Crown, Country and the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy

this is the last of four lectures in the series I've been giving and in the last three we've been tracing the winding path of artistic culture and patronage in England we started with the Tudors and we saw the way that in Tudor England what we call art today was admired for its ingenuity and its costliness rather than what we might today consider are its artistic value easel painting was a very minor element in the royal and aristocratic interior everybody much preferred textiles and plate as a way of decorating their houses then England isolated from Europe by religion and war during the Elizabethan period was reconnected with the mainland after peace with Spain which was brought by James the first and this allowed a small number of very rich aristocrats close to the crown to participate in collecting Italian and in particular Venetian painting but the artistic interests of the royal family and court were esoteric for most people and lacked any wider impact things began to change after the restoration as easel paintings suddenly became more available people began to buy paintings on a large scale to decorate their houses but in the forty years or so after the restoration the interests of the elite were wide ranging and essentially were what we as opposed would today call scientific portraits and landscapes were master for pleasure and decorative effect but they didn't form deliberate assemblages what today I suppose we would call art collections so sort of in summary of my first three lectures in the 16th and the 17th centuries the communities who were interested in what we call art and who invested in it were essentially in the circle of the court and the people who were not in this gilded circle looked to the court for guidance on artistic matters the crown was actually very much in the lead of fashion and even for a monarch like charles ii for whom cultural patronage was a minority interest the court was the undisputed leader of fashion last time i described how charles ii had patronized antonio Vario at windsor castle creating an architectural and artistic model that was followed by the aristocracy in their houses for the ensuing 40 years well this evening we are going to follow the decline of the cultural influence of the court after 1700 for a period of more than a century leadership of high artistic culture left the monarchy the court and the palaces and it rooted itself amongst the aristocracy and the upper commercial classes as I explained last time these people had already come to regard knowledge of painting and sculpture as a mark of gentility but after 1700 and definitely after 1720 it was these people who were setting the fashion rather than following it now the rapid decline of the cultural influence of the monarchy was paralleled by a shift in political power from the crown to the aristocracy and it was epitomized I think perhaps more than anything else by the state of the Crown's principal royal residence in London in 1698 white old palace which you see a plan of here the seat of the English monarchy since 1536 burned down it might have appeared to the casual observer a sort of ramshackle conglomeration of buildings but it was symbolically the heart of the nation they perhaps also as now it was big it was famous it was impressive but it was now just a pile of rubble William the third and then much more decisively Queen Anne moved the headquarters of the monarchy to st. James's Palace that you see here now of course a sovereign's principal residence conveys messages about their kapow ER and their cultural positioning this is why louis xiv for instance spent so much money on creating versailles the british monarchy after 1714 was based absent James's and there's no doubt that this building was pretty unimpressive the problem was that it was never designed to be an impressive symbol of the monarchy or of the nation it was built quite simply to safeguard the Monarchs children and as such never had a principled public facade there was thus I think a gulf between any national or international understanding of a palace and the reality of this modest building which had been converted to undertake a magnificent task when the German aristocrat Baron bill Feld visited george ii court at st. James's in 1741 he thought it a lodging-house crazy smoky and dirty in 1823 The Morning Post stated bluntly that I quote the outside will never look like a royal palace until the brick walls have been covered with a stone facing ornamented with pillars and porticos the following year an MP said in the House of Commons that and I quote since James's Palace looks more like an arms house than a kingly residence and it's a disgrace to the country although these voices were raised against the Jameses by Britons who travel Brod and thoughts and james is a pale reflection of the might of the British crown there were others that saw it as an appropriate constitutional expression of the monarchy's role when the poet and diplomat Matthew Pryor was shown around Versailles by one of louis xiv household officials he was asked whether william the Third's achievements were celebrated in english royal houses prior piously proclaimed that I quote the monuments of my Master's actions are to be seen everywhere but in his own house in response to criticisms by son James's by Baron bill felled the translator of