Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England

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Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan EnglandAuthor(s): John GurneySource: Architectural History, Vol. 43 (2000), pp. 113-120Published by: SAHGB Publications LimitedStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1568688 .Accessed: 18/06/2014 02:08

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Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley

House, and architectural

innovation in late-Elizabethan

England by JOHN GURNEY

Ashley House in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (Fig. i), is best known to architectural historians for its detailed and informative building accounts, which date from the years I602 to i607.1 The house was demolished in I925 without adequate record, and scholars have tended to assume that it was built to a quite unexceptional H-plan design and was, therefore, of no great architectural interest.2

A recently-discovered contemporary first-floor plan of Ashley House shows that it was in fact a building of considerable importance.3 The plan (Fig. 2) demonstrates that Ashley was remarkably similar in layout to both Charlton House and Somerhill in Kent, two Jacobean houses justly famous for their innovative, axially-placed halls (Figs 3 and 4).4 This architectural development, as is now generally recognized, represented a significant departure from the linear house-plans most often associated with traditional, hierarchical household arrangements.5

Charlton, which was begun in I607 for Sir Adam Newton, Dean of Durham and tutor to Prince Henry, is usually considered to have been the first house in southern England to contain a hall of this type.6 Somerhill, a house built for the Earl and Countess of Clanricarde, was slightly later, its rainwater heads bearing the dates 161 I and i6i3.7 Other contemporary houses with axial halls include Sir George Coppin's house at Kensington, which was begun in I605 or soon after,8 and Eagle House in Wimbledon, built in 1613 for the merchant Robert Bell.9 These houses were all later than Ashley, where work started in the last year of Elizabeth's reign. Ashley House must therefore be regarded as the earliest recorded example of an axial-hall house in southern England.

The house was built for Lady Jane Berkeley, the estranged wife of Lord Henry Berkeley.10 She was the daughter of Protector Somerset's brother-in-law and political ally, Sir Michael Stanhope, and she had previously been married to Sir Roger Townshend of Raynham (d. 1590). The Stanhopes were connected by marriage to William, Lord Burghley, and benefited substantially from his patronage. Two of Lady


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ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 43: 2000

Fig. I. Ashley House, Walton-on-Thames: early twentieth-century photograph (? D. Sherborn)

Fig. 2. Ashley House:first-floorplan, c. 1602 (East Sussex Record Office, GLY302: courtesy of Lord Hampden)

114



ASHLEY HOUSE

'.q ,

' _*-# .. , .

CHARLTON

Fig. 3. Charlton House, Kent: second-floorplan (? Crown Copyright RCHME)

Fig. 4. Somerhill, Kent: ground- floorplan, byJohn Thorpe (Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir

John Soane's Museum)

I

I I5




Berkeley's brothers, Sir Michael and Sir John Stanhope, pursued successful court careers, and it is likely that she herself held a position at court during the I57os and I58os.11

Ashley House was in many ways typical of the suburban houses built for prosperous court officials and their relatives in the early years of the seventeenth century. The house did not form part of a great landed estate: Ashley Farm, on which it was built, contained no more than 167 acres, but it had the advantage of lying close to the royal palace of Oatlands and of being within reach of Hampton Court and Windsor.12 Ashley was also reasonably compact, like the houses of Sir Adam Newton at Charlton and Sir Walter Cope at Kensington. The doubling up of rooms in the main range at Ashley, a feature that was to be repeated in the other axial-hall houses and in Cope's house, would have contributed to this relative compactness.13

The relationship between the axial-hall houses of southern England and the slightly earlier examples to be found in the Midlands remains uncertain.14 The banqueting house at Holdenby, which dates from the I58os, may have been the first building in England to contain an axial hall; it was soon followed by the Earl of Shrewsbury's Manor Lodge at Worksop, and, most famously, by the Countess of Shrewsbury's two houses at Hardwick.15 As Mark Girouard has argued, the southern and midland groups may have evolved independently, but the possibility that reciprocal influences were at work cannot be discounted.16

It is certainly possible that Lady Berkeley had gained some knowledge of the earlier group of axial-hall houses before she began work at Ashley. The Stanhopes, whose main seat was at Shelford in Nottinghamshire, belonged to the Midlands community of noble and upper gentry families whose houses were among the first to incorporate this type of hall. Although there was a history of often violent hostility between the Stanhopes and their neighbours the Talbots and Cavendishes, contacts between these families were never wholly lost.17 Lady Berkeley's brothers Sir Michael and Sir John Stanhope continued, for instance, to correspond with the seventh Earl of Shrewsbury in the years I590-9I, despite the Earl's feud with their eldest brother Sir Thomas Stanhope.18 The Stanhopes, as leading members of Nottinghamshire society, also had contacts with such prominent builders as Sir Francis Willoughby, and Sir Thomas Stanhope is known to have visited Willoughby's new house at Wollaton in June I588.19 It is, therefore, by no means inconceivable that Lady Berkeley had some familiarity with the houses of advanced design which were being built for wealthy patrons in the Midlands in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign.

