Inigo Jones and the Architecture of Necessity

- Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this evening's lecture. You know, there are some characters from history who you just would not have wanted to be. Guy Fawkes had a pretty grizzly end. So did Thomas Becket, and it wouldn't have been particularly good to have been Joan of Arc. But there are a whole cast of lesser figures who have forgotten, and who you equally would not have wanted to be. And tonight I'm thinKing especially of two cleaners on duty at Whitehall Palace on the 12th of January 1619. They'd been ordered to sweep the basement of James I's new Banqueting House. It was only 13 years old, and although James thought it imperfect, it was in pretty regular use for masks, diplomatic receptions, plays, and the ceremonials of the Jacobean Court. That day, the basement was full of scenery made of oil painted sail cloth, which the King had wanted to keep because he wanted to reuse it at Shrovetide. And as the basement was windowless, the cleaners worked by the light of a candle. I think you can guess what's just about to happen. At this point, one of the candles fell onto a pile of back cloths, igniting them. Instead of raising the alarm, the cleaners simply left the room, locked the door, and went about their business as if nothing had happened. Half an hour later, a vast ball of fire erupted through the Banqueting House floor as if from nowhere. The hall was full of timber staging for the Christmas masks, which of course ignited like match wood. Soon the flames were spreading to the adjoining buildings. At that very moment, the chief officers of the court were just around the corner from here, in the city Guild Hall, where they were discussing ways in which they could improve the architecture of London. Rushing back to Whitehall, they found a scene of chaos with looters already pilfering items from the smoke-filled royal lodgings. Seeing the Banqueting House was clearly beyond rescue, they concentrated on saving the rest of the palace, demolishing adjoining buildings to stop the spread of fire. James I's reaction is nowhere recorded, and for the record, nothing is ever heard of the cleaners. But what happened to them cannot have been good. James wanted the Banqueting House to be rapidly rebuilt, and he assembled a commission of courtiers to take responsibility for determining the next steps. The men who served on the commission were chosen with characteristic care. First of all, had to be the most important court officers. The Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and the Lord Steward, Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox These were the two men who were responsible for the daily functioning of ceremonial, and they would have very strong views on the functionality of the building in the future. Given the Crown's rather perilous financial situation, the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir Fulke Greville, was also to sit with the Chamberlain and the Steward. Two other courtiers were chosen for their expertise, Sir John Digby was the Vice Chamberlain of the household, but much more importantly for this purpose, he was James's leading diplomat, and he knew more about foreign courts and diplomacy than anyone else. And lastly, there was Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel. Now he didn't hold a major court post. His qualification for being on the rebuilding commission was as a connoisseur, and as a leading member of the King's efforts to rebuild London in a grander style. So this galaxy of talent was assembled because they understood the requirements of a building of state. The new Banqueting House, as you see here, which was designed by Inigo Jones and completed in 1622, was in no sense, a building for everyday life. It was designed specifically for regulated court ceremonial. James was extremely proud of his new hall of state, and before it was completed, he had already commissioned the Flemish artists, Paul van Somer, to paint him standing in front of it. James, you see here, was shown before a window in the palace guard chamber, with the east elevation of the Banqueting House, seen across the court through an open casement. Van Somer must have been furnished with the drawing of the building as intended by Inigo Jones, as it's not actually shown as finally completed. But the King, however, and this is the important point, is portrayed in all his majesty. He's in his coronation robes with an orb and scepter, and his intention, I think, is absolutely clear. The Banqueting House was intended to be the principle theater of his majesty. Now in the early Stuart period, there were essentially two types of royal building, buildings of state, like the Banqueting House, which fulfilled a formal role in national and court life, and buildings of necessity, the private residences of the monarch, if you like, the difference between Buckingham Palace and Sandringham House. And this distinction is explained in a letter the Lord Treasurer wrote in 1605 to the offices of the royal works, setting out the requirements for a new hunting lodge to be built at Amptill in Bedfordshire. And in this letter, the King describes the sort of residency he was thinking of, and it says this,"The King wanted to be lodged, though not in state,"yet sufficient to serve for the enjoying of his pleasures"of hunting and hawking,"by the attendance of all such necessary officers,"and no more as our requisite for his royal person to have." So there was to be space in this new house for the Prince of Wales to stay and the Queen, but the lodgings were, and I quote again,"Not to be lodgings of state, but lodgings of necessity." Space was also required for the