Quarrel with the King (24 page)

This was repeated in June 1632, and those lords who refused to obey it and remained in London for the summer were prosecuted and fined in 1634, 1635, and again in 1637. These are precisely the years when Wilton was transformed from a Tudor to a Palladian house. As Lord Chamberlain, Pembroke would have needed to be more responsive to this idea than any other. More than that, though, the courtly-Arcadian fusion, the creation of an Italianate pleasure house in the midst of the Elysian beauties of his chalkland estates, would have seemed by the early 1630s as an inevitability. To make a palace in the trees was almost the only possible response to his inheritance.

In a fascinating way, the emergence of the new Wilton under Philip Pembroke's hands is his articulation of his predicament. It is deeply Arcadian but it is deeply courtly, too. It is of and in his Wiltshire estates but is intended as a place where king and court can feel at ease. John Aubrey's description of the new Wilton's origins is full of clues. “King Charles the first did love Wilton above all places,” Aubrey wrote, “and came thither every summer. It was he that did put Philip first [
sic
] Earle of Pembroke upon making this magnificent garden and grotto, and to new build that side of the house that fronts the garden, with two stately pavilions at each end, all ‘al Italiano.'” Philip's remaking of Wilton, urged on by the king, was not as a classical building but
an Italian, part of the same cultural world as Titian and Tintoretto, even as Sannazaro's original Italian
Arcadia
. The old Tudor palace, larded with Henry's elaborate armorial glass and escutcheons, was hopelessly out of date, a remnant of the faux-chivalric world to which they had all subscribed twenty years before but that now seemed flat-footed and unsophisticated. The king's suggestion was first of all a summer idea: the new Wilton was not to be a pompous prodigy house of the kind the earlier generation had built, but a light and elegant thing. And the first element was to be the garden and grotto.

The scheme devised and installed by the Fleming Isaac de Caus—“the fat Dutch keeper hereof, a rare Artist,” according Lieutenant Hammond on his 1635 visit—was huge, stretching a thousand feet from the house, but for all its scale, the garden was playful. De Caus was an associate of Inigo Jones. He had already worked on the Banqueting House in Whitehall and had built a grotto in the undercroft there. His work on the Wilton garden began in 1632 and peaked in 1634. There were long gravel walks with pots of flowers, embroidered platts, marble fountains, marble statues standing within the fountains, and covered arbors and raised terraces from which the plan could be viewed. Female deities, a statue of Susanna, perhaps in memory of Philip's dead wife, and the pair of Bacchus and Flora, the deities of fullness and fruitiness, loomed over the beds. At the far end a huge bronze Roman gladiator stood surrounded by cherry trees. Beyond him was a vaulted grotto in which the passage of the water through pipes could be made to imitate the singing of nightingales; and “Monsieur de Caus” could somehow, by a secret he never shared, make rainbows appear to the visitors. Elaborate underground and underwater machinery could make stone swans swim and stone balls float. No expense was spared, but gaiety rather than grandeur was the effect, a realm of delight through which the Nadder flowed. In the 1690s, when Celia Fiennes visited, the se
quence of gardens was still “very fine with many gravel walkes with grass squaires, set with fine brass and stone statues—fish ponds and basons with Figures in ye middle spouting out water—dwarfe trees of all sorts and a fine flower garden—much wall fruite.”

If all of this seems like the background to a masque made real, such an effect was also apparent at the time. This family had appeared in one performance after another at Whitehall. In 1631 Pembroke had played the “Judicious Lover,” and his son-in-law the Earl of Carnarvon, the “Valiant” in Ben Jonson's
Love's Triumph
; the earl's two eldest sons, Charles, Lord Herbert, and Philip Herbert, had come on in
Tempe Restored
, in February 1632, as two of the children portraying “the influences of the stars on divine beauty.”

