CHAPTER TWO
Aristocrats and Architects
Henry Wotton and the Country House Poem
What happens to the figure of the architect in the narrative and historical modes of architectural description of early modern England exemplified in William Camden’s Britannia? Most histories of English architecture have tracked the development of the professional architect primarily through the assimilation of classical and Continental models and design principles, as they appear in both written works about architecture and built architecture itself.1 The early to mid-seventeenth century offers sparse material for this approach, since Renaissance aesthetic styles seem to have leaked slowly into England, and even then, only in disarticulated bits and pieces.2 Inigo Jones (1573–1652) frequently stands out as the only figure of his time whose career united what Vitruvius called “both practice and reasoning,” with practice being “the constant, repeated exercise of the hands” and “reasoning” consisting of the ability to “explain the proportions of completed works skillfully and systematically.”3 In this union of the theoretical and the practical, it has been argued, Jones himself was England’s best approximation of the professional architect both described and embodied by the architect-authors of Continental and classical treatises.4
By positing a close association between the practices of the architect and of the antiquarian chorographer during this period, this study takes a different tack. The Britannia offers an alternative history by describing architecture in a way that is dependent on neither architect nor aesthetics. Camden rarely identified architecture with Italianate or any particular style. For him, architecture offered an occasion for telling human stories, and these stories often celebrated patrons and landowners. This alternative tradition allows us to see differences between England and the Continent not as a result of England’s conscious resistance to the foreign but as the result of competing modes of architectural literacy.5 While historical and narrative perceptions constituted a response to the local political, religious, and architectural changes of the post-Reformation period, they also presented a challenge to Continental models that centralized the skill of the architect and the “systematic” visual assessment of a building’s aesthetic qualities. English writers of the period conceived of the architect in a way that stemmed more directly from the related practices of the antiquarian chorographer and estate surveyor than from those of the professional designer imagined in Continental treatises.6 As a result, English and Continental models relied on very different constructions of the architect and the architectural profession. While previous studies have noted the lineal relationship of surveyor to professional architect, less attention has been paid to the ways in which these divergent models implied and produced different methods for seeing, judging, and interpreting buildings.7 For English writers, a building’s significance depended little on the visual evaluation of façades, proportions, or symmetries and more on its relation to both landscape and human history. At times, these differences manifested themselves in physical perspective—English estate description often looks outward from the house rather than at it—but they also changed the way architecture was written about and what its most important qualities were perceived to be.
Here, I use these competing models of the architectural profession as lenses through which to examine four seventeenth-century texts about the architecture of the English estate: Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624), Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” (c. 1612), Thomas Carew’s “To My Friend G.N., from Wrest” (1639), and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (c. 1654). All are partly structured around a tension between English and Continental perceptions of the architect and between resultant ways of seeing and writing about architecture. The Elements—frequently hailed as the first Vitruvian-style architectural treatise written in English—attempts to integrate these Continental and English traditions in order to package Wotton’s knowledge of Italian art and architecture for prospective English patrons. The three well-known country house poems also offer lessons in architectural connoisseurship.8 As they instruct the reader in the proper understanding of the country estate, each text implicitly or explicitly marginalizes the skill of the architect in order to promote the authority of the patron, and each argues against visual perception itself as a way of comprehending architecture’s significance. Precisely because they were sponsored by an awareness of the tension between antiquarian and aesthetic approaches to architecture, these texts also confront questions about the differences between England and the Continent that continue in current critical discussions of England’s architectural history. While English architecture and architectural writing of this period often do not reflect the terms employed by classical and Continental treatises, discussions of history, ancestry, and landscape play prominent roles. Taken together, these writers allow us to see England’s architecture as the product of an alternative and highly developed tradition.
To understand how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers imagined the architectural profession, one must know a bit about the history and profession of estate surveying during the period. In England, as architectural historians have noted, the estate surveyor provides the most direct ancestor of the modern professional architect. In his history of surveying manuals, Andrew McRae has shown that surveyors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were already engaged in negotiating a new, more technical and codified position for the profession. They, much like the literary and architectural texts to be discussed, strategically handled tensions between innovative professional developments and older, more paternalistic and strictly historical ways of imagining the estate.9
Rather than combining abstract theoretical aesthetic principles with manual skills, as the Vitruvian architect did, the surveyor joined practical building skill to the historiographic practices of the antiquarian chorographer. In a surveying manual of 1533, John Fitzherbert defines the title of surveyor: “the name of a Surveyour is a frenche name, and is as moche to saye in Englysshe, as an overseer.”10 But the surveyor was an overseer in several different senses, performing at once the duties of engineer, assessor, cartographer, and historian. He needed some knowledge of building materials, but surveying was also a descriptive practice. The surveyor mapped or measured the boundaries of an estate, and, in a role that has no direct parallel in classical and Continental conceptions of the architect, he dredged up those aspects of the estate’s history that documented the landowner’s rights to the rents, contributions, and loyalties of his or her tenants.11 “[T]o that end,” John Norden wrote in The Surveyors Dialogue (1607), “it is . . . expedient, that Lords of tenants have due regard of their owne estates, namely of the particulars of all their tenants landes, and that by a due, true, and exact view and survey of the same, to the end the Lord be not abused, nor the tenants wronged & grieved by false informations, which commonly grow by privat Inteligencers, & never by just Surveyors.”12 Fitzherbert’s early instruction manual also reveals an overlap in the research methodologies of antiquarian and surveyor. Fitzherbert demands that the surveyor search for “rentes/fees, customes, & services, the lorde oughte to have of his tenauntes” through the consultation of “evydence” such as “courte rolles, rentayles, and suche other presidentes, and specially by the originall dedes of their tenaunts.”13 The description anticipates Camden’s antiquarian inquiries, as he documents them in the Britannia’s prefatory material: “I have poored upon many an old Rowle, and Evidence: and produced their testimonie (as beyond all exception) when the cause required, in their very owne words.”14
As we have seen in the Britannia, buildings were more often associated with aristocratic owners and patrons than with the names of architects. Viewed within the purview of the surveyor, the processes of building and estate description are also tied less to aesthetics or artistry than they are to the construction of aristocratic prerogative. The builder of houses was also a builder of maps and histories—not his own, but those of the owners of the estates. As Norden’s word “dialogue” suggests, building becomes one part of an imagined exchange between surveyor and landowner in which the professional architect—as distinct from the surveyor—has no part. McRae has described land surveying and antiquarian chorography as parallel developments of the late sixteenth century, but in the works of writers such as John Leland and John Norden, the two converge.15 Leland, at least according to his posthumous commentator John Bale, had proposed to Henry VIII the simultaneous rescue of historical manuscripts and the mapping of the nation, promising the king, “thys your worlde and impery of Englande so sett fourthe in a quardrate table of sylver . . . that your grace shall have ready knowledge at the fyrst sighte of many right delectable, fruteful, and necessary pleasures, by contemplacion thereof, as often as occasyon shall move yow to the syghte of it.”16 Norden, one of the cartographers responsible for the county maps of the Britannia, also published county descriptions that were heavily indebted to the Britannia itself, inquiring after the etymologies of place names, the abundance of natural resources, and the legal and political histories that attached to various sites.17 In The Surveyors Dialogue, Norden offers the description of land in visual form: “a plot rightly drawne by true information,” which “describeth so the lively image of a Mannor, and every branch and member of the same, as the Lord sitting in his chayre, may see what he hath, where and how it lyeth.”18 As McRae has shown, some early modern estate maps supplemented visual information with narrative forms of description. In speaking of Cyprian Lucar’s 1590 Treatise Named Lucarsolace, McRae points out Lucar’s suggestion that the margins of maps “should be used to record a vast range of additional information, from the quality of the soil to ‘the disposition, industrie, studies, manners, trades, occupations, honestie, humanitie, hospitalitie, apparell, and other morall vertues of the inhabitants.’”19 The work of builder, antiquarian chorographer, and cartographer thus converged in the figure of the surveyor, and all of these activities were dedicated to recording and securing historical relationships among landlord, land, and tenant.