principal offices of court, such as the Lord Chamberlain, the King's secretary, and the master of the horse, but only attendance of necessity, not attendance of pleasure. This distinction between lodgings of state and necessity, in fact, as existed under Henry the VIII, who would visit smaller houses for hunting and pleasure with a tight knit group of friends and attendance, known as his riding household. Such an arrangement didn't appeal to Elizabeth I, but James I revived it both architecturally and institutionally. Already in Scotland, people had observed that he liked, and I quote, "To withdraw himself from places"of most access and company"to places of more solitude and repast"with a small retinue." In my Gresham lecture on James I and the court at play, I explained how the King built new houses, houses of necessity at Royston, and you see here, my reconstruction of that new market and Thetford, and this is the royal house in the middle of the town, this is the effectively the A1, The Great North Road here. And here's the King's house of necessity right in the middle of it. Well tonight, I'm going to talk about Charles I and Henrietta Maria, who no less than James I, made a distinction between residences of state and residences of necessity. Unlike his father, Charles I liked Whitehall. He liked being in London, and over the four or five month long court season in the depths of winter, Charles would reside at Whitehall continually. Yet even then he still managed to retain a distinction between state and necessity, keeping state at Whitehall, and retreating to St. James' Palace across the park a few minutes walk away, and using it as a family residence, a house of necessity, which allowed him to escape the formality of court life. Charles and Henrietta Maria's marriage had not started well, but the assassination of the King's great favorite, the Duke of Buckingham in August 1628, seems to have cleared the way for a deep and passionate love affair between the King and the Queen. Their sexual chemistry infused the court. For more than half of the 1630s, the second Henrietta Maria was pregnant, giving succession to a series of healthy children. Like Victoria and Albert, the royal couple became a model of idealized love and family life. The King and Queen were entwined in all they did. Under Anna of Denmark, the Queen's residences had been female preserves, rarely visited by James, and then only briefly. But Charles, his children and his courtiers were regular visitors in Henrietta Maria's houses. The King often staying overnight at Denmark House, her London residence, despite the fact that Whitehall was very close by. By the end of 1630, when a series of short, but rather expensive wars against both France and Spain had come to an end, a decade without war was ushered in. The Earl of Clarendon was able to look back on this period in the 1640s and say that such peace and plenty, and universal tranquility for 10 years was never enjoyed by any nation. It was a golden age. In the 1630s, Henrietta Maria was in her 20s. It was her decade. She was energetic, vivacious, financially independent, and possessed of a taste refined in Europe's most fashionable court. She was adored by her husband, a man little concerned with the details of rule. Unlike his father, he was lazy and work shy, preferring hunting, plays, masks, and art to the minutiae of state affairs. He thrived in the company of his wife, and together, they were devoted to pleasure and the arts. In her first years in England, the Queen received money directly from the exchequer for her living expenses. While a permanent jointure was worked out, it took some time to assemble. In fact, it was never formally granted. But between 1626 and 1639, Henrietta Maria was in receipt of lands and houses, which yielded an annual income of some 28,000 pounds a year. She was granted seven houses, the first and most important presented to her romantically on St. Valentine's Day 1626, was her official London residence, Denmark House, which you see here depicted in its state after the restoration rather than before. Then came her first country houses, Richmond in February 1627, and the following month, Oatlands and Nonsuch, you see someone's reconstruction of Oatlands here. And exactly a year later, the Queen was formally granted the manor of Greenwich. In August 1629, she was given another large country house, Holdenby in North Hamptonshire. And finally in 1639, Charles I purchased Wimbledon Manor for her. In addition to all these houses, of course, she had extensive lodgings in all the major royal houses, such as Whitehall, Hampton Court and Tibbles. Well, when Henrietta Maria was given Greenwich Palace, which you see here, she decided to recommence work on a parkside pavilion begun by her predecessor. Here you see the finished building, the Queen's House. Anna of Denmark had commissioned Inigo Jones to build a lodge to view the hunting in Greenwich Park, and you can see here, the relationship between that and the park here, where the hunting was. And here's my reconstruction of the plan. So these are the residential, main residential buildings in the river. Here's the River Thames, got stables and things over here, nice gardens, and here is the Queen's House overlooking the park, and rather bizarrely situated over the main road. So the house actually acted as a bridge so that you could cross from the private side of Greenwich through the house, into the park side. Well, soon after Henrietta Maria recommenced work on this building, that had been begun by her mother-in-law, Henrietta Maria seems to have commissioned Jan van Belcamp, to paint a picture of the royal family and their friends enjoying a summer's walk