Architecture and Elite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland

Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

Hanneke Ronnes

Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

Amsterdam University Press Pallas Publications

Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700 is a revised and abridged version of the author’s 2004 PhD-thesis (University College Dublin, Ireland). The present book is the first edition in the Academic Studies Series, published by the Dutch Castle Foundation (Nederlandse Kastelenstichting). Series editor: Prof. drs. Hans Janssen.

Cover illustration: Main entrance to Barrystown, County Wexford, Ireland (H. Ronnes). Cover design: Mesika Design, Hilversum ISBN-13 978 90 8555 361 8 ISBN-10 90 8555 361 x NUR

648/694

© Amsterdam University Press/Pallas Publications, 2006 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Contents

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................9 Chapter 1 – Introduction..................................................................................................11 Listening to the silence of castles ................................................................................12 Appropriations of the castle, Part I.............................................................................13 Academic confiscations.................................................................................................................. 13 The national castle......................................................................................................................... 14 Personal encounters with the past................................................................................................. 14

Bygone perceptions on the big house, Part II............................................................15 Part I – Castles in the present..........................................................................................17 Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ .........................................................19 Castle versus country house ........................................................................................20 The United Provinces.................................................................................................................... 21 England ......................................................................................................................................... 24 Ireland............................................................................................................................................ 26

Martial meanings of ‘castle’ .........................................................................................27 ‘The castle of my parck’................................................................................................33 Castle creations ..............................................................................................................35 Conclusion......................................................................................................................36 Chapter 3 – National appropriations of ‘castle’ ...........................................................39 National Histories .........................................................................................................39 England ......................................................................................................................................... 39 The United Provinces.................................................................................................................... 41 Ireland............................................................................................................................................ 43

Reinventions of (castle) history ...................................................................................45 William of Orange......................................................................................................................... 45

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Castles and the collective unconscious.......................................................................................... 47

Dutch appropriations of castle ....................................................................................49 An unknown past .......................................................................................................................... 49 History well-trodden ..................................................................................................................... 55

Englishness and castle architecture ............................................................................58 Castle heritage ............................................................................................................................... 58 Pride and prejudice........................................................................................................................ 60

Castles and Irish nationalism ......................................................................................62 Seven lost centuries ....................................................................................................................... 62 Castle language ............................................................................................................................. 64

Conclusion......................................................................................................................67 Chapter 4 – Personal appropriations of ‘castle’............................................................69 Touching history ...........................................................................................................70 Ruin sensibility ............................................................................................................................. 70 The historical sensation ................................................................................................................. 71 Ireland............................................................................................................................................ 75 England ......................................................................................................................................... 78 The Netherlands ............................................................................................................................ 81

Imagining the past ........................................................................................................84 The familiar house ......................................................................................................................... 84 Labouring under a misapprehension ............................................................................................. 86

Conclusion......................................................................................................................88 Part II – Castles in the past ..............................................................................................91 Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other..........................................................93 Introduction ...................................................................................................................93 ‘A patch’d building’ ......................................................................................................93 The United Provinces.................................................................................................................... 94 England and Ireland...................................................................................................................... 97

Power problems...........................................................................................................101 Architecture’s worth in the quest for power................................................................................ 101 Pretence and (false) modesty ....................................................................................................... 104

Culture of friendship ..................................................................................................105 William as friend ......................................................................................................................... 105 True friendship ............................................................................................................................ 107

Architecture and the culture of friendship..............................................................110

6 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

Architectural expressions of friendship....................................................................................... 110 The habitat of female friendship................................................................................................... 111

William of Orange and the architecture of friendship...........................................112 Apartment allocation................................................................................................................... 112 Platonic love? .............................................................................................................................. 114

Power and friendship .................................................................................................115 Equality ....................................................................................................................................... 115 Idle flatterers and true friends..................................................................................................... 117

Conclusion....................................................................................................................117 Chapter 6 – Privacy: the castle and the individual ....................................................121 Debating privacy .........................................................................................................121 Recognising past individuals ....................................................................................124 Archaeology on the individual..................................................................................................... 124 Architectural manifestations of the individual ........................................................................... 128

‘Far away from the hall …’ ........................................................................................131 In the bedroom ............................................................................................................................. 131 Further channels for retreat......................................................................................................... 132 Closeting...................................................................................................................................... 133

Culture of privacy .......................................................................................................135 Privacy institutionalised ............................................................................................................. 135 Retreat in the country ................................................................................................................. 138

Archaeology and privacy...........................................................................................141 Conclusion....................................................................................................................143 Chapter 7 – God in the house: the castle and the otherworld ..................................147 Piety and vernacular architecture.............................................................................148 Castle meets church ..................................................................................................................... 148 Ecstasy in the closet..................................................................................................................... 150 Garden prayers ............................................................................................................................ 151

Castles’ chronicles on religious disparity ................................................................152 Religious tolerance....................................................................................................................... 152 Religious activism ....................................................................................................................... 155 Politics and religion..................................................................................................................... 157

Religious transformations and architectural space ................................................158 A personal religion ...................................................................................................................... 158 Religiousness in retreat ............................................................................................................... 160

Conclusion....................................................................................................................162

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Chapter 8 – Conclusion..................................................................................................165 A credible past .............................................................................................................165 Power versus culture ..................................................................................................166 ‘To my poor cell’..........................................................................................................168 Addendum – Fieldwork and historical sources .........................................................171 References ........................................................................................................................177 Illustrations ......................................................................................................................197

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin, Tadhg O’Keeffe above all, for his incisive comments and his most generous supervision, the consecutive Heads of Department, Gabriel Cooney and Muiris O’Sullivan, as well as Joanna Brück, Ursula Mattenberger and Rob Sands. At the Dutch Castle Foundation (Nederlandse Kastelenstichting) I am indebted to the board, especially Annemieke Wielinga and Willem de Nijs Bik, and to Hans Janssen, Alphons te Beek, Wendy Landewé and Marjolijn Saan. My gratitude also extends to the Department of Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam, and to Heritage Studies (Erfgoedstudies), University of Amsterdam. I sincerely thank the following people for their comments on draft versions of this book and for proof reading: first and foremost Ellen Lammers, Andrew Tierney and Blaze O’Connor (immeasurable contributions!); also Thomas Herron, Matthew Johnson, Rob van der Laarse, Nicholas Nisbett, Ben Olde Meierink, Sheila Swarbrick, Sarah Tarlow. I furthermore thank for their (literature) suggestions and the sharing of research findings: David Austin, Ruth Barton, Johan Carel Bierens de Haan, Colm Donnelly, Angelica Dülberg, Nick Hanks, Jorien Jas, James Lyttleton, Máirín NíCheallaigh, Koen Ottenheym, Reinder Postma, Ronald Prins. For reasons ranging from offering technical help with graphs and opening up their castle and house, to joining me on my castle sprees in Ireland, Great Britain and The Netherlands, I would like to thank: Willemijn Beekman, Madelein Bouma, Jan-Willem Briët and Mienke Briët-Proost, Oliver Cunningham, Geertrui Hartman, Baron van Heeckeren van Kell and Baroness van Heeckeren van Kellvan Tets, Perry Hoetjes, G.M. Kamerlingh Onnes - Baroness van Dedem, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, Rosemary Kitchin, Britta Kretschmer, Diny Lammers-Aalders, Anna Laven, Tamara Leeuwerik, Rudie Les, Arthur Molenaar, John and Clare Montcalm, Fadi Mounzer, Nada Mounzer, Frances O’Connor, Aine O’Sullivan, Anne and Noel O’Sullivan, Erik Rinia, Lida Robben, Iris Ronnes, Piet Ronnes, Martine Schepers, Mascha Schouwenaars, Dave Swarbrick, Frans Theuws, Fidelma Tierney, Hebe Verrest, Rhoda Woets, Manni Yunis.

Acknowledments | 9

Finally, for funding my research I thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University College Dublin’s Open Postgraduate Scholarship, Het Prins Bernhard Fonds, Dr. Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fonds, and the Dutch Castle Foundation.

10 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

Chapter 1 Introduction

‘But this place has wonderful powers.’ ‘I do agree,’ said Helen, as she sipped the milk. ‘But you said that the house was dead not half an hour ago.’ ‘Meaning that I was dead. I felt it.’ ‘Yes, the house has a surer life than we, even if it was empty […]’ Forster 1992 [1910], 308, 314

In this excerpt from Howard’s End, E.M. Forster touched on the relationship between the physical structure of the house – stone, wood, glass – and living human beings inhabiting it. Against all odds it may seem that it is the house rather than its occupant that has a life. The idea that buildings can come alive and exist rather like biological organisms is one often heard, both now and in the past. People talk of houses having character, atmosphere, ambiance; houses are frequently experienced as being haunted, eerie or full of ‘wonderful powers’. The idea that houses have ‘a surer life than we’ is convenient from a scholar’s point of view. After all, the people who built and lived in these houses are dead and we scholars are left, if we are lucky, with the houses that they gave life to. Stuck with these fragments of the past, we probably all try to wrest stories from buildings, as if we are dealing with speaking human beings rather than with neatly arranged heaps of planks and stones, and rubble. To paraphrase Margaret, a house has a surer life than we do, even if it is empty. Indeed, we often have to make do with an empty, ruined castle or house, but with the help of a phenomenological approach, or of a textual metaphor that regards archaeological artefacts and architecture as language, we can infuse it with sheer human communicative powers. Still, at the end of the day, the castle or house, as Matthew Johnson phrases it, ‘remains silent’ (Johnson 1999, 12). For archaeologists it has traditionally been, and still is, the custom to turn their attention to the building per se. True, the emphasis has generally shifted from a purely military or art-historical perspective to one where there is increasing attention to the people who constructed and inhabited these buildings. However,

Chapter 1 – Introduction | 11

in order to find out more about these people and the society in which they lived, we still focus our attention on the materiality of the past. As Ian Hodder asserts, ‘specific theories might vary, but there is a widely accepted view that archaeologists need to focus on the particular material character of their data’ (Hodder 2001, 10).

Listening to the silence of castles When I started my research it was my aim to elucidate past perceptions generated by, associated with, and projected onto sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch, English and Irish castles and houses. I applied an approach which may be described as phenomenological in that I focused on the bodily experience of moving through the buildings, studying the accessibility of rooms and the pathways between these spaces as well as the relative placements of such features as doors, windows, fireplaces, floors, chimney-stacks, and presses, in the hope of gaining insight into the mindscape behind the structural organisation and the commonplace perception of these buildings. This method did not work for me, though. How much can one conclude about past perceptions of architecture from the shapes or sizes of windows? What does the presence of a fireplace actually tell us? Not much, it seemed to me. In England and The Netherlands I faced an additional problem with respect to this research method: almost none of the castles and houses that I had visited remained as they had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I became conscious of the fact that I was spending more and more time in the basements of houses and castles where structures were often left unaltered, rather than in the main living spaces. Leafing through the field notes that I had assembled over the first year or so of my research, I also noted that my ‘phenomenological approach’ had slowly turned into one of participant observation, the trademark anthropological method. Not happy to equate my own physical experiences of the houses (or the experiences of the people who accompanied me) with those of men and women in the past, I had increasingly jotted down remarks and observations made by other present-day people visiting, living and working in these historical buildings. In short, I had turned into an ‘anthropologist of history’, studying the heritage of castles and historical houses for the sake of the present rather than the past. This might not seem so bad; after all, Chris Gosden speaks of ‘the entanglement of archaeology and anthropology to the point where they are inextricably bound together’. However, while he refers to the fact that these academic subject areas have linked histories and overlapping subject matters, he considers research methodologies to be ‘the point of division’ between archaeology and anthropology (Gosden 1999, 5, 11, 61). Yet, I found myself doing an anthropological instead of an archaeological study as it would be defined conventionally. This concatenation of events is reflected in the structure of this book. Part I, entitled ‘Castles in the Present’ is informed, for the most part, by my fieldwork, my turn to present-day perceptions and appropriations of ‘castle’. Seeing that it was not possible to generate sufficient

12 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

information through archaeological or indeed anthropological methods, I turned to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical documents, mostly ‘egodocuments’ – letters, diaries, poems and autobiographies – in order to learn what past men and women had stated about the houses they owned and frequented. Part II, ‘Castles in the Past’, is based mainly on these contemporary written commentaries on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century domestic élite architecture. This distinction between a part based largely on fieldwork dealing with the present, and another emanating mainly from historical documentation addressing the past, sprang from my research experience and was not conceptualised as a theoretical framework at the outset. Yet, as this division conjures up structure-text and artefact-literature dichotomies – archaeology / history, Catholic / Protestant, empirical / ideological, modernism / picturesque, phenomenology / (post) structural(ism) – dichotomies which all feature and are questioned in this book, I do believe it has considerable theoretical merits. Thus apart from being a study of élite architecture as experienced by the upper echelons in The United Provinces, Ireland and England in the period covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this book also problematises past research methods and presents an alternative strategy. In the remainder of this chapter I will further explicate the outline of this book.

Appropriations of the castle, Part I The topics of the chapters in part I are, consecutively, appropriations of castles in academia, on a national and on an individual level. I have chosen to apply the term ‘appropriation’ for three reasons. First, it does not just hint at ‘perceiving’ or ‘interpreting’ these past structures, but signals an active engagement with castles. Secondly, it intimates the ‘confiscation’ of castles, not in the military sense but on an academic, national and personal level. Thirdly, it is preferable, I believe, to terms such as ‘application’ or ‘use’ since these expressions emphasise a one-sided political interpretation of these buildings at the expense of other readings.

Academic confiscations An archaeologist’s appropriation of the castle, like a national and personal appropriation, brings about a moulding of the past according to a particular present-day reality. The archaeologist’s history of castles is written in the present in that the narrative is embedded in his/her wider, contemporary, social, political and philosophical context, and his/her participation in or engagement with that context. What scholars state about castles is, moreover, dependent on the academic traditions in which they were trained. Certain ideas are so vested with power that they remain undisputed; equally, scholars’ response to earlier scholarship and self-proclaimed truths, causes one paradigm to be replaced by another.

Chapter 1 – Introduction | 13

Chapter 2, Academic appropriations of ‘castle’, queries the widely established idea, especially regarding Irish and Dutch castles, that the historical period under discussion, the fifteen- and sixteen-hundreds, is the time of ‘the end of the castle’. To what extent are the buildings discussed in this book classified by academics as either castles or country houses on the basis of past notions, or indeed on the basis of more modern ideas? In this chapter, it is my aim to strip the castle of some of its present-day academic baggage, enabling me in part II to retrieve an idea of how people in the past perceived these buildings.

The national castle Chapter 3, National appropriations of ‘castle’, centres on the uncritical adoption in castle stories – in museums, education, the media – of national historical narratives. In recent decades much has been written on the process of creating history, with the narrator labelling particular moments of a country’s past as significant, thereby relegating others to insignificance (see, for example, Ardener 1989; Hastrup 1992; Silverman and Gulliver 1996). Many words have also been devoted to the ‘invention of tradition’, and to other, more or less conscious, (mis)uses of the past for nationalist purposes (see, for example, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Fulbrook 1997; Grant 1997). An awareness of these processes of creating a past in the present has informed critical analyses of the academic pursuit of history, and it has led to the creation of alternative historical accounts. In castle studies, however, the more conventional histories persist. For ‘castellologists’ – to borrow from the French term for students of castles – history is secondary to their main research object, the castle, which is routinely placed against the backdrop of conventional historical key-moments and key-figures. This chapter aims to uncover in what ways our national(istic) histories bias our view of the castle.

Personal encounters with the past Castles and historical houses are appropriated within an academic and a national context and also on a micro- or individual level. What kind of personal experiences people have with castles – what role castles play in people’s personal biography – depends, of course, on many factors, most of which are accidental and subjective. Instead of merely describing what these personal experiences comprise of and so falling into the trap of postmodern ‘ethnographic particularism’ (Moore 1999, 7), I have chosen to single out a particular way of personally appropriating castles and historical houses, namely through ‘the historical sensation’ (Huizinga 1995 [1926], 110). Given the fact that the historical sensation increasingly informs prevailing museological and cultural heritage policies, this is not an arbitrary choice. Chapter 4, Personal appropriations of ‘castle’, will first convey whether or not castles in Ireland, England and The Netherlands are personally appropriated through ‘the historical sensation’ and why this is so; secondly, this chapter will 14 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

pay attention to the academic merits and/or drawbacks of the recent popularity of Johan Huizinga’s historical sensation in castle studies.

Bygone perceptions on the big house, Part II After having dealt extensively with questions of present-day ‘authorship’ at a series of levels (academic, national, personal), in part II I shift the focus to the past. Castellologists have traditionally busied themselves with questions concerning the architectural development of castles, diffusion of architectural influences, sequences of types through time, and the military role castles played in medieval society. Recently, following a general archaeological trend, a number of castellologists have moved away from this approach, which means that categorising and typologising is no longer a self-evident, undisputed task. Or, as Julian Thomas puts it, archaeologists have started to reject spatial science in favour of the study of ‘culture and social relations, power and politics, identity and experience’ (Thomas 2001, 166). In 1954 Christopher Hawkes presented his ascending scale of difficulty regarding the interpretation of archaeological data, arguing that technological information from the past is easiest to assess, followed by the economic, then the sociological and political, and finally the ideological data (Hawkes 1954). Postprocessual archaeology has rejected this system and is more optimistic about the possibility of interpreting the archaeological data that Hawkes considered to be most difficult to assess. Following my attempt at some of the more typical postprocessual research strategies – such as phenomenological and textual approaches, as well as access analysis (see, for example, Hillier and Hanson 1984) – I conclude that though these approaches and methods did inform me of certain aspects of the past, they did not enlighten me about past perceptions and experiences of élite architecture. This is not to say, of course, that Hawkes’ model must therefore be correct, nor is it a denunciation of modern archaeological methodology in general. Post-processual archaeology is anything but selfcontained and self-referential in its methodology, with archaeologists now borrowing freely from other subject areas in order to enrich their methodological framework. Yet, perhaps it is fair to say that I felt compelled to borrow other disciplines’ methodological research strategies to such an extent that it is debatable whether I was still doing archaeology. Conducting a study of past perceptions of the house, I felt it was necessary to hear the men and women who created these buildings speak about their homes. This is not archaeology coming to the aid of history, but rather history coming to the aid of archaeology. Materiality is vital to each and every person’s life in both past and present times, a point that does not receive sufficient attention in historical studies. As a project within the field of archaeology, this book foregrounds this materiality, but in order to understand its subject matter, the castle and house, it is not enough to consider material remains alone.

Chapter 1 – Introduction | 15

Alongside my fieldwork, my literary study of primary sources, consisting of letters, diaries, poems and autobiographies, forms the basis of chapters 5, 6 and 7 in part II (also see addendum). Chapter 5, Friendship: the castle and the other deals with architecture and friendship; more specifically it examines the ways in which élite architecture played a part in Renaissance relationships. Chapter 6, Privacy: the castle and the individual, explores architectural expressions of ‘solitude’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, The United Provinces and Ireland. Chapter 7, God in the house: the castle and the otherworld, tackles the subject of architecture and religion, probing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch, English and Irish domestic élite architecture as expressions of religiousness. Finally, with the decision to focus on literary sources in order to retrieve a part of the past, I have not, of course, proved the validity of this methodology. My decision to play down, to a certain extent, existing archaeological approaches and to focus on literary sources brings in methodological challenges and epistemological dilemmas of its own. In part I further problems associated with studying the past in the present will be identified and discussed. A brief critical reflection on methodological and epistemological quandaries will therefore be found at the end of part I in the conclusion of chapter 4.

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Part I Castles in the present

Chapter 2 Academic appropriations of ‘castle’

It is a fair generalisation that in academia the castle is ‘owned’ by archaeologists, the country house by art-historians. A distinction between castles and country houses as two different types of building has a long tradition, stemming from a differentiation between their respective function (military versus domestic, aesthetic) and form (turrets, slit windows and parapet versus symmetrical facades, well-proportioned windows and grand staircases). Whilst a division between castles and country houses can to a certain degree be traced back to these alleged dissimilarities in terms of function and form, the idea that the two building types belong to different eras – with the castle rooted in the Middle Ages and the country house tied in with early modern times – also goes some way to explain this distinction. Castellologists in Ireland and The Netherlands often regard the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the period under discussion here, as the time marking the transition from medieval to early modern times and as ‘the end of the castle’. David Sweetman, one of Ireland’s best-known castellologists, states that the seventeenth century is the ‘final period of castle building’ in Ireland (Sweetman 1999, 198), while the main Dutch castle handbook argues that the last castle in The Low Countries was built in the 1530s (Janssen 1996, 111; De Rijk 1996, 112). For England the story varies slightly in that the English castle is generally believed to have been outdated prior to the fifteen- and sixteen-hundreds. A concoction of reasons has been put forward for this alleged demise of the castle, mostly relating to the castle’s military function. The invention of the cannon, the onset of more peaceful times, as well as the development of standing armies that negated the necessity to personally defend one’s abode and family, are some of the more frequently cited reasons leading to, or accelerating, the end of the castle and the advent of the period of the country house. In this chapter the academic understanding of ‘castle’ as opposed to ‘country house’ will be studied; that is, are the buildings discussed in this book ‘castles’ or are they better classified as ‘country houses’? Is this distinction useful at all? Before relating in part II what these buildings embodied for those who used to

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 19

inhabit them in the past, it is necessary to first uncover the academic constructs that inculcate the concepts of both ‘castle’ and ‘country house’.

Castle versus country house

1. Cannenburch in Gelderland, a mid-sixteenth-century house built on the foundations of a medieval castle, also contains seventeenth- and eighteenth-century extensions which are visible on the left.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch, English and Irish élite architecture varied widely both geographically and chronologically in terms of shape, size, architectural detail and the use of material. Dutch architecture was distinctive in its almost exclusive use of brick, a practice that only became popular in England in the seventeenth century and never became common practice in Ireland in the period under discussion; the English generally built on a larger scale in comparison with the Dutch and Irish; and Irish élite architecture of the period shows a higher level of uniformity than that of The United Provinces and England due to the omnipresence of the Irish tower-house. Notwithstanding geographical and chronological variations, the élite architecture of The Low Countries, England and Ireland also shared particular features. The tower remained a popular architectural element in each of the areas throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; an increase in window size characterised the architecture of all three countries; and when the chamber pot was first introduced, built-in toilets (or garderobes) disappeared from Dutch, English and Irish residences. An interplay between foreign influences and local traditions is generally held responsible for these architectural variations and similarities, with the primary foreign influences during this period attributed to the Italian Renaissance. Even though the Irish architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth century obviously hints toward Renaissance muses, this is undoubtedly more evident in the architectural heritage of The United Provinces and England. In the latter countries 20 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

pattern books such as those by Sebastiano Serlio and Jan Vredeman de Vries, depicting designs for architectural features such as pilasters, columns and fireplaces circulated widely from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Affluent men and women immersed themselves in these architectural treatises, taking an active part in the practice of designing their homes. It is often argued that this was the time of the invention of the architect, the professional designer navigating the creative building process from behind a desk, as such replacing the hands-on master mason. The assumed distinction between the archaeologist’s ‘castle’ and the art-historian’s ‘country house’, is closely related to Renaissance influences; buildings adorned with Classical features came to be appreciated primarily for aesthetic reasons, a quality usually denied to the purportedly military castle.

The United Provinces For the remainder of this chapter, and indeed for the remainder of this book, it is imperative to pay due attention to the canons of architectural history in so far as they concern the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, starting with that of The Netherlands. It is often stated that from the second half of the sixteenth century until the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the Dutch applied Classical (or Renaissance) features like pediments, columns and coquillages in a twodimensional way.

2. Indented, ‘early Renaissance’ pediment adorning the tower at Cannenburch.

These features were rather arbitrarily chosen with the aid of newly acquired pattern books and they generously decorated medieval or Gothic houses that otherwise remained structurally unaltered (figures 1 - 2 and I). It was only during the subsequent ‘Classical phase’ that also the three-dimensional structure itself became affected by Classical ideas of proportion. Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 21

In Frederik Hendrik, the prince-stadholder in The United Provinces between 1624 and 1647, we have one of the first enthusiastic Dutch builders in the Classical style. He is reported to have said ‘Let us talk of war no longer, let us talk of building and planting’ (Kooijmans 2000, 104; my translation). Frederik Hendrik did not just enjoy his architectural endeavours, but took very seriously his building projects as they played a significant part in his attempt to give the title of stadholder some royal allure. Frederik Hendrik and his wife, aiming high, made an attempt at creating a little Palais du Luxembourg, hiring De la Vallée, son of the architect of this Palais, as their personal architect (Thornton 1981, 40). The stadholder’s building activities had an altogether inspiring effect and the construction during his reign of two houses especially, Het Mauritshuis in The Hague (figure 3), built by his cousin, Johan Maurits van Nassau, and the house Constantijn Huygens built next door (sadly no longer existent), generally count as the starting point of the Classical phase of Dutch architecture.

3. Het Mauritshuis in The Hague (1637-1638) is generally considered one of the earliest and most influential Dutch Classical buildings.

Het Mauritshuis in particular has been influential, inspiring not only Dutch but also English and Irish architects (Craig 1982, 145; Pevsner 1983, 337). Nikolaus Pevsner goes so far as to base an entire type of English country house on Het Mauritshuis’ plan (ibid., 337). Het Mauritshuis consists of an almost perfectly symmetrical body, its gables ornamented with Ionian columns, small pediments above the windows, festoons, and topped by a Palladian-style pediment incorporating sculptured figures and a hipped roof. Perhaps it was the interior of Het Mauritshuis that was celebrated most of all. Apart from the more usual riches, it contained ‘Indian’ wood from Brazil, Indian weaponry, drums and trumpets, paintings depicting Brazil’s indigenous population, several monkeys, crocodiles and tigers, water snakes, lion skins, diamonds and sapphire – all sent over from

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Brazil by the owner of Het Mauritshuis, Johan Maurits, who was governor general of the Dutch West Indian Company (Lunsingh Scheurleer 1985, 162; De Regt 1987, 16-47). When Johan Maurits died in the late 1670s he was so much in debt that his descendents were forced to part with Het Mauritshuis. The house was rented out to John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough and his wife Sarah Duchess of Devonshire (about whom more in part II), the year (1704) it burnt down. The gables alone withstood the flames; a renovated Het Mauritshuis is now open as a picture gallery exhibiting a part of the collection that once belonged to William III.

4. Amerongen in Utrecht, built in 1676 in the severe Classical style.

The construction of these two early Classical houses in the mid-seventeenth century was to some extent a joint project. Johan Maurits van Nassau and Constantijn Huygens extensively discussed their architectural ideas and notions, debates that architects such as Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post also took part in. Van Nassau’s stay in the West Indies did not interrupt these conversations, with Huygens regularly updating him on the improvements made to Het Mauritshuis in his absence. Other members of the Dutch élite at this time equally approached architecture with a mixture of excitement and scholarly assiduousness. Willem Frederik van Nassau, then stadholder of the northern provinces, noted that whilst sick he passed the time with the pleasant occupation of drawing the plans of the two houses he possessed in The Hague (Kooijmans 2000, 72). This fascination with architecture was inherited by the next generation to which William III, stadholder and king, belonged. It is often argued that William and the men and women in his entourage abandoned the sobriety that characterised the architecture of the previous generation, and were far more prone than stadholder Frederik Hendrik, Johan Maurits van Nassau and Constantijn Huygens to build in a grand style – albeit still fairly modest to foreign eyes.

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 23

The Classical architecture of the seventeenth century and generally also the Mannerist-style buildings of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century are placed in the ‘house’ as opposed to ‘castle’ category. The last Dutch castle is, as said, rather precisely dated to the 1530s (Janssen 1996, 111; De Rijk 1996, 112). However, end dates of Dutch castle architecture have always varied greatly, exemplified by the designation of late-seventeenth-century Amerongen in Utrecht (figure 4) as the house marking the transition in The Netherlands from castle to country house (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 27). Significantly, however, a radical transition in building style in the sixteenth century, the time associated with the final period of castle building, is not noticeable. That is, ‘castles’ and ‘houses’ cannot be distinguished on the basis of their plans. The vernacular architecture of the sixteenth century comes in various forms and shapes, with ‘castles’ and ‘houses’ built in U-shapes and L-shapes or consisting of a hodge-podge of different structures from various time periods, resulting in uneven rooflines (more often than not adorned with the typical Dutch step-gable), uneven floor levels, and a general lack of symmetry (figures 1 - 2 and I). Hence, it is easier to differentiate between the architecture of the sixteenth versus the seventeenth century than between early sixteenth-century castles and later sixteenth-century houses. As with the shape of buildings, radical changes in terms of the organisation of space did not occur in the sixteenth century. The great hall – traditionally the place where the lord and lady met, ate and at times, it is often argued, spent the night accompanied by servants and locals – still adorned sixteenth-century élite houses; already prior to this time the hall had lost its grandeur and significance, however, with the lord and lady having retreated to other, more private, rooms. In the seventeenth century the great hall had degraded to such an extent that it became a mere vestibule.

England In the fourteenth century William Langland famously wrote: ‘Wretched is the hall […] each day in the week. / There the lord and lady liketh not to sit. / [They] leave the chief hall / That was made for meals, for men to eat in’ (Girouard 1978, 30). Notwithstanding Langland’s lament it was only in the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth century – the time Hoskins (1955) coined as the period of The Great Rebuilding – that big houses were no longer self-evidently provided with a ‘great hall’. Peace and prosperity are held responsible for the numerous ‘prodigy houses’ springing up in this period, built especially, as their owners were prone to say, for Queen Elizabeth, who toured these houses during her summer progress (figures II - III). To a contemporary commentator, prodigy houses, influenced by Renaissance principles and pierced by windows of unprecedented sizes, were ‘rather curious to the eye like paper work’ (Harrison 1994 [1587], 225). He added: ‘Those [houses] of the nobility are […] so magnificent and stately as the basest house of a baron doth often match in our day with some honors of princes in old time. So that if

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ever curious building did flourish in England, it is in these our years, wherein our workmen excel and are in manner comparable in skill with old Vitruvius, Leon Battista, and Serlio’ (ibid., 199). The houses William Harrison alluded to differed significantly from those built in The United Provinces. English masons in this period used stone rather than brick, applied alternatively shaped windows and did not employ the prominent step-gables found on Dutch examples (figures 5 and IV). In contrast, England’s later architecture with a mid- to late-seventeenthcentury date is often considered to have run parallel with Dutch architecture: the two countries shared architects such as Daniel Marot and were both influenced by a spatial organisation indebted mainly to French examples. Moreover, in England, designing, reading and studying architecture had also become a popular pastime for the élite – a pastime in which, it has been remarked, not only affluent men but also women partook (Laurence 2003).

5. Multi-phase Ightham Mote in Kent.

Parallel developments are explained, at least in part, by the fact that following their flight to the The United Provinces during the Civil War and the subsequent Republican phase, considerable numbers of English men and women, among them the future King Charles II, were influenced by Dutch as well as French architectural ideas. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1666, during the socalled Second Great Rebuilding (Platt 1994), English architects worked in a style that was either more akin to the French Classical style or to Dutch Classical interpretations. Pevsner, rather stereotypically, argues that the trading success of the Dutch gave their architecture a quality fit mainly for domestic architecture, and that the grandeur of the French absolute monarchy led to more representational architecture (Pevsner 1983, 318). Yet the most influential English architect of the time, Christopher Wren, sought inspiration in both styles, carefully

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studying engravings published in both Paris and Amsterdam. A ‘Franco-Dutch’ style, also called the ‘Wren-style’, is mainly recognised in country houses built during the second half of the seventeenth century (figure 6). Made of brick, rectangular, small and symmetrical, they are reminiscent of and indeed reckoned to be based on the Mauritshuis plan (figure 3).

6. ‘Mauritshuis-style’ Squerryes Court in Kent.

Ireland In contrast with the peace and prosperity the English enjoyed in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, this period was a time of unrest in Ireland. Instead of the smart and colossal prodigy houses, tower-houses continued to be built in Ireland; a new type of building, usually termed the ‘(semi) fortified house’ also emerged at this time. The tower-house, first of all, represents an exceptionally widespread phenomenon; it is believed by some that as many as 3000 to 7000 tower-houses were built in Ireland (Cairns 1987, 3, 21; Barry 1987, 140). Towerhouse construction persisted well into the mid-seventeenth century, although this type of building is mainly associated with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Notwithstanding temporal and regional differences, the omnipresence of the fairly uniform tower-house facilitates a description of the architectural heritage of Ireland in the period under discussion. Built of stone and, though no longer visible, of wood, tower-houses featured machiculations (protruding or overhanging balcony-like structures from which objects could be thrown onto unwelcome visitors), parapets, and arrow slits and gun loops (figures 27 - 28 and XIII, XXIII). The towers were usually divided into four to five different storeys, possibly with additional mezzanine levels. A stone, newel staircase positioned near the main entrance on ground floor level connected the storeys, which were either wooden or vaulted. Each level, consisting of one

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large space or partitioned into one large and one small room, was occasionally enhanced with a corridor or small niche for the garderobe (toilet). It is uncertain how many towers used to be surrounded by a bawn and additional outbuildings, yet evidence exists that many were. The fortified house, the type of élite building routinely categorised as the tower-house’s successor, was first built in the latter half of the sixteenth century (figures 7 – 9 and V). As was the case with tower-houses, fortified houses were commissioned and inhabited by the Gaelic, Old English and New (or Planter) English populations alike, but given that the situation rapidly worsened for the first group from the late-sixteenth century onwards, élite architecture in Ireland increasingly became the prerogative of the Old and New English. The fortified house, about three floors high and several bays wide, possessed a horizontal instead of the tower-house’s vertical emphasis. Its windows were generally larger than those found in tower-houses and exhibited the reverse rhythm of larger windows in the lower part of the house and smaller ones higher up the building. Floors as well as internal partitionings were of wood, with the result that there is usually nothing left of these houses but the stone façades. Two exceptions (merely proving the rule) are Rathfarnham in County Dublin (figure 7), renovated in the eighteenth century by William Chambers and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart and from then on kept in use, and Portumna in County Galway (figures 8 9), which was recently renovated on the basis of original plans. The supposedly military features of fortified houses, such as machiculations and bartizans, parapets, and gun loops, suggest a symbolic rather than an actual military function. Door-frames were frequently adorned with ‘crude’ Renaissance features copied from elsewhere, most likely England or France, or found in pattern books. Throughout much of the seventeenth century, fortified houses were the prevailing Irish élite dwelling; houses in the Classical style – well proportioned, symmetrical and devoid of castle-like features – only appeared in Ireland in the lateseventeenth century (figure 10).

Martial meanings of ‘castle’ In Ireland the transition from castle to country house is considered to have been a gradual one from tower-house (castle) to fortified house (semi-castle) to Classical house (uncastellated). In The Netherlands this transition is usually considered to have been more abrupt with the main castle handbook citing the 1530s as the date of the last castle – this said, it is not uncommon for Dutch scholars to recognise a gliding scale from castle to country house similar to that of their Irish colleagues. One of the main problems with this approach is that it is seldom explicated what it is that we define as a ‘castle’, with most castle books lacking a proper definition of the term. In the rare instances that authors do address the definition of the castle, it becomes manifest that a discourse on the origins of the concept is imperative. Hans Janssen importantly, yet almost in passing, remarks that the ‘present-day academic term castle has its origins in the academic pursuit of history’ and that ‘in

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 27

the Middle Ages itself this term did not exist as such’ (Janssen et al. 1996, 11; my translation). Hans-Joachim Mrusek also alludes to the fact that the concept was an afterthought rather than a contemporary term: ‘If we consider the elements which go to make up a castle as it now appears (perimeter wall, ditch and rampart system, keep, chapel, residential and accessory buildings, well, etc.) […]’ (Mrusek 1972, 8; my emphasis). Tom McNeill in a similarly veiled manner signals the problematic nature of the term when he refers to ‘structures which we now identify as castles’ (McNeill 2000, 8). So what do we nowadays identify as castles?

7. Rathfarnham in County Dublin, an early example of the so-called ‘fortified houses’, built in Ireland in the late-sixteenth and early half of the seventeenth century, was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by William Chambers and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart.

Academics have always been quick to underline the defensive or military function of the castle. Philip Warner writes that castles ‘were sited and built to meet a military requirement’ (Warner 1971, 2). Brian De Breffny quotes The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that defines a castle as ‘a large building or set of buildings fortified for defence; a fortress’ (De Breffny 1977, 7). Mike Salter, in the preface to Castles and Stronghouses of Ireland, writes: ‘The 350 buildings which feature in this book are a personal choice from the 2,500 or so fortified buildings of the period 1180-1680 known to have existed in Ireland’ (Salter 1993, 2). In the last few decades the notion that castles should be regarded apart from defensive structures as residences, has caught on strongly. According to Janssen, for instance, ‘a castle is a medieval building that combines the functions of defence and residency by providing living space and defence to a limited number of people, varying from a noble family with a few servants to a small royal household and a military garrison to a maximum of about fifty people’ (Janssen 1996, 15-16; my translation). Following from this, Janssen proposes – hereby looking (as is common in Dutch

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castle studies), to Germany for inspiration – a castellology that deliberates not only on the castle’s military qualities, but also on the socio-historical context of these buildings in terms of ‘the number of persons who lived in a castle, their social status and their standard of living’ (Janssen 1992, 10-15; my translation). Recently, scholars who might be dubbed ‘revisionist castellologists’, not only embrace the idea of the castle as residence but go so far as to attack the first prerequisite of the castle definition: the castle’s military function. It was Charles Coulson, in a publication on Bodiam in Sussex, England (figure VI), who claimed that some of this castle’s supposedly military features were bogus (Coulson 1992). Although the discussion on the military significance of Bodiam’s moat, arrow loops, windows, flanking towers and portcullis is ongoing, Coulson has convinced many. Among those convinced is the prominent castellologist Matthew Johnson who, in abiding by Coulson’s thesis, has come up with his own examples of sham castles and in doing so has further ignited discussion on the martial function of the castle (Johnson 2002, xiii-xix).

8. Portumna in County Galway, another ‘fortified house’, was built between 1610 and 1618.

Coulson and Johnson are not the only castellologists struggling with the military paradigm. While others may not openly question the definition of the castle, their writings do indicate its problematic nature. While discussing thirteenth-century Dutch tower-houses like Lunenburg and Walenburg, both in Utrecht, Jorge Guillermo queries: ‘exactly what they were meant to protect remains a mystery as Langerbroek [sic], the nearest village, never had any great strategic importance, and the surrounding marsh remained undrained and uncultivated until long after the towers were built’ (Guillermo 1990, 131). Ingrid Moerman also saw herself confronted with the fact that a military scenario did not fit the historical reality of the famous Dutch castle Teylingen in Zuid-Holland (figure 11). She grappled with

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 29

the fact that Teylingen has large unprotected windows at first floor level. The positioning of these windows – structurally unnecessary – on the least protected side of the castle and thus further exposing it, is even more puzzling to the author (Moerman 1981, 5). Also in Ireland, the structure of castles often jars with their ascribed military function. Although Glinsk (figure XXVI), a fortified house in County Roscommon, possesses numerous gun loops, their military significance is seemingly undone by large windows low down in the building. There are multiple Irish examples where machicolations, murder holes and enclosing bawn walls are positioned in such a way that they cannot possibly have been of any use during an attack.

