Chatsworth House

Seeking Perspective At Chatsworth House

The grand mansion was ever built to impress and raise social standing, its setting in the landscape deploying all manner of visual knacks and contrivances to enhance imposing looks. See, it says, this is the domain of the rich and powerful, beings who inhabit a realm far removed from that of ordinary mortals.

And to prove this point, it was not unknown for mansion owners to dispatch from their purview, and place elsewhere, the unsightly villages of their peasant tenants. It was common, too, to incorporate tunnels and hidden thoroughfares in the surrounding grounds so as not to suffer the indignity of looking out from the drawing room windows and seeing a passing labourer.

Sometimes one does wonder why we British never had a revolution.

Here at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, generations of the Cavendish family have spared no expense when it comes to home and garden improvements. (It is still the family’s home, albeit now the Chatsworth House Trust).

The first house here was built in the 1550s by Elizabeth Talbot (widow of Sir William Cavendish who amassed great wealth during the Dissolution of the monasteries), otherwise known as Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury. She built a large Tudor mansion on the banks of the River Derwent, which in later times acquired the Classical finish we see today, complete with elaborate gold leaf embellishments (recently restored across the entire exterior by the Chatsworth House Trust).

Yes, all those windows in the header photo, and more besides, have gilded frames since real gold is said to provide the best weather protection.

On the stately homes tourist trail, Chatsworth is among Britain’s most popular visitor attractions, this despite the £33 adult entry ticket. The gardens and park are perhaps what return visitors love most, the Emperor Fountain (header) and the Cascade (coming next) being among the more spectacular favourites. (Note too the ride cut through the trees on the far hill, to mirror the Cascade and add to the expansiveness of the parkland setting).

The first version of the Cascade was built in the 1690s by French hydraulics engineer, one Monsieur Grillet, who had worked for Louis XIV. In succeeding years it was doubled in length, widened, made steeper and repositioned to align with the southern frontage of the house. The contrived waterfall is fed from water draining from the high moors into a series of lakes above Chatsworth, and then descends through some 60 metres, just under 200 feet.

These days it is out of commission, waiting for 7-million-pounds’ worth of repairs. Over half of this sum has already been awarded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, but members of the public are also being urged to sponsor one of the hundred stones that make up the 23 steps, the suggested donations ranging from £100-£500.

Meanwhile, the grandeur of the interior might also render one speechless. This is the Painted Hall, created in 1694 by Louis Laguerre. Actually, when we visited a few years ago, it simply made me very cross. Much of the wealth of the Dukes of Devonshire (and before them the Earls of Shrewsbury) derived from tithes and rents from their farm and lead miner tenants who inhabited communities on their land holdings across Derbyshire’s High Peak District. Among them were generations of my maternal Fox and Bennett ancestors. So it makes me think, looking at such unbridled opulence; family tales have it that, as a girl, my great grandmother, Mary Ann Fox, used to ride over to Chatsworth from Callow Farm, at Highlow, to deliver the family’s tithe in eggs.**

The photo above shows the library. We were only allowed to look through the open doors. And this is but one of very many extravagantly furnished rooms and apartments . (See the State Apartments HERE) So how does one gain perspective on the scale of wealth disposed for the single purpose of showing off? What did successive dukes and duchesses see if they caught sight of themselves in one of their many grand mirrors?

Enough. I’ll finish with a much more pleasing view out in the garden. A soothing avenue of young beech trees, moderately uncontrived, in late summer light:

And a view of the River Derwent that flows below Chatsworth. Upstream it passes through fields once farmed by the Fox family at Callow Farm. They had to sell up in 1892. The rents were by then too high to make a living.

**To Chatsworth and how Mary Ann went to the ball

Lens-Artists: Perspective, Depth, Scale This week John shows us different tools in photo composition. Go see!

A Fountain Fit For A Tsar…?

It might have been a protocol blunder of imperial proportions, but then it tells you much about the man almost responsible for it. And so it was that when the high-spending William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, thought Tsar Nicholas would visit his Chatsworth domain in 1844, he commissioned Joseph Paxton to build the world’s tallest fountain; this to outdo both Chatsworth’s existing Great Fountain (then the tallest in Britain) and the Tsar’s own grandest fountain at his Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg. So: a back-handed sort of honouring, and I wonder how the Tsar would have taken this spectacle of extravagant one-upmanship: smiling through gritted teeth perhaps?

He anyway did not come, although the fountain was named ‘the Emperor’ to mark the non-occasion. The jet has been known to reach nearly 300 feet, although it was ‘turned down’ on the day I took this photo due to high wind.

For more about Chatsworth and a small family connection see my earlier post To Chatsworth and how Mary Ann went to the ball

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: fountains and sprinklers

A Curious Rendition?

Well, it is surprising, isn’t it – to find this Elvis artwork at the head of the grand staircase at Chatsworth House, Chatsworth being one of England’s most prestigious stately homes and the country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire.