in Greenwich Park. And this is the painting, here you see in The Royal Collection. And he added figures to a fine landscape that had already been painted by another Dutch painter. And in the background of this painting, you can see the stumpy half built hulk of what became the Queen's House. On the far left in his garter ribbon is probably the King's groom of the stool, James Hay, the 1st Earl of Carlisle, who was called camel face by the King's daughter, not very kindly, wearing an indoor cap. He's talking to Endymion Porter here, who's a fellow connoisseur, and a close friend of the King. The man who's laboring up the hill, you could just about see here, in blue wearing his garter ribbon is probably the Earl of Pembrooke, Charles I's Lord Chamberlain. And there are various other people who I think we can identify there. This is a group of the King's closest, and Queen's closest friends. Well you don't know what was in Henrietta Maria's mind when she ordered Inigo Jones to take up where he had left off 11 years before and finish the Queen's House. But it seems as if the structure that was designed and half built in 1616 was indeed that one which was brought to completion in 1638 to 9. But its decoration and its function were completely reinvented by its new owner. Now Henrietta Maria was no less enthusiastic a huntress than Anna of Denmark. She had her own pack of hounds. She had her own huntsman, and she even had her own personal crossbow maker. She and the Queen regularly shot deer in Greenwich Park, but as work restarted on what we now know as the Queen's House, it wasn't on the park side of the building. Anna of Denmark's house had addressed the park in function and in form, but Henrietta Maria turned its aspect northwards to face the palace and the river. And see, this is the portrait I showed you earlier of Henrietta Maria. And you'll see actually here is the Queen's House underneath the horse. She's obviously very proud of it. And in her time, it is facing the other side. It is facing the gardens and the other side of this wall than facing the park. And so as work advanced, it was only the interiors on the north side that were completed. And by 1636, the Queen was laying out lavish gardens in front of them. When work stopped in 1640, the northern half of the house now overlooked new pleasure gardens, and was largely complete and inhabitable. When you go to Greenwich today and visit the Queen's House, you get absolutely no sense of what it was like on the eve of the civil war. It's now set austerely in manicured lawns as a sort of architectural jewel, rather like a sort of painting hanging on a wall in a gallery. It's a shrine to its architect, Inigo Jones, and to the style that much later became known as Palladianism. But the upper portions of the garden frontier, which are just white today, were originally painted with colorful grotesques, and the windows of these rooms contained ironed balconies from which the Queen could look out over gorgeous gardens, laid out in front and view the river, the palace, and distantly the city of London. It was in fact, a garden pavilion described by one contemporary as a house of delight. Such buildings had a long pedigree. And since the 15th century, Greenwich had always been conceived in two parts, incorporating a secluded garden retreat, known as a plaisance. Henrietta Maria was thus really reinstating a traditional form of royal residence. Put simply, she was creating a little house of necessity. And decorating this house became the Queen's principle interest in the mid 1630s. And she was frequently to be found at Greenwich discussing the progress of work with Inigo Jones, who was handsomely rewarded for his efforts. And the King and Queen drew on their international network of connoisseurs to create a series of bejeweled interiors. In 1626, the Tuscan painter, Orazio Gentileschi, entered the service of Charles I. He'd previously been worKing for Henrietta Maria's mother, Marie de' Medici in Paris, and he had come to England with her blessing. He was quickly assimilated into the group of connoisseurs and collectors around the King, as both a painter and an advisor. But he was superseded in royal favor in the early 1630s by van Dyck, and was instead absorbed into the Queen's circle. Gentileschi painted two large canvases for the Great Hall at the Queen's House and was commissioned to paint its ceiling. Like the Banqueting House, the ceiling was divided up into compartments by great beams. And in these, Gentileschi painted his allegory of peace reigning over the arts. Well, while this ceiling survives badly mutilated at Marlborough House, the composition is quite legible. While ribbons at the Banqueting House publicly trumpeted the triumph of the Stuart dynasty, this was, if you like, a painting of state, the iconography of Gentileschi in the Queen's House was much more intimate, representing the national cultural rebirth over which the King and Queen saw themselves presiding. All 26 figures in the complex allegory, part of which you see here are female, admonishing the role that their sex played in the arts. Indeed, the subjects on the wall canvases were female too. The single male presence in the house was the exquisite bust of the King commissioned by Henrietta Maria from Bernini, and which perished in the late 17th century fire at Whitehall. No less attention was given to the first floor rooms. The connoisseur, Sir Balthazar Gerbier was enlisted to secure the services of the leading Flemish painter, Jacob Jordaens, to paint 22 canvases for the withdrawing room. So this is the upper part. This bit's abandoned, not used, this is overlooKing the park. This is the bit that overlooking looks the gardens. Here's