9. Early Renaissance Portumna.

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Tom McNeill spotted a further anomaly in the military definition of the Irish castle. The hypothesis that the development of new kinds of artillery caused the transition from the tower-house to the less defensive fortified house (as the first ‘country house’) is flawed according to McNeill as ‘the move away from anything we can really call a castle [it is not explicated what ‘really’ is a castle], and towards country houses, had started well before the wars of the middle of the [seventeenth] century.’ He furthermore remarks that ‘artillery which did not become effective before the 1650s cannot have caused a change visible before 1600’ (McNeill 2000, 229). Given the trouble with the military definition of the castle, how can it be that it has proved to be so enduring? Tadhg O’Keeffe suggests the castle definition is a corollary of the fact that the study of castles has always been a predominantly male occupation. An androcentric and largely military perspective on the past was the norm for Victorian male scholars; a military view of castles on behalf of a

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number of influential mid-twentieth-century castellologists was not seldom informed by their experiences in the Second World War (O’Keeffe 2001, 78). Remarkably and significantly, in contrast with this nineteenth- and twentiethcentury military take on castles, these buildings were not necessarily symbolic of masculinity and soldierly bravery in the past. William Harrison, writing in 1587, believed they were rather cowardly structures. To him, real men did not hide behind thick walls, they met each other in the field (Harrison 1994 [1587], 221-223). This should not be taken to mean that Harrison did not believe ‘castles’ served a military purpose. He did. Historical sources in general are unambiguous about the fact that people attributed defensive qualities to buildings we now identify as castles. Moreover, these structures did, of course, feature in military warfare. Consequently, I do not align myself with revisionist castellologists who are on the brink, so it seems, of denying the military function of castles altogether; however, I do believe that this function was not something that was exclusively linked to one type of building. That is, in medieval and early modern society, defence was not associated merely with castles but was an integral part of each and everyone’s life. People sought protection behind town walls and beyond these urban centres they barricaded themselves in their dwellings, keeping dogs as a further means of protection. Those who travelled – then potentially a highly dangerous affair – made sure to avoid notorious roads (as Felix Platter’s journey from Basel to Marseille well illustrates (Le Roy Ladurie 1996)) and, especially during the night, stayed out of sight. At sea, finally, military ships regularly protected large commercial fleets part of the way to their destinations in the Levant, the Baltic or the Far East. In short, in societies that lack a strong central government and a standing army, the issue of defence is always an important one in people’s daily lives.

10. Castletown in County Kildare counts as one of Ireland’s most lavish eighteenth-century houses.

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 31

Thus, I would argue that it was not only the castle that provided protection; rather, numerous structures and measures had a potentially defensive function. English Lady Anne Halkett wrote in the seventeenth century that she moved out of a particular house because her room had a big window facing the street and that there was ‘none in the houwse butt weemen’ (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 64). The fact that Anne Halkett referred to a large window and a lack of male company when stating her reasons for changing lodgings, teaches us first of all that the ‘house’ that succeeded the ‘castle’ was not fundamentally different in terms of its possible defensive purpose; both types of buildings were expected to provide a certain level of defence. It furthermore shows that aside from the structure of the house, several other factors, such as male company in Halkett’s case, contributed to either a safe or an unsafe situation.

11. Multi-phase Teylingen in Zuid-Holland was first built in the early thirteenth century, yet was repeatedly refurbished until well into the seventeenth century.

I will provide an additional example. Water in The United Provinces carried supplies from one part of the country to another (water’s commercial purpose); water was also employed for agricultural purposes and provided energy (economic functions); moreover, as Simon Schama points out, floods were seen as a telling sign: ‘from […] the flood […] they might learn whether they continued to enjoy the protection of the Almighty’ (water’s religious meaning) (Schama 1991, 44). Significant in this context is the fact that apart from a commercial, economic and a religious meaning, water also had a defensive or military function. In 1573, in the early stages of the Eighty-Year War between the Dutch and the Spanish, the latter laid siege to the Dutch town of Alkmaar. Diederik Sonoy, one of the governors of the Dutch militia stationed in the town, opened the sluices and flooded large parts of the area surrounding the town. The Spanish could be seen 32 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

fleeing from the town walls (Van Foreest 2000 [1573], 54-55). This strategy was used to great success throughout the course of this long war. To carry this example a little further; not only water was credited with multiple meanings and purposes, the same is true of commercial ships navigating these waters. That is, commercial ships were not only engaged in trade but were employed in warfare as well. In 1587, England’s Privy Council announced a general halt of shipping in view of the threat of the Armada; Sir Walter Raleigh, preparing an expedition, was one of many who had to hand over his ships to the Royal Navy (Miller 2001, 190-192). About a century later, at the start of The First Dutch War, Samuel Pepys argued in front of the Privy Council that the sailing of commercial ships to the Mediterranean should be prohibited, ‘the King having resolved to have 130 ships out by the spring, he must have above 20 of them merchantmen’ (Coote 2000, 152). The history of the Irish ‘pirate queen’ Grace O’Malley also illustrates the multiple purposes of ships as military, pirate, trading and passenger ships (Chambers 1998). The watergeuzen, Dutch men and women fighting the Spanish on the water, likewise employed ships for trading, pirating and warfare. (War)ships’ numerous meanings are perhaps best illustrated by the name, De Liefde (‘Love’), of a seventeenth-century Dutch warship fighting in the Baltic (Van Wassenaer Obdam 2000 [1658], 205). It is well-known, to stay momentarily with the subject of love, that castles were symbolic of the female body and that the conquest of the castle was emblematic for the conquest of a woman (Gilchrist 1999, 138-145; Landewé 2000); moreover, it was from the ‘castrum’ that the love god Cupid operated (Müller 1996, 161). Returning then to the military paradigm, it will be apparent that the buildings that we are in the habit of calling castles served several different functions, defence being just one of them. Given the fact, moreover, that each residence – house, cottage, hut, country house – held a protective function to its occupants, every residence becomes a castle if one is to apply the now-generally accepted definition of the term castle as a defensive and residential structure, causing the distinction between the castle and country house to become redundant. However, before being able to draw the conclusion that this distinction is indeed a futile one, let me first elucidate various other difficulties with the conventional academic approach to castles.

‘The castle of my parck’ The main problem with the definition of the castle lies in the fact that it is not generally acknowledged that people in the past used a variety of terms to signify the buildings that we now know as castles. In The Low Countries some of the words in usage were huus, borg, as well as havezathe, hofstad and spieker; in Scotland: manerium, mansio, domus, locus and palatium (Tabraham 1997, 11); in England: castrum, castellum, firmitas and municipium (Brown 1976, 27); and in Ireland: caistél, caislén, longphort, daingen, dúnad and dún (O’Keeffe 2000, 26-27). ‘Modern translation of these terms is difficult’, Tadhg O’Keeffe remarks, ‘and in

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 33

any case the contexts in which they were used suggests that meanings changed from one situation to the next’ (O’Keeffe 2000, 27). My own research, for the most part dealing with a later period than that studied by the scholars cited above, indicates that terms such as ‘house’ and ‘castle’ were essentially interchangeable. In her letters, Liselotte Princess Palatine and Duchess of Orléans, sister-in-law of Louis XIV, referred to the palace in Heidelberg where she spent her childhood as both a ‘castle’ and a ‘house’ (D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722]). Before-mentioned Teylingen (figure 11), customarily considered as a run-of-the-mill castle, was referred to in fourteenth-century historical sources as a huse (Moerman 1981, 12); the Irish Civil Survey of 1654-1656 mentioned several ‘new castles’ (see, for example, Ballynavin, County Tipperary (Farrelly and O’Brien 2002, 321)), thus post-dating the heralded ‘end of the Irish castle’. The Earl of Cork, furthermore, built a ‘lodge’ in his park, most probably a banqueting house, in the early seventeenth century, which he routinely called ‘the castle of my parck’ (Boyle 1886b [1566-1643], 156-160). According to the Earl of Clanricarde, Terrelan (or Terryland) in County Galway, one of the properties in his possession, was ‘a fair castle […] divided from the [city] of Galway by river and loch […]’ (Burke 1983 [1634-1647], 14; my emphasis). During the war of the 1640s, however, Clanricarde stated that he would send his wife and a small retinue to his ‘house of Terrellan […] the only proper quiet and securest place I could provide for her to reside in’ (ibid., 416; my emphasis). Constantijn Huygens Jr. also consistently mixed the terms house and castle in his diary; Carrick-on-Suir in County Tipperary, Ireland (figure VII), is a ‘house’ where he can fish for salmon from a window, but a ‘castle’ two lines further down (Huygens Jr. 1876 [16881696], 310). That it was not just Carrick-on-Suir – an Irish, yet English-style building – which confused Huygens Jr. but that he was in the habit of combining the two terms is evident from the following excerpt from his diary: ‘not far from our camp there was a house or castle’ (Huygens Jr. 1876 [1688-1696], 309; my translation). An English example is provided by Lady Anne Clifford, who wrote in her diary that ‘I also saw payd for loading of wood from Whinfield to this Brougham Castle for firing my house’ (Clifford 1990 [1603-1676], 245-245; my emphasis). The diaries, letters and autobiographies of these men and women who will feature more prominently in part II indicate that our neat distinction between the concepts ‘house’ and ‘castle’ does not reflect a past reality. In the case of the Earl of Cork, the Earl of Clanricarde and Huygens Jr. it is not only apparent that they varied terms such as lodge, house and castle; their examples moreover provide insight into the defensive purposes these men ascribed to buildings that are usually not imbued with martial meanings, such as ‘lodges’ and ‘houses’. Huygens Jr. noted about Irish tower-houses that ‘most of these houses are built as strongholds, in a strange Irish fashion’ (Huygens Jr. 1876 [1688-1696], 294; my translation). According to the Earl of Clanricarde, the house of Terrellan was the ‘securest place’ for his wife. The Earl of Cork, finally, wrote in his diary that when his mason had finished building the lodge in the park, the latter had agreed to 34 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

make him ‘such another castle […] for the secureties and good of the countrey’ (Boyle 1886b [1566-1643], 156-160; my emphasis).

Castle creations If we accept the idea that the ‘castle’ is a post-medieval construct – a collective noun, encapsulating a heterogeneous group of buildings – and not unique in providing defence, it becomes manifest that the castle as we know it did not exist in the past. The concept as applied in academia (and beyond) is an academic tool, and a tool moreover that as currently constituted does not work very well. Scholars have grappled with the problematic nature of the term for many years now, albeit not openly. In the 1950s Allen Brown wrote about the definition of the castle that there would ‘of course […] be untidiness around the edges’ and went on to say that ‘the distinction between the castle and the great house could be blurred in particular instances’ (Brown 1976 [1954], 16-17). Also in the 1950s, Sidney Toy stated that ‘in the use of terms the author [Toy], avoiding pedantic and discursive arguments, has chosen the terms most generally understood’ (Toy 1966 [1953], xvii). Today too scholars struggle to connect the creation that is ‘the castle’ to past realities.

12. Constantijn Huygens’ mid-seventeenth-century Hofwijck (‘Flee from court’) near The Hague was built in the shape of a body, garden lanes making up the legs and arms of this body with the house representing the head.

Reviewing a Dutch publication on castles, Gertrudis Offenberg deliberates on the dilemmas that the authors of this book faced when trying to define which buildings did and which did not deserve the denotation ‘castle’. Since this was all but clear-cut, an appendix was decided on, consisting of buildings with an

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 35

ambiguous ‘castle status’. Offenberg adds that ‘future research might reveal that some [of these castles] do in fact correspond with the already mentioned castle criteria’ (Offenberg 1996, 346; my translation). A publication on Dutch castles in the Dutch province Noord-Brabant, finally, mentions buildings that look like castles, but which do not deserve this title since they were not defensive (Becx et al. 1999, 18). Irrespective of the fact that historical buildings were experienced in an infinite number of culturally prescribed and personal ways, castellologists in most cases only differentiate between them on the basis of function and shape. We have already seen, however, that the current definition of the castle on the basis of its supposed function as a defensive and a residential building does not work since defensive and residential functions are not exclusively tied in with, or unique prerequisites of, castles. To distinguish a castle on the basis of a building’s shape – to establish on the basis of a list of structural features which buildings can justifiably identified as a ‘castle’ – is also problematic, to say the least. As was obvious from Offenberg’s observation, the use of ‘castle criteria’ only leads to an appendix of semi-castles. This is not surprising given the fact that each building is, of course, unique: while one may have a parapet, it might not have thick walls, both considered attributes of the castle; and whilst the shape of a building may conform to the idea of the castle in terms of its drawbridge and turrets, large windows and a perfectly symmetrical façade might indicate that this is a house rather than a castle. If the way in which these buildings are grouped together seems dubious, the manner in which castles are subdivided into different types and sub-types is just as disputable. Although no art-historian, archaeologist or castellologist is able to do his or her research without some kind of categorisation, the current manner of classifying building types – not on the basis of categories that were recognised in the past but on present-day evaluations of shape, function and chronology – has resulted in an approach which is far removed from the everyday reality of past people visiting, living and working in these places. Castellologists spend much time establishing which castles represent the transition from one architectural trend to the next (Olde Meierink 1996, 151), deciding on the ‘last’ castle (De Rijk 1996), and singling out castles that are ‘archetypal’ (Johnson 1989, 19) or ‘atypical’ (Sweetman 1999, 96). Apparent also is the enduring search for ‘factual’ or ‘objective’ knowledge. Discussing historical drawings of castles, Jaap Renaud, the doyen of Dutch castellology, writes that ‘central to these drawings is of course the question of their reliability’ (Renaud 1996, 248; my translation).

Conclusion Notwithstanding the fact that this rigid categorising of buildings as well as the definition of the castle in general give castellologists serious headaches, the castle’s military function has long since been decided on. My dissatisfaction with the academic appropriation of castles does not merely concern the fact that it tells

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a story based more on the present than the past; my unease is equally rooted in the fact that this one-sided, military and political story of castles affects, as we will see, the way in which castles are appropriated on a national as well as a personal level. The traditional approach towards castles is but one of many possible ways to study these historical buildings: with a different definition buildings that now fall outside the ‘castle perimeters’ would be considered castles and alternative typologies would be propagated. Definition and approach are not integral to the studied object; they are chosen by scholars working in the present. The same can be said about the questions scholars pose. Castellology is seriously lagging behind other subject areas within and outside archaeology in terms of its theoretical framework, which more than validates the recent upsurge in castle revisionism led by British scholars. In the following I too will move away from the traditional approach towards and the traditional definition of the castle, and will make an attempt to tell a different story about these buildings. Regarding the definition of the castle, I believe the question of what a castle is should be asked anew. As was illustrated in this chapter, ‘the castle’ does not exist on the basis of one or two specific functions. The castle’s defensive function should be regarded as integral to the residential function; the notion that a defensive quality is a characteristic unique for castles must be abandoned. Crucially, moreover, it seems that the distinction between castles and other residential buildings was not made in the past. It will be evident then that I will not partake in the future struggle Offenberg predicts of trying to establish which ‘semi-castles’ might be re-classified as sure ‘castles’ (Offenberg 1996, 346). In part II I will not concern myself with the modern concepts ‘castle’ and ‘house’, but will instead study past perceptions of these structures. This means that instead of trying to pinpoint whether or not a building is a proper castle or a mere house, I will equate the two terms, as is customarily done for Ruurlo (figure 16) which is known as Kasteel Huize Ruurlo (Kok 2002). Or perhaps it is more to the point to state that I will follow Constantijn Huygens Sr. who, in his poem Hofwijck (1651), posed the question as to whether his house Hofwijck (figure 12), which he finished in the mid-seventeenth century, was a castle or not. He concluded that it did not really matter what one would call it – a fort, a castle, a hut, a cell, a pigsty, a tent – as all these buildings serve only one purpose and that is to provide een veilig dak (‘a safe roof’) over its owner’s head (Van Strien and Van der Leer 2002, 62).

Chapter 2 – Academic appropriations of ‘castle’ | 37

Chapter 3 National appropriations of ‘castle’

Whilst historians nowadays usually take a self-critical stance on conventional national(istic) accounts of history, castellologists still by and large gullibly apply such narratives as the backdrop to their castle stories. A national(istic) perspective on castles is perhaps even more prevalent in the presentation of castles to the wider public, in castle museums, the educational curriculum and various multimedia. The impact of the application of such nationalistic canons of history on representations of castles is the subject of this chapter.

National Histories Most of the canonical moments of the national histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, The Netherlands and Ireland transpire on a macrolevel within the political realm. Historical events traditionally recognised by historians as key-moments and still featuring as historical markers in castle stories deal foremost with kings and queens and relate violent clashes and political reconfigurations. The history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is usually summed up in a number of influential or aspirant heads of state, and their feuds and wars such as Henry VIII’s scuffle with the Pope, Elizabeth’s victory over the Spanish Armada, and the Civil War conflict between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Typically, accounts of the history of The Low Countries in the period between 1500 and 1700 relate the War of Independence against the Spanish as well as Holland’s political and economical supremacy – the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. The historiography of the Irish sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conveys a narrative about British interference in Ireland resulting in political and religious reconfigurations, plantation programs, widespread Irish and Old English opposition, and the eventual defeat of the Irish.

England Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England in many ways seems to prefigure England’s ‘Golden Age’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Morgan

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1993; Morrill 1996). King Henry’s vigour, Queen Elizabeth’s flair, Drake’s success and the Glorious Revolution, all read as the start of more good things to come. The narrative goes more or less as follows: Henry VIII, King of England in the early part of the sixteenth century and member of the Tudor dynasty, had three children by six wives and was the owner of a foul temper (hence, it is suggested, the six wives). He is probably foremost remembered as the king who introduced Protestantism in England, turning his back on the Roman Catholic Church when the Pope refused to annul one marriage to enable another. At the time, Henry was father to one child, a girl called Mary, who was brought up a Catholic. Edward and Elizabeth, born after his conflict with the Pope, grew up as Protestants. When Henry died in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the boy Edward who succeeded him. Edward was a sickly child and did not reign long. Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter, came next, a devout woman whom history nicknamed ‘bloody’ given her alleged harsh treatment of Protestants. Due to her marriage to Philip II of Spain, who was just as spiritually inclined as she was, mighty Spain and a more humble England formed a true Catholic stronghold in Europe. Much to Mary’s dismay, though, they did not bear a child, and when Mary died in 1558 it was her younger sister Elizabeth who followed her on the throne. Elizabeth did not die young like her brother, was as popular as her sister was unpopular, and proved able to withstand challenges to her power from both inside and outside England. During her reign the country prospered, the arts flourished, and the Spanish Armada was crushed by the Protestant wind that once again blew in England. Elizabeth, ‘the virgin queen’, died after a long reign in the early years of the seventeenth century. With her death the Tudor dynasty became extinct and was succeeded by that of the Stuarts. During the seventeenth century, hostilities with the Scots and the Irish alternated with naval wars against the Dutch. However, it was particularly the Civil War between royalists and the parliamentary faction that made the sixteenhundreds notoriously volatile. The Civil War started following continuous disagreements between King Charles I and his parliament over their respective claims to power. Eventually this led to the beheading of the king in the midseventeenth century and to a republican phase, unique in the history of England. Oliver Cromwell led the new Republic, yet it was soon recognised that a Republic was not what the English wanted, resulting in an invitation to the throne sent to Charles’ son, then living in exile on the Continent. Charles II, who remained king for the next twenty-five years, is best known for the debauches he partook in as well as for his religious wavering; for the first time since ‘bloody Mary’ a century earlier did Protestantism in England seem at risk. James II, who succeeded his brother Charles in 1685, transpired to be even less reliable in matters of religion, openly demonstrating Catholic behaviour. Three years into his reign, James’ wife bore him a son, which was the onset of a national fit of anxiety concerning the survival of Protestantism in England. A new invitation was sent out, this time to Holland to William of Orange, who had claims to the English throne through his marriage to King James’ daughter Mary and through his Stuart mother. The 40 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

‘Glorious Revolution’ that ensued averted the ‘Catholic threat’ while at the same time consolidating parliamentary powers. William reluctantly accepted the infringement of his authority arising from the condition that parliament would, from now on, enjoy increased administrative and judicial powers. He ruled Britain until his death in the early years of the eighteenth century.

The United Provinces William of Orange was not only King of Britain but also Dutch stadholder (for the Dutch historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth century see Blom and Lamberts 1992; Schama 1991). His father Willem II, grandfather Frederik Hendrik, granduncle Maurits, and his great-grandfather, the illustrious Willem van Oranje (William of Orange I), had been stadholder (a term derived from the time of Spanish domination when the stadholder replaced the absentee Spanish king) before him. The ‘United Provinces’, seven in total, formed a republic, which was so unusual at the time that when William of Orange I was assassinated in 1584, a number of foreign aristocrats and rulers amongst whom the English Earl of Leicester, were invited and tried out as possible kings. When it became obvious that this experiment was doomed, the Dutch settled for an unusual political system in which the Orange princes remained in their position as stadholder but shared power with wealthy merchants and a modestly sized nobility occupying benches in the States General. In theory the provinces operated largely independently from each other; in practice, however, a great deal depended on the wishes of Holland, the wealthiest of the provinces. The War of Independence that entered the annals as the Eighty-Year War spanned much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is believed that the Dutch rebellion was ignited by the harsh treatment of Protestants in the Dutch provinces by the Spanish King Philip II (the devoutly Catholic husband of ‘bloody Mary’). Another reason for the Dutch revolt were burdensome Spanish taxes. The hostilities of the Eighty-Year War consisted of many a summer season of seemingly never-ending Spanish sieges of Dutch cities that the defenders frequently tried to shake off by breaching the dikes and flooding the countryside. At sea the Spanish met with the watergeuzen, a name derived from the French gueux (beggar), allegedly bestowed on the rebellious Dutch by the Spanish and, rather curiously, taken on by the Dutch as an honorary title. After almost eighty years of war, minus a twelve-year truce in the early seventeenth century that the Dutch spent fighting amongst themselves, combat officially ceased in 1648. Following the peace treaty with Spain, political life was troubled by increasing dissent between the successive stadholders William II and William III (King William in England) and regents in the States General. Subsequent to the death of William II, the regents ousted the stadholders from power and declared a stadhouderloze tijdperk (a time period in which the office of stadholder remained vacant). The ‘stadhouderloze tijdperk’ ended a little over twenty years later, in 1672, the Rampjaar (‘Year of Disaster’), when the French, English and several other

Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 41

forces invaded The United Provinces. In that year, William III won much popular support by leading the forces that eventually defeated the invaders; the regent party on the other hand lost two prominent figures with the assassination of the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt. From 1672 on, William III remained stadholder of The United Provinces, and in his dual role of British king and Dutch stadholder, William of Orange’s main objective was the defeat of Louis XIV, King of France.

13. Zeist in Utrecht, built in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

Irrespective of the Eighty-Year War the Dutch had developed into an extraordinary prosperous populace. Their ships ruled the seas, carrying goods from across the globe which were dispersed across Europe from Amsterdam, the world’s financial centre in the seventeenth century. Reportedly, the Dutch were unusually literate and, amusingly enough, clean; yet, they were best known for their tolerant stance, compared to what was customary in other countries at the time, on issues concerning religion and gender relations. Foreign travellers were dumbfounded when they learned that in The United Provinces a husband could be summoned before a magistrate for beating his wife and that married couples could file for divorce (Van Strien 1993, 216; Dekker 1991, 429). Girls, it was believed, enjoyed more freedom in The United Provinces than elsewhere. They were allowed to spend time alone with men before getting married and in the skating season, when they travelled a good distance, they might stay the night at an inn with one or several male companions (Van Strien 1993, 216). Pepys reminisced about a coach journey during his time in The United Provinces, when he encountered ‘two very pretty ladies, very fashionable […] who very merrily sang all the way and that very well, and were very free to kiss the two blades that were with them’ (Pepys 1928 [1659-1664], 139). According to Schama, The

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Netherlands can boast of the oldest and richest tradition of feminism: ‘Dutch moralists (exclusively male) seemed insistent that their commonwealth stood or fell by the untarnished behaviour of women. And yet the way they thought to achieve it seemed by allowing them greater, rather than fewer liberties than elsewhere’ (Schama 1991, 403-407). Much has been said also of religious tolerance in the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. Whilst the reality and the degree of tolerance in The Netherlands in the seventeenth century is to some extent still debated, current deliberations on Dutch tolerance for the most part centre on the reasons why religious tolerance existed. Ancien Régime liberality in The United Provinces is no longer explained as a Dutch character trait (Huizinga 1998 [1941], 171) but as a pragmatic response to a past reality, as a ‘tool to keep a society going’ (Kossmann 1991, 298).

Ireland The figure binding together the historical narratives of England, The United Provinces and Ireland in the period under discussion is undoubtedly William of Orange. For the Irish William of Orange is the man who sealed their dire fate of foreign subjugation (for the Irish historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Foster 1989; Moody and Martin 1994). The English first settled in Ireland in the twelfth century. However, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Irish forced them to retreat to a small area around and including present-day Dublin, called ‘The Pale’. It was only in the sixteenth century under Henry VIII that the British seriously renewed their interest in Ireland. At the time the island was inhabited by an Irish (or Gaelic) and ‘Old English’ population, the latter having arrived in Ireland in the wake of the twelfth century invasion and to some extent married into the upper strata of the Gaelic society. Initially, it was principally this latter group that showed dismay with the increasingly dominant presence of the New English in Ireland during the sixteenth century and it was this Old English segment of society that first rebelled in the 1530s and again forty years later. Especially to the latter revolt the British responded ferociously. Munster, where the rebellion had primarily taken place, was partly emptied of its Irish inhabitants and planted with a New English populace. This was a strategy that the English were to use more often in the future, as in Ulster where Hugh O’Neill posed serious problems for the English authorities. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century O’Neill, with the help of Spanish forces, organised a military campaign against the English, which seriously frightened the latter. However, when forces eventually met at Kinsale in County Cork, the English triumphed. This defeat was to have unfortunate consequences for the Irish. It led, first of all, to what was coined ‘the flight of the earls’, the exodus from Ireland of the principal Gaelic figures. This in turn created a power vacuum, especially in O’Neill’s Ulster, providing the English with the opportunity to organise another plantation program. Like Munster before, Ulster was populated with English and

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Scottish settlers; the Irish were as much as possible marched out of the province. This was not a situation the Irish and Old English could reconcile themselves with and when the chance arose, they rebelled. In the early 1640s, when the Civil War in England kept English armies busy on the British mainland, the Gaelic and Old English, united by their discontent with British rule and generally also by religion, joined forces into what became known as the Confederate Army. However, the British were again victorious. Cromwell sped to Ireland as soon as the Civil War in England had ended, forcing the Irish and Old English into submission with, as is still recounted in Ireland today, unprecedented ferocity. On top of this, Cromwell decided on yet another plantation program, this time moving a large segment of the Irish population West of the river Shannon, into the barren, rocky part of the country, with the fertile lands east of the Shannon in English hands.

14. Legendary Loevestein in Gelderland dating back to the fourteenth century, known foremost as the state prison which Hugo de Groot escaped from by hiding in a bookcase.

Only with the return to the throne of the Stuart kings in 1660, and especially with the succession of James II, did the situation improve somewhat for the Irish. Land and properties confiscated during the Cromwellian period were now piecemeal returned and James’ Catholic sympathies resulted in the unprecedented selection of Catholics for chief administrative posts in Ireland. Much as this elated the Irish, it alarmed the English, both in- and outside Ireland. It was not long before William, the Protestant saviour, arrived in England, toppling James in the process. From Ireland, where he not surprisingly enjoyed much support, James attempted to recoup his throne; William, however, pursued him to Ireland and what ensued is an episode that, as one historian put it, ‘was a major crisis in our history’ (Simms 1994, 210). In 1690, William defeated James’ army in the Battle of the Boyne, resulting in new confiscations of land and properties and destining Irish

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leaders who had fought alongside James to a life outside of Ireland, just as had happened after the Battle of Kinsale, nearly ninety years prior to the Battle of the Boyne. To make matters worse, further anti-Catholic measures laid down in penal laws made life increasingly difficult for the largely Catholic Gaelic population. It was not until the early half of the twentieth century that the majority of the Irish were able to liberate themselves from English political domination.

Reinventions of (castle) history As has often been argued, each subsequent generation reinvents history (Huizinga 1929; Geyl 1956), emphasising certain historical events, forgetting others, and inventing new ones (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). What seem historical truisms are uncovered as more recent inventions; what appears typical for a country’s past transpires to be the product of a creative mind with a nationalistic agenda. Moreover, historical events deemed memorable centuries ago are later discarded as insignificant in the nation’s history; alternatively, episodes long forgotten regain currency in later eras. The narratives related in the previous section were equally subject to this active process of remembering, forgetting and inventing. Take the history of William of Orange (Willem III), central to each of the three national histories previously relayed, and an important figure in this book.

William of Orange I started my research into the architecture associated in one way or another with William of Orange (1650-1702), the British king and Dutch stadholder, by looking through a small section of books devoted to him in the library of University College Dublin. One of the books I picked up was called William of Orange. A Dedicated Life, 1650-1702 (Kilpatrick 1998). Another borrower had crossed out the word ‘life’ on the title page and had written instead, in big capital letters, ‘bastard’ and ‘cunt’. Underneath the title, in another hand: ‘Death to those who would read this filth’. The book, comprising of a glowing account of William’s reign, was published by the Education Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland in Belfast. South of the border, in the Republic, the memory of William of Orange evoked quite different feelings in the twentieth century. Materially, this was expressed by the destruction of the three monuments in Ireland commemorating him. First, in 1923, an obelisk situated near Oldbridge was destroyed by landmines. Then, in 1928, the IRA attempted to blow up a statue in Dublin. Soon after this failed attempt the statue was taken down by the authorities, supposedly because of its awkward position in terms of traffic. Members of the IRA responded by breaking into the storage area where the statue was kept and, appropriately re-enacting a historical practice, cut off the head, which they took away with them. Only a few months later, in County Roscommon, the third and last monument honouring William of Orange was destroyed.

Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 45

William of Orange, however, was not always this hated in the Irish Republic. In the eighteenth century, Irish men and women supporting the American War of Independence associated William of Orange with administrative reforms that assured greater parliamentary power. In the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast with what was to happen a century later, Daniel O’Connell, a Catholic, ordered the statue of William in Dublin to be newly coated in bronze (Cathcart 1990, 1621). In this period, many Catholics furthermore still took an active part in the official celebration of William’s birthday. Only when Irish Protestants started to use William of Orange as their symbol and, more specifically, as a symbol for the Orange parades, did he become the hated figure that he still is in the Republic today. The fact that the name William of Orange was once synonymous with religious tolerance and democratic reform is now forgotten.

15. Het Muiderslot in Noord-Holland was built in the thirteenth century by Floris V and refurbished in the seventeenth century when it was the home of Pieter Cornelis Hooft. Het Muiderslot was restored in the late-nineteenth century, when most of the seventeenth-century additions were removed and the original thirteenth-century structure was recreated.

William’s role in the English national account of history has also been subject to modification and revision. Currently, King William is regarded as one of the most, or possibly the most, loyally Protestant kings ever to have ruled England. Shortly before the Glorious Revolution, though, instead of being portrayed as staunchly Protestant, rumours had it that William was a concealed Papist. Once he had crossed the Channel and had proved himself to be a faithful Protestant, he was assessed, again contrary to current British ideas, as one of the most prominent kings in British history. In The United Provinces, William was at once celebrated as a national hero, saving the Dutch in 1672, ‘the year of disaster’, and severely criticised for his role in the murder of the powerful regent brothers De Witt. Yet

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nowadays William III, neither revered nor reviled, is no more than a rather obscure historical character in The Netherlands. In short, at present William of Orange III is a central figure in the Irish historical narrative, but only a relatively minor character in the story of the national histories of England and especially The Netherlands. Or, put differently, William of Orange is a key-figure in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish historiography and public perception, but not in that of England and The Netherlands. The way in which certain individuals and events in a country’s history are singled out as key-figures and key-moments and other equally significant (or insignificant) figures and eras are dismissed, greatly affects the way in which archaeological remnants of the past, such as castles, are read.

Castles and the collective unconscious It sometimes occurs that events recognised as key moments in a country’s past were significant for the history of a particular castle as well, with the result that the related history of a castle neatly reflects the national history. Castle Dromagh, County Cork, forfeited in the 1642 rebellion (key-moment in the struggle against the British) was owned in the eighteenth century by a gentleman named Mr. Philpot and a Mr. Leader in the nineteenth century (English supremacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), only to be deliberately burnt down by the Irish in the 1920s (key-moment of Irish resistance) (Power 2000, 534). The history of Zeist in Utrecht (figure 13), to give a Dutch example, echoes most of the pivotal moments in the national history of The Netherlands. Built by Willem Adriaan, Earl of Nassau-Odijk, a relative of the Dutch Orange princes (key-figures), Zeist was inhabited after his death by members of the religious cult Herrnhutters (keycharacteristic of tolerance); throughout the Second World War, Zeist was occupied by German troops and immediately subsequent to the war it was used as a prison for Dutch collaborators (key-moment of the Second World War); after Indonesian independence from The Netherlands in 1949, Dutch-Indonesian refugees were temporarily lodged at Zeist (key-moment of Dutch (post)colonial history); survivors of the notorious 1953 flooding, finally, also received temporary refuge at Zeist (another key-moment in twentieth-century Dutch historiography). Save these two examples, it seldom happens that the story of a castle reiterates the pivotal moments of a national history. More commonly, a castle’s history was played out on a local level. This is not surprising given the fact that the political context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century castles and big houses was not that of the nation state. Although this seems an obvious, almost banal statement, it is often (conveniently) forgotten, even when historical primary sources clearly point towards a regional or provincial, instead of a national perspective. One regent, for instance, when rounded up in stadholder William II’s 1650 (failed) coup d’état, wrote in response to the news that he and fellow prisoners were being brought to the castle Loevestein (figure 14), then serving as a prison, that he was ‘a little more

Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 47

at ease’ now that he knew he ‘would stay in [the province] Holland’ (Keyser 2000 [1650], 192; my translation). Notwithstanding the fact that histories of castles usually fit the story of a regional past better than a national one, castle stories have always been, and continue to be, informed by national(istic) histories. That castles have (quite literally) been made to fit the national narrative is a commonplace as regards nineteenth-century renovation projects influenced by the theses of Pugin, Ruskin and Violet-le-Duc. In the Gothic revival movement castles and churches especially – medieval Gothic structures susceptible to ‘birth of the nation’ readings – featured heavily. Decisions on which castle should be restored and what building phase revealed or emphasised in a restoration program, were made in keeping with the prevalent national accounts and as such castles in turn became compliant protagonists in these nationalistic narratives.

16. Multi-phase Ruurlo in Gelderland. The tower on the far right dates to the sixteenth century and is decorated with Renaissance motifs; the entrance party is built in the Classical style.

A national appropriation of castles was continued into the twentieth century. Irrespective of the somewhat infamous interest in regional folkloric culture in the first half of the last century (which was, curiously, to a certain extent cast in national terms (De Jong 2001)), and despite modernist opposition to revival-style architecture and renovation practices, a philosophy advocating honest collective architecture for ‘the people’, the nation, was also propagated in the twentieth century (Watkin 2001). The remainder of this chapter will discuss the influence of national(istic) readings of history on ‘the castle’ in the second half of the twentieth century and particularly the early twenty-first century.

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Dutch appropriations of castle An unknown past The illustrious Dutch castle Het Muiderslot (figures 15 and VIII), open to the public and visited more frequently than any other castle in The Netherlands, is currently undergoing renovation. It is not the first time Het Muiderslot is being renovated; in the late nineteenth and in the twentieth century too the castle was substantially altered. Het Muiderslot is linked with two national figures, earl Floris V and Pieter Cornelis Hooft; the former built the castle in the thirteenth century, the latter, a prominent Dutch literary character (about whom more in part II), inhabited and modified the castle in the early half of the seventeenth century. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century renovation programs dedicated the outside of the castle to Floris, with the interior of the castle evoking an atmosphere reminiscent of Hooft. An entrance building to the castle in the courtyard built in Hooft’s time was demolished in the early twentieth century as it did not originate from Floris’ time. Before extrapolating to what extent the current renovation program of Het Muiderslot also abides by a nationalistic historical narrative, first another matter concerning the Dutch appropriations of (castle) history.

17. Vorden in Gelderland, a sixteenth-century L-shaped house.

It was the Dutch Castle Foundation that published Kastelen zijn de Moeite Waard (‘Castles are worth the trouble’) a few decades ago (Hoekstra [no date]), seemingly deeming it necessary to coax people into a castle visit. Indeed, at the time, castles, with the exception of some of the more famous examples such as Het Muiderslot, could not boast of high visitor numbers. Only recently have castles regained a certain level of popularity. However, this popularity is in many cases not so much related to the illustrious past of a castle, but rather to present-day events. Castles are frequented because of exhibitions held in the castle or castle garden, such as

Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 49

recent expositions of Zimbabwean sculptures at Zeist in Utrecht (figure 13), and Ruurlo in Gelderland (figure 16); Vorden (figure 17), also in Gelderland, a village that is widely known as the ‘eight castle village’, owes its fame more to a popular cycle tour passing by these eight castles than to its particular historical context.

18. The current view on Doorn in Utrecht dates back to the eighteenth century, yet the house incorporates a medieval building. In the 1920s the grandparents of film actress Audrey Hepburn sold Doorn to the last German Emperor Wilhelm II, who died there in 1941.

