The Architecture of Scotland, 1660-1750 9781474455282

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The Architecture of Scotland, 1660–1750

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Sir William Bruce by John Michael Wright, c. 1664. National Galleries of Scotland, PG 894. Purchased 1919.

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The Architecture of Scotland, 1660–1750 Edited by Louisa Humm, John Lowrey and Aonghus MacKechnie

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Louisa Humm, John Lowrey and Aonghus MacKechnie, 2020 © the chapters their several authors, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Miller Text by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Malta at Melita Press A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5526 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5528 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5529 9 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables

ix xi xiv xvi xxix

I  Setting the Scene

Introduction Aonghus MacKechnie

1

Political Economy and the Shaping of Early Modern Scotland Allan I. Macinnes



3

15

II  Classicism and the Castle   2 The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse as a Solomonic Signifier Ian Campbell

39

  3 Exiting Europe? The Royal Works in the Age of 1689 Revolution and 1707 Union Aonghus MacKechnie

51

  4 Sir William Bruce: Classicism and the Castle John Lowrey

72

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vi   Contents

  5 A Classic Looks at the Gothic: Sir John Clerk, Ruins and Romance Iain Gordon Brown

98

III  The Business of Building, Trades, Materials and Pattern Books   6 Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730 Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie   7 Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer: ‘An Englishman and the Best Plaisterer that was ever yet in Scotland’ William Napier   8 The Roof Structure of George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel and Roof Design in Scotland During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Anna Serafini and Cristina González-Longo   9 Colen Campbell, James Gibbs and Sir John Vanbrugh: Rethinking the Origins of the British Architectural Plate Book James Legard

121

141

156

170

IV  The Country House 10 The Architectural Innovations of Mr James Smith of Whitehill (c. 1645–1731) within the European Context Cristina González-Longo 11

From England to Scotland in 1701: the Duchess of Buccleuch returns to Dalkeith Palace Sally Jeffery

12 Women Patrons and Designers in Early Eighteenthcentury Scotland: Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne Clarisse Godard Desmarest 13 Architectural Works by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Rory Lamb 14 Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas in Eighteenthcentury Scotland Dimitris Theodossopoulos

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191

213

233 253

269

Contents   vii

V  Gardens 15 ‘The Inexpressible Need of Inclosing and Planting’: Country House Policies in Scotland, 1660–1750 Christopher Dingwall

293

16 The Terraced Garden in Scotland in the Seventeenth Century Marilyn Brown

308

17 Alexander Edward’s European Tour, 1701–2 John Lowrey

322

18 William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland, 1720–45 Louisa Humm

346

19 William Adam and Antiquity: an Arcadian retreat at Arniston? Nick Haynes

379

VI  Urban Architecture 20 Town Housing and Planning: Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn in Early Georgian Glasgow Anthony Lewis

407

21 Interpretation of European Classicism: Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries Deborah Mays

429

22 Edinburgh and Venice: Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living in Geographically Challenged Mercantile Communities Giovanna Guidicini 23 Living Horizontally: the Origin of the Tenement in Paris and Edinburgh Clarisse Godard Desmarest 24 William Adam’s Public Buildings David W. Walker

442

455 483

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viii   Contents

VII  Conclusion 25 Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’? Ranald MacInnes

517

Notes Index

530 613

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Abbreviations

BL BOEC BoS: Borders

BoS: D&G

BoS: Dundee

BoS: Edinburgh

BoS: Fife BoS: P&K

Colvin, Dictionary

CUP

British Library The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (Edinburgh: The Old Edinburgh Club) Cruft, K., Dunbar, J. and Fawcett, R. The Buildings of Scotland: Borders (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 2006) Gifford, J. The Buildings of Scotland: Dumfries and Galloway (London: Penguin, 1996) Gifford, J. The Buildings of Scotland: Dundee and Angus (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 2012) Gifford, J., McWilliam, C. and Walker, D. The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) Gifford, J. The Buildings of Scotland: Fife (London: Penguin, 1988) Gifford, J. The Buildings of Scotland: Perth and Kinross (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2007) Colvin, H., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 3rd edition, 1995; 4th edition, 2008) Cambridge University Press

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x   Abbreviations

DSA

Dictionary of Scottish Architects, www. scottisharchitects.org.uk (all refs accessed May 2019) EUP Edinburgh University Press GTCM Glasgow Town Council Minutes, Glasgow City Archives GUA Glasgow University Archives HES Historic Environment Scotland Manchester University Press MUP Mylne, Master Masons Mylne, R. S., The Master Masons to the Crown of Scotland and their works (Edinburgh, 1893) National Library of Scotland NLS NRAS The National Register of Archives for Scotland NRHE National Record of the Historic Environment NRS National Records of Scotland ODNB Matthew, H. C. G., et al. (eds) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: from the earliest times to the year 2000, 62 vols (Oxford: OUP, 2004) Oxford University Press OUP PSAS Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland RCAHMS Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland RPC Burton, J. H. et al. (eds) The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Edinburgh: Register House, 1877–1970) SAS Society of Antiquaries of Scotland SBRS Scottish Burgh Records Society SCA Scottish Catholic Archives SHR Scottish Historical Review SHS Scottish History Society

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Contributors

Louisa Humm has been employed by Historic Environment Scotland since 2002, first in their listing team and more recently as a Senior Casework Officer, responsible for listed building consent casework in Glasgow and other parts of south-west Scotland. Her job involves researching and protecting buildings of all types and dates. This is her first publication. John Lowrey is an Edinburgh University academic who specialises in Scottish architectural history. He has published widely on urban architecture and urban design, the country house and on landscape history and theory in relation to both the city and the country house estate. Aonghus MacKechnie is former Head of Historic Buildings and Monuments Casework, Historic Environment Scotland, and a professor at the University of Strathclyde. He has published widely on the architectural history of the Renaissance and later periods in Scotland, on Romanticism and on the architecture and culture of the Scottish Highlands. *  *  * Iain Gordon Brown was Principal Curator of Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, where he is now an Honorary Fellow, and Curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a Trustee of the Penicuik House Preservation Trust. Marilyn Brown is a garden archaeologist and historian.

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xii   Contributors

Ian Campbell is Honorary Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. Ali Davey is a project manager focusing on traditional skills and materials at Historic Environment Scotland. Christopher Dingwall is a freelance heritage consultant with a special interest in historic gardens and designed landscapes. Clarisse Godard Desmarest FSA Scot is a lecturer in British Studies at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens) and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. Cristina González-Longo RIBA SCA RIAS FHEA FRSA is a Chartered Architect and the Director of the MSc in Architectural Design for the Conservation of Built Heritage at the University of Strathclyde. Giovanna Guidicini is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art. Nick Haynes is a freelance historic environment consultant Sally Jeffery is an architectural and garden historian. Rory Lamb is a PhD candidate in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. Anthony Lewis is the curator of Scottish History for Glasgow Life Museums. James Legard is an architectural historian at Simpson and Brown, Architects, Edinburgh. Allan I. Macinnes is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde. Ranald MacInnes is Head of Place and Publishing at Historic Environment Scotland. Deborah Mays IHBC, FRSA, FSASCOT, FInsTILM is Head of Listing at Historic England. William Napier is a Chartered Building Surveyor and Architectural Historian with Adams Napier Partnership Ltd. Anna Serafini is a freelance conservation architect.

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Contributors   xiii

Dimitris Theodossopoulos is a lecturer in architectural technology and conservation at the University of Edinburgh. David W. Walker is the author of Aberdeenshire: North in the Buildings of Scotland series, co-author of Aberdeenshire: South and a contributor to Lanarkshire.

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Acknowledgements

This book is essentially the proceedings of a conference we held in 2015. Because of its scope, the book’s creation has required the help, support and advice of a large number of individuals and organisations, colleagues, family and friends, and it is a pleasure to record their names here: Keith Adam, Peter Auger, Malcolm Bangor-Jones, Steven Blench, Daniel Bochman, Peter Burman, Clare Brown, the Duke of Buccleuch and his archivists Crispin Powell at Boughton, and Gareth Fitzpatrick at Drumlanrig, Desmond Chang, Sir Robert Clerk, Bill Coltart, John Crae, Barbara Cummins, Joanna de Giacomo Aravjo, Althea Dundas-Bekker and Henrietta Dundas, Richard Emerson, Marcello Fagiolo, John Frew, Glasgow Museums, Miles Glendinning, John Goffin, Eric Graham, Richard Hewlings, the Earl of Hopetoun, Jessica Hunnisett, Fraser Hunter, Catherine Kent, Robin Kent, Caroline Knight, Jim Lawson, Grace McCombie, Lyndsay McGill, Barbara and Arthur MacMillan, Eddie McParland, Andrew Martindale, David Mitchell, Nick Mols, the Duke of Montrose, Sam Moorhead, Hugh Morrison, Tom Parnell, Dara Parsons, Vincenzo Piscioneri, Martin Roberts, Joe Rock, Juliette Roding, Donald Rodger, the late Treve Rosoman, Murray Simpson, Andrew Skelton, Pete Smith, Vanessa Stephen, Andrew Stevenson, Margaret Stewart, Joanna Swan, Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, David M. Walker, Diane Watters, Patty Watters and Marion Wood; and, of course, the front-of-house staff in both the National Library of Scotland and the National Register of Archives, as well as the numerous families and others who have been good enough to have made their archives available to researchers.

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Acknowledgements   xv

Sourcing nearly 300 photographs has been a considerable ­ ndertaking, requiring the kindness and co-operation of staff and u volunteers at many archives, institutions, libraries and picture libraries, as well as property owners and private photographers – too many for us to mention individually, but we have done our best to ensure that all images are properly credited and traceable to their source. Especial thanks are due to Nick Haynes, who has been extremely obliging in going out of his way (including while on holiday) to take photographs for several chapters in this book. In addition, he arranged to photograph the Arniston copies of Vitruvius Britannicus and Vitruvius Scoticus for us and we are particularly grateful for that. Above all, we wish to record our gratitude to the University of Edinburgh, The Strathmartine Trust and Historic Environment Scotland. Without their support, financial and otherwise, this book could not have been produced. Louisa Humm, John Lowrey, Aonghus MacKechnie Edinburgh, July 2019

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Figures

Frontispiece: Sir William Bruce by John Michael Wright 1.1 Culross Palace (1597–1611), 1835 1.2 Craigievar Castle (1610–26) 1.3 West Quay, Port Glasgow 1.4 Glamis Castle, engraving published 1790 1.5 Greenhill Farmhouse, a former Covenanter’s house at Wiston, near Biggar 1.6 Parliament House, Edinburgh, drawn by James Gordon of Rothiemay 1.7 The Porteous Mob in Edinburgh, painted by James Drummond, 1855 1.8 Gourlay’s House, Old Bank Close, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh by James Skene, 1827 1.9 Duff House (1735), engraving from 1797 sketch 1.10 Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll. Painted by Allan Ramsay, 1749 1.11 Gardenstown, a planned fishing village founded c. 1720 by Alexander Garden of Troup 2.1 Holyroodhouse entrance (c. 1676) 2.2 Alexandre Francine, Livre d’Architecture (1631), plate 11 2.3 Alexandre Francine, Livre d’Architecture (1631), plate 20 2.4 Stirling Castle Chapel Royal (1594) 2.5 Tomb of William Schaw, Dunfermline Abbey (1604) 2.6 David Loggan, ‘Arch of Concord’, in John Ogilby, Entertainment (1662)

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ii 17 18 21 22 23 26 28 30 32 33 35 40 41 42 44 47 49

Figures   xvii

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 5.1 5.2 5.3

Holyroodhouse. Plate 5 from Vitruvius Scoticus: section drawing looking east Holyroodhouse. Bird’s eye view of 1753 looking east Parliament House, Edinburgh by John Elphinstone Plan of Fort William with the country adjacent, c. 1710 Blackbarony House Melville House Family tree showing family connections within the Mastership of Works John Urquhart of Meldrum (d. 1726). Portrait by Sir John Medina Meldrum House Argyll Lodging Dundarave Glamis Castle (Thomas Winter, 1746) Holyrood Palace (c. 1690) Jan Slezer, view of Dunkeld, Theatrum Scotiae Leslie House, plan. Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 66 Argyll’s Lodging, courtyard entrance gate (c. 1674–5) Alexandre Francine’s Livre d’Architecture (1631), plate 2 Argyll’s Lodging, courtyard gateway from rear (probably 1630s) Balcaskie, view from courtyard (north elevation) (c. 1668) Balcaskie, view to Bass Rock from terrace Methven Castle, Perthshire (1678–82) Hatton House, Ratho (c. 1660s–1690s) Jan Slezer, front view of Thirlestane Castle, Theatrum Scotiae Jan Slezer, side view of Thirlestane Castle, Theatrum Scotiae Sir William Bruce/Alexander Edward, design for Melville House (1697) Craighall Castle, Fife (1697) Serlio, Book 3 (1540), Poggio Reale Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd baronet (1676–1755) Waltham Cross, engraved by George Vertue after a drawing by William Stukeley, 1721 Durham Cathedral, etching and drypoint, by John Clerk of Eldin

52 53 54 59 61 62 65 66 67 68 69 74 79 81 82 84 85 86 86 87 88 89 92 93 95 96 97 99 104 106

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xviii   Figures

5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Salisbury Cathedral from Wilton Park, etching and drypoint, by John Clerk of Eldin, 1772 Rosslyn Castle, after a painting by James Phillips Rosslyn Chapel, after a drawing by Francis Grose. Detail showing John Baxter’s roof Old Penicuik House (‘Newbiggin’), after a drawing by John Clerk of Eldin Sketch design for Gothic ‘eye-catcher’ ruins by Sir John Clerk Sketch design for castellated tower cum pigeon house on Knight’s Law by Sir John Clerk Sketch design for castellated tower cum pigeon house by Sir John Clerk Window grill at James V’s palace, Stirling Castle (c. 1540) West Gate at Panmure House (c. 1672) Detail of Glamis Castle roof cresting (c. 1673) Glamis Castle roof cresting Stair balustrade leading to the Picture Gallery, Holyrood Palace (c. 1673–6) Courtyard screen and gates at Traquair (c. 1695) Gate at Traquair – detail of overthrow (c. 1695–1705) Railings at Hopetoun House (c. 1701) Staircase at Hopetoun House, William Aitken (c. 1699–1704) Staircase at Newhailes, William Aitken (c. 1686) Staircase at Raith House, James Horn (c. 1695) Caroline Park House, north stair, attributed to Alexander Gairdner (c. 1685) Drumlanrig Castle external staircase, James Horn (c. 1684) Drumlanrig Castle external staircase, James Horn (c. 1684) Craigiehall staircase, possibly James Horn (c. 1708) Hampton Court Palace screen: section representing Scotland, Jean Tijou (c. 1689–92) Dalry House, first-floor hall (1660s) The House of the Binns, King’s Room (c. 1630) Wemyss Castle, Kings Room (c. 1671) Harden House, Drawing Room (c. 1672)

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107 109 110 114 115 116 117 122 124 125 125 126 130 130 131 133 134 135 136 137 137 138 139 142 143 144 145

Figures   xix

7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 9.1

9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

9.6

Menzies Castle, Withdrawing Room (1660s) French Ambassador’s House, Linlithgow (1660s) First floor, east room, Law’s Close, Kirkcaldy (early 1670s) Balcaskie House, Ante-Room (1674) The Palace of Holyroodhouse, Queen’s Ante-chamber (1671–2) The Palace of Holyroodhouse, Morning Room (c. 1675–6) Prestonfield House, Edinburgh, Cupid Room (c. 1690) Kinross House, Great Stair (c. 1679) The common rafter roof covering the chapel of George Heriot’s Hospital (1628–74) The trusses in the central part of the roof of George Heriot’s Hospital chapel (1628–74) Parliament Hall, Edinburgh (1631–40) Tron Church, Edinburgh (1636–48) The development of Scottish timber roof structures The common rafter roofs at Pinkie House’s painted gallery (1613) and Cockenzie House (1680–3) The roof structure of Holyrood Palace (1671–9) The roof structure of Yester House (1729–48) The roof structure of the Trades Hall in Glasgow (1791–4) Alterations over time to the roof structure and ceiling of George Heriot’s Chapel Alterations over time to the roof structure and ceiling of George Heriot’s Chapel Colen Campbell, design for a house dedicated to the Earl of Halifax, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1 (1715), plates 29–30 L. Aubert, The Front of Blenheim Palace Towards Ye Gardens (c. 1710–11) Sir John Vanbrugh, south front of Castle Howard, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1 (1715), plates 69–70 Colen Campbell, west front of Wanstead III, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 3 (1725), plates 39–40 Sir John Vanbrugh, design for south front of Castle Howard, Yorkshire, with inset plan, c. 1699–1700 (detail) Colen Campbell, drawing for a great house related to Wanstead House

147 147 148 150 151 152 153 154 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

172 176 180 180

181 181

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xx   Figures

9.7 9.8 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9 10.10 10.11 10.12 10.13 10.14 10.15 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6

11.7 11.8

James Gibbs, Earl of Mar’s Lodge (design for Comeley Bank Lodge, Alloa, Clackmannanshire) (c. 1710–14) James Gibbs, design for Dupplin Castle, Perthshire (c. 1710–14) Letter dated 10 January 1676, from Christopher Irvin, Paris to John Irvin, Rome Holyrood Palace, James Gordon of Rothiemay view c. 1649 Holyrood Palace, west front and entrance Drumlanrig Castle balustrade Caramuel’s Barbaric Doric, as used at Drumlanrig Castle Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, as depicted in Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679) Entrance to the building in front of the icehouse, Newhailes House (c. 1705) Plate 33 from G. B. Vignola, The Regular Architect (1669) Canongate Church. James Smith, 1688 Oratory of St Philip Neri, Rome. Francesco Borromini, 1637–50 Tomb of Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh, Greyfriars Kirkyard. James Smith, c. 1690 Chapel of Reginald Pole, Via Appia Antica, Rome (1539) Hatton House Gate. Dated 1692 Hatton House Pavilions. Built some time between 1664 and 1691 Farnese Gardens, uccelliere Dalkeith Palace from the south. James Smith, 1700–10 Ship entering the harbour at Leith (c. 1710) Bill of lading for Captain Bapty’s ship, The Ouners Goodwill, bound for Leith, 5 August 1702 The King’s Bedchamber at Hampton Court (1690s) Ground floor plan of Dalkeith Palace. Plate 22 from Vitruvius Scoticus Chimneypiece in the Great Closet, Dalkeith with marble relief of Neptune and Galatea by Grinling Gibbons, 1701 Chimneypiece in the Picture Closet, Dalkeith Chimneypiece from Lodge Low, Dalkeith, now at Drumlanrig

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183 184 194 197 197 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 210 211 213 217 218 222 223

224 226 227

Figures   xxi

11.9 11.10 11.11 11.12

11.13 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 12.9

12.10

13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8 14.1

Plan of Buckingham House in St James’s Park. Plate 43 from Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1 The staircase hall at Dalkeith The staircase hall at Dalkeith photographed for Country Life, 1911 Portrait of Ann, Duchess of Buccleuch and her two sons, James, Earl of Dalkeith and Lord Henry Scott, later Earl of Deloraine, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1685 Portrait of the Duke of Monmouth on horseback, unknown artist, c. 1672–3 Panmure House. Front elevation from Vitruvius Scoticus Panmure House, attic, principal and ground floor plans. Plate 130 from Vitruvius Scoticus Prospect of the town of Brechin. Jan Slezer, Theatrum Scotiae (1693) Main façade of Brechin Castle. Completed in 1711 after a design by Alexander Edward Plan of the second storey and west front of ‘Brichen Castle’ Brechin Castle, ground floor plan, 1704. Drawing attributed to Alexander Edward Brechin Castle, ground floor plan Brechin Castle, first floor plan ‘The House of Nairne of Strathord, built by William, Lord Nairne and destroyed by his nephew, James, Duke of Atholl (1747)’ Draft of the new garden at Nairne. Included in a letter from Margaret Nairne to the Earl of Breadalbane, dated 22 February 1709 Reconstructed plan of a house for Henry Fletcher (1699) Front and rear elevations of a house (c. 1707) Principal floor plan (c. 1707) Upper floor plan (c. 1707) Basement plan (c. 1707) Section of Fletcher’s house design Stills of Fletcher’s house design from 3D model Sketch of a roof design by Christopher Wren, redrawn by Dr Gregory Lether (1707) Map showing location of John Douglas’s main buildings

228 229 230

231 232 236 237 238 239 240 240 241 242

244

245 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 263 272

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xxii   Figures

14.2 14.3 14.4 14.5 14.6 14.7 14.8 14.9 14.10 14.11 14.12 14.13 14.14 14.15 14.16 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7 16.1

16.2 16.3

16.4 16.5

Timeline of John Douglas’s major projects Galloway House, front elevation (late 1730s) Lochmaben Town House (1743) Archerfield, the restored façade (c. 1747) Archerfield, original design attributed to Douglas Archerfield: plan showing original tower and Douglas’s additions Archerfield: south elevation showing the original house incorporated into Douglas’s design Finlaystone, first floor plan by Douglas Finlaystone, west elevation, by Douglas (1746–7) Finlaystone, west elevation with later additions Interpretation of Douglas’s design with dotted lines showing the succession of later additions Ground floor plan of Wardhouse Wardhouse elevation (1757–8) Campbeltown Town Hall (1758–60) St Andrews United College, north building Edzell Castle, panel depicting Geometria John Reid’s ideal garden, from The Scots Gard’ner (1683) Kinross House garden plan, attributed to Alexander Edward (c. 1685) Glamis Castle by Thomas Sandby (1746) Title page of John James’s The Theory and Practice of Gardening Title page of Thomas Hamilton’s A Treatise on the Manner of Raising Forest Trees Detail from General Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland showing Binning Wood Aerial view of Clunie Castle in the Loch of Clunie built for Bishop Broun of Dunkeld in the early sixteenth century Reconstruction drawing of the gardens at Aberdour Castle in the mid-seventeenth century Moray House and its terraced gardens depicted on the 1647 plan of Edinburgh by James Gordon of Rothiemay Terraces at Balcaskie House laid out by Sir William Bruce to face the Bass Rock Leslie House as it was depicted on the manuscript map of Fife by John Adair in 1684

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273 274 275 276 278 279 280 282 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 295 296 298 300 301 303 305

309 311

312 315 316

Figures   xxiii

16.6

The terraces at Drummond Castle showing the double staircases 16.7 Hatton House from the engraving in Theatrum Scotiae by Jan Slezer 16.8 Detail from Slezer’s engraving of Hatton House showing the use of the terrace wall for growing espaliered fruit trees 16.9 Plan for Thirlestane Castle and its gardens by Jan Slezer and Jan Wyck (c. 1680) 17.1 Alexander Edward’s notebook 17.2 Map showing places visited by Edward and conjectural route 17.3 Transcription of two commemorative tablets from the Antonine Wall recorded in Alexander Edward’s notebook 17.4 Sketch survey of St James’s Park 17.5 Plan for a Palladian House 17.6 Extract from the list of engravings purchased by Alexander Edward in Paris 17.7 Edward’s plan of Château de Pont 17.8 Château de Pont, from Manière de bien bastir by Pierre Le Muet (1647) 17.9 Alexander Edward, topiary designs 17.10 Topiary designs for Versailles from the royal collection at Versailles 17.11 Alexander Edward, topiary designs 17.12 Topiary designs for Versailles from the royal collection at Versailles 18.1 William Adam, General Plan of the Gardens of Newlistone, 1736 18.2 Dezallier d’Argenville, Designs of Woods of Forrest Trees 18.3 Niddry Castle at the head of the cascade walk 18.4 Plan of Newliston (1759) marked to show alignments 18.5 John Watt, detail from survey plan of Johnston Estate, Renfrewshire (c. 1729) 18.6 North Merchiston, as shown on Robert Kirkwood’s Plan of the City of Edinburgh (1817) 18.7 Blair Cranbeth as Adam bought it in 1733 18.8 Blair Cranbeth at William Adam’s death in 1748 18.9 House, avenue and rond-point at Drum (1760s) 18.10 William Adam’s proposals for Buchanan (1745)

317 318

319 320 324 326

328 332 336 337 338 338 342 343 344 344 348 350 351 352 355 357 358 359 363 364

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xxiv   Figures

18.11 Plan of Dalkeith Parke 18.12 Gateway at Dalkeith supplied by William Adam, c. 1734 18.13 William Adam’s plan for La Mancha (c. 1732) 18.14 Dezallier d’Argenville, Designs for Groves of Middle Height 18.15 Airth Garden. William Adam, c. 1730 18.16 Garden buildings shown on William Adam’s Hopetoun Plan 18.17 Garden pavilion at Hopetoun, believed to incorporate the pediment of William Adam’s bowling green pavilion of 1732–3 18.18 William Adam, A General Plan of Hopetoun Park and Gardens (c. 1731–2) 18.19 Fishing Pavilion, Duff House. William Adam (c. 1735) 18.20 William Adam, garden pavilion at Brunstane (c. 1735) 18.21 Chatelherault. William Adam, 1731–4 19.1 The General Plan of Arniston House Parkes and Gardens, 1726 19.2 Arniston Designed Landscape, c. 1720 19.3 Arniston Designed Landscape, c. 1750 19.4 Plates 42 and 39 from William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus showing the north elevation, c. 1730 19.5 Arniston House entrance hall 19.6 Detail of Roman emperors’ heads on the underside of the entrance hall arches 19.7 Detail of the entrance hall showing an acanthus leaf capital and antique-style basket of fruit and flowers 19.8 Plate 41 from William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus showing the internal elevations of the library, engraved c. 1730 19.9 Detail of The General Plan of Arniston House Parkes and Gardens, 1726 19.10 Plan of Arniston Inclosures, survey’d March 1752, Dd Dundas 19.11 Plan of the Arniston and Shank Inclosures, dated 1758, by an anonymous surveyor 20.1 Shawfield, Colen Campbell (1711–15). Plate 51 from Vitruvius Britannicus II 20.2 Trongate, Glasgow. Charles Ross, ‘A Map of the Shire of Lanark’ (1773), detail from Glasgow inset

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365 365 366 367 368 369

370 371 372 373 375 380 390 391 394 395 396

396

397 400 402 403 409 411

Figures   xxv

20.3

Detail from John McArthur, ‘Plan of the City of Glasgow’ (1778), showing location of Montrose lodging 20.4 The Duke’s Lodgings, Drygate, view at the back, 1843. Watercolour painted by William Simpson (1823–99) in 1897 20.5 Alexander McGill, site plan of proposed house for Duke of Montrose (1717) 20.6 Alexander McGill, plan and elevation of house for the Duke of Montrose (1717) 20.7 Town Hospital, Glasgow. Elevation drawing by Jack Russell (1841) 20.8 View of Trongate from the east by Robert Paul 20.9 Somerset House. Plate 16 from Vitruvius Britannicus I 20.10 Architectural model of Glasgow Town House by Alan Dreghorn (c. 1756) 20.11 A view of St Andrew’s Church at Glasgow from the battlements of the Old Town House. After Robert Paul (1769) 20.12 Dreghorn Town House. Detail taken from The Old Town’s Hospital and residence of R. Dreghorn Esq. Thomas Fairbairn (1849) 21.1 Trinity College Library, Dublin by Thomas Burgh, 1712–32. The more capacious roof by Deane and Woodward, 1856–61 21.2 Glasgow University Library, William Adam, 1732–44 (now demolished). Photograph by Thomas Annan 21.3 King James I Library, North Street, St Andrews. John Gardner, 1764–7, extended by Robert Reid in 1829 21.4 James Malton’s view of the interior of the Long Room (Trinity College Library) 21.5 William Adam’s design for the decorative ‘End Prospect towards the North’ of Glasgow University Library (1732) 21.6 Internal elevations of the College Library of Glasgow from Vitruvius Scoticus (plate 157) 21.7 Detail from Joseph Swan’s engraving of Glasgow Old Library (1828), from John M. Leighton, ‘Select Views of Glasgow and its Environs’

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xxvi   Figures

21.8 21.9

21.10 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 22.5 22.6 22.7 22.8 23.1

23.2

23.3 23.4 23.5 23.6 23.7 23.8 23.9 23.10 23.11 23.12 23.13 23.14

John Gardner’s Classical design for the north elevation of the King James I Library (1764) John Oliphant’s drawing of the King James I Library on completion (1767), with the gateway to the quad and entrance behind Interior of King James I Library showing Gardner’s columned gallery James Gordon of Rothiemay, map of Edinburgh (c. 1647) Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice (c. 1460–70) Detail of Figure 22.1 Detail of Figure 22.2 Gladstone’s Land, Edinburgh (1617–20) Ca’ Loredan, Venice Milne’s Court, Edinburgh (1690) Edinburgh New and Old Towns. John Laurie, 1766 Section, elevation and plans of a house 12ft wide and 21ft deep. Pierre Le Muet, Manière de bien bastir (1623) Map showing location of 14 rue Tiquetonne. From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général (1827–36), vol. 1, plate 46 Elevation of a house at 14 rue Tiquetonne Ground and upper floor plans of a house at 14 rue Tiquetonne Elevation of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne Ground floor plan of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne Plan of the upper floors of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne Plan of the cemetery of the Saints Innocents. ClaudeLouis Bernier, 1786 Elevation to the rue de la Ferronnerie, 1669 Elevation to the cemetery of the Saints Innocents, 1669 Floor plans for two houses on the rue de la Ferronnerie, 1669. Sections of a house on the rue de la Ferronnerie, 1669 View of the illuminations on the rue de la Ferronnerie in 1745 Map showing the rue des Blancs-Manteaux and rue Vieille du Temple. From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général (1827–36), vol. 2, plate 53

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438

439 440 443 443 444 445 447 448 452 453

458

459 460 461 462 464 465 469 470 470 470 471 471

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Figures   xxvii

23.15 A project for seven houses with shops on the corner of the rue des Blancs-Manteaux and the rue Vieille du Temple, 1640 23.16 Map of the rue Childebert showing houses built for the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général (1827–36), vol. 2, plate 97 23.17 Elevation of houses to be built for the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, south side of the rue Childebert 23.18 and 23.19  Ground and first floor plans of houses to be built for the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, south side of the rue Childebert 23.20 Gladstone’s Land, Edinburgh (1617–20) 23.21 Contract drawing for a flat in Writers’ Court, Edinburgh (1695) 24.1 Conjectural reconstruction of Aberdeen Town House, c. 1760 24.2 Robert Gordon’s College, preliminary scheme, principal elevation (1731). Vitruvius Scoticus, opposite plate 107 24.3 Robert Gordon’s College, principal elevation as altered by John Smith in 1829–33 24.4 Dundee Town House, principal elevation and floor plan (1731–5). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 104 24.5 Sanquhar Tolbooth (1736–9) 24.6 Hamilton (Old) Parish Church (c. 1729–34), 24.7 Glasgow University Library, entrance gable and east elevation (1732–44). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 156 24.8 The Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh, principal elevation (1734–6). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 140 24.9 Design for completion of the Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh, published by Thomas Tod, 1781 24.10 George Watson’s Hospital, Edinburgh, principal elevation and floor plans (1738–41). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 151 24.11 The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, principal elevation (1737–48). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 150 24.12 The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, central pavilion photographed by Thomas Begbie 24.13 The Charity Work-house, Edinburgh, preliminary scheme engraved by Paul Fourdrinier, 1739 or 1740

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xxviii   Figures

24.14 The Charity Work-house, Edinburgh, executed design without courtyard wings, engraved 1820 24.15 The Surgeons’ Hospital, Edinburgh, Dean of Guild drawings, attributed to William Adam, dated 1738 25.1 Robert Adam’s inscription above entrance to Old College University of Edinburgh

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510 512 528

Tables

7.1 18.1 18.2

Late seventeenth-century decorative schemes which share older-style decorative features Newliston alignments Blair Adam alignments

146 353 361

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Part I Setting the Scene

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Introduction Aonghus MacKechnie

It’s a matter worthy of ones enquiry, how a Nation, as SCOTLAND, so much addicted to Military Arts, and so constantly ingaged in both Foreign and Domestick Wars, should have been in a Capacity to erect such superb edifices as that Kingdom abounds with. There is no Country in Europe that can brag either of greater Piles of Buildings, or a more regular Architecture in its Ancient Churches . . . You may receive this Impartial Account from me as a Foreigner, who am now settled in this Nation.1 Military engineer Captain Jan Slezer, 1693 As well as young Scottish students and noblemen going to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and elsewhere, many of their counterparts, eager to enhance their experience, travelled throughout Scotland, visited its universities, its royal palaces, the houses of its nobility and of its learned gentlemen and there found a cordial reception within a cosmopolitan society with which they were already familiar throughout the continent.2 Historian James K. Cameron, 1986, concerning the late Renaissance-early modern periods

T

his book is a story of Scotland’s early Classical architecture. We ask where, within the European context, does Scotland’s early Classical architecture sit? And we address that question by providing this platform both for established scholars and for a new generation of scholars who have original things to say. These authors each have their own individual and fresh perspectives, and they highlight Scotland’s place as both an integrated and a contributory part of

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4   Aonghus MacKechnie

contemporary Europe – and yet also a place which has retained its own individuality. It could be argued that interest in our topic was invigorated – initiated, even – by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain’s annual conference in 1983 where early Classicism in Scotland was the conference theme. A scholarly guidebook was produced under the direction of Kitty Cruft, and visits were made to buildings designed by Sir William Bruce (c. 1625–1710), Master James Smith (c. 1645–1731), William Adam (1689–1748) and others, examining not simply architectural design but also the craftsmanship displayed in the stone, timber, plaster and ironwork. There were specialist contributions from (amongst others) John Dunbar, John Gifford, Bruce Lenman, Colin McWilliam, James Simpson and David M. Walker. The numerous overviews and academic papers which have since followed have transformed the state of scholarship in this area, but no modern books on Bruce and Smith exist yet; nor has a dedicated book on this early Classical period been produced, until now. So the following pages present an unprecedentedly broad coverage of our topic, with a combination of not simply ‘orthodox’ architectural and garden history, but also more discrete aspects such as craftsmanship and roof construction. Another context for this book’s European theme is that, over recent years, outside interest in Scottish architecture has resulted in our welcoming a fresh generation of scholars from Europe who have studied or domiciled in Scotland. These individuals inevitably bring welcome new perspectives to the subject, and the book is profoundly the richer from having their contributions. We have also sought to consider the architecture within the wider and dramatically changing political environments of our period, a framework for which is in the narrative below. The broader political/cultural interface of Scotland with the wider world is described by documentary historian Allan Macinnes in Chapter 1.

The political context within the seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries in Scotland For the reader new to Scottish history, we must highlight some of the key political factors which drove the events and fortunes of our period. A good place to start is with King James VI (r. 1567–1625), who in 1594 provided northern Europe with one of its earliest Classical buildings – his Chapel Royal, in Stirling. It was designed by his Master of Work, William Schaw, as a replicate of the Biblical

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Introduction   5

Temple of Solomon, and was created to celebrate the baptism of James’s son in a ceremony and setting calculated to present the Stuart dynasty as appropriate to succeed England’s childless Queen Elizabeth. In 1603 James duly inherited as James I, King of England and Ireland. In that same year the monarchy emigrated, thereby inaugurating the process of Scotland becoming a satellite territory; because, immediately, Scotland’s monarchs – having resisted waves of English military invasion and attempted annexation from 1296 – now, as a united monarchy, wanted Union with England and conformity to English norms. James, and then his successors, Charles I and Charles II, worked autocratically towards these ends. The increasing frustration with Charles I’s policies became open defiance from 1637 when he sought to impose an English Episcopal prayer book. In exasperation, Covenanters (Presbyterians) devised and signed the National Covenant in 1638, from which came their name. They took control of parliament and government in defiance of the king and the royal interest; civil warfare followed, and an alliance with English Parliamentary forces which collapsed when the latter executed Charles I and opposed the Scots crowning his son as Charles II. All this concluded in conquest and English military occupation from 1651 to 1660, along with the resultant destruction or militarising of many of Scotland’s major buildings. At the restitution of the monarchy in 1660 the country had to rebuild. Parliament rather meekly allowed its gains to return to the Crown (the opposite to the position in post-Commonwealth England). And Charles II immediately picked up where the likewise non-consensual Charles I had left off, issuing directions for Scotland, demanding obedience, creating societal divisions and igniting another unnecessary phase of civil warfare. Charles’s brother and heir, James, Duke of Albany and York, had meanwhile converted to Catholicism, which turned English opinion against him. James was sent to Scotland where, at Holyroodhouse, intermittently between 1679 and 1682, he held a satellite royal court, encouraging and invigorating the arts and sciences, and promoting architecture. He inherited the thrones of the three kingdoms in 1685, reigning as James VII/II until the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England. That was in 1688, when, at the invitation of disgruntled English Protestants, William of Orange was invited to invade England. James left for France, and William was crowned England’s King William III – as joint monarch with his wife Mary, James’s daughter. Back in Scotland, the 1689 Convention (parliament in a variant form), composed of an anti-Catholic majority, declared James

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6   Aonghus MacKechnie

forfeit and (copying England) William and Mary were offered and accepted the throne. The dramatic new environment meant difficult decisions for the ruling elites, desperate to be on the winning side, whichever that would be: the Earl (and future first Marquess) of Annandale, for instance, that year changed sides five times in as many months; the Duke of Hamilton, three times. The old Catholic ascendency, such as the Chancellor Earl of Perth and his brother, Secretary of State Melfort, was replaced by supporters of King William (see Chapter 3). What the Privy Council called the 1689 ‘alteratione of the ­government’ was a turning point in Scotland’s history. To its promoters, it had been born of desperate measures; but it burned divisions in society perhaps even more searingly than the Stuarts had achieved, giving birth to ‘Jacobitism’ – supporters of the forfeited Stuarts – and it inaugurated Scotland’s longest (intermittent) civil war which ended only in 1746 on Culloden’s battlefield. The formerly downtrodden Covenanters were now in charge, and Jacobites were the new downtrodden. In the Highlands, the ‘alteratione’ created a vast, militarised landscape, a venue for the state/Crown terrorism exemplified by the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 – an attempt to exterminate a clan which had shown insufficient attachment to the new monarchy. Unlike in 1660, parliament this time (that is, from 1689) retained much of its new status and power, albeit Scotland’s soldiers were placed in what was a de facto ‘British’ army under King William in his wars against the old ally, France, warfare that was both damaging and irrelevant to Scotland’s political priorities. Then, in 1707, Scotland entered into incorporating Union with England (see Chapter 25), thereby formally exiting from international politics. On the other hand, the new order and the Union, in time, presented opportunities, as we shall also see. This book shows that these two political events – the ‘alteratione’ of 1689 and the Treaty of Union in 1707 – impacted upon architecture. Royal architectural patronage effectively ended in 1689, together with what over the previous two centuries had been architectural leadership from royal architects. The palaces, created over centuries in a spirit of showy optimism and national self-confidence, became all but unwanted. Best placed amongst these (the other palaces all fared significantly worse) was Holyroodhouse, which retained a ceremonial role. But it essentially became an ill-maintained block of superior houses of multiple occupation, with what would soon be declining ruins attached to its eastern corners – the medieval Abbey

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Introduction   7

Kirk and a matching 1670s neo-Gothic kitchen built on a royal scale, but useless by the eighteenth century and demolished.3 The revolutionary political changes meant that the royal architects William Bruce (in post 1671–8) and – the postholder in 1689 – James Smith were suddenly problematised, being Jacobite. We highlight aspects of their careers in the chapters below, in addition to the careers of others whose fortunes were dictated by changing politics. Amongst the latter was gentleman architect John Erskine, 6th and 11th Earl of Mar (1675–1732), exiled in 1715 for leading a Jacobite army against the government forces, exposing the latter’s vulnerability and threatening the overturn of the still-new settlement. From numerous bases in France and elsewhere, Mar designed and sometimes sent home architectural designs including some for royal palaces. His story is told elsewhere by Margaret Stewart.4

Renaissance–early modern relations with Europe People have for centuries been Scotland’s primary export, and of course they took their culture with them to their new surroundings. Merchants, academics, shipbuilders, masons – vast numbers of people found new lives elsewhere.5 On a much smaller scale, people immigrated to Scotland – French weavers, for instance, from Picardy to the new-made Picardy village near Edinburgh, in 1730, which was Alexander McGill’s and probably Scotland’s first Classical terrace. It seems clear that Scotland in the earlier part of our period imported more architectural expertise than it exported. This importation was restricted to craftsmen and excluded architects. The primary source for this expertise was the English royal works, a pattern which simply replicated that established in the 1610s when specialists – notably carvers/sculptors and plasterers – from there were engaged at the Scottish palaces. (Expertise was seemingly at that time brought from no other foreign country – save for a French gardener at Stirling.)6 Their expertise doubtless helped inspire the new architectural and sculptural excellence which from then onwards developed its own character under the leadership of Master of Work/royal architect Sir James Murray of Kilbaberton (d. 1634), only to be stifled by the wars. All this was a contrast with the royal court of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries where Italian, English, Low Countries and French excellence was imported (more exotically still, James IV even had African drummers). Regarding our own period, the imported specialists themselves had amongst them people from not only England, but also the Low

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8   Aonghus MacKechnie

Countries. The plasterers John Houlbert and George Dunsterfield were brought from London to help decorate Holyroodhouse (1670s), and their skills were exploited by patrons including Bruce at his own Balcaskie, Lord Lauderdale at Thirlestane, Lord Hatton at Hatton House, and Lord Tarbat at Caroline Park and Tarbat. Dutchman Jacob de Wet (1640–97) represented another category of foreign specialist, namely those who appear to have reached Scotland independent of the English royal works. He executed a series of royal portraits for Holyroodhouse (1684), as well as private commissions such as the 1688 chapel at Glamis. The carver Henry Manners, of unknown origin, was employed from the royal works by Lauderdale, and also at Lord Perth’s Drummond Castle (1688). Jan van Santvoort carved timber decoration in Holyroodhouse in the 1670s, and in the following decade Peter Paul Boyse and Cornelius van Nerven carved decoration in stone on the main façades of Kinross House and Drumlanrig Castle (1686). Other imported specialists included Jan Slezer, quoted above, who had a lengthy career as a military engineer and who also dabbled in house design – as at Kinnaird (Angus) in 1689, for example (unexecuted). Two other Low Countries sculptors, Arnold Quellin and Jan van Nost, both worked for Scottish clients; Quellin executed statuary for Glamis (1686), while van Nost provided the tomb of the Duke of Queensberry and Dover (‘the Union Duke’ – d. 1708) at Durisdeer. Possibly these works were shipped north after completion, as may also have been the case with the monument in Holy Trinity Church St Andrews to Archbishop Sharp (assassinated 1679), said to have come from the Netherlands. The baldacchino in Durisdeer’s Queensberry aisle is a clear copy of the St Peter’s formula; it also rather exemplifies the vigorous interest in marble imports (for example, see Chapter 11). Scotland’s ancient Baltic timber trade is of course well known, while for New Tarbat House in 1688 Lord Tarbat wanted timber imported from Holland for his sash windows. As regards external Scottish architectural influence, this was strongest at first through colonisation. After 1603, Scots-type buildings were built in Ireland for Scots clients (Malcolm Hamilton’s Monea, for example) as part of an anti-Catholic and anti-Gael colonisation programme. Isolated documented instances of nonScots patrons elsewhere included Norway’s Erik Rozencrantz, whose tower in Bergen was built by ‘muremestre oc stenhuggere af Skotland’ (Scots masons and stone hewers) in 1563.7 Hardly surprisingly, Scots masons were in occasional demand nearer to home.

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Introduction   9

Some early modern Cumbrian houses (Crakeplace Hall, for example, or Johnby) have distinctive Haggs-Kenmure-type neo-Romanesque detailing of 1560s–80s character,8 and Berwick has a plethora of crowsteps and skewputts of various dates, all illustrating people favouring Scottish design in provincial northern England. More usually, particularly in the early modern period, Scottish buildings elsewhere – such as the Scots merchant houses at Veere, or the Stuart Château de la Verrerie – were in the local style. But regarding our period, Scottish architects seem at first to have had little presence externally – though as we shall see, this situation was to reverse from the 1710s. The Episcopalian minister-turnedarchitect and landscape specialist Alexander Edward (1651–1708) was remarkable in that he travelled abroad for the specific purpose of conducting research for others into contemporary French architectural fashion and landscape design (see Chapter 17). This perhaps underlined the dissemination rather than exchange of ideas, as prestigious French culture was, simply, attractive to others. That said, John Reid’s book A Scots Gard’ner (1683) disseminated ideas from Scotland, while, at the close of our period, Thomas Blaikie was gardener at the French court and to courtiers until ruined by the French Revolution in 1789 when payment from his rich clients abruptly ended. Here we must make a slight detour to remind ourselves that Scottish patrons and architecture existed far beyond Europe, notably in the colonies. Scots in Jamaica, for instance, built themselves new houses while missionaries strove to save the souls of those whose bodies and lives the house-building slavers destroyed. For his house-cum-observatory in Kingston (built early 1740s), slaveowner Alexander MacFarlane (1702–55), benefactor to Glasgow University of the MacFarlane Observatory, chose a Classical design, with loggias on two levels.9 But to return to Britain. It is important to stress that politically, and just like Scotland, England was a separate European country until 1707 when the two merged. While the Treaty of Union created the new, integrationist state of Great Britain, there was an independent cultural continuity on either side of the border, and a rather two-way flow of cultural influence. Off to England, where the power and richer patronage lay, went architects Colen Campbell (1676–1729) and James Gibbs (1682–1754), soon to be followed by Robert (1728–92) and James (1730–94) Adam, and Robert Mylne (1733–1811), all of whom feature amongst the foremost architects working in eighteenth-century England. Both James ‘Athenian’

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10   Aonghus MacKechnie

Stuart (1713–88) and William Chambers (1722–96), though Englishbased, were half-Scottish. From the other direction came a range of English cultural norms – possibly most evidently, the English form of the English language and deletion of Scots from formal use, while English architects and military engineers now arrived in Scotland as part of the antiJacobite militarisation programme that was to continue until the end of the century. This context of English architects and anti-Jacobite militarism helped bring about the next sea-change in Scottish architecture. The Classicism documented throughout this book can be considered as bringing the end to the country’s First Castle Age, because clients now more frequently decided to build in a Classical style. However, at 1740s Inveraray, the Second Castle Age of the Scotch Baronial was inaugurated by an Anglo-Scot client, the 3rd Duke of Argyll. Here, a Gothic-windowed new castle was begun, complete with a protective deep and wide fosse. The design emerged from a grouping or committee of architects and specialists including William Adam and military engineer Dougal Campbell (d. 1757), with the executed design being that of Englishman Roger Morris (1695–1749), itself a version of an unexecuted 1720s project by his fellow-countryman Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).10 By the time the castle’s foundation stone was laid on 1 October 1746, the Jacobite ‘threat’ was gone, the fosse consequently redundant. But a new fashion for neocastellation had begun.

The architectural historiography of Scotland in Europe If it is a truism to state that ‘everything’ is political, then the story of Scotland’s architecture certainly complies. Scottish historiography (and accompanying martial architecture) at the start of our period was shaped by the triumphalist Scottish nationalism of the Scotichronicon (compiled from the fourteenth century and influential over the centuries, first published 1759), while by our period’s end, that paradigm had somersaulted to a British nationalism with an accompanying new ideology of pre-Union Scotland having been a failure, rescued by Union. The new ideology was promulgated from the mid-eighteenth century by already-inferiorised Scots: historians such as David Hume (1711–76) and William Robertson (1721–93), who set a new and contrasting tone that dominated, arguably, into the mid-twentieth century and is seen sometimes with us still. Establishment historians sometimes presented Scotland’s past as a

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Introduction   11

sequence of glorious Unions – 1603 and 1707, of course – but now added to this (and contradicting their own sources) a rhetoric which re-presented the Scots ninth-century conquest of Pictland as the ‘union’ that created Scotland. From the latter half of the twentieth century a new generation, taught by people such as Gordon Donaldson, and learning documentary discipline from luminaries such as Ronald Cant and John Durkan, provided a new framework. These were historians such as Allan Macinnes and Michael Lynch who determined to avoid Scottish or British partisanism, setting Scotland within her own, her United Kingdom, European and global contexts. The topic of ‘Scotland and Europe’ was mainstreamed, to be followed by appraisals of Scotland within a global context, and addressing external aspects such as, more recently, the humiliating and dehumanising aspects of colonialism and Scottish slavers – another somersault, upending the triumphalising norms boasted by British nationalist/ imperialist writers such as W. H. Fitchett (1841–1928). The architectural story fits broadly into this pattern; for an outline overview of Scotland’s fluctuating architectural historiography, readers are referred to Scotland’s Castle Culture.11 Earlier accounts of Scotland, such as that by Spain’s Don Pedro de Ayala (1498), noted that Scottish buildings tended to be ‘built of hewn stone’ (that is, dressed stone),12 which is to say there was a distinguishing national architectural tradition upon which visitors remarked. English visitors gave Scotland’s buildings mixed reviews. Jan Slezer, quoted above, was in 1693 particularly careful to praise Scottish architecture, and to emphasise that he was doing so from an informed, European standpoint. Presumably, this was the sort of opinion Scots wanted to hear and would enjoy, and he knew it. The change in tone came quickly after the Union of 1707, in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, published from 1715. Where Slezer had been anxious to praise Scotland’s historic architecture, Campbell instead published a manifesto for a new British architecture. This would lionise Inigo Jones, and present England’s cultural achievement as that of Britain, an imagined common heritage that Scots could – and in time, did – celebrate as their own.13 Campbell gave Scotland little presence (although approximately a quarter of volume I’s subscribers were Scots), and the only ‘traditional’ Scottish castle (Drumlanrig) was presented in naïve perspective whereas everything else was in professional two-dimensional sharpness. The Scottish castellated tradition was thus made to seem – intentionally or not – at best rustic or quaint, but Campbell’s

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12   Aonghus MacKechnie

real point was to create a new architectural paradigm for the new Britain. James Gibbs’ Book of Architecture (1728) avoided political rhetoric, perhaps because Gibbs was a Catholic Scot seeking a career in anti-Catholic England. On the other hand, the Whig, pro-Union Presbyterian William Adam was making a pro-Scottish statement by compiling a riposte to Campbell with his projected Vitruvius Scoticus – where, ironically, the only naïve perspective design was that of Bruce’s super-sleek Classical Kinross House. Mention of Drumlanrig (rebuilt from c. 1675) diverts this story once again towards the Scottish castellated tradition, a tradition which seems during the First Castle Age to manifest in stone the ideology, or cult almost, of Scottish martial excellence. Castles were still being built in contemporary Europe during our period, so to that extent 1670s Scotland was unremarkable; the strength or persistence of that culture here, even as the classicising castellation it had now become (notably at Holyroodhouse), did however set Scottish architecture apart from Europe’s mainstream. This changed in the decades around 1700, when the new Classicism became ubiquitous, thereby making Scottish architecture as mainstream European as could be, only for the castellated tradition to return with a vengeance – the Second Castle Age – under Robert and James Adam, following, as argued above, the design of Inveraray, from 1743, and the impact which that building had both within Scotland and beyond. But to conclude this section on the new historiography: this was accompanied, as we saw, by the quest for a European context. England, of course, for long after 1707, was de facto almost as culturally ‘foreign’ as anywhere else in Europe, as shown in Glendinning et al’s 1996 A History of Scottish Architecture. Charles McKean dashed forward in 2001 to emphasise the French connection with his The Scottish Chateau. Historians discovered they could be upbeat without losing objectivity, and even the lightweight prejudice from within the sedate Oxbridge world of Howard Colvin could be attacked for his alleged disrespect of a Scotland ‘different from us’ by declaring loftily his Anglocentric presumption that the Scottish ‘tower-house was an anachronism’.14

The architects The third of the ‘star’ architects repeatedly highlighted below alongside Bruce and Smith is William Adam, though there is new work too on the first generation of Scottish architects welcomed into England – Campbell and Gibbs (see Chapter 9). As a pupil of Carlo

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Introduction   13

Fontana, Gibbs must have made a mark on early eighteenth-century Roman buildings. That topic awaits research, and here only his book and British context is considered. Lastly, further mention is required here of Alexander McGill (d. 1734), whom we met above. McGill, son of a Presbyterian minister, was by 1699 part of the architectural circle of Bruce, Edward and Smith. From the 1710s, he partnered the ageing Smith in projects such as Yester, characterised by its Frenchinspired horizontally channelled façades. William Adam (baptised 1689, the year Scotland’s new king was appointed William II) superseded Smith in the 1720s as the foremost architect. Gifford’s 1989 book on Adam has not been superseded,15 though here Adam’s work as a garden designer and designer of public buildings is particularly highlighted as being simultaneously innovative, yet within the national tradition. Adam, who had travelled to England and the Low Countries, was in that sense simply another of Scotland’s premier early Classical architects who were talented, and who had travelled within Europe, which instantly confirms an architectural cosmopolitanism to their understanding and to their work.

Conclusion Our conclusion takes us back to the historiography, its shaping and reshaping by successive political agendas up to the modern age of today’s more determined search for dispassionate scholarship. Mainstream historiography has stepped beyond the postwar problematising of Scottish architecture by Anglocentric writers led by Sir John Summerson and (notwithstanding the scholarship of, say, John Dunbar) forefronted by some government archaeologists within Scotland. But has the dragon of inferiorism really been finally slain? That question is addressed in our concluding chapter, which strongly reaffirms today’s academic position: that the politically inexistent post-1707 Scotland, deprived for the longest time ever of royal architectural patronage, withstood the loss only to continue its individual programme or ‘national tradition’ – one that would flourish triumphantly in the nineteenth-century Scotch Baronial until subsumed within the international architectural environment that came after the First World War. Our period ends with Robert Adam, creator of superlative Classical buildings, but, as we saw, significant too as a key deviser of a new, revived national architecture – a new type of castellated Classicism – as inaugurated by Inveraray where he had worked,

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14   Aonghus MacKechnie

and exemplified by Seton and Culzean, in a style drawing from the architecture of his own country. Ultimately, the Scoto-European connections were, and had always been, a strong aspect of Scotland’s culture, and were of course, if inconsistently, a two-way process. Precisely that point was made by James Cameron, as quoted at the start of this chapter: that while Scots travelled to Europe, bringing with them their experiences and ideas, ‘many of their counterparts, eager to enhance their experience, travelled throughout Scotland . . . and there found . . . a cosmopolitan society with which they were already familiar throughout the continent’.16

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1

Political Economy and the Shaping of Early Modern Scotland Allan I. Macinnes

I

ntegral to the discourse on national prosperity in early modern Scotland was whether wealth creation was attributable to land, a finite resource, or to labour, which had a far greater, if not infinite, potential for expansion. From the mid-seventeenth century, first in England, then in Scotland and Ireland, as a reaction to the intensely debilitating Wars of the Three Kingdoms, writing commenced on political economy that postulated if prosperity was attributable primarily to landed enterprise or to overseas trade, which financed the engagement of labour in manufacturing a diverse range of goods and services.1 The emergence of political economy was far more than an intellectual pursuit and became a key element in shaping government policy throughout Europe from the late seventeenth century. Jurisdictional issues of state formation and religious issues of state confessionalism had served to demarcate the early modern period from the middle ages. However, the growing primacy of political economy pointed the way to modernity as reflected in the built environment through the growth of towns and villages, public buildings and mansion houses; by increased quarrying activity for stone, lime and slate; and by the spread of contract labour.

I The exemplar for political economy was the Dutch Republic, the Calvinist-inclined United Provinces that broke away from Spanish control in 1579 to become the leading global trading power in the seventeenth century. The Scots, who had strong confessional, intellectual and military links to the Dutch Republic, benefited

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economically in several ways. The principal continental port for the transmission of Scottish staple exports to the continent was Campvere in the province of Zealand, which was conveniently placed to benefit from the shift in economic power away from Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands to Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Dutch Republic. In the course of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam and Rotterdam along with Hamburg and London became major trading hubs for Scottish commercial networks operating from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Caribbean to both Latin and North America. Economic warfare with Spain, which lasted until 1648, led to the Dutch using Scottish shipping as flags of convenience for the carrying trade from Iberia which, in turn, led to the Scots becoming adept operators in the European carrying trade. Indeed, English aversion to closer union with Scotland, following the joining of the Crowns in 1603 in the person of James VI/I, was in no small measure due to the greater efficiency of the Scottish carrying trade, which was also diversifying into tramp-trading: that is, the conveyance of goods to and from several ports rather than directly to the ship’s ultimate destination. Following an accommodation in 1594 the Dutch, who dominated deep-sea fishing in the North Sea, were granted limited access to Scottish inshore waters, an arrangement which served to raise fishing standards and practices in Scottish sea-towns and ports that withstood the endeavours of Charles I in the 1630s to create a common fishing for England, Scotland and Ireland. The Dutch characteristics on housing in the ports of Fife testify to the Republic’s impact on the growth of herring and white fishing in early modern Scotland. Settlements around the Firth of Forth also became major suppliers of coal and salt to the Dutch, which greatly increased the revenues of coastal landlords who used their political power to have serfdom imposed on colliers and salt-workers. The Dutch economic stimulus worked in tandem with indigenous Scottish and other external influences. In the course of the sixteenth century, the landed property of the pre-Reformation Church was secularised. This process, which led to over half the landed property in Scotland changing hands, released entrepreneurial energies for the development of plantations by land and sea, from Peterhead in the 1590s on to Stornoway in the 1620s. In 1611, George Bruce completed Culross Palace (Figure 1.1), an early Scottish example of a town mansion in the new hybrid Scots-Classical style, from the profits of his technologically advanced coalmines under the Firth of Forth.2 At the same time, feudal tenures and leases became more

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   17

commercialised, which placed greater emphasis on the marketing rather than the consumption of produce. Plantations required venture capital, particularly for those Scots migrating west, primarily to Ulster, and east, mainly to Sweden. Migration was military as well as mercantile, notably in North Sea and Baltic states affected by the Thirty Years War that concluded in 1648. This conflagration continued the price instability in Europe that had commenced with the influx of gold and silver from the Americas, mainly through Spain and Portugal, in the course of the sixteenth century. Gold and silver bullion from the New World became a major source of inflation as too much money chased too few goods. However, inflation also led to a major shift in economic power away from the Mediterranean towards the Atlantic that was grasped by the Dutch, the French and the English who promoted urbanisation to diversify from agriculture into manufacturing. In Eastern Europe, landlords preferred to impose serfdom on peasants, leaving trade in the hands of Jews and foreigners, a practice that benefited Scots merchants, such as ‘Danzig Willie’ Forbes, who used capital repatriated from

Figure 1.1  Culross Palace (1597–1611). Late nineteenth-century photograph by Erskine Beveridge. NRHE SC1129178 © HES: Erskine Beveridge (N Maylan Collection).

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Figure 1.2  Craigievar Castle (1610–26). NRHE DP075143 © Crown copyright: HES.

Poland to extensively refurbish Craigievar Castle in Aberdeenshire by 1626.3 While the imposition of serfdom along the Firth of Forth conformed to Eastern European practice, Scotland did strive to follow Western European urbanisation and diversification from agriculture into commerce. In this endeavour, both landed enterprise and overseas trade played their part. New opportunities were being opened up in the Americas. Although the colonisation of Nova Scotia in the

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   19

late 1620s failed, ships from Ayr and Glasgow were shipping tobacco from Virginia into the Baltic by the 1630s. Landlords led the way in promoting commercial pastoralism marked by the droving of cattle and sheep to urban markets. More intensive arable farming led to fewer periods of dearth and famine, 1621–3 and 1635–6 being noted exceptions in the early seventeenth century. The most pronounced entrepreneurial development in the countryside was the emergence of a class of yeoman, who bridged the lesser lairds who held their lands heritably for duties fixed in perpetuity and the substantive tenant-farmers who leased their lands in returns for rents that were periodically renegotiated with their landlords. In the hinterland of Glasgow, yeomen engaged in mining for coal and lime as well as agriculture. The decline in customary exactions, as rents were renegotiated commercially between landlords and tenants, was complemented by a rise in wage labour which was redeployed to quarrying as well as building.4 Other than castles and churches, there is limited evidence for slate-roofed, stone buildings beyond the university towns of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. The growth of stone town houses for the nobility in Edinburgh, as in Stirling and to a lesser extent Linlithgow, in proximity to royal palaces, was checked by the Union of the Crowns in 1603, but revived in anticipation of the coronation visit of Charles I in 1633. With the gathering pace of urbanisation leading to the construction of multi-storey tenements in Edinburgh, Charles pressed the town council to refurbish the High Kirk of St Giles as a cathedral.5 His determination to impose British economic uniformity led to recession in Scotland, marked by an unstable currency and erosion of cost differentials for coal and salt as well as staple commodities. When Charles moved from economic to religious uniformity, he instigated a revolution that started in Scotland in 1637 and spread to Ireland in 1640 and England in 1642. Throughout the 1640s the (Presbyterian) Covenanting Movement, which led the revolution in Scotland, made unprecedented demands for military recruitment, fiscal exactions and ideological conformity. By exporting revolution, the Covenanters dominated the British political agenda until 1645. Thereafter, debilitated by civil war, Scotland fell prey to acquisitive English interests as represented by Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army, who unilaterally executed Charles I in 1649. The Cromwellian occupation of Scotland from 1651 featured regressive taxation to pay for the New Model Army, and stagnation in trade. While access to the American ­colonies

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20   Allan I. Macinnes

was guaranteed by the Navigation Act of 1652, this led to war with the Dutch, Scotland’s principal trading partner. Not only was the Scottish carrying trade impacted severely, tramp-trading to the Baltic had effectively ceased by 1653. While the British restoration of Charles II in 1660 was generally welcomed in Scotland, his English Parliament reimposed Navigation Acts that were directed against the Scots as well as the Dutch. The prevailing ethos in European political economy was now mercantilism, effectively protectionism in the guise of economic nationalism in which the bigger powers squeezed the lesser.

II English Navigation Acts between 1660 and 1671 impacted adversely upon Scotland, especially during the Second (1666–7) and Third (1672–4) Anglo-Dutch Wars. The Duke of York (later James VII/II), who was instrumental in granting Scottish merchants dispensations from the Navigation Acts, also moderated mercantilist attempts to monopolise the fishing resources around the British Isles for English benefit from 1661. A committee of inquiry into trade, instigated by the Duke of York after he was sent north by his brother Charles II in 1679, identified the Dutch, the French and then the English as Scotland’s most important trading partners. However, his Scottish Council was sceptical about calls to protect Scottish trade. The country lacked the political muscle to impose mercantilist measures. York promoted two colonies in America as an alternative to incorporating Union with England. The first, at Stuart’s Town on the Ashley River in South Carolina in 1682, was an undertaking of transatlantic traders from Glasgow and entrepreneurial landowners, mainly from west and central Scotland, that was razed by Spanish forces in 1686. The colony established in East New Jersey in 1685 was a more durable venture around the town of Perth Amboy that attracted support from the Highlands as well as the north-east and the Borders. At the same time, mercantile engagement with the American colonies made Scotland particularly adept at circumventing the Navigation Acts, with Port Glasgow becoming the major Atlantic gateway from 1667 and Delaware becoming a major locus for interloping into the tobacco trade. Sugar houses, as well as public buildings promoting welfare and education, featured prominently in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Duke of York won widespread acclaim for establishing his court at Holyrood in Edinburgh, notwithstanding the presence of

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   21

Figure 1.3  West Quay, Port Glasgow. NRHE DP096050 © HES.

Jesuits, the vanguard of the Counter-Reformation. He restored royal patronage for the arts and sciences at a time when Scottish excellence in law, botany, mapping, astronomy and medicine was gaining recognition in the European Republic of Letters. York’s cultural leadership led to further domesticated embellishment of tower houses, most notably at Glamis Castle in Angus (Figure 1.4), which was reconstituted as a Baroque palace by Patrick Lyon, 3rd Earl of Strathmore.6 However, York’s cordial relations were strained by the Test Act in 1681. All in public office were required to uphold the royal supremacy in Kirk and State while accepting that the future king, as a practising Catholic, would be supreme governor of the Protestant Kirk. The Duke inaugurated a brief, but unique, Commission for Securing the Peace of the Highlands, which exacted bonds of surety, parish by parish, from the clan elite and other landlords between 1682 and 1684. Their willingness to accept ­responsibility for the

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22   Allan I. Macinnes

Figure 1.4  Glamis Castle, engraving published 1790. NRHE DP10354 © HES.

conduct of their tenants and dependants in order to suppress thefts of livestock contrasted sharply with the reception accorded to such bonds imposed on Lowland landlords to restrain their tenants and dependants from militant resistance to the re-establishment of Episcopacy at the Restoration. The Commission tapped into the significant expansion of landowning occasioned by indebted chiefs and clan gentry preferring to mortgage and sell lands to more frugal kinsmen who had profited from the expansion of the droving trade, which the Highlands had come to dominate by the 1680s. The later Covenanting Movement’s subversive political impact was justified ideologically as upholding popular sovereignty. Rights of resistance were vested in an active commonwealth, not just the political nation (of nobles, gentry, burgesses and clergy). Lists of prisoners banished to America reveal marked changes in social composition as Covenanting shifted from a movement of power in the 1640s to that of protest in the later seventeenth century. Nobles were conspicuous by their absence. Lairds and merchants continued to feature, but a new prominence was assumed by yeomen farmers, some of whom built substantial two-storey houses. They were joined by artisans, craftsmen and labourers and given a militant backbone by discharged soldiers. Women, who were coming to prominence as tenant-farmers and as skilled workers in textiles, printing and

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   23

Figure 1.5  Greenhill Farmhouse, a former Covenanter’s house at Wiston, near Biggar. Photograph taken at time of dismantling in the mid-1970s. The house was re-erected in Biggar in 1975. Reproduced with permission of Biggar Museum Trust.

shopkeeping, played enhanced roles as couriers, agitators and clandestine organisers. Ministers were celebrated as itinerant preachers, but there was also a strong element of anti-clericalism. The later Covenanting Movement reflected and drew strength from increased commercial activity. The periodic reallocation of open fields into strips of run-rig was giving way to fixed family holdings that prioritised marketing over consumption of grain and livestock, a shift marked by the mushrooming of fairs and villages. Competitive bidding for tenancies occasioned a growth in singletenant farms. The accompanying surge in seasonal and casual labour for wages undercut paternalism in Highlands and Lowlands. Diversification from agriculture ranged from textile manufacturing, paper making and metal working, on through extractive industries to fishing and whaling in the North Atlantic. Nevertheless, as evident from continuing migration overseas, more labour was seeking entry to the market than could be absorbed in Scotland. This structural weakness along with relatively static wages was aggravated by the resurgence of European mercantilism.7 Set against a background of international tensions, particularly between France and the Dutch Republic, York’s brief reign as James VII/II ran into acute difficulties when he attempted to dispense with the penal laws against Roman Catholics whom he was keen to advance in civil and military office. In 1688 the Nine Years War broke out between Louis XIV of France and William of Orange, the Dutch Stadholder, which pitted the major backer of James VII/II against his son-in-law. Dissident landed and commercial elites, first

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in England, then in Scotland, supported an invasion by William of Orange that led to the abdication of James II in England but to his actual deposition as James VII in Scotland. This purported Revolution was relatively bloodless in England, but not so in Ireland and Scotland, where the forces that rallied to James (the Jacobites) were respectively not defeated in Ireland or contained in Scotland until 1691. William of Orange, who was primarily concerned to garner British support against Louis XIV, condoned if not contrived in the massacre of a minor Jacobite clan, the MacDonalds of Glencoe at the outset of 1692. To take the political heat from the massacre, William licensed two significant enterprises in 1695 – the Bank of Scotland and the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. Both were financed through public subscriptions. The Bank’s remit was to stimulate manufacturing and commerce. In this it largely succeeded. The Company of Scotland, however, shifted its focus from trading to planting at Darien on the Panama Isthmus, a settlement that could potentially dominate trade to the West and East Indies and control the overland route for Spanish gold and silver from Peru to the Gulf of Mexico. A settlement at Darien was anathema to the Spanish Crown, whose support for William was vital to his ambitions to contain Louis XIV. The East India Company was no less concerned to preserve its monopoly trade to India. William duly reneged on his commitment to the Company of Scotland which was not allowed to raise finances or acquire shipping in London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Hamburg. Darien became a solely Scottish venture, albeit shares worth £400,000 sterling were promptly subscribed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Funding was not matched by adequate planning. Two expeditions to Darien foundered. The majority of the colonists succumbed to disease. The Darien venture, which was abandoned in 1700, coincided with a demographic crisis in Scotland through prolonged famine that lasted for over five years from 1695. The famine was felt acutely as dearth was no longer a regular occurrence. Even in peak years, the famine was never endemic. Towns with greater purchasing power fared better than rural areas dominated by arable farming. Districts where pastoral farming predominated were less affected. Prices for grain and livestock had stabilised by the accession of Queen Anne in 1702.8 Darien, however, had renewed pressure for political Union, which was advocated by William as once again he broached hostilities with Louis XIV over the War of the Spanish Succession, which actually commenced in the reign of Queen Anne. Initial overtures from

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   25

the Court Party in Scotland to Union in 1702–3 were rejected by the English Parliament, despite support from the queen. However, circumstances changed radically when the Country Party, which opposed Union, used the war to press for constitutional limitations on Queen Anne and her designated successors, the German house of Hanover. Scottish commercial networks’ disregard for the Navigation Acts was disrupting the transatlantic trade, the main source of revenue for England to fight the war. Queen Anne and her English ministry determined on an incorporating Union in 1705, which was accomplished within two years by sophisticated political management, military intimidation and selective financial subventions for Scottish politicians willing to create the United Kingdom.9 The Treaty of Union of 1707 was not a magnanimous act of altruism in which England rescued an impoverished Scotland. Darien had not financially crippled Scotland.10 No more than £153,000 sterling in venture capital was lost on the Panama Isthmus as just over 38 per cent of the shares were actually subscribed. The losses from Darien were more than compensated by returns from the carrying trade as from inward and outward investment through commercial networks operating in the Dutch Republic, Sweden and Northern Germany. The Scottish balance of trade appeared far from healthy with imports hugely exceeding exports. But the adverse balance was calculated on trade taxed, not on trade conducted. The balance took no account of imported goods re-exported or reprocessed as manufactures. Above all, the balance took no account of the invisible earnings from the thriving Scottish carrying trade. The financial capacity of Scottish commercial networks was powerfully demonstrated in the first four months of 1707, as the Treaty passed through the Scottish and English Parliaments. Scottish networks exploited fiscal loopholes by investing £300,000 sterling in brandies, wines, salt and whalebones (for manufacturing into bodices and stays) which they exported to England tax free after the Union became operative on 1 May.11

III Constitutionally the United Kingdom was created with a common monarchy, a specified Hanoverian Succession and a common parliament. The main issues determined by the Treaty of Union concerned political economy, with overseas trade secondary to landed enterprise. A common market was created throughout the United Kingdom. But in this market, Scotland was comparatively

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Figure 1.6  Parliament House, Edinburgh, drawn by James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. NRHE SC1783303 © HES.

­ nder-resourced and undercapitalised and also lacked a competitive u edge in manufacturing and skilled labour. Nevertheless, by allowing for the free flow of capital, English investors could no longer be prevented from investing in Scottish ventures. The Scots were now guaranteed access to the American colonies of the Crown. However, all parts of the UK came under the same trading regulations and were liable to the same duties. In effect, the Scots had to adjust to English commercial regulation and meet higher duties for customs and excise. The English National Debt, which had financed the wars against France since 1694, was around £20 million when the Union was negotiated. Scotland was indemnified with a capital Equivalent of £398,085 sterling, to be paid over seven years as recompense for

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   27

higher public burdens, for standardising the coinage and as reparations for Darien. A rising Equivalent of £2,000 annually for seven years was also conceded to promote the manufacture of coarse woollens, linen and fishing. As the Equivalents were to be raised by higher levels of customs and excise, the Scots were effectively paying for their own compensation, reparations and development funding. From 1708 an intrusive British Parliament promoted administrative, political, economic and religious legislation that raised Scottish concerns about governance post-Union. Scots were outraged when, in direct contravention of the Union, an augmented malt tax was introduced before the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Scottish politicians who had actively supported the Union now began to work closely with those politicians who had opposed it. The motion debated in the House of Lords was not to dissolve the Union but to instigate a formal debate towards the same end. The Union was only saved by four proxy votes.12 The immediate beneficiary of the ongoing unpopularity of Union was Jacobitism. As well as major risings in 1715–16 and 1745–6, and two minor risings in 1708 and 1719, there were sporadic plots either to assassinate leading ministers or to overthrow the British government that gained renewed momentum from the Hanoverian Succession of George I in 1714. Popular antipathy to the Union saw in Jacobitism an appropriate vehicle to reassert Scottish patriotism. The identity of the Scottish people was expressed through the momentous attainments of scholars, soldiers and adventurers no less than monarchs. Appeals to patriotism became part of a continuous process of redefining Jacobitism that was not always to the taste of the exiled House of Stuart. There were other ways of protesting against the Union that did not necessarily involve Jacobitism. Although they accepted the Hanoverian Succession, militant Covenanters remained prominent anti-Unionists as well as anti-Jacobites. Their continuing militancy was evident in Galloway where wholesale enclosures to increase profits from the droving trade were resisted vigorously in 1724 by Levellers who destroyed dykes in protest against the landed interest. The threat of rioting, which had led the British government to postpone the augmented malt tax in 1713, duly became a reality when a revised tax was implemented in 1725. The most notorious protest was the Shawfield Riot in Glasgow when the mansion of the local MP Duncan Campbell was razed because he had not vociferously opposed the malt tax (see Chapter 20). The military’s inept

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Figure 1.7  The Porteous Mob in Edinburgh, painted by James Drummond, 1855. National Galleries of Scotland, NG 180. Purchased by RAPFAS 1856; transferred 1897.

handling of the mob magnified disorder. The magistrates and the town council were blamed by the British government and, after a brief period of incarceration in Edinburgh, punitively fined by the Scottish judiciary. Smuggling was intimately bound up with the Porteous Riot in Edinburgh. The city guard opened fire on a mob attempting to free a convicted smuggler in 1736. The mob regrouped, then seized and lynched John Porteous, as captain of the city guard. The political fallout was less pronounced than after the Shawfield Riot. Order was restored without punitive action being taken against the magistrates or town council. Smuggling had lessened the tax that accrued as customs and excise, thereby compounding the 20-year delay by the British government in fully redeeming the Equivalents. Ongoing fear of Scottish Jacobitism contributed to the eventual provision of development funding that was channelled from 1727 through the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures in tandem with the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Board’s venture capital to promote

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   29

fishing and textiles was limited and mainly applied to the raising of manufacturing standards for linen and then wool, but not in the Highlands or the north-east. Nevertheless, patriotism was undergoing a British rebranding. Loyalty to the territorial nation became a more pressing concern than allegiance to the exiled House of Stuart or the incumbent House of Hanover. British patriotism profited from the recovery of Scotland from recession in the immediate aftermath of Union as imperial opportunities expanded exponentially in the Americas and reached new horizons in Africa and Asia.13 Droving of black cattle took off with unrestricted access to London, now the imperial metropolis as well as Europe’s largest city, with increased naval demand for salt beef, and with the growth of manufacturing towns in England. Droving had a negative impact in financing the absenteeism of chiefs and clan gentry, their accumulation of debts from increased consumer spending and their raising of rents. However, droving was a positive stimulus to banking. Sustained inflows of cash were invested in fishing and textiles. Notwithstanding the painful experience of Darien, Scotland was caught up in the mania for speculative ventures in stocks and shares that fed the South Sea Bubble whose bursting in 1720 caused widespread bankruptcies throughout the UK. The Bank of Scotland was to the fore in promoting commercial stability through sound lending. This continued to be a feature of the dual banking system operative from 1727. The Royal Bank had authorised capital in excess of £150,000 to the Bank of Scotland’s £100,000. Scotland soon benefited from their rivalry. Pioneering note issues, overdrafts and deposit accounts during the 1730s facilitated commercial enterprise on the basis of credit rather than secure funds, a basis which attracted inward investment from England where banking practices remained conservative. As well as advancing credit for colonial traders in tobacco, sugar and rum, increased funding was now available for exports of linen and woollens directly to colonial markets through Glasgow and other Scottish ports rather than indirectly through London, Bristol and Liverpool. The principle colonial exports from Scotland – light woollens copied from the Mediterranean, linens priced for quantity not quality, salted and cured herrings – were geared primarily to clothe and feed the burgeoning slave plantations in the American South and the Caribbean.14 Glasgow merchants had secured dominance in the tobacco trade by the 1740s, primarily by expanding the store system under which

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Figure 1.8  Gourlay’s House, Old Bank Close, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh by James Skene, 1827. After brief tenancies in Mylne Square and Parliament Square, the Bank of Scotland’s head office was located here for most of the eighteenth century. The part of the building they occupied terminated the close and was largely behind the artist, but it may have been entered from the arch in the foreground. It was demolished 1834–5 to make way for George IV Bridge. City of Edinburgh Council - Edinburgh Libraries www.capitalcollections.org.uk

the merchant rather than the planter bore the risk of transatlantic shipping. Advances of credit on future tobacco sales in Europe were tied to the purchase of merchandise from the colonial store, a practice particularly suited to the expansion of small plantations along the Chesapeake and into the hinterlands of Maryland, Virginia and

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   31

the Carolinas. Glasgow merchants took advantage of drawbacks (refunds) on customs for re-export by shipping out huge quantities of tobacco to the Isle of Man and then bringing small amounts back illicitly to ports in the south-west of Scotland. Scottish entrepreneurs extended the store system into the Caribbean to enhance profits from sugar and rum. The Treaty of Utrecht, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, opened up imperial opportunities for Scottish entrepreneurs in the sugar trade, notably from the expulsion of the French from St Kitts and from the eradication of any Spanish threat to the more extensive working of sugar in Jamaica. Scots also gained a significant foothold in the African slave trade through the concession of the asiento, the monopoly to supply Spain, to the recently formed South Sea Company which subsequently devolved the contract for carrying slaves to Campechy in the Gulf of Mexico to Scottish shippers. Sugar no less than tobacco became a major driver of urban and rural improvements in the early eighteenth century, especially after the resilience of the Scottish economy was tested by widespread famine in 1742–3. Central government now actively promoted drawbacks for linen exports, drawbacks which gave Scottish colonial entrepreneurs a vested interest in maintaining the Union and the Hanoverian Succession.15 Imperial engagement had a profound impact on political management. The limited offices and other places of profit in Scotland tended to be monopolised by Presbyterians and committed Whigs, especially after political management was devolved to Archibald Campbell, Earl of Islay (later 3rd Duke of Argyll) in 1725. Placement in Empire was different on account of the pervasive contacts of John Drummond of Quarrel. Having begun his career as an Edinburgh merchant, he moved to Amsterdam where he established himself as the leading continental financier for the British forces during the War of the Spanish Succession. Drummond helped shape the direction of the East India Company after he settled in London from 1724. Though he favoured Union, his strong Episcopal and Jacobite connections made him the ideal imperial complement to Islay’s domestic political management. Drummond enjoyed the backing of Prime Minister Robert Walpole who had factored in Jacobites as expendable manpower to maintain the British presence in the Caribbean and secure the frontiers of American colonies such as Georgia and North Carolina. Until his death in 1740, Drummond was the chief mover in placing Scots regardless of their political or religious affiliations in both the

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Figure 1.9  Duff House (1735), engraving from 1797 sketch. NRHE DP094367 © HES.

military and mercantile branches of the East India Company. The Governor of Madras, James MacRae, from an impoverished family in Ayr, became the first Scottish nabob in the 1720s. Drummond also aided Scottish adventurers in Madras and Bengal from where they tramp-traded through the Indian Ocean to the South China Seas. Gaining placement in India was no guarantee of prosperity, however. The chances of any adventurer returning with a fortune were about 1 in 500. Scottish networks tainted with Jacobitism did prosper from Empire. The Duffs from the north-east, based in the shires of Aberdeen and Banff with further mercantile interests in the towns of Elgin and Inverness, repatriated funds through London from three Empires – the Spanish and the Swedish as well as the British. With the network’s fortunes founded on private banking, landed enterprise and overseas trade, William Duff of Dipple was ennobled in 1734 as Lord Braco (later as 1st Earl of Fife). Although he had already commenced building Duff House at Banff to celebrate global adventuring, his mansion was never completed as he became embroiled in a contractual dispute with his architect, William Adam. The Stirlings

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   33

of Keir, landowners near Glasgow and in the shires of Stirling and Perth, focused their endeavours on the West and East Indies. Sums repatriated from tramp-trading in India to Britain by 1748 were used, in part, to improve and expand the family holdings in central Scotland, but primarily to acquire further plantations in Jamaica.16

Figure 1.10  Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll. Painted by Allan Ramsay, 1749. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

IV In the wake of the FortyFive, the British government pursued a final solution to the Jacobite problem, particularly in the Highlands, by active terrorism by land and sea directed against the clans.17 Following adverse press publicity for the atrocities in the months after Culloden, the British government moved away from extirpating to civilising the clans. The legislative programme promoted from 1747 to disarm the clans and proscribe the wearing of tartan applied to all Highlanders, not just Jacobites. In the mistaken belief that the authority of chiefs was institutional rather than personal, the British government abolished heritable jurisdictions. The real intent of this enactment was to reward chiefs and other landowners who had opposed Jacobitism. Archibald, 3rd Duke of Argyll (Figure  1.10) distributed around £493,000 (more than double the actual reparations for Darien) for jurisdictions that had largely become anachronistic. Argyll was also intent on demonstrating that British patriotism trumped Scottish rebellion. Two venture companies ensued – the British Linen Company, which promoted manufacturing through banking services, and the British Fishery Company, the first in which the Scots had voluntarily participated in over 120 years. Landed enterprise at home, no less than commercial engagement with Empire, now turned improvers and adventurers

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into British patriots, albeit agrarian and industrial transformation had still to gain traction. Scotland was entering an era of Enlightenment marked by innovative institutional approaches from health and welfare to rural and urban planning. The Edinburgh Medical Society, which was founded in 1731, was remodelled in 1737 as the Society for Improving Arts and Sciences, then revitalised in 1751 as the Edinburgh Philosophical Society. In the interim, senior professors at Edinburgh University worked purposefully with the town council to establish the city’s Royal Infirmary, which attracted international renown for its clinical teaching (see Chapter 24). Medical provision in general was not necessarily open to all citizens, however. Infirmaries restricted access to subscribed investors and their associates. Access to workhouses was based on compulsion for the poor. Nevertheless, the town council of Aberdeen funded free medical care for over 100 inmates and outpatients in a workhouse and infirmary from 1741 that proved so attractive to beggars that strict policing and rigorous means testing was introduced after 1753.18 In advance of their wholesale construction of Classical (and increasingly from the 1740s, neo-castellated) mansions, landowners in Highlands and Lowlands were demonstrating their economic and social leadership by creating planned villages characterised by their geometric layouts, wide streets and hygienic standards. The primary role of planned villages was entrepreneurial; to relocate and redeploy labour not just for casual and seasonal service in agriculture but to diversify employment opportunities in textiles, fisheries, extractive industries, chemicals and distilling. Planned villages, which were operational from the south-west to the north-east from the 1720s, dispersed markets and stimulated consumerism. Continuous investment was integral to their sustainability. Where investment was lacking, planned villages could and did degenerate into housing only agricultural labour or even into seatowns where serfdom had been occasionally imposed upon the working population to maintain fishing.19 While landed enterprise was integral to the creation and proliferation of planned villages, overseas trade was the principal driver for urban renewal. New towns in Edinburgh and Glasgow were projected as Enlightened representations of the UK and of imperial engagement. First proposed formally in 1752, Edinburgh’s New Town did not get underway until 1767. The lead in urban planning was actually taken by Glasgow (see Chapter 20). The grid planning of the Merchant City, initiated in the 1720s by tobacco lords and

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The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland   35

sugar barons, was a piecemeal undertaking that was not completed until the late eighteenth century. Regardless of refashioned British perspectives or new imperial horizons, Scottish cities and towns, whether expanded externally or remodelled internally, retained an element of European outreach, with respect to the use of land and labour.20

Figure 1.11  Gardenstown, a planned fishing village founded c. 1720 by Alexander Garden of Troup. NRHE DP163696 © Crown copyright: HES.

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2

The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse as a Solomonic Signifier Ian Campbell

T

he rebuilding of Holyroodhouse, between 1671 and 1679, after the damage wrought on it during the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland in the 1650s, was a potent manifestation in Scotland of the resurgent Stuart dynasty. This chapter explores both the form and meaning of the centrepiece of its façade, the main door, arguing that its paired columns connote royal and specifically Solomonic associations. William Bruce (c. 1630–1710), Surveyor-General and Overseer of the King’s Buildings in Scotland, is given overall credit for the design of Holyroodhouse, although Robert Mylne (1633–1710), Master Mason to the Crown, may be responsible for particular elements.1 The main entrance comprises a doorway framed by a lugged architrave, pulvinated frieze and dentilled cornice, supporting a huge carved relief of the royal arms of Scotland (Figure 2.1). To either side, paired giant order Doric columns rise from shared pedestals, their capitals conventionally enriched with egg-and-dart mouldings and bead-and-reel astragals. Unique, however, are thistles (instead of rosettes) in the capitals’ necks, making a Scots Doric order reinforced in the entablature where the metopes contain carvings of thistles and the Honours of Scotland, as well as the cipher of Charles II and his queen, Catherine of Braganza. At either end of the entablature, which breaks out over the columns, rest pedestals supporting two dolphins acting as a broken pediment, on which recline two female figures holding laurel wreaths. A balustrade runs between, matching those on either side of the entrance. Behind rises an octagonal clock tower with Corinthian pilasters at the angles and capped by a stone imperial crown, overarching a leaded cupola.

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40   Ian Campbell

Figure 2.1  Holyroodhouse entrance (c. 1676). Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019. Photographer: Peter Smith.

The inspiration for the upper stage will be discussed later, but we can say here that the lower part is directly inspired by a Doric doorway in Alexandre Francine’s Livre d’Architecture, first published in Paris in 1631, reprinted in 1640 and published in an English edition in 1669.2 The design has paired columns supporting female figures reclining on the reversed ends of a segmental pediment (Figure 2.2). Its columns, however, rest on low unmoulded pedestals. The taller moulded ones at Holyroodhouse more closely resemble those of an

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The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse   41

Figure 2.2  Alexandre Francine, Livre d’Architecture (1631), plate 11. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College Cambridge.

alternative Doric doorway design (Figure 2.3). Francine’s book was clearly circulating in Scotland since his designs are copied or adapted in three other contemporary projects with which Robert Mylne was involved: the entrance gate of Argyll’s Lodging in Stirling (c. 1670);3 the doorway to the chapel of Heriot’s Hospital, Edinburgh, the

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42   Ian Campbell

Figure 2.3  Alexandre Francine, Livre d’Architecture (1631), plate 20. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College Cambridge.

interior of which was fitted out in 1673;4 and the tombstone of his uncle and predecessor as Master Mason to the Crown, John Mylne (1611–67), in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh (1674).5 The sudden popularity in the 1670s suggests that it was the 1669 English edition that was being used.

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The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse   43

Having identified the principal source of the form of the gateway, we can turn to its meaning. Imperial crowns had been a feature of Scottish architecture since c. 1500 and had been already present at Holyroodhouse as finials to the turrets of James V’s north-west tower.6 However, a crown imperial (in iron) had shortly before been installed at the summit of the cupola of the lantern of Francesco Borromini’s S. Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome (building 1643–60), which has been convincingly interpreted as a representation of Solomon’s Domus Sapientiae (House of Wisdom).7 Attention has also been drawn to the crown cupola, which recalls that of the cupola on Amsterdam Town Hall, built to the designs of Jacob van Campen from 1648 on.8 The cupola has been interpreted as a reference to the Temple of Solomon, and it is possible that a similar meaning was intended here.9 Our principal focus, however, is the meaning of the paired columns, which rarely occur in extant ancient Roman or Greek architecture, but do appear in the Italian Renaissance, as on the late Quattrocento façade of S. Zaccaria in Venice, on Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini in Rome (1501–10) and, most prominently, on the drum and lantern of Michelangelo’s dome of St Peter’s (designed 1558–61), where particular meanings have been ascribed to them, although St Peter’s was certainly intended to surpass Solomon’s Temple.10 However, Yves Pauwels has argued that in France by the late sixteenth century their use was reserved for royal buildings, culminating in the most prominent example, the east façade of the Louvre, designed just before Holyroodhouse.11 He was anticipated, however, by André Corboz, who proposed a Solomonic meaning to Perrault’s colonnade and pointed out that the Salle Grande of Charles V’s Louvre had already been compared to Solomon’s Hall of Columns, and that its Tribunal of the Salle des Cariatides, built in 1533 (which had paired columns), resembles contemporary illustrations of Solomon’s Judgement Hall (see 1 Kings 7.6–7).12 While it would be rash to claim every occurrence of paired columns has a Solomonic meaning, it can certainly be ascribed to those at the entrance to the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle, built in 1594 as a copy of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (Figure 2.4).13 Deborah Howard pointed out that the formal sources of the entrance go back to the sole extant ancient example of a paired-column arch, the Arch of Sergii at Pula in modern Croatia, first published in Sebastiano Serlio’s Third Book in 1540, and rapidly becoming a popular type.14 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s Exempla Arcuum (1549) includes two arches, one Doric and one Ionic, with paired columns sharing

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44   Ian Campbell

Figure 2.4  Stirling Castle Chapel Royal (1594). © Louisa Humm.

a single pedestal alla Pola.15 Such illustrations inspired several temporary arches erected for joyous entries to cities, most notably that of the future Philip II of Spain into Antwerp in 1549, which was published in 1550.16 Paired-column arches are also encountered in designs for the frontispieces of books, such as Andrea Palladio’s Four Books in 1570 (which also includes a broken pediment with reclining figures à la Holyrood). Aonghus MacKechnie and I have argued that, while we agree with Howard that these designs inspired the formal details of the Stirling entrance, underpinning them was a belief that the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem was an arch

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The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse   45

flanked by four columns as shown on coins struck during the Bar Kochba rebellion against Roman rule in ad 132–6, an image now thought to show either the upper part of the Ark of the Covenant or the shrine of the Torah.17 Although they were first illustrated in the 1650s, Villalpando describes the coins, which inspired his reconstruction of the Temple entrance, in his second volume of In Ezechielem explanationes, published in 1604.18 However, there is evidence that the association of paired columns with the Temple or Jerusalem more generally had already been made. As early as the mid-fifteenth century Jacopo Bellini, in his Louvre sketchbook, frames his scene of ‘Christ brought before Pilate’ within the Arch of the Sergii.19 In a 1564 edition of the Bible, Jost Amman showed paired columns flanking a doorway in his woodcut of ‘The Reconstruction of the Walls of Jerusalem’ (illustrating Neh. 4).20 He reused the woodcut to serve as the Temple of Jerusalem, in his illustrations to Josephus’ Works, first published in 1569.21 Another woodcut in the Josephus, ‘Omens Before the Destruction of the Temple’, shows the Second Temple as a rotunda, fronted by a pedimented portico supported by paired columns flanking an arched doorway.22 In Vicenza between 1580 and 1583, Andrea Michieli (‘il Vicentino’) painted a wall panel in the Salone dei Cesari in Palladio’s Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, depicting ‘Titus conquering Jerusalem’, with the city gate flanked by paired columns.23 Marcello Fagiolo has demonstrated how Francesco Borromini’s remodelling of St John Lateran (from 1650) incorporates multiple allusions to Solomon’s Temple and the Heavenly Jerusalem.24 As the cathedral of Rome, the Lateran was seen from its foundation as the successor to the Temple of Jerusalem: its spoils, brought to Rome by Titus after its destruction, were transferred to the Lateran from the pagan Temple of Peace, and the scriptural readings at the Mass for the Lateran’s dedication (9 November), still celebrated in all Catholic churches, refer to the Temple. Each pier of Borromini’s remodelled nave has paired pilasters, between which are aedicules flanked by inner columns and outer pilasters to accommodate statues of the Twelve Apostles. Behind each statue is represented a closed door, allowing the aedicules to be interpreted as the twelve gates of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21. 12–13).25 Borromini also designed an aedicule with paired columns to house a medieval fresco of Pope Boniface VIII, which an unexecuted project drawing of 1656/7 shows topped by a crown, a remarkably close parallel to the Holyroodhouse entrance.26 Even in the next century, Alessandro Galilei used paired columns for the central bay of his new façade for the Lateran Basilica (1733–6).27

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46   Ian Campbell

The question arises: if paired column entrances signify the Temple over several centuries, why is there no written testimony, like that for spiral columns, universally recognised as ‘Solomonic’?28 There is no obvious answer, but perhaps the knowledge was regarded as arcane in some way. Philibert de l’Orme uses a paired column arch in his Premier Tome (1567) to illustrate what he calls divine proportions, which in the foreword he says were used for the ‘first architecture of the fathers of the Old Testament’. Unfortunately, he left their detailed discussion to the second volume, which never appeared.29 Aonghus MacKechnie and I argued that the reason the Stirling Castle Chapel Royal is only once identified in writing as a copy of Solomon’s Temple (in a secret report by a spy) is that the knowledge was only entrusted to a few. We noted that the chapel’s designer, William Schaw (c. 1550–1602), the king’s principal Master of Work since 1583, was also the founder of modern Freemasonry, and that according to masonic tradition, the first masonic lodge was in the portico of Solomon’s Temple.30 It is surely not chance that Schaw’s funerary monument in Dunfermline Abbey is framed by paired pilasters (Figure 2.5).31 While the second edition of James Anderson’s Constitutions (the first edition revered as a foundational text for English and American Freemasonry) claims that William Bruce was masonic Grand Master of Scotland, there is (surprisingly, in view of his connections) no evidence in Scotland that he was any sort of Freemason.32 Robert Mylne, however, was a member of a masonic dynasty, serving as Warden of the Edinburgh lodge, Mary’s Chapel, and it seems likely he suggested Francine’s paired-column designs for the entrance, fully aware of their arcane significance.33 It is worth noting that the two columns on his uncle’s tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard have writing on their shafts, a very unusual feature. This may be an allusion to another piece of masonic lore, the ‘Pillars of Seth’, which Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, I.2.3) says were erected by Adam’s third son, inscribed with all that was known at the time, to preserve the knowledge in case of global catastrophes such as the Flood, as prophesied by Adam. These columns are also treated at great length (780 lines) in Les Semaines, the exposition on the creation of the world by the French Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas (1544–90). Published in French between 1578 and1603, La Semaine (1578), La Seconde Semaine (1584) and Les Suites de la Seconde Semaine (1585–1603) were immensely popular in Protestant Europe, with eight editions of Joshua Sylvester’s English translation available by 1641.34 No one

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The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse   47

Figure 2.5  Tomb of William Schaw, Dunfermline Abbey (1604). © HES.

admired Du Bartas more than James VI/I, who in 1584 had been the first to translate one of his works into English, and received him on his visit to Scotland in 1587.35 Of particular interest to James would have been Du Bartas’ ‘La Magnificence’, which forms the second part of the fourth day of Les Suites de la Seconde Semaine, first published out of sequence in 1591, but which the author had already sent to James in 1589 in manuscript.36 In it Du Bartas treats of Solomon and the building of the Temple, and compares James explicitly with Solomon.37 Solomon is the archetypal wise and peaceful king, and hence a role model for both

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48   Ian Campbell

Christian and Muslim rulers and for their palaces. We have already referred to the Louvre, but from the Alhambra to Amsterdam Town Hall, Solomonic features have been detected in seats of power.38 In Scotland, from the reign of James IV (1488–1513), the Stewarts/ Stuarts seem to have had a peculiar fascination for him, with Stirling Chapel Royal only the most striking manifestation.39 The Solomonic theme continued after James’s accession to the English throne in 1603, culminating in his funeral sermon in 1625, entitled ‘Great Britain’s Solomon’, and in the ceiling of Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall, where Rubens in ‘The Peaceful Reign of James I’ (1629) paints the monarch between two Solomonic columns. The theme may also be implicit in three other occurrences of paired columns in London associated with the Stuarts. The first occurrence was one of the temporary arches erected on the processional route for James VI/I’s entry into London in 1603, which had two pairs of Corinthian columns sharing a single pedestal flanking the arch.40 It will be objected that the published description, apparently written by Stephen Harrison, the designer of most of the arches, states this to be the Temple of Janus, but, as Harrison goes on to explain, the ‘principal person in this Temple was Peace’.41 ‘Peace’ or ‘Peaceful’ is the meaning of the Hebrew name ‘Solomon’ and, since James understood Hebrew, the coincidence is unlikely to be accidental. Harrison also points out that this ‘Temple’ was erected at Temple Bar, which is named after the nearby Temple, the medieval church of the Knights Templar in London, its circular plan harking back to the octagonal Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, whose form inspired many representations of Solomon’s Temple.42 One additional link with the Temple may be the choice of the Composite order, which the text links to the Arch of Titus, built to celebrate the suppression of the Jewish Revolt, after which the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.43 The second occurrence is in Inigo Jones’ drawing of an unexecuted scheme for the west front of St Paul’s Cathedral, which has been variously dated between 1608 and 1633–4, the latter date, being the present consensus, making it immediately prior to the scheme as executed under William Laud between 1634 and 1642.44 The drawing shows the nave rising in three stages, like Villalpando’s Temple façade, the lower two with paired half columns, and the attic with paired antae, all sharing pedestals.45 The equation of London as England’s Jerusalem, St Paul’s with Solomon’s Temple and Ludgate Hill with Mount Zion, made in several contemporary sources, has been explored by Vaughan Hart and Christine Stevenson.46

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The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse   49

Figure 2.6  David Loggan, ‘Arch of Concord’, in John Ogilby, Entertainment (1662), fo. 110v. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

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50   Ian Campbell

The third occurrence is one of four temporary arches erected in London for the coronation entry of Charles II in 1661. Descriptions of the ‘Entertainment’ and the arches were published by John Ogilby (1600–76), himself responsible for the ‘Poetical Part’ (‘speeches, emblems, mottoes, inscriptions, &c’) contemporaneously with the coronation and republished in a much expanded and erudite edition of 1662 with engravings by David Loggan.47 The third arch, in Cheapside, had paired Corinthian columns sharing pedestals below, which supported a segmental pediment (Figure 2.6). Above rose a drum with Composite pilasters, the same orders as on the 1603 arch of Janus.48 The arch is described as representing the Temple of Concord, which is a synonym for Peace (who also appears as Pax in the left-hand spandrel of the arch), which again takes us back to Solomon.49 Ogilby attributes the ‘Architectural Part’ of the entry to Peter Mills and ‘another Person, who desires to have his name conceal’d’.50 Since the eighteenth century, the anonymous collaborator has generally been identified as Balthazar Gerbier (1592–1663/1667), who had been Charles I’s Master of Ceremonies and who expected to succeed Inigo Jones as Surveyor of the King’s Works, but who was in disfavour with Charles II from his collaboration with the Protectorate.51 A Solomonic subtext to the arch would accord well with Gerbier’s assertion in his Brief Discourse (1662) that the rules of architecture were prescribed directly by God for Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. In the same work he praises the ‘excellency’ of the coronation arches.52 Recently, however, the four preparatory drawings for the engravings of the arches have been attributed to the younger Edward Pearce/Pierce (c. 1630–95), a sculptor and mason, raising the question of whether he was Ogilby’s anonymous person rather than Gerbier.53 Even if it were so, as a mason he was almost certainly aware of the Solomonic dimension. The overall similarities of the ‘Temple of Concord’ with the Holyroodhouse entrance are such that it is reasonable to see the former as the precursor to the latter. Given that Charles II’s Scottish coronation in 1650 at Scone was a rushed affair before he went into exile to evade capture by Cromwellian forces, the entrance to Holyroodhouse can perhaps be seen as the arch for an entry to his Scottish capital which never happened. The astute statecraft displayed after Charles’ restoration to the English throne in 1660 shows that he had inherited his grandfather’s wisdom. What could better symbolise the resurgent Stuart monarchy than to mark the entrance to the new Holyroodhouse by using the paired columns introduced to Scotland in James VI’s copy of Solomon’s Temple at Stirling?

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3

Exiting Europe? The Royal Works in the Age of 1689 Revolution and 1707 Union Aonghus MacKechnie

In no mans memorie hath ther wanted a Master of Work, . . . (for very good men have been alwise in it) as Louvois was to the King of France.1 Lord Tweeddale to Secretary Johnston, 1694 In 1824, [Robert] Reid . . . [became] . . . ‘Master of Works and Architect’ . . . In 1839 . . . Reid’s office and title were abolished.2 Howard Colvin, 2008

T

he previous chapter told us about sophistication within the royal architecture. This chapter continues the royal theme – but its tone is very different. This is a story about the dismal end to what had been a half-millennium’s architectural ambition, investment and excellence. But if the history of any country’s royal palaces is important, then this story about Scotland’s royal palaces and royal architects deserves to be told. The palaces highlighted Scotland as an important place, a member of the European ‘club’ of great kingdoms, with a suitably ‘ancient’ imperial monarchy, as displayed by its imperial crown spires.3 The monarchy safeguarded Scotland’s independence, and James IV (r.  1488–1513) even re-orientated Stirling’s royal castle to face towards the battle site of Bannockburn, where independence had been secured in 1314. In the 1670s Holyrood was rebuilt and in 1688 it was attacked by an anti-Catholic mob. The next year King James VII,4 a Catholic, was replaced on the throne by two Protestants – his daughter, Mary, and her husband who reigned as William II/III. From then onwards, until Holyrood alone was ‘rediscovered’ in the nineteenth century,5 royal interest in the palaces was negligible.

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52   Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 3.1  Holyroodhouse. Plate 5 from Vitruvius Scoticus: section drawing looking east and showing that Sir William Bruce’s intention and expectation in the 1670s was to have unbroken roof slopes, without dormers. The kitchen block to the right in this view was to become superfluous and neglected, being cleared in time for the 1822 visit of George IV, and the palace south-east corner subsequently made good. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

The royal architects and palace builders were the Masters of Work. Amongst them were Sir William Bruce, who rebuilt Holyrood, and Master James Smith, both of whom rank among Scotland’s greatest architects. But what became of the Mastership from 1689, when the new monarchy needed Scottish ‘friends’, yet was uninterested in using Scottish palaces?

Master James Smith, royal architect from 1683 Our story begins with Smith, who was appointed to the Mastership in 1683. He denoted himself ‘Overseer’; after all, he already possessed the courtesy title ‘Master’ which signified a university background.6 James VII/II (who had consulted Smith from 1679) became king in 1685. Holyrood was developed as a CounterReformation centre, with its own printing press, and James wanted strong architectural statements, notably the magnificent St Andrews Chapel (designed by Smith) for the neo-chivalric order of the Knights of the Thistle. The nave-and-aisles CounterReformation formula was adopted for Smith’s Canongate Kirk (1688–9), and surviving unbuilt civic designs by Smith might have been conceived for developing James’s Scottish capital when that was the royal intention in 1688.

1688–9 and the ‘alteratione of the government’ 7 In 1689, the year following the anti-Catholic riots, the Convention declared King James forfeit, and invited William and Mary – already monarchs of England and Ireland – in his place. The new Claim of

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Exiting Europe?   53

Right stated that ‘by . . . law . . . no Papist can . . . bear any office whatsoever’.8 So would Smith, a Catholic, have to go? Scotland’s administration had copied England’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. An aggressively anti-Catholic and paranoid government was now in charge. But there was far more outrage at the ‘alteratione’ in Scotland, where the Stuart monarchy had stronger support and, consequently, a more divided community; there followed an unprecedentedly lengthy series of civil wars which concluded only in 1746. The new settlement navigated successfully through these years, and carried Scotland into a peacetime incorporating Union with England.

Sir Archibald Murray of Blackbarony: Master of Work 1690–1700

Figure 3.2  Holyroodhouse. Bird’s eye view of 1753 looking east. This view shows the dormers added from c. 1690. These were required because the palace was no longer expected to be a royal residence and was instead converted to provide a series of elite town houses. See Figure 4.2 for the original drawing on which this print is based. NRHE SC891890 © HES.

Dismissal of some of James’s appointees provided opportunities for others. On 29 August 1689 Sir Archibald Murray of Blackbarony made a bid to Secretary of State George Leslie, Lord Melville, stressing his loyalty to the new regime and that he had ‘not

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54   Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 3.3  Parliament House, Edinburgh, by Master of Work James Murray of Kilbaberton, 1632. View by John Elphinstone, published 1788. The Masters of Work, from the time of Sir William Bruce until 1707, were all in addition sometime Commissioners to the Scottish Parliament. NRHE SC426674 © HES.

­ iffered . . . in on[e] vote of Councill’.9 After all, Blackbarony had d attended the 1689 Convention and signed both the letter congratulating William and the Act declaring the Convention had the authority it claimed.10 A soldier, a politician since the English occupation of the 1650s and possibly a lawyer, Blackbarony was a Peeblesshire laird married to Mary, daughter of property magnate the Earl Marischal. Strongwilled, Blackbarony refused to attend Richard Cromwell’s parliament of 1658 because doing so would ‘not give him soe much monie as he expected’,11 and, in 1664, the Privy Council cautioned him for feuding.12 But let us return to 1689. Sir Patrick Murray of Saltcoats, Receiver of Rents and Revenues,13 advised Blackbarony to bid for the lucrative Chancery Directorship – a post held previously by Kerr family members. That September, Blackbarony wrote to his friend and future Lord Chancellor, John Hay, Earl of Tweeddale, noting the competition for the post and discussing his tactics. He had spoken ‘W[i]t[h] the Kings advocate [John Dalrymple, Master of Stair] who hes undertaken to doo qt he can, and advised me to send up a giffte which I have done’.14 But Blackbarony was disappointed. Tweeddale raised the matter

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Exiting Europe?   55

with the Marquess of Lothian – recipient of the ‘giffte’ and a kinsman both of Blackbarony and of his rival, Kerr – who, Blackbarony concluded, was ‘very [?far] changed . . . I had never been such a fool as to have sent up a gift’.15 Kerr retained the Chancery, and Blackbarony grumbled about Saltcoats who ‘is verie weale posted himselffe which if he had been a good fellow might have served tuo . . . I perchance might have [?thocht] my selfe in a conjunct with him bot he gave me this assured diversion of the Chancery’. Consequently, continued Blackbarony, I have been casting about . . . for some place or other, I have ever & hes still ane aversion to [?be] on the Session. If I had had the halfe of the Chancery to be on the Session . . ., bot now it seames that is sticked so I most steare to some other shore, I have now thought upon the maister of works place which I think is [in] no bodyes view, it is ane imployment very honorable having beine in my Lord Carmichaels grandfathers hands.16

So, Blackbarony now determined to become Master of Work, and with letters written on 9 November pursued his aim more aggressively with both Melville and Sir George MacKenzie, Lord Tarbat. To Melville, he wrote: [I] expect your Lo[rdship] will be very reddie to procure me his Ma[jesty’s] gifte to any thing I can rationaly propose to my selfe, And the being Maister of his Maj[esty’s] works heire in this kingdoome is that wherin theire may be least trouble to your Lo[rdship] to procure, and least obnoxious to any other, being upon the mater now vacant in so farre that theire was only ane ordinaire worke man imployed, tho it formerly has beine alwayes in considerable gentlemans hands.17

And to Tarbat: ‘I judge . . . you can have greate influence, And having now wrote to My Lord secretary for the imployment of Maister of work which hath been formerly in very good gentlemens hands . . . I will expect your friendshipe.’18 Smith, still the incumbent, was generally highly regarded. He was not formally dismissed, and both he and the new administration might have quietly anticipated him keeping his job, precisely as Catholics such as Master of Work William Schaw (d. 1602) were retained at James VI’s court. Blackbarony, however, acted on the presumption that Smith had been dismissed. To Blackbarony, the job was for a gentleman and not an ‘ordinary work man’, as he ­indicated

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architect Smith to have been. On 15 April 1690, Blackbarony was duly appointed.19 Clearly, Blackbarony had no overriding wish to be an architect. He first searched out where the money was; he took bad advice and was not important or quick enough to succeed with his initial plan. He had thought about insinuating himself into a joint post with Saltcoats as a tax collector, but was deflected to seek instead a chancery post; in default of these, he now sought to be Master of Work – citing no architectural competence, but referencing instead his entitlement to political reward, claiming the existing postholder to be socially unsuitable. Blackbarony’s appointment referred not to ‘skill in architecture’, as had Bruce’s, but to the more nebulous ‘loyalty, abilities and good qualifications’.20 He nonetheless found lucrative exchequer and accounting posts from 1690 onwards,21 and continued to be cash-hungry. In 1694 Tweeddale wrote on his behalf to Scotland’s Secretary James Johnston about a lucrative new chancery vacancy: if we could by any meanes gett in Blackbarronie who is Lothians relation and on[e] of his best friends nor can Lothian much complain, his familie being so well provided and if Blackbarronie his place were vacated I know not a gentleman in Scotland so fit for it as Sir Francis Scott.22

Regardless, another Kerr was appointed. Scott, though, would later become Master of Work, as we shall see.

Blackbarony the politician Blackbarony took politics seriously (‘I am still hammering at the politicks’, he wrote in 1689).23 For example, in 1690 the Privy Council met 121 days, with Blackbarony present 96 of these – his attendance being fourth best out of forty-eight people.24 He now served on Privy Council committees, including one to examine geographer John Adair’s charts; another for the military; and one for ‘security of the peace’ of Edinburgh: that is, suppressing Jacobitism.25 In Council, he aligned with establishment hostility towards Jacobites and Gaelic Highlanders. For example, he subscribed to the following: rebells in the Highlands may convocat and make incurssiones upon the wast, robb and ruine some of his Majesties loyall and well affected subjects . . . [to harbour or assist rebels constituted treason; garrisons were]

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Exiting Europe?   57

. . . to be in a good pousture of defence . . . [to] signall all the fencible men within tuelve miles.26

The language was that of military occupation. The anti-Jacobite, anti-Gael rhetoric which underpinned the state terrorism and atrocities such as the showpiece Massacre of Glencoe was voted for by Blackbarony.

Blackbarony the soldier Blackbarony was Lieutenant Colonel of the Peeblesshire Horse, 1668; was on the Committee for the Forces and Garrisons, 1690; was captain of Militia Horse of Peebles and Selkirk, 1691;27 and two of his sons were soldiers. His youngest was killed in King William’s wars, which made Blackbarony anxious about another son whom he sought to prevent being posted to Flanders, ‘since my Eldest son hes no children, and my succession depending upon my second son, My third son hauing dyed in his Ma[jesty’s] service in Flanders’.28 Blackbarony was successful,29 but he had not calculated that the son in question might have differing opinions and be concerned for his ‘credit’.30

Blackbarony the patriot Blackbarony was concerned for Scotland’s well-being. Being intermittently in London, he acted as Tweeddale’s agent and conduit for information. Events dismayed him. For example, the ‘haiste to turn out so many ministers’ was a concern – he was evidently a ‘moderate’ Presbyterian.31 He witnessed the lower priority given to Scottish affairs, and in 1690 expressed his hope that Tweeddale would ‘joyn to help to save our poore Harassed Co[u]ntry’. To Blackbarony, ‘neither Church or State in England did ever bring us remedie’, and he complained (diplomatically), ‘I beleive His Ma[jesty] gets hardly tyme to reflect upon the Condition of our Co[u]ntry’.32 Big decisions about Scotland were being made in London instead of Scotland. William’s regime exacerbated matters at home, and on 24 October 1693 Blackbarony wrote to Tweeddale, ‘I am sorry at the grouing disorders of our poore Co[u]ntry’. He decided to remain in London to observe: ‘I thank God I am much the better of the Baithes, and I resolve to stay heire a little, till I sie what order comes out of these greate confusions’.33 The unsettled environment continued, as he wrote to Tweeddale, ‘Theire will be changes amongst us, I wish

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you had been heire . . . to have given your opinion of putting things right that are so farr wrong’.34 Tweeddale sympathised, writing (rather optimistically) to Blackbarony, ‘We are well redd of English medling in our affairs’.35

Blackbarony, Master of Work Blackbarony took the administrative part of the Mastership job seriously too, by appointing his cousin, Walter Murray of Halmyre, as Clerk and Store Keeper to the Master of Work.36 When Blackbarony was first appointed, all ‘traditional’ Mastership work was put his way, while Smith was consulted to advise on claims dating from his time in charge.37 The royal castles of Blackness, Stirling, Dumbarton and Edinburgh needed to be adapted for anti-Jacobite duties, and such tasks were initially referred to Blackbarony. For example, in 1690 he attended Edinburgh Castle with the Earl of Leven, governor there, as client, and with military engineer Captain Jan Slezer.38 At Dumbarton, Blackbarony was to decide ‘what houses may be necessary to be built for lodging, the store and magizone and what will repair the old wall . . . and to cause take tryall if a new wall be necessary to be built’. He was also to ‘cause build and put up’ thirty beds there.39 Numerous domestic castles in the Highlands such as Blair were fortified, but Blackbarony seems to have been less, if at all, involved with these castle fortifications.40 Braemar was possibly an exception; in 1690 it was to be prepared ‘att the sight and the advyse of the Master of Work or any he shall appoint’.41 This order accompanied another, that the directione therof might be recommended to the Master of Forbes who is interested to see it speedily done, it being the only post proper to keep those braemen in order and secure the lower pairts of the shyres of Aberdein, Mairns and Angus from their thifts and depradations.42

Braemar was burnt, though, by Jacobites. The Great Glen was fortified. MacDonnell of Glengarry, a Jacobite, fortified Invergarry.43 Government military engineer Theodore Durie was sent to strengthen Inverness, to work with army commander Sir Thomas Livingstone.44 An ‘inginier’ was also ordered there ‘to help Colonell Cuninghame to designe and compleatt the work’.45 These orders omit to mention the Master of Work – but twice mention a military engineer and a soldier builder.

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Exiting Europe?   59

At the opposite end of the Great Glen, General Hugh Mackay chose Cromwell’s old Inverlochy citadel as a fort, for which he drew a ‘detailed plan’.46 It would be renamed Fort William, and the attached settlement was to become a burgh called Maryburgh – a plantation or colonial town in potentially hostile territory, intended to convert the area to the new king’s side and to extend commerce. In eleven days in 1689 the fort had been palisaded secure enough for 1,000 men.47 John Callander, laird of Craigforth and the Master Smith from the royal works, worked on the drawbridge.48 Old Cromwellian soldier Colonel John Hill, the fort’s governor, explained the locational decision, ‘this being the center off the Highlands, and neer to which all the men of actione are’.49 A war zone had been created, with an occupying military force. Scare tactics such as random-looking troop movements added a psychological tension.50 And of course the highest-profile display of state paranoia and terrorism against non-combatants was the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 – using the Earl of Argyll’s soldiers despatched from the Fort.51

Figure 3.4  Plan of Fort William with the country adjacent, c. 1710. The so-called ‘alteratione of the government’ in 1689 resulted in the Highlands becoming a militarised landscape for about a century. Fortifications were the new government’s architectural priority – not royal palaces, as had been the case under the Stuarts. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

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The new Fort William thus exemplified the new establishment’s priority – remaining in charge at all costs, recognising its position was vulnerable; which meant military suppression of pro-Jacobite territories. For the royal works, this meant building forts, not palaces.52 The post of Master of Work had quickly become nearirrelevant within this militarised context, subordinate in terms of use-value to the military engineer. Attention turned, though, to Holyrood, where Blackbarony did find a more active role. Should a royal visit be made to Scotland it would be awkward to have no royal palace suitable. The other palaces were already long ignored; Edinburgh and Stirling were now simply military bases. Glasswork was installed at Holyrood – mostly casement windows and ‘square lozenges’ in 1693. But with increasing indications that the palace might no longer accommodate a monarch, perhaps about a dozen apartments were provided, including one each for the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton and another for their son Lord Basil Hamilton.53 Like Masters of Work before him, Blackbarony received budgets,54 instructions and disbursed payments.55 But how busy, as Master of Work, Blackbarony actually was, is harder to deduce. He countersigned or signed accounts for repairs/works done or to be done, the inspections and initial approvals having being made by Halmyre, for almost everything might be delegated to him. On the other hand, Blackbarony kept working until shortly before his death in 1700, for on 5 July that year he was still authorising payment for works.56

James Smith: the ordinary workman Meanwhile Smith, still not explicitly dismissed, tried to get his old job back. After all, the new regime still sometimes wanted his services.57 He took the fight to the king in London, in 1693–4,58 supported by the Duke of Hamilton; Blackbarony also represented his case to the king.59 Hamilton threatened, reportedly, to ‘roupe’ [sell] the palaces,60 to render the post obsolete (‘which will cutt of[f] my gifte’, complained Blackbarony).61 The row dragged in Tweeddale,62 who enlisted Secretary Johnston’s support (‘I give yow my most hearty thanks for your kindness to Blackbarronie’). Tweeddale added, ‘In no mans memorie hath ther wanted a Master of Work, . . . (for very good men have been alwise in it) as Louvois was to the King of France’.63

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Perhaps a compromise was devised but never implemented, should this explain surviving unsigned ‘Letters In favours of Mr Ja[mes] Smith 1696’.64 Politics, of course, triumphed; architectural excellence and Smith both lost.

Was Blackbarony an architect? In the 1680s, Blackbarony had already repaired his own house, Blackbarony, also known as Darn Hall, which had impressive gardens.65 It was rebuilt before 1715, but seemingly for his son, Sir Alexander.66 Both the Earls of Lauderdale and Queensberry, who, respectively, had recommended Bruce and then Smith to the Mastership, had employed their protégés personally. In each case, this demonstrated their confidence in their choice. So what about Blackbarony’s promoters? Had they a similar confidence? Melville seems to have ignored Blackbarony for his new Melville House (1697). Instead, he consulted Bruce and Alexander Edward,

Figure 3.5  Blackbarony House. Sir Archibald Murray of Blackbarony was Master of Work 1690–1700. The existing building is multi-phase, with a tower house nucleus. Whilst this show front follows the traditional compositional formula of Classical grid tied at each end by castlelike towers, is no evidence that this building phase was the design of the Master of Work. NRHE SC1783300 © HES.

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Figure 3.6  Melville House. The influence of Lord Melville was key to Blackbarony being appointed Master of Work, or royal architect. For his own new-built country seat Melville consulted established architectural specialists from the late 1690s and employed James Smith as his architect, ignoring Blackbarony. NRHE SC1783301 © HES.

but he employed Smith. Whoever Tarbat employed to design the south front of Royston/Caroline Park is unknown. Was it Blackbarony? The question has some validity, given the house’s standalone character: ‘The south front is without parallel in Scotland’ said John Gifford, implicitly excluding Bruce or Smith as likely designers.67 But of course there were numerous others perfectly able to redesign a mansion house. To take this appraisal further, Blackbarony – who, tellingly, considered the Mastership a ‘gift’ – appears to have been content not to be regarded by the administration as an architectural designer. Evidence for this comes from Tweeddale himself, who commissioned not his friend the Master of Work and royal architect Blackbarony, but Smith, for works to Tweeddale House, in 1692–3.68 Blackbarony, being in London, was happy to be tasked instead with selecting pictures for Tweeddale’s newly panelled rooms.69 Meanwhile, someone else close to Blackbarony, Lothian, recommended his wife in 1693 ‘to take advice of Mr. Smith architect’ regarding work at Newbattle.70 Only one new-build structure has a known documented link to Blackbarony – a doocot (‘of about six hundred holes’) he was building somewhere in 1697 with stones from his own quarry.71 He borrowed carts from Clerk of Penicuik to transport the stones, and he accepted the gift from Clerk of some doves to stock it.72

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James Scott of Logie: Master of Work 1700–4 Blackbarony died in 1700, but the Borders family connection with the Mastership which he had revived was to continue. His immediate successor was James Scott, younger of Logie;73 like Blackbarony, Master of Work, Overseer and Director-General of the works.74 Logie (1671–1732) was a politician, both a commissioner to the Scottish Parliament and a member of the British Parliament, suspected intermittently of Jacobitism, but ultimately (or superficially) loyal to the new settlement. In 1692 he married Isabella, daughter of Alexander Bannerman of Elsick.75 His contribution to architecture seems minimal at best. He was replaced in the Mastership in 1704. In October 1707 he attempted, unsuccessfully, to become joint Master of Work, but by then the new ‘Union men’ under the Duke of Argyll were in complete charge.76

Sir Francis Scott of Thirlestane: Master of Work 1704–5 Logie’s successor was Sir Francis Scott of Thirlestane (d. 1712), mentioned above.77 Thirlestane’s mother was Isobel, daughter of Sir John Murray of Blackbarony (d. 1617); his sister Margaret married Sir Alexander Bannerman of Elsick, meaning that Logie was Thirlestane’s nephew; and Blackbarony’s grandfather was Thirlestane’s uncle. Thirlestane, as we saw, had been identified by Tweeddale in 1694 as a potential Master of Work (very possibly for architectural reasons). The same year, Tweeddale suggested to Secretary Johnston people (including Blackbarony) who might serve on a mercantile commission, recommending ‘Scott (who knows more of sea affaires yn all the gentlemen of our nation having been tuo years aboard ye fleet) . . . and because [Tweeddale’s son] yester and Sir Francis Scott have no pensions the King may be pleased to divide the salary I had as a Commissioner of ye Treasury, which was discharged upon my coming into ye station I am in’.78 In 1698 Thirlestane was a director of the ‘Indian and African Company of Scotland’ another of whose promoters was Tweeddale (for which William dismissed him).79 Thirlestane was considered influential, and patriotically Scottish rather than pro-’British’, by an anonymous and anxious correspondent from London in January 1700 (‘I can think of no fitter person than you to give the news to’). The correspondent reported that some Scots – notably Sir James Ogilvy (Earl of Seafield from 1701) – a ‘Traytor of his Nation’ – were planning an English takeover of Scotland; that

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‘venal souls may ruine the whole nation’: ‘Their main design here both in Court and Parliament is to make us greater slaves than the Irish’.80 Thirlestane forwarded the letter to Hamilton, highlighting ‘the extraordinary methods of the English parliament against our companie [the above-mentioned trading company] or rather nation’.81 In 1704 Thirlestane was appointed Master of Work – the same titles as Logie, save that he was inspector rather than overseer. He fulfilled Mastership duties,82 and, very thoroughly, prepared Holyrood for the 1705 parliament.83 But within twelve months he was gone, replaced by Mamore and Meldrum (both of whom we meet again below), left to fight for unpaid salary.84 Thirlestane’s departure severed the Borders family connections with the Mastership – and possibly also severed the idea that Masters should actually do any work, for Halmyre became Deputy Master, indicating that Mastership duties would be routed towards him.

