On 7 May possibly 1603, James VI of Scotland and now James I of England rode into the cash of his new kingdom: the Stuarts had arrived. 1000’s of Londoners collected to view and, at Stamford Hill, the Lord Mayor was ready to present the keys of the town while 500 magnificently dressed citizens joined the procession on horseback.
There was a small technical hitch. James really should have been sure for the Tower of London right until proclaimed and crowned but, despite frantic creating work, it was nowhere close to completely ready. As Simon Thurley recounts—twitching aside a velvet curtain to expose the shabby backstage machinery—parts of the Tower, regular powerbase of English monarchs since William the Conqueror, were derelict. The terrific corridor gaped open up to the skies and for many years the royal lodgings experienced been junk rooms. In the course of James’s continue to be, a display wall had been crafted to conceal a gigantic dung heap.
Art and architecture for the Stuart monarchs in England—an extraordinary period of time when the environment was turned upside down twice with the execution of a person king (Charles I in 1649) and the deposition of yet another (James II in 1688)—were neither about maintaining out the climate nor solely about outrageous luxury. The royal residences have been complex statements of electrical power, authority and rank. The architecture managed the jealously guarded accessibility to the king and queen: in several reigns, practically any individual could get in to stand guiding a railing and view the king consuming or praying, and a astonishingly large circle was admitted to the state bedrooms, but only a handful acquired into the true sleeping places. The options of great and attractive artwork from England, Italy, France or the Minimal Nations around the world, who acquired to see it—whether an English Mortlake or a Flemish tapestry, a mattress produced of durable Tudor Oak or an opulent French just one, swathed in magnificent imported gold-swagged silk—and the place courtiers or mistresses have been stashed, ended up all sizeable conclusions and interpreted as these types of.
From James’s astonishing takeover of Royston in Hertfordshire as a hunting base—nobody who reads Thurley’s account will yet again see it as just (forgive me) a relatively dull prevent on the street north—to the disastrous obstetric heritage of Queen Anne, which finished the Stuart reign in 1714, the sums expended were remarkable, even with out translating into present-day phrases or comparison with the golden wallpaper of existing Primary Minister Boris Johnsons’ flat. Anne of Denmark, spouse of James I, used £45,000 reworking Somerset Household on the Strand. Henrietta Maria, spouse of Charles I, invested yet another fortune, which includes on the most sensitive architecture of the Stuart reigns, an elaborate Roman Catholic chapel (ransacked by a rioting mob in the mid-century Civil Wars).
Thurley recreates some vanished residences, together with the seemingly stunning Theobalds in Hertfordshire and a pretty private pleasure dome in just a wonderful garden in Wimbledon. Probably the most amazing insight is that in his very last months, imprisoned on the Isle of Wight and engaged in failing negotiations with the Parliamentarians, Charles I was also thinking about designs to fully rebuild Whitehall palace, a task ended by the axe at the Banqueting Home, one particular of the several buildings that would have been kept.
There is fewer architectural heritage and more gossip in this lively compendium than in the thorough scientific studies of personal structures Thurley has now printed, but there are myriad ground programs and present-day engravings, and plenty to set the intellect of the common reader wandering by way of the prolonged galleries—the new Whitehall would have had a 1,000 ft gallery—and a 29-site bibliography for all those who want extra.
• Simon Thurley, Palaces of Revolution: Existence, Death and Art at the Stuart Court, William Collins, 560pp, 8 color plates additionally black-and-white intext illustrations, £25 (hb), published September 2021
• Maev Kennedy is a freelance arts and archaeology journalist and a standard contributor to The Art Newspaper