- Good evening. In June 1685, one of the
most unlikely invasion forces in English history landed
at Lyme Regis in Dorset. Only 83 strong, this band of
loyal Protestants were led by Charles II's eldest and
favorite illegitimate son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth. Their aim was to unseat James II who had acceded to the throne that year on the death of King Charles. James II was, of course, a Roman Catholic, and his accession had been
steadily opposed by a section of the English political
classes for a decade or more. Well, within a week, some
4,000 had joined Monmouth under his blue banners
which were emblazoned with the slogan, for God,
freedom, and religion, and he was declared king in
the marketplace at Taunton on Midsummer's Day, but at
this point, his luck ran out. He had hoped to advance much further than what this map shows
here, and as he went, build up his army, but just
outside Bridgewater in Somerset, his poorly trained armed force
was wiped out at Sedgemoor by a professionally trained
royal army under James II. It was the last set piece
battle fought on English soil. Monmouth himself was
captured, taken to London, and nine days later, he
lost his head on Tower Hill. If, on one of the great,
what-ifs of English history, Monmouth had bided his time, he would have certainly been
at King William III's side in 1688, and in the reign
of William and Mary, would have undoubtedly
been the leading aristocrat of his age, but that is
not how things played out. Events, as they have happened, have obscured the significant
achievements of the Duke, and in particular, the
subject of tonight's lecture, his role in the development
of architecture in England. Well, my lectures this
year, for those of you who've been following
them, have taken a look at four great aristocratic
families and their estates. In my first lecture, we
considered the Boleyns, a dynasty that rose in four
generations from Norfolk gentry to produce an, albeit
short-lived, Queen of England. This was a slide I showed
you showing the dynasty and the houses that they amassed. Their rise was founded on money made from the city of London, but consolidated through a
series of spectacular marriages that brought huge wealth and influence. What's interesting about the Boleyns is that until Anne became queen, none of them were great
architectural patrons, and although they all extended, modified, and improved houses that
they had bought or inherited, architecture was never
one of the driving forces in their rise to power. The case of the Cecils,
covered in my second lecture in this series, was entirely different. Without the blood to
marry into great wealth, two brilliant men, father and son, systematically invested the fruits of royal service into land. They bought, built,
amassed, and consolidated. On the strength of their many offices, reinforced by palpable royal favor, they borrowed to buy still more. Both William and Robert
Cecil looked to the future. They were dynasty-building,
creating houses and estates that have actually endured for 400 years. Their approach to building
was different, too. The Boleyns were eager to
stress their ancient lineage. Here's Hever Castle, which
they didn't modernize. They liked the fact that it
was a medieval residence. Owning property was a
dynastic affirmation. They wanted their houses to look old. Any modernization was carefully
judged to bring comforts within a preexisting architecture, but the Cecils came from
much more humble stock, a fact that their opponents and detractors were very keen to point out. The family was out to establish itself, not only through architecture,
but through the totality of an estate with a capital
mansion at its heart. Those mansions made references to the feudal obligations of a landowner. You see the great hall at Burghley here, but were essentially modern
houses built by new men. What ties the Boleyns
and the Cecils together is their faith in the value
of landed estates and property to secure the long-term
security of their families and achieve upward social mobility. What separates them are
the methods they used to achieve that aim. Today, we're going to look at
the third family, the Scotts, Dukes of Monmouth and Buccleuch. The Duke of Monmouth's
rise and fall took place against an architectural
background of great importance. As we will see this evening,
in the 1670s and '80s, as the notion of political
parties was born, so was a new way of deploying building in the service of politics and family. Well, James, Duke of Monmouth, and you see this gorgeous
picture of him here in the Royal Collection,
was, until very recently, regarded as a flimsy Restoration fop whose life was given over
to gambling, sex, horses, and fighting, but Dr. Anna
Keay's brilliant 2016 biography, The Last Royal Rebel, has
demolished this picture of a dilettante and rake,
and replaced it with that of an engaged and principled politician, and a capable and original administrator. What I'm going to say this evening only reinforces that picture. Well, he was born in 1649 in Rotterdam to one of Charles II's
mistresses, Lucy Walter. After rather an overadventurous
childhood in the company of his unreliable and dissolute mother, Charles II kidnapped the boy in 1657 and had him sent to Paris,
where he took the surname of his guardian, Lord Crofts. In 1662, Charles II, secure
on his throne in England, ordered James Crofts, as
he then was, to London. One of Charles II's most
