A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540-1640
Mark Girouard
Yale, £40, 372 pages
Mark Girouard, born a Catholic in 1937, is the unchallenged doyen of English architectural historians, particularly after the recent lamented death of John Harris. His major works include The Victorian Country House (1971), Life in the English Country House (1978) and Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (1983).
He has taken his time in producing this work. In 1956 John Harvey, author of English Medieval Architects: A Biographical Dictionary down to 1550 (1954) wrote to him suggesting he write a biographical dictionary of architects to fill in the gap between his own work and that of Howard Colvin (A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1660-1840, also 1954). He eventually signed a contract with the excellent Yale University Press in 2012. He has carefully used “Architecture” rather than “Architects” in his title.
The book in the main is designed to appeal to the specialist and academic rather than the general reader. Most of the names covered are of remarkable obscurity. Girouard does of course cover well the most famous architects of the period, such as Robert Smythson and Inigo Jones and also sculptors like Maximilian Colt and Nicholas Stone.
Finding a Catholic angle is somewhat difficult in an epoch after the promulgation of the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which released her subjects from loyalty to Queen Elizabeth in 1570. Thereafter it behoved any Catholic to keep as low a profile as possible. The great Elizabethan prodigy-swagger houses were inevitably built for the hard-faced Protestants who had done well out of the Reformation and monastic spoils. These include Burghley House (by and for William Cecil), Hardwick Hall, “more glass than wall” (by Smythson for Bess of Hardwick), Hatfield House (by and for Robert Cecil), Longleat House (by Smythson for Sir John Thynne) and Wollaton Hall (by Smythson for Sir Francis Willoughby).
In the entry on Sir Henry Savile, Warden of Merton and Provost of Eton, Girouard notes in connection with his construction of the late 16th-century Schools next to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, “anything from Italy savouring of Roman Catholicism or High Churchmanship would have been unacceptable”.
The Gazetteer starts very promisingly with John Abell: “He was a Catholic recusant, perhaps a protégé of the Catholic Monningtons of Sarnesfield Court.” Abell was responsible for the Laudian restoration of Abbey Dore Church in Herefordshire for the first Viscount Scudamore; this initial Catholic promise is not, however, sustained.
The most prominent Catholic architectural patron of Elizabeth’s reign was Thomas Tresham. In 1559 he inherited considerable estates around Rushton, Northamptonshire, from his grandfather, Sir Thomas Tresham, the last indigenous British Grand Prior of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta) until 1993. He was under arrest from 1571 until 1593 for having harboured the martyr St Edmund Campion; on his release he built the New Building at Lyveden Hall and more remarkably the Triangular Lodge at Rushton, a profound statement of Catholicism with its numerous architectural references to the Trinity and the Mass.
In 1612 James VI & I did erect a very Protestant monument by the Cure brothers in Westminster Abbey to his profoundly Catholic mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, judicially done to death in 1587 by her cousin Elizabeth I; the Latin inscription is deeply filial. Various crypto (or possibly actual) Catholics such as Anne of Denmark, wife of the same King James (The Queen’s House Chapel at Greenwich by Inigo Jones) and Henry Howard, first Earl of Northampton (Northampton House in the Strand) were major architectural patrons.
The most notable avowed Catholic patron was Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV of France and wife of Charles I. The Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace was built for her by Inigo Jones in 1623-5 in advance of her marriage, for her to benefit from Catholic worship on her arrival; she imported Catholic furnishings from France. Somerset House was the official residence of the Queen of England and she had a Catholic chapel built for her there, again by Inigo Jones; it was manned by Franciscan friars. It had a most ingenious and famous monstrance by Francois Dieussart; needless to say both chapels fared badly from the rebellious Parliamentarians in 1643.
This well-produced book should be a useful and important addition to the library of any serious architectural historian of this period and others.
Michael Hodges is the Herald’s architectural correspondent, and Senior Vice-President of the British Association of the Order of Malta