Right in the middle of the garden's construction period, in the early 1630s, one of the most expensive masques ever staged,
The Shepherd's Paradise
, was designed by Inigo Jones and performed by the queen and her ladies in Somerset House on Twelfth Night in 1633. The masque lasted an interminable seven or eight hours, was largely inaudible, and was celebrated as one of the most boring explorations of Platonic purity ever devised, but two of its backdrops, for which drawings survive at Chatsworth, seem to bear an extraordinary relationship to Wilton. The first is labelled by Jones “The Shepherds Paradise.” Behind the dancing masquers, the courtly audience would have seen a colonnade of parklike trunks receding from them. The trees are loose and easily flowing. They provide a frame for the view of the great house in the way that a formal colonnade would have done—and did in other masques designed by Jones—but here the lines have become sinuous, and seductive. This is order so orderly that it can afford to let any stiffness go. The trees have about them that elegant, relaxed poise of sprezzatura, a form of disdain or carelessness, the grace that comes from inner nobility, the charm of effortlessness. This cultivated wildness approaches
to within hailing distance of the great house. Beyond the trees, and within their embrace, one sees the palace itself as a model of classical restraint, of exactness and overt order, with an elegant and neatly laid out garden in front of it. Jones drew this as de Caus was building the great Renaissance garden but probably before any work had begun to transform the house. The house he has drawn is not as Wilton would emerge in a few years' time—although with its two terminal pavilions and central emphasis, it is not unconnected to it—but the relationship of house, garden, hill, and park is identical. It seems at least possible that in this sketch of paradise, the form to be taken by the new Wilton first emerged. Before anything had appeared in stone or mortar, the image of Wilton had already floated before the eyes of the court as part of a shepherd's paradise.

Inigo Jones was certainly involved from the start. As the royal architect, for a rebuilding which was the king's idea, he was the natural choice. He certainly knew the Herberts. There is a remote chance that he may have travelled to Italy with William Pembroke as a very young man, but in later life he certainly knew both brothers well. As successive Lords Chamberlain, they would have dealt with him regularly over his masques. He had also been to Wilton long before, when, in 1620, James I had been staying there and their conversation had turned to Stonehenge, ten miles north of Wilton, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. William Pembroke had sent for Jones to investigate the monument. He soon realized it was Roman. The Ancient Britons had been incapable of art. It was the Romans who “gave first rise to civility in this island” and so Stonehenge could not be druidical, nor an emanation of the soil, but was clearly the imposing on a wild ancient country of an imperial idea. It was not recognizably Roman in its decorations, but that was deliberate. The Romans chose a form of architecture, the Tuscan Order, “best agreeing with the rude, plain, simple nature of those they intended to instruct. [And] of this
Tuscan
Order
, a plain, grave, and humble manner of
Building
, very solid and strong, Stoneheng principally consists.”

Jones's analysis of the Bronze Age monument reveals his cast of mind: civilization came from abroad, in fact from Italy. There was no point in looking for homegrown models for architecture, but the classical system could, nevertheless, happily adapt itself to local circumstances. The massively eaved barn of a church Jones built in Covent Garden was chunky and Tuscan in style, deliberately avoiding the kind of finesse that in the early 1630s might have smelled of Roman Catholicism. And the great south front of Wilton also chooses simplicity and a lack of show, an external sobriety that is more suitable to a palace in the trees than are enrichment and elaboration. A drawing does survive of a much grander elevation for Wilton—four hundred feet long, double its present length, and with a large central portico and pediment—but there is no evidence that it was ever seriously considered, although that greater length of façade would have aligned itself more easily with the scale of the de Caus garden.

Work on the house probably began in 1635, even as the garden was being finished. An entry in the Pembroke household accounts for 1634–1635 mentions a contractor, Antony Hinton, gentleman, who was paid £1,200 “for works building the new garden and the lord Earl's house at Wilton by order of the lord Earl.” Inigo Jones himself was busy completing the Queen's House at Greenwich, and so de Caus was instructed to “take downe the side of Wilton House which is towards the garden & such other parts as shall be necessary & rebuild it anew with additions according to ye Plott which is agreed.” A Mr. Brookes was told first “to remove all the stuffe in ye roomes & Lodgeings of that side of the house which is to bee pulled down and rebuilt.”