The second part of Norden’s Surveyors Dialogue is presented as a conversation between a surveyor and a lord who might possibly employ him. This understanding of building and estate management as part of a dialogue between surveyor and landlord—rather than as the aesthetic conception of an architect—helps to explain some strange features of what is often called the first architectural treatise written in English: Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624). Wotton openly acknowledges his classical and Continental sources, so it is not surprising that his implicit deference to English traditions has been less often noticed. On its surface, the treatise is an eclectic compilation of material from sources that include Vitruvius’s Libri decem de architectura (c. 30–20 B.C.), Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485), Philibert de l’Orme’s Nouvelles inventions pour bien bastir (1561) and Le premier tome de l’architecture (1567), and Andrea Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architecttura (1570). Wotton also displays his knowledge of textual commentary on Vitruvius, and alongside the familiar names of these Continental masters appears another set of names perhaps less well known to the modern reader: Philander, Gualterus Rivius, and Barnardino Baldi, Abbot of Gustalla.20 “I am but a gatherer and disposer of other mens stufffe,” he admits in the Preface, “at my own best value.”21 Despite the apparently broad scope of Wotton’s reading, the scope of the treatise itself is comparatively narrow. Wotton covers only topics that might be applied to the English country estate, in contrast to his sources, who take up towns, temples, public buildings, and military architecture as well.
The compilation that results is a strange generic hybrid. Part building manual for an architect designing a house and part guidebook for the gentleman connoisseur, the Elements is a book about building that could not really have been used to build, and a guide to connoisseurship that rested largely on principles of construction. The treatise vacillates between practical, mechanical advice and disavowals that such knowledge is necessary. In a complicated piece of logical diplomacy, the reader is both freed from and indebted to the sort of practical information that the Elements compiles. At the end of the Preface, Wotton suggests that his purpose is to make the reader “fit to judge of examples,” but the Elements then goes on to discuss such topics as the depth of foundations, the firing of brick, and the compounding of lime and mortar, none of which would necessarily have belonged to the knowledge of the gentleman connoisseur (A 2 v). Still, the treatise ends with an assertion about the value of “censuring,” that is, judgment, disjoined from the science of construction: “I should thinke it almost harder to be a good Censurer, then a good Architect: Because the working part may be helped with Deliberation, but the Judging must flow from extemporall habite.” Wotton stuffs most of what he says about construction into the category of connoisseurship, being “desirous to shut up these building Elements, with some Methodical direction how to censure Fabriques alreadie raised” (115), yet this “Methodical direction” seems to depend on a thorough understanding of what he calls “the working part” of architecture: “[L]et him [the censurer] suddenly runne backewardes, (for the Methode of censuring is contrary to the Methode of composing), from the Ornaments . . . to the more essentiall Members, till at last hee be able to forme this Conclusion, that the Worke is Commodious, Firme, and Delightfull; which (as I said in the beginning) are the three capitall Conditions required in good Buildings, by all Authors both Ancient and Moderne” (116). “[E]xtemporall habite,” in this case, emerges only from a systematic knowledge of the careful deliberations required to produce a building in the first place.
These strange vacillations—between the concerns of building and censuring—are explained by the absence or redefinition of the central figure, who, in Wotton’s models, is meant to unite the theoretical and practical skills of the professional architect. In Wotton’s sources, this figure joins the manual and the intellectual, the technical requirements of structural soundness and the abstract aesthetic requirements for visual beauty. Rather than basing his conception of the architect or builder primarily on the professional of foreign treatises, however, Wotton drew on a combination of two figures who were, for him, closer at hand: the landowning gentleman amateur and the surveyor. This modification is in part due to Wotton’s own goals for the treatise; his own background as reader, traveler, and purveyor of foreign goods; and his own pressing needs within the patronage system. For practical reasons, Wotton was not only interested in promoting new models—for both architects and architecture—but in reinforcing and commending native social and architectural structures that were already in place.
According to Vitruvius, an architect ought to know everything. His ideal list of accomplishments includes knowledge of letters, draftsmanship, geometry, optics, arithmetic, “a great deal of history,” philosophy, physiology, music, law, medicine, and astronomy. Of course, Vitruvius concedes, “[n]o one . . . can possibly master the fine points of each individual subject,” but it is through perception of “the relationship of all the branches of knowledge” that the architect “climb[s] step by step . . . to reach the loftiest sanctuary of Architecture.”22 This elite education is translated into concrete terms as Book II takes up the topic of building materials, including consideration of timber and brick, as well as at least six other types of masonry. Alberti held that an architect “should strive constantly to exercise and improve his ability through a keen and animated interest in the noble arts,” cultivating the capacity “by sure and wonderful reason and method . . . both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble deeds of man, by the movement of weights and the joining and massing of bodies.”23 De l’Orme’s list is similar to Alberti’s and particularly promotes the importance of geometry and arithmetic.24
There are traces of this extensive program of education in the Elements, but Wotton does not consistently extol the marriage of theoretical and practical knowledge—what Alberti calls the ability to “realize by construction”—in the same way that his sources do. In fact, he often seems at pains to separate them. To begin with, he apologizes for the concatenation of intellectual and material concerns, or at least prods it gingerly from a safe distance. “Surely,” he writes, “it cannot disgrace an Architect, which doth so well become a Philosopher, to looke into the properties of Stone and Wood . . . Nay, to descend lower even to examine Sand and Lyme, and Clay (of all which things Vitruvius hath discoursed, without any daintines, & the most of new Writers)” (10–11). Vitruvius, says Wotton, “much commendeth in an Architect, a Philosophical Spirit, that is, he would have him (as I conceave it) to be no superficiall, and floating Artificer; but a Diver into Causes, and into the Mysteries of Proportion” (54–55). For Vitruvius, this diving and philosophizing would not, indeed must not, interfere with the acquisition of mechanical knowledge; but for Wotton they seem at times to be mutually exclusive, or at least he seems to think that his readers will believe they are. The architect’s knowledge distinguishes him from the craftsman rather than joining craft and intellectual conception.