The family connections Blackbarony and Halmyre were cousins, as we have seen. But the connections were deeper, as the family tree shows (Figure 3.7). Sir John Murray of Blackbarony (d. 1617) was: – Grandfather of Sir John Veitch of Dawyck and Sir Francis Scott of Thirlstane – Great-grandfather of Blackbarony and Halmyre – Great-grandfather-in-law to Scott of Logie Through the Bannermans of Elsick, Logie and Thirlstane were also related. Within the extended family, when the Veitches of Dawyck are included, can be counted four Masters of Work – or five, should we include Halmyre, the Deputy. Through the Fala Murrays, the Blackbarony family was connected – albeit probably more remotely – to Sir James Murray of Kilbaberton (d. 1634), Master of Work to both James VI and Charles I, and central figure in an earlier Borders kin group which had dominated the royal works for a half century.85

Master John Campbell of Mamore and John Urquhart of Meldrum: joint Masters of Work, from 1705 In 1705 Master John Campbell of Mamore and John Urquhart of Meldrum were appointed joint Masters of Work, Inspectors and

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Sir John Murray of Blackbarony (c.1552–1617)

Christian Murray = Veitch of Dawyck

Sir John Veitch of Dawyck (Master of Work 1641– after 1649)

Sir Archibald Murray of Blackbarony, 1st baronet (d.1629)

Isabella Murray = Patrick Scott of Thirlestane

Sir Alexander Murray of Blackbarony, 2nd baronet (d.1671) = Margaret Cockburn

Walter Murray of Halmyre

Sir Francis Scott of Thirlestane 1st baronet (1645– ?) (Master of Work 1704–5)

Sir Archibald Murray of Blackbarony, 3rd baronet (d.1700) = Lady Mary Keith (Master of Work 1690–1700)

Walter Murray of Halmyre (d.1729) (Clerk and Storekeeper to the Master of Work c. 1690–1705; Deputy Master of Work 1705– ?)

Directors General; and in 1714, a regrant was made to Mamore alone, meaning the salary became entirely his.86 Over the next two years sash windows were installed in Holyroodhouse. On 20 August 1706 repairs were to be made in time ‘for the Ensueing Parliament’ (this would be the Union parliament), including ‘seven great Windowes in the Royall apartments to be made Sash Windowes’.87 Holyrood’s casement windows emphasised the cultural connection with mainland Europe. Installing sashes would seem modern, and possibly indicated closer cultural alignment with England, albeit sash windows (as noted in the Introduction) might be sourced from Holland. After Blackbarony’s earliest years in post the Masters of Work seem to have had little or no input into military works. Consequently, again in 1705 military engineer Durie felt abandoned. He wanted paid for his ‘large map’ of Fort William;88 a gateway at the fort had been built incompetently;89 he found the masons putting ‘sands and gravel in the wall instead of good mortar’;90 and he had a row with King’s Master Wright Andrew Paterson, builder there of a rampart. He wanted Treasury support: ‘for if I have no authority here, I can not hinder ill things being done’.91 In 1706 he was paid for ‘the earth breast work upon the rampart’.92 This was the Highlands’ premier anti-Jacobite fortification (equivalent to Fort George in the next century), and architectural leadership was needed, but absent.

Margaret Scott = Bannerman of Elsick

Isobel Bannerman = James Scott of Logie (1671–1732) (Master of Work 1700–4)

Figure 3.7  Family tree showing family connections within the Mastership of Works. Aonghus MacKechnie and David Fraser.

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Meldrum In the civil war of 1689, John Urquhart of Meldrum (d. 1726), who was then a Catholic, joined the Jacobite army.93 But he deserted and in 1691 he won pardon from the new administration which accepted the defence he being a young man unexperienced in the affaires of the wor[ld] . . . was seduced partly by force and partly by fair means . . . but within a very few days . . . did deserte . . . and did render up himself to the laird of Brody . . .

Figure 3.8  John Urquhart of Meldrum (d. 1726). Portrait by Sir John Medina (1659–1710). Meldrum was joint Master of Work 1705–14. Photography: National Galleries of Scotland. Reproduced with permission of Meldrum House Hotel.

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Exiting Europe?   67

[he now] . . . Acknouledged his undeutifulness in joyning with the rebells and his willingness to submitt to their Majesties government, and having throuen himself on his Majesties mercy.94

Meldrum married Jean, daughter of Sir Hew Campbell of Cawdor,95 and was a commissioner to parliament 1703–7, where he voted for the Union.96 Meldrum’s portrait still hangs in Meldrum House, which is now a hotel.

Mamore Mamore (c. 1660–1729) had an even more adventurous past than Meldrum, for in 1685 he participated in his father the 9th Earl of Argyll’s anti-Catholic military invasion of Scotland. The strategy was to co-ordinate with the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion in England, but the enterprise failed disastrously (while constituting a learning experience for the future King William’s successful English invasion in 1688).97 When it became clear that Argyll’s invasion was doomed, Mamore, disguised as a woman, surrendered to the Earl of Dumbarton. He was imprisoned, first in Stirling Castle, and then for debt in Edinburgh’s tolbooth (‘albeit I have not a groat to satisfie the debt’).98 He was

Figure 3.9  Meldrum House. This seat of John Urquhart of Meldrum partly survives within the modernised mansion. It is unknown whether anything extant was built for him, but it is possible that the oversized Classically detailed staircase dates to his time. The stair leads to a diminutive tower which evidently had an exalted purpose, possibly as an observatory. Crown copyright: HES. Photographer: Mike Scott.

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Figure 3.10  Argyll Lodging. This was the Stirling town residence of Mamore’s father, the 9th Earl of Argyll. It was reconstructed in 1674 using specialists from the royal works – possibly Mamore’s first experience of building. He would have seen the property again in 1685 when a prisoner in the nearby castle. © Louisa Humm.

sentenced first to death, commuted to banishment, but after 1689 he was recategorised as a hero, pardoned in 169099 and made Groom of the Bedchamber. Mamore had studied at Glasgow University in the mid-1670s before his father’s flight abroad in 1682, and he joined him in Holland some time before the invasion fleet sailed from Amsterdam in 1685. With that adventure and his own exile behind him, in 1692 he married Elizabeth (1673–1758), daughter of Isabel Maitland, a daughter of Lord Hatton, Smith’s predecessor as Master of Work; and of John, Lord Elphinstone – who in 1685, ironically, had served in the royal army against Argyll, and so also against Mamore himself. In 1699 Mamore was sheriff depute of Argyllshire, sheriff or still sheriff depute in 1700 and 1703.100 He appears to have had no ‘country seat’ at Mamore and in 1700 was resident at the nearby Argyll property of Rosneath, also on Garelochside, taking his judicial duties seriously.101 He was resident at Dunderave in 1702,102 1705103 and probably 1706,104 suggesting that this was the closest he had to a formal residence, it being a Campbell acquisition confiscated from the MacNaughtons after the first Jacobite war in 1689.105 Mamore’s appointment was surely organised by his nephew, Argyll. Maybe Meldrum’s marriage to a Cawdor Campbell qualified him for

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Exiting Europe?   69

Figure 3.11  Dunderave. Dated 1598, the castle of Dunderave was a MacNaughton property acquired by the Campbells after 1689. In the 1700s it was a residence of John Campbell of Mamore, Master of Work from 1705. Author’s collection.

co-appointment. The appointments were made during the 1705 parliament, which they both, plus Logie, attended as Commissioners. As High Commissioner, and in default of a royal presence, Argyll was escorted ceremonially into Edinburgh on 24 April all the way to Thirlestane’s refreshed Holyrood. The Mastership – from now, clearly, an essentially work-free sinecure – would bring in welcome cash, Mamore having complained over the years that he had too little wealth.106 Mamore was both a commissioner to the Scottish Parliament, and a member until 1727 in the new British one.107 He was accused by Lockhart of Carnwath of receiving an English bribe to vote for the Union.108 Stuart kings had executed both his father and grandfather, and Mamore had himself been imprisoned, threatened with death and exiled under James VII/II. So it was no surprise that he was antiJacobite,109 and as Colonel of a troop of Dumbarton fencibles110 he had a role in defending the infant Hanoverian settlement as events were leading to war, and to battle at Sheriffmuir in 1715 – though it is unclear whether he was present at the battle. His son, John, became 4th Duke of Argyll.111

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Halmyre Halmyre, meanwhile, kept his job throughout all these changes and, as we saw, in 1706 he was described as ‘dep[ut]y Master of Worke’ – which was evidently his real job from the outset.112 And on 8 January 1715 he received a refreshed commission as the royal ‘storekeeper & clerk to the M[aste]r of Work’, with a yearly pension of £30.113 Halmyre died in May 1729. His inventoried possessions included books – none on architecture.114

Conclusion: Scotland in Europe? The period from 1689 saw the biggest ever change to the Mastership. For the first time in its existence Scotland’s royal construction programme was characterised over an extended period not by the architecture of peacetime, commerce and ambition, but predominantly by fortifications for suppressing internal dissent. This was a total reversal of the position a century earlier and of King James VI’s Solomonic peace, and of Stuart architectural ambition and excellence. From 1689 nothing would be attempted to rival Scotland’s earlier palace work, while the military engineer was instead far more valued by the administration than the increasingly obsolete palace-builder. So how did Scotland’s experience compare with royal architects and palaces elsewhere in contemporary Europe? Consider France, where under Louis XIV the palaces – most notably the continuing enrichment of Versailles – were a continuing national pride (with one such palace, ironically, occupied by the king Scotland had rejected); England, where Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt Hampton Court and Kensington palaces for William and Mary, and St James’s, for Queen Anne. Scotland was very different. Why? The royal marriage ‘market’ of early modern Europe sometimes resulted in territories conjoining through absorption of the female’s territory. This was so with, say, France’s absorption of Brittany.115 And this was precisely the motive for the 1540s English invasions, the failed ‘rough wooings’ of Mary Queen of Scots which might have absorbed Scotland within England then. But Scotland, having provided England with her king in 1603, reversed the trend. Having chosen a new monarchy which did not prioritise (or in the case of the Trading Company, actively undermined) its interests, Scotland decided its future lay in incorporating Union with England, and although pro-Union activists such as John Erskine, Earl of Mar changed their mind on that point, it was too late.

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Consequently, the ‘royal architects’ from 1689, and more particularly after 1707, built nothing new for the Crown (nor, most probably, for anyone else), and hardly, therefore, merit mention in architectural appraisals. So this study concludes with the masters appointed prior to the 1707 Union with England. The Mastership, in the sense of providing royal architects, was finished; notwithstanding a brief reincarnation for Robert Reid (1774–1856), it was formally abolished in 1839. The Scots accepted the increasing royal uninterest, perhaps seen most clearly in this period when Charles II had Holyrood reconstructed without troubling to complete, visit or furnish it.116 The Mastership became history; the country watched the palaces being neglected or destroyed. Save for Holyrood. Its decline was less dramatic, and in the twentieth century it was finally completed, once again for royal use, by architects including historian George Hay.117 So the story of the Mastership’s latter days ends on a low note. Yet there was much else in the period to be upbeat about, as shown for instance in the following chapter which examines a more intellectual aspect of Scottish culture, as articulated by one of the promoters of the 1707 Union.

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4

Sir William Bruce: Classicism and the Castle John Lowrey

T

he period covered by this book is one when Classical architecture established itself as the norm in most Scottish building projects of any prestige: in country houses, public buildings and in major urban developments. However, the introduction of Classicism was not a straightforward matter of old, outmoded and inconvenient indigenous architecture being supplanted by a more fashionable, comfortable but essentially foreign style. It was a feature of Scottish architecture in the period between the Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century that castellated architecture persisted, even as Scottish architects responded to the European architectural culture of Classicism, and there was a constant and often creative tension between this conservatism and innovation. Non-Classical houses continued to be built, even by architects well versed in Classicism. There were in fact a number of different approaches adopted by architects and patrons, ranging from entirely new houses that were nevertheless deliberately juxtaposed with old buildings in a kind of associative counterpoint; there was the reuse of existing buildings, absorbed or disguised to a greater or lesser extent, within a new building; there were new buildings that responded to the castellated tradition and there was deliberate revivalism. In many cases, the response to Classical regularity and formality included not only the house itself but also the relationship between house and landscape. Of as much importance as the ‘how’ this was done is the question of why architects and the builders of country houses continued to respond to this earlier tradition. Neither cultural backwardness nor the need for defence are arguments that need detain us here, having

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Classicism and the Castle   73

been thoroughly dismissed by a number of scholars over the past thirty or so years.1 One of those, Charles McKean in The Scottish Chateau, uses the French terminology to underscore the point that the castles of Scotland in the early modern period were not, or were rarely, for defence.2 They did not indicate that the country was any more volatile, dangerous or unsettled than anywhere else in Europe at the same time (a time, as it happens, when Europe was pretty volatile, dangerous and unsettled) and the presence of castles does not indicate an uncultured, brutal and uncivilised country, although, in any case, culture and brutality made perfectly acceptable companions all over early modern Europe. In this chapter, we will focus on the late seventeenth century and, with a particular, but not exclusive focus on the contribution of Sir William Bruce, the architect described as ‘the introducer of architecture to this country’3 and as the man who ‘imposed the taste of Whitehall’ on Scotland, the latter, at least, suggesting an approach that moved away from the existing Scottish tradition.4 To begin with, let us consider a building that is a symbol of the Restoration, but did not involve Bruce. One of the major Scottish building projects of the late seventeenth century was the rebuilding of Glamis Castle in the 1670s and 1680s by Patrick, 1st Earl of Strathmore and, on the face of it, it is difficult to imagine a more conservative building.5 This is the biggest tower house project of the Restoration period and it provides a useful summary of the main theme of this chapter, namely how and why castellated forms were combined with Classicism. The key features were, on the one hand, an L-plan castle almost exaggerated in form and detail, and, on the other, an apparent symmetry in the arrangement of the main parts of the building around an axial entrance in the re-entrant angle, which is part of a wider order that pervades the formal landscape around it and is the culmination of a complex avenue of approach.6 That sense of symmetry and order comes from the combination of a building, which is regular but not exactly symmetrical within an extremely formal landscape, dominated by the great avenue, which enhances the overall sense of symmetry (Figure 4.1). The background to this was the War of the Three Kingdoms and the Commonwealth. The Strathmores were one of the old noble families, supporters of the Stewarts, who suffered badly in the 1650s. In 1651 Cromwell’s troops ravaged the area around Dundee, including the Glamis estates. The estates were confiscated after the war and both Glamis and Castle Lyon, the other family seat, ­situated

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Figure 4.1  Glamis Castle, Angus (Thomas Winter, 1746). NRHE SC672953; Glamis Castle Archive ref P43. © The Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

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between Perth and Dundee, were partly razed and also used for billeting English troops. After the Restoration, the young Earl of Strathmore was determined to expunge the terrible memories of this time. This was a fairly typical reaction: to rebuild and improve the estate and to declare to the world that his fortunes had been restored. We see the same thing happening at Hamilton, under the redoubtable Duchess Anne, and there were similar motives operating at Holyrood Palace. Glamis Castle was a sixteenth-century tower house, which had been added to and improved by successive Lords of Glamis. By 1660 it was a large L-plan house with a circular stair tower in the re-entrant angle. By the middle of the seventeenth century it was relatively easy for members of the landed classes to educate themselves in architecture. French, Italian and German treatises were fairly common items in libraries, and travel, whether for pleasure or as part of a gentleman’s education, was becoming increasingly common. In 1660 Strathmore was seventeen years old; he evidently had access to books but ‘I did deny myself the satisfactione which the most pairt of youth of that age desyre, of going abroad and travelling’.7 This perhaps partly explains the way the house looks but what is very clear is that Strathmore did not see his castle as a defensive structure: Such houses are worn quite out of fashion, as feuds are, which is a great happiness, the country being generally more civilised than it was of ancient times, and my own opinion when troublesome times are it is more safe for a man to keep the fields than to enclose himself in the walls of a house, so that there is no man more against these old fashion of tours and castles than I am.8

What was of importance to Strathmore were essentially Classical ideas about regularity and symmetry in his house. He wrote that he ‘did covet extremely to order my building so as the frontispiece might have a resemblance on both sydes’.9 A key aspect of this was the creation of the axis of symmetry, achieved by placing the entrance door centrally in the tower rather than enfilading one of the jambs, as an L-plan tower house would normally be arranged. By placing the door in this way the castle became the culmination of a formal sequence of monumental gateways and courts that started at the outer gate (Satyr Gate), along the avenue to the Barn Gate, Gladiator Gate (outer court), to the gate and gatehouse to inner court and which terminated at the door of the castle.

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That order and lack of the picturesque that so many authors seem to have required of Scottish architecture10 led to an interesting confusion in the history of the building, summed up by one Victorian writer who believed that it was built by the Earl of Strathmore ‘under the direction of the celebrated architect Inigo Jones . . .’,11 which, if nothing else, indicates an awareness that this was no ordinary tower house, even if he could not imagine that a Scottish architect could conceive of such a thing. In fact, the Jones tradition seems to have no basis in evidence and, in any case, the major post-Restoration rebuild was carried out long after Jones’ death in 1652, and executed by the Edinburgh mason Alexander Nisbet, under the direction of the Earl. A question arises, however, as to Strathmore’s motivation in all of this: what was the ‘meaning’ of Glamis? There’s no doubt that, although he had never travelled abroad, Strathmore was well aware of contemporary, or near-contemporary developments in architecture; his concern with symmetry, if nothing else, indicates that. His lack of interest in rebuilding Glamis in a more Classical style can be related to a number of factors: a lack of cash, the difficulty in converting a tower house into a Classical mansion and possibly the lack of suitable Classical models within Scotland are all potential factors in his decision, but it is interesting that Strathmore actually enhanced its tower-like appearance and we are forced to conclude that the most compelling reason of all for his failure to build in a more Classical idiom is the rather obvious one that he was not concerned with building a country house but with restoring a castle. He was motivated, according to the Book of Record, ‘by a desire to continue the memorie of my family’ whose fortunes had been all but destroyed by the English occupation.12 He had no interest in restoring his house in a style that had nothing to do with his history. The keywords here were Restoration and Continuity. His interest in earlier Scottish architecture as a suitable source for contemporary work is illustrated by a surviving building contract with the masons John and Andrew West of Dundee to build an office house and gate for Castle Lyon in 1679. The building is clearly described in the contract: a small square building with a gate through the centre and office house above, incorporating a ‘vollarie’.13 The contract is quite specific that there was to be a balcony corbelled out ‘in that same manner that the Earl of Moray hath them in the Canongate’ and the gate itself, which was separate from this pavilion, was also to be based on that at Moray House.14 So, Strathmore was requiring his masons to look back to a famous existing Scottish model from the pre-civil war period.15 That respect for, and inspiration from,

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the past at Castle Lyon is even more clearly evident, and this time with a more direct family relevance at Glamis. A very convincing argument has been made for the continuation of the castle in this period, based on the idea that the older aristocracy had no desire to build in a new and ‘bourgeois’ manner but rather used architecture to stress their own lineage, power and antiquity.16 That emphasis is enhanced, so the argument goes, by the alignment of the avenue on a Pictish monument, which is not visible from the castle.17 This highly sophisticated integration of architecture and landscape, within a context that is significant to the family, anticipates other, often more famous examples of the ‘Scottish Historical Landscape’ (see Part V of this volume for further discussion of this) and, according to McKean, makes Glamis an essentially Baroque creation, anticipating the work of the Earl of Mar at Alloa by about thirty years.18 However, whilst the core of that argument and the idea that Glamis is actually a Baroque palace is not disputed here, and the idea of linking the castle to a Pictish past is appealing,19 it is worth pointing out that, in fact, the arrangement is not quite symmetrical; the door of the castle is actually very slightly off-axis. This wasn’t caused simply by incompetence on the part of the Earl or his surveyor. Strathmore acknowledged the inaccuracy, and explained it. Having stressed the importance of his building having ‘a resemblance on both sides’, he immediately qualified that statement: I built my walls according to my draught and formed my entry which I behoved to draw a little about from the west else it had run directly through the great victual house at the barns, which my father built and I was very loathe to destroy it; very few will discover the throw20 in my entry which I made as insensible as possibly I could. Others more observing have challenged me for it but were satisfied when I told them the cause, others perhaps more reserved take notice of it and do not tell me and conclude it to be an error of ignorance but they are mistaken.21

It is a noticeable feature of Glamis that there is a significant point on the avenue where it opens out into a courtyard, labelled ‘the Barns’ on the Winter plan, and that all of the elevations of the service buildings, including the paternal victual house, are recorded, along with that of the castle itself. This is just as much about celebrating the memory of his family as the castle, and so these perfectly sound buildings were not to be sacrificed simply for the sake of an axis of symmetry; rather they were to be retained for a mixture of practical and sentimental reasons, a mixture which underlies the restoration

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of Glamis as a whole. If the avenue ultimately terminates on the invisible Pictish stones, it must surely be an accident, because clearly the more local commemoration of his father’s victual house is what set the line of the avenue. There is also another agenda at Glamis; it is a Restoration house in every meaningful sense of that word. It is not only about the restoration of the fortunes of the Strathmores, but also is strongly connected with support for the restored Stewart dynasty. Strathmore, in common with many others, owed his position to Charles II, whose act of indemnity in 1662 compensated people like Strathmore for their former losses. There are strong indications at Glamis of Strathmore’s support for the Stewarts; the most obvious of these is the use of statues of Stewart monarchs in the gardens. Probably more significant, though, is the employment of Jacob de Wet for large-scale decoration.22 De Wet was brought to Scotland for political reasons, that is to provide an artistic bolster to Charles II’s image in Scotland. At the Revolution, c. 1688, he discreetly returned to Holland. He was, therefore, specifically connected with the Stewarts and to use him for large-scale decoration, as Strathmore did, clearly indicates support for the Stewarts. In this way Glamis Castle might be seen as a conservative building, but one which is very much a product of the Restoration and is intimately connected with ideas to do with Scottish architectural tradition, Scottish history, support for the Stewart dynasty, family and monarchical continuity. However, Glamis is only one building, albeit one of the most obvious ones, which reflects these concerns. Sir William Bruce was notably absent from the Glamis project, no doubt partly because of a legal dispute between him and Strathmore over the acquisition of Kinross.23 Nonetheless, if Glamis represents the major aristocratic, modern tower house of the late seventeenth century, it has strong connections with the major royal project at Holyrood Palace (Figure 4.2), which embodies similar themes of conservatism and modernity. Holyrood is considered more fully in other chapters of this book so these comments will be restricted to just a few observations. Holyrood is important because it introduces a number of modern innovations into Scottish architecture. It introduces ‘correct’ European Classicism to Scotland for the first time in the ascending hierarchy of the orders, from Doric to Corinthian, in the inner court. Marking the king’s apartment, on the east side of this court, is Scotland’s first giant pediment, whilst the roof marks the first time a mansard roof of any size had been built in Scotland. Holyrood

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also introduces elaborate state apartments, in tune with Baroque planning all over Europe.24 France had been an influence on the development of Holyrood since the 1530s, when James V built the northern tower as part of the improvements for his French bride, Madeleine de Valois and, as Bruce remodelled it, Holyrood was essentially a French hôtel particulier, or courtyard palace of the Luxembourg type. The corps-de-logis at the back of the inner court; the long wings towards the street, one of them containing a gallery; and the closing range on the west side, with lead flats on either side of the entrance, allowing views out into the city, are all features to be found within these French typologies.25 Along with many internal alterations, Bruce and Mylne regularised the main façade by repeating on the south end the sixteenth-century tower at the north end of the west elevation. This was significant in two respects. First of all, it completed the palace in the manner in which both James V and later Charles I had intended26 and, secondly, it links Holyrood to Glamis in both form and meaning. To deal with the latter first, the background story at Holyrood was somewhat similar to that at Glamis: it had been occupied by Cromwell’s troops, who had built a large barracks on the west range of the palace (known in post-Restoration times as the ‘Usurper’s Building’). The shame of that and the need for a visible restoration

Figure 4.2  Holyrood Palace. Drawing formerly attributed to the office of Sir William Bruce. Undated, but probably after 1690. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. Museum number 1880,0612.340.

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lay behind Charles II’s agreement to a programme of rebuilding and repair to ‘certain of our palaces and castles in Scotland which lately by the injuries of a calamitous time are altogether fallen down, or become unfit for dwelling in . . . particularly our Royal Palace of Holyrudhous’.27 Like Glamis, it was a building that had been much abused by an occupying force and like Glamis, it was felt that restoration had to be clearly indicated. In that context the ­duplication of the great sixteenth-century tower was not only a device to bring order to the palace façade, but also a way of completing the sixteenthcentury palace; in that way Bruce was linking the palace back to the sixteenth century and the great Stewart kings who introduced the Renaissance to Scotland. Whilst Bruce’s original 1671 plan for this on the one hand introduced the new Classical courtyard, on the other it proposed a symmetrical west front that adopted the older style seen in Gordon of Rothiemay (Figure 10.2).28 Thus, at this stage there was a very clear combination of the traditional and the innovative in his design that lasted until some time around 1676 (see Chapter 10 for further discussion of this). Moreover, if the idea of continuity was important for the Earl of Strathmore, it was very much more so for Charles II, after the trauma of civil war and the Commonwealth. Throughout the reigns of both Charles II and James VII/II there was a strong interest in stressing the antiquity and continuity of the Stewart line. The great gallery at Holyrood, connecting king’s and queen’s apartments, was associated with this idea. As at Glamis, De Wet was the artist chosen to propagandise the Stewart position. He was commissioned in 1684 to produce a huge series of portraits, 111 in all, of all Scottish monarchs. The whole gallery was designed around this sequence, which started with the first Scottish king, the mythical Fergus I (fourth century bc) and culminated in the Stewarts, ending with James VII/II. The portraits are a mix of busts and (slightly larger than) full size. All of the Stewarts are full size and certain key individuals, like Fergus I, Kenneth McAlpine (the ninthcentury king who conquered the Picts), David I and Robert the Bruce are also full size. So the Stewarts were presented as the culmination of an unbroken line of kings stretching back into the mists of time. This stress on antiquity and lineage had been used in the past; it was one of the devices the Scottish monarchy had used to stress the independence of Scotland from her aggressive and overweening neighbour in the south,29 but at Holyrood, we have the most consistent example of its use and it has been changed from a device that stressed the independence of Scotland from England to one that stressed the legitimacy of the Stewart line.

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Holyrood symbolised that legitimacy and lineage in a similar way to Glamis, but it also had another function. After the restoration of the Stewart monarchy in May 1660, Charles II gratefully promised to return to his Scottish capital. He didn’t. The work at Holyrood should be seen in that context, both as a palace fit for a king on his return but also as a symbol of the absent monarch in much the same way that the almost contemporary work at the Louvre came to symbolise the presence of Louis XIV in his capital, while his actual presence was at Versailles. That same interest in a Scottish architectural heritage in antiquity and the connection of both royalty and nobility with it, can be detected in Jan Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae, even though it was published in 1693. The first volume (the only one published) emphasised both the lineage and common heritage of monarchy and nobility. It contains views of royal palaces, castles, burghs, abbeys and a few noblemen’s seats. In the text there is a strong heraldic and genealogical interest, which traced the ancestry and stressed the antiquity of the various noble families who were included. Modern architecture, with the single exception of Dunkeld House, a Classical house designed by Bruce in the 1670s (Figure 4.3), was not included and, in the case of Dunkeld, it was ‘antiqued’ with battlements and

Figure 4.3  Jan Slezer, view of Dunkeld (detail focusing on house), Theatrum Scotiae. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

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Figure 4.4  Leslie House, plan. Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 66. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

turrets, giving it a traditionalism and a sense of history which the building itself did not possess but the family did; the house was a replacement for one destroyed by Cromwell.30 What is being suggested here is that the continuing preference for traditional forms of architecture, albeit in greatly modified form, can be related to an awareness of history, lineage, and so on but possibly also to a kind of insecurity, not that induced by the physical threat that the tower house was designed to deal with, but a fear of social and political change which was dealt with by an appeal to past privileges via, among other things, traditional architectural forms. So much for meaning; in terms of architectural form, Holyrood represents an approach that became common in the late seventeenth century, namely, to impose a certain amount of regularity, symmetry or balance, with or without Classical detail, on an old building. Glamis has been dealt with, but there were many other buildings that adopted this approach and a few examples, most with a Bruce connection, will suffice here to illustrate the point further. Leslie House (Figure 4.4) was commissioned by another of the group of Stewart loyalists who had suffered during the

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Commonwealth and were restored to power and wealth after 1660. In this case, John Leslie, 7th Earl of Rothes, was a favourite of Charles II and rewarded accordingly. His house at Leslie, in Fife, was remodelled by John Mylne and Sir William Bruce between 1667 and 1672. It was originally an L-plan structure, with jambs on the east and south, but this was turned into a courtyard house with new wings on the west and north. This regularised the building, although stylistically the language and detail used were traditional,31 but, more importantly, it also modernised its planning, allowing for a great state apartment (including a king’s bedchamber) on the west and a huge gallery on the north. In many respects, the essentials of the layout were the same as Holyrood, especially in the use of the gallery as an adjunct to the apartments.32 Argyll’s Lodging, like Holyrood, also takes the form of the French hôtel particulier. The building was remodelled for Archibald, 9th Earl of Argyll in 1674–5 and the key move in creating the courtyard form from the existing L-plan was the construction of the south-west range that continues the south wing to the street (see Figure 3.10 for a view of whole building). However, rather than simply continuing the existing wing, the architect has introduced a block that is itself L-plan and has a castellated-style polygonal stair turret. The reason for this is that it masks the irregularity introduced into the courtyard by the 1632 staircase in the south-east corner. That allows the architect to manipulate the axis of symmetry in the courtyard so that the new gateway is axially aligned with the door of the house. So, a new piece of traditional architecture is used to regularise the building.33 This piece of manipulation works in tandem with a new closing range to the street, with a high screen wall and a heavily rusticated gateway (see Figures 4.5 and 4.6).The gateway design is taken from Alexandre Francine’s Livre d’Architecture (1631, English translation by Robert Pricke, 1669, plate 2). The response to the engraving is highly accomplished; on the one hand, it is a very precise rendition of the published design but, on the other, it has been very successfully translated into three dimensions and goes well beyond the engraving in that it is fully integrated into a deep, barrel-vaulted gateway. The quality of that response gives weight to the suggestion that this work comes from someone associated with the royal works.34 Further credence is given to this idea when we note that Robert Mylne is known to have used Francine on more than one occasion, notably for the family tomb in Greyfriars Kirk yard35 and that Sir William Bruce also used it, at Kinross House.36 Chapter 2 in this book discusses this important source further.

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Figure 4.5  Argyll’s Lodging, courtyard entrance gate (c. 1674–5). NRHE SC893628 © HES.

This highly sophisticated adaptation of Argyll’s Lodging suggests, like Castle Lyon, an awareness of and respect for the architecture of the recent past, both in the L-plan addition already noted and also in the gateway itself, because, whilst the exterior is clearly and with great skill derived from Francine, the interior face has a quite different design based on Corinthian pilasters that have nothing to do with Francine and are clearly of an earlier period of Scottish architecture, almost certainly the 1630s (Figure 4.7). Between 1668 and 1674, Bruce built his own house of Balcaskie, near Anstruther (Figures 4.8 and 16.4). Here, rather than adding another L-plan to make a courtyard house, as at Leslie, the L-plan

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Figure 4.6  Alexandre Francine’s Livre d’Architecture, plate 2 (1631). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

was used to extend the main jamb of the existing house to produce a U-plan facing south towards the sea. The result of this is a house that is almost symmetrical, but the sense of regularity and axiality is greatly enhanced by the huge, dominating axis that runs through the house and across the terrace gardens and then is picked up

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Figure 4.7  Argyll’s Lodging, courtyard gateway from rear (probably 1630s). NRHE SC1271935 © HES.

Figure 4.8  Balcaskie, view from courtyard (north elevation) (c. 1668). NRHE SC1769239 © Crown copyright: HES (Scottish National Buildings Record).

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Classicism and the Castle   87

by an avenue that runs all the way to the sea, with the Bass Rock, five or six miles away on the other side of the Firth of Forth as its visual termination (Figure 4.9). It is an example, like Glamis, of the regularisation of the house being partly dependent on the axiality of the landscape setting. The entrance to the house is on the long, north façade and here we see a pattern that is also found in a number of other houses of this period, with a long regular range, flanked by two gables (in this case crow-stepped) and completed at each end by projecting towers. The result is a mixture of Classical balance and traditional features and details and it is a format that is used not only in modernisations but also in new-build. Two new-build houses are of particular interest, the first a new tower house and the second an extended country house. Methven, in Perthshire,37 was built for merchant and banker Patrick Smyth between 1678 and 1682 and was almost certainly designed by James Smith (Figure 4.10). It has an appearance similar to a tower house, albeit it has none of the external detailing of battlements and so on. It is a tall, deep and regular block, with projecting round towers on the corners. This nouveau riche gentleman (that is, not old nobility) was attracted to Methven at least partly because it was an ancient site with royal associations and therefore loaned a prestige and antiquity to its new owner38 and, arguably, the architecture is designed to evoke that fake antiquity. On the entrance front we can

Figure 4.9  Balcaskie, view to Bass Rock from terrace. © Marilyn Brown.

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Figure 4.10  Methven Castle, Perthshire (1678–82). NRHE SC1377385 © Crown copyright: HES.

see a relationship with Balcaskie; although it is a shorter frontage it has the same components, with crow-stepped gables at each end and projecting towers beyond those. It has been suggested that the essentials of the plan form are the same as Balcaskie, that is the U-plan, but in this case, the central space has been filled in. We can see this at roof level, where that space is a balustraded lead flat, contrasting with the steep pitched roofs of the rest of the building and providing a vantage point from which to view the countryside around.39 Wemyss’ analysis of the detailed plan of both Methven and Glamis is interesting and persuasive and it shows that, whatever the external form of these buildings, modern, essentially Baroque planning was the expectation of the owners. As it happens, Glamis also has a lead flat overlooking the formal landscape.40 There are some similarities with another, particularly key building of the Restoration period, namely Panmure House, which shares components like the gabled elements on the façade, lead flats and the need for a complex Baroque plan. But the outcome is very different. In 1666 John Mylne was commissioned to build a new house for the Earl of Panmure. Mylne died in 1667 and the work was taken over by Alexander Nisbet, who was later recommended by Panmure to his nephew, Patrick, Earl of Strathmore, to build Glamis Castle.

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This is a significant point because what Panmure shows is that, even for the old aristocracy, the castle was not the only solution, and Panmure House is a key building in the move towards the Classical country house. It is horizontal rather than vertical and, although it looks nothing like the typical English Restoration house, it has two of its essential features, the semi-basement for services and the double-pile plan (see Figures 12.1 and 12.2).41 However, its elevation fits very much into the pattern we have been discussing here, with gables, lead flats and projecting closet towers. Some of the detail has been somewhat classicised, so, for example, the gables have straight, moulded skews rather than crow-steps. It also has a more extended front than Methven and a somewhat longer one than Balcaskie and therefore has a third gable, in the centre, with lead flats on either side. It is not difficult to imagine this fully classicised, with a pediment, for example, rather than the central gable. A building like House of Gray, near Dundee (attributed to Alexander McGill, c. 1716), a Classical house but with projecting ogee towers, is perhaps a more fully realised Classical version of a similar idea. Hatton House (Figure 4.11) was built around the 1660s, possibly by John Mylne, for Charles Maitland, Lord Hatton, brother of the Duke of Lauderdale (of whom more anon). Hatton benefited from

Figure 4.11  Hatton House, Ratho (c. 1660s–1690s). NRHE SC1234118 © HES.

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his brother’s powerful position in Scotland and enjoyed a number of roles in government but was also involved in the rebuilding of Holyrood and became Surveyor of the royal palaces in 1679. Again, its façade has many of the components discussed already but there is a slight difference here. In this case, the house is based on an ancient tower house and the regularisation of the old house was achieved by using a traditional plan form, an L-plan that wrapped around the old tower. The new additions were lavishly decorated in a manner similar to the Lauderdale house at Ham in Middlesex. Lord Hatton also modernised Dudhope Castle, his property in Dundee, in a similar manner.42 The original tower house was left as an empty space in the centre of the house and was not integrated into the plan but, on elevation, it continued to dominate the entrance front, rising up above the gables and the balustraded flat in between. Its role was symbolic, giving the new house the air of a castle with all of the prestige that this conferred, whilst the accommodation was modern, on the horizontal and luxurious. Whatever the exterior detail or style of these houses, in each case discussed so far, the planning was modern, which is to say that it was based on the apartment plan and on the progression through that plan from dining room to closet. In the case of Panmure, the plan is extremely sophisticated with an ante-chamber (though the French terminology is eschewed in favour of ‘lobby’43) inserted between dining room and drawing room. In fact it could be argued that in all of these examples (with the possible exception of Hatton) with gables turned to the façades, that the elevation derives from the up-to-date plan, combined with traditional method of construction, especially roof construction (see Chapter 7). The traditional roofing method was to throw up two gables and place a pitched roof in between. That method works well with single-pile space; it is very much more difficult over a double-pile space because there are problems with timber lengths and with the height of the gables that have to span a double width. The solution used at Panmure was to put a single-pile roof along the back of the house and three gables coming out from that at right angles. That left two spaces in between these projecting gables for lead flats. The whole house is therefore covered with single-pile roofing. That is true of all of the houses discussed so far and what we find in many of these cases are attempts to combine a deeper and more sophisticated plan with ordinary single-pile roofing. In terms of roof construction, what was required before fully Classical façades could be built was the hipped roof (the mansard roof or, in Scots, the piend roof). In the post-

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Restoration period the key exemplar of this is Holyrood Palace, as we have seen (however, see a discussion of this in Chapter 8). Even for the more tower-like Methven, it is possible to imagine a more Classical arrangement if the piend roof had been used. Methven is not so unlike Dunkeld or Moncrieffe in that they all share very deep plans and vertical proportions, but two of them are clearly Classical and have piend roofs. We now return briefly to Panmure, which, as we have seen, has some familial and professional connections to Glamis, but a very different architectural outcome. However, there were other links. The Panmures, like the Strathmores, supported the Stewarts and suffered as a consequence during the Commonwealth. Unlike the Strathmores, however, they didn’t rebuild their old tower house, instead building this new house about half a mile away, but some of the ideas implicit in Glamis are still present here. During the Civil War period Patrick Maule was 1st Earl of Panmure. He died in 1661, just after the Restoration, and in his will directed his son ‘to build a house and repair the burial place of his family, both which he intended to have done, but the confusions and hardness of the times did not allow him’.44 So the 2nd Earl, George, was respecting his father’s wishes in actually building a new house, just as his nephew Patrick was showing similar filial respect in not demolishing the victual house at Glamis. At Panmure the idea of continuity was also very strong, not simply with his father, but with the generations who had gone before. In 1678 Robert Edward wrote a description of Angus, which included a genealogy of the Maules, stressing their antiquity and their connections with their land going back to 1072. He also talked about the house: This Earl [George] hath lately built a magnificent house, proportioned to his ample fortune, adjoining to the ancient castle of Panmure (of which some of the ground vaults still remain) and of the same name, as if it had been only a reparation; because it was in this old castle of Panmure that King William signed the Panmure Charter to Peter de Maule in the year 1172.45

So Panmure House, on the one hand, celebrates the family’s new status as earls and, on the other, maintains continuity with the past and, in that sense, shares the same concerns as Glamis. Sir William Bruce had some involvement at Panmure in the design of the gateway (see Chapter 6) and in the later stages of the work but had no role in the design of the house itself. However, in the same

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Figure 4.12  Jan Slezer, front view of Thirlestane Castle, Theatrum Scotiae, 1719. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

period he continued to work on the adaptation of old buildings even as, as at Dunkeld, Moncrieffe and later Kinross, he also worked on entirely new, Classical dwellings. The most important of these adaptations were the houses he modernised for the Duke of Lauderdale.46 Lauderdale, as virtual ruler of Scotland in the king’s absence was in a position not only to remodel all of his residences, Brunstane and Lethington as well as Thirlestane, but also to use the royal architect, Sir William Bruce, and the workforce of the royal works, including Robert Mylne and many of the craftsmen from Holyrood. Thirlestane’s remodelling, from 1670 to 1677, overlapped with the work on the royal palace, from 1671 to 1678. The existing castle was an unusual, long block, with corner turrets, on the site of an English artillery fortification from the 1540s.47 Again, the ‘Classicism’ of this castle lies partly in the relationship between the castle and its environment. The entrance was moved to the west gable and Bruce designed a highly dramatic entrance at the end of a formal approach. Slezer’s view (Figure 4.12), in particular, shows how

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Classicism and the Castle   93

carefully the composition was built up from the outlying, singlestorey courtyard pavilions to the raised cour d’honneur, flanked by new pavilions (and sitting on top of the kitchens) to the entrance squeezed between the two corner towers, with a pediment (never executed) above. Although Serlio has been suggested for the overall plan of Thirlestane,48 the build up in three dimensions of towers and pavilions to a terrace entrance suggests French influence, notably du Cerceau49 or a more recent building like François Mansart’s Château de Balleroy, in Normandy, c. 1630. Respect for the recent Scottish past is also evident in the entrance front of Thirlestane. Here the doorcase, though Classical, is clearly of an earlier style than 1670s and is, in fact, based on an early seventeenth-century design by the royal architect of that period, Sir James Murray of Kilbaberton,50 so the courtly architecture of the 1670s is linked back to the courtly architecture of the 1620s–1630s, just as it is at Castle Lyon and at Argyll’s Lodging. The side elevation as shown by Slezer (Figure 4.13) is much more true to the original castle. Whilst the main entrance was the culmination of an avenue of approach from the west, the south side of the castle shown in this view overlooks a formal statue garden, and the corresponding space on the north had a series of walled enclosures (Figure 16.9).51 These more intimate formal gardens were viewed from the main rooms of the house but also from the spectacular

Figure 4.13  Jan Slezer, side view of Thirlestane Castle, Theatrum Scotiae, 1718. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

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wallhead terrace, introduced by Bruce as a viewing platform on each side. It has been plausibly suggested that this arrangement of projecting side towers and linking wallhead terrace may derive from the Château de Loches, near Tours, in the Loire valley.52 The Slezer view is also useful in showing elements that were not executed. Most interesting amongst these is the loggia with balustraded lead flat stretching across the whole east side of the building. This was not only intended to provide access to a terrace, via the loggia at ground level, but the lead platform was also to be accessed from an intended library on the piano nobile. The ground on that side fell away and provided open views across the countryside. At Thirlestane, then, Bruce, more than anywhere else, and with great skill, allowed the castle to speak for itself but regularised and, indeed, classicised it at least on its entrance front. Typically, and in common with other castles we have looked at, he also related it to its landscape, axially, formally, intimately and openly, according to the functions of each elevation and the landscape it faced. The difficulty of working within a pre-existing house ‘in order to meet the standards of privacy and aesthetics of the post-restoration era’ has been particularly noted at Thirlestane53 but this view is open to some question (the issue over privacy is not disputed). This long, thin building, whilst it is certainly not Classical in its proportions, absolutely lends itself to the great formality of the Baroque apartment plan. At Thirlestane, the build-up to the entrance then continues inside, with the great staircase immediately to the left leading to the state apartment, which fills the entire floor with one room, as it should, leading to the next on an enfilade. There are few dégagements, only a number of service stairs, which would have allowed discreet service and private access; otherwise the plan is all about the hierarchy and the progression of the formal plan, and the old castle was perfect for realising this. For our final example, our starting point is a house that is not a castle and was entirely new. Melville House, at Monimail in Fife, was built between 1697 and 1702 for George, 1st Earl of Melville, taking us away from the Restoration and that privileged group of old aristocracy around Charles II. The attribution of the design of Melville to James Smith is not definitive54 and Sir William Bruce, along with Alexander Edward and James Smith, was deeply involved in the design. Melville itself, however, is not what concerns us here; Smith carried out a number of different designs which relate to this building. One of these has been linked to Palladio’s Villa Trissino, with an open two-storey loggia on one of the façade drawings.55

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Figure 4.14  Sir William Bruce/Alexander Edward, design for Melville House, c. 1697. The editors have not been able to trace the source of this image.

However, there is another drawing (Figure 4.14) which shows a clearly related design that has also been attributed to Smith.56 For our purposes, it doesn’t matter who produced the drawing because it is related to Melville, and Bruce was therefore almost certainly aware of it. As it happens, I would not attribute it to Smith but rather to Alexander Edward, firstly because the very precise marking of courses and guidelines on the page makes it similar to drawings by Edward (see, for example, Figure 17.5) and, secondly, because the slightly scruffy wash on the roof is very unlike Smith’s rather precise work but is very similar to Edward’s use of wash in the Kinnaird Castle drawings. Finally, the banded rustication on the drawing was frequently used by Bruce, notably all across the façade at Hopetoun. It had never been used by Smith at this point.57 The reason the Melville drawing is important is because Bruce remodelled Craighall (Figure 4.15), a U-plan castle less than ten miles from Melville, at exactly the same time as the work was being done at Melville. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to suggest that there is a link between the two, with the double arcade (not the colonnaded loggia as in Smith’s design) uniting the two wings of the old castle.

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Figure 4.15  Craighall Castle, Fife (1697). NRHE SC739304 © Courtesy of HES (Erskine Beveridge Collection).

Serlio, rather than Palladio, might be the source here, with Bruce responding not to the external elevation (apart from that of the pavilion on the left) but to the section through the courtyard, revealing the arcaded loggia within at Poggio Reale (Figure 4.16). On the other hand, the use of the segmental pediment is highly unusual and suggests a northern rather than Italian influence on Bruce, with buildings like Salomon de Brosse’s Château de Blérancourt (1619) being a possible influence. In any case, this is only one year before Bruce started work on Hopetoun, where a similar pediment was used. This was a project that was very much about his family – not so much its past history but its future, because this was the house of his daughter Anne and her husband, Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall. More importantly, it was where Bruce’s ambitions for the future of his own dynasty lay (thwarted as it turned out) in the person of his grandson, John Hope.

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Figure 4.16  Serlio, Book 3 (1540), Poggio Reale. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

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5

A Classic Looks at the Gothic: Sir John Clerk, Ruins and Romance Iain Gordon Brown

C

ultural historians see Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd baronet (1676–1755), as a proto-Enlightenment figure of the generation immediately preceding that of the great age of Scottish intellectual achievement in the second half of the eighteenth century. A virtuoso in the later seventeenth-century tradition, he came to preside over a circle of poets, painters, musicians, antiquaries and architects as their Midlothian Maecenas.1 His influence was widely felt and was both generally and genuinely commended. Scholars of the Grand Tour recognise the prime importance of the years Clerk spent in Europe as a young man.2 At Leiden University he had shown a much greater interest in Greek and Roman antiquity than in the more arid legal studies he was supposed to be pursuing. There followed what proved to be the seminal event of his life: an extended tour of the courts of Germany and Austria, and of all the great cities and sights of Italy, France and the Low Countries. This formative period included fourteen months in Rome, where he studied the buildings of Antiquity and the Renaissance, and learned the rudiments of architectural drawing. A taste for art and collecting was born: he became a cognoscente. Historians of antiquarianism acknowledge Clerk as a pioneer in the study of Roman remains in North Britain, an aspect of his scholarly life that built upon interests first formed in Europe.3 Antiquarianism was a widely interpreted intellectual and moral pursuit, for he sought a life as much that of a cultivated Roman gentleman as, in the modern world, he could. Friends gave him the pseudonyms of Agricola or Varro; he himself identified with Horace or, even more, with Pliny the Younger. He thought in terms of the

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Figure 5.1  Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd baronet (1676–1755). Studio of William Aikman, c. 1727. Iain Gordon Brown.

Roman concept of otium, the ‘virtuous ease’ of a country life enjoyed at his rural villa and balancing the negotium (literally, the negation of ease) of his dutiful public career as advocate, briefly as politician and subsequently as a Baron of the Court of Exchequer. Social historians are interested in Clerk’s decision to forego the public career that beckoned in favour of a more placid life of reading, writing and shrewd observation of the world around him, and of the men and manners of the age, which manifested itself also in the special field of travel and ‘country-house tourism’. Economic historians study his career of land and estate improvement, arboriculture and devotion to the progress of mining technology. Architectural historians may, with some justification, regard Sir

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John Clerk as a cultural counterpart of Lord Burlington in England: generally, as a patron and encourager of artistic or literary talent, and as a significant collector, but, more specifically, in terms of his being the leading Scottish gentleman amateur and architectural adviser of the day – for Clerk was, most notably, the patron of and collaborator with William Adam at Mavisbank, and the éminence grise behind the design of several other houses.4 Garden historians know Clerk for his literary landscapes of Classical association and evocation laid out at his seat at Penicuik and his subsidiary villa of Mavisbank. All was codified in his long blank-verse poem ‘The Country Seat’. So, we have Clerk the Classicist: the enthusiast for Roman antiquity; the man who lived a ‘Roman’ life and followed a Roman ethos which, in architectural and antiquarian terms, extended to that Roman notion of pietas – or duty of respect towards the memory and works of ancestors and thus to the monuments of the past – with which he was imbued; the literary gardener; the authority on the theory and practice of Classical architecture. Can we also find in Clerk a corresponding – or contrary – interest in the Gothic, in medieval and later castellated buildings and their ruins, and in the romance and wonder of a non-Classical world? Yes: in opposition to what Sir Howard Colvin once suggested I think we can, at least to some degree.5 Clerk being Clerk, however, nothing is very precisely expressed, and his adherence to one opinion often slides away into another set of thoughts and meanings entirely. Thus, although he may have admired specific Gothic buildings, he detested what he called ‘the Goths’ and all that the contemporary concept of ‘Gothicism’ meant.6 ‘The Country Seat’ may be regarded as a distillation of his thoughts on the building of Classical houses of varying degrees of grandeur and sophistication, and also his views on the laying out of parks.7 More didactic textbook than a work of poetic elegance, this is an English georgic which is also a summation of a lifetime’s looking and dreaming, for Clerk thought more about building houses in what he called ‘paper fields’ than in actual ones. At the poem’s conclusion he figuratively gives up in disgust at the prospect of those who would choose to ignore his precepts: But others are on whom these rules you waste, For Goths will always have a Gothick taste.

‘Goths’ of any age, either in late Antiquity or the present, were those benighted souls who disregarded the rules of Classical per-

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fection. Historically the Goths were, so Clerk argued, the people who had overturned the Roman Empire and the civilisation, arts and architecture that had been its legacy and which had at length been rediscovered and revived at the Renaissance. By extension, ‘Goths’ were people ignorant of or disrespectful to this Classical legacy. Towards the close of the ancient world (Clerk mused) even the Romans themselves had become almost Gothic. He was shocked, when visiting Hadrian’s Wall in 1724, to have made a detour to see what he understood to be a fine equestrian ‘statue’ and to find nothing more than ‘a barbarous piece of sculpture on a sepulchral stone made about the declention of the Empire when sculpture with other arts and sciences were expiring. Surely no masone in Britain coud make a more Gothick ornament than this figure.’8 In the post-Roman world, Gothicism had reigned, and might still prevail if the vigilance of Classicists like Clerk were relaxed. Time and chance had rendered the whole of St Andrews a Gothic place full of ruins, misery and disorder. The cathedral had been ‘barbarously destroyed at the Reformation’, which had been an episode of sustained ‘Gothicism’ of a particularly appalling kind.9 Modern Goths were those who disrespected the heritage of the past: Caleb Baily, the ‘Stonekiller’ of Avebury (perhaps more a ‘Vandal’ than a Goth) who broke up the sarsen monoliths to the despair of William Stukeley; or, nearer home, Sir Michael Bruce of Stenhouse, the oafish local landowner who pulled down the mysterious building known as Arthur’s O’on near Falkirk to build a mill dam with its dressed stones, all to the anguish of Clerk and his fellow antiquaries.10 A note to ‘The Country Seat’ asserts that the Goths broke and destroyed all monuments of antiquity . . . which fell in their way. They introduced a bad manner not only in Architectory but in all arts and sciences. We have been for upwards of 200 years endeavouring to recover ourselves from this Gothicism. Yet still there are too many amongst us whose bad taste neither example nor precept will ever rectify & therefore are to be left to themselves.11

Prefaced to a catalogue of Clerk’s collection of antiquities and curiosities (1739) is a memorandum in defence of collecting and indeed of antiquarian study in general. Writing in his most pontifical manner, he expressed his concern at the threat posed by Ignorance and Unconcern:

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. . . if all the world had been such Goths as to have broken down & quite defaced all antient monuments, there had been an end of all architecture. If medals, coins, entaglios, cameos, &c had been throwen away . . . good God, in what a Gulph of Ignorance and Stupidity had we been all in . . . in short the preservation of such things are so useful that I would not advise any tollerably learned, wise or discreet man to throw away even trifles . . .12

To ignore the heritage of antiquity that had survived into the present, and to neglect to honour and preserve it in all its forms, small and great, was (as hinted at above) to fail in the Roman duty of pietas, or respect for continuity between past and future.13 Disturbed by what he regarded as a developing tendency in the Society of Antiquaries of London to concern itself overmuch with matters medieval, Clerk wrote to Roger Gale in 1736, in doing so reusing a phrase already employed in ‘The Country Seat’: I am sorry to find that Gothicism prevails so much in your Society. [It was his Society too: he was a Fellow, indeed the first resident in Scotland to be elected.] If your Antiquarians woud entertain a just opinion of it, they woud believe it to be only the degeneracy of Greek & Roman arts and sciences. In this view I myself have admired the laborious dullness and stupidity in all the Gothick contrivances of any kind. These barbarians had the originalls in full perfection yet coud discover no beauties fit for their imitation. But Goths will always have a Gothick taste.14

This was in response to a letter from Gale which had told Clerk, the Classicist, about recent papers read before the Antiquaries: ‘as they were generally upon Roman subjects and history I am sorry to tell you they seemed not to be so well relished by severall as a piece of Monastic Gothism would have been’.15 From all this we should be able to conclude that Clerk condemned the Goths and their architecture because theirs were not Classical buildings, just as he condemned the prevailing ignorance of the socalled Dark and Middle Ages. Historical Gothic architecture was debased, and, naturally, any modern attempt to revive it was also reprehensible. Yet here was the paradox in Clerk’s antiquarianism. Much inclined to favour the Classical over the Gothic, he nevertheless respected the intrinsic achievement of medieval builders, and had no wish to fall into the trap of being a ‘Goth’ himself in condoning or promoting destruction of old buildings in general, or of failing to secure in any way possible their preservation – whether

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in actuality (the ideal) or on paper (the second-best situation, but still much better than to have neither structure itself nor record of it when it was gone). The Antiquaries might be misguided in their monkish Gothicism, but what they sought to study was, in its own way, admirable and worthy at the very least of preservation from the jaws of devouring Time. When Clerk saw Waltham Cross in 1733 he noted that it was ‘of a Gothick kind of architecture’. That was all he said by way of definition of its architectural style, so his appreciation of the edifice was very basic. ‘This Cross is so remarkable that the learned Dr Stukeley thought fit to draw it for the consideration of the Antiquarian Society and for preserving the memory of it.’16 (Figure 5.2) Is there, perhaps, just a slightly sarcastic suggestion that if Stukeley wanted to spend his time that way, in making this early contribution to the Vetusta Monumenta series of the Society of Antiquaries (Stukeley’s drawing was engraved for publication by George Vertue: Clerk himself acquired a copy of the print), it was a harmless enough pursuit? Stukeley had already had wooden posts erected to prevent carriages and wagons running against the Eleanor cross. But Clerk, for his own part, would certainly (I think) have preferred to see some Roman antiquities excavated, protected, published and so preserved. A note to ‘The Country Seat’ states that if the ‘Gothick taste’ were to be revived it would be ‘a remarkable violation of nature, which can last no longer than till men please to exercise their Reason, and examine upon what foundation such a Taste can be supported.’ In the Introduction to the poem he had written: ‘The ancient Greek and Roman structures, or the designs of them by Palladio and others ought to be standards fit for the Imitation of our modern Architects’, by whom ‘so many indifferent Fabricks had been rear’d up’, not so much due to ‘Ignorance in Architectory as to a Bad Taste’. Yet Perth mercat cross, a re-creation of 1669 by Robert Mylne of the original destroyed by Cromwell’s iconoclasts (and which was itself to be removed as an obstruction to traffic in 1765), Clerk appeared to praise as ‘a little neat sort of Gothick mimicry tho but a modern structure’.17 Gothick revival (more or less) of a different kind he inspected with some apprehension when he visited Sir John Vanbrugh’s family compound at Greenwich. Vanbrugh (he wrote) was a famouse Architect but of an odd taste. These houses consist of great heaps of brick and thick walls . . . The ornaments are such which the Goths and their successors used to place on castles and prisons, viz battlements, round towers, little windows and doors . . .18

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Figure 5.2  Waltham Cross, engraved by George Vertue for the Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of Antiquaries of London after a drawing by William Stukeley, 1721. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

Clerk’s attitude to the Gothic and to the fashionable contemporary revival of the historical style was, like so much in his nature, paradoxical and contradictory.19 Clerk looked at authentic Gothic buildings with some real appreciation of the craftsmanship but relatively little understanding of

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historical sequence or the evolution of styles. He was, however, genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about the technical aspects of construction: ‘The Country Seat’ is replete with advice on the mixing of mortar and the slaking of lime, and many of his less confident contemporaries deferred to his skill in ‘dealing with the mortar tub’. When he wrote that ‘our forefathers were better builders than we’, it was the masons of the abbeys, cathedrals, churches and castles of the Middle Ages he had in mind.20 Of Elgin Cathedral he remarked in 1739 that he had never seen ‘better masone work in Britain than is to be found here’: it had been ‘a very great and elegant building’.21 At miserable St Andrews, a remote corner of the world fit but for monks, friars and fishermen, he admired only Bishop Kennedy’s tomb in St Salvator’s Chapel, ‘a very pretty Gothick piece of Architecture full of small pillars, arches and other members in their light manner’.22 He recorded two visits to Kelso, nineteen years apart, on the first occasion (in 1724) lamenting the destruction wrought there (as he supposed) at the Reformation – as at other fine ecclesiastical buildings in Scotland – on the abbey and the then parish church within its nave.23 (‘At the Reformation’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘most of our mobs were in the wrong, or some fine cathedrals had been standing.’)24 These structures at Kelso were ‘of Gothick architecture in its perfection’.25 Returning to the Borders town in 1743 he looked again at the old kirk ‘which has indeed been a very fine one’. He discussed the ruined building with a local Quaker. I took occasion to tell him that by his principles we would have no churches neither old nor new and that I thought it had been a great injury done our Reformation, to pull down our fine churches . . . meerly because the Papists had served God in them after their own way.

Even if, as the Quaker expostulated, the Papists had worshipped graven images, Clerk thought that ‘the statues might have been preserved as monuments of antiquity and idolatry, but it was monstrous to have thrown down some of our finest churches’. A version of the Horatian tag about fools shunning vices by running to the opposite extreme brought up the end of his homily.26 Surviving English ecclesiastical buildings gave him pleasure and instruction. Durham Cathedral was ‘a prodigious fabric and very solidly built’: as so often, it was the quality of the actual physical structure of the building rather than the style or the artistry of the edifice that was praised, and Clerk seemed more concerned to score a moralistic point of sorts by the sarcastic observation,

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Figure 5.3  Durham Cathedral, etching and drypoint, by John Clerk of Eldin. National Galleries of Scotland, ref. P6017.

made on inspecting the monks’ kitchen, that it did not appear as if ‘there had been great mortification practiced here in old times’.27 He would have appreciated the record of so many medieval buildings later drawn and etched by his son, John Clerk of Eldin (Figure 5.3). On Sir John’s return journey from London in 1727, a trip which had been very largely devoted to seeing Classical country houses and collections, he visited York Minster, ‘a fine Gothick building and perhaps one of the largest in Europe’, where the Chapter House was singled out for attention on account of its ‘little round dome’ and ‘cupola in the Gothick way with very small pillars’.28 At Lincoln in 1733 he marvelled at the clustered piers which looked at first like marble but on closer inspection were found to be of ‘plaister of Stuco mixed with coal dust’. This seemed to him to explain ‘the nature of several pillars even in Italy which are said to be cast and moulded. For fine stuco plaister may be made to resemble marble by a proper mixture.’ Clerk was always more a man for his masonry and mortar than for the niceties of design. But Lincoln was, he said, a cathedral of ‘the light Gothick kind’.29 Making a clear distinction from a building such as Durham, he attempts some form of rudimentary typology.

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At Salisbury Cathedral (‘a very fine Gothick building’) six years previously he had taken a particular interest in the piers, which ‘are of marble, both small and great. Each great pillar is surrounded with small ones about 5 inches diameter and these all disjoyned from the body of the main pillars.’ He wondered that the ‘consistory dome’ should be ‘supported in the middle by only one small pillar’.

Figure 5.4  Salisbury Cathedral from Wilton Park, etching and drypoint, by John Clerk of Eldin, 1772. National Galleries of Scotland, ref. P6029.

This architecture explains the humure of the Goths whose inventions ran much on the wonderfull to wit that great heavy roofs, steeples, arches and other ornaments should be supported by very weak pillars. But in order to effect this all their masonry was very exact.

Interested though he generally was in the principles and technical aspects of building construction, he seems to have entirely overlooked or failed to understand the role of the flying buttress while nevertheless singling out fine stone-cutting and jointing for due praise.30 The celebrated Tickencote Church, Rutland, impressed Clerk but also showed up his lack of anything more than very basic

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knowledge of the history of English medieval architecture: it was, he wrote, ‘very old, and by the gothick manner seems to be built about the 8 century . . . by Italians, whom the Saxon kings sent for into England’. Yet the astonishing chancel arch, and the notable, sexpartite vault beyond it, went unremarked.31 The chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, he described as ‘the noblest and best piece of Gothick Architecture in the world except the great church at Milan . . . very richly ornamented with carvings according to the manner of that age’. The Tudor emblems attracted his particular attention, and he praised – he could scarcely not do so – the glass. This was his only recorded comment on traceried windows, surely such striking features of any later ecclesiastical Gothic building. The glorious fanvaulting, however, passed him by.32 Unquestionably the most important Gothic building both to attract Clerk and to involve him actively in its conservation was Rosslyn Chapel, almost on his own doorstep.33 Roger Gale, in 1739, was the first to draw attention to Clerk’s role: under the direction of ‘that true lover of antiquities and all the liberal arts’, Gale said, the Chapel – ‘a most noble Gothic structure, exceeded by few’ – might soon not only be ‘secured from ruin, but be made as beautiful and stately as most of that sort of edifices in the kingdom . . .’34 In the later 1730s Clerk had become embroiled with Colonel James St Clair over prospective repairs at both the old St Clair (or Sinclair) seat of Rosslyn Castle and at the Chapel itself. In the case of the castle, Clerk found himself acting as intermediary between St Clair and an architectural consortium of William Adam and John Baxter, with the result that Clerk advised St Clair not to attempt large-scale rebuilding at the site.35 What St Clair called Sir John’s ‘indulgence and goodness’ led to Clerk’s playing a role somewhat akin to that of agent or clerk of works, capacities in which he would come to be rather more involved at the Chapel. After some divergences in opinion, Colonel St Clair in fact drew back from serious involvement with the castle’s putative restoration and adaptation. The romantic possibilities of the site, with its proximity to and views over the rocky banks and waterfalls of the North Esk, had certainly weighed with both Clerk and the patron (Figure 5.5). But Sir John’s plea for practical caution, and for not devoting substantial sums of money to the conservation and refashioning of a partial ruin where the investment would scarcely be repaid (and that solely in terms of picturesque sensibility), won out. Clerk hooked the Colonel, however, with work to save the extraordinary Chapel. The letters of St Clair suggest that it was through

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Figure 5.5  Rosslyn Castle, engraved by William Russell Birch after a painting by James Phillips, from Délices de la Grande Bretagne (1789). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

Clerk’s influence that he had come to value his ancestral property in the first place.36 St Clair could now say that ‘it would give me the outmost pain if any dissaster happened to it in my hands, notwithstanding of its having been most ridiculous in me ever to have intangled my self with it’; whereas previously ‘it would not have given me much trouble to have heard that the highest stone of it was the lowest, but as the matter now stands, the sooner it’s repaired the better’. Sir John even made the suggestion that the St Clair family set aside a modest annual sum for ongoing maintenance of the building. So effectively did Clerk plead the case that the once-reluctant St Clair soon wished the restoration programme to be carried out ‘well and substantially, let the cost come out as it will’, with Sir John in charge of such demolition as he felt necessary, and equally of such rebuilding and repair work as he deemed appropriate. The empty windows were glazed. But one gets the impression that St Clair, in his calling this general involvement ‘meddling’, had been (despite his apparent Damascene conversion to the cause of conservation) almost strong-armed by Clerk into taking action against his real wishes, which were more truly those of a man ‘frightened to dip into Mortar’.37 And, moreover, Sir John did not prove as proactive a clerk of works as he might have been, allowing tradesmen – in St Clair’s blunt military man’s words – to ‘piddle on about it’ for months. A

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Figure 5.6  Rosslyn Chapel, engraved by Samuel Sparrow after Francis Grose, from Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland (1789–91). Detail showing John Baxter’s roof. Iain Gordon Brown.

series of unfortunate vicissitudes under Clerk’s somewhat desultory direction allowed John Baxter to erect the inappropriate and very prominent pitched roof which darkened the east end of the building, obscuring the great window there, and cut through the clerestory over both the north and south aisles: an ‘eye-sore’ according to St Clair, and right he was.38 (Figure 5.6) A telling line in a later letter casts the aspersion that it was Sir John whose pressure had prevailed upon the owner ‘to undertake that piece of old Family nonsense of repairing the Chappell’. Clerk’s concern for old buildings was not, perhaps, as widely felt as he might have supposed, and certainly not by those who had to bear the cost of his antiquarian-minded proposals. Yet by 1789 Clerk’s role had been overlooked, minimised or forgotten. Thus Francis Grose was able to write of Rosslyn Chapel: Of late years this beautiful edifice was in great danger of becoming quite ruinous: but to the great honour of the late General Sinclair [sic], then proprietor, he prevented it, by putting new flag-stones on the roof; and new wooden casements, with glass, into all the windows. He likewise new laid the floor . . . on which repairs he expended a very considerable sum. At present, the building seems to want a little more such friendly assistance . . .39

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All these structures mentioned on the pages above with which Clerk was familiar, and which for the most part he admired, were several hundred years old when he knew them. Subject, however, to an opinion halfway between satisfaction at the tentative emergence of the Classical style, and dissatisfaction verging on contempt due to their mongrel nature, were those rather more recent, or fundamentally altered, buildings such as Wilton House. The seat of Clerk’s friend the Earl of Pembroke had been ‘formerly a large monastery but was afterwards reform’d in some places by the famous architect Inigo Jones. The building is rather great than regular . . .’40 Here was medieval architecture subjected to a ‘reformation’ of a kind different from that of the erstwhile Wilton Abbey at the hands of the iconoclasts of the English Reformation. Clerk appears to have held in lesser esteem, too, those buildings which he could still term ‘Gothick’, but which were of rather more recent date and yet were not overtly in what he could appreciate as a clearly ‘Classical’ style. At Stirling Castle, the square palace built by K. James the 5th is remarkable for its old Gothick figure and particularly the statues that stand out in the wall. I wondered it did not look more modern, since it was built after Architecture was restored in Italy, for the finest palaces in Rome and Florence are older than it.41

Yet of the great hall at Stirling he wrote that ‘it does not want something that looks august’ (my italics), its late-Gothic grandeur thus appearing to lend it a sort of ‘Classic’ dignity: the medieval was viewed through a Classical lens in what seems an interesting instance of perversely inverted architectural judgement. The negative assessment, almost belittling, of Scottish Renaissance architecture was continued in Clerk’s critique of the Jacobite George Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland. The Scottish king was not ‘the best lodged Prince in Europe’, as Lockhart has asserted. ‘Not justly observed’, Clerk scribbled in his copy, ‘for about the time of K James the 5th or rather in K James the 4th time . . . there were much better houses built for poor Italian princes viz all those by Michaelangelo Buonaroti and other Architects . . .’42 The architecture of Drumlanrig, a house he knew well through his family connection with the Duke of Queensberry, looked to Clerk very Gothick by reasone of its round stairs and turrets. The house in the mean time affoords no great conveniences for lodgers, being only a single

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house, one room entering through another, unless where a trance is taken off the breadeth of a floor to give secret passages as they found convenient. The principal stair is of timber and a meer bable for its contrivance. There is a gallery here which runs along the front of the house, but is too narrow for its length.

He was perceptive in appreciating that Classical fancy dress could not really conceal the baronial body behind and beneath.43 Thirlestane Castle was dismissed as ‘a great building of a vile Gothick taste’.44 Even its ‘reformation’ by Sir William Bruce could not redeem it. But Clerk was pleased enough to obtain engravings of both these great houses and to preserve in his collection annotated copies of the prints along with many others recording the architectural achievements of the age. In a well-known (though sometimes misquoted) phrase of 1717, Clerk had described Bruce as ‘the introducer of Architecture in this country’, as if nothing worthy of the name had existed prior to his time.45 Maybe Gothic ‘building’, admired as masons’ workmanship, was not ‘architecture’ because it conformed to no Classical rule. But, as if hooked on this new drug, Bruce himself had gone too far in extravagance, and that moderated by no very pure taste. Kinross had cost too much for his means. Whatever Sir William’s talents were, the ornaments of this house show nothing of them . . . the orders of architecture are ill contrived and worse executed . . . The greatest fault of this house is . . . that it is all outside, for ther’s nothing within it answerable to its external figure.

The old house of the Earls of Morton stood nearby and was convenient, commodious and serviceable. However, as Clerk observed with a dash of cynicism, ‘Sir William coud not satisfye himself with so mean a building, tho it was more than sufficient for the estate. But the common expence of our times exceeds even the luxury of our forefathers.’46 The new was not necessarily always superior to the old, especially if extravagance led to financial embarrassment and to a feeling that the bounds of propriety had been exceeded. A visit twenty years later caused Clerk to modify his opinion of Kinross somewhat: in its ‘Italian’ form it made a very fine house, though the Ionic columns of the entrance were ‘mean’ in contrast to the giant Corinthian order of the façade. But still it was all ‘much above the station of a privat man’.47 Clerk lamented the fact that another old Morton seat, at Aberdour, really could not be restored. (He had been asked to cast an experi-

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A Classic Looks at the Gothic   113

enced eye over the building for the earl’s heir.) So ruinous was it that it would have to serve only ‘for a quarry’. A new house must be built. Such a circumstance was regrettable and was a fact Clerk lamented. As he recorded in his travel journal, ‘I am always much against pulling down old houses and monuments, for I think old families ought to preserve their old towers as monuments of their antiquity.’48 Elsewhere – and with specific reference to his own lands – he wrote of such structures as ‘the Honour and pride of a Country’.49 John Clerk of Eldin would carry forward his father’s liking for such structures when he wrote of castles as ‘sublimely picturesque and beautiful, the stupendous productions of a warlike age’, in doing so making a distinction between this ‘Castle style’ and the ‘Gothic Architecture’ proper, which was specifically religious in purpose.50 This nostalgic respect for antiquity, matched by regard for the picturesque appearance of ruins themselves as elements of the historic landscape, was a major element in Sir John Clerk’s romantic view of the past in relation to the present.51 Whether in respect to his own house at Penicuik, or in giving advice to others similarly lodged in venerable dwellings but either having some notion of improving these structures or of introducing a measure of Classical regularity, Clerk always preferred to remain satisfied with the ‘conveniency’ and irregularity of the old. My notion of building is that every man should study conveniency and good aire, without any reguard to regularity . . . for an old building reformed and made a little regulare, makes as ill a figure as a Taylleur with a clamperd coat on his back, whereas a good old coat made so as to keep a man warm, looks like nature without affectation.52

Money and inclination permitting, coupled with architectural taste or practical skill or (that failing) reliable professional help – and if temptation ‘to deal with the mortar tub’ could no longer be resisted – by all means might one build a-new, as Clerk was himself to do at Mavisbank.53 But old Penicuik House, the venerable pile usually (and perversely) called Newbiggin (‘New building’), was to be left largely alone, looking better ‘in its antique figure than if it was all new built’, for it was, as its affectionate owner wrote of it, ample rather than magnificent, useful and convenient rather than sumptuous or splendid . . . It shows an aged and wrinkled brow . . . and [is] more suited to the wants of my family than if it had been finished with all the arts and ornaments of Vitruvius.54

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Figure 5.7  Old Penicuik House (‘Newbiggin’), lithograph by Schenck and McFarlane after a drawing by John Clerk of Eldin. Iain Gordon Brown.

Here he hoped the Clerks would live as long as possible, content with their architectural lot. It was almost with regret that he confessed to having embellished Mavisbank more than had been ‘absolutely necessary’.55 Even ruinous buildings past saving for continued occupation might have a future. They might survive, not just in picturesque decay and as accessories provoking delicious notions of sic transit in a world of romantic sentiment, but as something practical. Brunstane Tower, on his own estate, was a local example. Of this Clerk wrote: ‘I would never advise to pull down the ruines but rather to help [i.e. to conserve] them and especially the north side of the court which might be a good pigeon house.’ The place had in old times been very conceity. There is a charter house in it and a kind of following of rooms . . . there are gun holes all about it as was the fashion of those troublesome times in the days of Queen Mary of Scotland.56

Sir John was not satisfied merely with the preservation of ruins, and with recommending other landed proprietors to do likewise. He wished to create some judiciously placed ‘ruins’ of his own,

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A Classic Looks at the Gothic   115

Figure 5.8  Sketch design for Gothic ‘eyecatcher’ ruins by Sir John Clerk (undated). NRS GD/5078/41. Reproduced with permission of Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, Bt.

which would take their place in the landscape of association he was laying out at Penicuik. Such ‘ruins’ might also suggest, perhaps, a more ancient link with the lands in question than his family in fact enjoyed: a medieval ‘past’ might be created on an estate that had actually been theirs for less than a century. Castles, peels and watchtowers were potent symbols of ancient possession and evocative of a romantic, martial past. Ruins were imbued with a deep sense of associational and emblematic meaning.57 He sketched alternative designs for an eye-catcher, to be built at the end of the Coldshoulders avenue as a termination to the view: one in the form of a ruinous Roman triumphal arch, one in ‘Gothick’ dress but with a rather similar basic outline though with such added features as a crenellated parapet and conical roof apparently with a ball finial (Figure 5.8). Both are close to designs by Batty Langley.58 At 40 or 50ft in height and 30ft or more in width this would have been a substantial folly: the masonry would have been rubble.59 The fact that the basic form of the alternative designs was similar indicates something of Clerk’s stylistic uncertainty, and points to an essential confusion in his mind between exactly what constituted a Roman and what a ‘Gothick’ edifice of this sham ruin or castellated kind. I have argued before that when Clerk wrote of ‘an old fashioned tower’ he may have meant either one evocative of the almost timeless ruins of the Roman campagna so beloved of Classical landscape painters,

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Figure 5.9  Sketch design for castellated tower cum pigeon house on Knight’s Law by Sir John Clerk (1741). NRS GD/1483a/2. Reproduced with permission of Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, Bt.

or equally possibly one that was more characteristic of the past of his native Scotland.60 Robert Adam’s ‘castle style’, with its mixture of sources and its dual inspiration – part Italian, part Scottish – lay just a generation in the future. There exist in the Clerk Papers two designs for castellated towers for Knight’s Law. That with merely a crenellated wall-head (Figure 5.9) would, he decided, ‘have a better effect than one contracted or pointed above like a kirk steeple’ – by which he meant a little conical cap like the ‘gothick’ eye-catcher.61 The mound known as Claremont was also to be topped by a castellated tower: this he described as ‘old fashioned’; it was to be roofless and, like that projected for Knight’s Law, was to serve as a pigeon house (Figure 5.10).62 ‘Old fashioned’ is an intriguing term. It can be argued that to one of Clerk’s overwhelmingly ‘Roman’ outlook – an antiquary for whom the Romans seemed so much alive and omnipresent – something ‘old-fashioned’ must imply medieval. In an undated memorandum he mentioned a tower which he designed for Knight’s Law and which he states clearly was a ‘Gothick’ one.63 But, as so often, uncertainty and stylistic confusion supervene, because he continued that ‘I thought once of the proportion of a Tuscan column, but this is idle, the hill being already high enough.’ The tower built on Knight’s Law by John Baxter, which is certainly castellated but really astylar and lacking any authentic Gothic detail, actually looks vaguely Roman or, even more (as something

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A Classic Looks at the Gothic   117

Figure 5.10  Sketch design for castellated tower cum pigeon house by Sir John Clerk (1741). NRS GD18/1483a/1. Reproduced with permission of Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik, Bt.

so characteristic of the Italian countryside or suburban scene) to have strayed from the landscapes of Claude Lorrain or Gaspar Dughet: the Knight’s Law tower at Penicuik could stand happily in company with many throughout late-medieval or sixteenth-century Italy. With its building, Clerk’s overwhelming Classicism seems to

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have asserted itself over his somewhat ambiguous sympathy for the medieval. In the next generation, John Clerk of Eldin was firm in his belief that the fine and noble style of Gothic was not for garden buildings and the like. To use it in such a way was to show want of taste and propriety.64 So it was as well that those ‘Gothick’ fancies in the form of eye-catchers or towers (other than the magnificent creation that is Knight’s Law, which has a complex double helix stair and a sophisticated system of stone-built pigeon nesting-boxes) never graced – or blotted – the Penicuik landscape, even if the real reason for this was Sir John Clerk’s habitual parsimony. ‘All expensive ornaments about gentlemen’s houses’, he once wrote, ‘are so shocking that those who see them commonly bless themselves that they do not belong to them.’65 In conclusion, I see in Clerk divergence between a formal, theoretical taste for the Classical style preferred by the virtuoso in whom it had been bred by reading, foreign education and a humanist background; and a romantic liking for the architecture of the medieval past – evocative, picturesque, sentimental, eloquent of past glory – bred in him by his Scottish inheritance, a consciousness of historical continuity, and familiarity with old houses such as his own. An ‘oldfashioned tower’ having the look of a ‘baron’s castle’ suggested such continuity, and implied ancient possession.66 His formal Classicism and his incipient medievalism, the latter the product of a romantic antiquarian mind and a picturesque imagination, correspond to what one may think of as his public and his private taste. The pull between opposing elements in his intellectual outlook expresses itself architecturally in the way he theorised on new building, in his satisfaction with the old and in the spirit of conservation he fostered. The question was whether to lay stone and brick a-new in the architectural style of the age of reason, or to maintain the old and live content with the buildings of romance.

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6

Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730 Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

T

he new architectural fashions and energy witnessed in Scotland from the 1660s included a focus on decoration, as had been the case before the cataclysmic mid-century civil war and English military occupation. But now a new element was popularised, namely, decorative wrought-iron. It was used internally, notably on staircases, but also externally, particularly to enclose courtyards or as gateways. This chapter discusses the new fashion, and argues that between 1670 and 1730 Scottish architectural ironwork found and developed its own distinctive or national style. Obviously, decorative ironwork featured during the earlier periods – for example, to service the post-Reformation need for baptismal fonts and brackets – but this new episode was to commence precisely when a new architectural elite had emerged, headed at first by King’s Master Mason John Mylne and then by successive royal architects Sir William Bruce and Master James Smith. Study of this topic has been low profile but is not new. For example, in the 1880s the great castle specialists David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross highlighted Caroline Park, declaring the ironwork of its principal staircase ‘as fine a specimen as we possess in this country of that class of work’, and they allocated a full page for its illustration.1 Other publications followed, including illustrations in the Edinburgh Architectural Association’s Details of Scottish Domestic Architecture (1922) and Bailey Scott Murphy’s English & Scottish Wrought Ironwork (1904). The topic also found itself included within studies of English historic ironwork.2 This class of wrought-ironwork also caught the attention of traditionalists of the turn of the twentieth century, seen most famously

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in the smith work of Thomas Hadden commissioned by architect Robert Lorimer, but also, for example, at Lady Stair’s House, restored in 1897 for Lord Rosebery by George Shaw Aitken. More recently, the topic was highlighted at the 1983 Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain conference,3 which was the catalyst for a new generation’s complete reappraisal of the period’s architecture. And ironwork was highlighted in the first general history of Scottish architecture to emerge afterwards.4 Of course Scotland already had an ancient tradition of working in iron. From the late medieval period into the seventeenth century, castle entrance doors were typically protected by both a heavy timber door, often strengthened with iron studs, and a wroughtiron square-gridded external gate called a yett. Similarly made grills were frequently placed over windows. At Stirling Castle, one such yett survives in James IV’s triumphal arch gateway of c. 1507, and at James V’s c. 1540 palace alongside, a series of window grills also survive (Figure 6.1). In each case, the ironwork served a practical need for enclosure, but care was taken also that it should look good. The sourcing of iron was fairly well established by the latter part of the seventeenth century when our story begins. By the early seventeenth century, Swedish iron had a high reputation for its qualities, and – for the royal works at least – iron was imported from there as well as from Gdansk.5 In 1617, almost eight tons of iron was supplied to the royal works from Sir George Hay of Kinfauns’ commercial ironworks,6 which had been established at Loch Maree around 1610.7 Figure 6.1  Window grill at James V’s palace, Stirling Castle (c. 1540). © Louisa Humm.

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The fashion for decorative architectural ironwork was established in parts of Europe before the seventeenth century, when it was being adopted gradually in Britain. A fondness – most probably inspired by Italian examples – for wrought-iron balconies flourished in early seventeenth-century English towns. Several examples survive on Guildford High Street, for example; there is no clear evidence, however, of a similar trend in Scotland. (Obvious places to search include the 1620s Moray House on Canongate, Edinburgh, but evidence is inconclusive at best.)8 However, some of the design features of these English balconies are echoed in Scottish ironwork in the second half of the seventeenth century. These include cutting silhouette designs from plate iron (for example, at Thorpe Hall near Peterborough), the use of plain and/or twisted upright bars, newel posts topped by ball finials and decorative infill panels formed from scrolls (seen at Nunnington Hall, North Yorkshire and Guildford High Street). Fleurs-de-lis were also used as a detail at fixing points to masonry (also found in Guildford).9 While the motifs and styles found in sixteenth-century Europe were not replicated exactly in Scotland, the desire for wrought-iron was fuelled by a well-established aesthetic. Iron was versatile, robust and durable, but it could also be made extremely elegant. Finer and more durable designs could be achieved in iron than in timber or stone, while popular motifs, such as the heavy leafwork common on timber staircases of the period, were also transferred to iron, as seen for example at Caroline Park (Figure 6.12). Iron was useful too for smaller commissions. Documented works include, for example, East Park/Smeaton House, where in 1710–12 the smith James Sinclair’s work included finials: ‘two spears to the Glob[e]s for the top of the rounds of the hous[e]’.10 Much of Sinclair’s work comprised hinges and so on, and smaller decorative work was of course also popular. For example, at the Marquis of Montrose’s Glasgow town house c. 1680 the ‘hammerman’ Walter Corbett provided ‘furnitur[e] to 5 casement windous bands, rings, & nails’.11 Here, however, our focus is on the more prominent or larger constructions, and one of the first exemplars of this new ironwork fashion was most likely the 1672 Panmure House West Gate (Figure 6.2). The gateway was designed by Sir William Bruce for George, 3rd Earl of Panmure, its stonework executed by Alexander Nisbet.12 Its expensive decoration shows this clearly was intended to be an important entrance, and it was ‘to be at least seventeen feet high’. The gatepiers themselves are banded, vertically fluted, with ball finials, each of which is topped by a little coronet. Armorial panels flank

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124   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 6.2  West Gate at Panmure House, Sir William Bruce (c. 1672). NRHE DP106958 © Crown copyright: HES.

the gatepiers, and screen walls extend beyond.13 The gap between the gatepiers is much wider than the gates themselves, thereby requiring infill railings, which allowed a more extensive display of ironwork than practicality required. The main metal structure is composed essentially of alternatively long and short vertical rails, with a curvilinear decoration confined to the gate perimeters and – more elaborately – the upper level, its delicate, airy cresting with added flowers rather lighter than most later work. Another two of the earliest Scottish examples of ironwork from our period are at Holyrood Palace and at Glamis Castle, where in each case we see silhouette forms cut from plate iron. The roof cresting at Glamis (c. 1673) has a silhouette thistle design made from plate iron (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). The Holyrood example of wrought-ironwork, dating from around 1673–6, is at the gallery stairway (Figure 6.5). Its silhouette baluster panels, made by the King’s blacksmith John Callander,14 are formed from flat plates, each shaped as a thistle and crown, with scrolled tendrils radiating from the centre.15 Fleurs-delis terminate the scrolled decoration of the side panels, and are also used to decorate the anchor point where the handrail meets the wall. The fixings and assembly mechanisms are simple and undisguised. Brass ball finials terminate the top and bottom newel posts.

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Figure 6.3  Detail of Glamis Castle roof cresting (c. 1673). Strathmore Estates, Glamis Castle.

Figure 6.4  Glamis Castle roof cresting (context). NRHE SC769834 (detail) © Crown copyright: HES.

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126   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 6.5  Stair balustrade leading to the Picture Gallery, Holyrood Palace. John Callander (c. 1673–6). From English and Scottish Wrought Ironwork by Bailey Scott Murphy. HES

More generally, decorative wrought-ironwork on buildings was used for stair balustrades, sometimes balconies, and was composed typically of wide, sweeping scrolls made from round bar iron with added decoration – typically thistles, roses or tulips in differing combinations. Gate design normally comprised vertical bars with added decorative panels and decoration (typically scrolls, wavy lines, corkscrews and flowers), topped by ornate terminals formed of

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   127

round bar scrolls decorated with floral motifs. The thistles of course represented Scotland, while the rose motif represented England, and also showed loyalty to the royal drive for Union. The fleur-delis, representing France, referenced the (increasingly absurd) claim of the English monarch as King of France. All of which is to say that this newly adopted decorative form was quickly used to signal precisely the same old ideologies seen in sculpture and ceiling decoration since James VI’s time. We have now met James Sinclair, Walter Corbett and John Callander, each of whom did smithwork for a wealthy clientele. Another prominent and talented smith was James Horn (or Horne), who was clearly valued by both Bruce and Smith. Horn worked on the reconstruction of Drumlanrig, as did the smiths William Baine and William Gairdner in 1684, where James Smith had a prominent role as architect or overseer, meaning that he was probably responsible for employing all three.16 On Drumlanrig’s otherwise rather stark south wall, a double forestair (similar to those on some Dutch town halls) enclosing a shelter was added,17 leading from the state apartment to the garden, and it was given a wrought-iron balustrade executed by Horn (Figure 6.13).18 Gifford described the ‘wrought iron balustrade decorated with roses, thistles and tulips and, in the centre, the Douglas emblem of a winged heart and the coroneted monogram of the first Duke of Queensberry’,19 monograms and coronets being part of the wider repertoire. Meanwhile, other work by Horn included balconies (one intended, one surviving) at Bruce’s own Kinross House in 1689–90.20 Horn’s relationship with Smith continued, and on 6 October 1693, a contract was signed between the Earl of Panmure and James Horn, denoted ‘smith in the Abbay of Hollierood house’. Horn agreed ‘to work and sett up att panmure a good and sufficient weell wrought irone gaite according to the draught subscrybed by both . . . pairties And to provyde himselfe with all instruments needfull’. The Earl was to provide ‘irone to the . . . gaite and realls [rails] and a house to work in’. The contract price was agreed provyding alwayes that if Sr William Bruce off Kinross payed any less then the pryce . . . sett doun to the s[ai]d James Horn for the stone [in weight] off made work then in that caise the . . . Earl is to pay no mor to . . . James Horn then what was payed to him by . . . Sr William Bruce.

A witness to the contract was James Smith, ‘Masson and Burges in Ed[inburgh]’, that is, the younger James Smith, cousin and

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c­ ollaborator at both Panmure and elsewhere of his better-known name­sake.21 Horn, as we saw, had indeed worked for Bruce shortly before. The elder James Smith had meanwhile received from the Earl on 3 April ‘in pairt payment of ane newe gate which I ame obliged to build according to ye designe yrof signed by his [?lordship] & me’.22 Whether this constituted an iron gate or a stone gateway, or whether it concerned the same gate contracted for by Horn, is uncertain. The following year Smith was ill, writing from Edinburgh to the Earl on 22 June 1694: I ame at a great [?loss] yt my siknes[s] makes me uncapable to waite upon youe at the tyme Houever my comfort is that the bearer [ie, of Smith’s letter] does persuade me yt ye worke is done to your [Lordship’s] satisfaction, for I had never sent him theare if I had not known him verie capable of more difficult works then any in that gate.23

The same document has John Collier’s receipt for £12 sterling ‘and that in full and Compleat paym[en]t of the [?] [?] Gate wrought and sett up att panmure by Mr James Smith my Master’. Also receipted was another £28 12s Scots for ‘ane accompt betwixt ye sd Earle and the sd James Smith In witness wherof I have subscrybed thir p[rese] nts with my hand at Panmure the 25th day of June [16]94 years before [?] witnesses including James Horn smith in Ed[inburgh]’. That Horn was a witness shows that he was still busy at Panmure in June of 1694; in fact, only days previously he had submitted two near-identical accounts (one possibly a revision of the other) for a wrought-iron gate: ‘Acompt of ane Iron Gate wrought be James Horn 18th June 1694’. The basic materials included ‘17 bars of broad Iron . . . 21 bars of stencheon Iron . . . [and] ane bar of Champaloun Iron’. Specific wrought elements included cross bars, long and short bars, and ‘The Crown and Cypher with ane flour’.24 On 10 July 1708, Bruce was newly released from a three-month prison sentence and was now home at Kinross, already responding to requests for architectural advice. The Earl of Breadalbane had written to him on 26 June, and Bruce replied: The bearer tel[l]s me, ye piece of work mentioned in your letter, that your Lo[rdship] would have done, is an iron raill and gate, in place of a Ston[e] Wall, w[hich] [is] too near ye house bounds ye sight narowly. No advice can serve you so well as to send for a Smith from [?Lenie], [?deverting] him to go to hopton-house, & see & draw ye draught of ye iron gate & raill [?plait] there, betwixt ye outter & inner court.25

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   129

Hopetoun House had been designed by Bruce and constructed 1699–1701, and the inner forecourt was defined on its east by an ironwork screen which presumably connected to the front pavilion ends, dividing the inner court from the outer court beyond. A similar arrangement was planned c. 1714 by Smith’s partner from the 1700s, Alexander McGill, for Blair Drummond, where intermittent piers on the screen separating inner and outer courts were almost certainly connected by ironwork.26 The intention at such houses was to create a cour d’honneur (court of honour – where important guests would be received) – a long-lasting, predominantly French contribution to the Baroque. Lennie is near both Cammo House, where construction work had continued intermittently since 1693, and Craigiehall House (c. 1695–1708), which Bruce had designed, and this reference indicates that a significant amount of ironwork at either of these houses (Craigiehall, probably) was ongoing in 1708. It shows too that Bruce had complete faith in each of the smiths present there, and that smiths were expected to be able to draw ironwork to a competent level. The task required by Breadalbane was a version of what Smith created at Traquair c. 1695–1705 for the 4th Earl of Traquair, a fellow prisoner of Bruce’s in 1708.27 There, the plan had included lengthening the house northwards, and a new pavilion was placed beyond the existing north gable in anticipation of this happening. Smith contrived and engineered a symmetrical-looking platformed forecourt where a barmkin had presumably been, bounded on its west by an elaborate screen of railings and big gates. The decoration of flowers sprouting from the scrollwork is near-identical in its treatment to that used for the overthrow of Gogar House. Here at Traquair is the country’s best surviving example of the forecourt as an iron-railed cour d’honneur (Figures 6.6 and 6.7). Unusually for a European Counter-Reformation nave-and-aisles church, James Smith’s Canongate Kirk (1688–9) was deeply set back and screened from the streetline, thereby creating an iron-railed and gated courtyard space rather similar to a cour d’honneur between it and the roadside, enabling a likewise grand reception area.28 Creation of that area shows the intention to connect the church with this modern European château formula. The curved walls of the screen also set the entrance itself back from the street and provided a suitable turning space for the royal coach, because an expected guest to the building would have been its promoter, James VII/II, forfeited in 1689, before its completion.

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Figure 6.6  Courtyard screen and gates at Traquair (c. 1695). From English and Scottish Wrought Ironwork by Bailey Scott Murphy. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Figure 6. 7 Gate at Traquair – overthrow (c. 1695–1705). © Louisa Humm.

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   131

Figure 6.8  Railings at Hopetoun House (c. 1701). Currently located to the side of the house, they are thought to have originally enclosed Bruce’s entrance courtyard. The gates at nearby Staneyhill are almost identical in design. © Ali Davey.

Ironwork was used by Bruce elsewhere in the Hopetoun landscape (Figure 6.8), and work of similar character to one of the patterns used there – namely, vertical rails with big flowery tops – is seen too at nearby Staneyhill’s gateway. Similar flower terminals were also made for the extremely elaborate ironwork seafront entrance to the forecourt of Donibristle, a house designed by Alexander McGill and built 1719–23. Staneyhill, an L-plan house, 1620s–30s in appearance, was reduced to a stalk (presumably by Bruce) to become a dramatic landscape ruin. Aligned on its east-facing door is its contemporary gateway comprising two obelisk-topped stone piers, but the gates must belong to Bruce’s time, presumably replacing more orthodox timber gates, the new work being considered an important modernisation. Examples of internal and external stair baluster railings dating from the 1680s–90s suggest that around this time there was a ­stylistic shift away from flat plate towards the more venturesome, round section bar being used to form the main body of staircase

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baluster panels, shaped into large scrolls, although plate was still widely used for additional decorative detailing (in particular for flowers and foliage, and flat plate with added moulding might be used for strong-room doors, as at Hopetoun). While this use of large scrolls was not exclusive to Scotland (the 1690s exterior stairs at Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire feature a similar design feature, for example), the use in Scotland seems to be more extensive and has a unique character with a distinct vocabulary of added decoration; roses, tulips and thistles, in particular. The preference for round bar in Scottish architectural ironwork is interesting, because during this period it appears generally to have been more expensive to produce than square bar, so it is notable that the more expensive form of the material became so predominant. This new design trend in its simplest form is seen in service stairs made by smith William Aitken at both Hopetoun House (c. 1699– 1704; ‘eccentrically supported, with a joyous serpentine balustrade of wrought iron’29) and Newhailes House (c. 1686). At Hopetoun, wide, elegant ‘S’ scrolls set in panels between square-section newel posts form the balusters (Figure 6.9). The Newhailes stair (Figure 6.10) has an elegant curved baluster enclosing a cantilevered spiral staircase. The scrolls are held in place using collars and rivets, while the terminating newels are topped by ball finials. At Raith House (1694, designed by James Smith), this design formula was developed to include embellishments such as corkscrews and scrolls terminated by elegant leaves and tendrils, plus a panel holding the coroneted initials of Alexander Melville and his wife Barbara Dundas (Figure 6.11). This was executed by James Horn who in 1695 was paid for ‘ye ryvell [ravel] of ye open stair’.30 More elaborate variations on this scroll motif survive at Drumlanrig Castle, Caroline Park and Craigiehall. In these examples, the large scrolls have been decorated with the usual variety of leaves and flowers – notably thistles, roses and tulips. At Caroline Park, stairs in the north and south quarters are different in treatment from each other, although the basic scroll format remains. The northern stair – accessing the state apartment – may represent work for which Alexander Gairdner was paid in 1685 (Figure 6.12).31 Here, each baluster panel is made of a pair of large scrolls which are the height of the baluster. The scrolls are made from round bar with roses at their centres, each scroll separated from its companion by an upright stanchion. The scrolls are encased by weighty, voluminous leaves, reminiscent of many timber staircases of the same period. Smaller scrolls and tendrils run off the

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   133

Figure 6.9  Staircase at Hopetoun House, William Aitken (c. 1699–1704). NRHE SC766897 © Crown copyright: HES.

central scroll, while ball finials terminate plain newel posts. The south staircase, in contrast to its neighbour, is near-identical to that at Craigiehall (Figure 6.15) and presumably dates from c. 1696 when the house was re-orientated to face south.32 The south porch balcony

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134   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 6.10  Staircase at Newhailes, William Aitken (c. 1686). National Trust for Scotland, Newhailes.

is of similar though not identical style and can be definitively dated to some time between 1700 and 1705, so it may be later than the nearby staircase.33 The design of both the south staircase and the exterior balcony is lighter than the north wing staircase, and while both are still composed of scrolls, the design is no longer focused on single, large scrolls and there are no encasing leaves. Here, each panel comprises three pairs of C scrolls set alternately back to back and facing inwards towards each other. The Caroline Park balcony is almost identical to the external stair balustrade at Drumlanrig (Figures 6.13 and 6.14), save that at Drumlanrig there are additional twisted newel posts with applied flowers between each scrolled panel. In each case, each panel is formed of three sets of paired scrolls – a pair of C scrolls back to back at the top, joined by two horizontal collars to form a stylised lyre. These sit on top of larger scrolls which form a heart – the Douglas crest, as we saw. At the base of the panels are horizontal S scrolls joined by a collar. A single thistle alternates with a single flower stem fixed at the centre of the heart-shaped scrolls. The similarities

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   135

Figure 6.11  Staircase at Raith House, James Horn (c. 1695). NRHE SC1108725 © Crown copyright: HES.

are such as to indicate that the balcony at Caroline Park House might also be the work of James Horn. As already noted, Caroline Park’s south staircase is identical to the main staircase at Craigiehall (Figure 6.15). Each panel includes alternating thistles, oak leaves and roses at their centre. As with the north stair at Caroline Park, each panel is topped by a double rail, and square-section newel posts are terminated by brass ball finials. At Craigiehall, however, the thistles, roses and oak – for no obvious reason – are upside down. Given the similarity in style

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136   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 6.12  Caroline Park House, north stair, attributed to Alexander Gairdner (c. 1685). From English and Scottish Wrought Ironwork by Bailey Scott Murphy. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

to the Caroline Park balcony it is tempting to ask whether these staircases were perhaps also by James Horn, but there is no known documentation. In 1693 Jean Tijou, working at Hampton Court for King William II/ III and Queen Mary (Figure 6.16), published A New Book of Drawings, ‘for the Use of them that will work Iron in Perfection and with Art’.34 However, in Scotland, while publications from other countries were notably welcomed, the impact of Tijou’s book is not obvious. It seems that by the 1690s proponents of the ‘new’ Scottish ironwork tradition – smiths, clients and architects – now a generation on, considered their own ideas more to their taste, thus contrasting with the more general

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   137

Figure 6.13  Drumlanrig Castle external staircase, James Horn (c. 1684). Image courtesy of John Bolton.

Figure 6.14  Drumlanrig Castle external staircase, James Horn (c. 1684). NRHE SC764721 © Crown copyright: HES.

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138   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

Figure 6.15  Craigiehall staircase, possibly James Horn (c. 1708). NRHE DP034668 © Crown copyright: HES.

architectural context, as people now rarely built castles in the national style and used imported source material to assure that their work was situated within the European mainstream of Classicism. Scottish smiths and ironwork designers enjoyed a liberty to produce their own ideas. There are many more known examples of wrought-ironwork dating from this period than we have mentioned above – not least the Hammermen’s Hall in the Magdalen Chapel (Edinburgh) whose wrought-iron screen of 1725 centres upon a hammer. And we have not resolved how far the role of designer lay with the architect or with the smith: perhaps a smith would replicate for different clients a design given to him by an architect. But here we have attempted, for the first time, to set out a provisional overview of the topic, backed up by sample contemporary documentation. There is clearly scope for much more to be done, even through the basic approach of spotting where compelling similarities exist between different works (such as noted at Caroline Park and Craigiehall). And we hope this chapter will encourage others to take on the task. Another observation perhaps relevant to our overview is the fact that this fashion appeared in the 1670s, at about the same time as Sir William Bruce found himself the dominant architectural figure in Scotland. Does this mean that Bruce should be credited with introducing the idea, and with its development and popularity? Bruce knew England, but had lived in France and what now is The

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Scottish Ironwork, 1670–1730   139

Figure 6.16  Hampton Court Palace screen: section representing Scotland. The extensive use of repoussé embellishment is a defining feature of Jean Tijou’s style, as depicted in his New Book of Drawing. Jean Tijou (c. 1689–92). Man vyi, Wikimedia Commons.

Netherlands and Belgium, meaning that some design source material may have come from those experiences. Notwithstanding the greater status of decorative ironwork from its – albeit rather tentative – use for the monarchy in the 1670s, the option might still be rejected. For Melville House c. 1700, Lord Melville chose a timber principal stair and stone lesser stairs, but ironwork for the external garden steps; and for Kinross, Bruce himself chose timber and painted trompe-l’oeil for his principal stair. So not everyone wanted wrought-iron stair balustrades. The fact was discovered by the Duke of Hamilton who in 1699 wanted a

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140   Ali Davey and Aonghus MacKechnie

handsome modern wrought-iron balustrade for the still-incomplete Hamilton Palace, but his wish was overruled by his mother, the 3rd duchess, as was reported to him from Edinburgh: ‘my Lady Dutches[s] orders me to tell yo[ur] grace. That she is now resolved upon a wainscot Raill for ye hanging stair, So yo[ur] gr[ace] neid Say no more of the iron one.’35

From around 1725 onwards, Scottish architectural ironwork began to lose its distinctive character and shifted towards the adoption of design trends seen in England, such as anthemion leaves, palmettes and lyres, all of which became standard components of gate and railing design. The gradual cultural aligning with England noted in the seventeenth century rather moved up a gear following the Act of Union in 1707, and this seems likely to have had an effect upon the demise of a distinctive Scottish style – a style which flourished during our period because there were talented designers available to wealthy clients, and talented craftsmen, smiths who could convert the ideas into three dimensions and into a legacy we can all enjoy.

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7

Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer: ‘An Englishman and the Best Plaisterer that was ever yet in Scotland’ William Napier

T

his chapter will explore the work and influence of Thomas Albourn, an English plasterer who came to Scotland as a soldier during the Cromwellian conquest and stayed afterwards to work in houses of all sizes throughout south-central Scotland at a time when decorative plasterwork was undergoing significant stylistic change.1 In the years immediately following the Restoration in 1660, patrons wishing to decorate their interiors with plasterwork had to settle for a type of work that relied heavily on styles and features, which had been commonplace half a century before (Figure 7.1). This type of work generally comprised a compartmentalised ribbed ceiling infilled with decorative motifs and enhanced further with pendants, friezes, cornices and overmantles.2 This is typified by a group of ribbed ceilings executed in Edinburgh during the 1660s,3 which comprised compartmentalised elements embellished with applied cast decoration similar to that used in a group of plasterwork ceilings such as Pinkie House, c. 1610, and Winton House, c. 1630. 4 This type of work was very different from that being carried out in contemporary England, where a new style of ceiling decoration had been introduced over forty years earlier by Inigo Jones. Jones favoured much larger compartments, with ceilings dominated by large central circles or ovals, as exemplified by the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall Palace.5 Although such ceilings were initially executed in timber, this new style began to be taken up by plasterers in England such as Joseph Kinsman, who undertook work at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, Whitehall Palace and Ham House, the site of his only extant work.6

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142   William Napier

Figure 7.1  Dalry House, first-floor hall (1660s). Post-Restoration ceiling decorated with casts that were fashionable up to half a century before. NRHE SC854458 © Crown copyright: HES.

In Scotland, it took until the mid-1660s for less compartmentalised ceilings to become popular, albeit it was a gradual change, still reliant on older decorative features. Surviving evidence suggests that decorative features from a largely overlooked group of five properties in central Scotland, including Auchterhouse, c. 1622 and the House of the Binns c. 1630,7 were especially influential during this transitional period. Equally influential were two plasterers who appear to have been principal exponents during this period of stylistic change. Thomas Albourn (c. 1630–1700), together with James Baine (c. 1630–?), the first person to hold the position of His Majesty’s Master Plasterer,8 worked extensively throughout east and central Scotland after the Restoration. Albourn had settled in Scotland after coming north in May 1650 as part of a foot regiment, raised by Colonel William Daniel in Cheshire and Lancashire, and (in the absence of any known rival contenders) it was presumably he who was described in 1725 as ‘an Englishman and the best plaisterer that ever was yet in Scotland’.9 He was evidently already a skilled plasterer, as shown by an account of October 1661 for decorative work at Balloch, Perthshire. Account due to Thomas Aillburne, plasterer, for work at Balloch, including painting door of the king’s chamber, plastering the stair from the cellar to my lady’s chamber, putting the badges of the arms in windows in the king’s room, for dressing windows in Mistress Allie’s chamber

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   143

Figure 7.2  The House of the Binns, King’s Room (c. 1630). Many of the decorative casts applied here continued to be used in plaster schemes until the mid-1670s. William Napier.

wardrobe, and for the ends of the timber stair that goes up to the king’s chamber, paid 26 October 1661.10

Soon afterwards Albourn was recorded as working at Hamilton Palace,11 and he was based nearby in Glasgow by 1667, having taken on William Lindores as his apprentice.12 By 1673 he had moved east to Markinch in Fife, where he may have settled whilst undertaking work at nearby Leslie House for John, 7th Earl of Rothes, who was completing his John Mylne-designed palace in 1672.13 The contract for Leslie specifies that the ceilings of the great dining room, the drawing room and two principal bedchambers were to be ‘enricht with statlie & rich freat worke in a beautifull manner’.14 Albourn is the likely candidate for the work at Leslie, more so given that he was working nearby for the 2nd Earl of Wemyss, a kinsman of Rothes’, at Wemyss Castle, near Kirkcaldy around the time that Leslie was being finished. The 2nd Earl’s ‘minute book’ names the plasterers who undertook the plasterwork.15 On 27 April 1671 I have agreed with Thomas Alburne, plasterer, to work all my new house which is added to my old hall of West Wemyss from the bottom to the top, all four storeys, completely of good plaster as our contract of this day’s date bears, I giving him the sum of 2000 merks scots for all, with morning drinks and 4 hours to himself and his man, to wit a

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144   William Napier

Figure 7.3  Wemyss Castle, Kings Room (c. 1671). William Napier.

pint of ale and 2 loaves of oatmeal a day everyman, and a chamber with fire and candle and one bale of cloth for himself during the whole week. No bounty. At Whitsunday 1674 I have paid Thomas Alburne, plasterer, completely to a penny. The two plasterers were John Nicoll (a Danish man) and one William Lindores . . . they got 30s a week for 10 months, that is from 1 June 1672 to April 1673.

The plasterwork in the King’s Room at Wemyss (Figure 7.3) echoes early seventeenth-century work comprising a compartmentalised ribbed ceiling of squares and curved lozenges (a similar layout to the Sea Room at the House of the Binns). The ribs are enriched, but by far the most prominent decoration placed in the square compartments is the portrait medallions of David and Alexander.16 However, despite the old-fashioned nature of the work completed at Wemyss, Albourn also seems to have been capable of producing plasterwork that was modern by comparison and clearly influenced by fashion in England. At Harden House, Hawick in 1672, Albourn, working alongside John Scott, completed a ceiling which shows transition towards ceiling designs laid out around a large central compartment.17 Here the plasterwork comprises a large enriched oval in the centre of the ceiling with a smaller, roughly-L-shaped

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   145

Figure 7.4  Harden House, Drawing Room (c. 1672). Plasterwork designed around a large central oval, but reliant still upon older cast decoration. NRHE SC1274303 © HES.

compartment in each corner (Figure 7.4). However, despite the novelty of the oval, the cast decoration around it – angel-heads, vases of flowers, baskets of fruit and fleurs-de-lis – all feature in schemes carried out almost half a century before at Auchterhouse and the Binns. Albourn and his men clearly had access to the same decorative moulds commonly used in central Scotland several decades before. It may be that once Albourn had completed his army service in Perth, he had access to locally available moulds and casts – possibly some of those belonging to plasterers such as John Johnstoun, a ‘St Johnston’18 based plasterer. He is likely to have been the same ‘John Johnestoun plaisterer’ recorded in a charter of 1643 as resident in Perth,19 and perhaps this is the same plasterer who travelled to Edinburgh Castle from York in 1617 to work in the Royal Apartments and who afterwards worked in the royal palaces.20 If shared decorative features is evidence of the same group of plasterers being involved, it may be that Albourn and his men were responsible for around two dozen schemes throughout south and central Scotland in the late seventeenth century (Table 7.1). A close examination of contemporary, but as yet unattributed, decorative plasterwork schemes reveals the widespread use of decorative elements associated with Albourn and his men. Since the moulds used

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146   William Napier

Table 7.1  Late seventeenth-century decorative schemes which share older-style decorative features Property

Date

Room

Menzies Castle

1660s

French Ambassador’s House West Green, Culross Law’s Close, Kirkcaldy Wemyss Castle

1660s

Harden House Sailor’s Walk

1672 c. 1670

First Floor Withdrawing Room Second Floor Main Room Third Room First Floor Room Second Floor Room First Floor Apartment King’s Room First Floor Room Drawing Room East Wing West Wing

225–9 High St, Kirkcaldy Balcaskie House, Fife

Kellie Castle, Fife

c. 1670 1674 c. 1670 c. 1670 c. 1670 1676

Panmure House Holyroodhouse

1672 1671/2

Carnock House

c. 1670

c. 1670 1671

Ante-Room Closet Globe Room Blue Room Earl’s Room Professor’s Room Dining Room Drawing Room Queen’s Lobby Queen’s Ante-Chamber As recorded by NRHE

on those particular projects were unique (i.e. they were not recycled pre-Wars moulds), this indicates that Albourn and his men were much more prolific than previously known.21 Two properties in particular, Castle Menzies in Perthshire22 and the French Ambassador’s House in Linlithgow, share many features with Albourn’s known work. In addition, both show signs of stylistic evolution as they too are much less compartmentalised. The plasterwork of the first-floor Withdrawing Room (formerly the chamber of dais) at Menzies comprises a ceiling divided by a wide decorated rib, the main focus of which is a central square, infilled with a large pendant and surrounded at each corner with a diagonally placed thistle, rose, harp and fleur-de-lis (Figure 7.5). The rib enrichment, thistle, rose, harp and fleur-de-lis match those used in the King’s Room at the House of the Binns (Figure 7.2). The

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   147

Figure 7.5  Menzies Castle, Withdrawing Room (1660s). William Napier.

fleur-de-lis is also the same one used later by Albourn at Harden (Figure 7.4). Photographs of the plasterwork in the now demolished French Ambassador’s House in Linlithgow (Figure 7.6) show a ribbed ceiling laid out in the same manner as Menzies, again with the same thistle, Figure 7.6  French Ambassador’s House, Linlithgow (1660s). NRHE SC1212076 © HES.

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Figure 7.7  First floor, east room, Law’s Close, Kirkcaldy (early 1670s). Older style compartmentalised plasterwork and newer style based around an oval applied side by side. William Napier.

rose, harp and fleur-de-lis placed in the outer compartments.23 The ribs are enriched with the same decoration as the frieze at Elcho Castle, while the large central square compartment is filled with four angel-heads matching those at Harden. In total, six decorative features employed at Menzies match those used by Albourn at Wemyss and Harden, while nine out of the ten individual casts applied at Linlithgow feature at Menzies, Wemyss and Harden, implying Albourn’s involvement at the latter two properties. The same features are also commonplace in schemes in Fife where Albourn was based. Cast decoration from Wemyss and Harden were used in at least three properties on Kirkcaldy High Street, including Law’s Close,24 where archaeological research has shown the property to have undergone a scheme of improvements around 1670 when Albourn was most active.25 Law’s Close has two very different styles of plasterwork, old and new, applied side by side on the one ceiling (Figure 7.7). One part is decorated with a compartmentalised ribbed ceiling, like Wemyss, and the other contains a large oval, reminiscent of Harden. Between the cornice and the oval, a vase with fruits, roses and thistles is placed in each corner, emerging at 90-degree angles as at Wemyss, while four angel-heads, positioned centrally between each vase, match those used at Linlithgow. By the mid-1670s, Albourn’s repertoire, that of applying olderstyle cast decoration in less compartmentalised ceiling designs, was affected by the arrival of two London-based plasterers, John

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   149

Houlbert and George Dunsterfield, in Scotland. This is evident at Balcaskie House, approximately fifteen miles east of Kirkcaldy, and at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where it appears Albourn’s style of work was quickly superseded. Houlbert and Dunsterfield were brought to Scotland by John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale in 1673, principally to work on the transformation of the Palace of Holyroodhouse but also on at least another twelve houses belonging to Lauderdale, his family and colleagues. Houlbert and Dunsterfield’s plasterwork was very different from even the transitional work of Albourn and his men. Main central compartments became larger and more elaborately shaped, while the use of cast decoration as the main focus was replaced by hand-crafted plasterwork in high relief which created a much more three-dimensional effect. This is apparent in a number of plaster schemes carried out under the direction of Sir William Bruce at Holyroodhouse and Balcaskie (his own house).26 The evidence for Albourn’s involvement at Balcaskie lies in the frequency of features employed in the secondfloor Blue and Globe Rooms, which match those used previously at Harden and Wemyss, including rib enrichments and angel-heads. Furthermore, an account survives for payment to William Lindores, Albourn’s apprentice at the time, which provides further evidence of his involvement.27 At Holyroodhouse, both Albourn and James Baine were employed during the early 1670s, producing less compartmentalised ceilings embellished with the same cast decoration used in earlier ceilings associated with Albourn and his men.28 Between 1671 and 1672, Baine completed decorative plasterwork schemes in the Queen’s Lobby and Queen’s Ante-Chamber, the latter to a design similar to Albourn’s work at Harden. The Queen’s Ante-Chamber is decorated with some of the same cast decoration as employed at Wemyss and Balcaskie. However, at both Balcaskie and Holyroodhouse, stylistic changes were introduced by Houlbert and Dunsterfield, which heralded a move away from older-style features being applied.29 Dunsterfield was a member of the London Plasterers’ Company and worked with John Grove, the King’s Master Plasterer in England. Similarly, if (as seems almost certain) the ‘Hubart’ who was paid for ‘Plaster heades’ at Clarendon House in 1666 is Houlbert, that suggests that he was also a skilled and experienced operator.30 At Balcaskie, this new style of plasterwork was installed in each room of the first- floor state apartment. All these rooms are much more elaborate than the work completed only a short time before

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150   William Napier

Figure 7.8  Balcaskie House, Ante-Room (1674). William Napier.

in the upstairs Blue and Globe Rooms. However, the Ante-Room (Figure 7.8) does contain some older-style casts from Wemyss and a large central oval placed side by side, suggesting collaboration between Albourn’s men and Dunsterfield, whose account was paid at the same time as Lindores’, on this occasion for ‘71 working days Att 3ss 6 a day’.31 At Holyroodhouse, the work undertaken by Houlbert and Dunsterfield is also much more elaborate than that previously carried out by locally based plasterers. A good example is the difference between the plasterwork in the Queen’s Ante-Chamber (Figure 7.9) and that in the nearby Morning Drawing Room (Figure 7.10) carried out by Houlbert: not only is the central compartment in the Morning Room more elaborately shaped, but there are more than six different rows of decoration used across the girth of the rib used to create it. In contrast, the outer edges of the rib used to create the relatively straightforward oval in the Queen’s AnteChamber are plain, the only decoration being a scrolling trail of cast fruit, branches and leaves along its centre. Likewise, while the outer compartments around the oval in the Queen’s Ante-Chamber are left unfilled, separated only by large low-relief circular wreaths, the outer compartments in the Morning Drawing Room are crammed with high-relief decoration, including monograms of King Charles II surrounded by cherubs, eagles and the Honours of Scotland.32

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   151

This style of high-relief plasterwork became highly sought after. Lauderdale had similar work executed in the most important state apartment rooms at Thirlestane Castle. Here the extravagant plasterwork included garlands framing the large central panels on the ceilings of the Drawing Room and Great Bedchamber, bespoke musical instrument motifs on the ceiling of the Music Room and large eagles in the corners of the Drawing Room.33 Many of Lauderdale’s family and colleagues in government took advantage as well,34 including his younger brother, Charles Maitland, who employed Dunsterfield three times at Hatton House between June 1674 and January 1676.35 On at least one occasion, Maitland secured Dunsterfield’s services for his friends: ‘Kenneth McKenzie on behalf of his Brother Lord Tarbat and George Dunsterfield Plasterer in London that the said George proceed to Miltoun House and perform certain Plaster Work conform to Agreement with Lord Hatoun.’36

Figure 7.9  The Palace of Holyroodhouse, Queen’s Ante-Chamber (c. 1671–2). NRHE SC1208866 © HES (Scottish Colorfoto Collection).

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152   William Napier

Figure 7.10  The Palace of Holyroodhouse, Morning Room (c. 1675–6). NRHE SC1226359 © HES (Scottish Colorfoto Collection).

The new high-relief style of decorative plasterwork continued to be highly desirable. Once Houlbert and Dunsterfield had departed, plasterers based in Scotland, such as Albourn, developed their own skills and became responsible for increasing the popularity and application of the new style for the remainder of the century. At Kellie Castle, for example, the plaster ceiling in the Vine Room, dated 1676, shares many of the features of Houlbert and Dunsterfield’s work. However, it appears less exuberant, as it lacks the high-relief characteristic of their hand-modelled work and relies more upon cast features. Similarly, Prestonfield House, Edinburgh, remodelled in 1687 for the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Sir James Dick,37 has decorative plasterwork schemes in the Tapestry and Cupid Rooms (Figure 7.11). Here the work was thought to have been carried out by the same plasterers who did the work at Holyroodhouse;38 however, Houlbert and Dunsterfield had returned to England by

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   153

Figure 7.11  Prestonfield House, Edinburgh, Cupid Room (c. 1690). NRHE SC774501 © Crown copyright: HES.

that date.39 While it is evidently heavily influenced by their work, it lacks the same assuredness and was more likely carried out by local plasterers.40 Research is hampered by the loss of so many ceilings from this period but there are tantalising glimpses surviving in several archives. There is evidence of such work at Abbey House, Culross, belonging to a kinsman of Bruce, where a large oval-ribbed ceiling was recorded in an 1840 sketch by John Sime.41 Similarly, an account for plasterwork at nearby Stirling Castle in the late 1670s suggests that contemporary decorative plasterwork by Thomas Albourn, and overseen by Sir William Bruce, has been lost.42 Albourn was clearly Bruce’s favoured plasterer after Houlbert and Dunsterfield had returned south. Bruce’s new house at Kinross, built between 1679 and 1693, contains a scheme similar in style to those carried out by Houlbert and Dunsterfield over the Great Stair (Figure 7.12). Although Dunsterfield has been credited with the work, he is thought to have returned south in 1676 and it is payments to ‘Robert Allburne’ and ‘Thomas Allburne’ that are documented in surviving accounts.43 The work at Kinross took place after Bruce had been relieved of his official duties in 1678. However, Bruce’s architectural career continued, as did his preference for entrusting plasterwork to the Albourn family.44 As well as Kinross, Bruce employed the Albourns at Craigiehall, west of Edinburgh, and at Craighall, near Cupar, in

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154   William Napier

Figure 7.12  Kinross House, Great Stair (c. 1679). NRHE SC1314222 © HES (Henry Kerr Collection).

1697.45 Albourn’s popularity is also evident in the work he did for James Smith at Hamilton Palace in 1697.46 ‘Thomas Aliborne’ is recorded as working on ‘the troublesome and small tedious work’ including the cornices, mouldings and clam shells.47 Albourn worked under Smith again at Melville House for George, 1st Earl of Melville, president of the Privy Council between 1697 and 1703.48 However, by the early eighteenth century, the plasterwork of the Albourn family seems to have become less prominent. Perhaps their influence diminished with the passing of a generation. Born c. 1630, even if he had lived into his old age, it is unlikely that Thomas senior would have had too much involvement in the last years of the century. Instead, his sons, Thomas and Robert, and grandson Andrew, were running the business. However, judging by an account for work at Leslie, it seems the work they were carrying out was much more routine as they were paid for ‘8 days of . . . whiting’ rather than the more accustomed decorative work executed hitherto.49 Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, as plasterers Calderwood, Enzer and Clayton rose to prominence,50 the Albourn

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Thomas Albourn, William Bruce’s Plasterer   155

family diversified and increased their land holdings, becoming publicans by opening an inn, The Plaisterers, in Markinch.51 It seems that by 1757 the plastering side of the business had petered out completely, as the roup roll of Andrew Albourn’s son (also Thomas) included the sale of ‘some old plaister mulds’ bought by Thomas Low.52 It is plausible that Low was related to the Albourns by marriage and the same plasterer who worked with Joseph Enzer at Leslie in 1737, and connected to George Low, a plasterer from Dundee who eventually purchased the Albourn lands in 1781.53 The link between the Albourn and Low families is further strengthened by the erection of a gravestone at Markinch Parish Church by the Low family which shows that from 1781 Low family members were buried alongside previous generations of Albourns. So who was the Thomas Albourn referred to as ‘an Englishman and the best plaisterer that was ever yet in Scotland’? Written soon after Thomas Albourn junior’s death in 1713, it may have been for him; however, given that the largest corpus of surviving Albourn family work appears to have been executed over a thirty-year period between the early 1660s and 1690 in some of Scotland’s most significant houses, it is much more tempting to suppose that it was for his father, Thomas Albourn, the soldier and plasterer from Cheshire, the Englishman who came north and stayed.