Here’s more of the art work. It is pretty surreal, however it comes: whether in the original technicolour or in monochrome. (I’m afraid I omitted to make a note of its creator). But now I discover that the likely reason for its presence is that the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, otherwise known as Debo to her friends, was a huge Elvis Presley fan and had a fondly kept signed photo of him on her wall.

Also when the Duchess died in 2014 at the age of 94, he was to play a big part in her simple funeral service, held in the Chatsworth estate church. She had chosen his recording of ‘How Great Thou Art’ to play her out as she was borne aloft in her woven wicker coffin stranded with ivy and autumnal hawthorn berry sprays. A surprising soundtrack perhaps in rural gentrified Derbyshire.

Debo was the last surviving Mitford sister, a notorious brood of five ‘gels’, several of whom, in pursuit of love, bolted from deemed acceptable aristocratic marriages in order (between them) to embrace the full spectrum of political persuasion. Jessica was a communist; Diana ran off with fascist Sir Oswald Mosley; Unity pursued Hitler; novelist Nancy was a socialist and left her husband for a protracted affair with a French statesman; Pamela left her husband to live with an Italian horsewoman, while Deborah, in true English gentry style, married a future duke and spent her life developing Chatsworth House as a premier visitor attraction, including the pioneering of heritage shopping and the marketing of local produce.

You can find her final accompaniment ‘How Great Thou Art’ on YouTube.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: things musical

Chatsworth Revisited In Sepia

When it comes to horticultural bling, the gardens of England’s grand houses take a lot of beating. They were of course designed entirely for the purposes of showing off the fruits of questionable gains, whether acquired through creative accounting practices in the service of the monarch, strategic marriage alliances, political opportunism, slave owning or straight forward pillage.

And so it is that, along with the overbearing edifice large enough to house a small-town population, the surrounding designer parterres, avenues, arbours, grottos, fountains, cascades, Greek temples, and goodly cavalcade of deities and other mythological beings, could be seen to confer legitimacy, privilege and status on arriviste owners and their subsequent offspring.

Here at Chatsworth, home of successive Dukes of Devonshire, the formal garden alone extended to one hundred acres. The earliest version was created in 1555 by Sir William Cavendish (he of creative accounting fame) and Bess of Hardwick. Over the next three centuries the layout became increasingly extravagant in a bid to complement the palatial makeovers effected on the house. In 1836 the 6th Duke appointed Joseph Paxton to re-design what were then termed the ‘Pleasure Grounds’, and it is Paxton’s influence that is most in evidence today.

In particular, he was charged with re-engineering the Emperor Fountain as seen in the photo above. For 160 years it was the tallest gravity-fed fountain in the world, the jet having reached a record height of 295 feet (90 metres). It replaced the earlier Great Fountain, itself a wonder of hydro-engineering, until the 6th Duke thought Tsar Nicholas 1 of Russia was intending to visit, and so had it mind to outdo the Tsar’s Peterhof Palace fountain. To me this seems incredibly rude, hospitality-wise, and in any case the Tsar never turned up, although the fountain continued to be named for the visit that never was.

…the Emperor Fountain is the spirit of novelty, dashing its endless variety to the skies…

6th Duke of Devonshire

On the day we were there it was windy, which meant the fountain was turned down. Even so, it was doing much blowing about, and producing some very pleasing rainbow effects in the autumn sunshine, and in fact rather living up to the 6th Duke’s exuberant description of it. On the other hand, if you didn’t keep an eye on its movements as you wandered the lakeside lawns, it could also give you a surprise dousing.

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Lawn Ornaments

Antony Gormley’s ‘Learning To Be I’

We have to test our environment, both built and elemental. We are the only animals that choose to live in an environment that is entirely articulated through Euclidean geometry, but at what cost?

Antony Gormley

After all the displeasing extravagance of the interiors, I was pleased to find this Antony Gormley work in the Chatsworth House grounds. Here it stands so internally and externally grounded – overborne if not overwhelmed by Joseph Paxton’s Rock Garden. I believe this is indeed its creator. I remember seeing a TV documentary, Gormley in his studio being plastered over by his assistants to create the casting mould. To me he is always an artist whose work we can meet head-on, even when it is as stupendous as the 30 metre high Angel of the North.

You can see more of Gormley’s work HERE

Six Word Saturday

To Chatsworth And How Mary Ann Went To The Ball

So here we have a fine contrast between the Fox family’s tenanted property at Callow Farm, a few miles uphill and upstream in the Derwent valley, and the landlordly premises that ate up farm rents and lead mining royalties and employed armies of local craftsmen and servants.

This, then, is Chatsworth House, the place called home by the Cavendish family, otherwise known as the Dukes of Devonshire. It is one of England’s most imposing stately piles, these days run by the Cavendish family as a charitable trust, and caught here so flatteringly in the October sun. The setting alone is magnificent.

And so how does it come to be here. Whose money built it?