In such passages, Wotton’s emphasis is shaped by both the limitations of his own credentials and by the education he would have expected his prospective patrons to possess. Wotton himself could not claim the same kind of knowledge or practical experience as the architect-authors from whom he gathered his material. As Wotton says in the Preface, “It will be said that I handle an Art, no way suteable either to my employments, or to my fortune” (A 1 r). The conventional modesty of the claim does not preclude its truth: it is unlikely, given his background, that Wotton could have executed his own advice, about laying foundations, for instance, or firing brick, or engineering vaults and arches. His name is not associated with the creation or design of a single building in England: the “elements” assembled in his treatise were never assembled in timber or stone. His sources differed substantially from one another in their training and experience, ranging from Alberti, the great humanist scholar, to Palladio, who rose under the auspices of Daniele Barbaro from his trade as a mason, but Wotton displays significantly less practical experience or knowledge than any of them.25 Much of his advice about materials and construction remains at a level so obvious it is nearly funny. Of roofs, for instance, he writes, “There are two extremities to be avoyded . . . That it be not too heavy, nor too light,” and of types of stone, “that some, are better within, and other to beare Weather” (79, 11). In a discussion of floor plans, he specifically characterizes himself as a “speculative” writer, who is “not bound, to comprise all particular Cases, within the Latitude of the Subject” but only to give “Generall Lights, and Directions, and pointings at some faults.” The work of the architect once again becomes secondary to the promotional concerns of the treatise, as the builder is here left to wrestle with practicalities, being put to “ingenious”—and here undescribed—“shifts” in order to deal with the “scarsitie of Ground” (74).
The Elements was produced by an extensively traveled diplomat, dilettante, and spy seemingly as part of a desperate bid for patronage. It was churned out and, Wotton himself would write, “printed sheet by sheet, as fast as it was born, and it was born as soon as it was conceived.”26 In 1624, after seventeen years as James I’s ambassador to Venice, Wotton heard that his post had been given away to Sir Isaac Wake. Taking this news as a bad sign, he returned home to England in search of a new employer and a new job. “I am left utterly destitute of all possibility to subsist at home,” he wrote to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, “much like those seal-fishes, which sometimes, as they say, oversleeping themselves in an ebbing water, feel nothing about them but a dry shore when they awake.”27 Seeking appointment to the lucrative provostship of Eton College, Wotton whipped up this short treatise of 125 pages and sent presentation copies to a number of influential prospective patrons, including King James, Prince Charles, Lionel Cranfield the Lord Treasurer and Earl of Middlesex, and George Abbot the Archbishop of Canterbury.28 His efforts, along with some other trading and politicking, were ultimately successful, and Wotton would hold his post as provost of Eton until his death in 1639.29
The Elements, then, is informed by Wotton’s own abilities and experience, but it equally defers to the capacities and interests of the aristocratic patrons Wotton hoped would help him secure the appointment. Although architecture was becoming a fashionable interest for gentlemen in early-seventeenth-century England, students of the art were actively encouraged not to become acquainted with its grittier aspects. In his 1607 pedagogical handbook, The Institution of a Young Noble-Man, James Cleland outlines what he considers a gentleman’s education in architecture. First, he recommends that young men read John Dee’s preface to Henry Billingsley’s 1570 edition of Euclid, in which Dee cites both Vitruvius and Alberti, not as building instructors, but as sophisticated mathematicians. In addition, the gentleman should learn the “principles of Architecture . . . not to worke as a Maister Mason, but that he may, be able, in looking upon any building, both naturallie in respect of it selfe, and in respect of the eie, to tel what is Frontispice, Tympane, Cornishes, pedestals, Frizes, what is the Tuscane, Dorik, Ionik, Corinthian, and composed order, like a Surveyor.”30 The gentleman, in this case, was emphatically a “censurer” rather than a builder, and the term “surveyor” here seems designed to distinguish the overseer of a work from the craftsmen who actually construct it.
Wotton rarely defines the role of architect precisely, and he never does so in Vitruvius’s explicit terms. When he does discern the architect’s distinct hand in a building’s production, he reimagines the production of a building as a collaboration between architect and surveyor, rather than adhering to a three-part Vitruvian collaboration among lord, architect, and artisan. It may, on the face of it, seem odd that Wotton would omit the very collaborator to whom the treatise was supposed to appeal. I argue, however, that Wotton’s formulation conflates the roles of patron and architect, in order that Wotton may attribute the greatest influence and prestige to his aristocratic audience, not to the professional architect, a socially indeterminate employee. Near the beginning of the Elements, Wotton writes:
To redeeme this Profession, and my present paynes, from indignitie; I must heere remember that to choose and sort the materials, for every part of the Fabrique, is a Dutie more proper to a second Superintendent, over all the Under Artisans called (as I take it) by our Author, Officinator lib 6. cap.11. and in that Place expressely distinguished, from the Architect, whose glory doth more consist, in the Designement and Idea of the whole Worke, and his truest ambition should be to make the Forme, which is the nobler Part (as it were) triumph over the Matter. (11-12)
On its own, this passage seems another attempt to slice the practice of architecture away from the practice of the manual arts more cleanly than Vitruvius and his followers had done. The topic, however, appears more sensitive when juxtaposed with the passage from Vitruvius that Wotton cites but does not exactly translate:
Now the exact type of material that should be used is not under the architect’s control, because all types of building material do not occur in all places. . . . Besides, it is the owner’s prerogative [in domine est potestate], to build in brick or concrete or squared stone as he wills. Therefore, the test of all architectural works should be made on the basis of three things. . . . When a magnificently completed work is looked upon, the lavishness is praised, this is the owner’s domain [a domini potestate inpensae laudabuntur], when it is completed with superior craftsmanship, the standards of the artisan [officinatoris . . . exactio] are what is approved. But when the work has a masterful beauty because of its symmetries and their harmony, then the glory goes to the architect.31
In Vitruvius’s account the roles themselves differ and different duties are assigned to each. Here, the selection of building materials is not left to the architect at all; it is the “prerogative” of the lord, the most highly positioned in social rank, if not in the hierarchy of talent and skill. Wotton’s rearrangements are original; the commentaries of Barbaro, Baldi, and Philander, all of whom Wotton claims to have consulted in the preparation of the Elements, do not interpret the passage this way.