the bed chamber, which I'm going to show you in a moment, the closet, and here is the withdrawing room. And the subject in here was Cupid and Psyche, very thinly disguised as the King and Queen, and the gods surrounding them were to be easily recognizable and required ye faces of ye woman, ye women, as beautiful as may be. Unlike Jordaen's paintings, none of which survive, the Queen's bed chamber remains largely intact and is the only early Stuart interior, where today you can get a sense of the King's and Queen's private existence. Now it doesn't actually look like this anymore. This is a photograph of it when it was displayed a few years ago as a royal palace. Today, it's returned to be shown as a picture gallery. Through the papal agent at her court, the Queen secured the services of Guido Reni to paint the central canvas in a ceiling decorated by the English office of works. Guido's painting unfortunately never reached England, but the coving, which you can see here, is a unique survival of decorative painting in an early Stuart royal interior. Royal taste was strongly for Italian Renaissance's grotesque work, a form of decoration popular in England for a century or more, but brought to a state of high sophistication by designers, such as Francis Klein. The Queen's House, I think, tells us more about the early Stuart Court than any other surviving building, except the Banqueting House. Conceived as a private pleasure pavilion and dedicated to their love of each other, the love of the arts, Henrietta Maria and Charles I used their contacts across Europe to create a luxurious jewel casket set in a gorgeous landscape. And it was only open to a tiny privileged group of close friends as epitomized by Belcamp's painting of them walking in the park. Now the precise sequence of events that led in 1639 to Henrietta Maria purchasing Wimbledon Manor is not known. But those of you who listened to my series of Gresham lectures last year on Great Tudor and Stuart houses may remember me introducing this house in my lecture about the Cecil's. Now it's rather hard today to imagine 16th century Wimbledon. It was then one of a, one of three tiny hamlets that boarded in a triangle, a great plateau of high ground, which we now know is Wimbledon Common, but was then much larger. The Heath, as it was called, was bisected east to west by the main London to South Hampton Road, the main thoroughfare bypassing Wimbledon, Putney, and Mortlake on its way to the coast. Wimbledon was six miles from London, and from the high ground, the city was perfectly visible. I got on the train, went down there just to prove this to you and took this photograph. Obviously the post office tower was not there, but you can see from this, and it's not even a long lens, I just took it on my telephone. How you can see from the top of the hill of Wimbledon, you can see London extremely clearly. But it was then extremely remote with a population of perhaps only 230 people clustered together in tiny cottages with a church set a little apart next to the rectory. And it was the rectory which was purchased by William Cecil, the future Lord Burghley in 1550. At that point, he was a rising star, only 30 years old and wanted a rural retreat to which he could go from his house near Whitehall Palace in Canon Row. Well, the rectory is still there. I've not been into it, sadly. It recently sold according to Country Life for 26 million pounds. But apparently some of the interiors do remain. But during Lord Burghley's ownership, he added land to the rectory and extended it. But with several other enormous houses to his name, including Burghley House and Tibbles, he granted this, his old family home to his eldest son, Thomas, in 1575. Thomas Cecil, in his turn, expanded the family land ownings in Wimbledon, including purchasing the neighboring Manor House on the other side of the parish church. He then married an heiress in 1564, adding to the family's great wealth. Building seems to be his chief interest in life, and he must have taken a major hand in designing this new spectacularly located and elegantly planned suburban home in Wimbledon that he began in 1688 on the site of the old Manor House. As you can see, it was cut into the hillside. And although it's completely gone today, as you go up the road where it was, you can see the steeply falling land away. And to the right, if you know Wimbledon, there's the golf course. And then beyond that, there are the tennis club, the tennis courts. And the whole property was very big, it covered some 266 acres. Well, James I was a regular visitor to Thomas Cecil in Wimbledon, but after Cecil's death, the house passed to his son, General Sir Edward Cecil, a soldier who spent much of his career abroad. He certainly used the house, in fact, he took his title from it, Viscount Wimbledon, and he built a chapel on the side of the church, which still survives. And there's his two in the church, the rest of the church has rebuilt in the 19th century, but this is Cecil's tomb. We don't know much about his life at Wimbledon Manor, but we do know that at one point there was an explosion in the kitchens, when a maid opened a barrel of gun powder thinking it was a barrel of soap, I suppose he was a soldier, and she dropped in a candle. Must have been a nasty moment. But other than repairing what damage this caused, it seems he made few, if any architectural changes to the house. A foreign tourist who visited it in 1629 raved about its beauty, and especially the gardens, the likes of which he thought were rarely found in England. And when Edward died without a male heir, the estate was put up for sale. Well there's no evidence that Charles and Henrietta Maria were visitors to this house during the 1630s, or even that they were looKing for another residence, and with Greenwich, Oatlands, Richmond, Nonsuch, it has to be wondered why the Queen wanted another house. Well, I shall answer that question in a few minutes, but first we shall just note that the King bought it for her for the colossal sum of 16,789 pounds. Well, Inigo Jones, the Queen's personal architect, was instructed to draw up plans for altering the Elizabethan house to the Queen's specification. None of these plans survived, but we have just one drawing in Jones's hand for Wimbledon, which is inscribed for friezes at Wimbledon, and this sketch probably shows some cornicing for one of the new rooms. But I can't emphasize strongly enough that this was not just an interior redecoration job, because we know that in December, 1638, a brick field was leased by the King, and a brick making contractor fired 124,000 bricks for maKing alterations to the house. This, in fact, was a major project designed by Inigo Jones for the Queen, that because it's been completely demolished, has never gained any prominence. However, we can reconstruct exactly what Henrietta Maria commissioned from Jones, and by analyzing the house, we can reveal what she was trying to do. Well the starting point is a remarkably detailed survey of Thomas Cecil's house found in a book of drawings assembled by the royal surveyor, John Thorpe. Unfortunately, the circumstances or the date of this plan, can't be convincingly stated, but it's clear from the annotations that this was a survey of the existing building. And as the book is dated 1596, the survey must have been taken before that. And you can see the manor we see here wasn't a particularly big one. It was only one room deep. There was a great hall. This eastern arm here contained a chapel, stairs up to a long gallery that went the whole distance of this wing. And in this wing here were the family quarters. And on this side of the house, this is the view looking down towards London, and on this side of the house were these spectacular gardens. And we know about these gardens because the house was surveyed again in 1609. And here you see Robert Smythson's survey of the manor. This is what we were looking at earlier, the U-shaped house. And you can see the extensive gardens and a series of terraces climbing up the hill to the heathland at the back. As far as the layout of the rooms in the house are concerned, the two plans essentially agree. But what Smythson does is he includes on this side here, the kitchens, which thought didn't include, perhaps because they rather spoiled the symmetry of his rather elegant plan. But what these two Jacobean plans give us are the plan of the house during the occupation by Thomas Cecil. And if we assume that his son Edward didn't make any significant alterations to the house, and there's no evidence that he did, these plans show Wimbledon Manor in the state in which they were purchased by Henrietta Maria in 1639. Now, at this point, I want to show you a third plan of Wimbledon. And this one is in the hand of Nicholas Hawksmoor, Rem's chief draftsman, and of course, an accomplished architect in his own right. Unfortunately it's not dated, but my colleagues who have studied Hawksmoor's drawing style believe that it was done in the early 1690s. And as you can see, the plan of the Elizabethan house is perfectly recognizable. But in an addition, there is a new extension here on the western side. Perhaps this is the addition built by Inigo Jones. But to be absolutely sure it wasn't built later, we need to quickly check what happened to the house between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the early 1690s. Well during the Commonwealth and protectorate, Wimbledon Manor belonged to one of the most senior parliamentarian generals, John Lambert. For eight years, he and his family enjoyed living at Wimbledon. They tended the garden, they furnished the house with pictures bought from the royal sales. When he bought the house in 1652, it was extremely fashionable, and had only just been renovated by Inigo Jones. And so there's no evidence to suggest that he needed to make any alterations to the former royal palace. Although his interest in the gardens suggests that he may have made some improvements there. Well at the restoration, Wimbledon Manor was returned to Henrietta Maria, but she felt it had been defiled by the presence of John Lambert, and she sold it for 10,000 pounds to George Digby, the 2nd Earl of Bristol. He took possession of it in 1661. He found it rather run down and had to spend some money on repairing the house and the garden to make them habitable. His political career was catastrophic. Described by Professor Hutton, Gresham College's new Professor of Divinity, as remorseless, sorry I'll say that again, remorselessly self-destructive. There's no suggestion that Digby could have ever made significant alterations to the house. He stopped living there in the 1670s, and on his death in 1677, it was sold to the Earl of Danby. Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, later the 1st Duke of Leeds was a Yorkshireman in need of a base close to London. He liked the house and he particularly liked its gardens, and he started to entertain important guests there. But like the political career of his predecessor, the Earl of Bristol, Danby ended up in deep water, impeached, and in the Tower of London. But unlike Bristol, he was rehabilitated, and in 1690 became William III's Chief Minister and Duke of Leeds. And I would suggest it was at this moment of rehabilitation with his star rapidly rising again, that he commissioned Nicholas Hawksmoor, England's, by then, most fashionable country house architect to survey Wimbledon in preparation for a remodeling. So, if I'm right and neither Lambert, Digby, or Osborne made any significant changes to Wimbledon between 1649 and 1690, Hawksmoor's plan shows the alterations made to Wimbledon Manor by Inigo Jones. And in fact, this can be proved by a very detailed survey taken of the house in 1649 by the parliamentary surveyors who describe in detail the house exactly as shown on Hawksmoor's plan. So, if we put the drawings together, we can consider this as a lost work of Inigo Jones. He oversaw the remodeling of the house, receiving a fee of 580 pounds and a special bounty from the Queen for his efforts. The east wing had, that's this wing here, had been designed in tandem with a sunken garden, that's this here, and an undercroft. Can you see sort of there's some dots here, these are pillars supporting a terrace above, and the underneath that there's an undercroft which contained a shell grotto. And what Jones does is he incorporates this into the house and converts this wing here into a new chapel, and a large marble parlor giving out onto this terrace, overlooking the garden. The great first floor rooms remained much as they were, but on the west side here, Cecil's rooms were completely remodeled. Here, the King and Queen had new bed chambers, and a shared withdrawing room. Each bed chamber had its own en suite bathroom with tiled floors, lead lined barbs, and hot and cold running water. Nearby was a linen room. Adjacent was also a highly ornamented study that had apparently been Cecil's, with a Dutch stove and various secure cupboards. Although the gardens, which you see here, were already the fame of the place, the Queen commissioned the French garden designer, Andre Mollet, to reconstruct them in a contemporary fashion. The Tudor gardens, actually I'll just go back one, were, as you can see here, asymmetrical. They were a sort of assemblage of walled compartments containing ponds of Banqueting House and various monuments. But what Mollet did was impose an order and symmetry on the gardens with a strong central access here, and the sunken garden on the east side, which you see in this view here, became an elegant parterre with an orangery. And you can see here, I think you can see the arched supports here for the terrace that Inigo Jones creates with the grotto, the shell grotto underneath. The principle rooms were joined to the gardens by a series of bridges, which linked the gardens to the main part of the house. And in the sunken area below that, there were lawns, a fountain, and an aviary. So here is a an engraving a bit earlier than the engraves I've just been showing you, of Henrietta Maria and her three eldest children. And what you can see is she's standing on a terrace with a balustrade, and below that is a garden with showing a parterre. And it must have been a view much like this, that the Queen and her children would have seen at Wimbledon Manor in 1640. But Henrietta Maria's most remarkable addition to Wimbledon Manor was Inigo Jones's cruciform stone gallery, this structure you can see here in the top right corner. The southern arm, 10 feet wide, with many compendious sentences painted on the walls, led to a bridge across into the garden. So actually I'm just going to go back a couple, just so you can see where that comes out. So that leads to there, that's the arm of that leads to there. Okay, so you walked out into the garden at that point. And the north arm led to an alcove containing a crimson bed with cloth of silver and gold, with three matching chairs, six matching stools, and a carpet. The east-west arm here ended in a balcony at this point, and the crossing here was a stove. How exactly this crossing worked isn't really known, but I think you can see from Hawksmoor's survey, there were pillars here which must have supported some sort of structure above, I don't know, a dome, a vault of some description. This is a completely unique layout, and a unique composition, a royal bed chamber that opened directly onto a garden. And at the garden door here, there was a room that was described as the lord's chamber, presumably a room where someone could be stationed to control access to the Queen's private bed chamber. Well this cross gallery contained what was almost certainly the first bed alcove in England. This alcove was a fashionable new feature from French aristocratic houses. At the beginning of the 17th century, French bed chambers were large rooms containing a bed, often doubling as a reception room. But in the late 1620s, bed chambers began to be used for more private intercourse. And an intimate space was created in the bed chamber called the ruelle. This was simply an area between the side of the bed and the wall, a place where the owner could receive specially favored friends. And the ruelle gradually became an architecturally defined space. And here you see what happened in England, the architecturally designed bed alcove, with the cross gallery, the balcony, the gallery going out here the lord's chamber. So what was happening in France was also happening here at Wimbledon. And the first recorded bad bed alcove in Paris was at the demolished Hotel Duhombole in the 1630s. By the 1640s, they had become reasonably common. And so for Henrietta Maria to build an alcove at Wimbledon in 1639 to 40, showed her absolutely in tune with the ultimate in contemporary Parisian fashion. And here you see a very extravagant bed alcove from the later 17th century, and the only surviving 17th century bed alcove in England at Powys Castle. And these bed alcoves were architectural features associated with privacy and intimacy. And it wasn't only the extraordinary architecture of