While the midland axial-hall designs are most often associated with the name of Robert Smythson, Charlton and Somerhill have in recent years both been identified as probable designs of John Thorpe.20 The Ashley House building accounts unfortunately give no indication of who was responsible for the design of the house.21 Richard Mason, who compiled the building accounts, was a senior member of Lady Berkeley's household, and is unlikely to have had any direct involvement in the building process. Although his name is identical to that of the stonemason who in I595 was in charge of work for the Earl of Shrewsbury at the axial-hall house of Worksop Manor Lodge, it is clear from surviving examples of their handwriting that

II6



they were not the same person.22 If Charlton and Somerhill can indeed be ascribed to John Thorpe, then it is highly likely that he was also responsible for Ashley House. Thorpe is known to have left his post in the Queen's Works, and to have begun seeking commissions from wealthy patrons, in the autumn of I60I.23 Ashley may represent one of his earliest successful commissions for the design of a private house.

Other significant connexions can be established with greater certainty. Lady Berkeley's grandson and heir, whose baronetcy she paid for in I617, was Sir Roger Townshend, who was to embark upon his own remarkable building project at Raynham in I619.24 This followed the successful conclusion of his court case against Richard Mason, which centred on disputed sums remaining in the latter's hands at the time of Lady Berkeley's death.25 The case papers connected with this action reveal additional, intriguing links between Lady Berkeley, Sir Roger Townshend, and Sir George Coppin, builder of the noted axial-hall house in Kensington which was later to form the nucleus of Kensington Palace. In November 1613 Mason had, it was claimed, been instructed by Lady Berkeley to pay Sir George Coppin JI,ooo for a 'newe house at Kensington' for the use of her grandson.26 Another builder known to Lady Berkeley was Sir John Trevor, who was keeper of Oatlands Park when Ashley House was built.27 Ashley was situated on the edge of Oatlands Park, and the plan of the house has survived among Trevor's papers. When Trevor came to build his own house at Plas Teg in Flintshire in I6IO, he chose to incorporate what in Wales was then the highly unusual feature of an axial hall.28

The appearance of axial halls in English and Welsh house plans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was undoubtedly a development of great importance, marking as it did the point at which some builders came to accept the logic of shifting the hall from its traditional, asymmetrical position adjacent to the entrance and screens passage. The significance of this development should not, though, be exaggerated: it cannot be said to have represented a complete break with the past, and it may not have been as radical in its implications as, for instance, the appearance in some near- contemporary plans of centrally-placed and entered halls.29 Although Palladio's radical design for the Villa Valmarana at Lisiera provided the source for many of the axial-hall plans, particularly those associated with Thorpe, there remained major differences between the rigid internal symmetry of Palladio's design and the disposition of rooms in the English houses.30 The traditional features of hall screen and dais, and the functional separation of high and service ends of the house, were evidently maintained in such houses as Ashley, Somerhill and Charlton. A hall screen is known to have been installed at Ashley by the Walton carpenters Richard Taylor and Thomas Young, and a dais is identifiable on the Thorpe plan of Somerhill.31 The symmetry of the hall at Somerhill was broken by a single doorway below the dais, which led, significantly, to the services: access to the high end of the house would only have been possible via the dais. A similar layout appears to have existed at Charlton.32

The reorientation of the hall in these houses may well have reflected, at least in part, the increased importance for some owners of first-floor living, and their desire to make improvements in the disposition of first-floor rooms. The realignment of the hall made possible the realignment of the great chamber, and created new opportunities for

ASHLEY HOUSE II7




builders to improve circulation routes on the upper floor.33 This would have been particularly important in such houses as Ashley and Hardwick, with their unconven- tional households headed by women.34 Lady Berkeley's surviving household orders, which were drawn up in August I601, some months before she began building at Ashley, indicate her clear preference for first-floor living, and her desire to safeguard the division of social space between owner, gentleman servants and yeoman servants. It was in the great (or dining) chamber of her house that she spent most of her time, and it was in this principal first-floor room that guests were entertained. The dining chamber, rather than the ground-floor hall, also served to accommodate the whole household at divine service, the one occasion when servants and family members all gathered together. Lady Berkeley's gentleman servants were enjoined to wait on family members and guests in the dining chamber, and to remain there when her yeoman servants returned to the hall after prayers, 'for as the hall is a fytte place for the yomen so is the dyninge chamber most conveniente for the gentlemen to make theyre most a bode in.'35 The great chamber had clearly become the most important room in this particular household, and the centre of its owner's social activities. For owners who were coming to see the distinction between ground and first floor as more important than that between high and low ends of the house, the traditional ground- floor plan no longer needed to be retained at all costs; the conventional arrangement of hall and screens passage could be sacrificed in the interests of improving the layout of first-floor rooms.36

Although the precise significance of the axial hall remains open to debate, it is clear that its introduction, at Ashley and elsewhere, helped to make possible the wholesale abandonment of the traditional house plan later in the seventeenth century. Ashley House deserves recognition as one of the earliest and most important of these innovative buildings.

