Hampton Court: a Social and Architectural History

Apollo, April, 2004 by Ian Gow

Simon Trurley Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003, ISBN 0 300 10223 2, 35 [pounds sterling] (UK) or $60 (US)

Given the British passion for their country houses, monographs on individual buildings are far from rare. Among the many that are written by their squires are such classics of self-deprecation as Ralph Dutton's A Hampshire Manor (1968) and the 6th Duke of Devonshire's more ebullient Handbook to Chatsworth, republished by the Duchess of Devonshire, with an equally lively commentary by Herself, as The House (1982). But modern academic studies of individual houses are rarer than one could wish and with the development of ever more specialisations, from furniture history to wallpaper history, they perhaps present rather too daunting a challenge--although under the editorship of Denys Sutton, APOLLO made a distinguished contribution to the genre with such issues as that devoted to Stowe in June 1973 or Petworth in May 1977. A very grand committee of distinguished expertise was perhaps understandably necessary for Boughton House: The English Versailles, under the editorship of Tessa Murdoch in 1992. But who but Simon Thurley, although greatly assisted by the publishing expertise of Yale University Press, would have the bravura to contemplate a single monograph devoted to Hampton Court, which, in his own words, is not only 'the foremost secular architectural complex of the early modern period in England' but also embraces gardens which can be classed as 'the largest formal landscape ever created in England'? His book sets a new benchmark for the genre and one which must inspire other authors and publishers with the confidence to embark on similar projects.

The foundation of this work lies in Dr. Thurley's MA and PhD theses on the Henrican palace and its wider context among Tudor palaces, but what makes it remarkable is not only how this scholarship has been taken back to the Knights Hospitallers, but brought forward almost to the present day, thanks to the author's ever-deepening absorption in the palace through his employment from 1990 to 1997 as Curator of Historic Royal Palaces. The palace and its gardens have the good fortune to be well documented in the official records of the Office of Works, and the sheer quantity that we are so ably steered through here could have been an over whelming obstacle to clarity--to say nothing of the wealth of the visual records and an excess of architectural drawings.

For centuries Hampton Court was at the mercy of the whims of individual monarchs, some of whom whom adored it, such as Willliam III and the late Queen Mary, others of whom came close to ignoring it, as George III did, or even robbing it--George IV removed much furniture and sculpture. It then achieved a contrary kind of posthumous fame when later monarchs had finally deserted it for other (often less architecturally distinguished) residences. When it might have slumbered as a mere empty husk, it suddenly developed an independent life of its own as air archetypally English tourist attraction.

The broad outline of this story is revealed in all the detail one might have expected, greatly promoted by the admirable clarity of Daphne Ford's archaeological drawings, which are undaunted by the degrees of intricacies inherent within Henry VIII's planning or the complexity of Wren's structural systems. Yet Dr. Thurley happily finds space, when the disciplines of compression might have understandably squeezed them out, to stray into many fascinating byways, such as the short-lived blue-and-white ceramic wonderland of Queen Mary's Water Gallery or William Talman's still-born Trianon. The palace was to spawn two important aesthetic revivals based on its two major, but opposing, gothic and classical building periods. Its Henry VIII Great Hall and Wren's Portland stone detailing were both imitated, the former in Lincoln's Inn and the latter in Bentall's Department Store. The popularity of these revivals also infected the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like contrasts provided by the original in various insidious ways, although happily Edward Jesse's almost cancerous 'proposed new gothic screen to replace the Wren colonnade' happily remained a paper fantasy. The vivid, although rarely visually rewarding, world of its grace and favour residents, with a social world focused on the Chapel Royal, is reconstructed from the 5,000 surviving letters in the Lord Chamberlain's Series in the Public Record Office and some rather joyless photographs.

The gardens rightly get almost equal billing with the buildings and it is a surprise to learn that the famous Tijou Screen was removed to the Victoria and Albert Museum, split up, and from thence sent by the museum's circulating department to places 'as far away as Dublin and Edinburgh', only returning in response to royal pressure personally exerted by Edward VII. The chilling horror of the 1986 fire is recounted with considerable restraint and alarming photographs. The author records how this provoked administrative changes whose beneficent effects are revealed throughout this book in the many splendid modern photographs of revitalised rooms filled with colour and richness, which form a striking contrast with the 1880s archival photograph of the dismal 'bed museum'. A similar process has now transformed the gardens. An advantage of the monographic approach is that it sheds light on many wider aspects of taste: for example, the subsidiary story of how the once all-important tapestries were elbowed aside to create a picture gallery (and the difficulties of reversing this tide during recent years) cannot but inform and benefit other art-historical studies.