admirable and charming traits was the very strong affection
that he had for his children, and although he hadn't seen
much of his 13-year-old son up until this point, he
absolutely fell for his charm, his good looks, and his quick wit. Very soon, James was moved
into Whitehall Palace, which you see here, and
he was given lodgings in the ground floor of this building here. This is the King's private
lodging, the King's backstairs, which led directly up to his bedroom, linked with James' lodgings
on the ground floor, so he was given accommodation in the most privileged position
in the whole of Whitehall. Well, the very high favor
in which James was held quickly came to the
notice of Margaret Leslie, Countess of Wemyss. Her daughter, Anne, who you see here, Countess of Buccleuch, was
the heir of the richest family in Scotland, and Margaret
needed to see this young girl married to a man who would
protect her from the designs of the rapacious Earls of Tweeddale, to whom the family estates would fall if her daughter, Anne,
were to die without issue. She had the brilliant idea
of offering this young girl, Anne, to Charles II as a
bride for James Crofts. Anne was only 11, but she was
the heir to an annual income of £10,000 a year. The marriage was quickly
agreed to in principle, and in February 1663, James
became the Duke of Monmouth and Earl of Doncaster
and was given precedence over all non-royal dukes,
and on the 23rd of April, he was installed as a
Knight of the Garter. Just three days earlier,
he had married Anne. He took her family name of
Scott, and at the same time, became Duke of Buccleuch
and Earl of Dalkeith. Given the fact that Anne
was too young to marry, for the time being,
they were to live apart. Lady Wemyss and Charles II must have been mutually delighted. One secured the finances
of his son forever without investing a single penny and the other married
into the royal family, securing the fortunes of her own dynasty. Whitehall was no place
for a 12-year-old girl, and in March 1664, at the cost of £7,000, Charles II bought Anne and
James a house at Chiswick, a safe 10 miles distance from Whitehall. Now Chiswick House today
is famous for this building built by the Earl of Burlington
at the Palladian villa, which was actually only
a wing of this building, which is the Jacobean
house that Charles II bought for James and Anne. These stables are later,
but this is the house and this is the, these are the grounds which the house in Chiswick occupied. The house had been built by one of James I's
Grooms of the Bedchamber, John Ashburnham, in the 1620s, so it was typical Jacobean house. It was very large, it had
33 hearths, 33 chimneys, and you can see, it was a courtyard house with a courtyard in the
middle, a tower at the back, and looking over the
river, which is down here at the bottom of the slide. From March 1664 until February
1665, when her marriage was finally consummated, it was Anne Buccleuch's official home. Well, while Chiswick House
was being prepared for Anne, the King turned his attention to his son. In the space of just three months, James had acquired two dukedoms, married the richest woman in Scotland, and had been declared the
country's leading aristocrat. While his lodgings at Whitehall had put him in immensely
a privileged position, they were now not reflective
of this extraordinary status. The Surveyor of the King's
Works, Sir John Denham, was ordered to set up suitable lodgings for the Duke and Duchess in
what was known as the Cockpit. Now this is the 1670
plan of Whitehall Palace. These are the royal lodgings,
here's the banqueting house, which still survives today,
and all these buildings here on the west side of Whitehall, formerly Henry VIII's recreation center, were known as the Cockpit. After the Cockpit, which was here, contained are various tennis
courts, a bowling alley, and other recreational facilities. And the largest tennis
court, covered tennis court, for what we call real tennis today, which is this building here,
was converted into a lodging for the Duke and Duchess, and here we see an identical
tennis court at Hampton Court built in the 1530s like
the one in the Cockpit, and in 1670, this tennis court
was converted into lodgings for the Duke of York, and
the conversion that happened at Hampton Court is identical
to that which took place at Whitehall for the Duke of Monmouth. Essentially, two floors were put in, modern windows were
inserted, and as you can see, it made a large and handsome residence, and this view of Whitehall
Palace in the 1690s, again shows the banqueting house here, but here is that tennis
court which was converted by Sir John Denham for the
Duke and Duchess of Monmouth, and remarkably, the rooms
in it survived unaltered into the 19th century,
and this is a drawing of the Board of Trade in
1821, and there is no hint that this room is in a Tudor tennis court. As you can see, this
very elaborate ceiling, which was inserted in the early 1660s, and Sir John Soane, the
architect responsible, undertook this beautiful drawing of it, and you can see the way that
the initials, James and Anne, and B for Buccleuch and M for Monmouth. And here you see one of the other ceilings in an adjacent room, and still, in the Sir John Soane's Museum today, a plaster squeeze of that
monogram that was on the ceiling. These rooms were done
up in the finest taste and furnished with items from
the royal wardrobe to match. Monmouth's tally of privileges was notched up further in February 1665, when the King granted