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8

The Roof Structure of George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel and Roof Design in Scotland During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Anna Serafini and Cristina González-Longo

T

he great developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture in Scotland corresponded to a gradual development of roof construction techniques and structural arrangements: the challenge was transition from large spans covered by open purlin structures, to large spans covered by shallower roofs carrying heavy plaster ceilings. This chapter investigates the roof structure of George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel in Edinburgh, a seventeenthcentury common rafter roof with later alterations, and compares it with earlier and later examples to discuss the development of Scottish roof structures during the period. It also considers the construction arrangements, the design process and the influence of the timber trade with north-east Europe. Its focus is the roof type made to support a flat ceiling, as distinct from earlier roof forms whose timbers were exposed. Little research has been carried out on roof structures hidden behind timber and plaster ceilings, which, according to our surveys, constitute the vast majority in Scotland in that period. This has created a lack of awareness of their structural, technological and ­cultural importance. Despite recent contributions,1 it is still difficult to establish the extent of their survival and their nature, and to understand whether they are the result of local or international influences, or both. The authorship of these structures and the identity of wrights (the Scottish word for ‘carpenter’) also remains unexplored. The challenge for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wrights was the transition from open purlin structures, such as the one in Darnaway Castle,2 to shallower structures capable of supporting

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heavy plaster ceilings. Hanke has researched some of these roofs covering a period up to the mid-seventeenth century, in Midlothian, while Newland, Thomson and Crone have researched the timber sourcing and trade.3 This chapter builds upon these studies plus a new survey of seventy-four timber roof structures in Scotland to start tracing their development.4 *  *  * The roof structure of George Heriot’s Hospital’s Chapel (1628–84) is a good illustration of the impressive development that Scottish timber roof structures achieved through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is composed of closely spaced (approximately 1ft apart) rafter couples connected transversally by two collar beams and slanted braces, and longitudinally by thick timber boards (‘sarking’ in Scots) (Figure 8.1). The connection with the wall is not visible. The roof is quite steep (about 50 degrees) but not excessively large (the span is 22.3ft). The timbers are hand-axed full logs connected with mortice and tenon joints secured by timber pegs. Large, roughly sawn Roman numerals mark the frames.

Figure 8.1  The common rafter roof covering the chapel of George Heriot’s Hospital (1628–74). © Anna Serafini.

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158   Anna Serafini and Cristina González-Longo

Figure 8.2  The trusses in the central part of the roof of George Heriot’s Hospital chapel (1628–74). © Anna Serafini.

The central part of the roof is supported by two additional lowpitched queen-post trusses (Figure 8.2). The trussed timbers have big sections, machine-sawn. The joints are secured with iron straps and the tie-beam is composed of two elements, joined with a scarf joint. Small, neatly chiselled Roman numerals mark the timbers. The trusses support the timbers of the original roof, which have been partly cut. The date of these trusses is unknown, since the timbers have not been dendro-analysed, but they are clearly a later addition. The comparison with earlier and later examples allows some possible conclusions on the date and reasons for their constructional form to be made. *  *  * The timber for the works at George Heriot’s Hospital was brought from Dalkeith and Norway,5 as was common from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century,6 as Scottish timber was scarce, difficult to transport and often of poor quality.7 Typical cuts of timber brought from Norway included sawn boards (‘deals’) for the sarking and beams between 14.5 and 37.4ft in length for the

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rafters and collars, of either redwood (Scots pine) or whitewood (common spruce).8 Pine is stronger than spruce and was therefore preferred for structural work. Such timbers were suitable for making a roof like that of George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel, whose longest timbers are 22.6ft. In December 1633 Heriot’s governors decided to cover the Chapel roof with lead; in 1635 the work was contracted to plumber John Bland.9 In early 1637 the hospital’s governors discharged him, suggesting completion of the work.10 However, wrights first appear in the Treasurer’s accounts of 1638–9, when John Scott is mentioned leading a six-man team.11 It is unlikely that the Chapel roof structure was built without wrights on site, but it seems that Scott was not much involved in its design. In fact, in 1648 he suggested dismantling the giant ogee roof of the south-west tower, saying that ‘it was never his opinione that the said southwest torret should be built in the way that it now standis’.12 Other roofs were rebuilt in those years.13 In that same period Scott, Master Wright of Edinburgh from 1637 and Royal Master Wright from 1641, was also busy at Edinburgh Parliament Hall (1631–40)14 and Tron Kirk (1636–47) (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Their two arch-braced open purlin roofs show us that Scott knew how to design and construct complex structures. Nevertheless, he chose to do something very simple at Heriot’s Chapel, perhaps Figure 8.3  Parliament Hall, Edinburgh (1631–40). © Louisa Humm.

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Figure 8.4  Tron Church, Edinburgh (1636–48). © Louisa Humm.

because the roof structure was never meant to be visible or because of economic constraints (the hospital governors often ran out of money). A further hypothesis is that the reliance on imported timber meant roof construction was rather dictated by standardised lengths,15 while ‘ready-to-build’ timber roof ‘kits’ from Norway would have certainly been a cheaper solution than paying Scott to design a complex roof, and would have allowed Heriot’s architect to bring in wrights only when construction started. *  *  * Our roof surveys confirm the statements by Hay,16 Stell,17 Hanke18 and Ruddock,19 who all agree in suggesting that, from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century, the majority of Scottish roofs were characterised by a simple, closely spaced common rafter form, just like that in George Heriot’s Chapel. There are, however, exceptions,20 confirming that Scottish wrights had the skills and expertise to design and construct complex structures. However, when the spans were reduced and the structures concealed, they opted for simple structures. This is remarkable considering the wider European context, where more complex structures appear from the thirteenth century.21 The reason for this extensive use of simple roof structures lies in the development of Scottish architecture of the time and in the

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a­ vailability of material. Before 1500, Scottish elite domestic architecture was characterised by single-pile rectangular plan buildings. From the few remaining roof structures, one can deduce that the roofs were ‘sandwiched’ between two masonry gables. The internal structure depended on the span: open purlin roofs, or hammer-beam roofs in the case of wide spans (more than 26ft), and stone vaults or simple timber roofs in the case of narrower spans (Figure 8.5), such as those in Glasgow Cathedral22 and in Alloa Tower.23 These first roofs were open, visible from underneath. Later, decorated timber and then plaster ceilings became fashionable. We have surveyed thirty common rafter roof structures dating from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth. As at Heriot’s Chapel, they are simple gabled roofs composed of rafter couples, spaced 1–2ft apart, connected transversally by one or two collar beams and longitudinally by sarking boards (Figure 8.6). The rafters are often simply sitting on the wall-head (as at Pinkie House, Figure 8.6), or on a sole piece tenoned into an ashlar post extended downwards on the masonry (as at Cockenzie House,

Figure 8.5  The development of Scottish timber roof structures. From left to right: Darnaway Castle, Dunglass Church, Alloa Tower, Holyrood Palace roof space, St Andrew’s in the Square church roof space. Darnaway: NRHE DP222838 © Crown copyright: HES. Dunglass: NRHE SC 1171792 © Crown copyright. The rest © Anna Serafini.

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162   Anna Serafini and Cristina González-Longo

Figure 8.6  The common rafter roofs at Pinkie House’s painted gallery (1613) and Cockenzie House (1680–3). © Anna Serafini.

Figure 8.6 – an arrangement called a ‘Scottish rafter foot’). The space in between the rafter feet is sometimes filled with rubble masonry for added rigidity. The timber elements are whole logs roughly axed to 3–6in. scantlings, often preserving some bark.24 The joints are mortise and tenon (as at Pinkie House) and, later, simple lap (as at Cockenzie House), secured with timber pegs (Pinkie House) and, later, metal nails (Cockenzie House). The spans are usually less than 21ft, and the pitches are steep (50–60 degrees). The frames are normally numbered with large, roughly sawn Roman numerals. Heriot’s Chapel roof accords with other contemporary Scottish roofs, but the timbers are slightly bigger, more rectangular (the rafters are 7¼ ≈ 5in. – height ≈ base) and more carefully dressed (Figure 8.1). Furthermore, the slanted braces that connect the lower collar to the rafters are unusual. Earlier roofs generally employed arched braces (as at Pinkie House, Figure 8.6), and later roofs had the ceiling directly attached to the rafters and the lower collar (as at Cockenzie House, Figure 8.6). The use of such braces was, however, not uncommon in other Northern and Central European roofs.25

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Scottish common rafter roofs are in fact similar to European ones in many respects.26 However, they have no tie-beam until 1700,27 they never have additional longitudinal bracing other than the sarking until around 165028 and they have no wall-plates until around 1670.29 The Scottish rafter foot was known by Dutch and French carpenters of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,30 but, just like the sarking, which is not unknown in Europe,31 it seems never to have been so extensively used as in Scotland. *  *  * To understand George Heriot’s Chapel roof it is worth considering how roof structures evolved from a simple common rafter form to a trussed form. Important innovations were introduced from the late sixteenth century, when painted and sometimes boarded ceilings became popular, and from the 1610s, when English-type flat plaster ceilings were introduced. By the 1670s Scottish roofs had again to adapt to the new geometries and aesthetical requirements of the architecture introduced by Sir William Bruce and Master James Smith. It was no longer fashionable to see the timber roof structure, now hidden behind heavy plaster ceilings, nor to have gabled highpitched roofs. ‘M’ roofs, hipped and platform roofs were introduced (Figure 8.5), but internal timber structures took some time to become efficient enough to carry heavy plaster ceilings over wide spans. An early attempt can be seen in Holyrood Palace (1671–9) (Figure 8.7). The structure is still a common rafter roof, but it spans above a double-pile plan using the intermediate spine wall as additional support. Most importantly, the roof employs for the first time a platform geometry and tension-absorbing joints. Until then Scottish wrights understood timber elements as behaving in compression only: in structural terms, open purlin roofs and common rafter roofs resemble barrel vaults, because all their elements work in

Figure 8.7  The roof structure of Holyrood Palace (1671–9). © Anna Serafini.

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compression.32 The use of tension-absorbing joints, allowing timber elements to work in tension, is therefore an important innovation. Holyrood’s roof achieves a shallower external geometry, but not an undisturbed wide span inside.33 Roof structures had to further evolve to be able to get rid of this wall while achieving the shallower geometry and supporting the ceiling underneath.34 It was eventually necessary to import from elsewhere a completely different structural type: the trussed roof. *  *  *

Figure 8.8  The roof structure of Yester House (1729–48). © Anna Serafini.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, as testified by Yester House (1729–48), butt-purlins (‘b’ in Figure 8.8) were introduced as additional longitudinal bracing, and rafters started being categorised as primary (‘a’ in Figure 8.8) or secondary ones (‘c’ in Figure 8.8), which significantly reduced the amount of timber needed. The timbers’ scantlings and dressing changed as well: Holyrood’s rafters are bigger compared to previous roofs (8¼ × 7in. – height × base), but Yester House’s rafters are even bigger and more rectangular (10½ × 6¾in. – height × base). (Yester was designed by James Smith and Alexander McGill c. 1700.) Moreover, some of their faces are hewn: the use of pit and frame saws was not unknown in seventeenth-century Scotland but became common only during the following century.35 Yester House’s roof has a structural behaviour closer to that of a trussed roof, rather than a common rafter roof. The trussed roof was in fact introduced in Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century (Figure 8.5):36 our surveys suggest that from the 1740s–50s king-post trusses started being used to cover reduced spans (as in Fort George Museum and staff blocks, 1762–6), and princess-post and queen-post trusses to cover bigger spans (as in St Andrew’s in the Square Church, Glasgow, 1739–56). We have surveyed thirteen trussed roofs across Scotland. They have different external geometries and internal arrangements, some developing veritable three-dimensional structures (as in St Andrew’s

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Figure 8.9  The roof structure of the Trades Hall in Glasgow (1791–4). © Anna Serafini.

and St George’s Church, Edinburgh, 1782). The spans reach their maximum in Oakshaw Trinity Church in Paisley (1754–6), at about 65.6ft, and pitches vary between 44 and 27 degrees. The sarking is always retained, even though butt-purlins are always employed too. Posts normally have joggles, and joints are all mortice and tenon with timber wedges and sometimes timber dowels; scarf joints are rare and metal straps are seldom used – in some cases they are a later addition, as is the case at Glasgow Trades Hall.37 The two queen-post trusses in George Heriot’s Chapel resemble those in Glasgow Trades Hall (Figures 8.2 and 8.9 section cc’). In order to understand if they are contemporary, it is necessary to consider the Chapel’s construction history after 1637, once the roof had been covered in lead. The interiors remained incomplete until Thomas Sandilands, one of Scott’s apprentices, was contracted in

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Figure 8.10  Alterations over time to the roof structure and ceiling of George Heriot’s Chapel. From left to right: (a) the original ceiling might have been a timber ceiling similar to the 1626 one in Provost Skene’s House; (b) an undated drawing shows what the eighteenth-century ceiling might have looked like after the renewal in 1787; (c) remains of the eighteenth-century plaster decorations are visible in the roof space; (d) a view of the ceiling today, as renewed in 1835. Provost Skene’s House: NRHE SC1327346 © HES. Undated drawing reproduced with permission of the Governors of George Heriot’s Trust and Birlinn Ltd. The rest © Anna Serafini.

1683 to finish the work.38 The available documents do not provide enough details to understand what Sandilands did exactly. The Chapel’s roof structure with its slanted braces would have easily accommodated a painted timber ceiling like the 1626 one in Provost Skene’s House (Figure 8.10, photo a). Nothing as grand as this is mentioned anywhere, however. One hypothesis is that a simple timber or plaster ceiling was installed as an interim measure until further funds were found. A more likely interpretation is that religious ideology, or contractor prudence, dictated decisions. The year 1637 was when Scotland’s Presbyterians finally defied Charles I and his Episcopalian agenda,39 inaugurating the period of revolution and warfare that continued until 1660. This meant that a painted, timber-boarded ceiling, had one been envisaged, could not have been installed in a late1630s religious building without high risk of censure from the new

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Figure 8.11  Alterations over time to the roof structure and ceiling of George Heriot’s Chapel. © Anna Serafini.

Presbyterian leadership.40 The fact that Holyrood’s 1617 Episcopal Chapel Royal was dismantled in 1642 proves that any new religious iconography would be at high risk of destruction in those years. In 1787 the chapel was refitted with a new ceiling.41 An undated drawing shows a decorated ceiling that matches evidence found in the roof space (Figure 8.10, photos b and c). The central part of the

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roof structure was altered at this time to allow for this new ceiling to be installed: the rafters were cut (‘a’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11), leaving exposed the mortice and tenon joints where the lower collars used to be (bottom photo of Figure 8.11b); two purlins were inserted to support the cut rafters (‘b’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11). The purlins were kept in place by a collar (‘c’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11) and two struts (‘d’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11) pushing on the lateral walls. Ceiling joists (‘e’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11) were placed beneath and connected to the rafters with struts (‘f’ in Figures 8.10 and 8.11). In December 1833 the governors ordered that the whole plaster-work be replaced for structural reasons:42 the architect James Gillespie Graham and the cabinetmaker William Trotter carried out the works in 1835.43 Their work is what we see today (Figure 8.10, photo d). The two trusses were evidently added at this time to reinforce the central part of the roof structure, which had been weakened by the late eighteenth-century interventions. Their dating to the nineteenth century rather than earlier is supported by their pitch (18 degrees), much lower than that of late eighteenth-century Scottish trusses: the truss above Glasgow Trades Hall (Figure 8.9) is the shallowest we have surveyed so far with its 27-degree pitch. Moreover, the timber elements composing the trusses in George Heriot’s Chapel have been machine-sawn. We know that mechanical sawmills started being employed in Scotland only from the early nineteenth century and became common after 1820.44 *  *  * Building upon the previous research noted above and a new survey of seventy-four timber roof structures across Scotland we can start tracing their development through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our surveys confirm that most Scottish roofs of this period are of simple common rafter form hidden behind decorated ceilings, like the one in George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel (1628–84). The Chapel roof is a good illustration of the development of Scottish timber roof structures during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Chapel’s original roof structure, built in the 1630s, is a simple common rafter roof in line with contemporary Scottish roofs, but the timbers are slightly bigger, more carefully dressed and with peculiar slanted braces that connect the lower collar to the rafters. The use of such braces appears in other Northern and Central European countries. Scottish common rafter roofs are similar to other European roofs, but tie-beams were not adopted until c. 1700; the additional

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longitudinal bracing is only provided by the sarking until c. 1650 and they have no wall-plates until c. 1670. The works were carried out by John Scott, Royal Master Wright. In the same period he was also working at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall and Tron Church, whose roof structures demonstrate that he had the skills and expertise to design and build complex structures. Nevertheless, he chose (or was commissioned) to do something very simple in George Heriot’s Chapel. This was possibly due to the fact that the structure was not meant to be visible; it might alternatively have been caused by economic constraints or, more probably, by the rejection of religious ornament, as Scotland’s Covenanter elites now openly defied Charles I and his promotion of Episcopacy. The timber used was imported from Norway in standardised elements, as was common in that period. This was an important aspect, as it probably simplified the design and construction processes of the roof, allowing for wrights to be less involved in the design. The Chapel roof is in line with other contemporary Scottish common rafter roofs, but it has some characteristics that anticipate the innovations of the late seventeenth century, when roofs had to adapt to the new architecture introduced in Scotland by Sir William Bruce and Master James Smith. From 1670, wrights started employing tension-absorbing joints and members, as can be seen in the roof at Holyrood Palace; and then, primary rafters and butt-purlins, as in Yester House. Eventually, from the 1740s, they started using trusses, even for reduced spans, as in George Heriot’s Chapel. We can also see in this roof the practice of continuously altering the structure to accommodate different ceiling types. The latest intervention seems to have been at the beginning of the nineteenth century when two trusses were introduced as reinforcements.

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9

Colen Campbell, James Gibbs and Sir John Vanbrugh: Rethinking the Origins of the British Architectural Plate Book James Legard

I

t is a striking fact that Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, undoubtedly the two most celebrated Scottish architects of the first half of the eighteenth century, owed their fame and influence, in the words of Gibbs’ epitaph in Marylebone Church, as much to the ‘Printed Works as well as the Buildings’ for which they were responsible.1 While Campbell’s contemporary reputation was first made by his villa at Wanstead for Sir Robert Child, it was through his publication of the three volumes of Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25) that he most directly shaped the incipient Palladian revival and secured enduring currency for his name.2 Equally, while Gibbs was one of the most prolific and highly regarded architectural designers of his time, it was his Book of Architecture (1728) that spread his style across the British Isles and then into North America.3 In spite of these works’ exceptional status, their prehistory has remained remarkably obscure. In large part this reflects a frustrating paucity of documentary evidence beyond the books themselves. In the case of Vitruvius Britannicus, we have a series of advertisements in the London press announcing the forthcoming work along with most of Campbell’s original drawings for the plates, but almost no other contemporary sources that might help us understand exactly how or why the book was published.4 For Gibbs’ Book of Architecture there are also original drawings and advertisements, but precious little else beyond an incidental passage in a letter in which Gibbs first broached the idea of publishing an architectural work, some fifteen years before his book’s eventual appearance.5 It is my purpose in this chapter to revisit the origin of these remarkable works. After a brief overview of the most influential strands in

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The Origins of the British Architectural Plate Book   171

the historiography of the books’ origins, I will go on to discuss a hitherto neglected predecessor plate book, John Vanbrugh’s Exact Description of the Palace of Blenheim. I will argue that by recognising the critical importance of this work, we can make some fairly robust inferences about Campbell’s and Gibbs’ transformation from architectural practitioners into publishers. In doing so, I hope to enrich and in certain respects revise current views of the origins and purposes of these early architectural books. The end result, I hope, will be to help bring into question some widespread and persistent, but arguably misleading, orthodoxies of eighteenth-century British architectural history. It has long been appreciated that we must seek to explain the origins of Vitruvius Britannicus and A Book of Architecture both by close scrutiny of the few surviving direct sources and by relating these works to the wider cultural and architectural milieu from which they emerged. The pioneer in this regard was Tim Connor, the first scholar to make a serious specialised study of Vitruvius Britannicus.6 He saw Campbell’s work as a point of convergence between two traditions in British architectural publishing. The first was the emergence of a distinct genre of books that catered for a growing market for topographical views of domestic buildings, such as those found in Jan Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae of 1693 and Kip and Knyff’s Britannia Illustrata (traditionally dated to 1707 but possibly not published until 1708). The second was a series of attempts by contemporary English architects to publish engravings of technical architectural drawings – plans, elevations and sections – of their own works. This tradition Connor traced back to 1698, when Sir Christopher Wren was granted copyright over all published representations of his own numerous architectural works, and then followed onwards through an attempt by Vanbrugh to publish engravings of Castle Howard in 1706. Though apparently abortive, these projects nevertheless reflected the growing sophistication of the market, in terms of supply as well as demand, for specialist architectural publications. The result, Connor argued, was that ‘A commercial opportunity existed here to be exploited by anyone who possessed the enterprise and resources’.7 The ‘making of Vitruvius Britannicus’ is, in Connor’s view, essentially the story of how Campbell succeeded in exploiting this opportunity with maximum benefit to himself, in spite of the considerable practical obstacles that had to be overcome. The principal challenge was the high cost of producing a book of copperplate engravings on the required scale, to which Campbell successfully

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responded by selling subscriptions to secure advance income for the publication, and by working in partnership with a consortium of London publishers prepared to underwrite the balance of the necessary expenditure. Campbell then adroitly exploited the book’s potential for architectural self-promotion by capitalising upon rumblings of discontent with the ‘grandiose complexities of the English Baroque’.8 Placing himself in explicit opposition to the ‘licentious’ work of Bernini and Fontana, and the ‘wildly extravagant’ designs of Borromini, Campbell promoted himself as a reformer intent on returning contemporary British architectural practice to the purity of Palladio and Inigo Jones. The book’s skilful presentation of a large group of Campbell’s own Palladian designs (Figure 9.1) alongside several of Jones’ most important works, as well as a representative selection of more recent British buildings, enabled him to place himself in the vanguard of ‘stylistic progress’.9 More recent research by Eileen Harris has returned to the extant documentary evidence to enrich and, in important respects, revise, Connor’s pioneering analysis.10 Turning to Vitruvius Britannicus’s title page, she made the acute observation that Campbell’s name is the sole asymmetric element in the otherwise perfectly balanced layout of the book’s title page. She concluded from this that it was only after the title page had been engraved that Campbell’s name was added to make him the ‘author’ of the work.11 She also noted that neither of the two earliest original advertisements for the work, published in mid-1714, mention Campbell. It was not until

Figure 9.1  Colen Campbell, design for a house dedicated to the Earl of Halifax, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1 (1715), plates 29–30. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes

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8 April 1715, when a copyright patent was issued for the work, that Campbell was acknowledged as an equal partner in the enterprise with the consortium of publishers with whom he worked. He was only finally referred to as the work’s ‘author’ when its publication was announced in The Daily Courant on the following day.12 According to Harris, the explanation for this is that it was the consortium of publishers, and not Campbell himself, who acted as the real motors of the project. Their intention, she suggests, was to publish a book of formal plans and elevations of contemporary British buildings based on continental predecessors such as Jean Marot’s engraved surveys of French architecture and David Mortier’s Nouveau Théâtre d’Italie. Campbell initially served only as the relatively unimportant draughtsman, with little real input into the content or presentation of the planned volumes.13 Only the forthcoming publication of Giacomo Leoni’s translation of Palladio’s Quattro Libri enabled him to gain the upper hand. Fearful that ‘the collection of mainly baroque buildings in Vitruvius Britannicus [would] appear old fashioned’ by comparison, the publishers allowed Campbell to Palladianise their book.14 According to Harris’s interpretation, then, both Campbell’s formal authorship of Vitruvius Britannicus and its Palladianising agenda were ad hoc responses to changing fashions in the world of architectural publishing, rather than the conscious result of Campbell’s desire for self-promotion. In comparison with Vitruvius Britannicus, the origin of Gibbs’ Book of Architecture has been subject to relatively little detailed analysis. Bryan Little, the architect’s first serious biographer, was inclined to take at face value the evidence of a letter of around 1713 to the Earl of Oxford, in which Gibbs spoke of his desire to publish a book in order to establish his reputation in London. Little seems to have inferred from this that the architect had a long-term project to engrave his own work, and it was only the sudden take-off of his career in 1714 that prevented this early project from realisation until 1728.15 By contrast, Terry Friedman, in his 1984 monograph on Gibbs, emphasised the specific circumstances of the late 1720s as the background to the publication of A Book of Architecture, suggesting that it was primarily ‘an expression of the reputation Gibbs had recently established as a serious advocate of classical ideas . . . and of his links with institutions of classical learning in London’.16 Eileen Harris, too, has related A Book of Architecture very much to the immediate period of its publication, claiming that it was a direct reaction, indeed riposte, to the virtual exclusion of Gibbs’ work from the third volume of Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus of 1725, as well as to

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the nearly contemporaneous publication of another Palladianising work, William Kent’s The Designs of Inigo Jones of 1727. Fearful of being marginalised by such lavish and potentially influential print projects, Gibbs responded in March of the same year by at last issuing proposals for his own book of ‘Plans, Uprights, Sections and Perspectives of Buildings’.17 The cumulative effect of Harris’s and Friedman’s reinterpretations of Campbell’s and Gibbs’ works is to replace the impression of moreor-less systematic implementation of conscious intent presented by Connor and Little with a far more complex pattern of reaction and counter-reaction by rival publishers and authors. Projects emerge, wane and re-emerge, alliances between authors and publishers develop, power balances shift, architectural reputations are made and remade. And it must be conceded that for anyone familiar with the complexities and instabilities of British social and political life of the period this picture will seem reassuringly more familiar, and therefore intrinsically more plausible, than its more straightforward predecessor. What it fails to register and explain, however, is a curious coincidence noted in passing by Connor: the apparent contemporaneity of the initial plans for Campbell’s and Gibbs’ publishing projects, as well as Giacomo Leoni’s project to produce an English edition of Palladio. As Connor noted From c. 1712 Gibbs appears to have had the idea which eventually became the Book of Architecture; Leoni’s plan to publish a translation of Palladio may have been formulated by 1712, and Campbell was probably thinking of his book in the same year.18

Such a coincidence surely provides some kind of prima facie case that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, something rather significant must have happened in the early years of the second decade of the eighteenth century to enable this sudden crystallisation of architectural intent. There is, in fact, a plausible candidate for what this something may have been: an attempt by the Comptroller of the Queen’s Works, John Vanbrugh, to publish a plate book of his designs for Blenheim Palace. Blenheim was the grandiose Oxfordshire mansion intended by Queen Anne as a reward for her most successful general and personal favourite, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. It was Vanbrugh’s single most important architectural commission and, thanks to generous Crown subsidy, the most lavishly funded British

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domestic building project of its time.19 Although little discussed in the literature, it has been known for some time that Vanbrugh took advantage of the seemingly inexhaustible flow of royal largesse to subsidise a series of engravings of his designs for the palace.20 The earliest surviving evidence of this dates from 18 December 1708, when Vanbrugh received a fifteen-year copyright for publication of ‘the Delienations [sic] or Descriptions of ye Plan and Uprights of ye Duke of Marlborough’s house of Blenheim’.21 The subsequent development of the project can be followed through the Blenheim building accounts, with payments made in July 1709 to Vanbrugh’s collaborator, Nicholas Hawksmoor, for copper plates and the cost of engraving the ground plans, the east front and grand bridge.22 Further, apparently retrospective, payments were made in September 1711 to Vanbrugh himself for another copper plate and for the engraving of the south front by one Monsieur Auber.23 By the early autumn of 1710 the project had reached a sufficiently advanced stage for Vanbrugh to inform Marlborough that the east front was completed and the south front was being engraved. He went on to remark that ‘I propose to adjust all the prints to a scale that they may form a book as is usually practised abroad in such cases.’24 Thus, for the first time, we have definitive documentary evidence that a British architect was not simply publishing individual plates of one of his works, but actually doing so with the intention that they should form a unified plate book modelled on continental precedents. A few months later, in the Spectator of 17 March 1711, we find Vanbrugh’s good friend and fellow Kit-Kat Club member, the publisher Jacob Tonson, announcing that ‘an exact Description of the Palace of Blenheim in Oxfordshire, in a large Folio, Illustrated with the Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspectives’ was ‘now printing’.25 There is no extant copy of the full Exact Description, but that it was more than a chimera is proved by the survival of an apparently unique partial set of the plates in the Clarke Collection of engravings in the library of Worcester College, Oxford. There, they are correctly catalogued as ‘the official Blenheim set’, but are otherwise entirely unremarked in the scholarly literature.26 These remarkable plates give some flavour of the exceptional ambition of Vanbrugh’s publishing enterprise. They comprise eight  exceptionally large and finely executed engravings. The biggest, of the south front (Figure 9.2), significantly exceeds 1 metre in width. This elevation, although unsigned, must correspond to the engraving by Auber for which Vanbrugh claimed reimbursement in 1711. This is confirmed by the appearance of Auber’s name on

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Figure 9.2  L. Aubert, The Front of Blenheim Palace Towards ye Gardens (c. 1710–11). Clarke Collection of Engravings, Worcester College, LIII: 080. By kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford. © Worcester College, Oxford.

the corresponding elevation of the north front. This was to be a composite image made of three folio-sized plates that, when pasted together, would have formed a single sheet in excess of 1.5m long. There is also a further elevation of the palace’s east front and plans of the basement and principal floors, all by Joseph Nutting, and an elevation of the Grand Bridge, by the Anglo-Dutch engraver Michael van der Gucht. These four plates must correspond to the engravings for which Hawksmoor was reimbursed in 1709. With the exception of the engraving of the bridge, the plans and elevations are numbered sequentially from four to eight. They must therefore have been only some of the ‘plans, elevations, sections and perspectives’ announced by Tonson in 1711. It would seem, then, that this extraordinary project, like Wren’s before it, failed to reach fruition. Nevertheless, the potential significance of the Description of the Palace of Blenheim for our understanding of the origins of Campbell’s and Gibbs’ subsequent publications is self-evident. We can now appreciate that their works had a direct precedent that was prominently advertised in the period immediately before Vitruvius Britannicus and A Book of Architecture seem to have first been conceived. Coincidence does not, of course, equal cause. Nevertheless recent scholarship gives good reasons for thinking that the connection between these works, and especially between Vanbrugh’s plate book and Vitruvius Britannicus, is more direct than might be expected given the traditional reputation of the latter as an attempt to secure, in Sir John Summerson’s incisive phrase, ‘the diversion of English taste from the French, Dutch, and Baroque models of Wren, Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, and Archer’.27

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There is in fact a plethora of detailed evidence that substantiates the impression that Vanbrugh was closely involved with Campbell’s publishing project. Even Summerson eventually had to concede that Vitruvius Britannicus is ‘really wonderfully representative and respectful of the architectural establishment . . . The greatest space is given to Vanbrugh . . . And there are representative houses by distinguished Works officers such as Hawksmoor, Archer, and John James.’28 Moreover, Summerson also noted that Campbell had acknowledged Vanbrugh’s help ‘in lavish terms’, evidently thinking of the explanatory text for the Vitruvius Britannicus plates of Blenheim in which Campbell stated that he was ‘at a Loss how to express my Obligations to this worthy Gentleman [Vanbrugh] for promoting my Labours, in most generously assisting me with his Original Drawings, and most carefully correcting all the plates as they advanced’.29 That Campbell’s encomium is more than simple flattery can be directly documented through several Vitruvius Britannicus plates of Vanbrugh’s works. One example is relatively well known, though its implications seem never to have been fully appreciated. This is the replacement of both of the plans of Castle Howard in volume I of Vitruvius Britannicus with updated versions between the first and later printings. In the case of the ‘General Plan of Castle Howard’, the first version was inadvertently mirrored, this error being rectified in the second version. With the ‘Plan of ye principall floor of Castle Howard’ there were two stages of revision. In the original plate, the terracing and flights of steps within the north courtyard were omitted; they were subsequently inserted in a second, modified state. It was later entirely revised to incorporate a number of refinements and regularisations in the design, such as the incorporation of bow windows at both ends of the south front, rather than – as built – at the west end only.30 The revisions to both plans, it should be noted, eventually led to an entirely new copper plate being engraved, a move that would have entailed considerable direct cost to Campbell and his partnership.31 That Vanbrugh was able to demand such changes, and succeed in securing their implementation, is remarkable testimony to the degree of influence he had in the production of the book. A similar pattern of collaboration at an earlier stage in the production process has been identified by Joanne O’Hara in her study of Campbell’s drawings for Vitruvius Britannicus.32 O’Hara ­particularly noted the survival among the Campbell drawings of original Vanbrugh office drawings. Campbell had clearly been ­provided them to use as the basis for the engravings in his book, and

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their retention amongst his papers suggests a close working relationship.33 In addition, O’Hara has identified a number of Campbell elevation drawings based on Vanbrugh office drawings that he was subsequently forced to redraw after Vanbrugh produced a revised scheme. That Vanbrugh expected Campbell to accommodate such revisions, she concludes, ‘may actually indicate greater control from Vanbrugh in the production of Vitruvius Britannicus than has previously been realised’.34 I have identified a further example that goes beyond the specifics of producing Vitruvius Britannicus and suggests a broader and more personal pattern of architectural exchange and influence. The generalised resemblance between Campbell’s south front at Wanstead House (Figure 9.3) and Vanbrugh’s south front at Castle Howard (Figure 9.4) has long been appreciated. What has not seemingly been noted are the remarkable parallels between one of Vanbrugh’s preliminary designs for Castle Howard (Figure 9.5) and a Campbell drawing in the RIBA collection that has been plausibly identified as an early design for Wanstead (Figure 9.6).35 Campbell’s treatment of the wings and terminal pavilions in his drawing corresponds so closely to the drawing for Castle Howard that it can only derive directly from the precedent offered by Vanbrugh’s design. The Castle Howard drawing belongs to a tiny group of early plans and elevations that Vanbrugh apparently drew in his own hand as he sought, somewhat ineptly it has to be said, to work out the basic form of the house.36 The simplest explanation for Campbell’s inspiration by such an early Vanbrugh design is that he had direct access to Vanbrugh’s private architectural papers in the period when he was first sketching out schemes for Wanstead around 1712–13. This offers compelling prima facie evidence that Campbell and Vanbrugh’s relationship both extended beyond, and considerably predated, the publication of Vitruvius Britannicus. In this light, it is not implausible to suggest that Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus was not merely inspired by, but was in important respects the direct successor to, Vanbrugh’s Description of the Palace of Blenheim. It is not difficult to imagine how Vanbrugh, disappointed by the incomplete state of his own book, and in possession of finished drawings of both Castle Howard and Blenheim already prepared specifically for the engraver to work from, might have proposed a mutually advantageous quid pro quo to an ambitious would-be architect freshly arrived from Scotland. Vanbrugh would supply drawings, while Campbell would provide his drafting abilities in order to reduce them from the large scale

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that was possible as part of a state-subsidised vanity project to the smaller size required for a commercially viable publication. In exchange, Campbell would have the opportunity to include a significant number of his own designs in the projected work. In this connection, it is worth noting that in the first volume of Vitruvius Britannicus both Vanbrugh and Campbell were represented by exactly sixteen plates each – surely the result of an extraordinarily careful editorial balancing act. The subscriptions lists, too, give the impression of a coordinated campaign by the two architects. The predominance of subscribers from the Clan Campbell and the high level of representation of Scottish peers is likely to reflect Campbell’s exploitation of dynastic and regional affinities to advance his publication. No less conspicuous, however, is the overwhelmingly aristocratic tenor of the list as a whole, a wholly exceptional phenomenon among architectural books of the time.37 This can be plausibly accounted for by Vanbrugh’s exceptionally wide-ranging acquaintance with the nobility.38 This level of  circumstantial and documentary evidence of direct and sustained interaction between Vanbrugh and Campbell in the production of the work is surely sufficient to justify the conclusion that it was, essentially, a collaborative effort. With this in mind, we can now move on to revisit the origins of Gibbs’ Book of Architecture. The critical document is a letter, already alluded to, from Gibbs to his powerful potential patron, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, who had recently replaced the Duke of Marlborough as Queen Anne’s favourite and de facto premier. In it Gibbs sets out a plan to publish his own designs in terms that bear quotation at length: I would willingly be doing something to establish my reputation here, by showing the world by demonstration that I know something of what I pretend I have learned while I was abroad, and by making this as advantageous as I can, till such time as your Lordship shall think fit to provide for me. In order to this I have a mind to publish a book of architecture, which indeed is a science that everybody criticises here, and in all the countries that ever I was in, never did I see worse performers. Be that as it will, this is my design, which I think to go about this summer if your Lordship will encourage me by accepting the dedication, and being at the expense of the plates, for I am so far from being able to pay the charge myself, that I am fifty pounds in debt, so that I can do nothing in this till I have a favourable answer from your Lordship, and if you should have the goodness to lend me some little sum of money to help to pay my debt,

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Figure 9.3  Sir John Vanbrugh, south front of Castle Howard, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1 (1715), plates 69–70. Author’s Collection.

Figure 9.4  Colen Campbell, west front of Wanstead III, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 3 (1725), plates 39–40. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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Figure 9.5  Sir John Vanbrugh, design for south front of Castle Howard, Yorkshire, with inset plan, c. 1699–1700 (detail). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 9.6  Colen Campbell, drawing for a great house, related to Wanstead House. RIBA collections, ref. RIBA84397.

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I will promise to repay it upon demand, if able, which will very much help and oblige me.39

The date of the letter is uncertain, but it appears to be closely related to correspondence with Oxford from the period around August 1713. At this time Gibbs was seeking to secure the position of Surveyor to the Commissioners for the Fifty New Churches that it was intended to build in London in conformity with a Parliamentary Act of 1710.40 Thus we find Gibbs, too, developing plans for architectural publication in the wake of Vanbrugh’s Description, and at just the time as Vanbrugh and Campbell would have been working together on compiling the drawings for Vitruvius Britannicus. Once again, direct influence of some kind seems likely, but in this case political and professional rivalry would almost certainly have sharpened Gibbs’ incentive to advance his project. Soon after presenting himself as a suitable candidate for the Fifty New Churches surveyorship, Gibbs had become aware that, in spite of the support of the Earl of Mar, Lord Oxford, Lord Bingley and Dr Arbuthnot, and a certificate of recommendation from no less a figure than Sir Christopher Wren himself, his confirmation in the post he so desired was being blocked by Vanbrugh.41 Campbell, too, was a rival: when Gibbs was subsequently dismissed from his surveyorship in 1716, it was almost certainly Campbell whom he had in mind when he blamed his misfortune on a ‘Countrayman of mine who misrepresented me as a papest and disaffected person, which I can assure you is . . . done purly out of a designe to have gott him self into the place I have now lost’.42 Both Vanbrugh and Campbell were unambiguously aligned with the Whig interest, and were strong supporters of the Hanoverian succession. Gibbs, by contrast, was associated with Harley and Mar in the Tory interest, and was a practising Roman Catholic. In this context, it certainly seems reasonable to infer, like Harris, that Vanbrugh and Campbell may have sought to exclude Gibbs from their publication. By the same token, however, it is equally likely that Gibbs himself would have been reluctant to share his drawings, along with the potential profits from publishing them, with his personal and political enemies. This is especially the case given clear evidence that Gibbs was actively and persistently seeking to further his own plans for publication. In the Clarke Collection, alongside Vanbrugh’s Blenheim engravings, there are also two intriguing prints by Gibbs showing his plans for Comeley Bank Lodge for his patron, the 6th Earl of Mar, and Dupplin Castle for the 6th Earl of Kinnoul (Figures 9.7 and 9.8).

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Figure 9.7  James Gibbs, Earl of Mar’s Lodge (design for Comeley Bank Lodge, Alloa, Clackmannanshire), c. 1710. Clarke Collection of Engravings, Worcester College, XLIV: 052. By kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford. © Worcester College, Oxford.

Friedman has suggested that they may relate to his early publication plans, and both the circumstantial evidence and the nature of the prints themselves make this very likely. They are signed ‘J.G. delin. et sculp.’ indicating that Gibbs was not only responsible for the designs but actually produced the plates. The use of the relatively simple and accessible technique of etching, rather than true intaglio engraving, coheres with this and suggests that at the time they were produced Gibbs not only lacked the means to commission professional engraving but was determined (or desperate) enough to try to do the job himself. The likeliest period for such an experiment is before he secured regular employment as Surveyor to the Fifty New Churches. The stylistic approach of the designs conforms with this, as they still bear the strong imprint of Gibbs’ Roman training in the studio

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Figure 9.8  James Gibbs, design for Dupplin Castle, Perthshire (c. 1710–14). Clarke Collection of Engravings, Worcester College, XLIV: 054. By kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford. © Worcester College, Oxford.

of Carlo Fontana. In particular, the extraordinary project for Dupplin, though traced by Friedman to French influences, bears a quite remarkable resemblance to Filippo Juvarra’s later Palazzetto di Caccia di Stupinigi.43 Both share the fundamental conception of a circular central block containing a vast domed hall, from which radiate diagonally four ranges of state rooms, with the lateral spaces between the ranges partly infilled. Since Juvarra and Gibbs were almost exact contemporaries as students of Fontana in Rome it seems likely that both designs ultimately originated in ideas circulating in Fontana’s milieu. The design for Mar’s lodge is admittedly more conventional – indeed the plan is so regular that it could have come from the hand of Campbell himself. Even so, the application of channelled rustication across the whole elevation, along with an array of somewhat florid sculpture, results in

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a Talmanesque intensity of a kind that would be tamed in most of Gibbs’ later designs. While this initial attempt at self-publication was probably shortlived, there is direct evidence of both Gibbs’ continuing plans for publication and a related concern to restrict the circulation of his drawings. Upon his dismissal from the New Churches surveyorship in 1716, he pleaded that the Commissioners should ‘give to no body the designes’ of his church of St Mary-le-Strand, ‘nor suffer them to be copyied, in order to have them printed, becaus I am now about graving them my self at my own proper Charge in order to publish them’.44 Given Gibbs’ apparent fear that Campbell hoped to replace him as surveyor, we may even suspect that a significant concern was that his great rival might use any consequent access to the drawings to publish the church in the still forthcoming second volume of Vitruvius Britannicus, with or without Gibbs’ consent. No less relevantly, it should also be noted that the plates finally published in A Book of Architecture are far from consistent in layout, style of engraving, or style of lettering. A detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it is clear that many different engravers must have been involved. This could reflect the exigencies of especially rapid production, of the kind envisaged by Harris, which would require multiple engravers to be employed simultaneously; but it can more plausibly be seen as the consequence of an unusually long gestation, in which plates were gradually accumulated as and when funds were available to commission them from whichever engraver with the necessary skills was available at that particular time. A Book of Architecture thus emerges as a long-term project, pursued patiently and persistently by a strikingly independent and determined individual, rather than as a short-term strategic response to changing architectural fashions. If this is correct, then the late fruition of Gibbs’ publishing project should not be allowed to obscure its origin, like Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, in the specific architectural conditions of London in the years immediately after the Act of Union of 1707. Both architects had fixed their ambitions on the English capital, with the far greater professional opportunities it presented than their native Scotland. Both found themselves with certain professional advantages in terms of training and experience, but in a highly competitive environment where public reputation and social or political connections were essential preconditions for advancement. In such a hothouse, even leading professional architects, such as Wren and, especially, Vanbrugh, were deeply conscious of the potential financial and

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reputational benefits of print publication of their works. It is hardly surprising to find two Scottish pretenders rapidly acquiring a similar awareness given that they arrived in London just as Vanbrugh was putting in place the core components of what would have been, had it been completed, the first ever English plate book of architectural designs by a contemporary architect. It was, then, only natural that Gibbs and Campbell should seek to follow suit with their own similar enterprises. That they did so in ways that differed so much surely reflects their very different Scottish backgrounds. Campbell, a well-connected Protestant Edinburgh lawyer, clearly succeeded in making a rapid entrée into London’s influential Whig circles, forming an early and enduring alliance with Vanbrugh himself. The sharing of drawings between them seems to have been the essential background to the development of the project for Vitruvius Britannicus, which became the natural successor to Vanbrugh’s attempt to publish an Exact Description of the Palace of Blenheim. In spite of far greater professional qualifications, Gibbs, as the Catholic son of an Aberdonian merchant, found himself in a more challenging situation. Although receiving some early support from Lord Oxford and his Tory allies, he inevitably found it much harder to gain the patronage of London’s aristocratic and mercantile elites. In this situation, cooperation with Campbell might have seemed a good way of securing publicity for his abilities. However, submitting his designs for publication in Vitruvius Britannicus would have required Gibbs to concede the social, if not necessarily the architectural, superiority of his principal rival and political opposite. This was no small matter in the acutely hierarchical and vehemently partisan society of late Stuart and early Georgian England. Gibbs seems to have responded by keeping his drawings as much as possible to himself and following an independent course until his own project was finally realised in 1728. This picture of the emergence of Campbell’s and Gibbs’ publications is in some ways a return to the more straightforward interpretation of authorial intention presented by Connor and Little. However, if accepted, it also brings with it fundamental challenges to a number of enduring orthodoxies of eighteenth-century British architectural history. If Vanbrugh and Campbell could collaborate with such apparent ease, it is difficult to imagine that the former’s architectural style really was the intended butt of the latter’s polemics. It is equally difficult to imagine that Campbell had a clear conception of Gibbs as the proponent of a stylistic idiom to which he

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was fundamentally opposed, rather than simply as a rival who had to be overcome. Moreover, the closeness of Vanbrugh and Campbell, and the relative isolation of Gibbs, suggest that political identity blurred rather than drove stylistic preferences. Proponents of different, and to our eyes contradictory, architectural approaches proved happy to form alliances along partisan lines, endlessly recycling the same critical tropes to extol their own works and denigrate those of their rivals, with little awareness that the brickbats they threw might end up being returned with interest. It is surely, therefore, time to rethink the crucial roles played by Campbell and Gibbs, the two great Scottish émigré architects of their time, and their publications in the development of English architecture, and, in doing so, develop recent efforts, pioneered by the late Giles Worsley in his still underestimated Classical Architecture in Britain – the Heroic Age, to comprehensively reinterpret the underlying dynamics of architectural change in early eighteenth-century Britain.

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10

The Architectural Innovations of Mr James Smith of Whitehill (c. 1645–1731) within the European Context Cristina González-Longo

T

he architecture of James Smith has been largely interpreted within the domain of Palladianism.1 This chapter counters that view by arguing that, rather than Vicenza, it was his direct experience of the architectural culture in Baroque Rome and the work of Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz that is significant in Smith’s architecture. His transformations of Drumlanrig Castle and Queensberry House are key to the understanding of these critical influences.2 John Summerson, who was rather disparaging of Smith’s ‘Palladian’ work,3 considered Drumlanrig Castle, Smith’s major project of the late 1670s, ‘the most remarkable building emerging from the tradition initiated by William Wallace’ but he attributed the building to Robert Mylne,4 Master Mason to the Crown who was working at the time on the transformation of Holyroodhouse Palace. Summerson summarised Wallace’s style as inflected by ‘Netherlandish’ and with some French influences.5 His main source was probably the fact that Drumlanrig featured in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus,6 although in a simplified version that avoids showing the Baroque decoration. It was nevertheless a strange fit in a publication about Classical buildings, especially considering Campbell’s dislike of Baroque and Gothic architecture, and can only be attributed to a real personal admiration for Smith. Living in Rome between 1671 and 1675, James Smith was the first from the Scottish architectural profession to enjoy a direct and extended knowledge of contemporary European architecture. He did not go to Rome to train as architect, but rather to study at the Scots College to become a Roman Catholic priest.7 He was a mature student (around twenty-five years old), healthy, of good character,

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articulate, honest and with a good reputation, as stipulated in the College rules.8 Smith was most probably born in 1645, son of a mason also named James Smith, who in 1656 was living in Tarbat, becoming burgess of Forres (Moray) in 1659.9 These were times and places of civil war and religious repression and all the indications are that Smith grew up in a strong Roman Catholic community; many of Scotland’s Catholic minority lived in that area at the time. He probably spoke Gaelic and would have attended the local grammar school to begin his lessons in Latin. Later, he probably trained as a mason, but his use of the title ‘Mr’ and his reference to attending ‘Colleges at home and abroad’10 indicate that he was a university graduate and may have gone to Aberdeen University.11 Later, Smith’s father could perhaps have afforded to fund the trip to Rome as he had acquired a lucrative business as a Master of Work for kirks and bridges in Aberdeen in 1674.12 Smith’s arrival in Rome is evidenced by a letter from the Scots College’s Cardinal Protector, Antonio Barberini (1607–71), dated 7 April 1671, stating his excellent references and the fact that Smith would be an asset to the College; the letter also confirms he was coming directly from Scotland.13 Like other students, he probably travelled on foot most of the way and a stay at the Scots College in Paris to break the journey would have been normal. Some students went to Douai before going to Rome, but there is no trace of Smith in the records.14 Cardinal Barberini’s letter as well as the records of the College make evident that Smith came to repopulate the college, as all existing seven students had left in 1671; shortly after him another three seminarians arrived. In his Oath on 3 May, he confirmed that he came from Moray.15 Smith stayed officially at the Scots College between 3 May 1671 and October 1675.16 The students were not allowed to leave the College without permission; Smith’s only opportunity to learn about architecture during these years would have been from books and during his walks from the Scots College at Via delle Quattro Fontane to the Collegio Romano, near the Pantheon, where he attended lectures always wearing the college’s colourful violet soutane with red cinture and black soprana.17 The preparations in Rome for Pope Clement X’s Jubilee of 1675 were ongoing and a great number of façades and chapels were added to existing churches. Drawings attributed to Smith in the RIBA collection have so far been studied with a focus on the Palladian agenda. However, there is much more to see in that collection. For example, one of the drawings is the front elevation of

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a domed church which has great similarities to one of these ongoing works: Carlo Rainaldi’s twin churches at Piazza del Popolo.18 Smith just had to look through the window and across the road to see the Barberini Palace, the first Baroque palace in Rome and one that greatly influenced European architecture of the period. At the time, the palace was undergoing a substantial remodelling under the College’s Cardinal Protector.19 For reasons of both heritage and economy, the Barberini family decided to keep the pre-existing building on the site, the Sforza Palace, which had recently been built on an ancient Roman arcaded structure. This constituted the north wing of the new building; Cardinal Barberini reserved the new south wing for himself and located the public rooms in the central portion. There is an echo of this in the work Smith did for  the Duke of Queensberry in the transformation of Hatton House on Edinburgh’s Canongate into Queensberry House.20 Here Smith added a west wing to the existing building and elevated the main entrance to the former first-floor level, resulting in a broadly similar plan and spatial arrangement, including the location of the public rooms and the Duke’s own apartments. The Collegio Romano, the Jesuit University where Smith attended lectures, was at the time a global centre of culture. During his time there he followed the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, completing the three years of philosophy or ‘art course’, focused on Aristotelian studies. The second year included Mathematics, with elements of architecture and geometry. He also carried out one year of Rhetoric and one of Theology.21 Crucially, the great German polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) was then resident in the Collegio, where he had created his famous experimental museum displaying the precepts of Aristotle, the nature of the Jesuits’ global missions, ancient and contemporary cultures, together with a number of machines invented by himself and many other wonders. He also published his writings and exceptional drawings, as will be discussed later. A letter dated 26 August 1675 from the secretary to the Cardinal asks for Smith’s permission to return to Scotland and for funding for the journey. Smith would then have had a month before officially leaving the College at the beginning of October and the rules restricting the movements of seminarians may not have applied then. It is perhaps during this brief period that Smith had the opportunity to study the city’s buildings. Smith did not go to Vicenza to see Palladio’s work, as has been reported elsewhere.22 His return journey took him directly to Paris and then to London. This is confirmed by a series of letters

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Figure 10.1  Letter dated 10 January 1676, from Christopher Irvin, Paris to John Irvin, Rome. Reproduced with permission of the Scottish Catholic Historical Collection, SCA BL1/1/45/8.

from Christopher Irvin, a medical student at Padua and cousin of the  seminarian John Irvin. On 30 August 1675 Christopher wrote from Padua to Mr William Leslie, Rector of the Scots College in Rome: if Mr Smith be to depart shorty or no and to lett me have an answer before the 10 of the next month, for if he be to depart shortly, and to passe be this place, I will willingly stay till his come here.23

On 10 January 1676 Christopher wrote to his cousin John ­confirming  that Smith went straight to London via Paris (Figure 10.1): I delayed my writting to you expecting daily, and with as great anxiety, Mr Smith, as the Jewes doe the Messias, att lenth being informed by Fr Con of his embarquement . . . there after we receive the news of his happy arrival to London.24

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   195

The letter confirms that by New Year 1676 Smith was already in London, his journey on foot having taken around three months.25 This would have given him plenty of opportunity to see buildings along the way in Italy and France, especially in Paris, before taking the boat to London. Once in London, and with a future career in architecture in mind, he would no doubt have been interested in visiting the buildings of Inigo Jones and the contemporary work of Sir Christopher Wren and possibly Sir Roger Pratt. Like these latter two architects, Smith was interested in contemporary architecture and would have had a similar appreciation of European architecture to Pratt: ‘From things modern, I think that as then there was nothing to be seen either of that greatness in any part of Europe except in Rome’.26 Although all this travelling experience must have influenced Smith’s approach to architecture, we have clearer evidence about his interest during his time in Italy in the work of a Spaniard: Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz (1606–82). Caramuel was a Cistercian monk, polymath and writer, who had an interesting but indirect Scottish connection, as the honorific Abbot of Melrose. He was also a close friend of Kircher, providing a direct link with the Collegio Romano. He was an internationally recognised mathematician, philosopher, theologian and writer who travelled around Europe and had a number of ecclesiastical posts. Before the full publication, in Spanish, of his illustrated treatise Architectura civil recta y obliqua in Vigevano,27 where he had been Bishop since 1673, he formulated his theory of ‘obliquity’ in his Mathesis Architectonica, part of his Cursus Mathematicus (1667–8). Although the treatise had a Spanish audience in mind, it was widely disseminated and a Latin translation was published in 1681. Even before its publication, illustrations were made available. Caramuel has been the subject of recent research but his influence in the design of built architecture, apart from his own two churches in Prague and Vigevano, has not been studied so far.28 His theory was highly innovative, considering a continuum between past and present and challenging established orthodoxies about architectural orders by revisiting them and investigating issues of place and national identity. He was the first to include the ‘Gothic order’ in an architectural treatise and to defend what others considered ‘barbaric architecture’ in order to encourage northern countries, far from the Classical world, to develop their own architectural language. However, he discusses his theories in the context of appreciation of Classical architecture and presents both the Temple of Solomon

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196   Cristina González-Longo

– where he finds the origin of ‘oblique’ architecture – and what he consider its modern version, King Philip II’s El Escorial monastery, near Madrid, as models to follow. Caramuel was interested in scientifically analysing the building, so that it could serve as inspiration for architects across Europe, both from the design and the construction point of view. As with all architects of the period, books and prints would have been an important source for Smith to learn about architecture, both while in Rome29 and afterwards. In Scotland, masonic lodges provided members with access to printed resources, and gave opportunities for interaction with other members of higher social ranks, and the chance to raise members’ social status, helping to create the profession of architect.30 Treatises were often simply used as pattern books, perhaps due to language barriers, meaning that professionals copied the pictures without understanding the texts associated with the drawings. Smith’s Roman experience, although potentially suspect in Protestant Scotland, would have given him a clear advantage within the architectural profession; however the vague reference that he studied ‘in colleges at home and abroad’ in his candidature to parliament in 1715 could be an indication that he would not openly declare that he spent four years in Rome.31 On the other hand, in 1676, the year of Smith’s return, James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II, became a Roman Catholic, taking residence in Holyrood in 1679 and again in 1681–2. He became King James VII of Scotland and II of England when Charles II died in 1685. By 1676 most of Holyrood Palace had been completed, including the new south-west tower that copied the existing north-east one, and attention was turned to the centre section of the west front.32 The old façade was still standing and supported the barracks erected by Cromwell on top (Figure 10.2). It had been the intention to clear this since the beginning of the project and also to insert a new carriage entrance into the inner court.33 This was a design that King Charles II approved on 3 June 1671: ‘His Majestie likes the front very well as it is Designed, Provided the gate where the Kings coach is to come in, be large enough . . .’34 However, at the end of February 1676, he approved the changes proposed by Sir William Bruce, a new grant of money was made and a contract between Bruce, Robert Mylne and Sir William Sharpe (representing the Duke of Lauderdale, the Scottish Secretary) was signed in March 1676.35 In July a construction contract was signed, with a very specific description of the new portal, including dimensions.36

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   197

Figure 10.2  Holyrood Palace, James Gordon of Rothiemay view c. 1649. In public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holyrood_Palace_1649.jpg

Figure 10.3  Holyrood Palace, west front and entrance. © Louisa Humm.

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198   Cristina González-Longo

We first hear about Smith back in Scotland when he signed a receipt in December 1677 for 20 shillings for ‘my necessare expences on my voyage upon the account of Sir William Bruce’.37 The date implies that it would have been a business trip relating to Bruce’s main ongoing project: Holyroodhouse Palace. There is some substantial information about the works at the Palace between 1674 and 1679,38 so we know that the most significant piece of mason work carried out during this period was the main entrance (Figure 10.3), using stone from Dalgety Quarry in Fife. It is not clear how Smith managed to get involved in Holyrood; however there is some evidence that he may have been in contact with Mylne at least from 1675 and that may have eased his passage into the work.39 In April 1677 Jacob de Wet, the artist responsible for the portraits in the great Gallery of Holyroodhouse Palace, produced the patterns for the masons to use for the coats of arms for both the main pediment and above the gate.40 A timber model was also made of the gateway: James Porteous, wright, was paid for a ‘modell of the cupola of the gate of the said Pallace with the modell of the pedestal and ballusters’, in March 1678 and, in January 1679, Walter Schiell, a wood turner, was paid for turning the four columns for the model of the gateway.41 There is evidence that Smith began to have a substantial involvement in the project at around this time.42 The first published record of Smith working on an actual building in Scotland was in a payment at Holyrood Palace to ‘James Smith, Measson . . . for days wages to himself and servants’ dated March 1679.43 There is, however, a contingent account dated April 1678, handwritten by Smith showing his disbursement for supplying stone from Dalgety Quarry, for the construction of the main entrance. In May 1678 Lauderdale dismissed Bruce from his position as Surveyor General of the Kings Works in Scotland. The dismissal was on the grounds that the building was finished, which, on looking at the accounts, does not seem to be true, and replaced him with his own brother, Lord Hatton, for whom Smith had worked as mason at his town house on Canongate, mentioned above, and perhaps also his country house. There is also a document dated 11 March 1679 for payments for the supply, clearly labelled for the ‘cupola above the gate’ and signed by Bruce and Smith;44 the quarriers were part of the building workforce.45 All this means that Smith, shortly after returning to Scotland in 1676, was leading a team of masons at Holyrood, the most prestigious site in the country, and working on the iconic main entrance.

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   199

Considering all the above, the Holyrood entrance must have been instrumental in helping Smith to establish himself in Scotland. It was most probably for his capabilities and experience in dealing with the execution of this project that the Incorporation of Mary’s Chapel, the guild of masons and wrights in Edinburgh, officially recognised Smith as ‘archetecter’ in the 1679 register.46 Smith was also then in courtship with Janet Mylne, the daughter of the Master Mason to the Crown and deacon of the guild, Robert Mylne. By marrying her in 1679 he avoided the formal apprenticeship,47 although, as mentioned above, it is likely that he had acquired these skills under his father in Forres, before going to Rome. The characteristics of an architect were well established by Caramuel, who dedicated the first chapter of his treatise Architectura civil recta y obliqua to ‘the art and literary faculties that an architect should have and practise’. He went on to say: ‘What the others have to do with their hands, he [Architectus] orders it first with his invention [ingenio]’.48 Smith uses the same term ‘invention’ in a letter to his client, the Duke of Hamilton, concerning Hamilton Palace, where he also indicates the preference for his design over others produced in London, within Wren’s circle.49 Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) had, much earlier, given a full description of the role of the architect.50 Caramuel refers occasionally in his treatise to this small book, one of the first significant books on architectural theory in Britain, though without illustrations. It was based on Vitruvius, Alberti and other Italian treatises, and was not just limited to the rules of orders; its scope also extended to literature, philosophy and architectural criticism. Wotton had spent considerable time in Rome and Venice as a diplomat and three months at the court of James VI in Scotland in 1602. It is important to remember that a fundamental practice for an architect is the preparation of complex drawings and models, including perspectives, to be discussed directly with the client.51 Due to his position, Bruce had the opportunity to deal with the clients as equals, and they had a very central role in the conception of the architecture in Scotland during the period.52 However, in order to produce designs Bruce needed the help of professionals like Smith, who quickly advanced to be a fully independent architect, although he always collaborated with others, in particular family members. Although he was aware of and admired Palladio’s work, as we can see from his attributed RIBA drawings, Smith’s architecture is far from the neo-Palladian architecture promoted later by Lord

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Burlington. Smith’s approach was always more creative and he would have been more interested in the architecture of Bernini and Hawksmoor and the development of his own contemporary architecture, rooted in Scottish traditions. In that respect he anticipates later Scottish architects, like William Adam. While in Rome, he was subject to very little Palladianism in the city;53 rather, he absorbed the existing rich Roman architectural culture of the 1670s. By the time of his arrival all the major works of the Counter-Reformation had been completed and it was a flourishing Baroque city due to the initiatives of three consecutive Popes. Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) and his approach to an integrated art incorporating architecture and sculpture – the concept of bel composto (beautiful composition) – would have made an impression on Smith.54 These influences are encapsulated in Smith’s design and the use of one particular small but sophisticated architectural element: the topping balustrade with bold Tuscan balusters characteristically rotated 45 degrees (Figure 10.4) that he uses in many buildings. It is extensively used at Drumlanrig, the entrance pavilions of Newbattle Abbey and the stair and south quadrant of Kinross House (although not rotated, but following Caramuel’s theory), where Smith was employed by Bruce from the outset.55 Even more interestingly, they appear at the MacLeod of Geanies enclosure in old Tarbat Parish Church, near Smith’s probable birthplace. The unusual rotation of the balusters allows the sunlight to penetrate through the balustrade, most effectively in the north façade of Drumlanrig, creating a chiaroscuro with changing profiles as the sun moves around the building. It is very much in line with contemporary Baroque compositional devices, using light as one of the elements of the composition, a design strategy extensively used by Bernini and Carlo Fontana. The criteria used to assess architecture in the seventeenth century were still mainly based on the orthodox use of Classical architectural orders. Smith, very much in line with Caramuel, challenged this orthodoxy, in particular at his masterpiece, Drumlanrig Castle, where an interpretation of Caramuel’s ‘Barbaric Doric’ was included (Figure 10.5).56 Far from trying to copy an established model, Smith experiments with the latest of the architectural theories: the proposed ‘oblique architecture’ of Caramuel, and the search for a new architecture in Scotland, taking also inspiration from illustrations such as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis (Figure 10.6), published by Kircher in his Turris Babel (1672–9).

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   201

Figure 10.4  Drumlanrig Castle balustrade. © Cristina González-Longo.

The divided horseshoe-shaped fore-stair at Drumlanrig was also designed in Caramuel’s spirit of the ‘oblique’. Smith experimented here with the principles set out in Caramuel’s alternative proposals for St Peter’s Square in Rome, which he had produced as part of his criticism of Bernini’s design. At the same time, however, the stair design follows Bernini’s strategy of creating a scenography with the illusion of a deeper entrance space.57 The complexity of the balustrade demonstrates how, for Smith, theoretical and architectural design concerns prevailed over tectonic ones and how he was able to incorporate a variety of architectural and cultural influences. Smith made extensive use of Vignola’s treatise, in some cases very literally, as in the entrance to the building in front of the ice house at Newhailes (Figure 10.7). This entrance is an exact copy of the drawing of ‘the rustic gate of Tuscan order’ at Villa Farnese in Caprarola, included in Vignola’s Regole (Figure 10.8), with a 1:2 Classical harmonic proportion to achieve beauty, used ­extensively

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202   Cristina González-Longo

Figure 10.5  Caramuel’s Barbaric Doric, as used at Drumlanrig Castle. © Cristina González-Longo.

at the time. Like Vignola and other Italian architects, Smith ­occasionally included Gothic elements, for example in the window at Durisdeer Church and in the vaults below the main entrance of Drumlanrig Castle, behind the portico of ‘Barbaric Doric’ order. Scottish traditional architecture also played a major role for Smith, for example at Queensberry House, where his use of gables with chimneys and windows on the wings is a common feature of his work, very much in Caramuel’s spirit of revising Classical architecture. With its asymmetrical plan, it is a clear example of what Charles McKean called the visual balance that characterises many Scottish buildings after 1530, in contrast to pure geometrical symmetry.58 With a Catholic King in James VII/II there was an aspiration to return to Roman Catholicism. In 1687–8 Smith was asked to refurbish the Abbey Church of Holyrood as a new Chapel Royal. A Jesuit college with a library and print works were also created on the site. When the Chapel Royal was ready for consecration in 1688, it was destroyed by a Presbyterian mob, one of the many events which culminated in King James’s exile to France. However, perhaps with the help of the Duke of Queensberry, Smith continued in the service of the new King, William of Orange. In order to replace Holyrood as the local parish church, Smith was also asked to design the Canongate Kirk in 1688, but it never

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   203

Figure 10.6  Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, as depicted in Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679). Image 1613744 from The New York Public Library, https:// digitalcollections.nypl.org

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204   Cristina González-Longo

Figure 10.7  Entrance to the building in front of the icehouse, Newhailes House (c. 1705). © Louisa Humm.

saw Episcopal worship as it was incomplete at the time of the Revolution.59 Canongate Kirk (Figure 10.9) could well qualify as a Roman Catholic church, with its Latin cross plan and apse, similar to the plan of the Jesuit church model of Il Gesú in Rome, and following the recommendations of the 1577 Counter-Reformation Istruzioni of San Carlo Borromeo.60 The unusual façade appears like the contour of a Roman church with the scrolls to the sides, but surmounted by Smith’s characteristic ogee-shaped gable.61 This unusual contour may also make reference to Borromini’s Oratory of St Philip Neri in Rome (1637–50) (Figure 10.10) and Caramuel’s Duomo di Vigevano (c. 1680). Smith’s continual reference to Caramuel is present not only in the façade here, but also in the curved layout of the boundary wall outside, creating a small space and with aspirations of being, as in Vigevano, a piazza or parvis. The Roman influence continued in Edinburgh when in 1691 Smith designed the tomb of Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh, Lord Advocate, in Greyfriars Kirkyard (Figure 10.11). His design with engaged columns and scallop-shell niches in the area between the columns, and an ogee roof refer to another Roman theme, the circular temple, used most famously by Bramante at San Pietro Montorio, and proposed by Bernini and Carlo Fontana at the Colosseum; however, in this case he seems to have been referenc-

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   205

Figure 10.8  Plate 33 from G. B. Vignola, The Regular Architect (1669). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

ing the sixteenth-century chapel of Reginald Pole in the Via Appia Antica in Rome (Figure 10.12). The importance of printed images as design inspiration has already been mentioned, but Smith’s references were beyond the typical. His architectural output shows direct evidence of a particular interest in Kircher’s Latium (1671) and Caramuel’s Architectura civil recta y obliqua (1678).62 Latium was published the same

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Figure 10.9  Canongate Church. James Smith, 1688. NRHE DP189944 © HES.

year Smith arrived in Rome; Kircher used existing material and literary evidence to represent, through striking illustrations, the great Roman suburban villas. Latium was a highly influential book and had illustrations of buildings set within a series of terraced gardens. The terraced garden was not new to Scotland,63 but after the 1670s may have been influenced by Kircher’s drawings via Smith. One of the buildings that could have been influenced by this is Hatton House, near Edinburgh, the old tower house of Lord Hatton’s wife’s family, which he had started to transform in the 1660s. The 1719 edition of Captain Jan Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae (1693) included the plate of Hatton House, wrongly named ‘Argile House’ (Figure 16.7). Unfortunately, Hatton House has now been demolished but its few remaining elements – the garden’s ogee-roofed pavilions, the terrace and the gate – proclaim their Roman affiliations and the likely involvement of Smith. The gate displays the date 1692 (Figure 10.13), the year that Hatton sold the property. The design makes reference to similar gates in the form of triumphal arches in Rome and Lazio, with pineapple finials resembling those on the gate of the Sforza ducal gardens, Horti Pii Carpenses, included in Vignola’s Regole.64 There is an unusual and interesting scissor arch in the gate, providing a design connection with the later portal of Palazzo Pignatelli in Naples (c. 1718), now demolished, attributed to the architect Ferdinando Sanfelice (1675–1748), who extensively

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   207

Figure 10.10  Oratory of St Philip Neri, Rome. Francesco Borromini, 1637–50 (1720 engraving after drawing by Domenico Barrière of 1658). In public domain: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Borromini_Drawing_01.jpg

employed Caramuel’s ‘oblique architecture’ in the design of his buildings.65 Ogee-roofed pavilions, such as those at Hatton House (Figure 10.14), became another of Smith’s trademarks. They were probably inspired by the original curving metalwork roofs of the uccelliere (aviaries) of Vignola’s Farnese gardens (Orti Farnesiani) on the Palatine (1550), towards the Roman Forum, which also had a system of gates and terraces.66 Interestingly, a print of the Roman Forum with the uccelliere was published about the time that Smith arrived in Rome. (Figure 10.15). The gardens were created by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a man of the Renaissance interested in the glorious ancient past of Rome and a supporter of the Jesuits, who commissioned Vignola to design these gardens as well as Villa Farnese and the church of Il Gesù. The possible inspiration for Smith becomes even more evident by looking at the uccelliere with the archetypal ancient

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208   Cristina González-Longo

Figure 10.11  Tomb of Sir George MacKenzie of Rosehaugh, Greyfriars Churchyard. James Smith, c. 1690. © Louisa Humm.

Roman element of scallop-shell niches, extensively used by Smith in the MacKenzie mausoleum and other buildings. Similar ogee roofs were introduced at Holyrood, Heriot’s Hospital and Drumlanrig as well as in almost all of Smith’s garden pavilions. When discussing Roman influences, we should also include the widespread practice of reusing existing buildings. As in Rome, and in many other places, the reuse of dressed and undressed stones for new buildings was a common practice in Scotland.67 Few of Smith’s buildings were completely new constructions, one exception being Melville House. The reuse of existing buildings was often a question of cost and family heritage more than architect’s ethos, but skill was needed to deal with the complexities of the existing fabric and achieve a contemporary design, and certainly this was something that Smith experienced in Rome.

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   209

Figure 10.12  Chapel of Reginald Pole, Via Appia Antica, Rome (1539). © Nick Haynes.

Smith developed a skill in this that is most evident in the last of his bigger projects, Dalkeith Palace, where the old tower was preserved. This design has been compared to the Dutch Palace of Het Loo,68 though at Dalkeith Smith incorporated the old building and created a much more complex composition. A key part of that and a feature shared with his work at Hamilton Palace was a raised pediment

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210   Cristina González-Longo

Figure 10.13  Hatton House Gate. Dated 1692. NRHE SC1234124 © HES.

Figure 10.14  Hatton House Pavilions. Built some time between 1664 and 1691. NRHE DP100255 © Crown copyright: HES.

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Mr James Smith of Whitehill   211

(with the lowest course starting higher than the wallhead) with wide cantilevered courses displaying remarkable structural design skills and expertise in heavy ashlar construction.69 He also carried out sophisticated three-dimensional transformations,70 such as those in Queensberry House and Drumlanrig Castle,71 with the creation of a new entrance at higher level. Around 1695 Smith also made an ambitious proposal to extend the existing tower house at Traquair House for the 4th Earl of Traquair, which was only partially executed.72 Smith’s extensive output is a very rich compendium of architectural practice at a time when architecture was free from strict archaeological and historical concerns and the academicism that would emerge shortly afterwards. With the support of educated patrons aware of contemporary trends in Europe and his personal experience in Rome, he definitely changed the direction of Scottish and British architecture and established his role as a professional architect, the first in Scotland in a modern sense. He was able to get independent commissions and to devise designs that went beyond the formal and constructional aspect to a more theoretical and conceptual design. Smith’s design sophistication has been obscured so far by the limiting of current historiography to tracing the origin of British neo-Palladianism through his Italian travels but, as we have seen,

Figure 10.15  Farnese Gardens, uccelliere, by G. B. Vignola c. 1550 (c. 1670 engraving by G. B. Falda). Cornell University Library. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/ catalog/ss:11177586

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212   Cristina González-Longo

his architecture goes far beyond this limiting stylistic classification. Unlike Inigo Jones, who was mainly interested in earlier Classical sources, and Colen Campbell, with his academic approach and dislike of seventeenth-century Roman architecture, Smith was very much interested in contemporary Roman and Scottish architecture, including Gothic and traditional forms. His Roman experience played a large part in this process but he had also the clear intention to innovate by creating local identity. He deployed a wider creativity, with interest for the latest contemporary theoretical thought, in particular Caramuel’s ‘oblique’, and specific architects’ devices such as the use of chiaroscuro as part of the architectural composition, moving from the standardised use of orders into a more creative design. Smith invigorated architecture at the end of the seventeenth century in Scotland as a cultural enterprise and as the result of academic learning and  research, in line with other European countries. He was also greatly influenced by his Jesuit education and the stimulating artistic and scientific context to which he was exposed at the Collegio Romano, including the introduction to the work of Athanasius Kircher and Juan Caramuel. This opened his mind not just to a European but to a global world.

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11

From England to Scotland in 1701: the Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace Sally Jeffery

A

nn Scott (1651–1732), daughter of the 2nd Earl of Buccleuch, travelled to England in 1663 as a young girl and married James Croft or Crofts, eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, when she was just twelve years old. Croft (1649–85) changed his name to James Scott and was knighted and created 1st Duke of Monmouth and 1st Duke of Buccleuch. He was beheaded in 1685 for his rebellion against King James VII/II, but his widow remarried in 1688 and continued to live in England, retaining both her titles: Duchess of Monmouth and Duchess of Buccleuch.

Figure 11.1  Dalkeith Palace from the south. James Smith, 1700–10. © Louisa Humm.

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214   Sally Jeffery

This chapter discusses the Duchess of Buccleuch’s return to her family home at Dalkeith (south-east of Edinburgh) after her long residence in England. John Dunbar and John Cornforth wrote three excellent articles on Dalkeith Palace in Country Life in 1984, and its history was explored in an exhibition on James Smith of Whitehill in 1995.1 Further examination of the archives has yielded new detail about the Duchess’s preparations for the journey, her progress from London to Dalkeith in 1701 and the fitting out of Dalkeith as a quasiroyal palace. Duchess Ann began to think about returning to Scotland soon after the death of her second husband, Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, in 1698. She was a strong-minded woman and throughout her two marriages had jealously guarded her Scottish title of Duchess of Buccleuch and her independent rights to her estates in Scotland. In spite of her long sojourn in England, she continued to regard herself as Scottish, and wrote early in 1700: ‘I do as much long to go to Scotland as ever I did to anie thing in my life . . .’2 Her intention was to return to Scotland in the summer of 1700, but this was deferred for a year because she had financial affairs to settle. She wrote: I have some thoughts of being in Scotland this somer if the King will pay me my jointer; but he is now owing me six thousand pounds. I am loth to leve this till I am a littl setteld in that sort of payment.3

In the end, she left in the autumn of 1701. Having decided to return to Dalkeith, she employed James Smith to repair, partly rebuild and modernise her castle of Dalkeith (Figure 11.1). From early in 1700 and into 1701, while still in England, the Duchess wrote by almost every post to Smith, and also sent instructions via her relations by marriage, the Earl of Melville and the Earl of Leven, who acted as her counsellors and men of business.4 In a letter of 9 May 1700, Smith was asked to send her a ‘draught’ or plan of the new work on the castle so that she could see what furniture she might need to send from England, and on 20 May she was pressing him to set men to work, adding ‘Pray lett what can be done be sett about soon, or a good reason why not . . .’5 It is clear from her letters that she was personally involved in the interior fitting of Dalkeith, right down to the smallest detail. Her instructions ranged from sending a list of what was needed for the kitchen to specifying window sizes. On 7 June 1701 she wrote (probably to Lord Leven) that she had received a letter from Mr Smith

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   215

which ‘dos not discurage me for he says my apartment shall be don as soon as can be . . .’ She continued with a note for his steward saying she had sent a list of all she wanted in the kitchen. She asked him to provide what he could, but to let her know what he could not obtain and she would send it in her ship.6 In another letter, she said that she had been told that spices were ‘better and cheaper’ in England than in Scotland, so she would take a few months’ supply with her.7 She also sought advice about the clothes she should take with her. She asked Lord Melville to find out from his wife what could be purchased in Scotland.8 She had heard that ‘the Ladys sent to England for ther clothes, and that there was no silk stufs fit to be worn ther’. Again to the Earl of Leven, she wrote as to ‘one of her children’, saying: I hear Mr Smith has got a verie good ioner [joiner] to finish the windows which I am glade of I did formarly desir nothing to be don till I was there for fear they did not work so well as they do here but since it can be well don I am verie glade . . . Good my Lord order Mr Smith to make the windows the sashs as large as he can to let light enough in I hate dark rooms.9

Her letter to Lord Melville of 21 June 1701 discussed the wainscot and furnishings at Dalkeith. The wainscot was to go ‘from the Ground up to the window boards’. She said she would bring hangings with her which would go from the cornice to the window board in the drawing room next to her bedchamber. She was sending several beds and sets of hangings and chairs by a ship that was about to sail. She wanted him to order some ‘Guilt Lether Hangens for the diningroom’ and some of the plain chairs which were made for eating rooms. She specified cane, or ‘anie sort that has no stuff on them’.10 William Scott, cabinetmaker of Edinburgh, supplied thirtythree cane dining-room chairs for Dalkeith, among other things, which were billed in September 1701, and Sir Alexander Brand supplied ‘Gold Leather’, made at his manufactory and hung at Dalkeith in September 1701 at a cost of £82 5s 6d sterling.11 He supplied skins with ‘a pearle Ground’ and ‘plaine Gold Leather skines’, and made a screen that was lined on both sides. The Duchess had been living in grand style in St James’s Place in London and at Moor Park, near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire – a house built for her and her husband about twenty years before.12 Many of her furnishings from both homes were packed up and

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moved, but new items were made in England and transported to Dalkeith, and goods were commissioned in Scotland and elsewhere as well. The whole complex operation is recorded in detail in the Buccleuch archives. In 1698 Duchess Ann acquired the title to Soho House in Soho Square, London, which had been commissioned by her husband in c. 1682. It had never been completely finished and was in poor condition.13 After some repairs, it was put to use as her headquarters and packing station for the move to Scotland. Malachi Lloyd, joiner, was billed for work there in May 1701, which included mending floors, doors, shutters and stairs.14 In June 1701 two men were paid for moving lumber and cleaning the rooms at Soho House, and Benjamin Sidney of Soho, upholsterer (fl. 1700–7), with his assistant Samuel Hudson and nine others lived there for three months from June 1701 while they worked on her furnishings. Sidney certified that ‘all these workemen were imloyd at Sohoe house in meinding & making up the Goods sent to Scotland and yt they were to have 3sh. 6d p day and were so many days as is mentioned in this Bill’.15 Hangings and beds from her house in St James’s Place and Moor Park were taken down, delivered to Soho House, cleaned, repaired and packed up for shipment. Sidney charged for porters to carry ‘2 bundles of Tapestry hangings from St: James to Sohoe’. The canvas of the tapestry hangings was taken to the laundry to be washed and brought back again. Other tapestries were brought to Soho House for her to see, and another time she travelled by coach to the Temple to view some others. Sidney’s bill also included rods for ‘her Graces green Needlework bed lined with Crimson mohair’ and ‘little brass nailes’ for its gold and silver fringe.16 This was almost certainly the bed installed later in the Green Needlework Room at Dalkeith, of green, gold and silver, lined with crimson mohair.17 Thomas Roberts, joiner (1685–1714) worked on goods to go to Scotland from May to August 1701. In May, in a list marked ‘For Scottland’, he charged for field bedsteads, a large 7-foot-wide sofa ‘carvd handsome with arch fore rales & arch back & scrold cheeks’ with a coronet, another 6-foot sofa and another 5-foot 6-inch one, both carved. All three were blacked and polished. At Soho House in June, Roberts supplied six chairs with carved feet, cross frames and carved elbows, and two round stools, blacked and polished, together with materials for packing them. Later, he sent a ‘double rising’ tester and cornices and gilded a carved headboard for a wainscot bed, and a field bedstead. There were four large elbow chairs ‘ye frame all carvd of a new fashion and moldings round ye

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   217

seats and false seates with wenscoate bottoms and arch backs with moldings round the back and false backs to take out’, and six large square stools to match. His large bill came to £103 19s 5d including many packing cases, cords and boxes.18 This furniture was all extremely grand. Thomas Roberts was joiner to the royal household from 1686 to 1714 and made furniture for the royal palaces. He worked from a shop known as ‘The Royal Chair’ in Marylebone Street, Westminster. James Moore (c. 1670–1726), cabinetmaker of Long Acre in London, put in a bill for work done in April and August 1701. It lists much repair work and ends with a charge for ‘17 cases for packing with Cord paper & pack thread’ on 13 August 1701. It is endorsed ‘James Moore Cabinetmaker Scotland’ indicating the destination of the pieces. The most expensive items were two ‘flowerd Japan Cabinetts & frames’ for £16 the pair.19 Moore was familiar with work on carved and gilded mirrors and working with japan (sometimes described as ‘black’) and gesso. A special trip was made on 1 July 1701 by a porter ‘for fetching a Japan Cabinett from Mr. Moore in Long Acre’, and a frame, perhaps for a looking-glass, was sent to him on 19 July.20 Many of the items travelled by sea from London to Leith. Between 1701 and 1706 fourteen separate voyages were recorded in various vessels, all based at Leith, and there were probably more. On 5 June

Figure 11.2  Ship entering the harbour at Leith, c. 1710. Historic Environment Scotland Acc. no. TRH023 © HES.

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218   Sally Jeffery

Figure 11.3  Bill of lading for Captain Bapty’s ship, The Ouners Goodwill, bound for Leith, 5 August 1702. NRS GD 224/26/5/52/3. The Buccleuch Collections.

1701 Benjamin Robinson, the Duchess’s secretary and steward, paid charges at the Custom House in London for ‘ye first parcell of Goods sent to Scotland’ on The Crowne of Leith, captained by Skipper James White.21 The second ship to leave was The John of Leith, skippered by Captain Spence, which was being loaded from 11 to 15 August. Thirty-nine cartloads were brought from Soho House, from St James’s Place and from ‘Mr. Moores’ the cabinetmaker, to the wharf at Scotland Yard where a barge transferred them to the ship.22 Some things travelled by land from London to Scotland, usually via Newcastle, where a Mrs Kennedy received ‘her Graces goods from London’, en route to Edinburgh.23 Preparations for the travel of the Duchess herself began in earnest in the summer of 1701. A pair of Dutch coach horses was purchased from the Dutch Ambassador on 18 June.24 Richard Chaire was paid £7 ‘for a Sash Mary to carry Goods into Scotland’.25 Richard Philipps sent a large bill for coach repairs, trunks and harness, including

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   219

£16 12s for ‘Mending ye Sash Maree’, which suggests considerable alterations – almost a complete rebuild. Among other things, he supplied a new seat and frame, a leather roof and a new ­undercarriage. He coloured the body brown, painted a coronet and cypher on it in gold, and the wheels and undercarriage red.26 This vehicle is a bit of a puzzle but, unlikely though it seems, the ‘sash mary’ was probably the kind of light two-wheeled goods cart known in France as a chasse-marée, used there for transporting fish. Duchess Ann herself travelled in her new coach, also supplied by Philipps, which cost £81 7s. She left London on 2 September 1701.27 After London, the first stop was Barnet to bate the horses, after which she and her train continued to Stevenage for the first night. They followed the route of the Great North Road, the present A1, passing through Buckden, Stamford, Newark and Doncaster, then on to Wetherby, Northallerton, Durham (where they stayed at the Bull’s Head in the market place), Newcastle, Alnwick, Berwick and Haddington, finally arriving at Dalkeith on 15 September 1701.28 This fourteen-day progress was grandly carried out, with frequent stops at inns in the major towns, accompanied by ‘musick, ringers and players’, and gifts to the poor and prisoners. Although the Duchess travelled by road, her servants went by sea. There is an item in the accounts for ‘6 Coaches to Billinsgate with Graces Servants the 18th. Augt. when they went to graves End to go on board the Ship to go for Scotland at 2 sh p Coach’.29 The freight bill for travel on Captain Spence’s ship in August 1701 was for twenty-two servants at 20s each, including ‘finding them Meat & Drink’ and ‘For the use of ye Cabin and beds’. Some were lodged in the captain’s cabin and others, less favoured, ‘betwixt Decks’.30 After the Duchess’s departure, goods both old and new continued to be sent to Scotland over a long period. Work at Dalkeith had just begun when she arrived, and interior fitting did not start until mid1703. Some of the furnishings must therefore have been stored, but some went to her lodgings in Edinburgh. Ever optimistic, she had intended to live at Dalkeith immediately on her arrival. In a letter of 1701 she wrote: when I hear how soon the Hous will be ready I will sett my day of leveing this Kindom but I am so desirous of seeing som part of somer that I will rather lye above stairs in the upor story then go too late in the year.31

And in the same letter she said: ‘I am so near Edn. at Dalkeith that I shall need no lodgens in town’. However, this proved not to be the

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case and it seems likely that, in the early years, she lived mostly in her Edinburgh chambers. She first stayed at lodgings in Mylne Square, and then from late 1702 at least until Whitsun 1706 in Parliament Close.32 Considerable work took place there, and furnishings and furniture were supplied.33 Grinling Gibbons sent seven simple chimneypieces of different coloured marbles ‘for Scotland’ which were carried by The Crowne of Leith in the first shipment of 1701. There are no chimneypieces of these dimensions and colours at Dalkeith, so they were probably installed in the lodgings.34 Materials were obtained in Scotland and abroad for the building work. A boat was sent to Norway to purchase timber for the ­carpentry in 1702.35 The Duchess’s steward, Benjamin Robinson, was in Holland in 1704 buying deals and wainscot which were shipped from Rotterdam to Port Seton, and glass and cord for the sash windows.36 The main features of the principal interiors were wainscot panelling, some of it richly carved and gilded, and quantities of marble. There were marble tables in nearly every room, chimneypieces, marble frames for looking-glasses and portraits, marble doorframes, a marble staircase and marble panels in the staircase hall. Regarding the use of marble, the Duchess commented in a letter: ‘you will think me extravegant in marble but it is to shew you I do not Dispyse my old Castle’.37 Some was bought new in Holland and London, but a considerable amount was removed from Moor Park, where it must also have been extensively used. Five boxes of marble specified as from Moor Park were sent in Captain Bapty’s ship which arrived in July 1703.38 A consignment on The John of Leith was referred to by the Duchess in a letter of 9 August 1701. She wrote: ‘The shipe sets out on Munday or Tieusday. I hear no news of my marball, but I hope well’.39 The earliest inventory to survive was written in 1756, some years after the death of Duchess Ann, but the interiors had probably not changed greatly since her day. It records that in almost every room there were pier glasses or overmantel glasses, ornamented in various ways. On the walls, ‘hangings’ of various kinds were used, in many cases tapestries. Window curtains were hung – usually one per window. Light fittings mentioned were lanterns, ‘flambos’, sconces and crystal branches or chandeliers. Today almost all the original furnishings have been removed from Dalkeith, but photographs taken in 1911 for Country Life give some idea of its appearance (Figure 11.11).

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   221

Richness and colour were added with furnishings and fabrics from many different sources. For example, painted paper and tapestries were purchased in London and gilt leather hangings were supplied for the dining room.40 Red velvet hangings were sent by land from London, probably for the Duchess’s Great Closet, and yellow ‘fellep’ (a long-haired velvet), blue damask and pieces of silk for her Picture Closet were sent by Mynheer Edens from Rotterdam.41 Many pieces of furniture were japanned – sometimes described as black. The rooms contained a large number of china jars. According to the inventory, these were blue and white, or copper-coloured and white and were arranged on corner shelves, or on and under tables and cabinets, in the manner established by Queen Mary at Kensington and Hampton Court Palaces, as described by Daniel Defoe (Figure 11.4).42 The Duchess was fitting out her castle in the latest taste and seeking inspiration in the most important houses and palaces in and around London. She had known the young Princess Mary before the latter’s marriage to William of Orange and had visited her in the Netherlands. She remained in contact with them as King William and Queen Mary.43 She would have known the state rooms of the late 1680s at Whitehall and Kensington palaces, and those being finished at Hampton Court in 1697–8, just before her departure. She sent Benjamin Robinson to London in 1704 to act as her commissioning agent. While there, he went with ‘Mr Moore’ (James Moore, the above-mentioned cabinetmaker, who acted as adviser) to ‘Hampton Court to see furnishing & Staires & to severall other houses aboute London’.44 The household accounts entry adds that they went to ‘the Duke of Buckingham’s and other New Houses’.45 The interiors at Dalkeith were directly comparable in the richness of the decoration and furnishings to those of Hampton Court, and some of the craftsmen employed by the Duchess had previously worked there. At Dalkeith, the rooms were wainscoted, hung with tapestry and decorated with marble chimneypieces, elaborate overmantels, paintings and colourful furnishings, as at Hampton Court. The exception was the ceilings: at Hampton Court, many of the ceilings and staircase walls were frescoed by Verrio and others; at Dalkeith, they were of plain plaster. There were two main suites of rooms on the ground or principal floor – the state apartment and the Duchess’s own apartment – which met at the north-east corner with two closets (Figure 11.5). In this clever arrangement, the closets could be used for either apartment. Here, too, Hampton Court seems to have had an influence on the design – the King’s and Queen’s apartments

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Figure 11.4  The King’s Bedchamber at Hampton Court (1690s). HRP 01329 © Historic Royal Palaces.

there ­progressed towards a corner where there were two closets. At Dalkeith, there was one further suite of rooms on the principal floor, on the south-west. Upstairs were a great dining room and drawing room and two less extensive apartments. Some of the richest decorations  and fittings were reserved for the two closets – the Great Closet and the Picture Closet. There, the joinery was ornamented with carving and gilding and the rooms had expensive hangings. An impressive marble chimneypiece with a carved relief panel and a glass overmantel survives in the Great Closet (Figure 11.6). This seems to have been made up in Scotland from three separate elements, perhaps following the wishes of the Duchess herself

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for a chimneypiece in the latest taste. It has a simple marble fire surround with a bolection moulding, a marble panel in bas-relief above, and an overmantel of blue glass. Just such a carved marble relief with Neptune and Galatea is recorded as having been made by Grinling Gibbons for the Duchess at a cost of £80 in 1701, as part of a marble chimneypiece at Moor Park.46 Though it was delivered there, it seems that it was subsequently taken down and transported to Dalkeith where it was set above the fire surround with an ornamented glass above. This was no doubt what was referred to in a bill for Scottish customs as ‘The Great Glass & Marble Frame for ye Great Closet’.47 The exceptionally elaborate blue glass is overlaid in silvered ornament including palm leaves, a cypher and a coronet. There is no surviving information about its provenance or maker. Complex chimneypieces made of a variety of materials were being developed by Grinling Gibbons and others at Whitehall and Hampton Court and appear in work of the period c. 1689–94.48 They echo designs that could be seen in numerous engravings published

Figure 11.5  Plan of the first floor of Dalkeith House. Plate 22 from Vitruvius Scoticus. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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Figure 11.6  Chimneypiece in the Great Closet, Dalkeith with marble relief of Neptune and Galatea by Grinling Gibbons, 1701. Assembled at Dalkeith in 1704. Photographer: Wyndham Westerdale.

in France and elsewhere, and began to set a fashion that moved away from the overmantels with carved limewood drops and cresting, for which Gibbons was so famous, towards carved stone or marble combined with mirror glass, as can be seen in the closets at Dalkeith. The extensive use of mirror glass became popular after it was introduced at Versailles from c. 1685 onwards. Daniel Marot, who was familiar with French decoration and worked for King William and Queen Mary in the Netherlands and in England, may well have been one

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   225

of the designers responsible for these trends. He was in England in the 1680s and may have advised on the interiors at Hampton Court designed for Queen Mary. He later published a number of engraved designs for composed chimneypieces.49 Jacob Bogdani was a Hungarian painter famous for flower and animal paintings, some of which can be seen at Hampton Court. He was paid for work there in the Looking Glass Closet in Queen Mary’s Water Gallery (where Gerrit Jensen, glass-seller to the king, provided the glass) just before her death in late 1694, but this work does not survive and it is not specified whether he painted on glass or on canvas.50 For the Duchess, he supplied flower paintings on mirror glass. She had gone to ‘the painters for the glass to shew them to her grace the firste time’ early in 1701, and Bogdani, or ‘James Bogdane’ as he signed himself, sent a receipt for £50 ‘for painting three Large Glasses for Moore parke with Flowers’ that were delivered in August 1701.51 Bogdani’s glasses for the Duchess were probably intended, like the Gibbons relief, to be sent on to Scotland. The painted mirror glass in the Picture Closet at Dalkeith is perhaps one of these. It is set over the mantel in a carved frame of white marble, above a carved white marble chimneypiece that was possibly from the Gibbons workshop (Figure 11.7). In 1706, on a further visit to London on the Duchess’s business, Grinling Gibbons’s workshop was visited by Robinson and Moore and he was subsequently paid £123 7s and then an additional £70 for a ‘Marble Chimney to Dalkeith’ – the largest sum recorded for a single chimneypiece there.52 This may have been for the spectacular chimneypiece in finely carved white marble, with an overmantel in wood that was carved with drops of flowers and fruit and surmounted by palms, angels and a ducal coronet, that was installed in the bedchamber called ‘Lodge Low’, on the south-west of the principal floor. Nevertheless, it shows evidence of having been intended for a different location, since the carved wood drops have been cut down. It has since been removed to Drumlanrig Castle (Figure 11.8). On his visit to London in 1706, Robinson went again to Hampton Court with Moore, and also again to Buckingham House, just completed that year. In the list of expenses is an item for ‘going to Buckingham house abt. ye stairs’.53 It seems that its staircase was specifically viewed as a potential model for the one at Dalkeith. At Buckingham House, the staircase was approached through a colonnade and rose in three flights around an open well (Figure 11.9). A similar design was followed at Dalkeith, where the stair is approached through a Corinthian marble colonnade that ­subdivides the hall.

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Figure 11.7  Chimneypiece in the Picture Closet, Dalkeith. Painted mirror glass overmantel, attributed to Jacob Bogdani; carved white marble fire surround, possibly by Grinling Gibbons. Photographer: Sally Jeffery.

The entrance hall is panelled in wainscot, while the staircase hall and the staircase itself are lined in grey-veined white marble (Figure 11.10). The marble treads of the stairs are inlaid with parquetry, seen in the photograph taken for Country Life in 1911 (Figure 11.11). Marble wall panelling and steps were used at Versailles, but were most unusual in England and Scotland, so this was the ultimate use of marble, to equal or exceed any London palace.

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   227

Figure 11.8  Chimneypiece from Lodge Low, Dalkeith, now at Drumlanrig. Carved marble and limewood, attributed to Grinling Gibbons. NRHE SC1783302 © Crown copyright: HES.

In 1708 a large shipment of marble from Holland arrived at Port Seton and was so difficult to unload that the quay was damaged.54 This consignment of marble arrived just before work started on the staircase at Dalkeith and it seems likely that it was intended for it. This was one of the last interiors to be completed, involving work

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228   Sally Jeffery

Figure 11.9  Plan of Buckingham House in St James’s Park. Plate 43 from Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 1. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

by carpenters, joiners and marble workers. Richard Neale, a marble cutter from St Michael Queenhithe parish in London, and his team of nine marble sawyers worked on it for a total of sixty-four weeks from 7 November 1709 to 27 January 1711. Neale’s contract provided for half his money to be paid to his wife in London, and he travelled back home once during the contract.55 The total expense was £95 7s 9½d.56 Twenty large trees were purchased for the Great Stair in July 1708.57 The joinery contract for the stair, dated November 1710, went to William Walker, who had held the main joinery contract for the house, and included timber work and wainscot. It provided for ‘The Steps fram’d in Purquet with ye halfe paces’, and ‘The Staircase Roome without ye. Pillars, all round in Wainscoate after the Best Manner’.58 At the same time, Walker also made alterations

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   229

to the great windows in the staircase ‘with new Cases and two new Chessess’ for £1 10s, and provided a model for the ‘Marble Bewfatt’ (buffet) in the staircase hall for six shillings, and for ‘framing of all ye marble for ye Staires’ for £2.59 A marble buffet, or curved recess, often used for the display of plate, could also be seen at Buckingham House, not in the stair hall but in the parlour next to it. After her removal to Scotland, Duchess Ann continued to celebrate her status as the widow of a royal duke and her association with the Stuarts. She preserved relics of the Duke of Monmouth – his saddle and harness, his cradle and the shirt in which he was executed. Over the chimneypiece in the Great Ante-chamber she installed Sir Godfrey Kneller’s large triple portrait of herself and her two sons which was painted soon after Monmouth’s execution (Figure 11.12).60 Skipper Henrey Phillips is recorded as carrying ‘Her Graces and two sons pictures’ in his ship to Leith in September 1706.61 Visitors ascending the main staircase were greeted by a huge equestrian portrait of the Duke of Monmouth, now at Boughton House, Northamptonshire (Figure 11.13) but seen in the photograph taken for Country Life in 1911 at the top of the stairs.

Figure 11.10  The staircase hall at Dalkeith. The buffet recess can be seen on the left. Photographer: Daniel Bochman.

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Figure 11.11  The staircase hall at Dalkeith photographed for Country Life, 1911. It shows the parquetry work on the stair treads and the equestrian portrait of the Duke of Monmouth (Figure 11.13) at the top of the stairs. Country Life Picture Library.

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The Duchess of Buccleuch Returns to Dalkeith Palace   231

Figure 11.12  Portrait of Ann, Duchess of Buccleuch and her two sons, James, Earl of Dalkeith and Lord Henry Scott, later Earl of Deloraine, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1685. The Buccleuch Collections.

The Duchess lived at Dalkeith for a number of years after her arrival in Scotland. However, she disapproved of ‘this unlucky Union’, as she called the Act of 1707, and after the collapse of the rebellion of 1715 she spent much time in London, where she died in 1732 aged eighty.62 Her body was carried to Scotland and she was buried in the church at Dalkeith. The numerous documents relating to the Duchess’s removal to Scotland and the fitting out of Dalkeith present a full picture of the

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232   Sally Jeffery

Figure 11.13  Portrait of the Duke of Monmouth on horseback, unknown artist, c. 1672–3. The Buccleuch Collections.

way in which furniture, furnishings and materials could be removed, transported and reused, and of the means used to commission new items for delivery to Scotland from a wide range of suppliers in a number of countries. They provide an insight into the advice and help she received from her family, steward, architect and craftsmen, but also into the control exercised by the Duchess herself over the appearance of the interiors of her castle at Dalkeith and the way they were presented.

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12

Women Patrons and Designers in Early Eighteenth-century Scotland: Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne Clarisse Godard Desmarest

L

ady Margaret Hamilton, Countess of Panmure (1668–1731), and Margaret Murray, Lady Nairne (1669–1747), were two Scottish noblewomen bound by close ties of friendship and kinship. Margaret Panmure, the youngest of the three daughters of Duchess Anne of Hamilton (1632–1716), was married to James Maule, 4th Earl of Panmure (c. 1658–1723). Lady Nairne’s husband was William Murray (1664–1725), the fourth son of John Murray, 1st Marquess of Atholl. Lord Panmure and Lord Nairne refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchy in 1689 and continued to support James VII/II after his forfeiture in that year. They remained loyal to his heirs, and supported the Earl of Mar’s raising the royal standard at Braemar for James VIII – Mar being Panmure’s nephew. Following the failure of the Jacobite Rising of 1715, the two committed Jacobites were imprisoned and attainted for treason, and their estates forfeited. Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne’s intercessions to save their husbands from execution were successful, and in early 1716 Lord Panmure left Scotland for the continent to join the exiled ‘Old Pretender’ (to Scottish Jacobites, the rightful King James VIII), while Lord Nairne returned to Strathord in July 1718. While their ill-fated husbands were held in prison or in exile, the women made use of the politics of patronage to secure the payment of their jointures from the general confiscation of the rebels’ estates and to preserve the interests of their families. Lady Nairne managed to sustain her claim in the Court of Session that the Strathord estates were vested in her, rather than her husband. Lady Panmure’s efforts to prevent and delay the sale of the Panmure estate were to no avail – the estate was sold in 1724. The episode does, however, show

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the political acumen of women in Scotland, a factor being made increasingly clear through recent research,1 and although Scottish noblewomen in the pre-Union period may not have enjoyed the same level of political commitment as their later counterparts, the Countess of Panmure and her eldest sister Catherine, 1st Duchess of Atholl (1662–1707) distinguished themselves as political activists in the local and national scene at the time of the Darien scheme and the 1706–7 Union debate. This chapter focuses on the aesthetic and architectural contribution of Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne. As women with a high level of education, they were involved in the building projects of their families and friends in the early years of the eighteenth century. Correspondence in the Hamilton, Panmure, Atholl and Breadalbane Papers dating from before the Jacobite Rising of 1715 shows their connections with Sir William Bruce of Kinross and Alexander Edward (1651–1708), Bruce’s draughtsman and a former Episcopalian minister in Fife.2 The letters of Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne demonstrate a remarkable understanding of architectural design which they combined with a certain expertise in estate management. Despite the forfeiture of their husbands’ estates, the two ladies were able to remain on their estates after 1715, skilfully retaining to themselves this ultimate source of power and economic substance. The importance of female patrons has long been overlooked in architectural historiography, but recent research has shown that Scotland was no different from the rest of Europe, where numerous women designed or defined the development of buildings under construction.3 For example, during the Renaissance, Catherine Briçonnet (1494–1526), Diane de Poitiers (1500–66) and Catherine de Médicis (1519–89) were involved at Chenonceau, in France. Female patron-builders in England included Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (c. 1521–1608). Known as ‘Bess of Hardwick’, she was one of the best-connected and wealthiest women in Elizabethan England and reputedly an indomitable matriarch.4 The letters and accounts attest to her detailed concern for building at Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall. After the English Civil War, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke (1590–1676) devoted much of her life to restoring the mostly ruinous family castles, among which was Appleby Castle. Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham (1632–1705), who was familiar with the buildings of the Dutch architect Pieter Post and of the Italian Andrea Palladio, designed a significant number of churches and houses, including Wotton House, in Buckinghamshire.5 Sarah Churchill, 1st Duchess of Marlborough

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Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne   235

had a fraught relationship with her architect John Vanbrugh, but played an important part in the story of Blenheim Palace. It appears from examples like these that women proved visibly influential when they were able to take charge of estates as a result of political fortunes or family misfortunes, or when left dowagers. Margaret Panmure was the daughter of the Duchess Anne of Hamilton, a prominent example of female engagement in politics and in the arts in late seventeenth-century Scotland. The Hamilton estate was confiscated during the 1650s English military occupation – and it was due to Duchess Anne’s vigorous campaigning that they were restored to the family in 1657, a year after her marriage to William Douglas, Earl of Selkirk (1634–94).6 With her husband, Duchess Anne, who bore the title in her own right rather than through marriage, embarked on a large-scale project at Hamilton which lasted from 1684 until 1700. The architect chosen for the reconstruction of the palace was James Smith, the ‘Overseer of the Royal Works’ in Scotland from 1683. Sir William Bruce was not offered this major commission, but was consulted, and the Duchess had direct access to his designs. After the death of her husband in 1694, the Duchess retained control of the estate. In 1698 she passed only the title to her eldest son, James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, so that he could represent the family as a peer in the Scottish Parliament. With James Smith, who supplied the plans, she supervised the extensions to the palace and the architect implemented the Duchess’s requirements. Concerning the design for the north wing, Smith wrote to Arran: ‘Her Grace is content that wee should make it as fine as possible so as the same be not gaudie or exceed the rules of proportion and trew symetrie with the rest of the work’.7 The Duchess even chose the sort of cornices to be used for the principal rooms in the palace. Once the palace was finished in the 1700s, an extensive landscape garden was designed for the Duchess, following the 1708 plan provided by Alexander Edward. Like her mother at Hamilton, the Countess of Panmure played a significant role on the Angus estates of her husband, at Panmure House (Figures 12.1 and 12.2) and Brechin Castle (Figures 12.3 and 12.4).8 The Earl of Panmure commissioned Alexander Edward to rebuild Brechin Castle (1696–1709),9 his secondary residence, and to expand Panmure House, the Maules’s main property.10 Therefore, Edward worked for the Duchess of Hamilton’s daughter before he was involved in the park at Hamilton Palace.11 It seems clear that Edward was supervising the improvements at Panmure House (after designs possibly by Bruce and himself) as there is a ‘Mr Alexr

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Figure 12.1  Panmure House. Plate 131 from Vitruvius Scoticus. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

Edwards Room’ in the house inventory of 1705.12 Although that room was situated on the servants’ floor, next to the soap house and the ‘Gentlemens Room’, it was still a comfortable one with a fireplace. Throughout the 1690s, Edward and Bruce worked on the offices at Panmure, on interior arrangements, and in the garden, where planting amounted to 48,000 trees in the year 1694 alone.13 A great variety of fruit trees was planted in the gardens at both Panmure House and Brechin Castle, as confirmed by a ‘catalogue of espalliers in Panmure Gardens, 1700’ and a list ‘For Brechin Castle Tarris Wall, 1698’ in Edward’s notebooks.14 Edward’s trip to the Continent (see Chapter 17), which was financed by several Scottish aristocrats including Panmure, made it possible to acquire Continental species of plants. Margaret Panmure’s correspondence with her brother the new Duke of Hamilton, in England, confirms the building accounts of the period and testifies to her personal devotion to the projects.15 Three years after Edward had returned to Scotland from his travels on the continent, she wrote from Brechin Castle to the Duke: Now as to Mr Edward both My Lord and I have spoke to him about his goieng to Preston he tells me he is to writ him selfe so no doubt will condescend on the particullar time he designes to take journey, I do assure you my Lord will not hender him, so he may goe as soon as he pleases, for any work that required his being here at this time is now att an end, but to tell the truth he could not have gone from this till now for he was in a manner undertaker for the work for neither the masons nor wrights that were imployd could have done it without him.16

Margaret Panmure understood how building works operated, with Alexander Edward being in charge of supervising the work

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Figure 12.2  Panmure House, attic, principal and ground floor plans. Plate 130 from Vitruvius Scoticus. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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Figure 12.3  Prospect of the town of Brechin. John Slezer, Theatrum Scotiae (1693). The side elevation of Brechin Castle is visible just below the church tower. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

of masons and wrights. By 1705 the interior of the west quarter of Brechin Castle, which Edward had designed, was greatly advanced.17 The eighteenth-century architectural drawings of Brechin Castle are unsigned and unattributed (Figures 12.5–12.8). However, one of them is dated April 1704 and appears to be in the hand of Alexander Edward (Figure 12.6). Margaret Panmure justified Edward’s delay in joining the Duke of Hamilton at Ashton Hall near Preston, the house the Duke had purchased in 1698 on his second marriage to the English heiress Elizabeth Gerard. Margaret Panmure’s additional comment in the same letter that ‘it is a troublesome business to be ingadged in work’ is a further example of her personal involvement in the building schemes. Lady Nairne, Lady Panmure’s friend, was also very concerned with the house she was rebuilding with her husband from the 1690s. House of Nairne was situated north of Perth on the banks of the River Ordie. Although work was done at the house in 1698, as evidenced by an agreement with James Mercer, a mason in Perth, the house went on fire in December 1704.18 A note on several family misfortunes reports that the house had ‘13 Beds, with all their pertinents, and all the Picture[s] and Furniture of the Rooms, which were all destroyed

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Lady Panmure and Lady Nairne   239

by the fire, excepting one Looking Glass, which loss may be at least valued at £1,000’.19 Lady Nairne held the masons who had ‘lade the joists too near the hearth’ responsible for it.20 On this occasion, Lady Panmure expressed her deep concern and sympathy to Lady Nairne. Soon after the fire, and instead of rebuilding the old house, Lord Nairne decided to construct a new mansion worthy of his rank (Figures 12.9 and 12.10). Sir William Bruce, for whom this would prove to be the last commission, was chosen to design a new house which was completed around 1710 at a total cost of £5,000, comprising building and furnishing.21 The house was presumably a source of financial concern to Lord and Lady Nairne as the couple were ‘grieving’ over it in 1709.22 In a letter to the Earl of Breadalbane, his cousin at Taymouth, Lord Nairne wrote that he had been supervising work on the terrace at House of Nairne despite the winter cold:

Figure 12.4  Main façade of Brechin Castle. Completed in 1711 after a design by Alexander Edward. © Louisa Humm.

I’m abroad every day Griving 19 or 15 workmen at my Tarrissis, Lap’t up in my jocky Coat which I doubt I’ll turne to a Kelt Gown soon, for I find when I sit in my Centry box my legs very cold.23

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Figure 12.5 (above)  Plan of the second storey and west front of ‘Brichen Castle’. Eighteenth century. NRS RHP35213/3.

Figure 12.6 (below)  Brechin Castle, ground floor plan, 1704. Drawing attributed to Alexander Edward. NRS RHP35166.

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Lady Nairne acknowledged the difficulty of her task in a letter of the summer of 1709 in which she mentioned the unease of being confined sick at home with fifty to sixty workmen on site.24 The political situation had been getting in the way of Lord Nairne’s building projects. After he campaigned to try and defeat the Union, Nairne took part in the 1708 Jacobite rebellion. Unlike Lord Panmure who was able to go back to his Angus estates, Lord Nairne was arrested and thrown into Edinburgh Castle, then taken to Stirling Castle and thereafter removed to London. Although he was released and had returned to Scotland by 1709, this first of his several imprisonments cost the family £1,000. During the building works at their respective houses, Lady Nairne and Lady Panmure exchanged correspondence and discussed drawings in great detail. In 1705, when Edward was involved at Panmure, he was consulted for the rebuilding of Nairne. Lord Nairne is

Figure 12.7  Brechin Castle, ground floor plan. Eighteenth century. NRS RHP35213/1.

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Figure 12.8  Brechin Castle, first floor plan. Eighteenth century. NRS RHP35213/2.

­ entioned in Edward’s ‘Memorandum of Commissions’ when he m was on the Continent and Edward had purchased for him a little drawing case of instruments.25 Edward circulated the ladies’ letters, as when Lady Nairne wrote to Lady Panmure ‘I had yrs Dear madam to night from Mr Edward’.26 Edward was then expected to visit the ruinous house. Two weeks later, Lady Nairne told Lady Panmure that Edward had not yet arrived at Nairne.27 Edward must therefore have travelled between Nairne, north of Perth, and Panmure, east of Dundee, about 40 miles away. Lady Nairne commented on the design of House of Nairne in a letter to Lady Panmure (1709): I’m very glad the designe of the House pleases you, for theres nobodys aprobation I desire more in every thing, yr amendment for my Lord’s mane closet is most reasonable, & shall be follow’d. & I acknowledge the entersoling spoyles mine, but if I have not two, one will have more the Air of a wardrob, than a Lady’s closet, however I have so much defference

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to yr oppinion, that I believe I shall rather endeavor to provide myself in the offices houses than wt an entersole since you are against it. My Lord has gone to Mar about the Cariage of the great Timber which My Lord Mar has allow’d him the favour to cut there, ‘tis above 40 miles from this, so it will be terrible worse to transport them wt horses, which is the only way they can be brought, he is much obliged to good neighbours, who all assist him wt this Timber & Lime, which is the only materials we are far from, the stone & sclate is near & the sand & watter within six yards of the Building.’28

For Lady Panmure, Lady Nairne’s closet was spoilt by an entresol or mezzanine affecting its height. Such a mezzanine next to her closet would have been practical and could have been a maid’s room, but it would also have damaged the closet, an exclusive room for informal recreation such as having tea. Lady Nairne accepted the removal of her mezzanine, as suggested by Lady Panmure, and was resolved to accommodate a room of service in the office houses. The mezzanine was a feature also present at Melville House and Kinross, Bruce’s own house, which he designed and built from 1684 to 1695. House of Nairne was demolished in 1764 and no plan of the house survives, so one can only rely on a set of two drawings. The sketch kept in the archive at Blair Castle is inscribed on its back ‘The House of Nairne of Strathord, built by William, Lord Nairne and destroyed by his nephew, James, Duke of Atholl, 1747’, and shows the elevation and entrance court of House of Nairne (Figure 12.9).29 The other drawing is a plan of part of the garden terrace with a cover inscribed ‘The Rt Honble The Earle of Bredalbane’ and endorsed ‘My Ld and Lady Nairne wt a draught of there new Garden, 22 Febr 1709’, and with a waxed seal (Figure 12.10).30 James Nairne, the grandson of Lord Nairne, noted that the house numbered ‘thirteen large rooms on a floor, besides closets with vents; it stood in the middle of a very improveable estate, six miles in extent, larger than the Island of Guernesey’.31 The house, which had a good plantation, was vaulted with cellars, kitchens, pantries, bakehouse, brewhouse, dairy and other conveniences on the ground floor. A large brook lay near the house and turned a mill. In General Roy’s Military Survey (1747–55), House of Nairne appears in a formal landscape, and connected to a small house, Mile House, 1 mile away. Alongside her concern in the provision of building materials, Lady Nairne was also interested in decoration and advised Lady Panmure in 1710 to buy a fine bed and some other suitable room furniture from the 1st Duke of Atholl (1660–1724), her brother-in-law and husband of Catherine

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Figure 12.9  ‘The House of Nairne of Strathord, built by Lord Nairne and destroyed by his nephew, James, Duke of Atholl, 1747’. NRHE SC1238193. From the collection at Blair Castle, Perthshire.

Hamilton, Margaret Panmure’s sister. She therefore worked as an intermediary between Lady Panmure and the Duke, to whom she recommended the purchase of some grander furniture for the new rooms at Blair Castle.32 Lady Nairne offered technical advice to friends and family who were commissioning work on their estates at the same time as House of Nairne was being rebuilt. In 1707 she supplied the 1st Duke of Atholl with a drawing for the new Court of Regality Court-House at Logierait, south-east of Blair Atholl.33 She later reported on the inadequate liming of the courthouse. In 1709 she had to stop working on her drawings for House of Nairne as she was asked by her husband to work on proposed additions to Blair Castle, the principal seat of the Duke of Atholl.34 Lady Nairne must have discussed the design of Blair with Bruce as she was particularly grateful to the architect for writing a long letter to her. She even asked the Duke if he could possibly offer a deer to Sir William Bruce, who was sick. She considered a venison ‘broath’ could help the architect recover, because the death of Bruce would, in her own words, be a ‘national loss’.35 Lady Nairne was happy to exchange knowledge and goods. By 1709 planting was carried out on the Nairne estate and Lady Nairne was addressing her thanks to the Earl of Breadalbane, her husband’s cousin, for the slates and firs to be used at the house and in the park of Nairne. She also sent him a sketch of the gardens at House of Nairne for him to agree. It seems that for some time Lady

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Nairne’s designs for House of Nairne were the only ones in existence, as she prayed the Earl of Breadalbane to return them as ‘ill as they [were], they [were] the only draughts of the wholl designe that [were] in being’.36 In a letter to the Earl of Breadalbane probably dating from 1709 and attached to the sketch of the garden terrace, Lady Nairne explains that her drawing only showed the east end of the terraces as the paper was not large enough for the whole.37 Her comments on Lord Nairne’s terraces fully detail the practical and aesthetic effect of the presence of a water fountain on the first terrace :

Figure 12.10  Draft of the new garden at Nairne. Included in a letter from Margaret Nairne to the Earl of Breadalbane, dated 22 February 1709. NRS GD112/39/225/22/2.

little round at the end of the first terrace is a spring; which feeds the pond my Ld thought it would be very pretty to have this little plain about it for tis excellent water besides it gives an agreeable variety to the finishing of the walkes, & the rising ground and steps above it something resemble yr Mount, which my Lord is so fond of.38

Because of the numerous firs provided by the Earl, a good plantation at House of Nairne bore the name ‘Breadalbane Hill’.39 Lady Nairne could make some aesthetic judgement about the irregular firs

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breaking the straight lines of birches at Nairne: ‘the streight line of birch, through the irregular firrs, makes a very agreeable diversity’.40 Sir William Bruce himself seems to have relied on Lady Nairne’s designs as she reported: ‘Bruce says I can do a little of that kind’.41 To the Earl of Breadalbane, Lady Nairne gave a precise account of the progress of the new work at House of Nairne in September 1711: the principal house is all sarked and just now being slated; the coat of arms and flowerpots upon the west timpan & doing by Mr Morgan with all the hast he can for the East, the plumer is preparing his tables, & will begin tomorrow to cast the lead for the platform. John Fair is setting up the cupola. The south office house is quite ended, except a gula which is to be under the sclates, which is now hewing, and the rooff for it is bound and ready to fit on. The north office house, the one half of it is near the hight, the other half is to be fallen to very quickly, & John Fair assures my Lord all shall be ready to sclate befor winter.42

Lady Nairne’s engagement in the work comes through in this letter and, in the use of technical language, an idea of her expertise is also clear. The main structure of Nairne was reaching its final stage by September 1711, with the coat of arms being cut and the roof slated, and John Fair and Alexander McGill working on the cupola. She could recommend the best artisans and suggested appropriate masons in 1710 for the works at Blair Castle, some being best at hewing and others at laying.43 She was pleased to tell the Duke that Alexander McGill had approved of her sketch for the new work at Blair, and of her disposition of the windows and chimneys.44 That expertise clearly extended to the wider gardens also, and the Duke’s trees at Huntingtower were to be used for the water pipes of Blair Castle while John Fair was to bring wrights for boring the pipes. In 1723 she provided a layout for some plantations at Blair on ‘Mary Hill’, a hill named after the late Duchess of Atholl.45 Lady Nairne recommended that some young trees be taken out of the Duke’s nursery and she suggested the use of holly for some straight lines on the hill. She also supplied the Duke with a design for the west avenue at Blair Castle. Kinship was therefore essential in the Atholl family, and in 1736 Lady Nairne sent family pictures to the Atholls at Dunkeld to protect her family belongings at House of Nairne.46 Paradoxically, Margaret Panmure and Margaret Nairne were able to develop their full talent in politics and in estate management when political vicissitudes affected their families. As a wealthy Lowland nobleman, Panmure gathered support for the Jacobites in

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1715 and raised a regiment. He fought alongside the Earl of Mar at the battle of Sheriffmuir where he was seriously wounded. After entertaining King James VIII/III by proxy at Brechin Castle on 2 January 1716, Panmure fled to France and followed the Jacobite court into exile, travelling to Paris, Saint-Germain and Avignon, successively.47 The consequences for Panmure were serious as his estate was forfeited by the victorious Whig regime in an attempt to suppress Jacobitism, as were those of the Earl Marischal, the Earl of Mar and the Earl of Southesk. The Nairne estate was also forfeited after 1715. Through vigorous campaigning and the efficient use of family circles and friends, Margaret Panmure worked to secure her jointure from the general confiscation of the rebels’ estates (the payment of which she obtained in 1719) and to preserve the interests of the family by resisting forfeiture and delaying sale. She managed to maintain control of Brechin and Panmure by obtaining a lease from the Forfeited Estates Commissioners in 1718,48 and then from the York Buildings Company which bought the estates in April 1724 for the sum of £60,400. The purchaser was thereafter bound to pay Margaret Panmure’s jointure and she to make the payment of a rent for Panmure and Brechin.49 So the Countess, by being a tenant of the mansion house of Panmure and surrounding parks, virtually remained in full possession of Panmure while her husband, who refused to pay allegiance to the new monarch, remained in exile from 1716 to his death in 1723. He was then succeeded by his brother Harry Maule (1659–1734) as representative of the family. The Countess transferred the lease granted by the York Buildings Company for Brechin Castle and its parks to Harry Maule in April 1724.50 Margaret was left to oversee the work on her property, supervise the estate management, receive payment from tenants and pay the bills. No doubt is ever expressed in her letters that sooner or later the inheritance of their forefathers would be recovered. A list of the Earl and Countess of Panmure’s servants at Martinmas 1715 (autumn) numbers as many as sixty servants, including those of the household and garden at Panmure House, Edinburgh and Brechin Castle.51 The lawyers in London as well as the merchants, masons and workmen were paid out of the rents of the estate.52 As head of the house, she oversaw the activities of the servants and knew which designers and craftsmen to hire. She was particularly concerned with the enclosure of the grounds and the plantation of trees and believed that cultivating and exploiting Panmure and Brechin were sure ways of protecting them from destruction. She drew a precise account of the number of trees planted since her

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husband left, which numbered about 10,000 in August 1716 and 40,000 in January 1717.53 She watched over the Earl’s nurseries, knew when the best season for planting was and implemented the Earl’s garden design. In December 1716, as the Commissioners were about to name factors to the estate and as the Countess was anxious to secure a tack, she informed the Earl that the planting of the great alleys at Panmure and Brechin would have to be postponed because of the frost.54 The Countess also tried her best to prevent poaching on the estates.55 In October 1718 she informed him that ‘the new park [at Brechin Castle] is planted round as you directed so farr as the dyke goes which is near the goos dub’.56 She refers here to a place near the duck pond. Numerous garden accounts addressed in name to her, and discharges for seeds and plants, prove that Lady Panmure was supervising the tree plantations and implementing the Earl’s garden design from 1715.57 In May 1721, in the hope of entertaining her husband at a time when they were facing serious financial difficulties, she sent the Earl an amusing report of the plantations at Panmure: now from the windows of the first floor the sight of the Castellio del Afflecko is intirely obstructed as is also the Montanio del Sidliano and I believe in a year or two more they will not be seen from the high dining room but before that time I pray God you are also thriving very well especially on the south side of the Rivuleto del Clerio . . . the beeches in Gallio haugh are wonderfully grown they mixt with the firrs on the grounds above that makes a beauty full landskip (at least in my eyes) the Mount of firrs on Crombello hill now begins to appear well and the Hamiltonia Mount (as the vulgar now call it) in the south deer park makes now some appearance from the windows to the south, it being also planted wt firs. 58

The Earl of Panmure had travelled on the Continent and through Italy in 1717–18, as is shown by the journal of a tour he made with Dr Blair, in the Panmure Papers.59 This may explain the Countess’s playful Italianisation of local names. Castle Affleck was a nearby tower house, ‘Montanio del Sidliano’ refers to the Sidlaw Hills in Perth and Angus, ‘Rivuleto del Clerio’ to the Clearie Burn to the north of the house, while ‘Hamiltonia Mount’ may refer to the mount to the south-east of the house. ‘Crombello hill’, or Crombie Hill, was situated north of the house. By August 1721 the plantings on each side of the west avenue had grown very thick and needed to be thinned.60

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Although she was happy to supply her very affectionate husband with some reports on the estate, the Earl’s constant refusal to accept the succession to the throne and return home placed a severe strain on the Countess’s finances. By then, the family’s debts were increasing and the Countess was pressing her husband to help her out with the estate. On her visit to him in France in 1719, the Countess suggested that she would travel ‘in a post chaise’ between Calais and Dover to save expenses.61 The Earl of Panmure was then solely relying on his wife’s jointure to make a living as the French government was increasingly unable to pay the pensions of the Jacobites from 1717 to 1718 (France was heavily in debt).62 On her visit to Paris, the Countess remitted money to the Earl and his nephew, Mr James Maule, as accounts for 1719–21 demonstrate.63 Whereas in his early life the Earl had shown an interest in politics, he occupied himself during his exile by collecting valuable manuscripts and records of his family’s history. With James Maule he made a pilgrimage to the places in Normandy where the Maules (who claimed Norman descent) had flourished – the 1st Lord Maule accompanied William the Conqueror into England.64 He even managed to establish a connection with the French House of Maules. After the Earl’s death, Margaret Panmure maintained a correspondence with her brother-in-law and kept him informed of the rise in the stocks of the York Buildings Company and of the fluctuating price of oats and grain.65 Archibald Grant of Monymusk and Archibald Garden of Troup obtained an agreement for most of the Panmure land and estates, along with the forfeited estates of Marishal, Southesk and Pitcairn, from the York Buildings Company on 9 November 1728, and the Panmure family bought the estate back in 1764.66 Lady Nairne is well known to historians for her political activism, and her letters are good accounts of the social and political life of eighteenth-century Scotland. She lived to see the two main Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and each time was kept informed of the progress of the Jacobites. Both her husband and her son shared the Earl of Mar’s enthusiasm and got involved in the Jacobite cause.67 Following the battle of Preston (1715), they were held prisoner and she was instrumental in preventing her husband’s execution (the Earl of Derwentwater and Viscount Kenmure were both beheaded). Lord Nairne was liberated in August 1717, but his estates remained forfeited. From 1716 Lord and Lady Nairne sought a reversal of forfeiture, and Lady Nairne produced evidence in the Court of Session that the forfeited Strathord estates were vested in her and did not

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belong to her husband. Her marriage contract of 1691 specified that both the title, Baroness Nairne, and the actual property passed to her from her father, not from her husband. The Court of Session decided in her favour and an Act of 1738 rescinded the forfeiture.68 From 1715 until her death in 1747, Lady Nairne effectively had total autonomy over her estates, more evidently so during her twentytwo-year widowhood. Lady Nairne and Lady Panmure’s letters show that they were equally well-educated ladies who could read Epicetus’s Morals69 or the Paris Gazette for news of the ‘Chevalier’,70 and exchange poetic verses.71 Lady Margaret Panmure’s acquaintance with the classics appears in her annotation of Latin books in the Panmure library.72 Her philosophy in most difficult times was permeated with biblical allusions: let us follow if possible Solomons advice which is to eat and drink and be merry for a merry heart doeth good like a medicine but a broken spirit drieth the bones, and since we both (thank God) enjoys good health lett us indeavour to be easie under the want of other comforts and hope yet for a better time coming as to our own particular circumstances.73

In the Panmure inventory of 1705, the Countess’s closet contained an inlaid guitar, a further indication of her enjoyment of the arts. Both ladies were active in polite society. Among the Maule family papers is a printed advertisement, dated 15 February 1728, for the setting up of Edinburgh’s first assembly rooms by order of ‘The Right Honourable Margaret Countess of Panmure, Henrietta Hamilton Lady Orbeston, Elizabeth Hamilton Lady Northberwick, and Katharine Johnston Lady Newhall’.74 Lady Orbistoun and Lady Panmure codified the rules of this new assembly, and the writs belonging to and concerning the Edinburgh Assembly in custody of the Countess of Panmure were delivered up on the latter’s death.75 Lady Orbistoun’s name appears on the plan for the second floor at Brechin Castle by Alexander Edward and dated April 1704 (Figure 12.5).76 ‘Lady Orbistons Room’, with a closet and a drawing room attached, looked north and west and stood exactly above Lady Panmure’s room. Margaret sold the whole household plenishing and furniture of Panmure House, Brechin Castle and Panmure House in the Canongate, Edinburgh to her friend in 1716 and leased Brechin to her in May 1717, in an attempt to forestall the confiscation of the estates, which happened in June 1717.77 This was presumably done in an attempt to secrete assets from the Commissioners in case her

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property was frozen. Some of the household furniture of Panmure was sent to Glamis in June 1716.78 Household matters were of equal concern to Lady Nairne and Lady Panmure. Lady Nairne was knitting a plaid for Lady Panmure in 1705 and informed her she had found a new way of making buttons.79 Lady Nairne complained about the weaver who had spoilt the colour and the quality of the fabric of the plaid she had intended for Lady Panmure. Lady Nairne also made an argument about the necessity of fostering Scottish manufacturing in a post-Union context: none shall wear or use any thing that is not Scots Manufactury, sugar and spice excepted, that puts me in mind to ask yr Ldsp what sort of Scots worset stuffs are most worn, whether Damasks, lustrings, plain, etc for being now to go out mourning, & to take off a gown & petycoat, which I am resolv’d shall be nothing but Scots worset.80

It is symptomatic that twenty years later the ladies imposed as one of the rules of the Edinburgh Assembly that dancers were to be wearing only Scottish cloth. For Lady Nairne, the woollen manufactory in Scotland would soon be superior to that found in England, which was to be a source of great national pride: ‘I’m so true a Scots woman as not to grumble it will be to Scotland’s honour to outdo England in their woollen manufactury’.81 Her wish for Scotland to progressively surpass England’s woollen manufacture finds an echo in the transactions of the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland, established in Edinburgh in 1723, as well as in the incentives of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures (1727). Lady Nairne was aware that she would be looked down on by the courtiers in London had they known she was wearing worsted at home in ‘poor old Scotland’.82 This contempt was in line with the daily mocking directed at North Britons in the London Parliament after the 1707 Union. Although she was in London on several occasions in 1708–9, mainly for political purposes, Lady Nairne remained true to her heart and country and insisted that the Court in London did not change her. She took advantage of her visits to the new British capital to learn the art of candlemaking from ‘tallow chandlers’ and that of bleaching wax ‘which [was] done by being melted into very thin casks, & laid in the sun, & constantly watered, the hotter sun the sooner bleached’.83 Her letters are marked by a sense of humour, as when she wrote that an interview with the Queen had been easier to arrange than one with a London-based candlemaker.

