Inventing Freedom by Daniel Hannan

Author:Daniel Hannan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

NOT BUILT TO ENVIOUS SHOW

Inigo Jones, the architect who was captured naked at the fall of Basing House, had designed a royal palace in Whitehall that would have outshone any in Europe. But Charles I never had the money to complete it. Like all subsequent monarchs, he was kept on too tight a financial leash by Parliament to indulge the baroque fantasies that, in the rest of Europe, were taking physical shape in marble and statuary.

Nowhere in the Anglosphere is there a kingly residence that, in scale or splendor, can rival Louis XIV’s Versailles outside Paris, nor the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, nor the Belvedere in Potsdam, nor the Herrenhausen in Hanover, nor the Buen Retiro in Madrid.

We have noted the peculiar taste for restraint in Anglosphere design, a restraint eulogized by the Country House Poets. The strength of Whiggery may, in a sense, be seen in the parsimony of Britain’s royal palaces. While Europe’s princes, from Naples to St. Petersburg, were overawing their subjects with lapidary projections of their power, the British monarchy was losing property. Many of the great medieval and Tudor palaces were destroyed during the civil war, ransacked by Puritan troops or scarred by artillery. Others were sold off. As the historian Linda Colley put it, “Whereas Henry VIII had been able to hunt game, or women, or heretics out of more than twenty great houses scattered throughout England, Charles II returned in 1660 to only seven: Whitehall, St James’s, Somerset House, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Windsor Castle and the Tower of London.”

Although Charles wanted to restore the glory of these palaces, William III discontinued all his projects, and turned Greenwich into a hospital for disabled seamen.

To see how physically different Britain might be had the Stuarts succeeded, look at the building they could afford to commission from Inigo Jones—the building before which Charles I was eventually beheaded: the Banqueting House on Whitehall.

To look properly, you will need something to spread on the floor and lie upon, for the most impressive feature of the building is a ceiling that contains nine virtuoso paintings by Rubens celebrating the union of the English and Scottish crowns.

They are sumptuous works, swirling and sensual. In the main picture, England and Scotland are portrayed as fleshy women, each holding half a crown. A curly-headed lad between them is the future Charles I. Minerva, goddess of wisdom, hovers above, while below the weapons of war are consigned to a furnace.

Yet, as you sprawl on the floorboards, you find that something is bothering you. The paintings that make up the ceiling are gorgeous pieces, for which Charles I paid the almost unbelievable sum of £3,000. But the whole setup feels out of place in an English-speaking country. It is too ostentatious, too propagandist, too hierarchical in its iconography.

The more you look, the more you understand the distaste that people across the Anglosphere felt for the Stuarts. In their tastes, as well as in their politics, the monarchs seemed foreign: transalpine, ritualistic, overelaborate. It

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