Recently, commotion about the lack of historical knowledge on the part of Dutch citizens has occupied the Dutch press. In March 2004 Vrij Nederland, a critical weekly magazine, carried an article called De vergeten geschiedenis van Nederland (‘The forgotten history of The Netherlands’), in which the American professor James Kennedy, affiliated with the Free University of Amsterdam, stated his surprise about Dutch historical ignorance (Palm 2004, 30). The same article speaks of the ‘illustrious exam in history for MPs’ a number of years ago when Dutch politicians on average scored a four on a scale from one to ten. Practically all the main national newspapers have carried articles on Dutch historical ignorance in recent years. Seemingly, they also make allowance for this ignorance when addressing their readers on topics historical. The already mentioned unfamiliarity of the Dutch with William of Orange III, one of the protagonists of this book, is taken into account in a newspaper story on private collections, one of which was dedicated to William III. The article exclaimed, as if in complete surprise, that William ‘even became the king of England!’ (Van Delft 2003; my translation). A survey carried out a few years ago, which tested the historical knowledge of the Dutch, confirms the picture drawn by the press (Van Assen 2003). Although questions had purposely been kept simple by the initiators of the survey, as they merely wanted to establish whether or not people knew ‘the basics’ of Dutch

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history, apparently every category of Dutch citizen scored low: men, women, well or poorly educated, etc. One of the questions people struggled with concerned the identity of the opponent of William of Orange (Willem I), the latter being, I believe it is fair to say, The Netherlands’ most illustrious historical figure. He was at the heart of the Eighty-Year War, the principal Dutch war (apart from the Second World War, that is) and the Dutch War of Independence from Spain, marking the birth of the country. Usually, such moments in history are extensively propagated in later times to promote the antiquity and unity of the nation and are consequently familiar to everyone (Anderson 1991; Fulbrook 1997; Grant 1997). Not so in the case of the Dutch, was the outcome of the survey. The idea that the Dutch know so little of their own history is, I believe, not a journalist’s figment of the imagination. It is a fair generalisation that, in comparison with the English and Irish, the Dutch indeed have a very poor historical understanding. It is apparent that in Britain and Ireland newspapers dedicate substantially more pages to their national history, television companies spend more time and money on documentaries with historical subjects, and film producers are far more likely to invest in a historical or period drama than their colleagues in The Netherlands. One of the instigators of the before-mentioned survey pointed at the Dutch education system as a cause for the general lack of historical knowledge on the part of Dutch citizens. However, he mainly blamed a fear that studying one’s history would lead to nationalism and racism. Unintentionally, he seems to prove there is truth in this idea, stating ‘this, of course, is nonsense. It is time we start regarding ourselves with a little more importance’ (Van Assen 2003; my translation). Likewise, the plea for a national history museum that will ‘teach the Dutch some more historical self-respect’, indicates that history and self-glorification do indeed go hand in hand in The Netherlands (Gerrits 2006; my translation). In the previously cited article in Vrij Nederland forty Dutch historians were asked to list, amongst others, the five most important Dutch historical figures as well as the five most important historical events in the history of The Netherlands. However, a number of historians refused to answer these questions, annoyed with a narrow-minded nationalistic approach to history (Palm 2004, 38); another article cited a Dutch history professor warning of a nostalgic approach to the past which, he argued, leads to self-glorification and an excessive ‘we-feeling’ (Oomen 2004, 44). Although nowadays a link between historical knowledge and self-importance seems often no longer problematic – or is even encouraged – it indeed used to be seen as reason for caution. It was mainly since the nineteen-sixties and subsequent waves of anti-colonialism, anti-nationalism and communism, that a glorification of the past became problematic and a historical apathy took hold in The Netherlands. More specifically, a Dutch focus on the future rather than the past was tied in with the redevelopment and reconstruction of the country after the havoc wreaked by the Second World War and with Sixties utopias related to American functionalism and a-historical structuralism (Den Boer 2005, 40). However, this does not suffice as an explanation for Dutch historical apathy; after all, countries such as England Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 51

and France went through the same academic and political upheaval with a quite different outcome. Fear of nationalism on the part of the Dutch stemmed perhaps foremost from its supposed interference with ideas about the Dutch national character.

19. Sixteenth-century Ter Horst in Gelderland was embellished with a Classical gable in the eighteenth century.

Up until recently, liberalism and tolerance were crucial ingredients of this selfimage, and a strong sense of history was believed to jeopardise the liberal, antinationalistic image that is so important to many in The Netherlands for their identity. Thus, paradoxically, in The Netherlands there used to be a certain national pride in not being nationalistic. It is important to note, however, that the general public mostly associated this liberal and tolerant non-nationalistic selfimage with the present-day situation (liberal drug legislation, ready acceptance of gay marriages and euthanasia) instead of with the past. When Dutch liberalism got mentioned, it was not by reference to specific historical events or characters; usually merely a vague explanation that the Dutch have ‘always’ been liberal was offered. In recent years, this carefully protected political correctness has largely been abandoned. The disquiet in the media about Dutch historical ignorance should not only be seen as a reflection of the present status-quo, but foremost as the harbinger of more nationalistically informed times. Put differently, that the media in The Netherlands picked up on Dutch poor historical understanding and the attitude of not relying on the past for their national self-image is indicative of the 52 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

fact that attitudes towards the national narrative of the past are in flux. The question to what extent this new attitude towards the past predates, or is instead the result of the political situation in The Netherlands with two political murders in a short span of time and of worldwide political anxiety, it is not my aim to answer. Important here is the fact that a recent concern with national history is reflected in various initiatives. The before-mentioned propositions for the creation of a national history museum, for instance, are still very much on the agenda; the composition of a canon of national history (as well as of national culture and literature) is being considered in Dutch educational policies (Gerrits 2006); and Dutch television now follows English formulae with a program establishing by popular vote the greatest historical figure The Netherlands ever produced.

20. Especially the sixteenth-century extensions of the originally thirteenthcentury tower-house Nijenbeek in Gelderland were severely damaged in the Second World War.

This new attitude towards the past also influences the way in which castles are experienced and appropriated. One wonders if 2005 would have been proclaimed ‘The year of the castle’ (and obtained sufficient financial support), had it not been for this recent historical interest. During this year the extent of the current popularity of the phenomenon ‘living history’ also became obvious, with castles flocked with hordes of troubadours, soldiers and craftsmen, playing out the past in castle courtyards, parks and gardens. Archaeological reports, building history dossiers, and further documentation on castles all testify to the fact that castles are now commonly regarded as powerful symbols of national identity. To name but one of many examples, the castle publication Verborgen Kastelen in Zicht (‘Hidden Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 53

castles in sight’), states that castles ‘enhance people’s ability to identify with their environment and to feel at home’ (Van Kempen and Hom 2005; my translation).

21. Rosendael in Gelderland, a seventeenth-century house considerably enlarged and refurbished in the eighteenth century, incorporates a circular medieval donjon.

Returning to Het Muiderslot and its current renovation program, it is evident that considerations regarding the castle’s history and national identity are pertinent in the execution of its restoration. A parallel presentation of the history of the castle and that of the country are evident in the renewed emphasis on Floris V. That the history of thirteenth-century Floris V is favoured over that of seventeenth-century P.C. Hooft, is not only explained by the latter probably being too erudite, stuffy and unreadable, but also because the former is more accessible due to the fact that the medieval period Floris belonged to, is a more archetypically known (fairytale) era than the seventeenth century. Thus, an appreciation of the medieval period seemingly requires less historical knowledge. It will take a while – a new generation of pupils exposed to a new history curriculum – before the Dutch will have acquired a level of familiarity with the key-moments and figures of the past. For the time being, Dutch historical ignorance still clearly influences the presentation of the history of castles. To give one simple example, at Doorn Castle in Utrecht (figure 18) the guide mentioned an incident, recognised by Dutch historians as a key-moment of eighteenth-century history, involving the wife of William V and known by the place where the incident happened, Goejanverwellesluis. However, halfway into her exposition on Doorn’s involvement in the history of ‘Goejanverwellesluis’, the guide remarked that perhaps we did not know what this event entailed. As she had rightly assessed, visitors of Doorn were indeed unfamiliar with ‘Goejanverwellesluis’, which of course negated the very reason for mentioning the event in the first place and causing the remark to fall flat. 54 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

The following scene further illustrates the consequences of Dutch historical ‘blankness’ on castle presentations and experiences. At Ter Horst in Gelderland (figure 19), a sixteenth-century castle with an eighteenth-century Classical front gable, an unusually large crowd had gathered one morning to see the castle. They showed no surprise at the schuilkerk (‘hidden church’), once a link in the chain of hidden churches in castles across The United Provinces where travelling priests said mass and administered the sacraments to the owners and other Catholics living in the vicinity of the castle. Perhaps the hidden church was no cause for surprise because the audience was familiar with the phenomenon, considering what will be related next though, this seems not to have been the case. In the room that was explained as the former hall, a beautiful sandstone fireplace was pointed out. Made in the mid-sixteenth century, it refers to the original owners. The two caryatides carrying the lintel represent culptures of Wijnand Hackfort, the builder of the castle, and his wife Aleyd Boshof. The lintel itself is divided into three segments, the left one, above the figure of Wijnand, displaying his coat of arms, the one on the right, above Aleyd’s figure, hers. The segment in the middle of the lintel depicts a carving of the biblical scene from John (8:2-11) which relates the story of a woman caught in the act of adultery yet saved from being stoned by Jesus, speaking his famous words: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’. The guide explained how the fireplace in this way contained a message to those visitors of Ter Horst who were inclined to judge Aleyd for the fact that she already had a bastard son when she married Wijnand around 1550. The fireplace, in other words, was meant to silence moralist observations. Interestingly, the people on the tour with me responded with exclamations of disgust. The guide too, judged it awfully cruel that Aleyd was daily reminded, on account of the fireplace, of what people unjustly classified as a misdemeanour. The audience fervently agreed, seemingly uncritically projecting Dutch presentday values on a past more than four-and-a-half centuries removed. For many of the visitors of Ter Horst, its architecture and especially the schuilkerk and the fireplace did not reveal Ancien Régime Dutch liberalism, which was clearly unknown to them, but instead a feeling that people in the past were narrowminded and, well, rather strange.

History well-trodden There is one period in Dutch history that is neither neglected nor unknown, but quite the contrary, frequently visited by writers, scholars, journalists, television producers and teachers. This is the Second World War. Remembrance days are still carefully observed, novels and children books on the topic pour out of the presses, and media coverage of the War remains prevalent. Though historical films are seldom produced in The Netherlands, a long list of Second World War films can be provided – Soldier of Orange (1977), The Assault (1986), The Twins (2004) amongst the more ‘famous’ ones. It does not surprise therefore that the outcome of another survey, this time testing Dutch historical awareness of the

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Second World War, indicated that people’s knowledge of this war is considerable (Stam 2006). Neither revolutions nor longstanding wars preceding independence or unification disturbed the Dutch in the nineteenth century. The country’s neutrality during the First World War moreover meant that they also escaped the atrocities their neighbours suffered during this era. The advent of the Second World War greatly shook this peace. It is a period in the history of The Netherlands that clearly still holds a special place in the historical consciousness and is experienced as a key-moment.

22. Doornenburg in Gelderland, a particularly scenic, though mostly twentieth-century structure. The bridge over the moat connects the main building with the forecourt.

In the same way that Dutch historical ignorance affects the way castles are perceived and experienced, the prominent place of the Second World War in the historical consciousness of people in The Netherlands is evident in the way they talk about and experience castles. When meeting a baron who spent his childhood years in a castle in the East of the country and asking what that had been like, this baron immediately started to relate his war-time experiences. I was frequently told about the war when inquiring about the history of a castle, not so much because the war was the most eventful phase in the castle’s history – each moment in time is, strictly speaking, equally dense or devoid of events (Collard 1989) – but because this was so for the people I spoke with. This said, it should immediately be added that historical houses did suffer badly during the war. Although the Dutch were relatively fortunate in comparison to neighbouring countries in terms of damage done by bombing campaigns to urban centres, Dutch castles and country houses had to endure much more than was the case in England and, naturally, in neutral Ireland. Many historical houses were used as German bases

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or conversely as allied headquarters, which meant castles were frequently attacked, leaving many of them in a bad state of repair after the war.

23. Like the main building, the gate-house at Doornenburg was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties.

To give an example, Nijenbeek in Gelderland (figure 20), a thirteenth-century tower-house with considerable later additions, was occupied in April 1945 by allied forces and attacked by the Germans from across the river IJssel, severely damaging it in the process. Castle Zuylestein in Utrecht on the other hand was occupied by the German Wehrmacht, and bombed by British air forces. Often the damage done to castles in the Second World War is mentioned in guided tours, as at Rosendael in Gelderland (figure 21), where bullet holes in the books in the library in the old donjon are pointed out. To give one other poignant example, Doornenburg in Gelderland (figures 22 23 and IX), a sizeable castle built and added onto from the fourteenth until the eighteenth century, was so worn out by the early twentieth century that a grandscale renovation project was decided on. Between 1937 and 1941 the castle was restored, after which, in the early years of the war, it functioned as a Red Cross hospital. From 1944 onwards, it served as German headquarters, and as such it was bombed by the British in January 1945. It was not damaged to such an extent that the Germans were forced to leave, so British planes returned two months later and this time two heavy bombs left the castle completely ruined. After the war a German diary found on the site indicated that the Germans had departed on the fourteenth of March 1945, finishing the job of destruction, it is said, by blowing up the gatehouse (figure 23). Despite the utter devastation of the castle, the initiator of the first restoration program found energy and money to start afresh. This second campaign lasted another decade, until 1966 (Pantus 1997). The current caretaker of the castle told

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me how, not long ago, an emotional English pilot visited the castle proclaiming it was he who had dropped the two bombs on Doornenburg in March 1945. The caretaker also spoke of some of the problems he encountered with German visitors, having received complaints about the guided tour that mentioned Dutch money taken by German occupiers when fleeing the castle. Moreover, unremitting German protest over information panels claiming the destruction of the gatehouse was carried out by German soldiers, had made him decide to remove these panels. The castle, an imposing and scenic sight, is thus both structurally and historiographically a product more of the twentieth century, with the Second World War playing a dominant part, than of any of the previous centuries. The foregoing examples of castle stories featuring the war – or war stories featuring castles – follow from events that occurred at particular castles during the Second World War. Many other such stories, however, are related not because of what exactly happened at a castle site, but originate in the fact that the Second World War is generally experienced as a key-moment. The extent to which the reading of castles follows these national key-moments is also evident in the fact that anti-German sentiments can still be heard in tours of Dutch castles. One has to wonder if the caretaker at Doornenburg was merely relating German grievances or whether he himself found it difficult to welcome German visitors. Interestingly, at the time when historical houses were built, the Dutch often counted people originating from what is now Germany as allies against enemies France, Spain and England. The name of one country house, Moufe-schans, incorporates the term mof, nowadays a derogatory Dutch term for a German. In the sixteenth century, when the house was built, the name Moufe-schans (‘German’s fort’) referred to German assistance in the Dutch War of Independence against the Spanish (De Vries 1998, 76). Since the Second World War is of far greater consequence to Dutch people at this point in time than the Eighty-Year War fought against the Spanish, castle tours do not express anti-Spanish sentiments that were probably uttered by the former residents of these castles and houses. Yet anti-German remarks which would have been alien to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch men and women are commonplace, which once again illustrates how not only the experience of the Second World War but also a lack of historical knowledge informs the national appropriation of Dutch castles.

Englishness and castle architecture Castle heritage Historical houses are generally of far greater importance to English nationals than to the average Dutch or Irish person. Malcolm Kelsall argues that the country house is the ‘national equivalent of a place of pilgrimage’ and presented as ‘a natural excrescence […] it has not been built so much as grown by organic process from the English soil’ (Kelsall 1993, 5-6). Indeed, England can boast of a Heritage Industry that is considerably more extensive and thriving than that in either Ireland or The Netherlands. The National Trust (together with English Heritage 58 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

the main heritage organisation) has approximately two hundred historical buildings in its care and relies on ‘the generosity of its supporters, through membership subscriptions, gifts, legacies and the contribution of many thousands of volunteers’ (Smith 2004, 385). As David Lowenthal aptly puts it, the British are ‘a nation more secure in its older collective identity’ (Lowenthal 1985, xv). Yet in England, as in The Netherlands, post-colonial tides have generated awareness of, as well as embarrassment about, the level of pride in the British tale of past greatness. By and large the English nowadays readily admit that their illustrious past was not all that great for other societies involved. At the same time, however, the British just as quickly retreat back into stories of historical genius, producing yet another television program on Victorian inventions or a volume on the Tudors. It is typical for the British situation to find television broadcasting a competition quite shamelessly deciding on the ‘Greatest Brit ever’, immediately followed by protest concerning the person elected. The Guardian, for instance, responded to the selection of Winston Churchill with an article called The Churchill you didn’t know, with the subtitle Thousands voted him the greatest Briton – but did they know about his views on Gandhi, gassing and Jews […] (Iggulden 2002, 7). The article subsequently quotes remarks by Churchill such as ‘I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes’, and ‘I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism’ (ibid., 7). Both a celebration of the past and a critique of English attitudes towards this past also played their part in a recent poll on British identity and British pride in another television program, BBC Breakfast (BBC 2004). Viewers were asked what qualities – pride, xenophobia, political correctness amongst others – encapsulate Britishness. ‘Pride in being British’, a pride in which history features large, was mentioned most frequently, suggesting both a nationalist tendency and an awareness thereof. In Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (BBC 2002), at the juncture between academia and journalism, this ambivalence is also apparent. In an episode called ‘The Empire of Good Intentions’ on, it says on the cover, ‘the liberal empire from Ireland to India – the promise of civilisation and material betterment and the delivery of coercion and famine’, Schama goes through all the horrors of the Irish Potato Famine (not avoiding the reality that grain was being shipped from Ireland to England whilst large segments of the Irish population were starving), before stating it was not a British genocide and that ‘many of the cruelties were acts Irishmen inflicted on each other, just as the highland clearances had been horrors committed by Scots against other Scots’. This seems a little crude and insensitive, to say the least, especially since the remark is not backed up by any explanation. Close to the end of the program Schama remarks about the Irish and Indian privations that this was not all ‘I think, exclusively our fault’. Admittedly, Schama shows more awareness of those at the receiving end of British foreign policies than Tony Claydon, who recently referred to the Glorious Revolution – the same episode that was described by an Irish historian as ‘a major Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 59

crisis in our history’ (Simms 1994, 210) – as a revolution that marked the beginning of peace in Ireland, when ‘many of the underlying causes of that violence seemed to be suddenly eased’ (Claydon 2002, 3). Schama’s conclusion still sounds somewhat too easy, to say the least. A model of all-powerful colonisers on one end of the spectrum versus a completely powerless populace on the other is no longer given much credence in postmodern times stressing agency and criticising binary oppositions. Schama is nonetheless able to condemn past attitudes of his fellow countrymen while at the same time leaving the English historical narrative of its past upright. An attitude both acknowledging and reinforcing English ethnocentrism also informs, as will be shown, presentations of English castles and country houses.

Pride and prejudice The National Trust ‘has the unique statutory power to declare land inalienable – such land cannot be voluntarily sold, mortgaged or compulsorily purchased against the Trust’s wishes without special parliamentary procedure. This special power means that protection by the Trust is for ever’ (Smith 2004, 385). These farreaching powers are directly related to the meaning of castles and country houses as symbols of a glorious past, a symbolic value that ensures that English castle museums are guaranteed much higher visitor rates than their Dutch and Irish counterparts. Moreover, with a steady stream of visitors, fewer concessions in terms of ‘disneyfication’ are necessary to please the public. This means that many historical houses in England are still presented in a way that is reminiscent of the Classical high-art tradition, that is as a Kunstkammer, with the house and the rooms within it presented by means of style rooms. English historical houses furthermore almost always epitomize a re-enactment of the past. Sometimes this re-enactment is quite literal. At Lyme Park in Cheshire, better known as ‘Pemberley’ owned by Mr. Darcy in the immensely popular 1995 BBC production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (and promoted as such by The National Trust), Mr. Darcy’s dive into Pemberley’s pond is repeated by numerous men every year (no doubt in an attempt to impress would-be girlfriends), many of whom fall ill on account of the heavily polluted pond. Some of the most visited historical houses in England are those buildings featuring in popular film and television productions, thus confirming the idea that our present-day lieux de memoire are frequently the product of interaction between place-bound sites and mobile media (Rigney 2005, 97). English ‘Big House films’ represent a golden age (Barton 2004, 130-147), as do many other historical dramas featuring castles and country houses. In this highly successful genre, castles and country houses are symbols of a prosperous and extraordinary past (in contrast to the more bleak present), providing comfort to many British people. Occasionally, television and film productions reflect this transition from a glorious past to a bleaker present, as does Brideshead Revisited (1981), based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel with the same title. The past is here represented in the opulence of the baroque country house

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Brideshead (in reality Castle Howard, County York), the here-and-now in the decline of both the owners and the house, with Brideshead in the final scenes no more than an empty shell, save a battalion of soldiers and stacked-away furniture. History is not only remembered and re-enacted through television and film productions. Historical houses that have been turned into museums are presented and appropriated as typically English – the pride in and the comfort provided by these houses are clearly palpable (and evident moreover in ‘The Pitkin Guide to Great Britons’, for sale in many of the castle and country house gift-shops).

24. The main seventeenth-century body of Milton Manor House in Oxfordshire is flanked by two, slightly lower, eighteenth-century additions.

Castle tours too often attempt (consciously or unconsciously) to keep the past alive. An example of a tour re-enacting history was performed at Blenheim in Oxfordshire (figure X), ‘financed out of public funds to reward a national hero’ (John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough) and in the nineteenth century a ‘sort of national property that might appropriately stand for the privileges of nationality demanded by the middle classes’ (Helsinger 1994, 112). The guide at Blenheim moved easily between past and present, making visitors in awe of both past and present owners. The exposure to the current duke’s private quarters (for which an extra fee on top of the already steep entrance price had to be paid) was experienced by many visitors as an encounter with a celebrity’s environment. The guide mentioned the duke’s connections with historical celebrities and presentday ones such as President Bill Clinton and Princess Diana, pointed out where the current duke sits, uses the telephone, reads, and provided details concerning the duke’s physique, such as his height. The question where the family was when we strolled through their apartments was answered with a haughty remark about another country house in the duke’s possession and, as if he were indeed a

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celebrity, that she was not allowed to answer questions regarding the whereabouts of this other mansion. An even more extreme example of a re-enactment of the past through a castle tour – and one where past and present truly seem to blur – can be experienced at seventeenth-century Milton Manor House in Oxfordshire (figure 24). Milton Manor is still occupied and it was the present owner, whose husband’s forebears had lived in the house, who gave a tour when I visited it, in this way linking past and present. The owner requested that we would all sit down on the antique chairs and benches and that somebody would play the old piano in the drawing room, music of course being an archetypical pastime for the upper-classes in former times. When explaining about the highly valuable eighteenth-century Chinese wall paper in one of the bedrooms, she ran over the wall paper with her fingers, moving beyond the usual barriers in castle museums in terms of red ropes and signs stating that one should not touch or come near the displayed objects and valuable fittings of the house. Milton Manor, slightly dilapidated, has an old feel, something that was only reinforced by the brown tennis court with loose hanging net. Reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited, the tour at Milton Manor encapsulated at the same time a re-enactment (and perhaps to some extent even a continuation) of history and a confirmation that the time of the Big Houses, that glorious time, is indeed a thing of the past.

Castles and Irish nationalism Seven lost centuries As an outsider in Ireland, one is often overcome by the feeling that the Irish still somehow hope to turn around history and retrieve their ‘seven lost centuries’. There is a real sense of regret about the past, foremost about English supremacy in Ireland, yet a genuine feeling of loss is palpable also about the Civil War immediately following independence, the virtual loss of the Irish language, the Potato Famine and the mass exodus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to America and England. Not surprisingly then, history in Ireland is still quite blatantly used for political and nationalistic purposes. In academia, in the field of history, Ireland’s past is still the battlefield of revisionists and anti-revisionists who contend the other side has either a nationalistic agenda or an English bias (Brady 1994). It has been argued that an Irish negligence of much of the international debate on archaeological theory and practice follows from what Bruce Trigger sees as the resistance of nationalist archaeology to an imperial archaeology (Cooney 1995; Trigger 2000). It is obvious that the history of foreign domination is the defining element in the Irish perception of the past. On a national level, in administrative policies concerning the cultural heritage of the Irish nation, a political and nationalistic approach to history is even more manifest than in academia. Commemorations of the 1798 rebellion against British rule, to give one example, were painstakingly 62 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

prepared by the Irish government and exuberantly celebrated in 1998. Government officials delved into the archives to find as many Irish heroes of the rebellion as they possibly could, with the aim of erecting monuments celebrating these newly created heroes. Notwithstanding the fact that these obscure historical figures were not recognised by locals as heroes and were occasionally even suspected as mere crooks – thieves rather than rebels – numerous monuments were unveiled in Ireland in 1998. Local resistance to this initiative should not be taken to mean that Irish citizens have no nationalist inclinations: they have. Yet, they wish to choose their own heroes, as indeed they regularly do. Monuments celebrating men and women who died during the Famine, the War of Independence, or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century uprisings, often come from local initiatives with local historical societies operating as politically informed associations (Ronnes 1999, 21-36).

25. Familiar scene of cattle roaming around Irish castles. In this case Fennor castle in County Meath is protected from the animals by a wooden fence.

Whilst the Irish national identity is thus inextricably bound up with British involvement in Ireland’s past and continually reinforced by the erection of monuments celebrating historical moments and figures related to the resistance, the Irish at the same time search and yearn for an identity that is unrelated to their neighbouring country. Johan Goudsblom described the relationship of the Dutch towards the outside world as a one-way mirror: in the same way that psychologists in laboratories can see those they observe through a one-way mirror but cannot be seen themselves, the Dutch can access and follow what is happening, for example, in Germany and Britain, their two big neighbours, but due to the language barrier they are not read themselves (Goudsblom 1986). When one projects this image onto the situation in Ireland it is clear that the Irish, having virtually lost their own language as a result of the British prohibition

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of the use of Gaelic, do not possess such a one-way mirror, something they are keenly aware of. The extensive British influence through the British media, on account of their shared language, is regretted. The crippling effect of the loss of Gaelic and, alternatively, the significance of its survival and regeneration, is discussed by Declan Kiberd who maintains that a successful revival of the Irish language can be ‘a force for a counter culture quite distinct from nationalist attachments. Indeed, anti-English outbursts have been signally absent among those who, speaking Irish on a daily basis, have no reason to worry as to whether what they say or do has the stamp of Irishness or not’ (Kiberd 1996, 651). Joep Leerssen argues along the same lines, stating that ‘one of the defining characteristics of emergent cultural nationalism in Ireland’ was ‘the appropriation of a Gaelic past by an English-speaking population [that] went hand in hand with the development of anti-British nationalism’ (Leerssen 2005, 158).

Castle language History provides benefits and drawbacks, David Lowenthal observed, and ‘to endure present life we may want to forget or obliterate a malign or traumatic history’ (Lowenthal 1985, xx). Where the English eagerly fix their gaze on the past to enjoy the benefits this past holds for them, history for the Irish represents considerable drawbacks, making them want to forget a part of their cultural heritage. As in Britain and The Netherlands, Irish castles and big houses that have continually been inhabited do exist, although in Ireland it is painfully clear that their owners, in past and present, are almost never of Irish (Gaelic) extraction. In the last decade or so, following Ireland’s economic boom, a considerable number of castles have been made habitable again, with more often than not the new owners once again being of non-Irish descent. Overall, however, these renovation projects concern only a fragment of the total number of castles that are scattered around the country, their dilapidated state reflecting the longstanding poverty of the majority of the population. Castles are usually left to fall into disrepair, cattle damaging the lower half of the castles and ivy (figures 25 - 26) doing the rest – ‘[S]ite not seen at close quarters because of wild bull in the field’ is what the Irish archaeological inventory for County Tipperary reports on one particular castle (Farrelly and O’Brien 2002, 324). Instead of civil servants and volunteers running tearooms, cafes and gift-shops in historical houses, as is the case in The Netherlands and Britain, in Ireland only relatively few castles have been turned into museums. One generally meets only the local farmer on whose land the ruinous castle stands, in most cases not greatly interested in his monument and largely unaware of its history. In Ireland, in contrast to England, big house films do not represent a golden age. Quite the contrary, country houses in Irish films are always ruined, representing the poverty and misery endured by the Irish in the past (Barton 2004, 130-147).

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26. Ivy-clad Coppinger’s Court in County Cork.

In order to create an Irish identity independent from Britain, it is useful to highlight material culture dating back to a time when Ireland was not yet dominated by the English and therefore not reminiscent of this period of foreign rule. The story of the Celtic invasion for instance (firmly disputed of late as a Hobsbawmian invention of tradition (James 2000)), accompanied by the beautiful and skilfully crafted Celtic art providing reason for Irish pride, serves as a starting point for the history of the Irish as a nation and as a buttress of national identity. Castles, on the other hand, built in a time when the British had already arrived in Ireland, are not very appropriate as markers of an Irish identity. What is more, most Irish people erroneously believe that castles in Ireland were exclusively built by the British. The fact that castles are painful reminders of a hated past does not mean, however, that historical houses cannot in ways other than those relating to the creation of an Irish identity be appropriated on a national level with a nationalistic agenda. That is, castles, as symbols of oppression, can adorn the story of the Irish as victims of the British. The destruction of castles is very often blamed, for instance, on perhaps the most hated historical figure in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell. People one meets at castle sites – owners, passers-by, visitors – routinely argue that it was Cromwell who blew a hole in the fabric of the castle or placed dynamite in the tower. Given the omnipresence of this story it has to be suspected that it was propagated on a national level at some point in time. Carrigadrohid Castle in County Cork provides another example of the way in which castles, despite their inaptitude for identity politics, do play their part in the nationalistic narrative of the Irish past. At this castle a modern stone plaque on the Chapter 3 – National appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 65

wall commemorates the hanging of a particular bishop in the war of the midseventeenth century (Power 1997, 361). In other instances, castle features need covering up so as to not disturb certain nationalistic myths on ‘Irishness’. Sheelana-gigs, carvings of devil-like women with exposed genitalia found on Irish churches and castles, are vivid reminders of the fact that medieval Catholicism used to mean something entirely different than it does today. The sexually explicit sheela-na-gigs are a far cry from present-day prim Catholicism, like the Celtic invasion one of the main pillars of the Irish identity and currently under threat. One contributor to the archaeological inventory uncritically projected a twentiethcentury Catholic perception of sexuality onto the phenomenon of the sheela-nagig, dismissing it as ‘a rude carving’ and ‘a figure of hideous character’ (Sweetman 1995, 122).

27. Tower-house at Pallas, County Galway, with a seventeenth-century house on the left.

Recent plans for the restoration of Pallas Castle in County Galway (figure 27), to be carried out by the main heritage organisation in Ireland Dúchas, are also exemplary of the close link between the Irish historical narrative and the national appropriation of Irish castles. When I first visited Pallas, the site consisted of a tower-house probably built around 1500, surrounded by a later, most likely seventeenth-century, bawn wall. The bawn wall incorporated a seventeenthcentury house as well as an eighteenth-century malt house. Just outside the bawn stood a farmhouse and a caravan, the latter inhabited by the only person still resident on the site. A small team of men employed by Dúchas, busy renovating parts of the castle, such as the slab stones making up the wall walk and a slit window in the tower-house, revealed that Dúchas meant to turn Pallas into a

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heritage site and intended to pull down the seventeenth-century house inside the bawn, the malt house, the farmhouse, and to remove the caravan and its owner. The gate-house in the bawn wall was to become the ticket-office; a car park would be created just outside of the bawn. Pulling down all of the later additions to the sixteenth-century tower-house would enable Dúchas to tell the story it wished to relate about Pallas and castles in general. It is a story that is over-simplified, with the castle’s history flattened down and reduced to a shallow political and military narrative, reflecting only the traditional Irish key-moments related to the political and military struggle against the British and omitting other histories of the castle represented by the malt house, the seventeenth-century building and the farmhouse. Not surprisingly, information boards on the castle’s history placed inside the bawn, also emphasised these supposedly military features at Pallas, even though the wall walk (figure 27) most probably represents a seventeenth-century sentimental notion of what a castle ought to be and never carried any soldiers or knights. Moreover, the military features of tower-houses in general are increasingly interpreted as symbolic rather than military in nature. That the men whom I met at Pallas were renovating the bawn’s wall walk and a slit-window, both traditionally and Romantically associated with the knight’s defence with bow and arrow and as such important protagonists in Dúchas’ castle story, is not a coincidence (Ronnes 2000, 31-35).

Conclusion The way in which the national histories of The Netherlands, Ireland and England are presented and experienced is directly related to the symbolic and emotional value of this past. Historical key-moments – the Second World War in the case of The Netherlands, the period of world dominance in the case of England, and British domination in the case of Ireland – have their bearing on the way castles and country houses are portrayed and perceived. This means that the way in which castles are appropriated on a national level is often more closely related to the national(istic) account of history than to the history of the castles themselves. Consequently, the appropriation of castles on a national level – in castle museums, the media, education – in contrast to that on the academic level, is very different for each of the three countries. While the academic take on castles is fairly similar in Ireland, England and The Netherlands, the story of castles told in the national media, in castle and country house museums, and in the school curricula, differs significantly between these three countries owing to the sharply different national historiographies in which the stories of these buildings are embedded.

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Chapter 4 Personal appropriations of ‘castle’

In museum presentations an oscillation between the art museum pur sang, focal point of Classical high art, and the Heimat museum, targeting regional and national heritage, is discerned (Van der Laarse 2005a, 6). The pendulum has recently been brought to a standstill at the latter type of museology, with museum presentations to a certain extent echoing the Romantic and Picturesque era in which it was no longer the assessment, accumulation and erudite understanding of high art that was in vogue, but rather a personal journey through a (monumental) landscape that submerged one into a beautiful, picturesque or sublime experience. With experience-museums springing up far and wide, which advance ‘edutainment’ that promulgates (a little) education and (much more) entertainment by means of a corporeal or otherwise ‘senseational’ experience, one might say that we have now arrived at a picturesque appreciation of the monumental and museum landscape, save the elitist premise that underpinned the picturesque movement. The Romantic notion that ‘beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning’ (Forty 1996) referred to the idea that taste was inherent to some (the highly born and cultured) and impracticable to others (the less-affluent members of society). Conversely, this increased accessibility of culture has been linked with ‘embourgiousement’ (more people being included in the select society of these so-called ‘cultured’) and with a ‘democratisation of culture’ (at the expense of Culture) (Ashworth 2005, 197). Perhaps it is also related to a modernist critique and eradication of stylistic and taste-orientated, elitist notions. Whatever the exact reasons may be, our present time is one in which ‘the eye of the Cyclops’, the static experience of high art inextricably bound up with the Classical invention of linear perspective (Borden 1996, 102), is transformed in the egalitarian ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990). As was evident in the foregoing chapter, castles frequently act as potent markers of national identity. This chapter will explore the manner in which castles are appropriated on a personal level, facilitating a personal identity. In keeping with a personalised experience of heritage, Johan Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’ (traditionally, and today still, on the crossroads of academia and museology) is

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finding new audiences amongst both scholars and museum curators. The first part of this chapter will examine the personal appropriation of castles in Ireland, England and The Netherlands through the historical sensation, touching on still persisting Romantic notions of the castle and on the question to what extent current museological ideas facilitating the historical sensation are adopted in castle museums. The latter part of the chapter, in anticipation of part II, will focus on the academic merits and/or drawbacks of the historical sensation.

Touching history Ruin sensibility An interest in historical material culture is closely related to the way in which material remains are personally experienced and viewed. This is not only true for a museum audience but also for archaeologists, as is evident from the following: The very materiality of archaeological evidence has an immediacy and an emotional power which is absent from more literary sources of knowledge about the past. The actual things of the past hold a fascination which goes beyond scholarship: there is a joy in being able to touch and see objects which have been held by women and men who died maybe hundreds of years ago. In the case of historical archaeology the nostalgia allied to this romantic fetishism has great public appeal. Tarlow 1999, 263-264 Most archaeologists fall in love with the subject by getting ‘hooked’ on things. The things vary from case to case – castles, Roman baths, Native American arrowheads, Neolithic pots, Maya temples – but in most cases the immediate appeal is of mystery and romance, of the past calling to us through its remains. This romantic appeal is often aesthetic and sensual as well as intellectual. We all love clambering round medieval ruins or handling pottery sherds. Johnson 1999, 12

Of the wide-ranging assemblage of historical material remains left to us, castles, ‘archetypically’ imbued with mythical and legendary powers (though in reality of course only since the Romantic era), especially appeal to the imagination (figures 14 and XI - XII). It is apparent that when scholars write about their personal experiences with castles they do so especially in relation to ruins instead of the more complete historical buildings. In 1953 Rose Macaulay wrote her Pleasures of Ruins which discusses ‘ruin sensibility’ (figures 28 and V, XI) (Macaulay 1953, 9). The popularity of ruins peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminating in the practice of adorning picturesque gardens with follies. Prior to that time, ruins were portrayed in illuminated manuscripts in the medieval

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period, in religious paintings in the early Renaissance and in Dutch seventeenthcentury landscape paintings. As the title of her book betrays, Macaulay does not only write of the special meanings ruins held for people in the past, she also ventures into her own pleasure of ruins, colouring her work with many personal anecdotes. In Ruins, a more recent publication on the subject, also explores a historical as well as a personal infatuation with ruins (Woodward 2002). Macaulay and Woodward list a number of reasons for this enduring fascination with ruins: in the Middle Ages, it is argued, they were symbols of man’s fleeting transience, a picturesque appreciation of ruins was aesthetic in nature, and for Romantics a ruined castle confirmed the idea that nature will eventually always be victorious over man (Macaulay 1953, xv; Woodward 2002, 5, 66, 99). Both Macaulay and Woodward employ a flowery, Romantic prose that makes it seem as if they speak of lovers instead of buildings, an impression reinforced in Woodward’s case by the fact that now and then he brings the Roman woman he married onto stage, juxtaposing her and his other love, the ruin that is Rome. Historical and current ruin sensibility is evident when Woodward, with palpable nostalgia, introduces William Chubbe, who lived in a time at the beginning of the eighteenth century when ruins were still largely untouched and waiting to be discovered by climbing ‘throu every story and staircase [of the ‘old ruind castle’] […] puling each other over the gaping arches and rugged heaps of rubbish […]’ (Woodward 2002, 132). Macaulay, in keeping with Woodward’s nostalgia, cites Henry James who, seemingly elaborating on Chubbe’s enthusiasm, noted that while he ‘lay on the grass beside the well in the little sunny court of this small castle [Stokesay in Shropshire] and lazily appreciated the still definite details of medieval life’ he had ‘the sensation of dropping back personally into the past’ (Macaulay 1953, 451).

The historical sensation ‘[Castles] thrill me with a sense of poetry […] and raise up for me the vision of an epoch’. These are the words of George Eliot’s main protagonist in The Mill on the Floss, whereby the author articulated a sensation similar to that which befell her contemporary Henry James (Eliot 1996, 275). A few decades later, Johan Huizinga famously coined sensations such as the ones that James and Eliot experienced – with the catchphrases ‘ecstasy’, ‘dreamlike’, ‘metaphysical’ and ‘mystical’, echoing James’ ‘sensation’ and Eliot’s ‘poetry’ and ‘vision’ – the ‘historical sensation’. Huizinga’s historical sensation, which he believed was best explained as ‘contact with the past’ (Huizinga 1995 [1926], 110), has been both praised and criticised. It was Huizinga himself who cited two early scholars who judged the concept respectively ‘untenable’ and ‘absurd’ (Huizinga 1995 [1948-1953], 199); many critics were to follow, some to the extent of ridiculing ‘Holland’s greatest historian to date’. Recently, however, the concept has gained in popularity, albeit at times in a guise that would have been alien to Huizinga himself, with the historical sensation taking on a variety of new meanings and applications. One study

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building on Huizinga’s idea of the historical sensation, De Vreugden van Houssaye. Apologie van de Historische Interesse (1992) by the historians Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, poses and answers the question of what it is exactly that generates a historical sensation. The authors first of all state that a sense of becoming a part of a world that has been long dead and gone – a historical sensation – certainly does not always occur when encountering remnants from the past. Which then are the circumstances that are likely to cause a historical sensation?

28. Interior of Rathmacknee tower-house, County Wexford. Note the straight stairs behind the door openings and the corbels that used to support the wooden floors.