Wotton’s strategy is logical, if complicated. Eileen Harris suggests that, although “Wotton’s hierarchical distinction between architect and artificer is contrary to . . . the Vitruviuan idea of a uomo universale, uniting theory and practice,” it is “part and parcel of the larger division of form and matter, thought and action, which he derived from Plato and the neo-Platonists, Ficino and Alberti.”32 It seems likely, though, that Wotton’s motives were more social than philosophical. In the context of the passage from Vitruvius, the architect—not the patron—is the one who transcends the realm of purely practical knowledge and influence, who is responsible for the most comprehensive role in the planning of the work, and who is therefore the object of the most admiration. In a similar vein, Alberti states that the architect ought to insist on the recognition of his preeminence by eschewing patrons who were unappreciative of his genius: “What can I gain if I explain my valuable and useful proposals to some completely untutored person . . . ? If you have gained some benefit from my experience, and this has saved you substantial expense or made a real contribution to your comfort and pleasure, do I not, for heaven’s sake, deserve a substantial reward?”33 De l’Orme, likewise, instructs that once an architect has been selected, his freedom ought to be “exempt from all constraint and subjection of spirit.”34 This sort of presumptuous and demanding professional was useless and even inimical to Wotton’s purposes in the Elements. In search of aristocratic sympathy, it was beneficial for Wotton to attribute the greatest share of the prestige to his elite audience, not to someone who was, like himself, a dependent, rather than a benefactor, in the patronage system.
In combining the roles of patron and architect, then, Wotton accommodated his own interests, but he also promoted those of the aristocratic amateurs who may have been among his intended audience. The wealthy amateur makes a brief appearance in Vitruvius’s Preface to Book 6, which deals particularly with private buildings. With so many incompetent architects about, Vitruvius says, “I cannot but praise the heads of households who, trusting in their own reading, build for themselves in the belief that, if they must entrust a commission to amateurs, they themselves are more worthy of the expenditure, which will be according to their own wishes rather than those of others.”35 Notably, Vitruvius mentions these admirable heads of households in a section of the Libri decem where his goal closely resembles Wotton’s; at least in part, he seems to be giving aristocratic patrons a reason to read his treatise. Wotton would have been familiar with aristocratic amateurs, who were among his circle of acquaintances. In relation to Wotton’s description of the architect quoted above, for instance, Timothy Mowl notes that Wotton might well have had in mind Robert Cecil, the coordinator of his own building works at Hatfield House.36 In 1609, Cecil had appointed Wotton to order and then transport the elaborate mosaic representing his father, William Cecil, which is still on display at the house.37 Cecil had also employed and supervised a number of English workmen at Hatfield: Robert Lyming built the north front and the window grid; Inigo Jones, according to some architectural historians, was responsible for a wing of the south front; John Bucke designed much of the impressive interior woodwork; Maxmilian Colt (famous as the sculptor of Queen Elizabeth’s tomb) made the chimneypieces; Richard Buckett provided painted decoration; and the firm of Bentham, Dauphen and Butler produced the stained glass.38 Similar building schemes had recently been undertaken by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, another patron, to whom Wotton would send architectural books and plans in 1624.39 In 1620–1621, Buckingham had pulled down the first house on his estate at Burley-on-the-Hill and had a new one built. It was in this second house that he had received King James in August 1621.40 In 1622, Buckingham had purchased the sixteenth-century palace New Hall, in Essex, and reportedly employed Inigo Jones to alter it “according to the modern fashion.”41 A glorification of the aristocratic amateur would have been more appealing to Wotton’s desired audience than a promotion of the unfamiliar and largely unavailable professional architect.42
Seventeenth-century conceptions of the country house, then, were patterned on contemporary patronage models and on practices of land surveying, which focused on architecture’s relationship to landscape and on the historically grounded obligations that governed the social and political relations of the estate. Architecture, loosely defined as the practice of building, was thus intimately tied to both mapping and history. Before describing the hierarchy of architect and superintendent discussed above, Wotton has already located both parties in the midst of an estate where an owner’s possessions are continually and pleasantly revealed to him. Like Vitruvius and Alberti, Wotton runs through a number of considerations relevant to the choice of a “seat,” including the quality of the air and soil, a pleasant degree of sun and wind, and the absence of malign astrological influences.43 Most expansive, though, is Wotton’s description of the ideal view, and this seems to constitute a version of the estate survey. In choosing a site, he writes, some factors “may bee said to bee Optical.”
Such I meane as concerne the Properties of a well chosen Prospect: which I will call the Royaltie of Sight. For as there is a Lordship (as it were) of the Feete, wherein the Master doth much joy when he walketh about the Line of his owne Possessions: So there is a Lordship likewise of the Eye which being a raunging, and Imperious, and (I might say) an usurping Sence; can indure no narrow circumscription; but must be fedde, both with extent and varietie. Yet on the other side, I finde vaste and indefinite viewes which drowne all apprehension of the uttermost Objects, condemned, by good Authors. (4–5)
The heavy political significance with which Wotton invests this particular point is characteristic of the surveying treatise, with its emphasis on landlord-tenant power relations, but it is absent from Wotton’s classical and Continental sources.44 Alberti, the “good Author” on whom Wotton mainly relies here, merely remarks that the private house should have “a view of some city, town, stretch of coast, or plain, or it should have within sight the peaks of some notable hills or mountains, delightful gardens, and attractive haunts for fishing and hunting.”45 Alberti is frequently explicit about the relationship between architecture and the display of power, but here, his remarks remain couched in the language of beauty and pleasure, in contrast to Wotton’s invocation of “Royaltie,” “Lordship,” and “usurp[ation].” It may be opportunistic that Wotton invokes two aspects of the land survey in this passage. The first, the “Royaltie of Sight,” seems to emerge from advances that had recently been made in estate mapping that allowed for the visual estimation and quantification of land. The second, the “Lordship . . . of the Feete” may refer to the older practice of surveying land by walking the boundaries. McRae writes that, while this tradition was originally associated with Catholic rogation ceremonies, it was “subsequently embraced by the Elizabethan establishment . . . for its practical function of confirming property and parish boundaries.”46
Wotton differs from Alberti in his description of the ideal country seat, but he departs still more sharply from Vitruvius, whose most detailed instructions about the selection of a site are not centered on an individual owner at all but concern the location of whole towns. When it comes to private buildings, Vitruvius does speak of what he calls “optics,” but Wotton has wrenched the word into a new context, indeed into an entirely new perspective. Vitruvius applies the term to the activity of looking at houses, not looking out from them, and this area of expertise is assigned to “the special skill of a gifted architect to provide for the nature of the site, the building’s appearance, or its function, and make adjustments by subtractions or additions.” “Optics,” in Vitruvius, thus consists of “the impact of images on our vision.”47 In the Elements, optics has more to do with the experience of the owner than with the skill of the architect, and it is grounded in ownership rather than images, in the practice of the surveyor rather than in the design of the architect. “Lastly,” Wotton adds, “I remember a private Caution, which I know not well how to sort, unlesse I should call it Political. By no means, to build too neere a great Neighbour; which were in truth to bee as unfortunately seated on the earth, as Mercurie is in the Heavens, for the most part, ever in combustion, or obscuritie, under brighter beames then his owne” (5). Wotton is not borrowing this idea; it seems to be “private” in that it is his own. The country house, then, in Wotton’s description following the surveying tradition, is transformed from the classical object of vision to the occasion for the contemplation of the surrounding landscape. As Norden had imagined in The Surveyors Dialogue, the patron is to see his estate, and to see his own prerogative reflected in it, as the house becomes a topographical landmark that reveals the expanses and lineaments of his own sprawling possessions.
