By Ellen O'Brien - “PhD student, book lover and tea addict, I spend my days researching and writing, with help from my bunny George. History is not quite so visible in Australia as in England… but it's there if you know where to look!”
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
hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
Or
stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And,
these grudged at, art reverenced the while. (1-6)
Then
hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh
as the air, and new as are the hours.
The
early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig,
grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The
blushing apricot and woolly peach
Hang
on thy walls, that every child may reach.
And
though thy walls be of the country stone,
They’re
reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan… (39-47)
(Lines
from Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ 1616)
Earlier in 2016, as autumn started to
settle in, I was lucky enough to visit FOUR country houses in a WEEK. Two in particular struck me, not because of
their grandness or beauty, but because of their difference to one another.
The first was Penshurst Place, just outside
Tunbridge Wells in Sussex, immortalised in Ben Jonson’s country house poem, To Penshurst. The second was Blenheim Palace in
Oxfordshire, home to the Dukes of Marlborough.
It can be easy to lump all “English Country
Houses” in together, with their ubiquitous elderly room wardens,
cafeteria-style National Trust tea rooms, their inevitable printed tea towels
and competitive boasts of famous visitors or occupants. The same thing happens
when you go on any holiday, and experience a glut of the national monument…
Buddhist temples, European cathedrals, and Scottish castles: they can blur into
one and get a bit “same-y.”
However, Penshurst and Blenheim were so
vastly different: they were born of different historical circumstances, and projected
such different personalities, that you would hardly mention them in the same
breath. The key difference was the sense
of professional commercialism that ruled Blenheim, and the slightly amateurish,
casual welcome offered by Penshurst.
Penshurst, (without reverting to poetic
analysis) is an older house that supposedly grew naturally from the English
soil, and its glory is derived from its organic, ancient presence, an inseparable
part of the landscape. However, by the time Jonson was writing his tribute to
the recently landed and titled Sidney family in 1616, the house has already
undergone the renovations that made it distinctly larger than ‘an ancient pile.’
(The Great
Hall)
An Elizabethan and Jacobean mansion, it is
surrounded by a maze of 10 foot walls, heavily espaliered and laden with fruit.
In his poem, Jonson claims that any child could wander in and pluck a woolly
peach off the branch, but the forbidding walls suggest otherwise.
(The
Walled Garden)
Nevertheless, the house seems more a part
of the landscape and the village than something like Blenheim ever could. The arched
tourist entrance, made of old red bricks, opens directly into the village of
Penshurst, which is built right up against the walls of the estate, perhaps a
throwback to the protection once offered by the manor house, and the local
cricket green can be seen from the grounds.
(The
Visitors Entrance)
We wandered through the formal, square
gardens, full of secret avenues and hidden bathing ponds, marvelling at the
fruit that was thick on the ground and overly ripe in the branches. The
carefully laid out flower beds, now withering, contained only a faded hint of
their former colour. Summer was over-blown, turning to brown, the way it had in
the garden for over five hundred years. Our picnic, invaded by the occasional
bumblebee, and complete with union jack paper cups, felt appropriately rustic.
(A Country
Picnic)
The house, recently used as a filming
location for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, was
sparsely decorated and photography was forbidden. Inside, it retained an
Elizabethan flavour: all was dark wood and flagstone, crumbling red brick and
embroidered furnishings.
(Wolf
Hall, from the books by Hilary Mantel)
Penshurst, proud of its age, wears it like
a badge, and appears to have held out against the highly commercial,
professional business of the country house industry. The final room contained
photographs of the family and servants, taken by family members and pasted into
books, or plastic sheet protectors. There was something very touching about
these carefully collated but amateurish family albums.
(Hidden
Waters)
The only commercially produced information
board was tucked away in the garden, and explained the various stages of the
garden’s planting and landscaping, emphasising that this was a place which grew
over time, and had witnessed six hundred years of English history.
(Heraldic
Garden)
In terms of visitor experience, the prices were
very reasonable, made more so by my student card and Nell’s train ticket
discount. As with many country houses, access is only by car. We were almost
alone in the house and grounds, despite it being Sunday, and the few people we
did encounter were local families who had brought their children to picnic and play
in the garden.
…
Blenheim Palace…
As we pulled into the grey expanse of car
park at Blenheim, the drizzle was beginning to set in, along with a touch of
the ol’ ‘castle fatigue’, and I was perhaps, unfairly, steeling myself to be unimpressed.
Gone was the grassy, county-fair style parking of Penshurst: this place was set
up to accommodate the maximum number of tourists, and charged accordingly. We
were a little taken aback by the extortionate entry fee, and thought it a bit
rich that any additional service (like the electric cart for elderly visitors)
cost extra.
(The
courtyard at Blenheim)
Built to celebrate the military successes
of the first Duke of Marlborough, under James II, William and Mary, and finally
Queen Anne, Blenheim more resembles a French chateau or Italian palace, than an
English country home. Its purpose is clear: to impress.
Fighting against a tide of French college
students, we were swept through the rooms on a rather crowded, ‘official’ tour
of the house and its most famous occupants. I say ‘official,’ because great
care had been taken to project a blemish-free, whitewashed version of events.
The first Duchess, Sarah, was up for slating, but Winston Churchill and his
immediate family were sacrosanct.
The floor length information boards,
commercially produced (yet littered with spelling mistakes) told the story of
Winston, the most celebrated son of the estate, but very little else. What a
missed opportunity to locate the house in England’s long and dramatic history!
Mary S Lovell wrote a deeply researched and
candid biography of the Churchill family (The
Churchills: In Love and War), and having recently read this, it struck me
that the ‘Blenheim version’ of events sacrificed human drama in favour of
respectable posterity. There was no mention of Winston’s father’s philandering,
and likely death of syphilis, or his mother’s irrepressible character and
remarriage to a much younger man, his brother’s forced marriage and marked
preference for ballet dancers and actresses.
Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American heiress
he married, was a beautiful and tragic figure. It was rumoured she sobbed
through her wedding veil, and many years later, she managed to obtain a
divorce. But, apart from the Singer Sargent family portrait, she is largely
absent. It was she who noticed that their elaborate dinner left-overs were
scooped into buckets and sent out to the poorer tenants. By the time they
arrived, they were little more than slops. She organised tin containers, like
lunch boxes, to separate and preserve the food for the estate workers.
(Consuelo’s
family portrait)
Where the garden at Penshurst retained some
medieval aspects, and had an English ‘country garden’ atmosphere, Blenheim was
utterly devoid of sweet peas or marigolds. Acres of Capability Brown
landscaping had carved out long, sweeping views, but walking the length of them
was impossible.
(The
formal gardens at Blenheim)
Despite the extensive grounds, there was a strong
sense of enclosure, of ownership, of exclusivity. The flocks of pheasants so
clearly belonged to someone, although
there were no fences. There was no pretence of communal gardens and farming,
like at Penshurst. Blenheim proudly proclaims its dominion, surveyed by the
column of victory.
(Column
of Victory)