him an annual pension of £6,000 a year, and in
1667, an additional allowance of 4,000 years was granted
primarily to cover the cost of entertaining the King to suppers in his lodgings in the Cockpit,
and the gold kept on coming. The royal allowance was raised
by £2,000 a year in 1672, and in 1667, to cover the
cost of their three children, another 1,600 was added each year. If you then look at other one-off gifts, including the £5,000 given to
celebrate the Duchess' birth in 1670, the birth of a
child to the Duchess in 1672, one-off gifts amounted
to a staggering £43,000 in 1672 to 1673 alone. So what do we know about
this incredibly wealthy, well-connected, and exceedingly
glamorous young couple? A selection of their account
books survive and make it clear that they did not stint in the
enjoyment of their position. They were hugely extravagant. In 1666, their servants alone cost them 3 1/2 thousand pounds a year. Their stables cost £1,135 a year. Their clothes budget was
meant to be £1,200 a year, but in 1671, Anne blew the entire sum on a single pair of diamond earrings. But what about architecture? Well, the young couple
had Chiswick, but in 1665, Anne, who we must remember
was only 14 years old at this point, was
invited to visit Moor Park in Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire. This country house belonged
to the Duke of Ormond, one of Charles II's closest allies, who had also been given
lodgings in the Cockpit and were the neighbors of
the Monmouths at Whitehall. Anne, seeing Moor Park,
absolutely loved it, and immediately started
coveting the house. By today's standards, this
was pretty precocious, and it must be wondered
what drew this 14-year-old to the property. The house there was very
similar to Chiswick. It had been built in 1614 to '20 by the Earl and Countess of Bedford, and there can't have been much advantage in swapping one Jacobean
mansion for another, and so it must have been
Moor Park's position, and in particular, its
gardens, that attracted her. The Bedfords had, in fact,
laid out a famous garden there that was described by Sir
William Temple in 1685 as, "The sweetest place I
have ever seen in my life, "either before or since,
at home or abroad." And in 1663, when the Duke of
Ormond originally bought it, Lord Clarendon said,
"The beauty of this place "depends entirely on its gardens." And what you see here on the screen is a conjectural reconstruction,
published in Country Life, showing what the gardens
may well have been like when it was coveted by
Anne, Duchess of Monmouth. The house is up here at
the top, you can't see it, but you can see these remarkable gardens coming down in terraces
with ponds and statues and parterres, a beautiful,
a beautiful place. Well, Charles II, ever
indulgent to his son, bought this house from the Duke of Ormond, furniture and all, the
entire contents with it, for the enormous sum of £13,200 in 1670. The house at Chiswick had been
sold two years previously, and the couple, absently
glued to the side of the King at Whitehall, had really rarely used it. Soon, they added another
property to their portfolio. In 1674, Monmouth was appointed to one of the three great court offices, the Master of the Horse. This very significant role saw him with a major responsibility
for overseeing the King's and the court's transport
logistics, all the horses and carriages and carts and
everything, and its headquarters was at Charing Cross in the Royal Mews, a vast complex of yards,
stables, and coach houses that occupied the location
of current Trafalgar Square, and here, you see a plan of it. This is more or less where the royal, where the National Gallery is up here. You see the great courtyards,
and what came with the post of Master of the Horse was a house here, quite a large house, on
a lane called Hedge Lane, now Whitford Street, and it
had 11 rooms on this floor and presumably another 11
rooms on the floor above. This house had been built in
1660 and had been purchased by the King the following year, and remained the official residence of the Master of the Horse. Now, sadly, we have no image of it, but the residence very
quickly got a makeover and was furnished with
the finest furnishings that money could buy, and here,
the Duke kept his 30 horses, his coaches, and his
yellow-liveried footmen who ran alongside his
coach wherever he went. Now, the news that James, Duke
of York, Charles II's brother and the heir to the throne,
had converted to Catholicism, this news that broke in
1673, was a turning point in the reign of Charles II,
triggering huge controversy in a vehemently anti-Catholic country not long out of religious revolution. Disquiet turned into
hysteria by this discovery of a Catholic plot against the King, the so-called Popish Plot. The Duke of York was implicated in this entirely fictional conspiracy by the discovery of some
incriminating letters held by one of his chaplains. This, and I quote a
contemporary newsletter, made as much noise in and
about London, and indeed, all over the nation, as if
the very cabinet of hell had been laid open. A movement to have the
Duke of York removed from the succession,
which had already begun, now began to gather momentum,
and the streets of London filled with angry crowds. There were Pope-burning processions, and you see one of those here
on this contemporary print, and the call amongst the
populace on the street was for Monmouth to be made