Interestingly, though Tollebeek and Verschaffel are historians, they do not point towards historical texts as instigators of historical sensations, which they describe as direct contact with the past (Tollebeek and Verschaffel 1992, 18), but towards historical artefacts (ibid., 20). In this they follow Huizinga, who believed objects such as a charter or painting and not a history book were the most likely generators for a historical sensation (Huizinga 1995 [1926], 100). This is in line with current views on museology that stress a corporeal or embodied experience instead of a more intellectual one. Like Sarah Tarlow and Matthew Johnson in the before-mentioned quotations, Tollebeek and Verschaffel argue that a historical artefact works as a baton between the past and present. Or, as Lowenthal puts it: ‘relics remain essential bridges between then and now’ (Lowenthal 1985, xxiii). Beverley Butler, to mention yet another scholar ascribing these communicative and conductive powers to historical material remains, states about The Wreck of the Titanic Exhibition (1994-1995) in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich: ‘In the whole of the exhibition the artefact which had the most profound effect on me was that of a steward’s jacket […] This is the first and only contact that I made with an individual, a human being from the Titanic tragedy. This artefact […]

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transcended the status of relic and functioned here as an emotive emissary from the past, linking two individuals on a human level’ (Butler 1996, 95). The idea that a historical object serves as the transmitter between a past and a present begs the question of how these two timeframes should be defined. In other words, where does the past end and the present begin? The dividing line constantly shifts, that is ‘the present is usually not well defined. Does the present refer to today, this month, this year, this decade, this century?’ (Hodder 1992, 176). For each individual the moment when the present starts and the past ends differs; moreover, this dividing line shifts from case to case with, for instance, architecture from the 1950s experienced by a particular individual as belonging to the past, yet 1950s literature to the present. In order for a historical object to stir a historical sensation it does not matter whether, in our case, this object is a thirteenth-century gatehouse castle, an eighteenth-century folly or a twentieth-century restoration project as long as the building is rated as historical, as belonging to a realm different than our current one. The main prerequisite for the experience of the historical sensation that Tollebeek and Verschaffel seem to identify is the (perceived) authenticity of historical artefacts. A belief that a historical object truly stems from a distant era is essential for a historical sensation to occur. On the contrary, when objects at first believed to be genuinely old turn out to be recent fabrications, the historical sensation, Tollebeek and Verschaffel argue, instantly vanishes (Tollebeek and Verschaffel 1992). Erik Cohen similarly states that there is a high chance that ‘tourists who desire authenticity, will be misled by the tourist establishment, and their experience will be falsified; as long as they do not grasp the falsification, they may labour under the illusion that they have realized their aim’ (Cohen 1979, 195). Picking up the thread of Macaulay and Woodward, who with their ruin sensibility follow in a well-established Romantic tradition of which Henry James and George Eliot were earlier adherents, it is evident that according to Huizinga’s, Tollebeek’s and Verschaffel’s preconditions, ruins are especially favourable to the historical sensation. In the case of a ruin there is little doubt as to whether it belongs to the present or the past; ruins in a present-day context by definition serve no other purpose than as remnants from the past. Moreover, the ruin sensibility Woodward and Macaulay describe is closely related to the fact that ruins give the impression of being historically authentic. This becomes apparent when they are compared to castle museums. While ruins appear untouched, virginally historical, castles that are turned into museums are usually clearly altered – with ex-situ objects added, original furnishings removed, ‘natural’ developments such as the building’s gradual ruination put to a standstill – and as such lose their suggestion of authenticity. The impression that ruins are historically authentic is, however, not only related to their old, weathered look; to experience a ruin on one’s own, undisturbed by other people, is another reason why especially a ruin and not a museum crowded by people enables close encounters with the past. Ruins possess an ‘enveloping’ quality that is to some extent comparable to the effect created in Chapter 4 – Personal appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 73

the nineteen-seventies cinematic experiment in New York, where compartments facilitated a personal engagement with and appropriation of films (Thompson and Bordwell 2003, 594). This technique of enveloping people so as to intensify an individual absorption of visual culture is at this point in time the prevailing museological approach. Through the means of audio-tours, video presentations, light effects, the routing through the museum, and virtual realities, the immersion in and the personal engagement with the presented remnants of the past, and as such the historical sensation, is encouraged. Concerning the West Stow site interpretation, for example, one person noted about the audio-tour: ‘Closing my eyes, with the smell and the warmth of the fire, you are sent back in time’ (Sansom 1996, 133).

29. Derelict staircase in an Irish towerhouse.

Ruins are nonetheless more sympathetic to the historical sensation than castle museums, where an authentic feel and a personal absorption and appropriation of the house and its history is often strived for but not always achieved. Whether or not people personally appropriate castles – both ruins and castle museums –

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through the historical sensation depends, as will become evident, on various additional factors.

Ireland Irish castles almost all fall into the category of ruins. Castles, predominantly tower-houses, are practically all abandoned, visited and inhabited only by cows, birds and bats. Hidden behind much later farm houses or sheds (if not used themselves as sheds) and invisible behind the ivy that is slowly but surely consuming them, Irish castles give the impression that they apologise for their existence. One often has to wonder if it is at all safe to go up; derelict staircases (figure 29) and vaults not seldom expose large gaps one has to climb over in order to see the rest of the castle. Sometimes its ruination is still traceable to a specific moment in time: Richardson in County Cork for instance was ‘knocked down by lightning in 1865’; Ballyhaugh in County Tipperary ‘collapsed in the high winds of January 6th, 1839’ (Power 2000, 514; Farrelly and O’Brien 2002, 357). Most Irish castles are clearly a part of the here-and-now and consequently bring one closer to the present-day reality than to the past. This is the case when a castle is a private home bedecked with present-day objects, radiators and other modern fittings, or when a castle turned into a museum is overwhelmed by the present-day reality due to an over-diligent renovation project, other visitors, the car park, and in Ireland the inevitable Dúchas flag. Although the chance of being confronted merely with the present instead of the past is, as said, smaller in the case of a ruin, it can also happen that one is struck mostly, not by the history of the place but, for instance, by a natural world one does not encounter when living in the city. Many ruined castles have bird nests in spring, mostly in the holes in the doorways that were used for bolting the door, sometimes on the floors on top of the vaulted ceilings. Finding little eagles in a recess in a wall or getting a fright when almost stepping onto a nest with two little baby birds, the impression many Irish castles left me with was of an encounter with an unexpected facet of the present rather than with the past. Similarly, a confrontation with rather dire living quarters on a castle site, inhabited by an old, lonely farmer seemingly unable to look after both his property and himself, is not an encounter with history but with a somewhat distressing present-day world. Only in very rare instances, such as when finding a skilfully made fireplace in a back room in a locked up castle seemingly unvisited for years I, for a moment at least, did feel the present withdraw and the past loom up from behind. Considering that Ireland is a country packed with ruins oozing authenticity and devoid of hoards of visitors, one would expect the Irish to be subject to much ruin sensibility and highly susceptible to the historical sensation. However, this seems not to be the case. It is rare in Ireland that people identify or personally appropriate the castle that adorns their village or field. Entries in the Archaeological Inventory mention that in 1968 Castle Dromcarra in County Cork was ‘blown up by the landowner’, Ballymaddock Castle in County Laois ‘destroyed, with the aid

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of dynamite, in the 1950/1960s’, and Mountfin Castle in Wexford ‘pulled down c. 1970’ (Power 1997, 368; Sweetman et al. 1995, 118; Moore 1996, 190). This is not to say of course that similar acts of destruction did not occur in England and The Netherlands, nor that everyone in Ireland feels detached from castles, yet I hardly ever met with much castle enthusiasm.

30. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Trim in County Meath. Note the information boards put up since the recent renovationproject, the modern walking bridge at roof level and the stairs leading visitors up to the castle.

When the picturesque boomed in England, the overwhelming majority of the people in Ireland was too poor to concern itself with such Romantic pleasures. Nowadays, the Irish do not seem to personally appropriate castles through historical sensations or otherwise, foremost because castles are often exclusively associated, erroneously, with ‘the Brits’, opponents and oppressors. As discussed in chapter 3, the Irish generally take a sombre view of history in which British domination features large, making it difficult for people to identify with the material culture of this period. One Irish woman who quite literally had a castle in her back-garden (it stood so near to the house that one night during a storm the collapse of a part of the castle was clearly audible above the noise of wind and rain) announced she was not able to tell me much about the castle other than that it was Anglo-Norman. Given the proximity of the castle one might have expected an interest in the building, or for the castle to have played a role in this woman’s personal biography. However, it was probably the false idea that this castle was Anglo-Norman whilst in fact it was Gaelic, that caused her not to identify with – or perhaps even to reject such identification – or to personally appropriate the castle. Let me now turn from the castle ruin to Irish castle museums: to what extent are these buildings personally appropriated through the historical sensation? One

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tourist reviewing the tour of Trim castle in County Meath (figure 30) – vainly described by the Irish Office of Public Works as ‘the largest Anglo-Norman castle in Europe’ (Igougo 2006) – commented on the web: There are cubbyholes and stairs here and there, but the tour guide will rush you by, asking you to stay with the group […] I was there when the place first opened, August 2000, and they were still working the kinks out. All around, there were planks, boards, uneven stairs, dirt, rocks, etc. Also, they were trying, but had not, by any means, screened up all the holes where pigeons were getting in […] I am sure, by now, they have ironed out these things, I just looked at it as an authentic castle tour, one which truly showed what the original occupants must have put up with […] Before the opening two weeks earlier, before the remodelling started the year before, the place was just sitting there unoccupied, a ruin. It was where the local schoolchildren used to play after school. I remember thinking, ‘how cool, I wish I had a castle to play in where I grew up’ and I wondered if the kids were totally bummed that they didn’t get to play there anymore. Igougo 2006

This ‘ironing out’ of authentic features concerns both the materiality of the building and the related history. The previous chapter spoke of recent plans for Pallas Castle consisting of the destruction of all the houses on site (some of which of great architectural-historical value) save the tower-house. If carried out, this rigorous destruction at Pallas would facilitate a one-dimensional nationalistic take on the Irish past, merely highlighting the familiar political and military keymoments. At Ross Castle in County Kerry (figure XIII), like Pallas a Dúchas property, the ambivalence, uncertainties and ambiguities inherent to each historical (as well as present-day) reality are also carefully smoothed out. Much money was spent on an extensive renovation program that industriously covered up the scars of time, with merlons once again (or for the first time?) finishing off the castle. Nothing was left to chance at Ross so as to ensure that there is only one way in which this castle and its history can be interpreted. No guide or booklet can be bought, visitors only receive a leaflet; moreover, the castle is accessible only by guided tour. Irish tour guides generally aim to disseminate as much information as possible, leaving little room for a more embodied experience that is more favourable to historical sensations. As for the tour at Ross Castle, this did not merely ‘iron out’ the architectural and historical story in order to be able to relate the usual Irish political and military narrative, but it was also blatantly inaccurate. Archaeologists, historians and art-historians are in the dark for instance as to what the function was of the frequently found, vertically placed, small rooms occupying the space next to the spiral staircase in tower-houses, yet, at Ross the guide stated about one such room that it used to be ‘the bedroom of eleven soldiers’. She furthermore remarked that the ground floor used to be a Chapter 4 – Personal appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 77

storage room, notwithstanding the fact that an exceptionally large fireplace suggested it used to be the kitchen. The kitchen, however, was in the attic we were told, a space without a fireplace and hence clearly never a kitchen. Also in the attic was a balcony that looked remarkably like the one adorning the famous castle Bunratty in County Clare. Indeed, the guide said, it was a copy of Bunratty’s balcony, built at Ross Castle during the recent renovation project because ‘every tower-house in Ireland was furnished with such a balcony’. She added: ‘There used to be about 1000 to 2000 tower-houses in Ireland’ and it was very easy to know what they looked like in the past ‘because they were all the same’. Summing up, in Ireland a personal appropriation of castles is frustrated by the fact that they have been usurped on a national level. Before Trim Castle was turned into a museum, not only the young children mentioned by the tourist who recounted his experiences on the web frequented the old ruin. A friend of mine spoke affectionately about Trim Castle, where he used to meet with truant classmates and smoked illicit cigarettes. Following Trim’s renovation he could no longer access it, other than by subjecting himself to a guided tour propagating the familiar Irish historical narrative. In other words, the appropriation of castles on a national and a personal level is decidedly one-directional in Ireland; the national take on castles is so dominant that it leaves little room for a more personal experience of castles. Irish castles are thus rarely the object of historical sensations: Tollebeek’s and Verschaffel’s main precondition, authenticity, is seriously tampered with or ironed out in the case of castle museums; an authentic feel of ruins merely reflects an all too real, still traumatic, national history of suppression.

England To what extent are English men and women able to personally appropriate a castle or historical house through the historical sensation? A personal appropriation of a house or castle – it will not surprise – is most easily achieved when owning or inhabiting a historical house. Considering that this is a privilege enjoyed by few, the tour of seventeenth-century Milton Manor House described in chapter 3 can be regarded as a personal appropriation through ownership by proxy. This ultimate re-enactment of history came about when the all-in-one tour guide (owner of the house and the wife of the descendent of generations of previous occupants) invited us to touch objects usually behind glass, an alarm system or red rope. Castles and country houses in possession of The National Trust and English Heritage – although respectively aiming to provide ‘for ever, for everyone’, and to offer an ‘edutainment experience’ which English Heritage explicates as a move ‘from ruins to tourist attractions’ (Sansom 1996, 119) – usually abound in such instruments that keep the public away from those very objects that are believed to function as conduits between past and present. National Trust and English Heritage properties rarely meet Tollebeek’s and Verschaffel’s prerequisites. Overzealous restoration projects render English historical houses an unwarranted polished look (albeit to a lesser extent than

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restoration schemes in Ireland), leaving visitors in the dark about what is old and what a contemporary reconstruction. An authentic feel is moreover jeopardised by the fact that there is often too much ‘present’ and too little ‘past’ on site for visitors to feel connected with the past; crowds of people, the inescapable volunteers, shuttle busses with loud advertisements commuting between the car park and the house, often amount to too much present-day stimuli. As said, the historical sensation is about the experience of a material past instead of an intellectual consumption of written sources. Following from this, the currently fashionable museological approach that aims to generate a historical sensation encourages an embodied, senseational, historical experience. Yet, the attitude of the National Trust towards this New Museology in terms of its historical houses is half-hearted to say the least, still foregrounding an intellectual understanding of the building and its collection instead of a personalised experience that allows freedom of movement and an overall embodied engagement with the building. National Trust properties abound in leaflets, booklets, guides, coffee-table books and room-to-room information sheets, despite museological studies (such as for instance that which was carried out at the Museum of London), indicating the unpopularity with the general public of textbased information (Cotton and Woods 1996, 68).

31. Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire, built in the late-seventeenth century by William Blathwayth, Secretary of War during the reign of William of Orange (William III). House and garden are inspired on Dutch examples.

Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire (figure 32) provides a good example of this bias towards an intellectual instead of a bodily understanding of the castle. A thirteenth-century cloister remodelled as a private house in the sixteenth century and refurbished in the Neo-Gothic style in the eighteenth century, Lacock presents a fascinating blend of building styles and phases, all still easily distinguishable

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from each other. The four wings of the house are located right on top of the four corridors of the cloister, yet when inside the house visitors have no inkling of this spatial arrangement as the curtains of the windows opening onto the courtyard of the cloister are shut. In order to view the cloister one has to leave the house, turn one corner, walk a short distance and then enter the cloister through a gate. Whilst from the interior of the house it is the cloister that is invisible, once inside the cloister one cannot peek into the house. Hence, since the location of the house visà-vis the cloister remains obscure, most tourists will leave Lacock Abbey without a ‘sense’, literally, of the building they have just visited.

32. Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, a sixteenth-century house built over a medieval cloister.

A related, yet perhaps more serious problem with English heritage sites concerns their lay-out or spatial organisation. From the moment one walks or drives through the entrance of a National Trust property one’s every step on the historical terrain is laid out. Signs show visitors where to park, where to buy a ticket, where to enter the house (via the tea-room and out through the gift-shop), and how to navigate through the house. This one-way system is all-pervasive and applied so meticulously that it even continues back at the car park. Leaving Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire (figure 31) I accidentally drove back towards the entrance, herewith generating so much panic in one of the volunteers that he came running out of his booth and with wild arm gestures directed me back onto the right trail. The same day, walking through nearby Lacock Abbey (figure 32), another National Trust property, I intended at some point to turn back and once again observe one of the rooms I had already passed, only to be told it was not allowed to move in the ‘wrong direction’. I then asked if I could perhaps carry on to the end of the tour and from there start anew, but since it was just past five, the time of last entry (the property closed at five thirty), this was not permitted.

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The application of a one-way system has serious ramifications for the experience of the house. Given that this one-way system goes against current ideas of a personalised, embodied museology, what reason other than a merely practical one in terms of the organisation of tourist flows – which I believe is an insufficient explanation for such an all-pervasive practice – underlies this phenomenon? Carol Duncan’s and Alan Wallach’s famous study is brought to mind, analysing the routing through the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which the authors suggest is not value free but instead subtly streamlines visitors’ interpretations (Duncan and Wallach 1978). Applying this idea to the carefully laid out routing through the historical houses in possession of and exploited by the National Trust, it is noteworthy that, despite National Trust’s ‘for ever, for everyone’ slogan most of these properties still fall into the category, as already stated in chapter 3, of the old-style high-art museum with style rooms, which can only be understood with a certain level of ‘taste’, ‘sophistication’ and ‘knowledge’. It should not surprise that Rose Macaulay was a member of the British nobility and that Christopher Woodward acknowledges in his book In Ruins to be born in affluence (Woodward 2002, 33). The reason then why a visit to a National Trust property will not likely generate a historical sensation stems from the fact that the wider public is not made part of the architectural heritage and history of these castles and country houses. Shielded off from history by a rope that demarcates where one is allowed to go and where not and by a persisting elitist stance towards the high culture on display, most visitors are prevented from identifying with the past and thus miss out on a historical sensation. Museums, it is argued, play an important role in the social inclusion of a variety of different groups in the wider British society (Fleming 2006). English castle museums are not likely to contribute much however.

The Netherlands The museology proclaimed by English Heritage and encapsulated in the phrase ‘from ruin to tourist attraction’ is already well under way in The Netherlands. In stark contrast to England and especially Ireland, The Netherlands is a country devoid of authentic-looking ruins. Whilst visiting Vorden, a sixteenth-century castle in Gelderland (figure 17), the castle showed such clear signs of renovation work that seeing the castle from the bridge – the two brick wings, making an Lshape with a turret placed in the corner where the two wings meet, the early Renaissance coquillages above the windows, the courtyard – it all looked so polished and neat that it was difficult to get any sense of the past. In the eighteenth century a renovation program saw the replacement of cross-windows by sash windows, as was usual at the time. Moreover, from then onwards the old courtyard was abandoned as the entrance to the castle and a bridge over the moat was built to reach the new doorway at the back of the short wing of the castle. I found this bridge aged and rotten, with its balustrades gone, looking wobbly, and

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genuinely old (figure 33). I later found out that this bridge was a much later (possibly even twentieth-century!) replacement of the eighteenth-century bridge, but since this was the only part of the castle that was not yet restored and thus seemingly historically authentic, it was this youngest part of the castle which gave me the greatest sense of history. In The Netherlands bridges such as this one will sooner or later always be ‘renovated’ or ‘developed’ (not seldom euphemisms for ‘demolished’), as I was told will happen at Vorden. At Schuilenburg Castle in Overijssel, to give another example of these sometimes harrowing effects (not only in terms of the historical sensation) of such renovation practices, initiatives to rebuild a bridge in the same location as the original according to a drawing by Pronk dating back to 1732, saw the destruction in 2005 of the actual sixteenth-century bridge that lay below ground, and which had previously been preserved by archaeologists. So far no association comparable to The National Trust or Dúchas, which relates easily recognisable castles stories based on a national(istic) account of the past, exists in The Netherlands. Plans for such a body exist however. The recent upsurge in castle enthusiasm in The Netherlands is linked, as was shown in chapter 3, to changing perceptions of, and an increased interest in, history. Not only are the Dutch no longer afraid that a study into the past will lead to nationalism, it seems that this by-product of history is no longer condemned, rather encouraged. Archaeological reports, museum curators, castle publications and architectural designs for castle sites that will be ‘developed’ – development being a peculiar pastime of the Dutch – increasingly speak of the benefits for a nation or region of a literally unearthed castle heritage. The jargon adopted in these plans invariably contains the buzzword ‘identity’. With regards the famous castle of Teylingen, to give only one example, members of both the Kastelenstichting Holland en Zeeland (Castle Foundation Holland and Zeeland) and the town administration expect a reinforced regional identity as a corollary of the castle’s symbolic value. Hence they support the redevelopment of the site (with the castle, not coincidentally, also providing the name for the newly constituted town ‘Teylingen’). Even the Vijfde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening (a government ordinance on policies regarding the planning of public space) unambiguously mentions the concept ‘identity’ (VROM 2001). An awareness or a sense of national or local identity, these reports, plans and ordinances argue, will encourage a sense of community as well as a personal feeling of belonging. The flipside of the identity coin is in most cases guilelessly or conveniently forgotten. After all, identity is ‘a matter of relationality, both ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ is constructed’ (Lammers 2006). Or, put differently: ‘the dialectic between connection and otherness […] is at the center of all forms of historical and cultural representation’ (Behar 1996, 20). This flipside is evident for instance in a way of personally appropriating castles through newly built ‘castle houses’, a phenomenon that has become popular in The Netherlands. Haverleij, a neighbourhood near the city of Den Bosch, Noord-Brabant, and the brainchild of the Dutch architect Sjoerd Soeters, 82 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

consists of one thousand houses and apartments contained in nine ‘castles’. Apart from the impregnable moats, towers and courtyards, also the lifts in these twentyfirst-century castles demonstrate their secluded and excluding nature. The lift in Leliënhuyze, one of the castles in Haverleij, brings inhabitants only to their own floors, which means that for people living on the second floor the doors of the lift will not open on the first, third or fourth floor.

33. Bridge at Vorden.

Moving on to Dutch castle museums, it is apparent that many curators opt for presentations that give the impression that the original owners of the castle have only just left their home, to return at any moment (Van der Laarse 2005b, 77). Instead of style rooms that each reflect a different time period, Dutch castle museums now often present one epoch and usually one that is fairly recent so that visitors can tap into their own memories and as such identify with the building (ibid., 77). An approach enabling visitors to identify with the past by means of reminiscing and remembering their own (family) history of course particularly suits an audience that, as stated, is not well-versed in the language of history. At the castle Het Muiderslot, built by Floris V and inhabited and altered by P.C. Hooft, curators also attempt to enable a ready identification with the history of both the building and its inhabitants by means of a simplification of (castle) history and a personal, senseational, castle experience. With this in mind, Het Muiderslot was outfitted with three new castle trails which caused some controversy, as part of the original structure of the castle was penetrated in order to allow for these new routes through the castle. The visitors are no longer subservient to the building, but the castle instead adapts to the needs of tourists, who (it is believed) wish for and are accordingly provided with a ‘ride’ through the castle. The history of thirteenth-century Floris V rather than that of seventeenth-century P.C. Hooft is emphasised (and there is now for instance a

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ridderroute (‘knight’s route’) through the castle), Floris V’s medieval period being most accessible and archetypically known to people who have been ingrained with fairytales of this age. ‘It is Disneyland, but then for real’ (‘Het is de Efteling en het Land van Ooit in één, maar dan echt’) according to Yvonne Molenaar, head collections at Het Muiderslot (Leeflang 2006). The so-called disneyfication of (castle) museums is undoubtedly a derivative of the historical sensation, which is evident in Molenaar’s reference to both the sensational (Disneyland) and the historical (by which is meant an authentic) reality at Het Muiderslot. Some critics, ostensibly discerning a gliding scale from authenticity to disneyficatication, condemn the museology that is making headway in The Netherlands for ‘staging’ authenticity, no longer presenting ‘the original that seems ‘authentic’ ‘, but adhering to ‘current views of what the past ought to have looked like’ (Lowenthal 1985, xxiii; MacCannell 1999). This critique prompted the British museum director David Fleming to pose the question: What is it that the Dutch are afraid of? (Fleming 2006). Although the presentation of collections in many museums has changed in order to coax new audiences, British museums, Fleming argues, have not changed into theme parks. It has to be said, though, that recent developments as regard English castle museums have not gone quite as far as those characterising Dutch museology where plans for Teylingen include, for instance, the creation of fog and mist (Van de Werk 2006, 48). Other castle-related phenomena are equally infused with a mystic, fairytale flavour. When It Swannewâld in Heerenveen, Friesland, another castellated (this time baroque-style) neighbourhood, was first presented, the scene was enlivened by actors in knight’s costumes and maidenly robes (ibid., 38). Indicative of the same phenomenon is the ‘bicycle shed folly’ in The Hague created by the English architectural company FAT, blending Dutch and English castle traditions described as ‘Romanticism-on-LSD’ (Smets 2006, 9).

Imagining the past The familiar house Central to a sense of being in contact with the past is the possibility to identify with a material past. The Irish by and large do not wish to identify with the physical reminders of British supremacy in Ireland; despite the slogan ‘for ever, for everyone’, the presentation of National Trust properties in England is still based on an elitist premise that makes it difficult for people other than the affluent and educated members of British society to identify with these historical houses; the Dutch finally adhere to a museology that aims to facilitate an easily achievable identification with the past. Whilst a personal appropriation of castles through ‘the historical sensation’ has in previous pages only been described in terms of persisting Romantic notions, museological paradigms (or tastes), and politics, these aspirations also touch on the world of academia. Considering that the historical sensation is making a come-back in academia and given the fact that it plays its part in a scholarly interest in the past – evident from the citations taken 84 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

from Tarlow and Johnson at the start of this chapter – it is important to discuss possible academic merits and drawbacks of the concept. In the remaining part of this chapter I will explicate why, in my opinion, a personal appropriation of castles through historical sensations inspires, yet ultimately also obscures the academic study of the castle. In order to elucidate the academic dangers that may lurk behind the identification with the past – dangers that lie at the heart of the historical sensation – I ask the reader to bear with me while I take a brief detour. After my first year of the PhD, in the summer of 2002, I went to The Netherlands to study Dutch castles and to stay with family and friends. While studying anthropology and history I had always been interested in architecture and when the opportunity arose during my MA and PhD in archaeology to study historical houses, I did. Many of my friends had been more faithful to the discipline of anthropology and during that summer I heard about their studies into, amongst others, international policies towards the alleged perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, young urban refugees in East Africa, the resettlement of victims of war in Lebanon, and Dutch-Ghanaian relationships between the advent of the Dutch slave trade and the present. I, in the mean time, was arranging meetings with the Dutch aristocracy. That summer I had appointments with a baron and a baroness who used to live in one of the castles I studied and with a baroness still inhabiting a castle; coincidentally, I stumbled upon another baron in a castle’s garden (see also Kuiper 2003). Through my research I suddenly found myself among the nobility of The Netherlands, their sheer existence previously virtually unknown to me. This part of my studies came as a bit of a shock. I had somehow expected I would make the same choice my friends had made, that is, to put those in society who are less well-off, centre stage. It was an uncomfortable realisation that I had moved into the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the fact that history is sometimes regarded as the study of distance in time and anthropology as the study of geographical distance, in anthropology and history (as well as in archaeology), I believe we also look for a part of our own world. My personal interest in houses and castles is closely related to a sense of familiarity with these buildings, a familiarity that is based on an unconscious and inaccurate assumption that my life’s experiences are related to or comparable with the past of these buildings. Dutch society in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was more egalitarian than that in Ireland or England, something that is reflected in the architecture of the time. Past and present foreign travellers have noted that Dutch castles and big houses are of more humble proportions than those in other countries. A Dutch castle is not necessarily of a scale that is absolutely incomparable to one’s own house and consequently it is quite possible to identify with a Dutch castle. In terms of architecture only, my own life’s experience bears much resemblance to that of someone who belonged to the seventeenth-century Dutch élite. We both grew up in a house owned by our parents, had a room to ourselves like the rest of our family, both her and my house had a kitchen and a scullery; there was a particular room where the family came together and which was heated throughout the day and both our houses had Chapter 4 – Personal appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 85

extra rooms with specific purposes. Both of us, furthermore, were familiar with a garden divided into different parts, one for utilitarian purposes, another for display and still another with a recreational function. Although the scale of her and my house (and especially the garden) could differ significantly, at first glance, on the basis of architecture alone (my house also being ‘historical’, albeit no more than a century old) it would seem that I could understand Dutch life in a seventeenth-century house. However, when confronted with present-day castle owners, it became evident that I cannot actually identify with the lives of the Dutch aristocracy in both present and past times. The fact that I only fully realised that I studied a past élite through meeting present-day castle owners, shows that when the architecture of the castle seemed familiar, I also projected my own personal experience of the house onto that of the people who, in former times, inhabited castles. As such, I not only overlooked or underemphasised issues relating to wealth or status, but also those related to religion (such as a castle’s reference to ecclesiastic architecture and the importance of religion to past owners), court culture, and other aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture that were unfamiliar to me.

Labouring under a misapprehension The introduction to this book stated that the past is dead and that E.M. Forster’s protagonist’s idea that the house has ‘a surer life than we do’ was untrue. Yet, the house is alive. That is, we experience it as such – to us the house is alive – haunted and in possession of ambiance and atmosphere. It is evident that we can never in reality step back in time and enter the past; the historical sensation remains a ‘sensation’. To answer the question, ‘to what extent is it possible to identify with the past?’, is less straightforward. Is it not possible at all to identify with men and women who lived centuries before our time? In order to answer this question I will briefly venture into the subject of anthropology, where the term ‘native anthropologist’ refers to those scholars studying their own culture or country. Native anthropologists were believed to enjoy numerous advantages over non-native anthropologists, owing to their ability to speak the language of the research subjects, their accessibility to a network of informers, and their familiarity with local mannerisms and mores. Recently, due to a postmodern focus on the local and particular instead of the national and a denunciation of dichotomies such as culture / nature, male / female as well as native / non-native, the concept ‘native anthropologist’ has received criticism (Cheater 1987; Hastrup 1993a and 1993b; Altorki 1994). It is currently believed that we are all natives and non-natives at the same time, with a German academic possibly having more in common with an Indian academic than with a fellow countryman or -woman working for a bank or in a factory. Each person is believed to be bi- (or multi-) cultural on account of the fact that we all form part of many different cultures, such as those of a neighbourhood, workplace, age group, gender, etc. The question for anthropologists is thus no longer whether or not they

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share a nationality with the people they study but instead whether or not they are ‘at home in some way’ (Mounzer 2002). This shift in the meaning of the term ‘native’ has interesting consequences for those of us studying the past. There was of course never going to be a native archaeologist able to bridge the gap of time like a native anthropologist can supposedly bridge a cultural distance. But if we follow the idea that the question that needs answering is whether or not we are at home in the past in some way, it might be reasonable to suggest that we can all identify with certain aspects of a past world. The past, for instance, that we experience when visiting a castle is not so strange to us that we cannot feel at home in one way or another. This said, the fact that the house is silent and former inhabitants dead, makes it a little too easy to identify with a building’s history, as one is almost never proved wrong. The native anthropologist might find out along the way that he or she has less in common with an academic from India than he or she at first believed; the native archaeologist, not interacting but ‘intra-acting’, engaged in a dialogue with nobody other than him- or herself, probably will not.

34. Het Markiezenhof in NoordBrabant, a city palace for the most part built around the turn of the sixteenth century.

When seeing a ruin, Woodward – susceptible, as we saw, to much ruin sensibility – writes that ‘each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her

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own imagination and a ruin therefore appears differently to everyone’ (Woodward 2002, 15). Previously I mentioned the peculiarity of the fact that historians like Huizinga, Tollebeek and Verschaffel all refer to material culture instead of written sources as generators of the historical sensation. They do so, I believe, because material culture is more open to manipulation and the imagination than written texts. This is also the reason why, as stated in the introduction to this book, I find the idea of ‘archaeology as text’ problematic. Knowing a castle intimately can easily give the false impression that one can also identify with its past. One of the historical buildings that I know well from the time that I was a child is Het Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom in Noord-Brabant (figures 34 and XIV), one of the earlier Renaissance city palaces in The Low Countries. Since this palace is so obviously a historical building I thought I knew it as such, but once I started to read about the palace a number of years ago I realised, I really only know this building from my own lifetime. Learning about the creation of the late medieval hofzaal (‘the hall’), I became aware of the fact that I only associate this space with classical concerts held there. One of the outbuildings of the palace, moreover, I know intimately as the children’s library, making it difficult to have to start thinking of it as a stable. When reading about the top part of the tower of Het Markiezenhof being removed in the early eighteenth century after complaints of citizens who saw it swaying back and forth in the wind and who feared it would one day blow off the tower, I realised I only associated this part of the palace with a day in 1986 when we were told in school that the father of one of our classmates would complete twenty-five years of renovating Het Markiezenhof by placing a new onion dome on the tower (Van Ham 1986; Meischke 1987). Although those events for me were coated in history, this sensation was not based on any knowledge I had of what had really happened there in times gone by. This knowledge I only acquired once I studied written, not material, sources. In other words, although this may be blasphemy for an archaeologist, I believe material remains are more malleable than historical sources. A historical materiality leaves much room for the imagination, enabling the identification and consequently the historical sensation that museum curators, policy makers and ruin sensible people strive for. Academics like myself who do not wish to succumb to total relativism, though inspired by the historical sensation, strive for the evaporation of historical sensationalism on an academic level.

Conclusion Those who delight in being lured backwards through time by their sense of the past very quickly become aware of two dominant themes, the way things change, the way things do not change. Byrne 1983, 1

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Bruce Trigger criticises Johnson’s claim that ‘archaeologists who ‘attack’ extreme relativism have been tilting at windmills’ – consensus according to Johnson lying ‘somewhere between narrow positivism and unbridled relativism’ – by referring to the early, partly extreme relativist, work of Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (Shanks and Tilley 1992; Johnson 1999, 182, 185; Trigger 2000, 369). Perhaps one could argue that both Johnson and Trigger are right: extreme relativism is indeed rare in archaeology (as well as in academia in general), yet its sway over archaeology has been profound. Archaeologists now by and large have distanced themselves from New Archaeology’s positivism and moved ‘toward a consensus based on the moderate relativist position’ (Trigger 2000, 369). The problem Ian Hodder discerns with the objectivist–relativist debate in archaeology is ‘the simplistic opposition between past and present’. Hodder believes it is the fact that it ‘is taken for granted that past and present exist and can be distinguished’, which causes the continuous doubt about the truth value of archaeological research. After all, ‘the past constructs us in the present in that we are members of societies which have been constructed in the past, economically, socially and ideologically’ (Hodder 1992, 176). That ‘we think through language, which is handed down to us across generations’, was evident in this chapter, as well as in part I as a whole (ibid., 176). Our understanding of castles and historical houses is informed by mainly nineteenth-century nationalistic and martial interpretations of the castle as well as by ruin sensibility and other (Neo) Romantic constructs. Indeed, as Hodder posits, we are not hermetically sealed off from the past, and though this might warrant a particular level of understanding of the past, it just as much blurs our vision. This chapter juxtaposed historical sensationalism, a deceptive feeling of contact with the past that bypasses the temporal-spatial reality, and native archaeology, which touches on the idea that we also with right feel ‘at home in the past in some ways’. The post-processual pioneer Hodder turned to the work of the historian R.G. Collingwood early in his career, adopting the latter’s theories on ‘re-thinking of’ or ‘re-collecting’ the past (Hodder 2003 [1986], Collingwood 1994 [1946]). As Robert Preucel puts it: ‘Like Dilthey and Collingwood, Hodder argues that the empathic procedure is justified on the basis of a continuity between the past and present, a commonality of feeling such that ‘each event, although unique, possesses a significance which can be comprehended by all people at all times’ ‘ (Preucel 1991, 22). In later years, Hodder rejected Collingwood’s hypotheses – perhaps feeling, like Sarah Tarlow (2000, 745), that ‘empathy may be a valid goal, if not an appropriate methodology of archaeological research’ – however, Hodder remains positive about archaeology’s potential and maintains that ‘we do not simply impose our ideas on the material evidence’ (Hodder 1992, 162). The study of historical buildings – the three dimensional structure where past people lived and which one can see, touch, walk around and enter – can bring about an enormous sense of immediacy with the past; almost validating, or so it seems, a phenomenological approach centring on a bodily experience of the house. Even Huizinga, as a historian preoccupied with literary sources instead of historical Chapter 4 – Personal appropriatons of ‘castle’ | 89

objects, and a most eloquent writer besides, was convinced it was the material, not the documentary past that engendered a historical sensation. However, as I have now extensively argued, it is the immediacy of language, our precise, detailed, and refined way of communicating – though perhaps not bringing bygone eras alive in the same way a three dimensional house can – that provides (albeit, most certainly, in combination with the material architectural heritage) the proximity to the past generating the historical understanding aimed for here. Moving away from and beyond eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarly ideas of the castle, national agendas, and personal (ruin)sensitivities, towards sixteenth- and seventeenth-century perceptions of the buildings that we now tend to call castles, it will be the individuals of that era who will perform as protagonists in part II through their written words and built edifices (see the addendum for a description of the sources and their authors).

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Part II Castles in the past

Chapter 5 Friendship: the castle and the other

Introduction Louis XIV personified William of Orange’s lifelong enemy and raison d’être. The United Provinces had been without a stadholder since the death in 1650 of William II, William’s father. William III was appointed stadholder thanks only to his accomplishments during ‘the year of disaster’ in 1672 – the year Louis XIV invaded The United Provinces – when William proved himself a more than capable military leader. Sixteen years later William was furthermore crowned King of Britain, a role he was eager to fulfil, as he badly needed England as an ally in his fight against King Louis’ France, which continued until his death in 1702. In light of this ongoing strife, various scholars have remarked, inter alia, on the oddity of the fact that the architecture of William’s palaces and houses in The United Provinces and Britain, as well as those of the people in his immediate circle, is largely inspired by French architecture (Van Nispen tot Sevenaer 1946; Blunt 1973; Girouard 1978; Guillermo 1990; Biesboer 2001). The surprise originates in the often unarticulated interpretative frameworks these writers apply. Guided by theories developed by prominent scholars such as Foucault, Bourdieu and Giddens, archaeological remains in general and architecture more specifically have come to be explained predominantly in terms of power (see for instance Leone 1984; Markus 1993). This chapter attempts to explain the paradox inherent in the architectural heritage of William of Orange by developing an alternative interpretative framework. However first we must step back and review William’s architectural context (for comprehensive biographies see Robb 1962; Robb 1966; Troost 2001; much of the historical material outlined below is derived from these. See also Ronnes 2004b and Ronnes 2005).

‘A patch’d building’ William of Orange (1650-1702) possessed numerous houses – inherited, bought, or given to him – in The United Provinces and Britain, and some in France. Reasons for purchasing or investing in a house were interestingly diverse: he bought Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 93

Kensington Palace (figure XV) because his asthma did not agree with life in the city of London; Het Loo (figure 35) attracted William due to its low situation which enabled him to have the large spraying fountains in the garden that he desired. He purchased several other places in the Veluwe, his favourite hunting spot in the centre of The United Provinces, such as Asselt, Coldenhove, and Hoog Buurlo, in order not to trespass and be prevented from hunting the entirety of this large, rich area.

