Sidney's Place: HATFIELD HOUSE and BLICKLING HALL: The Stately Homes of England (1)

[This is the first in a series of articles describing some English Stately Homes and their connections]

One of the many glories of England is its profusion of great houses, often owned by a single family for a number of generations. Most have an interesting history and have been preserved against all manner of threats - such as extravagant heirs, woodworm, agricultural slumps and death duties. The creation of The National Trust has helped save more than 200 houses from destruction but Noel Coward’s famous comic song “The Stately Homes of England” pithily recounts their tribulations and one can only be thankful that so many have survived. I start this series with two mainly Jacobean houses of the early 17^th century designed by the same architect, Robert Lyminge.

The original Hatfield Palace had been since 1497 the property of the Church and it was seized by Henry VIII in the mid-1530s and used as a residence for his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, who were step-sisters. The Elizabethan influence has been carefully maintained, Elizabeth’s successor James I did not like the house and persuaded his chief minister Robert Cecil to swap Hatfield for the nearby Cecil residence, Theobalds. Robert Cecil pulled down 3 sides of the old Palace and built the great house we now see to the designs of Robert Lyminge in 1608.

Hatfield House from the South

Hatfield House in the town of Hatfield in Hertfordshire is only about 20 miles north of central London. It has been the home of the illustrious Cecil family for 4 centuries. It is a Jacobean gem, with its distinctive pepper-pot towers and Renaissance room plan.

Hatfield, The Marble Hall

There is a succession of splendid rooms exuding the dignified Jacobean spirit, well maintained even though renovated by later generations.

Hatfield, The Long Gallery

Wonderful though the House may be, the Cecil family at Hatfield produced many important figures. Robert Cecil (1563 – 1612), the first Earl of Salisbury, hunchbacked and conspiratorial, was a trusted minister of Queen Elizabeth and adroitly managed the accession of opinionated James VI of Scotland to become James I of England when the crowns were united in 1603. The 3^rd Marquess (1830 – 1903) was 4 times Foreign Secretary and 3 times Prime Minister in late Victorian Britain; he promoted his relations like nephew Arthur Balfour, giving rise to the ribald expression “Bob’s your Uncle!” He was a cultivated man but his views were somewhat gloomy: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible”

The 5^th Marquess, (1893-1972) known to his friends as “Bobbety” was a Tory grandee and arch-imperialist. Charged with interviewing the Cabinet to help choose a successor to Eden in 1957, he famously asked the same question “Is it Wab or Hawold?” – Rab Butler or Harold MacMillan, once you penetrated his speech impediment! A more familiar face was Lord David Cecil, distinguished professor of English literature at Oxford, whose machine-gun style of speaking was seen on TV but whose eccentric neglect of his teaching duties foxed his undergraduate pupils like Kingsley Amis, who went on a vain search for him after 2 terms of silence. His biographies of poet William Cowper, The Stricken Deer, and of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, Lord M, were much admired.

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Blickling Hall, designed again mainly by Robert Lyminge from 1619 is situated north-west of Aylsham, about 16 miles north of Norwich, Norfolk. The building we now see was erected by James I’s Lord Chief Justice, Sir Henry Hobart (pronounced “Hubbert”) and passed down generations until the Hobarts became Earls of Buckinghamshire. On the Hobart line dying out, Blickling passed to a cousin, the 8th Marquess of Lothian and it was finally occupied by Philip Kerr, the 11^th Marquess who bequeathed the Hall on his death in 1940 to the charity The National Trust, the first substantial house accepted by the Trust under its Country House Scheme which mitigated death duties, largely run by the famously elitist, occasionally malicious and highly entertaining diarist, James Lees-Milne.

Blickling Hall, the Front

The architectural affinity of the Hall to Jacobean Hatfield is very evident: 18^th century additions to the Hall overseen by the Norwich architects Thomas and William Ivory are important too.

Blickling Hall, the Long Gallery

The Long Gallery with its sumptuous plasterwork is much admired. It is now the Library containing the unique Ellys library of rare books inherited by the 1^st Earl in 1742. The Hall, somewhat altered from the original by the Ivorys in the 18^th century, features a handsome staircase and carved wooden figures.

Blickling, The Hall

Finally, amid rooms with eye-catching Mortlake tapestries and dozens of fine paintings including Canalettos and Gainsboroughs, the transient fashions of the 18^th century are epitomised by the Chinese Bedroom in Palladian Rococo, with Chinese hand-painted wallpaper

Blickling Hall, The Chinese Bedroom

The Gardens and Park of 4,500 acres were remodelled and replanted by Humphrey Repton and his son in the early 19^th century underlining how munificent a gift Blickling Hall was to the National Trust in 1940.

History has not been kind to the donor Philip Kerr, 11^th Marquess, who after a brilliant career in Milner’s kindergarten in South Africa, private secretary to Lloyd George and finally British ambassador in Washington 1939-40, was castigated as a leading member of the” Cliveden Set”, which revolved around the Astors of Cliveden and advocated appeasement of Germany in the 1930s. Kerr was high-minded and believed that a rational German government would be pacified by a policy of accommodation. His and their influence have probably been exaggerated, as they did not appreciate that the Germans had entrusted their future to a criminal gang led by a paranoid madman. Kerr was from a prominent Catholic family but embraced the quackery of Christian Science, like Nancy Astor in the 1930s. Falling ill in Washington he declined to call a doctor for religious reasons and duly expired.

The now 13^th Marquess is Michael Ancram, an erstwhile genial Tory MP who was an articulate spokesman in the Major, Hague and Duncan Smith eras. He retired from politics in 2010 and has no connection with Blickling. The Lothians retain their Scottish estates.

SMD

28.07.13