Because Wotton was interested in the topic of country houses in general, not just a single estate, his architectural treatise does not include the kind of local and specific histories that characterized the work of antiquarians and estate surveyors. These details, however, appear abundantly in another seventeenth-century genre permeated by the practices of antiquarian chorography and estate mapping, the country house poem. It is customary to think of country house poems as historical in the sense that they are conservative and nostalgic, extolling the traditional values of local hospitality and family-oriented rural retirement.48 Wotton himself provides a similar interpretation of the country estate, calling “Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home . . . the Theater of his Hospitality,” and noting that English floor plans ought to differ from Italian ones, because “by the naturall Hospitalitie of England, the Buttrie must be more visible, and wee neede perchance for our Raunges, a more spacious and luminous Kitchin” (82, 70–71). These social ideals have been well explored in recent criticism and situated in the political and social contexts of Jacobean England.49 It is not my goal to rehearse these arguments here. Instead, I build on these observations to show how the representation of these ideals is indebted to—and enabled by—markedly antiquarian ways of thinking about architecture’s relationship to both landscape and human history.
A handful of country house poems pointedly set this historical mode of interpretation against visual and spatial experiences of architecture, which form the basis of classical and Continental aesthetic descriptions. Whatever its strategic modifications, the Elements was in part intended to educate English readers in a foreign architectural language, by explaining how to look at and judge a building in a particular and systematic way. The poems I consider here, however, consciously reject these modes of understanding and talking about architecture as irrelevant and even obtrusive, insisting instead that their readers rely on an alternative form of architectural literacy. According to Jonson, Carew, and Marvell, the virtues of an estate become visible only in the retelling of stories.
Country house poets are generally said to have found their source material in classical pastoral and georgic; their debt to English antiquarian texts has been little recognized.50 The Britannia is almost never named as a source for this genre, yet interspersed among its prose descriptions, Camden’s compilation offers the reader some of the earliest English country house poems (which are written in Latin).51 In a description of Greenwich, for instance, Camden inserts a verse by Leland, whom he names the “Antiquarian Poet.” The Latin precedes the following translation by Philemon Holland:
How glittereth now this place of great request,
Like to the seat of heavenly welkin hie?
With gallant tops, with windowes of the best.
What towres that reach even to the starry skie:
What Orchards greene, what springs ay-running by.
Faire Flora heere that in this creeke doth dwell,
Bestowes on it the flowre of garden gay;
To judge no doubt of things he knew ful well,
Who gave this banke thus pleasant every way,
So fit a name, as did the thing bewray.52
Similar descriptions integrating architecture with both topography and political preeminence are invoked at both Windsor and Hampton Court, regarding which Camden quoted from his own long Latin chorographic poem “The Marriage of Tame and Isis.”53 In turn, as John M. Adrian has written, country house poems describe estates in ways that recall the Britannia and similar works. Adrian points out that in “To Penshurst,” “that quintessential English country house poem, the estate is imagined in terms of the same categories of local definition that chorography helped to establish.”54
In appropriating these antiquarian approaches to architecture, country house poems pose a different set of critical questions than those asked by architectural historians interested in questions of period and style. In the examples examined here—“To Penshurst,” “To My Friend G.N., from Wrest,” and “Upon Appleton House”—the question is not whether English architectural style is superior to Italian or French architectural style; it is whether architectural style, at least insofar as it characterizes the appearance of a building, is a significant criterion for the judgment of architecture at all. The poems thus proceed from a dichotomy of deliberately incommensurate terms, replacing the visually perceptible features of a building with stories of local and human history, or, we might say, replacing the art of the architect with that of the surveyor and antiquarian chorographer.
“To Penshurst” famously begins by comparing the house to some unidentified competitor:
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
Of touch or marble, nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told,
Of stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And these grudged at, art reverenced the while.55
The lines seem at first to describe Penshurst through the use of contrast; more accurate would be to say that Jonson declines to describe the house, at least in visual terms. Jonson himself would have been familiar with the kind of foreign sources Wotton attempted to import; his acrimonious relationship to Inigo Jones in the creation of court masques would have exposed him to numerous representations of cupolas and polished pillars, and his own annotated copy of Vitruvius survives.56 Armed with these tools for describing architectural appearances, however, Jonson begins by laying them aside. The only possibly physical quality we are provided is that Penshurst is “ancient,” and this descriptor has as much to do with time as with appearance; at least, there are any number of ways in which a house could look old. Modern scholars sometimes classify Penshurst, with its crenellated battlements and central oak-beamed hall, as medieval or Neo-Gothic in style, but Jonson is never that specific.57 In the poem, Penshurst does not appear one way or another. Looking at the house is not the right way to understand Penshurst at all.
In these opening lines, the place name Penshurst clearly refers to the house, but as the poem continues, the term expands silently to include the estate as well. By looking immediately outward from the house, rather than at it, the poem performs a perspectival reorientation that is similar to Wotton’s adaptation of Vitruvius’s discussion of optics. Jonson’s description, like Wotton’s, reflects the practices of the estate surveyor or antiquarian. The virtues of Penshurst become accessible through the notation of other features than marble and gold, as Jonson reconstitutes the aesthetics of the estate: “Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air, / Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair” (7–8). Here, Jonson applies the term “fair” to “marks” which are either invisible (“air”) or simply not pretty or artful in the same way as pillars and lanterns.
Frustrating the reader’s expectation, and rejecting a particular kind of description, Jonson reveals the human histories and local associations of the house. His interests become antiquarian and aetiological. Historical memory is shallow but insistent in the poem. Describing an oak that was said to have been planted at the birth of Robert Sidney’s illustrious (and already deceased) brother Philip, for instance, Jonson writes:
That taller tree, which of a nut was set
At his great birth, where all the muses met.