The answer is somewhat convoluted – successive generations of royal patronage is part of it. But so too is Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir and his subsequent break from the Catholic Church, one result of which was the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

If you have ever wondered what happened to the amassed wealth of some 900 monastic estates during Henry’s big 1530s campaign to liquidate holy assets and usurp papal domination, then Chatsworth is one place to look. William Cavendish, courtier and royal employee was a man with a good head for figures and a strong survival instinct, though he did slip up badly in the end.

For a time he held a post in the Exchequer. In 1530 he was also one of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners who visited the monasteries to audit their wherewithal and demand its surrender to the Crown. This included the lead off the roofs, which would have been worth a fortune by itself, and its stripping key to the physical dissolving of monastic edifices, which disintegration happened pretty soon after the weather got in.

It is said William took unfair advantage of this appointment. On top of this he was officially rewarded by the king with a knighthood and estates in Hertfordshire. He continued to enjoy royal favour even as his former boss, Cromwell, fell from grace (and was beheaded). Cavendish was despatched to Ireland to repeat the property assessing exercise. When Henry died he remained in the young Edward VI’s court and was granted still more monastic land. He even managed to hang on when Mary Tudor succeeded (he having paved the way by sending the Lady Mary tokens of loyalty before her accession). When she returned the nation to the Catholic Church he conformed and so gained a post as her Treasurer of the Chamber (1546-1553). It was here he rather over-reached himself. In late 1557 when the auditors arrived in Westminster to discover what he had been doing while in office all those years, they found the accounts in a shambles. Sir William was accused of embezzlement. He then died pretty much at once thereby avoiding further unseemly exposure, but begging for clemency for himself and his family.

It was during his years of service to Mary Tudor that he married for the third time – a rich young Derbyshire widow, Elizabeth Barley. She would later become [in]famously known as four times married ‘Bess of Hardwick’. She wanted to live in her native Derbyshire and so Sir William sold up all his monastic acquisitions and in 1549 bought the then lowly manor of Chatsworth for £600. Thus began the massive building of the first Cavendish family seat, which was only completed by Elizabeth after Sir William’s death. She would later go on to build the even more astonishing Hardwick Hall. She also the founder of the Cavendish Chatsworth dynasty, bearing 8 children during her marriage to Sir William.

Thereafter the heirs sought and bought titles, including the Earldom of Devonshire, and it was the 4th Earl who gained a further step up by being rewarded with the dukedom (1694) – this for his part in bringing Protestant William and Mary to the English throne. It was also the 1st Duke who went in for some massive rebuilding, including most of what we see today. He began by adding more family rooms and the extravagant State Apartment for receiving the new monarchs. Once started, however, no frontage could be left untouched. He also had the formal gardens laid out on a jaw-dropping scale. This included the famous Cascade, though he lived to enjoy its creation for only four years after its completion in 1703.

The 4th Duke (1720-64) decided the house should have westerly approach, which meant demolishing the 1st Duke’s stables since they interfered with the view. He also relocated the village of Edensor where his staff and tenants lived, so it too did not spoil the view. Architect James Paine was commissioned to build the new stables we see today plus a new bridge upstream of the house.

And Capability Brown was engaged to make the now enclosed park look more ‘natural’. In the meantime the Duke found a vastly rich heiress to marry and acquired even more property and family titles.

The 5th Duke was famous for marrying celebrated beauty and socialite, Lady Georgiana Spencer. They lived in London but had lots of jolly house parties at Chatsworth. They also lived happily in a menage a trois with Georgiana’s best friend Lady Elizabeth Foster. The 6th Duke never married, but nearly bankrupted the estate with all his ‘improvements’. These included funding plant expeditions around the globe and having his head gardener Joseph Paxton construct the Emperor Fountain (85 metre/280 feet of jet). The fountain meant draining the upland moor into an 8-acre man-made reservoir on the high ground above the house.

On the day we visited the jet was on short measures due to the high wind.

The 7th Duke (1808-1891) was apparently a sober successor to the Batchelor Duke, a sad widower who lost his wife when she was only in her twenties. For thirty years he maintained strict economies in the running of the estate. Our family legend has it that my great grandmother Mary Ann opened the tenants’ ball with him one year, she as the eldest daughter of the oldest tenant family on the estate. He is said to have remarked to her on her family’s long presence in the locality, far longer than his own, he said. He would have been quite elderly at the time, and Mary Ann perhaps in her late teens or very early twenties. The blue silk covered buttons from the dress she wore were apparently kept down the generations, and still in my grandmother’s sewing basket when my mother inherited it. I’m not sure if I have a real memory of seeing them or not. Anyway, it was not long after this that Mary Ann ran off with the Bolton spindle manufacturer, and had her more usual bright print country dresses scoffed at by the dark clad women of Farnsworth.

When we went around the house we had hoped to see the ballroom, but when Graham asked the attendant she said it was in the family’s private quarters and had been turned into a theatre. And as for the interior rooms we did see, and the severe outbreak of aggravation they induced in me, they and it will have to wait till the next post. For now, here’s the Emperor Fountain making a rainbow, which we very much enjoyed.

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Places People Visit

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge