinds of.
From James’s astonishing takeover of Royston in Hertfordshire as a hunting base—nobody who reads Thurley’s account will once again see it as just (forgive me) a instead dull end on the street north—to the disastrous obstetric background of Queen Anne, which finished the Stuart reign in 1714, the sums put in were being amazing, even devoid of translating into contemporary conditions or comparison with the golden wallpaper of present Key Minister Boris Johnsons’ flat. Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, invested £45,000 reworking Somerset Household on the Strand. Henrietta Maria, spouse of Charles I, used yet another fortune, which include on the most delicate architecture of the Stuart reigns, an elaborate Roman Catholic chapel (ransacked by a rioting mob in the mid-century Civil Wars).
Thurley recreates some vanished properties, which includes the seemingly gorgeous Theobalds in Hertfordshire and a very personal pleasure dome within a glorious backyard in Wimbledon. Possibly the most extraordinary insight is that in his past months, imprisoned on the Isle of Wight and engaged in failing negotiations with the Parliamentarians, Charles I was also thinking of options to wholly rebuild Whitehall palace, a project finished by the axe at the Banqueting Dwelling, a person of the handful of structures that would have been stored.
There is a lot less architectural background and far more gossip in this energetic compendium than in the in depth scientific tests of person buildings Thurley has previously released, but there are myriad ground plans and modern day engravings, and plenty to set the intellect of the normal reader wandering via the very long galleries—the new Whitehall would have experienced a 1,000 ft gallery—and a 29-site bibliography for people who want a lot more.
• Simon Thurley, Palaces of Revolution: Existence, Demise and Art at the Stuart Courtroom, William Collins, 560pp, eight colour plates as well as black-and-white intext illustrations, £25 (hb), released September 2021
• Maev Kennedy is a freelance arts and archaeology journalist and a regular contributor to The Artwork Newspaper