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Given the talent of her mother, and the rich marriage trousseau she was given by the Duke of Hamilton on her wedding in 1687, it is perhaps not surprising that Margaret Hamilton developed a sense of refinement and good husbandry, as well as a talent for architecture and estate management.84 The friendship she enjoyed with another Jacobite wife seems to have offered both correspondents great relief in times of hardship, be they the imprisonments of their husbands, the forfeiture of their estates, the long campaign to claim their jointures, or even the 1704 fire at House of Nairne. Lady Nairne’s reliable draughtsmanship was greatly valued by her contemporaries, fellow aristocrats as well as architects and craftsmen. In the early eighteenth century, however, Margaret Panmure and Margaret Nairne were not the only ladies concerned with gardening and the aesthetics of parks. In a Short Treatise on Forest-Trees, Acquaticks, Ever-Greens, Fences and Grass-Seeds, a text addressed to his grandson, Thomas Hamilton, the 6th Earl of Haddington (1680–1735), acknowledges the importance of his wife Helen Hope, sister of the 1st Earl of Hopetoun, in the laying out of the parks, avenues and plantations at Tyninghame in East Lothian.85 Lady Haddington carried out plantations shortly after she and her husband went to live at Tyninghame in 1700. Lord Haddington knew about Mar’s and Bruce’s works, and was persuaded to give over his fondness of sport and acquire an interest in planting. In 1707 Lady Haddington began to enclose and plant the muir of Tyninghame, a 400-acre field of little value, which she called Binning Wood. The planting soon prospered and the couple decided to introduce formality in the park, with walks radiating out from a centre. In the Short Treatise, Lord Haddington explains that the Earl of Hopetoun, the Earl of Marchmont and Sir John Bruce came to offer advice, and they went to the field accompanied by Lady Haddington – fuller details of this episode are given in Chapter 15. Among the contemporaries, Daniel Defoe did not fail to admire the remarkable plantations initiated by the Countess.

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13

Architectural Works by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Rory Lamb

T

he Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655–1716) is known to posterity as ‘The Patriot’ for his fierce opposition to the 1707 Act of Union.1 However, Fletcher also exemplified the European-Scot, with a grasp of Continental politics which spurred him to publish A Discourse Concerning the Affairs of Spain (1698), in Italian, in which he voiced concern about the potential repercussions of a union between the French and Spanish royal families.2 His awareness arose from a lifetime of Continental travels, amongst which were extensive periods of exile resulting from outspoken criticism of the authority of the Duke of Lauderdale and later that of King James VII/II.3 Within this European context sit a set of architectural designs dating from the decades after Fletcher’s reestablishment at Saltoun in East Lothian (c. 1690). These can be understood in light of the contemporary European architecture known to him through exile in various Continental centres, primarily Paris and Amsterdam, in addition to his classical education and Grand Tour received under his tutor, the Episcopalian rector of East Saltoun, Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury (1643–1715).4 Additionally, Fletcher’s vast library also contained many books on architecture and provided further source material for his forays into design. To understand how these factors affected his amateur architectural output it is necessary first to visualise the drawings themselves. Amongst a collection of drawings relating to Saltoun Hall, mostly comprising the designs for its early nineteenth-century ­transformation by William Burn, are seven sheets which make up Fletcher’s known architectural work. This small folio is not the

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single project that the catalogue suggests it to be, sheet 6a being a plan distinct from the project of sheets 1–6. This individual sheet is not in Fletcher’s hand but was drawn by someone else at a later date, and is entitled ‘Ane Attempt towards recovering (from a description given in a letter) The Plan of a House, sent by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun Esqr to his Brother, in the year 1699’ (Figure 13.1). This letter survives and the detail in which Andrew wrote to Henry Fletcher helps us understand his amateur designing. The design was described as being the result of recent studies in ‘the rules of proportions for privat houses not inferior to what the Greeks had for their Temples’, and Fletcher goes on to suggest that Henry would be desirous of ‘such a house’.5 He confirms that in addition to the enclosed plan an elevation was shortly to follow, before launching into a thorough description of the whole building. Although neither of the original drawings is known to survive, his descriptions and the plan drawn from them provide a clear impression of the building’s appearance: it was to have two storeys and ‘no vaults nor garrets’, but was to be decorated with ‘bases, archit:[raves], frises & cornishes . . . with pilasters on the corners’, as well as extending to back courts and staircases.6 These features indicate that Fletcher had, by 1699, absorbed the Classical architectural vocabulary which would be brought to bear in his other project, as we shall see. Indeed, a first-hand knowledge of Italian domestic architecture is apparent, as much of the letter is taken up with Fletcher’s musings on the Italians’ use of high storeys with small windows to control heat. He observes that the Scots might conversely employ this practice ‘to have a great deal of air without cold . . . [for] we have another enimy to great windows, which is winds and storms’. His conclusion of the exposition notes ‘in such a house . . . I belive I would be more conveniently loged than where I am; and if the rooms were 22ft cubical, more noblely’. The tone of the letter reflects a boyish enthusiasm for his new-found interest, inspiring this early design, which he was eager to show off to his brother. Unfortunately, as the plan is a reconstruction, we cannot tell the quality of Fletcher’s own draughtsmanship at this point to compare it with the other designs, yet this project serves as a helpful introduction to his architectural understanding. The second, undated, project survives in greater visual detail, consisting of two elevations and four plans, presumably in Fletcher’s own hand. Sheets 1 and 2 are rear and front elevations respectively, showing a cuboid house with a pyramidal roof and Classical window mouldings (Figure 13.2). The elevations differ so much

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Figure 13.1  Reconstructed plan of a house for Henry Fletcher (1699). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 17873 (sheet 6a). Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

in their scale and arrangement that they could easily be distinct designs, one crowned by a balustrade of urns and the other with statuary, yet they are reconciled in the plans which confirm a front façade of five bays and a rear of three. Sheet 3 does not conform to either the elevations or the other plans and seems to be a grand early scheme for the basement, with rear turnpike stairs, a central staircase and tripartite window and door arrangements in the centre of three sides. The next plan is the principal floor with grand rooms at the front and a vast hall behind, separated by a central spine containing a small bedroom and the staircase (Figure 13.3). This drawing provides Fletcher’s notation of room sizes and heights accompanied by a scale of 60ft, ten to the inch, which can be used to inform the other drawings. Nonetheless, a margin of error must be applied to this scale as, despite Fletcher’s insistence on his ability in proportion, this plan contains multiple inconsistencies in the total width depending on whether it is measured across the front face,

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Figure 13.2  Front (L) and rear (R) elevations of a house (c. 1707). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 17873 (sheets 1 and 2). Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

the back face or through the centre of the rooms.7 Likewise, when the two elevations are aligned, their cornices are of neither matching design nor matching height. Clearly, one must remember Fletcher’s amateurism when reading his drawings. One of the other floor plans has been lost, making it challenging to determine whether sheet 5 is the first or second floor of the house (Figure 13.4). It also shows a long room to the rear of the building and indicates the presence there of a barrel vault, suggesting that this shows the second storey of the grand hall (i.e. the first floor), which the previous plan marked as 24ft high, with the vault springing from just above the top of the window recesses. However, this interpretation is confused by the presence on the plan of a door onto the landing, an arrangement which at first-floor level would require an opening in the arc of the vault. Instead, the sheet could be read as the second-floor plan, showing a second large room of the same length and breadth that spanned the rear of the building and indicating the vault below it. In both readings, it is unclear why the vault is shown rising within an inset rectangle rather than from

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Figure 13.3  Principal floor plan (c. 1707). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 17873 (sheet 4).. Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

the outer walls of the room. The second suggestion offers the possibility that this space accommodated Fletcher’s large library, and the plan shows recesses flanking the chimney breasts which could have held bookshelves. In the 1699 letter, Fletcher suggests that his brother ‘keep all abouve the hall for [a] liberary’ thereby providing a precedent for this arrangement in his own designs.8 Likewise, a later tradition in Scottish houses places the library above a hall, as at Arniston (1726) and Penicuik (1760), the latter’s subsequent rear façade adopting a remarkable likeness to Fletcher’s. The final plan, sheet 6, shows the basement, with seven rooms and an exit into a surrounding sunken area bordered by a retaining wall. The wall is lined by a sequence of curved niches, carefully

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Figure 13.4  Upper floor plan (c. 1707). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 17873 (sheet 5). Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

arranged to complement the different fenestration on either façade, although their purpose is unclear as they would barely be visible to residents and guests on the principal floors, precluding their use to hold sculpture. Their detail on plan shows they stand proud of the wall, suggesting they may have been intended to have architrave surrounds (Figure 13.5). Applying the dimensions and scale from the principal plan to the other drawings, a section of the building can be created on the axis through the building’s doors (Figure 13.6). Despite the apparent discrepancy of the two elevations, the four floors of the front pile can be aligned with the three floors of the rear pile, assuming the floor structures to be around 1ft deep. The basement height is taken from the two elevations which show the level of the principal floor. The principal plan in turn informs us that the front rooms were 12ft high while the grand hall was 24ft high. Taking the first-floor rooms, which probably housed the principal bedrooms, also to be 12ft high,

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Figure 13.5  Basement plan (c. 1707). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 17873 (sheet 6). Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

we arrive at a level of 26ft at the front (two rooms of 12ft height and two floor structures of 1ft, one above one between) and 25ft behind (hall of 24ft and floor above of 1ft). This conforms to Fletcher’s plans if we understand sheet 5 as the top floor which shows steps from the landing into the room above the grand hall accounting for the 1ft difference (Figure 13.4). Creating the section of the house opened the way for a 3D model to be constructed from which a more complete understanding of the house was gleaned (Figure 13.7). As the drawing set contains no side elevations, Fletcher’s use of bays on the sides to transition from front to back is unknown and the balustrade is subsequently left uninterrupted. The windows on these sides were positioned once the floors and stair landings of the central spine were established by using a scale of 1:2 on their width of 3ft from Figure 13.3. Having attempted to understand the drawings themselves, this design is further illuminated by considering it within the context

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Figure 13.6  Section of Fletcher’s house design. Rory Lamb.

of contemporary European architecture. Fletcher lived in several European countries during the late seventeenth century and their architectural traditions thoroughly inform his work.9 A good starting point is the Château de Marly, one of Louis XIV’s residences, with twelve pavilions flanking the royal building in a formal landscape. Fletcher was in Paris in October 1683 and could have learned of or even seen the pavilions, conceived by François Mansart in 1679 and under construction from 1683 to 1684.10 The Marly pavilions seem a plausible general model: despite only being of two bays, they utilise the same square façade and pyramidal roof as the Fletcher design, as well as the rusticated quoins and decorative urns. Charles le Brun’s lavish French Baroque decoration, however, is not of the same ilk as Fletcher’s stripped-back Palladianism, the former being more a manifestation of the decorative style emulating from Versailles.11 Indeed, it is perhaps doubtful whether Fletcher, ever suspicious of royal power, would model his house on a residence of the monarch on whose absolutism he commented, ‘We are told that there is not a slave in France. I say there is not a free man in France.’12 Indeed, these pavilions were intended as the lodgings of the courtiers who waited on Louis at his hunting lodge, lined up under the eye of

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Figure 13.7  Stills of Fletcher’s house design from 3D model. Rory Lamb.

his royal pavilion. The buildings were therefore an architectural expression of the subordination of Louis’ subjects to his power, and thus perhaps too politically charged for Fletcher to draw from them more than basic inspiration. His sober style more closely reflects the influence of Inigo Jones’ Palladian work in London, where we find Fletcher in hiding intermittently between 1668 and 1683.13 Additionally, his publication on the regulation of government in 1703 recounts a

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conversation which took place in London, revealing that Fletcher, like many Scots nobles, was there shortly before he produced his architectural designs.14 Fletcher’s house bears resemblance to much of Jones’ work, including his famed Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, and, more particularly, Lindsey House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields which features the same arrangement of floors, windows and façade bays, and uses very similar window mouldings. However, a decisive indicator of Jones’ influence are the pavilion houses of St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden which adopted a similar arrangement as the rear façade of the house, with a rusticated base, large principal floor windows and smaller upper ones.15 On 21 April 1707 one Dr Gregory Lether wrote to Fletcher that he was sending a copy of the ‘draught of Covent Garden Church’ taken from an original held by Nicholas Hawksmoor, which Lether hoped ‘will satisfye all that you have to doe with it’, proving Fletcher’s interest in this building.16 This influence is also clear in the buildings designed by Colen Campbell displayed in Vitruvius Britannicus. Campbell’s goal to resurrect the style of Jones in the early eighteenth century explains why his work employs many similar motifs and themes as those of the earlier Scottish amateur.17 Comparing designs like Stourhead House and Rolls House with Fletcher’s establishes a definite decorative connection in the window and door mouldings, balustrades and basement rustication. Dr Lether’s letter of April 1707 is a delayed reply to one received from Fletcher in April the previous year which clearly contained a list of questions on architectural matters. The date indicates that Fletcher’s architectural interests were maintained even at the height of his political involvement in the debates surrounding the Act of Union. Lether goes on to draw further attention to the interplay of architectural ideas across the Scottish-English border to which Andrew Fletcher was party. As well as hunting for Jones’ drawings, Lether informs us that Fletcher had asked him to make enquiries about architectural problems not only with Sir Christopher Wren but also ‘Mr [William] Talman’, Comptroller of the Royal Works from 1689 to 1702 and one of the foremost English country house designers of the period, well known for his houses like Chatsworth and Dyrham Park and for his quirky Baroque style.18 This contact with prominent Classical architects reminds us that lairds like Fletcher were using their status to develop their amateur skills from professional advice, and in doing so brought home developments from outside Scotland. Indeed, in the second half of his correspondence, Lether conveys an answer from Sir Christopher

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Figure 13.8  Sketch of a roof design by Christopher Wren, redrawn by Dr Gregory Lether (1707). NLS Saltoun Papers, MS 16502 (208–9). Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

Wren, with a small accompanying diagram, to a query of Fletcher’s regarding roof construction (Figure 13.8).19 The discussion is focused on how far a roof might project over the walls of a house before becoming structurally unstable and clearly does not refer directly to the project at hand, yet it indicates both Fletcher’s engagement with the technical aspects of design, beyond a simple aesthetic interest in proportion and ornament, and that he was specifically thinking about domestic designs using pitched roofs. Such serious enquiries, alongside the significant mention of Jones’ church, suggest that the letter’s date of 1707 may help place Fletcher’s otherwise undated project. As a whole, the document displays the lengths to which Fletcher went to improve his knowledge of architecture, directly referencing four of the senior English architects of the seventeenth century (Jones, Hawksmoor, Talman and Wren) and implying his

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broad knowledge of contemporary English buildings. Lether wrote from London on English matters yet, given his close involvement with the question of Scottish political identity, it is frustrating that we do not know whether Fletcher was in correspondence with, or had the opportunity to meet, Scottish architects like James Smith and Sir William Bruce. Fletcher would also have had first-hand familiarity with Dutch Classicism, a style that was influential in England in the late seventeenth century.20 He had studied in the Netherlands in his youth, and his biographer, William Mackenzie, tells us he ‘was to know [Holland] in later years very intimately’, living there during his time in exile with the Dukes of Monmouth and Argyll in 1683 as well as with William of Orange before the 1688 revolution.21 The Netherlands had become a haven for fugitives from Scotland due to its Protestantism: a Scots colony was established in Rotterdam and William of Orange helped shelter it from the surrounding Catholic monarchs aroused against them by James VII/II.22 In 1688 Fletcher was in The Hague with his former tutor Gilbert Burnet preparing for the invasion.23 There he would have seen Jacob van Campen’s Mauritshuis, a palatial residence designed in 1633 and widely admired as the model of Dutch Palladianism.24 He would also have encountered the works of Philips Vingboons, whose Classical house designs were popular in and around Amsterdam.25 Vingboons’ plate book Afbeelsels der Voornaemste Gebouven contains examples (e.g. plate 41) of houses with tripartite façade blocks arranged precisely like Fletcher’s rear façade. Another Vingboons design shows a house for one Jacob Burchgraaf that likewise employs this arrangement.26 Here, then, is a supplement to Fletcher’s experience of English Classicism, Dutch architecture bringing a similarly Palladian influence into his work, perhaps recalling his appreciation of Holland and its political haven. Fletcher’s own library at Saltoun Castle also enlightens the background to his architectural projects. He seems to have been renowned for his broad knowledge, described by George Lockhart of Carnwarth in 1703 as ‘master of the English, Latin, Greek, French and Italian Languages, and was well versed in history, the civil law, and all kinds of learning’.27 This scope was apparent in his library, considered to be one of the finest private libraries in Scotland, in which each category was broken down into sections for each European country, a further testament to Fletcher’s intellectual cosmopolitanism.28 A comprehensive catalogue of the library exists from 1708 in which the architecture section consists of all the major Italian treatises,

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except Alberti, and an up-to-date collection of French architectural theory including Blondel’s Cours d’architecture (1683) and works by Perrault (d. 1688).29 Descriptive books of the Palace of Versailles and its paintings indicate that he was interested in the French royal palaces. Likewise, a description of the Villa Borghese and a plate book by Pietro Ferrerio called Palazzi di Roma prove an interest in Italian domestic buildings, supplementing the natural inclusion of the villas of Palladio’s Quattro Libri. Numerous examples in Ferrerio’s volumes provide sources for Fletcher’s designs, including the Palazzo del S. Marchese Silvestri Incontro and the Palazzo Muti Papazurri. Fletcher was clearly engaged with Italian culture, his essay Discourses Concerning the Affairs of Spain (1698) being published in Italian in Naples, and he would no doubt have visited the country on his Grand Tour.30 There is, perhaps, a more precise Italian connection, however, in Fletcher’s large vaulted hall. This is the salone of Poggio a Caiano, Lorenzo de Medici’s villa built by Guiliano da Sangallo in the 1480s and completed by Pope Leo X Medici in the early sixteenth century, which is remarkably similar to what the plans and 3D model tell us about Fletcher’s hall. Philip Foster’s account of the villa states that the hall’s height is 24 brachia high, which he tells us is the harmonic mean of its length and breadth.31 Fletcher records his hall as 24 Scots ft high. The length and breadth (40ft and 16ft) create a harmonic mean rounded to 22.85ft, not 24, which could have been achieved with a breadth of 1ft less. However, in addition to its height, Fletcher’s hall matches Poggio’s salone in that it is barrel-vaulted, lies laterally across the building’s plan, rises through two storeys and has doorways at either end (niches in Fletcher’s design). We know from Fletcher’s letter of 1699 of his awareness of Italian villas as he compares their benefits to Scottish housing and Poggio, as an influential early Renaissance model, could well have been one which he knew.32 Other possibilities for the origin of this feature are found in the work of Van Campen and Vingboons. Amsterdam Town Hall, now the Royal Palace, was Van Campen’s masterpiece and includes a vast barrel-vaulted entrance hall in three storeys, which Fletcher would have known as the premier civic building of the city in his day.33 Interestingly, Vingboons also provided a design for a town hall, unexecuted, to which Fletcher’s work bears close resemblance. Its central façade has a row of five bays of large windows opening onto a double-height, coved hall, and smaller windows illuminate a long open room above it.34 This arrangement is markedly similar to Fletcher’s rear façade in the layout of spaces and the windows themselves.

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Finally, the statuary on the roof of the rear façade can be identified with some precision. Four figures top the balustrade. The outer two figures, one of which appears feminine, the other bearded, have a martial aspect. This suggests a pairing of Minerva and Mars, though neither provides further indicators of their identity. The left-hand figure of the central pair is denoted as Justice by her set of scales. The right-hand figure is more obscure and much harder to read: it seems to stand side on and hold an elevated object to its right. An initial reading of this as the allegorical pairing of Justice and Peace, the latter identified with a trumpet, proved tenuous, for the object little resembles a trumpet, and Peace would be more easily recognised through the attributes of an olive branch or a dove. A second possibility has more substance and can be understood through considering Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s An Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338) where we find two persons balancing the scales of Justice: Commutative Justice and Retributive Justice. The latter of these is seen to dispense justice by the sword, again a possibility for the statue’s subject, but neither does the object look like a sword, nor does the figure look like it is grasping one. Rather, closer inspection of Fletcher’s drawing reveals that the figure is winged and holds a measuring device in her elevated hand and an object involving ropes in the lowered one. A combination of such attributes is found in Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata, revealing the figure to be the Greek goddess Nemesis, a deity of the underworld who tempered the benefits of Fortune and brought harsh justice to the world.35 Supplementing Alciato’s images, where we find recurring attributes of a wheel, wings, a sword, a cubit measure and a bridle, is the description provided by Mesomedes of Crete’s Hymn to Nemesis (2nd century): Nemesis, winged one that tilts life’s balance, Dark-eyed goddess, daughter of Justice, That curbest the vain neighings of mortals with thy adamant bit, And in thy hatred of their pernicious insolence drivest out black resentment: Under thy wheel that neither stands nor follows A fixed track men’s gleaming fortune turns about, Unobserved, thou treadest at their heel; The haughty neck thou bendest; Under thy forearm thou measurest off life, And ever thou turnest thy frowning gaze into men’s hearts, With the scales in thy hand.

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Be Gracious blest dispenser of justice, Nemesis, winged one that tilts life’s balance. Of Nemesis we sing, undying goddess, Stern Victory with spreading wings infallible Seated by the throne of Justice, Of thee that resentest man’s arrogance and sweepest it down to Tartarus.36

Mesomedes provides an exhaustive reading of the objects on the statue’s person and highlights that the labelling of Retributive Justice had some accuracy. It gives us a glimpse into the reasoning behind Fletcher’s selecting this rather unexpected choice of deity for his statuary. Firstly, the hymn establishes a traditional link between Justice and Nemesis as mother and daughter, which is also mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus.37 However the poem’s most useful point is its association of Nemesis with corrupt power as a figure which curbs the arrogance of the fortunate. From such an association, one quickly recalls Fletcher’s own struggle with ruling despots in his critiques of absolutism and opposition to the unchecked power of Lauderdale and King James. Indeed, in 1703 Fletcher published The Right Regulation of Government which documents a conversation held at the house of the Earl of Cromarty in London. In it Fletcher condemns the power of the absolutist prince and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a select elite.38 He reveals his displeasure at the unjust subordination of Scotland and demands a balanced split of power between England and Scotland, before going on to outline his vision of a Utopian division of Europe which evenly distributes power and wealth.39 Such views shed some light on Fletcher’s interest in the associations of Justice and Nemesis, figures who signified something of the balance, temperance and equality which he considered should be brought to European politics. In a British context, understanding the designs in relation to his correspondence with Dr Lether suggests Fletcher’s displeasure with the passing of the Act of Union and the concentration of some of his energy into his architectural interests as he began to withdraw from political life. In conclusion, Fletcher’s architectural designs are the artistic reflection of his well-travelled life. They combine the diverse influences of the architectural traditions which he encountered both at home and during his years abroad to create a building that reflects contemporary trends in European architecture. His correspondence

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illuminates the significance of these designs in their display of the interplay of architectural ideas around the British Isles and abroad and it is also useful in explaining how the gentleman architect educated himself. In reconstructing the building we can learn the full grandeur of Fletcher’s outwardly modest design and reassess his architectural prowess which has in the past been thrown into doubt by the apparent inconsistency of his drawings. It is, perhaps, appropriate that his building even hints at something of the political leanings for which he is remembered today.

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14

Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas in Eighteenthcentury Scotland Dimitris Theodossopoulos

A

review of the body of work of John Douglas (c. 1709–78) reveals an eclecticism in his design work, influenced particularly by James Gibbs’ Book of Architecture of 1728 but also characterised by an interest in the aesthetic potential of the materials he used, linking his work with a practice that only became common later, during the Gothic Revival. The result was a restrained mannerism that was shaped by an interest in composition and materiality rather than the Classical orders. This chapter focuses on his country houses of Archerfield (1745–9), Finlaystone (1746–7) and Wardhouse (1757–8), and the town houses of Lochmaben (1743, attributed) and Campbeltown (1758–60). This study also frames Douglas in the gradual development of professional architectural practice that characterises his period, manifested in the organisation of his practice, what we would now call project management (finance and planning), the clear diversification of roles on construction sites, specialist incorporations and associated regulations.1 This particular approach is facilitated by an examination of the surviving contracts for Finlaystone, Archerfield and Holyrood, as well as the litigation (‘Lybell’) with his journeyman George Patterson.2 The latter source has the additional benefit of confirming his authorship and role in some disputed projects. Many of these aspects of Scottish architecture have been studied extensively in the work of the Adam family, the Mylne family, James Smith and William Bruce; indeed, this book makes a contribution to those studies. These are all architects whose careers are characterised by an extensive and significant body of work, broad professional contacts, a sustainable client base and a well-established

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business or financial model. Here we extend these studies to include John Douglas. This study also adds new insights, building on the earlier scholarship on Douglas’s work,3 through analysis of both archive material and some technical characteristics of his buildings. Unfortunately, the survival of original documentation is inconsistent and his country houses went through radical changes or even demolition within a generation. This architectural analysis is therefore based primarily on the surviving elevations and other fragments of his original buildings, and that very lack of survival itself raises questions about why his work seems to have gone out of fashion so quickly. There is uncertainty about Douglas’s date of birth, although it has been calculated to c. 1709.4 We know he died on 20 June 1778 because his will survives, witnessed by the Earl of Dalhousie (one of his last clients) and his brother William, a wright. In it he was denoted John Douglas ‘of Pinkerton’ (a property ‘at the Burgh of Crail and in the Shire of Fife’), and he was described as being ‘late architect in Leith’.5 Clarifying his home address is important in helping us to understand his status and, to an extent, where he could most readily practise. He was probably a burgess of Edinburgh during most of his professional life. The Edinburgh Recorder shows that he owned properties in the High Street at Fleshmarket Close, East (or Thomson’s) Close and at Old Provost Close, East Head, suggesting a degree of prosperity.6 However, an advertisement in the Caledonian Mercury newspaper of 18 February 1758 about a sale of pictures at the ‘House of John Douglas architect’, to be concluded once ‘all are sold off’, indicates that Douglas was then in financial trouble and possibly needed funds for his projects (Wardhouse, St Salvator’s and Holyrood at the time). Eventually it appears he moved to Leith, probably after 1760, when he had no major commissions (the last being Dalhousie in the 1770s). Little is known of his training and there is no indication of him coming from a mason family background (as was the case with James Smith) or a professional family, but an adverse remark by John Baxter on his masonry skills during the construction of Haddo House in 1732 indicates he may have previously been an apprentice or journeyman and, in his practice, his brother William, the wright, was often the contractor of his projects.7 On the other hand, the quality of his drawings indicates professional training: the elevation drawings for Finlaystone, for example, attempt to enliven the proposal with shadows and three-dimensional qualities.

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His earliest known work, though a minor one, was Freeland House, in Erskine, where he worked for Lord Ruthven in 1733, carrying out alterations.8 We then find him working with James Gibbs in 1735–6 on the reconstruction of Quarrell House, near Falkirk. Douglas’s first major commission was possibly Murrayfield House (1735), and he developed his vocabulary with Galloway House (late 1730s), together with several unexecuted designs (Blair Castle; Traquair) or alterations (Murthly Castle, 1735–8; Glasserton House, 1740–1). Douglas was not a developer, nor was he involved in the planning of Edinburgh’s New Town. He had a few urban projects, notably town houses for Campbeltown and Lochmaben, and possibly Murrayfield House, now within Edinburgh’s extended boundary. He can be regarded as following in the footsteps of James Smith, becoming a professional architect who created a wide geographic market through his ability,9 while, contrasting with Smith and Douglas’s own better-known contemporary, William Adam, his clientele comprised mainly middle-ranking aristocrats and lairds. Regarding his reputation, it is interesting to note that during the dispute over the fees retained after the Holyrood roof collapse in 1768 (discussed below) no architect colleagues or patrons came to testify for him, as he had done for William Adam in his dispute with Lord Braco over Duff House.10 Overall, few of his known proposals ultimately materialised, which does not show the building up of a sustainable client base. John Douglas did, however, design and renovate several country houses, and a full list of his main buildings is in the Dictionary of Scottish Architects, further reviewed critically by the present author.11 Their location (Figure 14.1) shows a wide spread across the Lowlands of Scotland, reaching as far north as Aberdeenshire. Attribution and identification of some buildings has been made by Ian Gow and Aonghus MacKechnie, by both stylistic analysis or study of his drawings and documents.12 Colvin is somewhat hesitant in confirming that he is the same John Douglas whose name is connected to a number of buildings,13 but analysis of archive material confirms him as the author in a number of cases; for example, the same signature appears on both the contract for Archerfield14 and a receipt regarding the work at Holyrood.15 His output16 (Figure 14.2) shows a gap in the years around 1750 between Finlaystone (1746–7) and a consultancy for a planned remodelling of Blair Castle for the Duke of Atholl (1748), and the student residence in St Salvator’s College (1754–7). The financing of his projects may have become critical, especially after the disruption of the Jacobite rebellion of

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Figure 14.1  Map showing location of Douglas’s main buildings. Dimitris Theodossopoulos and Nick Mols.

1745. His link with Gibbs possibly suggests Jacobite sympathies, and that idea is supported by his involvement at Blair, while in other potentially Jacobite parts of Perthshire, in 1743, he designed churches for Amulree17 and Killin.18 Douglas’s style was analysed at an exhibition and in an accompanying pamphlet in 1989.19 His work is characterised by an ‘approach . . . of relentless surgery or alternatively of concealment’,20 and often by a horizontal block punctuated by a strong, central projecting body (Archerfield, Campbeltown Town Hall). This re-examination of executed and unexecuted designs confirms his preference for a

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strong vertical axis, often as a semi-octagonal tower (with design influences from Gibbs), or sometimes emphasised by large urns over the pediment. The whole aspires to a subtle theatricality, ultimately expressed in making a small house like Wardhouse, in Aberdeenshire, look grand. Inspiration from James Gibbs and his Book of Architecture is important and, as indicated, it seems that the two men knew each other well. It has even been suggested that Gibbs (a Jacobite) borrowed William Kent’s 1727 book Designs of Inigo Jones from Douglas.21 Douglas certainly used Gibbs’ treatise, as he copied some of the characteristic elements (roundels, vases, Serlian windows) and design elements (octagonal towers, curved wings), though not on the same grand and expensive scale. Working as both an architect and a contractor (Archerfield, Finlaystone), like his contemporaries, meant that he saw the value in adding careful design to features like gables, stairs and chimneys, avoiding conventional or standardised versions; there are Scottish characteristics in his work, too, such as the large proportion of wall to window, or the use of turnpike stairs, in his plan drawings. His projects, as we shall see, have a restrained ambition, which made them affordable to those wanting to establish a country seat rapidly and perhaps relatively modestly, but they may have been too specifically of their time, so were remodelled later in a way that William Adam’s buildings, typically, were not. During his main periods of activity (1743–8 and 1754–60) Douglas’s geographically stretched Figure 14.2  Timeline of Douglas’s projects required journeymen to represent him major projects. (by transmitting orders, making payments and Dimitris Theodossopoulos and Nick Mols. receiving materials). In his contracts he engaged a full range of tradesmen, though not the skilful and expensive specialists employed by William Adam. The subtle mannerisms and materiality of his projects make him appear to practise as a creative ‘fashionable architect’ running a small business, more in the shadow of William Adam rather than his rival.22 But like Adam (and Smith, and Robert Mylne before him),

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274   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.3  Galloway House, front elevation (late 1730s). NRHE SC1138112 © HES.

he also attempted to establish himself as a minor landowner, by purchasing Pinkerton.23 This chapter will focus on his most significant and complete buildings in order to track and understand the consolidation of his vocabulary into his mature expression. This is not always straightforward as an understanding of the extent of his work often depends on the availability of archive material, while some extensions (such as Murthly) illustrate his stylistic characteristics more clearly. This analysis will reflect on his design expression, especially in conversions or attachment of new fabric, based on his selection of stone and his construction details, times, costs and quality. The range of his projects is broad and grew in complexity over the span of his career; in that respect, he was similar to William Adam, but his projects were less ambitious or costly, and, in execution at least, devoid of any architectural orders. Murrayfield House (1735),24 a four-storey building, may be where he first tested the elements of his style, though in a very restrained manner, having a central gable decorated with urns, added almost like an attic window. He explored these elements in a more confident design for a new entrance block at Murthly Castle, Perthshire

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   275

Figure 14.4  Lochmaben Town House (1743). Courtesy of Tom Russell, webmaster, Lochmaben community website.

(1735–8),25 where a Serlian opening takes central position as a grand entrance (refocusing Gibbs’ design for All Saints’, Derby in 1725). This is further highlighted with a monumental stair and plain versions of Gibbs’ roundels which expand to the existing fabric on either side of the entrance. At Fullarton (1745, now demolished) he expanded such a gable into a projecting central body but moved the Serlian windows to the sides, as if giving importance to the wings to place an emphasis at the centre. It was at Galloway House (Figure 14.3), as part of a team with Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and the architect/builder John Baxter, that he developed most of his vocabulary, and the scheme, which owes a lot to James Gibbs’ design for Ditchley House, was to be revisited in many variants throughout his projects.

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276   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.5  Archerfield, the restored façade (c. 1747). Dimitris Theodossopoulos.

Lochmaben Town House of 1743 (a suggested attribution, Figure 14.4) is apparently his first new building, replacing the previous tolbooth, following a financial contribution of £150 for the steeple by the Marquis of Annandale in 1741.26 Douglas’s design shows the principal elevation, a variant of the executed design (the building was extended to its rear in 1869). There, Douglas started experimenting with his characteristic central vertical axis by splitting the ubiquitous tower into a solid plinth crowned with an octagonal lantern of a plain design inspired by Gibbs (but less elaborate). The plan of the building is quite narrow, c. 42 × 14ft, divided into three equal square sections of around 14ft. The height of the roof is about 20ft and the top of the tower 34ft. The junction of the octagonal lantern with the square tower base is sharp, yet its dominance is more elegantly resolved than other architects did on earlier tollbooth towers (South Queensferry, Culross) or contemporary ones (Sanquhar, Dingwall, Tain, Kintore). An eclectic aspect of Douglas’s design is how the mass of the tower stands above a Serlian three-light window, with Gibbs’ surrounds used for the openings at the two outer bays. Round-arched doors occupy the ground floor. The red sandstone used is probably from nearby Corncockle Quarry, characterised by a vivid colour and a uniform fine-to-medium grain size.27 The ashlar facing is not

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   277

framed at any other point, except at the window surrounds and cornices projecting around the edges of the roof. The design is a modernisation of the ancient tolbooth concept and its impact was still felt in the 1869 extension which included a further Serlian window on a flank wall. Archerfield House was a major project for Douglas, albeit a modernisation and extension of an earlier tower. This formed part of the Dirleton estate, which was acquired by the Nisbet family in 1663,28 and it is not certain whether the earlier core was built then, or later, for William Nisbet (1724–83), Grand Master of the Freemasons in Scotland. As Nisbet’s social ambitions were growing, he had the house extended by John Douglas (contract dated 17 June 1747),29 and created comfortable entertainment rooms for his guests; this was later aggrandised for his son by Robert Adam, in 1790.30 Douglas’s project is characterised by compactness and economy in design,31 largely concealing the earlier house by extending to the front (Figure 14.5) and back. The stylistic features of this mature work frame well the affirmative texture of the volcanic whinstone of the elevation, within an otherwise restrained eclectic design. As often in his work, horizontality is signposted by a central vertical element, the entrance bay on the west front. This bay apparently substituted the circular staircase of the initial design for the entrance (Figure 14.6), a version of the one in Murthly, and adapts a design by Gibbs for St Martin in-the-Fields with a twist: the Nisbet coat of arms is framed by a festoon, and sits under a bracketed cornice that holds a torn-apart Serlian window flanked by floral volutes. The window underneath is the only one in Douglas’s oeuvre with fluted pilasters and capitals, while the whole bay projection is crowned by a deep parapet to hold his characteristic vases. All these elements are confirmed in the contract as amendments of Douglas’s original design,32 which further specifies that while the rest of the elevation is ashlar whinstone, the corners and window surrounds should be of fine polished free stone. Overall dimensions as executed coincide with those of the proposal, creating comfortable rooms at the front. The contract confirms the origin of the project, which seems to be the west extension and two new pavilions according to the plan agreed, but excluding the outer stair. An interpretation (Figure 14.7) of this extension in relation to the original core shows two shallow wings, judging from the remaining gables today (Figure 14.8). Possibly at an immediately subsequent stage these gables were extended with two lower square rooms, which followed the partitions of the corresponding edges

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278   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.6  Archerfield, original design attributed to Douglas. NRHE B58880 © HES.

of the original building (Figure 14.6), and later this courtyard was deemed unnecessary and was filled with a further room, this time taller than the flanking extensions. The two new pavilions referred to in the 1747 contract are possibly the ones flanking the façade with curved parapets, similar to Hopetoun and what Douglas would design later for Wardhouse. Judging from the similarity with the stonework to the front, it is unlikely these wings at the back were built by Robert Adam during his 1790 works. Regarding procurement, softwood was used for roofing and joists (red fir) and Douglas had ‘to finish the rough timber Work of the principal Stair’. The proposed central staircase (Figure 14.6) was never built and instead the pre-existing main staircase adjacent to that space was refurbished (Figure 14.7). The total budget Douglas was to be paid was £2,360, and the contract mentions one third to be paid at laying the foundations, another third when the roofs were on and the last third when the work was completed. However, Douglas seems to have already performed a considerable part of the agreed works (as he would do later in Holyrood when signing the contract) and had already received the sum of £960 (39 per cent of the budget). The works had to conclude

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   279

Figure 14.7  Archerfield: red line shows position of original tower; the grey areas are Douglas’s additions. North is to left. Plan courtesy of Yeoman McAllister Architects with additional information drawn by Nick Mols.

by the following Whitsunday (2 June 1748); that is, the contracted work would last for less than a year, and considering the site would have shut down for the necessary winter break, this suggests that the works were perhaps limited to the west front. The client had to furnish lime, stone and all manner of carriages for transport of materials. This was a normal and convenient agreement as Nisbet could recycle stone from demolished buildings. The Lybell offers some more details on the delivery of the project but must be read with caution, as the facts presented were disputed between the parties. Alexander Hogg and Alexander Johnston appear as journeymen, wrights and foremen for Douglas, and were paid by George Patterson, but Douglas seems to challenge reimbursing Patterson as he had not seen the Day Books that recorded ‘attestations from the foremen of the different works who kept an accompt of the days each man wrought’. A further person, Alexander Gowan, was employed by Douglas from 1740 to 1749 as one of his foremen and principal masons and he supervised the masons’ work in Archerfield in 1745–8, confirming Douglas’s earlier involvement from 1745. Douglas confirms in the Lybell how he appreciated the dimensions

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280   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.8  Archerfield: south elevation showing the original house (centre) incorporated into Douglas’s design. Dimitris Theodossopoulos.

of his addition, ‘a roof of 20 foot wide with flooring, joisting, doors and windows’. He claims this is a straightforward job and ‘a wright at 10d per day could either have directed or executed this work’. Patterson disputes the simplicity of the task, claiming ‘the addition to the roof was from 27 to 28 feet over walls’ and ‘several rooms in the old house were entirely finished and the Dining room, Drawing room and other rooms were finished . . . with proper mouldings round the doors’. The discrepancy may be on which dimension was crucial to the construction of the roof: Figure 14.6 shows the larger north-west and north-east rooms being 20ft × 30ft and it is the larger span (30ft) that is conditioned by how many of the repetitive transverse trusses were possible to assemble. No major staircase, however, seems to have been added in the building, which may indirectly confirm Paterson’s claim of lack of skills by Douglas’s team throughout the Lybell.33 Regarding the masonry, the purple whinstone of the elevation originates from Craigs Quarry, west of Dirleton. The blocks follow the same height of coursing, 10in., but no specific length, which may have been what the quarry could produce without significant effort. There is no particular bond throughout the elevation and there is not always alignment with window quoins at ground floor. Douglas’s

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   281

project does not seem to be unnecessarily expensive: the main decoration was concentrated in the central bay, to minimise costs, and windows with alternative triangular and circular pediments are only at first floor. The overall impression is that of a bespoke and highly distinctive architecture for an ambitious client. The construction concentrated on the material treatment of the main west elevation and its brand new appearance, beyond which the additions are of purely utilitarian character and do not aim to achieve a fully unified volume, as the earlier fabric was still partially evident. The construction quality is straightforward, avoiding major challenges, as the dispute with Patterson showed. Overall, Douglas delivered a socially ambitious project to budget, the design of which allowed for later extensions. Finlaystone (1746–7) was another relatively major project, similar to Archerfield in that it updated existing buildings into a fashionable mansion; but here, with a more creative solution of rearranging the site around a U-shape courtyard, going beyond the more straightforward Archerfield formula of, essentially, designing one main elevation. An estate register confirms the design principles (Figures 14.9 and 14.10).34 Douglas made the most of his limited budget (£1,300) and time, to make an assembly of small buildings look grand by linking together the existing Finlaystone House and Dinnistoune Tower, converting them to wings that flanked a new and taller building set between them, creating a unified whole. Maybe this design was too modish or small, and soon a new owner, Robert Cunninghame-Graham, converted the building into a compact block with a neo-Classical addition (1796–1826), harled the exterior and highlighted the edges with quoins.35 It is difficult now to appreciate Douglas’s design, as further extensions and the major modernisation by J. J. Burnet in 1899 unified the elevations in a grey render (Figure 14.11). The contract of 26 May 1746 is an agreement to have the repairs in the old part of Finlaystone finished by the following Candlemas (2 February 1747); that is, the roof upon the new (middle) part of the house, and to have the whole site furnished by Lammas Fair (1 August 1747).36 The payment of £1,300 to Douglas assigns £1,100 for the new part and £200 for the reparation of the old ones. ‘Stones and Limes & Carriages and Locks and Bands to the Doors’ were to be furnished by the Earl. Timber was delivered through Greenock.37 Little can be added to Holly Kinnear’s analysis of Douglas’s

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282   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.9  Finlaystone, first-floor plan by Douglas. Two existing buildings (in yellow) were incorporated into the plan: Dinnistoune Tower on the left and Finlaystone House to the right. NRHE DP057863 © HES.

Figure 14.10  Finlaystone, west elevation, by Douglas (1746–7). NRHE DP057864 © HES (John Douglas Collection).

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   283

original design, which follows in turn from the plans and elevations identified and discussed by Ian Gow. The main entrance was to be from the bow projection on the west (like Archerfield), marked by a small pediment, which was built. The existing houses would become pavilions linked with straight screens, but a survey of the current building shows very different proportions, which limit the screens’ visual effect, and the position of the tower is doubtful (it was possibly demolished), so the design of the north wing is a conjecture. The interpretation of the phases confirms that ‘a new house of Three Stories, 34ft in height to the top of the wall’ was built ‘towards the West end of the North front of the present house of Finlaystone . . . 46 feet in length and 37 feet in Breadth’, which corresponds to the lounge accessed from the bow projection (cf. the overall dimensions of length 80.7ft and breadth 51.8ft). The windows were eventually built smaller in size, probably due to the Scottish culture for small openings against the weather, which undermined the composition. The design became a pragmatic compromise, possibly because of the limited budget, and no records mention if Douglas returned to the project with a new contract. There is a gap of major projects until the mid-1750s (Figure 14.2), until Wardhouse of Insch in Aberdeenshire was built (1757–8, attributed) (Figure 14.13). This present discussion of the design of Wardhouse strengthens the attribution to Douglas. It may be his only private house of this period, and apparently an entirely new

Figure 14.11  Finlaystone, west elevation with later additions. Photograph: James Drummond.

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284   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.12  Interpretation of Douglas’s design with dotted lines showing the succession of later additions, as recorded in contemporary surveys. Dimitris Theodossopoulos and Nick Mols.

one. Arthur Gordon (d. 1760), the second laird, started the building, calling it ‘Arthur’s Seat’, and a datestone confirms when work began: ‘BUILT IN THE YEAR 1757 AND 17(?)’.38 Charles Edward Gordon (1754–1832) rebuilt it in 1773 (probably extending it to NE). Once again, though, the design was not appreciated in its later life as it

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   285

started declining after the death of the tenth and last laird, Rafael Gordon, in 1933. The house was sold in 1952 and is in a ruinous state. The main house is rather shallow (55.8 × 23ft), on three storeys, and Douglas’s design, together with the curved wings, makes it look more impressive. Essentially it is an austere design with strong stone coursing, of a robustness similar to Archerfield before its restoration. The interior walls are built in coursed rubble, visible now that most lath and plaster has crumbled, and the sort of Aberdeen masonry bond observed in the elevation (three or four small stones stacked at the perpendicular joints between major stone blocks) indicates that local masons were used. There are characteristic roundels within and below the pediment, the latter forming, together with the flanking square windows, a decomposition of the Serlian window below. The most idiosyncratic characteristic of the design, however, is the blue, slatey ashlar of the central body (possibly from the local Bin Quarry),39 laid on cant, which accelerated its decay. This use of materials creates an interesting polychromatic scheme, combined with the decorative details highlighted in red sandstone possibly from

Figure 14.13  Ground floor plan of Wardhouse. NRHE SC764134 © Crown copyright: HES.

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286   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

Figure 14.14  Wardhouse elevation (1757–8). Dimitris Theodossopoulos.

nearby Delgaty Quarry or pink sandstone from Rhynie Quarry.40 The beams and voussoirs of the Gibbs surrounds could not be of blue slate as pieces thick or strong enough could not be available, and the same can be said for almost all window lintels. The octagonal bay at the back shows robustness, with deep joints, and a Venetian window also marks its central position. This is his most intact design as it was little altered by the later addition and (ironically) can be better understood in constructional terms now that the tall roofs have gone. The house can be viewed as an interpretation of William Adam’s nearby Haddo (where Adam worked from 1732), Gibbs’ Ditchley House (1722), or even what seems Douglas’s own late 1730s design for Galloway House, through experimental materiality. The expressive quadrant corridors they all have in common (at 18ft radius) serve only as links with the other two blocks, probably the services, and they had their own doors that were blocked possibly as soon as they were built (the same stone, as square rubble, appears at the back), making the main door the sole entrance. Douglas picks up the Lochmaben scheme in Campbeltown Town Hall (1758–60), one of his last known projects (Figure 14.15), which replaced an earlier tolbooth on the same site. The restoration project in 201641 researched the authorship of the various building phases but could not determine whether Douglas’s project was originally harled or faced in ashlar, and in what type of stone, the latter being

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   287

Figure 14.15  Campbeltown Town House (1758–60). Courtesy of Claire McFadzean, Campbeltown Town Hall project.

an important aspect of his projects. The ground floor of the original phase (90 × 70ft) was divided into two parts resulting in a 6:10 proportion and, like Lochmaben, it was extended later and remodelled. Douglas designed a timber spire which was replaced by the present stone structure in 1778 by John Brown of Inveraray, a mason and architect active in Argyll in the 1770s and 1780s.42 Brown interpreted it with motifs from Gibbs’ spires, for example the one for St Martin in-the-Fields, though in more squat proportions. The tower itself is robust and the spire is aligned through a drum with a protruding half-octagonal bay that marks the central axis of the building. The framing of decorative elements is bolder, with more quoins and oversized voussoirs, and this design moves significantly away from the traditional tolbooth tower formula that Douglas tried to modernise at the beginning of his career. The development, however, of another new build, the student accommodation at St Salvator’s (United) College in St Andrews

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Figure 14.16  St Andrews United College, north building. Ground floor showing the four classrooms, arcade to south and protruding north staircase (built 1754–7; 1825–6 survey). Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ref. UY1382/A.

University (built 8 July 1754 to early 1757) reveals poor technical planning for a rather simple and repetitive building.43 Douglas was asked to design and build four schools (classrooms) at ground level and twenty student rooms over two floors (Figure 14.16). The design is not of the highest standard as some classroom partitions meet windows and there is only a minor articulation of the classroom division by a line of quoins mounted on a pilaster. The northern elevation had the staircase contained in a protruding gabled central section, though the entrance was from the south side, possibly lit originally by a Venetian window. Many service problems appeared soon after completion: the chimneys smoked and the roof was leaking so heavily that it had to be re-slated in 1769. Eventually the leak penetrated the rubble walls and damaged them structurally, so the building was demolished after 1844, although the replacement by William Nixon maintained some architectural features (like the protruding bay moved to the S entrance). This failure should not be acceptable professionally as Douglas had wrights in his team (Andrew Finlay, John Gardner), but probably the whole project was hurried and not well financed. A further significance of this project is that the adjacent barrelvaulted church is where Douglas possibly saw the flagstone roof that inspired him for his fatal repair in Holyrood Abbey Church – he evidently presumed or considered that the most appropriate material for roofing a medieval church was stone slabs; clearly a conservation-minded approach. The intervention in the church roof of Holyrood Abbey (1758–60) in partnership with the mason and developer James McPherson

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Mannerism in the Work of John Douglas   289

was his other disastrous project, as it caused the church’s collapse in 1768:44 a substitution of the timber trusses with equally closely spaced masonry diaphragm walls to support presumably heavy flagstones (this is not clear from the contract, but was reported by William Mylne who surveyed the collapse). The design can be summarised as a new textured roof that returned an archaic, though castellated, aspect, a vocabulary he explored in his designs for Blair.45 Douglas was not a comprehensive architect like William Adam, who would have total control over the production of his buildings and bring very skilful tradesmen.46 This limitation resulted in less ambitious buildings, but could have worked to his benefit as he would have had full control of his own expression on his buildings, without negotiating with tradesmen who may have had their own ideas for decorative elements that they would want to produce. Such relationships do, however, help to resolve unrealistic designs, and clearly some of his projects could have done with stronger technical input. His experience from what survived reveals an attempt to celebrate the local stone and push its aesthetic potential (Archerfield, Wardhouse). This is accompanied by a rearrangement of elements that are popular or shared in treatises, revealing a mannerist attitude principally around the vocabulary and designs of James Gibbs. His design would involve both style and form, and can be confirmed as fashionable, experimental and idiosyncratic, instead of institutional, early Georgian or even Classical. Moreover, by concentrating decoration in certain areas only and avoiding extravagant elements or expensive materials, he managed both to keep the budget low and construction times under control. Ian Gow has remarked on the quality of his drawings, that they convey depth in elevations, indicating awareness of the theatrical potential of his ideas, quite in line with mannerist attitudes.47 The overall idea that emerges about Douglas is one of a free-thinking designer who aimed for a balanced number of commissions that would not compromise his creativity. There are, however, some questions that require more research. Is the gap in his career (1747–54) the result of personal circumstances, lack of finances or political isolation after the Jacobite rebellion? Why did two rather simple projects (St Salvator’s and Holyrood) fail, and how did his reputation fare afterwards? And what was the personal and professional relationship with his brother, the wright William Douglas who does not appear in his later projects but is still entrusted in his will?

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290   Dimitris Theodossopoulos

John Douglas appears as a fascinating fresh mind that deserves to be celebrated and have his creativity explored more extensively in a mannerist and experimental context, even if not in the mainstream of his contemporary architectural production. He managed a lot with limited resources, and further research of Galloway, Finlaystone and Wardhouse may confirm more articulate designs, enriching the impression of continuity of high creativity in Scotland from the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth and, of course, beyond.

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15

‘The Inexpressible Need of Inclosing and Planting’: Country House Policies in Scotland, 1660–1750 Christopher Dingwall

T

he title of this chapter is taken from the preface to the book The Scots Gard’ner, published in 1683, addressed ‘to all ingenious planters’, in which the author John Reid speaks of ‘the inexpressible need of inclosing and planting, whereby you may improve your estates to best advantage, both in profite and pleasure’. The first part of Reid’s pioneering work is concerned with ‘the first contriving and planting of gardens, orchards, avenues [and] groves, with new and profitable ways of levelling; and how to measure and divide land’, while the second part is concerned with ‘the propagation and improvement of forrest and fruit trees, kitchen hearbes, roots and fruits’.1 As such, this chapter is concerned with what are generally referred to as ‘policies’, a term which appears to be confined almost entirely to Scotland, having fallen out of use south of the border. The word occurs in documents from the fifteenth century onwards, where it refers to the business of improving an estate or property through new building, enclosure and planting. Nowadays the word is generally used in its plural form to denote the pleasure grounds, parkland and plantations which provide the setting for a country house or large institution.2 The influence of European ideas on the business of gardening and landscaping in the British Isles goes back to long before the seventeenth century, being evident in the monastic settlement of Scotland which began in the eleventh century, and which had its origins in France. Cistercian monks, drawing inspiration from their mother house of Cîteaux in France, were responsible for the introduction of new plants and techniques of cultivation into Scotland

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294   Christopher Dingwall

from the twelfth century onwards. Thus, amongst the duties placed on the tenants of land owned by the Abbey of Coupar Angus in Perthshire was that of planting trees. For example, in a tack granted in 1473, John Portar and others were instructed to ‘put thar land [of Batchele] til all possibil polici in bigyn of houses, plantation of treis, eschis, osaris and sauch, with froit treis gif thar ma, with sufficiens defens tharfor’.3 We can imagine that the wood from these trees would be made good use of, for the manufacture of furniture and tools, or for the weaving of baskets and wattles, while the fruit would go towards feeding the community. Further evidence of these earlier European cultural links at the beginning of the seventeenth century is also to be found in the extraordinary set of sculptured panels which are on the walls of the quadrangular garden or pleasance at Edzell Castle in Angus. The majority of these panels are known to have been modelled on engravings made by European artists such as Crispin de Passe, Jan Sadeler and Georg Pencz, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer. W. Douglas Simpson makes a convincing case for the albums containing the engravings on which the panels were based having been brought to Scotland c. 1600 by German mineralogists from Nuremberg who were being employed at that time by Sir David Lindsay to prospect for minerals in the glens to the north.4 Of the three sets of seven panels, depicting the seven planetary deities, the seven cardinal virtues and the seven liberal arts, I wish to draw particular attention to the female figure of Geometria in the south-western corner of the garden (Figure 15.1). As Simpson observes, Below her lie a pair of compasses, a set square, and a bevel-stock, while her right foot rests on a couple of books. The background is an architectural one, and the figure wears a turreted or mural crown, doubtless meant to indicate the close connection between geometry and architecture.5

The depiction of Geometria measuring a globe with a pair of calipers also alludes to the connections between geometry and the business of mensuration or surveying – indeed, the word geometry comes from a combination of the Greek words geo, meaning earth, and metron, meaning measurement. As a branch of mathematics concerned with shape, size, proportion and the organisation of space, geometry could be applied to the business of laying out gardens, just as it could be to the design of buildings. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Part 1 of John Reid’s book The Scots Gard’ner is devoted to an explanation of

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Country House Policies in Scotland   295

Figure 15.1  Edzell Castle, panel depicting Geometria. Christopher Dingwall.

geometry and trigonometry, and how this can be applied so as to ‘make the works about a house regular’. Amidst an explanation of parallelograms, circles, triangles, semicircles and other geometrical shapes are instructions on the laying of these figures out on the ground to serve as a basis for plantations.6 Although he described himself as a gardener on the title page of his book, Reid emigrated to America in the same year that his book was published, where his skills in the measurement and laying out of land soon earned him the position of Surveyor General in the state of New Jersey, which had been seized from the Dutch in 1664, and where he laid out his own estate which he named ‘Hortensia’.7 Little is known of John Reid’s background and education, save that he was raised at Niddry Castle in West Lothian, where his father and grandfather are known to have served as gardeners to the Seton family. Although he is not known to have travelled on the Continent, there can be no doubt that young Reid was familiar with the French style of formal garden, which he would have encountered through his brief service as gardener first to the Duke of Hamilton at Hamilton Palace in Lanarkshire, and later to the Earl of Perth at

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Figure 15.2  John Reid’s ideal garden, from The Scots Gard’ner (1683). Author’s collection.

Drummond Castle in Perthshire. As in the works of the celebrated French garden designer André Le Nôtre, Reid’s ideal garden was based on the creation of strong axes and symmetrical plantations (Figure 15.2). Thus, Reid observes, Make all the buildings and plantings ly so about the house, as that the house may be the centre; all the walks, trees and hedges running to the house. As the Sun is the centre of this world; as the heart of the man is the centre of the man; as the nose the centre of the face: and as it is unseemly to see a man wanting a leg, an arme &c., or his nose standing at one side of the face, or not straight, or wanting a cheek, an eye, an eare, or with one (or all of them) great at one side and small on the other: Just so with the house courts, avenues, gardens orchards &c. where regularity or uniformity is not observed. Therefore whatever you have on the one

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hand, make as much, and of the same forme and in the same place, on the other.8

In the pages which follow Reid gives detailed instructions on operations such as the levelling of ground, the formation of terraces, the planting of avenues and parterres, the creation of ponds and much else besides. Given that John Reid emigrated to America when he was just twenty-seven years old, it is unlikely that he had an opportunity to put his ideas into effect on the ground. Consequently, this task fell to others. In 1683, the same year that Reid left Scotland to make a new life for himself in America, Sir William Bruce was in the process of laying out the grounds of Kinross House, where his extensive landscaping scheme, following on from his earlier work at Balcaskie in Fife, would surely have met with Reid’s approval. The late John Gifford describes the composition thus: Bruce’s layout of the house, gardens and landscape was rigorously unified, the most complete and uncompromising expression of the processional planning which he had introduced to Scottish architecture. Underlying this was the French conception of a royal palace as a sequence of rooms . . . of increasing grandeur and intimacy . . . At Kinross, Bruce included the approach to the house and beyond it the garden, Loch Leven and its castle in a processional sequence of exceptional length and inexorable linearity.9

Significant among Bruce’s innovations in landscape design was his use of distant eye-catchers in the landscape to serve as the focus of his great alignments, whether the Bass Rock in the case of Balcaskie, Lochleven Castle in the case of Kinross House or North Berwick Law in the case of Hopetoun House, to name but three examples. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Sir William Bruce’s son John is recorded as having sent trees, shrubs and flower roots to his father from Paris in 1681 and 1682, for planting in the gardens at Kinross.10 So it was that by the start of the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe was moved to describe Kinross House as ‘the most beautiful and most regular piece of architecture in all Scotland, perhaps in all Britain’. Of the surrounding landscape Defoe commented that Sir William, according to the new and laudable method of all the Scots gentlemen, has planted innumerable numbers of firr trees [i.e. Scots pine] upon the estate around his house . . . Posterity will find the sweet of this passion for planting, which is so happily spread among the people

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Figure 15.3  Kinross House garden plan, attributed to Alexander Edward (c. 1685). University of Edinburgh Library.

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of the south-parts of Scotland, and which, if it goes on, will in time make Scotland a second Norway for firr, for the Lowlands, as well as the Highlands, will be overspread with timber.11

It was about this time that Patrick Lyon, 1st Earl of Strathmore and 3rd of Kinghorne, began his Book of Record, a manuscript journal in which he described the enclosures and improvements made by him, first at Castle Lyon in the Carse of Gowrie, and later at Glamis Castle in Strathmore. The Book of Record tells how the Earl did away with what he described as ‘a strange confused unmodel’d piece of business [which] was to me a great eyesore’ before embarking on his new landscaping scheme at Glamis. Thirteen years on he was able to take some satisfaction in describing the improvements which he had made there: There be now an entrie from the four several airths and my house ­invyroned with a regular planting, the ground on both syds being of a like bigness and the figure the same with a way upon either syd of the utter court to the back court where the offices are. . . . There is a great gate adorned with two gladiators, from which the avenue goes with an enclosure on each syd, holdne with a plantation of fir trees, which is ane entrie of a considerable bread and lenth leading straight up to the barns and offices there.’12

When Englishman John Macky visited Glamis in the early 1720s, he described how ‘the noble Palace of Glames . . . strikes you with awe and admiration, by the many turrets and gilded balustrades at top: It stands in the middle of a well planted park, with avenues cut through every way to the house’ (Figure 15.4).13 There was nothing that Macky admired more than the style of planting characterised by radiating and criss-crossing avenues and vistas – what the Edinburgh nurseryman William Boutcher was later to describe as ‘plantations of forest trees and shrubs planted in the wilderness way’.14 Thus, Macky expressed his admiration for landscapes such as that created by the 6th Earl of Mar at Alloa, as described by Margaret Stewart in her book, The Architectural Landscape and Constitutional Plans of the Earl of Mar, 1700–32:15 The gardens consisting of two and forty acres and the wood, with vistoes cut through it, of one hundred and fifty acres . . . To the south of the house is the parterre . . . from whence you have thirty two vistoes, each ending on some remarkable seat or mountain, at some miles distance.16

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Figure 15.4  Glamis Castle by Sandby (1746). © The British Library Board, ref Maps K Top.49.23.b.

Another important figure from around the turn of the eighteenth century was Alexander Edward. Chapter 17 describes in more detail how in 1701 Edward embarked on a year-long journey that took him to some of England’s finest houses and gardens, before he crossed the English Channel to explore France and the Low Countries. Given the number of sponsors of his tour, and the projects which he undertook as an architect and landscape designer, whether in partnership with Sir William Bruce as at Kinross and Hopetoun House, or in his own right as at Brechin Castle and Hamilton Palace, Edward has to be considered as a significant player in the events of the period.17 Additional evidence of the diffusion of European ideas, and of the Continental style of landscaping, into Scotland at this time is to be found in the publication in 1712 by John James of The Theory and Practice of Gardening, a translation of Dezallier d’Argenville’s French original that had been published in 1709. Of around 250 subscribers to this influential book, more than 10 per cent were prominent Scottish landowners who were actively engaged in the enclosure and landscaping of their estates. At the very top of the list of subscribers was John Murray, 1st Duke of Atholl. That this book continued to exert its influence on land-

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Figure 15.5  Title page of John James’s Theory and Practice of Gardening. Author’s collection.

scaping for a ­considerable time after its publication can be seen from the instruction given by his son, James, 2nd Duke of Atholl, to gardener John Wilson in 1737, that some of the new plantings at Blair Castle be modelled on plate IV, being ‘Designs of Groves of a middle height’ (Figure 18.14), and on plate VI, being ‘Designs of Cabinets & Salons for Groves’.18 The diffusion of these ideas throughout the country was further encouraged by the formation in 1723 of The Honourable the Society

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of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland, a group of landowners intent on the ‘improvement’ of their estates through enclosure and planting. Amongst their number were to be found John Murray, 1st Duke of Atholl; James Hamilton, 5th Duke of Hamilton; John Hay, 4th Marquess of Tweeddale; Charles Lyon, 6th Earl of Strathmore; and John Campbell, 2nd Earl of Breadalbane, together with improvers of lower rank such as Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk. Such men were keen to keep abreast of the most recent developments, eager to compete with each other and impatient to demonstrate their wealth and good taste in the laying out of their landscapes. Both through their geographical distribution and their wide social circles, they sought to spread new ideas across the country by example. As Professor Chris Smout has observed, this was ‘the first agricultural society not only in Scotland but in Europe, and was seen as a great national and patriotic undertaking’.19 Although it took some time for Scotland’s agriculture to benefit from these developments, tree planting seems to have been in the vanguard of the improvements on many Scottish estates. A somewhat neglected figure in this story is the English agriculturist and surveyor Thomas Winter, first brought up to Scotland from Norfolk by Sir Archibald Grant in 1726 to advise him on the enclosure, planting and management of his estate of Monymusk.20 It was not long before Winter and his son, also Thomas, became more widely known and valued for their knowledge and skills, as the name Winter reappears from time to time in the historical record over the next thirty years, with either father or son drawing up plans and offering advice at Blair Castle in 1744, at Glamis Castle and Invergowrie House in 1746, at Easter Moy in 1747, at Castle Grant in 1748 and at Taymouth Castle in 1754.21 Alongside these documents is a huge manuscript plan dating from 1751 of the estates of Keithick and Bendochy in Perthshire detailing improvements which might be made, and giving a vivid insight into the process of enclosure and agricultural improvement which was going on across Scotland by the mid-eighteenth century.22 Amongst those who were both members of The Honourable the Society of Improvers and subscribers to John James’s Theory and Practice of Gardening was Thomas Hamilton, 6th Earl of Haddington. Hamilton, who is a noteworthy figure thanks to his Treatise on the Manner of Raising Trees (Figure 15.6), was an enthusiastic planter on his own estate at Tyninghame in East Lothian.23 In what he describes as ‘a letter to his grandson’, written in the 1730s,

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Figure 15.6  Title page of Thomas Hamilton’s Treatise on Forest Trees. Author’s collection.

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though not published until 1761, he makes observations on the propagation, cultivation and performance of a variety of trees, both native and exotic, based on his own experience. Under the heading ‘Of Wilderness’ Hamilton explains how these plantations were formed: Some have them large and some less. When they were introduced into this country, they were generally formed with a centre and straight walks from it, with the best views that could be found. These walks were for ordinary hedged, as were the serpentine walks that run through the whole, from one straight walk to another, and trees of different kinds set in the angles betwixt the hedges; but I hear that they are now weary of that way, and everyone lays out his wilderness as he pleases.24

By this time a number of European trees had been introduced to Scotland, and were being planted in increasing numbers by Hamilton and other landowners, whether for their timber or for ornamental purposes – Norwegian spruce (Picea abies), European silver fir (Abies alba), European larch (Larix decidua) and Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani). As Hamilton observed, tastes were changing, with new species offering new opportunities: The evergreens have a chearful look in the melancholy season of the year, and the flowering-trees make a fine variety in summer; but as all this depends on the fancy of the owner, let every one do as he likes best.25

The introduction to Hamilton’s treatise contains a rather touching account of the formation of Binning Wood on the Tyninghame estate, beginning in 1707. Having been persuaded by his wife Helen to plant what was previously known as ‘the muir of Tynningham . . . ground of very little value’, he decided that It would be a pity not to have a centre in it, and walks from it, with the best terminations we could find; For that end I traversed the ground, till I found what I wanted. I told this to my wife, who went and looked at it, liked it very well; but walking about, lighted on another spot of ground she thought more proper for a centre. I preferred my choice, she hers; but knowing that the Earl of Hopetoun, the present Earl of Marchmont and the late Sir John Bruce were to be here in a few days, we resolved to leave the determination to them.26

The day having arrived, and the party having gone to the field, they began to survey the ground. In Hamilton’s words,

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Country House Policies in Scotland   305 Figure 15.7  Detail from General Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland showing Binning Wood. Tyninghame House is not shown because it is on the next map sheet to the east. ‘New Beath’ (Newbyth) was a separate property, but it is interesting to note how the two landscapes were designed to connect with one another. © The British Library Board. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk.

In the meantime Sir John Bruce had straggled from us, and sent to tell he had lighted upon a finer spot of ground for a centre than either of the two we were contending for . . . When we returned to the house [My Lord Marchmont] laid down the whole field on paper, with the three centres, and the walks from each of them. When this was shewn, it was agreed unanimously that all three should be laid out on the ground; and the planting carried on by that plan. This was done and stands so to this day, with very little variation . . . I shall only say that all who see it express themselves highly pleased with it.27

Binning Wood, clearly depicted on General Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland with its three rond-points, or centres, and their radiating walks remains to this day (Figure 15.7). Although clear-felled for its timber during the Second World War, the wood was replanted to its original plan, so can be seen to have retained its form for more than 300 years. Another major Scottish landscape which can be seen to have retained much of its original formality is that surrounding Castle Kennedy in Wigtownshire. This was the creation of John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair, another enthusiastic member of The Honourable the Society of Improvers. In spite of the accidental burning down of Castle Kennedy in 1716, the Earl started the development of its

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landscape in the early 1720s, along with the gardens at his other seat at Newliston near Edinburgh. At least part of the inspiration for his extensive scheme of mock-military earthworks and criss-crossing avenues at Castle Kennedy may have come from the five years from 1714 to 1720 during which Stair served as ambassador to the French Court at Versailles, where he cannot have failed to be impressed by the great gardens created by André Le Nôtre there and at Vaux-leVicomte, comprising long vistas and geometrical plantations, terraces and ramparts. Returning to Britain, Stair would have been aware of, and is likely to have visited, the gardens in the ‘grand manner’ being created by his military and parliamentary friends and colleagues, gardens such as Stowe, Studley Royal, Claremont and Castle Howard. Although not listed among the subscribers, he would surely have been aware of John James’s Theory and Practice of Gardening (or the French original), in which Part II, Chapter III is devoted to a discussion of ‘terrasses and stairs’, including instructions for the cutting of terraces ‘supported by banks and slopes of turf’, and the formation of ‘amphitheatres of turf’. He is likely also to have owned, or been familiar with, copies of other books such as Stephen Switzer’s Ichnographia Rustica: or the Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation, published in 1718,28 and Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening, published in 1728.29 Of these three contemporary authors, it was Switzer who had a particular fondness for including mock-fortifications such as ramparts and bastions in his designs. Other influences on Stair may have come through his connection and friendship with John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, with whom he had campaigned in Europe in the first decade of the eighteenth century; and his wife, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was an important political ally of Stair’s. It is known that Stephen Switzer had a part to play in the early landscaping at Blenheim Palace, along with the architect John Vanbrugh and the landscape designer Charles Bridgeman. Vanbrugh and Bridgeman worked together at Claremont in Surrey, where they created a terraced grass amphitheatre, together with a circular pond and belvedere; a similar arrangement exists at Castle Kennedy. There is also a strong similarity between Vanbrugh’s design for Seaton Delaval in Northumberland and the Earl of Stair’s other estate at Newliston – a rectangular layout with bastions at its corners – suggesting that Dalrymple was at least familiar with Vanbrugh’s work, even if we cannot be certain on present evidence that the two men ever met.30 This chapter would be incomplete without mention of William

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Adam and the part that he played in designing and remodelling a number of important Scottish gardens and landscapes, including Newliston, Hamilton and Hopetoun, but Adam’s work there is described in Chapter 18. In trying to gauge the degree to which Scottish landscaping was influenced by European fashions, we have a useful indicator in General Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland, drawn up between 1747 and 1755. By the time of Roy’s survey most Scottish landscapes in the ‘grand manner’ had been completed, while the era of parkland landscapes which saw many of these formal arrangements swept away had yet to come. Together with contemporary estate plans, many of which survive, the Military Survey gives a good impression of those landscapes which were still dominated by the formal terraces, avenues, vistas and parterres so favoured by our European neighbours. Is it any wonder that several of the words we use even today to describe gardens of this period – allée, belvedere, ha-ha, parterre, patte d’oie, rond-point – have their origins on the continent of Europe?31

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16

The Terraced Garden in Scotland in the Seventeenth Century Marilyn Brown

T

erraced gardens are a particularly appropriate form of garden in Scotland where so many early houses, castles and mansions occupy positions on elevated sites. Terracing permits a measured approach to the garden; a means of access to a garden close to the house, easily available to women, allowing them the opportunity to take the exercise recommended by contemporary authorities on health; a sheltered site for the display of espaliered fruit trees; and a place from which to contemplate and be impressed by the garden, the park and the wider landscape, the property of its owner. The contemplation of the house from below, up a series of terraces, provides an enhanced view of the building, which dominates the landscape. As in much of Europe, the influence of Italian gardens, particularly those of the late fifteenth, sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, which drew on Classical precedents, was succeeded in the later seventeenth century by French models, and the prestige of the gardens at Versailles resulted in the construction of more elaborate examples. Terraces, however, always formed only one element of the garden and complemented other features, such as avenues, parterres, fishponds and fountains, forming part of the total design. Gardens with terraces that date from the seventeenth century survive in considerable numbers in Scotland.1 Although this period may be seen as the heyday of the terrace, its adoption in Scotland goes back into the sixteenth century and its antecedents may be identified even earlier.2 What may be the earliest extant example of a terraced garden in Scotland is found at Loch of Clunie near Blairgowrie in Perthshire where the Bishop of Dunkeld, George

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Brown, built a tower house on the island in the loch (Figure 16.1). In 1513−14, the gardener at the bishop’s residence there, Robert Howison, was working on the garden on the south shore of the loch and quarrying stone from the defences of the ruined royal castle there for the building of the tower house.3 He probably constructed the terraces on the east and north sides of the site, which overlie the ramparts of the ruined royal castle.4 There was frequent contact between Scotland and Italy, particularly in the military and clerical spheres. Bishop George Brown, a native of Dundee, had studied at the universities of both St Andrews and Paris, later becoming Chancellor of Aberdeen. In 1483 he was sent to the Roman court as King’s orator by James III in order to secure the promotion of Master George Carmichael as Bishop of Glasgow. While he was in Rome he was enrolled in the household of one of the most prominent cardinals, the Spanish papal vice-chancellor, Rodrigo Borgia, who later became Pope Alexander VI. After the death of the Bishop of Dunkeld in August 1483, Pope Alexander VI consecrated Brown to that see against the wishes of the King, whom Brown had to appease with bribes on his return to Scotland.5 His sojourn in Italy would have provided the opportunity to visit the gardens of the Belvedere in the Vatican, under construction for Pope

Figure 16.1  Aerial view of Clunie Castle in the Loch of Clunie built for Bishop Brown of Dunkeld in the early sixteenth century. The earthwork defences of the earlier royal castle on the shore were modified by later terracing. NRHE DP042065. © Crown copyright: HES.

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Innocent VIII in the mid-1480s; the terraced gardens of the rulers of Florence and Naples; those of Pope Pius II at Pienza; and Borgia’s own gardens at Subiaco.6 Travellers to Italy in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries admired gardens there, particularly those in Tuscany and the neighbourhood of Rome. The terraced gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, among others, would form a regular part of any visit.7 Gardens were recognised as contributing to health.8 Dr Andrew Boorde, who visited Scotland in the 1530s and studied at Glasgow, was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects, publishing The boke for to learne a man to be wyse in buyldyng of his howse for the helth of body [and] to holde quyetnes for the helth of his soule, and body in 1550, which incorporated material from his Compendyous Regyment or Dyetary of Health of 1542. In the first chapter he set out some desirable principles for the selection of the setting of a mansion, which, while they might not induce a landowner to build on a new site, might influence his choice for the development of a house and garden among a choice of existing properties. He favoured a site that was ‘pleasaunt, fayre, and good to the iye, to beholde the woddes, the waters, the feldes, the vales the hylles and the playne ground’.9 The influence of Roman authors, in particular Pliny the Younger, encouraged the adoption of antique garden features, including terraces, across Scotland.10 Aberdour Castle in Fife (Figure 16.2) was owned by James Douglas, Earl of Morton and Regent for James VI during the 1570s. The terraced garden at Aberdour, one of the earliest examples in Scotland, can probably be attributed to the period of his ascendency. This form of garden may be seen as a product of Italian Renaissance thought. Architectural theorists, notably Leon Battista Alberti, looked to Classical precedents, especially the descriptions by Pliny the Younger of his own villas.11 Study of the classical authors was a major element of the education system in Scotland, and their writings enjoyed an immense prestige. Owners would aspire to look beyond their intensively ordered gardens to hills and woods or the sea, the haunt of wild animals, allowing the garden to take in the natural world. This concept was adopted in the villas of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. To Pliny the views were crucial, facilitated by the placement of terraces and garden buildings, as well as by large windows and open porticoes.12 Works by Pliny, Vitruvius and Alberti were found in the libraries of Scotland, and one Edinburgh lawyer, John Marjoribanks, had books by all three on his shelves by the 1550s.13

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Figure 16.2  Reconstruction drawing of the gardens at Aberdour Castle in the mid-seventeenth century showing decorative parterres and paths on the terraces with an orchard below. © Crown copyright: HES. By John Knight and Historic Scotland surveyors.

Aberdour Castle was already old when it came into Morton’s possession: the earliest surviving part, the tower, dated from the fourteenth century.14 Mid-eighteenth-century estate maps and surviving surface evidence indicate the site of a terraced garden adjacent to the sixteenth-century circular dovecot. The original form of the site of the garden was a natural amphitheatre, part of a geological feature known as a raised beach. The designer of the garden took this natural shape and cut deep into the subsoil at the internal angle, using the spoil to build up the terraces on the west, formalising it into an L-shape. Excavation has revealed the remains of stone retaining walls supporting four descending terraces. There is evidence for stairways set at the internal angles of the terraces. Alleys, arbours and decorative planting in knots would probably have occupied the terraces with an ornamental orchard below.15 The terrace garden lay to the south of Aberdour Castle, away from the entrance front, and the inhabitants could look down on the gardens and across the Forth towards Edinburgh. The south range, a sixteenth-century building that provided residential accommodation on the first floor, had a staircase leading down to the upper terrace.16 Other gardens with surviving sixteenth-century terraces include Castle Campbell in Clackmannanshire, Huntly Castle in Aberdeenshire and Muness Castle in Unst in the Shetland

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Islands, illustrating the wide distribution of this feature across Scotland.17 Evidence from surviving gardens, maps and documentary sources indicates a general adoption of the terrace during the first half of the seventeenth century, where the topography was appropriate, and in some cases where it was not. Terraces were employed in town gardens, in the gardens around castles and mansions, as well as around the royal palaces at Linlithgow and Falkland.18 The gardens of the Canongate in Edinburgh are depicted on the 1647 plan of Edinburgh, by James Gordon of Rothiemay, laid out in three or more sections containing parterres, geometric arrangements of trees (probably fruit trees) and linear features (probably vegetable beds). 19 Evidence from later maps and documentary sources indicates that these divisions were terraced and linked by flights of steps. The garden of Moray House (Figure 16.3) was a notable example, with a fountain and two summer houses.20 In 1729 John Macky described Moray House as having ‘a very large Parterre or Flower-Garden behind, with four hanging Walks or Terraces to the bottom, where there is a Bowling-green, and a handsome Pavilion or Pleasure-house’.21 By the middle of the seventeenth century terracing was seen as the normal and practical method of handling sloping ground within a garden. Walter Stewart of Coltness House in Lanarkshire is described as putting his house and garden in order after his marriage in 1654: Figure 16.3  Moray House and its terraced gardens depicted on the 1647 plan of Edinburgh by James Gordon of Rothiemay. NRHE DP101340. © HES.

He sett himself to planting and inclosing, and so to embellish the place . . . The slope of the grounds to the west made the south garden, next the  house, fall into three cross tarresses. The tarras fronting the south of the house was a square parterre, or flour-garden, and the easter and wester, or the higher and lower plots of ground, were for cherry and nut gardens, and walnut and chestnut trees [were] planted upon the head of the upper bank, towards the parterre, and the slope bank on the east syde the parterre was a strawberry border. These three tarrases had a high stone wall on the south, for ripening and improving finer fruits, and to the south of this wall was a good orchard and kitchen garden, with broad grass walks . . .’22

With the return to England of Charles II from exile in France and Holland in 1660, Scotland, which had endured civil wars followed by conquest and a decade of English military occupation, appeared to resume the old pattern of social life of the earlier part of the

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century (see Chapter 1). The country was again ruled from London through Scottish nominees of the King, men who had, for the most part, been his supporters during the 1650s. Many of those who had not been imprisoned by the Cromwellian regime had, like the King, spent time in Holland and France and were familiar with gardens there.23 The estates of many major landowners had been confiscated and others had been heavily fined for their adherence to the royalist cause. The dominance of the landed gentry in this period post1660 was highlighted and reinforced by the construction of country houses and their gardens. The re-establishment of a hierarchical system of government, which derived its authority from the monarchy and in which the nobles saw themselves as possessing a major and recognised role, led to the formation of factions that sought to influence the King and gain offices and patronage in Scotland. Many of the great houses and gardens rebuilt at this time belonged to those who enjoyed royal favour. Classical models, with the prestige and authority that attached to them, were recognised as the appropriate medium for expressing the culture of such a society with its desire for stability after the upheavals of the mid-century. Symmetry, a particular feature of Dutch gardens of the mid-seventeenth century, was perceived as an attribute of order.24 The prestige of the French court and the gardens associated with it was increasing, with those of Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre, coming to epitomise the principles of monarchy.25 Prints depicting Versailles’ gardens circulated widely across Europe.26 This was the first period, according to John Evelyn, when it was considered that modern gardens had surpassed their Classical predecessors.27 André Mollet published Le Jardin de plaisir in 1651 when he was working for Queen Christina of Sweden in Stockholm. He had earlier worked for Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, at Wimbledon Palace and his designs seem to have influenced parterres at Holyrood Palace and Heriot’s Hospital in the 1640s.28 The book was published in three editions with Swedish, French and German texts, and an English edition appeared in London as The Pleasure Garden in 1670; it drew on the author’s experience particularly in France, England and Holland.29 In it Mollet set out the classic French concept of the design of the garden as a whole. Among the features of ‘the Royal and Lordly house’ he particularly emphasised are the presence of water, long walks lined with trees in double or treble ranks proportionate to the breadth of the house, embroidered ground works and knots of grass.30 Terraces were, of course, just one feature of the noble garden.31

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The construction of gardens after the Restoration accompanied the building of great houses and the remodelling of earlier castles and mansions. The two activities are closely linked, and the garden and the house would most profitably be considered together. Major building programmes appear to have been delayed until the mid-1660s and, depending on the finances and ambitions of their owners, continued through until the end of the century and beyond. As we saw, many estates had suffered from the depredations of the civil wars and military conquest, and landowners required time to recover from debts arising from fines imposed by the regime.32 As in the earlier seventeenth century, terraces were once again a major element in the design of gardens. While the nature of any specific site would limit the scale and height of terraces, there are indications from surviving examples, such as Balcaskie (Fife) and Barncluith (Lanarkshire), that there was a preference for designs with a strong central axis and terraces with greater, almost theatrical, verticality, although this should not be overstated. Sir William Bruce, who was to become the most influential architect of the later seventeenth century, purchased Balcaskie (Figures 16.4 and 4.8) in 1665.33 His mercantile activities during the 1650s had taken him to Holland and France, providing him with the opportunity of viewing gardens and mansions in those countries.34 He played a part in ensuring the smooth transition from the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell to the restoration of Charles II and was rewarded with a knighthood in 1660 and a baronetcy in 1668. His personal accounts provide evidence for his interest in gardening, music and painting, and he owned books in French, Italian, Latin and Greek; he also appears to have had a reading knowledge of German and Dutch.35 He extended and recast the original tower house at Balcaskie, forming a symmetrical composition, between 1668 and 1674.36 The garden was laid out to the south of the house on ground that slopes down towards the sea in four terraces. Their central axis was aligned on the Bass Rock, with its historically important castle. His later garden at Kinross House, which he acquired in 1675, was on a much more level site but similarly exploited the view across two shallower terraces to the castle on an island in Loch Leven, which he had already acquired by 1672.37 This alignment of gardens and avenues on sites and monuments that had been significant in the history of Scotland became a feature of gardens designed by Bruce and his successors.38 The extensive gardens of Leslie House in Fife (Figure 16.5) were laid out for the Earl of Rothes, an important supporter of Charles

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II both before and after the Restoration. William Bruce is believed to have influenced the design of the house, which was under construction in 1669 when Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall visited it.39 Thomas Kirke, an Englishman on a tour through Scotland in about 1680, described the gardens:

Figure 16.4  Terraces at Balcaskie House laid out by Sir William Bruce to face the Bass Rock. (See also Figure 4.9). © Marilyn Brown.

On one side of the house are gardens with little statues; in the middle of the fountain stands Apollo. On another side of the house are good gravel alleys, and walls with fruit-trees. At the foot of these is a square level piece, not finished, wherein is intended to be a fountain, and this piece is to be moated round. On the other side are two large courts with broad gravel walks, which lead to the house. On the fourth side is a bank with trees, which goes steep down to a brook, and on the further side of the brook are large gardens.40

The terraces still survive: those to the south of the house were connected by staircases at both ends and revetted by stone walls, against which fruit trees were grown. The terraces to the east of the mansion, where the little statues were placed, were shallower, sloping and

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316   Marilyn Brown

Figure 16.5  Leslie House as it was depicted on the manuscript map of Fife by John Adair in 1684, showing the garden including the terraces and avenues around the house. NLS Adv.MS.70.2.11 (Adair 7). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

grass-covered, with a central path and shallow semi-circular steps providing a link. John Reid, author of The Scots Gard’ner, which appeared in 1683, devoted his sixth chapter to the formation of the pleasure garden. In it, he includes a section on the construction of terraces which included both earthen terraces and those supported by walls, both of which were present at Leslie. Reid also advises his readers on the process of levelling walks and on the positioning of staircases between terraces, as well as on their planting. Terraces which consisted of walks and sloping banks could be planted with borders on both sides; he suggests violets, strawberries or grass. Those supported by walls should be planted with wall trees, presumably fruit trees trained against the wall; the other side should be planted with laurels or similar plants. He discusses the position of the stairs, stressing the interrelationship between the house and the

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The Terraced Garden in Scotland   317

garden. If the midpoint of the terrace was on the central line of the house or of any walk, the stairs from the top and bottom terraces should divide, leading down from a level platform which would serve as a viewing point, to look either over the garden or back to the house. Double stairs like this are present at the top and bottom of the terraces at Drummond Castle (Figure 16.6), where he had been employed in 1675, and at Pitmedden. The staircase, he advises, should not extend beyond the line of the border.41 The majority of stairs between high narrow terraces in Scotland are placed at the sides, influencing the way in which the garden was visited. Among the engravings in the 1719 edition of Jan Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae was one depicting the remarkable terraced garden at Hatton (or Halton) House in West Lothian (Figure 16.7), which survives in outline.42 Charles Maitland, the younger brother of Charles II’s favoured minister in Scotland, the Duke of Lauderdale, had acquired the tower of Hatton through his marriage to its heiress, Elizabeth Lauder, in 1652. He subsequently benefited too from his brother’s position, and was styled Lord Hatton (or Halton) from 1669.43 He was appointed Treasurer Depute and Master of the Mint, and was

Figure 16.6  The terraces at Drummond Castle showing the double staircases. © Marilyn Brown.

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318   Marilyn Brown

Figure 16.7  Hatton House (misidentified as Argyle House) from the engraving in Theatrum Scotiae by Jan Slezer. NRHE SC712215 © HES.

involved with the reconstruction of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, becoming in 1679 Surveyor of the Royal Palaces and Castles in Scotland following Bruce’s dismissal from that post. The building of Hatton and the construction of its gardens took place between 1664 and 1691, the year of his death. Sir John Lauder wrote in his journal for 1668 following his visit to Hatton: All the ground about it the Laird is taking just now in to a park . . . The garden that lies to the west of the dungeon [the tower of Hatton] would have bein better placed to the southe of the house wheir the bowling greine is, tho I confesse that by reason of the precipice of the bray hard at hand it would have bein to narrow.44

Because the gardens depicted by Slezer lie to the south of the house, it would seem that Lauder’s opinion came to be shared by Hatton, and there must have been a strong desire to create a substantial terrace, which would have required considerable excavation and levelling. On the lower terrace, which was reached by flights of stairs

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Figure 16.8  Detail from Slezer’s engraving of Hatton House showing the use of the terrace wall for growing espaliered fruit trees. NRHE SC712215 © HES.

at each end, were a pair of two-storeyed pavilions with ogee roofs and doors opening onto the lower terrace, and probably the upper terrace as well. The retaining wall of the upper terrace, standing some 19ft high, and the enclosing walls were planted with espaliered fruit trees (Figure 16.8). Lauderdale’s own mansion at Thirlestane was also situated on an elevated site and the gardens were laid out on a series of low earthen terraces (Figure 16.9). John Reid, while much concerned with methods for levelling ground, does not provide any detail for the construction of terraces, indicating perhaps that the techniques required for their creation were generally understood. Patrick, 3rd Earl of Strathmore, created two contrasting gardens at his residences of Glamis Castle and Castle Lyon (today known as Castle Huntly) in the 1670s and 1680s.45 Glamis was low lying, and the Earl, who prided himself on being his own architect, was concerned to provide the appearance of a level, orderly setting for the castle.46 At Castle Huntly, near Dundee, where the fifteenth-century tower was situated on a rocky knoll, he recounts how much effort was required to produce the terraced gardens there:

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320   Marilyn Brown

Figure 16.9  Plan for Thirlestane Castle and its gardens by Jan Slezer and Jan Wyck (c. 1680). The terraced gardens are depicted to the right of the mansion on sloping ground. NRHE SC372553 © HES.

The whole bounds of the kitchean yeard and nouricerie below the house and upon the west syde thereof is formed out of a declining rock which came out that farr, and the whole falling walks are cutt out of rock upon the East halfe of them and all filled up and carried ground upon the west halfe. And this I mention the more particularly because all levellings when done are so under cover disguise that it’s scarce to be beleeved what work or labour there hes been att the doing of it, besyds the Litle garden, which is before the gate where the statues are, was nothing but a litle piece of ground without forme declining to the east, an ugly rock standing up in some places as high as the top of the statu’s are upon the west syde. The bowling-green no better and the plott upon the south side of the house worst of all, the utter court beat doune by force of quarry mells and peiks to render it accessable . . .47

Terraces in Scotland in the later seventeenth century are only one element in the design of a garden, although a highly favoured one,

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The Terraced Garden in Scotland   321

for reasons of style, fashion and natural topography and for the opportunities it presented for the designer of the garden.48 With a tradition dating from at least the later sixteenth century, which drew particularly on Italian models, terraced gardens should not be seen primarily as a borrowing from France after 1660, although the prestige of Versailles and later gardens in the style of André Le Nôtre, for example at Meudon, Chantilly and Marly, reinforced the status of this feature. The increase in the number of higher terraces supported by retaining walls, inherently more difficult and expensive, marks a development in taste from the earlier part of the century. Construction of gardens with elaborate terraces continued into the eighteenth century, but the advent of the landscape garden reduced the number of extant examples in Scotland, and many of the examples remaining owe their survival to neglect and to the sheer difficulty and expense of encompassing their destruction. Only with the restoration of gardens, such as those at Drummond Castle, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a development which owed much to a romantic view of the Scottish past as epitomised by Sir Walter Scott’s praise of early gardens, was the terrace again appreciated as a major element in Scottish garden design.49

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17

Alexander Edward’s European Tour, 1701–2 John Lowrey

I

n January 1701 Alexander Edward, the Scottish Episcopalian minister turned architect and garden designer,1 signed a contract with a group of Scottish noblemen and lairds, who agreed to provide financial backing for a trip to England, Flanders, the Netherlands and France, in return for him carrying out certain commissions on their behalf and advising them on their houses and gardens for three years after his return.2 In terms of architecture and, to an even greater extent, garden design, this was to prove an extremely significant event, and will be the main focus of this chapter. However, it is important to understand that it had a wider purpose and significance. The contract is instructive here; it talks about making draughts of ‘curious and remarkable houses, edifices, gardens, orchards, parks, plantations . . .’ on the one hand, but, on the other, Edward was also expected to consider ‘land improvements, coal works, mines, waterworks . . . PARTICULARLY in the kingdom of England to consider some coal works and lead mines about Newcastle . . .’3 The priorities are interesting but not surprising. Edward had a career of a good ten years behind him advising estate owners about their buildings and landscapes, with a strongly practical bent, on enclosing, planting, and so on. The point has been made elsewhere that the Scottish formal landscape in this period was at least as much about economics as it was about aesthetics and that economic improvement was a crucial part of the improvement of country house estates.4 Further evidence that this was also a motivation for Edward’s trip is provided by the one surviving report of those he was contractually obliged to provide for the Earl of Mar during his time

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   323

away. There, he discusses, among other things, the way harbours in Normandy were arranged so that the outgoing tide could be used to sluice them out and keep them clean.5 There were lessons for Scotland to learn, not only about architecture and gardens, but also about these more pragmatic and productive matters.6 It was also a trip in which Edward’s existing credentials as an antiquarian and natural historian were accredited by Sir Robert Sibbald, who gave him a letter of introduction to Hans Sloane, Secretary to the Royal Society.7 These interests seem to have played a major part in Edward’s travels. Finally, it was also a political trip, with Edward carrying cipher letters to the Jacobite court at St Germain; it is significant that the majority of his patrons were Jacobite nobility.8 There was nothing ‘grand’ about this tour. Alexander Edward was not a wealthy gentleman traveller, undertaking a tour to polish his manners and culture. His position, a former clergyman and son of a clergyman, if anything qualified him for the position of tutor, who might have accompanied and guided such a gentleman traveller,9 but his tour was a much more complex event and ultimately one of great cultural significance for Scottish architecture and landscape design. There was no one else in Scotland at this time who had the combination of skills, knowledge, connections and political background to make such a trip.10 The key surviving source is a single vellum-bound notebook, which survives in the Dalhousie Papers (Figure 17.1). It contains information in the pages of the book but also has a good deal of loose material within. As a source, it needs to be treated with some caution because such an expensive item may well have been used for other purposes and at least one entry on the bound pages dates from long after the tour itself, indicating that it was clearly used after Edward’s return to Scotland.11 It is also possible that some of the material, particularly the loose material, may date from a point earlier than the tour, although most of it seems to be reconcilable with his activities on his travels, and it includes both a very small but essential vocabulary list (‘du lait, du beurre, du fromage, une omelette, une salade’) and a lock of grey hair, possibly his mother’s.12 The notebook also shows that other individuals were involved in the tour and, although they are not mentioned in the contract, they gave Edward commissions to undertake on their behalf and advice about what he should see on his travels. This does not mean, however, that Edward necessarily visited every place mentioned, and this chapter will attempt to disentangle that issue, with suggestions on the route followed and the places visited. Before that, there is an even more

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324   John Lowrey

Figure 17.1  Alexander Edward’s notebook. NRS GD45/26/140.

basic question to address, which is exactly when the trip took place, and here a number of other documents help to clarify the information in Edward’s notebook. Our starting point is the contract, which required Edward to begin his journey by 1 March 1701. That didn’t happen, as the surviving document shows, because Edward was signing a receipt for a payment from the Earl of Mar in Edinburgh on 15 May.13 I have argued elsewhere that a collection of material, mainly architectural and garden designs now in a private collection, represents part of Edward’s contractual obligation to one of his patrons and that some of the ephemera in that collection dates the material to 1700–1.14 Whilst that dating is sound in general, not all of it works in detail and the invitation to a funeral at St Eustache in Paris on Christmas Day 1701 seems an unlikely event for Edward to have attended because he seems still to have been in London at that time.15 Moreover, the one piece of evidence that places Edward in Paris in 1701 equally seems to be unreliable. In his notebook there are transcriptions of two charters held by the Scots College in Paris, one by Robert, Archbishop of St Andrews and the other by King David I, both from 1150. At the end of the transcription he has recorded: ‘Exscripta die 5 Junii Anno Di 1701. A Edward’.16 However, this seems to be contradicted by other evidence (discussed below), which suggests June 1702 is the likely date for this visit. The dates we do have are as follows: the contract was drawn up in January 1701; on 14 March (already past the 1 March deadline for departure), Robert Wodrow, Professor of Divinity and librarian of Glasgow University, who was part of Sir Robert Sibbald’s circle, wrote to Edward on antiquarian matters and said he was ‘satisfied to hear that you are to come this way for England’, suggesting that the

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   325

tour may have started in Glasgow.17 The receipt already mentioned was signed on 5 May and Sibbald’s letter to Sloane was dated 14 May, so at that point Edward seems to have been close to leaving. In July, however, he drew up and witnessed a Memorandum of Agreement between the Earl of Panmure and Alex Blair, a smith, for making garden gates at Panmure, so clearly he delayed his departure until some point after that.18 No other document exists for 1701 but there is evidence that he was in London at the start of 1702, when the notebook shows him busily acquiring goods from London traders, and two ships were dispatched to Leith and Burntisland with his purchases (a lot of garden material, discussed below) in February 1702.19 Given the amount of work Edward had clearly done by that stage, it seems likely that he was in London by late 1701. In April, May and June 1702 he is recorded buying books in Paris20 and in that same period he was also in contact with the exiled Jacobite court at St Germain, including, in June, passing on secret messages.21 On 8 June, he left Paris, heading ultimately to Holland, on a vessel owned by a Scottish ship master, Mr Boynd, and reported to the Earl of Mar on 7 July from Le Havre.22 The last piece of evidence for his presence in Europe comes in September 1702, when Sir David Nairne was attempting to secure him a pass from Louis XIV’s foreign secretary, Colbert de Torcy, to travel out of France; that is likely to have been the start of his journey home.23 As far as the duration of the tour is concerned, however, it seems to have lasted perhaps a little more than a year, with the summer of 1701, for which there is very little concrete evidence in terms of dated documents, being taken up mainly with his journey to London and the visits he made along the way. He certainly seems to have been back in Scotland by early 1703, because we then find him involved at Hopetoun House, in line with his contractual obligations, and he made a drawing of a sperm whale washed up at Monifeith on 23 February of that year.24 Cutting across the particularities of Edward’s visit is a different and much more significant timeline, namely that of the constitutional, political and military crisis enveloping both the United Kingdom and Europe at this time. The exiled James VII/II died on 16 September 1701 and Louis XIV recognised his son, James Francis Edward Stewart, as the rightful heir to the throne. Following the death of William of Orange the following March, at about the time Edward arrived in France, Louis refused to recognise Queen Anne, and on 15 May 1702 England declared war on France. That context is significant for the Edward trip both because it made its political, Jacobite aspects all the more important and because warfare made

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Figure 17.2  Map showing places visited by Edward and conjectural route. Drawn by Nick Mols.

travel more difficult and the cooperation of the French authorities was necessary. Having established the possible duration of the trip, it is now necessary to turn to the route taken by Edward and, with that, some of the places he visited along the way (Figure 17.2). The first thing to note here is that England was rather important to Edward on his tour. The notebook is minutely full of references to places to visit, notable antiquities, important and useful people, industrial sites and, of course, significant houses and gardens. We cannot be certain that every place or person listed there was actually visited but it does

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   327

show that Edward was travelling overland through England and, in that case, would certainly have been stopping off at various places on the way south. The themes already identified come through in that list: architecture and gardens, industry and economy, and antiquities are all noted. The exact route cannot be identified with absolute certainty but there is a core group of locations that cluster around the Great North Road and that would seem to have been the most logical route to take; however, this does not rule out the possibility of deviations along the way, especially if Edward travelled through England over a fairly long period of a number of months. Other clues to the route are those documents that we can state with more certainty indicate places he was intending to visit, as opposed to places that had been mentioned to him as possibilities, and, within the notebook, there are a number in this category. The notebook contains ‘Memorandum to Mr Alex Edward to observe in his traveling’, ‘Memorandum of some persons to search after’, ‘Memorandum of commissions’ and ‘Memorandum of observable curiosities’.25 So, Holy Island is noted; coal and lead works around Newcastle were already mentioned in the contract; an industrial site at Fenton, near Alnwick, where ‘they dig clay for pots for glass works’, attracted his attention; and the Devil’s Arrows – standing stones at Boroughbridge, where the Great North Road crosses the River Ure – was also noted. He was impressed by the Duke of Devonshire’s rape seed oil mills in Wetherby; and at Tuxford (near another river crossing at Newark) he made notes on the use of talc in the construction of floors ‘whereof the floors of houses is usually made upon reads above joists six inches thick and becomes hard and strong as stone . . .’26 Many houses are noted and a large number of these are on or close to the main road. Edward mentions Earl Carlisle’s near York – Castle Howard, where construction had started fairly recently. He visited Chatsworth, Belvoir Castle, Burghley House and any number of houses in and around London, including Ranelagh House and Gardens, next to Chelsea Hospital, and Rochester House – both of which the Earl of Mar wanted plans of – as well as Sayes Court, the home of writer and gardener John Evelyn, raising the possibility that he met Evelyn. Other places that were slightly further afield also seem to have been destinations on the tour. It seems certain that he went to Oxford and, in this, we get a glimpse of the wider network around Sir Robert Sibbald, with Edward working on his behalf. He was given the task of seeking out ‘Mr Loyd Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum to shew him what he left with Mr Paterson will be sent to

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328   John Lowrey

Figure 17.3  Transcription of two commemorative tablets from the Antonine Wall recorded in Alexander Edward’s notebook. NRS GD45/26/140.

him as he directs’.27 This was Edward Lhwyd, keeper from 1690 to 1709, an antiquarian who worked all over the British Isles and was well known to Sibbald and his circle.28 One of the loose items in Edward’s notebook is a small piece of paper with two Latin inscriptions (Figure 17.3). These are both commemorative tablets erected by soldiers of the sixth legion building the Antonine Wall. One is noted by Edward as being in Glasgow University library, having been found in 1695 at Old Kilpatrick. The other, slightly more elaborate one he indicates was discovered at Castletoun in September 1699. Despite a few minor discrepancies (Castlehill rather than Castletoun, for example), both stones are readily identifiable and both are in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow University today.29 These facts might suggest a visit to Robert Wodrow and Glasgow on the way south, although it is possible that Edward already had this information. Certainly, it seems

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   329

likely that he would have shared this with people like Lhwyd in Oxford and Sloane in London, as well, perhaps, as others in France and the Netherlands.30 The Ashmolean is of particular interest here not only because of how it links Edward into these networks but also because its collection had a very strong botanical focus at this time, being based fundamentally on the Tradescant collection. That, of course, also reflects Sibbald’s interests, and there is a following note, which suggests a somewhat wider geographical reach and deviation from the Great North Road. The note continues: ‘Bedminton, the Duke of Beaufort’s residence. Dr Sherard who was bred a lawyer is Mr Sutherland’s acquaintance and Director of these gardens and the best botanist in Britain.’31 The Mr Sutherland referred to was James Sutherland, a key member of Sibbald’s circle. He was, first and foremost, a botanist and keeper of the Physic Garden in Edinburgh, as well as being the Royal Botanist in Scotland. He was also an antiquarian and numismatist. In this instance, it seems to be his botanical interests that Edward was helping with because Dr Sherard was William Sherard, who was indeed the best and most famous botanist in Britain. Here, there is a strong Oxford, Edinburgh, London, Badminton linkage. The key person here was Mary Somerset, 1st Duchess of Beaufort. Badminton is mentioned twice in Edward’s notebook and Beaufort House in Chelsea also receives a mention, but it was the Duchess, rather than the Duke, who is significant. She was a pioneering botanist and plant collector, who developed scientific collections and the gardens at both houses. She was in correspondence with naturalists all over Britain, especially those in the circle of Sir Hans Sloane (who was also her doctor when she was in London), and the Royal Society.32 In Oxford, she was in contact with Jacob Bobart, Professor of Botany and Keeper of the Physic Garden, who connected her with Edward Lhwyd as ‘perhaps the best naturalist in England’; Lhwyd later contributed to her collection. Sherard belonged to the same group. He was directly employed by the Duchess at the very beginning of the eighteenth century and worked at Badminton House until 1702.33 Badminton as a formal landscape that may have had significance for Scotland will be discussed in due course. For the moment, what emerges from this analysis is, first, the highly networked character of Edward’s trip and, second, the rather strong likelihood that he took his time in travelling to London and visited places close to the main route but also further afield. Within the notebook, there are a number of references to places in the west of England that were of

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330   John Lowrey

interest, including Gloucester and Stonehenge, and this note suggests that Edward did perhaps make that trip. Again, what emerges here is the wide network of contacts that Edward was able to access. The Scottish lynchpin for this was Sir Robert Sibbald; in London, and England more generally, it was Sir Hans Sloane and the Royal Society, whose members crop up in Edward’s notes and, on investigation, form networks across the country, giving Edward contacts in antiquities, natural history, botany and, potentially at least, gardens and houses. Of course, the ultimate destination was London and Edward was to spend quite a bit of time and money there. For the moment, in working out the route, the surviving documentation is not definitive. The internal evidence of the notebook for the dates of his tour suggest London, to Paris, to the Low Countries and then back to France. This is also supported by the contract in that it lists the places to visit as England, France, Flanders and Holland, in that order.34 Another factor that becomes important from May 1702 was the outbreak of war, which disrupted direct travel between England and France, but it seems likely that Edward had travelled to France at least a month before the war started. Thereafter, direct communication between France and England was disrupted and, in his report to the Earl of Mar in July 1702, having travelled along the Seine to Le Havre, it is clear that communication is, by that time, via the Low Countries. He mentions delays to both ‘passage and even post letters from England to France by Holland’.35 At this point, it seems unlikely that he was returning to England because he was clearly still in France in September, when Sir David Nairne applied for a pass from Colbert de Torcy on his behalf. That suggests that his itinerary was from France to Holland by sea, and then back to France overland via Antwerp, Brussels and Enghien (listed in his notebook). When he returned, presumably in the autumn of that year, it is not clear if he was able to make a direct trip to Scotland or, once again, had to go via the Low Countries (see Figure 17.2). In the two or three months he spent in London, Edward was extremely busy, following up contacts given by patrons and associates in Scotland and purchasing items for clients back in Scotland. The most important were the nurserymen, a number of whom were mentioned and their prices noted. These included Peter Mason at Isleworth, who went on to found a business that lasted well into the eighteenth century.36 He had a large stock of both evergreens (mainly hollies) and fruit trees, including apricots, peaches and nectarines. There were also otherwise unknown figures, ­including

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Francis Watton in Putney (‘at the three sugar loaves’), Nerias Deios, seedsman at the Golden Cross near Exeter Exchange and a M. Guillaume, at Kensington. In the last two cases, Edward was not only checking prices but also buying for his clients. Nerias Deios supplied 500 beech trees to the Earl of Southesk, the same to the Laird of Balnamoon, 1,000 hornbeam to Hopetoun, silver fir to Sir John Shaw of Greenock, Dutch limes to the Earl of Mar and a range of other produce to most of the people named in the contract, along with other clients for whom Edward was working. Mar was the major client, and Edward purchased from Chelsea and Deios a huge number of shrubs, trees and plants, including juniper, yew, box, arbutus, laurels, myrtles and holly (from Ham House), as well as seed – for silver fir, asparagus, hollyhocks and other flowers, and vegetables. Edward also went to Ranelagh House as he had been recommended to do, because he bought plants from the gardener there, including variegated Phalaris (grass) and Swedish juniper. Other local gardeners are mentioned: Mr Gray in Fulham, Mr Kemp in Putney, Mr Holt in Fulham and John Roberts, gardener at the Physick Garden in Chelsea. Edward was helped in finding his way around and in making purchases by Robert Balfour, gardener in Twickenham, who was paid for his pains. Edward’s Scottish clients also took advantage of his presence in London to buy other goods that were less easily come by in Scotland, including wigs, toys, maps and expensive building materials like marble and glass. Among the many contacts Edward had been given in London was that of Leonard Knyff, the printmaker who would later produce Britannia Illustrata with Jan Kip. Knyff was to be found ‘in the corner of old palace yard Westminster next door to the steps to the House of Lords where he makes and sells drafts of perspectives’.37 Britannia Illustrata was not published until 1707 but it is clear that Knyff was already producing the engravings and making them available for sale. The original intention was to run a subscription but, as an advertisement in the Post Boy (31 May 1701) makes clear, they could also be purchased direct from Old Palace Yard.38 The advertisement mentions sixty engravings ready for the public, but Edward’s account for the Earl of Mar, early in 1702, shows that by that time sixty-five were ready, meaning that Mar had most of what became Britannia Illustrata long before it was published. The prints in question included Chatsworth, Bolsover, Dunham Massy and Badminton, among others.39 All of that material was dispatched to Scotland in February 1702, in two ships, that of Mr Spence, bound for Leith, and that of Mr Ged, heading to Burntisland.40

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Figure 17.4  Sketch survey of St James’s Park. NRS GD45/26/140.

Edward also explored the architecture, gardens and landscape design of London and its environs, and this has left one significant trace in the notebook (Figure 17.4). It is unclear whether Kip and Knyff’s plan of St James’s Park had already been produced by 1702 but that famous view is rigorous in its exclusion of buildings outwith the boundaries of park and palace. Edward clearly examined the site for himself because, although his drawing is quite sketchy, it is covered in very precise measurements. It is puzzling, however, in that it appears to show a building at each end of the main canal: Arlington House at one end, and what appears to be a Palladian villa at the other. The latter impression is reinforced by the addition of a set of villa plans below the St James’s Park sketch. In fact, the villa plans have nothing to do with the apparent villa on the axis of the canal and, once that is understood, its true identity as Inigo

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Jones’ Banqueting House becomes clear. As far as Arlington House is concerned, first of all Edward has squeezed it into the available space on the page, but the pair of linked asterisks on the plan show that its actual position is off to one side, almost axially aligned with the Mall rather than the canal. This, of course was the correct position for the house and, ultimately, for Buckingham House that replaced it, and of course Buckingham Palace subsequently. Edward’s plan is also important in recording Arlington House, just one year before its demolition in 1703,41 and Schomberg House (a house recommended to Edward as worth visiting) on the Mall. The basics of Arlington House are recorded; they show that the arcade on the front (recorded in Old and New London) was also present on the back. The great lantern rising from the mansard roof is also shown and the use of stone dressings for openings and quoins is also noted by Edward. Similarly, he recorded Schomberg House, a relatively recent addition to Pall Mall in 1698, reconstructed from two existing houses. Some of what he shows confirms what we know of Schomberg and even ties in with some of the speculation about its original appearance, notably the entrance hall with column screen at the back and the possibility of having three cupolas, but, intriguingly, he very definitely shows it without the central pediment that every other view of the house has.42 The recording of both houses at such an early date makes Edward’s little sketches significant sources for understanding the arrangement and appearance of both at the very beginning of the eighteenth century. London was therefore a key part of the tour and had a direct impact on estates back in Scotland as the nursery material was shipped north. The horticultural was, as we have seen, accompanied by the purchase of other goods and the networking with people like Knyff, Sir Hans Sloane and Sir John Woodward of Gresham College, another member of the Royal Society. There is much less information on Edward’s activities in the Low Countries, which will here be dealt with out of sequence, but the pattern appears to be very much the same as London, and the three memoranda in the notebook demonstrate similar concerns. There is the same combination of the practical acquisition of materials, for example the pricing of marble and oak planks for Sir John Shaw of Greenock, people to seek out and places to visit.43 Antiquarian activity was a key part of the Dutch episode in Edward’s travels. Booksellers feature quite strongly in his list of people to visit. One of those was Reinier Leers of Rotterdam (1654–1714),44 also a famous printer and publisher, who, Edward noted, ‘speaks English, is

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­universally knowing, is of the Loevestein faction’ (that is, essentially republican and had been against William of Orange).45 In Nijmegen, his interest was Johannes Smetius the younger, who ‘hath a great collection of [?] curiosities and medals and Mr Sutherland wants his Smetij Antiqitates Neomagenses in quarto’.46 This is a reference to the famous Smetius collection, published in 1678 by Johannes Smetius the elder. Smetius was the most important early modern researcher on the Romans in Batavia, and the main focus of his life’s work was documenting Roman culture and remains in Holland. He was an antiquarian and archaeologist who built up a large collection of Roman artefacts, which he published in the volume Edward was seeking for James Sutherland.47 It is possible that Edward could have viewed the collection itself in 1702, although it was sold the following year.48 Whether he did or not, there is a very clear overlap of antiquarian, and specifically Roman, interests between Scotland and Holland, with the interests of Smetius in Holland being echoed by people like Sir Robert Sibbald, James Sutherland, Robert Wodrow and Edward himself.49 Certainly, it seems very likely that Edward would have shared his Antonine Wall inscriptions with Smetius, because these were exactly the kind of artefact that formed the Dutch collection. As in England, the antiquarian interest was matched by a scientific one, and another of Edward’s contacts, this time in Delft, was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a pioneer in microscopy and microbiology and attached to the Royal Society in London. Edward even picked up commissions from contacts previously made in London. Leonard Knyff, having sold him his complete set of country house engravings for the Earl of Mar, then asked him to seek out Carel Allard in Amsterdam to find out if he ‘hath engraven any doubles of his English perspectives and which and to buy two of them’.50 Edward visited most of the main towns of the Netherlands; apart from those already mentioned, he went to Leyden, where he saw the anatomy theatre and Physic Garden, the model for Edinburgh’s Physic Garden, and visited the bookshops. He was also in and around The Hague, where his notebook itemises a number of important houses, all of them owned by, or associated with, William of Orange. These included Honselaersdijk, and the ‘house in the wood three miles from Hage’,51 which is certainly Pieter Post’s Huis ten Bosch. Two others were owned by key allies and friends of William: De Voorst was the home of Arnold Joost van Keppel, created Earl of Albermarle by William, and Sorghvliet, the home of Hans William Bentinck, Earl of Portland. Architecturally, in Huis ten Bosch, built

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   335

in 1645,52 and De Voorst, by Jacob Roman, only recently completed in 1700,53 Edward was exposed to a particular brand of Dutch Classicism, which drew part of its inspiration from Palladio and Scamozzi, and was influential in both England and Scotland in the Restoration and late Stuart period.54 Elsewhere in the notebook there is a distinctively Palladian set of plans for a small villa, with characteristically Palladian quadrant links from the house to the service wings (Figure 17.5). Even if this design is not linked to the tour, it must predate Edward’s death in 1708, and even at that point, what is now seen as typically Palladian was, in reality, fairly rare. It was even rarer in 1702. De Voorst was a possible starting point, at least for the use of quadrant links. However, the quadrant link already had a history in Scotland, having been used by Sir William Bruce as early as the 1670s at Balcaskie and also at Kinross.55 As yet, no source for this design has been uncovered, leaving the possibility that it is a design by Edward. The plans are presented in a somewhat similar manner, ascending floor by floor and with what appear to be mezzanines off to the side, as Edward’s plans of Kinross, carried out c. 1690. The house is considerably smaller than Kinross, but it has some of the same arrangements. We can detect the nursery in the basement because it has box beds, like Kinross, and we can deduce from that that the Woman House would have been in the outer pavilion adjacent to this. Above, on the principal floor, there is a grand staircase in the hallway, very unlike Kinross, and a main apartment that wraps around it, ending in a bed chamber and closet above the nursery. The top floor is given over to small bedroom apartments and the roof plan suggests a mansard roof and a house with pediments front and back. There are two other aspects to this design, which suggest that, although the overall context is the Anglo-Dutch Palladianism that was so influential at the time, Kinross is a very specific source. The two pavilions and their quadrant links enclose a small cour d’honneur and exactly as Kinross, that area is raised up into a small terrace (with a ‘green bank’). Moreover, there is a hint at the very bottom of the drawing of a double curved wall that makes an elegant transition between the pavilions and the boundary of the service yards; again, this is almost identical to what was proposed for Kinross. Overall, therefore, there is a sense of Edward responding to the Classicist architecture he had seen in both England and Holland, but he combines it with the existing Scottish response to that tradition. The French leg of the trip was slightly different from both the English and Dutch parts. There were no ‘persons to search after’, or at least none whose names Edward would commit to a notebook.

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Figure 17.5  Plan for a Palladian House. NRS GD45/26/140.

This was the part of the trip, undertaken just as war broke out with France over the issue of the British succession (i.e. Louis XIV’s recognition of the Old Pretender), when Edward was commissioned by his Jacobite patrons to make contact with the exiled Stewart

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   337

court at St Germain. Nor was there quite so much concern with purchasing building materials for Scottish clients, although some were identified, notably glass from Rouen.56 Aside from his ‘diplomatic’ mission, Edward’s main concern in and around Paris was architecture and gardens, partly to visit but mainly to acquire imagery, either by purchasing prints, making drawings or copying drawings. Under the terms of his contract, he was required to supply a certain number of engravings and drawings for his patrons, but he actually secured vastly more than that contractual requirement.57 There were three main print publishers mentioned by Edward in his notebook: Nicolas de Fer was royal geographer to both Louis XIV and Philip V of Spain. His map of Paris (possibly by his father, d. 1673) and his plans and illustrations of fortifications are all listed by Edward. However, de Fer was the least important of the Paris printmakers and publishers for Edward’s purposes. By far the majority of material he acquired came from the rival, but related, publishers Mariette and Langlois. Both operated in the area of the Sorbonne, on the Rue St Jacques, Mariette at the sign of the Pillars of Hercules, Langlois at the sign of Victory (Figure 17.6).58

Figure 17.6  Extract from the list of engravings purchased by Alexander Edward in Paris. This part shows items bought from Langlois and Mariette on the left, and engravings itemised by category (waterworks, doors, stairs, churches) on the right. NRS GD45/26/140.