his letters a man called William Hooper sprang to the defense of st. James's he thought and I quote the glory of the monarch consists not in a handful of tinsel courtiers or inexpensive and pompous effects festivals but in the ease and affluence the freedom the dignity and the happiness of his people these people were he reflected heat so these people were reflected he thought in the royal crown which was given lustre far superior to the what he called the blaze of the court of an absolute monarch so for him and for many of his contemporaries absolutism was expressed in brick stone and oil paint Matthew prior thought Versailles the foolishest thing in the world where he thought louis xiv was shown galloping in every ceiling since James's in this view could thus be seen as the ideal expression of Limited monarchy as constituted after 1689 and the Bill of Rights the Georgian monarchy ensconced for ceremonial purposes and James's displayed an architectural carapace that was in fact deliberately understated George the first who had some interest in cultural matters but disliked ceremonial and courtly formality rejected Sir John Vanbrugh as plans for replacing some James's his plans for extending kensington and for finishing what will in the third had started at Hampton Court even when George the first was offered the means of financing a complete rebuilding of Whitehall by the creative financial genius of Sir Robert Walpole he didn't take up the offer instead he supported extremely modest alterations and application adaptations at Kensington and Hampton Court in the typical Hanoverian fashion George the First's disdain for ceremony encouraged his son's passion for it Lord Harvey famously observed I quote all the pageantry and splendor of badges and trappings of royalty were as pleasing to the son as they were Aksum to the father this didn't at first make a material difference to the appearance of the court Daniel Defoe in his tour of England published in the mid 1720s drew a contrast between the splendor of the court and its official seat I quote the palace of sand James's though the winter receptacle of all the pomp and glory of this kingdom is really mean in the comparison of the glorious Court of Great Britain the splendor of its nobility the wealth and the greatness of its attendants the economy of the house and the real splendour of the whole royal family these outdo all the courts of Europe and yet this palace comes beneath those of the most petty Prince's in it now this very nice print shows the arrival of George the first at absent James's and I show it here because it supports the point that was I've just made and was made by Daniel Defoe and that is that although the palace was really mean the splendor and the the the the number of attendants and the way they were dressed was was was very very grand well George the seconds burst of courtly glory came to a crushing end with the death of Queen Caroline in 1737 after this the devastated King withdrew from public ceremonial as much as he could he ceased to take the court to Hampton Court his biggest and most modern royal palace and george ii didn't only fail to build of anything of any significance but he actually had complete disdain for what we would regard as high culture lord harvey the court wit and gossip tells us in his memoirs that I quote the King used often to brag of the contempt he had for books and letters he had a punk song for what the poet Alexander Pope called gun drum trumpet blunderbuss and thunder the only paintings he really liked were erotic once once complaining that his gigantic fat Venus had been removed from kensington and demanding its immediate return the point is i'm afraid to say that george ii was deliberately and perversely Philistine in his tastes not so his grandson after his accession George the third acquired the freehold of Buckingham house a large aristocracy mansion built on the western edge of some James's Park a stone's throw from the Royal Palace and James's the purpose of buying this building was to provide a suitable residence for the because Somerset House the Queen's official historic London residence was now very old and in an unfashionable part of London Buckingham house which had been built in 1702 2-5 had appropriated that royal landscape of James's Park and after its purchase by the king in 1762 improvements were made to make it fit for royal occupation and in fact in 1775 it became officially the Queen's residence so in the 18th century the contrast between Buckingham house and James's the Kings and Queens residences instant James's and their European equivalents was really stark and it provides a commentary on that the British monarch is long slow passage from what I call sovereign rule to sovereign reign from as early as 1702 a combination of constitutional shifts and the destruction of Whitehall meant that James's epitomized the question of whether the sovereign embodied the nation in all his deeds in France you'd say lata c'est moi or just embodied the ceremonial part of the nation in the former state when the sovereign embodied everything you'd expect the sovereigns residents to be of great magnificence in the latter when the sovereigns only embodying the ceremonial part or of government the residents should be suitable only to the needs of the royal family and so from the accession of Queen Anne till the accession of Queen Victoria a period of a hundred and thirty-four years since Genesis was the representation in brick and stone of the political and constitutional debate over the role and powers of the monarchy some felt international disgrace other the appropriate home for a constitutional monarch now what of course is astonishing about all this is that while Queen Anne the sovereign of a nation which was rapidly emerging as the most powerful in the world lived at st. James's Palace Parliament was paying for the construction of a baroque Palace covering four acres on a European scale for one of its courtiers on the east gate of Blenheim Palace but you see here is an inscription which reads under the auspices of a magnificent sovereign this house was built for John Duke of Maura and his Duchess Sara by Serge a van bura between the years 1705 and 1720 to the ancient royal manor of Woodstock one of the greatest royal possessions together with a grant of two hundred and forty thousand pounds towards the building of Blenheim was given by Queen Anne and confirmed by an act of Parliament this extraordinary fact did not escape contemporaries Daniel Defoe who we've already heard from this evening thought that The Dukes of Marlborough would never be able to afford to keep up such an enormous palace he wrote and I quote nothing below royalty and a prince can support and equip äj-- suitable to the living in such a house and one may without a spirit of prophecy say that at some time or another Blenheim will return to be as the old Woodstock once was the palace of a king well as we know Defoe was wrong but he was making an observation which was increasingly made of the great houses of the aristocracy and that is their princely nature princely a word increasingly used to describe the house is of the nobility now after 1688 and the Glorious Revolution the aristocracy effectively took control of the government they dominated the cabinet the Armed Forces the civil service and through patronage effectively controlled the House of Commons the aristocracy governed and they were expected to govern unlike the aristocracy of France they never became isolated from their communities they were political social and crucially economic leaders of society and very few people argued with that after 1660 the size of the aristocracy grew in 1658 the English peerage numbered a hundred and nineteen but charles ii who had an awful lot of debts and favors to repay granted 43 new peerages in the 25 years after the restoration this is john Maitland the first Duke of Lauderdale one of those 43 new peerages but I think even more importantly Charles created Dukes like the Duke of Lauderdale the highest rank 14 of them in all some of these were revival but the point is there was still 14 more Dukes in 1685 than there had been in 1660 when William the third came to the throne he also had pressing reasons to reward those who had supported him he created 27 new titles including seven more new dukedoms Queen Anne created 45 new titles and so by 1714 there were a hundred and seventy peers this very rapid expansion didn't continue into the 18th century and the Hanoverians are very reluctant to create new peerages so the point is that there was a massive expansion of the ruling class in a very short period between 1660 and 1714 now the important point about this is that we have to remember that peers were expected to have an income sufficient to support the dignity of their position in 1701 it was thought that a minimum income of four thousand pounds a year was appropriate for a by count and a minimum of three thousand pounds a year for a baron interestingly Sarah the Duke of mullahs wife who's recently been given a rather alarming historical role in the movie the favorite if you've seen it you know what I'm referring to was very reluctant to accept a dukedom for her soldier husband John Churchill you see here because she thought that his income wasn't up to maintaining the status of a Duke and it was only when she was given a grant of five thousand pounds a year was she finally modified but the highest incomes were vastly higher than this in 1683 the rental receipts from the Earl of Rutland estates were fourteen thousand four hundred and eighty-two pounds a year while the Duke of Devonshire's average annual income was at least seventeen thousand pounds a year the Duke of Newcastle was netting twenty five thousand pounds a year in the following decade by the time George the first came to the throne the Dukes of New Castle Bedford and Beaufort all had incomes of more than thirty thousand pounds a year and four other Dukes had incomes between 20,000 and 30,000 a year and these incomes which were extremely large and I'll give you some person's at a moment were reinforced by three factors the first was the ruthless use of the entail which allowed States to be passed legally from the father to the eldest son without being subdivided so this had the effect of keeping these big estates together rather than them being broken up and and dispersed the second factor that reinforced these huge incomes were advantageous marriages very often within the aristocracy but also very Judas judiciously organized with the wealthiest merchant classes so bringing new money into these families and also consolidating the family's wealth and estates and the third thing that happened was the very skillful use of acquiring debt particularly in the form of mortgages which were used to fund improvement and the expansion of estates so these devices the entails marriage and the mortgages magnified the returns from these aristocratic estates and consolidated their economic base at the same time as both the numbers and the spending power of the nobility increased the ability of the crown to spend on cultural projects rapidly declined in 1689 soon after the accession of William and Mary Parliament granted them six hundred thousand pounds a year for their civil expenses that is to say as opposed to their military expenses which Parliament would cover and the Army and the Navy previously royal expenditure had been covered through a mix of the Crown's hereditary revenue and special one-off grants from Parliament on the accession of George the first Parliament set what became known as the Civil List and they set it at 700 thousand pounds a year that is to say about 15% of the national budget of this 700 thousand pounds a year one third was immediately consumed by the royal household and a further hundred thousand pounds a year was reserved for the Prince of Wales most of the rest went on the costs of running the national administration the salaries of Ministers the costs of maintaining the judiciary and the Diplomatic Service there was also the cost of maintaining the royal estates the Royal Palaces which included the Palace of Westminster all these costs mounted up and by 1720 the crown was six hundred thousand pounds in debt now if you roughly average it that out it shows that the crown was overspending by about a hundred thousand pounds a year now one of the key problems was the cost of the royal household of the royal court and here you see the costs of the royal household you can see and what I was saying under George the first just over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds but you can see how the cost of the household went up under george ii to more like three hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds this is an enormous sum of money and since the restoration most aristocratic households had been rapidly scaling back the this their size there were a small number of old-fashioned dukes that insisted on maintaining large scale medieval hospitality but most didn't so the Duke of Chandos at cannons was very unusual in having 92 servants most households had had a fraction of that part of the reason for this rapid scaling down in the size of aristocratic households was the expense of maintaining large houses in London as I explained in my last lecture very few could afford the cost of medieval style hospitality in the countryside as well as a palace in the town and as a result the size of these aristocratic households rapidly diminished Roger North who wrote a treatise called on building contrasted the old form of his hospitable house with the newer houses that started to be built and after the restoration and he lamented the and I quote abolishing of grandeur and stateliness that that sort of former ages affected and wished that the gentry and nobility would look further for their invention than the suburban models which may serve a family in a London expedition but not in country living which requires something more like a court but he and few other critics who lamented the shrinkage in size of aristocratic households were on their own because aristocrats explicitly did not want their households to be like a court as Roger North put it this determination of the aristocrats to keep their household small and the monarchy to keep their household big set the royal household apart from the rest it was larger and more expensive than any other single institution in the land costing as you can see well upwards of a third of a million pounds a year now the decline in the political the financial and the cultural importance of the monarchy and the court coupled with the rise in the number and wealth of the nobility needs to be seen against a background of shifting priorities and concerns in the cultural sphere in my last lecture I explained how the period after the restoration was one of scientific inquiry and curiosity but as the 17th century turned into the 18th the interests of this generation of amateur scientists and collectors began to look a bit ridiculous while John evylyn wrote enthusiastically about things petrified eggs in which the yolk rattled a piece of beef with the bows in it and a crystal containing a drop of water not congealed but moving up and down when shaken the gentlemen of the early 18th century were much less impressed and I've juxtaposed these two pictures which make the point beautifully on the left-hand side you can see John shadows can't show off his amazing collected collection of shells on the right hand side you can see the virtuosa the dilettante of the 18th century who had absolutely no interest in a pile of show shells whatsoever in 1810 Addyson invented a spoof will belonging to a collector Sir Nicholas Jim crack it was full of daft legacies such as one box of butterflies a female skeleton and a dried cockatrice which were left his wife his receipt for preserving caterpillars and three crocodile eggs were left to his daughters and my rat's testicles were lent to a learned friend the fact is that fashion had moved on and the appreciation of painting and sculpture had become the sole defining mark gentility and education foreign curiosities rocks minerals and Natural History specimens did not make up a gentleman's education the virtuosos of the 18th century were not those who compiled compiled cabinets of curiosities but the dilettante men who traveled a continent refining their tastes and assembling large collections of classical art and souvenirs of their time abroad in my previous lectures in this series I've emphasized the importance of two dates in the development of the arts and architecture in England 1603 when the war with Spain ended and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after both of these dates the severed connections with Europe were re-established and the English flooded over the channel causing changes in taste and fashion tonight I want to introduce a third date for you between 1702 and 1713 Europe was consumed by the war of Spanish Succession making foreign travel extremely difficult for the English aristocracy this war was brought to an end by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and this treaty exactly like the Treaty of London in 1603 and the restoration of 1660 suddenly reopened Europe to British travelers and it's really from this date that the Grand Tour proper begins the travel of young aristocrats to the Low Countries France and to Italy to acquire education and taste and here you can see a group of young English gentleman and roam by and the Colosseum the arch of Constantine sitting down discussing the wonders of the classical world because you see young men like this had had a classical education and the Grand Tour took them to the very places which they had learnt about in their books back at home in their family houses they saw monuments they saw ruins they met dealers they saw painters and they were accompanied by expert tutors who fed their interest and helped furnish them with souvenirs here is a wonderful portrait of Douglas the eighth Duke of Hamilton on the Left the young boy he's on grand tour with Sir John Moore the physician on the right and Moore's son John they are in Switzerland through the window you can see a view of Geneva and they stayed there for two years so this is a very typical sight of the of the Union see how young that some of the grand tourists actually were now if you are collecting two things are necessary as well as the urge to collect the resources to do so and a plentiful supply of goods well we've just seen how well-placed the English aristocracy was to spend these young men went on the grand tour their pockets laden with cash and here you can see groups of grand tourists here and inspecting and statues which they potentially are interested in buying cluding this chap who's climbing up and and poking the venus de milo by the looks of it but as well as the wealth they also needed the goo and the years after the Treaty of Utrecht saw the ending of the great competitive collecting rivalries of the Italian families not only were the leading Italian ducal families no longer fighting for new acquisitions they were actually willing and eager to sell some of the collections that they had previously amassed but this was a hazardous path for the young English nobleman to follow the continent was awash with fakes botched up sculptures and bad paintings nevertheless English Lords managed to amass between them an astonishing quantity of fantastic painting and sculpture so let's look at just for a moment at Lord Leicester an aristocrat who lived nowhere near Leicester but possessed a giant estate in North Norfolk he still does Thomas Cook inherited his father's estate at the age of ten and five years later he became one of the first generation of young men to travel to peaceful Europe after the Treaty of Utecht retract six years later in 1718 he returned to his estate at Holcomb and he began to build himself a magnificent house over a period of thirty three years don't forget he inherited when he was 10 33 years of building his expenditure on his new mansion averaged 2,700 pounds a year Leicester furnished his new house with sculptures and painting that he bought on his Grand Tour but he also commissioned buyers to act for him in Rome when he got back in particular to buy sculpture for his projected sculpture gallery at which you see here meanwhile paintings by Rubens Van Dyck guido reni Poussin all arrived in packing cases in Norfolk as did drawings by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and of course this is a pretty oh isn't a real scene but it shows the studio of an artist in Rome and the buyers coming and here's somebody inspecting a painting which no doubt he's being flogged by one of the gentlemen on the left-hand side he actually probably weren't gentle and they were probably crooks but we won't argue about that and the house itself and here is Holcomb Hall was designed through a combination of the talents of Lord Burlington William Kent and Norfolk architect Matthew Bretting him together with the genius of Earl Leicester himself they attempted to create the sort of country house that they believed an ancient Roman aristocrat would have enjoyed serious consideration was given to ancient sources and it's remarkable hard yellow brick that is made out of was a careful match to roman bricks that had been sent back from Rome and were copied faithfully in Norfolk it's really hard to imagine that that is actually a brick building and the bricks are brilliantly made but you have to remember there is no building stone in Norfolk so he had no choice but to build it out of this brick which was designed to look exactly like stone and when he finished the job he had himself Scott carved by rebellion in the guise of a Roman patrician this is how he saw himself the interiors of the house were also carefully designed to evoke those of Roman houses first using Vitruvius descriptions but then digging into the works of Inigo Jones because Jones had used details from ancient Roman buildings and he'd combined them with features by 16th century Italian architects Lester at Burlington and Kent looked at buildings like the Queen's house and Greenwich and the banqueting house in Whitehall which they took many references from and you can see here the way that this building has this inspiration from Rome and the important point which I'll come onto in a moment but I want to mention it while this screen is up is that they were looking to Roman public buildings for their inspiration of course no actual Roman house looked anything like this that the these are the remains that they saw in Rome which were all remains of Roman public buildings now crucial in the development of this new type of Roman inspired interior were Lord Burlington the Scottish architect Colin Campbell and William Kent Lord Burlington's town house Burlington house on Piccadilly still partially there and his suburban villa at Chyzyk entirely they're both strove to create interiors that were authentically Roman the ceiling of the octagonal saloon at the center of Chyzyk house was modelled on one of the most famous buildings in Rome the vasila Basilica of Maxentius while the APS's in the gallery were modelled on the Temple of Venus and Rome and this makes the point or reinforces the point that the models that were being followed were found in Roman public buildings rather than domestic ones and at many other houses and I'll just give you example of of one here and Houghton Hall also in Norfolk William Kent took control of interior decoration in a completely new way no longer was oak panelling favored for the grandest rooms grandest rooms were now stuccoed and painted in imitation of stone and so here you have the the hall at Houghton center of the building this this is stone it's in Norfolk it is stones incredibly expensive to build given the old stone had to be brought from Northamptonshire and you can see here the way that William Kent has plundered details from Roman public buildings and sort of applied them to the walls here to create the his fantasy notion of the sort of house that a great Roman general or senator would have actually lived in but of course if such a person were magically to come back to life and were walk into that room they'd be utterly mystified by this this this concoction this was a really dramatic change to the way Great Houses looked because the oak paneling and dark paint gave way to these very light spaces which were often enlivened with a touch of gilding less ground rooms might still be paneled but here oak gave way to Light painted soft wood this is the long gallery at Kensington Palace redecorated by William Kent the the actual gallery was constructed by King William the third and will in the thirds time all this joinery you see here and here this was all unpainted oak as was the the chimney breast ceiling was painted white so it had a very very different feel and what Kent does is modernizes that the room he paints a new ceiling he paints that with a wood this light color he gills it he designs the frames for the great paintings on the wall and really transforms the appearance of the interior at the same time there were big advances in paint manufacturer and and now ready-mix paint could be bought rather than to have to make it on site and this helped spread the fashion of these stands standardized and stone colors but above all these great houses were now a vehicle for displaying the paintings and sculpture bought on the Grand Tour at a house like Holcomb which you see here the paintings weren't just randomly dispersed nor were they arranged in a sort of modern way by by school but they were conceived as part of the architecture of the room and they were given frames that were designed by the architect the iconography of the paintings was much more easily read than today and subjects were grouped to create themes the saloon at holcomb was hung with Roman subjects which could be interpreted as a homage to lady Lester and her husband as defender of female virtue and hokum had an astonishing collector collection of classical sculpture I've already showed you the gallery but it also had this absolutely amazing library which I happen to think just by the way is one of the most beautiful rooms in England the sheer numbers of sculptures and paintings imported from Europe into England by the grand tourists will never be known exactly but between the 1720s and the 1770s around fifty thousand paintings five hundred thousand edgings and engravings were imported from Italy France and Holland in a single year 1725 more than three hundred and thirty paintings arrived from Italy two hundred paintings arrived from France a hundred and twenty arrived from Holland and the which is part of a total of seven hundred and sixty-two paintings that came to England in all in the same year eleven thousand prints and engravings entered England from the continent while George the first and George the second collected and built very little the accession of George the third