There, in the writhèd bark, are cut the names
Of many a sylvan; taken with his flames. (13–16)
That Philip was a sibling rather than an ancestor of Robert highlights one of Jonson’s challenges in the poem. Penshurst was an old estate, but the Sidneys had only recently acquired it, a fact that they themselves attempted to disguise by bribing a herald to create a fake “twelfth century” deed, granting Penshurst to an invented ancestor.58 Newly rich off the spoils of Reformation politics, they had actually owned the estate only since 1552, when Robert’s grandfather William Sidney was rewarded for his service to Edward VI.59 Like Camden, who had deftly transferred the title “de Penhurst” from Stephen de Penhurst “a famous Warden of the Cinque ports” to Robert Sidney, “Baron Sidney of Pensherst,” Jonson manufactures an antiquarian reading of the estate, streamlining the complications of history toward culmination in the stability of the present landowner.60 In “writhèd bark,” Penshurst is literally inscribed with traces of the family’s history. Similarly, the following lines point to the history of another family member, more contemporary with the poem:
And thence the ruddy satyrs oft provoke
The lighter fauns to reach thy lady’s oak.
Thy copse, too, named of Gamage, thou hast there,
That never fails to serve thee seasoned deer. (17–20)
The names of both the oak tree and the copse refer to Robert Sidney’s wife, Barbara Gamage, who was said to have been taken with labor pains under the tree in question and to have enjoyed feeding deer in the copse.61 In such instances, Jonson creates from the materials of the present an elegant fiction of historical depth.
Jonson’s marked interest in landlord-tenant relationships also reflects the historiographic aspects of the estate surveyor’s profession, and it has little to do with the aesthetic emphases of classical and Continental treatises. In a less aggressive way than Fitzherbert or Norden’s surveyor, Jonson documents the system of obligation that binds the landowner to inhabitants of the land, although we might see here a similar sensitivity to the tension between paternalistic and economically articulated conceptions of estate management. The building itself is partly understood through the history of these relationships: “And though thy walls be of the country stone, / They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan” (45–46). The pun on “ruin” here contextualizes the material building in the historically established harmony between Sidney and his tenants: Sidney hasn’t raised the money for his house by exploiting his tenants to the point of their ruin, and the house hasn’t been built with materials pillaged from other structures, resulting in the ruin of preexistent buildings. Architectural and human history converge as the “country stone” reifies the virtues and traditions that historically characterize the country estate. The building process is imagined as the joint production of the estate’s material and historical resources, both its “country stone” and the history of harmonious coexistence that characterizes its social ties.
By Jonson’s account, the landlord-tenant relationships at Penshurst are un-contentious, charitable, reverential, and mutually respectful, but they are not confined to spontaneous expressions of hospitality and good will. They are grounded in the exchange of real, material goods which might constitute, in part, the practical manifestations of a tenant’s obligation. The rustics of Penshurst are not skeptical of being cheated or exploited, as the farmers of The Surveyors Dialogue are; this harmony between landlord and tenant emerges from the mutual agreement that they owe something. Robert Sidney welcomes the lowlier members of the local community—“the farmer, and the clown,” along with “their ripe daughters”—but they do not arrive “empty-handed”:
Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,
Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make
The better cheeses, bring ’em. (48, 49, 54, 51–53)
In addition, the phrase “ripe daughters” intermixes the human and natural resources of the estate by transposing an epithet generally applied to fruit to another kind of offspring altogether. Don Wayne has amply explored the politics of class and labor in such passages; here, I would point out that Jonson’s sustained attention to the legal and historical interests of the estate survey make the house an occasion for narrative, and thus further guide the reader away from the visual architectural splendor, toward which the opening lines gesture, putting forth in its place an alternative way of understanding and talking about the estate.62
Structurally, the center of the poem lies in the rooms of the house itself, not in their symmetrical disposition or well proportioned floor plans but in the exceptional hospitality and economy that the poet is experiencing there. While the core of the poem teaches the reader about the virtues of the house and its inhabitants, the closing lines return to the broader question of how houses ought to be judged. Adequately prepared, the reader is at last able to compare Penshurst to other houses on the basis of what it is rather than what it is not.
Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells. (99–102)
Having read the poem (“Now”), the reader sees architectural proportion differently; no longer attached to visual symmetries or physical size, the notion of proportion is redefined in incommensurate terms as the reader is engaged in an act of deliberation which depends on the perception of less tangible virtues and, significantly, on temporal or narrative distinctions. The tense shift of the final line insists that the house be measured, or proportioned, according to its human history rather than by its physical dimensions; and by this measurement, Penshurst extends further than its competitors, by reaching the present moment. Properly interpreted, visual perception dissolves into moral judgment and a historical sense of architecture’s value. The “proud, ambitious heaps” are found empty and wanting. It’s not that there is nothing to see in them, but there is only something to see “and nothing else.” Historically speaking, the “ambitious heaps” are limited, for their vitality falls short, quarantined to a past moment by Jonson’s use of the perfect tense. Rather than applying the visual and spatial aesthetics of a foreign treatise, then, Jonson echoes both estate survey and antiquarian chorography, implicating description of architecture with description of landscape and tying both to the retelling of human stories.
It is not surprising that no professional architects are mentioned in “To Penshurst”; such a figure—who might have been dismissed as a builder who does not dwell in or inhabit the house—is simply irrelevant to Jonson’s praise of the estate. Later in the century, however, Thomas Carew would present a pointed denunciation of the Vitruvian-style architect, along with the visual aesthetics his designs were meant to comprise. “To My Friend G.N., from Wrest,” first published in Carew’s Poems of 1640, describes Wrest Park, the Bedfordshire home of Henry Grey, eighth Earl of Kent.63 Carew’s description presents a lesson in architectural connoisseurship that directly opposes the kind of precepts that Wotton borrows from his sources. While Wotton had directed that the censurer proceed by “runn[ing] backewardes . . . from the Ornaments (which first allure the Eye) to the more essentiall Members” and Alberti had called sight “the keenest of all the senses” for judging “what is right or wrong in the execution and design of a work,” Carew renders both ornament and visual allurement as detractive and misleading.64 Instead, the virtues of Wrest are seen precisely because it fails to “allure the Eye” at all. The beginning of Carew’s poem inverts the structure of “To Penshurst,” by beginning with a description of the estate and then applying the estate’s native and natural ornaments to the house. Both country house poems, however, resemble the antiquarian chorography or estate survey in that the house is understood through its relationship to a topographical context, and in both, beauty is derived from what Jonson called the “better marks” of the property.
At Wrest, as at Penshurst, authenticity is constituted through the absence of expenditure and art. As “the pregnant Earth / Sends from her teeming womb a flowery birth,” “native aromatics” obviate the need for extravagant imported plantings:
No foreign gums, nor essence fetched from far,
No volatile spirits, nor compounds that are
Adulterate, but Nature’s cheap expense
With far more genuine sweets refresh the sense.65
Applying these criteria to the judgment of the house, Carew declares: “Such pure and uncompounded beauties bless / This mansion with an useful comeliness” (19–20). It is easy to imagine how a gum or spirit could be “uncompounded”; it is more difficult to imagine how a house, which could only be successfully assembled with a certain degree of deliberation and intervention, could be so. But in the following lines, we learn that the house is “uncompounded” because it remains untainted by a particular kind of architectural aesthetics. The house is
Devoid of art; for here the architect
Did not with curious skill a pile erect
Of carvèd marble, touch, or porphyry,
But built a house for hospitality. (21–24)
The architect’s sufficiency, strangely, rests in a lack of skill, in his capacity not to exercise art or to obtrude the traces of his influence between the qualities of the estate owner and the qualities of the house. For a professional architect of the Vitruvian school, the work of “curious skill” would be precisely to integrate the artful and the useful, not separate them from one another, to make “carvèd marble, touch, or porphyry” serve the interests and needs of the patron.66 Visual design and “use” would ideally be mutually constitutive. But for Carew, the visual and the functional counteract, rather than reinforcing, one another.
No sumptuous chimney-piece of shining stone
Invites the stranger’s eye to gaze upon,
And coldly entertains his sight, but clear
And cheerful flames cherish and warm him here. (25–28)
Like Penshurst, Wrest has been stacked against some unnamed competitors. As scholars, including Alastair Fowler, Christy Anderson, and Anthony Wells-Cole, have pointed out, many “ambitious” houses boasted spectacular carved chimneypieces whose designs were often derived from foreign pattern books.67 Wotton dedicated a subsection of the Elements to the subject of chimneys, which suggests that he thought the subject would be of interest to English patrons (or perhaps that they might see their own houses mirrored there), and his introduction to the topic implies that it was a point in which English houses might particularly exceed their foreign competitors. “Italians,” he observes, “who make very frugall fires, are perchance not the best Counsellers”; still, one might learn from them “how to raise faire Mantels within the roomes” (59–60). Whether or not Carew intended an implicit comparison, his statements explicitly contrast modes of sensory perception, not fireplaces. A coldness of sight, they imply, somehow prevents the perception of invisible warmth.
Throughout Carew’s poem, architectural description turns on an imagined animosity between that which “entertains” one’s “sight” and that which is for “use.” He continues:
Nor think, because our pyramids and high
Exalted turrets threaten not the sky,
That therefore Wrest of narrowness complains,
Or straitened walls; for she more numerous trains
Of noble guests daily receives, and those
Can with far more conveniency dispose
Than prouder piles, where the vain builder spent
More cost in outward gay embellishment
Than real use; which was the sole design
Of our contriver, who made things not fine,
But fit for service. (47–57)
The ostentation of “prouder piles” is replaced by “conveniency,” and “embellishment” by “real use,” while “design” is desirable only where it is indistinguishable from “service.” The acts of contriving and designing which in the architectural profession would culminate in visual and material realization here lead only to a visual void. We are never told what Wrest looks like, because we are not supposed to be looking at it. The only description is negative, as the reader learns simply that Wrest is “not fine.”
Like Jonson, Carew had a well-developed notion of what he was rejecting, and the contrasts through which he describes Wrest appear to reflect his own experience and resultant fluency in two architectural languages. In common with Jonson, Carew would have known many of the terms and aesthetic effects of foreign architectural treatises through his involvement in the creation of court masques performed against the elaborate theatrical sets of Inigo Jones.68 Carew’s own masque, Coelum Britannicum (1634), first performed in 1633, begins with a detailed “Description of the Scaene,” which provides clear evidence of both the degree to which the scenery was structured around the display of architectural elements and of the writer’s extensive and sophisticated vocabulary for describing these elements: “[T]he Scaene, representing old Arches, old Palaces, decayed walls, parts of Temples, Theaters, Basilica’s and Therme, with confused heaps of broken Columnes, Bases, Coronices and Statues, lying as underground, and altogether resembling the ruines of some great City of the ancient Romans, or civiliz’d Brittaines.”69 In contrast to a house such as Wrest, stage sets would have been designed only to entertain the eye, having no real “use” as buildings at all. The printed version of Coelum Britannicum begins, “The first thing that presented it selfe to the sight, was a rich Ornament, that enclosed the Scaene; in the upper part of which, were great branches of Foliage growing out of leaves and huskes, with a Coronice at the top.”70 This is exactly the kind of lifeless presentation that is absent from Wrest, where
No Doric, nor Corinthian pillars grace
With imagery this structure’s naked face:
The lord and lady of this place delight
Rather to be in act, than seem in sight. (29–32)
Grey’s hospitality, moreover, creates real, living versions of Amalthea and Bacchus, who are not represented “in effigy” or on “a marble tun” (58, 63). Wrest “offer[s] not in emblems to the eyes, / But to the taste, those useful deities” (65–66). Unlike the performance of a masque, “acting” is being and not seeming, and architecture itself follows suit as the house is rendered not as an artful and ornamented façade but as a “naked face.” In contrast to Wotton, then, who had imagined the architectural ornaments of a country house as a kind of stage set in the “Theater” of the owner’s “Hospitality,” where visual decorum and the actions of a noble character converged, Carew refuses to reconcile the two.
In the opening lines of “Upon Appleton House,” probably written in the early 1650s, Marvell’s critique of the architectural profession is more specifically leveled at the intrusive figure of the architect himself. While Carew excluded “foreign gums” from the natural gifts of Grey’s estate, in Marvell’s poem, it is the architect who is foreign, not because he hails from another country, but because he interrupts the mutually productive identity of estate owner and estate and is alien to the history that truly defines the house’s character. The poem begins
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect,
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew,
Who of his great design in pain
Did for a model vault his brain,
Whose columns should so high be raised
To arch the brows that on them gazed.
Why should of all things man unruled
Such unproportioned dwellings build?71
Scholars have speculated about which “foreign architect” Marvell might have had in mind, but the description is hardly specific to an individual.72 Each line of the first stanza alludes to and then dismisses some part of the Vitruvian-style architectural treatise and, by inference, all architects trained in that tradition. Marvell’s list of topics here—the quarrying of stone, acquisition of timber, the conception of a “design” for the whole work, the construction of a model, and the optical analysis of the façade—could all have been culled from almost any of the architect-authors from whom Wotton had “gather[ed]” his “stuffe.” Where Wotton had marginalized the role of the architect in order to centralize the influence of the patron, “Upon Appleton House” expunges the work of the architect altogether.
Marvell does his own gathering of stuff from foreign treatises, but rather than adapting his terms strategically, he radically redefines them. With his charge that grander works of architecture are “unproportioned,” Marvell twists another common principle of the classical and Continental treatise: architectural symmetries mirror the natural symmetries of the human body. For Vitruvius, the success of a design is determined by its relationship to the harmoniously proportioned whole: “Just as in the human body there is a harmonious quality of shapeliness expressed in terms of the cubit, foot, palm, digit, and other small units, so it is in completing works of architecture.”73 Alberti uses a similar analogy as a basis for “judgments on beauty.” Like a well-composed building, “every body consists entirely of parts that are fixed and individual; if these are removed, enlarged, reduced, or transferred somewhere inappropriate, the very composition will be spoiled that gives the body its seemly appearance.”74 Wotton adopts this precept, although he claims to have thought of it himself through rational contemplation: “I will propound a Rule of mine owne Collection . . . . [W]hat are the most judicious Artisans but the Mimiques of Nature? This led me to contemplate the Fabrique of our owne Bodies, wherein the High Architect of the world, had displaied such skill, as did stupefie, all humane reason” (6–7). By claiming that the rules of a specialized aesthetic system are apparent in nature, Wotton, like Marvell, minimizes the influence of the architect (here called an “Artisan”), who is ideally not an original designer or creator, but a mimic of patterns that are readily available to all pious and rational men.
But Marvell’s revisions go further. Appleton House is indeed proportioned according to human characteristics, but not the anonymous ideal physical specimen that Vitruvius had in mind. Instead, the country house follows nature because it reflects the individual character of its inhabitant. “The beasts,” Marvell continues, “are by their dens expressed. . . . No creature loves an empty space; / Their bodies measure out their place” (11, 15–16). Man, by contrast,
superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive than dead;
And in his hollow palace goes
Where winds (as he) themselves may lose;
What need of all this marble crust
T’impark the wanton mote of dust,
That thinks by breadth the world t’unite
Though the first builders failed in height? (17–24)
But Appleton House is no such “hollow palace”:
But all things are composed here
Like Nature, orderly and near:
In which we the dimensions find
Of that more sober age and mind,
When larger-sized men did stoop
To enter at a narrow loop;
As practising, in doors so strait,
To strain themselves through heaven’s gate. (25–32)
To be properly “composed” is thus to embody “dimensions” that follow the character of the patron rather than a foreign “palace” conceived in the mind of the architect. Its “dimensions” are those of the “sober . . . mind” (echoing the “sober frame” of line 1) rather than those of a “larger-sized” body. By the exclusion of the architect—because “Humility alone designs / Those short but admirable lines”—Appleton House truly reflects nature, and its “holy mathematics can / In every figure equal man” (41–42, 47–48).
As Fowler has pointed out, little is known about the appearance of the house at the time Marvell wrote, and the poem does not give us much information.75 Instead, both architectural features and architectural history dissolve into stories of the estate’s human history and human virtue, of the dwelling, Jonson might say, rather than the building. Like so many country houses in the Britannia, Appleton House had been a monastic house, and it seems to have been physically converted in stages over the century following the Reformation. And Marvell’s vocabulary for describing the house, like the estate surveyor’s or antiquarian topographer’s, is as much historical as visual. A perusal of Appleton House’s “fragrant gardens, shady woods, / Deep meadows, and transparent floods” (79–80) becomes the opportunity for an account of its past:
While with slow eyes we these survey,
And on each pleasant footstep stay,
We opportunely may relate
The progress of this house’s fate.
A nunnery first gave it birth
(For virgin buildings oft brought forth);
And all the neighbour-ruin shows
The quarries whence this dwelling rose. (81–88)
Unlike Penshurst, the walls of Appleton House have been raised with someone else’s ruin, productively reappropriating the materials of a Catholic past instead of violently scarring the earth, as is suggested by line 3 (“that unto caves the quarries drew”). The reason Appleton House became Protestant is, of course, that England did, a national shift at which Marvell only glances, by noting that Fairfax acquired the property “at the demolishing” (273). In the poem, this national transition is overshadowed by a long story of religious conversion—looking forward to the house’s architectural conversion—that precedes it. In twenty-four stanzas, Marvell recounts Isabella Thwaites’s seduction by salacious lesbian nuns, who are “dispossessed” of their charge only when Sir William Fairfax “through the wall does rise” to find Isabella weeping at the altar (272, 258). When Appleton House does change hands, the language—“escheat” and “willed”—picks up the legal overtones of “dispossessed” and hints at the kind of legal records and documents that enabled the historical dimensions of the land survey and of antiquarian chorography (274, 275). In the opening sections of “Upon Appleton House,” Marvell replaces the aesthetic standards of classical and Continental treatises with another—and perhaps more familiar—way of understanding architecture. The house becomes meaningful in relation to the estate and to features comprehensible only in human and historical terms. It is thus a particular and strategically applied mode of architectural literacy that transforms Fairfax’s estate to “paradise’s only map” (768).
In The Surveyors Dialogue, Norden imagines a conversation between the surveyor and a bailiff. Drawing within sight of a country house, the baliff observes confidently that “a stately house it is indede.” The surveyor is slower to draw a conclusion:
It seemes to be a large and loftie cage, if the Bird be answerable. . . . I mean, that a Titmus may harbour in a Peacockes cage, and yet the cage maketh her not a Peacocke, but will be a Titmus, notwithstanding the greatnes of the cage: So this loftie Pyle bee not equalized by the estate and revenewes of the builder, it is as if Paules steeple should serve Pancras Church for a Belfrey.76
Architectural correctness is a not a matter of proportion among the respective parts of a finished building; St. Paul’s and St. Pancras are offered mainly as the vehicle of a simile. The real proportional harmony is to exist among the credentials of house, owner, and estate: “Now, if upon view of the demeines,” the surveyor concludes, “and the rest of the parts, it be not found like unto a child borne in Cheshire, with a head bigger then the bodie, I shall like it well.”77 Here, Norden resorts to the conventional connection between correct architectural proportion and the human body, but the body imagined can be pleasing only if the architecture resides in a suitably “answerable” network of historical, topographical, and human relationships that extends beyond the house itself.
Norden’s treatise, The Elements of Architecture, and the seventeenth-century country house poems help us to understand the traditional social and intellectual networks in which early modern English architecture was implicated. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, architectural writing already constituted a different genre from the Continental architectural treatise; it was carried out in different terms and it relied on different conventions. The country house poems discussed here reveal the ways in which this genre’s ideas were seen to exclude—even to be threatened by—the precepts of foreign treatises that centralized the architect and the visual experience of materials and space. England’s architectural writing at this point owed more to the historical estate survey and to antiquarian chorography than to the elements of classical design that were trickling slowly into the country. Wotton strove not to violate traditional models, even as he sought to introduce a new set of architectural standards and to imagine the professional architect on the English country estate. As a result, the Elements is less successful as a building manual or a systematic guide to connoisseurship than it is as a strategic balance between two forms of architectural literacy. While Wotton’s treatise differs in form from the country house poems, it is indebted to the principles they expound. In the end, Wotton understood that the historical dimensions of a house were as important as its spatial and material qualities and that the splendid lines of an Italian villa must not erase the human stories that attached to the English country estate. Taken together, Wotton’s treatise and the country house poems allow us to see the architecture and architectural writing of early modern England differently: not as a failed or half-hearted imitation of the Italian Renaissance, but as a part of the nation’s historiographic and antiquarian traditions; not as a fractured reflection of classicism, but as a sophisticated and ingeniously adapted art.
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