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338   John Lowrey

Figure 17.7 (left)  Edward’s plan of Château de Pont. NRS GD45/26/140. Figure 17.8 (above)  Château de Pont, from Manière de bien bastir by Pierre Le Muet (1647). Cambridge University Library, shelfmark M.7.13 (OS).

The document shown in Figure 17.6 is interestingly set out, with six columns of information organised in four different ways. The first column seems to suggest things definitely purchased with a list of items ‘from’ de Fer, Mariette and Langlois, often with prices. These include perspectives of Chantilly, Liancourt and St Germain; a number of maps of Paris; fortifications; a few religious images; around forty garden views and plans, including Fontainebleau; thirty-eight parterre designs (fourteen of them coloured) purchased from

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   339

Mariette; and a note that ‘M. Langlois hath 41 prints of Versailles’. The second column lists a great variety of types of image held by Langlois, and the third column, which is rather sparsely filled, is organised by building type: bridges, gates, parterres, churches (the only category that has many examples), and so on. The last three columns are organised alphabetically. Overall, it provides a fairly systematic listing of the print sellers’ stock. Famous French châteaux, like Vaux-le-Vicomte, feature along with public buildings and urban hotels, including Carnavalet and Amelot de Biseuil (which had been recommended to Edward as a place to visit by the Earl of Southesk and which he mentioned in the notebook). Elsewhere in the notebook there are frequent mentions of designs, especially in the materials being shipped back to Scotland, and the printed material was being rolled into bundles and packed into barrels and trunks for the journey. These included 245 plans and perspectives of houses, 139 plans of garden designs, forty-five bound plans and perspectives of houses in one folio and eighty in another. In the first eight or nine lines of his account of material sent back, there are 750 architectural and garden design prints; in total, there seem to have been between 800 and 900. This is a huge number, and Edward’s activities in Paris provided the biggest single influx of French architectural material into Scotland in this period. He seems to have voraciously devoured the offerings of Mariette and Langlois for the good of his Scottish patrons and clients. Among his notes, Edward also made small architectural sketches of buildings or of details of buildings (notably stair designs); he was, however, almost certainly not making these on visits but was copying from engraved plans. In the case of the Château de Pont, his sketches seem to derive directly from Le Muet, specifically the 1647 augmented edition of the original Manière de bien bastir (Figures 17.7 and 17.8).59 The plans are typical of some of Edward’s other drawings in the notebook in that they are drawn freehand and are somewhat sketchy but are also rather precise. In this case, he copied the plan fairly accurately and also seems to have used the scale to mark out the dimensions of the main outdoor spaces. This practice of working from existing graphic material and augmenting it also occurs in his treatment of the Louis XIV pavilion at Marly, although on that occasion there is very clear evidence that he visited it as well.60 The drawing he produced (now in the Ashmolean) was for the Earl of Mar and went on to be of huge significance in the latter’s architectural activities in later years.61 Further confirmation of his personal familiarity with Marly comes

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340   John Lowrey

in the report to the Earl of Mar of July 1702, previously referred to. Here he talks about very detailed aspects of the garden design: of how the grass banks are relieved by stone stairs, of how the ‘moist walks’ are in stone sets but sanded ‘which looks very weel’.62 This report is an invaluable record of Edward’s activities and his thoughts on what he was seeing. It is a great pity that more reports have not survived because the level of detail is extraordinary. He talks to Mar about the large number of images he has purchased (spending 200 livres, although it is not clear if that was just for Mar) and about copying plans as well as buying ‘original draughts’, and makes it clear that Paris was the best place for this material (they ‘exceed for all that is to be got at London’). Edward, as we shall shortly see, had a keen interest in evergreens, especially holly, and the notebook has a number of references to this. In the report, he writes that, on the one hand, ‘really, the French gardening as to fyness and surprising variety exceeds the English much more than they do us’, while, on the other indeed they have but little variety in their cut evergreens and are mostly yew and pitcha and but few Hollie which after consideration I found a just choice for as their yews exceeds the English for closeness and verdure, so the Hollies are fainter than the British.

He also considers French parterre design, noting their lack of flowers, except in the side borders. He talks about a great plan of Versailles, mentioning the water features and suggesting ‘with no great expense your Lordship could have better than any as yet in Scotland’. In similar, though less ambitious fashion he notes that the practice of having either the inner or outer court in grass is something he had already recommended at Panmure.63 By this time, Edward was growing slightly weary of his trip and in particular of the journey from Paris to Le Havre, which had taken four weeks. But he was also feeling the strain of his mission in what was now a time of war. He wrote to Mar, the trouble of this journey is vexing towards the end and if shadows would fright me I [would be] in danger of trouble by some malicious persons yet I am satisfied with myself and shall give no just offence to any person.64

There is another significance in this report and another FrancoScottish and, it seems, Jacobite connection that was certainly commercial and possibly political. The ship master who travelled

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   341

between Paris and Le Havre, as we saw, was Mr Boynd. He plied up and down the river taking passengers (at exorbitant prices, ­according to Edward) and carrying materials, in particular marble, under a seven-year contract with Jules Hardouin Mansart, the royal architect who was building Versailles and Marly at the time. Edward mentions a fireplace at Marly that had used some of this marble. Boynd seems to have invited Edward to remain on board while he carried out some of his work, causing Edward to remain in France for three weeks longer than he had intended and raising the possibility that he was able to observe some of the very functional aspects of the royal works at first hand. What it certainly meant is that Edward was able to travel with this favoured person without hindrance. It is not clear who this Mr Boynd was, but the name is significant and so is the reference to Boynd Ogilvie in the Edward report. In his travel notebook, we have already noted the list of things sent back to Scotland from France; these went in ‘Mr Boynd’s ship for Scotland’, suggesting the same person and showing that his activities were not restricted to delivering things up and down the Seine. The name Ogilvie also appears in this account, as Edward records some prints being given to William Ogilvie on board ship. The account also lists a number of items, which are then summarised by Edward as ‘22 prints rolled up with the Laird of Boynd’s in his long trunk cost £17 and marked belonging to Mr Alexander Edward’.65 The Laird of Boynd was either Sir Patrick Ogilvie of Boyne or his son Sir James Ogilvie (Boyne was often spelled Boynd). The family seat was at Boyne Castle, near Banff, and they were very strong Jacobites, active throughout this period in Scotland and, like Edward, in France. To find a ship, which certainly appears to have a family connection, with a favoured status in the French royal works, suggests a combination of commerce and politics that does not look coincidental and suggests a link from the exiled Stewart court back to Scotland and not only to Leith but all the way to Portsoy. If the Boynd/Ogilvie link suggests a connection between commerce and politics, in Edward’s case there also seems to be a connection between politics and culture. The mention of Colbert de Torcy within the context of Edward’s visit suggests, first, that his political mission was known to the French authorities and, especially with the involvement of Sir David Nairne (and therefore the Jacobite court), was looked on with favour. That almost certainly made it easier for him to get permission to travel but there is a possibility that he was also favoured in other ways, including access to cultural resources that might not otherwise have been available.

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342   John Lowrey

Figure 17.9  Alexander Edward, topiary designs. Hopetoun Collection.

It is difficult to be certain about this. The notebook contains one reference to a proposed publication on royal architecture (intended by Mariette) that Edward could not buy (it wasn’t yet available) but he does mention seeing the drawings or prints in the King’s library, which hints at some sort of privilege enjoyed by him. It is tempting to see the hand of Colbert de Torcy in this; the Hotel de Torcy, which was also the Paris base of the Foreign Office, was on the Rue Vivienne, only a few metres from the Royal Library, and one of de Torcy’s main interests and contribution was in the development of state archives and libraries. There is another piece of evidence that indicates privileged access even more strongly. As we have seen, Edward was interested in evergreens and in topiary. In an album of material, identified as part of his contractual obligation to one of his patrons,66 there are two very detailed sets of Versailles topiary designs (Figures 17.9 and 17.11). Just as in the case of some of the architectural plans, he was not working from the actual objects – tempting as the image is of Edward sitting by the Bason de Latone drawing contorted yews. Instead, he was working from drawings in a library or archive either in the palace or, more likely, in the Royal Library on rue Vivienne, and these drawings have now been found (Figures 17.10 and 17.12).67 Edward clearly had access to these very drawings; in the case of Figures 17.9 and 17.10, his versions are almost exact replicas of the Versailles drawings. In the case of Figures 17.11 and 17.12, he has all the same designs, but

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   343

some are very slightly altered and others are in different positions on the page. The importance of Edward’s tour to Europe has been acknowledged for many years, but what this study has shown is, first, just how much material he shipped back to Scotland, particularly the print material from France. We can speculate about the impact of that, but the link with the subsequent activity of his main aristocratic patron, the Earl of Mar, is fairly clear to see. The scale of Mar’s ambitions and the nature of his designs both show a marked influence of France and, arguably, the impact of Edward’s tour. There was a Jacobite aspect to this and we have also seen how the politics of the tour at times hint at connections and activities that allowed Edward some kind of privilege in his movement and actions, at least in France. It has also shown how Edward was connected to wider networks of patronage and culture and, in particular, how his status and connections as an antiquarian and natural historian ultimately gave him access to a wide range of useful people and places, particularly in England. It has also clarified just how important the English part of the trip really was, particularly in the practical business of

Figure 17.10  Topiary designs for Versailles from the royal collection at Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/ Gérard Blot.

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Figure 17.11  Alexander Edward, topiary designs. Hopetoun Collection.

Figure 17.12  Topiary designs for Versailles from the royal collection at Versailles. © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Versailles)/Philipp Bernard.

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Alexander Edward’s European Tour   345

plant acquisition, since London nurseries were the main suppliers of clients in Scotland. The significance of the tour has been analysed before, in a thesis from the 1970s by M. G. Murphy.68 His conclusions were based on the state of research at that time and include the suggestion that, in terms of influence on Scottish gardens, the English part of the tour was much more important than the French.69 Murphy did not carry out a detailed analysis of the notebook and was, it seems, not aware of the interests and activities of the Earl of Mar (though it could be argued that they largely fall outside his period). It is argued here that the French part of the trip was almost certainly the most important and it certainly was what impressed Edward the most. It was also the source of architectural and garden imagery that was then sent back to Scotland. The one surviving contractual portfolio that survives (in the private collection that contains the topiary designs) shows a close focus on French material. However, Murphy still has a point because what the close study of the notebook and other material shows is that the English part of this trip was significant. Even the argument that Badminton was more important than Versailles (to simplify), whilst it has the flaw of not providing any sort of argument that Edward even went to Badminton,70 does have a point in that large, complex landscapes like Badminton, themselves influenced by France, could easily have been of interest to Scottish architects, and the specific feature of a main avenue flanked by two mounts mentioned in the thesis, common to Badminton and Hamilton, is persuasive. An argument has been put forward here that Edward probably did go to Badminton, and therefore the idea that it may have influenced Hamilton, which is Murphy’s contention, is not unreasonable. However, two final points contextualise this position. First of all, there can be no assumption that Scotland’s architecture or gardens would inevitably look to England rather than Europe; that trickle-down theory of influence has already been discredited. In this particular case, it seems obvious that Edward was as happy to draw on the European neighbour that was England as he was on France or Holland. Secondly, it seems on the other hand very clear that Scotland and England did many things in a similar way, and one of the things that Badminton shows – on one of the very Kip and Knyff engravings purchased by Edward – was that the Scottish practice of closing a view with a distant building or natural feature, so common in Scotland, was not exclusive to Scotland, because it occurred at Badminton.

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18

William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland, 1720–45 Louisa Humm

Mr Adams is capable to give you schemes for altering or embellishing yor house and gardens as yor fancy will inclyne.1 And indeed in other things of Ornament and Beauties of a Country Seat, besides the bare Architecture of a house, the Petitioner had a great Opinion of Mr Adams’s Judgement and Taste.2

D

uring the last twenty years researchers of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century Scottish garden and landscape design have identified a trend for aligning avenues, walks and vistas on man-made and natural features – often ones with particular historical or political associations.3 The prime example is Kinross House, which its owner and architect, Sir William Bruce, aligned on Loch Leven Castle as a demonstration of his allegiance to the Stuart dynasty. It is increasingly apparent that this approach was practised widely over the period covered by this book. The term ‘Scottish Historical Landscape’ is now the generally accepted way of describing this. Research by Professor Alan Tait in the 1980s considered William Adam’s landscape designs in the context of the informal English Landscape movement and fashions of the second half of the eighteenth century.4 While much of Tait’s research remains relevant and many of the gardens he discusses do not need to be re-examined in detail here, my view is that considering Adam’s gardens within the context of later fashions is not a particularly helpful way of understanding them or identifying what is important about them. Adam’s gardens did not greatly influence fashions after his death

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   347

in 1748 – his sons, for example, took a very different approach, and John Adam largely obliterated the layouts his father had created on his own estates of North Merchiston and Blair. Furthermore, Tait’s assessment of Adam as an early exponent of the picturesque relies to a considerable degree on a dubious attribution of the Taymouth Garden plan to Adam.5 My view is that Adam’s work is more helpfully considered in the context of existing and earlier fashions in Scotland, England and Europe: this chapter makes particular reference to how his work sits within the context of the Scottish Historical Landscape. William Adam was involved in the creation of many gardens, but the extent of his involvement in any individual one remains unclear. Plans signed by him exist for some gardens; descriptions of work carried out by his men exist for others; bills, accounts and letters give evidence of his involvement elsewhere. By drawing this evidence together, a broad picture of his activities in this field emerges, but for no individual garden is it possible to satisfactorily establish exactly how much of the design can be credited to him. At Broxmouth, for example, Adam is known to have been responsible for constructing the cascades that form a fundamental part of the garden’s design:6 yet the surviving plan of 1734 is by a London architect, and the travel writers Defoe and Macky indicate that much of the garden had been planted several years before Adam was involved.7 At Newliston and La Mancha Adam drew up plans that were carried out, but we do not know how much the design was directed by a knowledgeable client. Nor are his views on garden design very clear, as few pieces of advice that he wrote to his clients survive. However, the quotations above show that his abilities as a garden designer were highly regarded, and the number of commissions he received bear this out, making it clear that he was one of the leading practitioners of garden design in Scotland during this period.8 The earliest garden with which Adam is definitely associated is Newliston. The design of this garden was at the forefront of contemporary garden fashion and extremely sophisticated, as we shall see. It is often attributed to its owner the 2nd Earl of Stair, but Adam was involved from the start and a plan for additions to the garden is signed by him. John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair, had served in the army under the Duke of Marlborough before becoming British Ambassador in Paris in 1715. During his time in Paris he racked up huge debts through gambling and magnificent living, and was recalled from his post in 1720 because of this. Despite the parlous state of his

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Figure 18.1  William Adam, General Plan of the Gardens of Newlistone (1736). Photographer: Nick Haynes. Reproduced with permission of Blenheim Palace Archives.

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   349

finances he seems to have started work at Newliston straight after his return to Scotland in 1721.9 In October 1723 Adam sent Stair a bill for £150.10 This may have been for the ‘Designe of ane addition to Newliston House’ that Adam told Sir John Clerk he was working on in January of that year,11 but it is well documented that Adam did not ‘normally name my own price [for drawings] but left it to the discretion of my Employer’12 so it is more likely that this bill was for building work in the garden. Two plans survive for the garden at Newliston. The earliest, drawn in 1736 and signed by Adam, shows the garden that survives today with a large area of formally planted parkland in front of the house (Figure 18.1).13 The other plan is dated 30 September 1759 and was drawn up for Roger Hogg, who had purchased Newliston after Stair’s death in 1747. It might be a copy of an earlier eighteenth-century plan, but is more likely to be a survey of the garden as it existed at that time.14 The 1759 plan shows the same garden layout as the 1736 plan, with a few modifications such as the omission of the wilderness that would have blocked views up the diagonal cascade. Newliston is a ‘fortified’ garden: it is surrounded on all four sides by a deep ha-ha with circular ‘bastions’ or projections at each corner. This concept had been introduced by Sir John Vanbrugh at Blenheim in 1705, where he had built a hexagonal pleasure garden with circular bastions at the angles. The idea of enclosing a garden within a ha-ha was taken up with enthusiasm by Stephen Switzer who wrote that ‘without doubt [it] is the noblest way of fencing in a garden (apart from water)’.15 This form was quite popular during the next couple of decades, particularly with military landowners. Other examples include Stowe (Lord Cobham was a close friend of Stair), Grimsthorpe and Seaton Delaval.16 Newliston is most directly comparable to Seaton Delaval where, unlike the other examples, the house sits within the bastioned enclosure. There are other examples in Scotland too: the garden at Woodhall House in Lanarkshire (c. 1727) appears to have been an almost direct copy of Newliston or Seaton Delaval.17 A plan of the garden at Arniston, attributed to William Adam, shows the parterre behind the house as a similarly shaped bastioned enclosure. It is uncertain whether this was executed, but if so it is thought that these bastions may have been earth banks rather than ha-has with masonry walls (see Chapter 19 and Figure 19.9). Earth bank bastions also appear to have been used at the top end of Lord Stair’s other garden, Castle Kennedy, near Stranraer. The Newliston garden is largely wooded, which means that the views from the ha-ha terrace were not into the garden, but over

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350   Louisa Humm

Figure 18.2  Dezallier d’Argenville, Designs of Woods of Forrest Trees (image taken from John James’s English translation of 1712, which reused the original plates). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

Lord Stair’s improving farm land. The interior of the garden is laid out in a series of wildernesses or groves filled with broadly symmetrical patterns of paths and garden rooms in the French manner shown in Dezallier d’Argenville’s La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1709), a copy of which Adam possessed (Figure 18.2).18 There are a number of water features including two sets of cascades, and a central park, which was planted for hay or wheat.19 It is notable that there is no parterre or any other sort of flower garden: the only beds were in the kitchen garden, which is located west of the entrance court. The garden is not square, as it first appears, but gently tapers to the east. Elements within it are also less regularly placed than they first seem. The main north-south axis, running from the entrance gates, through the house and on to the semi-octagonal bastion is considerably east of the centre; the main canal is set at an angle; the main avenues, though broadly corresponding, are not placed symmetrically. None of this is accidental or a fault of inept surveying: on the contrary, this is a remarkably sophisticated piece of design, asymmetric for a purpose that had little to do with embracing picturesque irregularity, but to create alignments with natural and man-made objects in the surrounding landscape. The 1759 plan includes an Explanation which notes the vistas from the principal walks. It should be remembered, though, that this plan was made twelve years after the death of the original owner. Some of

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   351

the walks do not align with the buildings given in the Explanation: in particular, Craigiehall is given as the vista for several walks that point in slightly different directions. It appears that the Explanation was written by someone who knew that the vistas existed, but didn’t know (or couldn’t remember) what they were. And this brings us to another point: although some of these objects in the landscape were easily visible from the garden, a significant number were not. The vista that remains most obvious today is described in the Explanation as ‘Canals and Cascades being a View from the House to Niddrie Castle with a Maize on Each Side’. Niddry Castle is an early sixteenth-century tower house located about three-quarters of a mile from the garden boundary. When viewed from the house the castle appears to hover at the end of the avenue, perfectly filling the vista (Figure 18.3). This is a highly sophisticated piece of land engineering and manipulation of the levels. If one stands at the edge of the garden, at the far end of the cascade avenue, the castle seems to have shrunk in size and, exposed in the wider landscape, becomes almost insignificant.

Figure 18.3  Niddry Castle at the head of the cascade walk, as seen from just outside the house. © Louisa Humm.

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352   Louisa Humm

Figure 18.4  Plan of Newliston (1759) marked to show alignments described in Table 18.1. Approximate location of house (based on 1736 plan) shown in blue. Photographer: Nick Haynes. Reproduced with permission of the owner.

It is easy to see why this vista was given the most elaborate treatment of any in the garden – with a series of eight cascade falls shown on the 1759 plan and more than double that number on Adam’s plan. One is led to wonder whether Niddry Castle held any particular relevance to Lord Stair, particularly as it was the castle to which Mary Queen of Scots fled after escaping from Loch Leven Castle (which, of course, is the object of the most famous garden vista in Scotland). It is tempting to ask if this was the horticultural equivalent of toasting the King over the water. But no: Lord Stair was a firm supporter of the Union, and there is no indication that he ever harboured Stuart sympathies. Nor do the majority of the other objects on which the garden is

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   353 Table 18.1  Newliston alignments 1759 plan explanation (Letters given on the 1759 plan are in brackets)

Actual alignment and notes

AG

Abercorn Castle (to north).

B

No walk, but a direct line from the house to the corner of the garden aligns with the site of a Roman camp south of Broxburn.

CP

The Broad Walk being a view to Craigie Hall (L)

Uphall Church to the west and Cramond Brig to the east.

DO The canals and Park being a view to Barnton (T)

The canal aligns with the Catstane, a standing stone with a Latin inscription.

E

Canals and Cascades Being a View from the House to Niddrie Castle with a Maize on Each side (Y)

Niddry Castle.

FL

A Walk being a View to Uphall on the West and Craigie Hall on the East (X)

Uphall Kirk to the west and Kirkliston Kirk to the east. These churches have similar twelfthcentury towers.

H

Aligns with sunset on Lord Stair’s birthday (20 July).

I

Staneyhill Tower/Hopetoun House to north.

JS

A vista that was quite north of the Gardens (O)

Hopetoun House (to north).

K

A view to Lindsays Craigs (W)

Dundas Castle.

M

A view to the plantations in Lindsays Craig (M)

The site of the former chapel next to Dundas Castle.

N Q R

Probably to a roundel of trees called ‘Belvidere’ in parkland to the east of the garden. A view to Craigie Hall (N)

Craigiehall. No walk, but a direct line from the house to the corner of the garden aligns with Arthur’s Seat.

aligned appear to have any particular connection with Lord Stair or his family: they are just interesting antiquities.20 One is led to the prosaic conclusion that Niddry Castle just happened to be located in a position that particularly lent itself to being borrowed as a garden ornament. Unlike his friend, Lord Cobham of Stowe, Lord Stair does not seem to have created a political garden for himself. The other alignments are shown in Figure 18.4 and described in Table 18.1. As noted above, a number of these alignments were to structures that were probably never visible from the garden – at

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354   Louisa Humm

least, not from ground level. Kirkliston and Uphall churches would have been prominent in the landscape, but structures such as the Catstane, a 4ft-high standing stone over two miles away, Cramond Bridge (four and a half miles away) and Craigiehall (three and a half miles away) can have been barely visible. Dundas Castle is located behind Lindsay’s Craig and in something of a dip, so is unlikely to have been visible even from the roof of the old tower house.21 The most curious alignment is the avenue immediately north, and almost parallel to, the Niddry Avenue. This does not align with any object in the landscape; instead it appears to align with the point where the sun sets on Lord Stair’s birthday (20 July). While the existence of alignments to features in the landscape has been well established as a feature of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish gardens, it is not easy to ascertain how common sun alignments were, as this requires the survival of original planting or an accurate survey plan with a compass rose. Other alignments that have been identified relate either to the summer solstice sunrise or the winter solstice sunset. These are: the house and principal avenue at Mavisbank (towards the summer solstice sunrise);22 the Linlithgow Avenue at Hopetoun (winter solstice sunset); the canal at La Mancha (winter solstice sunset); and The Drum (front of house to winter solstice sunrise). Further research would show whether sun alignments were a feature of Scottish gardens in which Adam had no involvement, but they do not seem to have been used in obvious English or French examples. The use of landmarks to terminate walks and avenues in Scottish gardens is well known. English garden writers of the period do not place much emphasis on the use of natural or built objects in the landscape as terminations for garden vistas, though it is evident that this did happen. Kip and Knyff’s Britannia Illustrata (1707)23 shows three clear examples: Eaton Hall in Cheshire (built late 1670s), which was squarely aligned on the very prominent Beeston Castle; Hampton Court Palace, where one of the radial avenues is aligned with Kingston church steeple; and Badminton, where many of the park avenues align with surrounding churches, houses and other landmarks, several of which are over five miles away. At Studley Royal the main avenue aligns with Ripon Minster, and Vanbrugh is known to have used natural and man-made features (mostly steeples) as vistas at Blenheim and Eastbury.24 Reasons for aligning an avenue with local landmarks might range from the overtly political (Kinross), through the desire to invoke a historic association, to the purely aesthetic. There are also practical

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reasons: a steeple or other prominent landmark can provide a useful focal point for surveying. A rare insight into the work of the eighteenth-century land surveyor survives in the survey drawings of John Watt, who surveyed a number of estates in Renfrewshire in the 1730s. These show that he carefully noted the angles of numerous landmarks from particular vantage points, which helped to establish the accuracy of his surveys over a wide area (Figure 18.5).25 If identifying and plotting landmarks was an important part of the triangulation required for carrying out an estate survey, it is unsurprising that these same landmarks subsequently became points of reference for laying out avenues and other linear features. Construction of the garden and improvement and planting of the Newliston estate continued through the 1730s and into the 1740s. In evidence given at the Braco trial, Lord Stair’s former factor mentioned that the garden walls were constructed before he arrived and that during his period of employment (1726–37) Adam designed and built the cascades, stables, a back court of offices and the great gates.26 Adam’s 1736 plan was drawn up to show alterations that Lord Stair wished to make: these probably comprised the formal parkland and grand entrance approach shown on the lower half of the plan.27 To understand the lower part of Adam’s plan (Figure 18.1) it helps to know that two public roads ran roughly parallel to the southern boundary of the garden. The most southerly was the main road

Figure 18.5  John Watt, detail from survey plan of Johnston Estate, Renfrewshire (c. 1729). The star near the bottom of the drawing shows the direction of various landmarks and the table on the right gives bearings from the house to the most prominent ones, including Glasgow High Church (cathedral) steeple, Renfrew steeple and Ben Lomond. Boulton & Watt collection 3219/2/55/6. Reproduced with permission of the Library of Birmingham.

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between Edinburgh and Glasgow and was located slightly south of the bottom of Adam’s plan. The other road linked two neighbouring villages, Kirkliston and Broxburn. This road is shown on the plan as the dark green strip that runs perpendicular to the main axis, through the central square. The existence of this road explains the position of the lodges (an early example of this building type) and the pair of gateways at the north and south ends of the square. The planting was designed to obscure views of the house from the road so that it was only clearly visible to passers-by from the central axis. The main feature of the plan is a central grassed approach bounded by stands of trees forming a variety of shapes: semicircle, oval, square, smaller oval. The width of the approach subtly narrows towards the house which would, on arrival, have made the house appear larger and the avenue longer than was actually the case. Openings between the stands of trees would have allowed views into the adjacent park, which was planted to mirror the central arrangement. At the head of the avenue, just in front of the garden, are a pair of large courtyard offices, the western one of which was built to Adam’s plan. The two gate lodges were also constructed and survive. However, it appears that little of the planting was executed, as early nineteenth-century maps show a simple avenue terminating at the lodges. The whole arrangement exemplifies the mixture of formality and variety expounded by the authors of influential garden books such as Stephen Switzer in Ichnographia Rustica, d’Argenville in La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (which was translated by John James and published in London in 1712) and Batty Langley in New Principles of Gardening – the openings allowing views into the park being a particularly Switzerish feature.28 Of these works, Adam is only known to have owned La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, but many of Switzer’s ideas are found in Adam’s work, so it is likely that he was familiar with his writing. *  *  * There are some interesting parallels between Newliston and Adam’s designs for his own estates at North Merchiston (Edinburgh) and Blair. Adam purchased North Merchiston in 1726;29 his grandson, also called William Adam, described the place: North Merchiston was a square field of 28 acres, inclosed all round by a wall. My Grandfather planted it according to the taste of his time, with a circle in the centre, and four avenues taking their departure at regular distances from the circle. Across the northern end of one of those

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   357

Figure 18.6  North Merchiston, as shown on Robert Kirkwood’s Plan of the City of Edinburgh (1817). The remnants of William Adam’s circle are just above the ‘AL’ of ‘James Walker Esq’. The proposed line of the Union Canal is shown in blue, cutting through the estate. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

avenues, he planted a straight row of trees on one side of a broad walk, ending with a lime tree on each side . . . The vista to this walk was the Castle of Edinburgh, and the Tower of St Giles’ Church. At the western end was what afterwards became the house of my Father’s summer residence.30

John Adam landscaped these grounds in the 1750s, retaining only ‘one avenue . . . and the circle’. Robert Kirkwood’s 1817 Plan of the City of Edinburgh (Figure 18.6) shows John Adam’s layout and the remaining vestiges of his father’s planting: the north avenue is clearly evident and it is possible to make out the position of the central circle and part of the west avenue. From this it appears that the avenues were not spaced evenly around the central circle, but crossed at a slight tilt. The north–south avenue is angled towards the Braid Hills, while the east–west avenue seems to point towards Holyrood Park (though not Arthur’s Seat) and might actually have been aligned towards the position of Adam’s town house, if indeed any alignment was intended. In 1733 William Adam bought the estate of Blair Cranbeth, located on the border of Fife and Kinross-shire, just south, and

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358   Louisa Humm

Figure 18.7  Blair Cranbeth as Adam bought it in 1733. William Adam, Blair Adam – Gardens. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

within sight of Loch Leven and Kinross. In many respects it was the ideal estate for a busy architect with business all over Scotland and interests in industry, antiquities and agricultural improvement. It stood above the Benarty Pass on the Great North Road, between Perth and Queensferry (the most reliable Forth crossing as it was rarely affected by poor weather and not dependent on the tides), the soil was good and it contained a coalfield.31 It was probably the coal that attracted Adam: he was knowledgeable about mining and a number of his commissions depended to a significant degree on his ability to increase his clients’ wealth by advising them on their coal mines and other industrial improvements.32 He commenced mining his coal straight away, and the mines remained an important focus of the estate throughout his life. Other than two coal pits, the estate contained only a Laird’s house and one tree when Adam bought it (Figure 18.7).33 Once the coal mines were established, Adam turned his attention to agricultural and other improvements: he dug ditches, enclosed fields, planted trees and constructed a planned village, named Maryburgh for his

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   359

wife. The village was intended to consist of four terraces of singleand two-storey cottages facing each other across the Great North Road. In the end only half of it was built: this may have been because Adam had difficulty finding tenants, but the estate map indicates that he did not actually own all the land required to complete his symmetrical arrangement.34 The site that Adam chose for his own house is revealing. With only a very small change in location he could have built it on a pleasant, south-facing slope overlooking a small valley and sheltered from the northerly winds. But that location commands no view and so instead Adam built on the east side of his hill, above Maryburgh and orientated on a site at the edge of Loch Ore that contained the remains of a Roman camp that had been constructed by Agricola in ad 83, during his invasion of the Highlands.35 To the north are splendid views to Kinross and Loch Leven; the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, are visible to the south. Around the house, and as part of his agricultural improvements, Adam created a formal landscape of avenues and fields (Figure 18.8). He planted thousands of trees, many of which came from his nurseries at North Merchiston (the delivery and timely planting of these trees was a matter of considerable concern to Adam and his factor).36

Figure 18.8  Blair Cranbeth at William Adam’s death in 1748. William Adam, Plans and views of Blair Adam. Maryburgh is the pair of U-plan terraces near the right edge of the plan. Adam intended a corresponding pair to the south. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

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360   Louisa Humm

The pattern of avenues around which Adam structured his landscape was, at first glance, symmetrical but, like Newliston, closer inspection reveals that this was not the case. The main axis runs east from the house to the intended centre of Maryburgh. In front of the house, and breaking the line of the north–south cross-avenue, is a large bow-ended lawn or grass parterre, enclosed by a ha-ha that was surmounted by a hedge. This arrangement allowed estate traffic on the cross-avenue to dip unseen around the front of the house. The parterre sat within a triangular wilderness, which was terminated by two circular features that might have been bastions like the ones at Newliston. Beyond the wilderness the central axis opened into a broader avenue that tapered gently as it descended to Maryburgh. The sides did not taper evenly: the southern one cut in more sharply. This may be because Maryburgh was built first and perhaps not quite in the right place, but the arrangement of a narrow avenue opening to a wider but slightly skewed one would have screened the steep sides of Benarty Hill that would otherwise have enclosed the view, thereby giving the impression that the landscape was flatter than was actually the case. Three walks cut diagonally through each side of the wilderness. The principal pair extend through the parkland as avenues and were terminated by square ‘platoons’ of trees. They are not exactly symmetrical: the northern one is set at an angle of 18.5 degrees to the north–south cross avenue, while the southern one is set at about 22 degrees to it – a significant difference. The other two pairs seem to have been set more regularly. Letters to Adam from his factor, David Barclay, show that several of the avenues had vistas to places of interest in the surrounding countryside. These include Loch Leven Castle, an adjacent landowner’s house at East Blair, and the Kirk of Beath.37 The latter was an unassuming church nearby, but its pre-Reformation predecessor was known locally as ‘the first place of meeting that ever the protestant lords of Scotland had for the covenant and reformation’.38 The seventeenth-century replacement church was built at the instigation of Alexander Colvill of East Blair, which perhaps explains why his house was also considered a suitable vista. Comparing the eighteenth-century estate map with the modern Ordnance Survey map and my own observations on the ground, the alignments appear to be as shown in Table 18.2 (working clockwise from north). David Barclay’s letters show that Adam considered it important to align his avenues with objects in the landscape and was prepared to abandon an exact symmetry to achieve this. But straight lines and a broadly symmetrical layout were nevertheless important to him, and

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   361 Table 18.2  Blair Adam alignments North avenue

Kinross town

Main NE diagonal avenue

Loch Leven generally

Minor NE diagonal walk

Benarty Hill and Paren Well (the Paren Well is associated with Mary, Queen of Scots)

NE bastion avenue

No obvious alignment – possibly East Blair or Benarty House

Principal axis E

Lochore Roman Camp. Because of the width of this avenue Lochore Castle is also in the vista, but not centrally

SE bastion avenue

Due east to Loch Ore

Minor SE diagonal walk

No obvious alignment, but may have been towards the Firth of Forth, which William Adam (grandson) noted was visible before the trees grew.

Main E diagonal avenue

Kirk of Beath and Arthur’s Seat (latter not visible and perhaps a coincidence)

South avenue

Hill of Beath and the eastern (i.e. Edinburgh) end of the Pentland Hills, specifically Caerketton and Allermuir.

Coal Road

Benarty House

Side paths to wilderness

N and S edges of Maryburgh

restrictions imposed by the topography were largely ignored. The land falls steeply away from the house to the north, east and south, but Adam’s avenues marched on regardless of the gradient. It would be very difficult to drag a vehicle up the avenue from the south – the modern entrance drive, which passes along this avenue, contains several kinks to avoid the steeper sections. John Adam described to his son how a theodolite had been used to ensure that field boundaries remained straight over the brow of a hill. Of the two surviving letters from William Adam to David Barclay, one is an instruction to meet with his neighbours to straighten up their boundary: You will settle with Mr Black of Coklaw and Mr Syme of Kirkmore the march betwixt them and me in as far as I am to build a dike upon the march and because the course of the burn which now runs betwixt us,  which is understood to be the present march, is very crooked and irregular I desire that the same may be straightened. I mean where the dike is to be built as much as the nature of the thing will allow by giving and taking ground on each side of the water and throwing out the water to them at some places and taking it in at other places . . . and I shall have no objection to your giving to them rather more ground than I get from

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them as I would give no man reason to think that I am covetous of his ground . . .39

*  *  * At Newliston and Blair Adam it is evident that aligning avenues and walks with local and distant landscape features was a fundamental part of the design. By the 1720s this was a generally established design principle in Scotland, and not something that was unique to Adam’s work. By aligning with features that were barely visible, however, he demonstrated a sophisticated application of this principle.40 This principle is also demonstrated in a number of other gardens associated with Adam, including The Drum, Arniston and Buchanan.41 It has already been noted that the front elevation of The Drum aligns with the winter solstice sunrise; other walks and field boundaries within the policies align with prominent landmarks, including the Bass Rock. At the crest of the avenue to the north of the house was a wilderness with a central rond-point, from which radiated eighteen walks. These are not placed regularly around the circle, but instead were positioned to align with local landmarks – mostly prominent hills.42 It is possible to ascertain the vistas at The Drum because there is a detailed mid-eighteenth-century plan (Figure 18.9) and sufficient evidence on the ground to ascertain the precise location of the rondpoint. It is likely that where other rond-points have irregularly spaced walks, their positions were also determined by local landmarks. At Arniston (discussed in the next chapter – see Figure 19.1) the rondpoint on the main (north) axis from the house has regularly spaced arms that do not seem to align with anything in particular, whereas the three to the east and north-east do not and were therefore probably aligned with local landmarks. A walk in the remnants of the east wilderness is still called ‘Edinburgh Castle Walk’. At Buchanan, Adam’s last landscape design, this principle is also seen (Figure 18.10).43 Buchanan is located between Loch Lomond and the Campsie Fells, so there are plenty of distinctive hills nearby. The landscape design comprises a series of avenues radiating from the house. Although they appear to be regularly spaced, none exactly corresponds with its opposite number, indicating that alignments were intended.44 There is also a subtle widening and narrowing of the spacing around the circle – the avenues closest to the central axis are spaced more closely than those to the sides. This subtle narrowing and widening of angles was also used by Adam at a wilderness he designed for the grounds of Dalkeith Palace

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   363

Figure 18.9  House, avenue and rond-point at Drum (1760s). The diagonal lines show later coal seams. Detail from Plan of lands and coalfield [of Drum]. NRS RHP34652.

in about 1734.45 The wilderness was fairly conventional in its design, with a twelve-armed étoile at the centre and an outer circular path linking the arms, with garden rooms marking alternate intersections (Figure 18.11). The arms of the étoile are set regularly insofar as each one has a directly corresponding path opposite, but they are not spaced at equal 30-degree angles: instead they range between 21 and 36 degrees. Adam not only provided the design for this wilderness, but also supplied the majority of the trees and hedging plants – over 8,500 hornbeams, elms, filberts and hollies. These evidently came from Adam’s own nurseries (probably North Merchiston) because the

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364   Louisa Humm

Figure 18.10  William Adam’s proposals for Buchanan (1745). NRS RHP6150. Reproduced with permission of the Duke of Montrose.

same bill includes a separate entry for 2,340 hornbeams and beeches that he had ‘Bought of Mr Bain’.46 Adam’s part of the bill came to nearly £59, while Mr Bain’s trees came to £8 15s 6d, making Adam’s trees almost twice the price of Bain’s. Adam carried out a number of other works in the Dalkeith policies, including erecting the ‘Great Gateway’ at the end of the entrance avenue. The gates are decorative wrought iron and set between quadrant wing walls, surmounted by iron railings (Figure 18.12).

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   365

Figure 18.11  Plan of Dalkeith Parke (probably mid-eighteenth century). Detail showing Adam’s wilderness (B). The house is at A; his gateway is at the end of avenue M. Photograph courtesy of HES, NRHE SC1445632. Reproduced with permission of The Buccleuch Collections.

Figure 18.12  Gateway at Dalkeith supplied by William Adam c. 1734. The wood on the right occupies the site of his wilderness. © Louisa Humm.

A couple of years earlier Adam had designed another wilderness for Major Thomas Cochrane at his house, La Mancha (a few miles south of Penicuik).47 This was drawn to Major Cochrane’s specification and comprised a large square wood with a central octagonal pond. Straight paths are set from the centre to the sides and corners,

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Figure 18.13  William Adam’s plan for La Mancha (c. 1732). NRS RHP270/2.

and a path runs through the wilderness planting, punctuated in each section by a differently shaped garden room (Figure 18.13). The design is similar to wilderness layouts illustrated in d’Argenville’s La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, though it is not a direct copy of

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   367

any of them (Figure 18.14).48 The use of differently shaped garden ‘cabinets’ is also found on Adam’s plans for Newliston and House of Dun.49 The La Mancha plan also included a wide avenue in front of the house and an ornamental canal, which, as noted above, aligned with the winter solstice sunset. The La Mancha plan is stylistically similar to another, unsigned, plan for Airth (near Falkirk) (Figure 18.15). In particular, the rendering of the water on both plans – idiosyncratically drawn as a series of zigzags composed of dashes – allows the Airth plan to be attributed to Adam. As well as redesigning and extending the terraced garden, the plan also shows a proposal for a U-plan courtyard of offices that were built in about 1730.50 These offices, which are stylistically similar to Adam’s work, have the most unusual feature, clearly shown on the plan, of a ballroom or banqueting room over the central coach house, accessed from the rear (i.e. the entrance avenue) by a double forestair. At both Airth and La Mancha Adam was working in competition with his main rival, the nurseryman William Boutcher. Boutcher

Figure 18.14  Dezallier d’Argenville, Designs for Groves of Middle Height (image taken from John James’s English translation of 1712). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

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Figure 18.15  Airth Garden. William Adam, c. 1730. NRHE DP090705 © HES.

had been sacked by Major Cochrane because he had not followed Cochrane’s instructions, instead designing an elaborate arrangement of canals. Boutcher’s style was similar to Adam’s, incorporating relatively dense tree planting, wildernesses with serpentine paths and garden rooms, waterworks and radial avenues. Boutcher’s avenues, however, do not appear to have been aligned with features in the landscape. He is known to have produced plans for Auchincruive, Kilkerran and Castle Semple and was commissioned by Lord Braco

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   369

Figure 18.16  Garden buildings shown on William Adam’s Hopetoun Plan (Figure 18.18). The top image shows the canal and cascades, with two buildings (right-hand one of ‘treillage’) and column to King George. Bottom right is an obelisk marking the site of Abercorn Castle. The other two images have been rotated. The left-hand one shows the bowling green pavilion. Reproduced with kind permission of the Hopetoun Papers Trust at Hopetoun House.

to produce a design for Duff at the same time as Adam.51 Boutcher was also paid for making a plan of the gardens at Castle Kennedy in 1722, but it is not known whether the executed scheme was his.52 *  *  * It is unsurprising that Adam designed a number of ornamental garden buildings. Ornamental summer houses, banqueting houses and viewing towers had long been a feature of European, English and Scottish gardens, but the fashion for the profuse numbers of temples and other eye-catchers that became a defining feature of the English landscape garden really only got underway at Chiswick, Studley Royal and Stowe in the 1720s and 30s and took off more generally in the 1740s. With the exception of Hopetoun and possibly Duff and Hamilton, Adam did not usually propose multiple garden buildings, and Newliston is curiously devoid of them. Hopetoun is exceptional in the number of buildings that Adam proposed: four temples or arcades, an obelisk and a column, in addition to extensive waterworks and earthworks (Figure 18.16). All the buildings are Classical in style, ornamented with arcades, pediments and ball-finials. They were probably intended to be constructed from stone, with the exception of the arcade above the right-hand arm of

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370   Louisa Humm

Figure 18.17  Garden pavilion at Hopetoun, believed to incorporate the pediment of William Adam’s bowling green pavilion of 1732–3. © Louisa Humm.

the large canal, which Adam intended to be treillage (trellis). In La théorie et la pratique du jardinage d’Argenville noted that treillage structures, made of timber or iron lattice, were ‘not much the fashion at present [since] they are very chargeable to make and keep up, and continually liable to decay’.53 The only one of these pavilions to be built was the Bowling Green Temple (‘N’ on the plan), and a planting plan of 1747 indicates that the elevation shown in Adam’s garden plan was built more or less as illustrated.54 Although this structure no longer survives its pediment seems to have been reused on the pavilion now known as ‘The Pulpit’ (Figure 18.17). Adam’s plan for Hopetoun (Figure 18.18) is based around the original layout by Sir William Bruce and Alexander Edward and contains a number of features that are believed to have been part of their design, including the sea walk terrace and wilderness, and the oval pond. Adam’s proposal involved extending the principal axis west and introducing the ornamental features mentioned above, as well as replacing the original forecourt railings with a large D-shaped grass parterre enclosed by a deep ha-ha. The plan is undated and archive records for the garden at this period are sparse, but it is known that the ‘new kitchen garden’ and bowling green pavilion, both of which are shown on the plan, were built in 1732–3. A lot of planting seems also to have been done around that time.55 There was a lull in building activity at the house between 1731 and 1736,56 which further indicates that attention might have been turned to the

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Figure 18.18  William Adam, A General Plan of Hopetoun Park and Gardens (c. 1731–2). Detail focusing on garden. Reproduced with kind permission of the Hopetoun Papers Trust at Hopetoun House.

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Figure 18.19  Fishing Pavilion, Duff House. William Adam (c. 1735). Banff Preservation and Heritage Society.

garden during that period. A date of about 1731–2 therefore seems likely for the plan. The only two surviving garden temples by Adam are at Duff House in Banffshire.57 This is surprising because, although Adam was commissioned to design a garden in 1735,58 no planting was ever carried out and the house became infamous for its unadorned setting. The two buildings are a fishing pavilion on an island in the River Deveron, and the ‘Temple of Venus’, a circular arcaded building with a domed roof located on a prominent hilltop. It now acts as an eye-catcher, but may have originally been intended as the centrepiece for a ‘belvidere’ or plantation of trees, like the tower at The Drum and Lady Eglintoun’s rotunda (see below). The fishing pavilion (Figure 18.19) was also domed and its principal room was accessed by a perron stair and pedimented doorway. Adam also directed the construction of a triumphal arch on the same island and designed an unexecuted pyramidal mausoleum for another location on the estate.59 It is unfortunate that Adam’s design for the Duff landscape has not survived, as the relative profusion of garden buildings and incorporation of the island into the design indicate that he may

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   373

Figure 18.20  William Adam, garden pavilion at Brunstane (c. 1735). NLS Saltoun Papers, Acc. 17873-80. Reproduced by permission of Andrew and Valerie Fletcher.

have been working in a style more akin to the English Landscape movement (which was still in an early stage of its development) than can be seen elsewhere in his work – the scale of the commission and lack of an existing garden facilitating this. However, Adam is unlikely to have abandoned the wildernesses and dense planting cut through by straight walks that characterise his other work: such features were still found at all the major English gardens of the period, including Stowe and Chiswick. In Scotland, garden buildings were often two-storey structures

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374   Louisa Humm

built into garden walls or terraces, the lower storey providing storage or another service function. At least two of Adam’s buildings follow this tradition: a summer house for Lord Milton at Brunstane (Figure 18.20), which was set against a mount, and an unbuilt bowling green pavilion for Lord Stair at Castle Kennedy, which would have also been set into rising ground with a service basement accessed from the rear.60 More whimsical designs by Adam include a Classical rotunda for Lady Eglintoun (illustrated in Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 120) and a substantial pedimented wellhead with rusticated voussoirs at Inveraray. The tower in the rond-point at The Drum and the Hundy Mundy at Mellerstain are more doubtfully associated with Adam. Both these break the Classical mould of his other known buildings: the Hundy Mundy (1727) is a sham ruined castle; the tower (dated 1741)61 had a lean-to colonnade like Lady Eglintoun’s rotunda, and was described as ‘ane antient-like structure’,62 so might have been castellated. Adam’s most renowned garden building is, of course, Chatelherault, the splendid kennel and banqueting house he built for the Duke of Hamilton as an eye-catcher, over a mile away from Hamilton Palace, on the crest of the principal avenue that ran through the park (Figure 18.21). It was an architectural statement of the highest order, and plans for it were passed around the London cognoscenti by the Duke’s uncle, the Earl of Selkirk, bringing considerable prestige to both the Duke and his architect: Your plan of the Dog Kennel is admired by everybody, the Queen saw it yesterday. Lord Stairs was present who vouched for all I said of it, Lord Cobbam was also there and severall others it was asked what the house be to ansure so magnificent a Dog Kennell.63

There is more to Chatelherault than the pavilioned frontispiece. Behind this stands a substantial garden, the steeply falling ground built up in a bastioned enclosure with ‘square breaks’ at the far corners and a large semi-circular projection at the centre. This enclosure is itself divided into four compartments, three of which were enclosed by their own walls, leaving a broad terraced walk to the south and west. At the centre is a bowling green that is substantially raised above the adjoining compartments and the terrace. To the west of the bowling green, behind the banqueting pavilion, is a formal parterre garden; to its east was the kennels courtyard. Beyond the kennels, and extending forward of the pavilion screen, is a series of grass mounts that overlook the entire

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William Adam and Formal Landscape Design in Scotland   375

Figure 18.21  Chatelherault. William Adam, 1731–4. Cadzow Castle is to the right of the bridge. NRHE SC755844 © Crown copyright: HES.

ensemble and negotiate the rising ground to the east that would otherwise have overshadowed and diminished the definition of that end of the bastioned enclosure. The dramatic situation of Chatelherault has been noted by many writers from the eighteenth century onwards. The Baroque formality of the Great Avenue and the manicured neatness of the mounts, bowling green and parterre contrasted vividly with untamed nature in the gorge below, while the castle-like outline of the building (a resemblance noted by many tourists of the picturesque, some of whom even referred to it as an artificial ruin)64 and bastioned outline of the garden walls echoed the ruins of Cadzow Castle across the gorge. The position of the bastioned garden, which almost hangs over the steeply falling ground towards the gorge, can leave no doubt that the contrast between formality and wilderness was deliberate. But it might also be argued that this is a very natural response to the site as the two other buildings in the immediate vicinity, Cadzow Castle and Barncluith (a late sixteenth-century tower house located

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a little downstream with a terraced garden built dramatically into the side of the gorge) both take similarly teetering positions. Chatelherault was not Adam’s only contribution to the Hamilton Palace landscape. He was first employed by the Duke in 1726 to survey and draw up a plan of the parks and town, and continued to produce plans and oversee improvements to the house and grounds until 1742, at a salary of 30 guineas a year.65 These works are described elsewhere,66 but in considering the influence of English fashions on Adam’s work it is worth mentioning advice that he gave to the Duke in 1733 on the construction of walls for three deer chaces – rectangular enclosures ranged along the western boundary of the High Park. Adam’s enquiry as to whether the walls should be sunk as ha-has is illuminating both of his own knowledge of emerging fashions and of the type of discussion that occurred at a time when acceptance of these fashions was by no means universal: As your Grace is desiring that the Deer Chease should now be enclosed I begg to know if it shall be with a dry-stone wall raised above the surface of the ground or if by a sunk ditch faced with stone . . . To be sure it is a great beauty to see the deer in the Chase from whatever part of the park you are in; besides that this does not lessen the extent of the Park to your eye which otherways by high walls dividing it makes it look like so many enclosures; this is not the intent of what the English call a park and I want that it should not be less in the esteem of anybody that sees it than what I represented it to be on the front draught of the dogg-kennell, now with your Grace.67

In the end the walls were built above ground, another advisor having warned the Duke that the cost of a sunk fence would be double that of a normal wall. Adam’s explanation probably says more about the recent state of his own knowledge on this matter than the Duke of Hamilton’s since the Duke spent a large part of every year in London and presumably knew what the English meant by the term ‘park’. That the term was not generally used the same way in Scotland at that time is further evidenced by Edmund Burt, a government official posted to Inverness in 1730. Burt related how he rode out to see the ‘Culloden Parks’ with an acquaintance who had been misled into believing them to be a great landscape garden, similar to Studley Royal, and was greatly incensed to discover they were merely walled enclosures of fir trees. Burt goes on to explain that ‘every one of the small divisions . . . is called a separate park, and . . . the reason for making

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some of the inner walls has been to prevent the hares . . . from cropping the tender tops of the young firs’.68 *  *  * So where does Adam stand in the context of British garden history? A. A. Tait places Adam at the start of the Informal Landscape movement. To a certain extent this is true, but I am not convinced that this is a particularly helpful way of looking at his work. It is difficult to avoid comparisons with the rolling landscapes of Capability Brown when using this term, and Adam’s denser and more formal planting cannot usefully be compared with those. Instead, it is more helpful to place Adam in the context of what had come immediately before and was fashionable at the time. The majority of Adam’s garden work that can be dated was done in the 1720s and 30s – the period of Charles Bridgeman, Stephen Switzer and William Kent, with the influence of Vanbrugh still strong. The main books on garden design were Dezallier d’Argenville’s La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage, Stephen Switzer’s Ichnographia Rustica and Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening. These advocated a degree of informality, an embracing of nature, the importance of external views facilitated by the use of the ha-ha and (particularly Switzer) the idea of treating the wider estate as part of the pleasure grounds. Dense planting of woodland and wildernesses, cut through by straight walks and serpentine paths, was an important feature of the gardens illustrated by these writers. All these are to be found in Adam’s work. The influence of French and Dutch seventeenth-century garden design and practice had been important in England and Scotland into the first two decades of the eighteenth century, but had begun to wane. In England the trend towards informality that would evolve into the English landscape garden was still at a relatively early stage and the structure of pleasure grounds was still based around a relatively formal outline, contained within ha-has. The profuse use of garden buildings that became so associated with the English landscape garden had only started to get underway in the late 1710s, and it was not until the 1740s that the trend for multiple garden buildings really took off. The number of buildings that Adam proposed at Hopetoun was therefore relatively high, and his more modest use of buildings elsewhere fairly normal for the period. The influence of Sir William Bruce and his alignment of Kinross with Loch Leven Castle was strong, and the creation of alignments to geographical and built features was an important element of

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Scottish garden design before and after Adam’s period. This was, as I have shown, also a feature of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury English gardens. It is fair to say that Adam was not leading any fashion, but his letter to the Duke of Hamilton regarding the usage of the term ‘park’ and the use of ha-has shows that he was doing his best to keep up with developments in England, as well as conforming to, and to some extent informing, prevailing fashions in Scotland.

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19

William Adam and Antiquity: an Arcadian Retreat at Arniston? Nick Haynes

Tityrus hinc aberat. Ipsae te, Tityre, pinus, Ipsi te fontes, ipsa haec arbusta vocabant. Virgil, First Eclogue, lines 39–401

I

n May 1725 Robert Dundas (1685–1753) was forced to resign his post as Lord Advocate, the government’s chief legal officer in Scotland, for his opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s controversial malt tax. This turbulent event seems to have prompted thoughts of retirement from politics and retreat to his ailing father’s estate at Arniston in Midlothian. With the prospect of spending more time with his expanding family, Dundas commissioned William Adam to carry out an extensive Classical remodelling of the Arniston tower house and its surrounding landscape in the manner of a Roman villa. This chapter aims to review the fragmentary documentary and physical evidence of the first thirty years of the new Arniston, focusing on the garden and landscape, but in the context of a closely integrated scheme for the house and a broader revival of interest in the culture, art, architecture and gardens of Ancient Rome. *  *  * The overthrow of the absolutist James VII/II in 1688 saw the establishment through the Revolution Settlement of a constitutional monarchy. The beneficiaries of the decline in monarchical power and of the stability of the new Hanoverian regime from 1714 were the aristocracy, the gentry and the rising professional and entrepreneurial classes – and ultimately the British parliament, which assumed these powers. With the recent history of absolute ­monarchy, civil

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Figure 19.1  The General Plan of Arniston House Parkes and Gardens – the Seat of The Hon.ble Mr Robert Dundass Esquire in the County of Midle Lothian, 1726. (See Figure 19.9 for detail of area around house.) NRS RHP 5246/3, attributed to William Adam. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   381

war and foreign wars in mind, many within these groups looked to the Ancient Roman principles of political liberty and civic virtue as models for peaceful prosperity.2 Such interest in the Ancient Roman world was not new, but the early eighteenth-century revival saw poets, writers, artists, sculptors, designers and architects looking to the literature and, increasingly, the archaeology, of late Republican and early Imperial Rome for inspiration. The order, structure and harmony of the ancient world were reinterpreted for the new patrons of the modern age, often through the prism of earlier neo-Classical revivals. ‘Augustan’ is a well-recognised term in English literature, referring to the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, when overtly stylised, political and satirical writing reflected a similar shift in Latin poetry in the period 27 bc to ad 14 under the Roman Emperor Augustus. John Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) exemplified the modern Augustan style in England, both translating original Augustan poets, such as Horace and Virgil, and creating their own satires in ‘heroic couplet’ form. The Scottish poet James Thomson, author of Liberty and The Seasons, who moved to London in 1725, also celebrated the social values and virtues (particularly ‘liberty’) of Republican Rome.3 The new Augustan writers, such as Pope and Joseph Addison (1672–1719), found virtue in the contemplative and productive gardens and landscapes around the villas of Roman nobles. For advice on Roman husbandry they turned to ancient texts, including Cicero’s De Senectute (44 bc), which described the pleasures of country living; Virgil’s didactic treatise on agriculture, The Georgics (29 bc) and pastoral Eclogues (39 bc); Varro’s Res Rusticae (36 bc) on practical husbandry; and Pliny the Younger’s letters about his villas and the surrounding landscape at Laurentum and Tusculum, which made the case for the simple virtues and restorative powers of the countryside as a healthy place for relaxation, contemplation, study and writing. The writers record the Roman elite’s passion for the ambulatio, a kind of ‘tourism of the mind’: walking and intellectual conversation, exercising both the mind and the body in the grounds of the villa.4 Pliny in particular described the fluid transitions between interior and exterior spaces, through the use of courtyards, porticos, loggias, halls, arbours and terraces. He noted that the interior experiences of his villas intertwined with the views of the surrounding land and seascapes and the passing of the seasons. Pope, who designed his own garden at Twickenham from 1719, and referred to it as ‘My Tusculum’, is credited with

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first advocating the Ancients’ principles of gardening in harmony with nature: Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them.5

The term ‘Augustan’ is now less commonly applied to the architecture and landscape design of the early eighteenth century, but contemporaries, such as James Anderson, certainly used the term to refer to neo-Classical schemes: ‘The King order’d Sir William Bruce, Baronet, Grand Master of Scotland, to rebuild his Palace of Holyrood-House at Edinburg in the best Augustan Stile, and the Scottish Secretary Office at Whitehall’.6 From the beginning of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of architects and patrons turned to Ancient Roman writers and examples, and also to subsequent neo-Classical revivals, for authorities on how and where to build. Chief among the ancient sources for architects was the author, architect, and civil and military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (80–70 bc – c. 15 bc) whose De Architectura, dedicated to the Emperor Augustus, set out the famous triad of principles for construction of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (‘firmness, commodity and delight’ or strength, functionality and beauty). Vitruvius placed the imitation of the invisible rules of nature at the centre of his architectural theories, particularly proportions derived from the symmetry and correlation of measurements of the limbs and features of the human body. Later architects, including Alberti, Palladio and Inigo Jones, revived, mediated and reinterpreted these Vitruvian principles of natural order. A pivotal moment in the early eighteenth-century neo-Classical revival in architecture was the publication of the first volume of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715. Further volumes were to follow in 1717 and 1725. The ambitious publishing project of key buildings in Britain became a manifesto for a return to the purity of ancient architecture, away from the debauchery of the Baroque. The book held up Inigo Jones, dubbed the ‘British Vitruvius’ by John Webb, as the shining example of a native interpreter of pure Classical architecture. Vitruvius Britannicus was an instant publishing success and became hugely popular and influential, particularly in the circle of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, a leading promoter of neo-Palladianism. Other key texts for the new Augustan architects, garden designers and patrons included Giacomo Leoni’s translations of Palladio’s I

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Quattro Libri (1715–20, in fact a revision of Fréart’s French version of 1650) and Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1726); Richard Bradley’s A Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening (1725); Batty Langley’s Practical Geometry Applied to the Useful Arts of Building, Surveying, Gardening, and Mensuration (1726); and Robert Castell’s Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (1728). Leoni’s translation of Alberti, present in William Adam’s library and published in the same year that he completed the Arniston design, is particularly interesting for its emphasis on the siting and orientation of the  country house, the practical considerations of laying out a garden and the desirability of echoing or integrating the geometry of the house in the layout of the garden.7 *  *  * While other chapters in this volume chart the classicising tendencies of Scottish architecture and landscape architecture in the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, the purpose here is to look at the more immediate context for William Adam’s interest in Roman culture (and its later interpretations). Evidence for Adam’s fascination with Ancient Rome can be found not just in his works, but also in his friends and connections, activities, library and even in the way that he sealed his letters. How this enthusiasm came about is not known for sure. Whatever the source of Adam’s interest, it was almost certainly nourished by his deep involvement in the circle of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, the most prominent and influential Romanophile in Scotland.8 As a patriotic Scot and a negotiator for the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, Clerk had a complicated and sometimes paradoxical attitude to contemporary political issues and their parallels in Scotland’s Roman past: on the one hand he celebrated the ordering, improving, unifying and civilising culture of empire, but on the other hand he mourned the loss of nationhood.9 He wrote, but never published, a partisan history of the Union of Scotland and England in Latin in imitation of Livy and Salust.10 Clerk admired the remains of the conquering Romans in Scotland not just for their technical achievement, but because they reflected glory on the strength and vigour of his ancestors, the ancient Caledonians, whom the Romans had failed to conquer. A similar undercurrent of political statement could be present in the Roman references in William Adam’s work, but there is no documentary evidence to support this possibility. Clerk studied law at Glasgow and then at Leiden, where he also began to study Roman antiquities.11 He toured in Italy in 1697–9.

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This trip formed the basis of a magnificent collection of bronze and marble statues, Greek and Roman coins, and other Roman finds from northern England and Scotland, including sixteen altars. On inheriting the family estates in 1722, Clerk made a concerted effort to live his life on Roman principles of civic virtue and honestum otium (honourable, purposeful or dignified leisure). In practical terms, Clerk used his leisure time for ‘improvement’ of his estates, the promotion of culture and science (music, art, literature and poetry, architecture, geology, medicine, astronomy and chemistry), and antiquarianism. First among Clerk’s antiquarian friends, protégés and corres­ pondents was Alexander Gordon (c. 1678–1728), an operatic tenor and scholar of Roman Scotland. Gordon dubbed Clerk ‘Scotland’s Maecenas’, referring to Gaius Cilnius Maecenas (68 bc – 8 bc), the enlightened patron of Horace and Virgil, and confidante and political advisor to Octavian, later to become Augustus, first Emperor of Rome. Both Clerk and Gordon were members firstly of the Society of Antiquaries (founded 1707) and latterly of William Stukeley’s ‘Equites Romani’, or Society of Roman Knights, founded in London in 1722 to counter the perceived medieval bias of the Antiquaries.12 The Society of Roman Knights brought together an extraordinary range of politically and culturally influential aristocrats and gentlemen and gentlewomen archaeologists in the study and promotion of Roman Britain. Between 1723 and 1726 Clerk employed Adam as the consultant architect on his Plinian villa urbana, Mavisbank House, at Loanhead. Here Clerk chose the site carefully to incorporate what he believed to be a ‘Roman station’ into the layout of the garden. At this time Clerk took a great deal of interest in the great English champions of Palladio, Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington. He met both men on a trip with William Adam to England in 1727, visited their houses at Wilton and Chiswick respectively, and obtained portraits of them by William Wissing and William Aikman, which were hung at Mavisbank.13 In 1726, the year that Adam delivered the designs for Arniston House, Clerk wrote ‘in Milton’s way’ his 1,600-line didactic poem, The Country Seat, a guide to the construction of country houses and their gardens.14 The poem draws heavily on Classical descriptions of gardens and landscapes, and there is much emphasis on practicality, choice of site, the way in which gardens should be laid out and the appeal to the mind of variety and diversity. As Alistair Rowan has shown, the Adam family of Blair Adam owned a substantial library.15 While it is not possible to distinguish books bought by William from those acquired by his son, John, it is likely

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that William owned a substantial number of the earlier books in the collection. Of the architectural books, Vitruvius figures largely (four editions) and there were first editions of the neo-Classical standards by Serlio (1545), Palladio (1581) and Scamozzi (1615). Contemporary titles of revived Roman interest in English included Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25), James Gibbs’ A Book of Architecture (1728), William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones (1727), Robert Castell’s The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated (1728), Giacomo Leoni’s English translations of Palladio (1715) and Alberti (1726). There were twenty-seven Latin and Italian titles, eight volumes dedicated to Roman antiquities and a number of books on fortification, garden design (including a second edition of Dezallier D’Argenville’s La théorie et pratique du jardinage of 1713), French, German and Dutch architecture, technical treatises, and art and topography. Perhaps the most surprising omissions from the Blair Adam catalogue are Stephen Switzer’s gardening treatise of 1718, Ichnographia Rustica, which included a history of gardening from ancient times and a manifesto for ‘a Forest or Rural Garden’, and his Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks of 1729. The reason for the omission of Switzer’s volumes from the 1785 Blair Adam library catalogue is not known, but it seems highly likely that William Adam was aware of them, even if he did not own them himself. It may be that Adam borrowed the volumes from a patron, as he did with Palladio and Campbell volumes from Sir John Clerk.16 Certainly, the 1726 garden design at Arniston is very much in line with many of Switzer’s recommendations in Ichnographia Rustica, including an extensive and productive arrangement including agricultural fields and plantations beyond the garden; open prospects; use of the existing ground levels and features; a harmonious geometric layout; an axial feature; placing of a wilderness with views out over a vale; fortifications; and the agreeable mixture of ‘Profit and Pleasure’.17 Some of Switzer’s illustrations find an echo in the 1726 Arniston plan. As detailed in both Ichnographia Rustica and Hydrostaticks, Switzer was also very keen on axial cascades. Switzer lived and worked for a while at Spye Park, Wiltshire, where the owner, Ann Bayntun Rolt, employed him to construct a new fortified garden.18 On her marriage to James Somerville, 13th Lord Somerville, in 1724, the couple commissioned William Adam to rebuild the Somerville family home, The Drum, at Gilmerton, outside Edinburgh. The plans for The Drum progressed in tandem with those for Arniston.19 Bill Brogden has drawn attention to the similarity between the layout at Spye Park and that at The Drum,

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and also the possibility that Switzer provided advice, or even a plan, for the garden of his clients’ Scottish residence.20 Given the shared clients, it seems possible that Adam was not simply aware of Switzer’s treatise, but actively engaged in implementing a Switzer, or Switzer-like, plan at The Drum. Adam’s exposure to Roman structures was not all second-hand. Some time between 1723 and 1726 Adam accompanied Alexander Gordon on a survey of a possible route for a Forth-Clyde canal, which in many places followed close by the course of the Antonine Wall. Gordon made use of the canal survey to measure and investigate the remains of the entire 39-mile turf wall, along with other vestiges including forts and watchtowers, and recorded the findings in his book published under the aegis of the Society of Roman Knights, Itinerarium Septentrionale, or a Journey Thro’ most of the Counties of Scotland, and Those in the North of England.21 The ‘ingenious Architect Mr. Adams’ is mentioned in the book in connection with the so-called ‘Arthur’s O’on’ (or Oven), a possible Roman temple or triumphal monument at Stenhousemuir, where Gordon pointed out that the masonry was so closely jointed and weathered that the structure appeared to be made from a single stone.22 There was clearly a degree of mutual admiration between the architect and the antiquary, and perhaps they indulged in ‘a sea of discussion concerning urns, vases, votive altars, Roman camps, and the rules of castrametation’ (the planning and construction of military camps) like Walter Scott’s fictional Antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, and his travelling companion, William Lovel.23 Although the title of Adam’s magnum opus of architectural designs, Vitruvius Scoticus, had yet to be determined when he began planning the volume in 1726, the work itself was very clearly based on Colen Campbell’s earlier publication, Vitruvius Britannicus.24 By 1733 the name Vitruvius Scoticus was firmly attached to the project,25 but it was to be almost another eighty years before the engravings were bound into books and published by his non-architect grandson and namesake. Without an introduction and explanatory text, Vitruvius Scoticus lacks the campaigning characteristics of Campbell’s earlier volume, but through the buildings selected for inclusion it does celebrate native designers in the neo-Classical tradition. Such was William Adam’s interest in Roman antiquity that he even commissioned a seal stamp bearing the head of a Roman emperor, possibly Claudius, who began the conquest of Britannia in ad 43, constructed numerous public works including roads, bridges, gateways, aqueducts, canals and the port of Ostia, and was named

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   387

by Stephen Switzer in his list of ‘Garden-Heroes’ in Ichnographia Rustica.26 The stamp was in use until about 1740, when it was replaced by one depicting Inigo Jones.27 *  *  * Before considering the design for the landscape at Arniston in detail, it is worth examining the family background and influences that brought about the new Arniston from 1726 onwards. In 1571 George Dundas of Dundas and Katherine Oliphant, his second wife, purchased the lands of Arniston Mains for their eldest son, James, from Sir James Sandilands. More land purchases followed, and over the following century the family acquired major holdings stretching from Whitehouse in the Parish of Newbattle to the ridge of the Moorfoot Hills. As the fortunes of the neighbouring Castleton, Temple and Shank estates waned, Arniston flourished and a substantial tower house was constructed. Robert Dundas (1650–1726), 2nd Lord Arniston, inherited the estate in 1679. He lived in the Low Countries during the period of religious persecution immediately prior to the Revolution of 1688, and returned in that year with the Prince of Orange. Dundas served as an ordinary lord of the Court of Session and Senator of the College of Justice, and as Commissioner for Midlothian in the Scottish Parliament from 1689 until the Act of Union in 1707. He was also a commissioner for the Union negotiations in 1706–7, alongside the abovementioned Sir John Clerk, 2nd Baronet of Penicuik (1676–1755).28 Lord Arniston began the enclosure of the policies and extensive tree-planting at Arniston in the 1690s, most of which was later incorporated into the 1726 landscape design. By 1721 he was frail and infirm from gout and wanting to retreat from public office to his beloved tower house at Arniston, but political machinations kept him in his post as a judge until his death on 25 November 1726.29 The 2nd Lord Arniston’s political allegiance to the Whigs, support for the House of Hanover and legal aptitude were instilled in his second son and heir, also named Robert. Like his father, Robert (1685–1753), 3rd Lord Arniston, spent time in the Low Countries, studying law at the University of Utrecht and possibly also at the University of Edinburgh.30 Utrecht had a reputation not just for the humanist teaching of natural and Roman law, but also the necessary context of Roman history and culture, focusing on model jurists and orators. According to a contemporary description, Robert was ‘­naturally averse to study and application, and (except when

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employed in the practice of his profession) consumed his time in convivial meetings, and the company of his friends and acquaintance’.31 In spite of Robert’s reputation as a bon vivant, Alexander Carlyle considered him ‘one of the ablest lawyers this country ever produced, and a man of a high independent spirit’.32 In the autumn of 1712 Robert married Elizabeth Watson of Muirhouse (1690–1734), the elder sister of General David Watson, the noted military engineer and surveyor (responsible for commissioning William Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland in 1747). Robert Dundas became Solicitor-General in 1717, Lord Advocate in 1720 and Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1721. The following year, he was returned as the MP for Edinburghshire. After Robert’s dismissal as Lord Advocate, he once more took up legal practice at the bar, but did not heed his father’s exhortations to step down as an MP. He continued to oppose Walpole and his representative in Scotland, the Earl of Ilay, and became an active supporter of the Independent Whig party. Keen to remove Robert as a thorn in their sides at Westminster, Walpole and Ilay eventually promoted him to a Lord Ordinary in the Court of Session in 1737. With the fall of Walpole in 1742, Robert regained influence as a supporter of John Hay, 4th Marquess of Tweeddale and Secretary of State for Scotland. Eventually he became Lord President of the Court of Session on the death of Lord President Forbes in 1747. In several ways the decision to reconstruct the house and lay out new gardens at Arniston in 1725 was curious. Both a letter of 5 May 1726 from William Adam to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and an inscription on a landscape plan of 1726 confirm that Robert was the client for the new schemes in spite of Lord Arniston’s continued ownership and occupation of the estate.33 Lord Arniston must have been a particularly indulgent parent to allow his son to demolish and rebuild the family home around him in his old age and illness. The second unusual circumstance relates to the timing and scale of the planned reconstruction, in that it came after Robert had lost the most lucrative of his posts, and it involved grand Classical statements such as the entrance hall, the library and a very extensive landscape. A further curiosity is that in spite of Robert’s known aversion to study and application, the schemes for the house and landscape do seem to be rooted in the avant-garde of fashion and contemporary antiquarian scholarship. The reasoning behind the timing and design may never be known for sure. None of the surviving family correspondence throws light on the matter. One possible explanation is the involvement of old

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Lord Arniston. The schemes must have had his blessing, and perhaps even his financial backing. He was known to be ‘fond of retirement and study – Guarini’s Pastor Fido was among his favourite books’.34 That Lord Arniston agreed to Robert’s plans suggests that old age and illness had not dimmed his dynastic ambition for his son and grandson. In the absence of any enlightening family correspondence, the Epistle Address’d to a Friend of 1739 is a key piece of evidence.35 It appears to have been written by someone who knew both the family and the estate well. The poem refers to the estate as a place of retreat, retirement and conviviality, somewhere to rest from the stresses, strains and bad air of the city, and somewhere to stimulate the senses and imagination and to exercise the mind. Perhaps this sense of a place of retreat, like a Roman villa, imbued the initial commissions for the reconstruction in 1725. Another factor might have been the model of other Scottish lawyers trained in Roman law at Utrecht, such as Sir John Clerk and Sir David Dalrymple (Robert’s predecessor as Lord Advocate), who developed highly cultured ways of living based on the exemplars of Roman civic virtue.36 Certainly Robert cannot have been anti-scholarship, and the influence of his father, colleagues, friends, architect and son possibly played a significant part in the development of the plans for the new house and gardens at Arniston. The roles of the architect and landscape designer in realising an appropriate Roman setting for a ‘retired’ Scottish lawyer and his family are considered separately below. By the early 1730s there must have been concerns about the money for the reconstruction project at Arniston, as the state apartments and laird’s rooms in the western third of the corps-de-logis (central block) of the house remained unstarted. Major construction work on the house appears to have tailed off in about 1731–2, although some work persisted until at least 1739 and furnishings and decoration continued until Robert’s death in 1753.37 Further disaster struck Robert in the winter of 1733–4, when Elizabeth and two sons and two daughters were lost to an outbreak of smallpox. Robert remarried swiftly to Anne Gordon of Invergordon later in 1734. When it might have been expected that all available resources would be ploughed into completing the house, surviving correspondence of February 1736 shows that Robert, in London on MP duties, was taking a strong interest in the garden and wider landscape. He wrote to his second wife, Anne, instructing improvements that included the strengthening of holly hedges, planting of flowers and the opening of a view through Fir Park (in accordance with the 1726 plan).38

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Figure 19.2  Arniston Designed Landscape, c. 1720. Drawn by the author, based on the 1810 Narrative by Robert Dundas, 5th Lord Arniston and Chief Baron of the Exchequer, describing the tree-planting on the estate (NRAS 3246/169). Contains OS data © Crown copyright & database right, 2020.

That even quite ambitious planting continued throughout Robert’s later life is evidenced again by the Epistle poem, which describes the ‘new High Walk’ through a linear plantation along a ridge to the south of the house, and by David Dundas’s landscape survey of 1752, which shows substantial planting in addition to that set out on the 1726 proposal, including a second ‘wilderness’ of about 1735.39

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   391

The site of the western third of the house remained an embarrassing ‘muckle gap’ for more than twenty years. A new generation of Dundases and Adams picked up the baton in 1753. With the help of the 4th Lord Arniston’s first wife, the heiress Henrietta Carmichael Baillie of Lamington and Bonnington, the corps-de-logis was finished and new service courts and a ‘greenhouse’ were added. *  *  *

Figure 19.3  Arniston Designed Landscape, c. 1750. Drawn by the author, based on the 1752 and 1758 survey plans of the garden and the Chief Baron’s 1810 Narrative. Contains OS data © Crown copyright & database right, 2020.

Although no signed drawings or contracts for the work of the 1720s to 40s at Arniston House survive in the family archives, there is strong contemporary evidence in favour of William Adam as both the architect and the main contractor for the new building. The most compelling evidence for Adam’s authorship of the designs can be found in his Vitruvius Scoticus. The plans and elevations of Arniston, engraved by Richard Cooper in about 1727, are credited ‘Gul Adam inv et delin’ (‘Designed and drawn by William Adam’).40 An unsigned and undated drawing of the west side of the house and pavilion and a proposed screen wall and outer pavilion block is believed to be in Adam’s hand, and there are several contemporary

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accounts demonstrating that Adam was working on the new house at Arniston between 1726 and 1732 (although it is not clear whether this was in his role as architect or as a contractor).41 A very interesting letter of 5 May 1726 to Sir John Clerk shows that the Arniston commission came at a particularly busy period for Adam, when he was working for the Duke of Roxburgh at Floors Castle, designing Drum House for Lord Somerville and trying to fit in a trip to London to visit Lord Stair: I have not been able to goe to London yet, by the many Drawings past and now among my hands – and now that the Duke of Roxburgh is come from London, whom I’m oblig’d to attend and goeing to Floors tomorrow in order too [illegible symbol]. And severall oys [others] that have advertis’d me of their being quickly down from London as Mr Dundass of Arnistone, Lord Sommervill &ca who are designing to build this year, and I have their Draughts ready for them – so yet I’m in a straitt about my journey [to London].42

Evidence for William Adam’s involvement in the design and construction of the Arniston landscape is far more circumstantial. There are no garden designs included in Vitruvius Scoticus and no accounts or specific documentary references to the author or contractors for the major garden work have been traced in the Arniston archives. The draughtsmanship of the large and beautifully coloured plan of 1726 (Figure 19.1) that survives at the house is unlike other autograph plans by Adam, such as the garden designs for La Mancha, Peeblesshire (c. 1732) or Newliston (1736) (see Figures 18.13 and 18.1). It is not signed. However, analysis of the three sets of different handwriting on the plan shows that the title has a very close resemblance to other ‘best handwriting’ titles on other William Adam plans, such as that for the Library at the University of Glasgow (Figure 21.5) and the 1736 Newliston plan. The lack of evidence about the draughtsmanship of the plan leaves open a number of possibilities, including that the plan was drawn by someone in Adam’s direct employment or that it was commissioned from a third party, with a title in Adam’s own hand. Adam certainly worked with others on large-scale surveys, such as his General Map of the River Spey of 1732, where the English military engineer/surveyor Joseph Avery appears to have drawn up the map from Adam’s measurements.43 The identity of the draughtsman may remain a matter of speculation, but it is likely to be by someone closely associated with Adam and probably acting on his instructions.44

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   393

Before starting his Arniston commission in 1726, Adam had undertaken major projects at Hopetoun, Floors, Lawers, Dalmahoy and Mellerstain, and was continuing to develop an extraordinary network of patrons and contacts, drawn from the aristocracy and the legal-political elite of Scotland. His name was ubiquitous not just in the context of building designs, but also in contracting and related mining, quarrying and manufacturing industries. For example, Robert Dundas was one of Adam’s business partners in the glass works at Port Seton.45 As Louisa Humm’s preceding chapter details, Adam also offered his services in garden design and construction. *  *  * Much has been written about the design of the house at Arniston, but the intention here is to highlight the ways in which the original designs for the house and for the garden might be considered integral, or at least connected thematically by their ‘Roman’ features. ‘Roman’ in this context is used generically to refer not just to original antique structures, but also to revivals of Classical principles (including symmetry, proportion, harmony and a hierarchy of parts). Such revivals took place, for example, under Andrea Palladio in the sixteenth century, Inigo Jones in the seventeenth century and under contemporary interpreters of the Roman Classical past including John Vanbrugh, William Kent, Colen Campbell, James Gibbs, Lord Burlington and Stephen Switzer. The new Arniston represented the ideal ‘usefull’ country house, as described in Sir John Clerk’s didactic treatise-poem, The Country Seat, where the useful house ranked above the villa, but below the house of state and the royal seat.46 The main house forms the central corps-de-logis and is linked by wing walls to subsidiary service pavilions, which housed the stables to the east and the kitchens to the west. The design of the central corps-de-logis is essentially seven bays wide by six bays deep, with two principal storeys and a basement and attic, linked by single-storey quadrant corridors to two-storey service wings.47 The house is aligned approximately north–south. A small part of the old tower house was retained at the core of the new building. Even today, the Oak Room, with its thick walls, low ceiling and timber panelling, evokes an ancient past. Family portraits, dating back to the sixteenth century, still line the walls here. It is difficult to understand why a relatively small ‘stump’ of the tower house was kept within the new Classical house, unless it was for reasons of history, continuity and lineage.

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Figure 19.4  Plates 42 and 39 from William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus showing the north elevation ornamented with antique-style sculpture and a plan of the house and courts, engraved by Richard Cooper, c. 1730. From the Arniston copy of Vitruvius Scoticus. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   395

Figure 19.5  Arniston House entrance hall – an intermediate space between the house and garden, built on the site of the old tower house courtyard. The triumphal arch and passage lead towards the Oak Room and South Lawn. The Dutch stuccoist Joseph Enzer undertook the lavish plasterwork between 1730 and 1735. Photography by kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Image © Nick Haynes, 2019.

The designs for the house show a high quantity of sculpture at the temple-like entrance from the Principal Court: two Roman-style statues (possibly Vesta, goddess of the hearth, and Ceres, goddess of agriculture) flank the steps; grotesque ‘Green Man’ keystones are

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396   Nick Haynes

Figure 19.6  Detail of Roman emperors’ heads on the underside of the entrance hall arches. Photography by kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Image © Nick Haynes, 2019.

Figure 19.7  Detail of the entrance hall showing an acanthus leaf capital and antique-style basket of fruit and flowers. Photography by kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Image © Nick Haynes, 2019.

set over the three arches of the main entrance (derived from ancient Roman forms via the Italian Renaissance as symbols of productivity and dominion over nature or the synthesis of man and nature); there are three busts in the niches above; and the family arms in the pediment. Apart from the family arms and the grotesques, the sculptures do not appear to have been executed. As originally built, the main door led straight into the stone-paved entrance hall on the site of the old tower house courtyard. Here, in this intermediate loggia-like space between the house and the garden, Adam adapted Paul Decker’s swaggering Baroque design for a Royal Chapel in his 1711 book Architecture Civilis to a slightly more restrained arcaded and galleried double-height atrium.48 The

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   397

‘restraint’ is relative, for stuccoist Joseph Enzer spent five years covering every available surface of the coved and vaulted ceiling with an extraordinary riot of antique garden imagery: flowers, fruit, leaves, festoons, tendrils, rosettes, wreaths, wicker baskets and birds (Figures 19.5–19.7). Facing the entrance are three arches decorated on their soffits with relief plaster heads of the Twelve Caesars in chronological order from Julius Caesar to Domitian. The outer arches contain the fireplaces and the central, almost triumphal, arch leads to the Oak Room (in use as a dining room until completion of the western third of the house in the late 1750s, when it became the Garden Parlour) and out onto the parterre of the south garden. The library was evidently another internal space of significance to both patron and architect. Placed in prime position at the centre and top of the front of the house, the ‘skied’ library was of

Figure 19.8  Plate 41 from William Adam’s Vitruvius Scoticus showing the internal elevations of the library, engraved c. 1730. From the Arniston copy of Vitruvius Scoticus. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

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surprisingly generous dimensions, mirroring the length and breadth of the entrance hall below. The (then) recently completed library at Newhailes (1717–20), reputedly described by Samuel Johnson as ‘the most learned drawing-room in Europe’, may have influenced the scale and ambition of the Arniston library. Robert’s predecessor as Lord Advocate, Sir David Dalrymple, commissioned the eastern pavilion at Newhailes both as a library and as a business room in which to meet clients.49 Accessed from the private, family oval staircase (rather than the main ‘state’ staircase), the Arniston library enjoyed panoramic views northwards towards the Firth of Forth and the Lomond Hills. Robert himself was not particularly bookish. The space far exceeded the requirements of the existing book collection, and was clearly commissioned with an eye to posterity. The room was the only private house library to be engraved for Vitruvius Scoticus. As can be seen from Classical busts in the alcoves of the coombed ceiling and the ranks of articulating Ionic pilasters, the library was intended as an ordered and evocative Classical space in which to immerse the mind in Roman law and the culture of the ancient world. Responsibility for acquiring most of the busts appears to have fallen to Robert’s eldest son and heir, Robie, 4th Lord Arniston, during his student days in Utrecht and travels in Italy. Robie was an avid Classical scholar and bibliophile, purchasing many of the works that eventually filled the bookcases. *  *  * Certainly not everything in the landscape at Arniston had Roman allusions, and even when they did, the results were far from slavish copies of Roman originals or dry academic antiquarianism. The designs were for the modern heroic age, drawn from a wide range of sources and filtered through the exuberant imagination of the designer and the practical requirements of the client. There is definitely a sense of playfulness in some of the features: the subtle allusions were to be read and understood by a knowing audience. The reasons for creating an artificially ‘historic’ landscape are not fully known, but, like the retention of the stump of the tower house, might be regarded as ‘an attempt to memorialise Scotland’s exclusive history’.50 The evidence for the landscape at Arniston is complicated. Not all the designs were executed, and designs for which no drawings exist were carried out. A number of elements that definitely existed and were probably designed and built by William Adam, for example various gates and gatepiers, have long since been demolished. Some

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   399

features that appear in the designs, such as the parterre and the viewing mounts/roundels, might have been executed, but there is no documentary record of them in situ. The general thrust of the early proposals for the garden at Arniston can be pieced together from the illustrations in Vitruvius Scoticus, the 1726 garden proposal plan (Figures 19.1 and 19.9) and the Epistle to a Friend of 1739. Survey plans of 1752 (Figure 19.10) and 1758 (Figure 19.11), and the buildings and landscape as they survive today provide some evidence of how the proposals were implemented and modified in construction.51 There are many interesting features noted on the 1726 garden proposal plan and the 1752 survey, but for the purposes of this chapter, discussion is limited to those with antique allusions. A number of general observations can be made about the 1726 plan. Firstly, the plan is drawn in pen and ink with coloured washes at a scale of 1:1200 and appears to have been based on a reasonably accurate ground survey – it is possible to overlay a digital copy of the plan on modern mapping without excessive distortion. The house forms the focus of the design, and the Classical formality of the house is reflected in the plan. In its scope, the plan is expansive in the French manner, taking in the immediate courtyards, parterre and wilderness, but also the agricultural fields to the north and the semi-wild glen of Purvieshill Burn to the south. The landscape is designed with a very strong emphasis on the north–south axis through the house. The ‘footprint’ of the house on the 1726 plan does not correspond to the executed building nor to the plates in Vitruvius Scoticus. In particular, the layout of the pavilion wings differs: they were built in a north–south alignment rather than the east–west alignment shown on the landscape plan, and a further pair of square-plan pavilions were omitted from the arrangement as built. This discrepancy suggests that the plan was an early document in the design process and subject to later amendments. In spite of its early provenance and numerous later modifications in construction, the layout shown in the 1726 plan appears to have provided the basic framework for the executed works shown on the 1752 survey. The 1726 plan shows a broad, grassed Great Avenue private approach along the northern axis of the house (set apart from the existing rudimentary public road system, which is proposed for replacement in the plan). Although a direct north-facing alignment would have allowed Adam to focus the main axial view from the house on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, the slightly offset northnorth-east alignment in fact terminates on a gentle hillock in the

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Figure 19.9  Detail of Figure 19.1, The General Plan of Arniston House Parkes and Gardens, 1726. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

medium distance.52 The 1726 plan indicates that a large circular étoile feature was planned on the summit of the hillock, but it is not known if it was ever planted. Undoubtedly it would have directed views to Edinburgh and the River Forth and Fife beyond. The étoile was to connect into a grand grid of rectilinear rides around

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   401

the field boundaries of improved farmland. Continuation of the axis northwards, beyond the views from the house, leads not to Edinburgh, but rather to Inveresk, the site of a Roman fort. A large, square, symmetrical parterre à l’anglaise or parterre de broderie (characterised by paths and compartments forming an embroidery-like pattern) with corner ‘bastions’ or roundels was proposed on the southern axis of the house. It is not known whether the bastions were built, and if they were, how they were constructed. They could have been intended as ha-has with sunken walls, or low walls, or earthen banks, or even simply demarcated by planting. In dry weather, the appearance of parch-marks in the South Lawn suggests that compartments were executed, at least close to the house, in a different arrangement to that shown on the plan. Whatever was built of the parterre had a relatively short life, and had been removed by the time of David Dundas’s survey in 1752. It seems likely that when funds became tight from 1733, it was grubbed up in favour of a smaller lawn and bands of trees. The 1726 plan indicates that the parterre had dimensions of approximately 228 yards square. The colouring on the 1726 plan suggests it was to have comprised gravel, or shell, and grassed paths, two lawns, compartments of flowers, shrubs or small ornamental trees lined with hedges, small recesses or niches (for secluded contemplation or reading), a central octagonal pond, a fountain and perhaps some statuary. The layout of the paths is in the form of two Union flags with narrower curvilinear interlocking paths creating a strapwork pattern, similar in form to the ‘concave amphitheatre’ illustrated by Stephen Switzer in his Ichnographia Rustica.53 The northern bastions were to be aligned on the east–west axis of the house via pyramid yew-lined allées. The southern bastions, presumably intended as viewing platforms, were to be located just above the public Carrington-Esperston road and the bank above the Purvieshill Glen and its native woodland. The eastern and western sides were to be tree-lined, whilst the southern side was to have some form of hedge. The ends of the paths at the southern end of the parterre are left clear, presumably to enable views out. To eighteenth-century eyes the bastions are likely to have appeared in the manner of ‘Roman’ fortification features, perhaps derived from descriptions of castrametation.54 This was a subject on which numerous ancient writers commented, notably Polybius, and in which later writers, including Alberti and Palladio, had a strong interest.55 A similar parterre was laid out and a fortified wall constructed in Wray Wood at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, designed

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Figure 19.10  Plan of Arniston Inclosures, survey’d March 1752, Dd Dundas. The plan shows the rows of trees replacing the planned parterre, two wildernesses, the remodelled walled garden, the cascade and the Great Basin. Yew hedges lining the amphitheatre are still in place today. The western third of the main house was incomplete at this date. NRS RHP 5246/2. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor before 1718.56 As described in the preceding chapter, bastions and martial features appear in several other gardens where William Adam is known to have been active. Another significant feature of the 1726 plan (Figure 19.9) is the pond, green walk and possible miniature ‘exedra’, or circular platform and steps, on the southern axis of the house at Purvieshill Burn and Castleton Hill.57 Later in the design process this feature was replaced with a cascade, which was constructed at considerable expense some time before 1733 (Figure 19.10). The cascade was located on the main axis of the house on Castleton Hill. It dropped from a gravity feeder pond on the hill to the hexagonal Great Basin, which was located in what is now the walled garden. A sluice controlled the feed from a stone lade 56ft long. The six stages of the cascade were constructed of rubble, ashlar and broached ashlar stone, and puddled clay was incorporated into the reservoir.58 It was approximately 450ft in length (excluding ponds) and 30ft wide, and descended in irregular lengths and drops with larger ‘flats’ and ‘falls’ towards the middle and upper stages of the cascade. Robert

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An Arcadian Retreat at Arniston?   403

Dundas’s grandson, another Robert (1758–1819), 5th Lord Arniston and Chief Baron of the Exchequer, described how it was necessary to arrange display times in advance as the cascade would only run for an hour or so on the supply from the feeder pond. The cascade was removed by 1764, when the Great Basin was incorporated within a new walled garden. Probably as part of the cascade scheme, an earthen ‘amphitheatre’ was sculpted out of the bank opposite to allow viewing of the cascade at close hand. Amphitheatres were Graeco-Roman in their origins, but became fashionable garden features following the publication of John James’s 1712 translation of Dezallier d’Argenville’s La théorie et la pratique du jardinage. The translation became an extremely popular manual for the construction of gardens. William Adam probably owned a second edition (in French).59 The earthworks of the amphitheatre remain, and two curving lengths of yew hedge corresponding to the 1752 plan survive today beneath later rhododendron planting. Two walled gardens are marked to the east of the house on the 1752 plan (Figure 19.9). The northerly garden is marked in pencil as

Figure 19.11  Plan of the Arniston and Shank Inclosures, dated 1758, by an anonymous surveyor. The amphitheatre is depicted as a sculpted landform with ramps. John Adam’s scheme for completing the house and building new ancillary ranges was in progress. NRAS 5246/5. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker.

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404   Nick Haynes

the ‘Kitchen Garden’, the southerly as the ‘Orchard’. From the Chief Baron’s Narrative it appears that the kitchen garden was already in place by 1726 and also served as an orchard. The gardener’s house was attached at the north-west corner of the garden. David Dundas’s 1752 survey (Figure 19.10) shows an interesting Romanising amendment, with shallow apses added to the eastern and western walls. *  *  * Out of Britain’s Ancient Roman past a new Roman present was constructed in the early eighteenth century. Scotland’s recent Union with England created a different and complex allusive relationship with its Roman past, as articulated by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. William Adam’s design of Arniston House, and probably also its garden, for Robert Dundas reflects both the broader neo-Classical revival and the client’s specific circumstances. The integrated features of the house and garden created an appropriately dignified rural retreat and place of renewal for a laird, lawyer and proud Scot who had withdrawn to a large extent from the negotium, or hurlyburly, of political and legal life in the capital and appeared intent on settling after the Roman model as a man of honestum otium.

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20

Town Housing and Planning: Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn in Early Georgian Glasgow Anthony Lewis

O

n 13 June 1710 Captain Jacob Calhoff sailed his ship, the Johann, up the Clyde; it was laden with a cargo of pre-cut ­seasoned timber, destined for the construction of a new Glasgow.1 In its efforts to improve and modernise the city, Glasgow town council had been demolishing old thatched houses, and a Glasgow  New Town was emerging on the banks of the Clyde.2 So successful were these efforts that by 1725 Daniel Defoe could describe Glasgow as ‘the cleanest and beautifullest, and the best-built city in Britain, London excepted’.3 This chapter considers Glasgow in the period before its great expansion but at a time when it had started to develop its trade, and industry, and the wealth and ambition that accompanied that started to imprint itself in the architecture and urbanism of the city. It provides an insight into some aspects of the city’s architecture and urban development from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, considering the work of the local architect Allan Dreghorn, Edinburgh’s Alexander McGill and the AngloScottish architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs. By the end of the seventeenth century there were already many great civic spaces and buildings to admire in Glasgow. The High Street was lined with important and impressive civic buildings as well as fine merchant houses. The Cathedral dominated the skyline at the top of the street and, moving towards the river, first the College came into view and, at the foot of the street, the Tolbooth building at Glasgow Cross dominated the surrounding markets. Built from 1625, it was Glasgow’s building of government, as well as the city’s court and prison. Nearby, in Bridgegait, was the Merchant House, founded early in the century and enlarged in 1659, with a new

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hall and a steeple that added to the impressive skyline of the city, symbolising the town council’s authority and signalling Glasgow as a place of business. The seventeenth-century city also began to accommodate the industries of tobacco and sugar, which, on the one hand, were to provide great wealth, but, on the other, were built upon the misery of slavery. In 1667 Glasgow’s Wester Sugar House was built in Candleriggs and in 1669 its Easter Sugar House was built on Gallowgate. Caribbean molasses was refined into rum and sugar products such as cones, loaves and candies. In 1674 the town council recorded that a shipment of Virginian tobacco and Caribbean sugar had arrived in Glasgow via William Johnstoune and William Bouk: forty hogheads of Virginian leaf tobacco and eight caskets of sugar.4 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Glasgow could offer not only tobacco, rum and sugar, but a huge range of other commodities representing the city’s global commercial compass: coffee, tea, Indian spices and silks. They were accommodated in buildings which represented the city’s classicising modernity in architecture and urban planning. One leading patron of architecture in this early period was Daniel Campbell (c. 1671–1753), a businessman and politician. From 1693 he worked in New England, making his fortune from tobacco, sugar and slavery. He attracted the patronage of the Duke of Argyll who invited him to return to Scotland to represent his interests as Member of Parliament for Inveraray; first in the Scottish Parliament from 1702, and then in the British Parliament from 1707 to 1716. Thereafter, until 1734, he was MP for Glasgow. After 1707 he became a partner in the South Sugar House, Glasgow’s newest at that time.5 He announced his arrival to the Glasgow elite through purchasing the estate of Woodhall, near Holytown, to add to the family’s existing holdings at Shawfield, in Rutherglen.6 He decided to build himself a town house, which he also called Shawfield after his estate. This was near the western boundary of the city and within walking distance of Glasgow’s business district.7 The site was already partly owned by the family, but Crawford acquired a number of smaller properties to make a considerable building plot on what later became Glassford Street.8 In 1711 Campbell invited Colen Campbell (no relation) to design both Shawfield House and perhaps also the poorly documented Woodhall House.9 Both are long gone: Shawfield House by 1792; Woodhall, after a long period of decline, by 1925. Of the two houses, Shawfield House is the better known and of more interest here. It is

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   409

Figure 20.1  Shawfield, Colen Campbell (1711–15). Plate 51 from Vitruvius Britannicus II. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

often used as the starting point in discussions of Georgian Glasgow, and is a significant example of early British Palladian architecture. Designed and built between 1711 and 1715, its design was included in the second volume of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus (Figure 20.1). From there, Daniel Campbell proclaimed his political

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and economic power to Glasgow and beyond. He married his second wife, Catherine Erskine, in 1714 and the house was both a place of work and a new family home. Shawfield is one of three Scottish houses that feature in Vitriuvius Britannicus II, and it places Campbell alongside the two major architects of the previous generation, James Smith and Sir William Bruce. It is tempting to see this combination in the context of the Scottish interest in cutting-edge Palladianism:10 Smith, the ‘Scottish source for English Palladianism’11 and possible mentor of Campbell, is represented by Melville House, whose Italianate design has been singled out as part of this innovative Palladian trend.12 Bruce is represented by Hopetoun, which has also been seen as his late experiment in Palladian design.13 However, the importance of Palladianism has been overstated (see Chapter 10) and, in this case, the more appropriate context for Shawfield is the smaller, astylar villa, as developed by Smith at places such as Raith, Newhailes and Strathleven. These represent one of Smith’s most important contributions to the Scottish country house: relatively small, simple and cheap but with all that was required, including the planning sequence of the state apartment, within the small compass of a country villa. In this case, we know from the witness statements following the 1725 malt tax riots, when the house was ransacked, that the main floor was used for business. The counting room and public rooms were on that floor, with bedrooms on the first floor, leaving the basement for servants, stores and the kitchens.14 Of course, Shawfield was not a country villa but a town house, and its importance lies partly in Campbell’s response to that urban setting, setting his house back from the street and aligning it with Bridge Street, so that it provided a view to the river, the source of the city’s wealth (Figure 20.2). According to Glasgow Past and Present the gardens contained orchards, shrubs and gardens within a tall parapet wall topped with an iron railing. The main entrance faced south, with studded oak wood gates wide enough to admit a carriage. To either side of it were tall columns with busts on top of them. To the south-western and south-eastern corners of this front wall were two columns with a sphinx on top of each. These columns were also decorated with banded horizontal friezes of human heads looking outwards and around the corners.15 Sphinxes were not uncommon sculptures in the eighteenth century, but although the design source for the friezes remains a mystery, we will see that sculpted heads became a significant element of building decoration in Glasgow between about 1730 and the 1750s. Of this ensemble facing onto Stockwell

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   411

Figure 20.2  Trongate, Glasgow. Shawfield is the building set back from the street, opposite the head of Stockwell Street. Charles Ross, ‘A Map of the Shire of Lanark’ (1773), detail from Glasgow inset. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

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412   Anthony Lewis

and the Clyde, only the sphinxes survive. They went to Woodend House, Cathcart and then Muirend House, Renfrewshire before coming to Glasgow museums. From 1727 to 1760, Colonel William McDowall of Castle Semple and his son, also William, owned Shawfield, retaining its name. It then passed to the great Glaswegian tobacco merchant, John Glassford of Douglaston, and his son, Henry, from 1760 until 1792. Shawfield was finally demolished by William Horn in 1792 to make way for Glassford Street.16 *  *  * Shawfield and Campbell may have been the inspiration for the 1st Duke of Montrose to build himself a new town house in Glasgow on the site of his existing one on Drygate, beside the High Street, although the project remained unrealised. Montrose owned the estate of Buchanan, in Stirlingshire, and also lived and worked in Glasgow and London, where he saw the building of new urban squares, such as the Earl of Oxford’s Cavendish Square (1717), and decided to improve his old house in Glasgow. Letters to his factor from 1717 to 1720 make this clear. James Smith, Alexander McGill and James Gibbs were invited to design it. The work was underway by February 1717, when Smith surveyed the old house. Montrose Lodging is shown on John McArthur’s map of 1778 and a watercolour by William Simpson (Figures 20.3 and 20.4). It was essentially an urban hôtel, with subsidiary buildings to the street and the main block withdrawn to the back of a courtyard. Both McArthur and Simpson confirm that, alongside the existing residence (to the left in the painting), there was a clear gap on the site, on which a new building could be erected. Alexander McGill produced the design, and his detailed site plan of the proposed building (Figure 20.5) also confirms the evidence of the two sources already cited. Some of his work involved tidying up the service buildings to the street, notably the ‘New work to be finished’, which included servants’ accommodation. Alongside that, he ‘proposed that a coach house entry to the office houses might be straight’ for access to the coach house.17 The house itself was to be set to the back of the site, in the gap noted earlier. There is a strong sense of McGill attempting to bring geometrical order into this complex and dense urban fabric. He combined the simple geometries of square, for the house plan, and the circle of the court, which regularises what would otherwise have been a slightly

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   413

Figure 20.3  Glasgow High Street. Montrose Lodging is shown at the junction of Rottenrow, Drygate and High Street. Glasgow Cathedral is at the top of the image. John McArthur, Plan of the City of Glasgow (1778), detail. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

irregular parallelogram. There is very precise detail in this part of the plan: the circle is for turning coaches, and in the centre there is a grass platt, with a statue on a pedestal. In the corners are further statues, or perhaps topiary cones. The overall effect of this, on plan, is a sense of complete separation between the new work and the old, although, in fact, part of McGill’s task was to provide a link between the two buildings, ‘by the old drawing room and my Lady Duchess’s closet’.18 In that respect, he was grappling with a similar task to that undertaken by Lord Burlington when he built his villa at Chiswick a few years later, which also required a much older building to be linked with the new.

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Figure 20.4  The Duke’s Lodgings, Drygate, view at the back, 1843. Watercolour painted by William Simpson (1823–99) in 1897. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection.

The house itself was equally precise: almost a cube, with a flat roof and balustrade (Figure 20.6). It is possible that McGill was inspired by other urban houses published in Vitruvius Britannicus I (1715), like Inigo Jones’ Lindsey House. However, in detail, it does not appear very Palladian but rather seems like a distant echo of  the pavilions at Marly (in the rustication) or even the Fletcher of Saltoun design discussed in Chapter 13 of this volume. Some of the slightly Baroque detailing is very local. The vertically linked windows with foliate cresting at the top is a direct quote from James Smith’s Hamilton Palace. The watchful Duke, however, wanted to avoid ‘unnecessary’ costs.19 In March 1717 he warned his factor when anything occurs to you . . . as an improvement of Mr McGill’s design you would before entering upon it have his approbation so that if there’s anything amiss in the contrivance I may have ane architect to blame and none of you.20

McGill planned vaulted cellars and a schedule to lay foundations for June 1718. Inevitable delays, as McGill worked on other projects,

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   415

Figure 20.5  Alexander McGill, site plan of proposed house for Duke of Montrose (1717). NRS RHP6285. Reproduced with permission of the Duke of Montrose.

such as Mountstuart house on Bute, meant postponing work until the next year, although stone was quarried and cut in preparation. By December 1718 still nothing had been constructed except that Montrose had asked James Gibbs to check and approve McGill’s plans.21 In 1719 Gibbs and Montrose met in London to alter McGill’s plans. The house’s proposed fore and back courts and great stair were removed. Lord Hopetoun advised Montrose on building new chimneys. Since McGill was still not in Glasgow ‘to concert’ work, Montrose postponed building again until the next year.22 By 1720, after three years considering the cost and scale of the project, the Duke’s enthusiasm had waned. Writing from London in January, he reported receiving Gibbs’ latest drawing knowing that the project was more expensive than he wanted.23 He was ‘at some loss for not carrying on my building for the provisions that have already been made . . . In short . . . this House as the draughts as now

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416   Anthony Lewis

Figure 20.6  Alexander McGill, plan and elevation of house for the Duke of Montrose (1717). NRS RHP6285. Reproduced with permission of the Duke of Montrose.

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   417

extended can hardly cost under eight, nay perhaps ten thousand pounds’, leaving him concerned that he would be ‘running myself headless into so great an expence’.24 So he ordered that the bake house, brew house and timber floors be repaired at the old house. The new house remained unbuilt.25 Nevertheless, the story of the importance of the Duke’s house was noted by Defoe. The intent to build a modern town house, designed by leading architects, clearly indicated the ambitions that leading figures in Glasgow had for themselves and their city. *  *  * After 1720 Glasgow’s public architecture was mostly designed and overseen by Robert and Allan Dreghorn, deacons of Glasgow’s incorporation of wrights, and successful businessmen. They often worked with another wright and architect, John Craig II, who was also descended from a business family. John Craig I had been a deacon and a magistrate.26 Craig and Dreghorn owned adjoining timber yards on the banks of the Clyde beside today’s Clyde Street. Allan Dreghorn was also a partner in the Smithfield Company, producing metal goods. He could source cheap building materials with ease: wood and metal goods such as nails, door handles, locks, railings, brackets, tools and so on. Another frequent business partner Dreghorn had was the timber merchant Michael Bogle. Dreghorn had married Bogle’s half-sister, Elizabeth Bogle, and in doing so had joined Glasgow’s mercantile and political community. Dreghorn and Craig were responsible for a number of important new buildings in the city, some of which are discussed below. *  *  * Glasgow town council hired John Craig and Allan Dreghorn for its public buildings: the new town hospital (1732–5), town hall (1735–40) and church (1739–56). The town hospital was located on Great Clyde Street, where Ropework Lane is today (Figure 20.7). It was a simple building completed to a small budget provided by the town council, the Merchant House of Glasgow, the city’s Trades House and Kirk Session. The building had three well-lit storeys and dormer windows in the roof. The central block lacked the grandeur of William Adam’s Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh although it did have a cupola and wings. Its plainness made it closer in appearance to Edinburgh’s Trades Maiden or George Watson’s Hospitals. The rusticated quoins and doorway, recalling James Gibbs’ or Batty Langley’s published designs, and its iron gates were the most

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Figure 20.7  Town Hospital, Glasgow. Elevation drawing by Jack Russell (1841). © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection.

impressive exterior elements. The central block once contained a large hall designed to accommodate assemblies for patients, with committee and administration rooms to either side. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow also used it for its meetings as a complement to its small hall beside Tron Church, facing the new town hall. The town hospital project was a stepping stone for Dreghorn: delivered on time and on budget. Although William Adam was busy in the locality, for example for the Duke of Hamilton and Hamilton town council, Glasgow’s magistrates entrusted Dreghorn to complete its plan for improvement, which it discussed for King Street in the early 1720s. In the following decade, the council consulted Adam for a square and civic space.27 By 1739 Dreghorn was, in effect, the city’s architect and such was the esteem in which both men were held that both Craig and Dreghorn were each in turn elected Council Treasurer, a post no architect or tradesman would ever hold in Edinburgh town council. Of the two, Craig was first,28 holding the post between 1736 and 1738, with Dreghorn then in post from 1739 to 1741.29 The Council trusted them with both architectural and financial planning, as plans for a New Town needed to be drawn up and costed. In 1742 Dreghorn became a bailie, and he was rich enough to lend the council £500. He was still involved in decisionmaking and tendered for contracts for public buildings. As time

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   419

passed, his wealth and success increased. In a sense, Dreghorn’s career echoed that of James Smith in that both were architects who became involved in politics, while Dreghorn followed too the entrepreneurial path set by William Adam. *  *  * Several town halls and tolbooths were constructed in this early Georgian period, and Glasgow’s town hall was not the first of its type in Scotland. For example, William Adam altered Aberdeen Town House (1729) and designed both Dundee Town House (1734) and Sanquhar (1735) (see Chapters 14 and 24). Both Glasgow’s and Dundee’s had an arcaded entrance, but Dreghorn’s design more clearly references Colen Campbell and Inigo Jones’ architecture (Figures 20.8 and 20.10). The arcade with sculpted heads, the flat pilasters, the fenestration and vases on the balustrade all followed Colen Campbell’s illustration of Somerset House in Vitruvius Britannicus (volume 1, plate 16). The Somerset House plate was dedicated to the Duke of Montrose when he was Secretary of State for Scotland (1714–15) and working from that building (Figure 20.9). For Dreghorn, Campbell was to be admired as a leader of British architectural taste and practice. This was rooted in Campbell’s own admiration of Inigo Jones, and the acceptance of that authority here carried the implication that Dreghorn was the authority in Glasgow. The Town Hall had clear similarities with Somerset House, but was more than simply a copy. For example, it was bigger, with plinths or dados running below the large Corinthian pilasters to meet the piazza. From the 1730s to 1760s work progressed. In November 1737 four shops let in the Hall were also being used as an exchange.30 In 1738 the mason James Cross and his team of journeymen were paid £459 for the work they had done.31 This was mostly supplying quarried stone to masons and ‘carvers’, such as David Cation who worked on the arcade’s heads. The following year, 1739, Dreghorn oversaw construction of the main stair, in mahogany, and also the hanging of the civic collection of fourteen paintings in the gallery.32 By the early 1740s more payments had been made, including one in 1743 for new ‘lustres’ [lamps] from London for the main stair.33 By the 1750s work was nearing completion. The masons John Lawson and Robert Tennant extended the rhythm of arched pillars onto a neighbouring property to the west.34 Another mason, Mungo Nasmith,

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Figure 20.8  View of Trongate from the east by Robert Paul (mideighteenth century). Glasgow Townhouse is the arcaded building on the right. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection.

carved the balustrade and vases for the top of the Hall.35 By 1762 the plasterer Thomas Clayton was fixing chimney pieces into the building.36 Of this ensemble, only eleven stone carved heads made for the arcade survive today. They became better known as the ‘Tontine heads’. This naming took place either in reference to the Tontine Hotel, or because the Glasgow Tontine Society located itself in the building (it was there by 1781). Plate 16 of Vitruvius Britannicus shows heads in the arcade keystones of Somerset House, and Dreghorn’s wooden model of Glasgow Town Hall shows that similar heads were always intended for that building (Figure 20.10). The stone heads were more than mere decoration; they also represented Glaswegian trade and culture. Some were green men,

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   421

symbolising fertility and reflecting the idea that it was Glaswegian magistrates and merchants who made Glasgow flourish, turning the city’s motto into a reality. Two of the heads were masks representing comedy and tragedy, which referenced both Classical culture and gentlemanly good taste, and also the entertainment that companies of actors put on in cities across Scotland.37 Others appear to have been entertaining cartoons, which also celebrated trade. One, for example, wears a Native American feathered head-dress.38 To an onlooker of the 1750s this particular head represented a well-known marketing image for Virginian tobacco. Trade cards advertising tobacco were commonly seen throughout Great Britain in the period.39 The building thus celebrated and marketed the city’s commercial wealth and fame. If Rome was an aspirational destination for Glaswegian ­tourists, then London was a common one for Glasgow’s business and political classes. In London they conducted business at the stock exchange, the nearby coffee houses and by the Thames, where their merchant fleets were moored. They would also visit ­parliament to pursue their interests through legislation. The

Figure 20.9  Somerset House. Plate 16 from Vitruvius Britannicus I. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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Figure 20.10  Architectural model of Glasgow Town House by Allan Dreghorn (c. 1756). NMS A.1990.116. Image © National Museums Scotland.

r­ elationship between Anglo-Scottish, London-based architects and architects in Edinburgh working on projects in early Georgian Glasgow has already been discussed. The desire to be compared to London and impress visitors continued through the commissioning of the city’s new principal church, which today is known as St Andrew’s in the Square, another project carried out by Craig and Dreghorn. *  *  * St Andrews in the Square was first called the ‘New Church’, located in what then was Bells Wynd, by the Saltmarket (Figure 20.11). Plans were made, and timber gathered in Craig’s Clyde Street yard from May to September 1735, but it was 1740 before the town council selected Dreghorn’s plan for the church, and thereafter construction got quickly underway.40 The overseer was a Glasgow incorporation mason called James Cross, who had worked with Dreghorn the previous year to inspect hurricane damage to the cathedral. From 1740 to 1755 he regularly submitted accounts for work at the new church. By September 1741 he had also presented the magistrates with Dreghorn’s model of the building for their approval.41 The Lord Provost then had Dreghorn’s models of both the town hall and the new church.

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   423

Figure 20.11  A view of St Andrew’s Church at Glasgow from the battlements of the Old Town House. After Robert Paul (1769). © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection.

The mason was sometimes assisted by his colleagues, notably the  carver David Cation, who was sometimes denoted ‘architect’, and Gavin Lawson. They provided capitals, pilasters, entablatures and other carved work for both the Town Hall and the church.42 Of the other trades, the renowned plasterer Thomas Clayton also worked on both town hall and church. The accounts enumerate the stages of building the church: Cross built the superstructure, Dreghorn supplied structural timber and flooring, and Cation provided decorative masonry. In March 1753, with work well in hand, the town council contracted Cation again, who this time was joined by John Wilson, wright, and Clayton to complete the new church, using James Gibbs’ St Martin inthe-Fields as the example to follow, or any other building the Council thought ‘proper’.43 Specifications for dimensions of timber and plaster were given and accepted. Accounts for the scaffolding and completion of the balustrade and steeple run from 1754 to 1757, with James Cross, the mason, Mungo Nasmith, and wrights

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William Fleming and John Wilson being the principal workers there. In 1756 Nasmith supplied vases for the church’s balustrade using stone Cross had quarried, whilst Robert Craig junior installed the building’s plumbing. In 1758, the wright John Robertson was paid £5 5s for drawing up three different plans and estimates of the roof of the building. It can then be assumed that the roof structure was completed some time between 1759 and the early 1760s, with masonry being completed by Nasmith, carving by James Cation (son of David?) and plasterwork by Clayton. What we see in St Andrews church is the second Dreghorndesigned building for which there was a model made, built by a familiar team of tradesmen; and it remains the finest Georgian public building standing in the city. It deserves to be researched more closely – if only for the structural elements of its roof alone, which remain remarkably intact. In design, Dreghorn can, once again, be seen to cite London, and its Scottish architects there, as sources of inspiration: first Campbell for the town house, and then Gibbs for the church. The magistrates, as we saw, specified that they wanted St Martin in-the-Fields to be the model to follow, possibly at Dreghorn’s request, and probably as a result of the impact Gibbs’ work and books had had on their one-time treasurer and architect, and their own experience of Georgian London. Letters sent home from London by Glaswegian merchants to family members often described the buildings there. Gibbs had designed the new St Martin in-the-Fields from 1721 to 1722, a short time after the Duke of Montrose abandoned ambitions for Gibbs to design his Glasgow town house. Now, a generation later, Gibbs’ work was still a valued model to follow. Dreghorn, and the Glasgow tradesmen, followed Gibbs’ church’s elements closely, notably in the innovative combination of hitherto disparate elements of a Corinthian portico and a parish kirk-like steeple, although the Dreghorn steeple does not copy Gibbs’ in its detailing. Also, in each case, pilasters were carried onto the sides of the building; each was given similar wall treatment and on each the fenestration is heavily rusticated. It seems that John Robertson also followed Gibbs’ plan for the Glasgow church’s roof structure, and Nasmith completed Gibbs’ intention to apply St Martin-type vases to the balustrade. Inside, the magistrates would also have seen similarities: the flanking galleries, and Corinthian columns with architraves, friezes and cornices above. There is no evidence of

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   425

Cross and Cation travelling to London to see this church; however, like Dreghorn, they could access Gibbs’ Book of Architecture which featured the building. Glasgow was presenting a complete picture of a new Georgian city. Dreghorn can be seen marketing Glasgow town council as patrons of architecture in their own right as well as being linked to London through Scots architects working there and noblemen in political power. The new public buildings reflected the city’s commitments to commerce, trade and the British Empire, through design and decoration. If Campbell, McGill and Gibbs had once envisaged a grand Georgian Glasgow, Dreghorn pursued their vision to make Glasgow beautiful, and ‘British’, by adopting similar models to London. The Foulis Academy print of the new church contrasts it to an overgrown, ruined medieval old Glasgow. The promotion of Dreghorn’s splendid new city was made in print and stone. *  *  * As well as public architecture, Glasgow was also being built up with private houses and new streets and spaces, and, as we saw, with a perimeter of suburban or country villas. Today, the finest standing example of a Glaswegian Georgian villa is Pollok House, south-west of the city (though now incorporated within Glasgow’s extended boundaries). Dreghorn had been involved in the surveying of Old Pollok castle before the move to the new property in around 1750. Before then, on 27 April 1733 Sir John Maxwell of Pollok wrote to the Duke of Montrose about his new house, stating that he intended to build at Pollokhead, ‘on that side of the water, where some architects and people of skill tell me I shall find a much more preferable situation to that where the old house at present stands’.44 The new house is poorly documented, but it would be unsurprising had Dreghorn been consulted. Within Glasgow itself, the Shawfield mansion was soon surrounded  by new streets, squares and houses, many of which were given the names of their wealthy patrons (the Dunlop mansion, the McCall ‘Black House’, Cochrane Street, Miller Street, Ingram Street); and places where they made their money, such as Jamaica Street. Also, there was a homage to people Glaswegians wanted to show support to, or impress – notably the royal family (George Square). In 1749, the magistrates named a street Argyle Street and commissioned Allan Ramsay to paint a portrait of John, 3rd Duke of Argyll for its Town Hall gallery. Some of the mansions that were built in this New Town were influenced by Gibbs’ Book of Architecture,

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426   Anthony Lewis

Figure 20.12  Dreghorn Town House (on right). Detail taken from The Old Town’s Hospital and residence of R. Dreghorn Esq. Thomas Fairbairn (1849). The hospital is on the left. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection.

for example Lord Provost Murdoch’s house, which was ornamented with giant pilasters and a pediment containing an oculus window.45 Dreghorn built himself houses – a town mansion, and on his Ruchill estate outside the city. He was also a founding partner of Glasgow’s Ship Bank in 1750 along with William MacDowall of Castle Semple, owner by then of Shawfield House. Two years later, Dreghorn had applied to build his town house on Clyde Street beside his Town Hospital and John Craig’s wood yard (Figure 20.12). It no longer stands. Fragments of a fireplace and plasterwork were

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Alexander McGill, James Gibbs and Allan Dreghorn   427

salvaged from it by Michael Donnelly of Glasgow’s museums in 1976 before demolition in 1977. It was set back from the street, with an iron-railed fence and steep stair entrance with rectangular wings to either side and had round-arched entrances to the south and rectangular ones to east and west. These wings comprised the offices, while the main block of the property, also rectangular, was a three-storey house. The basement was for kitchens and servants, and first and second storeys for a drawing room, dining room and bedrooms. There were two sets of chimneys running in the centre block. The main façade’s pediment carried sculpture, topped with urns, and there were prominent quoins throughout. Inside, recalling the Town Hall arcade, it had decorative masks. One is identical to the mould Thomas Clayton used at Blair Atholl where he worked from the late 1740s to the early 1750s. Clayton described them there as ‘the Heads’ and busts.46 Dreghorn was demonstrating that he could have what a duke had. The issue of a coded self-promotion possibly extended to a language of flowers set in Clayton’s stucco, for the remaining pieces of ‘ornamentation’ include examples of willowherb, bindweed and daisy. The daisy commonly represented love, and the other two species were common in America. Was Dreghorn proclaiming his love for America in the knowledge that its tobacco had made the city rich? He did, after all, own land in Virginia. It had not been the first time Dreghorn had celebrated the city’s links to American tobacco. Indeed, the trade with the transatlantic colonies such as Virginia may have encouraged Dreghorn to design thistles for St Andrew’s Church’s stucco decoration in celebration of the American St Andrew’s Societies who traded with the Glaswegian merchants and used the plant as their symbols. This message could have been reinforced again by the establishment of Glasgow’s Thistle Bank in 1761 which used an image of the plant for its banknotes. *  *  * Dreghorn was a prominent figure in the Glasgow of his day, but he was not a great self-publicist, and, unlike Campbell, Gibbs and Adam, he did not publish a book of his architectural designs.47 However, as we saw, he took an active role in seeing his city grow in size and stature, and his architecture made contextual links between two generations of building projects through his references to the Anglo-Scottish, London-based architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, via books, buildings and patrons. All these sources reinforced the key message that Glasgow town council made through

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its patronage of art and publishing via the Foulis Academy, and architecture via Dreghorn – ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’. Within this key message were subordinate messages bringing Glasgow’s Georgian style of architecture and patronage of building closer to London. Glasgow was a modern British city.

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21

Interpretation of European Classicism: Three Eighteenthcentury University Libraries Deborah Mays

T

his chapter will look at the use of European Classicism by three eighteenth-century designers, highlighting similarities and differences in their achievement of the same end goal: the provision of a university library. These are Thomas Burgh and Trinity College Library, Dublin, 1712–32 (Figure 21.1); William Adam and Old College Library, Glasgow, 1732–44 (Figure 21.2); and John Gardner and King James I Library, St Andrews, 1764–7 (Figure 21.3). These three serve to illustrate, over five decades of the eighteenth century, reactions to Classical design as inspired by examples from

Figure 21.1  Trinity College Library, Dublin by Thomas Burgh, 1712–32. The more capacious roof by Deane and Woodward, 1856–61. © Seán O’Reilly.

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430   Deborah Mays

Figure 21.2  Glasgow University Library, William Adam, 1732–44 (now demolished). Photograph by Thomas Annan (1860s). From Memorials of the Old College of Glasgow. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

Figure 21.3  King James Library, North Street, St Andrews. John Gardner, 1764–7, extended harmoniously by two bays to the right by Robert Robert Reid (1829). © Nick Haynes.