his father's successor. Now, London, and in particular, Whitehall, had been the domain of the
court, the primary residence of the King since the Restoration,
but the Exclusion Crisis, as it was called, the
crisis to exclude James from the throne, changed all that. The strength of feeling about the prospect of a Catholic sovereign was
enormous and it gave birth to political parties. The Whigs, who were all
for changing the succession to keep the Catholic out, and the Tories, first amongst whom was the
King, were for standing up for the hereditary
principle come what may. The Whigs, as you may imagine, settled on the Duke of
Monmouth, the Protestant Duke, as their figurehead, as he alone was a credible alternative
heir to Charles II. Monmouth never publicly
put himself forward as a potential king, but he did want to exclude the Duke of
York from the throne, and he probably believed
that the throne should go to the Duke's daughter,
Princess Mary, who, of course, had married William of Orange, becoming William and Mary
eventually on the, in 1688. Well, we have to remember that
it was Charles I's inability to hold and control London
that was one of the triggers for the civil war, and Charles II knew that he had to defuse this
febrile atmosphere on the streets that was being stoked
by the Whig opposition. So, in 1674, when he realized that he would never persuade his brother to abandon Catholicism,
the King made a sudden and dramatic change to the
way the court operated. For several months, each
summer, he announced, the entire court would decamp
from London to Windsor Castle, which had never before done,
and massive building works were set in train to modernize the castle to make it suitable, and you see, on this slide here, an image of part of that spectacular
remodeling of Windsor Castle undertaken by the royal
architect, Hugh May. This is the royal chapel. But not only that, but the
King decided in the early 1680s to go one stage further
and start the construction of a huge, new palace built from scratch in a loyal town,
Winchester, and here it is, the palace begun by Charles II, designed by Christopher
Wren, which I believe he intended essentially
to move the headquarters of the monarchy to to avoid
this very difficult atmosphere caused by the Exclusion Crisis in London. Well, in order to calm
things down politically, Charles was also forced to
invite the Whigs, or some Whigs, into the privy council,
but in the autumn of 1679, Charles II effectively lost
patience with everybody. He abandoned the coalition council, he expelled the Duke
of Monmouth from court, he expelled the Duke of York from court, and the opposition leaders went with them. Now, up until this point,
the Duke had been a creature of the court, principally
residing in his lavish apartment in Whitehall, but now, Monmouth was banned from entering the precincts
of the royal palace, and while Duchess Anne and their children remained at the Cockpit,
Monmouth had to live in his official residence in
Hedge Lane, but meanwhile, the Duke and Duchess
commissioned Hugh May, the Comptroller of the
Royal Office of Works, the man who was in charge
of the works at Windsor, to rebuild the Jacobean
house at Moor Park. The Monmouths not only
secured the services of May as architect, but the entire
royal team from Windsor, from the joiners to the royal
painter, Antonio Verrio, who had painted the inside of this chapel, and the carver, Grinling Gibbons. They all went to Moor
Park to work for the Duke. Now, as far as we can tell,
the core of the Jacobean house at Moor Park was retained. I say this because, as I
will explain in a moment, the new house was a rather unusual plan, but what you see here on the screen is Moor Park as it is today. It's the headquarters of a golf club, but on the bottom right, you see the very clever reconstruction of its original appearance
undertaken by Paul Drury, Sally Jeffery, and Paul Wrightson. They have managed to determine
the original appearance because within the 18th
century house you see here, the original house is encased. As you see, the Duke's house was a brick. 1.4 million bricks were fired
in the park at Moor Park, and the house, which seems
to be perhaps very plain to our eyes, and perhaps not
at all what we would expect from this very fashionable
couple, this celebrity couple, it looks perhaps rather plain and austere, but this was the fashion. These neat brick houses,
beautifully proportioned but austere, were what everyone of taste, from the King downwards, actually wanted. In fact, at Hampton Court,
Charles II built for himself exactly such a building,
probably also by Hugh May. In fact, Moor Park was
described by one contemporary as one of the best pieces
of brickwork in England. We have a plan of the original house, and you'll see rather
unusually, it wasn't entered from the front, it was
entered from the side, into a great entrance
hall, up some more steps into a top-lit staircase which rose up to the principal floor. Hugh May was a master of space and light, creating extraordinary
staircases at Windsor Castle, and the staircase at
Moor Park was similar. On the first floor, when you got up there, there were two suites. There was a common
anteroom, large anteroom, which led to a withdrawing
room and a bedroom and some closets, and on this side, another withdrawing room, a
bedroom and some more closets, and these presumably
were his and her suites for the Duke and Duchess,