The United Provinces William of Orange was born at Het Binnenhof in The Hague (figure 36), then (and now still) the administrative centre of the Dutch government. A year after his birth, the States of Holland, owners of the complex, decided to erect a grand, new assembly hall, which meant the apartments of Wiliam’s mother Mary Stuart I (the actual place where William was born) were for the most part demolished. A few decades later, in 1678, it was William, not the States of Holland, who decided on the fate of Het Binnenhof, building apartments for Mary Stuart II and himself. It was probably because of his aversion to the frenzy of The Hague that he never extended Het Binnenhof beyond these initial alterations. When business brought him to The Hague he preferred to stay at Sorghvliet (‘Flee from worries’), the property of his friend Hans Willem Bentinck (figure 37), or else at one of his own residences in the vicinity of The Hague, preferably Huis ten Bosch (figure 43), Huis te Rijswijk (figure 44) or Honselaersdijk (figure 40), the proud possessions and creations of his grandparents Amalia von Solms and Frederik Hendrik. William did not alter either of these houses greatly; only the gardens were newly laid out, arguably according to a slightly outdated French architectural treatise.

35. Het Loo in Gelderland, commissioned by William III. The central block was started in 1684, the pavilions were added after William’s ascension to the throne of England.

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Another property William inherited was Huis te Dieren in Gelderland (figure 41), a tall and narrow house with high top gables. Due to its location in the Veluwe, Dieren counted amongst his most favourite places. In the late 1670s it received a severe Classical addition. However, following William’s coronation in 1688, Dieren was once again renovated so as to give it a more king-worthy appearance. During this second rebuilding phase the exterior remained simple; for the interior William sent over from England the Hungarian painter Jacob Bogdani, who had previously busied himself in William’s English palaces. Bogdani adorned Dieren with paintings of exotic flowers and animals, the experience of which the painter De Lairesse compared with ‘walking through the entire world’, ‘at once able to see all the wonders from Asia to Africa and from there to America, without ever leaving the room’ (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 122; my translation). Still, the house did not impress. Only the two camels that William had just received as a gift caught John Locke’s attention whilst visiting Dieren (Van Strien 1993, 304).

36. Het Binnenhof in The Hague, home of subsequent Orange princes. Het Mauritshuis, built by Johan Maurits van Nassau, who bought a plot at Het Binnenhof from Frederik Hendrik, is visible in the background.

The palace of Soestdijk in Utrecht, one of William’s early purchases, was the creation of the famous Dutch architect Maurits Post. In the years between 1674 and 1678 the house was laid out in the then-common fashion, French in origin, comprising of a centrally-placed entrance hall with the queen’s and king’s apartments on either side, each containing a series of rooms such as the chamber, antechamber, withdrawing chamber and cabinet. At Soestdijk, William’s and Mary’s apartments were positioned on the first floor, and those for courtiers on the second, which is curious as the former’s apartments were in most cases located on the higher level. Unusual also was the long gallery in Mary’s apartment, an English rather than a Dutch feature.

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37. Het Catshuis, formerly Sorghvliet (‘Flee from worries’), in present-day The Hague, was built in the mid-seventeenth century by the (country house) poet Jacob Cats. Later that same century it was in the possession of Hans Willem Bentinck. At present it functions as the prime minister’s office.

In 1684 William bought the old castle Het Loo in Gelderland (figure XVI), his interest once again stirred by the castle’s location in the Veluwe. Initially, he and Mary settled in the castle, yet soon work started on a new palace. The corps de logis, or main body, was finished in 1685, complemented a year later with two wings attached to the corps de logis by colonnades (figure 42). The architect at Het Loo was Jacob Roman who applied his usual severe Classical style, only emphasising the central bay of the main body which protruded slightly and was adorned with Ionian pilasters and a pediment. The Huguenot Daniel Marot, who was to have such a profound influence on the architecture of both The United Provinces and Britain, was responsible for the interiors of Het Loo. Apart from the fact that William and the men around him built in a style that was to a large extent based on French architecture, it is a collection of drawings, ordered from Paris at a time of heightened tension between The United Provinces and France, that puzzles scholars today. It is difficult to assess to what extent Roman, when designing Het Loo, made use of these drawings provided by L’Académie d’Architecture de Paris since the second building campaign at Het Loo might have obliterated traces proving the implementation of this French design. As at Dieren, this second building phase followed William’s ascension to the throne in England. Notwithstanding the fact that Het Loo had only recently been finished, he decided to demolish the colonnades and build four pavilions instead. These pavilions, housing a new dining room, a chapel and apartments for William and Mary (the latter again furnished with a long gallery) and their 96 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

courtiers, were considerably more luxurious than their forerunners. Even so, William was doubtful about these modifications, the older colonnades perhaps having been more aesthetically pleasing. Although it was undoubtedly the finest house in The United Provinces with universally admired gardens, Het Loo was indeed held to be ‘rather neat than magnificent’, fit only for a prince (William’s title in The United Provinces), not for a king (Van Strien 1993, 153).

England and Ireland The two main English buildings refurbished at William’s and Mary’s instigation by the royal architect Sir Christopher Wren were Kensington Palace in presentday London (figure XV) and Hampton Court in Surrey (figures 38 – 39 and XVII). William and Mary were likeminded in their dislike of St. James’ Palace in London, the former in general having no appreciation for city palaces and the queen feeling shut-in at St. James’ Palace where there was ‘nothing but water or wall’ (Haynes 2001, 5).

38. The sixteenth-century façade of Hampton Court in Surrey.

It was not long after William and Mary were crowned king and queen that they purchased the Jacobean house that came to be known as Kensington Palace. It has been suggested that its main attraction lay in its fine gardens (Haynes 2001, 37), and considering the amount of work the palace itself required, this might be true. In 1689, during the first building phase, four pavilions were joined to the corners of the Jacobean house with the king’s and queen’s apartments positioned in two pavilions diagonally across from each other. A year after this initial building program, in 1690, John Evelyn dubbed Kensington Palace ‘yet a patch’d building’ (Haynes 2001, 5; Little 1975, 161). William’s war in Ireland, the building activities at Hampton Court, and Mary’s death in 1694 at Kensington, all interfered with the completion of the palace. Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 97

39. Plan presenting William of Orange’s apartments at Hampton Court.

After Mary’s death, William had a greater interest, for a while at least, in the construction of Greenwich Hospital, which he regarded as a monument for Mary who had busied herself with the project. She had been opposed to Wren’s proposal for a U-shaped hospital, favouring an unblocked view of Inigo Jones’ building on the same site. After Mary’s death Wren allegedly attempted to persuade William about his initial plans for Kensington Palace, but William held on to his late wife’s wish. When building finally resumed at Kensington, two long galleries were added to the king’s and queen’s private apartments, with the king’s formal staircase modified no less than three times. Notwithstanding these efforts, Kensington Palace never became a revered architectural creation. The main South front was especially unspectacular, resulting in questions as to whether it was Wren after all who had been at work here (Haynes 2001, 7). Wren intended to turn Hampton Court (figures 38 – 39 and XVII), known foremost as the Tudor house built by Wolsey and Henry VIII, into an English Louvre. This was not to be. In light of his financial affairs no doubt, William decided to leave considerable parts of the Tudor palace in tact. He furthermore

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ordered that materials from the unfinished palace at Winchester as well as from Mary’s favourite water gallery which he had demolished after her death, should be reused. For the construction of tennis courts at Hampton (for which Wren needed advice ‘being unacquainted with tennis play’), the king instructed the use of cheaper resources than the ones proposed (Little 1975, 212). Overall, Hampton Court developed into a restrained and heavy Classical building, the king’s gallery being ‘very noble, though not grande’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6]; Little 1975, 189).

40. Honselaarsdijk in Zuid-Holland ‘from afar’.

Christopher Wren’s son’s Parentalia convincingly shows that William and Mary were actively involved in the building processes at both Kensington Palace and Hampton Court. For instance, William did not approve of Wren’s design for the cloister walks at Hampton Court which he believed were too low and dark, preventing courtiers from approaching the park with dignity (Little 1975, 176). Furthermore, William Talman, Wren’s pupil whom King William also commissioned, jotted down on a drawing of the ‘Trianon’, a copy of King Louis’ Trianon at Versailles (figure XVIII), that it was made after instructions of the king (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 30). While on site, Mary too argued and interfered with Wren. It was she – unhappy in Holland House where the royal couple lived while Kensington was being rebuilt – who personally sped up work, approving flawed drawings without consulting Wren. This she came to regret because it so happened that part of the building collapsed, leaving one of the builders dead (Little 1975, 162). William of Orange’s architectural heritage in Ireland starkly differs from that in The Netherlands and England, indicative not of construction but rather of loss. Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 99

After William’s victory on the river Boyne, Catholic landownership, already reduced from 59% in 1641 to 22% in 1688 after the Cromwellian confiscations, decreased to an all-time low of 14% in 1703 (Simms 1976, 195). Eminent Irish Catholics who had supported James II were forced to flee after the war and leave behind their landed properties, which were confiscated by William’s followers. The Irish misfortune is perhaps best illustrated by a brief account of the vicissitudes of the Earl of Clancarthy, one of those exiled.

41. Jan de Beyer’s 1743 depiction of Huis te Dieren in Gelderland.

Clancarthy, born in 1668, a member of the old Gaelic McCarthy clan, was raised as a Protestant and only later converted to Catholicism. He received his education in London where he met and married an English lady. Clancarthy was the owner of a vast territory (139,732 acres in present-day County Cork and 8,880 acres in present-day County Kerry), containing numerous castles and houses, including the famous Blarney Castle (figure 45). Following William’s victory, Clancarthy was incarcerated in the Tower of London because of his support of James II, which involved both military assistance and the provision of sustenance and accommodation at Blarney Castle. Clancarthy’s land and properties were taken over by the son of William’s close friend Hans Willem Bentinck. Managing to escape after four years of imprisonment, he fled to the Continent where, years later, Clancarthy’s name again resurfaces in historical records – surprisingly in documents of Dutch origin. Reportedly in England to collect his wife, Clancarthy was once more incarcerated in the Tower, only escaping long-term imprisonment through the interference of influential friends. William had him banned from England and Ireland, providing him in return with a yearly income of £300 (Rutgers 1903, 196-198). This small sum enabled him to make a living in presentday Germany and The Netherlands. In the latter country the once illustrious

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Clancarthy bought the small island of Rottumeroog off the Dutch north coast, where he earned his living supposedly as a sea pirate, sailing and prowling the Waddenzee. A lake, bridge and house in the North of The Netherlands are still named after him – yet not in a flattering way. Clancarthy was known to the Dutch as the malle graaf (‘silly earl’), said to live on the island with three women and several musicians, hence the title mallegraafsmeer, -brug, -huis (‘silly earl’s lake’, ‘bridge’, ‘house’) (figure 46). The earl’s letters from his Dutch period clearly express his wounded pride (Ronnes 2006, 4-5).

Power problems Architecture’s worth in the quest for power ‘I admit’, wrote Luxembourg, a French military heavyweight, ‘I enjoyed having the Prince of Orange’s house and another belonging to his favourite the Rhine grave – two of the prettiest little châteaux imaginable – burned down before my eyes’ (Robb 1962, 271). Like Luxembourg, Louis XIV also personally targeted William of Orange, occupying the latter’s principality of Orange which was vulnerably positioned in the Provence. This occurred in 1659, when William was only nine years old, and again in 1682. It was the smaller version of their Continental war with Louis XIV wreaking havoc in Orange and persecuting its Protestant population. Now on the defensive, William of Orange swore revenge, writing: ‘one must have patience and hope to find occasions for settling the score. I hope the good God will so far prolong my life’ (Robb 1966, 175-176).

42. Plan illustrating the room allocation at Het Loo.

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Notwithstanding this vengeful language, William ordered engravings depicting the palaces of Louis XIV for his cabinet in Hampton Court. Bentinck, sent to fetch the engravings, wrote to William from Paris that there was a delay in the delivery since Louis XIV, in his pride and competitiveness, ordered that the last modifications to the palaces and gardens be added (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 79). Architecture of course provided an excellent means for both kings to express their power. It is no coincidence that William’s coronation was followed immediately by renovation programs at Het Loo (figure 35) and Dieren (figure 41). His courtiers similarly started their building campaigns as soon as they were elevated into a higher position: Middachten in Gelderland (figure 47) came into being after William’s military mastermind, Godard van Reede Ginkel, achieved his successes in Ireland and was created the Earl of Athlone, whilst De Voorst (figure XIX), also in Gelderland, was erected after Arnold Joost van Keppel van De Voorst’s elevation to Earl of Albemarle. Both William’s and Van Reede Ginkel’s architectural creations referred to the triumph achieved in Ireland. The staircase at Middachten carries inscriptions of the names of all the battles that ended in British victories, incorporating moreover the images of the Irish harp and St. Patrick’s snake. In Het Loo’s garden a vase decorated with a harp points to William’s victory in Ireland as do the long pipe lines, also embellished with the harp, bringing water from the village of Asselt to the fountains of Het Loo.

43. Huis ten Bosch in present-day The Hague was one of the creations of William III’s grandmother Amalia von Solms, who was advised on the project amongst others by Constantijn Huygens. Today, Huis ten Bosch is occupied by Queen Beatrix.

Architecture did not only provide a means to express one’s power and status, it also served an important function in the patron-client relations which the kingstadholder maintained with his subordinates. The ceiling in the hall at Amerongen

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(figure 4), emulating one of the ceilings in William’s Soestdijk, should be seen as an expression of the relationship between the owners of Amerongen, Godard Adriaan van Reede and his English wife Margaretha Turnor (parents of Godard van Reede Ginkel), and William of Orange, who sometimes stopped by to look at the improvements made to Amerongen under Margaretha’s supervision. Het Nijenhuis in Overijssel (figure 48) possesses a Marot ceiling that is a copy of the mirror ceiling in Het Loo, which equally demonstrated and reinforced the patronclient relationship between owner and king. The former had followed William to England and with the fortunes the king bestowed on him he was able to restore his house. The ceiling in Het Nijenhuis celebrates William with the words ‘In Belgica Liberator, In Britannia Restaurator’ (Olde Meierink et al. 1997, 12-13). A final example is provided by Arnold Joost van Keppel’s De Voorst (figure XIX), where doorknobs were shaped in the form of William’s crown (Kok 2002, 16).

44. Huis te Rijswijk in Zuid-Holland.

Architecture was undoubtedly also used as a means to receive favours from the king. Van de Bunt (1969) argues that the hall at Zeist in Utrecht (figure 13) might have been built by Willem Adriaan van Nassau as an homage to William in order to secure privileges from the king. The same could be reasoned for Bentinck who presented William with orange trees at Het Loo. The king, in turn – participating in this Maussian-like gift exchange – did not only use architecture as a means to buttress the existing hierarchical order; through architecturally-informed favours or gifts outstanding dues were paid off. Van Reede Ginkel, for instance, received not only a title and a sum of money for his victories in Ireland, but also the services of William’s architect, Jacob Roman.

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Pretence and (false) modesty In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one was expected to build according to rank and status, which inevitably led to widespread debates on pretentiousness. Wolsey and Fouquet, respective owners of Hampton Court and Vaux-le-Vicomte in France, represent two famous examples of men deemed to have built too lavishly and who subsequently, and not coincidentally, lost their houses. The debate on pretentiousness also targeted William’s architecture, the complaint however in this case being that he did not build grandly enough. This might be related to the relative sobriety in comparison to his English and French counterparts that characterised William’s younger years – when William was still a boy, Pepys assessed his attendance ‘very inconsiderable as for a prince’ (Pepys 1928 [1659-1664], 140) – and perhaps also to the notorious Dutch characteristic of frugality, commented on by Fynes Moryson who famously branded inhabitants of The United Provinces ‘Sovereign Lords Millers and Cheesemen’ (Van Nierop 1990, 13). Be that as it may, it remains curious to say the least that Het Loo, William’s prime creation in his native country, was deemed ‘fit only for a prince’ and that Hampton Court, his grandest English home, was judged only so-so.

45. Blarney in County Cork, consisting of two joint towers built in the fifteenth century (the tower on the left) and in the sixteenth century (the tower to the right).

Instead of setting the standard for his courtiers, William of Orange drew inspiration from the architectural creations of the men and women in his entourage. He was so delighted with Middachten’s staircase, for instance, that he proposed an identical one for his Trianon at Hampton Court (Van Raaij and Spies

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1988, 131). In Britain, William went on a tour around the homes of his more affluent subordinates with the single object of attaining ideas for his own houses. Enchanted with what he had seen during this tour at Burghley, then owned by John Cecil Earl of Exeter, William decided to return the next day and have another look (ibid., 137-138). Of course one might argue that by inspecting these houses William evaluated what was being created so as to be able to build in an ever grander style himself. It must be said, though, that he seldom did. This brings me to the two issues taking centre-stage in the remainder of this chapter. The first issue (or set of questions) concerns William’s approach to architecture and his fascination with French architecture in particular. Why was it that William of Orange decorated his cabinet with prints of the palaces of Louis XIV, and what exactly was the attraction of French furniture which lured him to violate his own trading laws in order to obtain it? Why did he re-model Hampton Court on Le Louvre (small-scale and considerably less grand besides), if status was his main concern? Why, in other words, if he was indeed concerned first and foremost with power and revenge, did he not at least try to compete with the French king? The second issue relates to William’s relationship with his courtiers. That Van Reede Ginkel was rewarded by the king for his military victories is easily explained within the context of a power model. William’s bequest to Van Keppel, with neither political nor military prowess, however, cannot be explained in this vein. What was the reason behind William’s gift to Van Keppel – the very man whom Burnet declared ‘was so much given up to his own pleasures […] he never had yet distinguished himself in anything’ (Burnet 1979 [1725], 379) – of one of the most lavish houses in The United Province and the largest apartment in William’s residences in both Britain and The Netherlands?

Culture of friendship William as friend Constantijn Huygens, the man responsible for William’s education, adhered to the humanist concept regarding humans as complex works of art, ‘whole’ – spiritual, moral, mental and physical – beings. The curriculum he himself had been subjected to and which in turn his own sons as well as William III underwent, is believed to have been drawn from the education portrayed in Castiglione’s The Courtier (Heesakkers 1994, 137). This highly influential book (first published in 1528), comprising a debate on the required virtues of a courtier, also touches on the subject of friendship. One of the nobles taking part in the discussion suggests that it is of utmost importance whom the courtier selects as his friends since ‘he who consorts with the ignorant or wicked, is deemed ignorant or wicked; and on the contrary, he who consorts with the good, the wise, and the discreet, is himself deemed to be the like’ (Castiglione 2000 [1528], 99). Castiglione had another character reply that ‘there are very few true friends to be found, nor do I believe that the world any longer contains a Pylades and Orestes’ (ibid., 100). A third Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 105

person then muses that ‘the friendship of the wicked is not friendship […] the loss would be far greater than the gain, if human intercourse were to be deprived of that highest pitch of friendship which in my opinion gives us all the good our life has in it’ (ibid., 100-101). For pedagogical counsel Huygens will surely, besides Castiglione, also have consulted Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince, which advocated educationalists of a prince ‘to provide him with well-bred companions […] to become his friends but not his flatterers’ (Erasmus 1997 [1516], 55). Huygens seemingly took this advice to heart, surrounding young prince William with several pages his own age. One of them was Hans Willem Bentinck, who arrived at Het Binnenhof (figure 36) in 1664, when William was fourteen years old, and who subsequently also went to study with William in Leiden. Their parallel biographies are furhermore embodied in Bentinck’s choice of a wife, when he married the English Anne Villiers in 1678, sister of William’s mistress Elisabeth Villiers. Bentinck was to become William’s lifelong friend, entrusted with the weighty jobs of purchasing furniture for the king-stadholder’s palaces and superintending his gardens; worthy titles, moreover, such as that of the Master of the Bedchamber and Groom of the Stool were bestowed on him. Bentinck’s closeness to and influence over William were not appreciated by all, as a contemporary rhyme illustrates: Make room crys Sir Thomas Duppa Then Benting up-locks His King in a box And you see him no more till supper Onnekink 2001, 23

William’s friendship with the Irish Earl of Ossory also had its origins in the then fashionable pedagogical orthodoxy recommending that William should be accompanied by boys his own age. Whilst visiting England for the first time, the boy chosen for this purpose was Ossory. Adulthood found the two friends on opposite sides of the political and military spectrum, with William engaged in the war of the early 1670s for The United Provinces, Ossary for England. True friendship, however, was believed to survive such predicaments. Accordingly, William and Ossary, during this time, kept up their correspondence, both expressing the hope that the unfortunate affair would not cause an estrangement. When, at one point, their respective armies had put up camps a close distance away from each other, Ossory asked and was granted permission by Charles II to visit William’s camp in order to meet his friend. Whilst in Ireland, in 1691, William called upon Kilkenny Castle (figure XX) to see where his now-deceased friend had spent his childhood years. William’s friendship with Hans Willem Bentinck equally survived predicaments, relating in this instance to Bentinck’s jealousies of Arnold Joost van Keppel van De Voorst, William’s best friend in the latter years of his life. It was

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the hardiness Van Keppel showed when he fell off his horse and broke his leg, that first caught William’s attention. The king, as said, financed Van Keppel’s house De Voorst in Gelderland (figure XIX), unique in The United Provinces for its use of stone instead of brick, and provided him with the best apartments in various palaces once Bentinck had moved out. Bentinck claimed it was the widespread rumour that the king’s friendship with Van Keppel was physical in nature that bothered him: however, it seems more likely that the root of the matter was his jealousy that was palpable to all (Ashley 1963, 220). William did not let Bentinck go without a fight and pleaded with his friend to stay, at the same time expressing disappointment in Bentinck’s lack of trust regarding the rumours of sodomy (Robb 1966, 396-399). At first, William’s pleas seemed to placate Bentinck, nonetheless, he did eventually resign over the matter and emptied his apartments in all of William’s houses which subsequently became Van Keppel’s domains. Against all odds, William’s and Bentinck’s friendship seems to have survived these hurdles; when William lay dying at Hampton Court in 1702, both Van Keppel and Bentinck were at his bedside.

True friendship An oft-cited book in Dutch debates on the historical friendship is Luuc Kooijmans’ 1997 Vriendschap en de Kunst van het Overleven in de Zeventiende en Achttiende Eeuw (‘Friendship and the Art of Survival in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’). As the title betrays, Kooijmans looks on the historical friendship largely as a strategic (family) affair intrinsically linked with matters of power and (mutual) dependency. Kooijmans (2000) seems to contradict himself in Liefde in opdracht (‘Love on Assignment’), his biography of Willem Frederik van Nassau (1613-1664), stadholder of the northern provinces of The United Province and a relative of William of Orange. Arguing that true friendships and life at court were incompatible for Willem Frederik, Kooijmans implies Willem Frederik distinguished between an obligatory relationship that came with the job of stadholder and ‘true friendship’ (Kooijmans 2000, 117). I believe Willem Frederik probably did make such a distinction. In fact, as will become evident later in this chapter, it was a much-discussed subject within the context of the ‘culture of friendship’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The men and women Kooijmans writes about all took part in this culture of friendship based on the Classical veneration of ‘true and perfect friendship’ (Montaigne 1991 [1580], 4). Montaigne’s sixteenth-century On Friendship, one of his famous Essays, was amongst the most renowned treatises on the subject and excessively quoted. It speaks of friends ‘merging into one another’ and, following Cicero, generally regarded friendship – when ‘souls are mingled’ – as far superior to heterosexual love; a ‘best’ friend was one’s second self (Montaigne 1991 [1580], 9). The culture of friendship as it existed in the seventeenth century was, however, not a blind copy of Classical concepts of friendship. A scholastic, Augustinian, reconfiguration of the Classical amicitia perfecta introducing God as a third party

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partaking in the friendship, also affected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century friendships (Hyatt 1999, 256). Laws of friendship, Alba Amicorum (albums containing personal poems, drawings and Classical references to friendship, contributed by a friend for a friend), as well as paintings with the subject holding a copy of Cicero’s De Amicitia or portraying a group of friends, are understood as specific Renaissance inventions (Burke 1999, 265).

46. ‘Het Mallegraafsmeer’ (the Silly Earl’s Lake), in Friesland. Named after the Irish Earl of Clancarthy.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historical documents provide clear testimony to the culture of friendship. A first indirect reference can be found in Lady Anne Clifford’s diary with an entry in November 1616 that reads: ‘Upon the 9th I sat at my Work & heard Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s Essays, which Book they have read almost this fortnight’ (Clifford 1990 [1603-1676], 41). Daniel Heinsius, asked to contribute to an Album Amicorum, noted that the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618 was actually too serious a matter to be thinking of poems, but that ‘the laws of friendship’ made him obey the request (Thomassen 1990, 148). Letters exchanged by members of the Muiderkring (the circle of friends who used to assemble at Het Muiderslot; Hooft, Huygens, Tesselschade, Barlaeus and others) repeatedly mentioned ‘een trouwen band van vriendschap’ (‘a loyal bond of friendship’), ‘mijn beste, onveranderlijke vriend’ (‘my dear, unchanging friend’), and ‘vaste vriendtschap’ (‘steadfast friendship’) (Worp 1918, 271, 308, 320). Inspired by Classical predecessors, country house poems often contain descriptions of a meal in the company of friends, with friendship in general playing an important role in this genre. Erasmus already touched on this theme in his work, avowing that it was his dearest wish in life to enjoy food and conversation with a friend (De Vries

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1998, 168). Bishop Burnet spoke of ‘a close and strict friendship’ (Burnet 1979 [1725], 337), and one of the chapters in Digby’s thinly veiled autobiography is titled: ‘A perfect example of friendship and love’ (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 3).

47. Middachten in Gelderland, built in the late-seventeenth century on older foundations by Godard van Reede Ginkel, King William’s main military man and victor in Ireland.

Friendship was not just a buzzword of contemporary society; as a cultural phenomenon, friendship was also a topic of debate. Straight-talking Liselotte, Louis XIV’s sister in law, spoke out against this culture: ‘To my mind, the biggest proof of friendship is to let people live in peace. It is a great mistake to imagine that it is possible to possess another’s heart forever’ (D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 81). Others disagreed, conceding however that true friendship was a rare thing and becoming ever more rare (Delen 1990, 136). Discussions not only centred on the authenticity of friendship, a popular theme was also the comparison between marriage and friendship, as is evident from Montaigne’s adoption of Cicero’s evaluation, already mentioned briefly, that love between two male friends surpasses that between a man and a woman. He clarified: You cannot compare with friendship the passion men feel for women, even though it is born of our own choice, nor can you put them in the same category. I must admit that the flames of passion […] are more active, sharp and keen. But that fire is a rash one, fickle, fluctuating and variable […] which only gets hold of a corner of us. The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp or keen. Montaigne 1991 [1580], 5

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usually so high and elevated as men’s’ (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 5-6). Another excerpt from Loose Fantasies reads: ‘his affection to his friend prevailed above his own judgement, and above his love to his mistress’ (ibid., 106), thus mirroring a contribution to an Album Amicorum which contains a drawing of Abuchas saving his friend Gydanus from a burning house before collecting his wife and children (Offerhaus 1990, 54). Opinions on the subject will have varied however, as is demonstrated once again by Digby whose two main characters, a man and a woman, ‘confuted the opinion of those who hold that the laws of a high and divine friendship cannot be observed where a woman hath a part’ (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 113).

Architecture and the culture of friendship Architectural expressions of friendship A date stone that used to adorn the fortified house Ightermurragh in County Cork stated: ‘hanc struxere Domum quos ligat unus amor, 1641’ (‘Those who built this house are united in the highest form of love’) (Gleeson 1892, 158), a proclamation with which Ightermurragh’s owners seemingly participated in the aforementioned debate. In The United Provinces Emilia van Nassau, daughter of William of Orange I, and Don Emanuel, son of the prince of Portugal, decorated Wychen in Gelderland (figures 49 and XXI), the castle they bought in 1609, with wall anchors in the shape of a double ‘E’ for ‘Emilia’ and ‘Emanuel’ and the ‘Sfermé’ for fidelity. An inscription, ‘ditat cervat [sic] fides’ (‘fidelity enriches and strengthens’), and an engraving of two shaking hands (figure 50) complemented Emilia’s and Emanuel’s proclamation on marital love and friendship (Eliëns 1992, 9-19). A ceiling painting at Hof bei Oschatz in Sachsen, Germany, equally displays two shaking hands after an emblem by Gabriel Rollenhagen (figure XXII), illustrated in his Nucleus Emblematum (Rollenhagen 1611-1613; Dülberg 2005). At Otterston Castle in Scotland an inscription over the entrance announces ‘Welcum friends’ (Tabraham 1997, 12); a stone on the façade of De Torentjes in Limburg finally reads: ‘Me ponit amicis artis Apollinae cultor Nicolaes Beyssel AO XVC XXVI’ (‘For my friends; Nicolaes Beyssel, practitioner of Apollonic art, did place me, 1526’; my translation) (Hupperetz et al. 2005, 374). Apart from these explicit material references to friendship, past uses of architectural space can also be informative of this culture. In France, Madame De Rambouillet, personally drawing the plans for her house and one of the first to replace wood panelling and leather wall coverings with wallpaper, reportedly specifically hung portraits of friends against the quiet background that this new type of decorative scheme provided. (Dulong 1992, 327-329). Country house poems and closet poems indicate that an invitation to walk around the park or to enter closet or cabinet was regarded as an expression of intimacy and friendship (Fowler 1994, 15). Robert Carey, whose job it was to keep the border area between England and Scotland safe, noted about Robert Kerr, interned in his house: 110 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

Some four days passed; all which time his friends came unto him, and he kept his chamber […] after long discourse, charging and recharging one another with wrong and injuries, at last, before our parting, we became good friends […] After our reconciliation he kept his chamber no longer, but dined and supped with me. I took him abroad with me, at least twice a week, a-hunting, and every day we grew better friends. Carey 1972 [1577-1625], 40-41

Lady Anne Halkett’s autobiography provides an example of the reverse occurrence. When her friend Lady Anne Howard of Naworth Castle started to develop a distrust of her, Howard would no longer enter Halkett’s room in Naworth as before. According to Halkett’s memoirs, this trying time in their friendship, to which she dedicated roughly one third of what is left to us of her partly destroyed autobiography, was the result of the efforts of the chaplain to stir up strife. When Halkett instead ‘went to her [Howard’s] chamber […] as formerly […] I found the door shutt, but heard her weemen, so I knockt […] they said they could not open the doore for there lady was busy’ (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 3742).

The habitat of female friendship Lady Anne Halkett not only co-habited with Lady Anne Howard; later in life, before her marriage to Sir James Halkett and again after his death, she shared a house with the Countess of Dunfermline. It is important to pay attention here to the fact that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture of friendship cannot be studied in isolation from the eighteenth-century Romantic friendship and vice versa; the typical eighteenth-century friendship ensued from the Renaissance platonic friendship. Female friends moving in together is a practice associated mainly with the eighteenth century, though it obviously already occurred prior to that time. Perhaps the best-known eighteenth-century example of two female friends co-habiting concerns the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, two Irish women who eloped together and set up a household in Wales, referring to one another as ‘my better half’ (Myers 1990, 75-76). Mary Wollstonecraft entertained similar wishes to live with her best friend for whom she had felt ‘love at first sight’. In an essay on friendship Wollstonecraft sent this woman, friendship was defined as ‘the most solemn, sacred union’ (Faderman 1985, 138). A century earlier Lady Anne Halkett wrote in her autobiography: ‘Early one morning shee came into my chamber before I was outt of my bed, and lying downe by mee […] I took her in my arms’ (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 38). When the paintings of the ‘Hampton Court Beauties’ were finished, moreover, this series of paintings portraying the women at court believed to be most beautiful and the equivalent of Charles II’s ‘Windsor Beauties’, were hung not in one of William’s chambers, but in Mary’s apartment.

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The rituals of friendship – evident in co-habitation and (body) language used – which have come to be associated since the Romantic era with lovers instead of platonic friends, obscure our present-day understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century friendships, including, as we shall see, those William of Orange maintained.

William of Orange and the architecture of friendship Apartment allocation William of Orange’s letters are saturated with references to love, adoration and passion – references to the culture of friendship – which give these letters an exotic flavour. ‘I shall be yours all my life. I pray you, love me too’, he ended one letter to his Irish friend Ossory (Robb 1962, 209), and: ‘I wish with all my heart that the state of affairs would permit me to see you. Be assured that, whatever turn the world’s affairs may take, I shall always be very much your servant, and you will see, if ever the occasion offer, that there is no one more wholly yours than G.H. Prince of Orange’. To Bentinck, when his father had passed away, William wrote in his letter of condolence: ‘I am so much of your friend that I take all that happens to you as if it happened to myself’ (Haley 1988, 33-34). William’s biography exposes him as a typical Renaissance friend: he maintained intense, close friendships Montaigne-style (with Bentinck, Ossory, Van Keppel) and endured, as Castiglione (2000 [1528], 101) had preached, friends’ ‘natural defects […] without breaking with them for slight cause’ (Bentinck’s jealousy, Ossary’s loyalty to William’s rival). The provision of apartments to courtiers in William’s palaces was largely a matter of ceremony; after all, men like Bentinck, Van Keppel and Van Reede Ginkel usually all had their own private houses in The Hague and London. The ceremonial aspect, however, did not extend to the procedures determining who would and who would not be granted an apartment. Unmistakably it was those whom the king counted amongst his favourites that stood the best chance of receiving lodgings in one of his palaces. At Het Loo, after the renovations following William’s acceptance of the English crown, the second floor contained the apartments of William and Mary, whilst the first level was reserved for apartments for some of the king’s courtiers. Hans Willem Bentinck, initially, as shown, William’s best friend, received the largest and most luxurious apartment at Het Loo consisting of an antechamber, bedroom, cabinet and garderobe. Arnold Joost van Keppel was allocated a room and a cabinet. When Bentinck, however, resigned following his bout of jealousy towards Van Keppel, the rite of passage marking the (temporary) ending of Bentinck’s and William’s friendship was Bentinck’s emptying of all his apartments in William’s various palaces which were then given to the new best friend Van Keppel. Hendrik van Nassau-Ouwerkerk, a relation of William and another childhood friend, was allocated a room, a cabinet and garderobe at Het Loo; William’s close friend Vaudemont, was provided with a room and a cabinet. A room was also organised for Henry Sidney, who arrived 112 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

in The Hague a diplomatic courier and to whom the king, it was said, took an instant liking. We know that Bentinck, Van Keppel, Van Nassau-Ouwerkerk and Sidney were also provided with apartments at Hampton Court. Godard Reede van Ginkel, William’s main military man, did not possess apartments at Het Loo and Hampton Court, nor anywhere else it seems. Arnold Joost van Keppel, who was generally regarded as extremely useless but very likeable – ‘a cheerful young man, who had the heart to please, but was so much given up to his own pleasures […] he never had yet distinguished himself in anything’, as Burnet (1979 [1725], 379) put it – had, as was shown, an apartment in all of William’s palaces.

48. Multi-phase Nijenhuis in Overijssel. The façade dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the tower on the far right to the nineteenth century.

So, friendships evidently determined not only who received an apartment in William’s palaces but also the size of these apartments. The favourite or best friend possessed the largest apartment, which as we saw at Het Loo consisted of an antechamber, bedroom, cabinet and garderobe. Others only had a room, or a room and a garderobe. Friendship also determined where in the palace an apartment was located with the favourite receiving the apartment closest to that of William of Orange. This is evident when taking a closer look at the arrangement at Hampton Court. The king’s and queen’s apartments at Hampton Court were situated in two different, yet connected wings, located around a courtyard. The king’s apartments on the South side consisted of his ‘State Apartment’ at first floor level and his ‘Private Apartment’ on the ground floor. Remarkably, Van Keppel’s apartment at Hampton Court, consisting of three rooms, was placed within this wing of the palace, that is, within William’s apartment. Yet that is not all. Access to Van Keppel’s rooms was via a staircase that led from the deepest, the most private room of the State Apartment, down into William’s Private Apartments. Van Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 113

Keppel’s apartment thus formed a part of William’s most private space. At Kensington Palace, it is perhaps worth mentioning, the private apartments of William of Orange and that of his closest friend (first Bentinck, later Van Keppel) had connecting doors (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 16-19; Haynes 2001, 7; Thurley 1996, 26-27).

Platonic love? Mark Girouard argues that the sequence of rooms in English palaces and houses reflected the pecking order: how far one was allowed into the sanctuary of guard chamber, presence chamber, eating room, privy chamber, withdrawing room, great bedchamber, little bedchamber, closet, was dependent on one’s rank and status (Girouard 1978, 144-145). Norbert Elias before him explained the layout of Versailles in similar terms (Elias 1998 [1969]). Van Keppel, who could not boast of a particularly privileged pedigree, should according to this model not have been allowed to go very far into the apartments of the king. The fact that Van Keppel in actual fact possessed an apartment within the king’s most private domain, indicates that just who was allowed how far down the sequence tells us something besides that person’s rank.

49. ‘Double-E’ wall anchors at Wychen refering to the owners ‘Emilia’ and ‘Emanuel’. The ‘S-fermé’ on the right alludes to fidelity.

William’s relationships with Bentinck and Van Keppel were more than likely not of a physical nature. Admittedly, however, this is not easy to assess in hindsight. I already noted that part of the complexity of the matter lies in the fact that a particular spatial organisation and (body) language has come to be linked since the Romantic epoch with physical (or romantic) love, instead of platonic friendship. This should not be taken to mean that ‘sodomy’ was not part and parcel of (court) culture. At Versailles, Liselotte, Princess Palatine and Duchess of

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Orléans, was far from ignorant about some of the sexual practices in court circles, as her letters bear witness to. She wrote to her two half-sisters: ‘Where can you [Ameliese] and Luise have been hiding, to know so little of the way of the world? […] If one were to detest every man who is fond of young fellows, it would be impossible to find even six people to like, or at least not to dislike. They come in every sort of variation. Some of them hate women and only love men, others like both men and women, some only like children of ten or eleven, others young men between seventeen and twenty-five’ (D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 132). Of the fair sex she noted: ‘some of the young ladies there [at St Cyr] had fallen in love with one another; they were caught committing all sort of indecencies’ (ibid., 77). Notwithstanding this explicit review of sexual behaviourisms at a court reminiscent of that in England in more ways than architecture alone, William of Orange in all likelihood did not maintain physical relationships with Bentinck and Van Keppel. Their closeness – quite literally, in terms of the location of their apartments – should most probably be understood within the context of the amicitia perfecta with its sentimental and explicit, yet platonic, rituals. As to the rumours that present-day scholars refer to, proclaiming William was sexually involved with men, Liselotte once again provided an explanation: ‘What prevents me from making friends’, she wrote, ‘is that as soon as you do, there is talk of your being in love with them and they with you’ (ibid., 130).