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   431

the continent and from the various treatises then available. As university buildings they are, as we might expect, showcases of the latest thought. Their commissions provide a vignette of the evolving profession of the architect during the first half of the eighteenth century and the challenges they faced. Within these islands, the eighteenth century was a period of great library building. This was undoubtedly inspired by the examples of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1676–84, by Sir Christopher Wren and by Queen’s College at Oxford, 1693–4 (architect unknown). There were three particular factors which led to this heyday. The first was the nature of the political landscape from 1690: in Ireland simply more stable and in Scotland enjoying the growth of the Enlightenment and increasing numbers of university students. The second factor for Scotland (though not for Ireland) was the passing of the 1710 Copyright Act which allowed universities to claim any book published in the country, provided there was sufficient accommodation. The third factor was a healthy ambition and competition to possess an appropriate status symbol for the university. Advice on library design had existed for many centuries. Medieval ecclesiastical institutions had drawn on a European network and created guidance for the suitable housing of books, such as the Augustinian Customs.1 However, the European Renaissance opened the way to new advice for library design, firstly that of Vitruvius whose De Architectura was available in English translation from the early seventeenth century.2 He stressed the importance of windows allowing easterly light.3 This same advice was freshly interpreted in the seventeenth century by the French librarian and scholar, Gabriel Naudé, who had supplied Cardinal Mazarin’s library in Paris and is considered the pioneer of library science. In Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627) he lauded and expanded on Vitruvius’ recommendations in what was to become an influential publication.4 This was translated into English by Sir John Evelyn in 1661.5 Naudé advised library designers ‘to situate if possible within some spacious Court, or small Garden’, also that the elevations should be ‘well conducted and ordered’.He advocated the use of an upper floor ‘to avoid dampness’ but most of all he stressed that ‘these difficulties and circumstances are nothing to those which are to be observed for the giving of light, and conveniently placing the windows of a Library’.6 *  *  *

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The first of the three libraries under consideration was in Dublin where, with one college and one university, there was a wish to respond to the monuments to learning created in Oxford and Cambridge. It is shown in its original form in James Arthur O’Connor’s earlier nineteenth-century view.7 Trinity College had begun to plan for a new library early in the eighteenth century when its collection of books had outgrown its location. Plans dated 1709 were prepared by Thomas Burgh. Burgh was born in 1670, the son of the Bishop of Ardagh. He began with a military career, serving in Flanders in the 1690s as an engineer where he became a disciple of the Frenchman Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. By 1700 he was back in Ireland as surveyor-general. Architecturally he followed the ethos of William Robinson, his predecessor in this role and architect of such landmarks as the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, 1684, and was particularly at home working on a large scale.8 The foundation stone was laid on 12 May 1712.9 Financial and circumstantial realities delayed its completion until 1732. For example, to secure funding the university needed to prove its loyalty to the Protestant succession and accordingly elected the Prince of Wales as Chancellor in 1716, replacing the Provost with an avowed Whig. In addition there were two separate fires. As a result, Burgh, who died in 1730, did not see the library completed.10 Like Burgh’s earlier Anatomy House for the College of 1711 and following earlier university practice, the library was designed to serve a variety of academic and teaching functions. As built it cost £20,000.11 When built, the rectangular library with lower arcade, as seen in a perspective of 1753 by Joseph Tudor, overpowered the Library Square.12 Its site was predetermined by the evolving quad and as such was aligned east–west, contrary to Vitruvian advice. The exterior is stern astylar, relieved by a decorative cornice (Figure 21.1). The arcade supports a double-height upper storey. Burgh, as an engineer first, will have drawn on printed sources for the architectural design. Giles Worsley has shown, for example, that Burgh’s rustication at the library, just as at the Royal Barracks a decade earlier, came from Palladio’s Palazzo Thiene, which was illustrated in the Quattro Libri.13 The double-height upper Long Room (Figure 21.4) is one of the largest single-chamber libraries in Europe, bigger than Wren’s for Trinity College in Cambridge, and demonstrating that Burgh, with his experience as a military engineer, could easily manage an uninterrupted span of over forty feet. Surprisingly, he chose a book-

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   433

free upper gallery which, owing to the need for silence in the open space, is thought to have allowed for promenading as in the long galleries of Elizabethan houses. Through the Copyright Act of 1801, which followed Irish Union with Britain, Trinity College Library was given the legal right to a free volume of every book published in Britain and Ireland.14 This dramatically challenged the available space. In 1856 Deane and Woodward were hired to create more space (with work completed in 1861).15 The solution was to take away the flat ceiling and add a barrel vault, raising the roofline and populating the upper gallery with bookcases. Nonetheless, the Long Room, as conceived in the early eighteenth century, conveyed a truly Antique spirit, providing a Classical space on an Antique scale.

Figure 21.4  James Malton’s view of the interior of the Long Room (Trinity College Library), capturing its exceptional length and the towering shelves of the bookcases (pre-1793 view). The Board of Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin.

*  *  * The second of the three libraries to be taken chronologically in this study was in Glasgow (Figure 21.2): it is the only one of the three no

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434   Deborah Mays

longer extant, having been demolished in 1885, but there is sufficient information surviving to evaluate its eighteenth-century form and intentions.16 Glasgow University’s previous library had proved inadequate by 1691 and, despite efforts to free space at this time, by 1720 it was groaning.17 The Duke of Chandos gifted £500 for a new building but time was needed for interest to accrue on this sum to cover the cost.18 Like Dublin, the site chosen was in an existing quad, the Inner Close. Early in 1732 two local wrights, Allan Dreghorn and John Craig, had submitted proposals, but a mason, James Adam from Stirling, was chosen to build the new library.19 However, the building committee was unhappy and William Adam, by then Scotland’s leading architect, was brought in to give his advice on the plans. He then produced his own scheme for a little ‘temple of learning’. By 1730 there was an abundance of published architectural material to inform and inspire.20 James Gibbs’ 1728 Book of Architecture had an enormous impact on mid-eighteenth-century Classicism, and was certainly a key inspiration for Adam, along with the continental Baroque seen on his travels in the Low Countries. His library included many treatises and copy books, Vitruvius Britannicus and publications by Vignola, Le Pautre and Ruggieri to name but a few. Adam’s scheme (Figure 21.5) was approved by the Senate in May 1732.21 It is not clear whether the north–south orientation was consciously following Vitruvian advice or was the pragmatic result of available land in the evolving court, but Adam insisted expressly that the main entrance should be on the short north elevation. As in Dublin, Oxford and Cambridge, the library building was to serve multiple purposes: the lofty ground floor provided large teaching rooms, while the library proper was above, at piano nobile level. It had an Ionic-columned gallery around three sides, with the long east side lit by large round-arched windows, looking onto the gardens. Contrary to the recommendations of Naudé, the plan for the interior and the accounts reveal that a lavish finish was supplied, including a veined marble fireplace and mahogany festoons. A small functional room for the librarian and a stair to access the gallery were located to the west of the main body of the building, forming an L-plan. The 1732 design submitted to the Senate showed a grand pair of staircases leading to a pedimented portico.22 However, it appears that the cost of the intended external detailing and interior were

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   435

Figure 21.5  William Adam’s design for the decorative ‘End Prospect towards the North’ of Glasgow University Library (1732). University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, University Building Plans collection, GB248 BUL/6/56/12.

perhaps too great to leave funds for the portico. An engraving of the building by Joseph Swan c. 1828 suggests that this grand entrance may never have been realised, or that it was later removed (Figure 21.7).23 A photograph from the 1860s by Thomas Annan (Figure 21.2) shows more detail of this unfortunate state, with a rudimentary functional iron staircase without the Chandos coat-of-arms in the pediment.24 Both visualisations suggest too that the proposed roof balustrade was never executed. Just as with the Trinity College library in Dublin, the financing of

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Figure 21.6  Internal elevations of the College Library of Glasgow from Vitruvius Scoticus (plate 157), showing the fine interior designed by William Adam. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

the building had been one of stops, starts and practical difficulties. By 1733, £670 had been spent but the final bill when the building was completed in 1744 must have been much greater, as this did not include the timber wainscoting, glass and roof, let alone any grand staircase.25 *  *  * Facing similar challenges on space and expectation, rather than seek a new building requiring such expense, St Andrews chose to reconstruct the existing King James Library and Parliament Hall in South

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   437

Figure 21.7  Detail from Joseph Swan’s engraving of Glasgow Old Library (1828), showing the simpler entrance arrangement. Taken from John M Leighton, Select Views of Glasgow and its Environs (1828). National Library of Scotland. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0

Street (Figure 21.3). What exists today was, however, extended two bays to the west by Robert Reid in 1829, carefully repeating the eighteenth-century work. The existing earlier seventeenth-century building had served the university well enough but by the early eighteenth century it was in an increasingly ruinous condition26 and so, with new books to house following the 1710 Copyright Act, a fundraising campaign began for its reconstruction in 1748.27 The building was damaged by a storm in 1762, and the situation was desperate by 1764 when a committee was appointed to consider a plan and estimates for a substantial reworking.28 This committee and its erudite membership would be crucial in determining the design of the library that ensued. A local wright, John Gardner, submitted plans on 13 August 1764 (Figure 21.8), estimated at a conservative £587.29 But, just as Glasgow had shied away from the designs of the wrights Dreghorn and Craig, it seems that St Andrews University, seeking a building of status, were cautious about the provincial rank of a wright for such a commission. They adopted his plans conditionally, ordered the materials he had specified, but did not give him the contract. The committee’s historian, Robert Watson, was instructed to put Gardner’s plans to ‘Mr Adams’ when he was next in Edinburgh.30 At this date, this was probably John Adam – who happily for Gardner was not in town when Watson visited. The plans were then sent to George

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438   Deborah Mays

Figure 21.8  John Gardner’s Classical design for the north elevation of the King James Library (1764). Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ref. UY1381:18a/2.

Paterson, a local architect who had provided work for the university. Only when no word was received from Paterson by December did the university agree to proceed with Gardner’s plans.31 We know that Gardner ultimately convinced the committee of his merits as the quaestor’s voucher of 1766 saw him paid for ‘the overall plans and estimates of the whole and different parts of the elevations’.32 Nonetheless, the building committee instated a process of academic approval for each stage of the work. The quality and neo-Palladian character of his plans for the library indicate that Gardner had access to sources of recent architectural developments. As described above, there were plenty of architectural plans and technical manuals giving design guidance available by this date and more had been published since 1730, not least James Gibbs’ 1732 Rules for Drawing Several Parts of Architecture which was intended for the building trade, and consequently was not costly. In 1733 Francis Price produced The British Carpenter, soon acclaimed by Hawksmoor and Gibbs. Isaac Ware’s Complete Body of Architecture of 1756 provided an invaluable guide to theory and practice. Accordingly, a competent provincial wright such as Gardner had the necessary tools to create an edifice of stature. Working in an established tradition, guided by an erudite committee, he neatly interpreted the available sources successfully. For example, the north elevation at St Andrews shows an austere staccato rhythm similar to Inigo Jones’ at Wilton, as illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus. The

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   439

library committee comprised learned and well-travelled academics33 with known antiquarian interests, who would also have had access to this. The main aims of the reconstruction were to increase the available accommodation and improve the fabric. Space was found by heightening the existing walls to make room for a gallery. John Oliphant’s drawing of the library on completion in 1767 shows changes made between design and realisation (Figure 21.9). Gardner’s oval windows at the top of the salient bays were rectangular, repeating those at ground level and lighting the Parliament Hall within, above its benches. The band course was ornamented to include the various Chancellors’ arms, following a conceit that was together Antique, Renaissance and Scottish. The only high window on the north elevation that was not blind lit the room for the library keeper at the top of the stair. The interior remains much as it was on completion (Figure 21.10). The committee’s involvement was as constant for the interior; for example, they debated in January 1765 whether ‘pilasters or columns should be made for supporting the galleries’.34 Robert Reid’s faint plan of the library of 1829 details the galleried form created by Gardner and extant today. We may wonder if

Figure 21.9  John Oliphant’s drawing of the King James Library on completion (1767), with the gateway to the quad and entrance behind. Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Library, ref. MS38899/10.

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440   Deborah Mays

Figure 21.10  Interior of King James Library showing Gardner’s columned gallery and the southern light that distinguish the space. Crossing the floor in the foreground is the wooden meridian line introduced there in 1726, before the refitting, to mark the work of James Gregory in the previous century. © Nick Haynes.

Gardner had visited Adam’s new library in Glasgow for inspiration, or if members of his committee had done so. The interior was determined by existing floor proportions, which at a ratio of 1:3 offered an authentic Classical balance, and Gardner continued this focus upon harmonic proportions. The gallery was curved in the southern corners to allow light to enter unobstructed, and slender balustrades to the balcony also allowed light to permeate. The walls were whitewashed to maximise the light; the ceiling coved. Gardner was responsible for the new bookcases – making use of the old as instructed, and fitting them with wire at £46.35 The broken pediments of those on the south wall provide a Jonesian tone. The result was described by Samuel Johnson in his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland in 1773 as ‘elegant and luminous’. Testing any direct alignment with a contemporary manual, the measurements of the gallery elements were compared with those given by Vignola, Batty Langley and Gibbs. The proportions offered by Vignola and Langley are generally different from what we see at St Andrews, with no direct source conceivable. It is closest to Gibbs in spirit (a copy of his Rules for Drawing was known to be in St Andrews at this time), notably in his Serlian example of the Doric order. However, Gardner failed to avoid fractions which Gibbs stipulated as a major virtue. Gibbs specified a height of eight diameters, inclusive of base and capital, whilst the library’s are nearer to nine

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Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries   441

and more suited to the practical need for height. The diminution of the shaft diameter stayed close to Gibbs’ prescribed one-sixth. Throughout there is a high level of consistency of proportions in Gardner’s work here, and the craftsmanship is of the highest standard whether or not a set system of measurements fits exactly. He used a free interpretation of the available Classical vocabulary to an effective end, with elegant solemnity over ostentation. *  *  * In conclusion, we find that all three universities were challenged by financial circumstances in the creation of their new libraries and all espoused Classical aspirations and sought to achieve a noble status for their buildings. In terms of the Vitruvian advice then in vogue, emphasised through Naudé and Evelyn, certain precepts were followed. All chose an elevated location for the books, away from the damp ground and looking onto the quiet prospect of a grassy college green. Orienting the libraries was compromised in each case by the existing context of the chosen site, with only Glasgow achieving the easterly lighting recommended. All three chose to provide galleries, whether for promenade or additional space. Burgh and Gardner chose relatively stern schemes externally, executing the guidance for noble simplicity, while Adam departed from this restraint. Looking at the roles of the library designers, their building committees and the journey each took from intent to realisation, we find more similarities than differences and, considering the progress of each edifice, we have an instructive insight into the evolving profession and the adoption of Classicism. Over the century, the role of the master-craftsman was gradually eroded and replaced by the architect and the building-contractor. The initial reluctance of the St Andrews and Glasgow building committees to entrust the work to non-architects was indicative of this transitional phase. Burgh was the son of a bishop, trained as a military engineer; Adam was the son of a builder, trained as a mason; Gardner was raised as a craftsman. But all provided designs attributable to fully fledged architects. Technical treatises, architectural drawings, design copy books and existing examples were critical to their achievements and informed the evolution of Classical design as the clients of the eighteenth century sought schemes beyond the traditional practice of the craftsman-architect and the builder.

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22

Edinburgh and Venice: Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living in Geographically Challenged Mercantile Communities Giovanna Guidicini

I

n the early modern period, the spatial organisation of Edinburgh and Venice – a craggy north European burgh and a Mediterranean maritime powerhouse – showed remarkable similarities. Whilst Edinburgh was compared by Englishman Thomas Morer, visiting in 1689, to an ivory comb with its narrow teeth perpendicular to the grand High Street, and directly connecting the two royal residences of the Castle and Holyrood Palace (Figure 22.1), Venice’s equivalent structure is curved to follow the meandering of the Grand Canal (Figure 22.2).1 Around these main thoroughfares, all forms of transportation, commerce and public life were organised.2 Geographical obstacles, a lack of terrain fit for building, and defensive considerations all meant that very limited space was available for expansion,3 and residency within the agreed perimeter was essential to enjoy the benefits of citizenship.4 Edinburgh and Venice’s architectural responses to these constraining circumstances were, I argue, comparable: dense, flexible, commercially and residentially viable high-rise buildings. It would be only Edinburgh, however, that would both question and develop that model in the eighteenth century and afterwards with its extramural expansion – the New Town.5 With clear differences in size, wealth and areas of influence, both cities’ economies were based on a network of productive and trading activities, at scales from local to international. Economic dependency, competitive comradeship and collective gain from an individual’s success created a sense of shared goals and cohesion, reflected and enhanced by physical proximity.6 In Venice, the combination of a stable governmental system

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   443

monopolised by a few noble families, plus a civic pride in its nominally egalitarian status of republic, meant minimal chance of class mobility and discouraged internal animosities.7 As the Scottish nobility resided primarily in country estates and acquired or leased town properties when needed, Edinburgh lacked the political equivalent of the closed Venetian oligarchy, and coveted positions in urban administration were assigned to prominent guild members on a rotating basis.8 In such socially settled societies, with rank and

Figure 22.1  James Gordon of Rothiemay, Edinburgh (c. 1647). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Figure 22.2  Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice (c. 1460–70, before 1516). Minneapolis Institute of Art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund. Acc. No. 2010.88.

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444   Giovanna Guidicini

Figure 22.3  Detail of Figure 22.1. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

prospective occupations largely decided at birth, visual signifiers such as personal and architectural ornamentations were not necessary to declare one’s superiority, and compliant blending-in was, at least nominally, appreciated. 9 In Venice, a sober black toga was worn by patricians and citizens alike, visually emphasising the ethos of group consensus.10 Similarly, older patrician palaces were often not significantly different from more popular complexes in structure and design, grouped around a corte (semi-private courtyard) or calle (narrow street) and without visible boundaries from the rest of the community.11 Even with the showier fashions of the early seventeenth century, a restrained architectural style remained for some an appreciative nod to the myth of social harmony and equality, while a more daring one was appropriate to public buildings.12 For example, the use of crenellations and other military-related, if merely ornamental, language was often applied to symbolic communal buildings, such as the Arsenale or the civic granaries.13 Comparably, in Edinburgh, ostentatious extravagance was also frowned upon by cautious business partners, and discouraged by Reformed teachings, while simplicity of dress, frugality and sobriety were valued qualities.14 It became the role of public buildings, such as the Tron Kirk or the Tolbooth, to interrupt the uniformity of the

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   445

urban fabric with prominent siting in the High Street, and their turrets, crenellations and towers declaring their practical and symbolic importance.15 Everywhere but the High Street and the Grand Canal, the narrow closes/rii and calli, and semi-public squares/ corti limited the options for ostentatious façades, and the maze-like articulation was perceived at its best through direct engagement with the rich, varied sequence of solid and void spaces, thick with areas of darkness and light (Figures 22.3 and 22.4).16 For much of the early modern period, and taking differences in wealth, culture and structural limitations into consideration, the dwellings of the Edinburgh and Venetian merchants in these spacehungry cities were substantially comparable: creative, compact, vertically organised responses to trading needs. Until at least the sixteenth century, the typical house of the Venetian merchant was the Veneto-Byzantine casa-fondaco of Arab inspiration, working as lodging and as place of commerce and storage.17 The ground floor generally had a loggia for the disembarking and selling of goods, and an entrance hall (androne) giving access to storerooms on the sides and to the back courtyard; while the placing of openings on the façades responded to the internal organisation.18 In a single-property unit, a staircase (usually in the courtyard) gave access to an elongated

Figure 22.4  Detail of Figure 22.2. Minneapolis Institute of Art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund. Acc. No. 2010.88.

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446   Giovanna Guidicini

main room (portego) on the piano nobile, the family’s main common room and distributive space with a loggia overlooking the front. Further vertical circulation was provided by internal wooden staircases, or at times by freestanding spiral ones.19 The commercialunder-residential structure applied, with differences in size, number of storeys, complexity of structure and articulation of the façade, to most Venetian buildings, from modest houses built for rental to the fashionable single-family palazzo, deriving from a similar VenetoByzantine origin.20 When land pressure increased and economic interests diversified, Venetian houses could be subdivided, with the same building being shared by related and unrelated individuals, and by landlords and tenants.21 A traditional-looking façade could then hide a fractioned, asymmetrical structure, its flexible layout constantly being altered to adapt to the owners’ changing uses for the rooms behind them.22 The large store rooms at ground floor and the mezzanines could be used for different activities, or rented out independently; and the private staircase – moved if necessary to the back courtyard beyond the now shared androne – could become of communal use.23 In Edinburgh, buildings were also strongly shaped by commercial considerations and convenience of use. While the ground floor was generally for trade and the floors above for habitation, many modest residential spaces could double up as workspaces or shops, blurring any distinction between residential and commercial use.24 Wealthy merchants could be associated with an entire building: after the improvements and extensions by merchant Thomas Gladstone between 1617 and 1620, four-storeyed Gladstone’s Land had a commercial sequence of rooms at ground floor, with an arcaded loggia for displaying the goods facing the High Street (Figure 22.5). A projecting forestair enabled rather ostentatious independent access to the decorated first-floor apartment; the upper storey was lit by a projecting gallery, later divided into independent, windowed spaces.25 Annuity tax rolls show how multi-storey buildings such as Gladstone’s Land could be divided and used for multiple occupiers (and occupations), with rooms at different floors arranged into dwellings of various sizes and values, for owner-occupiers and tenants alike.26 Struggling to cope with land pressure, both Edinburgh and Venice developed comparable strategies to obtain more space, growing in height, filling in back courts and moving façades forward to encroach on public space. In Venice, the form of added storeys varied from the planned addition of living quarters in upper-class Ca’ Loredan (Figure 22.6), Ca’ Farsetti and Ca’ da Mosto, where progressively

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   447

Figure 22.5  Gladstone’s Land (1617–20). NRHE SC1164086 © HES.

later styles appear as the building was expanded upwards,27 to the makeshift attitude of the inhabitants of the dense, popular Jewish Ghetto. Here storeys were hazardously added, larger apartments divided, cellars dug out and staircases added on frontages (scala matta) to create and connect more lodgings.28 In Edinburgh, upper extensions were also the norm; the (so-called) John Knox’s House, still standing on the High Street, was initially a two-storey building with a projecting stair, heightened to three

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448   Giovanna Guidicini

Figure 22.6  Ca’ Loredan, Venice. Photographer: Didier Descouens. https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Ca%27Loredan_Venice.jpg

storeys, attic and garret in the mid-to-late sixteenth century with the addition of a separate house accessed by a spiral staircase.29 Light timber structures offered the option of quickly built and informal upper extensions; dendrochronology has demonstrated that the timber-framed building surviving at 302 Lawnmarket was built upwards in precisely this way.30 As an alternative, further land could be found in one’s own back court. In Venice, unused ground-floor service spaces, and backyard shacks and sheds, could

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   449

be improved or rebuilt and rented out as apartments or workshops, being given independent access from the side alleys.31 Opening up these side entrances transformed a space previously for the private use of neighbouring land owners into space for public transit, promoting the creation of a denser urban fabric.32 Similarly in Edinburgh, the closes (passages) on the sides of a plot giving access to a back enclosure became semi-public alleyways when newly built extensions, often filling the back yards and gardens, needed suitable access.33 Finally, in both Edinburgh and Venice, advancing the façade into the public space was a possible – if tightly controlled – option. In Scotland, the construction of jettied frontages was a common practice, more substantial extensions onto the street being supported by timber galleries. These galleries could later be refashioned as stone arcades, on condition that public access was maintained under their covered passage. Severe scrutiny was also applied to the construction of forestairs and turnpikes in public land, to give access to newly extended properties.34 In Venice, extra space could be obtained through a fabbricato a barbacani, that is, a building that jetties outwards towards the top and is supported by wooden or stone corbels.35 For more significant extensions, a house could be built over the public street – creating what is called a sottoportego – on condition that the short arcade beneath would remain for public use. These space-saving approaches were used across the board, from the grand portico built by Jacopo Sansovino to advance Palazzo Dolfin in 1538 to the line of the Grand Canal, to the smallscale projections paired with staircases leading to the apartments atop ground-floor workshops in modest Salizzada San Lio.36 In cities where buildings and the surrounding urban fabric could be so creatively adapted, expanded and heightened, the issues of accessibility and privacy were paramount. In a model single-property Venetian palace, the traditional central portego acted as a distributive common space within the suite of shared rooms, but by closing or opening doors and corridors, different combinations of rooms and properties could be arranged in case of a subdivision between cohabiting relatives, heirs or paying tenants,37 connected by the repurposed processional – now communal – staircase, and by smaller service ones. Horizontally, independent accesses to the plot (main frontage, side lane, by water, by land, main stair, service staircases) guaranteed a level of independence for the different kinds of users (family members, guests, servants, tenants, customers, business partners), with the back courtyard also acting as a distributive filter.

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450   Giovanna Guidicini

In Edinburgh, the shared turnpike staircase – encroaching onto the street, within walls, or hidden discreetly in back courtyards – helped the prodigious vertical growth, and worked in conjunction with timber galleries to facilitate ready access, and some standardisation and optimisation of space.38 Where independent access was needed, additional vertical distribution would be creatively added: staircases jetting out onto the public pavement or occupying back yards, or as internal single-flight, light timber staircases granting a level of privacy from one’s neighbours.39 Here, also, semi-private courtyards and access lanes, hidden by the tall façades and accessible via a maze of narrow passages, provided horizontal filters and shared access for those living in the back apartments. Both cities’ development depended upon legislation compatible with flexible forms of land occupancy. Visiting Edinburgh in 1689, Englishman Thomas Morer noted that ‘Most of the houses, as they are parted into divers tenements, so they have as many landlords as stories; and therefore have no dependence on one another, otherwise than as they stand on the same foundation’.40 This might have been caused by a combination of ‘scantiness of room’ – as suggested by Morer himself, but in itself a common phenomenon in many walled cities – and particularly stringent citizenship requirements.41 With the requisites for citizenship shifting in time to ownership of property rather than of the whole tenement (grounds) or ‘land’ (confusingly enough, the building), partitioning of properties could have been a solution to the ownership needs of an increasing number of prospective citizens.42 In Venice also, circumstances almost forced a flexible, layered understanding of property. A peculiarly Venetian form of co-ownership between cohabiting heirs – the fraternal, intended to preserve the family legacy and avoid fractioning the residence/business – meant in the long run complex property subdivisions between numerous loosely related kinsfolk.43 Contracts dating from the twelfth century already showed how houses could be bought and sold independently from the renting or ownership of the land.44 Also, ‘proper’ ownership of land and buildings was the privilege of Christian citizens, while religious minorities such as the inhabitants of the Jewish Ghetto had access only to a limited form of possession of the properties they inhabited (casaca’ more hebreorum).45 In sixteenth-century Venice, mercantile expansion lost momentum, and merchants preferred the security of land investments and positions in administration and government for their sons, rather than a career in trade, now seen as old-fashioned and undignified.46

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   451

The city authority created a body of statutes to control and direct private works, and to promote coherent development.47 Affluent families invested in rental speculations, and in their own palaces used architecture to distance themselves from Venetian tradition, demonstrating their modernity by incorporating elements from Florentine, Lombard and Roman Renaissance. An elegant front door would emphatically take the place of the commercial arcaded spaces of old, and the articulate façade became more restrained, less responsive to mercantile activities, shaping it from behind and more concerned with rhythmic use of architectural details.48 The more comfortable style of living expected by this new class of tenants (clerks from the public administration, office workers, government officials and businessmen) drove the demand for more suitable accommodations, although in Venice charitable bodies such as the Scuole Grandi also concerned themselves with respectable but more modest developments.49 Edinburgh showed a similar scenario, as after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the city effectively lost its royal status but became increasingly a centre of government and administration, a northern ‘capital’. A new generation of lawyers, judges, civil servants and government officials expected comfortable standards of living and a uniform, respectable architectural style.50 Existing buildings were regularised, with sober, unified ashlar fronts and ground floor arcades (piazza) of specified sizes and proportions replacing organic timber additions, and hiding irregular shop frontages.51 An ambitious, new building-regulation system and a body of tenement laws directed the Scottish capital’s architectural development, for example concerning common gables.52 While many of the existing buildings were modernised, in both cities purpose-built accommodation also became lucrative speculations. Land limitations were overcome in Edinburgh by offering legal options to supersede existing plot boundaries, and through state-financed compulsory purchases, and in Venice through state-controlled land reclamations and the building of new embankments.53 In Venice’s Terreni Nuovi, a variety of living accommodations could be offered on regular allotments following centrally laid-out networks of streets and canals, with spacious apartments ingeniously interlocked to more modest ones intended for artisans and manual workers to optimise space.54 The regular uniformity of the façade design hid the subdivision in separate households, and intentionally recalled traditional singleproperty palaces.55 Another resourceful combination was of two smaller main-door apartments on the ground floor flanking a larger

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452   Giovanna Guidicini

Figure 22.7  Milne’s Court (1690). NRHE SC1097881 © HES.

central one, developing vertically from the piano nobile to the sottotetto, for example in San Geremia in Riello (1540s).56 This was the case in Edinburgh also, where speculative developments such as Milne’s Court (1690) offered good-quality accommodation hidden behind a sober façade with uniform, regular fenestration (Figure 22.7).57 In both cities, a new vertical distribution system made this possible. In Edinburgh, broad scale-and-platt staircases with straight flights and landings made internal circulation ‘more decent and easie, and rids the street of an incumrance’,58 while in Venice an interlocking staircase or alla leonardesca gave two superimposed paired apartments access from separate main doors and independent vertical circulation, making the passage from modified casa fondaco to standardised multi-level, multi-occupant building possible.59 In

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Comparing the Evolution in Communal Living   453

both cities, modularity and optimisation of space became essential concepts, but with an emphasis on maintaining a genteel illusion of privacy and status. Edinburgh New Town itself, an upper-class, planned urbanisation to the north of the burgh begun in the 1760s, elaborated on the spatial solutions experimented with in the seventeenth-century developments, with modular flats in buildings with shared staircases behind well-organised, decorous façades mimicking unified palaces, and flats served by spinal communal staircases set neatly above ground floor, ‘main-door’ apartments.60 Challenged by modern free trading and by the competition of booming west-facing Glasgow, Edinburgh looked both for a role within a unified Hanoverian Britain, and to retrieve something of its lost status.61 Proposing developments outside the confines of the walled burgh – the town’s request for extension of the Royalty was approved in 1767 – marked the acknowledgement that Edinburgh needed to reinvent itself and its way of life to survive in a changing world.62 This was not the case for Venice, which in the same period, similarly confronted with free-trade views coming from the terraferma and a diminished political role as backwater of the Napoleonic and the Austrian empires, stiffened its traditional position and retreated within its geographical boundaries, ending up underpopulated and in disrepair.63 While, I argue, the urban and residential models of Edinburgh and Venice started and developed from comparable premises and along comparable lines, Edinburgh’s choice in the eighteenth century to Figure 22.8  Edinburgh New and Old Towns. John Laurie, 1766. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

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454   Giovanna Guidicini

boldly step out of the waning protection of geographical and manmade boundaries placed the city on a very different course from Venice and its impractical protectionism. While La Serenissima’s crumbling, faded charms became a major attraction for scholarly visitors à la John Ruskin, and architectural experimentations and developments all but stopped, Edinburgh confronted its own terraferma and, armed with a successful, well-tested residential model – now a fashionable New Town tenement – tried her hand at the new game.

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23

Living Horizontally: the Origin of the Tenement in Paris and Edinburgh Clarisse Godard Desmarest

A

new style of living ‘in the horizontal’ (on the same floor) emerged during the late medieval period. This chapter considers the origin of the purpose-built flat in Scotland and draws comparison with Paris which was, at the time, the biggest city in the western world. It argues that such a type of multiple ownership and occupation had become general in Paris by the second half of  the eighteenth century, precisely when the formula was repeated in the New Town of Edinburgh. Early examples of tenements, or logements de plain-pied, may be seen in speculative developments in both Paris and Edinburgh in the late seventeenth century. Tenements have been a familiar feature of life in Scotland since the late medieval period. They have been the predominant building type for pre-industrial domestic housing, unlike in England where the single-family house set itself as the norm for the middle class and the majority of workers.1 Tenements were the most common form of dwelling in Glasgow in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such residential buildings offered an answer to the massive and rapid influx of workers in towns and cities during the industrial revolution. The tradition of multi-storey, multi-occupied housing goes back a long way and has been shared with continental Europe for several centuries.2 Antecedents of tenements and urban planning may be traced as far back as early Antiquity. Overcrowding in the city of Rome produced a new urban form, the apartment block, or insula, at least as early as the third century bc.3 This type of housing contrasted with the surviving old-style town house, domus, which housed the traditional elite and the very wealthy. The insula, with buildings rising

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456   Clarisse Godard Desmarest

to at least three storeys in the third century bc, and then to five or more by the first century bc, came to dominate the entire city.4 The insula became the standard form of Roman middle-class as well as working-class housing, and there were numerous examples in Ostia and Pompeii. With shops and workshops on the ground floor and flats on the floors above, the insula had mixed uses. Streets carried continuous rows of open shops (tabernae) supporting several floors of accommodation. Many characteristics of mass housing which developed in Ancient Rome may be found in Italian, French and Scottish cities to this day – the arcades in Gladstone’s Land and the ancient tabernae have clear similarities. Apartment building saw a revival in early modern Europe, an increased popularity in the nineteenth century and a recent apotheosis (the tower block). With the expansion of trade and commerce, and higher densities of population, multi-occupancy developed in both Scotland and France in the early modern period. Dwellings in Paris and in other cities in France had traditionally been occupied by single families. A strict correspondence between the number of hearths (feux) and households meant that to each land parcel was associated the name of one person only (owner or tenant).5 With the progress of multioccupancy in the second half of the seventeenth century, however, people of different origins came to co-exist under the same roof. The fundamental structural aspect of Parisian habitation at the time was the disposition of rooms of the same household over several levels. This vertical organisation was seen in the dwelling of the playwright Molière who lived in a four-room lodging on the Place du Palais-Royal (two rooms on the first floor and two on the second) which could only be accessed via the flat of a different tenant.6 The style of living in the horizontal, with a coherent sequence of rooms on a single floor, was generally adopted in Paris in the eighteenth century, as a response to a wish for privacy and a more rational way of living. This modern type of accommodation foreshadowed the bourgeois apartment of Haussmann in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, in the seventeenth century 46 per cent of Paris lodgings of more than one room were laid out vertically. The proportion dropped to 40 per cent for the second half of the eighteenth century, thus indicating an increase in horizontal living in that century.7 Meanwhile in Scotland, multi-storey tenement building included self-contained dwellings, in which the householder occupied all the rooms throughout three or four storeys, as well as flatted tenements of multiple ownership and occupation.8 Here we examine when

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Living Horizontally   457

horizontal living replaced the traditional vertical living, and when purpose-built flats, as opposed to structures that had been subdivided, first appeared in Paris and in Scottish burghs. In both Paris and Edinburgh, the physical constraints imposed by the old urban fabric restricted developmental possibilities (see also Chapter 22).9 Paris’s surrounding wall provided a theoretical limitation to the city’s expansion, even though this legal framework failed to be entirely respected.10 The cens, a tax levied on each transaction of land or tenement, further reduced transactions in Paris by increasing the price of property.11 Research into the district of Les Halles, on the right bank of the Seine, has shown that the old landed pattern of central Paris halted at the end of the sixteenth century, once the subdivision of land was complete, and remained little changed until the Revolution.12 Since the expansion of housing was limited by an inflexible land pattern, the alternative practice of building upwards became established. The population in Paris rose steadily from 220,000 inhabitants in 1600 to 510,000 in 1700 and 620,000 in 1789.13 The city underwent more accelerated growth before and after that era. London’s population overtook that of Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century. But between 1640 and 1790, in terms of population, wealth, resources, levels of personal consumption and trade, and though Paris represented only 2.5 per cent of France’s population, it was pre-eminent in the western world. Literature, the arts and accounts left by contemporary travellers all bear witness to the fact.14 A pattern of narrow-fronted houses had appeared on commercial thoroughfares in both Paris and Edinburgh in the Middle Ages. On the busiest streets of Paris, which were also the most profitable for rent and commerce, including rue Saint-Denis, rue Saint-Honoré and rue Saint-Jacques, houses were one or two bays wide. Le Muet’s first plate in Manière de bien bastir (1623) (Figure 23.1) was for a house on a small plot measuring 12 × 21.5ft and was planned as one room deep with a side corridor connecting to a small courtyard and staircase at the back. A succession of identical houses may be seen on the Bretez/Turgot map of Paris (surveyed 1734–6) and on the maps of the censives. The house at 14 rue Tiquetonne, previously rue du Petit-Lion (2nd arrondissement), is one of many examples of a traditional style of living inherited from the Middle Ages (Figures 23.2–23.4).15 Along that same street is another, more elaborate example of a house with two shops and a middle corridor on the ground floor, with three floors and garrets above (Figures 23.5–23.7).16 In both examples on the rue Tiquetonne,

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Figure 23.1  Section, elevation and plans of a house 12ft wide and 21ft deep. Pierre Le Muet, Manière de bien bastir (1623), taken from English edition of 1670. National Library of Scotland. Licence: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0

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Living Horizontally   459

Figure 23.2  Map showing location of 14 rue Tiquetonne (marked here as rue du Petit Lion). From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général des quarante-huit quartiers de la ville de Paris (1827–36), vol. 1, plate 46. © Archives Nationales (France). Série F 31.

large openings suggest that the rooms on the ground floor were used by artisans and shopkeepers for commerce. Such openings, by contrast, were absent from Le Muet’s first plate, which suggests that the first house from the treatise was destined for professionals (lawyers, physicians or clerks) without precluding the possibility of a later commercial usage; hence the presence of a passage connecting the building from front to back. The terms ‘salle’ and ‘chambre’ were equivalent in meaning and referred to the principal rooms without hinting at a specific usage. To some extent, Le Muet’s fourth plan for a house (Distribution de la quatrième place) operates like the one on the first of his plates, except that in this instance the house was two rooms deep and a gallery at first-floor level connected the main body to a secondary lower dwelling in the courtyard. With the stables at the back, the intention was that horses would use the narrow corridor on the side. In the central districts of Paris, including Les Halles, where demand for accommodation was particularly high,

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Figure 23.3  Elevation of a house at 14 rue Tiquetonne, previously rue du Petit-Lion (2nd arrondissement). © Archives Nationales (France) Z/1J/361, minutes of 3 September 1683.

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Living Horizontally   461

such house plans on small urban plots were common, as proved by the inventories of the notaries. Pressure on land was equally strong in Edinburgh, especially because of its restricted site. By the later Middle Ages, Edinburgh also had inflexible boundaries: the Nor’ Loch to the north, the Burgh of Canongate to the east and monastic institutions to the south; and the medieval boundaries remained largely unchanged until Proposals were published in 1752 by the Convention of Royal Burghs. The burgh remained at approximately 130 acres for over four and a half centuries, during which time the population rose from 2,000 in 1300 to 31,000 in 1755. In addition, it had to absorb the institutions of a capital from around the fifteenth century. Edinburgh was one of the principal seats of the Scottish Royal Court before 1603, but the emigration of the Court from Holyrood in 1603 was in a sense compensated for in material terms by the increased activity of the lawyers in the Court of Session and Privy Council.17 Competition to live in the High Street was strong; as a condition of their privileges, merchants and craftsmen were obliged to reside in the burgh.18 This also explains the subdivision

Figure 23.4  Ground and upper floor plans of a house at 14 rue Tiquetonne. © Archives Nationales (France) Z/1J/361, minutes of 3 September 1683.

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Figure 23.5  Elevation of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne, previously rue du Petit-Lion (2nd arrondissement). © Archives Nationales (France) Z/1J/361, minutes of 3 September 1683.

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Living Horizontally   463

and adaptation of the burgage plot (a long, narrow, cultivated strip of ground occupied by the burgesses or freemen of the burghs) during the course of the seventeenth century. Burgages were gradually being built up, becoming filled with ‘backlands’. Gordon of Rothiemay’s map (1647) shows the density of a city which could only expand vertically. In Paris, likewise, vacant space disappeared and pressure to build in the backlands grew stronger. Tall building was therefore triggered by overcrowding and the high cost of land in the two capitals. Town houses, by comparison, were a luxury. Argyll’s Lodging (remodelled in both the 1630s and 1670s) and Mar’s Wark (1570–2), in Stirling, were early Scottish examples of prestigious residences, the former for courtiers, the latter for the Regent Earl of Mar. In the first half of the seventeenth century, more than 350 hôtels were built in Paris by the noblesse d’épée and, more commonly, by the rising noblesse de robe. Edinburgh came nowhere near this figure because its buildings were already crammed tightly within its bounds. However, it developed a courtyard pattern in the Canongate, with surviving examples such as Acheson House (1630s), Hatton House (renamed Queensberry House) and Panmure House. Urban congestion and the dangers of fire and poor sanitation were a constant concern of public authorities in both capitals. As described by contemporaries, streets in Paris were narrow, winding, dark, noisy and dirty.19 The rue de la Ferronnerie, remembered for being the street where Henri IV was assassinated, was only 4m wide until 1671, when it was widened. It was only in the eighteenth century that old streets more generally were widened and new ones designed, as urban embellishment progressed. On a visit to Paris in 1775, the Scottish gardener Thomas Blaikie (1751–1838) complained of the city’s congestion: most of the streets in Paris is remarkable narrow and no pavement for people a foot, so that Paris may be said to be very unconvenient especialy for the lower Class of people who goes a foot, who is constantly in risk of there lives by the numbers of Coaches carts &c . . . The town is lighted in the night by lamps which is suspended upon a cord fixed across the street.20

Although the Crown in France undertook extension and embellishment schemes, such as those in Place Royale, now Place des Vosges, and Place Dauphine in Paris, royal intervention did not stretch to the reconstruction of the medieval cores of cities.21

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Figure 23.6  Ground floor plan of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne. © Archives Nationales (France) Z/1J/361, minutes of 3 September 1683.

However, royal and municipal efforts were made to limit the height of newly erected buildings and to stop buildings encroaching upon public streets – the streets of Paris were legally part of the royal domain.22 The crude alignement (building line) procedure was established by an edict of Henri IV (16 December 1607). This enactment required owners to obtain permission before erecting a

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Living Horizontally   465

Figure 23.7  Plan of the upper floors of a house at 6 rue Tiquetonne. © Archives Nationales (France) Z/1J/361, minutes of 3 September 1683.

new house on a main thoroughfare and it gave municipal authorities the power to limit the incursion of private properties onto the streets. One year after the Great Fire of London, an ordinance of the Bureau des Finances (18 August 1667) established a strict height limit for houses of 48ft from ground floor to entablature.23 This decision, aimed at preventing fire, set the official framework for building in Paris and its suburbs in the eighteenth century. The 48ft rule, which

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only applied from pavement level to eaves, limited construction to a maximum of three floors on top of the ground floor and basement. It therefore encouraged the expansion of attics and the development of mansard roofs at the expense of gables. This rule paradoxically meant an opportunity to maximise profit.24 It also marked a step towards multi-occupancy. In Edinburgh, an Act of Parliament of 1698 stated that no house in the burgh was to be built higher than five storeys above the street.25 But at the back tenements could easily reach eight or more floors where the ground level fell away. In Scotland, the 1692 General Report on the royal burghs focused on decay. The question of safety, as in France, permeated the building regulations of the period. By the end of the sixteenth century, the town council and the Dean of Guild Court controlled ‘­servitudes’ and nuisances in Edinburgh.26 An Act of 6 May 1649 forbade the masons and wrights to build, demolish or repair the houses in the burgh until they had notified and gained the approval of the Dean of Guild and his Council. Edinburgh’s serious 1674 fire, which started in a shop in a tenement, prompted the town council to take immediate action, and considerable rebuilding in stone and slate followed – the 1675 legislation outlawed all building in materials other than stone, and tax remissions were offered to those who built in broached stonework or ashlar. Legislation similarly prohibiting the use of timber was repeated in Paris in the seventeenth century (1607 and 1667). Improved construction standards were therefore contemporary in both Edinburgh and Paris, and implemented with greater control and supervision by royal and municipal authorities.27 Observers often reported on the unusual height of buildings in Paris, but their descriptions could be sometimes biased and inaccurate. At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, Montesquieu had Rica, one of his characters, say: Paris is as large as Ispahan: the Houses are so high that you wou’d swear they were all built for Astrologers. Thou wilt easily judge that a City built in the Air and that has six or seven houses one at the top of the other, must be extremely populous.28

It is uncertain whether Montesquieu alluded to the height of buildings only, though ‘houses one at the top of the other’ suggests he also understood the trend towards multi-occupancy housing. Research has shown that by 1735, 70 per cent of houses in Paris had three or four floors below the entablature, a figure that continued until the end of the Ancien Régime.29 Houses were usually

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Living Horizontally   467

higher where urbanisation was older – up to four floors or more on the right bank of the Seine. By comparison, they tended to be lower on its left bank.30 The maps of Paris by Verniquet, Bretez and Delagrive provide more reliable sources. The highly detailed Bretez/Turgot map, for instance, shows a majority of elevations with gable roofs.31 This roof design was standard in the main thoroughfares of central Paris until the end of the Ancien Régime and appears on Raguenet’s views (mid-eighteenth century). The reports of building experts are highly informative about historic buildings,32 as are building contracts, but the importance of contracts has been overestimated in the past; this is also true of treatises. The tenement, as such, does not appear in Le Muet’s Manière de bien bastir (1623) nor in Blondel’s Cours d’architecture (1675–83). In fact, the authors of such treatises were not interested in the opportunities offered by tenements, but rather in convenience (whether a building was suitable for its owner). The most significant monographs published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries failed to embrace ‘ordinary’ housing. This partly explains why some historians mistakenly concluded that the tenement originated in the nineteenth century. That misconception was made easier by the fact that architects were very seldom employed for the ‘everyday’ house. Thanks to a large study of 2,783 inventories dated between 1600 and 1790, kept in the Minutier Central des Notaires,33 and to the study of a broad range of supplementary documents examined in the light of these inventories, Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun and Pierre Chaunu have greatly advanced the understanding of houses in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.34 Such documents include marriage contracts, wills, divisions of property among heirs, leases, deeds of sale, works estimates or reports sworn by building experts, all found in Series Z1J in the French National Archives, as well as illustrative documents from the print department of the Bibliothèque Nationale. This data enabled the authors to conclude that in addition to the traditional houses built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on narrow and irregular parcels of land, a new style of living in the horizontal mode gradually emerged in Paris. The vertical, hierarchical style of living was giving way to a horizontal organisation of space and, by the end of Louis XV’s reign, the family unit tended to concentrate on a single floor.35 The search for more privacy or comfort, key aspects of the Enlightenment, was the driving force behind that social change. Public and private spaces

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became more clearly separated at flat and building levels. Although it may be safely assumed that the purpose-built Paris flat came to its full development at the end of the eighteenth century, there were antecedents in the form of modest superimposed dwellings composed of one or two rooms on a single floor. In 1659 Léonard Tollin, a royal councillor, rented the second floor of a house by Louis Le Vau which was composed of three rooms and two cabinets.36 The flat of an officer on the rue Vivienne (1702) had a kitchen, an ante-chamber and a room, all on the second floor.37 This contraction of living spaces – where rooms had traditionally been spread over several floors – was mainly due to a rise in the value of the land. However, because they contradicted traditional practices, singlefloor flats only gradually became popular. A significant change occurred when houses were built for rent rather than for the occupation of one single family. Under the Ancien Régime, the nobility, royal family and religious congregations owned the land and, throughout the eighteenth century, they developed the practice of maximising profit through building schemes. Commercial or artisan activities were mostly kept on the ground floor of the houses, but several changes in the plans took place, including greater classicising symmetry, a new allocation for the main stair and a general use of cross-walls. A new type of building suitable for rent therefore appeared in the reign of Louis XIV, continuing into that of Louis XV and the time of the Revolution – with differences regarding detail. These speculative developments required a larger ‘footprint’, which normally meant amalgamating existing plots. A horizontal distribution of space gradually replaced the vertical mode of occupancy. This new form of mass housing relying on independent flats was fully developed by the nineteenth century. The Place Royale (or Place des Vosges) (1605–12), the Place des Victoires (1685) and the Place Louis-le-Grand (or Place Vendôme) (1702) pioneered the principle of uniformity by ‘dissolving’ individual houses behind a large and architecturally unified façade. Such monumentality was then applied to more modest building schemes. Two speculative developments commissioned in 1640 and 1669 by religious congregations show the origin of the tenement block in Paris.38 The first scheme was composed of seven houses with shops erected for the Blancs-Manteaux on the corner of the street of the same name and the rue Vieille-du-Temple. The second development was commissioned by the chapter of Saint-Germainl’Auxerrois, in the district of Les Halles, and consisted of twenty-

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Living Horizontally   469

eight buildings of the same sort aligned on the north side of the rue de la Ferronnerie (Figures 23.8–23.13).39 Both schemes were intended to provide money for the religious congregations. The housing scheme developed by the Blancs-Manteaux in the Quartier Saint-Gervais consisted of identical pairs of houses, each house two bays wide with a staircase to the side and looking on to the convent’s private courtyard (Figures 23.14 and 23.15).40 This project hinted at a possible new allocation of space with the merger of rooms and staircases on the same floor. The scheme on the rue de la Ferronnerie, built during the reign of Louis XIV by mason Frémin Quénehan and two carpenters, Sinson and Poitevin, was composed of a long, coherent block formed by the juxtaposition of exactly symmetrical pairs of houses separated by staircases (though it is difficult to say if this scheme was composed of twenty-eight or fourteen houses). The effect of monumentality produced was unprecedented in the dense urban district of Les Halles – the façades on the rue de la Ferronnerie had a more lavish treatment than those at the back, which looked onto the Cimetière des Innocents. The housing developments for Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois and the Blancs-Manteaux, for relatively more modest accommodation, show the gradual fusion of separate

Figure 23.8  Plan of the cemetery of the Saints Innocents. Claude-Louis Bernier, 1786. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Figure 23.9  Elevation to the rue de la Ferronnerie (1st arrondissement), 1669. © Archives Nationales (France) E//424, fol. 385.

Figure 23.10  Elevation to the cemetery of the Saints Innocents (1st arrondissement), 1669. © Archives Nationales (France) CP/ S//33.

Figure 23.11  Floor plans for two houses on the rue de la Ferronnerie (1st arrondissement), 1669. Reading anticlockwise from bottom right the drawing shows the ground, mezzanine, first and second floors. There were also two more floors above these. © Archives Nationales (France) CP/S//33.

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Figure 23.12  Sections of a house on the rue de la Ferronnerie, 1669. © Archives Nationales (France) CP/S//30.

Figure 23.13  View of the illuminations on the rue de la Ferronnerie in 1745. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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Figure 23.14  Map showing the rue des Blancs-Manteaux (the street to the left of the church) and rue Vielle du Temple (parallel with Rue des Guillemittes). From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général des quarantehuit quartiers de la ville de Paris (1827–36), vol. 2, plate 53. © Archives Nationales (France). Série F 31.

houses and a progress towards horizontal planning. Jean-François Cabestan considers that these two developments were early examples of the modern apartment block.41 The 1715 extensive city block designed by architect Dailly for the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the south side of the rue Childebert shows a long row of houses with shops on the arcaded ground floor and two storeys above (Figures 23.16–23.19). The symmetrical pattern is composed of two shops at the front and two rooms at the back separated by a passage leading to a staircase. On the upper floor, there is a discrepancy between the grand sequence of reception rooms and the poor room disposition; the grand cabinet gives onto the kitchen and the grande chambre de parade onto the landing. This early example of collective dwelling, the distribution of which remains somewhat hesitant, also shows that at this early stage, purpose-built flats relied on a horizontal rather than vertical expansion of living spaces.42 The majestic treatment of the façades on the rue de la Ferronnerie and the rue Childebert concealed all

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Living Horizontally   473

Figure 23.15  Monastery of the Blancs-Manteaux, a project for seven houses with shops on the corner of the rue des BlancsManteaux and the rue Vieille du Temple (4th arrondissement), 1640. Elevation of a façade with four shops on the ground floor looking onto the rue Vieille du Temple, ground and first floor plans. © Archives Nationales (France). CP/N/III/Seine/432.

irregularities of the plot. The principles of noble architecture were here applied to a form of collective dwelling. Although multi-occupancy developed in Paris in the second half of the seventeenth century, John Knox’s House at 45 High Street,

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Figure 23.16  Map of the rue Childebert (6th arrondissement) showing location of houses built for the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. From Vasserot and Bellanger, Atlas général des quarantehuit quartiers de la ville de Paris (1827–36), vol. 2, plate 97. © Archives Nationales (France). Série F 31.

Figure 23.17  Elevation of houses to be built for the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, south side of the rue Childebert (6th arrondissement), destroyed by the boulevard Saint- Germain. © Archives Nationales (France) MC/ET/XCI/630, minute of 12 March 1715.

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Living Horizontally   475

Edinburgh, and Gladstone’s Land, in the Lawnmarket, were earlier examples (Figure 23.20). The upper floors of John Knox’s House formed a separate dwelling by the later sixteenth century which was reached by its own turnpike stair in the front corner of the building.43 Its timber gallery built out into the street was a medieval survival – encroachments into the street were limited in the seventeenth century. On Gladstone’s Land, Thomas Gledstane seems to have occupied the double top flat after his acquisition and reconstruction of the property in 1617–20, and David Jonkin, also a merchant, occupied the first floor (of four flats, or ‘houses’) above the shop at the foot of the turnpike.44 The tenement was for mixed use; it was composed of shops on the ground floor with dwellings above, which were accessed by a forestair and an internal turnpike stair. The 1635 Stent Roll, drawn for the purpose of taxation, lists the owners and tenants of each property.45 This document proves that many of the ‘high houses’, ‘low houses’ and ‘turnpike houses’ in Edinburgh were

Figures 23.18 and 23.19  Ground and first floor plans of houses to be built for the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-desPrés, south side of the rue Childebert. South is to the top. © Archives Nationales (France) MC/ET/XCI/630, minute of 12 March 1715.

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Figure 23.20  Gladstone’s Land, Edinburgh (1617–20). © Louisa Humm.

in multi-occupancy. Some indications of subdivisions and leases, and of the status of occupiers, are known thanks to the records of Broughton Regality and poll tax returns for the Old Kirk parish in 1694. They show that household accommodation in central Edinburgh comprised between one and ten fire rooms by the last decade of the seventeenth century.

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Living Horizontally   477

It is uncertain whether Gladstone’s Land was originally intended as flats. Such structures were divided, subdivided and reassembled as needs changed. Arriving in Edinburgh in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe observed the tenements in Scotland and their traditional turnpike stairs: Even the buildings in the towns, and in the villages . . . imitate the Scots all over Northumberland: witness their building the Houses with the stairs to the Second (that is, first) Floor, going up on the Outside of the House, so that one Family may live below, and another above, without going at the same Door; which is the Scots Way of Living.46

The arcaded or piazza form used at Gladstone’s Land was common in Edinburgh in the seventeenth century and was also to be seen in the best houses in the vicinity of Glasgow Cross, in the High Street, Trongate and Saltmarket. The urban street pattern of the arcade allowed the display of wares on temporary stools and offered shelter for merchants’ customers. The system had been used at Covent Garden as well as at the Place des Vosges and the houses on the Pont au Change, in Paris. Earlier still, when Rome was rebuilt for Nero after the great fire, Tacitus noted that the streets were ‘built . . . with the further addition of colonnades, as a protection to the frontage of the blocks of tenements’.47 As opposed to flexible structures, large blocks of purpose-built flats associated with open courtyards came into fashion in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in Edinburgh. Organisations like the craft guilds, building speculators and individual burgesses rebuilt dwellings on a narrow medieval site and conceived broad tenements (in the hope of raising higher feu duties) for leading citizens. Land and house property were the most obvious and safest form of investment, which was also the case in France where financiers gained influence in the eighteenth century – the only other alternative being foreign trade. Thomas Robertson (d. 1686), initially a maltman and local politician (he became a burgess of Edinburgh in 1649), had a successful career as a speculative builder in the city and is remembered for building, in 1674, a Royal Exchange on the waste ground south of Parliament Close and east of Parliament House after plans by Sir William Bruce.48 His modern stone-fronted tenement in Parliament Close was a building of at least four storeys, and there were also garrets and cellars available. Its desirable location, next to Parliament and the Court of Session, appealed to many lawyers and merchants who rented houses there. The details for

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the poll tax of 1694 show that the richest merchants were concentrated in the respectable Old Kirk Parish, centred round Parliament House.49 The Rev. Thomas Morer, an Englishman visiting the city in 1689, commented on ‘Parliament Yard’ (Parliament Close), calling it ‘the pride of Edinburgh’.50 The most appealing houses fronted onto Parliament Close. Some of the Lord Provosts lived there, and one tenement was owned by Sir David Crawford, Keeper of the Signet and Secretary to Anne, 3rd Duchess of Hamilton, costing £3,351 5s.51 The shops on the ground floor were probably rented to goldsmiths, booksellers and instrument-makers. This new, spacious tenement contrasted with Gladstone’s Land and with some of the most densely populated tenements described by Robert Louis Stevenson in the nineteenth century.52 In his analysis of these majestic new blocks imbued with Classicism, Miles Glendinning alludes to a pattern which ‘fused Edinburgh’s dense urbanism with the sophistication of the Parisian hôtel’.53 Mylne’s Square (1684), in Edinburgh’s High Street, and Milne’s Court (1690), in the Lawnmarket, were two successful private improvement schemes constructed on sites cleared for the purpose and intended for the wealthy.54 Designed by the King’s Master Mason, Robert Mylne, both the square and the court were erected after an Act of Parliament regarding ruinous houses in the royal burghs. The flats in the square were to be of different sizes: the smaller comprised a dining room, three bedrooms, a closet and a kitchen, while the larger and more desirable first-floor properties consisted of an outer room, a dining room, four bedrooms, a closet plus a garret and two cellars (the latter being lower-status spaces presumably set on different levels from the main apartment). One of the advantages stressed by Mylne was that the flats were to be reached by a scale-and-platt stair, wider and more convenient than a turnpike stair. The interiors were also richly panelled. In 1688, Mylne completed a flat in the Square on the fifth storey above the ground for William Cunningham and Catherine Hamilton, his wife, which had five rooms including study and kitchen.55 Milne’s Court is composed of six storeys and an attic, rear blocks and a courtyard. It is a broad, ashlar-faced tenement devoid of gables and projections on its street front. Inside, the staircase gave access to two flats on each floor. Flats were two rooms deep and a continuous corridor in the middle served for service. The neighbouring James’s Court (1723), with its elegant frontage, was built on the same pattern of deep courtyard blocks and completed the process of refinement in the Old Town. By the end of the eighteenth century, the High Street

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Living Horizontally   479

and the Canongate were lined with high tenements whose roofs were set parallel to the street.56 Several stone tenements were built by James Smith of Whitehill from 1683, including at the head of the Canongate, on the west side of Niddry’s Wynd and also on the north side of the High Street, opposite Blackfriars Wynd, with Barrenger’s Close on the east and Paisley’s Close on the west.57 Smith, who was Robert Mylne’s son-in-law and who had been associated with Thomas Robertson from at least 1680, greatly transformed the city. Further insight into this formative period of tenement building, in terms of partnerships, problems and politics, is provided by the example of Writers’ Court (now overbuilt by the west wing of the City Chambers). Here, Robert Mylne went into commercial partnership with Patrick Steill, a vintner and keeper of the famous Cross-Keys tavern, venue for musical entertainment and Jacobite politicking.58 In 1681 they acquired property on the site of what became Writers’ Court59 and by 1695 a new courtyard development was under construction. In this case the contract, between Robert Mylne and Patrick Steill on the one side, and the advocate Robert Forbes on the other, survives, along with a contract drawing, showing the plan of the flat (Figure 23.21).60 Forbes had the fourth floor above the court (the top floor), and the plan shows a dwelling with a spacious hallway (with pantry), main living room to the left, three bedrooms Figure 23.21  Contract drawing for a flat in Writers’ Court, Edinburgh (1695). NRS RH15/68/3/3.

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(one with a closet) and a kitchen with nursery off, which was also accessed from one of the bedrooms. In addition, Forbes had both a cellar, accessed from the court, and a garret above the flat. The other householders were people of a similar standing, a Writer to the Signet, a fencing master and, below Forbes, David Paton, the miniaturist and portrait painter. The key point here is that these were spacious and expensive dwellings for the professional classes and also for members of the aristocracy when they were in town for parliament. These are not the mixed dwellings of rich and poor differentiated vertically by the floor they resided on, but exclusive developments, carving out a small amount of space within the dense urban fabric of the old city. Steill, the wealthy vintner, was a useful partner for builders like Mylne and we find him collaborating with another mason, Patrick Carfrae, on another development in 1705.61 Similarly, we find him in a different context, as a co-investor with James Smith at Morrison’s Haven glassworks, near Prestongrange, in 1700.62 Immediately post-Union, in August 1707, we find Smith and the brother of the Earl of Panmure, Harry Maule of Kellie, both contacting the Earl of Mar, the Secretary of State who had just seen through the Act of Union, to propose Steill for the position of Postmaster of the Canongate.63 Clearly as a businessman, possibly as a musician, but certainly as a property developer and Jacobite sympathiser, Steill was well regarded in Edinburgh and seems to have played an important role in the development of the apartment block at the turn of the eighteenth century. Tenements were also built in Edinburgh’s flourishing port of Leith, where Mylne was again engaged in speculative building.64 A contract dated 20 June 1677 survives for the rebuilding of a tenement near ‘the head of the hill’ in Leith, on land belonging to John Tailor, a skipper.65 John Cleugh, a wright, was contracted for flooring, making and plastering the partitions, putting on the roof, making the doors, windows and window cases, and paving the floors. Every room of the two uppermost storeys had a handsome cornice, and each of the upper stories had a study and a pantry. These flats were probably destined for rent, and inclusion of a shop on the ground floor indicates an intended mixed use for the building. The breaking of the old medieval pattern by demolishing and building across several burgages was a long-term change also in Paris. While each strip of land there had an average size of 79 square metres in the seventeenth century, it significantly increased in the first half of the eighteenth century to reach 174 square metres on average.66 This ‘merging’ process was particularly significant in the

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Living Horizontally   481

Marais.67 The increase in the available footprint enabled architects and builders to design more spacious dwellings with a horizontal distribution of space. To English visitors in Scotland, multi-occupation tenements offered a ready comparison with the Inns of Court in England. The New Square at Lincoln’s Inn, formerly known as Serle’s Court, and Edinburgh’s Milne’s Court, were exactly contemporary buildings. For Thomas Morer, Most of the Houses, as they are parted into divers Tenements, so they have as many Landlords as Stories; and therefore have no dependence on one another, otherwise than as they stand on the same Foundation, so that in this respect they may be compared to our Students Apartments at the Inns-of-Court, which are bought and sold without regard to the Chambers above or below ’em.68

For Joseph Taylor, in the early eighteenth century, ‘every staircase may contain 28 familyes, for the Scotch houses are built after the manner of the Inns of Court in England, and every apartment is call’d a house’, or what we now call a flat.69 To conclude, there is a long-established pattern in Edinburgh and Paris of living in multi-occupation and purpose-built flats, a tradition which did not exist in England. It took a thousand years before trade and town life had reached a sufficient pitch for multioccupancy living to expand in Europe. Buildings were initially very flexible structures that could be subdivided internally, formally and informally, when needed. This flexibility of plan persisted until at least the early eighteenth century. Purpose-built flats developed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century in Edinburgh, precisely when the new Classicism of Bruce and Smith was becoming fashionable; and they reached full development a century later in Paris. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, there were relatively few examples of flatted tenements in Paris, should we define these as purpose-built house blocks designed to contain vertically stacked individual dwellings with shared, communal staircases. These buildings rather differed from Paris’s earlier examples of horizontal living, featured in modest housing in the last decades of the seventeenth century, when small flats destined to be rented were added on the upper floors of previously very small houses. In both cities, large speculative developments can be considered as the origin of the modern apartment block which saw a golden age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were

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482   Clarisse Godard Desmarest

initiated and systematised by affluent builders, wealthy financiers or religious congregations in the hope of making profit. The social divisions, or class segregation, seen in Edinburgh tenements at the end of the eighteenth century mirrored the greater separation in Paris between the well-off living in the lower floors and the poorest inhabitants in the garrets. When the middle classes wanted to live separately from the workers they departed from the old central areas. In search of more space, the aristocracy in Paris moved from the Marais to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and later to the Chaussée d’Antin. Elegant hôtels with courtyards and gardens were built on the Faubourg Saint-Germain in the first half of the eighteenth century. The flat tradition persisted in the New Town of Edinburgh which developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. The terraces, along James Craig’s gridded pattern, were not simply composed of individual houses to be rented out separately but were deliberately conceived to contain groups of flats. The end of the Seven Years War in 1763 coincided with renewed building activity in Paris. Although the Classical idiom of the tenement – seen from the outset in Scottish examples – was afterwards fully developed to a great sophistication in the French capital, the size and comfort of the apartments in the New Town did not quite match the refinement of the plans of contemporary tenements in Paris.

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24

William Adam’s Public Buildings David W. Walker

Aberdeen Town House

W

illiam Adam’s first known public commission, in 1729, was for a new Town House to replace the sixteenth-century Tolbooth on the north side of Castle Street, Aberdeen (Figure 24.1). Like the Tolbooth, it was to have adjoined the tall and massive Wardhouse

Figure 24.1  Conjectural reconstruction of Aberdeen Town House, c. 1760: Wardhouse (sixteenth century) in the centre; Adam and Barron’s tolbooth (c. 1730 and 1750) to the west (left); the New Inn to the east. NRHE SC337442 © Crown copyright: HES

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484   David W. Walker

immediately to the east. As the Wardhouse already had a belfry, Adam’s design – which has not survived – was probably relatively low-key: only two very plain bays had been built as a western extension to the Tolbooth by 1731. They formed the model for Patrick Barron’s reconstruction of the Tolbooth as a three-storey, sevenwindows-wide block in 1750. Barron’s work was answered in 1756 by the building of the New Inn to the east of the Wardhouse which then became the centre of a fifteen-bay symmetrical composition, the two-way forestair leading to its pedimented entrance resembling that at Sanquhar (see below) and perhaps borrowed from Adam’s design.1 The New Inn was demolished c. 1839 and Adam and Barron’s work c. 1867.

Robert Gordon’s Hospital, Aberdeen Robert Gordon acquired a fortune trading in Poland, returning home in 1720 to increase his wealth by money-lending. On 13 December 1729 he signed a Deed of Mortification leaving the town council and ministers his whole substance and effects . . . towards the building of an Hospital . . . for maintenance, aliment, entertainment, and education of young boys, whose parents are poor and indigent, and not able to maintain them at schools, and to put them to trades and employment.

The governors were to spend £1,667 sterling on the new hospital, raised by Gordon to £2,000 on 19 September 1730 to ensure ‘a decent building’. After he died in 1731, governors and office-bearers were sworn in and Adam was appointed as architect. In Adam’s first design (Figure 24.2) the principal frontage had three storeys and was seven bays broad, the three central bays generously spaced and slightly advanced beneath a pediment; above this rose a three-stage tower and spirelet. It was similar in idiom to his designs for Haddo and Saughton (Vitruvius Scoticus, plates 56 and 117) but its broad proportions found no direct comparison in his domestic work. Its ground-floor entrance had a round-arched Gibbsian surround and the angles had long-and-short quoins, but there were no string-courses or band-courses. The ground-floor windows had lugged surrounds with triple keyblocks and the first-floor windows were similar with bracketed cills, while the low second-floor windows were simply lugged (cf. Gibbs’ Ditchley Park, plate 39 in A Book of Architecture, to which Adam had subscribed).

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Figure 24.2  Robert Gordon’s College, preliminary scheme, principal elevation (1731). Vitruvius Scoticus, opposite plate 107. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

The pediment was pierced by two oculi flanking an oval cartouche adapted from Gibbs’ circular one in A Book of Architecture, plate 110. The tower rose from a low plinth into a cubical clock stage, the octagonal belfry announced by urns having round-arched and keyblocked openings. Its domelet was ogee-profiled as in Gibbs’ Marylebone Chapel (plate 20), Adam substituting a spirelet for Gibbs’ cupola. Aberdeen’s Provost, William Cruikshank, conferred with William Baxter who estimated Adam’s scheme at £3,200, but suggested that if it were redesigned with one room less, and the other rooms made smaller, this with omission of the garden walls would reduce the cost to within Gordon’s limit. Cruikshank offered to build the hospital on this revised plan for £2,000, including its garden walls, or if the governors preferred he would supervise construction for £100. They accepted his offer of supervision on 2 September and two weeks later authorised him to buy materials and organise a workforce.

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486   David W. Walker

Adam discussed his revised plans with the governors on 16 December. He examined a site which Gordon had thought suitable but found it ‘too small and too low situate for erecting the Hospital’, recommending College Croft as ‘a proper situation’, dry with a beautiful prospect ideal for the hospital’s policies. The masons, William Sangster, John Aikenhead and Alexander Riach, made good progress and on 1 September 1732 the governors sent to London for lead for the roof. By October, however, it had emerged that the internal walls were not thick enough to support the stone cupola. On 21 May 1733 Adam produced revised designs but when these were costed the governors reluctantly accepted that the cupola should be constructed of timber. The hospital and gardens were completed by early 1735, and the front and rear gate-piers by 1738. As built (Figure 24.3), the hospital was based on Adam’s country house elevations of the earlier 1720s rather than Gibbs’ Book of Architecture. Its three-storey principal frontage, predominantly in coursed silver-grey granite facing south-south-east, now consisted of a three-bay centre slightly recessed between two-bay ends which rose into low attic storeys with shallow curvilinear pediments, the angles emphasised by raised long-and-short quoins in darker grey. The proportions were very different from Adam’s original proposals. The three central bays were compressed into a perfect square which, together with the greater height of the end-bays, resulted in a more tightly composed design in which verticals predominated, height-to-width being 1:2 rather than 1:3¼. The end-bay attics were an afterthought: without them, the basic scheme clearly derived from Balgreggan (Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 128),2 where again the three central bays formed a perfect square. The two buildings’ very different architectural appearance arose from their fenestration. Balgreggan had a tall first floor and low second floor; at the hospital the ground-, first- and second-floor windows were all equal height, resulting in greater vertical emphasis within the same envelope. Although Balgreggan lacked the hospital’s Doric-columned firstfloor Serlian window, its details were more refined with moulded window architraves and a richer doorpiece. The hospital’s door architrave was no more than a plain surround with an oversailing cornice but it supported a dated plinth above which a round-arched niche with an acanthus keyblock formed the Serlian’s central opening: this contained a statue of Robert Gordon.3 Adam’s curvilinear pediments over the end-bays corresponded to those of Gladney House, Kirkcaldy, built for his future Robertson in-laws in 1711, and were

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Figure 24.3  Robert Gordon’s College, principal elevation as altered by John Smith in 1829–33, with straightened pediments, central blocking course and scrolled panel. © David W. Walker, 2014.

to remain a recurring theme in Aberdeenshire architecture into the 1780s (cf. Straloch). The octagonal timber cupola with concave leaded spirelet and weathervane was made by William Chrystall, clearly modelled on the Aberdeen Wardhouse steeple of 1616 but fitted with glazed openings. Internally the floor plans were similar to Adam’s original scheme. The ground floor comprised a Greek-cross arrangement of vestibule, inner hall and stair-hall flanked by pairs of classrooms front and back, the same arrangement being repeated at the upper levels. The most interesting element was the dog-leg stair. Its parallel flights were entered by paired arches from the vestibule and landings, those at the lower floors set in Roman Doric half-columns and those at the upper floors rusticated. Some of the arches were formed of intersecting arcs with dropped keyblocks, a curious detail which was surely a variation by the executant masons. The other interiors

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488   David W. Walker

retain Adam’s original finishes, the best the panelled governors’ room at first floor on the west. Externally, the hospital is no longer as Adam designed it. In 1829–33 John Smith added neo-Classical wings and linking colonnades, and to bring Adam’s work more into conformity with his own he straightened the pediments and enriched the hitherto plain central wallhead with a blocking-course and scrolled panel.

Dundee Town House At Dundee a structurally unsound tolbooth was demolished on Adam’s advice in July 1731, and in November he offered designs for a Town House on the same High Street site (Figure 24.4), costing them at £2,852 3s 1d.4 For these designs he received 13 guineas. The Council approved his scheme, but asked that the main stair be constructed wider than that shown. On 15 January 1732 the Council instructed the Provost to ask in Edinburgh ‘on what terms the banks would advance the necessary funds for building’. Andrew Smart was appointed mason, Alexander Watson, a former Baillie, as paymaster and overseer, and Lord Gray as arbiter. At the Council meeting of 5 August 1732 it emerged that although the banks had not been as forthcoming as had been hoped, several citizens had offered loans to enable the contract to proceed. Adam returned to inspect progress on 13 September 1733, and work was near-complete by June 1735. However, it was reported that the ‘cost of the Town House, clock and Steeple Furnishings, with various alterations, may be stated to have come to nearly £4,000’. The effect on Dundee’s finances was such that the interior remained uncompleted for nearly twenty years. Adam’s design was much more ambitious than his proposals for the Town House in Aberdeen. It showed he had not abandoned the concept of his original scheme for Robert Gordon’s, which was here realised in embellished form. Facing north-west, the entrance front in reddish Craigie sandstone was three storeys and seven bays – 97ft – broad, close to the 102ft of the Robert Gordon’s scheme. Its three centre bays were again slightly advanced under a big pediment bearing an elegant tower and spire considerably refined from that of the Aberdeen proposals. In Vitruvius Scoticus it was 132ft high; as executed it rose 140ft. The ground floor comprised an open arcade of seven keyblocked arches in channelled masonry. It formed a continuation of the covered pavements within the ground-floor arcades of the ­tenements then

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Figure 24.4  Dundee Town House, principal elevation and floor plan (1731–5). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 104. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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490   David W. Walker

standing to either side. Arcades were a common feature of Scottish urban architecture from the seventeenth century, but were not a characteristic of Adam’s domestic work save for the wet-weather entrances in the external stairs at Duff (Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 148) and the unexecuted schemes for Hamilton Palace’s north front (plate 11) and Newliston (plates 35 and 36). Perhaps his sources for Dundee were Covent Garden (Vitruvius Britannicus, volume 2, plate 22) and Somerset House (volume 1, plate 11), both of which he had seen in 1727. At the Town House’s tall first and low second floors, pairs of giant-order Ionic pilasters and the pediment formed the three-bay centrepiece. Several of Adam’s grandest house designs in Vitruvius Scoticus had three-bay giant-order centrepieces but none featured the paired Ionic pilasters which distinguished the Town House and provided broader, more generously proportioned rooms within. The closest parallel is his proposed new front for Caroline Park5 where the pilasters rise through the first floor only, but it is so tall that the proportions are similar. There is no precedent for any such coupled columns or pilasters in Gibbs’ Book of Architecture and only at St Paul’s in London and Campbell’s church designs do they appear in Vitruvius Britannicus. The inspiration for those at Dundee and Caroline Park was more probably French, deriving from Jean Marot’s publications although no close parallel can be found there. Adam’s use of channel-jointed masonry for all three storeys of the Town House followed his earlier experiments at Somerville (now Drum, Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 38) in 1726–30 and Cumbernauld (plate 125) in 1730–1. The idea perhaps came from James Smith’s Yester, but the window surround details at Drum and Dundee were clearly drawn from Colen Campbell’s palace design dedicated to the Earl of Halifax (Figure 9.1) which in turn took these details from Palladio’s Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza. But at the Town House the first-floor window pediments of the Halifax and Somerville designs were omitted to accommodate the keyblocked oval windows, orientated horizontally, lighting the low second floor. Oval windows were again a very unusual feature in British architecture at this time. They appear in Thomas Archer’s St Philip’s Church – now Cathedral – in Birmingham which Adam knew from Vitruvius Britannicus (volume 1, plate 11), and also Archer’s north front at Chatsworth. Orientated vertically, ovals appear in designs by the Earl of Mar but it is doubtful if Adam could have seen these by 1731.6 The most probable sources are Serlio’s designs with complete rows of small oval lights above larger windows.7

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William Adam’s Public Buildings   491

The sheer size of the Town House’s pediment, with comparatively slim and shallow cornices, reflected the breadth of the three-bay centrepiece beneath it. It was pierced by two oculi as at Robert Gordon’s, one on either side of a heraldic panel. The tower was clearly based on examples in Gibbs’ Book of Architecture (particularly plates 3 and 7) but did not correspond exactly to any of them. The first stage was square, in channelled masonry, with a round-arched opening on each side; the low second stage, also square, contained clock dials framed by console brackets supporting segmentally arched cornices, and the octagonal third stage comprised the belfry, rising into a stone spire with concave faces pierced by oculi. Alexander Smith was asked to make the thirty-hour clock mechanism in 1734. For generations of Dundonians the ground-floor arcade, which contained business premises, became a favoured meeting-place known as ‘The Pillars’. Within the arcade a central round-headed opening accessed the handsome circular stair rising to first floor.8 At this level, the three central bays expressed the courtroom flanked by the magistrates’ retiring room and principal clerk’s chamber. At the rear, flanking the stair, were the clerks’ office and record room. A broad hall-corridor between them opened into the council chamber, 36ft 6 by 22ft on the east, and a guildry room of the same dimensions on the west. Both were as handsomely finished as they would have been in Adam’s country houses: they had coved ceilings resulting in many of the second-floor ovals being blind. The other rooms were vaulted. The second floor contained prison cells, two for male criminals and two for male debtors, females being segregated in the attic. In the early twentieth century James Thomson proposed re-siting the Town House as part of his city-centre masterplan but this was forestalled by the First World War; the friability of its Craigie sandstone resulted in its demolition early in 1932.

Sanquhar and Haddington Tolbooths Sanquhar Tolbooth is Adam’s only public building to survive much as he designed it (Figure 24.5). Occupying its predecessor’s island site near the north-west end of Sanquhar High Street, it was built for the Duke of Queensberry in 1736–9.9 Its stone came from Cleughfoot Quarry and the abandoned Sanquhar Castle, but Adam supplied many other materials, the timber and weathercock being shipped from Leith. The contractors were George and Thomas Laurie (or, probably, Lorimer) and James McCall.

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Figure 24.5  Sanquhar Tolbooth (1736–9). © David W. Walker, 2018.

The principal front facing east had two storeys and five bays in ashlar, the centre three bays fractionally advanced with a two-way forestair rising to the first-floor main entrance. Above the pediment a short but massive clock tower, set into the big and shapely bell-cast roof, supported an octagonal belfry with round-arched openings and bell-cast dome. Sanquhar’s details were almost wholly drawn from the first Robert Gordon’s scheme, but omitted the urns and spirelet. Only the pediment differed, its circular oculus the centrepiece of

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William Adam’s Public Buildings   493

sculpture left in block. The spiked stair railings date from the steps’ renewal in 1856–7. Internally, the ground floor comprised a square vestibule directly beneath the tower, a schoolroom on the south and three vaulted cells each of which originally had its own external doorway. At first floor, the octagonal vestibule under the tower had shell-headed niches providing seats between the doorways to the council room on the south and the courtroom on the north, the vaulted central room on the west seemingly the record office. In 1742 Adam designed a similarly planned tolbooth at Haddington, concealed by later buildings in 1788 and demolished piecemeal between 1823 and 1856. No pictorial record is known, but its tower ‘in the old Dutch round style’ was at the rear and contained the stair.

Hamilton (Old) Parish Church Hamilton Old Parish Church (Vitruvius Scoticus, plates 12 and 13) was the only church Adam designed wholly anew (Figure 24.6). The Duke of Hamilton offered to pay for almost its entire cost because he wanted to incorporate the area surrounding the town’s medieval collegiate church within his private grounds. A hilltop site within what was then the centre of Hamilton’s new town was provided by the Aikmans of Ross. Correspondence between Adam and John Clerk of Penicuik suggests the church was begun in 1729; construction was certainly progressing by 1732, Thomas Winter, mason, being at work in that year. It opened in 1734 although its tower was not completed until 1748. Conceptually its plan and the position of its tower owed something to Gibbs’ circular scheme for St Martin-inthe-Fields, but it was nevertheless a very original design. Built in pinkish-golden ashlar masonry it took the form of a Greek cross with a central drum 56ft in diameter, and four arms each 22ft broad of which the north and south were longer than the east and west; there were Gibbsian windows at both ground and gallery level.10 The north arm, which contained the main entrance, was almost exactly square on plan, being 24ft deep, and supported the slim and elegant clock tower. Steps framed between massive dieblocks led to three tall arches rising from channelled piers into triple keyblocks; the deep open porch within them contained a single square-headed doorway with four-panelled double-leaf doors (cf. Gibbs’ plates 58 and 84). Above the arches a band-course defined the gallery level in smooth ashlar with raised long-and-short quoins,

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494   David W. Walker

Figure 24.6  Hamilton (Old) Parish Church (c. 1729–34), tower completed 1748, with the ‘Nethertoun Cross’ (probably tenth century or later) in the foreground. NRHE DP008119 © Crown copyright: HES

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William Adam’s Public Buildings   495

its single round-arched window on brackets within a Gibbsian surround. This lit the vestry, and the gable pediment was crowned by a chimneystack disguised as an urn. The tower was telescopic, rising from a plain square plinth. Its cubical first stage with quoined angles had a round-arched opening on each face, with a modillioned cornice above; a slightly smaller cube in plain ashlar contained the clock dials, then another cornice receded into the third stage, again cubical with a square-headed belfry opening on each side, its leaded ogee domelet rising into a weathervane. The south arm, also 24ft deep, formed the ducal aisle and had a correspondingly grand doorpiece, finely architraved with consoles supporting a swan-neck pediment. Its ground floor was channelled and a slim cornice extended across its south gable beneath the archring of the retiring room window, which like its counterpart on the north was set in a Gibbsian surround and supported on brackets. The pedimental gable rose into the retiring room’s chimneystack, all very graceful and discreet. The east and west wings which contained seating for the town council and trades were 18ft deep, entered through small pedimented porches; their gallery windows were again set in Gibbsian surrounds beneath pedimental gables. Their flanks were lit by windows at ground floor; at gallery level they each had two circular keyblocked recesses on the north side only. Within each drum segment between the wings, a large shouldered window lit the ground floor and a large round-arched window lit the gallery, all as in Gibbs’ circular design for St Martin-in-the-Fields. The drum itself rose into a shallow conical roof. Adam’s plan shows that originally the gallery extended right around the drum. At both ground and gallery the pews formed a complete octagon and extended into the east and west arms containing the gallery stairs. The ducal family occupied the gallery on the south, and their servants the ground-floor pews beneath, retiring rooms being provided at both levels. The Hamiltons and their servants faced the minister, whose pulpit stood within the central floor area just in front of the north pews. The interior was remodelled in 1841–2, when the present U-plan gallery extending round the south, east and west sides was installed, and the conical roof was reconstructed with a glazed cupola; further alterations were made in 1887 and 1925–6, when the external stairs leading to the entrance porch were also widened. The pulpit’s tall back and sounding-board with a crown of scrolls is the only element of Adam’s interior still surviving.

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496   David W. Walker

Glasgow Old College Library Glasgow’s Old College Library is discussed in detail in Chapter 21, so this account is consequently brief. In 1720 the Duke of Chandos gifted £500 to Glasgow University, leaving it to the Chancellor, the Duke of Montrose, to decide how it should be spent. In 1726 Montrose decided to build a library and in 1731 the Glasgow wrights Allan Dreghorn and John Craig produced designs. These were supplanted by Adam’s scheme, its foundation stone laid by 27 June 1732, although it was not completed until 1744. Adam’s design (Figures 24.7, 21.5 and 21.6) shows his library was conceived as a Temple of Learning: it had no counterpart in Vitruvius Britannicus or A Book of Architecture. With pedimental gables at both ends, it was a freestanding ashlar-faced rectangle, 59ft × 38ft on plan, its tall three-bay library hall elevated high above the College lawns over a plinth-like ground floor. Old photographs show that the entrance gable’s forestairs, portico and armorial were never executed, no sculptures graced the niches and the east flank elevation remained without its balustrade; external access to the library hall was eventually gained by a functional cast-iron stair added early in the nineteenth century. Adam’s designs indicate that the library hall interior was a double-cube 25ft × 50ft and that its windows were similar to those of Hamilton Palace’s saloon (Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 13). The library did not survive the university’s move to Gilmorehill in 1870.

The Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh In 1727 Andrew Gairdner, Treasurer of Edinburgh’s Trinity Hospital which cared for the elderly, launched an appeal for its repair.11 This was so successful, raising over £1,000, that Gairdner used the balance of £218 13s 5d to assist the city’s orphans. He began by funding their education at existing charity schools but, influenced by August Hermann Francke’s Pietas Hallensis: an Historical Narration of the Orphan-House at Glaucha in Saxony, he proposed an Orphan Hospital. He reprinted Francke’s work,12 and wrote two pamphlets, A Looking-Glass for Rich People, . . . or a Plea for the Poor (1727) and Proposals to Raise a Fund for the Maintenance of Orphans . . . under the Title of a Charity-Bank (1728). The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge agreed to sponsor the scheme early in 1733, a subscribers’ meeting being held on 7 March. Managers were appointed on 25 April, and by 19 October they had

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William Adam’s Public Buildings   497

Figure 24.7  Glasgow University Library, entrance gable and east elevation (1732–44). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 156. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

found lodgings in Baillie Fyfe’s Close, appointing a master, mistress and servant, and selecting twenty-four boys and six girls from across Scotland. Further funds were sought from parish churches, Seceders’ meeting-houses and private individuals, and by June 1734 the governors could acquire a site for a new building, deciding on

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Figure 24.8  The Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh, principal elevation (1734–6). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 140. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

The Dingwall near to Fyfe’s Close, a physic garden and a textile factory (‘Paul’s Work’) where boys could be trained in weaving. Adam’s design consisted of an ‘East Ward’, ‘Middle Ward’ and ‘West Ward’, allowing for phased construction. His proposals (Vitruvius Scoticus, plates 139 and 140, Figure 24.8) represented the first of three public buildings in Edinburgh which he would design on a palatial scale, although with a restricted budget the hospital’s merits would have been in its massing rather than its architectural enrichment: indeed, it recalled a French hôpital or école militaire, perhaps consciously echoing the continental inspiration of the project. Its three-storey principal frontage facing south was to be nineteen bays – 226ft – long with centre and end pavilions emphasised by long-and-short quoins. The three-bay central pavilion – the ‘Middle Ward’ – was to be approached by steps sweeping up from massive die-blocks to the first-floor main entrance framed by Ionic columns and a segmental pediment.13 Its ground floor had segmentally arched windows, with those at first floor and the upper tier round-arched with triple keyblocks; adornment was restricted to the main pediment which was to be richly sculpted with urns at the angles.14 Behind this pediment, a French domed and platformed roof was to rise into an octagonal cupola with round-arched openings containing a clock, its domelet crowned with a weathervane. The five-bay accommodation wards, although their windows were more generously spaced than those of the centrepiece, had a lower wallhead. At ground floor they had doors and windows in triplekeyblocked architraves, albeit unmoulded. Then, above a plat-band and cill-course, the first-floor windows were round-arched and

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keyblocked, a feature more consistent with continental than English architecture; the second-floor windows were square within lugged surrounds. The three-bay hip-roofed end-pavilions were to have been treated identically with more closely spaced windows and pedimented outshots containing lavatories at their gables. Adam’s floor plans show that the broad steps leading to the main entrance did not usher visitors into a grand hall, as might be expected, but into the hospital’s schoolroom, a 30ft cube lit by the first-floor and upper-tier windows. The master sat at his desk against the back wall, facing the entrance with his charges in banked-up seating on three sides around him. The ward blocks were also not what they might appear, fully half their depth at first floor being given over to tall frontal corridors or dayroom ‘galleries’. In striking contrast to these large spaces the orphans slept in tiny cubicles on the rear side, each with a hearth; the mezzanine cubicles were accessed by tight straight stairs. Second-floor dormitories were reached by old-fashioned turnpikes, allowing for segregation. In general arrangement the first-floor galleries and cubicles seemingly derived from Wren’s Royal Hospital, Chelsea which had galleries to front and rear with back-to-back cubicles between them, these being dependent on borrowed light, heat and ventilation: Adam’s singlesided arrangement was altogether healthier. The end-pavilion rooms were to have been larger, one described as the ‘Directors’. The foundation stone was laid on 28 June 1734 and three bays of the west wing (the ‘West Ward’) were ready in April 1735, this being executed under the mason Henry Wilson; the building stone came from Tillichewens Quarry. The central pavilion was begun in 1736, but to the much-simplified design engraved for William Maitland’s History of Edinburgh. The entrance steps were not built; an inaccessible arched Gibbsian doorpiece replaced the Ionic entrance, the roof-line was straightened and the pediment and ‘spire’ (presumably cupola) were omitted. In 1742 George II granted the contributors and others Letters Patent, erecting them as a corporation under the name of the Orphan Hospital and Work House at Edinburgh, but the opening of a Charity Work-house in 1743 (see below) resulted in a very sharp drop in funding, and for many years the hospital comprised its central pavilion and foreshortened west wing only. Successful fundraising, notably by the prominent Methodist George Whitfield and other clerics who preached in the Orphans’ Park, enabled the hospital to be enlarged – it is unclear exactly how – in 1774, and again in 1779–80 when the east wing was finally built. In 1781 its treasurer, Thomas Tod, produced a revised thirteen-bay

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Figure 24.9  Design for completion of the Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh, published by Thomas Tod, 1781. Courtesy of Edinburgh City Libraries. Photographer: Rachel Collie.

design for its completion which was engraved to attract subscribers (Figure 24.9). The cupola was completed in 1783; in 1785 Tod published An Account of the Rise, Progress, Present State, and Intended Enlargements of the Orphan Hospital to encourage further donations, and additions – probably the Robert Adam-like east and west end-pavilions – were built in 1787. The hospital survived until 1845: by then the orphans had moved to Thomas Hamilton’s new orphanage at Dean, where Adam’s Gibbsian urns were re-erected at the front steps.

George Watson’s Hospital, Edinburgh George Watson, the Bank of Scotland’s first accountant, made a fortune trading with the continent.15 On his death in 1723 he left £12,000 to erect ‘a new Hospitall for entertaining and educating of the male children and grandchildren of decayed merchants in the city of Edinburgh’. The Merchant Company oversaw the appointment of governors who acquired a site of one and a quarter acres,

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known as Thomson’s Yards. But although a fabric committee was appointed no actual building was instructed, the possibility of selling the Yards first being mooted in 1734; in 1736 the governors learned that Heriot’s Hospital would be willing to feu them a larger site at Heriot’s Croft on the city’s south side, the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh having sought the Yards for their new hospital. Afterwards, however, Heriot’s feued the Croft to the city for development. It was probably fortunate that Watson’s trustees had just loaned the city £1,500; an agreement was reached whereby a 7-acre sub-feu was offered for the purpose of building Watson’s Hospital, the contract being signed on 10 March 1738. On 1 February that year the governors had appointed a committee to meet the trustees and take the advice of an architect. The committee visited the site with Adam who produced plans for a building which they considered too large, but revised proposals similar in their architecture but smaller in scale were approved on 9 March. On 24 April Adam contracted with the governors to build the hospital and provide many of its furnishings, the site to be enclosed by trees; for this he would receive £4,168 11s 4d payable in instalments, with completion before Whitsun Term 1740. He would have quarrying rights on the land, providing the quarry was infilled and returned to arable afterwards. Construction, however, took longer than envisaged. In November 1739, with the shell incomplete, the governors considered whether to pay Adam the instalment he was scheduled to receive; they did so as the interiors were further ahead than expected. Work was near-complete when a governors’ committee made inspection on 11 December 1740; the hospital was ready on 4 March 1741. Adam’s design, as engraved by Richard Cooper (Figure 24.10), represented a variation on the Orphan Hospital, similarly French in profile rather than Palladian or Gibbsian, but without arched windows. The entrance front facing north again had three storeys and nineteen bays, but was much shorter at 185ft, with a taller fourstorey, three-bay centre pavilion approached by steps extending across its full breadth. The entrance at first floor was set in a lugged and triple-keyblocked architrave crowned by a segmental pediment. There was no pediment above the wallhead, but its parapet was to have had urns flanking a magnificent Royal Armorial with Lion and Unicorn supporters, acknowledging George II’s patronage. The French domed roof rose much taller than the Orphan Hospital’s, its louvred octagonal cupola capped by an ogee domelet and weathervane.

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Figure 24.10  George Watson’s Hospital, Edinburgh, principal elevation and floor plans (1738–41). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 151. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

The accommodation blocks had four bays instead of five, as at the Orphan Hospital, and were spaced rather more closely. At Watson’s it was the ground-floor windows which were low and square, the first floor’s being only slightly taller than those at second, and all were set in plain surrounds. A first-floor band-course and shallow

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eaves cornice extended across the entire frontage. The hip-roofed end-pavilions were four bays broad instead of the Orphan Hospital’s three, and were emphasised by angle-quoins. Early views show the south elevation was almost identical to the north, but without the first-floor entrance. Internally, the ground and first floors apparently comprised classrooms and staff accommodation, their layout on each level being virtually the same. The connecting corridors lit by the front-facing windows served simply as circulation space rather than ‘galleries’ or dayrooms. The end-pavilions each contained a generously proportioned stairway and a large bow-ended room, that on the west with a fireplace being the dining room and that on the east, double-height but without a fireplace, the chapel. The second floor contained dormitories with central aisles, its partitions in deal rather than plaster to better withstand children’s rough-andtumble; a narrow turnpike led into the attic.16 Paul Fourdrinier’s engraving of 1753 shows that as executed the Royal Armorial was omitted, a square inscription panel with swanneck pediment being substituted in its place.17 Adam’s building was substantially enlarged on its south side by John Lessels in 1857–8, and most of it was retained after it was sold to the Royal Infirmary in 1869. The east and west end-pavilions survived until 2004, their rendered walls and simple detailing making them look more Scots Georgian than Adam’s designs might suggest.

Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Although Edinburgh had long provided support for the poor, including a doctor and surgeon when required, and the Royal College of Physicians had – almost since its inception, in 1681 – offered medical assistance to the needy, without a hospital their efforts were frequently unavailing.18 In 1712 Dr John Monro, Deacon of the Surgeons, published a pamphlet to raise funds for a hospital, but it enjoyed little success. In 1721 the Physicians proposed erection of a hospital which would provide free treatment for the poor, and allow far greater numbers of medical students to receive proper training. In 1725 George Drummond, newly installed as Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, inaugurated a fund by gifting the council’s shares in a moribund fishery company and encouraged other investors to follow suit. Subscriptions were sought, and in late 1728 the contributors appointed an influential committee to strengthen their cause. Collections were received from parish churches across Scotland and

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twelve Episcopalian congregations within the city. These enabled the committee to take a nineteen-year lease on a house in Robertson’s Close, the alterations being carried out by Alexander McGill with advice on fittings and furnishings from Deacon Wardrop. The Royal College of Physicians offered to provide its members’ services and medicines free of charge in exchange for the right of its students to attend proceedings on payment of 2 guineas annually to help defray running costs; the managers also recruited six surgeons on the same terms. This hospital – ‘the Little House’ – opened on 6 August 1729. Its success in providing care and education encouraged the committee to seek erection of the contributors into a corporation recognised by Royal Charter. This was obtained on 25 August 1736, the hospital thereafter being known as the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. By June 1733 the managers had considered purchasing ground at the head of College Wynd for a new hospital, and had reviewed various plans with the principal contributors and ‘others who had most Skill in Architecture’, presumably McGill and Adam. The College Wynd site was not pursued, but in November 1736 the managers learned that George Watson’s trustees were willing to sell Thomson’s Yards, its purchase being completed in November 1737. Adam’s final designs for a U-plan infirmary containing 216 patients and twelve ‘lunatics’ each in their own bed were produced by 17 March 1738, approved on 20 April and engraved by Richard Cooper for circulation, construction to be phased as funding allowed. The cost of the first phase, the central range’s eastern portion accommodating seventy patients, was estimated by Adam at £1,573 16s 2d. This fell to £1,144 19s 4d as a result of quarrying privileges for stone, the gift of slates from Easdale Quarry, the use of lath and lime plaster in place of deal and the masons’ offer to provide some services gratis. The managers authorised commencement of the first phase and appointed Drummond together with John Monro’s son Alexander, Andrew St Clair representing the physicians and George Cunynghame the surgeons as their Building Committee. A foundation stone was laid on 2 August 1738. Originally the managers intended to fit up a temporary operating theatre, but such was the influx of funds that they began the central pavilion in spring 1739. Its shell was complete when a detailed description of the hospital (under the pseudonym ‘Philasthenes’, and probably written by Adam) was included in A Letter from a Gentleman in Town to his Friend in the Country Relating to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh published on St Andrew’s Day that year.

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Drummond continued to lead the fundraising, assisted by his sister, May Drummond. Contributions came from Scottish expatriates on the continent and in the colonies, and materials and labour were freely given. A second foundation stone for the central range’s western portion was laid on 14 May 1740. The east and west wings were completed after HM Revenue of Excise organised a collection amongst its officers to meet the wages of masons engaged on their construction. Work had thus begun on all parts of the Infirmary when it opened in December 1741. It was completed in 1748, certain subscribers having funded a more sculptural treatment of the central pavilion to signify its status as a medical college, in marked contrast with the austere treatment of the flanking ward blocks. Cooper’s engravings were incorporated into Vitruvius Scoticus as plates 149 and 150 (Figure 24.11). The Infirmary was much the largest of Adam’s public buildings, a four-storey U-plan with its principal range on the south and wings projecting to the east and west: it was 200ft wide and 100ft deep overall.19 The main front facing the court extended across thirteen bays. The ashlar-faced central pavilion – the College element – which was slightly stepped forward, was five bays broad, its three inner bays projecting slightly further still as a tetrastyle centrepiece with

Figure 24.11  The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, principal elevation (1737– 48). Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 150. By kind permission of Althea Dundas-Bekker. Photographer: Nick Haynes.

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Figure 24.12  The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, central pavilion. This photograph shows the high quality of decorative carving. The iron gates were probably also supplied by Adam and can be compared to those at Dalkeith (Figure 18.12). Photographer: Thomas Begbie, 1872. City of Edinburgh Council – Edinburgh Libraries, www.capitalcollections.org.uk (ref 11397).

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a pulvinated entablature. These three bays were channelled at ground floor which contained the main entrance. The first and second floors were set in a giant Ionic order of attached threequarter columns at the inner bays and pilasters at the outer bays. Their windows had moulded architraves, the central three at first floor crowned by segmental and triangular pediments and the outer bays by oval inscription panels above their lintels. The second floor had a round-arched niche for a statue of George II in Roman dress, and swags and drapeau cartouches over the windows on either side.20 Elaborate scrolls above the outer bays, one carved with Scottish thistles and the other with English roses, supported a tall attic above the three central bays. There is no obvious parallel for these in Vitruvius Scoticus or Britannicus; scrolls of similar profile can be seen in the last Gateway in Serlio’s Extraordinary Book but the concept probably derived from continental Baroque church fronts. In Vitruvius Scoticus the attic’s centre bay contained a carved tableau of a patient with surgeon and assistants. A balustrade with urns enclosed the French square-domed roof clasped by chimneystacks on each flank, and its platformed top bore an octagonal cupola with glazed round-arched openings, an ogee domelet and a weathervane. As executed, the attic’s central tableau became a window with a clock face above it.21 This attic was a taller version of those at Rosehall (Vitruvius Scoticus, plates 132 and 134) and Adam’s unbuilt scheme for Airth (plate 65) in having windows set between panelled pilasters, here distinguished by portrait cartouches over the outer windows.22 The flanking ward blocks were simple Scots Georgian in harled rubble with first-floor band-courses. They were each four bays long, but with their end windows squeezed into the angles formed with the centre pavilion and east and west wings; matching the main cornice of the centre in height, they had small windows lighting the attic within the depth of its entablature, their lintels tucked beneath the eaves. The east and west wings had two-bay gable-fronts to Infirmary Street and were five bays deep towards the court, the gables each having an attic oculus: these oculi do not appear in Cooper’s engraving. Other small changes in the executed building included the omission of the windows’ triple keyblocks, and the substitution of pairs of chimneystacks straddling the roof-ridges and gables in place of single stacks. Within the angles of the court small pedimented porches were added subsequent to Paul Sandby’s drawing of 1749. The court itself was walled off from Infirmary Street and

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entered through iron gates hung on monumental rusticated gatepiers approached by semi-circular steps.23 This court, the private grass walks immediately to the rear of the Infirmary for patients’ use and the public gardens to the east and west covered some 2 acres. Inside, the three-bay centrepiece contained an impressive hall 24ft wide and 30ft deep; in 1747 Adam proposed that it be paved in marble, the rest of the ground floor being flagged in stone. A cantilevered great stair rose through ground, first and second floors at the hall’s southern end, its flights of very gentle ascent so patients could be carried up in sedan chairs. At first floor what was to have been a spacious landing was enclosed as the managers’ room, very grand with a coffered ceiling: the overmantel had a bas-relief of Charity, presumably by Thomas Clayton.24 At third floor the whole central area over the stair was occupied by the operating theatre, a 30ft cube well lit by the attic windows, roof-lights and cupola. It had tiered seating and galleries on three sides so 200–300 students could watch as surgical procedures and autopsies were undertaken, and it also served as a lecture room and chapel; the cupola could be used as an astronomical observatory. At ground floor the central range’s ward blocks contained vaulted cells for lunatics who were kept in solitary confinement. At the east end was a kitchen and at the west end a laundry. The east wing’s ground floor contained a surgery, bathroom, and physicians’ room which as first planned was to have been used for meetings of the managers. The west wing contained two nurses’ rooms, four cellars and a mortuary. Both wings contained secondary stairs entered from the porches in the angles. Pulleys were installed so patients could be hoisted to the upper storeys in chairs rather than suffer discomfort while being carried up the steps. Behind the stairs were single-storey outshots, apparently lavatories. The first and second floors contained open-plan wards for general medical patients, with the males’ east and females’ west: the two wards within the central range each contained twenty-four beds whilst those in the wings each contained twelve. The wards within the wings at first floor were reserved for patients of the servant class. Third floor was laid out identically to the first and second, but being closest to the operating theatre – and supposedly benefiting from fresher air and a quieter atmosphere – it was occupied by surgical patients. All wards were seemingly floored with brick arches and unglazed Dutch tiles to assist hygiene and reduce noise; patients were provided with lockers for possessions and medicines. The Gentlemen’s Letter of 1739 had suggested the Infirmary

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should have ‘a cold and hot bagnio &c.’ and in 1748 Alexander Monro proposed that a public bath-house and wash-house should be built, notwithstanding that similar ventures by the Surgeons and Physicians had foundered. Subscriptions enabled James Adam to provide a bath for patients in the east wing; a public bath opened in the west wing in July 1756, equipped with marble bathing-troughs and ‘finished in the neatest manner in all the other parts of its ­furniture’. The bagnio was last recorded in the Infirmary’s accounts for 1836–7. Adam’s Infirmary closed in 1879, David Bryce’s new Infirmary being largely complete. It was demolished in 1884. R. A. Macfie of Dreghorn purchased the stonework of the Infirmary’s central pavilion and re-erected much of it at Redford where the attic can still be seen in the form of a lodge and the three-quarter columns are clustered together as the Covenanters’ Monument.

Edinburgh’s Charity Work-house Edinburgh’s Charity Work-house was promoted by Provost James Colquhoun.25 Its directors and managers reviewed a sketch plan on 2 November 1739, presumably Adam’s as he produced plans approved by the building committee on 19 February 1740. James Runciman prepared a schedule as a basis for quotations, but The Committee did not reckon themselves altogether proper Judges either of Buildings of this nature or of the prices contained in these Estimates. They therefore had applied and taken the advice of several persons on whose knowledge they could very much depend and particularly of Lord Arniston Lord Hope and Baron Clerk.

All of those named were Adam clients. Samuel Neilson, mason, and James Heriot and William McVey, wrights, undertook to build Adam’s main block only, his courtyard wings being reduced to stumps. The site was near the Bedlam, now Forrest Hill. Like the Infirmary, Adam intended the Work-house to be a fourstorey U-plan, but open on the east rather than the north. The principal (west) range had a three-bay pedimented centre with arched windows lighting a double-height first-floor hall, perhaps similar to that proposed for the Infirmary before its embellishment into a college; the flanking bays constituted tenements five windows wide with central stairs towards the back, connected by spinal corridors. As at the Infirmary, these blocks were 30ft wide, but the west front’s

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Figure 24.13  The Charity Work-house, Edinburgh, preliminary scheme engraved by Paul Fourdrinier, 1739 or 1740. NRHE DP305028 © HES.

Figure 24.14  The Charity Work-house, Edinburgh, executed design without courtyard wings, by John Elphinstone, 1753 or earlier. The domed building on the right is George Mackenzie’s Mausoleum (Figure 10.11). NRHE DP305027 © HES.

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overall length – 226ft – was greater, exactly matching the Orphan Hospital’s. Two contemporary engravings show different designs for the Work-house. Paul Fourdrinier’s, in Maitland’s History of Edinburgh (Figure 24.13) which illustrates a completed courtyard must relate to a preliminary scheme of 1739–40 since its centre block differs from what was actually built, and recorded by John Elphinstone no later than 1753 (Figure 24.14). Fourdrinier represents the wings as eight windows wide to the court, suggesting it would have been 150ft deep, rather than 100ft as at the Infirmary. Detail differences between the engravings make the developing relationship with the Infirmary clear. Prominent in Elphinstone’s view but absent in Fourdrinier are paired chimneystacks like the Infirmary’s; in Fourdrinier, the central pavilion has no pedimented doorpiece, there are no segmental pediments over the lesser doorways and there is one oculus (not three) in the main pediment, which as built departed from earlier proposals in being open at its base. The Work-house was mostly demolished after a new poor-house was built at Craiglockhart in 1870. Two bays of the main block and the northern wing-stump survive.

The Surgeons’ Hospital, Edinburgh In 1729 the Incorporation of Surgeons approached the managers of the Edinburgh Infirmary to offer their services on the same basis as those offered by the physicians – namely, free treatment and medicines in exchange for teaching privileges – but were rebuffed, the Infirmary concluding that it only required six surgeons and that, on account of the Little House’s size, it could not provide for as many student surgeons as wished to learn.26 Accordingly the Surgeons began raising funds for their own hospital which would likewise minister to the poor and provide opportunities for students to learn surgery, their site in College Wynd perhaps the very one rejected by the Infirmary. In 1736 they proposed a merger but when their offer was declined in April that year Deacon John Kennedy and eleven other surgeons formed an executive group, the ‘Erectors’, and commissioned designs for a hospital with 2,000 merks available to build it. There is no record of whom they approached but as McGill had died in 1734 it is unlikely to have been anyone other than Adam. As submitted to the Dean of Guild in 1738 the hospital was to have been three storeys and five bays broad with its central three bays

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Figure 24.15  The Surgeons’ Hospital, Edinburgh, Dean of Guild drawings, attributed to William Adam, dated 1738. University of Edinburgh Library, LHB1/68/1/3&5.

slightly projected under a pediment (Figure 24.15).27 It was similar to some contemporary medium-sized country houses,  the closest parallel being Airds in Argyll, also of 1738. Both had frontal stairhalls: Airds’ was circular, while the hospital’s would have been an oval to maximise the floor area of the operating theatre behind it. Similar frontal stairs are found in Adam’s design for Gartmore (Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 83). The operating theatre would have been square-plan, occupying the first, second and attic floors with two tiers of galleries as in other early anatomy theatres. The prospect of two rival hospital projects competing for funds focused the minds of the Infirmary’s managers. They accepted the Surgeons’ offer in July 1738,28 and the new Infirmary’s ­foundation stone was laid immediately thereafter. With the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ resources united, the Infirmary could be built large enough to provide teaching facilities for far more students. Adam’s design for the Infirmary’s operating theatre, much bigger than that

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proposed for the Surgeons’ Hospital, made it possible to have a single bank of tiered seating, minimising the risk of infection from above and ensuring the best possible light.

Conclusions It is worthwhile considering Adam’s public buildings in the context of the two major architectural publications of early Georgian times. Hamilton Parish Church and his first design for Robert Gordon’s represented immediate responses to Gibbs’ Book of Architecture published in 1728. The influence of Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, volume 1 (1715), volume 2 (1717) and volume 3 (1725) is more complex. Adam was not a subscriber to any of them although several of his clients were, but he had volumes 1 and 2 by 1726. He may not have had volume 3 until the reprinting of 1731.29 As we have seen, he made only limited use of Campbell’s designs at Drum and Dundee Town House. The Baroque designs seemingly interested him most – Powis House, volume 1, plate 142, cf. Hopetoun, and Castle Howard, volume 1, plates 69–70 – although at the latter the influence on Duff was much more from the building itself than from Campbell’s plate which does not show the fluting of the pilasters. The origins of his three hospital designs are much less obvious. Such overt Frenchness was nowhere evident in England at that time and but for Adam’s Whig Presbyterianism it might have seemed politically suspect. They could relate to his early travels in the Low Countries and northern France or to the several French folios in his library, but obvious precedents are hard to find. The real mystery is the origin of the Royal Infirmary’s central pavilion which in sheer merit and originality challenged comparison with his best domestic work. Its central pavilion bears remarkable resemblance to that of Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Hôtel-Dieu at Lyons begun in 1741 but in elevation only – not on plan – and its basic design had been finalised by 1737–8 when the plate in Vitruvius Scoticus was engraved. As that plate does not show the paired stacks or gable oculi of the executed building, but includes the triple keyblocks of the wardblock windows which were omitted, there can be no doubt that the plate used to encourage subscriptions and that incorporated in Vitruvius Scoticus were one and the same, the latter having a partly re-engraved title.30 The late changes requested by some subscribers were limited to decorative details not shown in the engraving but present in the building as executed. In short Adam worked out this unprecedented design for himself, responding to his brief.

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25

Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’? Ranald MacInnes

I

n a recent review of Steven Gunn’s revised and re-issued Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend, Hilary Mantel wrote that the book results ‘from work in the archives which will not need to be repeated’.1 It is a curious statement for the celebrated historian to make. History writing is surely a vital mixture of new sources and the revisiting and reinterpretation of the existing. During the 1950s a number of important Scottish archival discoveries were made. Not least of these was the Adam family letters in the Clerk of Penicuik archives which not only brought Robert Adam’s colourful personality to life, but shed considerable light on his working methods, which, paradoxically perhaps, employed very hard work to stimulate his imaginative process. In Adam studies there is now very little new, directly relevant archive material coming to light and we tend, therefore, to see the same sources, indeed the very same quotations, used and reused in support of what has been a very traditional ‘British’ view of Adam’s achievement. Outside the rarefied and, somehow still isolated, world of architectural history, Adam has been represented as less the hard-headed adventurer or the ‘enterprising Scot’ and more the self-indulgent fop who kept his ‘coaches’ and his ‘madams’.2 This is not to say that Robert Adam scholarship has stalled. In fact it has progressed through exhibitions, essays and books, but these studies have come to inhabit the dry, academic world of connoisseurship, focused primarily on identifying and researching the 9,000 drawings left to posterity by the architect and his less vaunted brother, James. The study of Robert Adam’s place in the eighteenth century world of politics and social relations has not significantly been developed beyond John Fleming’s ­pioneering

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publication,3 which places the architect at home with his family in Edinburgh and, importantly, in Rome between 1752 and 1756 on the fringes of the Jacobite court in exile. This aspect of Adam’s life in Rome added a thrilling subtext of espionage and intrigue of a type that was all the rage during the Cold War4 and exploited by the author’s more famous namesake.5 Fleming had, of course, to deal with the existence of the royal court in Rome but at the time he was writing, the quality of Jacobite scholarship was uneven. There was no determined attempt to investigate the architectural consequences of Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism. Some serious-minded architectural historians went as far as to question the necessity of publishing such ‘irrelevant’ and frivolous material. Fleming’s account tended to trivialise the architect’s personal and professional relationships with Jacobites and their interface with the architect was not given any cultural significance. To this day, literature on Adam continues to regard the architect’s connection as little more than amusing and the Stuart court itself as a quaint survivor rather than a living cultural force.6 The profound sympathy that Adam had for the exiled court demonstrates an ongoing cultural loyalty to Scotland along with, predictably, an often-expressed contempt. In preparing this chapter I looked again at original sources and correspondence which I had examined in the 1980s and 90s. I soon found that in the intervening period my perspective had changed – quite considerably in some instances. For some scholars, an archive and its interpretation becomes a matter almost of personal intellectual property but it has been demonstrated time and again that new investigations can bring new perspectives, even if carried out by the same scholar. It can be difficult to return to geographically dispersed papers, but every time we look at a source we arrive with a different set of values. That is because we have changed, of course, but, more important, it is also because society has changed. Like historic architecture itself, which does not, of course, change in any material sense, its interpretation changes within and from generation to generation. Material culture can seem like a fixed entity but, in fact, its shape shifts along with its intellectual framework. It was these ideas that I first explored with Allan Macinnes in the 1990s as part of a wider interdisciplinary initiative which helped bring architectural history up to date with current trends in Scottish history but also saw the material culture of architecture itself play an ever greater part in shaping ideas in the historical mainstream. I was very happy, therefore, to bookend the conference with such a distinguished historian who continues vigorously to challenge the

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old and new orthodoxies of historical analyses and to give architecture its place. Allan Macinnes has famously described the three ‘schools’ of Scottish history: ‘Doom and Gloom’; ‘Kings and Courtiers’; and ‘Scotland International’. The ‘doom and gloom’ tendency, which Allan also jokingly referred to as the ‘Prozac’ school, was still very much to the fore when I began studying Scottish architectural history in the late 1970s. Historic Scotland the place was somehow seen, and occasionally referred to, as a ‘foreign country’, and this notion survived, particularly among architectural historians, into the late 1980s. It is an extreme case, of course, but in 1967 the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had summed it up like this: ‘At the end of the seventeenth century Scotland was a byword for irredeemable poverty, social backwardness and political faction’.7 We have to wonder where it was a byword. This attitude was still prevalent, if not in mainstream historical studies then certainly in architectural history, when I began my studies. It is what Scottish students were taught and it holds some sway to this day. However, as Allan Macinnes,8 Tom Devine9 and others have shown, it may have been partly true at the end of the seventeenth century when Scotland was bearing the cultural and political brunt of wider British historical events, but it was not the end point of a long and inevitable process within Scotland. In architecture the doom and gloom tendency was, predictably perhaps, most obvious in the interpretation of Scottish castles, in the work of Stewart Cruden10 and others who followed him, but it was also present in general eighteenth-century studies. The Scottish castle, with its apparently defensive features, could stand almost as a symbol of Scotland’s ‘turbulence’ and its longing for the peace and civilisation that Union would bring in the symbolic and civilised shape of Classical architecture. Allan Macinnes has also referred to the second type of history: the nobility and the Crown. We could say this was a version of the ‘great man’ theory of history created by Thomas Carlyle, strongly criticised by Herbert Spencer,11 Carlyle and later famously debunked by Karl Marx and others. In Macinnes’s version of this theory, history becomes a kind of historical pageant peopled by important men – and the occasional woman. This approach gives leading roles to the important and powerful people in society based on their desires and political ambitions. The Spencerian sociological approach reverses the theory and makes people the product of culture. In architecture, of course, as in all the ‘refined’ arts, the powerful and the patrons are combined and the effect of this is to concentrate study in a very

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limited area. The ‘great man’ theory was thoroughly debased in the 1960s and late 70s. Thereafter the pendulum began to swing back in the direction of the individual, and that was very much in line with the politics of the 1980s and 90s. When I was a tutor in politics in the mid-1980s I taught students that everything is political – it seemed so at the time – and it was a widely held view which seemed to me to apply to architectural history in a very immediate way. The view has receded to some extent over the intervening period, but two recent books have brought politics firmly back into architectural history. Both of these important books are, on the face of it, and paradoxically perhaps, about conservation. Miles Glendinning’s12 history of conservation, focusing largely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century urbanism, and Keith Emerick’s13 study of the preservation of ancient monuments in the UK and certain British-controlled overseas territories demonstrate the extent to which acts of conservation and preservation mirror political ambition. We already knew that new buildings – prisons, hospitals, barracks and so on – were somehow concrete expressions of society’s aims and anxieties, but now we have catalogued what we had long suspected – that conservation has been an avowedly political project. In fact, I came initially to architectural history through one of the most remarkable new buildings ever seen in Scotland – the Bridewell or Calton Gaol in Edinburgh.14 This was an astonishing, unhappy marriage of politics and architecture: a ‘rational’, utilitarian nightmare of constant surveillance and night-time illumination ­– the exact opposite of the nobility and the Crown thesis. Finally, in Allan Macinnes’s group of historical schools there is ‘Scotland International’ – in architectural history this was enthusiastically taken up by Charles McKean15 and to a lesser extent by Aonghus MacKechnie and Miles Glendinning and me in the 1990s, if I may speak for my colleagues.16 Our book is transparently political, but so is the ‘Kings and Courtiers’ method. In the international view, Scotland is connected in a political union with England but retains and develops its own architecture in response – sometimes to England, but also in a culturally dynamic way to Europe and the rest of the world. The key is continuity and survival. In thinking about this, we should not forget the impact of Beveridge and Turnbull17 in making the claim for a re-assessment of Scottish cultural history in its own right and on its own terms. Robert Adam plays a key part in all of this. Is he Scottish or British? What did these labels mean in his lifetime? Often, in assessments of Adam’s work Scotland becomes what is usually referred

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Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’?   521

to as a ‘background’. I have never been sure of what this means. Unlike Sir William Chambers who was keen to remind everyone of his Swedish birth, Adam’s Scottishness was never in the background unless he decided to put it there! Many people interested in Robert Adam will recognise the source of the question which gives this essay its title: ‘Was Scotland a Narrow Place?’ It comes from one of the most repeated quotations in architectural history. The source is a letter from Robert Adam who was then in Rome – written home to his sister Janet – where he describes Scotland as a ‘narrow place’. A great deal has been made of this remark. In the same letter Adam goes on: I often think what a pity it is that such a genius should be thrown away upon Scotland where scarce will ever happen an opportunity of putting one noble thought in execution. It would be a more extensive scheme to settle a family in England and let the Adams be the sovereign architects of the United Kingdoms.18

We should note the plural in the last word there. Adam’s plan was not to leave Scotland but to add England – in the spirit of the new polity of Britain – to the firm’s portfolio. His scheme, as he said, was to inhabit ‘a more honourable scene, I mean an English life’.19 But how did he view his previous attitudes to architecture? ‘I find my ideas of architecture’, he wrote, ‘are a good deal enlarged and my principles of the grand more fixed than they were before.’20 It is this mixture of hard-headedness and artistic imagination with which modern critics have historically had difficulty. If one letter had to stand for Adam’s reputation this would be it. But of course this is a letter to a beloved sister. He did not imagine that it would be published and that his public reputation might rest on its contents. There is, of course, another ‘cheerful and frolicsome’21 side of Adam that was rarely seen in public. ‘A man will always be merriest’, he confided to his mother, ‘speaking his native language and cracking jokes in his ain Mither tongue’. Adam signs the letter, ironically, ‘My dearest Mother’s British boy’.22 In his native language, though, it has to be said that Adam could be very cruel by today’s standards. He could express strong antiEnglish sentiments that we would find distasteful today. His sister, Peggy, rebuked him strongly for ‘despising the English nation’.23 His client base was disproportionately Scottish and, according to his friend David Garrick, his workmen were ‘all Scotch’. More important, he initiated a powerful revival of Scottish historic architecture

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along with a new British architecture full of references to Scotland. He was perceived and presented himself as a Scot all through the anti-Bute years of the 1760s. Finally, as is often remarked, the pall bearers at his funeral in Westminster Abbey were all Scots, with one exception. However, although described by Walpole as a ‘perfervid Scot’24 at a time when Scottish patriotism could equate with Jacobitism, Adam became an establishment figure who knew how to cringe when circumstances required. In presenting himself, he saw the value, as he put it himself, of ‘a good lie, well-timed’.25 At the same time, however, Adam was not ‘Scoto-centric’: he had an international outlook, especially as he had lived so happily in Rome, as he noted tellingly, ‘unmolested by Kirk or state’.26 Adam’s career is still often wrongly characterised as beginning on his return from Italy in 1758, by which time he had been in practice with his brother John for twelve years and had already designed, among many other buildings, Dumfries House and much of Hopetoun House. These were schemes he kept up with by letter from overseas. This is what makes his ‘narrow place’ judgement so puzzling. The fact that he ‘dreaded’27 returning to Scotland from Rome suggests something more significant than a lack of opportunity. A notable Adam scholar wrote in 2003 that ‘Adam is the leading figure in the creation of British neo-Classicism, but it is a remarkable fact that the country which nurtured his extraordinary ambition was, in his own words, “but a narrow place”’. This is, however, literally to take Adam’s word for it. In the Scotland of 1754 Adam could not have encountered a single monumental column; he would have known no domed interior, nor any building that was distinguished by the addition of a complete temple front – with the exception of James Smith’s Canongate Church in Edinburgh, where the portico has the scale of a garden building and the only colonnades he could have seen were the neo-Palladian quadrants added by his father to the front of Hopetoun House.28

This is, perhaps, going a little too far when we think not only of the buildings existing in Adam’s time, such as the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Dalkeith and Hamilton Palace, but also of the sheer scale of building in Edinburgh. In addition, of course, Adam had access to one of the most extensive architectural libraries in the country.29 The scope and complexity of work in which Adam was involved was on an industrial scale. It laid the basis for a confidence in grand planning seen in his proposal for rebuilding Lisbon after the

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Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’?   523

earthquake of 1756.30 Adam was also a visionary town planner who attempted opportunistically to create a unified, socially stratified vision in Edinburgh and to some extent in Glasgow with a series of linked buildings. The South Bridge ‘megastructural’ bridge scheme in Edinburgh is one of the most remarkable urban interventions of eighteenth-century Europe.31 Monumentality and grandness of scale was – far from being learned – in Adam’s blood. His Roman experience confirmed his devotion to monumentality and grandeur but it did not create it. Adam’s first major biographer understood the transitional nature of the architect’s life and times, noting that ‘Robert Adam came at the ebb and flow between the lapsing classic and the rising romantic movements’.32 Almost everything about the architect, and much about the second half of later eighteenth-century society, contained the contradictions we expect to see within a society in transition. Adam’s stylistic reaction – a mixture of past, present and eclecticism – was perhaps most likely to emerge from a country and a culture that had been thrown into violent transition by conflict. The middle years of Adam’s career, when he succeeded spectacularly, if not immediately, in England, during the 1760s and 70s, continue almost inevitably to be the focus of study. However, Adam had been thoroughly immersed in Scottish architectural culture before he set up shop in London in 1758. He had worked on the famous Proposals33 document for Edinburgh Town Council which had been set in train, not by Whig improvers, but by the future James VII/II as Duke of Albany when in Edinburgh in the 1680s. Adam’s grandiose reaction to the Proposals anticipated his later work in the area of town planning and city improvement. As he moved forward, however, Adam also looked back. He led the way in the architectural part of the eighteenth century’s polite rediscovery of the Scottish ‘vernacular’. While presenting the future for Classicism, Adam simultaneously, like other Scottish artists and writers, investigated Scotland’s architectural past through a new, proto-Romantic lens, creating the conditions for the breakthrough of the castle style, referred to as such by Adam himself. The castle as a positive symbol of old Scotland was put under review by Adam and recast as ultra-modern. It was highly novel and intended mainly for country houses in Scotland,34 but it was also deemed suitable for Edinburgh’s astonishing panopticon jail, the Bridewell (1791), erected prominently on Calton Hill under the guidance of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.35 The style was also deemed appropriate not just for a prison but also for the Baronial dream of Culzean Castle36 and even for James ‘Ossian’

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MacPherson’s house on Putney Common.37 More remarkable yet is Adam’s design for a royal palace at Kew,38 again in the Scottish castle style. Adam’s initial response to the Scottish landscape movement had been expressed through an outpouring of paintings and drawings in which fantasy castles were featured in wild and mountainous settings evoking Scotland.39 As early as 1744, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he had drawn a convincing Scottish tower house, possibly Clackmannan Tower,40 with the added feature of a lofty ‘Roslin’ (Rosslyn) style bridge of a type that he was continually to exploit. Most of the drawings were not site-specific, however. They were at first depicted in a generalised ‘Norman’ style of architecture, some with round towers, but determinedly not ‘Gothic’ in any accepted sense.41 Through Adam’s drawings and a study of the buildings themselves, his castles established themselves as a uniquely Scottish idea, a revived modern Romantic residence. Much later, in 1791, he exhibited an extraordinarily early antiquarian concern with authenticity at Cluny Castle, Aberdeenshire where he proposed a new vertical jamb, or wing, in keeping with the existing tower house.42 Adam’s story has tended to mesh with a Whig version of history in which all that is ‘progressive’ is bound up with the Protestant Hanoverian ascendancy. But there is very little that is Presbyterian or Whiggish about Adam. Recent research has suggested that the Presbyterian tended to be more home based where the Jacobite tendency was universal and continental, linking with what we heard described as the Scottish international, a globalising imperative.43 We are, perhaps, in danger of interpreting an impatience with the ‘narrowness’ of Scotland as an attachment to Britishness rather than its occasional cultural ally, cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, Adam wrote on this theme to his sister in very damning terms: The fickleness of the Scotch and particularly of the Edinburghers is notorious to all that have eyes. No player, no singer, no preacher, no Architect, tho’ a Lacey, a Storer, a Whitefield or an Adams will please them above a season. Their great heat is changed to a shivering coldness.