Wimbledon that suggests that this was a very particular private house of necessity, because we have some evidence as to how it was furnished. In 1649 after the execution of Charles I, a series of inventories were taken of the contents of the royal houses. Many things had been taken from Wimbledon by the time the surveyors arrived, but 24 paintings remained. And these tell us, I think, quite a lot about the house. Hanging on the walls were two pieces of needle work, four allegorical works, five still lives, a portrait, and 12 religious paintings of which six had the Blessed Virgin as its main subject. If you compare these paintings with those listed in the Queen's House of Greenwich, which were all allegorical paintings, this looks like a very personal collection, with a strong focus on the Queen's Catholic faith, and a rich selection of Marion images. The single portrait there was of the Queen's father, King Henry IV of France. Moreover, amongst the paintings was won very recently commissioned from Sir Anthony van Dyck. And this was my favorite painting of the whole 17th century, Cupid and Psyche, one of van Dyck's most beautiful paintings, charged with erotic power. Psyche embodied beauty, and Cupid desire, and together, of course, they made up Plato's definition of love, love being desire, aroused by beauty. Henrietta Maria was seized by the symbolism of the myth, and commissioned many paintings of it, including the ones I've already mentioned at the Queen's House. That this big painting, it's a really big painting, it's six foot square, and the figures are halflife, life size. The fact that it should be taken to Wimbledon emphasizes the Queen's focus on the house being a place of erotic and platonic love. And Wimbledon was immensely private. It was very remote. This is John Aubrey's sketch of Wimbledon in the 1670s, and you can see the heathened, the area around it, there's nothing around it. It's a very, very remote place. The house contained very few lodgings. There was a room for a maid. There was a pallet chamber for ladies on duty, but otherwise there were only rooms for the Queen's two closest friends, her childhood nurse, Francois de Monbodiak, and Susan Feilding, the Countess of Denbigh, who was the Queen's First Lady of the bed chamber. And on the first floor, there was a nursery suggesting that the Queen intended to bring her children to the house. So ladies and gentlemen, this all adds up to a unique royal residence, a house without a single named traditional room of state, no division between outer and inner lodgings, a place filled with private paintings, constricted of access in a remote location. This was a private hideaway, indeed a royal love nest, a house of necessity where the King and Queen could reside in complete privacy and enjoy uninterrupted intimacy. The bathrooms, shared with drawing room, alcove bedroom, direct access to the gardens are all things impossible even at the newly reconstructed Queen's House. Wimbledon Manor was the ultimate expression of the King's and Queen's love for each other. But very briefly to return to our starting point, because I think our understanding now of Wimbledon Manor helps us understand Inigo Jones and the Banqueting House. Of course, the Stuart monarchs needed great rooms of state, for set peace court ceremonial. But the houses of necessity were the places where they preferred to live, and their architect, Inigo Jones in fact spent much more time designing and supervising these private, intimate residences than the great buildings of state. And this means, I think, that we can look at him in a fresh light, installing the latest in French luxury bedrooms and bathrooms for Henrietta Maria, and not just the proper and correct bringer of architectural classicism to England. Thank you.(audience applauding)- Well, thank you, Professor Thurley for a wonderful lecture. We don't have much online. There is one question about the foreign visitor who visited Wimbledon House and admired it so. Just a factual question, do we know who the foreign visitor was that?- Yes, we do. He kept a diary, he came from the Netherlands and was very keen, I think, to see all the sort of great sites of London, and you know, Wimbledon was a curiosity, I think, and he wanted to visit that.- Are there any questions from the in person audience? I'm seeing a hand up there. Mariam?- [Mariam] Thank you very much, Dr. Thurley for a most interesting lecture. Apart from Indigo Jones' architectural talents, do we know why it is that in fact he became a royal architect? You referred to the beginning to the precarious finances of the King. So was it that in fact that his fees in fact were not so expensive, or? I wasn't clear actually how it is that he came to be selected. Presumably there are other architects that would've been pretty strong contenders to occupy royal favors.- Well, it's a very, a good and very interesting question, because today we have a very sort of clear conception of what an architect is. Someone who you commission to build a building, he's trained in drawing and understanding the functionality and the construction and the engineering the building. But in the 17th century, the divisions between the various branches of the arts and sciences were extremely fluid. And if you had asked Christopher Wren who he was, you know, he was just as much a mathematician, or a professor of geometry, or astronomer, an architect. They didn't see the distinctions between those, and nor did I think Inigo Jones really see the distinctions so strongly between his work as a designer of stage scenery, a painter. He started off as a carpenter, and famously because he clearly was a bit of a prima donna, he was described by Ben Johnson as a joiner with whom no man will join. And so architecture was just one of his many talents. And you only need to look at the extraordinary designs for masks, the ingenuity with which he designed incredibly complex stage machinery, to realize that you're dealing with a sort of polymath figure here, whose one of whose branches was architecture. And he probably did start his career in the household of Anne of Denmark, moving to be the King's chief architect. And really, he just crushed all before him. And the man who designed the Banqueting House that burned down, Robert Stickles, you know, was actually really, was probably really quite a useless architect. And James I was really unhappy with the design of the place. So I think he was head and shoulders really, above anyone else at court.