NOTES

I Surrey History Centre (SHC) MS 454. The accounts have been published as Ashley House Building Accounts 1602-1607, ed. M. E. Blackman (Guildford: Surrey Record Society, vol. xxIX, I977). They are discussed in Malcolm Airs, The Tudor andJacobean Country House: A Building History (Stroud, I995), pp. 60, Ioo, 123, 151, 198. 2 See, for instance, Howard Colvin's review of Blackman, Building Accounts, in Southern History, I (1979), pp. 244-45. 3 East Sussex Record Office (ESRO), GLY 302. A contemporary inscription on the plan confirms that it is 'the plott of Ashley house'. The building accounts, which contain references to small windows at the 'upper' and 'nether' end of the great chamber, set either side of the 'square' and 'carell' windows of the chamber, as well as references to the 'gable ende over the greate chamber square wyndoe', also suggest that the first-floor

great chamber was, as indicated on the plan, axially-placed: Blackman, Building Accounts, pp. 9-I I, 29, 52-53. 4 Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), The Monuments of East London (London, HMSO, I930), p. 34; John Summerson, 'The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe', Walpole Society, XL (1966) (henceforward referred to as Thorpe Drawings), pp. 99-1oo and plate 96. 5 John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (8th edn, Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 67, 79; Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the English Country House (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. I45, 153; Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, London 2: South, Buildings of England (1983), pp. 30, 250, Nicholas

II8



ASHLEY HOUSE

Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680 (New Haven and London, I999), pp. I24, 135-41, 155-59, 196, 285. I am indebted to Nicholas Cooper for discussing with me the significance of axial halls. 6 Girouard, Smythson, p. 288. For the date of Newton's acquisition of Charlton, see London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) E/MWC/I4, I6, 17; RCHME, East London, p. 31; H. Avray Tipping, English Homes, 9 vols

(London, I920-37), I, p. 328. 7 John Newman, West Kent and the Weald, Buildings of England (2nd edn, I976), pp. 536-37; English Heritage statutory lists: Somerhill Park, Capel, Kent. 8 Patrick A. Faulkner, 'Nottingham House:John Thorpe and his Relation to Kensington Palace', Archaeological

Journal, 107 (1950), pp. 66-77. 9 Cherry and Pevsner, London 2: South, pp. 30, 455; Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, p. 136. Io Blackman, Building Accounts, ix-x; cf. Lawrence Stone, Family and Fortune (Oxford, 1973), pp. 251-52. I I W. T. MacCaffrey, 'Talbot and Stanhope: an Episode in Elizabethan Politics', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 33 (I960), pp. 73-85 (p. 75); P. W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons 1558-1603, 3 vols (London, HMSO, 1981), III, pp. 436, 437, 440-41, 441-42, 520; Dictionary of National Biography 'John Stanhope, I545?-I62I'; Blackman, Building Accounts, ix. 12 ESRO, GLY 303; cf. Blackman, Building Accounts, ix, where 143 acres is given. 13 Cf. Eric Mercer, 'The Houses of the Gentry', Past and Present, 5 (I954), pp. 17-20; Girouard, Smythson, p. 287. 14 Ibid., pp. 287-88. I Ibid., pp. 131, I45, 153-54, 287-88; Mark Girouard, Hardwick Hall (National Trust Guide, I989), pp. 15, i8. I6 Girouard, Smythson, p. 288.

17 MacCaffrey, 'Talbot and Stanhope', pp. 73-85; Public Record Office (PRO) SPI2/252/45, 46; SPI2/ 27I/30. i8 Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), with Derbyshire Archaeological Society, A Calendar of the

Shrewsbury and Talbot Papers, 2 vols (London, HMSO, I966-7I), II, pp. I59, 60; MacCaffrey, 'Talbot and

Stanhope', p. 75. 19 HMC Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (London, HMSO, I9I1), p. 454. 20 Girouard, Smythson, pp. 287-88; Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (3rd edn, New Haven and London, I995), p. 979; Summerson, Architecture, p. 79; Newman, West Kent and the Weald, pp. 536-37; Andor Gomme, 'Portumna: Ultramarine Ancestors and Cousins' (forthcoming). I am extremely grateful to Professor Gomme for providing me with a copy of this paper. 21 The only reference in the building accounts to a 'plott' is in connexion with carpenters' work in the house: Blackman, Building Accounts, p. 56. 22 Sheffield Archives BFM 2/128 (Richard Mason to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 12 March 1594-95); British Library (BL) Add. MS 41,655, fol. 87; SHC MS 454. Mark Girouard suggests that Manor Lodge 'can reasonably be attributed' to Robert Smythson: Girouard, Smythson, p. 288. 23 Thorpe Drawings, p. 4. 24 BL Add. MS 45,902, fols II, I6, 24, 33-33v, 34, 37, 42, 48: Stone, Family and Fortune, p. 258; James M. Rosenheim, The Townshends of Raynham (Middletown, Connecticut, I989), pp. 8-9, 13. For Raynham, see H. L. Bradfer-Lawrence, 'The Building of Raynham Hall', Norfolk Archaeology, xxIII (1927), pp. 93-146; John Harris, 'Raynham Hall', Archaeological Journal, I 8 (I96I); Malcolm Airs, 'The Designing of Five East Anglian Houses, I505-I637', Architectural History, 21 (1978), pp. 58-67; Linda Campbell, 'Some Documentary Evidence for the Building of Raynham Hall', Architectural History, 32 (I989), pp. 52-63. 25 BL Add. MSS 41,655, fol. 59; 45,902, fols 1-48. 26 BL Add. MS 45,902, fols I9, 45. It should not of course be assumed that this was the well-known Coppin house. 27 ESRO, GLY 223. 28 Peter Smith, for the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, Houses of the Welsh Countryside (2nd edn, London, HMSO, I988), p. 242. Cf Gomme, 'Portumna', for connexions between Plas Teg and Somerhill.

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120 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 43: 2000

29 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, pp. 158-59, 285; personal communication from Professor Andor Gomme.

Early examples of central halls parallel with the front and entered from the centre include Bidston in Cheshire and Westwood Park in Worcestershire. 30 Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture (Isaac Ware edition, 1738, reprint New York 1965), Second Book, plate 42. Cf. Thorpe Drawings, p. 29. 3 Blackman, Building Accounts, p. 56. 32 Thorpe Drawings, plate 92; RCHME East London, pp. 32, 33. The interior of Somerhill has now been

greatly altered: see plan in the National Monuments Record.

33 Some more conservative owners might of course still try to reconcile improved first-floor arrangements with a conventional ground-floor plan: see, for instance, Thorpe's plan of Sir George St Poll's Lincolnshire house, with its axial great chamber above a conventionally-placed great hall, in Thorpe Drawings, plate 59. The

position of the fireplace in the great chamber at Ashley confirms the view that the hall in this house was, like those of Charlton and Somerhill, axially placed. 34 Cf. Alice T. Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago, I989), pp. 46-47, 149-51 for a discussion of the position of women, and their use of social space, in elite households.

35 BL Add. MS 33,588, fols 44-49v. For an indication of the size of Lady Berkeley's household see Add. MS

41,306, fols I05v-IIo. 36 Cf. Mercer, 'Houses of the Gentry', p. 17, for first-floor improvements brought about by the introduction of axial halls.



Article Contentsp.[113]p.114p.115p.116p.117p.118p.119p.120

Issue Table of ContentsArchitectural History, Vol. 43 (2000), pp. i-vi+1-346Front Matter [pp.i-vi]Charlottenhof: The Prince, the Gardener, the Architect and the Writer [pp.1-23]Structural Rationalism and the Case of Sant Vicen de Cardona [pp.24-41]Weeting 'Castle', a Twelfth-Century Hall House in Norfolk [pp.42-57]The Shop within?: An Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops [pp.58-87]The Late Medieval Rebuilding of Sherborne Abbey: A Reassessment [pp.88-112]Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England [pp.113-120]Rose Windows and Other Follies: Alternative Architecture in the Seventeenth-Century Pennines [pp.121-139]'London the Ring, Covent Garden the Jewell of That Ring': New Light on Covent Garden [pp.140-161]The Church of St. Peter-Le-Poer Reconsidered [pp.162-171]'A Very Mortifying Situation': Robert Mylne's Struggle to Get Paid for Blackfriars Bridge [pp.172-186]William Jay's English Works after 1822: Recent Discoveries [pp.187-194]The South Front of St George's Hall, Liverpool [pp.195-218]Christ Church, Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy [pp.219-252]The Maori Response to Gothic Architecture [pp.253-270]Castles in the Air: Philip Webb's Rejected Commission for the Earl and Countess of Airlie [pp.271-280]Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St. Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922-37 [pp.281-333]A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840: Corrections and Additions to the Third Edition (Yale University Press 1995) [pp.334-342]Back Matter [pp.343-346]

Documents

Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England