was seen by some to be a sign that the monarch might again lead fashion and perhaps into the bargain build a palace worthy of the name of Britain George had been taught architectural drawing by Sir William chambers and he was believed to be something of a connoisseur and this was confirmed when early in his reign the King created the new post of architect of works which was shared by the two most fashionable architects of the time Sir William chambers who you see there and Robert Adam not only this but in both chambers was in 1761 Chambers was commissioned to design a new Palace to be built at Richmond to replace the antiquated piles of Hampton Court and Windsor and this is what he designed it was to cost about ninety thousand pounds and it would have been about the same size as Holcomb Hall work even began on this great project which wouldn't have rivaled the great palaces of 18th century Europe but would have at least put the English crown on a level with its own subjects but this like so many royal projects floundered and fell and the building despite a dozen dozen revisions to its design was eventually abandoned but the most extraordinary thing about George the first thirds failure to complete Richmond palace was that it was for at what I think was a completely new reason if you look back to the beginning of the 17th century Charles the first didn't build any palaces because he didn't have any money charles ii had the money but he died and didn't have the time William the third did build but but like charles ii didn't live long enough to see the fruits of his labors george the first and george ii weren't interested in building so why didn't George the third complete Richmond if he had the time the money and the money in the bank well the reason seems to be that he just didn't have the enthusiasm or energy needed to drive the thing forward so instead he spent some seventy thousand pounds on remodeling Buckingham house in London more domestic and comfortable residence for his wife which I showed you earlier so what did become of architectural patronage in the Hanoverian era as far as the crown is concerned well as the Civil List was created Parliament took control of the institutions of State after the accession of George the third Parliament appropriated all civil expenditure leaving the Civil List only to pay for the expenses of running the monarchy but from 1689 the institutions of state especially the Navy were the responsibility of Parliament and thus came about the two most important and spectacular architectural commissions of the 18th century first the Royal Hospital the seamen at Greenwich created out of the remains of a destroyed Tudor Palace and an abandoned Stuart one ill-educated visitors travelling to London up the Thames must have mistaken it for a Royal Palace and its magnificence must have led to an anticipation of an even more spectacular city centre royal residence an expectation which of course was dashed when they finally saw sand James's and then there was Somerset house made possible by the sale of the old Royal Palace to Parliament this was a palace for civil servants covering some six acres on the banks of the Thames it costs Parliament some four hundred and sixty two thousand pounds these two buildings represented the triumph of the institutions of the state over the crown just as decisively as the rise of the great country houses filled with the loot of the Grand Tour represented the triumph of the aristocracy over the monarchy so with this ladies and gentlemen I want to finish over my four lectures this year we followed a journey that to us with the privilege of hindsight seems inevitable smooth and interrupted as your narrator I've told the story with a beginning a middle and an end but of course what we have to remember is that in fact none of this was inevitable the so-called Whig interpretation of history that charts the march of progress and sees the inevitable decline of the crown in favor of parliamentary supremacy was in fact not inevitable but what it does is explain the unique landscape of 18th century Britain a country adorned with enormous mansions of the aristocracy furnished with the greatest art that money could buy while the Georgian monarchs lived in old run-down and unfashionable residences favouring military and rural pursuits these three images here are the residences of the King of France Versailles the Emperor of Austria schonbrunn and the King of England Q palace where he lived for several years in the hope George their liver for several years in the hope that a great palace would be built in in in Richmond and this is a slide showing at the bottom the home of George the Third's sick and injured seamen and two of his aristocrats the Earl of Carlyle and the Duke of Devonshire these two images two slides with the six images are I think a remarkable illustration of the shifts in political economic and cultural influence in Britain in the period between Henry the eighth's and George the third thank you very much you

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Gresham, Gresham College, Education, Lecture, Public, London, Debate, Academia, Knowledge, built environment, architecture, english history, history, british history, art, Aristocracy, cultural supremacy, culture, power, wealth, monarchy, simon thurley

Id: WhnQGJjNsyw

Length: 54min 5sec (3245 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2019