- There's a bit of interest in the bed alcoves. And the question is, did the bed alcoves have curtains which came across and completely shut the bed off from the rest of the room?- Well no, they didn't actually, that's an interesting question. The alcove was kind of like an architectural setting for the bed. The bed itself had curtains. In the later 17th century, they were designed with carved wooden curtains, the ones that Charles II had, but in this early period, these alcoves were associated very strongly with privacy, intimacy. Being invited into the alcove was kind of the ultimate accolade, really. You got in the most intimate place you could get to.- Any other questions in the room? I'm seeing a few hands up now. Just a second. Now where are you going, Miriam? Yeah, sorry, we'll come back down in a second.- [Man] I visited many years ago, The Church of St Benet Paul's Wharf, and I believe, I'm going back probably about 25 years now. I believe the vicar said Inigo Jones is buried there. Is that correct, sir?- Well this is one of the excellent moments in the Gresham lecture where the lecturer has absolutely no idea, but someone in the audience probably does know whether he's buried there or not. Yes, someone there confirming or denying it. Yes, okay. Is there someone in the audience who knows and can confirm that? Thank you.- There's a question out front, and then we'll go to the two here if we can.- [Man] Yes, given the upheavals at the time, it seems strange there doesn't seem to be any provision for a garrison, and the house itself doesn't seem to be built with any kind of defense in mind. Was this an issue in Inigo Jones's mind at all?- Well, of course, we're all crippled with the blight of hindsight. I mean, in the 1530s, in 1630s, as I said, it was a golden age, it was peace, it was prosperity. It looked as if the King had resolved his financial difficulties with ship money, and all the various sort of dodges and dives that he was putting in place. I mean, Wimbledon is the ultimate expression of a house where there was no, there was no need, there was no conception that you'd ever need to defend it from anybody. So, absolutely not. It was designed in a period where it was inconceivable that there could be a civil war in England, completely inconceivable.- So I think there's a question in the third row, yes.- [Woman] Thank you. Two points very, very quickly. On a previous picture, there was some, a place on the skyline with some writing, as if it was a viewpoint you could see something in the distance.- This one?- [Woman] No, back again. Sorry.- We're going back through alcoves, my drawing.- There, there.- Ah here.- [Woman] In the distance, on the right arm, there.- [Simon] Harrow on the hill.- Oh, right, lovely. Thank you. And secondly, what happened to Wimbledon Manor?- Ah, yes, well, it was, like many 16th, 17th century houses, it just became very unfashionable, while Wimbledon became extremely fashionable. And by the early 18th century, everybody had cottoned onto the fact it was a fabulous place to live, because it was six miles from the city, it was up high, lovely views. And so the site was bought, the house was demolished, and a series of other houses were built, and is actually now a housing estate on the site. But there were a series of very grand 18th century houses. In fact, one belong to the Dutchess of Marlborough, which were on this site subsequently.- Question there.- [Man] My question is, well rather, I'm quite interested in the 1640 reference to a French design sort of coming in from Jones. And we know there was this huge Italian backdrop to his work, but I've never seen anything which suggests that he was French. So do you think that came from the Queen or?- Well, the short answer is yes, and it absolutely did come from the Queen. The Queen retained very, very close connections with France and French designers and French architects. And we absolutely know that in Somerset House, and we can prove it that Jones was given French patent books to inspire his designs. And I mean, I do think it is fascinating that he should build this bed alcove here at a point when it is the absolute height of fashion in France. Her contacts must have been extremely good. I suspect she was sent drawings. We don't have no proof of this, but Inigo Jones had not been to France. So the design must have been conveyed to him through drawings, prints, or other means for him to put something in which the Queen herself wouldn't have seen either. I mean, she wouldn't have seen it. So she heard about this and she wanted to introduce the height of, you know, French taste.- I'm afraid we're probably going to have to draw it to a close there. Thank you very much professor thoroughly for your talk, and thank you to our audience for your close attention, both those of you who joined us today and those online. And please join me in thanking the professor.(audience applauding)