Beyond that, the actual building history of Wilton remains obscure. A catastrophic fire in 1647, which began, according to Aubrey, after fires had been lit “for airing of the roomes,” destroyed this part
of the house. If you climb into the attics above the Single and Double Cubes, you will find alongside the massive adzed carpentry of the new 1640s roofs, signs of the disaster: burnt bricks, sooted plaster, and the stub ends of the oak joists still in the walls. The joists have turned to charcoal where they met the air, but you can dig them out and still find, where the brick protected them, the clean sawn 1630s estate oak. But there is no telling if the rooms as they were rebuilt in the late 1640s and 1650s resembled what had been here before the fire. On top of that, major alterations to Wilton were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is no longer possible to be sure that Wilton's great rooms are real Stuart interiors or later pastiches.

Nevertheless, Inigo Jones was certainly involved in the 1640s rebuilding, which was done largely by his pupil and nephew John Webb, and there is no doubt that if not in detail then at least in atmosphere Wilton still reeks of the Jonesian moment in English taste and sensibility. It remains the central Arcadian statement in England, a palace in the trees, a masque made real.

Philip Pembroke enriched the house with every picture he could. There were many inherited from his father and perhaps his grandfather: ministers and heroes from Queen Elizabeth's time, some of King Henry VIII, the Earl of Essex. But to them he added a great Italianate upper storey: Charles I on horseback, by Van Dyck, and a life-size picture of Peacock, his favorite white racehorse, “to both of which Sir Anthony gave many master touches.” Perhaps among the first collectors in England to do so, he also brought the great modern pictures down from London so that Wilton became a great treasury of Italianate taste: Correggios; both oil paintings and sketches by Titian, including a particularly prized “head of an old man”; four or five figures said to be “by Giorgione”; a painting of the Four Seasons by Bassano; a “ritratto of a Venetian looking sidewaise & showing a full body by Tintoretto il filio”; a portrait of “ye King of Spayne at length
by Tizian as big as the life”; and many others. These, described in the 1640s when they had been taken back up to London for safety, were to create the Wilton atmosphere.

An inventory made of the house in November 1683, on the death of the seventh earl, and preserved among the Pembroke papers, gives some sense of the enormous riches gathered at Wilton. The inventory roams through 158 separate apartments laden with goods and tapestry hangings, pictures and furniture, which if nothing else marks the oceanic gulf between the life conditions of this family and those scratching their existence in the chalkland valleys they could see from their windows. If there is a certain boniness and paucity to the copyholders' possessions, here you can scarcely move for the material goods: “a Fustian quilt”; “a blew damask carpet”; pair after pair of silk tapestry hangings; chairs covered in black damask; a Purple Room with a purple damask bed; a silver table and looking glass; cloth of silver curtains and a head-cloth to the bed embroidered with gold; a close stool and three pads for it; Turkish carpets and warming pans; an Indian quilt; a crimson velvet sideboard cloth; cloth-of-gold cushions with gold fringe; maps, folios, and volumes; “rich China bowls tippt and bottomed with silver”; one Book of Common Prayer and one Bible, both embossed with the family arms in silver; one Japan china teapot; and enormous quantities of wine in the barrel. Among it all, part of the “Goods belonging to the Dyning Room,” alongside “1 set of Elbow chairs” and “4 stools of shaggy purple,” was “The picture of the family & other pictures in ye Dining Roome,” together thought to be worth £1,200, by far the most valuable things in the house. The family portrait was by Van Dyck, and many consider it the greatest painting of a family ever made in England. It represents the climax of this family's fortunes, of this book, and of the Arcadian story it has pursued. The great painting by Van Dyck is the ultimate embodiment of the Pembroke world, a painting carefully framed around the ideas of inheritance, Arcadianism, nobility, and time.