The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England 9780719098277

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The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England

series editors

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic ­structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of t­ raditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent s­ cholarship on our ­ nderstanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged u through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. Also available in the series Art, museums and touch  Fiona Candlin The ‘do-it-yourself’ artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics Anna Dezeuze (ed.) After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema. The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel  Rose Marie San Juan The newspaper clipping: a modern paper object Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art Mechtild Widrich

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The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England Kimberley Skelton

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Kimberley Skelton 2015 The right of Kimberley Skelton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester m1 7ja www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 0 7190 9580 1 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Published with support of the Swiss National Science Foundation

Typeset in Minion with Myriad display by Koinonia, Manchester

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements

1 2 3 4 5 6

The unease of motion

page vii x 1

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

18

Mid-century mobility of language and architectural theory

44

Travel at home

80

The disciplinary distraction of motion

114

Motion as mode of perception

152

Bibliography Index

169 187

Figures

The plans in Figures 5, 6, 8, 21, 42–3, 46, 48 have often been labelled selectively to highlight the particular groups of rooms relevant to the accompanying text, as well as to reflect the spaces that can be identified with relative certainty. 11 Cesare Cesariano, De architectura libri dece, 1521, Vitruvian man. page 2 12 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1615, house with light rays. 4 13 Thomas Dekker, The Ravens Almanacke, 1609, astrological diagram of the human body. 5 14 John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563, Doric Order. 8 15 John Thorpe, Burley-on-the-Hill, c. 1620, ground-floor plan, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. 23 16 Sir George St Paul’s house, c. 1600, ground- and first-floor plans, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. 24 17 Robert Smythson, Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1580–8, entrance façade. 26 18 Slaugham, as altered by John Thorpe, c. 1600, ground-floor plan, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. 28 19 William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 1618 (1631 edn.), house and garden. 37 10 James Howell, Dodona’s Grove, 1644, title page. 52 11 Sebastiano Serlio, The First Booke of Architecture, Made by Sebastian Serly, Entreating of Geometry, 1611. Title page. 57 12 Leonard Digges, A Booke Named Tectonicon, 1585, title page. 58 13 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, 1563, Doric Order. 59 14 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, 1655, title page. 60 15 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, 1655, 60 Doric Order.

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List of figures

16 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, 1655, Atlantid from Doric portal in Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura. 61 17 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, The Regular Architect, 1669, Doric Order. 63 18 John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century. 65 19 John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century, detail with plans from Inigo Jones and Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova. 66 20 Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova, 1622, Figure 14. 67 21 John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century, detail of Rubens, Palazzi di Genova, Figure 14. 68 22 Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray, A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern, 1664, comparison of Serlio’s and Vignola’s Ionic Orders. 71 23 John Webb, Amesbury, Wiltshire, 1659–64, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 3. 81 24 Raynham Hall, Norfolk, c. 1635, garden façade. 82 25 Inigo Jones, Queen’s House, Greenwich, 1616–35, south façade. 83 26 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1615, Villa Molin. 84 27 Robert Smythson, Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1580–8, rooftop walk. 85 28 John Webb, The Vyne, Hampshire, 1654–7, garden façade. 86 29 John Webb, The Vyne, Hampshire, 1654–7, view through portico. 86 30 John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, entrance or garden façade (the façades are identical). 87 31 Peter Mills, Thorpe Hall, Cambridgeshire, 1654–7, entrance façade. 88 32 John Webb, Hale Park hunting lodge, Wiltshire, first design, c. 1638, entrance façade. 89 33 John Webb, Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, 1654–7, entrance façade, late seventeenth-century drawing. 90 34 Hugh May, Eltham Lodge, London, 1663–4, entrance façade. 91 35 Sir Roger Pratt, Horseheath, Cambridgeshire, begun 1663, entrance façade, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 3. 91 36 Inigo Jones, Prince’s Lodging, Newmarket, 1619, entrance façade. 92 37 Pieter Post, Huis ten Bosch, the Hague, begun 1645, garden façade, from Pieter Post, Ouvrages d’architecture ordonnez par Pierre Post. 92 38 Sir Roger Pratt, Coleshill, Oxfordshire, begun c. 1650. 101 39 Henry Winstanley, Advertisement, c. 1670s. 103 40 Daniel King, The Vale-Royall of England, 1656, Crew Hall. 105 41 George London, Garden, Longleat, c. 1683–1714, Wiltshire, in Johannes

List of figures

Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata, 1707, from later edition entitled Nouveau théâtre de la Grande Bretagne, 1716. 42 John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, final ground-floor plan. 43 John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, final first-floor plan. 44 Inigo Jones and John Webb, Whitehall Palace, ‘Taken’ scheme, late 1640s, first-floor plan. 45 Peter Mills, Thorpe Hall, Cambridgeshire, 1654–7, ground-floor plan. 46 Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Blenheim Palace, ­Oxfordshire, 1705–24, ground-floor plan, from Colen Campbell, ­Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 1. 47 Hugh May, Eltham Lodge, London, 1663–4, ground-floor plan. 48 John Webb, New Mead, Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, 1646–50, groundfloor plan. 49 Robert Smythson, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, 1590–7, great chamber. 50 Inigo Jones and John Webb, Wilton House, Wiltshire, Double Cube Room, 1649. 51 John Webb, Chevening, Kent, first-floor main room, 1652, entrance wall. 52 Grinling Gibbons, Belton House, Lincolnshire, saloon, 1684–5. 53 Isaac de Caus, Garden, Wilton, Wiltshire, 1632–6, from Isaac de Caus, Wilton Garden. 54 Alexander Keirincx, Pontefract Castle, c. 1640/1, oil on canvas. 55 Unknown British artist, seventeenth century, Llanerch, Denbighshire, Wales, c. 1667, oil on canvas. 56 John Webb, Gunnersbury, Middlesex, 1658–63, little parlour chimneypiece. 57 John Webb, Gunnersbury, Middlesex, 1658–63, ground-floor plan, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 1. 58 Jacob van Langeren, chart of Bedfordshire, from Mathew Simons, A Direction for the English Traviller, 1635 (1643 edn.). 59 John Ogilby, Britannia, Volume the First, or, An Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales, 1675, road from London to Hith. 60 John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668, chart of human speech.

106 116 117 118 119 120 123 124 126 126 127 128 129 141 141 142 145 154 157 161

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Acknowledgements

This book has developed out of numerous gratefully remembered conversations, ranging across topics from art historical methodology to the dating of bricks and across locations from the neo-Romanesque Old Art Gallery at Yale to the slate roof of a seventeenth-century country house in Hertfordshire. I would particularly like to thank my Yale art history faculty who, in my undergraduate and graduate years, encouraged me to develop the interdisciplinary cultural inquiry that lies at the root of this book. Christy Anderson and Sandy Isenstadt provided kindly critical eyes throughout the research and writing of my dissertation, helping me to establish the essential foundation for this eventual book. Tim Barringer, Ned Cooke, Brian Cowan, and Keith Wrightson also offered insightful, formative guidance in the crafting and writing of my dissertation, as they urged me to bring new approaches and questions to my material. During my years at Yale and beyond, Chris Wood has been ever the supportive and intellectually challenging mentor; I am especially grateful for his encouraging enthusiasm across the process of rethinking and writing this book, easing and explaining the inevitable twists and turns. Last but not definitely not least, Frank Salmon has generously and continuously offered me his warm support – quick to provide a steady guiding hand around any obstacle and to offer thoughtful advice as I experimented with my research. Other scholars too have been instrumental in shaping this project, offering insightful comments and engaging in thought-provoking discussions. Danny Abramson has been unfailingly ready to offer a helping hand through advice and comments across my work. Bernie Herman and Freek Schmidt have both very willingly engaged in extensive discussions about architectural m ­ ethodologies that have been key to comprehending the historical experiences of seventeenthcentury architecture. I am grateful also to Freek for challenging me to think broadly across our collaborations; I have learned much from our ongoing dialogue. I recall gratefully too eye- and mind-opening conversations with John Bold, Edward Chaney, the late Sir Howard Colvin, Nicholas Cooper, Kerry Downes, the late Andor Gomme, John Harris, Paula Henderson, Gordon Higgott, Maurice Howard, Susan Klaiber, Dietrich Neumann, and John Newman.

Acknowledgements

This book rests on in-depth archival research and building study which was possible only through the warm hospitality that I received from countryhouse owners and directors as well as from archivists across England. David Cornelius-Reid at Amesbury Abbey, the City and Country Group who own Balls Park, Bruce Bailey at Drayton House, Malcolm R. Lumb at Eltham Lodge, Carole Almond and Vic Archer at Lamport Hall, Ben and Mrs. Noel Sinclair at Norgrove Court, Tom and Sally North at Rougham Hall, the late Piers Pratt at Ryston Hall, Mr. and Mrs. R. S. Norman at St. Clere, Malcolm Chisholm at Thorpe Hall, John S. Bonnington at Tyttenhanger, and Nigel Bailey as well as Duncan Leslie at Wilton House all greeted me with generously open doors. Numerous archivists have patiently answered questions about often arcane documents; I am grateful particularly to the staff of the Hampshire Record Office, Norfolk Record Office, and Northamptonshire Record Office for their help during my repeated visits. Charles Noble at Chatsworth, Charles Hind at the RIBA Drawings Collection, and Joanna Parker at Worcester College, Oxford not only assisted me with their collections but kindly also offered advice and comments on my research in their collections. I would like to thank too the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for the generous support that facilitated this research and book. The staff at Manchester University Press have offered supportive critique and advice throughout the revising of my manuscript. I am grateful for their kind frankness and for their openness in helping me rethink this project in its various drafts. Two anonymous readers have offered thoughtful and perceptive comments key to deepening and refining my argument. During this project and more generally across my research, my study of the early modern built environment has been much enriched by the friends and colleagues who have shared their enthusiasm for art and architecture with me. Vanessa Wolf Alexander, Nicole Bensoussan, Alex Bremner, Jo Briggs, Olivia Horsfall-Turner, Aaron Hyman, Vicky Solan and Hatta Wood have invariably offered support, advice, and invigorating excitement. Particular thanks are due to Chriscinda Henry and Joris van Gastel not only for their warm support but also for their insightful, thought-provoking comments on early drafts of chapters. Daniel Harding has generously devoted time to helping me adapt several illustrations, despite simultaneously starting a teaching job in Moscow. Throughout my academic endeavours, my parents and younger brother have supported me with their love, humour, and caring advice. Early modern architecture would not be nearly as engaging without memories of Christopher nearly obscuring the façade of Chenonceau as he earnestly attempted to keep an umbrella over his sister in the pouring rain, of a mother who scoured the Rimini street in front of S. Francesco after her daughter accidentally hid herself behind a white van, and of a father who patiently photographed the

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Northamptonshire landscape on a chilly November day while his daughter exhaustively examined Sir Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge. Thanks to them, I never found the dusty ‘John Cobweb’ (as Christopher once rewrote ‘John Webb’) nor was I tempted to forget that research should always be leavened with a dash of light-hearted conversation in California sunshine. This book is, of course, for my family.

The unease of motion

Humility alone designs Those short but admirable lines, By which ungirt and unconstrained, Things greater are in less contained. Let others vainly strive t’immure The circle in the quadrature! These holy mathematics can In every figure equal man. Yet thus the laden house does sweat, And scarce endures the Master great: But where he comes the swelling hall Stirs, and the square grows spherical. Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’, ll. 40–521

In merely twelve lines, the English poet Andrew Marvell contemptuously dismissed the well-established basis of Classical architectural design. His English readers knew a long list of architectural theorists who had explicitly endorsed the circle and square, or ‘quadrature’, as the dependable mathematical foundation for designing a building. Circle and square appeared repeatedly in diagrams of the Classical Orders across volumes by Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio, Hans Blum, Wendel Dietterlin, and John Shute. A few authors too had illustrated the more literal origin of circle and square to which Marvell was referring: Vitruvius’s claim that all buildings are based on the human body inscribed in a square and circle.2 Cesare Cesariano’s 1521 edition of Vitruvius contains a woodcut of a man whose limbs are splayed out to meet the edges of square and circle, while Vincenzo Scamozzi included a similar man balancing on one leg at the beginning of his L’idea della architettura universale (Figure 1).3 The man inside square and circle was even so well-known that Helkiah Crooke referred to this diagram near the beginning of his Mikrokosmographia, a volume devoted to human anatomy.4

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Cesare Cesariano, De architectura libri dece, 1521, Vitruvian man. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Yet Marvell scoffs at these dependable mathematics. ‘Let others vainly strive’, he claims, to put circle inside square; he instead proposes a new mode of architectural design – a ‘holy mathematics [that] can / In every figure equal man’. No matter what happens, Marvell’s mathematical system will conform to the human body; every figure, regardless of its form and possibly of its regularity or irregularity, will intersect with the body. And these mathematics are so essential, so correct that they are ‘holy’, having received divine approbation. They are, however, also the opposite of the mathematics with which Marvell and his readers were so familiar.5 Marvell explains that his mathematics have ‘lines’, the usual edges to two-dimensional figures or three-dimensional volumes, but these lines are unusual because they are ‘ungirt’ and ‘unconstrained’. They have no boundaries, no endpoints or corners to constrain them, and so can hypothetically continue perpetually into the distance, leading eyes, mind and possibly hands further forward in a particular direction. That is, it is difficult – if not impossible – to remain at a particular point or place when looking at the figures of Marvell’s mathematics. It is precisely this perpetual motion that characterises the new ­mathematics, Marvell reveals, as he continues to describe Lord Fairfax’s Appleton House in

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Yorkshire. The house, his reader learns, barely fits around its ‘Master great’. It is so heavily ‘laden’ by Fairfax’s presence that it ‘does sweat’ and ‘scarce endures’ his presence. Instead of spacious interiors that allow Fairfax to move easily and freely, Appleton House is more analogous to clothing that closely fits the human body and changes shape with even the smallest movements of limbs. According to Marvell, the house in fact does change shape with Fairfax’s movements: ‘where he comes the swelling hall / Stirs, and the square grows spherical’. The great hall, immediately behind the entrance, is initially a square or rectangular shape since its walls stand perpendicular to each other and extend in straight vertical planes from floor to ceiling. When Fairfax begins to stride into the hall, however, the room ‘Stirs’ out of this angular form and gradually becomes ‘spherical’, transforming into a round volume that usually is distinct from the angular square. Square and circle, in Marvell’s mathematics though, are simply phases of each other; the sphere is what the square volume becomes when it is disturbed by Fairfax’s movements. Marvell’s reader too can imagine how there may be intermediate irregular shapes as square blurs into circle. Fairfax’s right or left leg may stretch the regular sides of the square forward with a particularly long stride, or his elbow may bend a vertical wall plane. It is no longer possible to define a particular geometrical shape consistently; rather, each shape is a mere phase – a passing moment. On the one hand, Marvell’s rejection of the usual distinction between circle and square is simply an idiosyncratic notion: he seeks a means of describing Fairfax as the ideal landowner and the mutable house provides a desirable metaphor. The ideal English landowner devoted funds from his estate to caring for his tenants, aiding wayfarers passing his gates, and reinvesting in crops and tools to enhance the productivity of his lands. His house was simply where he lived, responding more to the needs of his household than offering a display of his elite status. So, therefore, Appleton House is marked by ‘Humility’ with its ‘short but admirable lines’, dimensions that are just long enough to admit Fairfax and his household yet not so long as to soar impressively above the viewer. By necessity – because of its small dimensions, then, the house must change shape in order to accommodate Fairfax. On the other hand, though, Marvell was not alone in urging his reader to imagine placing the built environment in motion. The Italian Vincenzo Scamozzi, whose L’idea della architettura universale was owned and read closely by architects Inigo Jones and John Webb as well as by gentleman architect Sir Roger Pratt, included an illustration depicting light rays crossing from exterior to interior and then crisscrossing rooms inside a villa (Figure 2).6 Readers of architectural treatises were well accustomed to black lines on the printed page that indicated unchanging boundary – the external walls that set aside the interior in the section and the grid of walls that divided one room from another in the plan. There were certainly breaks in these boundaries,

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the blank white spaces left for windows and doors, but they were downplayed; they were small openings dwarfed by the long black lines. In Scamozzi’s illustration, these open windows and doors that rupture boundary walls become most important as the viewer sees light rays cut through the windows and pass across rooms. There is such a plethora of lines denoting rays in the plan that the usually prominent grid of walls becomes nearly lost beneath the web of diagonal lines. And these lines suggest a perpetually changeable interior – one where sunlight shifts across the day, even potentially changing from moment to moment with blowing clouds. The illustration itself requires the reader to put the interior in motion, for all of the light rays depicted would not enter the house simultaneously; rather, they would appear at different times of day

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Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1615, house with light rays. National Library of Scotland.

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and potentially during different seasons of the year. And the lines themselves denoted different pieces of information, suggesting light rays sometimes and delimiting areas of light and shadow inside a room at other points. It was as if Scamozzi had superimposed a series of plans depicting the house at various sunlit and interpretive moments; the reader then needed to separate these moments, replacing one with another and simultaneously rethinking the interior, to comprehend Scamozzi’s image. Such swift mental shifts were, in fact, becoming a predominant mode of understanding one’s world across discourses. Scientists revealed how, in a mere blink of an eye and turn of the head, the basic scale of one’s world might change. As one looked into the recently invented telescope, once small

Thomas Dekker, The Ravens Almanacke, 1609, astrological diagram of the human body. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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stars and moon became suddenly up close – even a world that one could imagine inhabited; Thomas Hariot documented the moon’s topography in his detailed maps, while other authors, including John Wilkins and Francis Godwin, envisioned the moon’s topography and populations for their readers.7 Quickly shifting mental frameworks also became a means of rethinking the usual diagram introducing an almanac. Readers were accustomed to a nude body with astrological signs linked to particular body parts to reveal how various limbs and organs were under the control of the moon. At the beginning of The Ravens Almanacke, however, Thomas Dekker shows his readers this familiar diagram but playfully offers them variant interpretations (Figure 3). He asks, ‘do not those Roundels … shew like so many pardons, tyed to the partes of his body with Labels?’8 As he was carried through the streets, a criminal would have a placard attached to him identifying the nature of his crime.9 Likewise, the lines in Dekker’s diagram attach astrological signs to the nude male body to identify – to make manifest astral connections. Or, Dekker then speculates, the body could be that of ‘a theefe begd for an Anatomy in Surgeons Hall’ where the anatomist then performs a ‘slashing and slycing, and quartering & cutting’.10 The anatomist uses sharp tools to cut open the human body, to peel back the skin and reveal bones, veins, and organs. So too the diagonal lines in Dekker’s illustration are poised at the layer of the man’s skin, immediately above the inner anatomy. And they appear sharp lines with their striking black contrasting to the white page that evokes the white skin they may be about to puncture. The human body was as malleable as the world surrounding it; Dekker moved his diagram quickly – with a mere few sentences – from astrology to the legal system to anatomical study, changing its context as swiftly and fluidly as Nun Appleton House moved from square to circle. Literal physical motion too became a new focus of describing the human body in scientific discourse. It was well known that circulation of nutrients and air through the body was essential to human survival. One breathed in some air and released other air; one also ingested food, then various organs filtered out the essential nutrients, and finally one excreted the unnecessary parts of the food.11 But this circulation was often considered within the more general context of static human anatomy.12 In his Mikrokosmographia, for instance, Crooke illustrated the veins by which blood passed nutrients through the body, yet he depicted the motionless veins and arteries rather than the blood that moved and his maps of veins and arteries occupied merely a few pages within his lengthy volume.13 In 1628, however, William Harvey produced an entire volume devoted to explaining circulation and announced his focus on motion from his very title, De motu cordis (‘On the Motion of the Heart’). In his text, he then focused on the movement of blood – how it travels from one area to another and how the speeds at which it travels can

The unease of motion

vary. And, in 1649, he published another volume that explained and justified these movements further: De circulatione sanguinis (‘On the Circulation of Blood’).14 The body was necessarily in motion in order to survive, the physical world – whether natural or built environment – changed perpetually around it, and the individual who constructed, experienced, and interpreted that world needed continuously to readjust in order to comprehend. Motion, that is, was becoming the de facto physical and mental mode of negotiating and navigating through one’s world. The problem and power of motion This book explores how across the seventeenth century, theorists, designers, and patrons rethought motion from the external threat of movement to the inherent quality of mobility. Movement was external to object or individual, an action that could or could not be performed, while mobility was an inescapable property – derived etymologically from the Latin ‘mobilis’, meaning ‘capable of being moved’ or ‘changeable’.15 Mobility, the potential for motion of an object or individual, was simply a given and also suggested a passivity and vulnerability in the object or individual that had this quality, for object or individual was as likely to move as to be moved – that is, to act on its environment as to be acted upon by that environment. It is precisely this shift from external action to internal quality and from active agent to agent or recipient that seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women both articulated and experienced. Early in the century, architect, patron, philosopher, poet, and etiquette-manual author had described and constructed secure boundaries to restrain motion: objects and ideas linked into the pairings of analogy and contradiction, reason’s bridle that restrained the violent passions, and walls that held individuals in place within the domestic interior. In the shelter of this relative security, individuals seemed to retain a degree of agency; they could exercise their reason, for instance, to choose whether to perform one action or another. From mid-century, however, these same theorists and designers speculated about a new viewer and a new type of environment; continuous motion characterised humans, the words that they spoke, and the built interiors in which they interacted, and they were newly responsive, newly malleable to these motions as they reacted to the sensory stimuli around them. Ideas coursed perpetually through the human mind, words could change meaning from one moment to another, and vistas cut through interior and exterior walls to reveal unprecedented spatial continua. Yet this shift from external threat to internal quality was no easy dissolving of boundaries into fluid motion, for, by its very nature, motion paradoxically reinforced and threatened the stability of the built environment and the human body. Vitruvius and subsequent architectural authors explained how

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John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563, Doric Order. Courtesy of Country Life.

winds could be directed through cities and interior spaces to create healthy air circulation, while these same writers asserted that building design rested on unmoving lines.16 The man immobilised in square and circle was the basis of all building, according to Vitruvius, while fifteenth- through seventeenthcentury authors articulated the Orders with geometrical diagrams. Even when there was a playful suggestion of potential movement, that illusion was carefully limited. In The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, John Shute illustrated Hercules as an example of the warrior from whom the Doric Order was derived and suggested that this man was about to break free from the vertical columnar space in which he stood (Figure 4).17 Hercules turns toward the reader in a three-quarter position, his elbow projects behind him to nudge

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the numbers of the adjacent mathematical diagram, and his right knee is bent as if he is about to stride forward off the pedestal. If he were to move out of his space, the diagram illustrating the Doric Order would collapse into nonsense; Hercules would leave the entablature that had rested on his head simply hanging in mid-air when he stepped off the pedestal, for instance. Yet Shute implicitly reassures his reader that Hercules will move no farther, for he encases Hercules in clear boundaries: the right edge of the page within which Hercules’s hand barely fits and the uninterrupted black line of the column shaft in the diagram to the left. Motion was essential to building, the source of a healthy environment, yet also threatened fundamental design principles. Philosophers likewise argued that the human body simultaneously benefitted from and was vulnerable to motion. Human existence depended on the circulation of nutrients, air, and blood through the body, yet one perpetually worried that one of the humours on which human health depended would migrate to a new area of the body and cause disease or infection.18 The human mind had to move in order to remember, for rhetorical theorists urged readers to store their ideas in mental landscapes through which they could then walk to recall those thoughts.19 But the mind could also be unsettled by the violent passions that tore through the body, driven unpredictably in one direction or another instead of following reason’s deliberative analysis.20 To remain healthy physically and mentally, humans had to move but also had to ensure a measured pace rather than succumbing to continuous flow. From mid-century, however, humans and environment alike were in perpetual motion; the boundaries that had guaranteed secure stability suddenly created the risk of incomprehensibility. Englishmen and -women were experiencing a wide range of motions that permeated both tangible and intangible experience: physical motions that encompassed journeys between city and country, imagined motions of looking along and travelling beyond the spatial continua of interior vistas, and the mental motions of adjusting to change in a concept or the meaning of a word. If one stood still physically, one risked losing touch with one’s social circles that had moved to a new location, and if one stood still mentally, one risked losing one’s understanding of a world that kept on moving. Stability, that is, depended on keeping pace rather than standing still. Yet the difficulty of maintaining this synchrony of motion was also well-known. The court masque dances that offered a tangible example of synchronous movement, as noble and gentle courtiers moved together to retain a geometrical formation, were possible only after weeks of training.21 It was only too easy to fall out of step – for instance, to move too slowly to understand the quick changes in meaning of a word. Seventeenthcentury Englishmen and -women thus needed to find a means of continuously evoking the strict choreography of the masque dance. I argue that architect and patron responded to this problem by designing domestic environments

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in which movement and the suggested potential of movement held immobile a malleable sensory viewer with a perpetual suggestion of novelty. Philosophers described a continuously restless mind that responded involuntarily to sensory stimuli, but as long as an individual’s physical environment offered potential novelties to engage the senses, the human mind would stay focused and in place. Owners offered guests this possibly endless sequence of novelties through façades that invited travel beyond England to the Continent, through unending vistas opening into little-defined greensward or blue sky, and through illusionistically changeable interior walls that evoked ongoing sequences of events. This synchrony of motion between viewer and environment, on the one hand, reflected particular English historical circumstances yet, on the other hand, was also symptomatic of a broader pan-European seventeenth-century turn to motion as a mode of perception. Only in England was traditional government overturned to create literal unpredictability in daily life; new political terms developed, for instance, to describe those who opposed and those who supported the monarch, while government buildings contained surprisingly a military instead of a hereditary leader. These political events, however, were simply an additional strand of changeability alongside widespread theoretical and architectural rearticulation of the relationship between viewer and environment in terms of mobility. Philosophers probed how data coursed perpetually through body and mind; the French René Descartes, for instance, speculated about how nerves transmitted sensory data to the brain, and music theorists re-grounded composition in the human process of hearing rather than static mathematical proportions.22 Architects across northern Europe opened the vistas that appeared in English houses through their interiors.23 Such vistas had proliferated on the warmer Italian peninsula at least since the late fifteenth-century Poggio a Caiano, yet not until the seventeenth century did the desirability of a spatial continuum outweigh well-established concerns about drafts in cold climates. Seventeenth-century England, then, was a particularly intense moment of an international turn toward mobility and a malleable sensory viewer. Mobility in historical perspective By examining the seventeenth-century turn to mobility, this book sets in its cultural context a strand of historical analysis stretching back to the nineteenthcentury Heinrich Wölfflin.24 ‘Baroque’, the word traditionally used to describe seventeenth-century art and architecture, contains within its very etymology the suggestion of potential motion. Derived from the Portuguese barroco and the Spanish barrueco, meaning ‘rough or imperfect pearl’, a Baroque object must be examined across a sequence of moments and physical movements.25 A

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perfectly shaped spherical pearl can be comprehended at a single glance since it does not vary, but an irregularly shaped pearl has uneven contours perceived by turning the pearl and examining with eye and hand its idiosyncratic sides. The pearl itself can seem changeable, and so mobile; since it does not fill the spherical outline of the perfect pearl, one can imagine how the pearl might be extended to become a sphere. As Wölfflin distinguished between Renaissance and Baroque styles, he asserted that precisely this potential for motion in object or building and response of the viewer distinguished the Baroque.26 Baroque architecture, he asserted, ‘did not aim at the perfection of an architectural body … but rather at an event, the expression of a directed movement in that body’.27 A Baroque building would never reach the stasis of perfection, when no more could be added or changed, because it was an ‘event’, inherently containing a cause-and-effect sequence, and because it had ‘directed movement’, a forceful thrust along one axis that would push away from a motionless centre. Correspondingly, the viewer who experienced this building was restless rather than calmly stationary, experiencing ‘a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfilment’.28 The viewer anxiously or eagerly awaits an event that is about to happen; he or she is held poised between the present and the unknown future, malleable in response to sensory stimuli suggestive of motion. A century later, Gilles Deleuze extended Wölfflin’s mobility to one’s entire environment and perception of that environment; quite simply, the definition of the Baroque is being in process. Everything in a Baroque world, according to Deleuze, was a sequence of events – from an object to the human mind; objects are composed not of individual points, whether atoms or dots, but rather folds that offer a continuous surface and so no opportunity to pause in a staccato rhythm of jumping from point to point. And these folds are perpetually changeable, constantly inviting the possibility of being folded and unfolded.29 The human mind itself is composed of folds and perceives the world through the process of their vibrations; each fold is an area of innate human knowledge and comes to one’s consciousness when sensory data cause it to vibrate. So similar are the human mind and the physical environment in their composition of mobile folds that Deleuze transforms the house into an analogy for human perception. Sensory stimuli enter through the groundfloor windows of the house and then float to the windowless upper floor of folds, agitating the folds of innate knowledge as they rise.30 Motion permeates both body and environment in the Baroque world, transforming Wölfflin’s ‘event’ of ‘directed movement’ into the primary mode of interaction and even existence. This assumption of a viewer in motion too has been a repeated cultural historical mode of distinguishing the interactions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century viewers with art and architecture. Stretching back to Hugh

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Murray Baillie’s 1967 article on processing through royal state apartments, there is a long tradition of analysing how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visitors would have moved through domestic interiors – including Mark Girouard’s description of processional experiences across the eighteenthcentury English house and garden and Patricia Waddy’s study of movements that maintained social hierarchy in Roman palaces.31 Other historians have suggested a period mentality particularly sensitive to the possibilities of motion. Infinity, the potential for unceasing motion, is of new and especial interest to seventeenth-century theorists across discourses, Alberto PérezGómez and Dalibor Vesely have argued.32 Michael Baxandall has posited a shift from a static ‘period eye’ to a ‘mobile viewer’ in eighteenth-century Europe. While the ‘period eye’ that he discussed for fifteenth-century Italy and fifteenth- as well as sixteenth-century Germany was a disembodied eye that simply looked, Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers speculate about how Tiepolo’s eighteenth-century paintings required a viewer to move.33 This book brings together such art, architectural, and cultural historical strands of analysis by examining why seventeenth-century viewers expected to be put in motion, how they were encouraged to move, and what the effects were of that motion. It particularly pairs Robin Evans’s and Dell Upton’s studies of how movement through the built environment can shape human physical and mental response with Michael Baxandall’s, Jonathan Crary’s, and Georges Didi-Huberman’s exploration of historical mentalities, criteria, and processes of human perception.34 I thus evoke the nuanced viewer often tacitly assumed and sometimes openly acknowledged by early modern architectural authors. Such writers filled page after page with mathematical principles and design principles that could be rationally analysed, yet occasionally they invoked a viewer who responded to sensory stimuli. Alberti, for instance, noted that a beautiful building could halt the approach of a hostile enemy as visual pleasure implicitly changed irritated aggression into calm admiration.35 To reveal this increasingly important sensory response during the seventeenth century, I blend building analysis and architectural writings with a range of philosophical, social, political, and religious texts that highlight contemporaneous assumptions about human perception. Since architect and patron rethought especially the spaces devoted to guests, the interior entertaining rooms and the garden, the well-educated guest is the viewer specifically emphasised in this book. Across the following five chapters, consequently, readers watch guests experience first the staccato spaces and mentalities of the early seventeenth century, then encounter a mid-century linguistic and architectural mobility, approach a mid- and late-century house that becomes imagined and actual tourist destination, move through redesigned interiors and gardens that offer repeated invitations to motion, and finally probe a broad cultural range of moments of mobility at the turn of the eighteenth century.

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The domestic built environment is particularly reflective of the seventeenthcentury dovetailing between malleable, mobile individual and manipulative, equally mobile building on which this book focuses. In all environments – whether city street, public building, or house, individuals encountered spaces to which they responded and which correspondingly shaped their expectations and actions. Across the domestic interior, however, they moved through a wider range of spaces and experiences; they could partake of a large social gathering within a great chamber and, only a few moments later, could be isolated within their lodgings. They passed, correspondingly, through a broad variety of mindsets to which they and the building around them adapted; by its very nature, the domestic interior was an enterprise in moulding and re-moulding a viewer’s actions and mentality. To seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women, house and estate were explicitly this lightning rod for the relationship of viewer to environment. Only for these spaces did an independent poetic genre develop – albeit also in response to Classical poetic traditions of praising villa and landscape, and authors of etiquette manuals frequently situated their readers inside the domestic interior when they described appropriate social interactions. To historians too, the domestic built environment has been a central topic of enquiry, for they have examined room use, building and patronage trends, interior decoration, garden design, and specific building sites.36 Absent or at the margins of these studies have been the malleable sensory viewer and the mid-century house and estate.37 The familiar viewer is the one from architectural books, who rationally gathers information from a building, and the familiar houses are those from decades of court patronage and of tangible change in room use or social practice. This book focuses on the untidy blur of the malleable viewer who reacts as much psychologically as rationally and the mid-century house in which the assumptions surrounding viewer and building were changing more than were particular social activities. When designer, patron and theorist rethought house and estate alongside social, political, scientific, and philosophical recasting of individual and environment, once tacit assumptions about human perception came to the fore and were re-evaluated; mobility and sensory malleability were the new foundation stones on which was constructed a built environment that was dependable and comprehensible paradoxically because it facilitated perpetual blur. Notes 1 On Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, see Alastair Fowler, The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edin­­burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp. 281–301. See also: Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1962), pp. 172–90; William A. McClung, The Country House

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in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 156–74; James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), pp. 61–84. 2 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), p. 73. 3 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (1615; reprint, Vicenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 1997), 1: p. 40. 4 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), p. 6. 5 On the strangeness of Marvell’s claim, see Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 145. 6 Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1: pp. 138–9. For a discussion and list of Jones’s full library, see Christy Jo Anderson, ‘Inigo Jones’s Library and the Language of Architectural Classicism in England, 1580–1640’ (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993). On Sir Roger Pratt’s library, see Kimberley Skelton, ‘Reading as a Gentleman and an Architect: Sir Roger Pratt’s Library’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society 53 (2009), 15–50. 7 Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: Or a Discourse of the Voyage Thither (London, 1638); John Wilkins, The Discovery of a World in the Moone (London, 1638); John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet in 2 Bookes (London, 1640); A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500–1750 (London and New York: Longman Group Ltd, 1983), pp. 122–3, 218; Theresa Neumann, ‘Looking Up From Adam’s Fall: The New Astronomy and the Quest for a New Eden in the Writings of the English Scientific Promoter John Wilkins’, in Jason M. Kelly (ed.), Looking Up: Science and Observation in the Early Modern Period (New York: Legas, 2002), pp. 13–27. 8 Quoted in Hillary M. Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), p. 1. 9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, Inc., 1977), p. 43. 10 Nunn, Staging Anatomies, p. 1. 11 Jerome J. Bylebyl, ‘The Medical Side of Harvey’s Discovery: The Normal and the Abnormal’, in Jerome J. Bylebyl (ed.), William Harvey and his Age: The Professional and Social Context of the Discovery of Circulation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 38–9. 12 On circulation through the human body and between the human body and its environment, see Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), esp. pp. 1–13. 13 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia. 14 William Harvey, The Anatomical Exercises: De Motu Cordis and De Circulatione Sanguinis in English Translation, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995). On these volumes, see especially Walter Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas: Selected Aspects and Historical Background (New York: Hafner Publishing Co. Inc., 1967); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science,

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Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1976), pp. 273, 316; Bylebyl (ed.), William Harvey and his Age; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 18–20. 15 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘mobile’. 16 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, pp. 24–31. See, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 28–9; Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, trans. Richard Schofield and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 60. 17 On Shute’s treatise and the human body more generally in sixteenth- and ­seventeenth-century English architectural theory, see Vaughan Hart, ‘“A peece rather of good Heraldry, than of Architecture”: Heraldry and the Orders of Architecture as Joint Emblems of Chivalry’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 23 (Spring 1993), 52–66. 18 Bylebyl, ‘The Medical Side of Harvey’s Discovery’, pp. 35–9. For an example of English discussion of these unpredictable humours, see John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes (London, 1627), pp. 2–3; Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, pp. 53–4; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 33; Nunn, Staging Anatomies, pp. 27–8. 19 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1995), esp. pp. 26–86; Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 40–2; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 20 See for instance Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde In Generall (London, 1604). 21 Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 75–83. 22 Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650); Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova (Campidona, 1673). On the importance of sound vibrations in seventeenth-century acoustic theory more generally, see Paolo Mancosu, ‘Acoustics and Optics’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds), Early Modern Science, Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 596–609. René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 34–5. 23 On the enfilade in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, see Robin Middleton, ‘Enfilade – die Raumfolge in den französischen Hôtels des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts / Enfilade – the Spatial Sequence in French Hôtels of the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Daidalos no. 42 (15 December 1991), 84–95. 24 On the origins of the art historical term ‘baroque’, especially with regard to Wölfflin and Deleuze, see Helen Hills, (ed.), Rethinking the Baroque (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 11–64, 203–17. 25 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘baroque’.

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26 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 58. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 38. 29 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 6. 30 Ibid., p. 4. 31 Hugh Murray Baillie, ‘Etiquette and the Planning of the State Apartments in Baroque Palaces’, Archaeologia 101 (1967), 169–99; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 194–212; Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York and Cambridge, MA: Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1990). For a more methodological enquiry into motion and the plan, see the ‘penetration diagrams’ urged in Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). For an instance of how other scholars use penetration diagrams, see Graham Fairclough, ‘Meaningful Constructions: Spatial and Functional Analysis of Medieval Buildings’, Antiquity 66 (1992), 348–66. 32 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 10–11, 274; Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 207. 33 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 29–108; Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 143–63. For a similar shift to motion as the dominant mode of perception by Baxandall, see Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995). For recent critique of the ‘period eye’, see the articles in Art History 21:4 (December 1998) and Adrian W. B. Randolph, ‘Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi da parto and Renaissance Visual Culture’, Art History 27:4 (September 2004), 538–62. 34 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors, Passages’, in Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 54–91; Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 11–52. 35 Alberti, On the Art of Building, p. 302. 36 For examples of this social history stemming from Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House, see Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 275–308; Patricia Smith, ‘Plain English or Anglo-Palladian? Seventeenth-Century Country Villa Plans’, in

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Malcolm Airs and Geoffrey Tyack (eds), The Renaissance Villa in Britain 1500–1700 (Reading: Spire Books Ltd, 2007), pp. 89–110; Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire, Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 37 For scholarship on the mid-century house, see A. A. Tait, ‘Post-Modernism in the 1650s’, in Inigo Jones and the Spread of Classicism, Papers Given at the Georgian Group Symposium, 1986 (Leeds: W.S. Maney and Son, 1987), pp. 23–35; John Bold, John Webb: Architectural Theory and Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Architecture Without Kings: The Rise of Puritan Classicism Under Cromwell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Giles Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp.  177–86. There are several analyses of individual buildings; see, for instance, the discussions in Oliver Hill and John Cornforth, English Country Houses: Caroline, 1625–1685 (London: Country Life Limited, 1966); John Bold, Wilton House and English Palladianism: Some Wiltshire Houses (London: HMSO, 1988); and Giles Worsley, ‘Thorpe Hall in Context’, Georgian Group Journal (1993), 4–13.