Power and friendship Equality The especially strong rumours relating to the alleged homosexuality of Princess (later Queen) Anne, William’s sister in law, were perhaps closer to the truth. The Duchess of Orléans told Lady Sandwich that ‘when Anne got drunk she made love to women’ (Ashley 1963, 238). The buzz about the princess’ sexual preferences were so widespread that one Dutchman in William’s entourage did not want his wife to come over for William’s crowning, believing Princess Anne was in love with her (Huygens Jr. 1876 [1688-1696], 100). Anne’s main love interest seems to have been Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, her ‘Lady of the Bedchamber’. The two women had no liking for William of Orange, whom they dubbed the ‘Monster’ and the ‘Abortion’, nor did they get on with Anne’s sister, Queen Mary (Field 2003, 72). The feeling was mutual and, at some point, Mary requested Anne to dismiss Sarah from court. Princess Anne, however, ‘thought she ought to be allowed to keep what person she pleased about herself, and when the queen insisted on the thing [Sarah’s removal], she retired from the Court’ (Burnet 1979 [1725], 345). Anne wrote Sarah: ‘I’d rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you’ (Field 2003, 70), and along the same lines she answered her sister she would sooner leave herself than dismiss her friend. So it came to pass. It was certainly not a cottage that Anne, Sarah and their husbands moved into, although the reference to a cottage is significant. True friendship, it was assumed, recognised rank nor status. Tellingly, Anne and Sarah used Chapter 5 – Friendship: the castle and the other | 115

nicknames for each other – ‘Mrs Morley’ and ‘Mrs Freeman’ – concealing their respective ranks; friendship had made them equal. Returning to the current political reading of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury friendships, it is important to note that friendship at the time was, quite on the contrary, perceived to be apolitical and devoid of issues concerning titles and standing. Daniel Defoe in his work confirmed this understanding of friendship as a force of equality, writing that ‘love knows no superior or inferior’ (Field 2003, 67). A poem dedicated to William of Orange further illustrates this belief: Virtue’s above the Reach of Flattery. He needs no Character but his own Fame, Nor any flattering Titles, but his Name. William ‘s the Name that’s spoke by ev’ry Tongue: William ‘s the Darling Subject of my Song. Defoe 1702 (cited in Kilpatrick 1998, 106)

Friendships did of course in reality, to a large extent, follow class divisions (as they do today). Emilia Lanyer in her country house poem The Description of Cookeham indicated that her friendship with the Countess Dowager of Cumberland (mother to Lady Anne Clifford), whom the poem celebrates, was hampered by their distinctive echelons (Lanyer 1994 [c. 1609-1610], 45-52): Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a diffrence is there in degree. Many are placed in those Orbes of state, Parters in honour, so ordain’d by Fate; Neerer in show, yet farther off in love, In which, the lowest always are above. Lanyer 1993 [1569-1645], 134

Hence, the point made here is not that the culture of friendship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contributed to a form of equality, rather that members of the élite cherished the idea that true friendship sprang from a compatibility of characters only and not from power related issues. An interpretation of the culture of friendship only in terms of power and status therefore entirely misses the point. Paradoxically a political reading of past society in general and the culture of friendship more specifically obfuscates the fact that friendship was actually a tool one could use in power relations. When out of money, Johan Maurits van Nassau, owner of Het Mauritshuis (figure 3), presented Bentinck with a grotto for his garden, in this way trying to gain William’s favour by pleasing the king’s best

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friend. Perhaps the ultimate example of this pragmatic stance on the culture of friendship is found on an early-seventeenth-century English tombstone: Fulke Greville Servant to Queen Elizabeth Councellor to King James And Friend to Sir Philip Sidney Llewellyn 1990, 157

Idle flatterers and true friends Friendship was a cultural phenomenon, a highly ritualised relationship, bound by particular rules and practices. Does this mean that friendship was merely a fashion? I do not believe this to have been the case. A study of contemporary historical sources reveals much moralising against ‘affectation’ and ‘idle flattery’ (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 80; D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 218) and the oft-made distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ friendship. Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, for instance, complained ‘there is no such thing as real friendships’ anymore (Field 2003, 441); Erasmus moreover distinguished between flatterers and true friends, the latter never using ‘pretence or lies to gain favour’ (Erasmus 1997 [1516], 55). A Dutch Album Amicorum carries an inscription that reads: ‘Vruntschap gemaect, In schijn Vergaet soubijt’ (‘Friendship born in falsehood, soon disappears’) (Heesakkers 1994, 123), and Roemer Visscher (Maria Tesselschade’s father), stated with regard to the artists and poets gathering in his Amsterdam house that ‘verwaende courtesy comt hier niet inne’ (‘arrogant flatterers will not be allowed in’) (Worp 1918, xvii).

Conclusion After the war in Ireland, William had a tough time deciding to whom and how much he would donate of the forfeited Irish estates. In actual fact it was to become an immensely complicated affair, with the English objecting to the sheer number of Dutch acquisitions; Irish Catholics desperately trying through petitions to retrieve their lost land and properties; and Protestant Irish landowners complaining that William listened too much to the Catholic Irish grievances, ignoring Protestant interests in the process. Initially, however, William’s task must have seemed an easy one: he distributed land to his friends and to those he was indebted to. This means William was quick to reward Bentinck (needless to say), his military men (such as Van Reede Ginkel), as well as his mistress, Elizabeth Villiers and, remarkably, the two former mistresses of James II. The Dutch houses built in the late-seventeenth-century by William and the men in his entourage were financed chiefly with money made from the sales of the forfeited Irish estates to Protestant Irish landowners, a fact not receiving

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adequate attention within Dutch architectural history. This Irish-Dutch architectural correlation is conveyed in Middachten’s staircase (figure 47), incorporating harp, St. Patrick’s snake, and the names of the battles won by Van Reede Ginkel, the ‘Earl of Athlone’. The Irish connection is also evident in the garden of William’s Het Loo (figure 35), where various architectural features incorporate a harp. Several paintings depicting battle scenes played out in Ireland were commissioned at this time, one of them ‘wildly imaginary’, with Athlone looking like Heidelberg (Murtagh 1990, 84). Constantijn Huygens Jr.’s diary is also testimony to this type of ethnocentrism. As William of Orange’s secretary, he was present in Ireland in 1691. The diary makes no mention of the battle of the Boyne; instead Huygens Jr. recorded the castles and houses that he saw. A tower-house between Dundalk and Ardee was ‘build in a strange Irish fashion’; while Dublin Castle he dismissed as ‘not interesting’. About a house in the North of Ireland Huygens noted derogatively that ‘it was biggish, very disorderly, build in an oldfashioned manner, and decorated with ugly paintings’. Only Kilkenny, rebuilt in the French style by William’s friend Ossary, he considered ‘a fine place’ (Huygens Jr. 1876 [1688-1696], 286, 294, 302, 308-309; my translations).

50. Handshake and inscription on the gatehouse at Wychen proclaiming marital love and friendship.

His father, on the contrary, was a lot more appreciative of foreign cultures. In a letter to Mary, Huygens Sr. pretended to be a Chinese man, remarking on the fact that a Chinese screen was cut in order for it to fit as the upholstering of one of Mary’s Chinese cabinets. In the process of cutting the screen, however, the story the screen conveyed was obliterated. Huygens, as the Chinese man, kindly asked Mary to take notice of this the next time she decorated one of her cabinets (Van Raaij and Spies 1988, 46-47).

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The Chinese porcelain and furniture in Mary’s cabinets were exotic, just like the camel Locke ran into at Dieren, and the crocodiles, monkeys and water snakes on display in Het Mauritshuis. Irish architecture and Irish culture in general, however, also assumed more of an exotic flavour than would appear from a contemporary vantage point. Neither political allies nor true friends, the Irish were mere strangers. For the most part, Ireland was far removed from the WestEuropean culture of the English, Dutch and French. In William’s own words, to stay in Ireland was to be ‘cut off from the civilised world’ (Troost 1987, 6; my translation). The opposite is equally true; Ancien Régime French élite culture was far more akin to the world of the men and women making up the higher echelons of Dutch seventeenth-century society than is the case in the twenty-first century. The upper strata in England, France and The United Provinces, the subjects of this book, to a large extent shared the same culture. William of Orange and Louis XIV in many ways spoke a similar language, and men like Bentinck, Vaudemont, and Sidney had few cultural borders to cross; the Earl of Clancarthy, on the other hand, was considered ‘silly’ (Rutgers 1903). William of Orange’s architecture was most certainly a political instrument, perhaps even a political statement; still more than that, it was an explicit articulation of contemporary cultural norms. This explains, for instance, why William after he had been crowned king worried about the replacement of the original colonnades at Het Loo by four pavilions. Issues of status and prestige and a king-worthy appearance might have overruled matters of aesthetics in this case, something that was not to William’s liking. It also explains how it was possible for William of Orange to have created palaces that were ‘very noble’ (that is, in the French style) but not ‘grande’: for William, to adopt the style that was admired by him and those who made up the cultural élite of the time had precedence over the sheer size or magnificence of the architecture in political terms. Although it seems inexplicable from the perspective of the macro level of state politics that William adopted the architectural style of his main enemy, we begin to understand this if we move away from this macro level and place it within the context of the shared élite culture that existed at the time. A focus on power that emphasises political and military divisions and understates a shared intellectual culture, dealing, amongst other issues, with (architectural) aesthetics and friendship, has made it difficult to understand the attitudes of past people towards their structural environment.

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Chapter 6 Privacy: the castle and the individual

Pursuing privacy as experienced by people in the past has proved to be remarkably complicated, aptly described by one scholar as ‘a thorny issue’ (Neuschel 1988, 620). The main queries in the debate on privacy are: Did a sense of privacy exist in the past? If yes, in what period did it originate, and why? Generally, the answers to these questions are too wide-ranging to provide much direction, abounding in sweeping statements and little cross-disciplinary debate. Scholars writing on past experiences of privacy, moreover, frequently operate from a personal and culturally-specific definition of privacy, providing a unilateral, instead of a culturally contingent explanation for its rise and existence. This chapter aims to bring together the wide variety of views on privacy, so as to elucidate the complex ways in which bygone notions of privacy are understood in the present, and to facilitate a theoretically-informed debate that will get to grips with experiences of privacy in the past. More specifically, it will deal with privacy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Ireland and The United Provinces in reference to an architectural context.

Debating privacy The sheer range of arguments on the subject of privacy is striking. Ideas vary significantly, first of all, about the origins of privacy. Orest Ranum, in a study on Samuel Pepys’ house in London, deems a need for privacy primordial, an Urphänomen. He writes, ‘no matter how rich or how poor, how young or how old, human beings create around them a space that is uniquely theirs . . . The amount of private space may be very small, but there is some privacy and sense of recognition of that privacy by others’ (Ranum 1982–1983, 259). Various other scholars, in contrast, look upon privacy as a fundamentally modern phenomenon and argue, for instance, that privacy originated in the post-Enlightenment period when many of the dichotomies recognised today such as culture–nature, sacred– profane, ritual–practical, and indeed public–private, are thought to have been invented (Brück 1999). Alternatively, the alleged harbinger of privacy is

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nineteenth-century bourgeois domesticity, separating the workplace from the home and generating public versus private spheres (Ariès and Duby 1988, ix; Benjamin 1978 [1935]), often distinguished as distinctly male (public) and female (private) areas (see for instance Cott 1977). Scholars who argue that this separation of the workplace and the home already came to pass before the nineteenth century, consequently also trace the emergence of private spaces back to an earlier period; Neuschel (1988, 620) to the sixteenth century, Rybczynski (1988, 70, 77) to Holland in the seventeenth century, and Friedman (1989, 180) to seventeenthcentury England. Matthew Johnson, in his analysis on the origins of privacy, ascribes the phenomenon to the social transition from medieval feudalism to early modern capitalism around the turn of the seventeenth century. Connecting the need for privacy with the move out of the great hall (see also Airs 1995; Cooper 1997; Girouard 1978; Rybczynski 1988), as well as to the emergence of ‘the individual’, Johnson also points towards the arrival of the new Protestant faith, to a time when the priest was removed as an intermediary and when a ‘turning inward’ of the Puritan master of the house could be detected (Johnson 1993, 173–176; see also Benn and Gauss 1983, for a similar reference to the influence of the Reformation on a growing need for privacy). Those who argue that the individual was ‘invented’ long before the seventeenth century usually also ascribe a budding need for privacy to an earlier period. Gerritsen (2001, 92), for instance, argues that people already came to be valued as unique, individual beings in the wake of ‘twelfth-century Humanism’, and accordingly connects this epoch with new distinctions between private and public spheres. David Austin (1998) sees it differently still. Although he, too, maintains that in the twelfth century ‘a tangible sense of priviness’ could be detected, Austin adds that ‘public as opposite [of private] is a product of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the growth of the world system and complex modern states redefined individuality and the location of the agent within a remoter and more attenuated structure’ (Austin 1998, 185–187; my emphasis). Apart from a separation of workplace and home, the advent of the individual, and the arrival of the Reformation, scholars have pointed to yet other reasons for manifestations of privacy. The changing relationship between landowner and peasantry in sixteenth-century England was decisive in the development of more private spaces according to Malcolm Airs. When peasants stopped farming the demesne and started to pay rent instead, the landlord–tenant relationship became less personal, with the manor house transforming from an economic centre with a focal great hall into a structure centred around more private spaces (Airs 1995, 4). Nicholas Cooper (1997), to give a final example, relates the need for privacy in the sixteenth century to centralisation processes. Employing Norbert Elias’ (1994 [1939]) famous thesis on the civilisation process which, according to Elias, got underway in the Middle Ages and progressed at least until the early-twentieth century, Cooper maintains that when defence became organised by the state, personal power was no longer obtained through violence but rather through 122 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

individual distinctions and mannerisms. When these civilised manners, and especially those regarding the bodily functions were internalised, a need for privacy was born (Cooper 1997, 120). Cooper (1986, 93) is not alone in his alignment of privacy and the human body. Loades couples a remark about privacy as ‘a rare luxury, not much sought after’ with a statement on the lack of hygiene in Tudor times; Sarti (2002, 144) in her dissection on private spaces in the European home asserts that ‘in the early modern era, the modesty about one’s person was different to that today’; Pardailhé-Galabrun’s 1991 The Birth of Intimacy, deals almost exclusively with privacy in relation to bodily functions. Correspondingly, Jameson remarks that privacy was ‘no doubt ritually acted out as far back as the violation of the body and the ban on touching’ (Jameson 1997, 264). Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process (1994 [1939]) has not only been influential in this association of privacy with the ‘ignominy of flesh’ (Yeats 2006 [1928]), it could be argued that despite Elias’ warning against linear processualism, this work has moreover advanced the idea of privacy as a linear process running from past to present, a need for privacy increasing steadily, with scholars signalling ‘an increasing desire for privacy’ (Turner 1997, 34), ‘a desire for a greater measure of privacy’ (Rybczynski 1988, 39), ‘an increasing need for privacy’ (Fock 2001, 22; my translation), ‘a growing feeling for privacy’ (Girouard 1978, 143), and ‘the increasing desire for separation and privacy’ (Sarti 2002, 145). This linear perception of privacy is also evident in literature on developments pertaining to the spatial organisation of historical architecture. It is frequently argued, first of all, that the development of separate bedrooms (a space that originated, depending on whom one reads, any time between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries), instead of the multipurpose rooms that preceded them, expressed a growing need for privacy (Ariès and Duby 1989, 509; Flanders 2004, xxiv-xxv; Rybczynski 1988, 110). Secondly, when scholars address the development of hallways or corridors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they frequently mention that by closing rooms off from each other, corridors accommodated a higher level of privacy (De Kool-Verhoog 2002, 23–24; Loughman 2000, 28; Pardailhé-Galabrun 1991, 55; Sarti 2002, 139-142). Finally, when mention is being made of the fact that in the nineteenth century servant quarters had become strictly separated from the main body of the house where the family resided, reference is usually made to a greater need for privacy (two examples are: Franklin 1981, 39; Girouard 1978, 285). In short, architectural features such as bedrooms, corridors and servant quarters are placed on a continuum that runs from no need for privacy in a distant past to a profuse need for private space in more recent times. In preference to a linear development, I wish to reiterate and develop the point that privacy encompasses several meanings and guises, which are time- and location-, or culture-specific. A wish for privacy, or ‘isolation’, in an era of ‘Sentimentalists’ and ‘Romantics’ (Todd 1986) undoubtedly comprised a different understanding of the concept of privacy from that which a twelfth-century Chapter 6 – Privacy: the castle and the individual | 123

reclusive monk employed. That meanings of privacy do not only vary diachronically, but indeed also differ synchronically, is evident from the letters written by the Duchess of Orléans, who observed distinct perceptions on privacy in relation to the body in seventeenth-century Germany and France. She writes: […] people here [in France] are not all that prudish, but talk openly enough about all sorts of natural functions. I know a gallant, whose name I must not mention, who always accompanies his mistress to her close-stool; when she has finished he takes the seat, while they chat to each other. And another couple of my acquaintance always announce when either of them needs purging. I have heard this with my own ears. D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 37–38

A need for privacy is thus at times related to feelings of shame and embarrassment, at other times to religious doctrine, political power, or psychological well-being. Privacy can furthermore refer to a separation of men and women, yet also to the retreat of the nuclear family, to the isolation of a social class as a whole, or to the withdrawal of an individual human being. Whilst perhaps none of the above-mentioned explanations for the development of private space is incorrect, it is evident that they represent only one of many possible narratives on privacy.

Recognising past individuals Archaeology on the individual Adding to the already convoluted discussion on privacy is the complicated and much debated, related subject matter of the history of the individual. Contrary to the information available to anthropologists through interviews and participant observation and the data available to historians in various ‘ego-documents’, the archaeological record provides only a murky view of ‘the individual’. Archaeological textbooks quite noticeably bear evidence to the widely shared belief that archaeological studies refer to cultures or societies at large, and not to individual people. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn define archaeology as the ‘study of past societies’ and the ‘past tense of cultural anthropology’ (Renfrew and Bahn 1994, 9), with anthropology, according to these archaeologists, representing the ‘study of humanity – our physical characteristics as animals, and our unique nonbiological characteristics that we call culture’ (ibid., 9). It is remarkable that whilst in our daily language we habitually speak of the uniqueness of the individual person, Renfrew and Bahn on the contrary apply the adjective ‘unique’ exclusively to cultures, that is, to people in a plural, and not in a singular sense. Archaeologists’ focus on past societies instead of individual human beings is rather conveniently backed up by postmodern theory. This means that instead of having to present a theoretical stance as an adjustment to a non-available dataset,

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it can be argued that archaeologists, in shying away from the individual, are in fact following a general trend in theoretical thinking. This might sound somewhat odd in a time of postmodernism in which the individual supposedly takes centrestage, with ‘the experience of the individual […] currently [being] the focus of consideration’ (Renfrew 2001, 122). Archaeologists, however, often talk more about subjectivity than they do about the subject, and decidedly more on identity, which does not touch on the ‘subjective, inner world of the individual’ (Meskell 2001, 188). Foucault is generally regarded as one of the key figures marking the discontinuation of humanism and the onset of postmodernism. Following a humanist ‘creation of man’ – translated in an archaeological context as: ‘the individual is an idea constructed by modern philosophical humanism’ (Thomas 2004, 147; my emphasis) – Foucault famously stated that ‘man is [now] in the process of disappearing’ (Foucault 2002 [1970], 420). An obliteration of individual ‘man’ is, however, not only linked to Foucault’s theses; archaeologists can tap into countless different theoretical approaches in order to defend their stance (or lack of a stance) on the individual. Although no longer applied in its original form, a structuralist approach equating cross-cultural human thought processes, as well as (post)structuralism foregrounding a cultural subject instead of a private individual, still manifest itself in present-day archaeology. Neo-Marxist and feminist approaches in their various guises are, similarly, widely adopted by archaeologists. However, these theoretical approaches, in spite of a stress on difference (especially discernible in third-wave feminism), ultimately focus on (sub)group similarities and relations, as is for instance evident in one anthropologist’s professed partiality for the term ‘intersubjectivity’ in preference to ‘subjectivity’ (Weiner 2000, 242). Contrary to what is commonly associated with postmodernism – a dismissal of grand narratives and stress on pluralism, relativism and subjectivity – Henrietta Moore not long ago acknowledged that ‘anthropology’s emphasis on the social at the expense of the individual accounts in large part for its failure to develop a theory of the subject’ (Moore 1994, 4). The curious fact that the recent popularity of theories on agency within archaeology and the wider theoretical pool archaeologists draw from, has not led to an increased interest in the individual, has been noted (Johnson 1989). Matthew Johnson, critiquing studies by Shanks and Tilley, Leone and Hodder, brands the individual in archaeology: ‘‘the man who wasn’t there’: in postprocessual explanation, the active agent present in a variety of theoretical forms but absent in practice’ (Johnson 1989, 206). Yet, even within the archaeological theoretical discourse, the agent and the individual are frequently divorced from each other. Thomas asserts that ‘agency is not a force that issues out of the body interior: we act in relation to others, and we act from a position that is socially constituted’ (Thomas 2004, 147). John Barrett, writing on pre-history and well-informed on matters theoretical, similarly reveals how archaeological theories on agency are separated from premises on the individual, which latter term he applies almost apologetically: Chapter 6 – Privacy: the castle and the individual | 125

Practice necessarily requires the presence of an agent, the active participant, although reference to the agent is not necessarily reference to the individual […] A concern with agency […] neither marks a return to the individual in history, nor a return to methodological individualism. The individual does not now become the basic unit of our analysis, nor are we primarily concerned with individual motivations, nor do we begin analysis with a consideration of an individual action, nor do we see societies as being nothing more than the cumulative product of individual actions. Barrett 2001, 149

One approach frequently adopted by archaeologists and favourable to an individual perspective, is phenomenology. The current appeal of a phenomenological approach to archaeologists is, however, not related to its potential vis-à-vis an individual perspective but to the fact that phenomenology emphasises a bodily engagement with the material world, which is favourable to a discipline studying human life through an analysis of archaeological, hence material, artefacts. Christopher Tilley, on the basis of phenomenology, asserts that a certain route traversing a particular landscape leads to one general, transhistorical, way of experiencing this landscape (Tilley 1994). Paradoxically, however, this inference has been criticised even within archaeology for moving too far away from a personal or individual perspective (Brück 1998). Another archaeologist applying an approach that is well suited to an analysis of the individual, in this case Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, concludes with the statement that ‘we cannot yet know what was in the minds of individuals in prehistory – but then, individuals were not yet recognized as such until more recent times’ (Nash 1997, 67; my emphasis). Although Nash is correct in arguing that archaeologists should not impose current ideas of individualism on the prehistoric era, this does not mean that ‘individuals’ did not exist as such in the past. The same is true for Rybczynski’s remark in Home: ‘just as one did not have a strongly developed self-consciousness, one did not have a room of one’s own’ (Rybczynski 1988, 35). Thomas more lucidly explains this idea that to use the concept of the individual for the distant past is ‘a dangerous and potentially narcissistic exercise. A respect for the other demands that we should allow that other to be itself, rather than reflect our own image back to us’ (Thomas 2004, 147-148; my emphasis). Contrary to Thomas, however, I would argue that it is in fact ‘dangerous and potentially narcissistic’ to deny the historical ‘other’ an individual quality we attribute to ourselves. Juxtaposing Thomas’ remark with one anthropologist’s (self)criticism of the practice of ‘othering’ within his subject area, elucidates to my mind that rather than a humanist interpretation of the individual it is the approach in the aforementioned citations that mirrors the ethnocentrism permeating numerous, especially early, anthropological studies:

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Modern social anthropology was built on the putative cultural distance between anthropologist and anthropologised, on the largely unexamined assumption of the differences between the self (observer) and the other (observed) […] one of its unfortunate consequences has been to deny to cultural ‘others’ the self consciousness which we so value in ourselves. Cohen 1994, 5

Despite the recent popularity of the body (metaphor) within both anthropology and archaeology, most postmodern scholars are not comfortable with a biologically informed individualism operating from the premise that in spite of the infinite diversity people reveal, our study object is ultimately of a human kind, which is biologically and psychologically homogeneous throughout time and space (Kloos 1987, 107-108). Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist partaking in the study of human cognition, corroborates why a physical explanation should not be ruled out in advance: We do not need to posit anything special about cultural representation that would make them functionally different from other types of mental representation. Any individual mind entertains a large number of mental representations. Most of these are idiosyncratic. Boyer 2000, 224; my emphasis.

A concluding remark on the subject of the individual within archaeology concerns the frequent name-checking by archaeologists of Foucault, which has already been alluded to. The title of one of Foucault’s best-known works The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and his ‘archaeological approach’, might inadvertently have flattered archaeologists and quite likely tapped into some of the insecurities experienced by archaeologists risking their, often incipient, steps into the field of theory. However, Foucault’s main appeal lies in his theories on ‘man’. Nash’s remark that ‘individuals were not yet recognized […] until more recent times’, as well as Thomas’ reference to ‘the individual’ as ‘an idea constructed by modern philosophical humanism’, are quite likely inspired, directly or indirectly, by Foucault’s thesis on the modern ‘creation of man’. Yet, they should not be attributed to him. Foucault, contrary to common belief, actually never contended that ‘the individual’ was ultimately a modern phenomenon; Foucault’s The Order of Things is a ‘history of thought’, dealing with the question how ‘man’ became established ‘within knowledge’ and emerged as a ‘new figure in the field of the episteme’ (Foucault 2002 [1970], 356; my emphasis). The emergence of this new figure should not be understood as the rise of ‘the individual’, but rather refers to the fact that from modern times onwards humans are perceived differently within the field of knowledge: ‘man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of

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knowledge and as a subject that knows’ (Foucault 2002 [1970], 340). In short, the fact that modern individualism represents an artefact of modernity, should not be – though, as shown, often is – taken to mean that individuals did not exist in the past; to understand the creation of ‘man’ as the discovery of ‘the individual’ is to simplify and misread Foucault.

Architectural manifestations of the individual ‘If I may nott have liberty in my owne lodging to sitt up and burne a candle as long as I please withoutt having such disturbance’, Lady Anne Halkett, obviously annoyed, exclaimed after soldiers burst into her lodgings in search of something or somebody. Halkett indicates in this excerpt from her autobiography that she regarded her lodgings as a private space and that she believed it was up to her, as an individual, how to inhabit this space (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 63). Historical sources abound in such clues as to the existence of a past individual, yet also the architectural inheritance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bears evidence to a change in self-perception. It is at this time that castles and houses start to be embellished with the names or initials of owners or builders, as well as with the date of construction or reconstruction (figures 51 and XXIII). A pre-sixteenthcentury date stone on a building is rare in England and The Netherlands as well as Ireland, but they increasingly appear after this time, with the practice becoming widespread in all three countries after the mid-sixteenth century (Ronnes 2007a (forthcoming); Ronnes 2007b (forthcoming)).

51. Date stone in a window embrasure at Ballinacarriga in County Cork, including the initials of Randal Murlihy and Catharine Cullinane, owners of the tower-house in 1585.

Date and initial stones have been surprisingly little studied in The Netherlands (in contrast to gevelstenen (‘gable stones’) adorning countless sixteenth- and especially

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seventeenth-century town houses), Ireland and England. The earliest known Dutch date stone (1514) in a castle context could formerly be found at Saasveld, in Overijssel. Not much later, in the period between 1525-1545, the fashion for date and initial stones gathered pace, with the phenomenon having become universal from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Hackfort, in Gelderland, commemorates both the owners of the house and the date 1567 (Keverling Buisman 1998, 85-86). An anonymous castle in the northern Dutch province of Friesland, to give a further example, used to incorporate a stone, now on display at Unia State, carrying the date 1614, with the ‘16’ and ‘14’ flanking the coat of arms of the former owners of the castle (figure 52).

52. Ex-situ date stone at Unia State, Friesland. The coat of arms are as of yet not identified.

An early English example can be found at Sutton Palace, in Surrey, built in the 1520s by Richard Weston, whose initials, ‘RW’, adorn a date and initial stone incorporated in the palace (Cook 1974, 53). Stapleford, Leicestershire, provides a rather loud example of an inscription in large-sized letters covering the length of an entire wing of the house: ‘William Lord Sherard Baron of Letrym Repayred this Bvylding Anno Domini 1633’. A more casual reference to proprietors and dates can be found at sixteenth-century Wilderhope Manor, Shropshire, where the initials of Ellen and Francis Smallman appear on the plastered ceilings, and several carved dates can be found elsewhere in the house. The initials ‘AP’, refering to Anne Pembroke, alias Anne Clifford, one of the protagonists of this book, are frequently found on the houses that were once in her possession. Date and initial stones first appeared in Ireland in the mid-sixteenth century, ostensibly a little later than in England and The Netherlands (figure 53, Gleeson 1892, 153-161; Buckley 1986; Moore 1987; Power 1992; Brindley and Kilfeather 1993; FitzPatrick 1993; Gosling 1993; Salter 1993; Sweetman et al. 1995; Moore

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1996; Power 1997; Grogan and Kilfeather 1997; Alcock et al. 1999; Moore 1999; Power 2000; Farrelly and O’Brien 2002; Salter 1993; Salter 2004a; Salter 2004b; Salter 2004c.). The long gallery fireplace of Carrick-on-Suir is embellished with what must be one of the very first Irish dates. However, not only ornate houses such as Carrick-on-Suir carried dates and references to owners. A window embrasure at the tower-house Ballinacarriga, County Cork, to give a random example, reads ‘1585’, ‘RM’ (for Randal Muirhily) and ‘CC’ (for Catherine O’Cullane). Another example comes from Castle Lower (or Timoleague Castle), in County Cork, where inscriptions in window frames read ‘DB ET ER ME FECET’ (David Barry and Ellen Roche had me made) and ‘1586 August 1’.

53. The proliferation of date and initial stones in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as found in the reseach for this book.

It is no easy task to determine the origins of date and initial stones and the reason for the sudden proliferation of the phenomenon in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury northern Europe. Possibly, the root of date and initial stones lies in the age-old practice of laying the first stone (De Vries 1994, 109-122). The beforementioned stone at Saasveld hints at this tradition: In ‘t jaar ons heeren duysent vyfhondert en veerttien, doen lydt men van my den eersten stien, door Adriaan van Rede

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en syn huysvrouw is dit geschien (In the year 1514, Adriaan van Rede and his wife laid the first stone) (Gevers and Mensema 1985, 413). This reference, however, is so far unparalleled. It seems more likely that date and initial stones formed a part of Renaissance formulae which, concurrent with conventional and well-trodden diffusionist theories, initially surfaced in the Renaissance centres in the South of Europe and could be found in northwestern Europe a while later. The fact that date and initial stones are frequently incorporated into Renaissance-style buildings decorated with columns, pilasters, pediments, and cartouches – or were themselves embellished with such features – also suggests a Renaissance origin (Ronnes 2007a (forthcoming); Ronnes 2007b (forthcoming)). To engrave names and dates is, however, perhaps foremost about positioning oneself both spatially and temporally. The fashion of adorning buildings with date and initial stones reflects the desire on the part of owners to mark their presence on earth and to negotiate their identity with those visiting the castle. There is evidence, moreover, suggesting that the pairing of the husband’s and wife’s initials refers to joint ownership of house or castle.

‘Far away from the hall …’ In the bedroom With one thorny issue, that concerning the existence of a past individual, for the moment out of the way, another is already looming large. To detect a past appreciation of privacy is not easily achieved, as could be gleamed from the literature overview on the topic given above. According to various scholars investigating privacy in relation to historical architectural space, one of the key indicators is the development from multi-purpose rooms to separate ‘bedchambers’, the underlying supposition being that a linear development can be discerned from a distant time when whole families or entire households used to spend the night together in what is usually assumed to have been the great hall, to a more recent era with alternative mores and manners spiralling into the conception of the personal bedroom. Although I argue against a narrow definition of privacy in terms of the body and do not recognise a simplified linear trend pertaining to privacy – whether or not one possesses a personal bedroom usually depends more on financial resources than on the actual time period – I do believe the bedroom is indeed an indicator for privacy. In the mid-seventeenth century, whilst making recommendations on interior decoration, one Englishman wonderfully illustrates this private quality of the bedchamber: Your own [portrait] and your wives or Children, best become your discretion, and her modesty, (if she be faire) to furnish the most private, or Bed-chamber; lest (being too publique) an Italian minded Guest gaze too long on them. Loughman 2000, 43

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Opinions, as said, vary as regards the time when bedrooms were first in use; Girouard (1978, 99), dealing with England and The United Provinces, makes a case for the mid-sixteenth century; Fock (2001, 87), Rybczynski (1988, 43) and Loughman (2000, 26), refer to seventeenth-century The United Provinces. Alcoves, private niches customarily carrying a bed, are generally believed to have become fashionable in the second half of the seventeenth century. My own research suggests that the bedroom as we know it was fairly common among the higher echelons of the English and Dutch societies from approximately 1600 onwards. A propos the Irish material, one of the key questions in relation to privacy concerns the small rooms in tower-houses. Should these verticallyorganised, four to five rooms, occupying the space adjacent to the spiral staircase be understood as bedrooms? Given the lack of historical sources on the use of this architectural space, this proposition could hitherto neither be affirmed nor refuted. The fact, however, that the Earl of Cork mentions a bedroom in one of his homes in Ireland would suggest that in Ireland too bedrooms already existed in the early-seventeenth century. For the more privileged Irish they were seemingly quite common by the mid-seventeenth century, as can be determined from the Earl of Clanricarde’s reference to a bedroom. Following the loss of his castle Terrelan in the nine-year war in the 1640s, he indignantly scribbled down that he had always thought Terrelan to be ‘as free to me as my drawing room to my bedchamber’ (Burke 1983 [1634-1647], 429).

Further channels for retreat In addition to the emergence of bedrooms, the access of, or approach to and from, a place is frequently brought up in discussions on architecture in relation to privateness. Access-analysis, first mentioned by Hillier and Hanson in The Social Logic of Space (1984), represents one tool available for archaeologists and architectural historians trying to convey the permeability of a building (Foster 1989, 41; Fairclough 1992, 352) and the interconnection of rooms and their location on pathways (West 1999, 120), both assumed to be related to issues of control and privacy (see also Faulkner 1963). Even if access diagrams in themselves do not seem to aid significantly, as I will argue below, the assumption that (a lack of) access is related to the issue of privacy, is in itself correct. In the sixteenth century, Montaigne wrote appreciatatively and with palpable surprise that several German inns were equipped with hallways, which allowed people to enter their rooms without first having to pass through various other rooms (Ariès and Duby 1989, 509). Two centuries later, Magdalena van Schinne, in contrast, was so familiar with the concept that she was simply astounded by her brother’s temporary accommodation, consisting of a room that could be entered from all sides (Van Schinne 1990 [1786-1795], 26). The origin of the hallway is typically hallmarked as a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century development (Fock 2001, 22; Girouard 1978, 123; PardailhéGalabrun 1991, 55; Loughman 2000, 28; De Kool-Verhoog 2002, 23; Sarti 2002, 141-

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142). According to the primary sources I consulted it would seem that this architectural feature became increasingly common throughout the seventeenth century. Hallways should, however, not be linked exclusively to the seventeenth (or eighteenth) century, seeing that they were already constructed in Dutch sixteenth-century houses such as Het Markiezenhof in Noord-Brabant (figures 34 and XIV) and Nijenrode in Utrecht (figure XXIV). Indeed, it has been argued that ‘Holland developed architectural elements similar to ‘modern’ corridors very early’ (Sarti 2002, 269, with a reference to Cosenza 1974, 127). (In)accessibility and privateness also have a bearing on the use and construction of private staircases. According to a 1736 biography of John Churchill (husband of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough), Princess Anne and Sarah, her ‘Lady of the Bedchamber’, ordered the construction of a secret staircase at St. James’ Palace (Field 2003, 55). About Anne’s sister, Queen Mary, it is reported that one night, in order to verify the rumours about William’s affair with one of the Maids of Honour, she posted herself on the private staircase at Het Binnenhof in The Hague (figure 36) where she waited, not in vain, for William (Ashley 1963, 210). The bay-window, an architectural feature increasingly common from the sixteenth century onwards in each of the three countries under discussion, is also presumed to have been associated with privacy (Fenlon 1996, 38). Although one has to tread carefully, the Bishop of Cork might have provided an example of the privyness of the bay-window when he noted that just before his capture, Florence McCarthy and his cousin were engaged in an ardent and private discussion ‘standing in the window in Kilbrittaine castell next to the sea’ (MacCarthy 1867, 293). Towers and turrets, finally, regularly carried more private lodgings in an English context. Perhaps this design originated in the medieval arrangement of a great hall with a tower attached to the high end, comprising the great chamber or solar and various other rooms which were accessible only to a select group of people. Tadhg O’Keeffe denotes a horizontal axis in medieval castles carrying the hall that used to be public in character, and a vertical axis consisting of the more private keep (O’Keeffe 1997, 8). Whether or not keeps were indeed synonymous with privateness remains uncertain. Nevertheless, it is apparent that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many cabinets or closets, the ultimate private space throughout that era, could often be found in towers and turrets.

Closeting Unlike the hall-way or corridor which used to disclose rooms and allowed people inside these rooms a certain level of privacy, and unlike the bedroom frequently housing not just one but a number of people (a married couple, guests), the closet was designed as a space where one could be entirely on one’s own. From Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary (1998 [1599-1605]) it is evident, for instance, that she welcomed people in her chamber, yet her closet was a space for her own personal and private use. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a variety of terms –

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‘study’ (or ‘secret study’), ‘closet’, ‘cabinet’, ‘withdrawing room’ – were in use to indicate this small, private space. Lady Ann Fanshawe noted in her autobiography that her husband ‘went with his handfull of papers into his study for an hour or more’ and ‘came out of his closet’ (Fanshawe 1979 [1625-1680?], 116). Usually, the closet formed a part of an ‘apartment’. Huygens Jr. in his diary inadvertently explains what an apartment ought to consist of – chamber, cabinet and garderobe – when claiming that William of Orange had promised him one (Huygens Jr. 1876 [1688-1696], 247). Particularly in royal palaces, however, a king’s or queen’s apartment could consist of numerous additional rooms. Various scholars have suggested that the apartment or ‘enfilade’, as these large apartments are called, did not allow for much seclusion or even ran counter to the object of gaining privacy, given the fact that they lacked a corridor (see for instance Fumerton 1991, 71-77; Thornton 1991, 313). This argument is erroneous first of all because it does not take into consideration private staircases and jib-doors that allowed one to circumvent the more public rooms in the enfilade. Secondly, since most apartments were usually the possession of an individual person, he or she retained control as to who would and who would not be permitted access. Thirdly, the idea that apartment and enfilades were public spaces, is flawed because it disregards the fact that one room – usually the closet – in the sequence of spaces making up the apartment or enfilade lay furthest away from the entrance, hence being the deepest, and often also the most private, room. The closet was the main architectural space where people spent time alone, praying, studying, contemplating, collecting art, composing letters or writing diaries. In several houses in The United Provinces, such as Middachten (figure 47), the closet was leather-covered, so as to keep out the noise and to ensure that what happened inside the closet was not audible for people outside. To add to the private nature of closets they often had no windows and were frequently positioned, as said, in remote parts of the house, in a tower or turret or deep inside an apartment. Lord Fanshawe used his closet as a space where he could busy himself with work of a political nature about which Lady Ann Fanshawe should remain ignorant. Other activities too required the private environment of the closet. Bishop Burnet disclosed in his memoirs that Queen Mary, shortly before her anticipated death, burned the greater part of her private papers in her closet and that subsequently her husband William of Orange, in his bereavement, locked himself up in his closet to cry (Burnet 1979 [1725], 359). Angel Day (1967 [1586], 238), linked the closet with distressed lovers (like William of Orange), who ‘revolving too and fro’ goes to his ‘woonted solitary closet’ to ‘be alone and think’. Closets furthermore constituted places for reading and writing, as for instance, John Evelyn’s diary and Liselotte’s letters testify (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6]; D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722]), and for private contemplation and religious reflections. The Primate of Ireland, Bagnall, according to one Englishman, spent ‘the whole day at his study […] which he hath placed at a good distance from his 134 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

house to prevent distraction and diversion’ (Brereton 1904 [1635], 379-384). Lady Margaret Hoby recorded in her diary that she: ‘[…] praied with Mr Roche, and priuatly in my Closett’ (Hoby 1998 [1599-1605], 17). For Samuel Pepys amongst others, the closet also served as a safe for money and other valuables (Ranum 1982-1983, 265). Finally, they also functioned as ‘cabinets of curiosity’, the forerunners of our modern museums (see Impey and MacGregor 1985), with one English collection occupying the walls of an entire ‘closset’ (MacGregor 1985, 211). Occasionally, a close friend was invited into the closet for a confidential and private conversation. John Evelyn, in a 1681 diary entry, speaks of this ‘closeting’: ‘I din’d with the Earl of Essex, who after dinner in his study, where we were alone, related to me how much he had been scandaliz’d and injur’d in the report of him being privy to the marriage of his Lady’s niece’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 430). In Lady Anne Clifford’s case it is not a friend but another confidant, her husband, who entered her closet to relay a personal and embarrassing matter: ‘The 5th [of April 1617], my Lord went up to my closet & said how little money I had left contrary to all they had told him’ (Clifford 1990 [1603-1676], 53). Lady Anne Halkett mentions that her own wedding ceremony was performed in her brother’s closet (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 84). Liselotte, finally, alludes to personal tête-à-têtes in the closet when she wrote nostalgically to her cousin in London: ‘I wish you were here with me in my closet’ (D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 218). Especially in a royal context, it was considered a great honour to be invited into a closet. John Evelyn proudly described the occasion when he was ‘call’d into his Majesty’s closet’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 282). Liselotte referred to Louis XIV’s closet as the ‘Holy of holies’ and ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’, and realised she had fallen out of favour with the king when the invitations to visit him in his closet were no longer forthcoming (D’Orléans 1998 [1672-1722], 125).

Culture of privacy Privacy institutionalised Traditionally viewed as quintessentially private (Girouard 1978, 56; Thornton 1981, 59), the closet was recently reconceptualized as ‘a politically crucial transactive space’ (Stewart 1995, 77). Matthew Johnson, on the basis of his more recent contentions on privacy (2002) compared to his earlier work (1993), now seems to be a strong advocate of this political approach, contending that ‘what we see as a ‘natural’ desire for privacy is actually all about the location of power within the house’ (Johnson 2002, 115–116). I beg to disagree on the basis of historical sources such as the ones that the citations given above stem from, and maintain that the closet was foremost a space associated with privacy and solitariness, with power-related issues mainly being a derivative of this function. Analyses of past perceptions of privacy in terms of power tend to downplay cultural prerogatives. Without wanting to refute the correlation between privacy and power – on the contrary, I would argue this connection is both real and

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significant – the issue of privacy entails and deserves more than the oft-heard general statements about power and dependency. Even when houses and castles built prior to the sixteenth century were also occasionally furnished with ‘cells’ or studies, in the seventeenth century they became a part of a habitus or a new set of behavioural rules. Francis Bacon, in his essay entitled Of Building, famously wrote that ‘houses are built to live in, and not to look on’ (Bacon 1997 [1625], 122). When speaking of the perfect palace, he noted that it needs two different parts, ‘a side for the banquet […] and a side for the household: the one for feasts and triumphs, and the other for dwelling’ (ibid., 123). Bacon seemingly distinguished between a predominantly public and a more private realm – between a place where a public role is performed and another where a more personal part is played out – a distinction that is echoed in Constantijn Huygens’ The Day’s Work: The Order of the House (1638) (Davidson and Van der Weel 1996). In its extensive description of Huygens’ relationship with his wife Sterre, the poem broaches a private world ‘within’, as opposed to public life in the ‘world without’: When my mind is filled with rumours I shall whisper news to please you […] These are things reflected to you, Secrets told within our fortress, Mirrors of the world without: As the camera obscura Topsy-turvy through its lenses Draws the sunlit world inside. Davidson and Van der Weel 1996, 97-99

A distinct cultural phenomenon, notions of privacy formed a part of a wider set of ideas coming into vogue in a period now referred to as the Renaissance, yet which had its roots not only in the Humanistic movement and the revival of Classical culture but also in medieval, more or less religious, traditions. In the period under discussion it became fashionable for the élite to be ‘solitary’, whereas previously only particular individuals, such as saints and knights, had removed themselves from society, an act which used to be tied in with bravery and misery (Ariès and Duby 1988, 516–517). Certain terms and expressions referring to this culture of privacy – ‘shutting oneself up’, ‘being private’, ‘solitary’, ‘solitude’, ‘alone’ and the already-mentioned ‘closeting’ – increasingly appeared in historical sources as catchphrases articulating new, not always more positive, evaluations of being alone. Sarah Duchess of Marlborough remarked: ‘I used to run from court and shut myself up […] in one of my country houses, quite alone.’ (Field 2003, 119). Ulrich von Hutten, even more gloomily, stated in 1518 that ‘whether you are awake or asleep, you are alone even in the midst of others’ (Ariès and Duby 1988, 540).

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There is evidence for a debate about the pros and cons of privacy, in which the above catchphrases also appear, albeit more as an exercise in rhetoric, a literary game, than a serious questioning of this new fashion of the élite to retreat. Westerbaen’s country house poem Ockenburg (1654), for instance, describes a conversation between two men, one of whom making an effort to explain to the other, to no avail it seems, the benefits of ‘being solitary’ (De Vries 1998, 183). Similarly, Mackenzie’s panegyric on ‘Solitude’ was answered with an essay by John Evelyn in which the latter, contrary to Mackenzie, promoted active employment in a public position as opposed to privacy (Bray 1895, x). Robert Carey, reminiscing about a period in his life of unusual peace and quietness, noted that subsequent to his attendance in Spain as chamberlain of the Prince of Wales (the future Charles I), he went to the young man’s father, King James I, and ‘delivered him the Prince’s letters, and after some discourse had with me, I kissed his hand, took my leave of him, and came to my own house, where I remained very privately, until the Prince’s return’ (Carey 1972 [1577-1625], 78). In his thinly-veiled autobiography Sir Kenelm Digby seemingly advocated privacy as an answer to the melancholy that so frequently held the upper classes in its grip during the seventeenth century (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 11). He wrote that his heroine’s father, after the death of his wife ‘retired himself to a private and recollected life, where he might give free scope to his melancholic fantasies’. The diarist John Evelyn looked for privacy to reflect on the years that lay behind him, and stated gravely: ‘I went to London to be private, my birthday being the next day, and now ariv’d at my sixtieth year, on which I began a more solemn survey of my whole life, in order to the making and confirming my peace with God’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 422). Nicely, though not coincidentally, coalescing the two themes so far discussed in part II, historical sources frequently disclose the connection between true friendship and privacy. As Montaigne professes: ‘That secret which I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can reveal without perjury to him who is not another: he is me’ (Montaigne 1991 [1580], 15). Thomas Butler in a similar vein bid John Evelyn ‘[…] let you and I dine together to-day, I am quite alone, and have something to impart to you; I am not well, shall be private, and desire your company’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 417). A final example of the synergy of the cultures of friendship and privacy, is related to Constantijn Huygens’ progress on The Day’s Work: The Order of the House (1638), and what we know happened to it once it was finished (Elslander et al. 1969, 35). Whilst composing this piece of poetry, Sterre, his wife, suddenly died, abruptly ending Huygens’ endeavour. When he resumed about a year later, he compared his state of mind to a dilapidated house. Upon finishing The Day’s Work, Huygens announced his wish to recite it for his (Muiderkring) friends. Assembled in this private sphere, Huygens read out his personal and heartfelt poem that was not accessible to the general public until nearly twenty years later. He ended with a plea to his friends:

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Comfort, you friends who have listened, Friends who have felt my sad words’ hurt in your heart, If the live limbs torn the living one from the other Have tested endurance, tested your suffering strength, Know at last what I suffer. Console me. My voice Protesting will never cut the thread of your discourse. Speech requires strength, all strength I had has now left me. Speak, friends, I succ […] Davidson and Van der Week 1996, 109-111

Retreat in the country The comment uttered by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, that she would shut herself up in one of her country houses, quite alone (Field 2003, 119), does not stand on its own. Parallel to the seventeenth-century vogue of the new poetic genres of ‘country house poems’ and ‘closet poems’, both alluding to the culture of privacy, their spatial equivalents – country house and closet – were at this time similarly tantamount to seclusion. When Carey remarked of the Earl of Essex that ‘I know his full resolution is to retire to some cell in the country’, he denoted the private nature of both country house (‘retiring to the country’) and closet (‘cell’) (Carey 1972 [1577-1625], 16). Thus, not only were certain spaces within the house such as closets and alcoves private, but complete houses and castles could become refuges of privacy. This is true for the country house in general, and for the hunting lodge and banqueting house more specifically. The hunting lodge, usually situated in a deer park or a forest, was not merely employed as accommodation whilst hunting, but also served solitary ventures and romantic rendezvous (figure XXV). Intimates at this time moreover started to retreat to the banqueting house, either a separate structure in garden or park or some remote place within the house such as a roof terrace or turret, in order to enjoy an exclusive banquet. According to Renaissance poets following in the footsteps of Roman precursors, ‘good’ man lived in the countryside (McClung 1977, 183). Simultaneously with this newly fashionable Classical ethos, another school of thought propagated the view that the culture of retirement epitomised in the retreat into the country, was synonymous with selfishness and ‘unchristian’ conduct. Harrison’s complaint (1994 [1587], 202) in the late-sixteenth century that the then avant-garde prodigy houses represented the decay of housekeeping and hospitality, is typical in this regard. Occasionally, the writings of adherents of the culture of retreat are testimony to this inhospitable or selfish element to seclusion. Montaigne states, for instance, that ‘we have lived enough for others; let us at least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves, and to our own ease and repose’ (Montaigne 2004 [1580]). He moreover lectured that ‘we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherin to settle our true liberty, our principle solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there’ (Montaigne 2004 [1580]). 138 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

In response to this accusation of selfishness and unchristian conduct, country house poems not surprisingly touch on the issue of hospitality. They speak of the lord’s obligation to the larger community, an obligation that is either fulfilled or rendered void (Fowler 1994, 15; Kelsall 1993, 44). In cases when the lord of an estate is defended by the poet, country houses themselves are often presented as modest structures. Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (c. 1652) represented an original attempt to defend the retreat of one man, Lord Fairfax (Cousins 1990). His quest for solitude and privacy at Appleton House, Marvell compared with a tortoise hiding in its shell. The supposedly modest proportions of Appleton are correspondingly equalled to the tortoise’s case: Why should of all things man unruled Such unproportioned dwellings build? […] The low-roofed tortoises do dwell In cases fit of tortoise-shell: No creature loves an empty space; Their bodies measure out their place. Marvell 1994 [c. 1652], 281

Another famous example of a country house poem celebrating and defending the owner of the house, is To Penshurst (c. 1616) (figure 54) by Ben Jonson, the opening words of which read as follows: Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold: Thou has no lantern whereof tales are told, Or stair, or courts; but stands an ancient pile, And these grudged at, art reverenced the while. Thou joyst in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair. Jonson 1994 [c. 1616], 53

Edmund Waller, evidently aiming with About Somerset House to counter the charge of self-centred behaviour and sumptuousness on the part of those retreating in the country, composed: From a confined, well-managed store, You both employ, and feed, the poor. Let foreign princes vainly boast The rude effects of pride, and cost, Of vaster fabrics, to which they Contribute nothing but the pay. Waller 1994 [1606-1687], 197-199

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Notwithstanding the tricky balance, which the English élite in particular had to strike between adopting the fashionable Classical culture of retreat and circumventing accusations of inhospitable and unchristian conduct, many still opted for a (seasonal) life in the country. In The United Provinces the élite en masse bought and built country houses appropriately baptized Sorghvliet (‘Flee from worries’), Rustrijk (‘A place of rest’), and Hofwijck (‘Flee from court’). The privacy enjoyed in a country house was to some extent associated with old age and retirement or, as Montaigne put it: ‘‘Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it […] Socrates says that boys are to cause themselves to be instructed, men to exercise themselves in well-doing, and old men to retire from all civil and military employments, living at their own discretion, without the obligation to any office’ (Montaigne 2004 [1580]). Apart from references to retirement, the reasons offered for a retreat in the country are no different from those given for a withdrawal into the closet. In his country house poem Hofwijck Constantijn Huygens avows he retreats to Hofwijck (figure 12) (a half hour coach journey away from The Hague), in order to do what he 1cannot achieve in the city, that is to think and contemplate. Comparing Hofwijck to the underwater world where all is silent and fishermen dive for pearls, Huygens at Hofwijck searched for pearls of the mind, for virtue and knowledge (Van Strien and Van der Leer 2002, 25-26). The privateness of the countryside was, however, not always sought for elevated reflections. In response to his friend Barlaeus’ unanswered love interest in Maria Tesselschade, Huygens jokingly started to vie for her hand as well, writing that she and he should find a place ‘far away from the hall in the castle of Muiden […] in darkest greenery’ (Worp 1918, 287; my translation). Equally reiterating the functions of the closet, Henry Vaughan in his country house poem Upon the Priory Grove, His Usual Retirement (1646) recommended a move into the country as a cure against melancholy, presenting the country house, moreover, as a place saturated with emotions of passion and love, and as a safedeposit: Hail sacred shades! Cool, leafy house! Chaste treasurer of all my vows, And wealth! on whose soft bosom laid My love’s fair steps I first betrayed. Henceforth no melancholy flight, No sad wing, or hoarse bird of night, Disturb this air. Vaughan 1994 [1646], 265

Montaigne warns that seeking privacy in the country in response to melancholy and grief will not always have the desired effect; it will depend on one’s personality (Montaigne 2004 [1580]). Moreover, ‘If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden with which he finds himself oppressed,

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motion will but make it press the harder and sit the heavier […] Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the public’ (ibid.). On the whole, however, it was believed that a retreat in the country was beneficial for one’s personal development and overall psychological well-being. The Fifth Earl of Clanricarde, whose main base was Portumna in County Galway (figures 8 - 9), wrote to the Earl of Ormond in the mid-seventeenth century, ‘I am now hastening back to Kilcolgan, my solitary place of retreat near the sea, and shall there for some time expect the addition of favour herein desired’ (Burke 1983 [1634-1647], 460). To Daniel O’Neill he remarked: ‘Noble Sir, Yours of the 25th of June found me upon the 29th near the sea at my castle of Kilcolgan, my solitary place of retreat, within whose narrow limits I find more content than by the large extent of liberty I formerly enjoyed’ (ibid., 458). Clanricarde explained his partiality for Kilcolgan by stating that this private space was ‘so agreeable’ to his ‘disposition and constitution of health’. In any event it was not magnificence that lured the Earl to Kilcolgan; he commented that his wife and children should stay at the castle only in cases of extremity (on account of the war), since it was ‘incommodious’ and would ‘not be habitable’ during times of rain (ibid., 419, 467).

Archaeology and privacy It was again Montaigne who, as early as the sixteenth century, asserted that although certain spaces – cloisters, philosophical schools, deserts, caves – possessed a private quality, real solitude lies in the mind (Montaigne 2004 [1580]; my emphasis), hereby alluding to the elusive nature of privacy, and rendering it difficult to discern archaeologically. Notwithstanding this hurdle, particularly in England archaeologists have produced interesting work on the issue of privacy in a castle context. Developing from Faulkner’s (1958) seminal work on domestic accommodation in English castles touching on sensitivities towards privacy, Matthew Johnson (1993, 2002) has heralded a wider archaeological debate on the social context of castle life, meanwhile deliberating, as shown above, on the issue of privacy, David Austin (1998) contemplated past meanings of ‘privy’ in castle contexts, Roberta Gilchrist (1999) probed the locales in fourteenth-century English castles where women remained privately, and Charles Coulson (2003), finally, criticised the idea of medieval castles as ‘private institutions’ instead of more or less public spaces. Generally, however, archaeological references to privacy are less nuanced. Access analysis, the approach informing most archaeological suppositions on privacy, is most informative if applied in combination with other methods and sources of information (see for a good example Gould 1999). Seeing that this is still not general practice among archaeologists, much of the current literature on the subject is characterised by conjecture, uncritically surmising instead of hypothesising about the existence of (a need for) private spaces. Ken Abraham (1991), for instance, tries to identify private spaces by examining the position and relationship of architectural features such as garderobes, murder holes, entrances

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and fireplaces within the different areas of Irish castles. A latrine reveals to his mind a public space, whereas ‘the location of a latrine well away from the entrance may denote a more private area’ (Abraham 1991, 250). A fireplace also counts as a public feature, except when ‘the fireplace is in the wall opposite the doorway, but also well away from the latrine. In these instances, the fireplace may denote the private area of the chamber’ (ibid., 252). It is a highly problematic mode of thinking considering that we do not know if a latrine or fireplace was deemed an indicator of a private space, a public area, or neither. Even though Abraham allows for the possibility that perception of these features depended on their relative position to each other, his reasoning is ultimately based on the assumption that the entrance was the most public space, something which we simply do not know and about which we can only speculate.

54. Penshurst in Kent was built over many centuries, starting in the fourteenth century and not completed until the twentieth century. In the sixteenth century, whilst Penshurst was home to Philip Sidney, it was frequently visited by Queen Elizabeth. It was moreover the subject of several country house poems, the most famous of which by Ben Jonson.

Tom McNeill, like Abraham, assumes that those spaces furthest away from the entrance, as well as the working and living quarters of servants, counted as private spaces (McNeill 2000, 223). He moreover deduces that ‘the private nature of a chamber is shown by its position and in the ease of access to it from public rooms such as the hall or chapel, or from the courtyard; also it should have a single latrine’ (McNeill 1996, 47). This approach is deficient, firstly because it assumes rather than questions or explicates a distinction between public and private spheres. Secondly, a room that appears private to us because of its relatively isolated position in a building (as access-analysis is often used to demonstrate) might have been used in a public or communal fashion. Conversely, a room that does not seem private because of its central position within a building

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might, in fact, have been subdivided into several more or less private spaces by wooden partitioning or canopies. Window curtains, fashionable from the seventeenth century onwards, provided a further means to ensure privacy, yet curtains too are difficult to detect by an examination of architecture only. The manner in which architectural space was used occasionally also facilitated privacy. Lady Anne Halkett disclosed in her autobiography that whilst she and a friend were engaged in a confidential conversation ‘he and I sat down together att some distance from the rest’ (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 60). Sir Kenelm Digby, assuming Mary de Medici had a love interest in him, noted that she hid away in the darkest corner of the room, Digby believed, in order to have the benefit of the privacy allowing her to muster up the courage to relate to him this personal and slightly discomforting news (Digby 1968 [1603-1665], 52).

Conclusion Privacy signifies a multifaceted idea that varies both diachronically and synchronically. The viewpoint presented in this chapter, interpreting sixteenthand seventeenth-century privacy foremost as a cultural phenomenon, which can be distinguished most auspiciously through a literature study, runs counter to more established archaeological approaches, as well as politically- and, to a lesser extent, biologically-informed explanations. On the basis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century testimonies, I maintain that the closet – recently reconceptualised as ‘a politically crucial transactive space’ (Stewart 1995, 77) – used to be quintessentially private and indicative of the ‘culture of privacy’. Power- and politics-related issues underlie the meaning of the closet in so far as such issues determined who could and who could not afford a house furnished with closets. For those who could, the closet henceforth functioned as a private sanctuary, only associated with power in circumstances when an extraordinarily high-profiled person, mainly royalty, either invited or denied someone access to his or her closet. The suggestion that apartments or enfilades should be understood primarily in terms of power was equally refuted in this chapter. Jib-doors and private staircases allowed an owner or confidant to circumvent the more public rooms in the enfilade and go directly to a private space. In terms of the (smaller) apartment, a private purpose is even more conspicuous, seeing that this was a space usually owned and utilised by an individual person, with guests entertained elsewhere in the house. Scepticism pertaining to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century privacy (see Fumerton 1991, Howard 1995, Girouard 1978) is palpable in the frequent references to the omni-presence of servants, purportedly preventing real privacy being obtained. Lady Anne Halkett’s autobiography illustrates the validity of this idea, yet refutes it at the same time. Halkett recorded that whilst meeting a gentleman in the garden late one night, the servants ‘had all this time beene so

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civill to us both as to retire att such a distance as nott to heare what we said’ (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 19). Further scepticism is tied in with the ‘inflation of privacy’ attributed to the second half of the seventeenth century, when a proliferation of closets was witnessed. Indeed, some houses were now furnished with such an array of closets that they could not possibly all have been used for private purposes. However, this process does not necessarily indicate a loss of privacy as regards every single closet. At Ham House, for instance, ‘her Grace’ possessed two closets, ‘the white closet’, named after the painted marbling and hangings of ‘white tabby [silk] with silver fring’, and ‘the duchess’ private closet’, where she reportedly kept her books and valuables (Rowell 1995, 35-37). In a similar vein, banqueting houses and hunting lodges can be interpreted as places that ensured a continuation of privacy at a time when country houses no longer provided the desired level of privacy. In order to understand the inflation of privacy it is important to appreciate the various shades of privacy distinguished. A finely graded system of more or less public and private spaces was in place, which did not follow a binary opposition between public and private (see Brück 1999); ‘public-private’ representing a continuum rather than a dichotomy. The Earl of Cork, for instance, noted that he kept valuables such as ‘ancient pattents, deeds, wrytings, papers and money’ in the most secluded place he boasted, namely in the ‘tyll of my iron chest in my inward study’ (Boyle 1886a [1566-1643], 236; Boyle 1886d [1566-1643], 188). Huygens Jr.’s diary equally illustrates the various levels of privacy that pervaded the spatial organisation. As William III’s secretary, Huygens Jr. spent much time in William’s antechamber, awaiting the king. When he was finally summoned, Huygens moved from the antechamber to the king’s bedchamber where business was subsequently consulted. Occasionally, much to Huygens Jr.’s annoyance, William did not deal with him directly and sent a confidant (Van Keppel most likely) to the antechamber instead. In contrast to the antechamber which formed part of the humdrum of Huygens Jr.’s everyday life, and the equally familiar bedchamber (albeit to a lesser extent than the antechamber), William III’s closet was a space that was beyond his reach. Only people closer to William III than Huygens Jr. were allowed access to this closet, such as William’s good friend Vaudemont, whom Huygens Jr. according to one of his diary entries, saw coming out of the king’s closet one time when he himself was in William’s bedroom (Huygens Jr. 1877 [1688-1696], 47). This example should not be taken to mean that William’s antechamber did not allow for any privacy. After all, considering the gliding scale from private to public, this was a space that was more private than many of the other rooms in the palace, which in themselves were again relatively private since only very few people had access to the palace. Correspondingly, the so-called ‘inflation of privacy’ with the construction of closets inside closets and banqueting houses in country house gardens and parks, does not signify a lack of privacy but an attempt to maintain the different levels, the different shades, of privacy that existed.

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So far the three locales under discussion have been discussed concurrently. However, Irish attitudes vis-à-vis privacy require a few additional words (see also Ronnes 2004a). In his study on Irish material culture, Toby Barnard (2004, 296) argues that ‘privacy was impossible’ in the latter half of the seventeenth century, hereby voicing an oft-heard opinion. Irish sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society is often treated in isolation, as if untouched by foreign influences, and still somewhat in line with contemporary depictions of the Irish as uncivilised and ‘wild’ by authors such as Fynes Moryson (1890 [1600-1603]). An adoption of foreign cultural influences in Ireland is mostly – if at all recognised – attributed to English and Anglo-Irish households. However, the higher echelons within the Gaelic society, habitually sent to England or France to study, would also have been aware of the cultural trends and fashions prevalent in these parts of Europe. As is evident from the Irish citations in this chapter, an awareness of a culture of privacy existed on the part of the English, Anglo-Irish, and Gaelic Irish élite. Historical sources moreover provide information on various architectural features associated with privacy – bedchamber, closet, alcove – which were evidently all present within a seventeenth-century architectural context pertaining to Ireland. Possibly, these architectural features reached Ireland somewhat later (there is no point in denying, as certain post-processualists do, all tenets of (architectural) diffusionism). Nevertheless, considering that Irish contemporary architecture was inspired not only by English examples, as is often inferred, but also, more directly, by French vernacular architecture from which the English to a large extent drew their inspiration, this was not necessarily the case. In addition to historical sources, archaeological information also suggests the existence of an Irish culture of privacy, albeit ambiguously. In contrast to what is often emphasised in discussions on Irish architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I argue that several of the latest architectural developments taking place in England and The United Provinces can also be found in Ireland, the fashion for date and initial stones providing one example, the existence of baywindows another. A third example concerns the lofty chimney-stacks on latesixteenth-century tower-houses, seemingly reflecting the so-called Elizabethan ‘fireplace revolution’ (Thomson 1993, 45) (figures 5 and IV, XXVI). These chimneystacks tentatively imply that they were employed and understood as references to the culture of privacy, as an attempt on the part of those commissioning the tower to refute the accusation of neglect of the wider community concomitant with a retreat into the country. Joseph Hall in his country house poem Housekeeping’s Dead contended: ‘Look to the towered chimneys which should be / The windpipes of good hospitality’ (Hall 1994 [1574-1656], 40).

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Chapter 7 God in the house: the castle and the otherworld Whilst strolling through the gardens at Hofwijck (figure 12), Huygens found himself ‘in discourse with myself, with solitude, with friends’ (Davidson and Van der Weel 1996, 141; my translation). Both Hofwijck the poem (1651) and Hofwijck the estate do not merely relate to friendship and privacy though; they are also testimony to Huygens’ deep religiosity. Walking the grounds he experienced a sensation of ecstasy, a trance that lifted him up, rendering him a view from up above – from heaven – onto his house and gardens below: My soul thus overjoyed, possessed by inward motion Of all within it, and the holy ecstasy Bathed there my soul so sweetly in all her inward thoughts I found it hard to draw my soul down from on high Davidson and Van der Weel 1996, 147

Huygens’ poetry illustrates but one of many ways in which early modern vernacular architecture and religiosity intersected. The architectural expression of piety in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, England and The United Provinces is the subject of this chapter. The main issue it aims to tackle is the parallel development of religious and domestic architecture, which in England, according to Matthew Johnson, underwent an adjustment during the Renaissance. ‘Where a system of architectural cross-referencing [between religious and vernacular architecture] was implicit, customary, taken for granted [in the medieval period], now such cross-referencing was witty, allusive, a riddle to be commented on’ (Johnson 2002, 125-128). This growing dissimilarity in the Renaissance period between domestic, vernacular buildings on the one hand and church or ecclesiastical architecture on the other, Johnson ties in with a new, élite distinction between a domestic and a religious sphere. In the following discussion I will appraise, for my own research area, Johnson’s premise of a growing societal as well as an architectural separation of a spiritual and a domestic world during the Renaissance.

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Piety and vernacular architecture Castle meets church The (solely secular) castle and the (exclusively ecclesiastical) church customarily occupy opposite ends of the architectural spectrum, thereby ignoring scholarly contributions pointing to various shared features. An architectural crossreferencing is pertinent for a Dutch and English medieval architectural context, with several types of fifteenth-century English manor houses boasting an ecclesiastical origin, and with castles frequently being furnished with chapels or altars as well as church-style windows (Wood 1965, 202). The same holds true for Ireland, where tower-houses demonstrate remarkable similarities to contemporary churches in terms of window types, sheela-na-gigs (predominantly found on churches, but also adorning various tower-houses), and frescos such as those discovered at Ardamullivan Castle in County Galway, which resemble frescos in nearby Knockmoy Abbey (Morton 2002, 105).

55. ‘Adam and Eve-chimney’ in Het Maarten van Rossemhuis in Gelderland. The caryatides represent Adam and Eve; the tiles on the chimney-back display a biblical scene.

It is generally argued that vernacular architecture followed ecclesiastical examples, rather than vice versa. Roberta Gilchrist provides an exception that proves this rule in her study of English nunneries. Ecclesiastical architecture was indebted to domestic architecture, according to Gilchrist, in that high-ranking nuns commissioned separate living quarters, thus duplicating the spatial segregation of women from men customary in castles (Gilchrist 1994, 159-160). The most striking example of a ‘witty’ and deliberate allusion to religion – which Johnson (2002, 128), as said, regards as symptomatic of this period of change as regards the intertextuality between religious and domestic architecture

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– must be Tresham’s Triangular Lodge in Northamptonshire, England. It is not only the Lodge’s triangular shape that alludes to the Holy Trinity; its measurements, windows and chimney-stacks all centre on the number three. Similarly, an early seventeenth-century verse explains the religious meaning behind a circular lodge erected on a particular estate in Kent; another source elucidates the spiritual significance of the more common E-shaped plan (Airs 1995, 13).

56. De Blauwe Camer in Noord-Brabant where Roman Catholic nuns settled in the seventeenth century is still inhabited by nuns today.

Moving from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious references conveyed in the exterior, or structure, of the house, to suggestions communicated via interior architecture, it is the fireplace that stands out as the most likely place to carry a pious statement. Inscriptions, symbols, and biblical scenes are frequently found on the overmantel, lintel, the caryatides, or, in the case of The United Provinces, on the (tiles decorating the) chimney-back (figure 55). Specific rooms were occasionally endowed with religious meanings as well. The informal bed- and sitting room known as the parlour, for instance, originated in a monasterial context where it used to be the place where monks and nuns could speak (‘parler’) to their relatives. Though the parlour’s religious roots had long been forgotten in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was not the case with the chapel or oratory, which remained a primarily religious space. However, in contrast to the situation in the Middle Ages when virtually every great house, especially in England, was furnished with an oratory or chapel, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses were no longer self-evidently endowed with this quintessentially spiritual locality (Wood 1965, 243-246). The chapel’s religious association was to a degree transmitted to two alternative architectural spaces: the closet and garden. Chapter 7 – God in the House: the castle and the otherworld | 149

Ecstasy in the closet As was shown in the two previous chapters, the small room alternatively termed closet, study, withdrawing room or cabinet was a space where one was private, a place where one could study or work in silence, be alone with a trusted friend, or freely express one’s emotions. William of Orange was not the only one to shed tears in his closet; his fellowcountryman Hondius admitted that it was in his study that he turned inwards and was not ashamed to cry ‘on my knees before my Lord’ (De Vries 1998, 113; my translation). In chapter 6, I already briefly touched on the religious quality of the closet; its sacredness, it is fair to say, was one of the key attributes of this space. This is not surprising given the fact that the closet was known to have originated within a religious context. Richard Flecknoe, in his mid-seventeenth-century closet poem On the Duchess of Newcastle’s Closet, queries: What place is this! looks like some sacred Cell Where holy hermits anciently did dwell […] Here she’s in Rapture, here in Extasy With studying high and deep Philosophy. Flecknoe 1994 [1666], 179

Flecknoe touches on two aspects of the seventeenth-century closet connected with the former ‘sacred cell’: its religiousness by virtue of the monk’s presence within this space, and the religious studies there performed. It logically follows, then, that historical inventories and closet poems frequently state the presence within closets of book collections. ‘Scarcely a Glass, or Mirrour in ‘t you find / Excepting Books, the Mirrours of the mind’, Flecknoe notes about the Duchess of Newcastle’s closet (ibid., 179). From what was said about Lady Mary Vere at her funeral, we might also infer the customary presence of spiritual tomes specifically within the closet. Follow her up the stairs, there you should be sure to find her, twice every day, shut up some hours in her Closet (which was excellently furnished with Pious Books of Practical Divinity). Here she redeemed much precious time, in reading the holy Scriptures, and other good Books. Gurnall 1672, 133

Apart from mentioning Calvin, Caelia’s Country House and Closet (1667), a closet poem allegedly dedicated to Lady Hamilton, contains the line ‘religious books she does obey, not show’ (MacKenzie 1994 [1667], 347, 349). The Ham House inventories disclose that in her ‘Private Closet’ the duchess kept a ‘little strong box with guilt hinges’, a ‘Japan box for sweetmeats and tea’ as well as ‘one bible with ye book of Common prayer’ (Rowell 1995, 35).

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If not on show within the closet itself, books were most certainly consulted there. After his daughter’s death, John Evelyn conveyed: ‘On looking into her closet, it is incredible what a number of collections she had made from historians, poetes, travellers, &c. but above all devotions, contemplations, and resolutions on these contemplations, […] prayers, meditations, and devotions on particular occasions, with many pretty letters to her confidants’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 474). Lady Margaret Hoby confided to her diary that she too went into her ‘Closett vnto priuat examenation and praier’ and to ‘writt som thinge for mine owne priuat Conscience’ (Hoby 1998 [1599-1605], 46, 59).

Garden prayers ‘I went abroad in the garden & said my Prayers [in the Standing]’, Lady Anne Clifford, wrote on a Sunday in March 1617. A week later she recorded: ‘This day I spent walking in the Park with Judith, carrying my Bible with me, thinking on my present Fortunes & what troubles I have passed through’ (Clifford 1990 [16031676], 50-51). Like the closet, the Renaissance garden was a place imbued with religious meanings. A spiritual perception of the garden went all the way back to the ‘Garden of Eden’ and the image of ‘Paradise’. The belief that God manifested himself in the natural world in particular, only added to the religious power of the garden. A further religious tier did not originate in a Christian context but in the ancient Classical tradition juxtaposing proud and vile city manners with a life of moderation and virtue in the country. In the Renaissance period this juxtaposition was translated into a more specifically religious reading, linking the Classical moderation of country living in which the garden featured prominently with religious temperance, and the virtue that Greeks and Romans had attached to the countryside with high Christian morals. Country house poems clearly illustrate a religious interpretation of the garden. Marvell spoke of the recovery of ‘lost paradise’ in the gardens of Appleton House and compared the swelling river overflowing the grounds of Appleton with ‘the flood’ (Kelsall 1993, 55). Continuing with further religious symbolism, he added: While it [the flood] lasts, my self imbark In this yet green, yet growing Ark; Where the first Carpenter might best Fit Timber for his Keel have Prest. Marvell 1971 [c. 1652], 77

In Caelia’s country house and closet (1667), Mackenzie testifies to the religious meaning of Leuchars Castle’s garden in Scotland, which ‘does with Eden in all things agree, Save that its Mistress will not tempted be’ (Mackenzie 1994 [1667], 346). Jacob Cats’ 1658 Hofgedachten (‘Court reflections’) is almost entirely of a religious nature and frequently addresses God directly, exclaiming ‘Oh God!’, or

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‘My soul!’ and ‘My beloved soul!’ (Cats 1834 [1658], 38, 74, 80). Natural phenomena witnessed in Sorghvliet’s garden are explained in spiritual terms or serve as religious lessons. A mosquito, tiny yet able to sting a ferocious lion, must count, according to Cats, as one of God’s miracles. His observation that some of the roses in the garden blossom in fall instead of spring, leads Cats to conclude that it is never too late to decide to dedicate oneself to God; even in the autumn days of one’s life one can do so (ibid., 26-27). A country house poem celebrating the garden at Jan van Arnhem’s Rosendael (figure 21) was also predominantly religious in character. Met een Geestelijk Oog Beschouwd (‘Observed from a spiritual point of view’) (Outrein 1700 [1690]) connects exact locations in Rosendael’s garden with particular religious reflections and Bible quotations. The poem became so popular that a later edition was purposely printed in a smaller format, so as to enable visitors to keep it near at hand whilst following the route through the garden, and to read the right Bible passage or reflection at the right spot (Bierens de Haan 1994, 54). In some cases the religiosity of the garden was further emphasised by the presence within the garden of that other space with religious connotations: the closet. Grottos, fashionable in the seventeenth century, for instance, frequently functioned as outdoor cabinets (Fowler 1994, 6). Westerbaen referred to a ‘green cabinet’ in his garden at Ockenburg (De Vries 1998, 177); Huygens gazed at two lovers just outside his estate – so happy together, they reminded him of Adam and Eve – from a ‘green closet’ (Van Strien and Van der Leer 2002, 48-51).

Castles’ chronicles on religious disparity Religious tolerance Sometime during the 1640s, in war torn Ireland, the Protestant Earl of Ormond wrote the Catholic Earl of Clanricarde that he hoped to have ‘the happiness of waiting on you’ and to provide Clanricarde with ‘the best accommodation that these wretched times will afford’ (Carte 1851, 447). Ormond was not the only one to open up his house to someone with divergent religious convictions. Regardless of the anti-Catholic comments permeating Hondius’ De Moufe-Schans (1621) – bees in his garden apparently instinctively disliked Jesuits! – careful readers of this country house poem will discern that some of the friends sharing a meal at the Schans were in fact Roman Catholic. Hondius announced that those friends who are ‘not at liberty to eat meat like we are’, would be served fish (De Vries 1998, 123). Other country house poems too provide examples of what can only be termed religious tolerance. Huygens noted that those who quarrel about matters of religion are not welcome in his house, adding that it is inhumane to use violent means to make people convert (Van Strien and Van der Leer 2002, 45-46). Wellekens applied even stronger language, branding religious wars ‘monstrous’ (De Vries 1998, 246). In Ockenburg (1654) Westerbaen also slotted in the conviction

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that conflicts over religious matters should immediately be brought to an end (ibid., 198). Purportedly, William III was not a religious bigot either (Hoftijzer 1988, 159), an impression that is confirmed by William’s use of architectural space. Vaudemont, William’s Catholic friend, not only possessed (as was shown in a previous chapter) an apartment at Het Loo (figure 35), he also occupied the kingstadholder’s house in Brussels. In England, during William’s reign, the Jewish community was allowed the construction of a synagogue, thereby seemingly pursuing an Amsterdam example where a synagogue had already been built in 1671. William’s tolerant stance as regards religious disparity is also reflected in the architecture of his new palace Het Loo, where he commissioned not only a pulpit for the Calvinist service he himself attended, but also requested an altar for Mary’s Anglican service.

57. Carmelite monastery in Boxmeer, Noord-Brabant, founded by the Bergh-family.

It appears, moreover, that William did not demur about being lodged in Catholic houses during his campaigns. Whilst in the Southern Netherlands the king and Constantijn Huygens Jr. once spent the night in a Benedictine monastery where they pleasantly conversed with the monks who, Huygens Jr. recorded in his diary, spoke warmly to them about the fame and good qualities of Huygens Sr. (Huygens Jr. 1877 [1688-1696], 595). William also seems to have left the hidden church in Het Oude Loo untouched; ostensibly not feeling compelled to obliterate this Catholic symbol within his domestic sphere. Neither did Godard van Reede Ginkel feel inclined to demolish the hidden church at Middachten (figure 47), which he also seemingly left intact (Van Immerseel 2002, 17-19). In his case this is perhaps related to his marriage to a Catholic woman who bore him twelve children, three of whom they raised in the Catholic faith and nine as Protestants.

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William’s grandfather, stadholder Frederik Hendrik, personally gave permission for the fourteenth-century castle De Blauwe Camer (‘The Blue Chamber’) (figure 56) to become a nunnery, which, because of its initial foundation and later protection by the Orange princes, became known by the name ‘Orange monastery’ (Van Oirschot 1970; Becx et al. 1999, 138-140). It is remarkable that even though monasteries, nunneries and begijnhoven (literally ‘courtyards for beguines’, religious and devotional women who had not taken the vows) as a rule had to close in the post-Reformation period in The United Provinces, nuns and beguines were occasionally able to move into an alternative building or to create a new begijnhof. In Rotterdam, Carmelite nuns who had been forced to leave their cloister, were curiously allowed to move into a begijnhof that stood untenanted since the beguines had left it on account of the Reformation. Elsewhere in The United Provinces, beguines who had been forced to leave, reportedly purchased an entire street where they continued to live together (Marshall 1989, 128-129).

58. Mid-seventeenth-century classical entrance porch to Boxmeer’s Carmelite monastery.

The Catholic Lord and Lady Van den Bergh, proprietors of Castle Bergh in Gelderland (figure XXVII) and the castle of Boxmeer in Noord-Brabant, benefited from a similarly lenient treatment. In the mid-seventeenth century they were able to establish a Carmelite monastery in Boxmeer (figures 57 – 58 and XXVIII) on

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account of the town’s (religious) autonomy (Mesters 1995, 3; Kutsch LojengaRietberg et al. 2003). Finally, Henricus Popta, a member of the Protestant church, purchased Heringa State in Friesland (figure 59) in 1687, whence he ordered the construction of a nursing home for women on the estate, which, he stipulated, should forever remain open to women of all denominations (Van Heemsta 1994, 611).

59. Heringa State, also known as Poptaslot, in Friesland, built in the sixteenth century.

Religious activism The architecture under discussion not only relates stories of religious tolerance: castles also featured in religious conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – as prisons for religious adversaries or, quite the reverse, as safe-havens for those with concurring religious viewpoints. In the process, castles often became symbolic of a religious faction, as was the case, for instance, with Loevestein in The United Provinces (figure 14). In the early seventeenth century, various prominent members of the Remonstrant party, including Hugo de Groot (or Grotius), were interned here. As a result, the phrase ‘Loevestein’ became, and is to this day, synonymous with religious conflict in The Netherlands. Kilkenny Castle (figure XX), on the contrary, served as a place of refuge for hundreds of Protestant civilians during the war in Ireland in the 1640s (Edwards 2003, 316). Chapter 7 – God in the House: the castle and the otherworld | 155

Castle heritage thus bears witness to religious dedication as well as sheer detestation of different belief systems. The most vivid proof of the former must be the refusal of numerous Irishmen to convert to Protestantism in order to be able to hold on to their castle or house. As a corollary of this religious commitment, the Earl of Cork simply relied on ‘fair and voluntary oathes vppon the bible’ when two Irishmen, Donnogh and Connor O’Brien, handed over three of their castles to him (Boyle 1886c [1566-1643], 222-224).

60. Het Maarten van Rossemhuis in Gelderland, with a midsixteenth century date. Maarten van Rossem, owner and builder of this city house, also constructed Cannenburch.

Architecture corroborates the silent protest against such dogmatic measures. English castles for instance were frequently furnished with ‘priest holes’ for Catholic priests to take shelter in. Roman Catholics in The United Provinces, in a similar vein, constructed hidden churches in and around castles – open secrets concomitant with the Dutch practice of stipulating stringent measures (as in the 1618 Synod of Dordrecht) against those who would not adhere to the state religion, but in practice, much to the annoyance of Calvinist church leaders, allowing religious tolerance to prevail. More vocal protest instilled in an architectural context is evident in the seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation signs carved on Irish tower-houses such as Gortnetubbrid Castle in County Limerick (Donnelly 2004), and in the

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inscriptions found on Ballycowan Castle in County Offaly – ‘By God of might, I hold my right’ – and ‘God’s strength is my defence’ on Grangecon in County Wicklow. The Earl of Cork was equally vociferous about a specific Catholic place. Throughout five volumes of diary notes the earl manages to maintain his usual mostly pragmatic tone of voice, yet he sounds furious when broaching St. Patrick’s Purgatory in County Donegal, a Catholic place of pilgrimage, and urged ‘to pull down and vtterly demolish that monster of ffame called St Patricks purgatory, with St Patricks bedd, and all the vaults, cells, & all other houses & bwyldings, and to have all the other superstitious stone & materialles caste into the logh’ (Boyle 1886c [1566-1643], 159). In a similarly militant manner, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrory and a descendant of the Earl of Cork, engraved the following text – so it is said – on the city gates of Bandon Bridge: ‘Jew, Infidel, or Atheist / May enter here, but not a Papist’ (Boyle 1903, xiii). A Dutch Album Amicorum contains a verse that compares the Dutch national history to a garden, equating the master of this garden with a prince (of Orange), the gardener with the state, and the weed with all religions other than Reformed Protestantism (Offerhaus 1990, 68). Various other country house poems carry similarly derogatory remarks about the Catholic faith. In Upon Appleton House (c. 1652), Marvell gives the nuns in a nearby nunnery a sneer by arguing that Appleton House is the genuinely religious house, the nunnery a house of vice (Cousins 1990, 66). Marvell had one nun say: Nor is our Order yet so nice, Delight to banish a Vice. Here Pleasure Piety meet; One perfecting the other Sweet. So through the mortal fruit we boyl The Sugars uncorrupting Oyl. Marvell 1971 [1621-1678], 68

Politics and religion In a time when political orientations were closely tied in with spiritual convictions and vice versa, the previously mentioned architectural religious references frequently also conveyed a political message. Counter-Reformation signs on Irish tower-houses for instance, were tied in with the Gaelic, Catholic struggle against Protestant, English invaders. Spirituality with a bearing on architecture was politicised in still another way. Hitherto, castles and houses were identified as signifiers of religion, expressing or mirroring religious allegiances. However, the right to possess a castle (for instance as a Protestant Englishman in Ireland) was frequently cast in religious terms as well, as could already be gleamed from inscriptions such as ‘By God of might, I hold my right’ found on Irish tower-houses.

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In England, a similar validation of the possession of a castle or country house in terms of religion can be witnessed in country house poems. In Upon Appleton House, Marvell justified Fairfax’s retreat to Appleton by proclaiming that this withdrawal represented a commitment to spiritual instead of worldly matters (Cousins 1990, 63). The criticism (mentioned in chapter 6) levelled at late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century prodigy houses, which were believed to represent the ‘decay of housekeeping’ and a move away from ‘the good old ways’, was equally cast in religious terms. On account of the location of prodigy houses away from the (village) community, the new levels of ostentation they displayed, and the dwindling numbers of servants – with those who remained now tucked away in strictly separate living quarters (Friedman 1989) – these ‘magnificent and stately’ houses were branded ‘unchristian’ (Harrison 1994 [1587], 202, 197, 225). The distinction made in The Faerie Queen between the ‘House of Holinesse’ and the ‘House of Pride’ is also suggestive of this charge (Spenser 1988 [1590]). Interestingly, in order to defend the owners of country houses against such accusations, poets usually likewise turned to religion (McClung 1977, 3). Marvell notes about Lord Fairfax, the owner of Appleton House: For he did, with his utmost skill, Ambition weed, but conscience till – Conscience, that heaven-nursed plant, Which most our earthly gardens want. Marvell 1994 [c. 1652], 286

Religious transformations and architectural space A personal religion One summer’s day, the conversation at Het Muiderslot in Noord-Holland (figures 15 and VIII) turned to matters of faith. The discussion that ensued – presumably only watched by the at all times religiously neutral host Pieter Cornelis Hooft, but participated in by the contra-Remonstrant Constantijn Huygens, Roman-Catholic Maria Tesselschade and Remonstrant Caspar Barlaeus – continued in the form of letters and poems after the guests had returned home. Hooft and Barlaeus, both only mildly interested in religious affairs, were often quite literally intermediaries between the more fervently devout Maria Tesselschade and Constantijn Huygens. At one point they forwarded a poem by Tesselschade dedicated to Huygens, in which Tesselschade alluded to the fact that, as the secretary of the Orange prince, Huygens’ religious loyalties might have been informed by those of the Orange dynasty. Huygens retorted instantly with a verse simply called ‘To Tesselschade’: My tongue was never hired, nor my pen e’er sold, My hands were never snared by gold or jewels, My freedom ne’er enslaved, so that I handled The truth with velvet gloves, against belief.

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Yes, tongue, pen, hand and freedom all have served The princely order that our freedom sowed, ‘Gainst Spanish force its counter force opposing, and Babel’s filthy creatures (I’ll speak plain). But worldly power strikes never to the root Of holy knowledge; ‘tis no contentious use To fear eternal God, and a prudent Prince Who can and does suffer what truth may yield. So I ask justice of you, and no grace, Famous, alas, but Papist Tesselscha. Davidson and Van der Weel 1996, 127

Along with this poem Huygens sent her an invitation to come and visit him. She accepted and went to stay with Huygens in The Hague; whether she also accepted his line of defence, is unknown (Worp 1918, xli). Even though people at the time acknowledged the fact that political allegiances might inspire religious loyalties, a more personal and individual understanding of religion received more credence. Religion at this time was personal in three ways. First of all, one’s religiosity was personal in that it was now largely a matter of personal choice which religion one recognised. Maria Tesselschade was brought up a Protestant, however, like her sister Anna Roemers and Joost van den Vondel – also members of the Muiderkring – in adulthood she converted to Catholicism, much to Huygens’ distress. Even so, Huygens maintained it was a matter of personal choice which religion one adhered to. This should not be taken to mean that Huygens did not try to dissuade Tesselschade away from Roman Catholicism; when Barlaeus expressed his belief that Huygens was perhaps a little too harsh on her, Huygens replied: ‘I do not hesitate to use the rod, I love the child too much’ (Worp 1918, 260-261; my translation). Secondly, religion was personal in the sense that spirituality was now subjected to a more personal reading. I do not merely refer here to the oftmentioned Protestant emphasis on Bible studies and the disappearance of intermediary priests, but to a personal understanding of religion resulting in the novel, idiosyncratic and playful appropriation of religious architectural symbols Johnson referred to (Johnson 2002, 125-128). Apart from the previously mentioned examples, ‘altars of friendship’ reflect a different, more personal reading of a formerly unequivocally religious symbol (Offerhaus 1990; Burke 1999). Huygens’ Hofwijck, moreover, does not solely reflect the renowned Renaissance fascination with the human body, but also an innovative religious construction with the house (laid out as the head on top of the garden made up of arms and legs) denoting the place of communication with God. A third way in which piety was personalised (and continuing from the previous chapter), concerns the practice, epitomised in the fashionable phrase ‘holy solitude’, of experiencing religion on one’s own. As shown, the two quintessentially religious spaces in this period – closet and garden – were both

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spaces associated with being alone (De Vries 1998, 266). John Evelyn only discovered the numerous religious contemplations his daughter had written in the privacy of her closet, subsequent to her death. Others, such as Lady Margaret Hoby, went in prayer, consulted religious works, or wrote religiously inspired letters or diary entries in the closet, a space that usually nobody else but its owner entered (Hoby 1998 [1599-1605]). As regards the garden, it was here that Cats addressed God as well as himself, exclaiming ‘my beloved soul!’, and that Huygens experienced a personal and private sensation of ecstasy.

Religiousness in retreat In contrast to the communal medieval chapel, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people also started to attach religious values to the more private spaces, closet and garden. Whilst the chapel carried predominantly – arguably even singularly – religious meanings, the connotations of closet and garden were more varied. That is, the closet was not only a space for reading religious books and writing down religious contemplations; a closet also facilitated private conversations between close friends, studies, work, the compilation and safe-keeping of art collections, and the outpour of private emotions. Thus, to Hondius his study was a space for meditation, as well as for hoarding rare objects, crying and studying (De Vries 1998, 108, 112). John Evelyn, aside from alluding to his daughter’s religious closet activities, frequently mentioned the elegancies of cabinets, as such touching upon an additional use of the closet as a ‘cabinet of curiosity’ (Evelyn 1895 [1641-1705/6], 436). Finally, the previously mentioned closet poem Caelia’s Country House and Closet (1667) by Mackenzie mentions, apart from Calvin, also Galileo, Raphael, amber and coral collections, and the Classical invention of perspective (Mackenzie 1994 [1667], 344353). Like closets, gardens served as multi-purpose places. Aside from religious spaces, country house estates such as Sorghvliet (figure 37) and Vredenburg, acted as a means ‘to flee ones worries’ and enjoy some ‘peace and quiet’. For Tudor and Stuart women the garden is said to have functioned as a place of calm recovery and friendship (Ariès and Duby 1989, 212; Schleiner 1994, 100); Hondius, whose country house poem reads as a catalogue of horticulture, was primarily interested in the medical potentials of the plants and herbs in his garden. Finally, the garden, again as the closet, also carried amorous connotations. The fact that closet and garden – as primary domestic religious locations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – were spaces which, unlike the chapel, carried a variety of different meanings, mirrors a society in which religion no longer provided the only channel through which to observe and explain the world. In the same way that the closet and the garden – again in contrast to the chapel – were not exclusively used for religious occupations, the people inhabiting these spaces did not solely turn to religion as a means to understand the world they lived in. Religious doctrine had come to face stiff competition from other

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‘grand narratives’ – secular ideologies, philosophies and cultures – which threatened the supremacy of religious doctrines. Moreover, English country house poems in particular bear witness to the impact of newly established contacts with formerly unchartered, exotic places (Fowler 1994; Lovelace 1994 [1649], 267-271). Hondius’ cataloguing of herbs and plants hints at a growing interest in science in the seventeenth century; and Huygens’ geometrically laid out estate in the shape of a human being was, as shown, infused with religious overtones, yet also indicated a scientific as well as a Renaissance interest. Not surprisingly, Puritan religious authorities opposed to the geometrical gardens on account of their supposedly hampering effect on people’s spiritual growth (Ariès and Duby 1989, 216). In short, following the Reformation, the Catholic monopoly on ideology and philosophy had been broken: one could now opt for, or personally decide on, rivalling (spiritual) doctrines.

61. Castle Bemmel in Gelderland, started in the early-fifteenth century and extended between 1575 and 1625. The wing on the right was added in the eighteenth century.

Religious allusions within a domestic architectural context were, as Johnson (2002, 128) argued, no longer ‘customary, taken-for-granted’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; once people were given the choice between various philosophies and ideologies, their architecture and the use of space not only embodied and made reference to the spiritual world, but also reflected scientific experimentation and an interest in the ancient Classical world. Johnson substantiates his argument with a reference to the growing distinction in the Renaissance period between a domestic and a religious world. I would argue that, in fact, also within the domestic sphere spirituality remained omnipresent in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. However, religion was now just one of several ideologies mirrored in (the use of) architectural space.

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In Ireland the situation was slightly different. As the flipside of a political cause, religion in an Irish context remained a force to be reckoned with, able to ward off alternative doctrines. Previously in this chapter, it was evident that Irish castles and houses seldom gave a hint of religious tolerance. The one example that did suggest spiritual lenience featured an invitation from the Protestant Earl of Ormond to the Catholic Earl of Clanricarde. The reason why the Earl of Ormond saw no problem in asking the Earl of Clanricarde to come and stay at Kilkenny Castle, hinged on the fact that they supported the same political, Royalist cause. Clanricarde gladly accepted the invitation; in contrast, he seemed not too pleased when a leader of the Catholic party paid an unexpected visit to Portumna (figures 8 - 9) (Burke 1983 [1634-1647]). In Clanricarde’s and Ormond’s case, shared political objectives – rooted in a similar ethnic and cultural background, which could be traced back to England – overrode religious differences. By and large, however, to a greater extent than was the case in England and The United Provinces, political and religious convictions coincided in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, which explains the continuing force of religion so clearly testified in the Irish architectural heritage.

Conclusion Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical and domestic architecture suggests that regarding their intertextuality there was indeed, as Johnson argued, decreasing evidence of religious architecture influencing vernacular building styles. As stated at the start of this chapter, one of the locations that frequently carried religious references was the fireplace. An assessment of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century domestic fireplaces demonstrates that whilst numerous sixteenth-century overmantels and lintels refer to biblical figures and scenes, iconographical schemes tend to change in the course of the next century. The influence of Renaissance pattern books increased, yet Serlio’s designs, for instance, were at first still translated into a Christian idiom with his caryatids in the shape of human figures at Castle Bemmel and the Maarten van Rossem Huis in Gelderland, transmuted into caryatids of Adam and Eve (figures 55, 60-61 and XXIX). Throughout the seventeenth century such religious translations seem to dwindle in numbers – with caryatids now usually representing a man and a woman or just women (Fock 2001, 32), sometimes referring to the virtues as at Heringastate (steadfastness, truth) and Dekemastate (wisdom, prudence, vigilance) (Olde Meierink and Stenvert 1999) – until they were almost absent. Mid- to late-seventeenth-century fireplaces, almost without exception, followed Classically inspired Italian or French designs containing, as in one midseventeenth century design by Pieter Post, ‘Corinthian columns, cartouches and festoons’ (Fock 2001, 94). Except for Classical stories, paintings on the overmantel in some cases still depicted biblical scenes. However, in the late-seventeenth century the fireplace evoked neither religious reflections nor Classical ruminations

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but kindled instead, with the painting on the overmantel now being replaced by a mirror, more personal musings. The medieval hall with its mere sacral function as well as church-style windows and dais disappeared from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses and was replaced by rooms that were strongly influenced by a contemporary, more secular culture. Apart from architectural detail, the structure of country houses and palaces as a whole – their shape and lay-out – in this period harked back to (Pagan) Classical examples and was informed by novel architectural designs that did not originate in an ecclesiastical context. Architectural stylistic developments in this way confirm and echo the retreat of religion into a more personal sphere, already evident in the popularity of the personal and multipurpose closet and garden, in place of the communal and unequivocally religious chapel.

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Chapter 8 Conclusion

A credible past I’d make the stranger see and make the Dutch man read Hofwijck as it stands now, the Hofwijck that shall be. So frail are human works, paper outlasts them all. Huygens 1651 (cited in Davidson and Van der Weel 1996, 137)

Part I presented historiographical quandaries a propos the appropriation of castles on three levels: a robust military castle narrative still pervades present-day academia; national(istic) histories continue to form the backdrop to the majority of the (museological) castle presentations; and on a personal level the historical sensation evokes an inspiring yet ultimately obscuring identification with the (material) past and its architectural remains. After my attempt in chapter 2 to strip the castle of some of its academic baggage, I did not dwell on shape, typology and (military) function in part II, but instead focused on how people in the past perceived the buildings they inhabited and frequented. Transpiring from chapter 3, the sources at the heart of the second half of the book did not consist of macrolevel, politically-informed historical accounts, but comprised ‘ego-documents’, histoire mentalité and local histories. Following chapter 4, I fine-tuned the methodological approach presented in the introduction to this book. Notwithstanding the extensive post-processual literature offering umpteen methodological approaches, given my dataset and research question, archaeology per se did not seem to suffice for my project. Regarding methodological queries, the historian Anne Laurence posits: Historians are well placed to take this study [of buildings] further, their sources straddling the ground between the surviving buildings of the architectural historians and the imaginative spaces of the literary scholars. However, they need to refine the ways in which they use existing buildings, which they rarely do with much

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sophistication, tending to use surviving fabric as illustration rather than as a source itself capable of being ‘read’. […] Surviving buildings and objects can reveal much which the written record cannot. New readings of old sources, the real significance of much recent literary work, can take historians beyond their literal readings of such documents as inventories and correspondence. Both approaches, too, can help in comprehending the spaces that people occupied which have not survived, but which have left a footprint. Laurence 2003, 293-294

Unfortunately, most historians and literary scholars indeed have little time for past materiality. Archaeologists on the other hand seldom engage in ‘new readings of old sources’. Part II attempted to combine Laurence’s ‘surviving fabric’, the ‘imaginative spaces’ captured in historical literature, and past ‘correspondence’ on the house. The ‘personal equation’ between scholar and research object already deemed unavoidable by Malinowski (1922), also permeates this book. However, a wide variety of sources not previously combined, if not remedying this inevitable bias at least approximates ‘more credible’ (as opposed to objective or subjective) results (Kloos 1988, 130). An additional advantage of the approach presented here lies in the fact that ‘ego-documents’ shed light on people’s uniqueness and individuality, in this way both illustrating and bridging the oft-assumed dichotomy within archaeology between (pre)historical and modern individuality and between generalisation on the one hand and particularism on the other.

Power versus culture In response to the ‘debate about the trivialisation of the past by the so-called heritage industry’ (McManus 1996, xiii) ‘castles’ are usually still subjected to a Romantic reading, hinging on a martial fairy-tale featuring knights, watchmen, parapets and drawbridges. As early as 1969 the renowned English castellologist Douglas Simpson (1969, 13) noted that ‘it is a mistake to exaggerate its [the castle’s] military aspect’; a notion that has been slowly but surely adopted in English castle museology. Irish and Dutch castellologists by and large steer clear of a rejection of the military paradigm (nationalistic motivations possibly obviating an Irish rebuff). Consequently castle museums in these two countries continue to present castles first and foremost as military strongholds (see Ross Castle and Muiderslot for instance). This said, various academic axioms eventually do find their way into (museum) presentations to the public in all three countries. A postmodern appreciation is irrefutable in the currently prevalent encouragement in museums of a ‘re-counting of many stories’ (Sant Cassia 1990, 224); an academic sway over the archaeologically-informed heritage industry is moreover indisputable in one project’s ‘use of current theories on status and power symbolism and gender roles in prehistory’ (Price 1996, 139-141).

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In terms of castle heritage more specifically, it could be argued that the academic, castellological bearing on national (museum) presentations to some extent follows the paradigmatic shift from the traditional military reading of castles to the currently more fashionable interpretation in terms of power. For each of the three countries discussed here, there is evidence for instance that tour guides have picked up on the now widely held idea (propagated foremost by Matthew Johnson (2002)) that the approach to a castle, the route leading up to the entrance gate, used to be of great significance. Castle tours frequently explicate that past visitors upon arrival were first led around the building and thus subjected to an exhibition of the owner’s might and riches before arriving, dumbfounded, in the courtyard. Against the grain of current social science theory, this book does not place sixteenth- and seventeenth-century élite architecture within the context of power relations but presents ‘an archaeology’, as Gilchrist (1999, 29-30) puts it, ‘concerned less with hierarchies and meta-narratives, and more with the observation of detail, complexities, and local or personal experience’. Thus an alternative reading is offered, that is the flipside of the soldierly and power perspective, explaining historical friendship, privacy and religion foremost as cultural phenomena. A cultural take on the past is not only underrepresented in current archaeology, this is even so in cases when notice is taken of cultural practices. That is, paradoxically, culture is often cast in terms of power. Michael Shanks’ (interdisciplinary) definition of culture can serve as an example: ‘the social production and reproduction of meaning, the social sphere of making sense which unites production and social relations; a field of signification through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored’ (Shanks 2001, 289). By mentioning ‘production’ twice before the semi-colon, Shanks already hints at the direction his definition will take, which becomes unequivocally clear from the ensuing reference to the ‘social order’. I side with Lynn Meskell (1997, 139) who finds fault with ‘a Foucauldian archaeology with its primary focus upon power’, not least because the protagonists of this book did not cast a wish for solitude, indelible friendship and religiousness, in political terms. What is more, such an explanation was explicitly refuted. Montaigne for one was unambiguous: ‘Within a fellowship the peak of perfection consists in friendship; for all forms of it which are forged or fostered by pleasure or profit or by public or private necessity are so much the less beautiful and noble – and therefore so much the less ‘friendship’ – in that they bring in some purpose, end or fruition other than the friendship itself’ (Montaigne 1991 [1580], 3). On privacy he stated: ‘Ambition is of all others the most contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place’ (Montaigne 2004 [1580]). Perhaps a failure on the part of present-day scholars to recognise a distinctively different, non-political stance vis-à-vis friendship, privacy and religion, follows the oscillation through time of gender-specificity regarding certain cultural practices. The Renaissance amicitia perfecta for instance was a Chapter 8 - Conclusion | 167

relationship saturated with high-pitched emotions, involving the exchange of presents, portraits, letters, poems and locks of hair. It was moreover invariably classified as a bond that belied a political reading. With the Romantic period this type of friendship was reconceptualised as ultimately feminine and perhaps be it is for this reason that male scholars today overlook this pivotal aspect of sixteenthand seventeenth-century masculinity.

‘To my poor cell’ This book aimed at bringing to the fore the men and women behind the houses they created and inhabited. For the present (portrayed in part I) I chose to focus on appropriations of ‘castle’ by scholars, policy makers and individual spectators; as regards the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (portrayed in part II) I looked at perceptions of the house harboured by its élite population. Mildmay Fane was a member of this latter segment of society; I cite from his My Happy Life (1644-1648): Dearest in friendship, if you’ll know Where I myself, and how, bestow, Especially whenas I range, Guided by nature, to love change: Believe, it is not to advance Or add to my inheritance; Seeking t’engross by power (amiss) What any other man calls his; But full contended with my own I let all other things alone; Which better t’enjoy without strife, I settle to a country life; And in a sweet retirement there Cherish all hopes, but banish fear, Offending none; so for defence Armed cap-à-pie with innocence, I do dispose of my time thus, To make it more propitious. First my God served, I do command The rest to some choice book or friend, Wherein I may such treasure find T’enrich my nobler part, the mind. […] Thus ravished, as the night draws on Its sable curtain, in I’m gone To my poor cell; which ‘cause ‘tis mine, I judge it doth all else outshine’ Fane 1994 [1644-1648], 208-212

Known foremost for his Otia sacra (‘Sacred meditations’), Fane lived secluded from the world for much of his life. His ‘retirement poems’, which celebrate

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privacy ‘as a form of security against external threats and the opportunity for meditation’ (Loxley 1997, 224), reflect this deliberate choice. In My Happy Life Fane touches on each of the themes – friendship, privacy, religion – discussed in part II. He directed his words to a friend, served God, and deliberated on his ‘sweet retirement’ in a ‘poor cell’. Fane moreover firmly rebutted any political motivations he might be accused of: ‘Believe, it is not to advance; Or add to my inheritance; Seeking t’engross by power (amiss); What any other man calls his’. The value of Apethorpe House, he found, lay not in its riches that he argued (in a similar vein as numerous other country house poets) it did not possess, but in the fact that the house was his. The sceptic might argue that this firm denial of a political reading is proof of Fane’s political motivations. He or she might also object that it is contradictory, to say the least, to compose a book about élite architecture which dismisses a (narrow) political reading of this architectural heritage. Indeed, power relations undeniably lie at the root of this book; that is, research on élite architecture by definition brings in the issue of power. The castle or country house, the past possession of the upper echelons of society, was the prime focus of this book, yet, the history related here took off the moment these affluent men and women closed their doors to outsiders and locked themselves away in their houses, that is, when the process of exclusion – to a certain extent taken for granted by the protagonists themselves – had already taken place. Importantly, mine is a story about the way in which a past élite experienced and perceived their houses (and it was argued that this was for a great deal culturally prescribed or informed), not about the (power-full) qualities that we nowadays attribute to this architecture. Less affluent contemporaries most probably saw these castles and country houses in quite a different light than the élite – and much more like post-processual archaeologists tend to do nowadays. From time to time such a voice was heard in this book. Emilia Lanyer discarded the idea prevalent amongst the élite in her day that friendship fostered equality, and she insisted instead that her partiality for a particular noble woman could never develop into a lasting friendship on account of their incompatible ranks. Thus, though neither poorer contemporaries of the past élite nor scholars nowadays necessarily agree with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘high culture’ and its concomitant interpretation of castle and country house, it was this élite’s experience and interpretation of their architecture that was the subject of this book.

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Addendum Fieldwork and historical sources

My fieldwork, stretching out over a three-year period, consisted of an assessment of approximately one hundred Irish castles and houses, built or refurbished between 1500 and 1700, including several examples of a slightly earlier or later date. I visited about half as many buildings in England. The British castles and houses discussed in this book are mainly located in England, hence my frequent use of ‘English’ and ‘England’. This phraseology is also related to England’s past and present cultural dominance within a wider British context and to the fact that it would be anachronistic to speak about Great Britain for the time prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before ‘a sense of British national identity was forged’ (Colley 1992, 1). This said, to some extent I mix the appellations ‘England’ and ‘Great Britain’; primarily in Part I, dealing with the present, I also employ the designation Great Britain and Britons. Regarding these British examples, I also examined several castles and houses a little outside the date-range. The same is true for The Netherlands, for which my sample consisted of roughly eighty buildings. The properties that I visited in England were all open to the public which meant that I could examine their interiors. I saw the interiors of about ninety percent of the buildings I examined in Ireland, and approximately seventy-five percent of those in The Netherlands. The remainder could only be viewed from the outside and in some cases only from a distance. In terms of the applied methodology I refer the reader to chapter 1 , 4 and 8. Although I do not adhere to the idea that any collection will ever be representative, it has to be said I immersed myself in a rather random selection of firsthand accounts. It is remarkably more difficult to unearth sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Irish ‘egodocuments’ than to find English and Dutch ones, with the unfortunate result that this book does not incorporate citations from Irish

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female authors and only few from the Gaelic Irish. Moreover, whilst country house and closet poems (two mainly seventeenth-century poetic genres celebrating the country house, its closets as well as the owners) provided plenty of information for the English and Dutch context, these genres were not in vogue in Ireland. The Irish voices frequently heard throughout this book are those of the Earl of Clanricarde and the Earl of Cork. Ulick Burke, the fifth Earl of Clanricarde, lived in the early half of the seventeenth century. Of Anglo-Irish ancestry, Clanricarde grew up in England where he briefly sat in Parliament. He married Anne Compton, daughter of the first Earl of Northampton, with whom he had one daughter. Portumna Castle (figures 8 - 9), in what is now County Galway, was built by Ulick Burke’s father, the fourth Earl. Other properties he inherited included nearby Kilcolgan, a medieval castle refurbished into a tower-house in the sixteenth century, and the early-seventeenth-century house Terrelan (now referred to as Terryland). His letters date from the 1640s war years when England was submerged in its Civil War and the Irish confederates rebelled in Ireland (Burke 1983 [1634-1647]). To Lord Cottington, Clanricarde wrote: ‘My estate in this Kingdom has continued in as bad a condition, spoiled and pillaged both by English and Irish, what one left always destroyed by the other’ (ibid., 39). Although the earl had remained a Catholic, he did not join the Confederate army, but instead attended talks at Kilkenny Castle (figure XX), home of the Irish Royalist leader the Earl of Ormond, in an attempt to negotiate a coalition between the Confederates and Royalists. When Cromwell replaced king Charles I, Clanricarde moved back to England where he died in 1657. Richard Boyle, the ‘Great Earl’ of Cork was born in Canterbury in 1566 and arrived in Ireland in the wake of the Munster rebellion, at the time of the Plantation of the province (Boyle 1886a, 1886b, 1886c, 1886d). Boyle’s diaries span much of the first half of the seventeenth century and reveal how he cunningly amassed his Irish property – buying, amongst others, houses in Cork, Tipperary and Waterford formerly in the possession of Sir Walter Raleigh – and how his various business projects prospered. They furthermore offer interesting glimpses of his administrative work as Lord High Treasurer as well as of his personal life. Boyle married twice, both times Anglo-Irish women, who bore him many children; the celebrated scientist Robert Boyle was one of them. As regards English sources I studied country house poems, autobiographies and diaries. Though well-off and frequently of noble blood, almost none of the Englishmen and –women here cited are known for specific historical deeds other than that of writing memoirs that have stood the test of time. Some of their works are especially well-known; the diaries of Samuel Pepys (1928 [1659-1669]), for instance, will need no introduction. Those by John Evelyn (1895 [1641-1705/6]) and Anne Clifford (1990 [1603-1676]) might also be familiar, yet a brief introduction into these works and their authors seems appropriate.

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John Evelyn, whose life spanned the last three quarters of the seventeenth century, was a famous man in his own time, author of celebrated works on topics as varied as architecture, cookery, botany, theology and politics. He served in various public capacities and was personally acquainted with Charles II and James II. Beyond state politics Evelyn’s diary reveals architectural tastes of the time and snippets of his own personal life. Evelyn married Mary Browne, daughter of the British ambassador in Paris, and wrote affectionately about both her and their children. The introduction to a nineteenth-century edition of his diary notes, with reason, that Evelyn’s words ‘will develop his private character as being of the most amiable kind’ (Bray 1895, vii). Remarkably, Lady Anne Clifford’s diaries span much of the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. The only daughter of the third Earl of Cumberland she struggled for much of her life to recover the various estates which her uncle had inherited on the death of her father. She eventually regained Knole in Kent and Brougham in North Yorkshire, two places from where she composed her diary. She wrote lovingly about her two daughters and about her mother, but considerably less so about her two husbands with whom she does not appear to have enjoyed happy relationships. Clifford’s diaries provide insight into the English court as well as the twenty-six year long building project including both castles and churches she embarked on at the age of sixty. The diaries are especially revealing of Clifford’s daily life at Knole and Brougham. They have gained a certain amount of fame through another, later inhabitant of Knole Castle, Vita Sackville-West. It was Sackville-West who wrote the introduction to one of the printed editions of Clifford’s diaries (Clifford 1923 [1603-1676]) and lent the diaries to Virginia Woolf. It has recently been suggested that Woolf modelled Orlando not on Vita Sackville-West, as is usually argued, but on Lady Anne Clifford (Hallett 1995). The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby and the biographies of Lady Anne Halkett, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Robert Carey are arguably less-known. Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary spans six years during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century and consists of brief and often matter-of-fact descriptions of her daily life, centering on the business of running a household and her strong religiosity (Hoby 1998 [1599-1605]). Hoby was born Margaret Dakins and the sole heiress of a large fortune. Throughout her childhood she was placed under guardianship in another aristocratic family, a common practice at the time. After the death of her guardian and her refusal of three marriage proposals, she accepted Sir George Hoby’s offer of marriage. She did not expect the marriage to bring her happiness, so it appears. Around the time of the ceremony she signed a letter ‘She that is nothing but grefe and misery, Margarete Hoby’ (Moody 1998, xxviii). It has been suggested that Hoby’s palpable discontent – in one diary entry Hoby explicitly mentions she is reading a book on melancholy – stemmed not only from her unhappy marriage but also from her inability to have children (Moody 1998, xliv-xlv). Lady Margeret Hoby died in 1633, almost thirty years after her diary ends.

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Lady Anne Halkett’s autobiography, written between 1677 and 1678, is a surprising piece of work on account of its candidness. It relates Halkett’s secret liaisons, break-ups, and the vicissitudes of her female friendships. The reader becomes acquainted with her zest for life, vulnerabilities and sense of humour (she helped the future King James II escape St. James’ Palace during the Civil War by providing him with female clothes ‘which fitted His Highness very well and was very pretty in itt’) (Halkett 1979 [1677-1678], 25). Deceived by Colonel Bampfield who turned out to be married already, she eventually married Sir James Halkett, despite avowing that ‘nothing butt the death of C.[olonel] B.[ampfield] could make mee ever thinke of another’ (ibid., 69). The Halketts had three children, one of whom, Robert, survived into adulthood. A supporter of King James II, Robert Halkett died in 1692, seven years before Lady Anne Halkett, in the aftermath of the war in Ireland where he was taken prisoner. Sir Kenelm Digby is the author of a love story titled Private Memoirs that, veiled by fictitious names and places, is the again candid account of a struggle – his own – to find love (Digby 1968 [1603-1665]). A diplomat and naval commander, Digby also engaged in the arts and sciences, and reportedly mastered six languages. He is typecast as an idiosyncratic figure on the basis of his dithering religious and political convictions. Born a Catholic, he converted to the Protestant English Church, only to convert back again to Roman Catholicism; his attitude towards the political hot topic of the time, the ‘King versus Parliament issue’, fluctuated accordingly (Ward and Waller 2004). Digby’s supposed eccentricity is moreover linked to various sexually explicit passages in his memoirs. The autobiography by Robert Carey, the first Earl of Monmouth, centres on his life in the provinces and at court in the late-sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth century (Carey 1972 [1577-1625]). It gained some fame owing to its eyewitness account of Queen Elizabeth’s last days and Carey’s journey from London to Edinburgh to inform the future King James I of her death. Carey became one of the king’s favourites and Prince Charles’ chamberlain. His memoirs also deal with an earlier phase in his life when he was employed in the perilous border area between England and Scotland, where he pursued, and when possible incarcerated, members of the ‘Border Reivers’. Robert Carey married Elizabeth Trevannion with whom he had three children. A propos Dutch sources I consulted country house poems (De Vries 1998) and English travel accounts of The United Provinces (Van Strien and Van der Leer 1993), amongst which, of course, are the legendary descriptions by Fynes Moryson, whose comments on Ireland I also investigated (Moryson 1890 [16001603]). Constantijn Huygens, knighted in England by King James I and the author of thousands of letters, countless poems, treatises on a wide variety of topics and an autobiography, can be rated as one of my key-informants. A true Renaissance man, Huygens was versatile in the extreme; apart from being an active writer, he was the secretary of subsequent Orange princes, an amateur scientist, composer, 174 | Architecture and Élite Culture in the United Provinces, England and Ireland, 1500-1700

architect, perfume-maker, and master of a selection of languages. He built one of the earliest Dutch Classicist houses as well as Hofwijck, uniquely built in the shape of a human body (figure 12). The latter still exists, though it has become somewhat decrepit with the garden lanes, the legs of the body, severed due to the expansion of The Hague. Huygens was happy in his marriage to Susanne van Baerle, with whom he had five children. To his great grief she died young; he himself, a widower for the remainder of his life, reached the respectable age of ninety. Huygens’ oldest son, Constantijn Huygens Jr., succeeded his father as secretary of the Prince of Orange and excerpts from his diaries also feature in this book. Christiaan, Huygens’ second son, was recognised as one of the greatest scientists of his age and discoverer of the ring around Saturn. I have made extensive use of the letters, diaries, poems and autobiographies produced by members of the Muiderkring (‘Muider circle’), a term coined in the nineteenth century to indicate a Dutch party of illustrious seventeenth-century literary and historical figures who used to meet in the castle Het Muiderslot (figures 15 and VIII). Amongst them were Constantijn Huygens, Pieter Cornelis Hooft (who inhabited Het Muiderslot), Joost van den Vondel, Caspar Barlaeus and Maria ‘Tesselschade’ Roemer Visscher. They lived during The United Provinces’ Golden Age, and their correspondence gives a vivid picture of their lives and mutual affections (Worp 1918; Keesing 1993; Smits-Veldt and Bakker 1999). It appears the men harboured a special fondness for Maria Tesselschade (1594-1649); clever, able and beautiful, she was named ‘Tesselschade’ after the Dutch island Texel that was severely damaged (‘schade’ in Dutch) in a storm on the eve of her birth. The assemblage of Muiderkring letters and poems by and to her, as well as about her, provide an exceptionally valuable source (Worp 1918). One playful example of the way in which these various letters speak of the house comes from a poem about Tesselschade that Huygens sent to Barlaeus. Huygens’ poem refers to the arrangements of the bedrooms in Huygens’ The Hague house during a visit by Maria Tesselschade (‘the widow’), who occupied the top room, positioned exactly above that of Huygens (‘the widower’): The widow lies in my house, but I do not lie with her Oh, surprising sadness The widow lies on top, the widower under. Barlaeus, how do you explain this? What do you think parts us? My cold attic floor and her cool virtue. Keesing 1993, 122; my translation

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Illustrations

Figures 34, 39, 40, 41, 59, XVI: Figures 42, 44: Figure VI: Figure XX: Figure XXII:

Dutch Castle Foundation. Ursula Mattenberger. Nicholas Nisbett. Irish Tourist Board. Angelica Dülberg.

The remaining illustrations are by the author.

Illustrations | 197