but on the ground floor, off the entrance hall, was an anteroom leading to a spectacular
stateroom, a bedchamber, and some private closets with
direct access to the garden, and then this undoubtedly
was a state suite, a suite of rooms designed
by the Duke and Duchess to entertain Charles II when
they were eventually readmitted to court and there was a reconciliation between father and son. The most significant surviving room in this mansion is this room here. You see a photograph of it here. The walls are later, but
the ceiling which you see is the ceiling that was
painted by Verrio for the Duke. The walls would have
been hung in tapestry. The original joinery survives, richly carved and gilded
cornices, dados paneling, undertaken by a team led by
Grinling Gibbons himself. The original effect of
this state apartment would have been spectacular, and if you want to get a feeling of what it might have been
like, go to Windsor Castle, to the King's great eating room there. This room is an exact equivalent to Monmouth's great chamber at Moor Park. Well, now, we come to the most
important part of this story, for although in 1679, the
Monmouths started building what was unquestionably one
of the most fashionable houses of its age, they never
wanted to live in it. Their life was in London and
that is where they wanted to be, and so while work
progressed at Moor Park, the Duke continued to live in Hedge Lane, which became the unofficial headquarters for the Whig opposition to the crown. Now, as you will know,
and I have covered this in one of my previous
lectures in some detail, one of the most dramatic
effects of the Restoration on London was the birth of
what we now call the West End, and in particular, the building
of the streets and squares south of Piccadilly and
north of St James's Park. This area was developed
very rapidly in the years after 1660, and during
the 1670s and the 1680s, the development spread
further to cover the area that we now know as Soho. The first new square
was St. James's Square, and this was, of course,
built at the gates of St. James's Palace, so
here is St. James's palace, here is St. James's Park,
Whitehall is just here, and you can see the regular
buildings of St. James's Square just round the corner from the front door of St. James's Palace. Now St. James's was the official residence of the Duke of York. He lived here with his
wife, and at St. James's is the still surviving
Roman Catholic chapel, and so, the house was not
only the residence of the heir to the throne, the Roman
Catholic heir to the throne, it also had an operating Roman
Catholic church at its heart, and it should be no surprise, therefore, that with only one significant exception, all the houses around St. James's Square, and you see an early plan
of it here, were occupied by supporters of the King
and the Duke of York. In other words, it was occupied by Tories. This was the headquarters of
the Tories in this square. In 1677, a successful London
bricklayer, Richard Frith, leased a part of Soho Fields, the open ground north of Charing Cross, and he began to build 42
handsome brick houses, following the model established
at St. James's Square, and in January 1680, the first
of these houses were sold. So here it is, this is Soho
Square as we now call it, originally called King Square, and here is what is now Oxford Street. By 1683, 14 houses in the
square had been completed and were occupied, and you
can see from this engraving, the design was highly uniform. Most houses were three stories
high and three bays wide with sashes in flush frames and broken scrolled pedimented
door-cases, and actually, a couple of the houses survive. This is one of them. You get a very good impression
of this very austere, plain, well-proportioned brick architecture that was so fashionable at the moment, and in the middle of the square, looking a bit worse for wear, is still the statue of Charles
II erected at the time. Now Frith, the builder
of this square, had hit on a brilliant piece of
salesmanship, for he had acquired as its principal residents,
for the colossal single house on the southern side of the
square, the glamorous figurehead of the opposition party, the
Duke of Monmouth himself. So here is the square looking
from the other direction and here is a huge house on this side which Frith managed to get
the Duke of Monmouth to take. The lease was granted to
Monmouth in February 1682 when he was at the height of his fame. It was an enormous plot. It was 70 feet on the square
and it went back 280 feet at the rear with a space for huge stables with their own frontage on Frith Street. The deal was a very, very
good one for Monmouth. He acquired the property
at the cost of only £400. The house was to be built
by Frith and his associates at their own cost over the following year, and several years later, the Duke was to reimburse them
the 6 1/2 thousand pounds that the building was to cost. The deal was secured on
Monmouth's promised to transfer to them what remained of
his lease on the stables on Hedge Lane by the Royal
Mews, and again, for this house, Monmouth House, a crack
team of royal craftsman were taken on, the master
joiner was Alexander Fort, the interior painter, Robert Streeter, the King's own personal painter. Both of these people were
already working at Moor Park. The square, as I've said,
was commissioned King Square with its statue of
Charles II in the middle, and Monmouth was resident
in his new house, not yet fully completed
just over a year later in the spring of 1683. What is remarkable, however, is who else had bought
houses in King Square. This is a plan taken from
the survey of London, and you can work out, and this is, don't have to worry about the writing here but you can work out
exactly who was living in each of these houses in the years immediately
after its construction, and what it shows is that out
of the 14 inhabited houses in the new development, seven of them were owned by leading
members of the Whig Party. Among them were Colonel
Rumsey and Lord de Grey, both of whom would sail with Monmouth on his fateful invasion. There was also Thomas Grey,
second Earl of Stamford, Thomas Thynne, Lord Weymouth,
and a fistful of other people. Just as St. James's Square
was the bastion of the Tories, now this ultra-fashionable King Square became the headquarters of the Whigs. The contract to build
Monmouth's new house was signed on the 17th of February
1682, and a few years ago, David Adshead identified in
the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the plans and elevations that
formed part of the contract, and they show here, Monmouth
House as it was intended to be built, and as far as
we know, as it was built, and you can see it was a very large and very impressive house, arguably, quite a lot more
impressive than Moor Park. Four stories high with a
platform and a little cupola on the top where you
could get amazing views over the West End in one
direction and out over the fields up towards Highgate and
Hampstead in the other direction. We also have the plans of this house, and this is the ground
floor, this is the front door coming in here, into a big entrance hall, which led up to a staircase. Again, quite a spectacular
staircase to the first floor, and the first floor is
extremely interesting because at the top of the
stairs, there was a landing and it led into a huge gallery. Very unusual with two fireplaces, so a very large reception
room, and beyond that, a second, very big reception
room, and beyond that, a third reception room
leading to a backstairs. These weren't bedrooms. These were rooms for entertaining,
and one nice feature here is a lavatory, a public loo for people who might attend functions in this house. In these rooms, very lavishly appointed, and I'll talk about this
a little bit more later, there was a huge use of marble,
elaborate plaster ceilings, including, again, their
initials in the ceilings and a wonderful limewood
carving over the chimney pieces by Grinling Gibbons. Now you see, looking at
the plan of this house, you can see that it was
specifically ordered to be a place of informal assembly rather
than formal ceremony. Socially and functionally, this was the seminal
townhouse of the Restoration, the one that epitomized
aristocratic fashions in London for two centuries that followed, because from the 1680s,
the West End of London was being rebuilt by Whig aristocrats, the Bedfords in Russell
and Tavistock Squares, the Cavendish in Cavendish
and Manchester Squares, the Grosvenors' building in Belgravia. For them, as well as for
the Duke of Monmouth, the West End wasn't just
a financial investment, it was a social investment, and above all, a political investment. It was the very basis of their lives. The richest aristocrats still
maintained three houses, their principal country
house, a suburban residence, and a townhouse, but the
townhouses were the epicenter of their lives, and were,
above all, political houses, places for the politics of
the day to be thrashed out. In the three successive parliaments, which met between 1679 and 1681, where the principal
business was the exclusion of the Duke of York,
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, was the leading opposition figure. Effectively, I think
you could say the leader of the Whig party. He was in an on-and-off alliance
with the Duke of Monmouth who, at one stage, he had
proposed directly to the King as an alternative successor
to James, Duke of York. John Dryden's thousand line
poem, Absalom and Achitophel, described the way in which it was believed that Shaftesbury had turned
Monmouth's head and make him, and I quote a line from the poem, drunk with honour, and
debauch'd with praise, half loath, and half
consenting to the ill. With a fine country house in Dorset, the Ashley Coopers had been
lucky in 1666 as their townhouse in Aldersgate Street in the city of London hadn't been burnt down. In fact, amazingly,
although you can see this in a 19th century engraving here, it survived into the age of photography, and you can see that here. It was built in 1644, and it
was one of the last generation of aristocratic townhouses
to be built in the city. Thanet House, as it was
known, was where Shaftesbury marshaled his opposition confederates, and Monmouth was a regular visitor here. The city of London was a Whig bastion. The corporation, the mayor, the sheriffs, and all the leading figures in the city were opponents of the
Duke of York's succession. Both Shaftesbury and Monmouth
wanted to use the city to pressurize the King to
agree to their demands. Shaftesbury became a member of the Skinners' Company
deliberately to participate in city governments to, and
influence their policies. Monmouth, meanwhile,
took a house in the city, just off Bishopsgate. So here's Bishopsgate, here's
the old Gresham College, here's the Excise Office,
and this is Monmouth's house that he took in the city,
large house on Bishopsgate. It was a brand new house
built by the wealthy merchant and MP for Old Sarum, Eliab Harvey. Harvey, not surprisingly,
was another exclusionist, and he may even have given
the house to Monmouth at a discount because the only
purpose for having a house in the city was to give him more leverage with the city corporation,
entertaining senior figures in the city rather than dragging
them over to the West End. Unfortunately, we don't know
what this house looks like, although it does appear on this map. The circumstances of
the years 1670 to 1685 saw the political establishment
fracture into two, disagreeing what to do over the prospect of the Catholic heir. The Tories were based at court,
but the Whigs in opposition had no geographical locus after Charles II had dissolved his last parliament in 1681. They were forced to meet in
coffeehouses, in taverns, in clubs, and crucially,
in private houses. Both Shaftesbury's and
Monmouth's houses in the city were bases in which to curry
favor with the corporation and secure their support to persuade the King to recall parliament so they could have
another go at exclusion. Meanwhile, Monmouth's houses in Hedge Lane and in King Square became
the centers of opposition in the West End. Monmouth House, in particular, designed to facilitate
large assemblies of Whigs. In this way, the early 1680s prefigured what was to become commonplace
in the 18th century, when the sons of the Georgian
kings were expelled from court and created centers of
political opposition in the great mansions of the West End. Leicester House was
used by two generations of princes of Wales to
oppose their fathers, so much so that opposition
to the crown in those years became known as the
Leicester House faction. These townhouses were created
by the new power of parliament and the necessity for
aristocrats and the crown to influence its composition
to support their policies. Great estates in the
country were all very well, but without an effective
working base in the West End, political ambitions would be stillborn. But to return to the Monmouths, while Monmouth House in King Square was briefly the first
great Whig townhouse, an epicenter of the opposition, its moment of glory was very short. In 1685, when the Duke was executed, he left his two major houses incomplete. Neither his house in
King Square nor Moor Park were finished, the Duchess was
still staying in Hedge Lane rather than King Square,
and the Duke's execution left an almost impenetrable
tangle of legal tenures on his London property. In fact, it was never
reoccupied by the Duchess and she eventually sold it in 1717. Moor Park, however, remained the principal
suburban residence of Anne as Duchess of Buccleuch, and
she brought the works there to a conclusion. In 1688, she married Charles Cornwallis, third Baron Cornwallis. At this stage, she was
still in her mid-30s and she had three more children with her second husband, all girls. Moor Park was extensively
remodeled and extended in the 18th century, and
so its final appearance under the Duchess is not
clear, and after the death of Cornwallis in 1698, he
died quite young, actually, she began to think of returning
to her native Scotland, and in fact, she made her way north to her Scottish estates in 1701. She hadn't even been
to Scotland since 1662, so it was a real homecoming. She was now 54. She lived into her 80s, and so she had quite a
lot of life left in her, and in Scotland, she carried herself as a member of the royal family, something that was increasingly
difficult to do in England. Although her second marriage
had been as ruinously expensive as her first, she still
remained personally extravagant and her income was such
that she could afford to build herself a magnificent new house. Her family had acquired Dalkeith castle just south of Edinburgh in the 1640s, and she decided to tear this down and rebuild it much as
she had done at Moor Park. As at Moor Park, the core
of the medieval house was going to be kept,
but everything you see from the outside would look new. Her architect was James Smith,
then the leading architect in Scotland and former royal architect to Charles II and James II. Well, Dalkeith Palace, as it
is known, which you see here, remains pretty much on
the outside as the Duchess would have known it despite a
refacing in the 18th century, and it's very likely that
its inspiration of its design is due to Anne's friendship
with Queen Mary II. Duchess Anne and Princess Mary were brought up together in London. They were virtually
sisters, and Duchess Anne saw firsthand the rebuilding
of Kensington Palace, which you see in my colleague Edward Impey's reconstruction
on the right-hand side here, and Het Loo in Holland,
William and Mary's new house, which you see on the left-hand side here. Both these houses, Het Loo and Kensington, were built with pavilions
attached to a central block, and it seems as if Smith was asked to copy this way of
building, and Dalkeith is, in particular, very, very
similar in appearance to Het Loo. The fine masonry was
executed by Scott's masons, but all the internal fittings
and all the furniture came mainly from London with a little bit also
coming from the Netherlands. In fact, both Monmouth House and Moor Park was stripped of their
paneling, of their fireplaces, and particularly, quite a lot of marble, and this was all brought up to Dalkeith, and you can see here some of
the extensive use of marble, there's the house from the outside, and this picture in particular,
you can see the paneling. This may well have been brought
from either Monmouth House or from Moor Park, and these,
this lavish use of marble over the fireplace with
the Duchess' arms over. This was no ordinary country house. It was, in fact, a royal palace, and when you look at the
ground floor plan of it, you can see that coming
into the entrance hall to the staircase, on
the ground floor here, was, in fact, a suite of royal rooms, a state apartment of regal
proportions and splendor. I made the point in my first
lecture in this series, that it was to women that the
Boylens owed their wealth. The characters of the early Boylen women are completely anonymous to us today, but we shouldn't doubt
their formidable influence on the family. The Cecils were also blessed
with remarkable women, one heiress, but crucially, Mildred, William Cecil's second wife who was one of the most
brilliant women of her age, and who played a crucial role
in partnership with William and in the education of Robert Cecil, and once again we see in
the story of the Monmouths, although the marriage with
the Duke wasn't a success in conventional terms,
Anne's income and her taste was absolutely crucial to their lives. With the Duke away from home, undertaking his military and other duties, Anne must have supervised
much of the building work at Monmouth House and at Moor Park, and her subsequent activities at Dalkeith show her in minute control of the design and furnishing of the house. But we don't end with Dalkeith tonight. We end with the important
observation that for a couple as wealthy and well-connected
as the Monmouths, it was London that was
important, not the country. Until rebuilding began
at Moor Park in 1679, it was principally important
to them for supplying hay for their stables and
fruit for their table. The life of the Monmouths was urban and the Duke's engagement in politics made their London residence
into the prototype of the political house. That isn't to say that
houses of the aristocracy were not centers of political
discourse before 1670, but afterwards, with
organized political opposition to the crown in parliament,
the political house became central to the
mechanics of national power. Monmouth House was the blueprint
for those that came after. In my final lecture in this series, we will turn to look at the Marlboroughs, and we will see exactly what
became of the political house, both in the town and the
country, and I very much hope that you will join me on June the 15th for the concluding lecture in my series. Now I'm hoping, by the
miracle of modern technology, that some questions asked
by you will have appeared on my phone, and indeed they
have, and the first question is why is Hugh May not better known? What an excellent question. Hugh May was the great genius
of the Restoration years, hugely overshadowed by
Sir Christopher Wren, of course, a previous Gresham professor. Many of Hugh May's most important works, including Somerset House and
Windsor Castle, were destroyed whilst Wren's works,
principally St. Paul's Cathedral at Hampton Court, have
survived, and I think if Hugh May's buildings had
survived into the 20th century, he would have been better
known, and I think Wren would not have been
viewed, as he often is, as a single, lonely, towering genius of 17th century architecture. The next question is how did the Monmouths finance their building works? Two sources of income. First of all, extraordinarily
lavish money doled out by an adoring father, Charles II. Monmouth was also granted a
number of very important jobs, which came with salaries and income, but, of course, they were also relying on the Duchess' money
from her Scottish estates, that £10,000 a year,
so money was pouring in from all quarters but it
was pouring out faster than it was able to come in. Windows at Moor Park resemble
the windows at Windsor Castle, Hugh May's signature, question mark. Yes, Julia, who asked that
question, you are very observant. I think that the windows at Windsor are very, very distinctive. I think they were a sort of type of early Gothic revival,
actually, the windows there. I'm not sure that we know
exactly what the windows at Moor Park were like. Paul Drury's reconstruction
there is interesting but I'm not sure what the
window form was based on, but unquestionably, May did have a very
distinctive use of those. Steven wants to know when
Shaftesbury's Thanet House was demolished or destroyed. I don't know the exact date,
but in the late 19th century, a terrible, terrible loss and tragedy. Yes, again, somebody else, Deb
asks, when was it destroyed? I'm sorry, I will see if
I can answer that question after the lecture, and
the last question says, is there any evidence that
the Monmouths' building works took into account Anne's
permanent lameness after her hip dislocation in May 1668? This is from Andrew. Yes, so, she dislocated her
hip which was a great sadness to her because she loved
dancing, was a great dancer, but I think the houses, both
in London and Moor Park, had spectacular staircases,
and this, as I said, was very much part of
that sort of light motif of Hugh May's architecture,
and there was no concession, I think, to, about someone with a bad leg going up and down those stairs, and I suspect she must have
found it very difficult. Ladies and gentlemen, that
is the end of the questions. Thank you very much for
listening to tonight's lecture.