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Early seventeenth-century staccato  boundaries

Across the early decades of the seventeenth century, Englishmen and -women moved through a physical, social, and mental world organised into a carefully maintained balance of motion and pause. From small to large scale, the seventeenth-century English world depended on the maintenance of static pairings. The human body itself and the broader social harmony rested on balanced opposites. In his Store-house of Varieties of 1601, John Norden informed his readers that the body remained healthy paradoxically because of discord, or contradiction among the humours: ‘In humane bodies is a discord set, / Choler and bloude, steame and melancholie … . Among them Nature hath sent enmitie. / Yet stands the bodie of this contrarie’.1 Choler may be hot and steamy, and blood may be characterised by cooler melancholy yet, despite – and in fact because of – this contradiction the human body ‘stands’, or remains healthy and functional. So too society can function only if it is composed of individuals with opposing functions. It is essential that ‘Lord and slave, master and servant wee find / To live unlike, yet in good harmonie’.2 Lords and masters command what work should be executed, while servants and slaves are those who are commanded and perform the appropriate tasks. As Thomas Wilson claimed only twenty years earlier in The Art of Rhetorique, society would simply cease to function were all individuals to become commanding masters; there would be no one to perform daily tasks.3 With these paired opposites, individuals necessarily moved – the fluids of choler and blood circulating through the body and the lords, masters, servants, and slaves moving about their daily activities – but this motion was also strictly limited. Choler could not pass into the areas occupied by blood, or the human body would become ill. Lords and masters could not exchange roles with servants and slaves, or society would cease to function; no one would be familiar with his or her appropriate duties. Everything, that is, had to stay within particular boundaries. This carefully bounded motion had its tangible manifestation in the physical spaces and social practices of the early seventeenth-century house. Guests, whether the monarch or more intimate family members, were welcomed in theatrical performances that established a staccato rhythm of

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

alternating halt and advance. Staccato rhythm was even built into house and garden as entrance spaces expanded and compressed around the guest, axes of movement changed, and the regularity of the rectilinear house contrasted with the whimsically unpredictable garden. And poets as well as etiquette-manual authors transformed staccato pace into the rhetoric for describing the ideal estate and its social gatherings. The contradictory estate welcome As guests – whether young or old, stranger or friend, poor or wealthy – passed through estate gates, they embarked on an entrance route that alternately warned and welcomed them and so was a perpetual reminder of the boundaries confining their actions. In 1607, the Countess of Ashby approached Ashby, the home of her children Lord and Lady Huntingdon, and found the house bedecked to celebrate her welcome. Scrolls and gilded shields adorned the entrance gate, and one of the Latin inscriptions on the gate proclaimed with joy, ‘Venisti tandem’ – or, ‘you have finally come’ (ll. 8–15).4 Her arrival was long awaited by those at Ashby, it seemed, and they rejoiced now that the day of her visit had come. But while the Countess read these expressions of joy, an enchantress appeared and ordered her not to enter: ‘Stay & attempt not passadg through this porte’ (l. 30). Only moments earlier, the Countess could have imagined moving easily through the entrance gate, being greeted at the gate by a familiar senior officer of the Ashby household and then quickly ushered to the house.5 There would have been little hesitation at the gate, for the senior official would have readily recognised the Countess as the mother of Lord and Lady Huntingdon. Yet the unknown enchantress forced the Countess to stop, and her strangely hostile appearance would have prompted yet further hesitation; she was appropriately dressed in rich crimson velvet, yet she had a strangely ‘dislykinge countenance’ (l. 26). Unexpectedly, the Countess was so little welcome that the usual figure at the estate gate exhibited annoyance or unease – a countenance of dislike – rather than warm cheerfulness. Beyond the gate too, the Countess learned, the house itself was no longer the familiar abode of her children; she paused, then, both at the enchantress’s injunction and with hesitation about what she might find within the estate. Her children did not own Ashby at the moment, nor even did another English family. Rather, the enchantress informed her, ‘Here the pale Lord of saddnes keepes his courte / rough visagd Saturne’ (l. 31). Saturn, a mythological deity from Antiquity, resided at Ashby, and his presence created a change in the nature of the estate. Where once the Countess would have expected a warm welcome, there was now ‘saddnes’ and ‘dull Melancholy’ (ll. 31, 33). Listless sorrow had replaced cheerful and potentially energetic entertainment, as the Countess and her children would have conversed and strolled around house

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and garden. Moreover, Ashby had even become a threat to all visitors since Saturn and his melancholy ‘sease on all that enter through this gate’ (l. 34). Anyone who passed through the gates of Ashby would become part of Saturn’s melancholic court, losing the cheerfulness that underpinned both mental health and harmonious social gathering. Ashby, then, was a site of mental and social decay that was to be avoided, not sought – the opposite of the cheerful household which the Countess would have eagerly anticipated visiting. So too Queen Anne when she approached Cawsome House found that she was surprisingly unwelcome at its entrance gates. As the Queen of England, she would have expected a respectful, courteous welcome, if not a warm celebration, from her subjects. Yet an unfriendly and unkempt cynic reproached her for disturbing his solitude. He preferred to remain alone on the estate, instead of socialising with others, and, implicitly, the Queen was unwelcome because she had broken into his solitude. Moreover, his appearance hardly suggested the well-ordered estate that she would expect a responsible landowner to maintain. Instead of a cleanly dressed estate worker, the hermit was merely ‘drest in a skin-coate’ and his hair was ‘disordered, stucke carelessely with flowers’.6 His clothes had not even been woven and sewn; he could have taken a ‘skin-coate’ from an animal that he killed. And his hair was uncombed, scattered with flowers as if he had just awoken from sleep in the woods – not expecting and unprepared for the Queen’s arrival. Not only must the Queen halt to listen to the cynic who suddenly appears but she must pause mentally to readjust to the lack of welcome and the possibly strange estate before her. Just as the Countess of Ashby and the Queen are physically and mentally halted, however, they found themselves once again welcomed to Ashby and to Cawsome House. After the enchantress finished her explanation of Saturn’s rule at Ashby, Saturn himself appeared to explain that the Countess was precisely the person whom Ashby needed to free it from its ‘saddnes’. She was the long-awaited ‘Lady’ who possessed the ‘three rare mixt graces’ of ‘fortune, beauty, witt’ (ll. 94–6). Ashby should throw open its doors and rejoice at her arrival since she was the only one who could return its happiness, fertility, and prosperity. The warning of the enchantress was simply a rhetorical foil to set up and accentuate the welcome offered to the Countess. She was no longer simply the mother of Lord and Lady Huntingdon but rather the saviour of the estate – someone whom the estate needed for its survival, not a more casually welcome guest. The quick contrast between forbidden and welcome entry threw into relief Saturn’s laudatory phrases since the Countess was surprised by the enchantress and now must return to her expectations of warm welcome – consequently, reflecting on the welcome instead of merely accepting it. The Queen too found herself swiftly welcomed after the cynic’s surprising hostility. For a member of her retinue reproved the churlish cynic and stressed the pleasures and importance of company.7 Again, quick contrast accentu-

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

ated the welcome offered since the Queen heard immediately juxtaposed arguments against and for the desirability of social interactions. Moreover, because the cynic’s comments required a contradiction in order to re-establish the Queen’s welcome, the Queen and her retinue had to listen to an explicit articulation of why they were important and even necessary for the estate. They did not simply pass through the gates with tacit assumptions about their welcome; rather, they moved through the estate with the knowledge of their warm welcome at the forefront of their minds. And this return to expected welcome was accompanied by a corresponding return to the orderly, polished dress of early seventeenth-century England. As the courtier reproached the cynic, he shed his cloak to reveal expensive – even hyperbolically costly – clothing: chequered and of an Italian cut, a hat with gold and silver, and gilt spurs.8 Because his clothes were thus expensively manufactured, the Queen and her retinue saw before their eyes a contrast between the basic ‘skin-coate’ and skilfully executed attire. With such verbal and visual contrast, guests were encouraged to reflect on the welcome offered to them and so to become more aware of their reception and expectations of their response – more aware of the carefully choreographed estate environment. This rhythm of moving and then halting permeated too the domestic interior, as guests continued to encounter unexpected moments. When the Countess ascended the main stair at Ashby, she met the enchantress once again and was offered a mysterious gift, a waistcoat with magic woven into it. The enchantress told the Countess that the ‘Queen of faierys’ had brought the waistcoat to Lady Huntingdon in a dream, and it was ‘a woorke / wherein strange miracles and wonders lurke’ (ll. 151–74). Somehow, the waistcoat had been transferred from intangible dream to tangible woven cloth and somehow too, the unpredictable, unfamiliar magic of ‘miracles and wonders’ had been intermingled with the threads of the waistcoat. The Countess could touch seemingly familiar fabric and see seemingly familiar colours, but she had to pause mentally to wonder what would happen when she donned the waistcoat or stored it with her other clothing: what were the ‘miracles and wonders’ stored in its fabric? Even when the Countess later entered the great chamber, she still encountered unfamiliar figures; that is, even as she entered the entertaining rooms where she would expect to find her children and possibly their guests, she had to halt and readjust. Upon entering the great chamber, she strangely first saw a cloud rise up from the floor and then also oddly heard the mythological deities Cynthia and Ariadne converse. These deities, moreover, conversed among themselves and speculated about the identity of the Countess who stood watching them (ll. 180–399). Inside the great chamber, the Countess would expect to become swiftly engaged in conversation since she was a familiar family member. Yet she was an awkward stranger who heard a c­ onversation

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about herself without being able to intervene. She hesitated inside the great chamber, pushed back socially from a room to which she would usually have easy access – her approach still punctuated by the barriers of unexpected encounters. This staccato rhythm of progression and pause, however, was less startling sequence than expected ceremonial welcome – a reiteration of the guest’s important elite status and so a reassuring reinforcement of social hierarchy, a pairing of opposites recognisably linked to stability. Owners commissioned theatrical productions only for royal, noble, and gentle visitors to their estates; those of lower social rank were simply given food and drink in the small buttery to the side of the great hall.9 And the production itself connoted effort and expense devoted to a small audience, the entering guest and his or her retinue. Someone needed to envision and write the script, actors needed to be employed and trained to perform, and materials for the sets in which the actors performed had to be purchased as well as the sets themselves constructed. These theatrical productions, then, playfully made tangible the careful choreography that underpinned the seventeenth-century understanding of the world and, more specifically, of the country house. Owner and guests engaged self-consciously in these rhythms – performing an expected dance that they knew would maintain the stability of the world around them. The staccato house Progression and pause were, in fact, so ingrained in the seventeenth-century understanding of the world that staccato rhythm was literally built into the experience of approaching and then moving through the initial spaces of the house. Daily life itself was analogous to the theatrical productions by which guests were welcomed to estates. That is, these welcomes were simply a more formal choreography of meticulously maintained social boundaries. Thomas Heywood, for instance, opened his Apology for Actors of 1612 with a preface that asserted, ‘The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, / Which God, and nature with Actors fill, / Kings have their entrance in due equipage, / And some there parts play well and others ill’.10 Humans are actors perpetually since the universe is a ‘Theater’ and the earth on which they live ‘a Stage’. They perform before each other and before God, judging and being judged simultaneously in the roles that have been assigned to them by social status and profession. The early seventeenth-century house and estate transformed this analogy of theatrical production and daily life into tangible experience. Across his turn-of-the-century sketchbook, the surveyor John Thorpe recorded a range of houses and often their surrounding lands – existing houses, his own proposals for new building or for rebuilding, compact-plan houses, courtyard-plan houses, small houses, and large houses.11 Almost without exception

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

John Thorpe, Burley-on-the-Hill, c. 1620, ground-floor plan, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. Abbreviations: Chap: Chapel, H: Hall, DP: Dining parlour. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama.

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in these plans, he delineated an entrance route along which the approaching guest had to halt physically and mentally at particular moments. There were certainly a few houses where the guest could walk easily up to the main door and then immediately enter the great hall, the first room in the sequence of entertaining spaces. Far more frequently, however, guests paused outside the house and then executed a series of quick turns as they moved through the initial rooms behind the front door. In courtyard-plan houses, such as that proposed by Thorpe for the Duke of Buckingham at Burley-on-the-Hill, guests passed through a narrow gateway in the front range of the house (Figure 5). From a fully open external world where they could look in any direction, they entered a restrictive passageway which hemmed them in on both sides and

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Sir George St Paul’s house, c. 1600, ground- and first-floor plans, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. Abbreviations: ground-floor plan: Bu: Buttery, Chap: Chapel, H: Hall, K: Kitchen, La: Larder, Par: Parlour; first-floor plan: GC: Great chamber, Ga: Gallery. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama.

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above their heads. They could see the surrounding land and could look into the courtyard, but both views were precisely framed – delimited and bounded – by the edges of the passageway. This narrow area too became an explicit boundary since it often contained the lodgings of the porter who either allowed or denied access.12 The visitor would need to halt in order to explain why he or she wished to enter the house and to listen to the porter’s response. Once the porter permitted entrance, the visitor found boundary replaced by a strong invitation to motion. In the courtyard beyond the front range, walls were pushed into the periphery of one’s vision, and one was again exposed to the vicissitudes of sun, wind, and chilling rain. As the space around one’s body had sharply compressed and swiftly expanded to evoke a strong boundary, visitors seemed to stand in a world distinct from the more casual, potentially haphazard environment of public roads where anything could happen. Entering the country house was not easy, and thus not casually undertaken; rather, the house was protected by physical and social barriers that forced approaching visitors to pause and reflect on their e­ xpectations. Likewise, in compact houses that were a single block of rooms without a courtyard, there were moments of pause and readjustment before the guest stepped across the entrance threshold. At several houses, for instance that of Sir George St Paul’s house, guests encountered a terrace perpendicular to the axis of approach and also physically delimited from that approach (Figure  6).13 Those approaching St Paul’s house walk along a long path punctuated by the occasional shorter path until they reach steps leading to a terrace. At the terrace, they find their smooth stroll suddenly halted since the terrace is elevated on steps and extends across their direction of movement. Once they ascend to the terrace, moreover, they are held precisely within its boundaries; the continuous balustrade provides a perpetual visual reminder of the distinction between terrace and forecourt path, as do the wall of the house opposite and the side walls of the house at the ends of the terrace. One pauses on the terrace, held in a particular moment between leaving the forecourt and entering the interior. The visual experience of looking at the entrance façade often reinforced this staccato rhythm of moving, pausing, and then moving again. Across the surface of the façade, one encountered boundaries that forced one to stop and readjust. Thick window glass reflected brilliant sunlight back that forced approaching visitors to blink, squint, and possibly even close their eyes.14 Architect and patron too articulated the wall plane to provide stone boundaries that halted the eye. At Wollaton Hall, a series of one-bay receding volumes force the eye to jump from the corner of one projection to another in order to move from one bay to the next (Figure 7). And in the central set of four bays, the entrance bay protrudes to create yet another disjuncture. Even within each bay, there is little flat stone; paired pilasters and, on the upper floor,

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niches between the pilasters occupy nearly the entire wall surface. The raised shafts of the pilasters create vertical boundaries to the movement of one’s eyes, while the niches curving back into the façade contrastingly lead the eye back into shadow. That is, the Wollaton façade requires the viewer’s eye to halt and move in opposing directions – forwards and backwards, horizontally and vertically – so that one’s perception of the façade is slowed; one pauses and reflects and thus potentially absorbs a more detailed, assured understanding of the façade than if one were able to slide one’s eye easily across its surface. Inside the entrance door, owners quickly established similar limits to visual and physical movement. The narrow screens passage frequently behind the entrance door sharply compressed the space around visitors and, for guests proceeding from a terrace, reoriented yet again the axis along which they moved – returning to the main entrance axis (Figure 6). Since the passage allowed at most a couple of people to walk abreast, one seemed swiftly funnelled into the house, sorted into the appropriate area of buttery or great hall and so quickly surrounded by the boundaries of expected social activities. And these boundaries then continued into the great hall, for guests could frequently move within this room yet neither look back to the buttery nor ahead to further entertaining rooms. In the majority of his house plans, Thorpe depicted a screens passage in which the buttery door was opposite the central partition of the screen opening into the great hall. Guests thus could hear the muffled sounds of servants offering refreshments to visitors of lower

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Robert Smythson, Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1580–8, entrance façade. Photo: Author.

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social rank but would catch glimpses of the buttery only when they looked at an angle through the openings in the screen. So important was this invisibility of buttery and great hall to each other that Thorpe reworked the entrance area of Slaugham to hide the pantry, an analogous space, when he proposed renovations to Sir Walter Covert (Figure 8). In the original plan recorded by Thorpe, there had been both a pantry and a buttery opposite the great hall and with entrances across from openings in the screen. Thorpe, however, removed the buttery to enlarge the pantry and conceal its door behind the central partition of the screen. Enclosed in the great hall, guests would be little distracted by other activities inside the house and, consequently, would be turned inward to each other, focused on their social interactions instead of wandering mentally into a potentially unpredictable variety of topics. Beyond the great hall, guests physically traced out this halting, staccato rhythm through the movements of their bodies as they turned around first one corner and then another. The plans across Thorpe’s sketchbook almost invariably show room arrangements in which guests would need to turn right or left to leave the great hall. They turned aside either to reach a parlour, where more exclusive groups of guests would dine or socialise, or to ascend the main stair leading to the most restricted entertaining rooms. At Burleyon-the-Hill, guests walk into an alcove off the front right corner of the hall and then negotiate yet another set of walls – the thin walls framing the door of the dining parlour (Figure 5). To access the main stair, they even have to turn tightly back upon themselves as they wrap around the narrow corner created by the small vestibule in front of the dining parlour. In the more typical compact plan of St Paul’s house, guests walk past doors in the sides of the great hall and the doors are not aligned with each other so that the more private lodging space is shielded from the larger group of guests who would ascend the main stair (Figure 6). Guests would see first the entrance to the main stair and parlour centred in the left-hand wall, and only if they were entering the apartment would they continue to the apartment door in the far right corner. Since these doors are on the side walls of the hall, moreover, guests would catch merely glimpses of parlour and apartment. Their bodies thus moved and then stopped to reach further rooms, in a physical equivalent of the staccato rhythm encouraged by the theatrical welcoming entertainments. Such meticulously delimited movement was the signal of an ideal house and estate for visitors – even an explicit criterion by which house and estate were evaluated. The early seventeenth-century poets who described landowners and their estates particularly lauded those who maintained restrained actions. Robert Herrick praised Sir Lewis Pemberton because he ‘knowst to lead / A house-dance neatly, and canst truly show / how far a figure ought to go, / Forward, or backward, or sideward’ (ll. 90–3).15 Pemberton maintains the

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8

Slaugham, as altered by John Thorpe, c. 1600, ground-floor plan, in John Thorpe’s sketchbook. Abbreviations: Chap: Chapel, H: Hall, Pan: Pantry, Par: Parlour, WP: Winter parlour. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama.

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precise dance ‘figure’ of guests and household members through his knowledge of the boundaries within which his ‘house-dance’ should move. Each of Pemberton’s guests and household members remains within the outline of his or her expected actions – servants performing their daily tasks and guests moving through the gestures of amiable conversation – so that the ‘figure’ of the dance retains its coherence. The entire community also never progresses too far in any direction since Pemberton carefully halts them before they move excessively ‘Forward, or backward, or sideward’. Guests, for instance Herrick explains, are allowed to drink only so much wine to avoid the unpredictable drunken behaviour that would transform the ideal harmonious social gathering into chaotic uncertainty. There are invisible social boundaries on all sides and at all scales to guarantee the coherence of Pemberton’s social gatherings – smaller boundaries around the body of each guest and larger boundaries around the whole group of guests. These invisible boundaries invoked by the metaphor of a dance would have come readily to mind for Herrick’s well-educated readers, as many of them experienced painstaking physical training to maintain the coherence of such a geometrical dance figure. To participate in court masque dances, courtiers rehearsed for at least two to five weeks, and, during the dance, their bodies were covered in costumes that disguised individual idiosyncrasies. Leather masks covered faces to obscure individual features and expressions, while the stockings clothing the legs of male dancers were often stuffed with cotton wool to suggest bulging muscles.16 Not even in the body itself could there be irregularities that would disrupt the coherence of the dance’s geometrical formation. So too the ‘house-dance’ had to be exactly choreographed to maintain its coherence and stability, to preserve the predictable physical and social gestures and statements on which harmonious social interactions depended. By their experience too of social gatherings, Herrick’s readers would have known that social harmony could be maintained only with careful discipline. According to the well-established tradition of estate hospitality, owners were expected to entertain poor and wealthy, familiar friend and casual passer-by alike. Strangers could be seated next to each other at table, and individuals of different social rank could find that they needed to maintain a conversation. In his Description of England from 1576, William Harrison explained that in the halls of noble landowners, ‘there are commonly forty or threescore persons fed … to the great relief of such (poor suitors) and strangers [also] as oft be partakers thereof ’.17 Gentry landowners offered a similar warm welcome to passers-by, though on a smaller scale befitting their more limited resources.18 Inside a landowner’s house, one thus moved, ate, and conversed in a crowd of people, between forty and sixty people at one table according to Harrison. Such a crowd could easily evoke chaos because so many people would be milling around, trying to find their appropriate place at table and trying to

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learn who were the other guests around them. A guest could then easily slip out of expected behaviour because he or she would be little noticed in the crowd, unless the landowner maintained a meticulously moderated gathering in which each guest had a particular role. Yet this enforced moderation had to be concealed, like the invisible instruction of training for a dance, so that the landowner’s welcome appeared sincere rather than grudging; otherwise, the landowner would seem to spurn, rather than welcome, guests. Ben Jonson, for instance, praised the Sidney household at Penshurst for openly welcoming all guests to the same meal, ‘the same beer, and bread, and self-same wine / That is his lordship’s, shall be also mine; / And I not fain to sit … and yet dine away. / Here no man tells my cups’ (ll. 63–7).19 In the great hall at Penshurst, everyone – regardless of social rank – drinks and eats the same food, sits at the same table, and is offered beer and wine with unstinting generosity. No one, including Ben Jonson who does not share the elite landowning rank of the Sidneys and their more intimate social circles, has to ‘dine away’ at another table. When performing a masque dance, the dancers moved so fluidly and synchronously that they appeared to perform with little effort or thought; so too the owner and his household had to welcome all guests with little reserve to maintain the smooth harmony characteristic of a warm welcome that put all at ease. Such effortless harmony, in fact, depended explicitly on precise physical and social choreography. Etiquette manuals reiterated in painstaking detail the appropriate comportment for social interactions.20 The Courte of Civill Courtesie, for instance, spelled out at length how to comport oneself so that the harmony of a dining table remained undisturbed. Guests of venerable age or respected reputation, the anonymous Italian author claimed, should be seated close to the host, and there were particular gestures and statements to use if a guest should need to correct the seating order. The author instructs his reader to ‘utter some familier speech in yelding the place’ so that the gesture of relinquishing a seat ‘wilbe the better understanded’.21 When a guest speaks a familiar statement, other guests do not fall into disorder; they easily comprehend the frequently used remark and so simply to slide into their own seats and restart conversations that might have been interrupted by the seat exchange. There would be no awkward social pause of puzzlement and no potential physical confusion of chaotically disordered bodies. Likewise at table, the guest should avoid sudden actions that would startle other diners and so rupture the smooth flow of conversation. If a guest at dinner ‘be constrained to yawne, reach, belche, cough, sneese, clense the nose, or spit … he must suppresse the sound, and shadow the sight, as muche as he may conviently without making it to nice’.22 A sudden belch, cough, or sneeze would produce a startling sound and motion that could cause other diners to halt in surprise and that could drown out a conversation carried on in a low

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

tone. At the same time, however, the guest is not to strive too hard to conceal his belch, cough, sneeze, or other ailment. When he makes his concealment ‘to nice’, or too exaggerated, he will also incur the puzzlement of other diners as they wonder why he bends in a strange direction or why he jerks suddenly. He must instead make his concealment appear natural, continuing to move with smooth and fluid gestures and maintaining his conversations so that the harmony of the table remains undisturbed. The experience of dining was analogous to a choreographed dance in which the participants needed to maintain particular visual and aural profiles in order to guarantee the comprehensibility of their ‘figure’ that was the conversation at dinner. Also implicit in this notion of a ‘house-dance’ and again explicit in etiquette manuals was the importance of performing before an audience – adhering to social expectations under judging eyes in a literal version of Thomas Heywood’s theatre of daily life.23 At the dining table, guests were to conceal coughs and sneezes so that they did not startle the eyes and ears of other diners. In his English Gentlewoman, Richard Brathwaite feared that the gentlewoman in her secluded closet would no longer adhere to appropriate behaviour because she was hidden from the watchful eyes of others. Instead of pursuing the expected religious worship, he imagined, she would look in her mirror and worry that the ‘poynt or pendent of her feather wags out of a due posture; her Cheeke wants her true tincture’.24 These small aberrations in her appearance, the point of a feather that is slightly bent rather than perfectly upright or a cheek that is slightly too pale, then unseat the woman’s desirably measured demeanour, for she is thrown into a ‘monstrous distemper’ – the opposite of calm worship.25 The gentlewoman can avert this disorder, however, if she remembers that she is still performing before an audience. Brathwaite admonishes her: ‘bee you retired from the eyes of men; thinke how the eyes of God are on you’.26 Even though there are no humans watching her, she is still being watched by God and so she will still be judged and evaluated against a standard of expected and appropriate actions; she must then continue to guard against inappropriate behaviour. As guests moved into the more exclusive entertaining rooms, they entered spaces that foregrounded this watchful visibility of one guest to another. After St Paul’s guests ascended his main stair, they stood in a vista that stretched across the central block of the house and out through the window of the long gallery.27 There were still clear boundaries to where they could look and move since the vista ended on one side in the blank wall of the lodgings wing and opened only into a slanted side window that would offer merely fragmentary glimpses of land and sky. But guests could now stride through and look across a sequence of rooms and, in the great chamber and along the long gallery, they could look through the entire depth of the house. They could thus readily see each other in the large spaces and through the aligned doors. As they watched

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each other, they could judge and be judged through the filter of shared expectations of physical, social, and mental comportment. They had read the etiquette manuals that spelled out in detail appropriate behaviour. And they also held in common an education that emphasised excerpting and remembering useful aphorisms from Greek, Latin, and other learned texts – quotations which owner and guests could expect to hear in support of a specific argument or assertion.28 Individuals would disrupt the smooth flow of these expected gestures and quotations when they performed ­idiosyncratic gestures or stated a flamboyant and potentially offensive opinion that was unsupported by these customary quotations. It was thus important to see and listen to each other in order to ensure and maintain the harmony of social interactions within the domestic interior. The physical wall boundaries that had halted the motion of guests on the ground floor could be pushed back because social boundaries had become shared intangible expectations. Owner and guest were held in place physically, socially, and mentally by the probing eyes of those around them, just as the pilasters, niches, and panes of glass slowed one’s perception of the Wollaton façade to a sequence of staccato pauses. The inherently disruptive body Such tangible and intangible safeguards were, in fact, essential defences against well-known, imminent threats – the inherent weaknesses of the theatrical metaphor used to comprehend daily life and the potential disorder of the human body. The theatrical metaphor invoked the perpetual discipline of an actor with well-learned lines and gestures yet also opened up a potential irresponsibility in that actor. For individuals who performed behind costumes could execute their actions unidentified and behind masks could produce facial expressions that disrupted the smooth harmony of a court masque dance. Readers of the English translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier learned that ‘being in a maske, bringeth with it a certaine libertie and licence’.29 Masked dancers could grimace unseen, and no one in the audience would know about their discomfort. So too on house and estate, owner and guests could perform expected gestures and statements while thinking opposing, disruptive thoughts. An owner might welcome his guests with seeming generosity but silently resent the intrusion of yet another guest into his house. On the one hand, such a risk was inevitable, and the mask – whether literal or metaphorical – covered up the moments in which an individual lapsed from expected behaviour. But there was also explicit emphasis on reducing this risk by training oneself in the mental attitudes that supported the expected gestures and statements. Robert Herrick’s praise of Pemberton’s ‘house-dance’ included praise of how thoroughly Pemberton had schooled his household. Pemberton, he remarks, ‘hast learnt [his] train / With heart and hand to

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

entertain’ (ll. 35–6). Pemberton has trained his household to demonstrate the sincerity of a warm welcome; they know how to entertain with warm hearts echoed in generously open hands.30 Owner and guests likewise had to assure that they possessed mindsets appropriate to the harmony of warm welcome and gracious acceptance. In his Christian Hospitalitie of 1632, Caleb Dalechamp admonished prospective hosts that they should show consistently ‘openness of the heart’ and advised prospective guests that they should display thankfulness in return for their hosts’ generosity.31 Hosts should always welcome guests with such sincere warmth that they opened their hearts to guests as if they were familiar friends rather than surprising strangers – for instance, including them in social activities that were not confined to household spaces. Guests, in return, should be sure that they always treated their host with gratitude – avoiding criticism of their host and being careful to praise him when possible.32 And Dalechamp’s admonitions sit within warnings about the possible risks of hospitality; the stranger who approached an estate was as likely to be grateful guest as hostile enemy. At the beginning of his volume, Dalechamp asserted both that hospitality required landowners to receive any ‘stranger’ into their household and that, according to the Bible, a stranger was either someone outside family and friend circles or a ‘foreign enemy’.33 If an owner admitted hostile enemies, those strangers might be liable to destroy the harmony and stability of house and household. They might stay too long so that the landowner’s resources became inordinately depleted, or might engage in quarrels with other guests so that the usually smooth flow of conversation became an irregular, strident pattern of disagreeing voices. Within the context of his warnings about the unpredictability of hospitality, Dalechamp’s advice to host and guest about appropriate attitudes and comportment is equally a description of ideal social encounters and a defence against the unpredictabilities that could undermine those interactions. Dalechamp’s readers, moreover, knew that guests could only too easily transform into hostile enemies by the very tendencies of human nature. In his Treatise of Mans Imagination from 1607, William Perkins averred that ‘naturally the heart, thinkes all evill against his neighbour’.34 Even those who approached an estate with well-meaning intentions could come to think evil of those around them. They might become envious of a landowner’s wealth, for instance, and so spread damaging rumours about his self-aggrandisement – the opposite of the ideal consciousness of public responsibility. Social harmony was simply an artificial construct that humans maintained by common consent and conscious effort. Perkins, in fact, claimed that adults could correct these ill-directed inclinations only through strict, repetitive training of their children. The foundations of religion, Perkins asserted, should be ‘driven into … [their] hearts’ by repeated instruction in order to ‘free … minds … from

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natural imaginations’ that prompted ill-intentioned behaviour.35 Only then would children be so accustomed to thinking along expected moral lines that they would as if instinctively turn to the appropriate, approved actions. Yet Perkins’s remedy was merely partial, merely viable sometimes; as Thomas Wright explained in his Passions of the Minde in Generall, there was a perpetual risk that the violent passions could break free from reason’s cool control to unleash undesirable behaviour. The most innate and basic alliance governing human actions, according to Wright, was that of the senses and the passions; reason, the faculty that ensured controlled behaviour, began to govern human actions only when children became older.36 Consequently, even after reason had asserted its control over the senses, there was a continuous risk that the senses and the passions would slip free to direct human action. Together, they ‘are like two naughtie servants, who oft-times beare more love one to an other, than they are obedient to their Maister’.37 Reason is the unquestioned governor, the ‘Maister’ to which the senses and the passions are mere ‘servants’, but these ‘servants’ can disobey reason since they have more affection for each other than ‘obedience’ to reason. Often, Wright even warned, humans allowed their passions to control their behaviour: ‘the most part of men resolve themselves, never to displease their sence or passions, but to graunt them whatsoever they demaund’.38 Reason stands little chance of governing human actions dependably if humans so frequently succumb to their passions. Its rule might even be overturned in a mere moment – a mere gaze at a glass of wine. Wright urged his reader to ‘perfunctorily passe over … wine when it glistereth … for such alluring sights, dart presently into the hart inordinat delights … [and] perhaps ensue too much affection, or drinking’.39 The sight of wine sparkling invitingly in a glass easily overcomes reason’s measured control, as ‘inordinat delights’ – some of the violent passions – swiftly emerge from the ‘hart’. An individual remembers the appealing taste of the wine and, consequently, wants to drink the current glass in addition to potentially other glasses. In the unreasoned grip of desire for the wine, guests may drink so much that they lose control over their actions and utter unexpected, offensive statements. One has to be careful to bound one’s gaze within specific parameters of time to avoid unleashing the violent passions. Bounding one’s gaze to create a staccato rhythm of actions, analogous to the staccato movements through the domestic interior, was a key technique to counteracting the very nature of the passions. For the passions are characterised by unbounded motion, while reason deliberates more slowly. Wright explained to his reader how passions are ‘blowne about the bodie’ and ‘never let the Soule be in quietnes’.40 The passions move violently, and potentially unpredictably, hither and thither to produce unexpected reactions – ‘blowne’ swiftly as if with a strong gust of wind. When they are thus ‘blowne’, they create turmoil throughout the human body; ‘the Soule’, an individual’s mental and

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

emotional faculties, can never be quiet and calm once the passions are excited. Reason, in contrast, requires a calm period of time since it ‘standes in deliberation’ over the choices presented before an individual.41 If reason is to have time to govern the human body, then, one must find a means to hold the restless passions at bay, to prevent them from reacting immediately to the senses.42 Boundaries to one’s actions, limits that set a rhythm of some motion and then a pause, accomplish this safeguarding against the passions, for one moves just enough to perceive new information but not far enough to ignite the passions. When authors of etiquette manuals echoed Wright’s concern about curbing the violent passions, they made explicit the importance of setting boundaries to ensuring appropriate social comportment. In The Compleat Gentleman, Henry Peacham explained that a gentleman maintained ‘evenness of Carriage and care of [his] Reputation’ by holding the violent passions immobile.43 He informed his reader, ‘The principall meanes to preserve it [reputation and carriage] is Temperance and that Moderation of the minde, wherewith as a bridle wee curbe and breake our ranke and unruly Passions, keeping as the Caspian Sea, our selves at one heigth without ebbe or refluxe’.44 Like energetic horses, the passions are perpetually about to race away out of human control and so an individual needs to rein them in with a restraining bridle. And through this bridle, the individual remains motionless – held at a particular ‘heigth’ without the tidal changes of ebb and flow; that is, the passions are contained inside the boundaries of acceptable mental and social comportment. As Wright described, reason is the faculty that maintains this bridle since ‘Moderation of the minde’, in addition to a more general mentality of ‘Temperance’, ensures that the passions will remain in check. Those around this rationally controlled individual will see clear tangible evidence of his restraint, for his gait will be smooth and regular – ‘even’ instead of irregular and rushed – and he will carefully guard his actions and statements to avoid damaging his reputation. The gentleman with bridled passions will be the ideally gracious and appropriate gentleman because reason is able to deliberate coolly without the rush of the passions. Predictable physical, social, and mental comportment depended on restraining boundaries that divided otherwise free-flowing motion into staccato moments – a quick glance at and then away from a glass of wine, for instance, and the swift changes in axes of motion by the guest entering the domestic interior. The contrast of the irregular garden These halting staccato rhythms that guaranteed predictable human behaviour and so social stability extended from the domestic interior into the surrounding garden. Just as guests on the interior executed a series of physical and mental shifts when they moved from room to room, likewise there was a larger-scale

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shift from regular house to irregular, whimsical garden. That is, together, house and garden provided the balance of opposites lauded by John Norden in his Store-house of Varieties. So sharp was the contrast between house and garden that they were rarely discussed together by authors. Sir Francis Bacon devoted one essay to gardens and another to building, and Sir Henry Wotton included only a brief survey of garden design after his detailed analysis of the domestic interior in his Elements of Architecture.45 Among authors who focused on garden design, Gervase Markham included merely a few pages on the siting and plan of a husbandman’s house in his English Husbandman, while William Lawson simply illustrated a house at the head of a garden in his New Orchard and Garden (Figure 9).46 There was too a clear opposition in the design principles of house and garden. Wotton asserted that there should be ‘a certain contrarietie between building and gardening: For as Fabriques should be regular, so Gardens should bee irregular, or at least cast into a very wilde Regularitie’.47 Buildings should have regular, or predictable and mathematically calculable, proportions and should also have a regular, most likely symmetrical, design – for instance, with equally spaced windows. Gardens, however, overturn this regularity by being either irregular – with surprising sequences of garden plots – or designed so that the regularity appears ‘wilde’, untamed and accidental. Markham explicitly urged his readers to present a variety of geometrical shapes in garden plots. An owner should ‘cast one [garden plot] in plaine Squares, another in Tryangulars, another in roundalls … which questionlesse when they are adorned with their ornaments, will breed infinite delight to the beholders’.48 The garden may be arranged in a grid of squares, like that illustrated by William Lawson, but the grid would be swiftly obscured by the variety of geometrical forms articulated with the plants, or ‘ornaments’, set inside each outline; the grid was a two-dimensional network of paths laid out on the ground, while the plants were growing upwards in three dimensions. The shift from square to triangle to circle would dominate viewers’ experience of the garden, perpetually eluding their expectations. And such contradictions of expectations, risky on the interior, were desirable in the garden; they produced ‘infinite delight’, according to Markham. These contradictions are even welcomed precisely for reactions that would be undesirable on the interior. While one was held within clear boundaries inside the house, William Lawson asserted that the garden should undermine one’s ability to stay in one place. The ideal garden, he claims, ‘makes all our sences swimme in pleasure’.49 According to Wright and Peacham, one was to resist the senses and the passions in order to maintain reason’s control over one’s behaviour. Viewers who experience Lawson’s ideal garden, however, are so overwhelmed with pleasure that all of their senses ‘swimme’. Reason can no longer hold sensory perceptions in a particular place, and there is the risk

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William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, 1618 (1631 edn.), house and garden. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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that one will lose control of one’s reactions, for a swimming body is fully at the mercy of the surrounding water; strong currents, tides, and waves can toss one’s body about – making progress difficult or even reversing one’s direction. While the interior rests on one’s ability to retain control over one’s actions, the ideal garden depends on precisely the opposite experience: control wrested from the viewer. Such disorder, however, restores human health because of the contrast that it offers to the interior – the salutary contrasting balance so praised by Norden. Inside the house, Lawson claims, owner and guests find ‘their stomacks cloyed with varietie of Banquets, their eares filled & overburthened with tedious discoursings’.50 After eating abundant meals and after listening to lengthy conversations, bodies become overloaded to the point of discomfort and of illness. Stomachs are ‘cloyed’ – filled to the point of disgust so that it will be nearly impossible to appreciate, or possibly eat, further food and offer the grateful praise expected by the landowner. So too ears are ‘overburthened’ – filled and wearied by the sound of words to the point where no further words

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might be comprehended. The garden restores one’s ability to fulfil the duties of a proper guest by refreshing the senses and the entire body. Lawson writes that the garden is ‘made and prepared, dressed and destinated for that purpose to renue and refresh their sences, and to call home their over-wearied spirits’.51 The ears, for instance, that were wearied from tiresome conversation are now ‘renue[d]’ by listening to water splashing in fountains and birds chirping so that they can once again convey the sounds of words comprehensibly to one’s mind. And Lawson particularly underscores the return to a specific place since he asserts that these outdoor spaces ‘call home … over-wearied spirits’. Guests whose minds might have begun to wander with the surfeit of sensory perceptions on the interior find that their faculties are restored to their usual position of health – recalled to what is as familiar as home. The disorienting garden provides the necessary antidote to the more restrictive interior; its contrast of wildness and irregularity offers a moment of relief to guests so that they are able to re-enter the house and resume their appropriate roles. This irregularity, moreover, was as carefully choreographed as the more regular domestic interior; one’s senses might ‘swimme’ but only so far, still held within rational bounds – the bounds of reason of the owner who had crafted the design. Guests in fact entered the garden with secure knowledge of these boundaries, expecting to be surprised yet merely to a limited extent and knowing that the most startling surprises could be easily explained. For the principles of automata that produced unexpected experiences were set out in books such as John Bate’s The Mysteries of Nature and Art and Salomon de Caus’s Les Raisons des forces mouvantes.52 At Enstone, for instance, guests entered a grotto where water sprang up from a rock, then fell at the centre of the space, and simultaneously kept a silver ball balanced at the top of its stream.53 Viewers well knew that water should flow down a rocky surface or stand in a hollowed-out pool on the top surface of the rock. Water spouted forth from a fountain in a garden, but that spout was clearly artificial because it occurred within carved stone – often within sculpture. But since water spouted up simply from an uncarved rock at Enstone, one’s expectations of the relationship between water and rock in the natural world were reversed, and one also could wonder how the silver ball remained so continuously balanced. Guests, however, could turn to the numerous machines that spouted water in Bate’s and de Caus’s volumes to imagine how a logically assembled machine created the effect before them; Bate even described experiments that spouted water upwards – precisely like the Enstone grotto.54 The grotto that was at first so surprising could thus direct the minds of viewers back to rational enquiry and back to the books that were an appropriate and expected topic of discourse. As one’s senses swam with pleasure in the garden, one was thus simultaneously healthily distracted by the profusion of sensory experiences and turned toward appropriate topics of conversation.

Early seventeenth-century staccato boundaries

The stability of familiar home With the staccato motions and the balance between regularity and irregularity that ordered physical, social and mental experience, house and estate seemed to guarantee predictability at every corner and every scale. From individual interior rooms to the estate as a whole, change and undesirable surprise were held at bay – even the vicissitudes of human nature defended against and disciplined. Such reassuring dependability became explicit as poets termed house and estate a familiar ‘home’, derived etymologically from a small village or town that stood within well-established physical and social limits.55 In a small village or town, individuals would know where the perimeter of their environment was and so where they themselves stood or walked relative to the outermost streets and buildings. They thus consciously moved within specific boundaries as they performed the tasks of their daily lives. Inhabitants likewise lived within clear social boundaries since they were well-acquainted with each other. They could recognise one another easily, and thus no one could escape into irresponsible anonymity. So dependable was this familiar environment of home that it offered reassuring protection to its occupants. As Ben Jonson contrasted living on an estate with living in London, he averred to Robert Wroth that Wroth ‘canst at home, in thy securer rest, / Live, with unbought provision blest’ (ll. 13–14). Living ‘at home’ on one’s own estate offers security and rest; Wroth can relax, or ‘rest’, because there will be few worries. While he would need to purchase food in London, he can simply subsist on ‘unbought provision’ – vegetables grown on farmland and deer shot in the woods – at his estate. He consequently can preserve his resources for subsequent generations of his family without fearing how he will conserve his funds. The estate too protects its owner from dangerous social vicissitudes, according to the poet Thomas Randolph. A London officeholder, he claims, ‘stands upon a pinnacle to show / His dangerous height whilst I sit safe below’ (ll. 91–2). On his pinnacle, the officeholder is exposed to the extremes of weather – brilliant sun, gusting wind, and drenching rain or snow – and he might then become ill or be knocked from his perch. Likewise in London he might lose his respected reputation, in a metaphorical equivalent of the ill man or the man knocked from his pinnacle; he could be misled by rumours, have his reputation damaged by fallacious rumours, or succumb to the temptations that would be more prevalent, for instance, accepting bribes to offer a particular vote in Parliament. Randolph, on the other hand, ‘sit[s] safe below’ – beneath the risky pinnacle and most likely in a valley; the surrounding hills or mountains shelter him against the vagaries of weather, rebuffing gusty winds and blocking the sun’s hot rays. On his estate, he is protected from rumours and temptations since he interacts with few people beyond his estate tenants and those who happen to pass his gates isolated in

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countryside. With such limited distraction, he is able to remain focused on maintaining the prosperous estate key to England’s well-being. The estate holds at bay, beyond the confines of its boundaries, the dangerous temptations and risks that could unseat already inherently unpredictable human nature. In early seventeenth-century England, Englishmen and -women moved through a carefully balanced world – one in which concepts were paired with each other to locate them precisely, in which individuals were choreographed into expected social gestures, and in which the built environment hemmed in the movement of body and eye to discipline daily life. The staccato rhythm of moving back and forth between the endpoints of two connected ideas or starting and stopping in the welcome to house and estate was essential to maintaining this balance; one could move but only so far. Continuous motion would undermine England’s stability since it allowed little opportunity for reason to deliberate and direct human actions. The physical, social, and mental boundaries that limited, or at the very least delayed, motion imposed the essential controls on humans who might often be unable to resist the strong alliance of the senses and the passions. On house and estate, these boundaries became particularly marked, both tangible through house as well as garden design and incorporated into the smallest rhythms of social interaction, even a cough or a sneeze at the dining table. Notes 1 John Norden, A Store-house of Varieties (London, 1601), Poem No. 94. For a similar argument, see John Norden, The Labyrinth of Mans Life: Or Vertues Delight and Envies Opposite (London, 1614), p. B3v. On contradiction (or antithesis) as a means of maintaining rhetorical balance, see David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin 59:3 (September 1977), 336–61; Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 70–2; J. Joris van Gastel, ‘Marmo Spirante: Sculpture and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Rome’ (PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2011), p. 40. For pairing more generally as a way of understanding the world, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 17–42; FloydWilson and Sullivan Jr, Environment and Embodiment, p. 4. 2 Norden, A Store-house of Varieties, Poem No. 94. 3 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), pp. 2–3. 4 John Marston, ‘The Entertainment of the Dowager Duchess of Darby’, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), pp. 189–207. On country house entertainments, see Suzanne Westfall, ‘“He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune”: Household Entertainments’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 263–79.

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5 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 32. 6 Thomas Campion, A Relation of the Late Royall Entertainment Given by the Right Honorable the Lord Knowles at Cawsome-House Neere Redding: To Our Most Gracious Queene, Queene Anne, in Her Progresse Toward the Bathe, Upon the Seven and Eight and Twentie Dayes of Aprill. 1613. (London, 1613), p. A2. 7 Campion, Late Royall Entertainment, pp. 1–3. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, pp. 30, 167. 10 Thomas Heywood, ‘The Author to his Booke’, in Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), unnumbered page. On this theatrical interpretation of early modern life, see particularly Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels, ‘The Visual Arts and the Theatre in Early Modern Europe’, Art History 33:2 (April 2010), 208–23. For a theoretical discussion of human life as theatrical performance, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 106–40. Lorna Weatherill has connected this notion of theatricality to the late seventeenth-century English domestic interior in Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (New York: Routledge, 1988). 11 For a reproduction of this sketchbook, currently housed at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, see John Summerson (ed.), The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe in Sir John Soane’s Museum, Walpole Society, Vol. 40 (1964–6). 12 Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, pp. 8–9. 13 For similar examples see among others: Summerson, The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe, T27, T32, T51, T85, T86, T89. 14 For a photograph of the effect of this reflective glass, see Girouard, Life in the English Country House, p. 116. 15 Robert Herrick, ‘A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 106–12. 16 Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, Inc., 1990), pp. 59–60; Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, pp. 15, 75–83, 97–105, 171, 175. 17 Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, p. 91. 18 Ibid., pp. 91–2. 19 Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 54–62. On this poem, see also Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 20 On this concern with the appropriate movements of the human body, see especially Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblau, and Stephen Mennell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 47–182; Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: ­ larendon Press, Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: C 1998), pp. 76–96. 21 S. R. (trans.), The Courte of Civill Courtesie (London, 1582), p. 1. 22 Ibid., p. 37. 23 On the discipline instilled by the act of watching and being watched, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 195–228. For Foucault’s conception of the body as a

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passive surface on which powers of authority are inscribed, see Lois McNay, ‘Gender, Habitus and Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity’, Theory Culture Society 16:95 (1999), 96–7. 24 Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (London, 1641), p.  295. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 297. 27 On the long gallery, see especially Rosalys Coope, ‘The Gallery in England: Names and Meanings’, Architectural History 27 (1984), 446–55; Rosalys Coope, ‘The “Long Gallery”: Its Origins, Development, Use and Decoration’, Architectural History 29 (1986), 43–84. 28 Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 91–100, 119–20, 131–7; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). For particularly useful examples of these commonplace books, see the Osborn Collection at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 29 1603 English translation of The Courtier, quoted in Limon, Stuart Culture, p. 96. On the more general early seventeenth-century conception of dance and theatrical performance as opening an opportunity for digression from moral codes, see ‘A Shorte Treatise Against Stage-Playes’, in The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543–1664, ed. W.C. Hazlitt (New York: Burt Franklin, 1869), pp. 240–2; Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 22–46; Michael O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 116–18; Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 19–33; Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, pp. 21, 192. 30 On the identification of hospitality with spontaneous welcome, see Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, pp. 108–12, 117. 31 Caleb Dalechamp, Christian Hospitalitie Handled Common-Place-Wise in the Chappel of Trinity Colledge in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1632), p. 20. 32 Ibid., pp. 110–11. 33 Ibid., p. 5. 34 William Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imagination (London, 1607), p. 118. 35 Ibid., p. 165. 36 Wright, The Passions of the Minde, pp. 7–9. 37 Ibid., p. 8. 38 Ibid., p. 10. 39 Ibid., p. 152. 40 Ibid., pp. 58, 174. 41 Ibid., p. 9. 42 Ibid. 43 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622; reprint, Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press and Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd, 1968), p. 185. See also Wright, The Passions of the Minde, pp. 5–6. For a discussion of Peacham’s book,

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see Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England: Revolutions in Architectural Taste (London: UCL Press Limited, 1994), pp. 81–2. 44 Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, p. 185. 45 Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (1624; reprint, Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1969), pp. 109–14; Francis Bacon, ‘Of Building’, in Essays, by Francis Bacon (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 114–17; Francis Bacon, ‘Of Gardens’, in Essays, by Francis Bacon (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), pp. 117–23. For an extended discussion of Bacon’s essay, see Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 33–5. 46 Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613), pp. A3v–4r. 47 Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, p. 109. 48 Markham, The English Husbandman, p. 112. 49 William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden, or, The Best Way for Planting, Grafting, and to make Any Ground Good, for a Rich Orchard (London, 1618), p. 56. For a similar comment, see Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, pp. 109–10. 50 Ibid., p. 56. 51 Ibid. 52 Salomon de Caus, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (Paris, 1624); John Bate, The Mysteries of Nature and Art (London, 1635). On these volumes, see Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), pp. 111–12, 133–4. 53 Strong, The Renaissance Garden, pp. 130–1. 54 Bate, The Mysteries of Nature and Art, pp. 14–23. 55 See for instance Geoffrey Whitney’s ‘Patria Cuique Cara: To Robert Cotton Esquire’, Ben Jonson’s ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, Richard Corbett’s ‘[Warwick Castle]’, Robert Herrick’s ‘The Country Life’, and Thomas Randolph’s ‘On the Inestimable Content He Enjoys in the Muses’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 31–4, 63–9, 80–2, 113–17, 138–44. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘home’.

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There was, however, a growing ambivalence about this staccato world of movement and pause. In the early seventeenth century, Englishmen and -women read a range of arguments that sought to halt the increasing slipperiness of signifiers in their daily world – arguments that attempted to hold in place familiar English words and equally familiar coats of arms. Yet they also perused these arguments alongside open debate about the benefits and risks of literal motion, the travel of people and goods within and beyond England. From mid-century, as the Civil War transformed unpredictability into a way of life, this debate collapsed into widespread acceptance of even a changeable English language. In the context of such mobile linguistic communication, authors and readers of architectural books rethought how design principles were conveyed and received. Translations contained malleable content and migrated into new readerships, readers reinterpreted volumes for their own more pragmatic questions, and formerly static design principles became transitory historical phases. By the late seventeenth century, motion had shifted from potential threat to a basic quality of interpreting one’s world, a changeability that one simply had to assume in order to comprehend one’s surroundings. The early seventeenth-century ambivalence toward motion Across early seventeenth-century social and linguistic practice, Englishmen and -women were already encountering moments where they had to move mentally in order to readjust – moments when they could no longer assume that the words and objects by which they communicated had their usual meaning. There was, however, sharp resistance to conceptual changeability, as authors sought to re-establish the meanings of traditional signifiers and as literal motion was intensely debated with an anxiety that rose with the number of boundaries breached. These debates particularly involved landowners and their families, for primarily England’s nobility and gentry experienced the slippery words and coats of arms and participated in the debated networks of travel – journeying themselves and investing in colonial ventures.

Mobility of language and architectural theory

Until the early seventeenth century, English noble and gentle families had been well accustomed to relatively secure social rank. They were held in place by traditional titles, including knight, lord, and duke, and by coats of arms that identified both family and particular individual. The members of each rank too were predictable, since Elizabeth I had made few new noble and gentle appointments. Under James I, however, social rank was suddenly fluid. In only the first four months of his reign, James I appointed 906 knights, and, across the following decade, introduced the new rank of baronet between nobleman and gentleman in addition to authorising his courtiers to sell titles.1 Courtiers consequently encountered an unprecedented crowd of strangers as they socialised with each other, potentially unable to identify other individuals or their rank, surprised by the new rank of baronet, and unfamiliar with even others who held the same title. The very possession of a title, moreover, had new associations; while individuals had once received titles to honour their fealty to the monarch, anyone who had sufficient wealth could simply purchase a title. Simultaneously, the coats of arms that conveyed these elite ranks were slipping from accurate to fictive symbols of lineage. Wealthy but untitled individuals found that they could bribe heralds to forge arms and pedigrees that placed them among England’s titled elite.2 The usual system of obtaining and communicating elite rank had become so mobile that it threatened the very stability of England’s hierarchy. Such social mobility and malleability was sharply and anxiously resisted; a profusion of books on heraldry spelled out in meticulous detail firm rules for the increasingly ambiguous coats of arms.3 John Guillim, in fact, opened his Display of Heraldrie with an explicit aim of seeking rules by which heraldry could be pinned down. At the beginning of his letter to the reader, he offered a long list of how heraldic symbols were often confusingly mixed together, from celestial and terrestrial animals to the mechanical and liberal arts, and then explained, ‘For redresse whereof, my selfe, … have done my best, in this my Display of Heraldry, to dissolve this deformed lumpe, distributing and digesting each particular thereof in his peculiar rancke’.4 Faced with the irregular ‘lumpe’ of groups of symbols piled indiscriminately together, Guillim organises heraldry by distributing each of its various elements into a particular position, or ‘rancke’. Celestial and terrestrial animals, for instance, will never blur into each other because each group has firm boundaries encircling its position. Across his subsequent pages, Guillim transformed such clear positioning into the basic structure of his volume; the first page of each section displays a diagram in which each main concept or category has a discrete position, and Guillim then devotes a subsection of text to that idea. These carefully distinguished and explained categories likewise immobilised the owners of coats of arms, for John Guillim explained in his text how a coat of arms could identify an individual’s family, position in that family, and moral qualities. As well, he

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devoted several pages at the end of his volume specifically to delineating how the social rank that his readers knew to be confusingly fluid could be swiftly and clearly articulated by a coat of arms.5 Through Guillim’s volume, then, readers found that both the coat of arms and its bearer were held motionless and so protected from the potential chaos of malleable heraldry and social rank. Language itself needed similarly to be pinned down in order to protect English words from a dangerous flood of foreign terms, Robert Cawdrey claimed. In 1604, he published a dictionary of English words to remind readers of how they could best communicate with each other. He explained, in his letter to the reader, that too many people had begun ‘pouder their talke with over-sea language’.6 Across a conversation peppered with foreign words, speaker and listener would have to shift among linguistic systems to comprehend a single idea – moving among inflections, syntaxes, and words themselves. It was far better, according to Cawdrey, to stay within the boundaries of familiar English that was ‘the plainest & best kind of speech’.7 During an English conversation, speaker and listener stayed in place since they could call to mind easily the meanings of familiar words; metaphorically too, they remained inside England’s island shores because the Continental travels that might be associated with foreign words were not evoked in their minds. Social and mental stability seemed guaranteed only if one stood still, as movement risked error and confusion. This anxiety about mobile signifiers reflected a broader ambivalence and concern about the threat of moving out of position; all types of movement – whether abstract or literal – were topics of debate, evoking a perpetual awareness of the risks of any motion. When landowners travelled from city to country, for instance, they directly undermined the stability of house and estate. Under Elizabeth I, they had fulfilled their traditional obligation of remaining on their estates to oversee an agriculturally productive community and to offer refreshment and aid to all who passed their gates. For Elizabeth I and her court had travelled among estates instead of residing in London. Following his accession in 1603, however, James I returned the court to London and correspondingly shifted the site of social entertainments from estate to capital. To participate in royal court gatherings, landowners and their families consequently lived increasingly in London rather than at home; by the 1630s, at least three-quarters of these families had either purchased or were renting a London residence.8 So expected and widespread was this travel to London that new spaces developed for elite entertainment – including complexes like Shavers Hall and Spring Gardens where courtiers dined, strolled through gardens, and played at games, and the New Exchange where they purchased luxury goods such as jewellery and silks.9 Across England, numerous country houses were consequently no longer the carefully maintained and hospitable

Mobility of language and architectural theory

communities, and landowners expended funds usually reinvested in their estates on their own entertainment in London. These movements between city and country, that is, threatened both a traditional English social community and national prosperity grounded in productive estates. In the face of such threats, monarch and etiquette-manual authors both sharply criticised landowners for neglecting their estates. James I and Charles I issued repeated royal decrees ordering landowners to remain on their estates unless they were attending parliamentary session; there were ten decrees in the twenty-two years of James I’s reign, and Charles I subpoenaed nobility and gentry who remained in London despite his decrees.10 Protracted travel between London and an estate was, then, so threatening that it was officially forbidden, explicitly an inappropriate and illegal action. At greater length, authors of etiquette manuals warned their readers against shirking traditional hospitality. In The English Gentleman, Richard Brathwaite threatened the noble or gentle landowner with divine reprisal for such neglect. He admonished, ‘your sumptuous Banquetting, your midnight revelling, your unseasonable rioting, your phantasticke attiring, your formal courting shall witnesse against you in the day of revenge. For behold the Lord commandeth, and he will smite the great house … and the little house’.11 By partaking of luxurious meals, expensive clothes, and nightly entertainments, English landowners have departed from the ideal moral Christian life and will correspondingly be punished, whether they are the important family of a ‘great house’ or the less wealthy family of a ‘little house’, when God judges their lives. Yet this sharp critique occurred alongside volumes offering arguments for both city and country as authors summarised the benefits of each lifestyle in a single text. From Nicholas Breton’s The Court and Country, the reader learns how country life follows healthy natural rhythms and how city life offers essential social refinement. The country man explains how he ‘rise[s] with the Larke and goe[s] to bed with the Lambe’; he pursues a life of healthy harmony since he is synchronised with the natural world, waking at dawn alongside the lark and going to sleep at dark alongside the lamb.12 Courtiers, according to him, reverse natural rhythms and social expectations, for they are perpetually ‘making day of the night, and night of the day, by sleeping after wearines upon the labour of wantonnes, if not of wickednes’.13 Day, the usual waking hours, becomes the time for sleeping, and night the time for being awake. Courtiers too transform the ‘labour’ that one would expect to be useful – for instance, in contributing to national prosperity – into immoral activity; they ‘labour’ at pursuing their own pleasures so far that they stray into ‘wickednes’. Breton’s courtier, however, counters that these pleasurable courtly entertainments are essential to moral probity. At court, he asserts, ‘idlenesse is hated, foolishness derided, wilfulnesse retrayned, and wickednesse banished’.14 One learns not to be idle or foolish because one will otherwise earn harsh censure, not to be

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wilful as one must adjust to the desires of others, and not to stray from moral expectations when one can hear of and see the expectations and examples of ideal behaviour. And in Breton’s final pages, this debate remains unresolved; countryman and courtier simply part amicably, each hoping to convince the other at their next meeting.15 Country and city life have particular advantages and disadvantages, but, in contrast to the royal decrees and Brathwaite’s argument, Breton implies that neither way of life is entirely desirable or undesirable, entirely right or wrong. There is instead an ongoing debate to which individuals may have varying responses. When travel networks ruptured the further boundaries of England’s shores, however, authors left readers in little doubt about their opinions; they voiced either sharp approval or sharp disapproval. Even though there was a well-established practice of Englishmen travelling across the Continent to complete their education – for instance, to practise their languages; travel manuals diverged markedly over whether such travel was advisable.16 From the very title of his book, Thomas Palmer asserted the importance of Continental travel: An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Travailes, into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable. Inherently, foreign travel offers profit and honour to the traveller – the profit of new knowledge and the honour of later using that knowledge for England’s benefit; Palmer’s advice merely makes that travel ‘More Profitable and Honourable’. In his letter to the reader, Palmer even claimed that travel was the most praiseworthy voluntary activity that an Englishman could undertake: ‘of all voluntarie Commendable actions, that of Travailing into forraine States … is the most behoveable & to be regarded in this Common-weale, both for the publike and private good thereof ’. 17 Travel is beneficial privately because a gentleman increases his erudition and publicly because England gains a future officeholder who can navigate international affairs skilfully with his first-hand knowledge of foreign customs. Here and there across Palmer’s text, the reader finds acknowledgement of potential risks – including illness from changes in climate and cuisine – but these intermittent warnings are outweighed by the extensive advice about how to comport oneself abroad in order to earn an honourable reputation.18 Yet alongside Palmer’s unstinting praise, early seventeenth-century English readers could peruse Joseph Hall’s unrelenting critique in his Quo Vadis: A Just Censure of Travell. It was simply foolish, he argued, to travel when, with a few exceptions, one could find the same social and intellectual education within England’s shores; the risks for the traveller were too high. Hall acknowledged that civil law was learned more effectively on the Continent, but, more frequently, ‘so farre is our ordinarie Travell from perfecting the intellective powers of our Gentry, that it rather robs them of the very desire for perfection’.19 In England, gentlemen would study assiduously at university to ‘perfect’ their intellectual abilities and knowledge, but, on the Continent,

Mobility of language and architectural theory

they would become distracted from study by the novelties around them and would even risk moral and social degradation – a ‘corruption of religion, and depravation of manner’.20 A gentleman could exchange adherence to the Church of England for support of perennially derided Catholicism or could forget familiar English social gestures for startling Continental manners. The stakes of travel that stretched beyond England’s protective shore were thus high, offering strong benefit and equally strong threat; while Palmer asserted that travel brought incomparable individual and public benefit, Hall claimed that the traveller could lose his moral and social probity. Readers encountered even sharper debate and higher stakes when networks of motion stretched to the global scale of colonial ventures, for they learned that their very physical and social health could be ruined or ideal. As colonial tobacco penetrated England’s shores, there was hyperbolical praise and critique: tobacco either destroyed human physical and social health or offered unparalleled opportunity for well-being.21 Authors who disparaged tobacco argued that tobacco smokers scorched their interior organs so harshly that they might no longer retain their usual shape or even function properly.22 John Deacon, in his Tobacco Tortured, worried too that tobacco undermined the stability of estate and household. Not only did a landowner waste funds from his estate to purchase tobacco but he could ruin the mental health of his family members.23 Deacon narrates how the wife of a landowner addicted to tobacco is ‘howling for anguish of heart … with grisly lookes, wide staring eies, with minde amazed’.24 She is no longer the ideal calm and happy individual – distraught with ‘anguish’ and exhibiting symptoms evocative of mental instability. She ‘howls’ more like an animal than a human, displays ‘wide staring eies’ that suggest a lack of comprehension of her surrounding world, and has a ‘minde amazed’ as if it has been halted in surprise and stopped comprehending. Neither the landowner, distracted by his addiction to tobacco, nor his wife then would be capable of managing estate or family. To seventeenthcentury readers who well knew that the family unit was a microcosm of national order, offering an analogy for national harmony and the essential moral education of children, tobacco put at risk both individual health and future national stability.25 In other books, contrastingly, readers found that tobacco healed the human body and guaranteed social harmony. Authors who praised tobacco filled whole volumes with descriptions of how it cured a wide range of diseases.26 In one such volume, Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tobacco, William Barclay also asserted that tobacco ensured the harmonious social gathering so sought after by landowners and guests. Tobacco, he argued, ‘is the only medicament in the world obtained by nature to entertaine good companie’ because it ‘maketh & induceth … the forgetting of all sorrowes & miseries’.27 When one smokes or chews tobacco, one becomes the ideally cheerful individual because one

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forgets daily worries and irritations. Consequently, with little effort – simply by offering tobacco to his guests, a landowner can ‘entertaine good companie’ with the assurance that his guests will interact amicably; tobacco simply erases the disturbing care and worry that, etiquette manuals explained, usually had to be carefully guarded against. Tobacco was a new import to England, yet it could be accepted and praised because it reinforced physical health and established social expectations. These sharp disputes about tobacco were symptomatic of broader debates encircling colonial networks of travel; there were clearly strong risks to colonisation, and authors correspondingly argued anxiously for and against England’s colonies on the North American seaboard.28 Those who travelled between England and the colonies and who wrote letters back to England communicated first-hand the dangers that they faced daily – disease, food shortage and pirate attacks onboard ship, and further food shortages as well as attacks by local tribes once on land.29 Printed accounts too reiterated and spread more widely details of these risks. Alongside the early sharp decline in Jamestown’s population, for instance – 440 deaths in the single winter of 1609–10 – residents of England could read a letter written by Captain John Smith and published by an unknown author and subsequently an account by George Percy, the eighth son of the Earl of Northumberland, that appeared in Samuel Purchas’s 1625 collection of various writings.30 Percy gave his reader a long list of the deaths from disease and starvation and explained the colonists’ unparalleled misery at length: ‘Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Fluxes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine. There were never Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such a miserie as we were in this new discovered Virginia … our food was but a small Can of Barlie sod in water …, our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth’.31 Nearly every danger imaginable seemed to threaten the Jamestown colonists, disease, battles with local tribes, and famine. It was simply impossible to survive in this strange land to which they had travelled, for not even the water essential to survival was healthy to drink; it was either too salty or filled with ‘slime and filth’. These dangers, moreover, were without precedent, as Percy claimed that in no known foreign country had English travellers been so miserable. And his account would have seemed particularly authoritative to readers since he was both a member of a prominent noble family and an early leader within the Virginia Company that sponsored Jamestown.32 Such reports of colonists’ difficulties, in fact, sparked overt anxiety among English residents. Even the original investors who had supported the Virginia Company were sceptical about providing further funds in 1613.33 Virginia seemed a menacing land that was a physical threat to those who made the voyage and an economical threat to those who remained behind.

Mobility of language and architectural theory

To counteract the anxiety about such manifest risks, other authors stressed the importance of the North American colonies for England’s prosperity. They deplored the sharp criticisms and offered detailed descriptions of bounteous natural resources as well as the salubrious climate.34 There were certainly inevitable dangers, including attacks by local tribes, but the benefits outweighed these risks in each author’s account. In New English Canaan, for instance, Thomas Morton devoted two sections to praise of the colonies and mentioned tribal attacks only in a few pages of his third section.35 Other authors argued that colonisation was essential to the social and political prosperity of England. Colonists who migrated to the North American seaboard alleviated England’s growing problem of overpopulation and created a foothold in new territory to ensure England’s international supremacy.36 Responding to contemporaneous anxiety about Spain as a colonial power of longer standing than England, George Withers observed in his introductory poem to John Smith’s A Description of New England that ‘the spatious West / Being still more with English blood possest, / The Proud Iberians shall not rule those Seas, / To checke our ships from sayling where they please; / Nor future times make any forraine power / Become so great to force a bound to Our’.37 Because English colonists have settled the North American seaboard, England will remain unchallenged in its maritime and imperial power. No other country – not even Spain with its already vast colonial territories – will determine where English ships can sail or will set a ‘bound’ to limit English power. Implicitly, too, if English settlers continue to migrate and expand English colonial possessions, they will provide a yet more secure defence against foreign threats. The risks posed by the colonies, then, were unavoidable in order to avert the graver dangers of social chaos from overpopulation and political weakness from a lack of colonial territory. Individuals who moved put themselves in danger physically, socially, and mentally, yet they simultaneously reaped benefits from their motion, and there was open, sharp debate about whether the danger or the benefit was more important. The mid-century acceptance of mobility From mid-century, however, the mobile signifiers that Cawdrey and the heraldry authors had resisted became the accepted means of articulating and comprehending one’s world. In the wake of the Civil War that introduced unprecedented political terms, authors argued that even the familiar English language was perpetually malleable; one now risked confusion if one stood still. Already in 1644 – in fact during the Civil War – James Howell transformed linguistic malleability into the pervasive rhetoric of Dodona’s Grove. The very first word of his title page requires the reader to shift not only to a foreign language but to one where strange letters signify familiar sounds,

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10

James Howell, Dodona’s Grove, 1644, title page. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

for ‘Dendrologia’ has been rendered in the Greek alphabet (Figure 10). Yet these Greek letters are merely a passing phase to which the reader turns and then turns away; directly below the Greek letters are Roman letters and the English language as the title continues. Within mere moments, readers must understand two discrete linguistic systems for representing the same sounds – for instance, the ‘d’ that is first a Greek delta and then a Roman ‘D’.38 And Howell’s reader must be willing to continue this movement among symbolic systems across the subsequent pages. In the letter to the reader, one learns that Howell has rejected the familiar rhetorical flourishes of ‘Emblems, fictions, and mythologies’ – including analogies to mythological Classical deities – for ‘An ancient way of fancy’ from Druidic England that trees could talk.39 Rather than the human figures of deities who had personified particular attributes and ideas, usually inanimate and silent trees strangely became the book’s protagonists. From the following pages, the reader then realised too that the words spoken by these trees were equally unexpected since Howell had invented new words to describe European powers, from ‘Ampelona’ for Spain to ‘Itelia’ for the Low Countries.40 To comprehend even a single page, one had to be

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physically and mentally in motion – flipping back to the glossary to find the meaning of a new term and adjusting mentally to insert the event described by the new term into the well-known chronologies of political events that Howell was describing. Howell was, in fact, offering his readers a playful version of a new mental mobility that was necessary simply to navigate through daily life. His readers were perpetually using new terms and recasting familiar words to describe the individuals around them. If they wanted to explain the political sympathies of an acquaintance, they had to rely on neologisms and on the corresponding ability of their listeners to adjust and understand that ‘Royalist’ or ‘Cavalier’ identified someone sympathetic to Charles I and ‘Parliamentarian’ or ‘Roundhead’ a supporter of the opposing Parliament. This new linguistic malleability was even an explicit rhetoric for criticising and explaining these political sympathies. The Royalist Beauchamp Plantagenet explained his decision to leave England for the North American colonies by citing the confusion of ‘New names, and terms, like an unknown language, and like to a strange tongue unheard of in all the Globe as far as our Antipodes’.41 So malleable has the English language become in the political turmoil of the Civil War that it seems ‘unknown’ and unprecedented throughout ‘all the Globe’. At every turn, Plantagenet and his contemporaries were experiencing confusion and incomprehensibility – unsure what words they would encounter and what interpretations they should deduce; the once risky colonies seem by comparison a safe haven. The very books to which Englishmen and -women might turn for explanation, moreover, merely reiterated the linguistic confusion. A rash of pamphlets appeared during the 1640s to criticise or clarify the new political sympathies, yet the authors of these pamphlets often introduced their arguments by citing their own uncertainty about the terms that they set out to define.42 The anonymous author of The Master-piece of Round-heads, or an Explanation and Declaration of the Right Round-heads asserts that ‘it is not yet, apparent, neither by Ancient or Moderne Writers, what these Round-heads should be, neither to what use or meanes this appellation is applied, or on what it is bestowed’.43 From no source, either ‘Ancient or Moderne’, is it clear to this author when ‘Roundhead’ may be used or whom it might describe. He finds instead a confusing blur of possible answers, which sometimes are and sometimes are not accurate. Even the familiar meanings of ‘round’ and ‘head’ simply create a nonsensical statement at odds with the usual negative associations of ‘Roundhead’. His reader learns, ‘it [Roundhead] must be understood of all men as they have Round-heads, although some heads be rounder than others’ but this term has become ‘a by-blow and nickename of scandal’.44 ‘Roundhead’ would have no particular significance if one followed the usual meanings of ‘round’ and ‘head’ since every human has a roughly spherical head. Yet somehow

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puzzlingly, this neutral meaning has become a term of ‘scandal’, an epithet denoting sharp criticism; unprecedented political partisanship has sparked such malleability of once stable English words that one has to be prepared to think beyond the usual meanings of words. Even when words were not recombined to create confusing neologisms, authors argued, they were easily separated from their familiar definitions. An ‘oath’, for instance, usually indicates a binding promise that cannot not be broken by the person who utters it. Yet in The Picture of a New Courtier, Mr. Time-Server and Mr. Plain-Heart debate whether an oath is a binding promise or its opposite, a political excuse that can be disregarded in moments. Mr. Time-Server, who has strategically adjusted and readjusted his sympathies to echo the current government, asks Mr. Plain-Heart, who has adhered to his own beliefs, to offer his opinion of recent events. He asserts that he will not report Mr. Plain-Heart’s opinions to the current political leaders and offers the reassurance of an ‘oath that I am no Spy’.45 Mr. Plain-Heart, however, sceptically replies that Mr. Time-Server’s oath ‘is not in my account worth two straws, for did you not Swear and Vow, Covenant and Promise against those very things that are now done by you … and, therefore, why may you not forswear yourself and deceive me?’46 To Mr. Plain-Heart, any promise by Mr. Time-Server has no meaning – ‘is not … worth two straws’ – because Mr. Time-Server has consistently broken earlier promises. His current ‘oath’, then, could simply be a false assurance, a tactic to weasel out Mr. Plain-Heart’s thoughts which he will report to his political superiors. A usually reassuring ‘oath’ had to be re-evaluated in each particular set of circumstances, Mr. PlainHeart feared. So pervasive were these moments of linguistic mobility that Thomas Hobbes explained how the entire English language had to be rethought from moment to moment. In his Leviathan of 1651, he warns his reader that it is ‘fallacious to judge of the nature of things, by the ordinary and inconstant use of words’.47 Any word may have one meaning used by one person and another meaning used by another since even the ‘ordinary’, or daily, use of words is ‘inconstant’. A simple command of ‘go’ could be friendly advice to be followed or a dangerous command to be disregarded. A friend might recommend that another friend ‘go’ to see a play or concert, while a leader of a political conspiracy could order a subordinate to ‘go’ to execute a treasonous action. The play or concert would offer pleasing entertainment, while the treasonous action was a dangerous undertaking that could result in imprisonment or death. The listener thus had to evaluate the circumstances in which ‘go’ was uttered, the intentions of the speaker and the result of his or her action, before deciding whether to perform the ordered action. ‘Go’ and other familiar daily words had quickly changeable associations which speaker and listener needed to determine for themselves and from which they then directed their actions.

Mobility of language and architectural theory

The very physical environment through which individuals moved at mid-century made tangible this new flexibility between a term and what it conjured to mind. Names of towns evoked memories of particular skylines and the gradual process of moving through outlying buildings scattered across greensward to reach the more densely constructed town centre. Yet after the Parliamentarian and Royalist armies fought around and seized various towns, travellers encountered brown wasteland from which grass had been stripped to build turf defences, outlying buildings that were often abandoned and damaged, and a surprisingly sharp boundary of turf defences delineating a town boundary.48 If an army still occupied the town, the traveller might even be refused entry. A town name, then, suddenly described a strange barren landscape and an equally strange resistance to once easy entry. London, formerly the desirable hub of elite entertainment, became precisely such a hostile, forbidden, and often unwanted destination for English landowners. At the city’s perimeter from 1643, eleven miles of newly constructed forts, redoubts, breastworks, and batteries stretched before the approaching traveller’s eyes, and those defensive structures also bristled with 200 guns.49 The capital suddenly seemed to defend itself forbiddingly against any traveller – a visual defence that, from the late 1640s, had an explicit parliamentary correlate. After Parliament defeated Charles I, any of his supporters had to obtain a licence certifying that they had business in London if they wanted to remain in the city for a prolonged period and had not yet paid the requisite fee to indicate their fealty to the new government.50 Those who crossed the boundaries of the defences and licence found the city itself permeated with an unexpected hostility. Sir John Reresby recorded in his journal how a mere stroll through the streets with his valet de chambre degenerated quickly into physical combat on one occasion. When street workers threw sand at Reresby’s valet to mock him for wearing a hat with a feather according to French fashion, Reresby and his valet drew their swords and had to withdraw to a nearby house for shelter, ‘not without … some blows’ received on their bodies.51 And Reresby’s encounter was merely one among numerous incidents, for he noted that many noble and gentle landowners had retreated to their estates because of London’s hostility.52 London and estate had shifted into the opposites of their former associations – London transformed into dangerous abode and estate a suddenly desirable calm retreat. The specific buildings of Whitehall Palace and Parliament had likewise become mobile signifiers in the minds of those who passed them. While these structures had contained the monarchy, House of Lords, and House of Commons for centuries, they suddenly contained unexpected occupants and interiors. Oliver Cromwell, who had commanded the New Model Army and then assumed leadership of England’s government with Parliament’s approval, strangely resided in Whitehall Palace and surrounded himself with members

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of the untitled lower gentry who had rarely held high political office.53 He and his officials, moreover, moved through interiors that no longer contained the familiar royal furnishings, for Parliament had authorised the sale of Charles I’s possessions.54 Parliament in turn unusually contained only the House of Commons after the House of Lords was dissolved and also housed for the first time almost solely English gentlemen; only seven noblemen held parliamentary office until Cromwell restored the House of Lords in 1657.55 It was well known, moreover, that the occupants of Parliament could be changed in a moment, at the mere whim of an individual. In 1648, any passer-by could have watched as Colonel Pride of the New Model Army stood on the steps of Parliament and allowed only those Members who would oppose negotiation with Charles I to enter the building.56 If Pride had thus determined the Members of Parliament, so too could another individual or so too could another set of political circumstances. Terms, guaranteed by centuries of use and tradition, were suddenly in flux at mid-century and standing alongside unprecedented new words; communication was no longer the ‘plaine … Speech’ praised by Robert Cawdrey but rather a tortuous process of ongoing mental readjustment. The mobile architectural book and reader In this context of malleable communication, authors and readers of architectural books assumed a new flexibility in the presentation and reception of design principles. Translators altered the content of books and opened them to new audiences, while readers manipulated these volumes to answer their own particular questions. Earlier in the century, authors and readers had produced and read architectural books within firm boundaries that delimited both content and audience. When translators transposed an architectural text from a foreign language – most often Italian – to English, they little altered a book’s content. In his English edition of Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise, drawn from Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s Dutch version, Robert Peake merely omitted a plan of Ostia in Book 3 and added illustrations of letters for inscriptions at the end of Book 4.57 Since he did not mention these alterations, moreover, his readers seemed to study precisely the Italian original. His readers too were exactly the wealthy patrons whom Serlio had addressed, as both Serlio’s and Peake’s books were expensive folio volumes affordable primarily to the welleducated elite. Peake kept his volume too within the boundaries of English reading practices through this expensive folio edition. For master builders, as well as surveyors and other craftsmen, most frequently read a design manual that was both in a small, less expensive format and articulated more pragmatically. A few owned Continental architectural treatises – including John Thorpe who translated the Swiss Hans Blum’s Quinque columnarum exacta descriptio

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atque delineatio and copied Blum’s diagrams of the five Orders into his sketchbook.58 Numerous readers, however, studied Leonard Digges’s A Booke Named Tectonicon, as new editions appeared repeatedly across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And, in its presentation and content, this volume was clearly adapted to quick and frequent reference. From the very title page, readers found a book that offered them the practical rudiments of architectural design. While the title page of Peake’s volume had displayed whimsically illusionistic strapwork to delight the reader’s eye, that of Digges’s book shows a scene in basic outline (Figures 11, 12). The tower observed by the surveyors has merely sporadic short lines to convey its masonry, and the undulating hills in the distance are simply single curved lines, in contrast to the meticulous hatching that indicated the curling strapwork of Peake’s volume. The text that followed was likewise stripped of fanfare, efficiently direct about its instructions for the reader. Digges himself explained this goal of unadorned directness when he informed the reader that his text was not ‘locked up in strange tongues’ and ‘not payned with many rules, or obscure’.59 Nowhere in his volume will readers find foreign words and theoretical excurses familiar only to well-educated patrons; rather, they will learn the basic rules of measuring

Sebastiano Serlio, The First Booke of Architecture, Made by Sebastian Serly, Entreating of Geometry, 1611. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Leonard Digges, A Booke Named Tectonicon, 1585, title page. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

without confusing, ‘obscure’ details and principles – focusing on the geometrical principles essential to surveying land and Digges’s examples of how those principles could be applied. All is readily accessible and easily used, addressed to the practising designer who simply needs to know English and to read short passages to glean the information that he seeks. At mid-century, translators of architectural books blurred this boundary between the foreign architectural book aimed at a wealthy, well-educated audience and the pragmatic English manual directed to master builders. In 1655, Joseph Moxon reworked a carefully articulated Italian volume so fully that he not only located it on a master builder’s bookshelf but questioned the very purpose of the book itself. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s late sixteenthcentury Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura was the typical large and expensive volume designed to instruct and delight the eyes of well-educated readers. Meticulously delineated engravings of each Order filled his pages, and beneath each engraving was an idiosyncratic type that mimicked the handwriting of precious manuscripts (Figure 13). Moxon, however, transposed this book into an echo of Digges’s A Booke Named Tectonicon. He likewise

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Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, 1563, Doric  Order. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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offered his reader a schematic title page of rudimentary outline; only a few lines denote the musculature of the two statues seated on the shelf, and only the lateral curves of the serpentine columns are delineated (Figure 14). And on the following page a longer title explicitly explains the easy accessibility of Moxon’s book to anyone. The reader learns that this edition shows ‘in a plain and easie way the Rules of the Five Orders in ARCHITECTURE … Whereby any that can but read and understand English may readily learn the Proportions that all Members in a Building have one unto another’. Like Digges, Moxon has included no foreign terms since the reader merely needs to know how to read English, and, consequently for the first time, patron and designer could read about building principles from the same author. As Moxon crafted this readily comprehensible volume, he also departed from Peake’s strict adherence to the original Italian volume; Vignola’s book offered him simply a starting point for assembling a useful manual. He even explicitly warned in his letter to the reader that ‘here and there I have been a little more large, thereby endeavouring the better to expresse his [Vignola’s] meaning’.60 Moxon feels free to revise Vignola’s statements whenever it

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14, 15

[Left] Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, 1655, title page. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. [Right] Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, 1655, Doric Order. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

is ­necessary to clarify the instructions – ‘to expresse his [Vignola’s] meaning’ more comprehensibly. Beneath Vignola’s illustration of the Doric entablature from the Temple of Marcellus, for instance, readers read simply that this entablature followed ‘this same proportion (questa medesima proportione)’ (Figure 13). They had to infer that this entablature repeated the proportions of Vignola’s earlier Doric illustrations and return to those pages to understand the proportions here. Moxon, in contrast, expands Vignola’s brief phrase into a lengthier explanation of how readers should study this illustration: ‘because the Dimensions of every Member is sufficiently set down in the Figure, I shall not need to say any thing to the Proportions of them’ (Figure 15).61 In Moxon’s volume, there is no question about how one should study the Temple of Marcellus entablature; because the etching shows the ‘Dimensions’ of all elements ‘sufficiently’, one can analyse proportions simply from the diagram. With his lengthier instruction, too, Moxon has simplified the process of studying Vignola’s book. Instead of comparing several illustrations and ­potentially becoming confused by their various details, his reader can

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simply focus on this single instance of the Doric entablature. He even simplified the page itself to facilitate the reader’s study. For Moxon transformed Vignola’s idiosyncratic type into easily legible Roman and italic type and separated text and image onto individual pages in his smaller volume. The illustration itself also no longer offers the reader a distracting profusion of carved detail across profile and underside of the entablature, as Moxon removed the underside to a later page of his book and thus isolated the profile described in the accompanying text.62 Across format, text, and illustration, Moxon has manipulated Vignola’s volume from a meticulously presented book suitable for a patron reader to a pragmatic volume offering basic design principles to the studious practitioner. Like the English words that so readily acquired and shed meanings, Vignola’s volume was so malleable that it could invite reinterpretation by Moxon and his reader. The original Italian engravings had suggested a precise mathematical approach to design since every detail was so meticulously articulated. Yet at the end of Moxon’s edition, readers found a sequence of illustrations

Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, 0r the Compleat Architect, 1655, Atlantid from Doric portal in Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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that seemed to resist exact measurements – capitals presented frontally and in three-quarter view, a soffit also in three-quarter view, and a human Atlantid figure next to a doorway (Figure 16). In contrast to Vignola’s thin lines and minimal hatching to indicate shadow, these illustrations of capitals, soffit and Atlantid were filled with thick dark lines that often obscured the architectural forms in their illusionistic evocation of shading. One could not even see what one was supposed to measure in order to apply Vignola’s instructions about proportions. The sheet with the Atlantid figure particularly thwarted any attempts at measurement since his stomach drooped in an irregular curve over his pedestal. The reader could measure the sharp perpendicular angles of his pedestal, but there was no way to determine the parabola of his stomach underneath his loose shirt. These final illustrations, then, seemed to undermine studious focus with an elusively playful illusionism. Moxon had, in fact, excerpted these illustrations from a book that offered the exact opposite of Vignola’s mathematical precision – the German Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura that included numerous designs too fantastical even to be built.63 Moxon’s volume that had begun with the promise of a ‘plaine and easie’ means of learning about architecture suddenly confused its readers in the last few pages, shifting the basis of study from proportions to visual delight. This assumption of malleability even became the dominant mode of creating architectural books following Moxon’s volume. When translators produced editions of Andrea Palladio’s I quattro libri and Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale across the 1660s and 1670s, they too turned to the simplified approach that offered basic principles accessible to the master builder. Godfrey Richards translated only Palladio’s first book, which sets out the rudiments of design, in 1668, while Simon Bosboom’s Dutch edition of Scamozzi that illustrated only the five Orders was published in 1676.64 These editions, moreover, coincided with a dwindling popularity of Leonard Digges’s A Booke Named Tectonicon. Eleven editions of Digges’s volume had appeared during the previous half century, yet only three new editions were printed from 1647 to 1692.65 Italian architectural books slid so successfully and perpetually across once firm rhetorical divides between patron and master-builder audiences that Digges’s earlier manual simply fell out of date. Yet these readership divisions had not collapsed; rather, information was moving for the first time fluidly between still discrete master-builder and patron audiences. For publishers continued to produce more expensive editions of architectural books. Costly versions of both Vignola’s book on the Orders and Scamozzi’s rules for the Orders appeared in 1669 and 1671 – that is, published as contemporaneous alternatives to the less expensive editions.66 John Leeke’s edition of Vignola even meticulously replicated the format of the Italian pages, duplicating the illustrations and the script imitating handwriting (Figure 17). Leeke too followed Vignola’s Italian text more closely than had Moxon;

Mobility of language and architectural theory

Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, The Regular Architect, 1669, Doric Order. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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beneath the Doric entablature from the Temple of Marcellus, he simply reiterated Vignola’s phrase of ‘the same proportion’. As had the readers of Peake’s Serlio, then, those of Leeke’s Vignola mimic the experience of studying the original Italian volume. When Leeke translates Vignola’s architectural terms, however, he chooses to transcribe some labels from Moxon alongside those from Vignola. Where Vignola had stated simply ‘sguscio’ to signal the cavetto, Moxon more loquaciously had explained, ‘The Grove or hollowing of the Upper List’.67 Leeke duplicates the second half of Moxon’s identification with his ‘Hollow of the upper list’. Details of architectural design were circulating among a variety of volumes – the Italian original, other architectural books, and English translations – as translators freely transposed text and illustration from one source to another to compile their own idiosyncratic editions. The readers who studied architectural books were simultaneously more willing to put design principles into motion – to manipulate them and set them in new contexts, much as they manipulated words in daily life. Early in

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the century, Inigo Jones had read his Italian treatises primarily with the eye of the patron who usually studied these volumes and in Palladio’s I quattro libri, within the emphases of the original text.68 Across his copy of Palladio, he annotated most heavily those sections that related to his own commissions – Book 1 on basic design principles, Book 2 on domestic architecture, and Book 4 on temples. Yet in these sections, he made technical notes about design alongside a profusion of other comments that suggested a patron’s wide-ranging interest in architectural history and theory; for instance, he disputed Palladio’s account of a building’s history and recalled the sites that he had visited on his trip to Italy. Among his notes on design, Jones too conformed to Palladio’s focus – analysing proportions of the Orders alongside Palladio’s discussion of them in Book 1 and turning to room arrangements as Palladio displayed plans of villas in Book 2.69 Jones was thus a responsive reader, following established patron reading practices and the structure of the volume itself. As John Webb – Jones’s student – read these same volumes at mid-century, he manipulated text and illustration to answer his own interest in mathematical proportions; that is, he echoed in his annotations the malleable volume of English translators.70 On page after page of Books 2 and 4 in his copy of Palladio, he enumerated the proportions of a design – even when those proportions were not explained in Palladio’s text. Palladio often discussed a project’s history, interior decoration, and the arrangement of rooms on other floors, but Webb ignored these comments to focus almost exclusively on measurements. The Temple of Peace in Book 4, for instance, becomes an opportunity to study the proportions of the Corinthian Order at length; Webb noted even the small-scale details of the ‘fillett of the first fascia’ and the ‘ovolo’.71 Webb was analogous to the practical reader of Digges’s A Booke Named Tectonicon, seeking information that could easily be applied, despite the fact that the book before him was most often studied by erudite patrons seeking wide-ranging knowledge of architectural theory and history. When Webb thus shifted his books into this pragmatic context, he was in fact self-consciously revising Jones’s earlier echo of the patron reader. For he transposed Jones’s comments on Serlio into his own copy of Serlio, yet carefully copied only design advice. Next to Serlio’s text on the Pantheon, Jones had made comments about both the building’s history and useful principles for imitation. Webb, however, isolated Jones’s notes about the principles to be imitated: ‘Pantheon ye fa[irest] & best understood amongst ye Antiquityes’, ‘The members annswere well to ye body’, ‘The round ye perfectest forme’, ‘within ye height iust ye bredth’, and ‘one only light & yt above wch dilateth itselfe every way’.72 He reminds himself that the Pantheon is a particularly useful model from Antiquity since it is so admired and well-understood, that there is a laudable harmony among its elements and in its height to breadth, that the circle is the best geometrical form, and that an oculus disperses light across the

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interior. Geometry, proportions, and lighting, Webb can thus remember, are topics for which the Pantheon is especially useful. He does not, however, need to recall the Pantheon’s architect when designing his own buildings and so he omits Jones’s annotation ‘the architecte Juditious and Reserved in comparing ye members with ye hole and not confounding with tonnes Covering [?]. Reserved in observing the Corinthia[n] order throughout’.73 Webb elided the patron’s usual interest in building history to create the streamlined equivalent of Moxon’s simplified edition of Vignola through his annotations. On separate sheets, he even transformed individual book illustrations into mobile and malleable units, as he created new juxtapositions and revised house plans. Across a single sheet, Webb intermingled plans from Philibert de l’Orme, Peter Paul Rubens, Sebastiano Serlio, Gioseffe Viola Zanini, and Inigo Jones (Figure 18). Not only were these plans from a range of countries – France, Italy, and England – but they were from an equally wide variety of textual contexts that encompassed Philibert de l’Orme’s discussion of winds in his Le premier tome de l’architecture and Rubens’s sequence of recent palace designs in his Palazzi di Genova.74 For Webb, however, these plans

John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century. Courtesy of The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

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John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century, detail with plans from Inigo Jones and Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova. Courtesy of The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

were answers to a single question from English architectural practice: how to arrange the interior rooms of the fashionable compact plan. All of the plans on this sheet are rectangles or squares, without wings stretching out into the landscape, and Webb has carefully ordered the plans more to facilitate comparison among interior spaces than to offer summaries of particular authors. There is one plan from Serlio at the upper left, for instance, and another at the lower right, yet both plans sit within logical geometrical sequences. At the upper left, Serlio’s plan with an oval hall offers an axial alternative to the narrow central passageway in the two previous plans, while the plan at the lower right is another compact plan enclosing stacked square and rectangular rooms, like the preceding plans from Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova. Within this Palazzi di Genova group, Webb even moves from book to built structure and back to the same book to observe the changing forms of a main stair (Figure

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Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova, 1622, Figure 14. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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19). A split stair preceding a square central hall in Rubens’s plan becomes a split stair pushed farther forward to flank the entrance and precede a rectangular hall in Jones’s building labelled ‘Mr Surveyr’, and Rubens’s next plan then duplicates Jones’s stair at opposite ends of the building in the middle of the side ranges. Like the texts delineating architectural principles, the illustrations of Webb’s books were simply starting points for constructing new sequences of ideas and so were units that could be moved easily from one context to another. Webb, in fact, literally manipulated the very plans themselves so that they fit more easily into his study, just as Moxon reworked Vignola’s illustrations. In Webb’s architectural books, plans were consistently black grids interrupted with white openings denoting doors and windows. Yet Webb redrew these plans as primarily geometrical grids; his walls are nearly uninterrupted

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21

John Webb, House plans from architectural books, mid-seventeenth century, detail of Rubens, Palazzi di Genova, Figure 14. Abbreviations: Bu: Buttery, Cham: Chamber, H: Hall, K: Kitchen, Par: Parlour, Pas: Pastry, WR: Withdrawing room. Courtesy of The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

sequences of diagonal hatchmarks since he marked the paired lines of doors and windows on top of these hatchmarks. There are few empty spaces to mark door or window and, consequently, to distract the eye from the long intersecting lines of walls. At a quick glance, Webb’s sketch plans allow him to compare the relationship of one square or rectangle to another within the same house or across houses. And Webb also adapted his geometrical study to established English preferences. He shifts, for instance, Figure 14 of Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova from an Italian villa with numerous entertaining spaces to an English house with familiar social divisions (Figures 20, 21).75 In Rubens’s plan, the left-hand rooms are general living spaces, a ‘salotto’ (parlour), a ‘camera’ (most likely, a room for general use), and a ‘recamera’ (withdrawing room). Under Webb’s pen, these rooms become the service spaces of an English house, a parlour that could be used by family and intimate friends, a narrow backstair, a kitchen, and a pastry. Webb too relabelled the right-hand rooms to transfer them to more specific English use, while retaining their entertaining function – replacing another ‘salotto’ and two ‘camere’ with a withdrawing

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room, parlour, and two chambers for more general use. He inserted too the traditional English buttery by removing Rubens’s square staircase at the back left corner. A plan in Webb’s architectural books was the starting point for experimentation through juxtapositions, drawing techniques, and reworked room arrangement itself – sparking, as much as answering, his questions. In the processes of translating and reading that inherently placed information in motion from one language or medium to another, mid-century author and reader accepted, rather than resisted, the corresponding opportunity to manipulate and remold text and illustration. Architectural books, in both presentation and reception, became sequences of phases of revision extending potentially infinitely through future generations. The sequential historical narrative of architectural design This sequential approach to architectural theory penetrated into the very arguments with which authors articulated design principles; that is, design tenets were becoming as malleable and changeable as words in the English language and as architectural books. Across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English readers had studied a range of volumes that asserted absolute accuracy. Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert de l’Orme, Andrea Palladio, John Shute, and others offered accounts of design principles unmodified by a consciousness of historical phases. Implicit even in the titles of these volumes was the assertion that their principles had the authority to withstand the vicissitudes of time – Serlio’s volume ultimately entitled Tutte l’opere d’architettura, all that one would need to know about architecture, and John Shute’s The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, the most basic and important rules of design. Even when an author, such as Leon Battista Alberti or Vincenzo Scamozzi, discussed the evolution of building design up to ancient Rome – from Egypt to Asia Minor to Greece and then Rome – he was describing a distant time period that had little connection with the current world.76 Scamozzi introduced his book with this narrative so that it became the framework for reading his subsequent discussion, yet when he described design principles, he removed any chronological changeability; designs varied across regions, but there was no suggestion that current preferences could change in future generations. Architectural design had developed into its current praiseworthy state, and Scamozzi as well as other authors were showing their readers the fruits of this development. From mid-century, however, English readers were learning that architectural principles could be changeable far into the future; seventeenth-century England was merely one historical phase, like ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. In 1661, John Evelyn translated the French Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne and appended his own essay

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on architecture that made overt the chronological change implicit in Fréart de Chambray’s argument.77 Fréart de Chambray opened his book with a familiar goal: seeking the most precise and accurate proportions for each of the five Orders.78 Yet he pairs this goal with a new warning; it is, he claims, impossible to find the original, and so the most accurate, proportions of the Orders. He informs his reader, ‘I would (were it possible) ascend even to the very sourse of the Orders themselves, and derive from thence the Images’ because the Orders have ‘become degenerate, and scarce cognoscible to their very Authours’.79 The Orders have drifted so far away from their original proportions that they would no longer be recognisable to ancient Greek and Roman architects. Fréart de Chambray wishes that he could correct this drift, but his wish remains in the unrealisable subjunctive – ‘were it possible’. Marooned with inevitably inaccurate proportions, Fréart de Chambray and his readers must be content with the best approximation of the ancient Orders – whatever ideas their particular generation can compile. They are inescapably participants in an ongoing sequence of historical phases, unable to recover long vanished designs for the Orders and thus simply creating and passing on their own version to future generations. This notion of sequence, Fréart urged, should lie at the root of the contemporaneous version of the Orders; one created the best possible design by comparing still available preceding designs. In his section on the Doric Order, where he advised his reader about the best technique for studying his volume, he explained how to sort through the confusing variety of ­proportions proposed by recent authors: ‘A man shall easily find it [a single rule] by conferring them together’.80 By comparing a sequence of recent designs, one can winnow out a single rule useful for the moment; for instance, one can see where earlier authors agree in their measurements. Fréart de Chambray’s subsequent illustrations invite precisely such comparison, for the section on each Order contains three examples from Antiquity as the most authoritative sources of ornament and proportion, then paired profiles developed by recent Italian and French authors, and finally an illustration of an ancient Roman building (Figure 22). Readers must themselves compare these illustrations in order to deduce a single rule, for Fréart’s text provides merely some description and criticism or praise of each example but offers no single set of proportions. Implicit in this absence of a single rule too is the possibility that future readers may deduce different rules – that Fréart de Chambray’s book can become the starting point for interpretations extending across generations. In the commentary that John Evelyn appended to Fréart de Chambray’s volume, he explicitly praised this potential for perpetual architectural change as essential to praiseworthy building. He sharply criticised those who ‘acquiesce in them [design principles] as if there were a Non Ultra Engraven upon our Columns like those of Hercules, after which there remained no more to

Mobility of language and architectural theory

Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray, A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern, 1664, comparison of Serlio’s and Vignola’s Ionic Orders. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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be discovered’.81 Architects, according to Evelyn, should not assume that they and preceding generations had learned everything about designing the built environment. There are no columns analogous to the Pillars of Hercules that stood at the edge of the known world and warned voyagers to stop with their inscription of ‘No farther’ (‘Non Ultra’). Rather, there is perpetually more to discover and revise in architectural theory, and anyone who resists continuous change risks fundamental damage to architectural design. For stubbornly immobile architects will create ‘rubbage and a thousand infirmities’.82 Their designs will be ‘rubbage’, or trash, because they will appear outdated – expired and useless like foods and other objects that one discards after a certain point. Such architects too will create buildings with numerous ‘infirmities’ – for instance, structural weaknesses that could cause a building to crumble or aesthetic weaknesses that would make the building vulnerable to critical eyes – because they have not moved to stay abreast of the most recent trends. Mobility, defined as both willing mental readjustment and accepted ­chronological change, was essential to maintaining architectural stability.

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The Classical Orders themselves that seemed fixed design elements, Sir Christopher Wren claimed in his posthumously published ‘Tracts’ on architecture, were paradoxically eternal and yet subject to changeable fashion. He asserted at the beginning of his first tract that ‘Architecture aims at Eternity, and therefore the only Thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions is its Principals, the Orders’.83 Because buildings seek to transcend time, to extend beyond historical vicissitudes in their social, political, and religious relevance, their basic principles are invariable. No transitory ‘Modes and Fashions’ can disrupt or alter the Orders that are these ‘Principals’, or fundamental design tenets. Yet with this argument, Wren was asserting less that the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite Orders were unchanging than that there were always some basic categories and rules according to which building design would be organised. The Classical Orders were simply a few in a long global list of possible Orders that were ‘not only Roman and Greek, but Phoenician, Hebrew, and Assyrian’.84 Wren’s statement is open to interpretation – implying either that the Classical Orders are so widespread as to be familiar to Phoenicians and Assyrians or that the Phoenicians and Assyrians likewise had their own Orders for the built environment. His reader is left in a quandary, yet Wren implies that at least the proportions which are such a defining feature for the Classical Orders could vary among historical periods and building sites. Architectural theorists who sought unchanging rules were embarking on a useless mission, according to Wren, because ancient Roman architects had adapted the Orders to various sites and because proportions ‘are but the Modes and Fashions of those Ages wherein they were used’.85 An architect should not study proportions used in an earlier century or decade, for those proportions may not be desirable to his own patrons. One generation of patrons may prefer more elongated column shafts, while the next generation may prefer shorter shafts. There were unchanging categories of design across time – architects were perpetually designing according to some Orders, however they were defined – but the visual manifestation of those Orders, particularly in their proportions, varied throughout history. Across discourses at mid-century, mobility in modes of communication, in topics of discussion, and in an individual’s response was essential to comprehending one’s surrounding world. The early century ambivalence that had encompassed strong resistance and equally strong praise had collapsed into implicit acceptance. So dominant was this changeability and so essential was the corresponding mental mobility that both underpinned the basic human experience of communication, as listeners held themselves in poised readiness to readjust either one way or another. And it was through this acceptance of ongoing readjustment that English architectural theory was rethought – books molded by their translators into new volumes addressed to new audiences, the questions of readers likewise floating free of established topics,

Mobility of language and architectural theory

and ­architectural theory rearticulated into a sequence of historical phases. The building was physically composed of indisputable wall boundaries dividing one interior space from another, but, at mid-century, its design and reception involved a mobile patron, architect, and viewer: individuals who understood the potential changeability of design from one historical period or site to another, who moved more readily among Continental accounts of architecture because of the new proliferation of translations, and who readjusted continuously when speaking and hearing the words of their discussions. Notes 1 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 41–2, 45–6, 51. 2 J. F. R. Day, ‘Primers of Honor: Heraldry, Heraldry Books, and English Renaissance Literature’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 21:1 (Spring 1990), 94–6. 3 On these volumes, see Day, ‘Primers of Honor’, 93–103. 4 John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie: Manifesting a More Easie Accesse to the Knowledge Thereof (London, 1611), p. a(6)r. 5 Ibid., pp. 264–82. 6 Robert Cawdrey, The First English Dictionary: Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabe­ tical (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007), p. 41. 7 Ibid., p. 42. 8 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 189. 9 J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community 1525–1640 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 156–8, 163–7. 10 Felicity Heal, ‘The Crown, the Gentry and London: The Enforcement of Proclamation, 1596–1640’, in Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government Under the Tudors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.  211–13, 221–2; Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, pp. 117–20. 11 Brathwaite, The English Gentleman, p. 38. 12 Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country (London, 1618), p. B2. On the city-country debate, see Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, p. 112. For a similar volume, see Thomas Nash, Quaternio, or a Fourefold Way to a Happie Life (London, 1633). 13 Breton, The Court and Country, p. B2. 14 Ibid., p. B3. 15 Ibid., pp. D4v–E1r. 16 John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad 1604–1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 71–90; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 18–20. 17 Thomas Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Travailes, Into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable (London, 1606), p. 1 of ‘To the Reader’. For a similar balance between the benefits and risks of travel, see Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, pp. 201–2.

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18 Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes, pp. 46–7. 19 Joseph Hall, Quo Vadis: A Just Censure of Travell (London, 1617), pp. 23, 26. 20 Ibid., p. 44. 21 On the debate surrounding tobacco, see Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 172–6; Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 20–1; Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 296–8; Marcy Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gilbert, ‘The Multinational Commodification of Tobacco, 1492–1650: An Iberian Perspective’, in Peter Mancall (ed.), The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 251–73; Sandra Bell, ‘The Subject of Smoke: Tobacco and Early Modern England’, in Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (eds), The Mysterious and the Foreign (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 153–69. 22 Philaretes, A Work for Chimny-Sweepers (London, 1602), p. 5 of unnumbered pages; C. T., An Advice How to Plant Tobacco in England (London, 1615), pp. 19–20 of unnumbered pages; John Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, or, The Filthie Fume of Tobacco Refined (London, 1616), p. 33. 23 Deacon, Tobacco Tortured, pp. 60, 72–80, 93–4. 24 Ibid., p. 72. 25 See for instance William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), pp. 17–18; Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p.  184. 26 Edmund Gardiner, The Triall of Tabacco (London, 1610); William Barclay, Nepenthes, or The Vertues of Tabacco (London, 1614). 27 Barclay, Nepenthes, p. 3 of unnumbered pages. 28 For the context of broader contemporaneous European debate about the advantages and disadvantages of creating and expanding an empire, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 103–25, 161–3. 29 David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 146–9; Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 65–8, 84–5; Catherine Armstrong, Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century: English Representations in Print and Manuscript (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), pp.  47–52. 30 George Percy, ‘A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colonie of Virginia’, in Peter C. Mancall (ed.), Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 112–26; Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, p. 20; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, pp. 265–9, 279–80; Games, The Web of Empire, p. 130. For a more general discussion of published worries about the colonies, see Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 34–40.

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31 Percy, ‘A Discourse of the Plantation’, p. 125. 32 Ibid., p. 112. 33 Games, Migration and the Origins, p. 36; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise, pp. 292–3. 34 See for instance William Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London, 1624); ‘The New Life of Virginia: Declaring the Former Success and Present Estate of that Plantation, being the Second Part of Nova Britannia’, American Colonial Tracts Monthly 1 (1897–8), iii; ‘A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia’, and His Majesty’s Council for Virginia, ‘A Declaration of the State of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia’, in Peter Force (ed.), Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, Vol. 3 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963). 35 Thomas Morton, ‘New English Canaan; or, New Canaan, Containing an Abstract of New England’, in Peter Force (ed.), Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, From the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1838), pp. 72–6. On this volume, see Parrish, American Curiosity, pp. 31–2. 36 See for instance ‘New England’s Plantation, Or a Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Country’, American Colonial Tracts Monthly 1 (1897–8); Richard Eburne, A Plain Pathway to Plantations, ed. Louis B. Wright (1624; reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 32–3; ‘A True Declaration’. 37 John Smith, ‘A Description of New England: or the Observations and Discoveries of Captain John Smith (Admirall of that Country) in the North of America’, in Peter Force (ed.), Tracts and Other Papers, Vol. 2, p. Br. For a similar argument, see ‘New Life of Virginia’, p. 19. On this contemporaneous anxiety about Spain, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 90–4. 38 For a related argument about the ease with which Englishmen and -women switched between English and foreign languages, see Walter Charleton, ‘The Translator to the Judicious and (therefore) Unprejudicate Reader’, in Deliramenti Catarrhi: or, The Incongruities, Impossibilities, and Absurdities Couched Under the Vulgar Opinion of Defluxions, trans. Walter Charleton (London, 1650), p. A3r. 39 James Howell, Dodona’s Grove, or the Vocall Forest, Second Part (London, 1644), p. 4 of introductory unnumbered pages. On Howell and Dodona’s Grove, see Turner, The Politics of Landscape, pp. 97–8; Daniel Woolf, ‘Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in SeventeenthCentury England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 243–78. On Dodona’s Grove as an example of mid-century metaphorical interpretation of landscape, see Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, p. 76. 40 Howell, Dodona’s Grove, pp. B1r, B2v. 41 Beauchamp Plantagenet, ‘A Description of the Province of New Albion’, in Peter Force (ed.), Tracts and Other Papers, Vol. 2, p. 4. 42 See for instance An Exact Description of a Roundhead (London, 1642); Soundheads Description of the Roundhead (London, 1642); The Master-piece of Round-heads

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(London, 1643); A Character of an Antimalignant, or Right Parliamenter (London, 1645); The Character of a Cavaliere, With His Brother Seperatist (London, 1647); George Laurence, The Debauched Cavalleer: Or the English Midianite (London, 1647). 43 The Master-piece of Round-heads, p. A1. For other examples, see Soundheads Descrip­­tion of the Roundhead, pp. 3–4; A Character of an Antimalignant, p. 1; Laurence, The Debauched Cavalleer, pp. 1–2. 44 The Master-piece of Round-heads, pp. A1r–v. 45 I. S., The Picture of a New Courtier Drawn in a Conference, Between, Mr. Timeserver and Mr. Plain-Heart (London, 1656), p. A2r. On this book, see Kevin Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 46. 46 I. S., The Picture of a New Courtier, p. A2r. 47 Ibid. 48 Stephen Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), pp. 18–23; Ronald Hutton and Wylie Reeves, ‘Sieges and Fortifications’, in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 204. 49 Hutton and Reeves, ‘Sieges and Fortifications’, p. 210. 50 Sir Justinian Isham, for instance, obtained such a licence: Northamptonshire Record Office, IC 3465, Parliamentary licence granted to Sir Justinian Isham for remaining in London, 15 December 1645. 51 John Reresby, The Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. James J. Cartwright (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1875), p. 37. John Evelyn also noted this disorder on London’s streets, John Evelyn, A Character of England (London, 1659), pp. 7–9. On reactions to London by elite English visitors, see Derek Hirst, ‘Locating the 1650s in England’s Seventeenth Century’, History 81:263 (July 1996), 369–70. 52 Reresby, The Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, p. 37. 53 Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 20–1. 54 Geoffrey Beard, Upholsterers and Interior Furnishing in England 1530–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 63–4; Hilary Maddicott, ‘A Collection of the Interregnum Period: Philip, Lord Viscount Lisle, and His Purchases from the “Late King’s Goods”, 1649–1660’, Journal of the History of Collections 11:1 (1999), 1–24. 55 David L. Smith, ‘The Struggle for New Constitutional and Institutional Forms’ and John Morrill, ‘The Impact on Society’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London: Collins & Brown, 1992), pp. 16, 95. 56 Derek Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 253. 57 Sebastiano Serlio, The First Booke of Architecture, Made By Sebastian Serly, Entreating of Geometrie (London, 1611), pp. 71v–72r. The plan of Ostia appears in Sebastiano Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, Vol. 1 of 2 vols, trans. and ed. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 173.

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58 Thorpe’s translation of Blum’s volume was published as Hans Blum, The Booke of Five Collumnes of Architecture, trans. I. T. (London, 1608). For Thorpe’s drawings of Blum’s Orders, see Summerson, Book of Architecture, T13–14. A manuscript translation by Thorpe of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s Leçons de perspective positive survives; on this manuscript, see Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘An Unknown Manuscript by John Thorpe of du Cerceau’s Perspective’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), pp. 215–28. 59 Leonard Digges, A Booke Named Tectonicon (London, 1585), pp. 1–2 of unnumbered pages. 60 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, trans. Joseph Moxon (London, 1655), p. 2 of unnumbered pages. 61 Vignola, Vignola, or the Compleat Architect, p. 34. 62 These undersides appear at Ibid., pp. 78–81. 63 In Moxon’s volume, these images are printed in reverse from Dietterlin’s original etchings; they are Plates 51–5. For the original illustrations from which these images are excerpted, see Wendel Dietterlin, Architectura von Außtheilung Symmetria und Proportion der fünff Seulen und aller darauß volgender Kunst Arbeit von Fenstern Caminem Thürgerichten Portalen Bronnen und Epitaphien (Nuremberg, 1598), pp.   75, 139, 140, 178. 64 Andrea Palladio, The First Book of Architecture by Andrea Palladio (London, 1668), and the edition of Vincenzo Scamozzi’s 1615 L’idea della architettura universale is Simon Bosboom, A Brief and Plain Description of the Five Orders of Columns (London, 1676). On the history of this and other Dutch editions of Scamozzi, see Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte, ‘From Deluxe Architectural Book to Builder’s Manual: The Dutch Editions of Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale’, Quaerendo 26:4 (Fall 1996), 274–302; Konrad Ottenheym, ‘L’Idea della Architettura Universale de Vincenzo Scamozzi et l’architecture du XVIIe siècle aux Pays-Bas’, in Michèle-Caroline Heck, Frédérique Lemerle, and Yves Pauwels (eds), Théorie des arts et création artistique dans l’Europe du Nord du XVIe au début du XVIIIe siècle (Lille: Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2002), pp. 121–40. 65 For a chronology of architectural books published in England from 1556 to 1800, see Eileen Harris and Nicholas Savage, British Architectural Books and Writers 1556–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 513–32. On seventeenth-century architectural books in the broader context of early modern English writing about architecture, see Rudolf Wittkower, ‘English Literature on Architecture’, in Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and Palladianism (New York: George Braziller, 1974), pp. 95–112. 66 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, The Regular Architect: Or the General Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture of M. Giacomo Barozzio da Vignola, trans. John Leeke (London, 1669); Vincenzo Scamozzi, The Mirror of Architecture, or The GroundRules of the Art of Building, Exactly Laid Down by Vincent Scamozzi Master Builder of Venice (London, 1671). 67 The earliest use cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for cavetto is Moxon’s Mechanical Exercises of 1700. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘cavetto’. I am grateful to Susan Klaiber for alerting me to this late use of ‘cavetto’.

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68 For a catalogue of Jones’s library, see Anderson, ‘Inigo Jones’s Library’, pp. 206–300. 69 Jones’s annotations to Palladio have been transcribed in Bruce Allsopp (ed.), Inigo Jones on Palladio, 2 vols (Newcastle upon Tyne: Oriel Press, 1970). Jones’s annotations on Palladio have been discussed at length, in particular with attention to their chronology. See especially Annarosa Cerutti, ‘Le note di Inigo Jones in margine a ‘I quattro libri dell’architettura’: spunti critici e stimoli creativi’, Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 12:2 (1980), 15–40; John Newman, ‘Inigo Jones e la sua copia de ‘I quattro libri’ di Palladio’, Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 12:2 (1980), 41–62; John Newman, ‘Italian Treatises in Use: The Significance of Inigo Jones’s Annotations’, in Jean Guillaume (ed.), Les Traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris: Picard, 1988), pp. 435–41. Christy Anderson offers an overview of Jones’s annotating technique across his books in: Anderson, ‘Inigo Jones’s Library’; Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On Jones’s annotations in his copy of Scamozzi, see especially Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, pp. 100–2. 70 Two of Webb’s architectural books survive at Worcester College, Oxford: Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1601); Gioseffe Viola Zanini, Della architettura di Gioseffe Viola Zanini (Padua, 1629). His copy of Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura survives in the Royal Institute of British Architects Book Library: Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospettiva (Venice, 1619). Also surviving at Worcester College, Oxford are six non-architectural books: Hieronymus Cardanus, De subtilitate (Lugdunus, 1559); Julius Caesar Scaligerus, Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri exotericarum exercitationum Lib. XV. De subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Frankfurt, 1576); Janus Jacobus Boissard, III. Pars iconum virorum illustrium (Frankfurt, 1598); Janus Jacobus Boissard, IV. Pars iconum viros virtute atque eruditione illustres (Frankfurt, 1599); Janus Jacobus Boissard, Bibliotheca sive thesaurus virtutis et gloriae (Frankfurt, 1628); Janus Jacobus Boissard, II. Pars iconum, continens virorum clarorum, eruditione et doctrina praestantium (Frankfurt, 1630). Webb wrote his name and the price in the front of each of these six volumes; they have underlining and limited marginal annotations. Webb’s annotations across his surviving architectural books cannot be dated precisely either from handwriting or from explicit dates. The only two notes that can be dated are a note in the front of Serlio’s Book 7 that it was purchased at Thieving Lane on 16 January 1643 and a reference in Palladio’s section on the Composite Order to the Composite cornice that Webb used at Gunnersbury House – a reference that must date at least from the late 1650s (the beginning of the Gunnersbury commission) if not subsequently. Webb’s copy of Serlio, Book 7, p. 2; Webb’s copy of Palladio, Book 1, p. 50. 71 Webb’s copy of Palladio, Book 4, pp. 14–15. 72 Jones’s annotations and corresponding underlinings are listed in Anderson, ‘Inigo Jones’s Library’, pp. 282–3. For Webb’s annotations on the Pantheon, see Webb’s copy of Serlio, Book 3, p. 50r. John Bold and Giles Worsley note that Webb copied Jones’s annotations in Serlio. Bold, John Webb, p. 29; Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, p. 177. 73 Anderson, ‘Inigo Jones’s Library’, p. 283.

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74 Philibert de l’Orme, Le premier tome de l’architecture (Paris, 1568), pp. 13v–19v. Webb also organised the other sketch plans that he drew according to his own questions – separating compact plans useful for English design from the Italian villas that were open to and sprawling across the land. For those plans useful to English architectural practice, see Royal Institute of British Architects Drawings Collection JoI&WeJ [205]–[206]; Nos 172, 180–1 in John Harris and A. A. Tait, Catalogue of the Drawings by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Isaac De Caus at Worcester College, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). For the Italian plans less useful to English architectural practice, see Nos 173–8, in Harris and Tait, Catalogue of the Drawings. 75 On Webb’s reinterpretations of plans in Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova in their mid-century context, see John Newman, ‘Criticizing Palazzi di Genova: The Evidence of John Webb and Roger Pratt’, in Piet Lombaerde (ed.), The Reception of P. P. Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova During the Seventeenth Century in Europe: Questions and Problems (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), pp. 121–30. 76 Alberti, On the Art of Building, 157–9; Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1: p. 7. 77 For a similarly relative approach to the Orders, see the discussion of Charles and Claude Perrault as well as François Blondel in Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis, pp. 27–41. 78 John Evelyn, A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern … To Which is Added an Account of Architects and Architecture, in an Historical, and Etymological Explanation of Certain Tearms Particularly Affected by Architects. With Leon Baptista Alberti’s Treatise of Statues, by John Evelyn Esq (London, 1664), p. 53. 79 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 80 Ibid., p. 16. 81 Evelyn, ‘An Account of Architects & Architecture’, in A Parallel of the Antient Architecture, p. 119. 82 Ibid. 83 Christopher Wren, Wren’s ‘Tracts’ on Architecture and other Writings, ed. Lydia Soo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 153. 84 Ibid., p. 154. 85 Ibid., p. 157. For a similar and slightly earlier questioning of Classical narratives of architectural history, see the discussion of Salomon de Bray’s Architectura Moderna (1631) in Freek Schmidt, ‘Building Artists: History, Modernity and the Architect Around 1630’, in H. Perry Chapman and Joanna Woodall (eds), Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands – Het beeld van de kunstenaar in de vroegmoderne Nederlanden, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 59 (2009), pp. 315–44.

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As mid-seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women read, wrote, and spoke about their social and physical world in terms of motion, they simultaneously came to experience house and estate through precisely this emphasis on mobility. Visitors who approached houses often found invitations to bodily and mental travel from façades that transposed Continental templates into the English landscape. Poets, in fact, made such travel explicit, for they led their readers on tours and explained how seemingly familiar house and land were paradoxically as unfamiliar as strange lands to which their readers might travel. And this rhetoric reflected actual experiences of readers who travelled ever more between city and country and who encountered new expectations that ruptured an owner’s traditional responsibilities. At the turn of the eighteenth century, estates had become literal sites of tourist travel and were even set in motion through prints that circulated bird’s-eye views of house and surrounding grounds. In the context of the mid-century acceptance of motion as a mode of comprehending one’s world, Englishmen and -women rethought the staccato rhythm of movement and pause on house and estate in terms of physical and mental travel. The invitation to travel in the house façade Upon approaching a house, English viewers expected security and stability – for instance, the measured rhythm of running their eyes across stone and then quickly halting at brilliantly reflective glass on the façade of Wollaton Hall (Figure 7). Yet at mid-century, they encountered first Italian and then Dutch façade templates that set them both physically and mentally in motion. In the early 1660s, those who approached the Marquess of Hertford’s recently completed Amesbury House discovered a nearly uninterrupted invitation to travel (Figure 23). Their eyes slid with ease across the width of the façade, as only the projecting portico interrupted the horizontal rows of rippling, roughly carved rusticated stones. They halted momentarily too at the vertical keystones that protruded forward slightly over each window, but

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John Webb, Amesbury, Wiltshire, 1659–64, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius ­Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 3. Abbreviations: ground-floor plan: Cham: Chamber, Cl: Closet, H: Hall, LP: Little parlour, SR: Store room, WR: Withdrawing room; first-floor plan: Bc: Bedchamber, Cl: Closet. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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these keystones were merely brief moments. Even the windows around which guests would expect to see frames have no vertical mouldings to interrupt the rows of masonry. And the bands of smooth stone between ground and first floor and at the attic, unmarked even by rustication, simply reinforced this horizontality. Where guests had once found a staccato assembly of details that required frequent halts and that encouraged their eyes to dart from point to point, they now experienced a clear emphasis on visual fluidity since potential boundaries were minimised. Surprisingly too, the portico that halted the guest’s visual movement across the façade was less a boundary than a redirection of that movement into the usually enclosed depth of the house. Guests were well accustomed to projections encased in wall and window, but the projecting portico was an open space with merely thin column shafts and a low balustrade separating its space from the approaching guest. The house seemed unusually easy to penetrate, unusually without protective boundaries, since one could look into an upperstorey space from floor to ceiling and thus reach past the entrance door that delimited interior from exterior. Guests too could find that this invited visual entrance was an unprecedented social invitation to enter formerly hidden exclusive gatherings. For although the portico opened off the traditionally secluded elite entertaining rooms, anyone who approached the house could watch Hertford and his guests socialising inside the portico. At previous houses, guests might have glimpsed the silhouettes of other guests passing in front of windows, but there was no longer this intervening pane of glass at Amesbury.

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Raynham Hall, Norfolk, c. 1635, garden façade. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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As guests pondered this invitation to move in various directions and visually as well as socially, they found also that the rippling rustication and permeable portico encouraged them to travel mentally. They could recall few English precedents of such roughly carved stone, but they could remember seeing ancient Roman buildings and palaces exhibiting precisely such carving during their travels across the Italian peninsula. The portico likewise encouraged their minds to roam beyond England’s shores, for English houses rarely displayed these temple fronts. When houses contained porticoes, they were attached to the wall – simply offering variation to the usually solid boundary between interior and exterior (Figure 24).1 Only the Queen’s House in Greenwich contained an open loggia, yet this building was more analogous to a small estate pavilion for elite leisure than to a large country house with its socially complex community of owner, household, guests, and estate workers (Figure 25).2 Recalling Italian villas visited on their own travels or seen in architectural books, guests discovered repeated models for the Amesbury façade before them. Across Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale, in particular, there were frequent first-floor open porticoes, and the Villa Molin could even be a basic template for Amesbury (Figure 26). Both houses contained a rusticated ground storey, a large band separating the ground from the first floor, an attic storey, and a portico over a door flanked by two windows; the Amesbury façade simply differed in its narrower portico, longer flanking walls, and upper-storey rustication. The Marquess of Hertford’s guests seemed simultaneously at home and abroad in front of Amesbury, driving through the familiar English landscape, yet seeing a façade characteristic of the Italian peninsula.

Inigo Jones, Queen’s House, Greenwich, 1616–35, south façade. Photo: Author.

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Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1615, Villa Molin. National Library of Scotland.

When they continued around the oval drive in front of the house, moreover, they learned that the house itself was malleable – not only offering them cues for visual and mental motion but itself changing from moment to moment.3 From Italian villa, Amesbury suddenly became familiar enclosed English interior, as the sides of the portico were solid walls with windows rather than the Italian open arches or colonnades; these windowed walls evoked the fully enclosed projections of earlier houses. Yet even this familiar English exterior seemed strangely unfamiliar since it was a fragment inserted into another design rather than the usual framework into which Classical details were injected. One glimpsed wall and window only briefly and only at an oblique angle along the oval drive. The windowed wall seemed a momentary

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aberration in an otherwise open façade and so a design device lifted from less customary design practices. Guests, then, found themselves standing at a mental distance from a house design that they would have once accepted with ease, and the entire exterior correspondingly became a surprising novelty that needed to be discovered and comprehended. They both had suddenly to shift between design traditions and to alter their expectations of the relationship between those traditions, echoing the quick linguistic shifts of their daily life. To mid-century guests, this architectural novelty signalled a simultaneous reshaping of traditional expectations of house and owner. In earlier decades, guests had seen sweeping views on rooftop walks where they had looked far across the estate, halted simply by intervening pavilions and chimneys (Figure  27). At Amesbury and at other houses where owners commissioned porticoes, guests again saw long stretches of greensward showcased specifically for their observation, as porticoes consistently faced open land (Figures 28, 29). The Amesbury portico opened onto greensward in front of the entrance façade, but at Chaloner Chute’s The Vyne and Sir John Maynard’s Gunnersbury, which stood close to public roads, guests saw a portico only on the garden front. Passing along the Hampshire road next to The Vyne’s entrance and travelling through the road intersection in the western environs of London where Gunnersbury stood, guests saw simply a familiar astylar façade. From the portico on the garden façade, however, they looked across

Robert Smythson, Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, 1580–8, rooftop walk. Photo: Author.

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John Webb, The Vyne, Hampshire, 1654–7, garden façade. Photo: Author. Reproduced with kind permission of The National Trust.

expansive views of farmland. At both houses correspondingly, guests saw a familiar astylar façade but encountered an open portico on the garden façade that faced onto farmland.4 And at Belvoir Castle and Cobham Hall, where such green expanses were less visible, the Earl and Countess of Rutland and the Duke of Lennox displayed to their guests simply the engaged portico

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John Webb, The Vyne, Hampshire, 1654–7, view through portico. Photo: Author. Reproduced with kind permission of The National Trust.

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John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, entrance or garden façade (the façades are identical). RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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(Figure 30). On its isolated hilltop, Belvoir offers views more of limitless blue sky and farmland far at one’s feet, and, in the enclosed courtyard of Cobham Hall, an open portico would have merely allowed house occupants to watch each other.5 When guests at Amesbury, Gunnersbury, and The Vyne looked across their portico vistas, however, they were encountering a swifter and more marked invitation to motion than they had experienced on rooftop walks. Strolling along these walks, they had stood at the very top of the house – far distant from the initial entrance spaces that filtered an owner’s visitors and even from the entertaining rooms in which they frequently socialised. They would have ascended two or more sets of stairs and passed through several interior rooms so that the unbounded rooftop views seemed safely insulated from equally unbounded, and so unpredictable, social encounters. Guests at Amesbury (Figure 23), in contrast, simply ascended the main stair and walked through the adjoining great chamber to enter the portico, and those at The Vyne merely passed along the main axis or ascended a few steps from the garden at The Vyne to reach Chute’s portico. As they looked through the portico, they also then saw a sweeping view that, though enclosed under the roof of the portico, could seem more regularly expansive than those offered by the rooftop walks. For guests no longer needed to look around chimneys and broader pavilions that together could create an impenetrable stone wall but instead gazed simply through equally spaced narrow column shafts that created momentary interruptions (Figures 27, 29). At The Vyne, for instance, Chute’s guests looked through the wide expanse of the tall side arches, halted briefly for the corner pier and then scanned quickly across the column shafts to see the view through the front of the portico. The house, consequently,

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seemed less the traditional filter that articulated the various social ranks of its occupants than a permeable structure that put one at sea – that encouraged eyes to slide across its exterior and minds to travel to Continental models and to drift away from expected associations. This mobility of house and estate beyond traditional experiences and associations, in fact, became explicit through the very design process, as landowners began to blur usual patronage boundaries. Only courtiers and their acquaintances at first displayed the portico for their guests.6 The Earl and Countess of Rutland at Belvoir, the Marquess of Hertford at Amesbury, and the Duke of Lennox at Cobham Hall were nobility who would have attended the royal court before the Civil War. The gentle Chaloner Chute and Sir John Maynard in turn had connections to these circles; Chute had held land in common with the Dacre family since 1631 and had married the widow of Lord Dacre, and Maynard was invited by the Earl of Essex to attend an antiCromwellian meeting at Essex House.7 Members of the county gentry instead preferred the more traditional astylar exterior. At Sir Henry Blount’s Tyttenhanger, at Chief Justice Oliver St John’s Thorpe Hall, and at Secretary of State John Thurloe’s Wisbech Castle, guests saw the usual firm boundary between interior and exterior as they observed smooth brick or stone walls interrupted only by a triangular or segmental pediment over each window (Figure 31).8

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Peter Mills, Thorpe Hall, Cambridgeshire, 1654–7, entrance façade. Photo: Author. Reproduced by permission of Sue Ryder-Thorpe Hall Hospice.

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And, guests well knew, these façade differences indicated ongoing patronage patterns. For courtiers and their acquaintances commissioned an architect familiar from the royal Office of Works – John Webb – to design their houses. Webb had, in fact, already designed a hunting lodge for John Penruddock’s Hale Park that contained an open loggia similar to that of the Queen’s House and could undertake several commissions because Parliament had dismissed him from the Office after he transported funds to Charles I (Figure 32).9 The courtiers who employed Webb, then, simply continued an established interest in Classicism. The local masons, master builders, and other designers who created the houses for local gentry, in contrast, had the more limited knowledge of design manuals and on-site experience. To a mid-century viewer, the portico appeared yet another iteration of the shared cosmopolitan focus on Classicism that distinguished courtier from county gentry social circles. Landowners even approached the design of their houses with this contrast in social taste at the forefront of their minds. Like Webb’s courtier patrons, Sir Justinian Isham had at his disposal Webb’s detailed knowledge of Classicism when he commissioned an addition to his Lamport Hall. Yet he was also outside courtier circles, a member of the Northamptonshire county gentry connected to Webb by personal acquaintance, and he c­ orrespondingly strongly preferred an astylar façade.10 In a letter of 19 June 1654, Webb promised Isham a sketch

John Webb, Hale Park hunting lodge, Wiltshire, first design, c. 1638, entrance façade. Courtesy of The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

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John Webb, Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, 1654–7, entrance façade, late ­seventeenth-century drawing. By kind permission of the Lamport Hall ­Preservation Trust and the Northamptonshire Record Office.

of a façade design with a portico yet reassured Isham that ‘I will so order yt that it shall not appeare temple like’.11 He would design a projection around the entrance – most likely, the single-bay projection shown in a surviving drawing – but would not use the pediment and columns of a temple front.12 Isham, though, rejected this projection in favour of a masonry front with triangular and segmental pediments like the nearby Thorpe Hall and the more distant Tyttenhanger and Wisbech Castle (Figure 33).13 Following the 1650s, however, courtier and county gentry landowner alike preferred façades that offered foreign templates and so invitations to mental travel – blurring the once sharp separation between their design preferences. Guests encountered the portico only infrequently and only applied in low relief to solid façade walls, for instance at Sir John Shaw’s Eltham Lodge where the portico is simply traced out with low-relief pilasters (Figure 34).14 Yet when guests saw the astylar façade that once again became popular, they were looking at a design that nevertheless had Continental precedent. Visitors to the Duke of Norfolk’s Horseheath Hall and to Sir John Brownlow’s Belton House, among other houses, saw façades interrupted only by windows and with a pediment at the centre of the roofline (Figure 35). They could recall,

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Hugh May, Eltham Lodge, London, 1663–4, entrance façade. Photo: Author. ­Reproduced by permission of The Royal Blackheath Golf Club.

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however, few English buildings that thus exhibited a pediment above a smooth masonry façade, remembering only the Queen’s Chapel and potentially an unexecuted design for the Prince’s Lodging at Newmarket (Figure 36). Far more profuse were seventeenth-century Dutch houses, including Pieter Post’s Huis ten Bosch, that paired smooth masonry wall with roof pediment (Figure 37).15 As guests looked at these pedimented designs, then, they travelled mentally beyond England’s shores to juxtapose English and Dutch house exteriors. Like the guests who saw the fragment of English wall at Amesbury, these late-century guests stood strangely at a mental distance from a familiar exterior – simultaneously travelling and at home in an experience that had become widespread, appearing on estates throughout England and offered by landowners throughout England’s social hierarchy.

Sir Roger Pratt, Horseheath, Cambridgeshire, begun 1663, entrance façade, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 3. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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36

Inigo Jones, Prince’s Lodging, Newmarket, 1619, entrance façade. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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Pieter Post, Huis ten Bosch, the Hague, begun 1645, garden façade, from Pieter Post, Ouvrages d’architecture ordonnez par Pierre Post. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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The strangeness of estate and household Guests became explicitly such travellers at home during the later seventeenth century, as poets transformed estates into strange and wondrous lands and as the political upheaval of the Civil War unsettled the landowner’s traditional responsibility for his estate. Readers of poems describing house and estate were accustomed to being the tacitly accepted observers who peered over the poet’s shoulder. They and the poet watched together a familiar world in which they needed no instruction and, consequently, of which a mere description sufficed to evoke landowner and estate. From mid-century, however, poets no longer assumed that readers would readily and correctly interpret the house and estate that they described. Rather, readers needed to be taken on tours in which they were directed where to look and what to think – as if they were travellers in an unfamiliar land. At the beginning of his eulogy to Lord Fairfax’s Bilbrough, Andrew Marvell instructed his reader, ‘See how the archèd earth does here / Rise in a perfect hemisphere!’, ‘See what a soft accès and wide / Lies open to its grassy side’, and ‘See then how courteous it ascends’ (ll. 1–2, 17, 21).16 There is a list of characteristics which Marvell’s reader should notice about the approach to Bilbrough: the hemispherical mound of earth, the wide and soft approach over the grass, and the gracious welcoming ascent that will not tire the visitor. And Marvell carefully draws his reader’s attention to each characteristic, prefacing each with a separate imperative of ‘see’. One must look first at the mound of earth, then at the approach, and finally at the ascent; Marvell textually points to each particular feature so that his reader cannot miss one of them. The reader too is told precisely what to think about each feature – to notice, for instance, the curve of the mound rather than its greenness or other quality. Marvell educates his reader about how to look at house and estate, implicitly making comprehensible a world that otherwise would elude this stranger’s understanding. By thus casting his readers as strange travellers, Marvell was reflecting on shifting contemporaneous experience of house and estate. For, following Charles II’s restoration of the monarchy in 1660, landowners and their families resided infrequently on their estates; once traditional ‘home’ had become only a brief way station. So extended and established was their residence in London once again that entire squares of houses were built for them, and they also expanded their travel to include other cities which constructed promenades and other new recreational spaces. Within these itineraries stretching across England, estates were simply summer residences – used for only a quarter of the year when the city became too hot.17 Already in 1667, Stephen Primatt was advising readers of The City & Country Purchaser & Builder that they could base house design on the assumption of their own ongoing travel. Noble or gentle patrons, Primatt explained, could commission either a ‘Summer and

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Winter Abode’ or a ‘Seat for the Summer onely’.18 And both options were equally acceptable, for the seasonal travel of landowning families was analogous to natural rhythms. Landowners who travelled regularly between city and country, Primatt claimed, were similar to ‘some sort of Fowl, who change their abode in the winter’.19 Like birds which migrate to the comfort of warmer climates in the winter, landowners travel to the cooler house and estate to avoid oppressive summer heat in the city; they simply followed easily accepted and inevitable physical need. Forty years earlier, Sir Francis Bacon likewise had invoked the seasonal migration of birds to explain house design in his essay entitled ‘Of Building’, yet he had transformed this analogy into advice for a single structure. As he advised his reader about how to select the site for a house, he cited the ancient Roman Lucullus’s distinction between summer and winter residences. When Pompey questioned Lucullus about how he would endure his large interior rooms during the chill of winter, Lucullus responded, ‘Why, do you not think me as wise as some fowl are, that ever change their abode towards the winter?’20 Birds know to seek warmer climates in winter, and Lucullus too has warmer rooms elsewhere – seemingly in another house since he changes his ‘abode’. Bacon, however, follows this anecdote by urging his readers to have rooms for all seasons in a single house. They would then migrate from one wing to another when the seasons changed because they should ‘have rooms both for summer and winter; shady for summer, and warm for winter’.21 As Primatt expanded this analogy to encompass travel among various sites, he ruptured the all-encompassing permanence of a home that satisfied all needs. According to the poet Mildmay Fane, the ‘home’ of an estate had become so unfamiliar that it could contain experiences expected of travel beyond England’s shores. Earlier poets had insisted that one was at home when one was surrounded by familiar objects and customs – the house built according to traditional English design and the landowner offering the usual warm welcome to all who passed his gates. Like these poets, Fane lauds the benefits of staying at home in his poem praising Sir John Wentworth’s Summerly; he criticises those who ‘seek for that abroad, at home was near / In more perfection’ (ll. 20–1).22 It is foolish to journey beyond England’s shores because ‘home’ already contains the best of what one seeks; whatever one finds abroad will simply be of lower quality – less perfect. Yet unlike his predecessors, Fane is not claiming that the familiar English world is better than whatever one could find on the Continent. Rather, Summerly offers its visitor a global microcosm of familiar and foreign experiences. The mythological deities of ancient Greece, for instance, can be encountered at Summerly, as Fane informs his reader, ‘Wouldst thou Phoebe meet, / Apollo, or the Muses? Not in Crete / And Greece, but here, at Summerly, those are / Removed to dwell’ (ll. 21–4). Travel to Greece was futile if one sought its mythological deities, for several of them were merely a

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short journey away within England’s shores. Paradoxically, owner and guest travelled across Europe while they were seemingly at home – in a rhetorical echo of the house façade that was a Continental template. The entire estate of Summerly, in fact, continuously surprises Fane who consequently remains a perpetual traveller in a strange land. As he looks around him, Fane finds few sights that he can easily recognise. Instead, he is ever striving to comprehend the novelties around him; he describes how his ‘eye, / … did crave rest, / For fear of forfeiting its interest / In so great bliss, for over-dazzled to-grew, / And dim of sight made by each object new’ (ll. 72–6). Nearly wherever Fane looked, he saw ‘new’ objects – gardens, fountains, statues, or other features that required the effort of attempting comprehension, and he feared that his eye would become overwhelmed, ‘over-dazzled’ and ‘dim of sight’ as if blinded in its fatigue. So surprising and incomprehensible is Summerly that it is analogous to the unknown shore of a colonial territory. Like an explorer or colonists who would find the ship that had transported them across the ocean more familiar than the strange shore where they had landed, Fane takes his rest at sea and then narrates, ‘We landed were again, and made a coast’ (l. 80). The land before him is unidentifiable, potentially indescribable, in its novelty; he can state only that he has found ‘a coast’, a shoreline from which he can little guess what lies further inland. At home, one was oddly a traveller who moved with curiosity and wonder from one unexpected novelty to another. Even a familiar house exterior that had previously suggested traditional hospitality could evoke a traveller’s wonder in a guest. At Thorpe Hall, guests see the usual nearly astylar façade with its isolated Classical elements – the doorcase and the pediment over each window, yet Fane claims that Thorpe is comparable to the ‘Wonders Seven’ that included ‘th’ Roman Circus, Amphitheatre, Nile’s Pyramids’ (l. 38).23 Like these renowned buildings, Thorpe Hall induces awed and potentially puzzled admiration from St John’s guests. As another ‘wonder’, it is of unknown origins – the etymological meaning of ‘wonder’ – and so a conundrum to its viewer, even analogous to the little visited and little explicable Egyptian pyramids.24 William Lithgow, one of the few travel authors who described the pyramids, for instance observed how they eluded all rational enquiry. He simply stood and admired, finding that ‘the more I beheld this strange Worke, the more I was stricken in admiration’.25 He was so ‘stricken’ into helpless wonder that he simply gazed at the strange work before him. The pyramid was beyond his powers of understanding and description and so, implicitly, was Thorpe Hall for Fane. This surprising novelty that cast the viewer as perpetual traveller was, Andrew Marvell claimed, inherent to the estate – an inescapable and continuous experience that offered little opportunity to find familiarity. The landscape of Nun Appleton was in such constant and inexplicable flux that

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it was analogous to mysterious shifts in the stage sets of a theatre: ‘No scene that turns with engines strange / Does oftener than these meadows change’ (ll. 385–6). A theatre audience saw quick changes among often contrasting settings, including city street and domestic interior or various geographical regions, and they could little understand when or how these changes occurred since hidden ‘engines’, or machines, changed the stage sets. So too changes on the Nun Appleton estate happened suddenly and with little explanation. A gust of wind might with little warning flatten crops or meadow grasses to reveal the door and ground-floor windows of a distant estate building. Yet moments later and just as unpredictably, the wind might vanish so that door and windows disappeared and one merely remembered this glimpse of the building’s full exterior. Because of its mobility – its susceptibility to inevitable natural vicissitudes, Nun Appleton presented owner and guest with an unceasing sequence of new experiences that transformed it into the unfamiliar land encountered by a traveller. Inside the house, guests likewise found startling social practices as if they were encountering a foreign culture. Traditional hospitality, once the hallmark of an ideal house and estate, could even dissolve into a contrasting disregard for a guest’s comfort and security.26 Thomas Shipman opened his eulogy of Belvoir Castle by describing how the Earl and Countess of Rutland offered their guests a panoply of ‘choicest meats’ and ‘delicates’ according to ‘ancient English hospitality’ (ll. 150, 155, 156).27 They made their guests so welcome that they offered them particularly desirable foods – the meats that were ‘choicest’ and ‘delicates’ that would be hard to obtain. Yet only twenty lines later, Shipman praises Belvoir with a comparison of the Earl and Countess to a giant who physically harms his guests. Belvoir’s opulent furnishings call to Shipman’s mind ‘the Giant’s castle, where / He seized on all that did appear; / And being cruel, being strong, / His living guests upon the walls he hung’ (ll. 173–6). The Giant is hardly the ideal landowner since he is ‘cruel’ rather than kind and since he imprisons his guests in picture frames on the wall instead of offering them refreshment. Though clearly a hyperbole since the Earl and Countess would not imprison their guests, Shipman’s analogy could nevertheless raise questions about what a guest could expect at Belvoir Castle. Would the Earl and Countess focus so fully on displaying opulent furnishings that they neglected the comfort of their guest? Because of his desire for more objects to hang on his walls, the Giant had imprisoned his guests; similarly, the Earl and Countess could purchase so many precious objects that they would have fewer funds to devote to heating rooms or offering lavish meals. Shipman’s readers learned that they could find traditional hospitality shift into unexpected display as quickly as the meadows of Nun Appleton changed. The analogy to the cruel Giant, in fact, reflected actual strangeness in social practice at the country house, as authors from John Evelyn to writers

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of agricultural tracts described how landowners and guests disregarded the traditionally careful harmony of their gatherings. The fictive French traveller who narrated Evelyn’s A Character of England recalled how, after dinner at one house, a violent fight broke out among a few gentleman guests.28 When the company reassembled after withdrawing to various rooms, the Frenchman was ‘astonish’d to see … one of the company entring into the Room all bloody, & disorder’d, to fetch a sword … and three or four of his companions … pursuing & draging him by the hair’.29 These guests have ruptured so far the usual restrained statements and gestures that they have intensely angered each other and caused physical harm – disordered hair and clothing, bloodshed, and one of their group fallen and dragged across the ground. Nor is there any hope that the gentlemen will revert to their expected calm, for they have entered the room ‘to fetch a sword’ and continue their combat. So violent is their fight, moreover, that they damage the house itself. The Frenchman observes that ‘one of their Spurs engaged into a Carpet, upon which stood a very fair Looking-Glass, and two noble pieces of Porselain, drew all to the ground, break the Glass & the Vasas in pieces’.30 A mirror and two valuable porcelain objects lie irreparably shattered on the carpet which itself may be snagged by the spur caught in it. Instead of performing their expected role of returning the landowner’s hospitality graciously, these guests have literally caused him financial loss. He no longer owns these objects in which he had invested, and he will need to purchase new items to fill their place. The once comfortably familiar house had become such a strange environment that, Evelyn claimed hyperbolically, guests had to fear for the physical safety which would seem guaranteed in any social gathering. At the root of these reportedly undisciplined house gatherings, authors of agricultural tracts argued, was a rupture in the traditional relationship between owner and estate. Owners were expected to oversee and reinvest their funds in their lands and estate communities, yet, one learned from agricultural tracts of the 1650s, owners were focused on exclusive elite entertainment. Repeatedly across the 1650s, authors urged landowners to remedy the ongoing economic depression by turning their attention to agricultural improvement. There would be fewer idle labourers, they asserted, if landowners intensively farmed their lands and so employed numerous workers.31 At the beginning of The English Improver Improved, Walter Blith explicitly and sharply criticised the damaging lack of restraint in landowners’ social gatherings. Owners and guests were ‘that ranting, roring Gard, which too many of the Gentry of the Nation, and some of the Nobles too maintaine’.32 Elite gatherings have broken so sharply with the expected harmonious calm that owner and guests are ‘ranting’ and ‘roring’; they utter remarks with extreme emotions and little reason since they were ‘roring’ more like animals than humans. Blith then explained that these entertainments destroy the financial and economic stability of lands and

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community, for ‘Estates steal away’, estate workers fall into ‘Idleness’, and care of the land degenerates into ‘ill or no husbandry’.33 Resources which should be reinvested in the estate are expended on elite entertainments, and the productivity of land declines as the workers who are supervised only intermittently by the distracted landowner labour less intensively. In physical and social experience alike, house and estate were becoming a world filled with surprising novelties that cast guests into travellers who needed to re-learn the expectations of a once familiar and dependable home. The estranged landowner This world of surprising novelty produced such unexpected experiences because the very assumptions on which it was grounded were themselves in flux. For owners no longer fulfilled their traditional responsibilities after the Civil War ruptured their long-established roles and authority on their estates. As battles between Parliamentarian and Royalist armies crisscrossed England during the Civil War, house and estate might or might not be the familiar sites of warm welcome. Occupying armies transformed houses into military strongholds, confiscating the estate from the owner and so transforming the site of welcome into one of forbidding defence. Owners too sometimes created their own strongholds to protect household and estate communities. At Lathom House, the Countess of Derby staunchly resisted all attempts by the Parliamentarian army to seize her estate – rebuffing negotiations and actual attacks.34 And after a battle or military occupation, a house might simply be a ruin, a mere shell empty of the thriving community expected by passers-by. Parliament itself, in fact, acknowledged that house and estate had become the opposite of the usual essential economic and social units. In contrast to James I’s and Charles I’s earlier attempts to preserve house and estate, Parliament authorised the demolishing or partial damaging of any houses which it had seized from the Royalist army.35 The Earl of Rutland, for instance, received a request that his Belvoir Castle be destroyed to prevent its use by rebel forces.36 Houses that had once desirably sheltered needy wayfarers were suddenly the potentially dangerous retreats of rebels. Even after the Civil War when owners regained relatively intact estates, they re-entered a world at odds with their once familiar house and lands. They, their guests, and tenants had the recent memory of an interrupted ownership – halted by the sudden occupation of either Parliamentarian or Royalist army – that had once been guaranteed for generations and often centuries.37 Consequently, there was the new risk that their ownership could be interrupted once again; they suddenly seemed to own their estates less with the authority of tradition than at the whim of variable circumstance. Royalist owners also had the additional reminder of swearing oaths of allegiance and

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paying a fee to the new government. While the vanquished Royalist army had simply ceded its confiscated estates to Parliamentarian owners, Parliament retained the seized estates of Royalist owners until they were guaranteed of that owner’s loyalty.38 On the estates themselves, owners were daily encountering social and physical reminders of their earlier estrangement. They saw, for instance, formerly productive lands fallen fallow and once sturdily built structures crumbling from damage and neglect.39 They simultaneously had to refamiliarise themselves with their estate tenants, learning about new families, realising that some children were old enough to labour, and recognising that other workers might have become too old or too injured to farm. Their estates looked strange around them, the conversations in which they engaged with tenant farmers would seem equally strange with the new names and needs being discussed, and they themselves assumed the unprecedented role of expending large sums to revive their estates. Landowners could, in fact, find themselves unable to respond to all of these unprecedented estate needs and so recast into onlookers more analogous to passing travellers than the traditionally supervising owner. For resuscitating their fields, buildings, and tenant communities required more funds than maintaining an already prosperous estate from one year to another – potentially funds that exceeded the resources available to a landowner. Margaret Cavendish lamented through a poem how she and her husband could not repair the heavily damaged Bolsover Castle.40 Under her pen, a personified Bolsover pleads with its knightly owner to remedy its numerous injuries. Bullet holes riddle its walls, its windows are shattered, and it has numerous other damages, but it expects relief when its responsible owner approaches. Trustingly, it asks its owner, ‘pity me, dear Sir, release my band, / Or let me die by your most noble hand’ (ll. 35–6). The castle assumes that its owner will release it somehow from the current struggle of bearing its injuries, either repairing it to ‘release my band’ of constraints from injury so that it can again thrive or demolishing it to ‘let [it] die’. Surprisingly, however, the knight reluctantly replies that he cannot fulfil his usual responsibility, ‘Alas, poor Castle, I small help can bring’ (l. 37). He is simply yet another sympathetic observer of the castle’s plight because he does not have the funds to repair its injuries; he explains, ‘to restore thy health, and build thy wall, / I have not means enough to do ’t withal’ (ll. 43–4). The knight also is unwilling to destroy Bolsover, as he does not acknowledge the castle’s request for death but simply addresses his inability to rebuild the castle walls. The traditional dependence of house and estate on responsible landowners has been ruptured to the point where the knight, who stands in for the Cavendishes, must simply watch and then like a traveller move from the dilapidated castle to other sites where he can reside. This knight’s reluctant withdrawal from his estate was a familiar experience to numerous noble and gentle landowners at mid-century; they too

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were often little able to resume their usual estate responsibilities. While landowners had constructed or refurbished an average of 170 houses per decade before the Civil War, they undertood merely 114 houses in the ten years of stability across the 1640s and 1650s when building would have been possible.41 During these years too, John Webb’s patrons sought to economise with their commissions. Although he received several commissions for new structures – including Amesbury, Belvoir Castle, Gunnersbury, and additions to Lamport Hall and The Vyne – the landowners whose income depended on the land were markedly less willing to construct large buildings. The Earl and Countess of Rutland ultimately rejected Webb’s large scheme and instead later chose a design that economically re-used the foundations of the earlier Belvoir Castle; the Marquess of Hertford received an unusually small Amesbury for a nobleman who would have had a large household; and Sir Justinian Isham had repeatedly rejected proposals by David Papillon, a French Huguenot engineer, for a new house before he approved Webb’s design of a new wing.42 Only Chaloner Chute and Sir John Maynard, who were barristers, engaged in extensive housebuilding. Chute purchased The Vyne estate and then commissioned demolition of its service court as well as construction of a new wing, and Maynard employed Webb to design a house at Gunnersbury that was larger than Amesbury.43 Contrary to traditional expectations, wealthy professionals rather than well-established landowners were the ones who executed extensive estate building and rebuilding; landowners, like Margaret Cavendish’s knight, had strangely to watch rather than act – minimising their interactions with once familiar communities. In the decades following the 1650s, owners subsequently cast themselves precisely as these more distantly observing onlookers by the very practices with which they managed their estate communities. They introduced the new figure of an estate steward to supervise tenant farmers while they resided in London and other cities. The estate, consequently, was no longer dependent on the landowner; it had its own social community of supervisor and labourers who would ensure continued productivity and whom the landowner could then simply watch. Landowners received continuous and detailed information on their estates since stewards sent weekly reports.44 Yet these reports were necessarily summaries of events which the landowner would have experienced in greater detail were he resident on his estate and also necessarily reports of decisions which the steward had to take as the landowner’s representative. The landowner could still make decisions about long-term issues – for instance, what crops to plant in the next year – because he could correspond across days and weeks with the steward. The steward, though, had to make smaller decisions independently, particularly about the pressing needs of tenants. The mid-century landowner was thus more occasional audience of than traditional protagonist in his estate, for he travelled between city and estate, experienced

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an unprecedented post-Civil War environment, and, through his own social practices, became the curious visitor wondering at the partly familiar, partly surprising world around him. House and estate as travel destination At the turn of the century, house and estate became in social practice and visual representation precisely such strange sites visited by curious travellers. Since at least the late sixteenth century Englishmen and -women had travelled to see various houses across England, but they journeyed more regularly during the late seventeenth century – so frequently that by the early eighteenth century landowners formalised particular visiting hours and there were growing numbers of guidebooks to explain house and grounds.45 When Englishmen and -women described visits to estates in their journals, moreover, they assumed the role of a traveller on a strange and unfamiliar site. Clearly, English estates were more familiar to their English visitors than were Continental houses and lands, yet both English and Continental house were recorded with the same minute physical detail. On a visit to Paris in the mid-1660s, Edward Browne enumerated a visit to the nearby Château de Maisons in exhaustive detail. He listed the numerous exterior and interior spaces through which he passed: the courts and bridge leading to the house, the staircase open to the roof cupola, a withdrawing room, a bedchamber, and two small adjoining rooms.46 Equally meticulously, he reported the objects in

Sir Roger Pratt, Coleshill, Oxfordshire, begun c. 1650. Courtesy of Country Life.

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each space, from the statues in the courtyard to ‘a purple velvet Bed, imbroidered very richly with Gold and Silber’ in the bedchamber.47 Since Browne was walking through a French house with which he was little familiar and which he would also not visit frequently, it was useful to record numerous details so that he could later remember the château. When Celia Fiennes visited more familiar English houses and estates at the turn of the eighteenth century, however, she recorded them with similar detail; as Fane, Marvell, and Shipman had suggested earlier, house and estate contained ongoing sequences of surprising novelties to be noted with curiosity. On her visit to Sir George Pratt’s Coleshill in Berkshire, for instance, there was much that she would have found unsurprising: the smooth stone exterior interrupted only by window frames and the two ranges of rooms inside a compact block (Figure 38). Primarily the double-storey entrance hall and the roof cupola were less familiar design features. Fiennes nevertheless echoed Browne in her enumeration of interior and exterior spaces and their objects, for she listed gardens, service rooms, the entrance hall, a dining room, a drawing room, a little parlour, backstairs, main stairs, a second-storey dining room, bedchambers, attic servants’ quarters, and the cupola.48 The entire house – even the mundane household spaces of servants’ lodgings and work areas – is to be examined with curiosity. Even though Fiennes and other house visitors would move through similar spaces in their own houses and in the houses of their acquaintances, they still regarded the houses that they visited with a traveller’s admiration. ‘Home’, in poetic rhetoric and social practice, had become both familiar and unexpected. With her traveller’s curiosity, Fiennes was in fact standing at a new distance from house and estate – reflective of the new mid-century strangeness. For previous travellers had described simply the surprising features of the estates that they visited. Browne, who had so painstakingly recorded the Château de Maisons, noted merely of Arundel House, ‘I saw a great number of old Roman and Graecian statuas, many as big again as the life, and divers Greek inscriptions upon stones in the garden’.49 The house itself was simply yet another large early seventeenth-century structure with which Browne would have been well familiar and so merited no discussion; he could easily have conjured such a dwelling to mind. Likewise, thirty years earlier, Sir William Brereton observed about Alnwick Castle only that it contained a decay in sharp contrast to the expected well-maintained estate. He wrote merely, ‘we saw a mighty great castle belonging to the Earl of Northumberland, wherein were all houses of office, many of them now in decay; but my lord is repairing the same by degrees’.50 The castle itself was a traditional medieval fortification and thus just a ‘mighty great castle’; the unusually dilapidated service spaces, however, warranted the lengthier explanation that they were ruinous and the Earl of Northumberland was repairing them. Fiennes, in contrast, created c­ omprehensive descriptions,

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distancing herself from what would have been familiar to consider all with an equally curious eye. So well-recognised was this mindset of the curious traveller approaching house and estate that artists transformed admiring travel into the basis for new representations of estates. For the first time, there were proposals for volumes of prints depicting house and estate so that even those who did not usually travel could journey across England from their homes. House and estate, correspondingly, became sites less where a guest interacted with the landowner offering his traditionally warm welcome than where a curious visitor simply stood and admired – visiting an estate as he or she might a cathedral or city where there was no welcome to a particular community. Estates were, that is, more publicly accessible objects of curiosity.5 In a 1670s advertisement for a volume of these printed views, Henry Winstanley explained explicitly how his volume would expand and even replace travel across England (Figure 39).52 Previously, the left-hand block of script proclaims, English houses had been ‘not only unknown to all forreigners that come not into England, but likwise to all people that travaile not about … [including] many people in ye same County’. Before Winstanley’s projected volume, only those who could afford to

Henry Winstanley, Advertisement, c. 1670s. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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travel would have learned about English houses. Those of lower social rank, for instance less wealthy professionals, would have remained ignorant of English architecture because they could ill afford the necessary time and money. With Winstanley’s volume, however, anyone in or beyond England could journey among estates simply by purchasing his volume and turning pages; it would be an expensive folio, though still less costly than protracted travel. Winstanley even suggested that his volume could substitute for travel by providing a desirably faster pace of observation. Travel that would have consumed days can now be accomplished in the few moments required to turn a page, since his prints will offer ‘an easy way for all my Country men, to turne from leafe to leafe, & soe have a sight of as many houses in few minutes, as would cost many dayes and weeks to travaile to them’. From the traditionally restrained environments characterised by careful movement and pause, house and estate have become objects among which one passes quickly, glancing swiftly across a print and then flipping to the next illustration. By the very technique of Winstanley’s depiction, in fact, his readers would be encouraged to move quickly. In the etching of Littlebury that he offered as an example, details of the main façade are visible immediately. Window and door mouldings pop out from blank sheet with their firm black lines, for Winstanley has isolated the dark hatching to the places where he needs to indicate three dimensions – for instance, to suggest the slanted pitch of the roof. There is little risk too that the viewer will wander distractedly among the etching’s details and so engage in prolonged study of a single house and estate. One can see the side façade of Littlebury, but few of its details are visible; windows are merely evenly spaced openings, and dormers are evident simply in silhouette. Winstanley thus focuses his reader on the main façade, the entrance wall that is the main means by which a house would be recognised and remembered and correspondingly the most important aspect for a viewer to observe. Like the English travellers who recorded summaries of houses in their journals, to which they could then return to refresh their memory, Winstanley’s readers have the basic outline of the house before them. Paradoxically while at home reading this volume, one can journey more swiftly than when actually physically travelling and one too can gain the traveller’s synopses that prompt subsequent recollection. To his seventeenth-century viewer, Winstanley also offered a clear invitation to travel curiously across England. His projected volume had, in fact, no precedent among English books, as earlier authors had scattered smaller, less precise illustrations of house and estate across books devoted to the histories and notable features of individual counties. For instance Daniel King, in his book on the county of Chester, included a view of Crew Hall in a page dominated by closely printed text (Figure 40).53 Two-thirds of this page is consumed by text, while the illustration occupies merely a narrow

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Daniel King, The Vale-Royall of England, 1656, Crew Hall. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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third and Crew Hall is a tiny block within that third. The house stands at the back of a scene filled primarily by a bridge, an open forecourt, and scattered estate buildings. Consequently, readers can see only general outlines of the house – the placement of windows, the profiles of chimneys, and a masonry band separating the ground and first floors. They can consequently merely guess at particular details, including the articulation of the window frames

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and the circles in the masonry band that could be either blank roundels or niches containing busts. In contrast, Winstanley showcases such details; his viewers see at a mere glance the curves of volutes around the dormers and the keystones of the oval windows. And his viewers move more swiftly from one house to another since they can just turn a page instead of searching through an entire volume to see the next house. Three decades after Winstanley proposed his volume, Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff produced another book that offered readers yet swifter and more extensive motion. In their Britannia illustrata of 1707, they presented bird’s-eye views of estates which allowed readers to glance across house and once more secluded gardens (Figure 41).54 Winstanley too had invited viewers to enter his estate of Littlebury since the gate leading to his house was open and since the entrance door was merely a shadowy recess rather than marked by the solid boundary of a closed door. But his invitation had a clear and quick limit – the entrance and side walls of the house that rose at the middle of the etching and that filled much of the sheet. One can see simply the shallow spaces in front of and beside Littlebury, as the garden remains hidden behind the mass of the house. In Kip’s and Knyff ’s engraving of Longleat, on the other

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George London, Garden, Longleat, c. 1683–1714, Wiltshire, in Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata, 1707, from later edition entitled Nouveau théâtre de la Grande Bretagne, 1716. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon ­Collection.

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hand, readers observe the overall courtyard layout of service buildings and house and then swiftly move to the geometrically laid out gardens, to the treed area beyond, and to the open meadows at left and right. Because they float above house and estate instead of standing in front of the house like Winstanley’s viewer, they accomplish in a few moments nearly the full tour of an estate that would have consumed hours. They still cannot explore interior rooms, but they can learn more swiftly about the rest of the estate – for instance, glimpsing Longleat’s interior courtyard often seen by walking through interior rooms. Their swift glances, moreover, broke down well-established social boundaries so that not only could readers travel faster but some could journey farther. The less wealthy professionals and other readers who could purchase Britannia illustrata would have rarely entered the Longleat garden when they were guests but, through Kip’s and Knyff ’s intervention, they see these spaces with a mere turn of the page and glance of the eye. One travelled swiftly and far when one perused Britannia illustrata, and through this travel, one crossed once well-established boundaries with a rush of speed. In this quick movement across an estate, readers also became estranged from the house and lands within which they would often have interacted. By its very nature, the bird’s-eye view pushes readers away from each site since they float vaguely somewhere over the engraving but stand in none of its spaces. As would a curious traveller, the reader is simply passing by on the way to other sites. Kip and Knyff, in fact, offer readers cues that encourage them to keep moving rather than imagine participating in an estate. One can imagine strolling along the garden path like the well-dressed women and men in the Longleat engraving, but the estate appears a world closed to entry; the small doors in the façade are not immediately apparent, and even the gate to the entrance drive is shut. Well-educated elite readers, moreover, would have realised that the very bird’s-eye view recast the English viewer as a Continental visitor since this technique had previously appeared in French and Italian volumes. In his sixteenth-century Les plus excellents bastiments, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau had illustrated châteaux often with bird’s-eye perspectives of house and garden alongside the more usual plan and elevation, and across Jean Marot and Daniel Marot’s more recent mid-seventeenthcentury L’Architecture française, readers could see four bird’s-eye views.55 The Italian Giovanni Battista Falda likewise, in his late seventeenth-century Li giardini di Roma, included aerial views of palazzi and gardens that frequently echoed a bird’s-eye view – showing the palazzi in perspective and the gardens as if the viewer floated directly above them.56 Kip’s and Knyff ’s readers, that is, were travellers through the estate and social boundaries both by their swift movement and by their mindset of surprise at unexpected strangeness. From mid-century, Englishmen and -women thus experienced once fami­­ liar house and estate through a range of cues – house façade, poetic rhetoric,

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and printed representation – that invited them to become curious travellers. There were still familiar moments, from the compact house blocks to mentions of traditional hospitality, but these moments occurred alongside surprising novelty that evoked wonder at unexpected strangeness. A Dutch façade could appear on an English house, ancient Greek deities could migrate to an English estate, and the bird’s-eye perspective could suggest a wandering traveller. And such cues had strong echoes in the daily lived experience of social practice, for owners stood unexpectedly at a distance from their traditional role of managing their estate, moved between city and country to reside on their estates only during a quarter of the year, and Englishmen and -women journeyed as curious tourists to see house and estate. One could still sometimes be at home, but only briefly, as home itself was also analogous to far distant Egyptian pyramids and was only one in a sequence of physical places or book pages to be visited and glanced across quickly. Notes 1 On Raynham Hall, see John Harris, ‘Raynham Hall, Norfolk’, Archaeological Journal 118 (1961), 180–7; Hill and Cornforth, English Country Houses, pp. 57–60. 2 On the early seventeenth-century English uses of pediment and portico, see Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, pp. 124–6. 3 This arrangement appears in a map within a survey book by Henry Flitcroft of the Amesbury estate then held by the Duke of Queensberry. Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, 944/1MS, fol. 1. The accompanying volume listing tenants and properties survives as Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, 944/2MS. Two later maps of the estate are Charles Bridgeman’s 1738 scheme for redesigning the land surrounding the house (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Gough Drawings a3*) and a map most likely connected with the sale of the property in 1824 (Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office 283/202). On the historical context for the 1726 map, see Anna Eavis, ‘The Avarice and Ambition of William Benson’, Georgian Group Journal 12 (2002), 8–33; Sally Jeffery, ‘Gardens and Courtyards of the Seventeenth-Century Villa and Smaller House’, in Malcolm Airs and Geoffrey Tyack (eds), The Renaissance Villa in Britain 1500–1700, p. 114. 4 Maurice Howard and Edward Wilson, The Vyne: A Tudor House Revealed (London: National Trust Enterprises Ltd, 2003), p. 122. A surviving 1776 map of The Vyne estate shows this relationship between the house and the road, and Horace Walpole’s 1795 description and history of The Vyne asserts that Webb’s portico faced toward the garden. Hampshire Record Office, 31M57 1210, 31M57 652, fol. 14. John Rocque’s 1745 map of London shows Gunnersbury standing close to this intersection but otherwise situated on farmland sloping down to the Thames; a copy of this map survives in the current Gunnersbury Museum. 5 A drawing of this project survives at Worcester College, Oxford as No. 73, in Harris and Tait, Catalogue of the Drawings. 6 Webb, the architect responsible for these portico designs, appears to have received

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commissions based more on these pre-existing courtier connections than on political affiliation, religious sympathy, or geographical location. Parliamentarian landowners outnumbered Royalist landowners by nine to five across the late 1640s and 1650s, religious sympathies were scattered from Puritan to Anglican, and just slightly more than half of Webb’s projects were in the vicinity of London with the others dispersed from Wiltshire to Leicestershire. For more specific details on individual patrons, see Kimberley Skelton, ‘Spaces of Leisure: The English Country House and Social Change in the 1650s’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2007), pp. 121–30, 334–6. A full summary of Webb’s patrons, projects, and extant documents is available in Bold, John Webb, pp. 53–102, 151–75. For speculation that Webb’s porticoes are politically symbolic, see Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, pp. 128–32. 7 On 6 May 1651, Chute, Lord Dacre and other owners complained together to the Committee for Compounding that the rents from their estates had been suspended. Chaloner W. Chute, A History of The Vyne in Hampshire (Winchester and London: Jacob & Johnson and Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1888), p. 73; Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, &c., 1643–1660, Preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, Cases, 1643–1646 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1890), p. 1530; Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Chaloner Chute’. No date is given for Chute’s marriage to Lady Dacre. Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Sir John Maynard’. 8 Hill and Cornforth, English Country Houses, pp. 102–10, 119–22; Worsley, ‘Thorpe Hall in Context’. 9 Bold, John Webb, p. 3. The other two drawings of Hale Park are in the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, London (JoI&WeJ [117]– [118]) and show a similar loggia. 10 Isham would have been acquainted with Webb through Henry Cogan. Cogan knew both Jones and Isham intimately; he was a witness to Jones’s will, and Isham stayed with him at his London house during the 1650s. On 1 February 1653, Bishop Brian Duppa addressed a letter to Isham, ‘For Sir Justinian Isham at Mr. Cogan’s House in Charing X’. Gyles Isham (ed.), ‘The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham 1650–1660’, Publications of the Northamptonshire Record Society 17 (1950–1), 61. I am grateful to Edward Chaney for sharing this information with me. A copy of Jones’s will survives as Somerset Record Office, DD/S/BT 21/7/2. 11 J. Alfred Gotch, ‘Some Newly Found Drawings and Letters of John Webb’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 28 (27 August 1921), 568. 12 Northamptonshire Record Office IL3079 A3, drawing by John Webb of Lamport Hall entrance. 13 Webb’s surviving proposal for the executed façade is Northamptonshire Record Office IL3079 A1, A1a, A2, A4, A7. 14 On Eltham Lodge, see especially Hill and Cornforth, English Country Houses, pp. 150–4. For a late seventeenth-century approximation of a portico at Welford House, see Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, p. 191. 15 On seventeenth-century Dutch architecture, see particularly W. Kuyper, Dutch Classicist Architecture: A Survey of Dutch Architecture, Gardens, and Anglo-Dutch Architecture (Delft: Delft University Press, 1980). On Dutch architecture as a template for mid-seventeenth-century English architecture, see Giles Worsley,

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Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 31–2. 16 Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 302–5. 17 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 150–72; Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 105–25, 134; Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 3–13. 18 Stephen Primatt, The City & Country Purchaser & Builder (London, 1667), p. 152. 19 Ibid. 20 Bacon, ‘Of Building’, in Essays, p. 114. 21 Ibid., p. 116. 22 Mildmay Fane, ‘To Sir John Wentworth’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp.  227–32. See also Mildmay Fane, ‘A Peppercorn or Small Rent Sent to My Lord Campden for the Loan of His House at Kensington, 9 February, 1651’, in Ibid., pp.  235–45. 23 Mildmay Fane, ‘Thorp Palace: A Miracle’, in Ibid., pp. 220–2. 24 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘wonder’. On wonder and incomprehensibility, see especially John Onians, ‘“I Wonder…”: A Short History of Amazement’, in John Onians (ed.), Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.  H. Gombrich at 85 (London: Phaidon, 1994), pp. 11–33; Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder’, American Historical Review 102:1 (February 1997), 1–26; Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a history of the notion of wonder, see Joy Kenseth (ed.), The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 25 William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse, of the Rare Adventures, and Painefull Pere­­ grinations of Long Nineteen Yeares Travayles (London, 1632), pp. 311, 312. On the rhetoric of wonder in early modern English travel writings, see Jonathan P.  A. Sell, ­Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). 26 On the widespread decline of an interest in hospitality among poets writing on house and estate, see Fowler, ‘Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre’, The Seventeenth Century (January 1986), 10–11. 27 Thomas Shipman, ‘Belvoir. 1679’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 358–62. 28 For a similar description, see Richard Allestree, The Gentlemans Calling (London, 1660), p. 124; Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, p. 139. 29 Evelyn, A Character of England, p. 35. 30 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 31 On these agricultural tracts, see Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 138–40; Anthony Low, ‘Agricultural Reform and the Love Poems of Thomas Carew; With an Instance from Lovelace’, in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds), Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England:

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Writing and the Land (London: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 66–7; Timothy Mowl, ‘New Science, Old Order: The Gardens of the Great Rebellion’, Journal of Garden History 13 (1993), 20–2. 32 Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London, 1652), p. d1r. Similar examples are: Samuel Hartlib, An Essay for the Advancement of Husbandry-Learning: Or Propositions for Erecting the College of Husbandry (London, 1651), pp. A1v–2r; The Reformed Husband-Man; Or A Brief Treatise of the Errors, Defects, and Inconveniences of our English Husbandry, in Ploughing and Sowing for Corn (London, 1651), p. A2r; John Beale, Herefordshire Orchards, A Pattern for all England. Written in an Epistolary Address to Samuel Hartlib Esq. (London, 1657), pp. 39–40. On Blith’s volume, see Turner, The Politics of Landscape, p. 93. 33 Blith, The English Improver Improved, p. d1r. 34 A Journal of the Siege of Lathom House, in Lancashire, Defended by Charlotte de la Tremouille, Countess of Derby, Against Sir Thomas Fairfax, Kt. and Other Parliamentarian Officers. 1644. (London, 1823); Hutton and Reeves, ‘Sieges and Fortifications’, pp. 200–1, 228–31. 35 Hutton and Reeves, ‘Sieges and Fortifications’, p. 199. 36 Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland, G.C.B., Preserved at Belvoir Castle, Vols 1–2, 12th Report, Appendix, Part 4 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1888, 1889), p. 4. 37 C. G. A. Clay, Industry, Trade and Government, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1984), 1: p. 91, 2: pp. 265–7; Christopher Clay, ‘Landlords and Estate Management in England’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales V: 1640–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2: pp. 119–45; Porter, London, pp. 28–66. 38 On the confiscation and the Parliamentarian sequestration of estates, see J. T. Cliffe, Puritans in Conflict: The Puritan Gentry During and After the Civil Wars (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1988), p. 86; Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 151–5. 39 J. T. Cliffe has estimated that at least 80 gentry country houses were either destroyed or seriously damaged across the Civil War. Estate deer parks too were often ruined – fences and hedges demolished and deer themselves sold, slain, or freed. J. T. Cliffe, The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 12–17, 52. 40 Margaret Cavendish, ‘A Dialogue Between a Bountiful Knight and a Castle Ruined in War’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 315–17. 41 J. T. Cliffe has estimated that 681 projects were undertaken from 1600 to 1640, 114 between 1640 and 1659. Cliffe, The World of the Country House, p. 4. The years of stability were approximately 1646–7 (between the two phases of the Civil War) and 1653–58 (from the establishment of Cromwell’s government until his death). On the early seventeenth-century explosion of building, see especially W. G. Hoskins, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640’, Past & Present 4 (November 1953), 44–59; R. Machin, ‘The Great Rebuilding: A Reassessment’, Past and Present 77 ­(November

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1977), 33–56; Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England; Adrian Green, ‘Houses in North-eastern England: Regionality and the British Beyond, c. 1600–1750’, in S. Lawrence (ed.), Archaeologies of the British: ­Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and Its Colonies, 1600–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 55–75. 42 I am grateful to John Newman for this evaluation of Amesbury. The documents in which David Papillon urged Isham to build a new house are: Northamptonshire Record Office, IC 312, letter by David Papillon to Sir Justinian Isham, 12 May 1652, IL3079 A47–9, plans by David Papillon for enlarging Lamport Hall. On the building history of Lamport Hall, see Hill and Cornforth, English Country Houses, pp.  97–101; John Heward and Robert Taylor, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire (Swindon: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1996), pp. 256–63; Skelton, ‘Spaces of Leisure’, pp. 341–3. 43 For a history of The Vyne, see particularly Chute, A History of The Vyne in Hampshire; Howard and Wilson, The Vyne. The purchase documents for The Vyne are: Hampshire Record Office, 31M57 95–104. 44 D. R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward and his World in Later Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–5. 45 Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), esp. pp. xiv–v; Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster, pp. 162–3; Dana Arnold, ‘The Country House and its Publics’ and Tim Clayton, ‘Publishing Houses: Prints of Country Seats’, in Dana Arnold (ed.), The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape and Society (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 20–60. 46 Edward Browne, A Journal of a Visit to Paris in the Year 1664, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: John Murray, 1923), p. 21. 47 Ibid. 48 Celia Fiennes, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), pp. 24–5. On her description of Coleshill, see Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England, p. 39; Cliffe, The World of the Country House, pp. 103, 215. For the recent debate on the building history of Coleshill, see Sally Jeffery, ‘The House in the Cucumber Garden’, National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2007, 25–9; John Harris, ‘Extracting Sunbeams From Cucumbers’, National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual 2008, 9. 49 Thomas Browne, Sir Thomas Browne’s Works Including His Life and Correspondence, ed. Simon Wilkin (London and Norwich: William Pickering and Josiah Fletcher, 1836), p. 52. 50 William Brereton, Travels in Holland, The United Provinces, England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Edward Hawkins (Chetham Society, 1844), p. 90. 51 On this broadening of the viewing public across media, see Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). 52 On this etching, see John Harris, The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting in Britain 1540–1870 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1979), p. 103.

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53 For similar examples, see William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656); Robert Plot, The Natural History of Stafford-shire (Oxford, 1686). On these volumes, see Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, p. 326; David Jacques, ‘Netherlandish Topographical Artists and English Gardens’, in Juliette Roding et al. (eds), Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1550–1800 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2003), p. 180. 54 On the history of Britannia illustrata, see John Harris and Gervase Jackson-Stops, ‘Introduction’, in Leonard Knyff and Johannes Kip, Britannia illustrata, eds John Harris and Gervase Jackson-Stops (Bungay: Paradigm Press, 1984), p. 5. This facsimile volume also contains the series of 80 engravings included in the first edition. 55 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Les plus excellents bastiments de France (Paris, 1576–9), esp. Montargis, Vallery, Anet, and Beauregard; Jean Marot and Daniel Marot, L’Architecture française, ou Plans … des églises, palais, hôtels et maisons particulières de Paris (Paris, n.d.). The bird’s-eye views in the Marot volume are of Marot’s design for the Elector of Palatine’s palace in Mannheim, St Peter’s in Rome, the Château de Lavardin, and a Greek temple in the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy (http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30888777v). On the French connection, see Harris and Jackson-Stops, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 56 Giovanni Battista Falda, Li giardini di Roma (Rome, 1688).

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When guests moved through the interior and garden spaces beyond the façade that offered such cues to motion, they found themselves enveloped in the perpetual changeability described by poets and encountered across social practice. In once enclosed entertaining rooms, vistas stretched before them through doors and windows to reveal long sweeps of interior and exterior space, while the walls of these rooms suggested sequences of events that could occur before their surprised eyes. And they walked through gardens that contained yet further vistas and that changed quickly in design to require mental adjustment and readjustment. Yet, owner and guests knew from both philosophers and the authors of etiquette manuals, these seemingly unbounded physical and mental movements – looking along an infinite vista or considering an unending sequence of events – no longer posed the threats feared earlier in the century. Rather, engaging a guest in perpetual physical and mental motion paradoxically ensured the perennially desirable calm harmony of social interactions. For, philosophers and social writers both argued, humans responded involuntarily to sensory stimuli; reason and social expectation no longer dependably governed human actions, and so humans could readily wander into unpredictable actions unless one held their attention. Vistas, potentially mobile wall surface, and changeable garden provided precisely this essential distraction that, in actual experience and theoretical discussion, rearticulated social divisions and assured the ideal harmony. The vista as invitation to motion Inside the mid-century house, guests suddenly found themselves pushed forward rather than halted, encouraged to keep moving quickly instead of pausing in measured rhythms. They walked into rooms that funnelled them through the interior, and they unexpectedly looked along lengthy vistas of interior and estate. At Webb’s ultimately unexecuted Belvoir Castle scheme, guests would have experienced continuous invitation, even pressure, to continue moving from the first moment when they stepped across the

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entrance threshold (Figures 42, 43). For they stepped into a familiar large axially oriented hall, yet this hall was unexpectedly transformed from a room for pausing in social interactions to a corridor that encouraged them to keep walking.1 They stood between colonnades that narrowed the space around them into a pathway leading to the end wall, and the individual columns were isolated objects likewise directing their eyes into the depth of the room. While they could have paused on the surface of a room wall interrupted only by one or two doors since they would seem to look at a single object, the columns of the colonnade created a sequence of objects to be examined one at a time. Guests too would find that they needed to stay in motion even at the end of this entrance hall as they turned right or left into a narrow corridor opening into the main stair. The castle suddenly shrank around them into a slender passage that was just wide enough for one person, not even allowing two guests to turn and talk to each other. And immediately to the side of guests were the main stairs, insistently pushed out into their space to urge them to ascend the steps. Yet again on this stair, then, guests are led forward continuously. Not only do they see the stairs rising before them, but along the second and third flights of steps, they look out through large windows to see gardens – turning their head to see the windows on the second flight and then seeing the windows directly ahead of them on the third flight. They are thus kept busily moving simultaneously in different directions, vertically up the stairs and horizontally through the windows; there is little opportunity to pause or even to allow their minds to drift from the environment around them. Finally, inside the great chamber at the top of the stairs, guests can rest, yet they also pause unexpectedly within a seemingly infinite spatial continuum in which the protective walls appear to dissolve. For the first time, they enter a large room that does not funnel them one direction or another and in which potential boundaries have even been pushed out of the way. Columns are now embedded in the walls so that they are merely low-relief variations in the wall surface and too they simply lead one’s eye around the room. Guests see columns on all walls so that they follow a rhythmic sequence around the room, ending where they started and thus moving in a complete circuit to reinforce their static position in a single space. Yet as guests look at both end walls, these repetitive column rhythms become dwarfed in a long vista stretching to the horizon. Both end walls nearly dissolve into glass windows that allow guests to look far into the distance – seeing limitless blue sky on Belvoir’s isolated hilltop. Only narrow segments of wall separate the windows to suggest some enclosure, and these segments would almost disappear when brilliant sunshine dazzled the eyes of those inside the room. Although guests could pause physically inside this great chamber, then, they were nevertheless still encouraged to be restless – still urged to imagine through an invitation that overwhelmed the cues to stand still.

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John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, final ground-floor plan. Abbreviations: Achap: Antechapel, Bc: Bedchamber, Chap: Chapel, CC: Chaplain’s chamber, CS: Chaplain’s study, Cl: Closet, H: Hall, Pan: Pantry, PBc: Pantry man’s bedchamber, SeDR: Servants’ dining room, SteBc: Steward’s bedchamber, SteDR: Steward’s dining room, St: Study, SP: Summer or great parlour, UR: Ushers’ room, WP: Winter or little parlour, WR: Withdrawing room. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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John Webb, Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, c. 1655, final first-floor plan. Abbreviations: Acham: Antechamber, Bc: Bedchamber, Cl: Closet, Ga: Gallery, GC: Great chamber, StaBc: State bedchamber, WR: Withdrawing room. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

Summer or great parlour, UR: Ushers’ room, WP: Winter or little parlour, WR: Withdrawing room. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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This invitation to restlessness, moreover, became insistently physical as guests walked to the far end of the great chamber; they discovered a vista now built into the walls surrounding them. Where they would have expected at most two or three doors to be aligned in a short sequence, they could suddenly look in both directions to see six doors aligned with each other and with windows to display Belvoir’s entire width before their eyes. Even if guests were to look along only half of this vista, they would still have the unexpected sight of three thresholds and a window, still perceiving a clear invitation to keep moving. In earlier houses, they would have seen similar uninterrupted vistas across long galleries, but these vistas were short, simply through the depth of the house, and more self-contained, in a single room

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Inigo Jones and John Webb, Whitehall Palace, ‘Taken’ scheme, late 1640s, firstfloor plan. ­©  ­Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

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(Figure 6). Longer vistas were so rare that they were greeted with marked surprise. The early seventeenth-century Sir Henry Slingsby found the vista at Holland House so unexpected that he termed it a ‘conceite’ – a playful device distinct from mundane daily life – and described it in detail as if to remind himself of its appearance. He noted in his diary, ‘from that house [Holland House], I took the conceite of a through-house in part of Red-house which I now build; & that by placing the Dores so one against another & making at each end a Balcony that one may see cleare thro’ the house’.2 Slingsby has to explain to himself at length what he means by the ‘through-house’ that he will seek to incorporate into his own house; he notes how the doors are aligned with each other and then with a balconied window at each end. Some

Peter Mills, Thorpe Hall, Cambridgeshire, 1654–7, ground-floor plan. Abbreviations: B: Buttery, CL: Closet, GP: Great parlour, H: Hall, K: Kitchen, LP: Little parlour, Pa: Parlour, WP: Winter parlour. Reproduced from Design and Plan in the Country House, by Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire, courtesy of Alison Maguire and Yale University Press.

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courtiers could have seen a similar vista across the unexecuted scheme for rebuilding Whitehall Palace proposed by Inigo Jones and John Webb. On the upper floor of their final plan, Jones and Webb aligned the doors of towers and rooms to create the illusion of a long gallery on all courtyard wings (Figure 44).3 The Earl and Countess of Rutland, however, placed this long vista at the very heart of their interior, for only when guests entered the less frequently used state bedchambers would they find enclosed spaces; they saw windows on solely one wall and solely in the periphery of their vision once they entered these chambers. But they passed into these rooms simply when the Earl and Countess chose to receive their guests here and socialised more often in the great chamber, withdrawing rooms, and the gallery that offered yet another vista. The Belvoir interior, then, seemed primarily one in a sequence of phases of motion since guests discover that upper-floor entertaining rooms lead their eyes back out to the landscape. Across England, guests experienced repeatedly such interiors that were simply one in a sequence of phases of motion. Chief Justice Oliver St John initially welcomed his guests at Thorpe Hall into a traditional interior of screens passage and great hall, but they quickly saw this familiar enclosure

46

Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, 1705–24, ground-floor plan, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 1. Abbreviations: Acham: Antechamber, DraR: Drawing Room, GBc: Great Bedchamber, GraC: Grand Cabinet, Sa: Salon. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon ­Collection.

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dissolve around them (Figure 45). For once inside the great hall, they looked through the depth of the house to the gardens, and when they reached the great parlour, the house opened before them once again – across the great parlour, screens passage, and closet of St John to the lands at the side of the house. Nowhere could St John’s guests find reassuring boundary since doorways repeatedly invited them to continue walking and windows urged them to look and imagine moving beyond the interior. By the early eighteenth century, guests at Blenheim simply continued along the entrance axis to see a vista; they merely passed from the main hall into a saloon where they could look along a sequence of doors and windows (Figure 46). Ever more easily across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries too could guests look through the window separating interior and exterior, and correspondingly the house interior became a yet briefer interlude in movements through the English landscape. At both Belvoir and Thorpe, guests had gazed through casement windows that were two narrow glass rectangles separated by a central stone post and densely crisscrossed by diagonal mullions.4 If one half of the window were open, viewers encountered even narrower slivers of landscape; they looked through glass, encountered a window frame, looked through air, and halted at the central stone moulding. Seventeenth-century viewers accustomed to looking through these windows could recompose these slivers and the diamond shards created by the mullions into an entire scene view swiftly, yet there was nevertheless still a slight hesitation as the fully open door became the screen of crisscross mullions. From 1670, however, one looked through sash windows which contained more widely spaced grids of perpendicular mullions and in which the narrow rectangular halves simply slid up and down within the wall. With such a window, guests observed a less interrupted expanse of glass both because the perpendicular grid offered larger squares and because when the window was open, a raised or lowered half merely added another horizontal bar and did not disrupt the width of the view. During the 1680s, guests even began to look through windows that were simply two gridded panes of glass sliding within the wall as the stone post disappeared.5 By the end of the seventeenth century, then, the transition from open door to glass window was swift, requiring little effort, and so little noticeable to guests looking along the spatial continuum through door and window. To late seventeenth-century English viewers, in fact, the sash window offered unprecedented transparency despite its grid of mullions. When the poet Charles Cotton praised the new sash windows of Chatsworth, he emphasised especially the unobstructed view available to owner and guest. The casement windows, he asserted, had been analogous to small holes ‘through which the pigeon was thrust out’, while the sash window was ‘but one great eye’ (ll. 1412–13).6 In dovecotes, the holes were tiny – just wide enough for pigeons or doves to squeeze through – and likewise the glass diamonds created by the

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crisscross mullions were just sufficiently large to allow a single eye to peer out. One peered through a sequence of such holes to assemble an entire view, scanning across numerous small fragments to see a single landscape. A sash window, in contrast, offered an instantaneous and effortless view, for it was an ‘eye’ that simply received light rays without any barrier. Cotton, and implicitly his readers, looked through a sash window as if there were no division between interior and exterior; they passed easily from open door to transparent glass window and beyond. It was so important for guests to keep moving inside late-century houses that even owners who preferred the traditionally more enclosed interior offered their guests expanses of rooms while avoiding the vista of doors and windows. [At Eltham Lodge, Sir John Shaw’s guests could never gaze through a sequence of doors and windows, yet they could look along the width of the house with little interruption from the first moment of entrance (Figure 47). Immediately inside the entrance door, they gazed across all of the front rooms and only moments later – only after seeing a short length of wall – they saw the same vista again. They left this vista behind them as they crossed to the main stair, yet they quickly encountered a new opening across the house – one stretching from a smaller stair at the left to a closet at the right. And their passage from the vistas of the front rooms to this new open space was particularly easy since they walked through an open colonnade instead of the usual narrower door. They moved, that is, fluidly through both the depth and width of Eltham. When they entered the back range of rooms, the house seemed to close more definitively around them; they found an anteroom that was narrower and had no doors in its side walls until guests nearly reached the back wall. Just before they reached the back wall of the room, however, guests encountered a final vista that, like the two vistas of the front range, stretched through the full width of Eltham. Repeatedly and at quick intervals, the interior opened in front of guests so that, more often than not, they were invited to walk seemingly through the entire expanse of the house; they paused only rarely, only for the brief moments when walls happened to enclose them. As guests executed these physical motions, they were simultaneously in motion mentally – travelling to recall Continental precedents of the vista and adrift from their usual expectations of the house interior. For like the foreign façade template, the vista between windows called to mind Italian villas visited on travels or studied through foreign architectural books. Guests could remember villa plans in Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura, Andrea Palladio’s I quattro libri, Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale, and Peter Paul Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova that contained at least one such vista. So important were these vistas, moreover, that Scamozzi even created asymmetrical interiors to align doors with windows; at the Villa Molin, for instance, all interior doors are off-centre so that they stand opposite windows,

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Hugh May, Eltham Lodge, London, 1663–4, ground-floor plan. Abbreviations: A: Anteroom, Ch: Chamber, CL: Closet, GP: Great parlour, LP: Little parlour. ­Reproduced from Design and Plan in the Country House, by Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire, courtesy of Alison Maguire and Yale University Press.

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and a staircase is divided into two uneven halves to avoid interrupting the sequence of doors (Figure 26). Yet, to English viewers, this vista evoked an interior in which they had to readjust to comprehend their environment, as it exposed the interior to winds. According to architectural theorists following Vitruvius, winds moved along straight lines and so in a vista, a wind could blow through an open window or seep around its edges to pass along the sequence of doors without obstruction.7 Englishmen and -women knew that such gusts brought the risk of ill health and destruction. Sir Francis Bacon observed in his manuscript ‘History of the Winds’ essay that the north wind exacerbated cough, gout, and unbalanced humours, the south wind damaged the appetites of animals and made disease more frequent, and the equally dangerous east wind had a notorious proverb associated with it: ‘When the wind is in the east / ‘Tis neither good for man nor beast’.8 In his Elements of Architecture, Sir Henry Wotton also warned that a wind could violently rip asunder a window because it was composed of such ‘different and unsociable pieces as Wood, Iron, Leade,

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48

John Webb, New Mead, Maiden Bradley, Wiltshire, 1646–50, ground-floor plan. Abbreviations: Cham: Chamber, H: Hall, K: Kitchen, La: Larder, Pan: Pantry, Pass: Passage, Pas: Pastry, SP: Summer parlour, WP: Winter parlour. Courtesy of The Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

and Glasse’.9 A nail, for instance, could hold two pieces of wood together, but that nail could also rust and loosen to the point where a gust of wind might tear the wooden pieces apart. Anyone within the vista, then, could potentially fall ill in an interior that was supposed to shelter its occupants. The vista too could unseat the social divisions essential to a stable household, for it inappropriately exposed rooms usually concealed from a stranger’s curious eye. Wotton warned his reader that an owner who desired a vista was merely following a ‘fond ambition of displaying to a Stranger all our Furniture at one Sight’.10 Such an owner invited any visitor to glance swiftly across his opulent furnishings, but he simultaneously and foolishly, or ‘fondly’, stripped away the walls that secluded more exclusive rooms.11 Consequently, the worried Wotton continued, owner and guest would experience an unsettling conflict ‘betweene … Dwelling and … Being’ – between how they lived in the domestic interior and how they led their social lives.12 When Webb attempted to incorporate a vista into Colonel Edmund Ludlow’s New Mead,

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Maiden Bradley, for instance, he cut it awkwardly through both service and entertaining spaces (Figure 48). Guests were accustomed to entering houses where service spaces were hidden in a basement or behind the buttery, yet inside New Mead, they could have seen both servants to the left in the household range of rooms and family or other guests to the right in the entertaining range of rooms. And Webb could not stretch the vista more suitably along the entertaining rooms because he also had to isolate the main stair in these rooms; the doors of the vista would have cut through the solid side walls supporting the stair. Ludlow could thus display a vista only if he overturned the fundamental division between service and entertaining spaces, only if he created the conflict between dwelling and being feared by Wotton. Like Fane who compared himself to a colonial explorer at Summerly, guests inside mid-century houses found physical, visual, and mental novelty at every turn – the invitations to actual and imagined movement that offered new objects and spaces to admire and the need to reconsider the usual assumption of a protectively enclosed interior. Mobile environment and viewer Guests found too that the vista was one moment in a sequence of experiences blending motion and mental readjustment. The very interior walls that had once provided a secure boundary suddenly seemed about change in the blink of an eye. Guests were well-accustomed to seeing the walls of entertaining rooms articulated with illusionistic decoration that was held firmly in place. In the great chamber at Hardwick Hall, the chimneypiece has strapwork playfully imitating leather, yet there is no possibility that the strapwork will curl out of shape or out of position; the leather is nailed in place, as is the moulding beneath the strapwork (Figure 49). Likewise, in the Double Cube Room at Wilton, the Earl of Pembroke’s guests saw sculpted swags hanging fancifully on the walls but also carefully set within gilded frames separating them from the additionally enframed paintings (Figure 50).13 Even the curtain that is pushed back over the chimneypiece painting will not fall down because it sits behind the large circular heads of two rods. Inside both Hardwick and Wilton, then, guests saw reassuringly stationary walls – walls that they could constantly comprehend after an initial investigation. At Chevening during the early 1650s, however, Lord Dacre would have enveloped his guests within an environment that seemed about to change – or even collapse – momentarily, if Webb’s proposed design had been executed (Figure 51).14 Along the walls of his central upper-floor entertaining room, they would have seen birds perched precariously on a shallow cornice and holding in their beaks the rings from which paintings would hang. The birds appear just able to maintain their balance since they have spread their wings

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49

Robert Smythson, Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, 1590–7, great chamber. © National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel.

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Inigo Jones and John Webb, Wilton House, Wiltshire, Double Cube Room, 1649. Photo: Author. Reproduced by permission of The Earl of Pembroke and Trustees of Wilton House Trust, Wilton, Salisbury, UK.

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John Webb, Chevening, Kent, first-floor main room, 1652, entrance wall. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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to steady themselves, and should they slip ever so slightly, they might lose both ring and painting. Guests too might speculate about the moments before each bird alighted because the birds seem to flap their wings slightly as if they have just ended a flight. That is, the wall evokes a sequential narrative of potential events in the viewer’s mind – consideration of how and why the birds flap their wings – and the narrative encompasses the entire lower half of the wall, not only the painting frame but the drops attached to cloth swags held by the feet of each bird. The entire room may have appeared only moments ago, and equally swiftly, may collapse; the interior surrounding guests is unexpectedly quickly changeable, offering potential novelty from minute to minute. Across the late seventeenth century, guests repeatedly encountered such rooms that evoked visual and mental sequences. Inside the saloon at Belton House, Sir John Brownlow’s guests saw a chimneypiece with densely carved drops of birds, fruit, and foliage that encouraged their eyes to dart in one direction and then another (Figure 52).15 As guests gazed at the chimneypiece, first the concave curve of a bird’s wing might catch their eye and lead it into the depth of the drop, then the convex curve of fruit might attract their eye and

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Grinling Gibbons, Belton House, Lincolnshire, saloon, 1684–5. © National Trust Images/Graham Challifour.

bring it back out to the drop’s surface, and then their eye might light on the staccato texture of foliage. And their eyes simply kept jumping from one detail to another since there were no blank areas where they could pause in their busy observation; one carving continuously abutted another. Guests would even discover new details to observe if they were to see the chimneypiece at different times of day or in different seasons. Sunlight would fall across the chimneypiece at varying angles to reveal once shadowy carvings and hide others previously observed. The chimneypiece too suggested that one could comprehend the entire room with such swiftly moving eyes, for the curving bird wings overlap the wall projection framing the chimneypiece to lead the eye easily from chimneypiece to flanking wall. Condensed into the overmantel, then, was a distracting variety of invitations to keep moving, among different carved details and along the wall surface that engaged Brownlow’s guests continuously. Beyond the house too, guests remained in motion – encouraged to walk along garden paths in which expected boundary had all but vanished.16 Along early seventeenth-century garden paths, strollers had encountered the familiar staccato rhythm of movement and pause as they passed through the varying

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Isaac de Caus, Garden, Wilton, Wiltshire, 1632–6, from Isaac de Caus, Wilton Garden. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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environments of the garden. They halted sharply, for instance, between the areas of geometrically arranged plantings and the wilderness that simulated an untamed natural world. At Wilton, the Earl of Pembroke’s guests could not even see the wilderness beyond the raised terrace separating it from the geometrical gardens (Figure 53). Only after they ascended to the top of the terrace did they learn that the garden’s central path continued into the wilderness, but they were then unable to stroll smoothly along this path – held in place by their elevated position and literally by the terrace balustrade. Those who walked under the arcade of the terrace found the continuity of the path interrupted by quickly contrasting experiences; they moved from open sunlit path through a narrow arch to the cool, dark shade of the loggia and returned to sunlit path as they entered the wilderness. Such physical contrasts could suggest a correspondingly sharp mental halt, for, in his slightly earlier garden at Gorhambury, Sir Francis Bacon attached to the gate between garden and wilderness an inscription that offered a fanciful warning about savage beasts and mythological satyrs.17 Crossing from garden to wilderness, one thus paused – physically to open the gate or to readjust to the dark loggia and mentally to rethink one’s expectations of the untamed wilderness.

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In George London’s late seventeenth-century garden at Longleat, however, guests moved swiftly from garden to wilderness, as the usual boundary dissolved into a gradual transition that encouraged them to keep walking (Figure 41).18 From the back façade of Longleat, they gazed down a long avenue to see the familiar gate separating the wilderness, yet the wall which contained the gate was not the usual straight line evocative of firm boundary. Rather, it was a concave curve that receded away toward the wilderness and so led strollers gradually into this more unruly area before they literally stepped through the gate. One walked through a semicircular intermediate space, then, after leaving behind the gridded garden paths and so blurred with a sequence of steps the previously sharp distinction between being on one side or the other of the gate separating garden and wilderness. From mid-century, it was thus rarely possible to pause physically or mentally on either interior or exterior; the measured staccato rhythm of movement and pause had dissolved into a nearly perpetual blur that offered guests an ongoing sequence of novelties to be observed and comprehended. The security of motion Such continuous and consequently distracting novelty would seem to undermine the traditional purpose of an English house – sheltering and facilitating the harmonious social gatherings that the landowner was expected to maintain. Guests who were perpetually in motion had little opportunity to pause and converse with each other; they were instead constantly seeking to grasp the next novelty that attracted their attention. Yet from mid-century, both the vista and the window shed their threats and became essential, implicitly highly desirable, elements of domestic design. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the gentleman architect Roger North strongly urged his readers to replace the fashionable compact plan with the more traditional winged house so that they could resume their customary hospitality.19 Yet alongside this reassertion of traditional English social practice that had been grounded in staccato rhythms North offered unstinting praise of the vista. A ‘visto’, he asserted, gave a house ‘the perfection that one would desire’.20 Only with this long spatial continuum that invited the viewer to keep moving would a house garner the maximum praise – would it appear ‘perfect’ to a visitor who consequently would find nothing to criticise. If the viewer stood still, the house would seem imperfect, or incomplete; it would lack an expected gesture of welcome and so, paradoxically despite its resulting stasis, would be less stable and predictable.21 Guests might wonder what other expected features were absent, feeling ill at ease as they worried about the owner’s welcome. The vista, once evocative of uneasy exposure, had become a key ingredient to the social comfort of owner and guest.

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The window too that extended the vista out into the landscape simultaneously shifted from a swiftly dismissed threat to an element of prolonged architectural study and of economic measure for a house. While Wotton had warned his readers about windows in a mere few sentences, John Webb devoted several manuscript pages to comprehensive notes from Alberti, Scamozzi, and Viola Zanini on windows – covering topics including construction, proportions, and placement. And windows were the only design element to which he allotted such focused attention; he also wrote pages on the Ionic Order, but these sheets comprised more an essay destined for publication, as Webb simply mentioned other authors’ names in his text instead of citing name and precise page reference for future review.22 North too described the window at length, enumerating for his reader the various types and where they were most appropriately used.23 As North was writing, Parliament transformed this once feared and fragile window even into a dependable basis for taxing owners on their houses. In response to sharp complaints about tax assessors who walked throughout houses to count fireplaces for the previous hearth tax, parliamentary officials repealed the hearth tax and then passed the less invasive window tax. Tax officials simply walked around the exterior of a house to count its windows, and owners then paid a set rate for the total: 2 shillings for 10 or fewer windows, 6 or 8 shillings for 10–20 windows, and 10 shillings for more than 20 windows.24 And the tax rate remained so low that the tax more underscored the preciousness of the window than placing an undesirable burden on the landowner. When Parliament revised the tax in 1709 so that owners of houses with 20–29 windows had to pay 20 shillings and those of houses with 30 or more windows had to pay 30 shillings, the tax still ranged merely from .05% to .3% of a gentleman’s income.25 Windows were valuable commodities that the vista put on display, offering economic affirmation of elite status as they also invited the viewer to imagine moving far into the distance. While Webb, North and Parliament thus praised and emphasised the vista and window, they were reflecting on a new conception of the viewer that transformed motion into more guarantee than threat. Instead of the rational, socially governed individuals assumed by Wotton and his contemporaries, a range of authors were simultaneously positing an individual controlled by the sensory stimuli encountered in his or her surroundings. North, for instance, based his recommendations about windows on how lighting would mould a guest’s physical and social experience. A cupola, he argued, was desirable in a dining room because it provided evenly dispersed light to ‘promote society by equall observation to and of all’.26 Owner, family, and guests could easily maintain conversations at table when sunlight fell equally on all faces. For both speaker and listener could see each other’s faces and so judge the attitude with which a statement was spoken and received. In rooms with windows along their walls, conversations would progress more awkwardly, by uncertain fits

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and starts as some individuals were fully illuminated and others backlit. The fully illuminated guests would be readily seen by those opposite them, even minute shifts in facial expression made visible, yet they could not likewise see the backlit guests whose faces were obscured by the brilliant sunlight behind them. Rather than relying on well-established social expectations, that is, North considered how the built domestic interior could provide sensory stimuli to facilitate harmonious interactions. The entire vista, argued Sir Roger Pratt in an unpublished essay on architecture, was precisely a moment of showcasing this emphasis on sensory experience. As he addressed potential patrons in his essay, he praised the vista for the visual pleasure that it offered. Simply by itself a sequence of doors was pleasing to the eye, and the addition of windows that created a seemingly infinite spatial continuum made the vista ‘soe much ye more pleasant’.27 It was pleasurable to look along a vista and even more pleasurable to observe one that offered an ongoing sequence of novelties – the new experiences inevitably encountered along a continuum and the surprise of the contrast between shadowy interior with dark wood furnishings and sunlit exterior. Pratt even recommended making this invitation to admire the vista with pleasure explicit, for he asserted that an owner should place a landscape painting over each door of the vista.28 As guests walked along the vista, then, they would repeatedly compare actual and painted landscapes in juxtapositions that transformed the English landscape into a strange land admired by a traveller. When they looked from one landscape view to another, they might notice previously unobserved aspects of the English landscape that made it similar to the Continental or mythological one and, correspondingly, that would lift it out of well-established expectations. Mid-century viewers would, in fact, be particularly aware of the admiration sparked by such juxtapositions since poets describing house and estate had used a similar technique to foreground visual pleasure. Andrew Marvell, for instance, compared a recently harvested field at Nun Appleton to a bull-ring ‘Ere the bulls enter a Madril’ (l. 448). Englishmen and -women who saw a harvested field could readily call to mind the traditional activities of tenant workers harvesting the crops, yet Marvell empties the field of its familiar labourers. He describes the mown meadow as simply ‘A levelled space, … smooth and plain’ (l. 441), and the analogy to the Madrid bull-ring intensifies his reader’s focus on the smooth emptiness. The dirt of the bull-ring would be likewise smooth and the bull-ring empty before the bullfight began. The comparison, moreover, was surprising – an unexpected juxtaposition of violent public ceremonial with peaceful mundane harvest and of infrequently visited hot Spain with familiar cooler England that distanced readers from familiar scenes. The startled reader could align these two spaces solely by stepping back to consider them with an observer’s curious glance rather than with a participant’s engaged gaze. So too Pratt’s juxtaposi-

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tion of painted and actual landscape puts the guest at an admiring distance, separated from the familiar activities that could be imagined across the land. Viewers, in fact, would find this comparison of painted and actual landscape particularly compelling because of the mid-century criteria used to evaluate landscape paintings. For when authors of drawing manuals described these scenes, they increasingly emphasised scenes simulating the motion of actual landscape.29 At the beginning of the century, in his Art of Drawing, Henry Peacham had implicitly preferred a motionless landscape; he urged readers to cast shadows all in the same direction as if there were no flickering shadows that might result, for instance, from blowing leaves.30 Readers of Thomas Jenner’s Book of Drawing of 1652, William Salmon’s Polygraphice of 1672, and The Gentlemans Recreation of 1686, however, found repeated injunctions to show daily natural motions, including the movements of clouds and leaves.31 In his Graphice of 1658, William Sanderson even devoted most of his section on landscape painting to an engraving depicting a violent sea storm – suggesting that extreme movements were especially to be sought.32 The engraving, he noted, displayed waves that ‘on end do stand; ranging their race with mighty furrows; wave shoveth wave, and Billow beateth Billow’.33 The highly skilled draftsman and engraver have evoked a chaotically busy scene on a single sheet of paper. Waves race across the scene, violently ‘shov[ing] each other’, and the larger ‘Billow[s]’ strike one on top of the other. Familiar with such texts, the well-educated guests who observed Pratt’s vista would expect to find movement in both painted and actual scenes – to see two scenes that offered parallel experiences of looking through a window. The location of the scenes might be different, but they were of the same type, changeable with the unpredictability of natural breezes and enframed by picture or window and door frame and thus easily placed alongside each other. With such close parallels before eye and mind, guests readily turned to the well-established pleasure associated with looking at landscape painting when they gazed through the window at the end of the vista. They were accustomed to seeing landscape paintings displayed on the walls of entertaining rooms, and the framed view through the window seemed yet another landscape collected by the owner. More than half of the paintings lining the great chamber and withdrawing room at the Countess of Arundel’s Tart Hall were landscapes, for instance, and in the wainscoting of the Single Cube Room at Wilton, the Earl of Pembroke’s guests saw paintings of scenes from Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral Arcadia.34 Along Pratt’s vista, then, the English landscape became a valuable object put on display for guests to admire; house and estate seemed to offer less activities in which one should interact than scenes to be gazed upon with sensory satisfaction. The vista according to Pratt, moreover, was simply one moment in an entire interior choreographed to manipulate a guest’s sensory experience. He

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described how sights, sounds, and smells could be channelled into particular routes to guarantee the ideally harmonious and stable house once ensured by social convention. In his 1625 essay ‘Of Building’, Bacon had already warned owners how to direct the smells from service and elite spaces; he recommended avoiding a stair between servant and owner dining halls if they were placed on top of each other so that the smells of the servants’ dinner would not rise into the elite dining hall. Yet this warning was a unique statement in a discussion otherwise focused on separating activities into discrete wings and courtyards.35 Pratt, in contrast, addressed sensory networks crisscrossing service, entertaining, and lodging spaces: the kitchen should be located near the family little parlour so that guests in entertaining rooms were not disturbed by unexpected smells, backstairs should adjoin each set of apartment lodgings so that servants did not encounter owner and guests on the main stairs, storage spaces should be placed over guest apartments so that guests did not hear servants coming and going at unusual hours, and there should be an entertaining room between guest and family apartments so that guests did not overhear family conversations.36 Inherently, the house was as changeable as the Nun Appleton meadows described by Andrew Marvell – containing unexpected experiences, and the owner assured predictable social interactions only by directing the potential motions coursing through the interior. If an owner were to allow these motions to collide, Pratt implicitly warned, house and household would simply collapse into chaos; such choreography was essential to social stability. He worried, for instance, that guests would depart from the ideal calm that ensured measured social interactions should they overhear conversations in the family apartments. An entertaining room insulating guest and family apartments ensured that guests ‘may not at all bee disquieted by any noyses from it [the family apartment]’.37 Guests literally would lose the ‘quiet’ essential to peaceful sleep if they heard disruptive sounds throughout the night, and they could lose their mental calm by becoming worried over family quarrels. They would realise that the family offered only a veneer of easy welcome and so might wonder whether the mask of warm hospitality would slip into hostility at some point. Servants who appeared on the main stair threatened house and household yet more directly, for Pratt feared that a servant seen there could ‘fowle’ the stair.38 A servant could literally dirty the stair if he or she dropped food, used clothing, or household implements on the way from one task to another. But ‘fowle’ also connoted disease, rot, and decay, evoking the possibility that house and household might crumble because of such an unexpected appearance.39 Guests could critically report this unexpected encounter to their acquaintances and thus undermine an owner’s usual reputation for maintaining customary social practice. Pratt’s and North’s essays remained unpublished – and so unknown to most seventeenth-century readers, yet this turn to sensory stimuli would have

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been well familiar to late-century owners and guests, for authors of devotional manuals began to describe appropriate worship in terms of sensory experience within the closet. Earlier writers had stressed the suitable gestures and mindset of the worshipper; Michael Sparke explained in The Crums of Comfort with Godly Prayers, for instance, that worshippers should kneel while praying to approach God as they would address a king or other powerful figure.40 From mid-century, Edward Wettenhall and subsequent writers discussed how the worshipper’s closet should be quiet, isolated from potentially distracting household noises. In his Enter into Thy Closet, or a Method for Private Devotion of 1666, Wettenhall recommended that the closet be located on an upper floor ‘so that it will be most remote from the noise, company, and disturbance of the people below’.41 The closet too should ideally be further insulated with two doors to prevent the voice of the worshipper from being ‘heard without’.42 Thus isolated, the worshipper would surely be able to maintain the focus necessary for religious prayer, and family and guests would likewise be able to continue their expected activities. There was no risk that the worshipper would overhear conversations and consequently wander into wondering what was being discussed or that family and guests would lose the thread of conversation when they overheard stray lines of prayer. Only by choreographing the movements of people and of sensory stimuli could owners still guarantee everexpected social stability; the house was inevitably in motion and perpetually offering unpredictable sensory experiences to invite its own demise. The malleability of the sensory viewer To mid-century owners and guests, moreover, sensory stimuli seemed to threaten social stability particularly intensely – to place harmonious gatherings at risk because of vulnerable human perception. Since Aristotle, philosophers had argued that humans responded immediately to sensory stimuli, yet mid-century philosophers were suddenly questioning reason’s ability to restrain sensory response into predictable behaviour, and mid-century social writers replaced safe social expectation with idiosyncratic individual inclination as the basis for human action.43 By their very natures, philosophers had argued for centuries, humans reacted physically and mentally with involuntary sensory response; yet such reactions had been safe – offering key information about the world and under reason’s firm control. One learned about objects visually and aurally, for instance, because light rays penetrated one’s eyes, and air particles that vibrated after two objects collided transmitted vibrations to particles in one’s ears.44 Rhetorical theorists, in their turn, argued that imagined movement could produce predictable recollections from an inherently unpredictable human memory; one stored ideas at particular points in a mental landscape and then imagined revisiting that landscape to find one’s

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ideas.45 At the root of this argument, as Thomas Wilson explained in his Art of Rhetorique of 1585, was the assumption that the daily physical environment inevitably triggered human recollection. His reader learned that ‘Sometimes a chimney telleth them [humans] of many late drinkinges and sitting up by the fire. Sometimes a Bedstead putteth them in remembraunce of many good morowes: sometimes a doores, & sometimes a parler’.46 Objects and spaces – whether chimneys, bedsteads, doors, or parlours – call to mind previous experiences when one sees them again. A chimney evokes late-night social gatherings, and a bedstead, door, or parlour turns one’s mind to days that had been the beginnings of sequences of good events, or ‘good morowes’. Such involuntary responses could have dangerously sparked unpredictable behaviour since the senses were closely allied with the unruly passions, but authors knew that reason could reliably retain its dominion over both the senses and the passions. In his Passions of the Minde in Generall, Thomas Wright had explained that though the senses and the passions were particularly closely allied, the passions were nevertheless ‘servants’ subordinate to reason.47 And Thomas Wilson assumed precisely this unrelenting rational control, for he argued that the chimney, bedstead, door, and parlour would prompt the calm recollection of earlier experiences rather than passionate impulses. Instead of desiring more wine when one remembers late-night gatherings at the hearth, one simply recalls the pleasantness of those gatherings. Humans responded involuntarily to the world around them, but reason also restrained those involuntary responses into predictably measured behaviour. At mid-century, philosophers feared that reason’s authority was no longer guaranteed. Across his 1645 treatises on the human body and soul, Kenelm Digby explained that either reason or the passions could control human ­behaviour. So powerful were the passions in their struggle to assert their authority, Digby asserted, that reason had to ‘muster all its forces, to encounter, as it were in set battaile, the assault of some concupiscence’.48 Simply to withstand the assault of a ‘concupiscence’, or passion, reason had to gather all the forces possible; the attack of the passion would be violent, and reason required strength to resist this attack that resembled a pitched battle. Even then, it could find itself defeated by the passion and ‘forced like a captive to obey the others lawes’, forced to follow the impulses of that passion. Thus freed from measured reason, an individual could execute uncontrolled and potentially unpredictable action – responding helplessly to an ungoverned desire sparked by sensory stimuli. Thomas Hobbes even argued in his De homine that reason never asserted authority, as the passions perpetually controlled human action. When individuals made decisions, they seemed to evaluate rationally the advantages and disadvantages of their options, but, Hobbes asserted, they were simply responding to oscillating passions. Stimuli in one’s environment triggered particular appetites, and those appetites oscillated with

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other appetites until the moment of decision arrived; one then selected the option that corresponded to whichever appetite happened to be dominant.49 Humans were at the mercy of their surroundings, driven by the senses and the passions to follow one or another course of action and conforming to social expectations only accidentally. Nor did etiquette manuals offer the usually reassuring counter-arguments of well-established social convention. For the first time, authors of these volumes encouraged their readers not to follow the expectations of those around them but rather their own inclinations – potentially allowing readers to perform idiosyncratic and so dangerously unpredictable actions.50 Individuals could act simply as they were prompted to act, whether by rational deduction or by passionate impulse. When George Mackenzie and John Evelyn debated the traditional dichotomy between the contemplative and the active life, for instance, Evelyn even qualified the usual insistence on an active life with an acknowledgement of individual idiosyncrasy.51 Mackenzie reiterated the usual claims about the contemplative life: one should retreat to solitary introspection and avoid the temptations of public office.52 Evelyn in his turn advocated an active life, stressing the temptations of solitary contemplation that could be avoided if one were occupied in some activity. Yet, unlike earlier English authors who had insisted that noblemen and gentlemen assume a life of public responsibility, Evelyn tempered his argument with Epicurus’s injunction, ‘Let every man … well examine his own Genius, and pursue that kind of life which he is best furnished for’.53 Evelyn urges his gentleman reader to consider his own strengths, his ‘Genius’, and then choose the way of life best suited to him. This choice encompasses both the contemplative and active lives since the reader learns that ‘if he be of a slothful nature, he is not for action; if active, he will never become a good Private-man: For as to the one rest is business, and action labour; so to the other, Otium is labour, and activity the most desirable repose’.54 A ‘slothful’ man should choose the contemplative life because his propensity for inaction makes any activity seem tiring ‘labour’, while ‘rest’ is more manageable ‘business’. In contrast, the active man will find ‘Otium’, or leisure, tiring labour because of his inclination to be performing deeds continuously and so should assume a life of public office. Clearly, the active life remains preferable since the contemplative man is undesirably lazy and idle – ‘slothful’. Yet despite Evelyn’s misgivings, he nevertheless rejects the earlier requirement that individuals fit themselves to a particular social mould. If reason is so helpless and humans are encouraged to turn to their unpredictable passionate impulses, all could seem likely to disintegrate into chaos; yet risky sensory responsiveness paradoxically guaranteed predictability and even stasis. The poet Mildmay Fane asserted that he remained the traditional resident landowner because he had been bewitched into immobility by the sensory splendour of his estate. He explains to his reader how sensory delights

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‘enchantments tie / To every sense’s faculty, / And master all those powers should give / The will any prerogative’ (ll. 119–22).55 At every turn and with every sense, Fane finds himself bound to his estate. He is used to directing his own actions – to having control over the faculties that give him the authority to will a particular action; for instance, he is accustomed to choosing where to look or what to smell. Yet Fane has no choice on his estate and simply stares at a scene, listens to a particular sound, smells a flower, touches a plant, or tastes the fruit from one of his crops. Like the individual described by mid-century philosophers, Fane is powerless under the sway of his senses and merely responds to the world around him. He is even so helpless that his senses are tied down by ‘enchantments’, by magical spells that are inherently inexplicable and thus impossible to untangle. Fane remains the traditional ideal landowner who resides permanently on his estate because of the senses that were once feared for their dangerous distraction. Manipulative design It was precisely by putting this sensory malleable individual in motion across house and estate that owners assured the ongoing stability of house and household. Garden books and new paintings of house and estate made explicit the strategic distraction of perpetually restless viewers, while the illusionistically changeable wall surface and the vista transformed distraction into an enveloping environment that ensured a well-protected household. Sensory distraction, garden book authors argued, inescapably calmed an irritated mind. Readers of John Worlidge’s Systema horti-culturae learned that ‘a great variety of Objects … reduc[e] a discomposed fancy to a more sedate temper by contemplating on those miracles of Nature Gardens afford’.56 One could walk into a garden ‘discomposed’, or irritated, from daily interactions, events, or responsibilities as one perpetually reviewed those irritations in one’s mind. Yet once within the garden, one would swiftly forget one’s annoyance as the great variety of objects in the garden – including plants, fountains, and sculptures – filled the senses and mind. There was simply no time and no room in one’s mind to remember earlier irritations because the sensory delights of the garden were so absorbing; first one novelty and then another appeared to be admired and investigated. These novelties too were particularly absorbing, for they were little explicable; Worlidge terms them ‘miracles of Nature’ and so invokes the mystery of an extraordinary event that eludes human comprehension. Guests, then, would inevitably become ‘more sedate’ as they experienced the garden around them, succumbing continuously to the forceful pull of sensory stimuli. Owners, Worlidge explicitly argued, could design their gardens to manipulate guests – to hold them enthralled and so predictably calm – through

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this perpetual sequence of novelties. Both garden and viewer should be put in motion to guarantee an ongoing series of unexpected events, his readers learned. Guests were well accustomed to stationary boundaries, whether fences or brick walls, separating one garden from another, but Worlidge observes that fences ‘are by far the more compleat and beautiful, every motion of your Body from its place, begetting a variety in the object’.57 Even the boundaries that usually offered reassuring order should change from moment to moment to contribute to the distracting ‘variety’ of the garden; fences, in fact, become ‘more compleat and beautiful’ – more fully what they should be and more visually pleasing – when they are thus changeable. Fences should even appear and disappear in mere moments, according to Worlidge, as he explains that the central portions of the fence slats should have their longer edges perpendicular to the garden, and that their tops should be square pyramidal points.58 Simply by looking from top to bottom of the fence, viewers standing opposite the fence see it first open and then close; they observe the adjacent garden between the short edges of the central portions of the slat and then find that the pyramid’s mass blocks their view. When they walk a few paces to look obliquely along the fence, they find their observations suddenly contradicted. They unexpectedly now see that the central portion of the slats blocks their view since they look at the long sides of these slats and realise that they can look more easily between the pyramids. Guests thus seemed to move through a garden in which the basic organisation swiftly changed and in which they consequently were perpetually rethinking their experience. Such continuous surprise could even extend across entire environments, startling guests into unease yet thereby also maintaining ideal calm. In his unpublished ‘Elysium Britannicum’, John Evelyn explained that the juxtaposition of carefully planned verdant gardens with austere ‘Rocks, Grotts, Caverns, Mounts, & Precipices’ both shocked viewers and offered them a pleasurable experience.59 In the verdant gardens, they saw rich colours – the green of foliage and the brilliant colours of blossoms arranged into orderly geometrical layouts that were also set within equally ordered paths. Rocks, grottoes, caverns, mounts, and precipices offered a sharply contrasting experience of grim grey or tan stone, hard and unyielding stone surfaces, and the shadowy darkness of caves as well as the unexpected drop-offs of precipices. One could never be sure what might happen at one’s feet or where one should walk, and one’s uncertainty was increased by the suddenness of the shift to a barren landscape; one was unprepared for this new environment and so had to readjust one’s expectations swiftly. Viewers, Evelyn observed, were ‘unexpectedly surprised with the … horror and confusion’.60 They experienced sharp and unsettling emotions, extreme ‘horror’ at the unpredictable dangers around them and bewildering ‘confusion’ at the austerity that had so swiftly enveloped them. With this ‘horror and confusion’, moreover, they were not

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only ‘surprised’ but ‘unexpectedly’ so – that is, doubly startled, at the change in environment and at the suddenness of that change. Yet this surprise is nevertheless pleasing to viewers, a desirable experience rather than one that reduces them to panic; Evelyn claims that there is little ‘more agreable’ than encountering these strange landscapes.61 One delights in combined physical and emotional motion – from garden to rocky landscape and from some earlier mentality, whether calm or irritation, to surprise, horror, and confusion. Like Worlidge’s viewer who becomes more sedate when surrounded by the variety of a garden, Evelyn’s viewers shift to the pleasant cheerfulness essential to harmonious social gatherings because they are in perpetual motion; delighted distraction reliably replaces their potentially unpredictable earlier attitudes. Inside houses too, owners offered their guests such distractions of perpetual variety and novelty through painted canvases filled with details of house and estate.62 In earlier decades, guests had comprehended house and estate at the relatively slow pace of their progression through interior and exterior spaces – the staccato movement and pause that allowed them to see some areas and not others and to reassemble house and estate only in fragments, only with the elements that they had particularly noticed. A few guests would have seen the estate map hanging in an owner’s study, but this overview was more diagrammatic notation than evocative representation. The map primarily facilitated the owner’s supervision of his estate, instead of offering a tour to the curious guest, since the house appeared simply as a small and little-articulated block and the fields were colour-coded to distinguish one area from another.63 Only at royal palaces would guests have seen painted representations of estates, yet even these paintings offered few details about house and grounds; one saw merely the view that one had observed when approaching the castle. In Pontefract Castle, the castle stands at the back of the painting, its windows simply roughly outlined rectangles of black paint and the road leading to it invisible (Figure 54).64 Viewers stand among the public roads encircling the castle, observing in minute detail estate labourers and animals carrying produce, and are positioned at a distance, watching from behind the barrier of a shadowy hillock. At mid-century, owners for the first time invited guests to penetrate into even the exclusive gardens of their estate by a mere glance at a painted canvas. They hung on their walls paintings of house and estate that included myriad areas among which their guests’ eyes could dart swiftly and easily. Across Llanerch, viewers scan quickly over details of both house and grounds, from individual roof balusters to the lines of brickwork on the pavilion in the walled garden (Figure 55).65 They encounter one element and then immediately pass to another, as the artist has filled the entire canvas with his meticulous articulation. There is no moment when they can rest or when their minds can wander, for they always find one more detail to examine. In their elevated

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Alexander Keirincx, Pontefract Castle, c. 1640/1, oil on canvas. The Hepworth Wakefield (Wakefield Permanent Art Collection).

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Unknown British artist, seventeenth century, Llanerch, Denbighshire, Wales, c.  1667, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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position above the estate, moreover, they can pass among areas with ease and the artist has even manipulated his perspective so that guests can see fully each area. They float slightly lower over the garden pavilion to see its brick wall and then slightly higher over the fountain to observe its concentric circles of stone and trees. Mutton Davies, the owner of Llanerch, thus seems to offer his guests a comprehensively detailed portrait of his estate that both keeps them in motion and fills eye and mind. Yet this comprehensive portrait is also a strategic distraction of the guest’s wandering mind, for the profuse details of house and garden push estate buildings and animals to the margins of the canvas and so to the periphery of the viewer’s attention. Farm buildings stand at the upper left and right corners, while cows appear only at the bottom edge of the canvas. The crowd of estate workers shown in Pontefract too has been reduced to two lone figures who trudge along a narrow lane. Just as Worlidge claimed that the variety in the garden would distract an irritated viewer into a calm mindset, likewise the profusion of details in Llanerch can divert the viewer’s mind from questions about the estate to observations about house and garden. The illusionistically changeable wall surfaces of entertaining rooms transformed such strategic distraction into an enveloping environment. Owners, in fact, isolated this changeability solely to entertaining rooms and articu-

56

John Webb, Gunnersbury, Middlesex, 1658–63, little parlour chimneypiece. RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections.

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lated the spaces of daily life with more familiar stasis. On the one hand, they were thus offering their guests the expected display of intricately articulated rooms appropriate for a wealthy landowner, yet, on the other hand and in the context of the repeated textual arguments about the sensory viewer, owners were choreographing malleable guests into predictable harmony. While Lord Dacre’s guests at Chevening had seen entire walls momentarily arrested in a sequence of events, the Maynard family and their most intimate acquaintances saw a restrained and reliable chimneypiece in the little parlour at Gunnersbury (Figure 56). They could easily see that this chimneypiece was unlikely to change in the blink of an eye, as its elements were held securely in place; an uninterrupted moulding separates fireplace from overmantel, and the columns framing the overmantel are little obscured by the ends of garlands dangling to either side of them. Only at the top of the overmantel would the Maynards and their guests find an invitation to travel across firm boundaries. The garland led their eye first behind and then in front of a pediment that consequently was alternately permeable and solid. From the side of the column where the end of the garland dangled, they could follow the garland first behind the pediment, then down over the topmost moulding of the overmantel, and finally back behind the opposite side of the pediment. Yet their back and forth motion occurred within clear boundaries that echoed the well-established staccato rhythm of movement and pause. They scanned their eyes across the pediment to follow the line of the garland, yet they also had to halt where garland and pediment overlap since the garland goes behind the moulding that is perpendicular to its line. The Maynards and their guests thus looked and stopped, looked and stopped again with the measured pace usually characteristic of stable social encounters. In the family and acquaintance circles where Maynard needed less to display his ability to manage social gatherings harmoniously, the interior correspondingly relaxes into near stasis; it is safer to allow familiar minds to wander since one can understand how and why they might wander. The vista buffered yet more emphatically these household spaces from the risk of wandering minds.66 By the basic visual experience of the vista, guests were as much invited in as kept out when they looked through doors and windows. They saw holes cut into once solid walls to allow them to penetrate into additional rooms, yet those holes were also framed to insist that guests could look merely through the door or window opening and no farther. The opening into which guests looked, moreover, narrowed ultimately from long door to smaller window and so explicitly restricted the area exposed to the guest’s eyes. As owners, guests, and servants moved around the interiors that contained these vistas, guests were thus precisely admitted and pushed away. They seemed invited to walk through the full expanse of the house when they gazed along the vista, but this openness was a unique and isolated experience.

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Those who moved among household and lodging spaces found that doors here were still insulated between walls to block chilling winds – for instance, in the tower lodgings of Belvoir and in the right-hand service range of Thorpe Hall (Figures 42, 43, 45). And guests who stood in the rooms of the vista were firmly separated from daily household activities. In earlier houses, they had turned first one direction and then another to avoid the rooms which they should not enter and individuals whom they should not encounter. Inside the vista, however, they experienced an interior that was apparently emptied of these hidden activities; there was no trace of household rooms or servants since guests could look from one end of the house to the other. Owner and architect even arranged rooms so that the vista was literally surrounded by empty spaces that offered no hint of other activities; two galleries, used occasionally for exercise, flanked the Belvoir vista, and a corridor separated service spaces from the more frequently seen vista through great hall and great parlour at Thorpe. When guests experienced the potentially infinite vista, then, they encountered an openness that strategically filled eye and mind with the suggestion of perpetual novelty and that thus prevented them from wandering inappropriately – either physically or mentally – into traditionally secluded family and household rooms. Even in more compact plans, owners nevertheless still found means to isolate the vista from rooms of daily life. Inside Gunnersbury, Maynard and his family had densely stacked rooms through which they and their guests could choose a variety of routes to the vista along the garden front (Figure 57). They could walk simply through the central hall to the portico, could turn left or right from the hall into one of the small rectangular rooms just in front of the portico and then left or right into the portico, could continue from one of these small rooms into the adjoining square room and then turn left or right into the corner rooms on the garden façade, or they could turn more quickly from the hall into a side room and then continue walking to either corner room. Guests, that is, could walk through a variety of spaces if all doors were open – from the central hall into which anyone could walk to the side rooms that could be either exclusive entertaining or private household spaces. In daily use, however, the Maynards created a sharp boundary between the vista through the portico space and the adjoining square withdrawing room used for family gatherings. During testimony for a dispute over Maynard’s will, Lady Mary Maynard revealed that the door from her husband’s study to the withdrawing room had been kept permanently closed; there had been trunks and books piled against the door, and the portico area was ‘the usuall way or passage into the said Study or Closett’.67 Only when Maynard became ill during the last six months of his life, did the family open the door between study and withdrawing room so that he had readier access to the room where Lady Maynard entertained her friends.68 Across Maynard’s life, then, anyone

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145

John Webb, Gunnersbury, Middlesex, 1658–63, ground-floor plan, from Colen Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or The British Architect, Vol. 1. Abbreviations: MBc: Maynard’s bedchamber, Po: Portico, St: Study, WR: Withdrawing room. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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– for instance, legal clients – who wished to consult with him in his study, where he stored his books and papers, would have seen an interior of inviting openness.69 Immediately after stepping over the entrance threshold, they experienced a deep main hall that, though shadowy with its two windows, nevertheless stretched through almost the entire depth of the house. Guests too could see the brilliantly lit portico area through the far door and so surmise that the garden façade was just beyond. When they then entered this portico space, they found four closely spaced windows before them that seemed to dissolve the wall with the light that they admitted. And as guests then turned into Maynard’s study and potentially also looked to the opposite end of the portico, they would see a vista stretching along the width of the house. The portico even seemed particularly to showcase this vista since single doors and windows were isolated and centred in each of the walls. Again too, this experience was unique, for the doors of the other three possible vistas inside Gunnersbury – across the small stairs at the entrance, between Maynard’s

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bedchamber and the main stairs, and across the Maynards’ withdrawing room and the room opposite it – would have been more often closed than open. The Maynards would have little wanted visitors passing through the main hall to see them or their servants ascending and descending the small stairs, to observe Maynard in his bedchamber, or to watch the exclusive and potentially more intimate gatherings in the withdrawing room. Those who passed through Gunnersbury’s side rooms – whether family or close acquaintances – would thus have experienced the familiar staccato movement and halt of turning from one space to another and of walking along a range of rooms before encountering protective, sheltering walls. Maynard and his contemporaries maintained the usual invisibility of household spaces by isolating an invitation to perpetual movement that distracted the malleable viewer with an ongoing suggestion of surprising novelty. From mid-century, guests found motion literally built into the interior and exterior spaces through which they passed – both cues that invited their own physical and mental movement and the potential changeability in house and garden. They looked across the seemingly infinite spatial continua of vistas, darted their eyes over illusionistic wall carvings that could appear about to collapse, and might walk past garden fences that were open one moment and closed another. Yet this once threatening mobility now ensured the security of predictably stable social gatherings. For owners and guests knew from philosophical argument and etiquette manuals that humans were inherently unpredictable – following sensory impulses and their own inclinations. Only by keeping guests engaged in perpetual sequences of sensory novelties could owners assure that their guests would not wander into startling gestures and topics; the blur of motion paradoxically distracted their guests into the stability that had previously depended on well-reasoned stasis. While owners and guests had once interacted within a world that was more backdrop than protagonist in its comfortable familiarity, the mid-century house and garden had become protagonists in social interactions to keep owners and guests always slightly off their guard in an arrhythmia that paradoxically maintained social stability. Notes 1 For examples, see T21, T93, T141, T202, T257 in John Thorpe’s sketchbook, reproduced in Summerson, The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe; see also Charlton House of 1607 in John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 79. 2 Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 46–7. 3 On the history of seventeenth-century designs for Whitehall Palace, see particularly Margaret Whinney, ‘John Webb’s Drawings for Whitehall Palace’, Walpole Society, 31 (1942/43), 45–107; Bold, John Webb, pp. 107–18; Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition, pp. 157–74.

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4 Hentie Louw and Robert Crayford, ‘A Constructional History of the Sash-Window c. 1670–c. 1725: Part One: Industrial Organization’, Architectural History 41 (1998), 84. 5 Louw and Crayford, ‘Industrial Organization’, 83–5. On changes in seventeenthcentury window technology, see also Hentie J. Louw, ‘The Origin of the Sash Window’, Architectural History 26 (1983), 49–72; Hentie Louw, ‘“The Advantage of a Clearer Light”: The Sash Window as a Harbinger of an Age of Progress and Enlightenment’, in Ben Farmer and Hentie Louw (eds), Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 300–8; Hentie Louw and Robert Crayford, ‘A Constructional History of the Sash-Window c. 1670–c. 1725: Part Two: Fabric & Technique’, Architectural History 42 (1999), 173–239. 6 Charles Cotton, ‘Chatsworth’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 373–82. 7 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, pp. 25–7; Bacon, ‘Of Building’, in Essays, p.  116. For a repetition of Vitruvius’s argument, see Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1: p. 147. Twentieth-century engineers, however, have shown that wind can move in a variety of directions and depends on both pressure differences and friction. They have diagrammed in detail how the force of a breeze can be redirected at a building or near a window. See for instance Benjamin H. Evans, ‘Natural Air Flow Around Buildings’, The Texas A. & M. College System, Texas Engineering Experiment Station, Research Report 59 (March 1957); Kamal Handa, Wind Induced Natural Ventilation (Stockholm: Swedish Council for Building Research, 1979); Hazim B. Awbi, ‘Ventilation’, in C. Gallo, M. Sala, and A. A. M. Sayigh (eds), Architecture: Comfort and Energy (Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1998), pp. 157–88. 8 Francis Bacon, ‘The History of the Winds’, in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. 5 (London: Longman and Co., Simpkin and Co., Hamilton and Co., Whittaker and Co., J. Bain, E. Hodgson, Washbourne and Co., Richardson Brothers, Houlston and Co., Bickers and Bush, Willis and Sotheran, J. Cornish, L. Booth, J. Snow, and Aylott and Co., 1858), pp. 154–5. 9 Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, p. 56. 10 Ibid., p. 73. 11 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘fond’. 12 Wotton, The Elements of Architecture, p. 74. 13 On the restoration of the south range at Wilton House (where the Double Cube Room is located) after the 1647 fire, see Hill and Cornforth, English Country Houses, pp. 75–89; Bold, Wilton House and English Palladianism, pp. 41–50; Bold, John Webb, pp. 57–62; John Heward, ‘The Restoration of the South Front of Wilton House: The Development of the House Reconsidered’, Architectural History 35 (1992), 78–117. 14 The drawings for this room are of two adjacent walls and survive as Victoria and Albert Museum, 3436—66–7. Andor Gomme has argued that this room was the central upper-floor space behind the main stair. Andor Gomme, ‘Chevening: The Big Issues’, Georgian Group Journal 14 (2004), 176–81; Andor Gomme, ‘Chevening: The Resolutions’, Georgian Group Journal 15 (2005), 131–7. 15 On this and other similar carvings by Grinling Gibbons, see particularly David Green, Grinling Gibbons: His Work as Carver and Statuary 1648–1721 (London: Country Life Limited, 1964); Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Grinling Gibbons (London: John Murray, 1989).

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16 On this growing interest in the spaciousness of the garden, see Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (London: John Murray, 1979), pp. 95, 107–27; David Jacques, ‘Garden Design in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, Architectural History 44 (2001), 367–70; Vittoria di Palma, ‘Fragmentation, Multiplication, Permutation: Natural Histories and Sylvan Aesthetics from Bacon to Evelyn’, in Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (eds), Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished: Essays Presented to Robin Middleton (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006), pp. 233–44. 17 For a discussion of the practice of planning a wilderness near the house, see Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 139–41. 18 On the history of London’s garden at Longleat, see Knyff and Kip, Britannia illustrata, p. 182. 19 Roger North, Of Building: Roger North’s Writings on Architecture, eds Howard Colvin and John Newman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 25–6. 20 Ibid., p. 132. 21 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘perfect’. 22 Webb’s notes on the Ionic Order and on windows are held at Worcester College, Oxford (Nos 229–7, 230A–H, 231–3 in Harris and Tait, Catalogue of the Drawings). 23 North, Of Building, pp. 53–5. 24 L. M. Angus-Butterworth, ‘Window Tax’, The Glass Industry 28 (August 1947), 415. 25 W. R. Ward, ‘The Administration of the Window and Assessed Taxes, 1696–1798,’ English Historical Review 67 (1952), 524; Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, Vol. 3: Direct Taxes and Stamp Duties (London: Frank Cass, 1965), p. 169; Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 103. These percentages have been calculated from J. T. Cliffe’s estimations of annual gentry income during the late seventeenth century. Cliffe used the range from £0–£3,000. I have used the top of his lowest bracket, £500, and £3,000 on the assumption that gentry with incomes of lower than £500 would be unlikely to commission the country houses under consideration here. For Cliffe’s summary of annual gentry income, see Cliffe, The World of the Country House, pp. 198–202. 26 North, Of Building, pp. 53–5. 27 Ryston Hall, Norfolk, Pratt Coll. MS. L, fol. 5v; R. T. Gunther (ed.), The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt: Charles II’s Commissioner for the Rebuilding of London After the Great Fire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 69. On Pratt’s writings in the context of his biography and architectural practice, see Nigel Silcox-Crowe, ‘Sir Roger Pratt 1620–1685’, in Roderick Brown (ed.), The Architectural Outsiders (London: Waterstone, 1985), pp. 1–20; Nigel Silcox-Crowe, ‘The Life and Work of Sir Roger Pratt (1620–85)’ (PhD dissertation, University of Reading, 1986); Skelton, ‘Reading as a Gentleman’. 28 Pratt Coll. MS. L, fol. 6r; Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt, p. 69. 29 On seventeenth-century English drawing manuals, see Henry V. S. Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, ‘A Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century Writings on the Pictorial Arts in English’, Art Bulletin 29:3 (September 1947), 196–207; Henry V.S. Ogden

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and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955), pp. 5–15, 63–75. 30 Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing With the Pen, and Limming in Water Colours (London, 1606), pp. 30–1. 31 Thomas Jenner, A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing Or Colouring of Map and Prints (London, 1652), pp. 16–17; William Salmon, Polygraphice, or The Art of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning, Painting, Washing, Varnishing, Colouring, and Dying (London, 1672), p. 35; The Gentlemans Recreation (London, 1686), pp.  226–7. 32 William Sanderson, Graphice: The Use of the Pen and Pensil (London, 1658), pp.  9–12. 33 Ibid., p. 9. 34 Ogden and Ogden, English Taste in Landscape, pp. 17, 72–3. 35 Bacon, ‘Of Building’, p. 115. 36 Pratt Coll. MS. L, fols. 3r–v; Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt, pp. 64–5. 37 Pratt Coll. MS. L, fol. 3v; Gunther, The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt, p. 64. 38 Ibid. 39 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘foul’. 40 Michael Sparke, The Crums of Comfort with Godly Prayers (London, 1628), pp.  1–53. 41 Edward Wettenhall, Enter into Thy Closet, or a Method for Private Devotion (London, 1666), p. 6. For similar examples, see W. Brough, Sacred Principles, Services, and Soliloquies (London, 1649), pp. 330–1; Publick Devotion and the Common Service of the Church of England (London, 1675), pp. 1–3; Jeremy Taylor, The Golden Grove (London, 1680), pp. 46–56. For a discussion of Wettenhall in the context of networks in the domestic interior, see McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, pp. 238–9, 770. 42 Wettenhall, Enter into Thy Closet, p. 6. 43 On the rising importance of individual consciousness in philosophy, see especially Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 44 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 175–9. 45 See Chapter 1, n. 19. 46 Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, p. 216. 47 Wright, The Passions of the Minde, p. 8. 48 Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises: In the One of Which, The Nature of Bodies; In the Other, The Nature of Mans Soule, is Looked Into: In Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules (London, 1645), p. 48. 49 Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen, trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), p. 46. 50 On this increasing individual introversion and its context in a rising split between public and private spheres, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 154–6; Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 8–12; John Brewer, ‘This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (eds), Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), p. 2.

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51 George Mackenzie, ‘A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment’ and John Evelyn, ‘Publick Employment and an Active Life Preferr’d to Solitude and all its Appanages’, in Brian Vickers (ed.), Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Mackenzie-Evelyn Debate (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1986). On this debate, see Røstvig, Happy Man, pp. 230–5; Joseph M. Levine, ‘John Evelyn: Between the Ancients and the Moderns’, in Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmann (eds), John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), pp. 62–4; Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 3; Joseph M. Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 8–9. 52 Mackenzie, ‘A Moral Essay’, esp. pp. 21–76. For a similar argument, see Marquis of Argyle, Instructions to a Son (London, 1661), p. 17. On the rising importance of contemplation and solitude on the estate, see M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Marvell and the Poetry of Rural Solitude’, Review of English Studies 17 (1941), 37–8; Røstvig, Happy Man, p. 108; McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry, pp. 148–55; Fowler, The Country House Poem, p. 18. 53 Evelyn, ‘Publick Employment’, p. 27. On this rising importance of the rights of the individual in political theory, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 54 Evelyn, ‘Publick Employment’, p. 27. 55 Mildmay Fane, ‘My Happy Life’, in Fowler, The Country House Poem, pp. 208–15. For a similar analysis of ‘Upon Appleton House’, see John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening During the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 18–25. 56 John Worlidge, Systema horti-culturae or, the Art of Gardening (London, 1683), p. 2. For a similar argument, see William Temple, ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or Of Gardening in the Year 1685’, in William Temple, Miscellanea (London, 1690), pp. 75–82. On the importance of variety in the late seventeenth-century garden, see John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination 1600–1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 153–74. 57 Worlidge, Systema horti-culturae, p. 28. 58 Ibid., p. 27. 59 John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, or The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 187. On Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’, see particularly Peter H. Goodchild, ‘“No Phantasticall Utopia, But a Reall Place”: John Evelyn, John Beale and Backbury Hill, Hertfordshire’, Garden History 19:2 (Autumn 1991), 105–27; Frances Harris, ‘The Manuscripts of John Evelyn’s “Elysium Britannicum”’, Garden History 25:2 (Winter 1997), 131–7; O’Malley and Wolschke-Bulmann, John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’. 60 Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, p. 187. 61 Ibid. 62 On paintings of English houses and estates, see especially John Harris, Artist and the Country House; Stephen Daniels, ‘Goodly Prospects: English Estate Portraiture,

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1670–1730’, in Nicholas Alfrey and Stephen Daniels (eds), Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Art and Cartography (Nottingham: University Art Gallery, Castle Museum, 1990), pp. 9–12; Anne Laurence, ‘Space, Status and Gender in English Topographical Paintings c. 1660–c. 1740’, Architectural History 46 (2003), 81–94. 63 For a discussion of estate maps, see Sarah Bendall, Maps, Land and Society: A History, With a Carto-Bibliography of Cambridgeshire Estate Maps, c. 1600–1836 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On the hanging of these maps, see Daniels, ‘Goodly Prospects’, p. 10; Bendall, Maps, Land and Society, pp. 146, 178. Bendall cites William Leybourn’s observation in his Compleat Surveyor of 1653 that estate maps were hung in the owner’s study or in another similarly secluded room – that is, not a space seen by most guests. Daniels mentions that these maps may have hung in more public rooms, such as halls and parlours, but offers no evidence to support his claim. 64 On Pontefract Castle, see John Harris, Artist and the Country House, pp. 11–12. 65 On Llanerch, see Ibid., p. 41. 66 On this intensifying interest in secluding the household, see John Bold, ‘Privacy and the Plan’, in John Bold and Edward Chaney (eds), English Architecture Public and Private: Essays for Kerry Downes (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 107–19. 67 Guildhall Library, MS. 898 (Rawlinson papers), 13 Dec 1690 document. Lady Maynard describes the narrow corridor between the two small rooms as the ‘portico’. By ‘portico’, Lady Maynard could refer to either the ground-floor corridor beneath the portico or the portico itself on the second floor. However, she is more likely describing the ground-floor corridor since passing along this space would not require guests to re-enter the cold English climate. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid.

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As owners offered their guests these physical and mental invitations to motion across house and estate, both owner and guest well knew by the turn of the century that they were experiencing tangible extensions of a continuous mobility permeating their daily lives. The English landscape through which they travelled between city and country and between estates contained a new ease of motion particularly showcased in atlases, the pendulum clock ticked out even the tiny seconds of daily experience, and familiar solid objects were composed of perpetually vibrating particles according to scientists. Individuals too had to be in motion in order to learn about their world – oscillating among hand, eye, and mind to comprehend the natural environment, observing the ideas that coursed constantly through their minds, and understanding moral principles and language itself through movement. Yet unless disciplined and guided, movement could still dangerously threaten social and even mental stability; it could potentially undermine English customs and overturn an individual’s innate balance and restraint. In both lived experience and theoretical argument, owners and guests were encountering repeated reiterations of the choreographed mobility that transformed continuous yet structured motion into the fundamental means by which they comprehended, articulated, and constructed their entire physical and social world. Daily environments of mobility From the large scale of the roads and waterways that crisscrossed England to the smaller scale of the seconds that the new pendulum clock ticked out, late seventeenth-century individuals were surrounded by motion; the pauses once inherent to early seventeenth-century staccato rhythms had vanished into a continuous blur. Already in the 1630s, postal and coach services linked regional towns so that people and news could travel more regularly. By 1635, there were regular postal deliveries between Oxford, Bristol, Colchester, and Norwich, and two years later in 1637, weekly stagecoaches travelled through the London environs as well as out to Cambridge.1 And beginning in the 1650s,

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these networks expanded to include northern and western England as well as Scotland, for coaches operated on all roads out of London and new routes were opened to Exeter, York, Chester, Newcastle and Edinburgh.2 Simply by purchasing a coaching ticket, Englishmen and -women could travel to the western edge of England in Exeter and across northern England to Edinburgh in Scotland. Residents from these areas could likewise journey to London as well as to other cities, and information could simultaneously circulate readily and predictably. Even those who stayed at home still seemed to travel, ­encountering news and residents of other cities simply as they walked down a familiar street. When Englishmen and -women travelled along England’s roads, they physically experienced this erasure of local boundaries. Individual parishes, with their varying resources, had usually maintained roads in their area and, consequently, travellers might encounter alternating rough and smooth stretches along the same road; poorer parishes had fewer funds to devote to maintaining the ideally smooth surface and so might allow their section of road to deteriorate. From 1663, however, Parliament authorised the collection of tolls along the Great North Road passing through Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire.3 Since travellers paid tolls to support maintenance along the full length of the road, its surface would be more regularly maintained and more uniformly smooth. Coaches needed to stop and pay the toll at each barrier, yet this stop would be a far briefer interruption than the long stretches of formerly bumpy road – merely a momentary hiatus in an otherwise continuously smooth journey. Late seventeenth-century travellers experienced the Great North Road in terms of continuously rolling wheels beneath them, and from their coach windows they would see the English landscape through a nearly perpetual blur of motion. The desirability of such uninterrupted motion, in fact, became an explicit criterion across rising debates about England’s roads and waterways. In his Essay Upon Projects, Daniel Defoe explained to his reader how English roads could become yet more smoothly continuous. He criticised how some parishes still left their sections of road in bad repair and urged instead that toll barriers be placed every two miles throughout England. An entire network of smoothly maintained roads would then stretch across England, and wherever they travelled within England’s shores, individuals would move effortlessly – merely halting momentarily every two miles to pay a toll.4 Other authors argued about how movement could be facilitated through England’s waterways. Francis Mathews devoted an entire volume, Of the Opening of Rivers for Navigation of 1655, to explaining how rivers and streams should be opened to increase the ready flow of objects for trade. He informed his reader that ‘all such Streams … which would willingly fall into our said Rivers designed for Navigation, ought to be free, and not to be bound up with Wears, Sluces, Pens

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for Mills, and the like Imprestures’.5 A mill owner might seek to dam up a local river or stream to provide more power for his millwheel, but, Mathews asserts, it is more important to keep the river or stream unobstructed for the smooth flow of water across England. He envisions a national network of rivers and streams along which water moves freely and with relatively regular depth so that boats can travel with ease. Both water and transport should encounter few boundaries, authors urged, for the national mobility of people and goods trumped local concerns. The authors who composed atlases of English roads transformed this blur of motion into the very mode of constructing and comprehending one’s journey. Across early decades of the century, atlases led readers through a staccato process of composing a journey based on particular destination points. From

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Jacob van Langeren, chart of Bedfordshire, from Mathew Simons, A Direction for the English Traviller, 1635 (1643 edn.). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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the title page of his Direction for the English Traviller, Matthew Simons cast England as a series of finite distances; he explained that his book would show how ‘to Coast about all England and Wales’ because its readers would ‘know how farre any Market or noteable Towne in any Shire lyeth one from an other’.6 One travelled through England by piecing together a sequence of distances, finding the number of miles from one town to another until one reached one’s desired destination. By the steps with which Simons urged his readers to construct their journey across his pages, moreover, they assembled their route literally through a staccato rhythm. For he outlined a three-part method: examining the charts of towns in each county to determine the distance to one’s final destination, studying the map of England at the beginning of his volume to find one’s route, and then returning to the charts to peruse the county maps and find the towns through which one might pass (Figure 58).7 His readers thus jumped from one page and from one mode of representation to another; they started with a chart of numbers delineating distances, then moved back earlier in the volume and to a representational map, and finally looked again at the exact numbers alongside another map. This final perusal of chart and map, moreover, involved sharp breaks at both small and large scales that reinforced readers’ staccato rhythm of comprehension. The charts themselves were grids of vertical and horizontal lines so that one looked at a number and then halted at the boundary of a line before progressing to the next number. When readers then attempted to compare chart and map in the 1643 edition, they suddenly found that they had to adjust the basic position of head or book with little warning. They could no longer move horizontally and vertically along the chart but had to tilt head or book to see the diagonally oriented map and the page itself offered them little transition; the final numbers of the chart simply hung in undefined space between chart and map – not enclosed by the usual square and not cushioned by an empty margin that allowed readers to pause. A journey through England seemed a sequence of discrete moments suggesting equally discrete phases of travel. Half a century later, John Ogilby portrayed these journeys across England more as continuous experiences than as staccato series of points in his Britannia of 1675. His preface informed the reader that Ogilby had chosen the ‘Itinerary Way as the most Regular and Absolute’.8 With an ‘Itinerary Way’, Ogilby would lead his reader on a journey – an ‘itinerary’ signalling the list of places on a trip and derived from the Latin iter explicitly meaning journey.9 And like the invitations to motion across house and estate, Ogilby’s ‘itinerary’ will produce the greatest stability and certainty. It is the ‘most Regular and Absolute’ way because an ‘itinerary’ includes all moments of a trip so that Ogilby’s reader knows precisely what to expect. Readers even learn from the end of the preface that Ogilby noted all variations in each road, including ascents and descents marked with right-side up and upside down hills, waterways with wavy lines,

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hedges with double black lines, and turnings to adjacent sites with a short double line.10 Before travelling on any of England’s roads, one could envision the experience of passing along that road; from a single number, a journey had expanded into a sequence of shifting moments. As Ogilby described each road in his following text, he explicitly put his reader in motion through both text and image so that ‘itinerary’ was the mode of understanding his atlas. His readers focused primarily on the experience of travelling from one town to another since he noted the destination only briefly – in each chapter heading and in a few sentences concluding each chapter – and filled his pages with descriptions detailed to a furlong, or an eighth of a mile. Ogilby too addressed his readers as if they moved already through the route. In his lengthy description of London, for instance, he explained, ‘entring Leaden-Hall-street, at 6 poles you are opposite to the Gate or midle of Leaden-Hall on the Right’.11 The reader – ‘you’ – has turned into Leaden Hall Street and stands opposite the gate or middle of Leaden Hall. Thus described, the road becomes a three-dimensional environment that one can imagine passing along. And the illustrations accompanying Ogilby’s text facilitate this easy passing along one’s route, for each road is a continuously curling scroll along which the line of the road smoothly runs (Figure 59). Although the reader jumps from one section of the scroll to another – leaping from the top of one section to the bottom of the next, the engraver has smoothed over these leaps by curling each scroll section illusionistically backward or forward. Readers find that the shadowy hatched upper edges lead their eyes back into the page, while the shadowy hatched lower edges lead their eyes forward to the white area where the road reappears. One’s movements among illustrations too are smoothed out since the beginning and end of each scroll are nearly hidden, simply wrinkled edges barely visible behind the section of scroll showing the road. On each page, readers thus see primarily another section of scroll to guide their eyes forward once again along a road. Throughout Ogilby’s volume, one moves nearly continuously along both the imagined space of the road and its visual representation, merely halting briefly to turn pages and to slide one’s eyes from one scroll section to another. Even when Englishmen and -women stopped travelling across England’s roads, they nevertheless still found themselves enveloped in perpetual motion – the visible and audible ticking of the pendulum clock.12 Usually clocks, whether on public buildings like town halls and churches or inside homes, created a staccato progression of time. Individuals experienced long periods of silence punctuated by the striking of clocks because clocks chimed only on the quarter hours and only to signal special events, including weddings and funerals. A conversation or other event unfolded smoothly in silence until it was suddenly punctuated by clock chimes, echoing the familiar rhythm of movement and pause. The experience too of discerning time from a clock

Motion as mode of perception

John Ogilby, Britannia, Volume the First, or, An Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales, 1675, road from London to Hith. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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required a staccato start-stop pattern, for only a single hour hand marked time on the face of private clocks.13 Since this hand moved imperceptibly across minutes, an individual could look at the clock for long periods without noticing any change. Only by turning away and then later looking back could one notice that the hand had changed position. After Christian Huygens invented the pendulum clock in 1657, however, the progression of time was continuously visible and audible. Hour, minute, and second hands moved to make visible the passing of even small moments and ticked to make these passing moments also audible.14 Like the landscape passing the window of the smoothly rolling coach and like the perpetually curling scroll of Ogilby’s atlas, the pendulum clock offered its viewer and listener no pause. There was a separate tick for each second, yet the ticks happened so quickly that they were a continuous sound. The pendulum clock too exposed a perpetual changeability in the human system of telling time – a changeability that required physical and mental readjustments similar to those necessary for comprehending changing associations of words. If one

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were to look outside at noon on different days, the sun would most likely be in different positions; it might be precisely overhead one day and overhead a few minutes earlier or later on another day. The clockmakers who sold pendulum clocks also offered ‘equation of time’ tables so that owners could adjust their clocks periodically to match the sun’s position. And individuals easily recalled this malleability; they simply looked at clock faces and saw the winding holes by which an owner adjusted the clock.15 Sensory experience of sequential and malleable time, moreover, became increasingly widespread across the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By 1720, for instance, even less wealthy residents of Bristol owned a clock or watch.16 Public clocks might still chime on the quarter hours, but Englishmen and -women saw and heard perpetually the passage of time in their own homes. While the movement of time was thus unmistakable, those who read scientific discussions of the physical environment – precisely well-educated owners and guests of estates – knew that there were also hidden motions in seemingly static objects. One might hold a hard book in one’s hand or run one’s fingers along the unyielding contours of a stone sculpture, but those firm edges resulted from perpetually vibrating particles. Robert Hooke, in his Lectures de potentia restitutiva, likened objects to a thin sheet of iron vibrating so fast that it occupied constantly a specific volume. No other object could enter the space of the vibrating iron sheet because it moved too quickly; it occupied all positions within that volume at seemingly the same time. So too physical objects contained vibrating particles that prevented other particles from penetrating among them to dent their hard edges. The entire environment, moreover, was filled with such vibrations, for particles vibrated also in the medium – whether air, water, or another solid – surrounding an object. Medium and object remained distinct only because particles remained in motion, vibrating at distinct speeds.17 Hooke’s argument had, in part, been familiar since the ancient Roman Lucretius, as proponents of atomism – from the Italian Giordano Bruno to the English Thomas Hariot – argued that natural events occurred because the particles composing objects were set in motion.18 Yet these authors assumed that atoms most often stood still. Hariot observed in a 1596 letter to Johannes Kepler, for instance, that objects refract light rays because they contain particles which ‘resist the rays’.19 Objects are composed of solid points – atoms – and holes, and light rays can pass through the holes but cannot get past the atoms. The hard edges of an object, then, indicate equally immobile particles. Hooke, in contrast, had set atoms in perpetual motion, claiming that the world maintained its stability paradoxically because these particles moved ceaselessly. So essential was motion to understanding the entire world by the late 1680s that Isaac Newton devoted a ponderous tome, his Principia, to analysing motion at all scales – from the particles composing objects to the planets of

Motion as mode of perception

the universe.20 His readers already knew individual arguments about different types of motion, including atomist ideas and the claims of Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler about the motions of planets in a heliocentric universe. But Newton joined these arguments together into one book and into an overarching framework of mathematical rules explaining movement across scales; he offered, for instance, equations to describe the route of any object moving in a curve and to define the forces acting upon objects in motion. Planet and particle alike could be thus explained as they moved in any direction. Introducing Book 3, which contains applications of his mathematical laws, Newton in fact explicitly asserted that he had provided his reader with precisely this general system for describing the world. He had discussed, he asserted, mathematical ‘principles on which the study of philosophy can be based’ and that it is possible ‘to exhibit the system of the world from these same principles’.21 ‘Philosophy’ – that is, natural philosophy or scientific study of the natural world – rests on the assumption of mobility. Objects may be at rest or in motion, but they always have the potential for motion, and from that potential, one can describe one’s world. Across England’s roads, the passage of time, familiar objects, and the entire universe, the potential for motion was for the first time a fundamental property. The mobile human body and mind As owners and guests experienced these tangible and intangible networks of motion crisscrossing their environment, they knew that they too were in motion and that, paradoxically, they consequently comprehended their world only if they continued moving. Not only did they know the Aristotelian argument that aural perception depended on vibrating particles but also they were reading advice about sequences of physical and mental observation. When Sir Francis Bacon reiterated Aristotle’s assertion of sensory motion in his New Organon, he had nevertheless assumed the early seventeenth-century staccato rhythm of movement and pause. Motion was at the root of all human comprehension, he claimed, because humans perceived an object only when it moved at precisely the speed with which the senses could transmit data.22 Yet he simultaneously stressed the discrete nature of each observation. One observed, made a concluding judgement and then observed again, for ‘every interpretation of nature which has a chance to be true is achieved by instances, and suitable and relevant experiments, in which sense … gives a judgement on the experiment’.23 One gains an idea, or ‘interpretation’, about the natural world by assembling a series of ‘instances’ or ‘experiments’ – individual moments and experiences on each of which one’s ‘sense[s] … gives a j­udgement on the experiment’. Half a century later, in his Micrographia, Robert Hooke envisioned an ongoing process of experimentation. He observed, ‘the true Philosophy …

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is to begin with the Hands and Eyes, and to proceed on through the Memory, to be continued by the Reason; nor is it to stop there, but to come about to the Hands and Eyes again’.24 To gain accurate information, or ‘the true Philosophy’, one should move through a continuous cycle: examination with hand and eye, comparison of the resulting sensory data with what one remembers, analysis of sensory and remembered data by reason, and then a juxtaposition of mental conclusions with renewed study by hands and eyes. Hooke’s readers could even conclude that there was never a definitive conclusion, for one might want to compare the second set of visual and tactile data again with one’s memory and analyse it once again too with one’s reason; a seemingly final judgement, then, could be simply a way station while humans continued to revise ideas about their physical environment. At the turn of the century, John Locke asserted that such unceasing motion was inherent to the human mind itself and so inescapably the basis of human comprehension. Ideas based on sensory perception coursed perpetually through the human mind, he claimed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding; an individual could not choose to halt at one idea or another because the next idea would inevitably appear in the ‘train of ideas which constantly succeed one another’ when one is awake.25 The staccato rhythm of Bacon’s ‘instances’ and ‘experiments’ was, quite simply, no longer possible. Since one’s mind moved innately, one was far more likely to perform Hooke’s more fluid gradations of revision. And this perpetual cycle of ideas determined the limits of what humans could understand. Only events that occurred at precisely the pace of the mind’s cycle could be fully comprehended since solely for these happenings could one perceive the necessary connection of cause and effect. An event that happened too quickly would have been completed before an individual had considered fully its initial phases, while an event that happened too slowly would appear disconnected occurrences. The restless human mind would become distracted from the slower event, comprehending the initial phases, then shifting to other events since no further change appeared, and possibly or possibly not returning to the original event to observe its conclusion.26 Once-desirable stasis led simply to chaotic confusion because motion was an inherent property of both one’s environment and the human faculties perceiving that environment. Individuals too could learn to communicate their ideas most effectively to each other by training their bodies in particular motions. Nearly contemporaneous with John Locke, the anonymous author of The Writing Scholar’s Companion urged readers to learn to write and speak the English language correctly through repetition of the motions of pronunciation. He instructed, ‘[you must] be sure not to forget to accustom your self to pronounce Words distinctly, Syllable by Syllable, for as you use to sound them, so they will settle in your Memory’.27 His readers should memorise English words not by

Motion as mode of perception

John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, 1668, chart of human speech. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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studying their static images in black and white type on the printed page but rather by pronouncing the words themselves. And this pronunciation is a process occurring across a sequence of moments, for the author recommends that words be spoken clearly – with each syllable carefully enunciated. One experiences the phases of moving tongue, throat, and lips to create the sound of each syllable so that the word becomes a sequence of motions and sounds. Readers of John Wilkins’s An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language even learned that the entire English alphabet could be reorganised according to these processes of pronunciation. They were already familiar with ingraining meaning in human movements, but, like Bacon’s individually judged experiments, these movements were isolated static moments. In his Chirologia, for instance, John Bulwer enumerated the symbolism of various combinations of hand and finger gestures; finger and hand moved to create a particular formation and then stopped to hold that position.28 Wilkins transformed this static symbolism into a moving human head that represented vowels and combinations of consonants, for his readers see a chart of human heads seemingly arrested at the moment of pronunciation, as lines of air emerge from nose, mouth or nose and mouth (Figure 60). In the accompanying text, Wilkins explained that his chart illustrated a reorganisation of English letters in terms of pronunciation. He had ordered vowels and consonants based on two main categories of whether the sounds are uttered primarily with the lips or the tongue and then based on various subcategories: without or with breath and if with breath, whether through mouth or nose, then the type of breath through one’s mouth, and finally whether vowel or consonant has a recognisable sound or is silent. ‘B’ and ‘P’, for instance, are usually at opposite ends of the alphabet but are paired here because the lips make a similar motion to create them.29 Words thus became less static symbols than a sequence of human movements so that the basic units of communication as well were a blur of motion. Some authors even transformed motion into a metaphor for learning about intangible moral values.30 Across The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan described a virtuous Christian life by narrating how a prototypical ‘Christian’ – an everyman on whom any reader could project his or her identity – moved through a landscape symbolic of Christian virtues. From the very first pages of his volume, he made motion explicitly the essential model for a virtuous life. His reader learned that this book ‘chalketh out before thine eyes, / The man that seeks the everlasting prize; / It shows you whence he comes, whither he goes; / What he leaves undone, also what he does; / It also shows you how he runs, and runs, / Till he unto the gate of glory comes’.31 Christian, Bunyan’s protagonist, is perpetually en route across the volume, coming from one place and going to another. His motion is swift, unceasing, and insistent, for he ‘runs, and runs’ – not walking more slowly and not pausing in his running

Motion as mode of perception

until he reaches the heavenly ‘gate of glory’. So too should readers learn to run by studying Bunyan’s volume; he asserts, ‘This book will make a traveller of thee / If by its counsel thou wilt rulèd be’.32 Standing still or even pausing can cause an individual to depart from a Christian life if readers stay virtuous by remaining travellers. In the following pages, Christian leads the reader on a clear journey of moral education, extricating his body from the Slough of Despond, just as one would need to pull oneself psychologically out of depression, and conversing with Faith about the Valley of Humility that echoes the humble individual who does not seek a widespread display.33 Over the broad span of philosophical, scientific, linguistic, and religious discourse, readers found that they had to stay in motion by their very natures and in order to comprehend their surroundings. The risks and choreography of mobility Despite this widespread acceptance of motion in the world as well as in the human body and mind, however, there were nevertheless still risks inherent to the mobility that seemed so essential.34 Readers could counter the argument of The Writing Scholar’s Companion, for instance, with the criticism that an individual might easily learn a word incorrectly if he or she repeatedly pronounced it erroneously. A static printed word, in contrast, was not vulnerable to such distortion since all individuals saw the same set of letters on a page and could then reproduce that set anywhere else. While most authors ignored these doubts in smoothly convincing arguments about the benefits of motion, a few writers confronted the risks that motion posed. And they offered a solution familiar from the designs of house and estate: ­choreographing networks of motion so that individuals remained on course as they moved. Global networks of travel and communication offered the unparalleled opportunity for learning more about the world, Thomas Sprat argued in his History of the Royal Society, yet Sprat also worried that these same networks could undermine praiseworthy English social customs. He lauded members of the Society for corresponding across far-flung areas of the globe to amass a ‘Universal Intelligence’ of the world’s flora, fauna, and natural occurrences.35 England too was in an ideal geographical location, he asserted, to be a leader in assembling these details since it was ‘in the passages between the Northern parts of the World, and the Southern’.36 London, where the Royal Society met, correspondingly became ‘a City where all the noises and business in the World do meet’.37 Members of the Royal Society simply had to step across their thresholds in order to encounter foreign visitors who could tell them about little known areas of the globe. The perpetually open ports of an island country thus seemed particularly desirable because they offered no barrier to the global circulation of information.

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Sprat, though, simultaneously warned his reader against the two possible extreme attitudes toward these networks – the resistance to foreign customs that his readers would expect him to criticise and, surprisingly, an unstinting openness to foreign ideas. He explains that Englishmen and -women need to correct ‘a narrowness of mind, and a pusillanimous confining our thoughts to our selves’ and a tendency to prefer ‘every Novelty, and vanity of forein Countries’ over ‘the good things of our own’.38 Neither should his readers close their minds to all foreign ideas and customs nor should they turn their backs on everything English for the novelties of foreign countries. Rather, they should judiciously consider and then select what is best – or most appropriate to England’s well-being – within England and beyond England’s shores. Sprat explains that ‘the English need not be beholding to others’ in their ‘habits, and manners, and gestures’ but that they should turn to foreign practice ‘in their Manufactures, in their Engines, in their works in Gold, and Silver, and Brass, and Iron’.39 Englishmen could learn profitably about foreign industry, the machines driving the industry and techniques of metalwork, so that they could then produce goods which would compete with those of other countries to increase England’s prosperity. English ‘habits, and manners, and gestures’, however, should not be altered, because English expectations are unique and idiosyncratic. If Englishmen and -women were to adopt French customs, for instance, ‘the difference between their Gentry and ours is so great; that the same manners will not be decent in us, which become them well enough’.40 When English individuals interacted with each other, they expected particular verbal and physical responses, and anyone who introduced a strange French gesture would be undesirably startling. According to Sprat, he or she might even appear to have acted immorally – to have performed an action that is not ‘decent’; touching a person might be tolerated in one country and not another, or particular topics of conversation might be variably welcome or unwelcome. Like the house owner whom Pratt urged to direct the circulation of sounds into particular areas, Sprat’s readers should guide the penetration of foreign information into particular areas, those where England especially needed improvement. Englishmen and -women likewise needed to safeguard their own bodies and minds against these extremes of immobility and unrestricted motion, Alexander Pope observed in his early eighteenth-century Essay on Man. Under his pen, the familiarly precarious balance between deliberate reason and the violent passions became less a stable point of calm than ongoing moderate motion. Both the passions and reason were essential to human existence, he argued, because the passions provided the impetus toward action and reason tempered this passionate unruliness.41 Either reason alone or the passions alone would dangerously lead to destruction. Pope feared that deliberate reason would pin a man to ‘his peculiar spot, / To draw nutrition, propagate,

Motion as mode of perception

and rot’, while, under control of the passions, an individual ‘meteor-like, flames lawless thro’ the void. Destroying others, by himself destroy’d’ (ll.  63–6).42 Held in place by reason, a man could gain nutrition and ‘propagate’, or create further generations of his species, but he would ultimately die, or ‘rot’; he would possess none of the motion implicitly essential to life. On the other hand, when in the grip of the passions, he would flash through the world like a meteor that destroyed all in its path and itself was destroyed when it crashed; he would move so hastily that he could injure those around him and himself, for instance by engaging in physical combat or by spreading malicious rumours. Yet humans can produce a controlled motion that avoids these extremes if they are careful to keep the passions under some, but not complete, restraint. Pope informs his reader, ‘’tis enough to temper and employ’ the passions since ‘mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, / [They] Make and maintain the balance of the mind’ (ll. 119–20).43 Instead of harshly curbing the passions that can seem so threatening, an individual should slightly restrict and redirect their activity to ‘temper’ them and then ‘employ’ them to particular ends. With such skilful redirection, the continuously moving passions paradoxically ‘maintain the balance of the mind’. And, again, this stability occurs because of meticulous choreographing that channels motion into a particular route – here, restraining the impulsive passions into ‘due bounds’, or the perimeter of appropriate movements for desirable human action. Motion remained clearly risky, easily blurring into destruction, but it was also an inescapable way of life that could and should be redirected paradoxically to maintain calm stability. By the early eighteenth century, Andrew Marvell’s man who moved in circle and square – the figure with whom this book began – was no longer anomalous or even surprising. Rather, this man was the ideal individual around whom a comprehensible and predictable house and estate were designed. For he was in motion continuously, as square changed gradually into circle, and his motion was also carefully controlled to fit the world around him. Lord Fairfax, the particular man whom Marvell described, moved through an interior which conformed so closely to his body that the house ‘scarce endures’ the ‘greatness’ of its entering master, straining to encompass his dimensions within its modest confines. Like close-fitting clothing that restricts one’s actions, Nun Appleton’s walls were analogous to the ‘due bounds’ that Pope recommends to his reader; Fairfax could move only so far in one direction before the walls confined his gesture. There would consequently be no sudden, unpredictable gestures inside Nun Appleton, like the violent combat observed by Evelyn’s Frenchman. The close fit too of Nun Appleton to Fairfax’s body suggests the essential synchrony of human and environment movements. Both world and human mind were in motion, Locke had argued, and both domestic interior and guest were moving, Pratt had asserted, and stable comprehensibility occurred only when these two motions occurred together – for instance, when

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mind and event had the same pace. At Nun Appleton, Fairfax’s movements equal precisely the potential for motion inside the house and so walls bend but do not break to allow the house to continue standing. Mobility had become the physical, social, and mental status quo, for human, object, and environment contained the potential for and responsiveness to motion on which comprehensibility depended. Humans expected to be in motion, were calm and reassured when they moved – it was a surprise when they stood still – and individuals across discourses correspondingly constructed, textually, visually, and architecturally, their environment through this blur that was paradoxically so dependable and predictable. Notes 1 Ivan Sparkes, Stagecoaches and Carriages: An Illustrated History of Coaches and Coaching (Bourne End: Spurbooks Ltd, 1975), p. 92; Joan Parkes, Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), pp. 55–6, 81–4; Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 9. 2 Hirst, ‘Locating the 1650s’, 381. 3 Sparkes, Stagecoaches and Carriages, pp. 110–11; Parkes, Travel in England, p. 8; Andrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 86–7. 4 Daniel Defoe, Essay Upon Projects (London, 1697), pp. 68–112; McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, p. 89. 5 Francis Mathew, Of the Opening of Rivers for Navigation (London, 1655), pp. 5–6; McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, p. 46. 6 Mathew Simons, A Direction for the English Traviller (London, 1636), title page. For a similar atlas, see John Norden, England an Intended Guyde, for English Travailers (London, 1625). On seventeenth-century English atlases, see Moir, The Discovery of Britain, pp. 9–10; McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, pp. 78–111. 7 Simons, A Direction for the English Traviller, pp. 1–2 of unnumbered pages. 8 John Ogilby, Britannia, Volume the First, or, An Illustration of the Kingdom of England and Dominion of Wales (London, 1675), p. B1. 9 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘itinerary’. 10 Ogilby, Britannia, B2v. 11 Ibid., p. E1v. 12 For discussion of how the pendulum clock changed English perceptions of time, see Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 13 Since clockmakers in large European cities were making timepieces with minute hands both for show and for sale, a few wealthy households might have possessed clocks with minute hands; it is, however, impossible to establish how widely such clocks circulated. Sherman, Telling Time, p. 37; Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 135, 165–6, 251–3. 14 Sherman, Telling Time, pp. 4–5. 15 Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, pp. 140–1, 256. 16 Ibid., p. 125. 17 Robert Hooke, Lectures de potentia restitutiva, or Of Spring Explaining the Power of Springing Bodies (London, 1678), pp. 7–9. 18 Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 3–53. 19 Ibid., pp. 10–11, 26. 20 Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 21 Ibid., p. 793. 22 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, eds Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 178. 23 Ibid., p. 45. 24 Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies (New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2007), p. a3r. 25 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 175. 26 Ibid., pp. 177–8. 27 The Writing Scholar’s Companion: Or, Infallible Rules for Writing True English With Ease and Certainty (London, 1695), p. 75. 28 John Bulwer, Chirologia, or, The Naturall Language of the Hand (London, 1644). On the symbolism of single gestures, see Dilwyn Knox, ‘Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages c. 1550–1650’, in John Henry and Sarah Hutton (eds), New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1990), pp. 101–36; Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 43. 29 John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), pp. 379–80. 30 McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel, pp. 112–17. 31 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World to That Which is to Come & Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, eds John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 10. 32 Ibid., p. 10. 33 Ibid., pp. 17–19, 64–7. 34 On the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century awareness of these risks, see: Jennifer L. Roberts, ‘Copley’s Cargo: Boy with a Squirrel and the Dilemma of Transit’, American Art 21:2 (Summer 2007), 20–41; Byron Ellsworth Hamann, ‘The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay’, Art Bulletin 92 (March–June 2010), 6–36. On the disjunctures of global flows more generally, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in Mike Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (Newbury Park: SAGE Publications Inc., 1990), pp. 295–310; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and

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the Research Imagination’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 5–6. 35 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), pp. 76, 86. On the Society’s practice of corresponding with the North American colonies, see Parrish, American Curiosity, pp.  108–25. 36 Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society, p. 86. 37 Ibid., p. 87. 38 Ibid., p. 424. 39 Ibid., p. 425. 40 Ibid. 41 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 62–3. 42 Ibid., p. 62. 43 Ibid., p. 69.

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Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Prints, books, paintings, and buildings appear under the name of the author/artist when mentioned in the text. agricultural tracts 97–8 Alberti, Leon Battista 12, 69, 131 Alnwick Castle 102 Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques Les plus excellents bastiments de France 107 architectural book translations 56–63 Aristotle 135, 159 Arundel, Countess of 133 Arundel House 102 Ashby see country house entertainments atlases 154–6, 154, 157 atomism 158 Bacon, Sir Francis Gorhambury 129 ‘History of the Winds, The’ 123 New Organon, The 159–60, 162 ‘Of Building’ 36, 94, 134 ‘Of Gardens’ 36 Barclay, William Nepenthes, or The Vertues of Tobacco 49–50 ‘Baroque’ 10–11 Bate, John Mysteries of Nature and Art, The 38 Baxandall, Michael 12 Belton House 90 see also Gibbons, Grinling Blith, Walter

English Improver Improved, The 97–8 Blum, Hans Quinque columnarum exacta descriptio 1, 56–7 Bosboom, Simon 62 Brathwaite, Richard English Gentleman and Gentlewoman, The 31, 47, 48 Brereton, William 102 Breton, Nicholas Court and Country, The 47–8 Browne, Edward 101–2 Bulwer, John Chirologia 162 Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, The 162–3 Castiglione, Baldassare Courtier, The 32 Caus, Isaac de Wilton Garden 129 Caus, Salomon de Raisons des forces mouvantes, Les 38 Cavalier 53 see also Royalist Cavendish, Margaret 99, 100 Cawdrey, Robert 46, 51, 56 Cawsome House see country house entertainments Cesariano, Cesare

188

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De architectura libri dece 1, 2 Charles I 47, 53, 55, 56, 89, 98 Charles II 93 Chute, Chaloner 87, 88, 100, 109n.7 see also Webb, John, Vyne, The clocks 156–8 coach services 152–3 colonisation 49–51, 53 Jamestown 50 tobacco debate 49–50 confiscation of estates 98–9 Cotton, Charles ‘Chatsworth’ 121–2 country house entertainments Ashby 19–22 Cawsome House 20–1 mid-century criticism 96–8 country house paintings 140–2, 141 country house poems 1–3, 7, 13, 19, 27–9, 30, 32–3, 39–40, 80, 93, 94–6, 99, 100, 102, 121–2, 125, 132, 134, 137–8, 165 court-country debates 46–8 Courte of Civill Courtesie, The 30–1 Cromwell, Oliver 55–6 Crooke, Helkiah Mikrokosmographia 1, 6 Dacre, Lord 88, 109n.7 see also Webb, John, Chevening Dalechamp, Caleb Christian Hospitalitie 33 Deacon, John Tobacco Tortured 49 Defoe Daniel Essay Upon Projects 153 Dekker, Thomas Ravens Almanacke, The 5, 6 Deleuze, Gilles 11 Derby, Countess of 98 devotional manuals 134–5 Dietterlin, Wendel Architectura von Auβtheilung Symmetria und Proportion der fünff Seulen 1, 61, 62 Digby, Kenelm 136

Digges, Leonard Booke Named Tectonicon, A 57–9, 58, 62, 64 drawing manuals 133 Elizabeth I 45, 46 enfilade see vista Enstone 38 estate maps 140, 151n.63 estate stewards 100–1 etiquette manuals 7, 13, 19, 30–1, 32, 35, 47, 50, 114, 137, 146 Evelyn, John Character of England, A 76n.51, 96–7, 165 debate on active/contemplative life 137 ‘Elysium Britannicum’ 139–40 Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern, A 69–71 Falda, Giovanni Battista giardini di Roma, Li 107 Fane, Mildmay ‘My Happy Life’ 137–8 ‘Thorp Palace: A Miracle’ 95 ‘To Sir John Wentworth’ 94–5, 125 Fiennes, Celia 102 Fréart, Roland, sieur de Chambray see Evelyn, John, Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern garden design early seventeenth-century irregularity 35–8, 128–9 mid- and late-century changeability 130, 138–9 Gentlemans Recreation, The 133 Gibbons, Grinling Belton House saloon 127–8 Guillim, John Display of Heraldrie, A 45–6 Hall, Joseph Quo vadis 48–9

Index

Hariot, Thomas 6, 158 Harrison, William Description of England, A 29–30 Harvey William De circulatione sanguinis 7 De motu cordis 6–7 Herrick, Robert ‘A Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton’ 27–9, 32–3 Hertford, Marquess of 88, 100 see also Webb, John, Amesbury Heywood, Thomas Apology for Actors, An 22, 31 Hobbes, Thomas De homine 136–7 Leviathan 54 Holland House 119 ‘home’ in poetic rhetoric 39–40, 94–5 Hooke, Robert Lectures de potentia restitutiva 158 Micrographia 159–60 hospitality 29–33, 47, 95, 96, 97, 108, 130, 134 criticism of decline 47 see also country house entertainments Howell, James Dodona’s Grove 51–3, 52 Isham, Sir Justinian 76n.50, 89–90, 100, 109n.10 James I 45, 46, 47, 98 Jenner, Thomas Book of Drawing, A 133 Jones, Inigo book annotations 3, 64–5 and Henry Cogan 109n.10 Prince’s Lodging, Newmarket 91, 92 Queen’s Chapel 91 Queen’s House, Greenwich 83, 89 sketch plans of houses by John Webb 65–7, 66 see also Webb, John, Whitehall Palace, Wilton House Jonson, Ben ‘To Penshurst’ 30



‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ 39

Keirincx, Alexander Pontefract Castle 140–2, 141 King, Daniel Vale-Royall of England, The 104–6, 105 Kip, Johannes and Leonard Knyff Britannia illustrata 106–7 landscape paintings 132–3 Lathom House 98 Lawson, William New Orchard and Garden, A 36–8, 37 Leeke, John see Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da, Regular Architect, The Lennox, Duke of 86, 88 linguistic malleability 45–6, 51–6, 52, 161–2 built environment 55–6 Civil War political affiliations 53–4 heraldry and social rank 45–6 Lithgow, William 95 Llanerch 140–2, 141 Locke, John Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An 160, 165 London 39–40, 46–7, 55–6, 85–6, 93–4, 100, 108n.4, 109n.6, 152–3, 156, 163 London, George Longleat garden 106, 130 L’Orme, Philibert de Le premier tome de l’architecture 65, 69 Mackenzie, George 137 Maisons, Château de 101–2 Markham, Gervase English Husbandman, The 36 Marot, Daniel and Jean L’Architecture française 107, 113n.55 Marvell, Andrew ‘Upon Appleton House’ 1–3, 95–6, 102, 132, 134, 165 ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow’ (Bilbrough) 93

189

190

Index

masques 9, 29–30, 32 Master-piece of Round-heads, The 53–4 Mathew, Francis Of the Opening of Rivers for Navigation 153–4 May, Hugh Eltham Lodge 90, 91, 122, 123 Maynard, Sir John 88, 100 see also Webb, John, Gunnersbury memory in rhetorical theory 135–6 Mills, Peter Thorpe Hall 88, 90, 119, 120–1, 144 see also Fane, Mildmay, ‘Thorp Palace: A Miracle’ Morton, Thomas New English Canaan 51 Moxon, Joseph see Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da New Model Army 55–6 Newton, Isaac Principia 158–9 Norden, John Store-house of Varieties, A 18, 36, 37 North, Roger 130, 131–2, 134 Northumberland, Earl of 50, 102 Ogilby, John Britannia 155–6, 157 Orders 1, 8–9, 56–7, 58–61, 59, 60, 62–3, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 78n.69, 131 Palladio, Andrea annotations by Inigo Jones and John Webb 64, 78n.69 I quattro libri 1, 62, 69, 122 see also Richards, Godfrey Palmer, Thomas Essay of the Meanes How to Make Our Travailes, Into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable, An 48–9 Papillon, David 100 Parliament 39, 47, 53, 55–6, 89, 98, 99, 131, 153 Parliamentarian 53, 55, 98–9, 109n.6

passions 7, 9, 34–5, 36–7, 40, 136–7, 164–5 Peacham, Henry Art of Drawing, The 133 Compleat Gentleman, The 35, 36 Peake, Robert see Serlio, Sebastiano Percy, George 50 Perkins, William Treatise of Mans Imagination, A 33–4 philosophical tracts 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 33–5, 36, 54, 114, 135, 136–7, 138, 146, 160, 163, 164–5 Picture of a New Courtier, The 54 Plantagenet, Beauchamp 53 Pope, Alexander Essay on Man, An 164–5 portico 80–90, 109n.6, 144–6 Post, Pieter Huis ten Bosch 91, 92 postal services 152–3 Pratt, Sir Roger Coleshill 101, 102 Horseheath Hall 90, 91 manuscript writings 132–4, 164, 165 and Scamozzi 3 Pride, Colonel Henry 56 Primatt, Stephen City & Country Purchaser & Builder, The 93–4 Randolph, Thomas 39–40 Raynham Hall 82, 83 reason 7, 9, 12, 13, 34–5, 36–7, 38, 95, 97, 114, 131, 135–7, 146, 160, 164–5 Reresby, Sir John 55 Richards, Godfrey 62 Roundhead 53–4 see also Parliamentarian Royal Society see Sprat, Thomas Royalist 53, 55, 98–9, 109n.6 Rubens, Peter Paul Palazzi di Genova 65–9, 66–7, 122 Rutland, Earl and Countess of 88, 98, 100

Index



see also Webb, John, Belvoir Castle; Shipman, Thomas

St Paul, Sir George (house) 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 118–9 Salmon, William Polygraphice 133 Sanderson, William Graphice 133 Scamozzi, Vincenzo Dutch and English editions 62, 69 L’idea della architettura universale 1, 3, 4–5, 83, 84, 122, 131 Villa Molin 83, 84, 122 scientific tracts 1, 6–7, 158–60, 162 senses in architectural writings 124, 131–4 in etiquette manuals 30–1 in garden books 36–8, 138–9 in philosophical tracts 10, 34–5, 40, 136–7 in poems 95, 137–8 in scientific tracts 159–60 in travel books 95 sight 12, 30–1, 34, 95, 104, 124, 159– 60 see also Deleuze, Gilles Serlio, Sebastiano annotations by Inigo Jones and John Webb 64–5, 78n.69 First Booke of Architecture, Made by Sebastian Serly, The 56–7, 63 in Fréart de Chambray, Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern 71 sketch plans of houses by John Webb 65–6 Tutte l’opere d’architettura 1, 69, 122 Shipman, Thomas ‘Belvoir. 1679’ 96 Shute, John First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, The 1, 8–9, 69 Sidney, Sir Philip Arcadia 133 Simons, Matthew

Direction for the English Traviller, A 154–5 Slingsby, Sir Henry 119 Smith, John Description of New England, A 51 Smythson, Robert Hardwick Hall 125, 126 Wollaton Hall 25–6, 32, 80, 85 Sparke, Michael Crums of Comfort, The 135 Sprat, Thomas History of the Royal-Society, The 163–4

Tart Hall 133 theatre metaphor for daily life 22, 32 metaphor for estate experience 95–6 see also country house entertainments; masques Thorpe, John Burley-on-the-Hill 23–5, 27 sketchbook 22–8, 23, 24, 28, 31–2, 57–8 Slaugham 27, 28 translation of Hans Blum, Quinque columnarum exacta descriptio 57–8 toll roads 153 travel early seventeenth-century anxiety 46–51 in England 46–8, 93–4, 100–3 in Europe 48–9, 101–2 metaphor for estate experience 93, 94–5, 103–8 metaphor for moral education 162–3 travel journals 101–3 see also atlases; coach services; colonisation; toll roads Tyttenhanger 88, 90 Vanbrugh, Sir John and Nicholas Hawksmoor Blenheim Palace 120, 121

191

192

Index

Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da in Fréart de Chambray, Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern 71 Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura 58, 59, 60–3 Regular Architect, The (John Leeke edition) 62–3 Vignola, or The Compleat Architect (Joseph Moxon edition) 58–62, 60–1, 65, 67 Viola Zanini, Gioseffe Della architettura 65, 78n.69, 131 vista 7, 9, 10 and anxiety about wind 123–4 in early seventeenth-century houses 31, 118–20,124–5 in Italian treatises 122–3 in mid- and late-seventeenth century houses 114–18, 120–3, 143–6 in Roger North’s writings 130 in Sir Roger Pratt’s writings 132–4 Vitruvius 1, 7–8, 123 see also Cesariano, Cesare Webb, John Amesbury 80–5, 81, 87, 88, 91, 100 Belvoir Castle 86–7, 88, 98, 100, 114–18, 116–17, 120, 121, 144 see also Shipman, Thomas book annotations 64–5 Chevening 125–7, 143 Cobham Hall 86, 88 dismissal from Office of Works 89 Gunnersbury 78n.69, 85–7, 100, 142, 143, 144–6, 145 Hale Park hunting lodge 89–90, 100 Lamport Hall 90 library 78n.69 manuscript on Ionic Order 131 notes on windows 131 New Mead, Maiden Bradley 124–5

patronage 88–90, 109n.6 sketch plans of houses 65–9 Vyne, The 85–8, 86, 100 Whitehall Palace 118, 119–20 see also linguistic malleability, built environment Wilton House 125, 126 see also Caus, Isaac de; landscape paintings Wettenhall, Edward Enter into Thy Closet 135 Wilkins, John discussion of the moon 6 Essay Towards a Real Character, An 161, 162 Wilson, Thomas Art of Rhetorique, The 18, 136 windows criticism by Sir Henry Wotton 123–4 in Roger North’s writings 131–2 in Sir Roger Pratt’s writings 132 reflective glass 25 shift from casement to sash 121–2 tax 131 see also Webb, John, notes on windows Winstanley, Henry 103–6 Wisbech Castle 88, 90 Withers, George see Smith, John Wölfflin, Heinrich 10–11 wonder 21, 95, 108 Worlidge, John Systema horti-culturae 138–9 Wotton, Sir Henry Elements of Architecture, The 36, 123–5, 131 Wren, Sir Christopher architectural writings (‘Tracts’) 72 Wright, Thomas Passions of the Minde in Generall, The 34–5, 36, 136 Writing Scholar’s Companion, The 160–1