There is what he called their ‘furious affection to disgust’. And it gets worse: This opinion of the Scotch in general I have and this it was alone made me venture a new life amongst people more immersed in business where you are not exposed to such particular censure and where everything that pleases, will please more as no such mighty matters are expected.

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The Scotch expected, he writes, ‘a St Peter’s Church’, as he put it ‘for the price of a simple house’.44 All of this is a version of the national malady often expressed as ‘I kent his faither’ which in Adam’s case everyone did. He even puts words in the mouth of his maternal uncle Archibald Robertson – ‘Bauldy’ – who says, ‘Hi, Hi, Hi. Is that all he’s learned abroad? I think I’ve just seen as good . . . and better too built by our Archie Handyside that was ne’er out of Fisheraw a the Days of his life’. Then, a killer comment: ‘Thus are we great people judged by the undistinguishing scum of people, sans goute et sans charite’.45 If Scotland was a narrow place, what was the country’s position in the new settlement? Was Adam’s a cultural or an economic assessment? I am suggesting that part of Adam’s achievement relates to the attempted configuration of a new place for Scotland as a surviving national culture within the new regime. Adam sees the new Britain not as the end of an ‘auld sang’ but the beginning of a new harmony of complementary cultures. It is also quite clear, though, that his English colleagues didn’t share this view. Neo-Classicism was not purely an artistic movement. Adam’s revival of the grandeur of Rome was also to be political. His creation of a new, individualistic version of Classicism chimed with his vision of a publicly funded, monumental architecture of state. As an architect and thinker, Adam was both influenced by and contributed to his own ‘revolution’ in taste, but also to a revolution in the organisation of society. During the later stages of Adam’s career, the growing wealth and urbanbased diversity of society began to undermine the previous hierarchical patronage relationships, and this was crucial for Adam’s later development. He was entirely caught up with the dynamism of late eighteenth-century urban expansion. As a businessman, contractor and developer he proved himself capable of responding to the radical changes that were taking place, if not of making the fortune he so earnestly sought. The architect in society was set a new societal task of visionary. For Adam, the study of the meaning of ‘antiquity’ and its application to architecture was changing. Antiquity no longer represented a set of rules, to be ‘rediscovered’ and followed towards a morally uplifting purpose. In some ways the reverse was now true. Antiquity was as much an idea, a feeling, even, or a limitless field of imagination, as much as it was a source of architectural authority. This was unquestionably part of an international tendency towards aesthetic individualism: the idea that it was the effect of architecture on the individual created by looking at a picturesque composition rather than the composition itself that was important. This

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concept was of course deeply influenced by literary ideas. Adam’s personal idea of the ‘picturesque’ involved the conscious evocation of contrasts between order and chaos: the interface of the artfully ‘savage’ or natural with the ordered and architectural. Robert wrote home to his family in 1756 that he found Rome was ‘horribly antique and pleasing. This is the most intoxicating Country in the world, for a pictoresque Hero’.46 It is Adam’s emotional response to the scene which is primarily being described. Where earlier architects had sought eternal rules of architecture in Roman remains, Adam delighted in the picturesque decline and decay of Antiquity. In his very first letter to his mother from Rome in 1755 he praised above all the Pantheon for its ‘Greatness, and Simplicity of Parts’, which ‘stamps upon you the Solemn, the Grave and Majestick’. He contrasted these qualities with the ‘gaity, or Frolick’ of ‘our modern buildings’. The single modern example worthy of Adam’s praise was the massive, monumental church of St Peter’s. Adam’s notion of a high-spending, ‘magnificent’ state of a type described in the introduction to the Spalatro volume aligns more closely with a continental form of government and with the majesty and grandeur of state which that implied. Typically, Adam was deeply excited by the architectural opportunities presented by what he perceived as a new, ‘British’ order. He and his brother, James, went as far as to propose a ‘Britannic Order’ of architecture, entwining Scottish and English iconographical details within a Classical framework, designed as a British national emblem. The order, designed for the proposed Houses of Parliament, celebrated the Union of Scotland and England in a very Scottish manner. In writing about the order, James Adam dealt with the then current issue of appropriateness – the orders of architecture suitable for categories of use – through imagining the building, ‘two thousand years hence’, lying in ruins yet still readable in terms of function through its surviving architecture. There would be no risk, in his view, that it be suspected to be raised by any other people but the British, nor at any period before the Union, as I have taken care that North Britain shall bear its own share in all decorations – so that I will venture to say that posterity would even guess at the architect’s being from beyond the Tweed.47

James Adam was right that English architects would not have seen the necessity to make such grand cultural statements about the position of post-Union Scotland and England. Scots, on the other

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Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’?   527

hand, as one authority has commented, ‘needed more than ever to convince their fellow Britons that the Union had been a treaty between sovereign equals’.48 Similarly, Scottish culture deserved equal treatment. Where better to present this than the new British Parliament? In fact, the Adams’ Britannic Order was rarely used in practice and did not catch on. Adam seems to have deemed it appropriate for certain other, especially British, works such as a proposed (unbuilt) screen wall to the forecourt of Carlton House, Pall Mall for the Prince of Wales (1785–6), and in one other significant example the new order was liberally applied. This was Cumberland House, a large existing town house set back from Pall Mall and redesigned in the 1780s by Adam for Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn (1745–90). The house was given a very British theme and embellished with pavilions topped with a lion and a unicorn respectively and lavishly decorated internally with the Thistle and the Rose and Lion and Unicorn motifs. This was not, however, a celebration of the victor of Culloden. On the death in 1765 of the earlier Cumberland creation, the commander-in-chief of the Hanoverian forces during the ’45, Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland, an unsuccessful attempt had been made to raise a subscription to erect a memorial in his memory. Berkeley Square in central London had been identified as the preferred location. However, Horace Walpole reported that ‘Adam, a Scotch architect, defeated the project; from the hatred his nation bore to their conqueror.’ Adam was at once both enthusiastically British and determinedly Scottish. His remarkable dedicatory message to King George III in his volume Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia49 demanded an ‘Augustan’ age for the new Britain with appropriate celebratory public monuments. However, research has demonstrated the continuation of ‘Augustan’ rhetoric as potentially also Jacobite in sentiment. The Spalatro volume also includes, for the first time, before and after views of the Emperor Diocletian’s palace, the ruined complex graphically and dramatically restored by Adam. The imagery of restoration is explicit. It is clear that ‘Britain’ as a political term had a new meaning by the 1750s. The term had been invested with an enhanced significance in relation to the new settlement. William Kent’s ‘Temple of British Worthies’ at Stowe (1734), for example, an exedra of sculptured busts, memorialised sixteen English cultural and political heroes from Shakespeare to Elizabeth I and John Locke and included the architect Inigo Jones, a key figure in the creation of what was hoped would become a British architecture. There was, as yet, no

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Figure 25.1  Robert Adam’s inscription above the entrance to Old College. University of Edinburgh.

place for Scottish-British heroes within this context. It is arguable that Robert Adam saw himself filling that cultural void. In Robert Adam’s writings there is a playful but strong sense that he wanted to invest the idea of ‘Britain’ with a new meaning, part of a new British cultural project which has, arguably, never been completed. Similarly with Adam’s architecture, the roots of the cultural assertion of Scottishness within and through the British national project in the nineteenth century, the rise of Scottish Romanticism, can clearly be identified. Historic architecture was linked with place: it could not be otherwise and it could not, unlike the national origin histories, be dismissed as myth-making. We see in Adam a strong desire to give Scottish culture a place in the new order. He was certainly aware of the alternative. Writing to dissuade his older brother, John, from removing his younger son from Eton College to Edinburgh University, he thought that the boy should stay where he was ‘if he is to be a John Bull’.50 Robert Adam’s alternative to John Bull was

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Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’?   529

‘British Bob’, a player in a new settlement which would symbiotically embrace and express both cultures. Finally, of course, Adam returned to Scotland and designed no fewer than eight public buildings in the last few years of his life: the beautiful, sophisticated stone architecture of the Glasgow Infirmary, the Assembly Rooms, the Bridewell on Calton Hill. These are often described as the ‘late’ years in Adam’s practice but we should think of the great architects, artists and writers who have produced their best work last and at the height of their powers. In Adam’s case, above them all is Edinburgh University: a superb, beautifully composed and constructed setpiece that celebrates Scottish monumentality and urbanity. And if we look at the monumental inscription of that building perhaps we see Adam’s intention. There are two point sizes in the massive panel in the triumphal arch of the building’s entrance: the larger is in the top line and in the bottom line – the inscription to George III is in the middle, reduced to the status of a ‘most munificent Prince’ and sharing the space with Lord Provost Thomas Elder and with Adam’s cousin, the university’s principal, William Robertson. The top line is reserved for James VI King of Scots and the bottom line for ‘Architecto Roberto Adam’.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Slezer, J., Theatrum Scotiae (London: John Leake, 1693), preface. 2. Cameron, J. K., ‘Some Continental Visitors to Scotland in the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries’, in T. C. Smout (ed.), Scotland and Europe 1200–1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), p. 55. 3. Its total disappearance suggests it was used as a quarry. Its ragged junction with the palace was tidied up probably in the 1820s when Holyroodhouse was upgraded both for, and following, the 1822 royal visit. 4. Stewart, M., The Architectural, Landscape and Constitutional Plans of the Earl of Mar, 1700–32 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016). 5. The most detailed enumeration of Scots in Europe is that concerning Denmark; see Riis, T., Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot: ScottishDanish Relations c. 1450–1707 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988). While most historians regard the interchange as generally cordial, there is a fifteenth-century French saying: ‘Rats, lice, and Scotsmen: you find them the whole world over’ (Simpson, G. G. (ed.), The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), p. vii.). 6. In London, Inigo Jones was involved with the pre-fabricated elements of James VI/I’s Chapel Royal in 1616–17. 7. Simpson, W. D., The Castle of Bergen and the Bishop’s Palace at Kirkwall (Edinburgh: University of Aberdeen, 1961), p. 57. 8. This connection with sixteenth-century Cumbrian houses was first noted by David Adams. 9. Nelson, L. P., Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2016), p. 143.

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Notes to Introduction   531

10. Glendinning, M. and MacKechnie, A., Scotch Baronial: Architecture and National Identity in Scotland (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 11. Dakin, A. et al. (eds), Scotland’s Castle Culture (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011), pp. xx–xxvi. 12. Hume Brown, P. (ed.), Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891), p. 47. 13. For example, in 1850 W. H. Playfair wrote of his chapel within Donaldson’s Hospital as being ‘like a Baronial Hall fit to receive Henry VIIIth, Anna Bullen [Boleyn] and [Cardinal] Wolsey’ (Walker, D., ‘The Donaldson’s Hospital Competition and the Palace of Westminster’, Architectural History 27 (1984), p. 496). 14. Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 176. 15. Gifford, J., William Adam, 1689–1748: A Life and Times of Scotland’s Universal Architect (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989). 16. Cameron, ‘Some Continental Visitors to Scotland’ (see note I.2).

Chapter 1: The Shaping of Early Modern Scotland















1. Pincus, S., ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English  Commonwealth’, American Historical Review 103 (1998), pp. 705–36. 2. The building’s sophisticated emblematic interior decoration is discussed in Bath, M., Emblems in Scotland: Motifs and Meanings (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018), p. 212ff. 3. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Making the Plantations British, 1603–38’, in S. G. Ellis and R. Esser (eds), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500– 1850 (Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2006), pp. 95–125. 4. Whyte, I., ‘Poverty or Prosperity: Rural Society in Lowland Scotland in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Scottish Economic & Social History 18 (1998), pp. 19–31. 5. Glendinning, M., MacInnes, R. and MacKechnie, A., A History of Scottish Architecture: from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Edinburgh: EUP, 1996), pp. 59–68. 6. Ibid., pp. 75–90. MacKechnie, A., ‘The Earl of Perth’s Chapel of 1688 at Drummond Castle and the Roman Catholic Architecture of James VII’, Architectural Heritage 25 (2014), pp. 107–31. 7. McIntyre, N., ‘Saints and Subverters: The Later Covenanters in Scotland, c. 1648–1682’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Strathclyde, 2016). 8. Watt, D., The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2007), pp. 219–42. Cullen, K. J.,

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532   Notes to Chapter 1

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

Famine in Scotland: the Ill Years of the 1690s (Edinburgh: EUP, 2010), pp. 123–56. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Queen Anne and the Making of the United Kingdom’, Swift Studies 30 (2015), pp. 120–38. Smout, T. C., Scottish Trade on the Eve of Union, 1660–1707 (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), pp. 244–56. Whatley, C. A., The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007), pp. 157–202. Macinnes, A. I., Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 277–309. Ibid. pp. 314–36. Whatley, The Scots and the Union (see note 1.10), pp. 323–34. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Jacobitism in Scotland, an Episodic Cause or National Movement’, SHR 86 (2007), pp. 225–52. Whatley, C. A., Scottish Society 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism Towards Industrialisation (Manchester: MUP, 2000), pp. 171, 194–7. Checkland, S. G., Scottish Banking: A History, 1695–1973 (Glasgow & London: Collins, 1975), pp. 58–71. Devine, T. M., The Tobacco Lords (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1975), pp. 55–71. Nisbett, S. M., ‘Clearing the Smokescreen of Early Scottish Mercantile Ventures: From Leeward Sugar Plantations to Scottish Country Estates’, in A. I. Macinnes and D. J. Hamilton (eds), Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire, 1680–1820 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), pp. 109–22. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Union, Empire and Global Adventuring with a Jacobite Twist, 1707–53’, in Macinnes and Hamilton, Jacobitism, Enlightenment and Empire (see note 1.15), pp. 123–40. Macinnes, A. I., ‘A’ Ghaidhealtachd and the Jacobites’, in David Forsyth (ed.), Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (Edinburgh: National Museum of Scotland, 2017), pp. 161–77. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Applied Enlightenment: its Scottish Limitations in the Eighteenth Century’, in J.-F. Dunyach and A. Thomson (eds), The Enlightenment in Scotland: National and International Perspectives (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2015), pp. 21–58. Lockhart, D. G. (ed.), Scottish Planned Villages (Edinburgh: SHS, 2012), pp. 1–53. Harris, B. and McKean, C., The Scottish Towns in the Age of Enlightenment, 1740–1820 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2014), pp. 27–45.

Chapter 2: The Paired Columned Entrance of Holyroodhouse

1. On Bruce and Mylne, see Colvin, Dictionary (2008), pp. 175–9 and 719–20 respectively. On Holyrood, see MacKechnie, A., ‘Birth-

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

stool of Scottish Romanticism? Holyrood and Sir William Bruce, Surveyor-General and Overseer of the King’s Buildings in Scotland’, Architectural Heritage 23 (2012), pp. 133–62. Harris, E. assisted by N. Savage, British Architectural Books and Writers, 1556–1785 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), p. 196. MacKechnie, A., ‘Evidence of a Post-1603 Court Architecture in Scotland?’, Architectural History 31 (1988), p. 101. Rowan, A., ‘George Heriot’s Hospital, Edinburgh’, Country Life (March 1975), p. 556. Gifford, J. and Walker, F. A., Stirling and Central Scotland (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 2002), p. 722. On John Mylne, see Colvin, Dictionary (2008), pp. 717–18. See Campbell, I., ‘Crown Steeples and Crowns Imperial’, in L. Golden (ed.), Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art History: an Album Amicorum in his Honour (Oxford: BAR International Series 996, 2001), pp. 25–34. On the Holyrood finials, see Mason, R., ‘This Realm of Scotland is an Empire? Imperial Ideas and Iconography in Early Renaissance Scotland’, in B. Crawford (ed.), Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1999), p. 84, fig. 4.7. Fagiolo, M., ‘S. Ivo “Domus Sapientiae”’, in M. Fagiolo et al., Roma Barocca: I protagonisti, gli spazi urbani, I grandi temi (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2013), pp. 249–65. Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, pers. comm., 25 November 2015. Vlaardingerbroek, P., Het Paleis op de Dam opmaak laatste: Geschiedenis van het Stadhuis an Amsterdam (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 2011), pp. 83–5. Heydenreich, L. H., revised by P. Davies, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1500 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1996), p. 89. Lotz, W., revised by D. Howard, Architecture in Italy, 1500–1600 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1995), pp. 22–3, 100. Campbell, I., ‘The New St Peter’s: Basilica or Temple’, Oxford Art Journal 4(1) (1981), pp. 3–8. Pauwels, Y., ‘Fêtes, massacres et colonnes: Antoine Caron et l’architecture de son temps’, Revue de l’art 188 (2015), pp. 33–9. Corboz, A., ‘Il Louvre come palazzo di Salomone’, in G. Spagnesi and M. Fagiolo (eds), Gian Lorenzo Bernini architetto e l’architettura europea (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1983–4), vol. 2, p. 589. Marcello Fagiolo has also suggested another layer of meaning to the paired columns of the Louvre – that of Louis XIV as the grandson of Henry IV of Navarre, reputedly descended from Hercules: see Vivanti, C., ‘Henry IV, the Gallic Hercules’, Journal of the Warburg

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534   Notes to Chapter 2

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), pp. 176–97. For the overlap between the Pillars of Hercules and Solomonic columns, see Fagiolo, M., ‘Un nuova introduzione ai segreti dell’ordine salomonico’, in S. Tuzi, Le Colonne e il Tempio di Salomone (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2002), pp.  xxx–xxxiv. On the Stirling chapel, see Campbell, I. and MacKechnie, A., ‘The “Great Temple of Solomon” at Stirling Castle’, Architectural History 54 (2011), pp. 91–118. Corboz, ‘Il Louvre’ (see note 2.12), p. 568, observes that from the High Middle Ages, the distinction between Solomon’s palace and temple are often blurred, so that they are best treated as a single source of architectural ideas. Howard, D., Scottish Architecture: Reformation to Restoration, 1560–1660 (Edinburgh: EUP, 1995), pp. 31–2. Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, trans. V. Hart and P. Hicks (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1996), pp. 216–19. Günther, H., ‘Die Salomonische Säulenordnung. Eine unkonventionelle Erfindung und ihre historischen Umstände’, RIHA Journal 0015 (12 January 2011), figs 3 and 4. Du Cerceau illustrates two arches using barley-sugar Solomonic columns but in one case the paired columns stand on separate pedestals, and in the other the outer columns are set behind the inner columns flanking the arch (ibid., figs 6 and 7). Howard, Scottish Architecture (see note 2.14), p. 32. Campbell and MacKechnie, ‘Great Temple of Solomon’ (see note 2.13), fig. 14. For the illustrations, see Kircher, A., Oedipvs Aegytiacvs: hoc est vniuersalis hieroglyphicæ veterum doctrinæ temporum iniuria abolitæ instavratio . . . (Rome, 1652–4), vol. 2, p. 101. Prado, J. de and Villalpando, J. B., In Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus urbis, ас templi Hierosolymitani (Rome, 1595–1605), vol. 2, part ii, p. 245. I am very grateful to Professor Max Küchler of Fribourg for confirming that there is no earlier reference to the coins in printed sources (pers. comm., 21 October 2015). Villalpando reports that one coin was in the collection of Federico Contarini (1538–1613) and the other had once been in the collection of Giovanni Grimani (1506–93). His failure to illustrate them suggests he had not seen them himself. Bellini, J., Book of Drawings, fol. 35, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Fortini Brown, P., ‘The Antiquarianism of Jacopo Bellini’, Artibus et Historiae 13(26) (1992), p. 74, fig. 12. Peters, J. S. (ed.), German Masters of the Sixteenth Century. Jost Amman: Intaglio Prints and Woodcuts (The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 20) (New York: Abaris Books, 1985), part 1, p. 284, n. 1.71 (365). Ibid., part 2, p. 776, n. 12.67 (374).

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Notes to Chapter 2   535

22. Ibid., p. 789, n. 12.93 (374). 23. Binotto, M., ‘Il salone dei Cesari’, in G. Beltramini (ed.), Guida a palazzo Barbaran da Porto (Vicenza: Centro internazionale di studi di architettura Andrea Palladio, c. 2000), pp. 53–5. 24. Fagiolo, M., ‘Borromini in Laterano: il “Nuovo Tempio” per il concilio universale’, L’arte 13 (1971), pp. 4–44. 25. Ibid., pp. 6–11. 26. Ibid., p. 19, fig. 16. It is worth pointing out that the lantern of Borromini’s S. Ivo is supported on paired columns: Fagiolo, ‘S. Ivo “Domus Sapientiae”’ (see note 2.7), fig. 1. 27. Wittkower, R., Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 382–3. 28. Tuzi, Le Colonne e il Tempio di Salomone (see note 2.13). 29. De l’Orme, P., Le premier tome de l’architecture (Paris, 1567), fol. 4v for the Foreword and fols 233r–233v for the text and woodcut of a paired column arch, its columns sharing single pedestals. See also Galletti, S., ‘Philibert Delorme’s Divine Proportions and the Composition of the Premier Tome de l’Architecture’, Architectural Histories 2(1) (2014), pp. 1–11. 30. Campbell and MacKechnie, ‘Great Temple of Solomon’ (see note 2.13), pp. 110–11. 31. MacKechnie, A., ‘James VI’s Architects and their Architecture’, in J. Goodacre and M. Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), p. 165, fig. 26. Fagiolo points out that the Lateran Basilica is dedicated to SS. John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, who are also the joint patrons of Freemasonry; see the essay by Fagiolo, M., ‘La Cattedrale di Roma come nuovo Tempio e Gerusalemme celeste’, in his Architettura e Massoneria: l’esoterismo della costruzione (Rome: Gangemi editore, 2006), pp. 158–9. The bibliography in this remarkable book lists around thirty other pioneering articles by Fagiolo from 1963 on exploring architecture and Solomonic/masonic lore. 32. Anderson, J., The New Book of Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons (London, 1738), p. 104. In the first version of the book, The Constitutions of the FreeMasons . . . (London, 1723), p. 41, though Bruce is mentioned as ‘Master of the Royal Works in Scotland’, he is not explicitly said to be a Freemason. Bruce does not appear in any extant list of Scottish masons as recorded in Stevenson, D., The First Freemasons: Scotland’s Early Lodges and Their Members (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). The same passage also asserts that Bruce designed the building in Whitehall which housed the Secretaries of State for Scotland, but,

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536   Notes to Chapter 2

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

according to the evidence cited in the Survey of London, the building was designed and erected by Wren. This is a matter which I hope to investigate further another time. Howard, D., ‘Mylne, Robert (1633–1710)’, ODNB. Du Bartas, G. de Salluste, seigneur, The Divine Weeks and Works, trans. J. Sylvester, ed. S. Snyder (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), vol. I, pp. 467–88 (II week, II day, 4th part, ‘The Columnes’). On the reception of the Semaines, see Auger, P., ‘The Semaines’ Dissemination in England and Scotland until 1641’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012), pp. 625–40. Auger, P., ‘Du Bartas’ visit to England and Scotland in 1587’, Notes and Queries 59(4) (2012), pp. 505–8. Banderier, G., ‘La Correspondance de Du Bartas’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 68(1) (2006), p. 122. Du Bartas, Divine Weeks (see note 2.34), vol. 2, pp. 663–702 (II week, IV Day, 2nd part, ‘The Magnificence’). Schrenk, G., ‘Le temple de Salomon dans La Magnificence de Du Bartas: le chant de la pierre’, Travaux de littérature 12 (1999), pp. 261–74. Corboz, ‘Il Louvre’ (see note 2.12), p. 568. Corboz, A., ‘L’Immagine di Venezia del Cinquecento’, in L. Puppi (ed.), Architettura e utopia nella Venezia del Cinquecento (Milan: Electa, 1980), pp. 63–8. Vlaardingerbroek, Het Paleis (see note 2.9), pp. 72–8. Vlaardingerbroek (p. 129) cites that some of the stone for Amsterdam Town Hall is reputed to have been supplied from quarries in Fife by Alexander Bruce, 2nd Earl of Kincardine. Bruce was not only a founder member of the Royal Society but also a Freemason (Stevenson, D., The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590–1710 (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 171–7). It is also worth pointing out that Bruce’s friend, Sir Robert Moray, fellow founder of the Royal Society and Freemason, who had been in French military service during the 1630s and 1640s, was admitted to membership of Maastricht’s guild of stonemasons in 1659, and hence ideas about Solomon and architecture may have been flowing between Scotland and France and Holland in the midseventeenth century: Allan, D., ‘Moray, Sir Robert (1608/9?–1673)’, ODNB. See Campbell and MacKechnie, ‘Great Temple of Solomon’ (see note 2.13), pp. 109–10, and Campbell, I., ‘The “Solomonic Window” in Renaissance Scotland and at Large’, in J. Masheck (ed.), Mostly Modern: Essays in Art and Architecture (Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press, 2015), pp. 66–74. For James’s brother-in-law as Solomon, see Roding, J., ‘King Solomon and the Imperial Paradigm of Christian IV’, in M. Andersoen, B. Bøggild Johannsen and H. Johannsen (eds),

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Notes to Chapter 2   537

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

Reframing the Danish Renaissance: Problems and Prospects in a European Perspective (Copenhagen: University Press Of Southern Denmark, 2011), pp. 234–42. The entrance to the chapel at Kronborg (1577–82/88) has statues of David and Solomon between the pairs of flanking columns: Johannsen, H., ‘The Protestant Palace Chapel’, in M. Andersen, E. Nyborg and M. Vedso (eds), Masters, Meanings and Models: Studies in the Art and Architecture of the Renaissance in Denmark; Essays Published in Honour of Hugo Johannsen (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2010), p. 44. Johannsen has also suggested that the chapel at Frederiksborg, which has alternating paired and single columns in its interior, has some Solomonic symbolism: Johannsen, H., ‘The Saxon Connection. On the Architectural Genesis of Christian IV’s Palace Chapel (1606–17) at Frederiksborg Castle’, in Masters, Meanings and Models, pp. 71–88, at 79–80. I have suggested elsewhere that both Kronborg and Frederiksborg were influenced by Linlithgow Palace: Campbell, I., ‘Linlithgow “Princely Palace” and its Influence in Europe’, Architectural Heritage 5 (1994), pp. 9–10. Harrison, S., The Arch’s of Triumph Erected in Honor of the High and Mighty Prince. Iames. The First of that Name . . . (London, 1604), Plate 7. On the book and Harrison, see Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2), pp. 229–31. On the entry and its arches, see Stevenson, C., ‘Occasional Architecture in SeventeenthCentury London’, Architectural History 49 (2006), pp. 39–46. Harrison, Arch’s of Triumph (see note 2.40), sig. I. Janus’ principal temple in Rome was intimately connected with peace, its doors only being closed when Rome was not at war. Ibid., sig. 1. Ibid., sig. Ir. Sebastiano Serlio (see note 2.14), p. 364. Harris, J. and Higgott, G., Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings (London: A. Zwemmer, 1989), pp. 241–3, n. 78. Prado, J. de and Villalpando, J. B., Hieronymi Pradi et Ioannis Baptistae Villalpandi E Societate Iesv In Ezechielem Explanationes et Apparatus Vrbis, Ac Templi Hierosolymitani . . . (Rome, 1596), vol. 2/2, p. 245. Hart, V., Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London and New York: Routledge 1994), pp. 107–12. Stevenson, C., The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 2013), pp. 66, 151, 155, 253. The very complicated publishing history with lots of variant copies is summarised in Bowers, F., ‘Ogilby’s Coronation Entertainment (1661–1689): Editions and Issues’, The Papers of the Bibliographical

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538   Notes to Chapter 2

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

Society of America 47 (1953), pp. 339–40. On Ogilby, see Withers, C. W. J., ‘Ogilby, John (1600–1676)’, ODNB. Ogilby, J. with an introduction by R. Knowles, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1988), fol. 110v. Ogilby, J., The Relation of His Majestie’s Entertainment Passing through the City of London, to His Coronation: With a Description of the Triumphal Arches, and Solemnity (printed at London, and reprinted at Edinburgh, 1661), pp. 18–19; Ogilby, Entertainment (see note 2.48), fols 101r and 113r. Ogilby, Relation (see note 2.49), p. 39. On Gerbier, see Colvin, Dictionary (1995), pp. 396–8 and Wood, J., ‘Gerbier, Sir Balthazar (1592–1663/1667)’, ODNB. On the attribution of the coronation arches to him, see Knowles, R., ‘Introduction’, in Ogilby, Entertainment (see note 2.48), pp. 12–13; Stevenson, ‘Occasional Architecture’ (see note 2.40), pp. 72–3. Gerbier, B., A Brief Discourse Concerning the Three Chief Principles of Magnificent Building. Viz. Solidity, Conveniency, and Ornament (London, 1665), pp. 2–3, 40. On Gerbier’s publications, see Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2), pp. 206–8. Stevenson, ‘Occasional Architecture’ (see note 2.40), p. 56. Grimstone, A. V., Building Pembroke Chapel: Wren, Pearce, and Scott (Cambridge: Pembroke College, 2009), pp. 38–9. Stevenson, City and King (see note 2.46), p. 104, fig. 42.

Chapter 3: The Royal Works in the Age of 1689 Revolution and 1707 Union





1. NLS MS7028, f. 28. The Marquis de Louvois was a Minister for War under Louis XIV. 2. Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 847. 3. For Scotland, the ‘empire’ was the home country. 4. By this time, James was king of Scotland alone. 5. Holyrood was used intermittently from 1796 to house the exiled French royal, the Count d’Artois, whose presence in London was unwanted by the establishment. 6. Report on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry . . . at Drumlanrig Castle (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1903), vol. 2, no. 28, p. 168. 7. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xiv, pp. 22, 86–7. 8. NRS PA2/33, ff. 36v–40.

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Notes to Chapter 3   539

9. [Melville, W. L. (ed.)] Leven and Melville Papers. Letters and State Papers Chiefly Addressed to George Earl of Melville Secretary of State for Scotland 1689–1691 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1843), p. 264. 10. Balfour-Melville, E. W. M. (ed.), An Account of the Proceedings of the Estates in Scotland 1689–1690 (Edinburgh: SHS, 1954–5), vol. i, pp. 48, 52, 99; vol. ii, pp. 1, 7, 160, 254. 11. Casada, J. A., ‘The Scottish Representatives in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament’, SHR, LI (1972), p. 131. 12. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. i, pp. 529, 678. 13. NRS GD26/11/32. 14. NLS MS7011, f. 204. 15. NLS MS7011, f. 208. 16. NLS MS7011, f. 208. 17. NRS GD26/13/227. 18. NRS GD26/13/228. 19. NRS GD32/1/32. 20. NRS GD32/1/31. Printed in Mylne, R. S., ‘Masters of Work to the Crown of Scotland’, PSAS 30 (Edinburgh, 1896), pp. 61–2. 21. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xv, pp. 35, 50. 22. NLS MS7028, f. 107v. 23. NLS MS7011, f. 204. 24. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xv, p. xvii. 25. Ibid., p. 276 and passim; cf. p. 89. 26. Ibid., vol. xiv, pp. 485–6. 27. Ibid., vol. ii, p. 531 and passim. 28. NLS MS7015, f. 171. 29. NLS MS7016, f. 19. 30. NLS MS7028, f. 8v; cf. NRS CC8/8/83, pp. 413–15. 31. NLS MS7011, ff. 168, 204. 32. NLS MS7012, f. 169. 33. NLS MS7015, f. 136. 34. NLS MS7016, f. 19. 35. NLS MS7028, f. 16. 36. NRS E28/580/12. 37. NRS E37/29. 38. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xv, p. 327. 39. Ibid., pp. 275–6, 306, 481–2. 40. NRS E37/31; GD26/9/113. 41. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xv, p. 564. 42. Ibid., p. 565. 43. Leven and Melville Papers (see note 3.9), p. 611. 44. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xv, p. 563.

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540   Notes to Chapter 3

45. Ibid., p. 565. 46. Mackay, J. of Rockfield, The Life of Lieut.-General Hugh MacKay . . . (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1836), p. 36. 47. Ibid., p. 88. 48. NRS E93/38/10. Callander had evidently been treated rather as Smith had been, for in 1692 he was denoted ‘Their majesties late master Smith’ (GD24/1/470). 49. Leven and Melville Papers (see note 3.9), p. 626. 50. Ibid., p. 627. 51. NLS MS7014, f. 13. 52. Lessons learned, from how to build protective and aggressive fortifications in hostile territory, to providing life’s basics – be that tools or tobacco – would make colonising schemes such as Darien seem very achievable. 53. NRS E28/580/12. 54. NRS E28/580/1. 55. An itemised account of 1693 from Andrew Paterson included, engagingly, ‘And many things more that cannot be minded [remembered]’ (NRS E28/580/2/3). 56. NRS E28/580/11. 57. Leven and Melville Papers (see note 3.9), p. 386. 58. NLS MS7015, f. 171. 59. NLS MS7016, f. 19. 60. NLS MS7016, f. 44. 61. NLS MS7016, f. 56. 62. NLS MS7016, f. 56; MS7028, f. 34ff; MS 7028, f. 43v. 63. NLS MS7028, f. 28. 64. NRS GD103/2/4/43. 65. Mitchell, Sir A. and Clark, J. T. (eds), Geographical Collections Relating to Scotland Made by Walter MacFarlane (Edinburgh: SHS, 1906–8), vol. iii, pp. 150–1. 66. The Works of Alexander Pennecuik, Esq. of New-Hall, M.D; Containing the Description of Tweeddale, and Miscellaneous Poems, new edn (Leith: A. Allardice, 1815), p. 217. 67. BoS: Edinburgh, p. 605. 68. NLS MS 14637, f. 140. See also ff. 157, 182. 69. NLS MS7028, f. 36; MS7016, ff. 79, 93, 974. 70. NRS GD40/2/8/58. 71. There is a doocot at Cringletie House, a neighbouring property, at that time also owned by the Blackbarony family. 72. NRS GD18/5641. 73. Young, M. D. (ed.), The Parliaments of Scotland: Burgh and Shire

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Notes to Chapter 3   541



74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Commissioners (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1992–3), vol. ii, p. 615. www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/mem​ b​er/​scott-james-i-1671-1732 (accessed July 2019). Mylne, ‘Masters of Work’ (see note 3.20), pp. 61–2. NRS GD253/149/11. NRS GD124/15/513/32. Young, Parliaments (see note 3.73), vol. ii, p. 616. Mylne, ‘Masters of Work’ (see note 3.20), p. 63. NLS MS7028, f. 79. Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies 1696–1707 (Edinburgh: SHS, 1924), pp. 64–6, 216. More documentation concerning Thirlestane’s involvement with the company is in the Duke of Hamilton papers, NRS GD406/1. See also Watt, Price of Scotland (see note 1.8). Hostility from King William and the English merchants drove the venture westwards instead of focusing, as planned, eastwards along established routes to Africa and India. Thirlestane invested £1,000 personally in the scheme, Smith, £200, King’s Master Mason Robert Mylne, £200, Blackbarony, £500; see Burton, J. H. (ed.), The Darien Papers . . . (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable for the Bannatyne Club, 1849), pp. 372–3, 377, 391. NRS GD406/1/4671. NRS GD406/1/4670. See note 3.79. NRS E28/580/14. NRS E28/580/14. NRS GD124/15/303. Kilbaberton’s family became more closely connected to that of Blackbarony after his death, as follows: Sir Gideon Murray (c.  1560–1621) was a brother of Sir John Murray of Blackbarony. Dame Katherine Weir, who was Kilbaberton’s second wife, then widow, married Sir Gideon’s son Patrick, first Lord Elibank, in 1638; and in 1644 Patrick’s daughter Isobel married Kilbaberton’s son, Sir James Murray of Kilbaberton and, later, of Cavens. Mylne, ‘Masters of Work’ (see note 3.20), pp. 64–6. NRS E28/580/17/2; E28/581/17/3. NRS E94/147. NRS RHP140977. NRS E94/147/12; E99/71. NRS E94/170/12. NRS E94/170/8. Tayler, H., History of the Family of Urquhart (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1946), p. 105.

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542   Notes to Chapter 3

94. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xvi, pp. 204–5. 95. A painting of this period envisioning a set of unfulfilled changes to Cawdor Castle hangs in the castle. Whose ideas were these? 96. Young, Parliaments (see note 3.73), vol. ii, p. 707. 97. Argyll’s invasion is narrated in Willcock, J., A Scots Earl in Covenanting Times: Being Life and Times of Archibald 9th Earl of Argyll (1629– 1685) (Edinburgh: A. Elliot, 1907), pp. 327–432. A participant account is in MacLeod, Rev. W. (ed.), Journal of the Hon. John Erskine of Carnock 1683–1687 (Edinburgh: SHS, 1893), pp. 105–41. 98. Balfour, Sir J. (ed.), The Scots Peerage (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1904), vol. 1, p. 381. RPC, 3rd ser., vol. xi, p. 593. 99. Thomson, T. et al. (eds), Acts of the Parliament of Scotland (London, 1814–75), vol. ix, p. 166. 100. NRS GD24/5/67; PA7/25/3/10/1; PA7/25/3/11. 101. NRS GD112/39/182/13. 102. NRS GD112/39/184/3. 103. NRS GD112/39/196/13. 104. NRS GD112/39/200/20. 105. Thomson, Acts of Parliament (see note 3.99), vol. ix (1822), app. p. 61. Mamore reportedly acquired other former MacNaughton territories in the Strone/Glen Shira area, and his son was a later resident of Dundarave. Campbell, Lord Archibald, Records of Argyll; Legends, Traditions, and Recollections of Argyllshire Highlanders, Collected Chiefly from the Gaelic . . . (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1885), p. 48. 106. NRS GD112/39/142/7. 107. www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/ campbell-hon-john-1660-1729 (accessed May 2019). 108. Szechi, D. (ed.), ‘Scotland’s Ruine’: Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs of the Union (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1995), p. 257. 109. Young, Parliaments (see note 3.73), vol. i, p. 100. 110. NRS GD220/6/284. 111. The 2nd Duke, Mamore’s nephew, recognised the teenage son to be a potential heir and pressed to be given him to educate (GD112/39/210/13; GD112/39/211/27). 112. NRS E28/580/17/3. 113. NRS GD220/6/1745/22. 114. NRS CC8/8/92, 25.5.1729, p. 270. William Adam is referenced in the will. 115. Merriman, M. The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 52–7.

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Notes to Chapter 3   543

116. Charles’s lack of interest in Holyrood as a potential cultural and artistic centre contrasts with his focus on the English palaces and is evidenced by the disparity in the nature and locations of his artworks, acquisitions and collections. A recent illustration of this is clear from Bird, R. and Clayton, M. (eds), Charles II: Art and Power (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2017). It was sufficient for the absentee Charles to know that a Scottish royal palace existed to signal royal interest and presence. His brother James, on the other hand, not only invested in the royal works, but encouraged architecture, the arts and sciences, medicine, architecture and town planning, as noted above. 117. For instance, see NRS E342/5/1. The equivalent English post of Surveyor also became a sinecure in the eighteenth century, but talented architects continued in royal/government posts, such as that of Comptroller.

Chapter 4: Sir William Bruce: Classicism and the Castle







1. Over that period, scholars including Ian Campbell, Miles Glendinning, Deborah Howard, Charles McKean, Ranald MacInnes and Aonghus MacKechnie have transformed this area of study. 2. McKean, C., The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of Renaissance Scotland (Stroud: Sutton Publications, 2001). Wemyss, C., The Noble Houses of Scotland 1600–1800 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2014) deals with these issues in fuller format, taking forward the arguments of Charles McKean into the more modern period. 3. The view of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik in 1717, quoted by Dunbar, J., The Historic Architecture of Scotland (London: Batsford, 1966), p. 2. This is sometimes misquoted as ‘the chief introducer of architecture to this country’. See also Macaulay, J., The Classical Country House in Scotland 1660–1800 (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), chapter 1 for the correct quote in the chapter title. This issue is also discussed in the following chapter of this work. 4. Summerson, J., Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, 9th edn (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1993), p. 500. 5. Apted, M. R., ‘The Building and Other Work of Patrick, 1st Earl of Strathmore at Glamis, 1671–1695’, Antiquaries Journal LXVI (1987), pp. 91–115. Walker, B., ‘Glamis: The “Great Rebuilding” on a Scottish Estate’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 101(3) (December 1985), p. 139. Guilding, R. A., ‘The De Wett Apostle Paintings in the Chapel at Glamis Castle’, PSAS 116 (1986), pp. 429–45. Apted, M. R. and Snowden, R. L., ‘The de Wett Paintings in the Chapel at Glamis Castle’, in D. J. Breeze (ed.), Studies in Scottish Antiquity

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544   Notes to Chapter 4

6.



7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984), pp. 232–48. Slade, H. G., Glamis Castle (London: Society of Antiquaries, 2000). Millar, A. H. (ed.), The Book of Record: A Diary Written by Patrick Lyon, First Earl of Strathmore and Other Documents Relating to Glamis Castle 1684–89 (Edinburgh: SHS,1890). Glendinning, M. and MacKechnie, A., Scotch Baronial. Architecture and Identity in Scotland (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 57. The authors talk about Glamis as an ‘intensified’ L-plan castle. Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5), p. 24. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 41. Campbell, I., ‘From du Cerceau to du Cerceau: Scottish Aristocratic Architectural Taste, c. 1570 to c. 1750’, Architectural Heritage 26 (2015), pp. 55–71. Campbell discusses the design of Careston Castle, Angus, and has traced this to du Cerceau. The symmetry of Careston was so alien to the beau-ideal of the Scottish castle that MacGibbon and Ross, who clearly hadn’t seen it, dismissed it as having ‘no pretension to architectural effect’ (MacGibbon, D. and Ross, D., Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887–92), vol. iv, p. 80) while Nigel Tranter (Fortified House in Scotland (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), vol. 4, pp. 102–3) chose to illustrate a suitably picturesque asymmetrical side elevation rather than the main front. Anderson, W., The Scottish Nation, vol. III (Edinburgh: Fullarton & Co., 1875), p. 533. Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5), p. 19. This word is not in the Scottish National Dictionary so it is assumed to be a new usage, almost certainly deriving from volare (to fly), meaning that some sort of dovecot or aviary was incorporated into the building. NRA(S)885/148/1/43, 23 July 1679, Contract between Earl of Strathmore and John and Andrew West, mason burgesses of Dundee for a gate and office house at Castle Lyon. It is marked as never built on the outside of the contract. NRA(S)885/148/1/43. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2). McKean, C., ‘The Refashioning of Glamis, 1668–1684’, in A. Dakin et al., Scotland’s Castle Culture (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2011), pp. 199–212. Stewart, M., The Architectural, Landscape and Constitutional Plans of the Earl of Mar, 1700–1732 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016). A similar argument has been made for Kinnaird Castle; see Lowrey, J., ‘A Prospect on Antiquity and Britannia on Edge: Landscape

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Notes to Chapter 4   545

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

Design and the Work of Sir William Bruce and Alexander Edward’, Architectural Heritage 23 (2012), pp. 57–74. ‘Throw’ or ‘thraw’, meaning a distortion or twisting, Dictionary of the Scots Language, www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/thraw (accessed May 2019). Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5), pp. 41–2. Macmillan, D., Scottish Art 1460–1990 (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1990), pp. 73–90. Guilding, R. A., ‘The De Wet Apostle Paintings in the Chapel at Glamis Castle’, PSAS 116 (1989), pp. 429–45. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2), p. 113. Baillie, H., ‘Etiquette and the Planning of the State Apartments in Baroque Palaces’, Archaeologia 101 (1967), pp. 169–99 is the main source for palace planning in this period. It is a strange omission of this seminal piece of work that it only includes Linlithgow, which is not Baroque, to characterise Scottish palace planning, rather than the much more modern, and relevant, Holyrood, which is. The sixteenth-century Château d’Écouen, mainly by Jean Bullant, is an example of the same sort of planning. Mylne, Master Masons, pp. 72–3, includes a reproduction of a 1663 plan by John Mylne (Master Mason to the Crown at the time), which indicates the outlines of both the unfinished James V work and the 1633 proposals by Charles I. Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scotch Baronial (see note 4.6), p. 52, quoting Mylne, Master Masons, pp. 172–4. Mylne, Master Masons, pp. 168–9; a series of four plans, site plan and main courtyard elevation show the 1671 design. For example, Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon in the fifteenth century. There is an argument that a deliberate focus on feudal privilege and Scottish antiquity and genealogy characterises the Restoration period and that it relates to an effort by the monarchy and aristocracy to emphasise and protect its status and privilege in the face of the rise of the middle classes. See Ouston, H., ‘York in Edinburgh: James VII and the Patronage of Learning in Scotland, 1679–1688’, in J. Dwyer, R. A. Mason and A. Murdoch, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1981), pp. 133–55. Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scotch Baronial (see note 4.6), p. 63. For a more detailed discussion of Leslie, see Uglow, N., Addyman, T. and Lowrey, J., ‘The Archaeology and Conservation of the Country House: Leslie House and Kinross House’, Architectural Heritage 23 (2012), pp. 163–78. Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scotch Baronial (see note 4.6), p. 66.

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546   Notes to Chapter 4

34. Ibid., p. 66. 35. MacKechnie, A., ‘Scots Court Architecture in the Early Seventeenth Century’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1993), p. 318. 36. Plate 39 was used for the intaglio carving of trophies of arms around the door on the entrance front of Kinross House. 37. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2). Chapter 4 gives an excellent summary of Methven and a more detailed analysis in ‘Paternal Seat  or  Classical Villa? Patrick Smyth, James Smith and the building of Methven 1678 to 1682’, Architectural History 46 (2003), pp. 109–26. 38. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2), p. 179. 39. Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scotch Baronial (see note 4.6), p. 63. 40. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2), pp. 116–17, 182–3. 41. Although it still has a main room that cuts through the centre of the building, front to back. See Macaulay, Classical Country House (see note 4.3), pp. 7–8. 42. Holyrood Project Archaeology Team, Scotland’s Parliament Site and the Canongate: Archaeology and History (Edinburgh: SAS, 2008), p. 149. 43. NRS GD45/18/864, furniture inventory 1695. 44. Stuart, J. (ed.), Registrum de Panmure (Edinburgh, 1874), vol. 2, pp. 328–9. 45. Edward, R., Angusia Provincia Scotiae (1678). This is a broadsheet map of Angus, dedicated to George, 2nd Earl of Panmure and with the description, in Latin, on the reverse. The first translation was published in Dundee in 1793. 46. Dunbar, J., ‘The Building Activities of the Duke and Duchess of  Lauderdale, 1670–82’, Archaeological Journal 132 (1975), pp. 202–30. 47. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2), p. 129. Glendinning and MacKechnie, Scotch Baronial (see note 4.6), p. 55. 48. Macaulay, Classical Country House (see note 4.3), p. 12. Inigo Jones’ Stoke Park is also a possibility, although in a sense the plan was a given due to the unusual shape of the castle. 49. Campbell, ‘From du Cerceau’ (see note 4.10), pp. 55–71. 50. I am grateful to Aonghus MacKechnie for this information. 51. Brown, M., Scotland’s Lost Gardens (Edinburgh: RCAHMS, 2012), pp. 224–9. 52. Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2), p. 129. Wemyss attributes the original observation to Charles McKean. 53. Ibid., p. 130.

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Notes to Chapter 4   547

54. Macaulay, Classical Country House (see note 4.3), pp. 29–32 deals with the issue of attribution and seems to tend towards Bruce, although all the drawings are by Smith. 55. Ibid., p. 32. The drawing is in NRS RHP35813. 56. Ibid., p. 31 and n. 13, in which he identifies the second drawing as belonging to A. R. Conlon, with a copy in NRHE. No trace of the original drawing or the NRHE copy can now be found. 57. Although he later embraced it with gusto at Yester.

Chapter 5: A Classic Looks at the Gothic















1. Brown, I. G., ‘Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (1676–1755): Aspects of a Virtuoso Life’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1980) remains the fullest treatment of Clerk’s cultural importance. 2. Brown, I. G., ‘Prelude and Pattern: the Remarkable Grand Tour of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’, in L. Borley (ed.), The Grand Tour and its Influence on Architecture, Artistic Taste and Patronage (Edinburgh: Europa Nostra, 2008), pp. 45–71. 3. Brown, I. G., ‘Critick in Antiquity: Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’, Antiquity 51(203) (1977), pp. 201–10; Brown, I. G., The HobbyHorsical Antiquary (Edinburgh: NLS, 1980); and much subsequent writing on this aspect of Clerk’s life and world. 4. Brown, I. G., ‘Judges of Architectory: the Clerks of Penicuik as Amateurs’, in G. Worsley (ed.), The Role of the Amateur Architect (London: The Georgian Group, 1994), pp. 44–52. 5. Colvin used some of Clerk’s comments in ‘The Country Seat’ as evidence of his prevalent anti-Gothic prejudice to match the views of Roger North: see Colvin, H. M., ‘Aubrey’s Chronologia Architectonica’, in J. Summerson (ed.), Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architecture and Architectural Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (London: Allen Lane, 1968), pp. 1–12. 6. On the contemporary concept of ‘Gothicism’, see Sweet, R., Antiquaries. The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon, 2004), p. 240. Sweet, however, minimises Clerk’s interest in and admiration for the Gothic (p. 286). 7. I have in hand an edition of ‘The Country Seat’. The text of the poem survives in three manuscripts (only one of these being in Clerk’s holograph) in the Clerk of Penicuik Muniments, NRS GD18/4403/1–3. 8. NRS GD18/2016, A Journie to England in Aprile 1724, f. 22. 9. NRS GD18/2108, An Account of Some Visits made in Fife, 1728, pp. 4–8.

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548   Notes to Chapter 5

10. Brown, I. G., ‘ “Gothicism, Ignorance and a Bad Taste”: the Destruction of Arthur’s O’on’, Antiquity 48(192) (1974), pp. 283–7. 11. Howard Colvin was the first to note this passage: Colvin, ‘Aubrey’s Chronologica Architectonica’ (see note 5.5), p. 1. 12. NRS GD18/1810. 13. For an interesting treatment of the concept of pietas as that related to monuments, see Glendinning, M., The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 12–14; and Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988), chapter 4. 14. NRS GD18/5031/9, Clerk to Roger Gale, 12 May 1736. 15. NRS GD18/5030/48, Roger Gale to Clerk, 23 April 1736. 16. NRS GD18/2110/1, Tour into England in the year 1733, pp. 50–1. 17. NRS GD18/2099, A Trip to Perth, 1717, p. 10. 18. NRS GD18/2107, Journey to London, 1727, p. 15. 19. On Clerk’s ambiguity in both stylistic definition and stylistic preference – notably as to what precisely constituted ‘Gothic’ (as displayed in the context of his observations on the Gothick Tower at Studley Royal) – see Brown, I. G., ‘ “A Fitter Place for Campania than Yorkshire”: Sir John Clerk and Thomas Blackwell at Studley Royal’, Garden History 45(1) (2017), pp. 66–81, especially p. 73. 20. NRS GD18/5008, Clerk to Charles Erskine of Tinwald, 3 August 1738. 21. NRS GD18/2110/3, Trip to the North of Scotland as far as Inverness in May 1739, p. 18. 22. NRS GD18/2108 (see note 5.9), p. 9. GD18/4523, Clerk to John Pringle, 21 March 1737. 23. Clerk appears not to have been aware that the destruction of Kelso was due primarily to the ravages of an English army in 1545. 24. NRS GD18/6080, Clerk’s annotated copy of George Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland, with his notes of 1716, 1738 and 1747, p. 273. 25. NRS GD18/2106, Journey to England in Aprile 1724, f. 3v. 26. NRS GD18/2110/7, Trip to England for the goat whey in 1743, pp. 2–3. Clerk alludes to Horace, Satires, I, ii. 27. NRS GD18/2106, f. 13v. 28. NRS GD18/2107 (see note 5.18), p. 49. 29. NRS GD18/2110/1 (see note 5.16), p. 5. 30. NRS GD18/2107 (see note 5.18), p. 31. 31. NRS GD18/2010/1, p. 59. 32. NRS GD18/2010/1, pp. 54–5.

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Notes to Chapter 5   549

33. See Brown, ‘Sir John Clerk of Penicuik’ (see note 5.1), pp. 272–3; and, more recently, but with some errors due to misunderstanding of the archival evidence, Maggi, A., Rosslyn Chapel: an Icon through the Ages (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008), pp. 7, 62–9, 148–9. 34. Gray, J. M. (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, SHS XIII (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable for the SHS, 1892), note O, pp. 250–1, where Gale’s letter to Maurice Johnson, of Spalding, Lincolnshire, is quoted. 35. NLS MS5074, f. 141, Clerk to Charles Erskine, 28 March 1739. 36. The facts and quotations that follow are derived from the letters, 1738–40, of Colonel James St Clair to Clerk in NRS GD18/5010/1–8. 37. NRS GD18/3224, Charles Erskine to Clerk, 5 April 1739. 38. Baxter’s roof is best shown in the drawings by William Delacour of c. 1761 (British Library) which are reproduced by Maggi (see note 5.33) at plates 26 and 28, and also in Rosslyn, H. and Maggi, A., Rosslyn. Country of Painter and Poet (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2002), plates 25 and 56. 39. Grose, F., The Antiquities of Scotland (London: S. Hooper, 1789–91), vol. i, p. 45. 40. NRS GD18/2107 (see note 5.18), p. 28. 41. NRS GD18/2102, An Account of Two Journies to the Port of Menteith in the Years 1721 and 1722, p. 1. 42. NRS GD18/6080 and note 5.24 above. 43. NRS GD18/2101, A Journie to Galloway in 1721, pp. 1–2. 44. NRS GD18/2106 (see note 5.25), f. 2. 45. NRS GD18/2099, A Trip to Perth, 1717, p. 6. 46. NRS GD18/2099, p. 6. 47. NRS GD18/2113, A Trip to Innermay, June 1737, pp. 3–4. 48. Ibid., pp. 3–4. 49. NRS GD18/1483a/1, ‘Schem of Improvements for the Several Rooms of the Baronie of Pennycuik & other pieces of ground in my possession’, 1741, p. 36. Brown, ‘Critick in Antiquity’ (see note 5.3), pp. 203–4. 50. NRS GD18/4983, ‘Short Retrospective View of the State of Architecture in Great Britain Previous to Mr [Robert] Adam’s Time’, by John Clerk of Eldin. See also Brown, I. G., ‘John Clerk of Eldin & the Virtuoso Genius of the Family’, in Bertram, G. with contributions by Brown, I. G. and Macmillan, D., The Etchings of John Clerk of Eldin (Taunton: Enterprise Editions, 2012), pp. 14–20, especially p. 18. 51. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, and equally his son John Clerk of Eldin, might well have merited mention in the general survey of ‘Castle Romanticism and the “historical landscape”: 18th century Scotland’ which forms a discrete section of Miles Glendinning’s The Conservation

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550   Notes to Chapter 5

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

Movement (see note 5.13): see pp. 58 and 62 of that work. However, the two Clerks are not cited in what is, admittedly, a brief overview of eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes. In their ‘engagement with old buildings’, the elder Clerk – both at Rosslyn Chapel and in his general view of ruins and romance – and the younger Clerk – in his respect for castellated architecture and for the ‘overtly Sublime cult of the ruin in wild landscape’ (evident in his art, where ruined castles were ‘increasingly venerated as objects of Sublime wonder’) – furnish particularly valuable examples, in theory and practice, of precisely the attitudes Glendinning examines. (Glendinning’s phrases, quoted here, are general ones, but I apply them specifically and appropriately to the Clerks.) NRS GD18/5238/57, Clerk to his father, Sir John Clerk, first baronet, 16 January 1705. NRS GD18/1483a/1 (see note 5.49), p. 44. NRS GD18/1758, Memoirs in relation to the house of Pennycuik, 1734/1737, p. 12; letter in Latin to Hermann Boerhaave, translated in Gray, Memoirs (see note 5.34), p. 237. NRS GD18/1483a/1 (see note 5.49), p. 9. Ibid., pp. 19, 21. See Cooper, S., ‘Sir John Clerk’s Garden Buildings at Penicuik’, Architectural Heritage 13 (2002), pp. 47–62, which is dependent upon my PhD dissertation, ‘Sir John Clerk’ (see note 5.1), pp. 265–77, 279–86. On these eye-catchers see Brown, ‘Sir John Clerk’ (see note 5.1), pp. 193, 367, n. 216. The Batty Langley ‘prototypes’ are illustrated in his New Principles of Gardening (London, 1728), plates xix–xxi. Clerk’s notes from and observations on Langley’s precepts are to be found among his notes on reading, NRS GD18/5078/bundle 44. NRS GD18/1483a/1 (see note 5.49), p. 11. Brown, ‘Sir John Clerk’ (see note 5.1), chapter 10, ‘The View from Knight’s Law Tower’. See also Brown, ‘A Fitter Place’ (see note 5.19), p. 73 where (in the context of the ‘Gothick’ tower at Studley Royal) I have observed: ‘The clear designation of the tower as “Gothick” is, nevertheless, of some relevance in view of the ambiguity of some of Clerk’s own preferences, in both paper theory and actual practice, in proposing or at length commissioning garden buildings at Penicuik which were sometimes regarded as “Roman”, sometimes as “Gothick” and sometimes as a sort of astylar amalgam of both.’ NRS GD18/5078/41 has on the verso of the last page a pencil sketch of a tower with a conical cap with ball finial rising above the crenellated wall-head (Figure 5.8). GD18/1483a/2, ‘Schem of Improvements’,

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Notes to Chapter 5   551

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

1741, copy by Clerk’s chaplain, William Ainsley: this has inserted in the text on p. 12 Sir John’s own sketch of the proposed tower without any refinements above the crenellated wall-head (Figure 5.9); see also Cooper, ‘Sir John Clerk’s Garden Buildings’(see note 5.57), pp. 53–6. NRS GD18/1483a/1 (see note 5.49 and Figure 5.10), p. 38. There is, however, no drawing in the manuscript to illustrate the ‘old fashioned tower’ proposed for Claremont. NRS GD18/1484, ‘Memorandum for the Management of the Enclosures of Pennicuick House’. A similar tower, also described as ‘Gothick’, appears in a marginal note on p. 11 of Clerk’s ‘Schem of Improvements for . . . the Baronie of Pennycuik’ 1741 (GD18/ 1483a/1). NRS GD18/4983 (see note 5.50). NRS GD18/1483a/1 (see note 5.49), p. 12. See Brown, ‘Sir John Clerk’ (see note 5.1), pp. 265–6, 280.

Chapter 6: Scottish Ironwork



1. MacGibbon, D. and Ross, T., Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887–92), vol. ii, pp. 456, 458. 2. For instance, Gardner, S., English Ironwork of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (London: Batsford, 1911). 3. [Cruft, K. et al.], Classicism in Scotland 1670–1748 (SAHGB Conference notes: Edinburgh, 1983). 4. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), p. 92. 5. Imrie, J. and Dunbar, J., Accounts of the Masters of Works, vol. II: 1616–1649 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1982), pp. 2, 7, 10–11 and elsewhere. 6. Ibid., vol. II, p. 65. 7. Dixon, J. H., Gairloch and Guide to Loch Maree (Edinburgh, 1886), p. 77. 8. The near-identical twin balconies of Glasgow’s (long-gone) College are shown in Slezer’s late seventeenth-century view with what may be ironwork. 9. Lindsay, S., An Anatomy of English Wrought Iron 1000 to ad 1800 (London: Alec Tiranti, 1964), p. 39. 10. Another smith engaged at East Park was Alexander Raff (NRS GD224/263/2). 11. NRS GD220/6/691. 12. BoS: Dundee, p. 656. 13. NRS GD45/18/599 includes a contract between Alexander Nisbet, mason burgess of Edinburgh, and the Earl of Panmure, 22 June 1672.

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552   Notes to Chapter 6

14. As a smith, John Callander of Craigforth is unusual in having been or become a laird – rather like the architects James Smith and William Adam, or the mason Robert Mylne of Balfarg. 15. Robert Lorimer commissioned an exact replica of the Holyrood Palace balustrade from Thomas Hadden for Dunderave Castle (1911–12). 16. BoS: D&G, p. 224. 17. The outer flights of steps are nineteenth-century additions. 18. Horn was then denoted as ‘of Kirkcaldy’, suggesting he was possibly working in the area, though presumably not yet at 1690s Raith (HES list description for Drumlanrig: http://portal.historicenvironment. scot/designation/LB3886, accessed May 2019) 19. BoS: D&G, p. 224. NRHE https://canmore.org.uk/collection/764721 (accessed May 2019). 20. BoS: P&K, pp. 488–9. 21. NRS GD45/18/612a. Horn confirmed receipt of payment 25 June 1695. 22. NRS GD45/18/613. 23. NRS GD45/18/613c. 24. NRS GD45/18/612, 612b. Contracts between James, Earl of Panmure, and Alexander Blair, ‘Smith in the Cottoun of Panmure’ for iron gates at Panmure including one of 1700 where Blair agreed ‘to worck & set up at Panmure foure good & sufficient weell wroght iron gates & all of them as good worck as the East Iron Gaite of the Gardens there & also all these foure gaits according to the subscribed draughts by both the fo[resai]d parties’ (NRS GD45/18/618); and, in 1701, ‘for making tuo iron doors to his Gardens, and allowance ‘for . . . nine in the hundred for diminution in the working of the s[ai]d iron doors’ (NRS GD45/18/618). 25. NRS GD112/39/218/12 Bruce at Kinross to Earl of Breadalbane at Taymouth, 10 July 1708. 26. Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 83. 27. Amongst those suspected Jacobites ‘who are nou under confynement by order of the Earle of Leven’ were Sir William Bruce, Lord Nairne (a client of Bruce’s at the time) and the Earl of Traquair (Fraser, Sir W., The Melvilles: Earls of Melville and the Leslies, Earls of Leven (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1890), vol. III, pp. 238–9). 28. Plate by John Elphinstone reproduced in Arnot, H., The History of Edinburgh (London: T. Longman and T. Cadell, 1779), opposite p. 27. 29. McWilliam, C., The Buildings of Scotland: Lothian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 256. 30. BoS: Fife, p. 353. 31. BoS: Edinburgh, p. 606.

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Notes to Chapter 6   553

32. Ibid., p. 606. 33. Ibid., pp. 606–7. A monogram of Viscount Tarbat and his second wife, the Countess of Wemyss, is incorporated into the balcony. They were married in 1700 and the Countess died in 1705. 34. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O77498/engraving-tijou-jean (accessed April 2019). 35. NRS GD406/1/4403, David Crawford to Duke of Hamilton (presumably in London), Edinburgh, 15 June 1699.

Chapter 7: Thomas Albourn











1. This chapter is based upon findings contained within Napier, W., ‘Kinship and Politics in the Art of Plaster Decoration’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Dundee, 2012). 2. This type of plaster decoration is typified by the two groups of work associated with Pinkie House, Musselburgh (c. 1607–10) and Kellie Castle, Fife (1617) and remained popular in houses throughout Scotland for many years. The plasterwork at Pinkie was carried out for Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline and Chancellor of Scotland from 1606 until his death in 1622. Kellie Castle was improved by Thomas Eskine, a lifelong friend and servant of the King, who was made Earl of Kellie in 1619. 3. Including Merchiston Castle, Gorgie House, Dalry House, Woodhall House, Niddrie Marischal House and Stenhouse Mansion. 4. Some invention was required in recognition of the new King. Casts were modified to include the initials CR2 throughout and NOBIS. HAEC.INICTA MISERVNT.108.PROAVI (translation: ‘to us 108 ancestors have sent these unconquered things’). 5. Gapper, C., ‘Plasterers and Plasterwork in City, Court and Country, c.  1530 – c. 1640’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of London, 1998), p. 551. 6. Gapper, C., ‘Caroline Plasterwork at Ham: the 1630s and the 1670s’, in C. Rowell, Ham House: 400 Years of Collecting and Patronage (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 2013), p. 49. 7. Also Elcho Castle, Stobhall Castle and Brunstane House. 8. Newland, K., ‘The Acquisition and Use of Norwegian Timber in Seventeenth Century Scotland, with Reference to the Principal Building Works of James Baine, His Majesty’s Master Wright’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Dundee, 2010). Baine was apprenticed to Alexander Cleghorn, an Edinburgh wright. By c. 1661 he had become the first person to hold the position of His Majesty’s Master Plasterer and, a decade later, had also been

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554   Notes to Chapter 7

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

appointed as His Majesty’s Master Wright. His significant plastering work included Panmure House, Glamis Castle, Castle Lyon and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Mitchell, J. F. and Mitchell, S., Monumental Inspections (pre-1855) in East Fife (Edinburgh, 1971), p. 300. He was described as a ‘sojore’, part of ‘Collonell Daniells Regiment’ when his son was born at Perth in 1654. I am grateful to Marion Wood for sharing her research into the Albourn family with me. A copy of Wood, M., ‘Plaisterers, Publicans and Punchbowls: The Alburns of Wanderknowe’, unpublished MA dissertation (University of Stirling, 2000), is held at the library of the Society of Genealogists in Edinburgh. NRS GD112/15. Marshall, R. K., The Days of Duchess Anne: Life in the Household of the Duchess of Hamilton 1656 –1716 (London: Collins, 1973), p. 205. Beard, G., Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain (London: Phaidon, 1975), p. 200. Wood, ‘Plaisterers’ (see note 7.9), pp. 7–10. Albourn obtained lands from the Earl of Rothes in 1677, and he, or his son, also Thomas, worked at Leslie House in the 1680s. Wemyss, C., ‘A Study of Aspiration and Ambition: the Scottish Treasury Commission and its Impact upon the Development of Scottish Country House Architecture 1667–1682’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Dundee, 2009), part 2, pp. 57–8. I am grateful to Charles Wemyss for sharing with me the information contained within the Earl’s ‘Minute Book’. Albourn et al.’s work is referenced in Beard, Decorative Plasterwork (see note 7.12), pp. 200–31. Two of the Nine Worthies, derived from engravings by Nicholas de Bruyn and used frequently in early seventeenth-century plaster schemes, including the King’s Room at the Binns, c. 1630 and in a group of ceilings linked to Kellie Castle and the Royal Apartments at Edinburgh Castle, c. 1617. BoS: Borders, pp. 342–3. Imrie and Dunbar, Accounts of the Masters of Works (see note 6.5), p. 326. Perth was then also known as St John’s Town. Thomson, T. (ed.), Registrum magni sigilli regum Scotorum: The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, a.d. 1306–1668 (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1882), vol. 9, p. 1321. Imrie and Dunbar, Accounts of the Masters of Works (see note 6.5), pp. 103–10. Beard, Decorative Plasterwork (see note 7.12), p. 200 lists five properties: Thirlestane, Holyroodhouse, Stirling Castle, Craighall and Kinross.

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Notes to Chapter 7   555

22. BoS: P&K, p. 266. Three rooms contain seventeenth-century plasterwork, all thought to have been carried out in the early 1660s. 23. Recorded by RCAHMS before demolition c. 1962. NRHE SC1212075, SC12120756, SC1212078 and SC1212095. 24. The others are Sailor’s Walk and 225–229 High Street. 25. Addyman, T., ‘Law’s Close, 339–343 High Street, Kirkcaldy, Fife (Kirkcaldy & Dysart parish), 16th-century town house’, in Discovery and Excavation in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2005), vol. 6, p. 73, https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/ archiveDownload?t=arch-753-1/dissemination/pdf/2000/2005.pdf (accessed October 2019). 26. Bruce held the post of ‘Surveyor-General and Overseer of the King’s Buildings in Scotland’ between 1671 and 1678. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), p. 74. 27. NRS GD29/263/6, Appendix 13. Lindores paid in February for ‘161/2 working days Att 18d a day’. 28. For example, Harden House and Law’s Close, Kirkcaldy. 29. Mylne, Master Masons, pp. 195–202. 30. Beard, Decorative Plasterwork (see note 7.12), p. 217. Gapper, ‘Caroline Plasterwork at Ham’ (see note 7.6), p. 59. 31. NRS GD29/263/6, app. 13. 32. In addition, the plain, moulded cornice of the Queen’s Ante-Chamber is enriched only by the low-relief frieze decoration beneath, while the cornice in the Morning Drawing Room is enriched with rows of cast leaf decoration and brackets above a frieze of scrolling arabesques. 33. BoS: Borders, pp. 718–19, 721. The eagles are a reference to the Duke’s coat of arms. 34. Wemyss, ‘Study of Aspiration’ (see note 7.14), vol. 2, pp. 38–113. 35. Dunbar, J. G., ‘The Building-activities of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale, 1670–82’, Archaeological Journal 132 (1976), pp. 209–10. 36. NRS GD305/1/147/76. 37. BoS: Edinburgh, pp. 638–9. The work was carried out following a fire started there by anti-Catholic rioters. 38. Fenwick, H., Architect Royal: The Life and Works of Sir William Bruce 1630–1710 (Kineton, 1970), p. 69. 39. Gapper, ‘Caroline Plasterwork at Ham’ (see note 7.6), p. 59. Dunsterfield returned home in 1676. Houlbert received his last payment for work at Holyroodhouse in 1679. 40. It is possible local plasterers were capable of producing high-quality work, equal to that of Houlbert and Dunsterfield. It is not known who carried out the high-quality plasterwork at Bannockburn House. Its quality suggests the involvement of Houlbert or Dunsterfield.

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556   Notes to Chapter 7

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

However, the use of a frieze on the ground floor which matches rib decoration employed at Menzies suggests that local plasterers were involved, in which case the work at Bannockburn could represent the apogee of locally produced work of this type. Research currently being carried out to inform a conservation repair strategy for the property may reveal further information. NRHE DP028222. NRS E36/37. I am grateful to Michael Pearce for this information. Fenwick, Architect Royal (see note 7.38), p. 18. Gapper, ‘Caroline Plasterwork at Ham’ (see note 7.6), p. 59. NRS GD29/263/21–7. The Albourn family tree shows Thomas Albourn and his wife, Anna Bruce, had two sons; the elder (Thomas) was born c. 1658. Robert may have been his second son. See Wood, ‘Plaisterers’ (see note 7.9), p. 4. This loyalty was repaid in a curious way. A riot in March 1691 objecting to the appointment of Presbyterian ministers to the parishes of Portmoak and Kinross involved many of Bruce’s servants, masons, wrights and plasterers, ‘one of whom was Thomas Alburne’. MacKechnie, A., ‘Sir William Bruce: the chief introducer of Architecture in this country’, PSAS 132 (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 517. NRAS2171/Bundle 152/2, Annandale Papers, ‘Plasterwork proposals by Thomas Alburne for plastering the house of Craigiehall’. Dunbar, J. G., Sir William Bruce, 1630–1710, Scottish Arts Council exhibition catalogue (Edinburgh, 1970), p. 16. Colvin, Dictionary (1995), p. 896. Marshall, Days of Duchess Anne (see note 7.11), p. 205. BoS: Fife, p. 321. Rothes MSS 40/65/1 contains payments to both Thomas and Andrew. Beard, Decorative Plasterwork (see note 7.12), pp. 199–253. Wood, ‘Plaisterers’ (see note 7.9), p. 14. NRS CC/6/32. Wood, ‘Plaisterers’ (see note 7.9), p. 19.

Chapter 8: Roof Design in Scotland

1. Hanke, T. ‘The Development of Roof Carpentry in South East Scotland Until 1647’, unpublished MPhil dissertation (University of Edinburgh, 2006). Newland, K., ‘To Norroway, to Norroway, to Norroway o’er the Foam: Sourcing Timber for Scotland’s Seventeenth Century Building Works’, in H. Hamre (ed.), Museum Stavanger årbok (2012), vol. 122, pp. 85–117. Crone, B. A. and Mills, C. M., ‘Timber in Scottish Buildings, 1450–1800: A Dendrochronological Perspective’, PSAS 142 (2012), pp. 329–69.

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Notes to Chapter 8   557

2. Stell, G. M., ‘The Great Hall and Roof of Darnaway Castle, Moray’, in W. D. H. Sellar (ed.), Moray, Province and People (Edinburgh: Scottish Society for Northern Studies, 1993), pp. 163–79. 3. Hanke, ‘Roof Carpentry’; Newland, ‘To Norroway’; Crone and Mills, ‘Timber’ (see note 8.1 for all three). Thomson, A., ‘The Scottish Timber Trade, 1680 to 1800’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of St Andrews, 1991). 4. The work is part of wider research on Scottish built heritage being carried out by the Architectural Design and Conservation Research Unit, within the Department of Architecture of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. 5. Lockhart, B. R. W., Jinglin Geordie’s Legacy: A History of George Heriot’s Hospital and School (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003), p. 29.. 6. Newland, ‘To Norroway’ (see note 8.1). 7. Thomson, ‘Timber Trade’ (see note 8.3). 8. Ibid. 9. Lockhart, Jinglin Geordie (see note 8.5), p. 53. 10. Ibid., p. 54. 11. NRS GD421/5/2. 12. Lockhart, Jinglin Geordie (see note 8.5), pp. 57–8. 13. Ibid., pp. 56, 57, 58. 14. Gomme, A., ‘Scottish Hammerbeam Roofs, and one that isn’t’, Architectural Heritage 26 (2002), pp. 13, 20–35. 15. Newland, ‘To Norroway’; Hanke, ‘Roof Carpentry’ (see note 8.1 for both). 16. Hay, G. D., ‘Some Aspects of Timber Construction in Scotland’, in J. Dunbar (ed.), Building Construction in Scotland. Some Historical and Regional Aspects (Edinburgh: SVBWG, 1976). 17. Kleboe, J. (ed.), Timber and the Built Environment Conference (Technical Conservation, Research and Education Report) (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2004). 18. Hanke, ‘Roof Carpentry’ (see note 8.1). 19. Ruddock, T., ‘Repair of Two Important Early Scottish Roof Structures’, Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers 110 (1995), pp. 296–307. 20. Hanke, T., ‘Newark Castle, Port Glasgow: A Proto-Modern Roof of the Late 16th Century’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 46(1) (2012), pp. 1–35. Oldrieve, W. T., ‘The Ancient Roof of Glasgow Cathedral’, PSAS 50 (1916), pp. 155–72. Hanke, T., ‘The Stable of Halkerston Lodge and Moray House: Roof Architecture of the 1630s around Edinburgh’, Edinburgh Architectural Research 29 (2004), pp. 33–7.

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558   Notes to Chapter 8

21. Drdacky, M. (ed.), European Research on Cultural Heritage: State of the Art Studies (Prague: Centre of Excellence, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2006). Hewett, C. A., English Historic Carpentry (Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1980). Hoffsummer, P., Les charpentes du XIe au XIXe siècle. Grand Ouest de la France (Turnhout: Brepol Publishers, 2011). Janse, H., Houten Kappen in Nederland 1000–1940 (Delft: Delft University Press, 1989). Ostendorf, F., Die Geschichte des Dachwerks (Leipzig, 1908). 22. Oldrieve, ‘Glasgow Cathedral’ (see note 8.20). 23. Ruddock, ‘Roof Structures’ (see note 8.19). 24. Crone and Mills, ‘Timber’ (see note 8.1). 25. Ostendorf, Die Geschichte; Janse, Houten Kappen (see note 8.21 for both). 26. Drdacky (ed.), European Research; Hoffsummer, Les charpentes; Janse, Houten Kappen; Ostendorf, Die Geschichte (see note 8.21 for all four). Yeomans, D. T., The Trussed Roof: its History and Development (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992). 27. An isolated exception was Stirling’s Chapel Royal, built in 1594 for the baptism of Prince Henry. Otherwise, the first known Scottish roof with a tie-beam is Yester House which dates probably to 1699– 1715. 28. The first known Scottish roof with purlins is Yester House which dates probably to 1729–48. 29. The first known Scottish roofs with wall-plates are Gardyne’s Land, Dundee (possibly late seventeenth century) and Methven Castle (1678–81). 30. Courtenay, L. T., ‘Where Roof Meets Wall: Structural Innovations and Hammer-Beam Antecedents, 1150–1250’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 441 (1985), pp. 89–124. 31. See note 26. 32. Hanke, ‘Halkerston and Moray House’ (see note 8.20), p. 30. 33. The decision to retain so much of the previous palace may have meant that the idea of introducing an unbroken wide span never arose. 34. Wide spans were constructed for earlier Scottish buildings including Darnaway Castle (1387, 35ft span), Edinburgh Castle great hall (1510, 33ft span), Stirling Castle great hall (late fifteenth/early sixteenth century, 47ft span), Edinburgh Parliament Hall (1631, 42.5ft span). These roofs are, however, open to view and thus do not need to support a ceiling underneath, as later roofs did. 35. Thomson, ‘Timber Trade’ (see note 8.3). 36. Serafini, A. and González-Longo, C., ‘The Design and Construction Techniques of Eighteenth Century Timber Roofs in Scotland: Glasgow

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Notes to Chapter 8   559

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Trades Hall and Tweeddale House in Edinburgh’, in D. Friedman et al. (eds), Proceedings of the 5th International Construction History Congress, Chicago 2015 (Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, 2015). Glasgow Trades Hall, an uncatalogued survey drawing of the timber roof structure by the architect Charles Wilson in October 1856 shows the interventions that he carried out to repair it, including the addition of iron bars. NRS GD421/10/68. Records of George Heriot’s Trust include detailed account and discharge by Thomas Sandilands, wright, for £683 Scots for timber and wright work performed on the chapel and lodge (or summer house) in the Easter garden, 16 January 1685. Lynch, M., Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 263ff. Mullan, D. G. (ed.), Religious Controversy in Scotland 1625–1639 (Edinburgh: SHS, 1998), p. 104. Lockhart, Jinglin Geordie (see note 8.5), p. 351, n. 98. Ibid., pp. 121–2. Ibid., pp. 121–3. Crone and Mills, ‘Timber’ (see note 8.1).

Chapter 9: Rethinking the Origins of the British Architectural Plate Book







1. Quoted in Friedman, T., James Gibbs (New Haven, CT and London: Yale, 1984), p. 20. 2. For the classic statement of the orthodox interpretation of Vitruvius Britannicus as the seminal text of the Palladian revolution, see Summerson, Architecture in Britain (see note 4.4), pp. 295–310. 3. For Gibbs’ wide-ranging influence and the central importance of his publications in disseminating his work, see Friedman, James Gibbs (see note 9.1), chapter 11. 4. The drawings are in the RIBA collection. See Harris, J., Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects: Colen Campbell (Farnborough: Gregg International, 1973); and O’Hara, J., ‘Colen Campbell and the Preparatory Drawings for Vitruvius Britannicus’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of York, 2010). 5. Gibbs’ drawings for the Book of Architecture are at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 6. Connor, T., ‘The Making of Vitruvius Britannicus’, Architectural History 20 (1977), pp. 14–81. 7. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 8. Ibid., p. 15. 9. Ibid., p. 16.

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560   Notes to Chapter 9

10. Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2), pp. 139–46. 11. Ibid., p. 139. 12. Ibid., p. 141. 13. Ibid., pp. 139–41. 14. Ibid., p. 142. 15. Little, B., The Life and Work of James Gibbs (London: Batsford, 1955), p. 33. 16. Friedman, James Gibbs (see note 9.1), p. 39. 17. Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2), pp. 208–9. 18. Connor, ‘Making of Vitruvius Britannicus’ (see note 9.6), pp. 14–30, and plate 1, p. 81. 19. For a more detailed description of the circumstances and development of Vanbrugh’s designs for Blenheim, see my doctoral thesis, ‘Vanbrugh, Blenheim Palace and the Meanings of Baroque Architecture’ (University of York, 2013). 20. Downes, K., Vanbrugh (London: Zwemmer, 1979), pp. 255–6. 21. Rogers, S., ‘The Use of Royal Licences for Printing in England 1695–1760: A Bibliography’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7th ser. 1(2) (2000), pp. 133–92, quoting from SP/44/353, pp. 421–2. 22. Downes, Vanbrugh, p. 255, quoting from BL Add MS19596 f. 61. 23. BL Add MS19605 f. 81. 24. Dobrée, B. and Webb, G. (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927–8), vol. 4, pp. 43–4. 25. Addison, J. and Steel, R., The Spectator, 15 (17 March 1711), p. 2; cited in the Worcester College, Oxford, ‘Online Catalogue of the George Clarke Print Collection’, http://prints.worc.ox.ac.uk/index.html (accessed July 2019), entries for volume LIII, prints 76–84. 26. ‘Online Catalogue of the George Clarke Print Collection’ (see note 9.25), entries for volume LIII, prints 76–84. 27. Summerson, Architecture in Britain (see note 4.4), p. 297. 28. Ibid., p. 297. This qualification may reflect some pangs of conscience: it does not appear in the 1953 first edition of Architecture in Britain, but had been added by the 1969 fifth edition. 29. Campbell, C., Vitruvius Britannicus (London, 1715), vol. 1, p. 5. 30. For bibliographical details and reproductions of several of the versions of the plates, see Bremen, P. and Addis, D., Guide to ‘Vitruvius Britannicus’ – Annotated and Analytic Index to the Plates (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), pp. 73–6. 31. Analysis of the plates shows that the final version of each plate was

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Notes to Chapter 9   561

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

entirely re-engraved, with multiple differences of detail and shading, as well as inscriptions in different hands from those in the original plates. O’Hara, ‘Colen Campbell and the Preparatory Drawings for Vitruvius Britannicus’ (see note 9.4). Ibid., pp. 119–20. Ibid., p. 128. Harris, Catalogue of Campbell Drawings (see note 9.4), p. 16, entry 36, number 2; illustrated as fig. 130 (not fig. 131 as the text mistakenly suggests). Most of these drawings are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Although not published as a coherent series, most are in print in some form: see in particular Downes, K., ‘Vanbrugh over Fifty Years’, in C. Ridgway and R. Williams (eds), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England 1690–1730 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing in Association with the National Trust, 2000), pp. 1–11; Beard, G., The Work of John Vanbrugh (London: Batsford, 1986), plates 9, 10, 17. As noted by Fry, C., ‘Spanning the Political Divide: Neo-Palladianism and the Early Eighteenth-Century Landscape’, Garden History 31(2) (2003), pp. 180–92. BL Add MS61464 f. 95r. HMC Portland, vol. 5, p. 332. Little, Gibbs (see note 9.15), pp. 32–3. Friedman, James Gibbs (see note 9.1), pp. 8–9. The slow progress of Gibbs towards the surveyorship is documented in ‘Minutes of the Commissioners: 1713’, in M. H. Port (ed.), The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27, A Calendar (London: London Record Society, 1986), pp. 24–6. Friedman, James Gibbs (see note 9.1), p. 10. Ibid., p. 103, and fn. 3, p. 341. Ibid., p. 257.

Chapter 10: The Architectural Innovations of Mr James Smith of Whitehill

1. Colvin, H. M., ‘A Scottish Origin for English Palladianism’, Architectural History 17 (1974). Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 951. MacKechnie, A., ‘James Smith’s Smaller Country Houses’; Lowrey, J., ‘Sir William Bruce and his Circle at Craigiehall, 1694–1708’; and Macaulay, J., ‘The Seventeenth Century Genesis of Hamilton Palace’, in J. Frew and D. Jones (eds), Aspects of Scottish Classicism (St Andrews: Blakeley Milroy Publications, 1989), pp. 17–24.

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562   Notes to Chapter 10

2. González-Longo, C., ‘James Smith and Rome’, Architectural Heritage 23 (2012), pp. 75–96. 3. Summerson, Architecture in Britain [first published in 1953] (see note 4.4), p. 349. 4. González-Longo, C., ‘The Transformation of Drumlanrig Castle at the End of seventeenth-century’, in J. Campbell et al. (eds), First Conference of the Construction History Society, Queens’ College, Cambridge (Exeter: Short Run Press, 2014), pp. 169–80. 5. Summerson, Architecture in Britain (see note 4.4), pp. 509–10. 6. Campbell, C., Vitruvius Britannicus (New York: J. Harris, 1967 reprint), vol. ii. 7. González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). 8. Regole da’ Osservarsi nel Collegio de’ Scozzesi di Roma, SCA, CA/3/2/8. 9. NRS E307/2, p. 128. Colvin, Dictionary (2008), pp. 949, 951. 10. Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 949. 11. There is a possible entry, from Dores (1655–9). Anderson, P. J., Officers and Graduates of University & King’s College, Aberdeen 1945–1860 (Aberdeen, 1893), pp. 25, 75, 195, 316, 348. Anderson, P. J., Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae aberdonensis MDXCIII–MDCCCLX (Aberdeen, 1889–98), pp. 280–2. 12. NRS PA2/32, f. 202v–204v. Records of the Parliament of Scotland, MS 1685/4/113, ‘Ratification in favour of John Scott of Comiston’, www.rps.ac.uk (accessed July 2019): ‘upon the apprising led at the instance of James Smith, master of the work of kirks and bridges of Aberdeen, for the sum of £2,756 principal and £137 16s of sheriff fee, dated 19 February 1674’. 13. SCA, 1/33/8. 14. Records of the Scots Colleges at Douai, Rome, Madrid, Valladolid and Ratisbon, vol. I. Register of Students, Aberdeen, i, 1906. 15. SCA, APSCR, Register of Oath. 16. SCA, APSCR, Registers 1602–1967; CA/3/3, p. 16. 17. Roberts, A., ‘James Smith and James Gibbs: Seminarians and Archi­ tects’, Architectural Heritage 2 (1991), p. 46. McCluskey, R., The Scots College Rome 1600–2000 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2000), fig. 2. 18. The drawing is published in MacKechnie, A., Stewart, M. and Dunbar, J., Minerva’s Flame. The Great Houses of James Smith of Whitehill (c. 1645–1731) Surveyor of the Royal Works, Catalogue of an exhibition at Dalkeith Palace, July–August 1995 (Dalkeith: James Smith Anniversary Committee, 1995). I am very grateful to John G. Dunbar for giving me this catalogue. 19. González-Longo, C., ‘Using Old Stuff and Thinking in a New Way: Material Culture, Conservation and Fashion in Architecture’, in

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Notes to Chapter 10   563

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

P.  Emmons, J. Lomholt and J. Hendrix (eds), The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012). González-Longo, C., ‘Conserving, Reinstating and Converting Queensberry House’, in B. Sinha and L. Tanacan (eds), Proceedings of the 8th International Seminar on Structural Masonry, 5–7 November 2008 (Istanbul: Istanbul Technical University, 2008). González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). Roberts, ‘James Smith and James Gibbs’ (see note 10.17). SCA, BL/1/43/8. SCA, BL1/1/45/8, Letter from Christopher Irvin, Paris, 10 January 1676 (he had arrived from Padua shortly before). SCA, BL/1/43/8.30, Christopher Irvin, Padua, to Mr William Leslie, Rome, August 1675, ‘if Mr Smith be to depart sorly or no and to lett me have an answer befor the 10 of the next month, for if he be to depart shortly, and to passe be this place, I will willingly stay till his come here’. SCA, BL/1/42/11, Louis Innes, Paris, to John Irvine, Rome, 8 Nov 1675: ‘Mr Smith, who as we hear is on his journey for Paris’. SCA BL1/1/45/8, Christopher Irvin, Paris to Mr William Leslie, Rome, 10 Jan 1676: ‘I delayed my writting to you expecting daily, and with as great axiety, Mr Smith, as the Jewes doe the Messias, att lenth being informed by Fr Con of his embarquement . . . there after we roceane the nerves of his happy arrival to London’. Gunther R. T. (ed.), The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt (Oxford, 1928). Caramuel Lobkowitz, J., Architectura civil recta y obliqua (Vigevano: Camillo Corrado, 1678). For example, Dvorˇák, P. and Schmutz, J., Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz: the Last Scholastic Polymath (Prague: Filosofia Publishing House, 2008). Fernández-Santos Ortiz-Iribas, J., Juan Caramuel y la probable arquitectura (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014). Roberts, ‘James Smith and James Gibbs’, p. 46. McCluskey, The Scots College Rome, fig. 2 (see note 10.17 for both). Howard, Scottish Architecture (see note 2.14), p. 212. Harding, P., ‘John  Mylne IV (1611–1667): Great Artisan, Grave Senator’, Architectural Heritage 23 (2013). Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 949. Mylne, Master Masons, p. 187, report on progress of work 19 December 1674. Ibid., p. 169, response to initial designs by William Bruce, given 3 June 1671.

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564   Notes to Chapter 10

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., pp. 190–3. Ibid., pp. 190, 193. NRS GD29/263/9. Robertson, J., ‘Notice of a Volume of the “Accounts of Sir William Bruce of Balcaskie, General Surveyor of His Majesty’s Works (1674–1679)”, now in the General Register House’. PSAS 3 (1857–9), pp. 113–17. MacKechnie, ‘Birth-stool of Scottish Romanticism?’ (see note 2.1). González-Longo, C., ‘Robert Mylne and the First Baroque Mural Monument in Greyfriars Kirkyard, 1675’, in P. Jupp and H. Grainger (eds), Death in Scotland: Chapters from the Twelfth to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2019), pp. 147–68. Mylne, Master Masons, p. 199. Ibid., pp. 199–200. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 200. NRS E36/33, Vouchers: Holyrood, 1675–9, nos 404–605. Dunbar, J. G., ‘The Organisation of the Building Industry in Scotland during the 17th Century’, in Dunbar (ed.), Building Construction in Scotland (see note 8.16), p. 8. Boog Watson, C. B., Roll of Edinburgh Burgesses and Guild-brethren, 1406–1700 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1929), p. 456. Newland, The Acquisition and Use of Norwegian Timber (see note 7.8), pp. 116, n. 6, 145. Caramuel Lobkowitz, Architectura civil recta y obliqua (see note 10.27), vol. II, V, p. 1. NRS GD406/1/11221, Letter to the Earl of Arran, son of the Duke, dated 1696. Extract published in González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). Wotton, H., The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), ed. C. Davis, p. 33, http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/1870/1/Davis_​Fontes​ 68.pdf (accessed May 2019). Figure 4.2 (Holyrood Palace) is an example of a perspective drawing that this author identified at the British Museum and believes was drawn by James Smith. Wemyss, A Study of Aspiration (see note 7.14). Wemyss, Noble Houses (see note 4.2). Wittkower, R., ‘Palladio and Bernini’, in R. Wittkower, Palladio and English Palladianism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974). GonzálezLongo, C., ‘Da S. Maria Nova a S. Francesca Romana: Architettura e committenza Olivetana nella transformazione della chiesa dal Trecento

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Notes to Chapter 10   565

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

al Seicento’, in A. Bartolomei Romagnoli (ed.), La canonizzazione di S. Francesca Romana. Santità, Cultura e Istituzioni a Roma tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna (Florence: Sismel-Edizioni Del Galluzzo, 2012). This is how Bernini’s biographers described his work. Lavin, I., Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. I, p. 6. Wemyss, A Study of Aspiration (see note 7.14), p. 30 and n. 421. González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). GonzálezLongo ‘Transformation of Drumlanrig’ (see note 10.4). González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). McKean, The Scottish Chateau (see note 4.2), p. 264. MacKechnie, A., ‘A King, Catholics, and Canongate Kirk’, History Scotland (Nov/Dec 2007), pp. 22–8. Borromeo, C., Instructionum Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, 1577 (Città del Vaticano, 2000). Deborah Howard also saw Canongate Kirk as Italian-inspired, although, in her case, as Venetian rather than Roman. See Howard, D., ‘Reflexions of Venice in Scottish Architecture’, Architectural History 44 (2001), p. 127. González-Longo, ‘James Smith and Rome’ (see note 10.2). Howard, Scottish Architecture (see note 2.14), p. 103. Vignola, G. B., The Regular Architect: or the General Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture of M. Giacomo Barozzio Da Vignola: With a New Addition of Michael Angelo Buonaroti (London, 1669), plate XXXXII. I am very grateful to Gaspar Dos Reis Souza Lima for casting his expert eye on this gate and pointing this out, as well as the reminder of the scissor arches at Wells Cathedral, by master mason William Joy (1338–48). The form can, however, be found earlier, for example in Brunelleschi’s stone roof of the lantern on the old sacristy of San Lorenzo, in Florence. 67. Knoop, D., and G. P. Jones, The Scottish Mason and The Mason Word. (Manchester, 1939) p. 15. Gifford, J., William Adam 1689–1748. A Life and Times of Scotland’s Universal Architect (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1989), p. 63. Ruddock, T., ‘Dalkeith House Pediment: its Form and Construction’, Scottish Georgian Society Bulletin 8 (1981). González-Longo, C. and Theodossopoulos, D., ‘From Master Mason to Architect: James Smith’s Construction Techniques at the End of 17th Century in Scotland’, in R. Carvais, A. Guillerme and V. Negre (eds), Nuts & Bolts of Construction History. Culture, Technology and Society. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Construction History (Paris: Picard, 2012).

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566   Notes to Chapter 10

71. González-Longo, ‘Transformation of Drumlanrig’ (see note 10.4). 72. McKean, ‘Refashioning of Glamis’ (see note 4.17), pp. 203–5.

Chapter 11: The Duke of Buccleuch

1. Dunbar, J. and Cornforth, J., ‘Dalkeith House, Lothian’, Country Life (19 April 1984), pp. 1062–5; 26 April 1984, pp. 1158–61; 3 May 1984, pp. 1230–3. MacKechnie et al., Minerva’s Flame (see note 10.18). 2. Much correspondence relating to this time is printed in Fraser, W., The Scotts of Buccleuch (Edinburgh: W. Fraser, 1878), vol. 2. This undated letter is quoted on p. 462. 3. NRS Buccleuch MSS, GD224/26/13/359/26. Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch (see note 11.2), p. 374. 4. NRS GD26/13/359/58. 5. NRS GD26/13/359/26; GD26/13/359/27 and 28. Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch (see note 11.2), p. 375. 6. NRS GD26/13/359/31. 7. NRS GD26/13/359/36. 8. NRS GD26/5/445. 9. NRS GD26/13/359/32, dated ‘July’, probably of 1701. 10. NRS GD26/5/445. 11. NRS GD224/25/18/22; GD224/25/18/24. 12. Drury, P., Jeffery, S. and Wrightson, D., ‘Moor Park in the Seventeenth Ccentury’, The Antiquaries Journal 96 (2016), pp. 241–90. For St James’s Place, see NRS GD224/25/13/26. 13. Colvin, H. M., Mordaunt Crook, J., Downes, K. and Newman, J. (eds), The History of the King’s Works, vol. V, 1660–1782 (London: HMSO, 1976), p. 27. Draper, M. P. G., ‘The Great House in Soho Square’, Country Life (12 September 1963), pp. 592–3. 14. NRS GD224/25/9/30. 15. NRS GD224/25/14/24 and GD224/15/14. 16. NRS GD224/25/14/24. 17. NRS GD224/1083, Inventory of 1756. 18. NRS GD224/25/19/74. 19. NRS GD224/25/15/12. 20. NRS GD224/25/17/22. 21. NRS GD224/25/16/1. 22. NRS GD224/25/16/2. 23. NRS GD224/27/5/3. 24. NRS GD224/25/10/17. 25. NRS GD224/25/9/45. 26. NRS GD224/25/17/49.

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Notes to Chapter 11   567

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

NRS GD224/25/17/22. NRS GD224/918/49/1–15. NRS GD224/25/17/22. NRS GD224/25/19/1. NRS GD26/13/359/31. NRS GD224/25/20/52; GD224/27/6/4; GD224/29/2/3. NRS GD224/27/3/21; GD224/29/3/58. Jeffery, S., ‘Grinling Gibbons’s Chimneypieces for the Duchess of Buccleuch’, Georgian Group Journal XXIV (2016), pp. 1–22. NRS GD224/261/2. NRS GD224/27/11/6, 8, 10, 11, 12. NRS GD26/5/445. NRS GD224/27/5/1, 2. NRS GD26/13/359/33. Fraser, The Scotts of Buccleuch (see note 11.2), p. 376. NRS GD224/918/46, p. 4; GD224/29/3/84; GD224/25/18/24. NRS GD224/27/7/39–40 and GD224/1083; GD224/28/3/44; GD224/28/4/1. The text reads: ‘The Queen brought in the Custom or Humour, as I may call it, of furnishing Houses with China-Ware, which increased to a strange degree afterwards, piling their China upon the Tops of Cabinets, Scrutores, and every Chymney-Piece, to the Tops of the Ceilings, and even setting up Shelves for their China-Ware . . .’ Defoe, D., A Tour Thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain, vol. I, letter II (London, 1724), p. 122. Lee, M., The Heiresses of Buccleuch (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), p. 108. The Queen dined with the Duchess of Monmouth at Moor Park in August 1693. Calendar of State Papers Domestic of the Reign of William and Mary, ed. W. J. Hardy and E. Bateson (London: HMSO, 1895–1937), p. 268. NRS GD224/28/1/47. NRS GD224/918/46, p. 55. Tipping, H. A., Grinling Gibbons and the Woodwork of his Age (1648– 1720) (London: Country Life, 1914), p. 221. GD224/27/9/44; GD224/27/10/19. Sir John Soane’s Museum, SM vol. 110 (Hampton Court Album). Thurley, S., Hampton Court. A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2003), pp. 171–81. The National Archives AO1/2482/297; Thurley, Hampton Court (see note 11.49), p. 172. NRS GD224/25/5/43; GD224/25/13/27; GD224/918/45, p. 18. NRS GD224/918/46, p. 50.

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568   Notes to Chapter 11

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

NRS GD224/29/3/84. NRS GD224/261/17/15 and 224/918/46, p. 50. NRS GD224/261/20/3. NRS GD224/625/1. NRS GD224/261/2. NRS GD224/261/3. NRS GD224/261/3/3/4. The painting is mentioned in the 1756 inventory, NRS GD224/1083, as ‘Her late Grace’s picture over the chimney and her two sons’. It now hangs at Bowhill House, Selkirk. 61. NRS GD224/29/3/76. 62. Minerva’s Flame (see note 10.18), p. 9.

Chapter 12: Women Patrons







1. Marshall, Days of Duchess Anne (see note 7.11). Von den Steinen, K., ‘In Search of the Antecedents of Women’s Political Activism in Early Eighteenth-century Scotland: The Daughters of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton’, in E. Ewan and M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland, c. 1100– c. 1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 112–22. Carr, R., ‘Female Correspondence and Early Modern Scottish Political History: A Case Study of the Anglo-Scottish Union’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 37 (2011), pp. 39–57. Carr, R., ‘Women and Darien: Female Participation in Scotland’s Attempt at Empire, c.  1696–1706’, Women’s History Magazine 61 (Winter 2009), pp. 14–20. Cowmeadow, N., ‘Redefining Scottish Noblewomen’s Political Activity in the Era of Union’, Women’s History Magazine 61 (Winter 2009), pp. 21–5. 2. Lowrey, J., A Man of Excellent Parts: Alexander Edward 1651–1708 (St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 1987). Lowrey, J., ‘Alexander Edward: The Education of an Architect’, Inferno: The St Andrews Journal of Art History (1996), pp. 35–48. 3. Godard Desmarest, C., ‘Mary Halket, Lady Bruce, at Kinross House in the 1680–90s’, Architectural Heritage 27 (2017), pp. 19–42. 4. Steen. S. J. (ed.), The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart (Oxford: OUP, 1994), p. 12. French, S., ‘A Widow Building in Elizabethan England: Bess of Hardwick at Hardwick Hall’, in A. Levy (ed.), Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 161–76. Friedman, A. T., ‘Architecture, Authority, and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House’, Assemblage 18 (1992), pp. 40–61. 5. Elizabeth Wilbraham may have designed as many as 400 buildings. She owned a 1663 edition of Palladio’s Quattro Libri (volume I) which

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Notes to Chapter 12   569

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

she heavily annotated. Millar, J., ‘The First Woman Architect’, The Architects’ Journal 232(18) (11 November 2010), pp. 42–4. Balfour, The Scots Peerage (see note 3.98), vol. 4, p. 367. NRS GD406/1/11221, James Smith to the Earl of Arran, 15 May 1696. Glenesk, Invermark, Edzell and Kelly were also on the Panmure estates. NRS GD45/18/1633, notes of 1701 for building a gate and walls at Brechin Castle. Walker, D. and Dunbar, J., ‘Brechin Castle, Angus’, Country Life (part I, 12 August 1971), pp. 378–81; (part II, 19 August 1971), pp. 436–40. Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), pp. 57–74. NRS GD45/18/882, ‘Inventar of household furniture in the house of Panmure the 16 May 1705’. NRS GD48/18/753, Number of trees planted at Panmure 10 November 1694. Maule, H., Registrum of Panmure, Records of the Families of Maule,  de  Valoniis, Brechin, and Brechin-Barclay, United in the Line of the Barons and Earls of Panmure (Edinburgh, 1874), vol. 1, pp. lxvi–lxviii. In 1696 Edward was building a court with two pavilions flanking the entrance. In 1697 he proposed a range of office houses on the east side of the castle court, and in 1698 he drew up plans for an extended north wing. In October 1700 he designed a formal landscape with a patte d’oie beyond the outer court. Walker and Dunbar, ‘Brechin Castle, Angus’, part I (see note 12.10), p. 380. NRS GD406/1/7311/2, Margaret Panmure, Brechin Castle, to her brother the Duke of Hamilton, 19 December 1705. In January 1703, a contract for masonwork to the west front specified the steps, window and door surrounds, but there is little evidence that work advanced much before September 1706. By 1709 the roof of the new building was slated (NRS GD45/18/1645); in 1711 the arms in the pediment were cut. Walker and Dunbar, ‘Brechin Castle, Angus’, part I (see note 12.10), pp. 380–1. The contract was for minor work in the garden, NRS RD4/85, pp. 393–4. Although several sources mention the burning of House of Nairne in 1706, it is more likely that it happened two years earlier, as it is mentioned in a letter from Lord Dunmore to Atholl of 23 December 1704. Atholl (Duke of), J. J. and Anderson, J., Chronicles of the Atholl and Tullibardine Families (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1908), vol. 2, p. 43. Fittis, R. S., Recreations of an Antiquary in Perthshire, History and Genealogy (Perth: Constitutional Office, 1881), vol. 8, p. 250.

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570   Notes to Chapter 12

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Kington-Oliphant, T. L., The Jacobite Lairds of Gask (London: Grampian Club, 1870), p. 60. NRS GD45/14/245/5, Lady Nairne, Nairne, to Lady Panmure, 15 December 1704. Jacobite Lairds of Gask (see note 12.19), p. 60. House of Nairne offers similarities with Hopetoun, Dunkeld and Moncrieffe. NRS GD45/14/245/19, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 28 September 1709. NRS GD112/39/225/10, Lord Nairne, at Nairne, to the Earl of Breadalbane, his cousin at Taymouth, 9 February 1709. NRS GD45/14/245/18, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 25 July 1709. NRS GD45/26/140. NRS GD45/14/245/6, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 2 January 1705. NRS GD45/14/245/8, Ditto, 18 January 1705. NRS GD45/14/245/18, Ditto, 25 July 1709. Blair Castle Archive, Blair Atholl, Image 3/98. NRS GD112/39/225/22/2–3. Fittis, Recreations (see note 12.19), vol. 8, pp. 253–4. Lady Nairne to Duke of Atholl, 2 March 1710. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 117. NRS GD45/14/245/18, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 25 July 1709: ‘House of Blair is repaired and the great rooms worth seeing’. Lord Nairne to Duke of Atholl, 29 September 1707. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 80. The building, which was reckoned to be one of the finest in Perthshire, did not survive the eighteenth century. Lady Nairne to Duke of Atholl, 25 August 1709. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 109. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 109. NRS GD112/39/233/18, Lady Nairne to Breadalbane, 1709. NRS GD112/39/225/22/1, Ditto, 1709. Ibid. NRS GD112/39/234/12, Lady Nairne, Dunkeld, to Breadalbane, 19 November 1709. Ibid. NRS GD112/39/233/18, Lady Nairne to Breadalbane, n.d. NRS GD112/39/257/9, Ditto, 4 September 1711. Lady Nairne, Nairne, to Duke of Atholl, 27 March 1710. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, pp. 119–20. Ibid. Lady Nairne to Duke of Atholl, 26 September 1723. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 358.

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Notes to Chapter 12   571

46. Duchess of Atholl to Duke of Atholl, 20 June 1736. Chronicles (see note 12.19), vol. 2, p. 424. 47. Panmure was one of the Scottish refugees present with the Old Chevalier at Avignon in 1716, along with the Earls Marischal, Southesk, Linlithgow, Tullibardine, Kilsyth, Kingston, Ogilvie, George Murray, Keith and Erskine. Tayler A. and Tayler, H., 1715: The Story of the Rising (London: T. Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1936), p. 330. Panmure was invested with the Order of the Thistle on 8 April 1716. 48. NRS GD45/14/220, Lady Panmure, London, to Panmure, 26 March 1718. 49. It was the first of the big estates to be sold to the Company. The York Buildings Company’s unrealistic prospects of profit had forced it to issue leases. Lady Panmure obtained a ninety-nine-year lease for Panmure and Brechin in 1724. In 1728 most of the Panmure estates were let to Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk for twenty-nine years at a rate of £1,674. The family estates were eventually bought back by William Maule, Harry Maule’s second son, for £49,157 18s corresponding to 30 years’ rental, in 1764. Sankey, M., Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion. Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 130–49. 50. Harry Maule was an accomplished soldier – he saved his brother from death on the battlefield at Sherriffmuir – and a passionate historical antiquary. The documents in Registrum de Panmure were mainly collected by him and his eldest son James Maule. Harry Maule’s main property was Kellie Castle. 51. NRS E650/54. Ten servants served at Brechin Castle. 52. NRS E650/54. 53. NRS GD45/14/220, Margaret Panmure, Panmure, to Earl, 7 August 1716, 18 January 1717. 54. NRS GD45/14/220, Ditto, 3 December 1716. 55. NRS GD45/14/220, Ditto, 29 January 1717. 56. NRS GD45/14/220, Ditto, 14 October 1718. 57. NRS GD45/18/744, Lists of garden seeds. 58. NRS GD45/14/220, Margaret Panmure, Panmure, to Earl, 27 May 1721. 59. NRS GD45/26/74, Journal of Doctor Blair, 8 February 1717. 60. NRS GD45/14/220, Margaret Panmure, Panmure, to Earl, 26 August 1721. 61. NRS GD45/14/220, Countess of Panmure, London, to Earl, 26 March 1719. GD45/14/381; the Countess was writing from Paris to her brother-in-law, Harry Maule, in Edinburgh, in September–November 1719, mainly on matters relating to her jointure and to the estate.

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572   Notes to Chapter 12

62. Szechi, D., 1715, The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2006), p. 227. 63. NRS GD45/23/84. 64. Robert de Maule, one of his sons, obtained from David I of Scotland lands in Midlothian. NRS GD45/26/75, ‘Journal of a Journey made by the Earle of Panmure and James Maule, son of Mr. Harie Maule of Kellie, from Paris to Maule, October 1720’. James Maule was a man of great learning who contemplated setting up a reference library in the Earl of Panmure’s house in the Canongate. 65. NRS GD45/14/381, Margaret Panmure to Harry Maule, Panmure, 30 November 1724. 66. NRS GD45/18/795, p. 302. 67. Lord Mar to Lady Nairne, 23 October 1715. Jacobite Lairds of Gask (see note 12.19), p. 37. The new Lord Nairne was also a staunch Jacobite and lost the estate after the 1745 rebellion. It was purchased by his cousin James Murray, 2nd Duke of Atholl who had no use for another large house. He had the house demolished and sold everything in 1764. 68. Fittis, Recreations (see note 12.19), vol. 8, p. 265. Nairne Estate, E684/8. 69. NRS GD45/14/245/18, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 25 July 1709. 70. NRS GD45/14/245/19, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, 28 Sept. 1709. 71. NRS GD45/14/245/2, Ditto, 22 December 1702. NRS GD45/26/99, verses composed by Margaret Panmure. 72. Registrum of Panmure (see note 12.14), p. lxviii. 73. NRS GD45/14/220, Margaret Panmure, London, to the Earl of Panmure, 5 July 1717. 74. Registrum of Panmure (see note 12.14), p. lxviii. 75. NRS GD45/17/1071. 76. NRS RHP35213/3. 77. NRS GD45/14/220, Lady Panmure to Earl of Panmure, 3 June 1716 – Lady Panmure said she was ‘perplex’d what to do about the furnitor of this House’. NRS GD45/17/936, 939, Discharges 23 February and 2 March 1716. 78. NRS GD45/18/916. 79. NRS GD45/14/245/7, 9, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, Nairne, 8 January and 5 February 1705. 80. NRS GD45/14/245/8, Lady Nairne, Nairne, to Lady Panmure, 18 January 1708. 81. NRS GD45/14/245/12, Lady Nairne, London, to Lady Panmure, 27 May 1708. 82. Ibid.

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Notes to Chapter 12   573

83. NRS GD45/14/245/16, Lady Nairne to Lady Panmure, London, 29 June 1708. 84. Hamilton Archives, F2/492/3. 85. Thomas Hamilton was the son of Charles Hamilton, 5th Earl of Haddington and Margaret Leslie, 8th Countess of Rothes. Hamilton, T., A Treatise on the Manner of Raising Forest Trees &c. (Edinburgh, 1761), pp. 7–10.

Chapter 13: Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun

1. Scott, P. H., ‘Andrew Fletcher, A Pioneer of the European Idea’, in P. H. Scott (ed.), The Saltoun Papers: Reflections on Andrew Fletcher (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 2003), p. 13. 2. Ibid., p. 15. 3. Mackenzie, W. C., Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun: His Life and Times (Edinburgh: The Porpoise Press, 1935), p. 42. 4. Ibid., p. 5. 5. NLS MS16502, f. 169. 6. Ibid., f. 169. 7. Ibid., f. 169. 8. Ibid., f. 169. 9. Fraser, K., Andrew Fletcher, The Patriot (Stirling: Scots Independent, 2004), pp. 8–14. Scott, ‘Andrew Fletcher’ (see note 13.1), p. 15. 10. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), p. 20. Berger, R. W., ‘The  Origins of Marly’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte LVI (1993), p. 535. 11. Ibid., p. 544. 12. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), p. 89. 13. Fraser, The Patriot (see note 13.9), p. 4. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), p. 19. 14. Scott, ‘Andrew Fletcher’ (see note 13.1), p. 16. 15. See Campbell, C., Vitruvius Britannicus II (London, 1717), pp. 21–2. 16. NLS MS16502, ff. 208–9. 17. Stutchbury, H. E., The Architecture of Colen Campbell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), pp. 9–10. 18. Harris, J., William Talman: Maverick Architect (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), p. 17. 19. NLS MS16502, ff. 208–9. 20. Louw, H. J., ‘Anglo-Netherlandish Architectural Interchange c. 1600 – c. 1660’, Architectural History XXIV (1981), p. 6. 21. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), p. 5. Scott, ‘Andrew Fletcher’ (see note 13.1), pp. 3, 18.

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574   Notes to Chapter 13

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), pp. 20–1. Ibid., p. 44. Louw, ‘Architectural Interchange’ (see note 13.20), p. 17. Curl, J. S., ‘Vingboons, or Vinckeboons, Philip(us)’, The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 823. Ottenheym, K., Philips Vingboons (1607–1678) Architect (Amsterdam: Walburg Press, 1989), pp. 215, 35. Scott, ‘Andrew Fletcher’ (see note 13.1), p. 6. Ibid., p. 15. NLS MS17863. Mackenzie, Andrew Fletcher (see note 13.3), p. 82. Foster, P., A Study of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Villa at Poggio a Caiano (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. 132. The harmonic mean of two numbers x1 and x2 is found by the calculation H=(2x1x2)/x1 + x2. NLS MS16502. Burke, G., The Making of Dutch Towns: A Study of Urban Development from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (London: Cleaver-Hume Press, 1956), p. 127. Ottenheym, Philips Vingboons (see note 13.26), p. 119. Smith, W., ‘Nemesis’, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology Volume 2 (London, 1844–9), p. 1152. West, M. L., Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 306–8. Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum, 14.11.25. Fletcher, A., ‘An Account of a Conversation Concerning the Right Regulation of Governments for the Common Good of Mankind’, in D.  Daiches (ed.), Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, Selected Political Writings and Speeches (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), pp. 112–13, 108. Fletcher, ‘Regulation of Government’ (see note 13.38), pp. 117, 130–4.

Chapter 14: John Douglas 1. McKean, C. and Walker, D. M., ‘The Professorial on the Professional: a History of the Scottish Architectural Profession’, in R. Bailey (ed.), Scottish Architects’ Papers, a Source Book (Edinburgh: The Rutland Press, 1996), pp. 18–61. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), chapters 3–4. 2. NRS CS232/P/3/18, State and Report in the Process George Patterson, Writer at Newmills (Pursuer) Against John Douglas, Architect in Edinburgh (Defender), 1762 (henceforth ‘Lybell’).

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Notes to Chapter 14   575

3. Kinnear, H. E. B., ‘John Douglas’ Country House Designs’, Architectural Heritage 12 (2001), pp. 1–12. Gow, I., John Douglas, William Adam’s Rival? An Exhibition of the Recently Discovered Drawings of the Eighteenth Century Scottish Architect, John Douglas. 15 August to 31 October 1989 (Edinburgh: RCAHMS, 1989). 4. DSA. 5. NRS CC8/8/124, Will of John Douglas, 20 June 1778. NRS GD45/16/2738, Deed of Entail by John Douglas in Favour of William Douglas and others 1773. 6. Gilhooley, J. (ed.), The Edinburgh Recorder: Spotlight on the Personalities, Properties, and their Fire Insurance Policies from 1720 to 1840 (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1990), records 2717, 2754–7. 7. Ibid. 8. DSA. 9. McKean and Walker, ‘The Professorial’ (see note 14.1), pp. 18–61. 10. Theodossopoulos, D., The Catastrophic Repairs of Holyrood Abbey Church, www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/66709197/Holyrood_​ 1760_​AHSS_​Apr2018.pdf (accessed April 2019). 11. John Douglas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_​Douglas_​(Scot​ tish_​architect) (accessed March 2019). 12. Gow, John Douglas, William Adam’s Rival? (see note 14.3). 13. Colvin, Dictionary (2008), p. 330. 14. NRHE ELD/125/53, Acc no. 1984/16, Contract betwixt William Nisbet of Dirleton and John Douglas, 17 June 1747. 15. Theodossopoulos, Catastrophic Repairs (see note 14.10). 16. Ibid. 17. NRS GD112/15/318/66. 18. NRS GD112/74/19. In the case of both these churches the principal heritor (i.e. landowner; heritors were responsible for church provision) was a pro-establishment Campbell, but the suggestion is viable. 19. Gow, John Douglas (see note 14.3). 20. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), p. 127. 21. Friedman, James Gibbs (see note 9.1). 22. Gow, John Douglas (see note 14.3). 23. Will of John Douglas, 20 June 1778 (see note 14.5). 24. Gow, John Douglas (see note 14.3). 25. NRHE, https://canmore.org.uk/site/26984/murthly-castle (accessed March 2019). 26. NRHE, https://canmore.org.uk/collection/336884 and Buildings of Lochmaben; www.lochmaben.org.uk/about/buildings (both accessed March 2019).

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576   Notes to Chapter 14

27. Geoscenic stone database, http://geoscenic.bgs.ac.uk/asset-bank/ action/viewLastSearch?newSearch=true British Geological Survey (accessed March 2019). 28. http://portal.historicenvironment.scot/designation/GDL00017 (acc­ es­sed March 2019). 29. NRHE ELD/125/52, Contract betwixt Nisbet and Douglas (see note 14.14). 30. The house was sold in 1883 following Mary Bruce Nisbet-Hamilton’s death; it was requisitioned for the war effort in 1940 and gutted for grain drying in 1962–3. In 2002 it was restored for a luxury golf course development. 31. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), pp. 127–8. 32. NRHE ELD/125/52, Contract betwixt Nisbet and Douglas (see note 14.14). 33. Other items under dispute highlight rates and site organisation. George Patterson claimed he paid workmen £231 (a tenth of Douglas’s budget) and appeared to work also as a wright on the project. Receipt no. 32 to Robert Gray (Patterson’s apprentice) confirms work for 156 days charged at £3 18s, which works out at 6d a day for an apprentice. Douglas mentions a wright in charge of the roof would be paid 10d a day. Other workers were paid to sort dills (lighter timber boards) in Dunbar where they would be shipped (receipt no. 42) or wainscot (receipt no. 41) (Lybell). 34. NRS RHP3876. 35. NRHE SC684491. 36. NRS GD39/6/Box 3/4/1, Contract between the Earl of Glencairn and architect John Douglas to build ‘towards the west end of the N. front of the present house of Finlaystone a new house of 3 storeys’. 37. Lybell. 38. Wardhouse or Gordon House, North East Scotland Preservation Trust, www.scalan.co.uk/Wardhouse.htm (accessed March 2019). 39. Geoscenic database (see note 14.27). 40. Ibid. 41. Campbeltown Town House Restoration, www.townhallcampbeltown. com/transformation (accessed March 2019). 42. Coltart, W. A., Historical Analysis of Main Elevation, Campbeltown Town Hall Conservation and Renovation Project. Design Stage (November 2012). 43. Cant, R. G., College of St. Salvator: its Foundation and Development, Including a Selection of Documents (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956). Grater, A., The United College: the Architectural Development

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Notes to Chapter 14   577

44.

45. 46. 47.

of the United College of St. Salvator & St. Leonard, University of St. Andrews, 1757–1931 (St Andrews: University of St Andrews, 2000). Theodossopoulos, D., Sinha, B. P. and Usmani, A. S., ‘Case Study of the Failure of a Cross Vault: Church of Holyrood Abbey’, Journal of Architectural Engineering 9(3) (September 2003), pp. 109–17. Theodossopoulos, Catastrophic Repairs (see note 14.10). Gow, John Douglas (see note 14.3). Simpson, J., ‘William Adam the Practical Architect’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), pp. 74–83. Gow, John Douglas (see note 14.3).

Chapter 15: Enclosing and Planting 1. Reid, J., The Scots Gard’ner (Edinburgh, 1683). 2. ‘Policy’, Dictionary of the Scots Language. www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/ policy (accessed May 2019). 3. Rogers, Rev. C., Rental Book of the Cistercian Abbey of Cupar-Angus (London: The Grampian Club, 1879). There are frequent references to the planting of ash, willow and hawthorn throughout the abbey records. For the passage quoted here, see vol. 1, p. 177. 4. The European dimension of the sculptures is discussed in Simpson, W. D., ‘Edzell Castle’, PSAS 65 (1930), pp. 115–73. 5. Ibid., p. 146. 6. Reid, Scots Gard’ner (see note 15.1), pp. 1–53. 7. For Reid’s life and career, see Whyte, D., ‘John Reid: Pioneer Landscape Gardener’, The Scottish Genealogist XXXIII, pp. 173–81. 8. Reid, Scots Gard’ner (see note 15.1), p. 2. 9. BoS: P&K, pp. 483–94. 10. Jamieson, F., ‘Kinross House and Gardens’ (unpublished draft research notes, 1999). 11. Defoe, Tour (see note 11.42). 12. Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5). The Earl’s improvements at Glamis are described on pp. 38–46. 13. Macky, J., A Journey through Scotland (London: J. Pemberton and J. Hooke, 1723), p. 135. 14. Boutcher, W., A Treatise on Forest Trees (Edinburgh: J. Murray, 1778). 15. Stewart, Earl of Mar (see note 4.18). 16. Macky, Journey (see note 15.13), p. 182. 17. Lowrey, A Man of Excellent Parts (see note 12.2) gives an account of Alexander Edward’s life. 18. James, J., The Theory and Practice of Gardening (London, 1712). Blair Castle Archives Box 70.D.12. for the 2nd Duke’s instructions.

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578   Notes to Chapter 15

19. Smout, T. C., A New Look at the Scottish Improvers, SHR 97(231) (2012), pp. 125–49. The principal members of the Honourable Society are listed on p. 130. 20. See Hamilton, H. (ed.), Selections from the Monymusk Papers 1713–1755 (Edinburgh: EUP for the SHS, 1945) for Thomas Winter’s involvement at Monymusk, including transcripts of his letters to Sir Archibald Grant in 1726. 21. Tait, A. A., The Landscape Garden in Scotland 1735–1835 (Edinburgh: EUP, 1980) includes several references to Thomas Winter. 22. NLS Map.Rol.d.19. Winter, T., A Plan of the Estates of Keithick and Benochie . . . the Property of James Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1751). 23. Hamilton, Forest Trees (see note 12.85). 24. Ibid., p. 60. 25. Ibid., p. 60. 26. Ibid., p. 60. 27. Ibid., pp. 7–9. 28. Switzer, S., Ichnographia Rustica; or the nobleman, gentleman and gardener’s recreation (London, 1718). 29. Langley, B., New Principles of Gardening: or the laying out and planting parterres, groves, wildernesses, labyrinths, avenues, parks &c. (London, 1728). 30. For a comparison of Vanbrugh, Switzer and Bridgeman, see Williams, R., ‘Fortified Gardens’, in Ridgway and Williams, Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England (see note 9.36). See also Brogden, W., Ichnographia Rustica: Stephen Switzer and the Designed Landscape (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016). 31. For a dictionary of garden terms see Jellicoe, G., Jellicoe, S., Goode, P. and Lancaster, M. (eds), The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford: OUP, 1986) and Symes, M., A Glossary of Garden History (Haverfordwest: Shire Publications Ltd, 1993).

Chapter 16: The Terraced Garden in Scotland 1. Brown, Scotland’s Lost Gardens (see note 4.51). 2. Ibid., pp. 85–6. Creighton, O. H., Designs upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), pp. 191–2. 3. Hannay, R. K. (ed.), Rentale Dunkeldense, being accounts of the bishopric (A.D. 1505–1517), SHS, 2nd ser. (Edinburgh, 1915), vol. 10, pp. 74, 187. 4. RCAHMS, South-east Perth: An Archaeological Landscape (Edinburgh: RCAHMS, 1994), p. 112, fig. 105A.

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Notes to Chapter 16   579

5. Hannay, Rentale Dunkeldense (see note 16.3), pp. 302–3. 6. Coffin, D. R., Magnificent Buildings, Splendid Gardens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 58–60. Woodbridge, K., Princely Gardens (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), pp. 33–6. Guillaume, J., ‘Le jardin mis en ordre: jardin et château en France du XVe au XVIIe siècle’, in J. Guillaume (ed.), Architecture, jardin, paysage; l’environnement du château et de la villa au XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris: Picard, 1999), pp. 104–5. 7. Lazzaro, C., The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1990), pp. 22, 60, and elsewhere. Coffin, Magnificent Buildings (see note 16.6), pp. 152–5. 8. Calkins, R., ‘Piero de’ Crescenzi’, in E. B. MacDougall (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington, DC.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1986), p. 172. 9. Boorde, A., The boke for to learne a man to be wyse in buyldyng of his howse . . . (Robert Wyer, [1550?]), unpaginated. 10. Scitaroci, M. O., ‘The Renaissance Gardens of the Dubrovnik Area, Croatia’, Garden History 24(2) (1996), pp. 193–4. Boudon, F., ‘Jardins d’eau et jardins de pente dans la France de la Renaissance’, in Guillaume, Architecture, Jardin, Paysage (see note 16.6), pp. 150–2. 11. Masson, G., Italian Gardens (London, 1961), pp. 17–26. 12. Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, ed. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 114–17. 13. Durkan, J. and Ross, A., Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow: J. S. Burns, 1961), p. 128. 14. RCAHMS, Inventory of Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1933), pp. 17–21. Hewitt, G. R., Scotland under Morton (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 1–2. 15. Hynd, N. R. and Ewart, G., ‘Aberdour Castle Gardens’, Garden History 11(2) (1983), p. 105. 16. RCAHMS, Inventory of Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan (1933), p. 20. 17. Brown, Scotland’s Lost Gardens (see note 4.51), pp. 121–2, 127–9. 18. Ibid., pp. 182–4. 19. NLS, MS. EMS.s.52. Slezer, J. et al., Theatrum Scotiae: Containing the Life of the Author and Additional Illustrations (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1874). 20. NLS, MS. EMS.s.786, Plan of the City and Castle of Edinburgh by Willm Edgar Architect 1765. NRAS, Moray Papers, 217, box 5. 21. Macky, Journey (see note 15.13), vol. III (1729), p. 64. 22. Dennistoun, J. (ed.), The Coltness Collection M.DC.VIII.-M.DCCC.XL. Memorials of the Stewarts of Allanton, Coltness, and Goodtrees by Sir

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580   Notes to Chapter 16

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

Archibald Stewart Denham, 1608–1698 (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1842), vol. 60, pp. 55–7. Ottenheym, K., ‘Dutch Influences in William Bruce’s Architecture’, Architectural Heritage 18 (2007), pp. 139–41. Hopper, F., ‘The Dutch Classical Garden and André Mollet’, Garden History 2(1) (1982), pp. 33–4. Chaline, O., ‘A King and His Gardens: Power and Sociability’, in P.  Bouchenot-Déchin and G. Farhat (eds), André Le Nôtre in Perspective (Paris: Hazan, 2013), p. 25. E. de Jong, ‘A Matter of Taste: The Operational Function of the Garden in the Time of Le Nôtre’, in Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective (see note 16.25), p. 303. Sieveking, A., Sir William Temple Upon The Gardens Of Epicurus, with Other XVIIth Century Garden Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), pp. 190–2. Brown, Scotland’s Lost Gardens (see note 4.51), p. 199. Laird, M., ‘Revisiting English Gardens: the French Connection in Britannia, 1630–1730’, in Bouchenot-Déchin and Farhat, André Le Nôtre in Perspective (see note 16.25), pp. 312–14. Mollet, A., The garden of pleasure, containing several draughts of gardens, both in embroyder’d ground-works, knot-works of grass, as likewise in wildernesses, and others (London, 1670). ‘Embroidered’ in this sense refers to a form of planting that resembled embroidered motifs. Mollet demonstrated that point: ‘Let us come to the inward embellishments, which we commonly call Garden; which ought to be composed of Imbroider’d Ground-works, knots of Grass, Wildernesses, fine Alleys in Terrasses, and flat Walks, so ordered, that they may still end at some Fountain or Statue . . . In fine, to finish our Work, the Statues ought to be erected upon their Piedestals, and the Grotto’s built in the most convenient places; as also the Fountains, Spurts, Ponds, Falls of Water, Bird-cages, and such like Ornament, which being well order’d and placed, will give the last Perfection to the Garden of Pleasure’. Mollet, The garden of pleasure (see note 16.29), p. 2. Lee, M., ‘Dearest Brother’: Lauderdale, Tweeddale and Scottish Politics, 1660–1674 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010), pp. 6, 40. Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5), p. 39. MacKechnie, ‘Sir William Bruce: the chief introducer’ (see note 7.44), pp. 499–519. Lowrey, J., ‘Sir William Bruce’, ODNB. Wemyss, C., ‘Merchant and Citizen of Rotterdam: The Earlier Career  of  Sir William Bruce’, Architectural Heritage 16 (2005), pp. 14–20.

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Notes to Chapter 16   581

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Colvin, Dictionary (1995), pp. 173–4. BoS: Fife, pp. 84–6. MacKechnie, ‘Sir William Bruce’ (see note 7.44), p. 505. Ibid., pp. 511–12. Brown, Scotland’s Lost Gardens (see note 4.51), pp. 284–5. BoS: Fife, p. 306. Lauder, J., The Journals of Sir John Lauder, Lord Fountainhall, SHS 36 (Edinburgh: 1900), p. 197. Kirke, T. and Thoresby, R., Tours in Scotland 1677 & 1681, ed. P. Brown Hume (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892), p. 17. Reid, Scots Gard’ner (see note 15.1), pp. 30–1. Slezer, J., Theatrum Scotiae: containing the prospects of his majesty’s castles and palaces, together with those of the most considerable towns and colleges . . . within the said kingdom . . . with a description of each place (London: J. Smith, 1719). Paterson, R. C., King Lauderdale: The Corruption of Power (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2003), p. 195. Lauder, Journals (see note 16.39), p. 193. BoS: P&K, pp. 259–62. BoS: Dundee, pp. 500–14. Millar, Book of Record (see note 4.5), p. 44. Ibid., p. 34. Woodbridge, Princely Gardens (see note 16.6), p. 247. [Scott, W.,] ‘On Ornamental Plantations and Landscape Gardening’, Quarterly Review 37(74) (London, 1828), pp. 309–10.

Chapter 17: Alexander Edward







1. Lowrey, A Man of Excellent Parts and ‘Alexander Edward: the Education of an Architect’ (see note 12.2 for both). 2. NRS GD124/16/24, Receipt signed by Edward on 15 May 1701, for a first payment of money from Earl of Mar. It includes a detailed outline of the contract. The group comprised the Earls of Mar, Panmure, Southesk, Northesk, Hopetoun, Loudoun and Strathmore. 3. NRS GD124/16/24. 4. Lowrey, J., ‘Practical Palladianism: the Scottish Country House and  the  Concept of the Villa in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Architectural Heritage 18 (2007), pp. 151–68. McKean, C., ‘The Scottish Country Seat in its Setting’, Garden History 31(2) (2003), pp. 141–62. 5. NRS GD124/15/219, Alexander Edward from Le Havre to Earl of Mar ‘care of Mr Hallie Maule Wreater in the Lyon Office, Edinburgh’, 7 July 1702. 6. Lowrey, A Man of Excellent Parts (see note 12.2), pp. 19–24.

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582   Notes to Chapter 17

7. Ibid., pp. 19–20. A nineteenth-century copy of the original letter of introduction (in the British Library) is in Edinburgh University Library, DC.8.35. 8. Ibid., p. 22. 9. Thomson, D., A Virtuous & Noble Education (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1971) provides the example of Michael Young, tutor to the sons of Lord Lothian on their Grand Tour, in 1651. 10. Lowrey, A Man of Excellent Parts, pp. 2–4, 17–18; Lowrey, ‘Alexander Edward: The Education of an Architect’, pp. 35–48 (see note 12.2 for both). A link has been made between Edward’s trip and a very similar one made by the architect William Talman; see Walker, M., Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England (Oxford: OUP, 2017), pp. 63–4. 11. NRS GD45/26/140 includes a note of building accounts for the house of Rait (between Perth and Dundee) from August 1705. 12. NRS GD45/26/140. 13. NRS GD124/16/24. 14. Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), pp. 57–74. 15. Ibid., p. 68. 16. NRS GD45/26/140. 17. Edinburgh University Library, LA.III.355. 18. NRS GD45/18/618. 19. NRS GD45/26/140; this includes an account with Peter Mason, nurseryman in Isleworth, 10 January 1702; an account of goods bought for Earl of Mar from Mr Rob, nurseryman at Chelsea, 21 February 1702; another account for Earl of Mar with Nerios Duos, ‘seedsman at the Golden Cross at Exeter Exchange in the Strand’, 24 February 1702; and a note of Mr Spence’s ship leaving for Leith in February 1702. 20. NRS GD45/26/140; the books are recorded as being ‘in Mr Boynd’s ship for Scotland’. 21. NLS MS14266, Diary of Sir David Nairne (Secretary to the Old Pretender), 13 June 1702: ‘I had a letter from Alex. Edwards with a note inclosed in cyffer from my Lord Arran’s own hand, which I uncyffered and gave to me Lord who gave it to the queen.’ The diary also shows that Edward had been in contact earlier than this, with an entry for 7 April 1702 showing an express letter being sent to Edward in Paris, from the court at St Germain. 22. NRS GD124/15/219. 23. NLS MS14266, Diary of Sir David Nairne, 2 September 1702: ‘I writ a letter for my Lord to M de Torcy [i.e. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1665– 1746), nephew of the great Colbert] for passes and particularly for Mr Edwards.’ De Torcy’s office both had an overview of Jacobite activities

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Notes to Chapter 17    583

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

and issued passports. See Rule, J. C. and Trotter, B. S., A World of Paper. Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), p. 201. Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), p. 68. The drawing of the whale is reproduced in Simpson, A. D. C., ‘Sir Robert Sibbald – the Founder of the College’, Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Tercentenary Congress (Edinburgh: RCPE, 1981), pp. 59–91. Simpson attributes the drawing to Sibbald, but it is very clearly in the hand of Alexander Edward, whose relationship with Sibbald was not so well understood at that time. NRS GD45/26/140. All of these are on bound pages of the notebook. Ibid. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum to Mr Alex Edward to observe in his traveling’. Simpson, ‘Sir Robert Sibbald’ (see note 17.24), p. 78 discusses a marine natural history drafted by Sibbald and the beaching of a sperm whale at Cramond in July 1701. This was described to Lhwyd in great detail in a letter from one of Sibbald’s associates, James Paterson. Hunterian Museum Archaeology and Ethnography Collections: GLAHM F.13 and GLAHM F.6, https://romaninscriptionsofbritain. org (accessed May 2019) has full details of both inscriptions. They were certainly used in Scotland, as they were engraved for Sir Robert Sibbald’s Historical Inquiries, Concerning the Roman Monuments and Antiquities in the North Part of Britain called Scotland (Edinburgh, 1707). See Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), p. 70. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum to Mr Alex Edward to observe in his traveling’. Laird, M., A Natural History of English Gardening (Newhaven, CT: Yale, 2015), chapter 2. Davies, J., ‘Botanizing at Badminton House, the Botanical Pursuits of Mary Somerset, First Duchess of Beaufort’, in D. L. Opitz, S. Bergwick and B. Van Tiggelen (eds), Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), chapter 1. Davies, ‘Botanizing at Badminton’ (see note 17.32), p. 26. NRS GD124/16/24. NRS GD124/15/219, Alexander Edward at Le Havre to Earl of Mar ‘care of Mr Hallie Maule Wreater in the Lyon Office, Edinburgh’, 7 July 1702. Harvey, J. H., ‘The Stocks held by Early Nurseries’, Agricultural History Review 22(1) (1974), pp. 18–35. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum of some persons to search after’.

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584   Notes to Chapter 17

38. McKee, H., ‘The Bird’s Eye Views of L. Knyff and J. Kip, as Published in Britannia Illustrata, and Their Use for Studying Historic Landscapes’, unpublished PhD thesis (Oxford Brookes University, 2004), p. 38. 39. Ibid., chapter 3, passim. 40. Spence’s ship carried the goods of Mar, Hopetoun, Panmure, John Shaw of Greenock, Annandale, the Lord President (presumably of the Court of Session, in which case, Sir Hew Dalrymple, Lord North  Berwick), and Southesk. Ged’s ship carried goods for Mar and  Hopetoun and also the orders for Northesk, Alva, the Laird of Powrie, Mr James Martin, Master of Balmerino, Balnamoon and Brotherton. 41. Walford, E., ‘Westminster: Buckingham Palace’, Old and New London (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878), vol. 4, pp. 61–74. 42. Sheppard, F. H. W. (ed.), ‘Pall Mall, South Side, Past Buildings: Nos 80–82 Pall Mall, Old Schomberg House’, Survey of London, vols 29 and 30, St James Westminster, part 1 (London: London County Council, 1960), pp. 368–77. 43. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum of Commissions’. This commission involved Edward making enquiries in England, Holland and France on Shaw’s behalf. 44. IdRef (Identifier 050607103), https://www.idref.fr/050607103# (accessed July 2019). 45. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum of some persons to search after’. 46. Ibid. 47. Esser, R., The Politics of Memory: The Writing of Partition in the Seventeenth Century Low Countries (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 141–2. 48. Ibid. 49. Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), p. 70 includes a discussion of Sir Robert Sibbald’s speculations on the extent of the Roman Empire, to include Lowland Scotland. 50. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum of some persons to search after’. 51. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Memorandum to Mr Alexander Edward to observe in his traveling’. 52. Kuyper, W., Dutch Classicist Architecture (Delft: Delft University Press, 1980), p. 85. 53. Ibid., p. 183. 54. Ottenheym, ‘Dutch Influences in William Bruce’s Architecture’ (see note 16.23), pp. 135–49. 55. See Lowrey, ‘Practical Palladianism’ (see note 17.4), pp. 162–5 for a discussion of the quadrant link.

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Notes to Chapter 17   585

56. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Commissions for Scotland’. The information in the notebook is very detailed, giving prices, dimensions and also freight and customs charges. 57. Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19), pp. 66–7 discusses the specifics of this contractual arrangement. 58. A discussion of the complexity of the relationship between these rival establishments can be found in Roberts, W., ‘Perelle’s Topographical Albums: Problems and Solutions’, in J. R. Perlmutter (ed.), Relations and Relationships in Seventeenth Century French Literature (Tubingen: GNV 2006), pp. 163–76. 59. Le Muet, P., Manière de bien bastir pour toutes sortes de personnes (Paris, 1647). This edition was published containing designs of real recent buildings in an appendix entitled ‘Augmentations de nouveaux bastimens faits en France’. 60. This is analysed in some detail by Walker, Architects and Intellectual Culture (see note 17.10), pp. 85–8. 61. For Mar’s architectural activities see Stewart, Earl of Mar (see note 4.18). 62. NRS GD124/15/219. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. NRS GD45/26/140, ‘Books etc bought at Paris’. 66. Partly analysed in Lowrey, ‘Prospect on Antiquity’ (see note 4.19). 67. The two drawings from the Versailles collection were exhibited in the 2013–14 exhibition on André Le Nôtre, held at the Palace of Versailles. 68. Murphy, M. G., ‘Scottish Gardens from the Restoration to the Act of Union, 1660–1710’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Oregon, 1979). Chapter 4 is on Alexander Edward. 69. Ibid., p. 102. 70. Ibid., p. 102.

Chapter 18: William Adam’s Gardens 1. NRS GD248/505/78 no. 31, Letter to the Earl of Findlater and Seafield, 1 September 1728. 2. NLS, Braco Papers item 1, Petition for William Lord Braco against Mr. William Adams Architect (Edinburgh, 1743), p. 22. 3. MacKechnie, A., ‘Scottish Historical Landscapes’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 22(3) (July–September 2002), pp. 214–39. Stewart, M., ‘Scotland’s Formal Landscapes Surveyed on General Roy’s Military Map of Scotland’, Landscape History 39(2) (2018), pp. 43–70.

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586   Notes to Chapter 18

4. Tait, Landscape Garden in Scotland (see note 15.21). 5. NRS RHP721, A Plan and Survey of the Gardens of Taymouth and County Adjacent (1720). The attribution is dubious on the grounds of style and date. The date is earlier than all known works by Adam and well before he added wings to the castle (c. 1737–42). The projections that Tait identifies as Adam’s wings are the corner towers of the castle. I am grateful to Christopher Dingwall, who suggested this point to me. 6. NLS, Braco Papers item 2, Depositions of witnesses, &c. in the cause William Adams Architect in Edinburgh; against William Lord Braco (Edinburgh, 1743), p. 2, witness I. 7. NRS RHP140976, Edward Oakley, architect. Broxmouth in the Shire of Lothian (London, 1734). Macky, Journey (see note 15.13), vol. III, p. 26. Defoe, Tour (see note 11.42), vol. 3 (1727), p. 11. The planting is described as extensive, but immature. 8. Adam can be definitely linked to sixteen gardens and landscape designs, not including doubtful attributions. 9. Macky, Journey (see note 15.13), vol. III, p. 325: ‘[Lord Stair] is making a Canal, and several very grand Improvements: But they [are] not far advanc’d . . .’ 10. Stair Archives, former NRS reference GD135/144 f. 24. Quoted in Tait, Landscape Garden (see note 15.21), p. 12. The Stair Archives were being transferred out of the NRS while this chapter was being researched, so I have not been able to consult them myself. 11. NRS GD18/4719, William Adam to Sir John Clerk, 30 January 1723. Reproduced with permission of Sir Robert Clerk. 12. NRS GD10/142/vol. 4, f. 212. 13. BL Add MS61467, Blenheim Papers vol. CCCLXVII ff. 24–6. 14. It is not a copy of the 1736 plan, which had been sent to the Duchess of Marlborough in the year it was made. 15. Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.28), vol. 2, p. 163. 16. Williams, ‘Fortified Gardens’ (see note 15.30). 17. Roy, W., Military Survey of Scotland (1747–55), southern section. Cruft, K., ‘The Enigma of Woodhall House’, Architectural History 27 (1984), pp. 210–12 suggests that improvements were made at Woodhall House about 1727. The fortified form may have appealed to the owner, Daniel Campbell, as his Glasgow house had been gutted by a mob in 1725. 18. Rowan, A., ‘William Adam’s Library’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), pp. 8–33. The Earl of Stair was not on the subscribers’ list for John James’s popular translation of this work, the Theory and Practice of Gardening (1712), but it is possible that he bought a copy of the original

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Notes to Chapter 18   587

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

while in Paris. It is curious that Adam owned the French version: one wonders if the volume hadn’t found its way into his library from Stair’s. Graham, J. M., Annals and Correspondence of the Viscount and the First and Second Earls of Stair (London and Edinburgh, 1875), pp. 164–5, David Baillie to Lord Stair, 30 Aug 1730: ‘The wheat within the gardens is sown in Mr Gull’s method’. The 1759 plan describes this area as ‘a little park commonly called the Hay park’. At Stowe there were several such parks contained within the pleasure ground. The main exception is Dundas Castle: Lord Stair’s mother was a Dundas. The current house was built in 1789 by Robert Adam, but a new house on this site was plannned from the start. I am indebted to Tom Parnell who made this observation, putting me on track to test the idea elsewhere. Sun positions can be identified at www.suncalc.net (accessed January 2017). Using the information on that site, it appears that the longest and shortest days occurred about 17 June and December in the years around 1730. Kip, J. and Knyff, L., Britannia Illustrata or Views of Several of the Queens Palaces as also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain (London, 1707). Dalton, C., ‘Sir John Vanbrugh and the Vitruvian Landscape’, Architectural History 37(1) (2009), pp. 17, 23. Nisbet, S., ‘John Watt in Renfrewshire’, Cairt – Newsletter of the Scottish Maps Forum 7 (June 2005). NLS, Braco 2: Depositions (see note 18.6), p. 24, witness XXXIII. The great gates no longer exist. They probably linked the two lodges shown in the lower half of Adam’s 1736 plan and are likely to have been wrought iron, set in a similar arrangement to the gates Adam supplied at Dalkeith in the mid-1730s (see Figure 18.12). BL Add MS61467, Blenheim Papers, vol. CCCLXVII f. 26, Earl of Stair to Duchess of Marlborough, 22 June 1736. Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.28), vol. 3, p. 83, ‘I have placed Plattoons . . . of trees . . . so that a gentleman . . . may have open glances into the little cornfields’. NRS GD18/4729/1, William Adam to Sir John Clerk, 8 March 1726. Adam, W., Remarks on the Blair-Adam Estate (1834), pp. 113–14. William Adam was John Adam’s eldest son. Ibid., pp. 67, 65. For example, in 1734 Adam advised the Duke of Hamilton on his ‘Coale and Salt work’ at Bo’ness (NLS MS16555 f. 6) and the Duke wrote separately about other improvements on the Isle of Arran that he wanted Adam to advise on: ‘Since you know the succeeding in

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588   Notes to Chapter 18

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

any project here that will bring in the pence, will make all edifices, obelisks, water works etc etc go on the better at Hamilton’. NRAS 2177/Bundle 872, Hamilton Archive, Duke – Adam 29 June 1742. Reproduced with permission of the Duke of Hamilton. Adam, Remarks (see note 18.30), p. 58. Adam, W., The Progress of and Estate in Scotland (no date) p. 4 and plans. The estate maps are ambiguous regarding the exact extent of Adam’s ownership in this area. John Adam’s purchase of the Dullomuir estate in 1753 would have completed the landholding. Adam, Remarks (see note 18.30), pp. 62–3. The author notes that he helped his uncle, John Clerk of Eldin, make a measured drawing of the camp. Two volumes of letters between Adam and his factor (mostly written by the latter) give considerable detail on the development of the estate. Blairadam letters series 5, vols 1 (1733–41) and 2 (1742–7). Blairadam Letters 5/216, 5/217, 5/411 and 5/108. The latter mentions ‘Blair’s House’. Adam, Remarks (see note 18.30), p. 85 clarifies that this was ‘Mr Colvin’s House at East Blair’ – it is now called Blair Mill. Mercer, A., The History of Dunfermline from the Earliest Records to the Present Time (Dunfermline, 1828), p. 303. Blairadam Letters 5/626, 9 June 1743. Reproduced with permission of Keith Adam. It is not suggested that Adam invented the idea of aligning with objects that were not easily visible – it is thought that Alexander Edward and the Earl of Mar may also have done this (for example, Mar at Loudoun), but firm evidence for this has not been found in the way that has been possible at Newliston. Adam produced a design for Buchanan, but there is insufficient evidence to firmly attribute Drum or Arniston landscapes to him. By taking angles from the c. 1760 estate plan (NRS RHP34652) and plotting them on an OS map, alignments appear to include Edinburgh Castle; West Lomond (Fife); Inchkeith Island (Firth of Forth); Largo Law (Fife); North Berwick Law (East Lothian) and/or Bass Rock (Firth of Forth); Traprain Law (East Lothian); Lammer Law (East Lothian); various peaks in the Moorfoot Hills; Allermuir (Pentlands, Midlothian); and Blackford Hill (Edinburgh). NRS RHP6150, William Adam, General Plan of the House, Gardens and Parks at Buchanan, as Proposed for His Grace The Duke of Montrose (1745). The only feature on Adam’s plan that exists today is the Endrick Water, a river that has shifted its course in the intervening 250 years, making it difficult to accurately position Adam’s plan on a modern

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Notes to Chapter 18   589

45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

map. The main axis to the south-east almost certainly aligned with Dumgoyne, a distinctive stack at the end of the Campsie Fells. NRS GD224/260/22/2, William Adam, Architect, A note of Severall things done by order of Her Grace The Duchess of Buccleugh and since by His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh att Dalkeith and East Park. NRS GD224/260/22/4, undated bill from William Adam. The bill was paid in 1736, which probably means it was sent in 1735. Adam took a gentlemanly approach to sending his bills, so the trees may have been planted in 1734. Mr Bain was a leading nurseryman in Edinburgh. Evidence on the precise date is conflicting, but it is probably 1732, when Adam is known to have been at La Mancha (NLS MS16548, f. 5). Cochrane later became 8th Earl of Dundonald. James, Theory and Practice of Gardening (see note 15.18), p. 70. NRS RHP82062 reproduced in Frew and Jones, Aspects of Scottish Classicism (see note 10.1), p. 47. Airth Accounts, NLS MS10879 f. 65 and f. 94 refer to the construction of the coach house. There is no mention of Adam in the accounts, but he usually left payment for plans to the discretion of his employer and is unlikely to have sent a bill. William Boutcher did send bills, but isn’t mentioned in the surviving accounts either. Auchincruive: HES, Inventory of Designed Landscapes, http://portal. historicenvironment.scot/designation/GDL00031 (accessed August 2018). Kilkerran: Tait, Landscape Garden (see note 15.21), illustrated on p. 11. Castle Semple: Nisbet, S., Castle Semple Rediscovered (Renfrewshire Local History Forum, 2009), p. 69. Duff: Letter from Lord Braco to William Adam, October 1735, quoted in NLS, Braco: Petition for Lord Braco (see note 18.2), p. 23. NRS GD135/139 no. 3 – ref given in NRHE notes for Castle Kennedy (see note 18.10), www.canmore.org.uk (accessed August 2018). James, Theory and Practice of Gardening (see note 15.18), p. 70. Hopetoun House Research Group, The Garden of Hopetoun – A Story of Development and Change (privately published, 1995), p. 36, fig. 21. Ibid., p. 29. Rowan, A., ‘The Building of Hopetoun’, Architectural History 27 (1984), p. 193. Shortly before publication I discovered that there may be another surviving garden building by Adam in the walled garden at Mavisbank. This appears to be a two-storey building similar to the one shown in Figure 18.20. For more information see my essay in the forthcoming Duff House Study Days Proceedings, Landscapes and Portraits at Duff House (Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland, 2021).

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590   Notes to Chapter 18

58. Lord Braco to William Adam, October 1735, quoted in NLS, Braco: Petition for Lord Braco (see note 18.2), p. 23. 59. The mausoleum is probably the pyramid shown in the background of Lord Braco’s portrait by William Mossman (1741). The triumphal arch was probably built of timber. 60. NLS Saltoun Papers, Acc 17873–80; Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 120. 61. Nisbett, H. M., Drum of the Somervilles (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1928), pp. 18–19. 62. Whyte, T., ‘An Account of the Parish of Liberton in Mid-Lothian, or County of Edinburgh’, The Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1 (Edinburgh, 1792), p. 319. 63. NRAS 2177/Bundle 894, Hamilton Archive, Earl of Selkirk to Duke of Hamilton, 10 April 1733. 64. Heron, R., Observation Made in a Journey through the Western Counties of Scotland (Perth, 1793), vol. 2, p. 10. 65. NRAS 2177/Bundle 873, Hamilton Archive, ‘Memorial of William Adam Architect in Edinburgh’ (November 1746). 66. In particular, see Lowrey, J., ‘The Development of the Formal Landscape at Hamilton 1700–1750’, in Frew and Jones, Aspects of Scottish Classicism (see note 10.1). 67. NRAS 2177/Bundle 896, Hamilton Archive, William Adam to Duke of Hamilton, 26 March 1733. Reproduced with permission from the Duke of Hamilton. 68. Burt, E., Burt’s Letters from the North of Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1998), p. 132.

Chapter 19: Arniston 1. Quoted on the title page of An Epistle Address’d to a Friend, 1739 (published 1740), p. 2 (a full text of the anonymous poem is available via Gale Eighteenth Century Collections Online). A copy in the Arniston library is signed in manuscript ‘John Lee’ and dated 23 October 1739. Prose translation: ‘Your Tityrus hence was absent. The very pines, O Tityrus, the fountains, and these very groves, invited you to return.’ The poet seems to be equating Robert Dundas’s return to Arniston from London politics in 1737 with Virgil’s Tityrus and his retreat from the ungrateful city of Rome to his bucolic country estate. 2. Ayres, P., Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. xiv, 1–47. 3. Ibid., pp. 75–7. 4. O’Sullivan, T. M., ‘The Mind In Motion: Walking and Metaphorical Travel in the Roman Villa’, Classical Philology 101(2) (2006), pp. 133–52.

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Notes to Chapter 19   591

5. Pope, A., An Essay on Criticism (London, 1711), p. 10, lines 139–40. 6. Anderson, New Book of Constitutions (see note 2.32), p. 104. The writer is grateful to Ian Campbell for supplying this reference. 7. Leoni, G., Della architettura di Leon Battista Alberti (London, 1726), book V, chapter XIV. 8. Iain Gordon Brown has written extensively on Clerk (see notes 5.1–5.4, 5.10, 5.19 and 5.50). Of particular relevance to Clerk’s antiquarian interests and the relationship with Alexander Gordon are: ‘Critick in Antiquity’ (see note 5.3), pp. 201–10 and ‘Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia: the Union and the Politics of Scottish Culture’, in A. Hook (ed.), The History of Scottish Literature (Aberdeen, 1987), pp. 33–49. Brown, I. G. and P. Vasey, ‘Arthur’s O’on again: newly discovered drawings by John Adair, and their context’ in PSAS 119 (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 353–60. 9. For more detailed analysis of Clerk’s ambivalence to the Roman conquest of Caledonia see Brown, ‘Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia’ (see note 19.8), pp. 37–8. 10. Gray, Memoirs (see note 5.34), pp. 84–5. 11. Ibid., p. xi. 12. The original equites were a class of knights, above the plebeians and below the senatorial class, integrated into a political group by the Emperor Augustus to help govern a larger empire. 13. For further details of Clerk’s 1727 visit to England, accompanied at times by William Adam, see Friedman, T., ‘Mr Inigo Pilaster and Sir Christopher Cupola’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), pp. 37–8. 14. Gray, Memoirs (see note 5.34), p. 121 (details of the poem’s composition and revision). Hunt, J. D. and Willis, P. (eds), The Genius of the Place (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 196–203 (extract from the manuscript poem). 15. Rowan, ‘William Adam’s Library’ (see note 18.18), pp. 8–33. 16. NRS GD18/4729/2, William Adam to Sir John Clerk, 5 May 1726. 17. Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.28), vol. 1, p. xvii. 18. Brogden, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.30), pp. 142–9. 19. NRS GD18/4729/2, William Adam to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 5 May 1726. 20. Brogden, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.30), p. 149. 21. Gordon, A., Itinerarium Septentrionale (London, 1726). Both ‘Mr Adams, Architect’ and ‘The Honourable Robert Dundass of Armiston, Esq’ are listed as subscribers to the book. 22. Ibid., p. 25. Adam referred to the trip in a letter to Sir John Clerk concerning a revived proposal for a Forth-Clyde canal in 1741 (NRS GD18/4736).

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592   Notes to Chapter 19

23. Scott, W., The Antiquary (1816), pp. 16–17. Scott’s antiquary, Jonathan Oldbuck, starts out on a carriage journey holding a copy of Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale and chatting about the book with fellow traveller William Lovel. Through their mutual interest in the book, the two become friends. 24. Brown, I. G., ‘William Adam’s Seal: Palladio, Inigo Jones & the Image of Vitruvius Scoticus’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), p. 92. Simpson, J. (ed.), Vitruvius Scoticus [1811] (paperback reissue and ­introduction, 2013), pp. 6–11. Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2, 2011 edn), pp. 94–104. Brown, I. G., ‘Architects or Gentlemen? Adam Heraldry and its Implications’ in Architectural Heritage IV (1993), pp. 82–92. Brown, I. G., ‘Atavism and Ideas of Architectural Progress in Robert Adam’s Vitruvian Seal’ in The Georgian Group Journal (1994), pp. 70–3. 25. Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers (see note 2.2), p. 96. According to Nicholas Savage, the first mention of ‘Vitruvius Scoticus’ is in 1733. Before that, Adam seems to have referred to the project as ‘My Designs for Buildings &c.’, that is, it would perhaps be intended at that point to be a Gibbs-like volume of his own designs, rather than a broader survey of classical buildings in Scotland. 26. Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.28), vol. 1, p. 30. William Adam’s emperor seal can be found on a number of letters of the late 1720s and early 1730s from Adam to Alexander Fraser of Strichan, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and Mungo Graham of Gorthie, for example NRS GD18/4729/5–6, GD18/4732/6 and GD220/5/1345/1. 27. Brown, ‘William Adam’s Seal’ (see note 19.24), p. 92. 28. Rigg, J. M., ‘Dundas, Robert, Lord Arniston (d. 1726)’, rev. A.  McConnell, ODNB. The 2nd Lord Arniston’s eldest son, James, predeceased him. 29. Rigg, J. M., Dictionary of National Biography (New York and London, 1888), vol. 16, p. 194. 30. Scott, R., ‘Dundas, Robert, Lord Arniston (1685–1753)’, ODNB. 31. Omond, G. W. T., The Arniston Memoirs: Three Centuries of a Scottish House 1571–1838 (Edinburgh, 1887), p. 59. 32. Carlyle, A., Autobiography of the Rev. Dr Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk (Edinburgh, 1860), p. 249. 33. NRS GD18/4729/2 (Adam mentions his client as ‘Mr Dundass of Arnistone’). 34. Omond, Arniston Memoirs (see note 19.31), p. 57. Rigg, ‘Dundas, Robert, Lord Arniston’ (see note 19.28). Pastor Fido, or the faithful shepherd, was a pastoral tragicomic play of 1590 by Giovanni Battista Guarini, set in Arcadia.

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Notes to Chapter 19   593

35. See note 19.1. 36. For Clerk, see Brown, ‘Modern Rome and Ancient Caledonia’ (see note 19.8), pp. 33–49. 37. NRS NRAS3246/Bundle 81, ‘Abstract of Accot of Wright work at Arnistown House’ (1727–39) and ‘Accompt of Great Timber Us’d at Arnistoun’ (1727–32). Much of the work after 1732 seems to have concentrated on the interior decoration and furnishings, and to a lesser extent the garden. For example, the 1730 contract with Joseph Enzer, the stuccoist of the entrance hall ceiling, was renewed for a further three years in 1732 (NRAS3246 vol. 166, ‘Contract betwixt Rbt Dundas of Arniston and Joseph Enzer’). 38. NRS GD235/9/2/44, Robert Dundas in London to his second wife, Anne Gordon, at Arniston, 26 February 1736. 39. An Epistle Address’d to a Friend (see note 19.1). NRS RHP5246/2, David Dundas, Plan of Arniston Inclosures, 1752. 40. Simpson, Vitruvius Scoticus (see note 19.24), pp. 39–44. 41. NRS RHP5248/19, copy of ‘Architectural Drawing of Ground Storey & Elevation of West End of Arniston House’. Tait illustrates this drawing and attributes it to William Adam: Tait, A. A., ‘William Adam & Sir John Clerk: Arniston & the Country Seat’, Burlington Magazine 111(792) (March 1969), p. 135, n. 21 and fig. 34. Several accounts for tradesmen show Adam’s involvement in the building project, for example NRAS 3246/Bundle 81, ‘Abstract of Accot of Wright work at Arnistown House’, shows ‘Mr Adam’ and Thomas Winter (foreman mason) settling accounts with the wrights (carpenters) between October 1727 and March 1732. Adam seems to have acted as both architect and contractor for the house. 42. NRS GD 18/4729/2, William Adam to Sir John Clerk, 5 May 1726, quoted by kind permission of Sir Robert Clerk. 43. BL, Maps K.Top.48.78, General Mapp of the River Spey from the Reid rock above the Boat att Focober downward to the Sea (November 1732). 44. Similar characteristics to the Arniston plan can be found in, for example, the autograph William Boutcher plan for Airth, NRHE STD50/8, ‘Ane Exact Plan of Airth the Seat of the Honnourable Mr James Graham Admirall of Scotland . . . Surveyd August first & Drawn at Ednr Septr 10th 1721 by William Boutchart’; and Houston House, West Lothian, NRS RHP10658, Ane Exact Plan of Husten, 22 July 1721. Particular features of the Boutcher plans are the clover-shaped niches in the parterres, which are also present in the Arniston design. The handwriting of the scale and acreages on the Arniston plan also share characteristics with the handwriting on the Airth plan.

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594   Notes to Chapter 19

45. Kay, W., ‘What’s His Line: Would the Real William Adam Please Stand Up’, Architectural Heritage 1 (1990), p. 55 and n. 52. A history of the glassworks is set out in Turnbull, J., The Scottish Glass Industry 1610–1750 (Edinburgh: SAS, 2001), pp. 247–65. 46. Tait, ‘Arniston & the Country Seat’ (see note 19.41), p. 132. 47. The house has seven regular bays on the southern elevation, but two additional narrow bays are squeezed into the pedimented centre of the northern elevation. 48. Rowan, ‘William Adam’s Library’ (see note 18.18), pp. 17–20. 49. For an architectural history of the library at Newhailes, see Joe Rock’s research pages, https://sites.google.com/site/researchpages2/archi tectural-history-of-newhailes-house (accessed May 2019). 50. Stewart, ‘Scotland’s Formal Landscapes’ (see note 18.3), p. 66. 51. NRS RHP5246/2 9, Plan of Arniston Inclosures by David Dundas (1752) and RHP5246/5 Anonymous Plan of the Arniston & Shank Inclosures (1758). David Dundas (1735–1820), descended from the Dundases of Dundas, was a nephew of Elizabeth Watson, 3rd Lord Arniston Robert Dundas’s first wife. 52. Both Tait, ‘Arniston & the Country Seat’ (see note 19.41), p. 138 and Gifford, William Adam (see note 10.67), p. 106 state erroneously that the house is aligned on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. Robert Dundas did create a walk aligned on Edinburgh Castle, but this was just over half a mile east of the house. 53. Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica (see note 15.28), vol. II, p. 6. 54. Williams, ‘Fortified Gardens’ (see note 15.30). Switzer, Ichnographia Rustica, vol. II, p. 174. 55. In 1575 Pietro de’ Franceshi printed an Italian version of Caesar’s Commentaries, illustrated by Palladio: Commentaries by Caius Julius Caesar, with copper figures of the encampments, battles, circumvallations of cities and many other notable things described in them, made by Andrea Palladio to facilitate the reader’s understanding of history. 56. See Dalton, C., Sir John Vanbrugh and the Vitruvian Landscape (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 88–104, and Jeffery, S., ‘Hawksmoor’s Vision of Wray Wood, Castle Howard’, Architectural History 61 (2018), pp. 37–73. There are other military features in gardens associated with Vanbrugh, including Blenheim, Claremont, Stowe and Seaton Delaval. 57. Tait, ‘Arniston & the Country Seat’ (see note 19.41), p. 137 identifies the green walk as a cascade. 58. NRAS 3246/236 Book of Measurements of Arniston House, undertaken for valuation purposes between 14 January and 13 February 1752. 59. Rowan, ‘William Adam’s Library’ (see note 18.18), p. 24.

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Notes to Chapter 20   595

Chapter 20: McGill, Gibbs and Dreghorn in Early Georgian Glasgow 1. GTCM, 13 June 1710. 2. GTCM, 1 October 1709; 3 November 1711; 20 November 1711. 3. Defoe, Tour (see note 11.42), letter XII. 4. Marwick, J. D. (ed.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow,  vol. 3, 1663–90 (Edinburgh: SBRS, 1905), 10 January 1674. 5. NRS GD3/17/2/16. 6. Pagan, J. et al., Glasgow, Past and Present; illustrated in Dean of Guild Court reports, and in the reminiscences and communications of Senex, Aliquis, J. B, &c., 2nd edn (Glasgow, 1884), p. 455. 7. Goodfellow, G. L. M., ‘Colin Campbell’s Shawfield Mansion in Glasgow’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 23(3) (1964), pp. 123–8. 8. Pagan, Glasgow, Past and Present (see note 20.6), p. 457. 9. Cruft, ‘Enigma of Woodhall House’ (see note 18.17). 10. Lowrey, ‘Practical Palladianism’ (see note 17.4). 11. Colvin, H., ‘A Scottish source for English Palladianism’, Architectural History 17 (1974), pp. 5–13, 41–52. 12. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 13. Howard, D., ‘Sir William Bruce’s Design for Hopetoun House and its Forerunners’, in A. Rowan and I. Gow (eds), Scottish Country Houses 1600–1914 (Edinburgh: EUP, 1995), pp. 53–68. 14. NRS JC3/12 & 13, Justiciary Court Books of Scotland of Adjournal, September–October 1725. 15. Pagan, Glasgow, Past and Present (see note 20.6), p. 458. 16. Ibid., p. 114, fn. 1. 17. NRS GD220/5/824, 18 February 1717. 18. NRS RHP6285/2, Alexander McGill, notes on design for Montrose House Glasgow, main elevation and floor plan, 11 November 1717. 19. NRS GD220/5/824, 18 February 1717. 20. Ibid., 4 March 1717. 21. NRS GD220/5/827, 26 December 1718 – Montrose. London, 26 December. Congratulates Gorthie on becoming rector of College of Glasgow; the Glasgow house, Mr Gibbs’ views on building there; asks Mr McGill to make a plan; sends a sketch made by Mr Gibbs [wanting]. 22. NRS GD220/5/985, 28 July 1719. 23. NRS GD220/5/831, 19 January 1720. 24. Ibid., 6 February 1720.

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596   Notes to Chapter 20

25. Ibid., 27 February 1720. 26. Renwick, R., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, 1739–1759 (Glasgow: SBRS, 1915), vol. VI, 20 February 1739. 27. Renwick, R., Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, 1739–1759 (Corporation of Glasgow, 1876), vol. V, p. 482, 28 June 1737. 28. Ibid., 30 July 1740. 29. Ibid., 20 February 1739. 30. GTCM, 10 November 1737. 31. GTCM, 21 September 1738. 32. Renwick, Extracts VI (see note 20.26), 23 April 1739. The paintings,  mostly of monarchs, are now in Glasgow Museums collection. 33. Ibid., 29 September 1743. 34. GTCM, 1 October 1756. 35. GTCM, 23 November 1756. 36. GTCM, 6 April 1762. 37. Caledonian Mercury, 10 December 1734. 38. Glasgow Museums item Temp.4663.3. 39. The collections of Georgian tobacco trade cards within the British Museum prints and drawings department makes this point clear. 40. Renwick, Extracts VI (see note 20.26), 17 September 1740. 41. Ibid., 22 September 1741. 42. Ibid., 22 September 1741. 43. Ibid., 9 March 1751. 44. NRS GD220/5/884, 27 April 1733. 45. Gibbs, J., Book of Architecture (1728) plate LIV shows a house elevation for a ‘Person of Quality’. Gibbs states that he had designed it in 1720. It was a three-storey house with pilasters, balustrade and a pediment with central oculus – features seen in Lord Provost Murdoch’s house and, again, the McCall family’s ‘Black House’. 46. Blair Atholl archive, Thomas Clayton letters, 3 December 1748 and 14 March 1747. 47. Adam’s book remained unpublished until c. 1812.

Chapter 21: Three Eighteenth-century University Libraries 1. Simpson, M. C. T., ‘Housing Books in Scotland Before 1800’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society 4 (2009), pp. 11–31. 2. Vitruvius, De Architectura, 10 books. The earliest version of Vitruvius’ works in Britain was an English translation published by Sir Henry Wotton as The Elements of Architecture (London: John Bill, 1624).

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Notes to Chapter 21   597

3. Vitruvius, De Architectura (see note 21.2), book VI, chapter 4, p. 181. 4. Naudé, G., Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris 1627, 1644, 1676). 5. Evelyn, J., Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library (London, 1661). 6. Ibid., pp. 116–19. 7. O’Connor’s picture is held in the Trinity College Art Collections, Dublin. This is the best illustration of the library as first built, but we were unable to include it in this book. 8. For further information on De Burgh, see Dictionary of Irish Archi­ tects 1720–1940, www.dia.ie/architects/view/764/BURGH-THOMAS (acces­sed July 2019). Further information on the library in general can be found in McParland, E., Public Architecture in Ireland 1680–1760 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale for Paul Mellon, 2001) and Fox, P., Trinity College Library Dublin: A History (Cambridge: CUP, 2014). 9. McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland (see note 21.8), p. 149. 10. Ibid., p. 158. 11. Ibid., p. 152. 12. Prospect of the Library at University College Dublin, by Joseph Tudor, 1753, in the Rijksmuseum. 13. Worsley, G., Classical Architecture in Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale for Paul Mellon, 1995), pp. 163–4. 14. The full title was ‘An Act for the further Encouragement of Learning, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, by securing the Copies and Copyright of printed Books to the Authors of such Books, or their Assigns for the Time herein mentioned, 1801’, 41 Geo.III, c.107. 15. Dictionary of Irish Architects, www.dia.ie/architects/view/1436/ DEANE-son%26WOODWARD#tab_​works (accessed 3 January 2016). 16. GUA and the NRS contain the key source material for the early eighteenth-century library. Gifford, William Adam (see note 10.67) and Haynes, N., Building Knowledge: an Architectural History of the University of Glasgow (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland in association with the University of Glasgow, 2013) provide succinct accounts. 17. Haynes, Building Knowledge (see note 21.16), p. 29. 18. Baker, C. H. C. and Baker, M., The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 101–2. 19. GUA, Minutes of the Committee appointed to take care of the building of the New Library, 18 and 25 January, 1 and 16 February and 6 April 1732: see Haynes, Building Knowledge (see note 21.16), p. 29.

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598   Notes to Chapter 21

20. For example, John Leeke’s translation of Vignola’s treatise, The Regular Architect, had provided useful analysis of Renaissance classical style from 1669. William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones was printed in 1727, Colen Campbell’s three volumes of Vitruvius Britannicus appeared between 1715 and 1725, and Leoni’s translation of Palladio’s Quattro Libri was issued between 1716 and 1720. Rule of thumb criteria, aimed at gentlemen and artisans, were provided by Batty Langley in his Practical Geometry (1726). William Halfpenny’s Practical Architecture (1724) detailed the orders and served as a technical manual. 21. Haynes, Building Knowledge (see note 21.16), p. 31. 22. Design held by GUA. 23. Joseph Swan engraving in Leighton, J. M., Select Views of Glasgow and its Environs. (Glasgow: J. Swan et al., 1828), plate 19. 24. Thomas Annan photograph, The Old College Library, held by Glasgow University Library, Special Collections. 25. NRS GD220/5/1271, Charles Morthland to Mungo Graham, 26 June 1733. Haynes, Building Knowledge (see note 21.16), p. 51. 26. The university records reveal many references to the poor state of the library; see University of St Andrews Minutes, 7 July 1710; July 1729; and 29 November 1734. 27. Ibid., 7 August 1748. 28. Ibid., 24 September 1762 address the storm damage, while Minutes, 26 June 1764 see them form a committee to seek estimates. 29. Ibid., 13 August 1764, record the committee’s presentation of John Gardner’s plans. The committee included Dr George Haddow, Professor of Hebrew and Medicine; Robert Watson, historian, Professor of Logic and later Principal; David Gregory and William Wilkie, Professors of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy respectively, the latter known as the Scottish Homer. 30. Ibid., 25 August 1764. 31. Ibid., 5 December 1764; following a vote, the committee appoints Gardner. 32. University of St Andrews Archive, Accounts, 1766, voucher submitted by Gardner for payment for ‘making the overall plans and estimates of the whole and different parts of the elevations of the north and south walls for John Neice’. 33. University of St Andrews Minutes, 25 August 1764. 34. University of St Andrews Minutes, 9 January 1765. 35. University of St Andrews Archives, Quaestor’s Vouchers for 1767.

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Notes to Chapter 22   599

Chapter 22: Edinburgh and Venice













1. Brown, P. H. (ed.), Early Travellers in Scotland (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891), p. 280. Discussed in Riches, A., ‘The Teeth of an Ivory Comb: Travellers’ Observations of Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1548–1830’, in D. Mays (ed.), The Architecture of Scottish Cities (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997), pp. 34–40. 2. The High Street is discussed in Bell, D., Edinburgh Old Town: the Forgotten Nature of an Urban Form (Edinburgh: Tholis, 2008), pp. 5–7; commercial Edinburgh in Mair, C., Mercat Cross and Tolbooth, Understanding Scotland’s Old Burghs (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1988), pp. 11–13, 19–26. 3. Edinburgh in Stuart-Murray, J., ‘Landscape, Topography and Hydrology’, in B. Edwards and P. Jenkins (eds), Edinburgh: The Making of a Capital City (Edinburgh: EUP, 2005), pp. 64–7. Venice in Gianighian, G., ‘Building a Renaissance Double House in Venice’, Architectural Research Quarterly 8(3–4) (December 2004), pp. 302–3. 4. Edinburgh in Marwick, J. D., Edinburgh Guilds and Crafts (Edinburgh: SBRS, 1909), pp. 3–39, 94–5. Robertson, D. and Wood, M., Castle and Town, Chapters in the History of the Royal Burgh of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928), pp. 52–87, and Mair, Mercat Cross (see note 22.2), pp. 13–14. Venice in Pullan, B., ‘ “Three Orders of Inhabitants”: Social Hierarchies in the Republic of Venice’, in J. H. Denton (ed.), Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 159–66. 5. Godard Desmarest, C. (ed.), The New Town of Edinburgh: an Architectural Celebration (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2019). Pittock, M., Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660–1750 (Edinburgh: EUP, 2018). 6. Tucci, U., Mercanti, Navi, Monete nel Cinquecento Veneziano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981), pp. 15–41. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 18–19. 7. Howard, D., The Architectural History of Venice (London: B. T. Batsford, 1980), p. 38. 8. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 52, 101–2. 9. Ibid., pp. 118–19. 10. Fortini Brown, P., Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2005), pp. 5–7. 11. Trincanato, E. R., ‘Le Forme dell’Edilizia Veneziana (XV–XVIII secolo)’, in G. Gianighian and P. Pavanini (eds), Dietro i Palazzi: Tre

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600   Notes to Chapter 22

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

Secoli di Architettura Minore a Venezia, 1492–1803 (Venice: Arsenale, 1984), pp. 11–12. Politicised façades in Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice (see note 22.10), p. 7. Doge Leonardo Dona’s Palace (1610–12), in M. Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 1–13, 187–8. Goy, R., Venetian Vernacular Architecture: Traditional Housing in the Venetian Lagoon (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), p. 83. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), p. 93. Howard, Scottish Architecture (see note 2.14), pp. 116–23. Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), pp. 12–13. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 18, 101–2. Howard, D., Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1987), p. 123. Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), p. 15. Goy, R., The House of Gold, Building a House in Medieval Venice (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 16–17. Goy, Venetian Vernacular (see note 22.13), pp. 123–40. Good, R., ‘Double Staircases and the Vertical Distribution of Housing in Venice 1450–1600’, Architectural Research Quarterly 13(1) (March 2009), pp. 74–5. Traditional external staircase in Goy, House of Gold (see note 22.18), pp. 128–9. Howard, Architectural History of Venice (see note 22.7), pp. 38–42. Upscale examples in Goy, House of Gold (see note 22.18), pp. 17–19; and Howard, Jacopo Sansovino (see note 22.17), p. 124. Gianighian, G., and Pavanini, P., ‘Il Cinquecento’, in Gianighian and Pavanini, Dietro i Palazzi (see note 22.11), p. 115. Organic changes in Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), pp. 16–17. Romby, G. C., La Costruzione dell’Architettura nel Cinquecento: Leggi, Regolamenti, Modelli, Realizzazioni (Florence: Alinea 1989), p. 63. Dorigo, W., ‘Exigentes, Sigentes, Sezentes, Sergentes. Le Case d’Affitto a Venezia nel Medioevo’, Venezia Arti 10 (1996), pp. 28–30. Good, ‘Double Staircases’ (see note 22.19), p. 77. Gianighian, G. and Pavanini, P., ‘Il Seicento’, in Gianighian and Pavanini, Dietro i Palazzi (see note 22.11), p. 122. Allen, A. A., ‘Occupational Mapping of 1635 Edinburgh: An Introduction’, PSAS 136 (2006), pp. 262–3, 268–9. See also Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), p. 53. BoS: Edinburgh, pp. 195–6. Stell, G., ‘Urban Buildings’, in M. Lynch, M. Spearman and G. Stell (eds), The Scottish Medieval Town (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988),

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Notes to Chapter 22   601

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

p. 72. For Gladstone’s Land in 1635 see Robinson, P., ‘Edinburgh – a Tenement City?’, in Edwards and Jenkins, Edinburgh (see note 22.3), p. 106; Robinson, P., ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’, Review of Scottish Culture 1 (1984), pp. 58–9. Frontages and property subdivisions in Schofield, J., ‘Excavations South of Edinburgh High Street, 1973–4’, PSAS 107 (1975–6), pp. 163–5. Howard, Architectural History of Venice (see note 22.7), pp. 44–5, 53. Goy, Venetian Vernacular (see note 22.13), pp. 126–7. Concina, E., Camerino, U. and Calabri, D., La Città degli Ebrei. Il Ghetto di Venezia: Architettura e Urbanistica (Venice: Albrizzi Editore, 1991), pp. 58–79. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5), pp. 63–4. BoS: Edinburgh, p. 207. Crone, A. and Sproat, D., ‘Revealing the History behind the Façade: a Timber-Framed Building at No. 302 Lawnmarket, Edinburgh’, Architectural Heritage 22 (2011), pp. 32–3. Gianighian, ‘Building a Renaissance Double House’ (see note 22.3), p. 299. Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), p. 17. Dorigo, ‘Case d’Affitto’ (see note 22.23), pp. 30–1; Dorigo, W., L’Edilizia Abitativa nella ‘Civitas Rivoalti’ e nella ‘Civitas Veneciarum’ (secoli  XI–XIII) (Venice: Università degli studi di Venezia, 1993), pp. 26–8. Robinson, ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’ (see note 22.26), p. 54. Stell, G. and Tait, R., ‘Framework and Form: Burgage Plots, Street Lines and Domestic Architecture in Early Urban Scotland’, Urban History 43(1) (February 2016), pp. 7–10, 12–15. Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), p. 16. Howard, Architectural History of Venice (see note 22.7), pp. 53–4. Howard, Jacopo Sansovino (see note 22.17), p. 128. Fortini Brown, Private Lives (see note 22.10), pp. 63–8. Robinson, ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’ (see note 22.26), p. 58. Stell and Tait, ‘Framework and Form’ (see note 22.34), p. 12. Timber galleries in A. Riches, ‘Ivory Comb’ (see note 22.1), pp. 35–6. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 53–4. Brown, Early Travellers in Scotland (see note 22.1), p. 279. Stell, ‘Urban Buildings’ (see note 22.26), p. 72. Compact living, boundaries and citizenship in Robinson, ‘Edinburgh – a Tenement City?’ (see note 22.26), pp. 104–5. Robinson, ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’ (see note 22.26), p. 57. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 7, 371. Residency and

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602   Notes to Chapter 22

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

­ roperty ownership in Europe in Kissane, C., ‘Barriers to Citizenship in p Early Modern Cities?’, 17th Century Conference: Cities & Citizenship, 13–15 July 2015, Durham University. Howard, Jacopo Sansovino (see note 22.17), pp. 137–8. Dorigo, ‘Case d’Affitto’(see note 22.23), pp. 25–6. Concina et al., Città degli Ebrei (see note 22.28), pp. 51–5. New lifestyle in Romby, Costruzione (see note 22.22), pp. 61–2; Tucci, Cinquecento Veneziano (see note 22.6), pp. 43–94. Romby, Costruzione, pp. 62–6. New styles in Goy, Venetian Vernacular (see note 22.13), p. 143. Façades evolution in Dorigo, Edilizia Abitativa (see note 22.32), p. 39; Howard, Jacopo Sansovino (see note 22.17), p. 132; Good, ‘Double Staircases’ (see note 22.19), p. 77; Trincanato, Edilizia Veneziana (see note 22.11), pp. 17–18. From mercantile to residential in Dorigo, ‘Case d’Affitto’ (see note 22.23), p. 29. Dorigo, Edilizia Abitativa (see note 22.32), pp. 24–6. Robinson, ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’ (see note 22.26), p. 56. Rodger, R., The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the 19th Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), p. 13. Examples in BoS: Edinburgh, pp. 195–6, 207. Search for uniformity in Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), p. 64. Glendinning, M., ‘Tenements and Flats’, in G. Stell, J. Shaw and S. Storrier (eds), Scotland’s Buildings (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2003), pp. 108–9. Edinburgh in Stell and Tait, ‘Framework and Form’ (see note 22.34), p. 25. BoS: Edinburgh, p. 59. Venice in Gianighian, ‘Building a Renaissance Double House’ (see note 22.3), pp. 302–3. Goy, Venetian Vernacular (see note 22.13), p. 167. Gianighan, G. and Pavanini, P., ‘I Terreni Nuovi de Santa Maria Mazor’, in Gianighian and Pavanini, Dietro i Palazzi (see note 22.11), pp. 45–8; Gianighian, ‘Building a Renaissance Double House’ (see note 22.3), pp. 302–3. Good, ‘Double Staircases’ (see note 22.19), pp. 81, 83. Gianighian and Pavanini, ‘Cinquecento’ (see note 22.21), p. 84. On Milne’s Court, see Pinkerton, R. and Windram, W., Mylne’s Court: Three Hundred Years of Lawnmarket Heritage (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Information Office, 1983), pp. 31–40. Modern residential requirements in Glendinning, ‘Tenements and Flats’ (see note 22.52), p. 109. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 60–2. Brown, Early Travellers in Scotland (see note 22.1), p. 280. See also Pinkerton and Windram, Mylne’s Court (see note 22.57), p. 28.

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Notes to Chapter 22   603

59. Goy, Venetian Vernacular (see note 22.13), pp. 50–1. Good, ‘Double Staircases’ (see note 22.19), p. 73. 60. Bell, Edinburgh Old Town (see note 22.2), pp. 237–8. Robertson, ‘Tenement City?’ (see note 22.26), pp. 108–11. 61. Youngson, A. J., The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840 (Edinburgh: EUP, 1966), pp. 20–2. Rationale of the improvements in Bell, Old Town (see note 22.60), pp. 88–90. 62. Youngson, Classical Edinburgh (see note 22.61), pp. 297, 301. 63. Caniato, G. and Dal Borgo, M., Le Arti Edili a Venezia (Rome: Edilstampa, 1990), pp. 15–20.

Chapter 23: The Origin of the Tenement in Paris and Edinburgh





1. Robinson, ‘Tenements, a Pre-Industrial Urban Tradition’ (see note 22.26), pp. 52–64. 2. Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), Multi-Storey Living, the British Working-Class Experience (London: Croom Helm, 1974). 3. Vitruvius commented that ‘the majesty of the city and the considerable increase in its population have compelled an extraordinary extension of the dwelling houses, and circumstances have constrained men to take refuge in increasing the height of the edifices’. Carcopino, J. E. J., Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire (London: Routledge & Paul Kegan, 1941), p. 25. 4. From the Republic onwards, the Romans found it necessary to make regulations to control the thickness of walls, the quality of building materials and the roofs and height of buildings, in order to prevent the risk of collapse. Julius Caesar set a limit of seventy Roman feet which was reaffirmed by Augustus and further reduced by Trajan to sixty feet, for increased safety. Later, after the great fire, Nero prohibited the rebuilding of tenement houses on narrow, winding lanes and laid out broad streets flanked with colonnades. 5. A ‘hearth’ was a household including children, valets and servants. 6. Jurgens, C. M., ‘Deux logis inconnus de Molière place du Palais-Royal’, XVIIe Siècle 48 (1960), pp. 16–27. 7. Out of the 475 lodgings studied by Pardailhé-Galabrun, 295 were set across two floors (62 per cent), 114 across three floors (24 per cent), 48 across four floors (10 per cent) and 18 across five, six and even seven floors (4 per cent). Pardailhé-Galabrun, A., ‘L’habitat parisien: comment on loge dans Paris aux 17e et 18e siècles’, in J. P. Babelon, P. Chaunu and M. Fleury (eds), La maison parisienne au siècle des Lumières (Paris: CREPIF, 1985), p. 44.

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604   Notes to Chapter 23

8. In medieval usage, ‘tenement’ referred to a piece of land or to a building. It was only later that it came to be applied in Scotland to ‘a large house (i.e. edifice under one roof) constructed or adapted to be let in portions to a number of tenants, each portion so separately occupied being considered and called a “house”’. ‘tenement, n.’ OED Online (OUP, January 2018), www.oed.com/view/Entry/199111 (accessed 11 March 2018). The current Scottish legal definition of a tenement is ‘a building containing a number of dwelling houses within four walls, all or a number of them having a common access from the street and so structurally divided and separated as to be capable of being distinct property or a distinct subject of lease’. Dalrymple, A. W., Scottish Judicial Dictionary (Edinburgh: W. Green & Son Ltd, 1946), p. 299. 9. Medieval plans long persisted in old urban centres. Lavedan, P., Qu’est-ce que l’urbanisme? Introduction à l’histoire de l’urbanisme (Paris: H. Laurens, 1926). 10. Royal attempts to limit peripheral expansion started in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued during the reign of Louis XIII. Building beyond the walls was prohibited in 1627, 1633 and again in 1638, when a line of demarcation was drawn. Such a prohibition did not, however, prevent building on the outskirts of Paris. Louis XIV renewed this prohibition in a royal statement of 26 April 1672 which set heavy penalties against perpetrators. A new demarcation line (statement of the Conseil 28 April 1674) had limited success in preventing the spread of the city and its suburbs. Royal statements of 1724 and 1726 (Louis XV) again set limitations to urban sprawl. The built surface in Paris was further expanded in 1765 (royal statement). 11. In the feudal system, a censive was land for which a tax was to be paid to a superior owner. Although burgesses (craftsmen or merchants) might own houses as hereditary tenants, they still had to pay a cens to the seigneury (royal family, archbishopric or abbey). Brette, A., Atlas de la censive de l’Archevêché dans Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1906). 12. Boudon, F., with A. Chastel, H. Couzy and F. Hamon, Système de l’architecture urbaine. Le Quartier des Halles à Paris (Paris: CNRS, 1977). 13. Pardailhé-Galabrun, A., La Naissance de l’intime. 3000 foyers parisiens 17e–18e siècles (Paris: PUF, 1988), p. 15. Chaunu, P., La Mort à Paris (Paris: Fayard, 1978). 14. Paris consumed four times as much meat per capita as all the rest of France, drank a share of its coffee, chocolate and tea, and published at least as much, if not more, than the rest of the country.

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Notes to Chapter 23   605

15. Archives Nationales, Z/1J/361, expertise of 3 September 1683, Anonymous house on 14 rue Tiquetonne. 16. Archives Nationales, Z/1J/361, expertise of 3 September 1683, Anonymous house on 6 rue Tiquetonne. 17. Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Fontana, 1972), p. 103. 18. It was not until 1846 that Parliament passed an ‘Act for the abolition of the exclusive Privilege of trading in Burghs of Scotland’. Mackenzie, W. M., The Scottish Burghs; An Expanded Version of the Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for 1945 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1949), p. 1. 19. Farge, A., Vivre dans la rue au 18e siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). 20. Blaikie, T., Diary of a Scotch Gardener at the French Court at the End of the Eighteenth Century, ed. F. Birrell (London: Routledge, 1931), p. 24. 21. The places were developed at the end of the sixteenth century and conformed to the classical principles of urban design (order, symmetry and vista) which had been revived and refined in the Renaissance. 22. For detail on jurisdiction and law applicable to streets, see Harouel, J. L., L’embellissement des villes; l’urbanisme français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 1993). 23. The duodecimal system was used for building in France until 1840, when it was replaced by the metric system. A foot equalled 32.5cm. The measurement of the ground in Paris was based on the ‘perche de Paris’ (18ft) and the ‘perche royale’ (22ft). The height of buildings and the width of windows were measured in toises (6ft). 24. A 54ft limit to building, replacing the 48ft rule, was set in 1784. 25. Armet, H., ‘Notes on Rebuilding in Edinburgh in the Last Quarter of the Seventeenth-Century’, BOEC 29 (1956), pp. 111–42. 26. A code of law applicable to the tenement and based on the servitude oneris ferendi (the right to have one’s property supported by an adjacent building belonging to someone else) developed under the influence of the Burgh and Dean of Guild Courts. 27. Although some unsafe tenements were removed, their dense concentration posed a constant threat in Edinburgh. Many high tenements were destroyed in a major fire in 1700. 28. Montesquieu, C. L., Persian Letters. Translated by Mr Ozell, 2nd edn (London: Tonson, 1730), vol. 1, pp. 76–7 (letter XXIV). 29. See research by Simone Roux on the left bank and the University district. Roux, S., Le quartier de l’Université à Paris du XIIIe au XVe siècle: Etude urbaine (Lille: A.N.R.T, 1990). 30. Carbonnier, Y., Maisons parisiennes des Lumières (Paris: PUPS, 2006), p. 154.

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606   Notes to Chapter 23

31. The 1667 statement provided an incentive for roofs to be built parallel to the streets. Mansart roofs therefore became more common in Paris. 32. Archives Nationales, Z1J Series. 33. The Minutier Central is part of France’s National Archives. 34. Pardailhé-Galabrun, La Naissance de l’intime (see note 23.13). Inventories were made following 10 to 15 per cent of all deaths at the start of the eighteenth century. Notarial documents were expensive documents – the work of a notarial clerk cost a day’s labour. 35. Boudriot, P. D., ‘La construction locative parisienne sous Louis XV’,  unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Paris-Sorbonne, 1981). 36. Archives Nationales, MC/ET/XII/124, 3 August 1659. Couperie, P. and Jurgens, M., ‘Le logement à Paris aux 16e et 17es: une source, les inventaires après décès’, Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3 (1962), p. 497. 37. Archives Nationales, MC/ET/LIII/127, 5 October 1702. Couperie and Jurgens, ‘Le logement à Paris’ (see note 23.36), p. 499. 38. Pinon, P., Boniface, P. and Gullon, P., Les Lotissements spéculatifs et formes urbaines. Le Quartier de la Chaussée d’Antin à la fin de l’Ancien-Régime (Paris: École d’Architecture de Paris la Défense, 1986). 39. Archives Nationales, CP/S//30, CP/S//33, E//424, fol. 385. 40. Archives Nationales, CP/N/III/Seine/432, monastery of the BlancsManteaux, a plan for seven houses with shops, 1640. 41. Cabestan, J. F., La Conquête du plain-pied. L’immeuble à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 2004), pp. 28–9, 218–19. 42. Archives Nationales, MC/ET/XCI/630, CP/N/III/Seine/302. The houses on the rue Childebert were destroyed when the boulevard Saint-Germain was built. 43. Further evidence of turnpike stairs in Scotland include the Earl of Kinnoul’s Lodging in Perth, Garland’s Land in Dundee and the Black Turnpike in Edinburgh High Street. 44. Hurd, R., Gladstone’s Land: The Story of an Old Edinburgh House (Edinburgh: National Trust for Scotland, 1966), pp. 6–9. 45. A list of the owners and tenants in the burgh was drawn to raise money  for the stipends of ministers. Boog-Watson, C. B., ‘List of Owners of Property in Edinburgh, 1635’, BOEC xiii (1924), pp. 93–146. 46. Defoe, Tour (see note 11.42), vol. 2. 47. Tacitus, Annals of Tacitus, book XV, chapter 43. 48. Wood, M., ‘All the Statelie Buildings of . . . Thomas Robertson’, BOEC 24 (1942), pp. 126–51.

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Notes to Chapter 23   607

49. Wood, M. ‘Edinburgh Poll Tax Returns’, BOEC 25 (1945), pp. 90–126. Wood, M. (ed.), Edinburgh Poll Tax Returns for 1694 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1951). 50. ‘The Parliament-Yard . . . is square and well paved, Beautified with good Buildings round about it; and the only fault is, that it is no bigger, the height of the Houses bearing no correspondence to the dimensions of the Area.’ Morer, T., A Short Account of Scotland (London, 1715), pp. 73–4. 51. Wood, ‘Statelie Buildings’ (see note 23.48), p. 140. 52. The Old Town ‘grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but in height and density . . . houses sprang up story after story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour’s shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight . . .’ Stevenson, R. L., Picturesque Old Edinburgh [1878] (Edinburgh: Albyn Press, 1983), p. 28. 53. Glendinning, ‘Tenements and Flats’ (see note 22.52), p. 109. 54. Stirling, I. A., ‘Mylne Square’, BOEC 14 (1925), pp. 45–8. 55. ‘Contract for the Completion and Purchase of a Flat in Mylne’s Square, 6 April 1688, by Robert Mylne’. Dunbar, J. G. and Davies, K. (eds), ‘Some Late Seventeenth-century Building Contracts’, SHS 11 (Edinburgh: Pillans & Wilson Ltd. 1990), pp. 316–21. 56. Moray House, on the Canongate, was built c. 1625 on several adjoining plots and was aligned to the street, which was a status symbol. 57. NRS CS137-507, ‘Act in the Ranking and Sale, Hary Allan Agains Anna Smith and others, 27 June 1733’. Armet, ‘Notes on Rebuilding in Edinburgh’ (see note 23.25), pp. 128–9. 58. Pittock, M., Material Culture and Sedition, 1688–1760: Treacherous Objects, Secret Places (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 99. Harris, D. F., St Cecilia’s Hall in the Niddry Wynd (Edinburgh, 1899), p. 259. 59. Harris, St Cecilia’s Hall (see note 23.58), p. 262. 60. NRS RH15/68/3, ‘Contract between Robert Milne of Balfarge, master mason, and Patrick Steill, merchant burgess of Edinburgh, on one part, and Mr Robert Forbes, on the other part’, dated 23 October 1695. 61. NRS GD150/776, 27 December 1705. 62. Turnbull, Scottish Glass Industry (see note 19.45), p. 195. Smith was also overseer of the works. See Cressey, M., Johnson, M., Haggarty, G., Turnbull, J. and Willmott, H., ‘Eighteenth-century Glass and Pottery

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608   Notes to Chapter 23

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Manufacture at Morison’s Haven, Prestongrange, East Lothian’, PostMedieval Archaeology 46(1) (2012), p. 39. NRS GD124/15/249/10 and GD124/15/663/1. M. Wood (ed.), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, 1665–1680 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1950), p. 339. Dunbar and Davies, ‘Some Late Seventeenth-century Building Contracts’ (see note 23.55), pp. 300–1. Pardailhé-Galabrun, La Naissance de l’intime (see note 23.13), p. 218. Babelon, J. P., Demeures parisiennes sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris: Le Temps, 1965). Morer, Short Account (see note 23.50), p. 72. Taylor, J., A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland (Edinburgh: W. Brown, 1903), p. 107.

Chapter 24: William Adam’s Public Buildings







1. RCAHMS, Tolbooths and Town-Houses: Civic Architecture in Scotland to 1833 (Edinburgh: RCAHMS, 1996), pp. 162–3. 2. The relationship between the Hospital and Balgreggan designs was two-dimensional only, the Balgreggan end-bays having a 10ft projection; for a similarly minimal projection of the end-bays see Belvedere (now Dalmahoy) and Newhall (Vitruvius Scoticus, plates 72, 74). 3. This statue was commissioned from Henry Cheere in 1753; however, it was perhaps designed and carved by Louis-François Roubiliac. 4. Steele, V., ‘William Adam’s Dundee Town House’, MA dissertation (St Andrews University, 1988). 5. Gifford, William Adam (see note 10.67), p. 159. 6. Stewart, Earl of Mar (see note 4.18), plates 90, 92. 7. The Blair Adam library inventory (see note 18.18) shows Adam probably had a copy of Serlio’s treatise. 8. As shown in the Ordnance Survey, 1st edn (1858); in Vitruvius Scoticus it is oval. 9. Not 1731–5 as stated elsewhere; the date 1735 was incised in the early twentieth century. 10. The details of the arch-rings of the porch and gallery windows were simplified from Gibbs’ designs and the Vitruvius Scoticus plate in execution. 11. [Anon], An Historical Account of the Orphan Hospital of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: J and C Muirhead, 1833). Richardson, J., ‘Some Notes on the Early History of the Dean Orphan Hospital’, BOEC 27 (1949), pp. 155–68. 12. Francke’s work first appeared in English in 1705, translated by his

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Notes to Chapter 24   609

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

fellow Lutheran pastor Anton Wilhelm Böhme who was a chaplain at the Court of St James. Historical Account of the Orphan Hospital (see note 24.11), pp. 6–7: ‘a person who desired his name not to be known, caused a frontispiece in marble to be prepared in London, with a suitable inscription, bearing the date of the founding of the Hospital, and to be put above the principal entry to the house’. For comparison with Adam’s domestic work, see Lawers (Vitruvius Scoticus, plate 158) and Gibbs, A Book of Architecture (London, 1728), plate 43. Heron, A., The Merchant Company of Edinburgh, 1681–1902 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1903). Waugh, H. (ed.), George Watson’s College, 1724–1970: History and Record (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark and George Watson’s College, 1970). Heron, Merchant Company of Edinburgh (see note 24.15), p. 34: ‘The governors usually met in the boardroom . . . which was decorated with frescoes depicting the hospital, and had a fine marble chimneypiece bearing a eulogy to the founder’. Maitland, W., A History of Edinburgh from its Foundation to the Present Time (Edinburgh, 1753), plate at p. 482. Thin, R., ‘The Old Infirmary and Earlier Hospitals’, BOEC 15 (1927). Turner, A. L., The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh 1729–1929 (Edinburgh, 1937). Stevenson, C., ‘Aesculapius Scoticus’, The Georgian Group Journal 6 (1996), pp. 53–62. According to the engraved drawings. Some sources give 206 or 210ft. The actual dimensions on the Ordnance Survey, 1st edn were 204ft 6in. by 97ft. The statue, installed in 1755 or 1759 (sources vary), was obtained from  London; it commemorated the grant of the King’s Invalid Fund. As shown in Paul Sandby’s drawing of 1749, engraved in Maitland, History of Edinburgh (see note 24.17). Two tablets bearing the inscriptions ‘I was sick and ye visited me’ and ‘I was a stranger and you took me in’ were subsequently erected on the centrepiece. This gateway survives, re-sited in Drummond Street. The fine furniture of this room was transferred to the new Infirmary’s boardroom in 1879. Charity Work-house minute-books, Edinburgh City Archives, SL146/1/1, Memorial for the Magistrates and Council of the City of Edinburgh, containing a Short Account of the Erection of the Charity Workhouse (1749).

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610   Notes to Chapter 24

26. Memorial Concerning the Surgeons Hospital (1737) and Appendix (1738). Copies held by the Royal College of Surgeons. 27. The plan is unsigned, but accomplished in draughtsmanship. The rendering of the forecourt and use of green ink is very similar to William Adam’s garden plans, for example Hopetoun, Newliston and La Mancha (see illustrations in Chapter 18). For more background, see Markus, T., ‘Buildings for the Sad, the Bad and the Mad in Urban Scotland’, in T. Markus (ed.), Order in Space and Society (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1982). 28. Incorporation of Surgeons’ minute-book, 8 June and 12 July 1738. 29. Simpson, J., ‘Introduction’ to Adam, W., Vitruvius Scoticus (New York: Dover, 2013), p. 7. 30. Ibid., p. 9.

Chapter 25: Was Scotland a ‘Narrow Place’?





1. Mantel, H., ‘Can a King Have Friends?’, London Review of Books 38(6) (17 March 2016), p. 6. 2. A popular rhyme at the time of the Adam brothers’ massive embankment and construction project at the Thames in London ran: ‘Four Scotchmen by the name of Adams, who keep their coaches and their madams, said John in surly mood to Thomas, have stole the very river from us’. Sanderson, M., Robert Adam and Scotland (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1992), p. 70. 3. Fleming, J., Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (Edinburgh: John Murray, 1962). 4. Lewis, L., Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961). 5. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. 6. See MacInnes, R., ‘My Mother’s Dear British Boy’, in A. I. Macinnes (ed.), Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 173–84. 7. Trevor-Roper, H., Religion, the Reformation and Social Change: and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1967). 8. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Early Modern Scotland: the Current State of Play’, SHR 73(195) (1994), pp. 30–46. Macinnes, A. I., ‘Repression and Conciliation: The Highland Dimension 1660–1688’, SHR 65(180) (1986), pp. 167–95. Macinnes, A. I. and Ohlmeyer, J. H. (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts Press Ltd, 2002). Macinnes, A. I., The Multiple Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland: The ‘British Problem’ (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 1–25.

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Notes to Chapter 25   611

9. Devine, T. M., The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 173. Devine, T. M. (ed.), Exploring the Scottish Past: Themes in the History of Scottish Society (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1995). 10. Cruden, S., The Scottish Castle (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963). 11. Carneiro, R. L., ‘Herbert Spencer as an Anthropologist’, Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 (1981), pp. 171–2. 12. Glendinning, The Conservation Movement (see note 5.13). 13. Emerick, K., Conserving and Managing Ancient Monuments: Heritage, Democracy, and Inclusion (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014). 14. Markus, ‘Buildings for the Sad’ (see note 24.27), pp. 25–114. 15. McKean, The Scottish Chateau (see note 4.2). 16. Glendinning et al., History of Scottish Architecture (see note 1.5). 17. Beveridge, C. and Turnbull, R., The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989). 18. NRS GD18/477. 19. Sanderson, Robert Adam and Scotland (see note 25.2), p. 43. 20. Ibid., p. 43. 21. Fleming, Robert Adam (see note 25.3), p. 225. 22. Quoted in ibid., p. 244. 23. Ibid., p. 194. 24. Walpole, H., Memoirs of the Reign of George III, ed. D. Jarrett (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1999), vol. 2, p. 160. 25. Fleming, Robert Adam (see note 25.3), p. 2. 26. Ibid., p. 127. 27. NRS GD18/4794. 28. Rowan, A., ‘Bob the Roman’: Heroic Antiquity and Architecture of Robert Adam (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2003), p. 6. 29. Rowan, ‘William Adam’s Library’ (see note 18.18), pp. 8–33. 30. Fleming, Robert Adam (see note 25.3), pp. 204–7. 31. For a discussion of Adam’s public buildings see MacInnes, R., ‘Robert Adam’s Bridges’, in Mays, Architecture of Scottish Cities (see note 22.1) and MacInnes, R., ‘Robert Adam’s Public Buildings’, Architectural Heritage 4 (1993), pp. 10–22. Typically, Adam’s vision outstripped reality and what was built is a scaled-down version of what was planned. 32. Bolton, A. T., The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam (London: Country Life, 1922). 33. Proposals for carrying on certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh ([Edinburgh]: 1752). See also Youngson, Classical Edinburgh (see note 22.61), pp. 3–19.

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612   Notes to Chapter 25

34. The majority of castle-style projects were for Scottish locations or patrons. See Rowan, A., ‘After the Adelphi’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 122 (1974), pp. 659–710; also King, D., The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam (Oxford: Butterworth Architecture, 1991), pp. 156–78, 220–4. 35. For an account of the Bridewell see Markus, ‘Buildings for the Sad’ (see note 24.27), pp. 25–114. 36. King, Complete Works of Robert and James Adam (see note 25.34), pp. 165–8. 37. Paradoxically, Adam also designed a villa for MacPherson in the Highlands at ‘Balaville’, Kingussie, Inverness-shire; see Bolton, Works (see note 25.32), vol. II, index p. 3 and p. 26. 38. Rowan, ‘Bob the Roman’ (see note 25.28), p. 54. 39. Tait, A. A., Robert Adam: Drawings and Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 1993). 40. Soane Museum, vol. 56, no. 14. 41. Adam toyed with Gothic or ‘Gothick’ architecture of a lightweight, ‘Batty Langley’ character but soon formulated a more architectonic style of romantic architecture. Gothicism in England was to develop along parallel and deeply serious antiquarian moral/religious lines. See Kidd, C., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: CUP, 1999) and Clark, K., The Gothic Revival (London: John Murray, 1962). 42. Macaulay, J., The Gothic Revival (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975), p. 110. 43. Macinnes, Living with Jacobitism (see note 25.6), introduction. 44. Sanderson, M. H., ‘Trivial Pursuit? Portrait of the Artist in Letters and Diaries’, Architectural Heritage 4 (1993), pp. 66–81. 45. Ibid., pp. 66–81. 46. Fleming, Robert Adam (see note 25.3), p. 200. 47. Ibid., p. 305. 48. Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism (see note 25.41), p. 133. 49. Adam, R., Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (London: printed for the author, 1764). 50. Blair Adam Muniments: Blairadam 4/10, vol. 63.

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Index

Italic indicates image; n indicates note Buildings within towns are listed under the name of the town Tradesmen are listed by trade Abbey House, Culross (Fife), 153 Aberdeen, 19, 34 Provost Skene’s House, 166, 166 Robert Gordon’s Hospital, 484–8, 492, 513, 485, 487 Town House, 419, 483–4, 483 University, 192, 309 see also Smith of Whitehill, Mr James Aberdour Castle (Fife), 112–13, 310–11, 311 absolutism, 260, 267 Adair, John, 56, 316 Adam, James, 9, 12, 509, 526 Adam, John, 347, 357, 361, 437, 587n30, 588n34, 404 Adam, Robert, 9, 12, 13–14, 517–18, 522–4, 528 and antiquity, 358, 525–6 and Britishness, 526–7, 528–9 and Proposals, 523 and Scottishness, 520–2, 524–5 Adam, William, 4, 10, 13, 108, 269, 271, 418, 441, 513 and alignments, 350–4, 357, 360–2, 367, 377–8, 399–401, 588n40, 589n44, 351–3, 361, 363 and antiquity, 353, 359, 379–404 and Clerk, 100, 108, 349, 383–4, 385, 388, 389, 393, 404

and coal mining, 358, 393, 587n32 and Dezallier d’Argenville, 350, 356, 366–7, 370, 377, 403, 586n18, 350, 367 and Douglas, 273–4, 286, 289 and gardens, 13, 306–7, 346–78, 393–3, 398–404, 585n8, 609n27, 348, 351–2, 357–9, 363–6, 368–75, 380, 400 and garden buildings, 369–76, 377, 369–70, 372, 374–5 and Gibbs, 434, 485, 484 and ironwork, 355, 364, 508, 587n26, 365, 506 and libraries, 384–5, 397–9, 429, 433–6, 441, 496, 397, 430, 435–7, 497 and stables and coach houses, 355, 356, 367 Aberdeen Town House, 419, 483–8, 483 Airth, 367, 507, 589n50, 368 Arniston House, 257, 349, 362, 379, 385, 388–404, 588n41, 593n41, 593n44, 380, 394–7, 400, 402–3 Blair Adam, 347, 356, 357–61, 362, 588n36, 358–9, 361 Brunstane, 374, 373 Buchanan, 362, 364 Chatelherault, 374–6, 375

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614   Index

Adam, William (cont.) Dalkeith, 362, 364, 365 The Drum, 354, 362, 374, 385–6, 392, 490, 588n42, 363 Duff House, 32, 271, 369, 372–3, 490, 513, 32, 372 Dundee Town House, 419, 488–91, 512, 489 Edinburgh Charity Work-house, 499, 509–11, 510 Edinburgh Orphan Hospital, 496–500, 498, 500 Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, 417, 501, 503–9, 513, 505–6 Floors Castle, 392, 393 George Watson’s Hospital, 417,500–3, 502 Old College Library, Glasgow, 392, 429, 431, 433–6, 496, 430, 435–7, 497 Haddo House, 286, 484 Haddington Tolbooth, 493 Hamilton Old Parish Church, 493–5, 513, 494 Hamilton Palace (Lanarkshire), 143, 154, 199, 209, 235, 295, 307, 345, 369, 374–6, 414 Hopetoun, 354, 369–72, 377, 393, 369–71 House of Dun, 367 Inveraray Castle, 10, 12, 374 La Mancha, 347, 354, 365–8, 392, 366 Mavisbank House, 100, 114, 354, 384 Newliston, 305–6, 347–56, 392, 490, 586n9, 587n26, 348, 351–3 North Merchiston, 356–7, 359, 363, 357 Robert Gordon’s Hospital, 484–8, 492, 513, 485, 487 Sanquhar Tolbooth, 419, 484, 491–3, 492 Surgeons’ Hospital, 511–13, 512 Taymouth Castle, 347, 586n5 see also Balcaskie; Holyroodhouse; Hopetoun House; Vitruvius Scoticus Adam, William, Jr Remarks on the Blair-Adam Estate, 356–7 Addison, Joseph, 381 Africa, 24, 29, 31, 63

African drummers, 7 agriculture and agricultural improvements, 17, 18, 19, 22–3, 301–2, 350, 355, 358–9 Aikman, William, 99 Aikenhead, John, 486 Airds House (Argyll), 512 Airth (Stirlingshire), 367, 507, 589n50, 593n44, 368 Aitken, George Shaw, 122 Aitken, William, 132, 133–4 Albany, James, Duke of see James VII and II, King Alberti, Leon Battista, 199, 265, 310, 385, 401 De re aedificatoria, 382–3 Albourn, Thomas, 141–55, 144, 147–8, 150, 154 Alciato, Andrea Emblemata, 266 alignments, 42, 77–8, 368, 586n40, 594n52 and Adam, 350–4, 357, 360–2, 377–8, 399–401, 588n40, 589n44, 351–3, 361, 363 and Bruce, 85–7, 297, 314, 346, 354, 377, 86, 298 and sun alignments, 354, 362, 367 Balcaskie, 297, 314, 87, 315 Blair Adam, 359–62, 361 Bruce, 84–5, 297, 314, 346, 354, 377, 86, 298 The Drum, 354, 362, 588n42, 363 Johnston Estate, 355 Kinross House, 297, 314, 346, 354, 377, 298 Newliston, 350–4, 351–3 All Saints’ Church (Derby), 275 Alloa Tower (Clackmannanshire), 161, 161; see also Comely Bank Lodge ‘alteratione of the government’ (1689), 6, 52, 59 Americas, 17, 18–20, 24, 29–31 Amman, Jost, 45 amphitheatres see gardens Amsterdam (Netherlands), 16, 43 Town Hall, 43, 48, 265, 536n38 anatomy theatre, 334, 512 Ancien Régime, 466, 467, 468 Ancient Rome see Roman Empire

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Index   615

Anderson, James, 382 Constitutions, 46 Anglo-Dutch Wars, 20 Annan, Thomas, 430 Anne, Queen, 24–5, 174, 325 anti-Catholicism, 52–3 anti-Jacobitism, 10, 27, 56–7, 58, 65, 69–70, 518 antiquarianism, 98–9, 100, 101–3, 376–86, 398, 439 and Adam, 353, 359, 379–404 and Clerk, 110, 118, 384 and Edward, 323, 324–5, 333–4, 344, 328 antiquarians Gale, Roger, 102, 108 Gordon, Alexander, 384, 484, 486 Grose, Francis, 110, 110 Lhwyd, Edward, 328, 329 Sibbald, Sir Robert, 323, 327, 329, 330, 334 Sloane, Sir Hans, 323, 329, 330 Stukeley, William, 101, 103, 384, 591n12 Sutherland, James, 329, 334 see also Smetius, Johannes Antonine Wall, 328–9, 334, 386, 328 Antwerp (Belgium), 16, 44 apartments see tenements arcades, 95–6, 193, 333, 427, 432, 449, 472, 477 and Adam, 369–70, 372, 396, 488, 490, 491, 395, 489, 494 and Craighall Castle, 95–6, 96 and Drumlanrig, 202 and Dundee Town House, 419–20, 488, 489, 491, 489 and Edinburgh, 446, 449, 451, 456, 477 and Melville House, 95, 95 and St Salvator’s College, 288, 288 and Somerset House, 419, 420, 421 Arch of Concord, 50, 49 Archer, Thomas, 490 Archerfield House (East Lothian), 269, 271, 272, 273, 277–81, 283, 289, 276, 278–80 architectural plate books, 170–87; see also De l’Orme, Philibert; Decker, Paul; Francine, Alexandre; Gibbs, James; Leoni,

Giacomo; Le Muet, Pierre; Ogilby, John; Palladio, Andrea; Serlio, Sebastianio; Ware, Isaac; Vitruvius Britannicus; Vitruvius Scoticus Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of, 10, 31, 33, 33 Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 9th Earl of, 83 Argyll’s Lodging (Stirling), 41, 83–4, 93, 463, 68, 84, 86 Ark of the Covenant, 45 Arniston, Robert Dundas, 2nd Lord, 379, 387, 388–9 Arniston, Robert Dundas, 3rd Lord, 387–91 Arniston, Robert Dundas, 5th Lord, 402–3 Arniston, Robie Dundas, 4th Lord, 398–9 Arniston House (Midlothian), 257, 362, 379, 385, 387–404, 394–8 and gardens, 349, 362, 379, 388, 392, 398–404, 380, 390–1, 400, 402–3 Arran, James Hamilton, Earl of, 235 Asia, 29; see also India Atholl, Catherine, Duchess of, 234 Atholl, James Murray, 2nd Duke of, 301 Atholl, John Murray, 1st Duke of, 300–2 Auchincruive (Ayrshire), 368 Auchterhouse (Angus), 142 Augustans, 381–3, 527 Austria, 98 avenues and allées, 252, 293, 307, 308 and Adam, 354–7, 359–62, 367–8, 374, 363 and Arniston House, 399–401, 402, 380, 400 and Badminton, 345, 354 and Balcaskie, 85–7, 87 and Blair Adam, 356, 357–61, 362, 358–9, 361 and Blair Castle, 246 and Bruce, 85–7, 314, 298 and Castle Kennedy, 306 and Chatelherault, 375 and Clerk, 115 and Dalkeith, 362–4, 365

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616   Index

avenues and allées (cont.) and The Drum, 354, 362, 385–6, 363 and Glamis Castle, 73, 75, 77, 299, 74, 300 and Kinross House, 346, 298 and La Mancha, 365–7 366 and Leslie House, 316 and Newliston, 350–4, 356, 348, 351, 352 and North Merchiston, 356–7 and Panmure, 248 and Reid, 296–7 Ayala, Don Pedro de, 11 Badminton House (Gloucestershire), 329, 345 Baily, Caleb, 101 Baine, James, 149, 553–4n8, 151 Balcaskie House (Fife), 8, 84–5, 87, 146, 149–50, 335, 86–7, 150 and gardens, 297, 314, 315 balconies, 76, 123, 126, 127, 133–4, 135, 136, 440, 551n8 Balgreggan (Wigtownshire), 486 Balloch (Perthshire), 142 balustrades, 39, 200–1, 203, 255, 259, 266, 414, 419, 420, 423–4, 435, 507, 200, 416, 422 Bank of Scotland, 24, 29, 30 Bannerman of Elsick, Alexander, 63, 64 Bannerman of Elsick, Isabella, 63, 64 Bannockburn, Battle of, 51 banqueting houses see garden buildings Bapty, Captain, 220, 218 Barbari, Jacopo de’, 443, 445 ‘barbaric architecture’, 195, 200, 202, 202 Barberini, Antonio, 192, 193 Barclay, David, 360, 361–2 Barncluith House (Lanarkshire), 314, 375 Baroque, 21, 73–7, 78–9, 88, 191, 193, 200, 513 barracks, 79, 196, 432, 520 Barron, Patrick, 484 Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Seigneur du Les Semaines, 46–7 baths (bagnio), 509

Baxter, John, 108, 110, 116, 270, 275 Baxter, William, 485 Beaufort, Mary Somerset, 1st Duchess of, 329 Beeston Castle (Cheshire), 354 Bellini, Jacopo, 45 Belvoir Castle (Leicestershire), 327 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 172, 200, 201 Berwick-upon-Tweed, 9, 218 Bible, the, 45 Blackbarony, Sir Archibald Murray of, 53–63, 64, 65, 65 Blackbarony House (Peeblesshire), 61, 61 Blackness Castle (West Lothian), 58 Blair Adam (Kinross), 347, 356, 357–61, 362, 588n36, 358–9, 361 Blair Castle (Perthshire), 243, 244, 246, 271, 301, 302, 427 Blair Cranbeth see Blair Adam Blair Drummond (Perthshire), 129 Blenheim Palace (Oxfordshire), 174–6, 177, 178, 182, 235, 176 and gardens, 349, 354 and Switzer, 306 see also Vanbrugh, Sir John Blondel, Jacques-François Cours d’architecture, 265, 467 Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures, 28 Bobart, Jacob, 329 Bogdani, Jacob, 225, 226 Bogle, Michael, 417 Boorde, Andrew, 310 Borromini, Francesco, 43, 45, 172, 207 botany, 329 Boutcher, William, 299, 367–9, 589n50, 593n44 Boynd, Mr (ship master), 325, 341; see also Ogilvie of Boynd Braco, Lord see Fife, William Duff, 1st Earl Bradley, Richard A Survey of the Ancient Husbandry and Gardening, 383 Braemar, 58 Brand, Sir Alexander, 215 Breadalbane, John Campbell, 1st Earl of, 128–9, 244–6 Breadalbane, John Campbell, 2nd Earl of, 302

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Index   617

Brechin Castle (Angus), 235, 236, 238, 247–8, 250–1, 300, 238–42 Briçonnet, Catherine, 234 Bridgeman, Charles, 306, 377 British Empire, 31, 32, 33–4, 425 British Fishery Company, 33 British government, 27–8, 33; see also Parliament British Linen Company, 33 Britishness, 527–9 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, 377 Brown, George, Bishop of Dunkeld, 308–9 Broxmouth (East Lothian), 347 Bruce, George, 16 Bruce, Sir John, 252, 297, 304–5 Bruce, Sir Michael, 101 Bruce, Sir William, 4, 7, 8, 73, 78, 83, 91, 112, 121, 128–131, 153, 235, 244, 477, 552n27, ii and Freemasonry, 46, 535n32 and gardens, 85–7, 131, 297–8, 314–15, 346, 370, 87, 298, 315 and ironwork, 121, 123–4, 127–9, 130–1, 138–9, 131 and Master of Works, 52, 56, 61 and Palladianism, 73, 94, 382, 410 and plasterwork, 8, 149–50, 153–4 and Smith, 198, 199 Balcaskie House, 8, 84–7, 149–50, 297, 314, 335, 86–7, 315 Craighall, 95–6, 153, 96 Dunkeld, 81, 91, 92, 81 Hopetoun, 95, 96, 128–9, 131, 297, 300, 370, 410, 131 Holyroodhouse, 39, 51–2 78–81, 149–50, 196–7, 198, 40, 52–3, 79, 197 House of Nairne, 239, 241–6, 244 Kinross House, 12, 78, 83, 92, 112, 127, 128, 139, 153, 200, 243, 297–8, 335, 346, 377, 298 Leslie House, 82–3, 314–15, 82–3 Melville House, 61, 94–5, 243, 95 Panmure House, 91, 123–4, 127, 235–6, 124 Thirlestane Castle, 92­–4, 112, 92–3 see also Edward, Alexander Brunstane (Midlothian), 92, 374, 553n7, 373

Buccleuch, Ann Scott, Duchess of, 213–29, 231–2, 231 Buchanan Castle (Stirlingshire), 362, 412, 364 building materials (sourcing and use) iron, 43, 121, 122–3, 126, 128, 158, 370, 506, 552n24; see also ironwork; and chapter 6 throughout glass, 220, 224, 327, 331, 337, 393, 466, 480 lead, 78, 88, 89, 90, 94, 159, 165, 246, 322, 327, 486 lime, 15, 19, 105, 243, 279, 281, 504 marble, 8, 220, 224, 226–8, 331, 333, 341 slate, 15, 19, 243, 286, 466 stone, 11, 15, 19, 127, 139, 198, 224, 243, 276, 277, 279, 285, 286, 288, 289, 309, 340, 369, 396, 402, 419, 424, 451, 466, 477, 499, 504, 536n38 timber, 8, 131, 139–40, 141, 156, 157–9, 220, 228–9, 243, 278, 281, 297–9, 304–5, 407, 417, 422, 423, 436, 448, 450, 466, 491, 576; see also chapter 8 throughout burgage plot, 463, 480 Burgh, Thomas, 429, 432–3, 441, 429, 433 Burghley House (Stamford), 327 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of, 384, 393 Burn, William, 253 Burnet, Gilbert, 253, 264 Burt, Edmund, 376–7 Cabestan, Jean-François, 472 cabinetmakers Moore, James, 217–18, 221, 225 Scott, William, 215 Trotter, William, 168 Calhoff, Capt Jacob, 407 Callander, John, 124, 127, 554n14 Cambridge King’s College Chapel, 108 Trinity College Library, 431, 432 Cameron, James K., 3, 14 Cammo House (Midlothian), 129

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618   Index

Campbell, Colen, 9, 182, 186–7, 212, 262, 393 and Drumlanrig, 191 and Glasgow, 407, 419 Shawfield House, 408–12, 409, 411 Wanstead House, 170, 178, 180–1 see also Vitruvius Britannicus Campbell, Daniel, 408, 409–10 Campbell, Dougal, 10 Campbell, Duncan, 27 Campbeltown Town Hall (Argyll), 269, 271, 272, 286–7, 287 canals Forth and Clyde, 386 in gardens, 332–3, 350, 351, 353, 354, 367, 368, 370, 357, 369 and Hopetoun, 369, 369 and La Mancha, 367, 366 and Venice, 442, 445, 449, 451 Cant, Ronald, 11 Caramuel Lobkowitz, Juan, 200, 201, 204, 202 Architectura civil recta y obliqua, 191, 195–6, 199, 205, 212 cardinal virtues, 294 Carlyle, Alexander, 388 Carlyle, Thomas, 519 Carnock House (Stirlingshire), 146 Caroline Park (Midlothian), 8, 62, 121, 123, 132–5, 138, 490, 136 carvings, 8, 39, 420–1 cascades, 347, 351–2, 355, 402–3, 351, 402–3 Castell, Robert Villas of the Ancients Illustrated, 383, 385 castellated architecture Aberdour, 112–13, 310–11, 311 Affleck, 248 Barncluith, 314, 375 Blackness, 58 Brechin, 235, 236, 238, 247–8, 250–1, 238–42 castles, 8, 10, 11–12, 58–9, 72–3, 122, 519, 523–4 Clunie, 308–9, 309 Cluny, 524 Craigievar, 18, 18 Drummond, 8, 296, 317, 317 Dudhope, 90 Dunderave, 68, 69 Edinburgh, 58, 145

Hatton, 8, 89–90, 206–7, 317–19, 89, 210, 318–19 Inveraray, 10, 12, 13, 374 Lyon (Huntly), 73–4, 76–7, 311, 319–20 Methven Castle, 87–8, 88 Panmure, 88–9, 90–2 Penicuik (‘Newbiggin’), 113–14, 114 Rosslyn, 108, 109 Staneyhill, 131 Thirlestane, 92–3, 112, 92–3 tower houses, 12, 21, 87, 90, 91, 211, 524 see also Balcaskie House; Drumlanrig Castle; First Castle Age; Glamis Castle; Second Castle Age; Stirling Castle; Thirlestane Castle castellated Classicism, 11–12, 13, 72, 73 Castle Campbell (Clackmannanshire), 311 Castle Grant, 302 Castle Howard (Yorkshire), 171, 177, 178, 306, 327, 401–2, 513, 180–1 Castle Huntly see Castle Lyon Castle Kennedy (Wigtownshire), 305–6, 369, 374 Castle Lyon (Castle Huntly) (Perthshire), 73–4, 76–7, 299 Castle Menzies (Perthshire), 146–7, 148, 556n40, 147 Castle Semple (Renfrewshire), 368 castles see castellated architecture; country houses, castles and gardens cathedrals see churches, chapels and cathedrals Catherine of Braganza, Queen, 39 Catholicism, 5, 6, 12, 21, 186 and James VII and II, 23, 202 and Smith, 53, 55, 191–2, 196, 202 see also anti-Catholicism Catstane (West Lothian), 353 Cawdor, Sir Hew Campbell of, 67 ceilings, 141–2, 143–53, 166–8 Abbey House, 153 Balcaskie, 146, 149–50, 150 Castle Menzies, 146–7, 148, 556n40, 147 Dalry, 553n3, 142 French Ambassador’s House, 146, 147–8, 147

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Index   619

Harden House, 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149 145 Holyroodhouse, 149, 150, 151, 152, 151, 152 House of the Binns, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 554n16, 143 Kinross House, 153, 154 Law’s Close, 146, 148, 148 Prestonfield House, 152–3, 153 Wemyss Castle, 143–4, 146, 148, 149, 150, 144 Chambers, Sir William, 10 chancery, 54, 55, 56 chapels see churches, chapels and cathedrals Charles I, King, 5, 16, 19, 166, 169 Charles II, King, 5, 20, 50, 78 and Holyroodhouse, 39, 71, 79–81 and Restoration, 312–13, 314–15 chasse-marée see coaches Chatelherault see Hamilton Palace Chatsworth (Derbyshire), 234, 262, 327, 331, 490 chimneypieces, 222–4, 225, 224, 226–7 Chiswick House (Middlesex), 369, 373, 384, 413 churches, chapels and cathedrals, 8, 19, 182, 185 All Saints’ Church (Derby), 275 Canongate Kirk (Edinburgh), 52, 129–30, 202–3, 204, 522, 206 Chapel of Reginald Pole (Rome), 205, 209 Chapel Royal (Stirling), 4–5, 43–9, 558n29, 558n34, 44 Dunfermline Abbey, 46, 47 Durham Cathedral, 105–6, 106 Durisdeer, 8, 202 Elgin Cathedral, 105 George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel, 41, 156, 157–8, 159–60, 162, 165–9, 157–8, 166–7 Glasgow Cathedral, 161 Greyfriars Kirkyard (Edinburgh), 42, 46, 204, 208 Hamilton Old Parish, 493–5, 513, 494 High Kirk of St Giles (Ediburgh), 19 Holy Trinity (St Andrews), 8 Il Gesú (Rome), 204, 207

Kings College Chapel (Cambridge), 108 Lincoln Cathedral, 106 Oakshaw Trinity (Paisley), 165 Oratory of St Philip Neri (Rome), 204, 207 Ripon Minster, 354 Rosslyn Chapel, 108–10, 110 St Andrews (Holyroodhouse), 52, 167, 202 St Andrew’s and St George’s (Edinburgh), 164–5 St Andrews in the Square (Glasgow), 164, 422–4, 161, 423 St John Lateran (Rome), 45 St Paul’s Cathedral (London), 48 St Paul’s Church (London), 262 St Peter’s Basilica (Rome), 8, 43, 201, 525, 526 Salisbury Cathedral, 107, 107 S. Ivo alla Sapienza (Rome), 43 S. Zaccaria (Venice), 43 Tarbat Parish, 200 Tickencote (Rutland), 107 Tron Kirk (Edinburgh), 159, 169, 160 York Minster, 106 Cicero De Senectute, 381 Cistercian monks, 195, 293 Civil War (1639–50), 5, 19 Claim of Right (1689), 52–3 clans, 6, 21, 22, 24, 33, 179 Claremont, 306 Classicism, 4, 10, 12, 72–3, 117–18, 138 and Adam, Robert, 523 and Edinburgh, 478, 481 and Gibbs, 434 and Holyroodhouse, 78 and libraries, 441 and Thirlestane, 92–4, 92 see also Baroque; castellated Classicism; Dutch Classicism; neo-Classicism; Palladianism Clayton, Thomas, 154, 423, 424, 427, 508 Clerk of Eldin, John, 106, 113, 118, 549n51, 588n35, 106–7, 114–17 Clerk of Penicuik, Sir John, 98–118, 302, 349, 383–4, 385, 388, 392, 517, 549n51, 99

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620   Index

Clerk of Penicuik, Sir John (cont.) The Country Seat, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 384, 393 clock towers, 39 closes, 270, 445, 449, 479, 497–8 Old Bank (Edinburgh), 30 Parliament (Edinburgh), 477–8 closets, 90, 221–5, 242–3, 250, 335, 478, 480, 226 Clunie Castle (Perthshire), 308–9, 309 Cluny Castle (Aberdeenshire), 524 coach houses see stables coaches, 129, 196, 218-19, 463, 517 coal, 16, 19, 322, 327, 358, 393, 587n32, 363 Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount, 349, 353, 374 Cochrane, Thomas, 8th Earl of Dundonald, 365–6, 368, 589n47 Cockenzie House (East Lothian), 161–2, 162 Collier, John, 128 colonialism, 8, 9, 11, 20, 24, 29–31; see also imperialism Colquhoun, James, 509 Coltness House (Lanarkshire), 312 columns, 39–41, 43–6, 48–9, 202 Colvin, Sir Howard, 12, 100, 271 Comely Bank Lodge (Alloa), 182, 184, 183 Commission for building Fifty New Churches, 182, 183, 185 Commonwealth, 5, 22, 73, 80, 82–3, 91 Company of Scotland, 24 Comptroller of the Queen’s Works, 174, 262; see also royal works conservation, 520 contract labour, 15 contracts, 76, 228, 441, 450, 467, 552n24 and Adam, William, 32, 391–2, 393, 488, 501, 525 and Douglas, 269, 271, 273, 277, 277, 278–9, 281, 283, 289 and Dreghorn, 418, 423 and Edward, 322–4, 325, 327, 330, 331, 337, 341, 342, 345 and Gardner, 437 and George Heriot’s Chapel, 159, 165–6 and Holyroodhouse, 196

and Leslie House, 143 and Mylne, Robert, 479, 480 and slavery, 31 and Smith, 127–8 Convention of the Estates (1689), 5–6 Convention of Royal Burghs, 461 Cooper, Richard, 501, 504, 505, 394 Copyright Acts, 431, 433, 437 Corbett, Walter, 123, 127 Corboz, André, 43 Cornwallis, Charles, 3rd Baron, 214 Counter-Reformation, 21, 52, 129, 200, 204 country houses, castles and gardens, 8, 313–14 Abbey House (Culross), 153 Aberdour Castle, 112–13, 310–11, 311 Airds, 512 Airth, 367, 507, 589n50, 593n44, 368 Archerfield, 269, 271, 272, 273, 276–81, 283, 289, 276, 278–80 Arniston, 257, 349, 362, 379, 385, 387–404, 588n41, 593n41, 593n44, 380, 390–1, 394–8, 400, 402–3 Auchterhouse, 142 Balgreggan, 486 Balloch, 142 Belvoir Castle, 327 Blackbarony House, 61, 61 Blair Adam, 347, 357–61, 362, 588n36, 358–9, 361 Blair Castle, 243, 244, 246, 271, 301, 302, 427 Brechin Castle, 235, 236, 238, 247–8, 250–1, 238–42 Brunstane, 92, 374, 553n7, 373 Buchanan, 362, 412, 364 Cammo, 129 Caroline Park, 8, 62, 121, 123, 132–5, 138, 490, 136 Castle Lyon (Castle Huntly), 73–4, 76–7, 311, 319–20 Castle Menzies, 146–7, 148, 556n40, 147 castles, 8, 10, 11–12, 58–9, 72–3, 122, 519, 523–4 Clunie Castle, 308–9, 309 Cluny, 524 Comely Bank Lodge, 182, 184, 183

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Index   621

Craighall Castle, 95–6, 153, 96 Craigiehall, 129, 132, 133–5, 153, 351, 354, 138 Dalkeith Palace, 209–11, 213–32, 362–4, 213, 223–4, 226–7, 229–30, 365 Donibristle, 131 Drum, The (Somerville House), 354, 362, 374, 385–6, 392, 490, 588n42, 363 Drummond Castle, 8, 296, 317, 317 Duff House, 32, 271, 369, 372–3, 490, 513, 32, 372 Dunkeld House, 81, 91, 92, 81 Edzell Castle, 294, 295 Finlaystone, 269, 270, 273, 281, 283–4, 282–4 Floors Castle, 392, 393 Galloway House, 271, 275, 286, 290, 274 Gogar, 129 Grimsthorpe, 349 Haddo, 270, 286, 484 Ham House, 141 Harden, 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149, 145 Hatton, 8, 89–90, 206–7, 317–19, 89, 210, 318–19 House of Nairne, 238–9, 241–6, 244–5 House of the Binns, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 554n16, 143 Inveraray, 10, 12, 13, 374 Invergowrie House, 302 Kellie Castle, 146, 152 Kimbolton Castle, 132 Kinnaird Castle, 8, 95 La Mancha, 347, 354, 365–8, 392, 366 Lennie, 128–9 Leslie, 82–3, 143, 154, 155, 314–16, 82, 316 Mavisbank, 100, 113, 114, 354, 384 Meldrum, 67, 67 Mellerstain, 374, 393 Melville House, 61–2, 94–5, 139, 154, 208, 243, 410, 62, 95 Methven Castle, 87–8, 91, 558n29, 88 Newbattle Abbey, 62, 200 Newhailes, 132, 201, 398, 410, 134, 204

Newliston, 305–6, 347–56, 362, 367, 369, 392, 490, 586n9, 587n26, 348, 351–3 Niddry, 295, 351–3, 351 North Merchiston, 356–7, 359, 363, 357 Nunnington Hall, 123 Penicuik House, 100, 113–18, 257, 114–17 Raith, 132, 410, 135 Rosslyn Castle, 108, 109 Saltoun Hall, 253–8, 414, 256–61 Traquair, 129, 211, 271, 130 Tyninghame, 252, 302–5, 305 Wanstead House, 170, 178, 180–1 Wardhouse, 269, 273, 278, 283–6, 285–6 Wemyss Castle, 143–4, 146, 148, 149, 150, 144 Winton, 141 Woodhall, 349, 408, 586n17 Yester, 13, 164, 164 see also Balcaskie House; Drumlanrig; gardens and designed landscapes; Glamis Castle; Hopetoun House; Kinross House; Panmure House; Thirlestane Castle; tower houses; town houses (domestic) Coupar Angus Abbey (Perthshire), 294 cours d’honneur (courts of honour), 129 court house, 244; see also tolbooths; townhouses and town halls Court of Session, 233, 249–50, 387, 388, 461, 477 Covenanters, 5, 6, 19, 22–3, 27 Craig, John, 417–18, 434, 418 Craighall Castle (Fife), 95–6, 153, 96 Craigiehall House (West Lothian), 129, 132, 133–5, 153, 351, 354, 138 Craigievar Castle (Aberdeenshire), 18, 18 Crawford, Sir David, 478 Cromwell, Oliver, 19 Cromwell, Richard, 54, 314 crosses, 103, 104, 494 crow-steps, 9, 88, 89 Cruikshank, William, 485 Culloden, 6, 33, 527

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622   Index

Culross Palace (Fife), 16, 17 Culzean Castle (Ayrshire), 14, 523 Cumbria, 9, 530n8 Cunningham, William, 478 cupolas, 39, 43 Dalkeith, James, Earl of, 231 Dalkeith Palace (Midlothian), 209–11, 213–32, 213, 223–4, 226–7, 229–30 and gardens, 362–4, 365 see also ironwork Dalrymple, Sir David, 389, 398 Dalrymple, John, 2nd Earl of Stair, 54, 305–6, 347 Darien, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33, 540n53 Darnaway Castle (Moray), 156, 161 De Fer, Nicolas, 337–8 De l’Orme, Philibert Le premier tome de l’architecture, 46 De Wet, Jacob, 8, 78, 80, 198 Dean of Guild, 466, 511, 512 Deane and Woodward, 433, 429 Decker, Paul Architecture Civilis, 396 defence, 72–3 Defoe, Daniel, 252, 297–8, 347, 407, 417, 477 Delaware, 20 Dezallier d’Argenville La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, 350, 356, 366–7, 370, 377, 385, 586n18, 350, 367 see also James, John Dick, Sir James, 152 Donaldson, Gordon, 11 Donibristle House (Fife), 131 Douglas, John, 269–90 and Adam, 273–4, 286, 289 Archerfield, 269, 271, 272, 273, 275–81, 283, 289, 277–80 Campbeltown Town Hall, 269, 271, 272, 286–7, 287 Finlaystone, 269, 270, 273, 281, 283–4, 282–4 Galloway House, 271, 275, 286, 290, 274 Lochmaben Town House, 269, 271, 276, 286, 287, 275 map of buildings, 272 St Salvator’s (United) College, 271, 287–8, 289, 288

timeline, 273 Wardhouse, 269, 273, 278, 283–6, 285–6 Douglas, William, Earl of Selkirk, 235 Dreghorn, Allan, 407, 417–19, 422–3, 424, 425, 426–7, 434, 418, 420, 422–3, 426 Dreghorn, Robert, 417 droving, 19, 22, 27, 29 Drum, The (Somerville House) (Midlothian), 354, 362, 374, 385–6, 392, 490, 588n42, 363 Drumlanrig Castle (Dumfriesshire), 8, 11, 12, 111–12, 132, 227 and ironwork, 127, 132, 134, 137 and Smith, 127, 191, 200–2, 211, 201–2 see also Clerk, Sir John Drummond, George, 503, 504–5 Drummond, James, 28 Drummond, John, 31–2 Drummond Castle (Perthshire), 8, 296, 317, 317 Dryden, John, 381 Du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet, 93 Exempla Arcuum, 43–4 Dublin, 432, 433–5 Trinity College Library, 429, 431, 432–3, 429, 433 Dudhope Castle (Dundee), 90 Duff House (Banffshire), 32, 271, 369, 372–3, 490, 513, 32, 372 Dumbarton Castle, 58 Dumbarton fencibles, 69 Dunbar, John, 4, 13, 214 Dundas, Barbara, 132 Dundas, George, 387 Dundas, Robert see Arniston, Lord Dundee Dudhope Castle, 90 Gardyne’s Land, 558n29 Town House, 419, 488–91, 513, 489 Dunderave Castle (Argyll), 68, 69 Dunkeld House (Perthshire), 81, 91, 92, 81 Dunsterfield, George, 8, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 150 Dupplin Castle (Perthshire), 182, 184, 184 Durham Cathedral, 105–6, 106 Durie, Theodore, 58, 65

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Index   623

Durkan, John, 11 Dutch Classicism, 264, 335 Dutch Republic, 15–16, 20, 23–4, 25; see also Netherlands Dyrham Park (Gloucestershire), 262 earthworks see gardens East India Company, 24, 31–2 East Park/Smeaton House (East Lothian), 123 Eastbury (Dorset), 354 Easter Moy, 302 Eastern Europe, 17–18 Eaton Hall (Cheshire), 354 economics, 15, 25–7 Edinburgh, 7, 19, 20, 270, 271, 442–54 and Adam, Robert, 523 and Buccleuch, Ann Scott, Duchess of, 219–20 and Enlightenment, 34 and gardens, 312 and Porteous Riot, 28 and tenements, 455, 461, 463, 466, 473–80, 481–2 and University, 34, 387, 528, 529, 528 Edinburgh (buildings), 443–4, 453 Bank of Scotland, 30 Bridewell (Calton) Gaol, 520, 523, 529 Canongate Kirk, 52, 129–30, 202–3, 204, 206 Castle, 58, 145 Charity Work-house, 499, 509–11, 510 Dalry House, 553n3, 142 Dean orphanage, 500 George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel, 41, 156, 157–8, 159–60, 162, 165–9, 157–8, 166–7 George Watson’s Hospital, 417, 500–3, 502 Gladstone’s Land, 446, 456, 475–7, 447, 476 Greyfriars Kirkyard, 42, 46, 204, 208 Hammermen’s Hall, 138 Hatton House see Queensberry House High Kirk of St Giles, 19 High Street, 461, 463, 478–9 James’s Court, 478

John Knox’s House, 447, 473–5 Lady Stair’s House, 122 MacKenzie Mausoleum, 208, 208, 510 Magdalene Chapel see Hammermen’s Hall Milne’s Court, 452, 478, 481, 452 Moray House, 123, 312, 312 New Town, 453 Old College, 528 Orphan Hospital, 496–500, 498, 500 Panmure House, 247, 463 Parliament, 159, 169, 26, 54, 159 Parliament Close, 477–8 Queensberry House, 191, 193, 202, 211, 463 Royal Exchange, 477 Royal Infirmary, 34, 501, 503–9, 513, 505–6 St Andrew’s and St George’s Church, 164–5 Surgeons’ Hospital, 511–13, 512 Trinity Hospital, 496 Tron Kirk, 159, 169, 160 Writers’ Court, 479, 480 see also Caroline Park; Drum; Holyroodhouse; Murrayfield House; North Merchiston; Prestonfield House Edinburgh Architectural Association Details of Scottish Domestic Architecture, 121 Edinburgh Philosophical Society, 34 Edward, Alexander, 9, 61, 234, 241–2, 322–45, 324, 337 and antiquarianism, 323, 324–5, 333–4, 344, 328 and Château de Pont, 339, 338 and England, 326–33 and European tour, 300, 322–6, 333–42, 344–5 and gardens, 235, 236, 300, 322, 325, 326, 329, 330–2, 339–40, 342–3, 370, 569n15, 588n40, 298, 342–3 and topiary, 342–4, 342–3 Brechin Castle, 235, 236, 238, 247–8, 250–1, 300, 569n15, 239–42 Hamilton Palace, 143, 154, 235, 295, 345, 374–6, 414 Hopetoun, 300, 325, 331, 370

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624   Index

Edward, Alexander (cont.) Kellie Castle, 146, 152 Kinross House, 300, 355, 298 Melville House, 61–2, 94–5, 139, 154, 208, 410, 95 see also Hopetoun House; Kinross House Edzell Castle (Angus), 294, 295 Eglintoun, Lady, 374 Elder, Thomas, 529 Elgin Cathedral (Moray), 105 Elizabeth I, Queen, 5 Elizabethan houses, 234, 327, 433 Elphinstone, John, 511, 52, 54, 510 Empire see British Empire engineers, 60, 70 Avery, Joseph, 392 Burgh, Thomas, 432, 441 Durie, Theodore, 65 Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius, 382 Watson, David, 388 England, 9–10, 11, 12, 25–7, 70 and Adam, Robert, 521, 523, 526–7 and Buccleuch, Ann Scott, Duchess of, 215–18 and cathedrals, 105–7 and Edward, 326–30, 344–5 and ironwork, 121, 123, 140 and plasterwork, 141, 144 and women, 234–5 see also London English invasion, 5, 67, 70 English landscape garden, 346, 369, 373, 377 English military occupation, 5, 19, 39, 76, 235, 312 Enlightenment, 34, 431, 467 entrances, 75, 277–8, 393–7, 484–5 and Holyroodhouse, 39–41, 43, 45–6, 196–9, 40, 197 and Newhailes House, 201, 204 and Stirling Castle Chapel Royal, 43–9, 44, 197 see also gateways Enzer, Joseph, 155, 397, 395–6 Episcopacy, 22, 31, 166, 169, 202, 504 ‘Equites Romani’, 384, 386 Equivalents, 26–7, 28 étoiles, rond-points and patte d’oie, 304–5, 307, 362, 363, 374, 400, 300, 305, 363–5, 380, 400

Europe see Dutch Republic; France; Germany; Italy; Netherlands, Spain Evelyn, John, 313, 327, 431, 441 eye-catchers see garden buildings fabbricato a barbacani, 449 Fairbairn, Thomas, 426 Falkland Palace (Fife), 312 famine, 24, 31 farming see agriculture Farnese, Alessandro, 207 female patrons see women Fergus I of Scotland, King, 80 Fife, William Duff, 1st Earl (Lord Braco), 32, 271, 355, 368 Finlaystone House (Renfrewshire), 269, 270, 273, 281, 283–4, 282–4 fire, 238–9, 252, 432, 463 and Edinburgh, 466 and Great Fire of London, 465–6 and Rome, 477 First Castle Age, 10, 12 Firth of Forth, 16, 18, 358, 361 fishing, 16, 20, 23, 28–9 Fitchett, W. H., 11 Flanders, 57 Fletcher, Henry, 254, 255 Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, 253–68, 414, 255–61 fleurs-de-lis, 123, 124, 127, 146–7, 147 Floors Castle (Roxburghshire), 392, 393 floorplans, 282, 285, 338, 409, 415, 416, 458, 480 and Adam, 373, 394, 489, 502, 512 and Douglas, 278–9, 282, 284–5, 288 and Parisian Houses, 461, 464, 465, 470, 473, 475 Brechin Castle, 240–2 Dalkeith, 221–2, 223 Leslie House, 82–3, 82 Panmure House, 89, 237 Saltoun Hall, 254–9, 255, 257–9 Fontana, Carlo, 12–13, 172, 184 Forbes, ‘Danzig Willie’, 17–18 Forbes, Robert, 479–80 Forfeited Estates Commissioners, 247

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Index   625

Fort William, 59–60, 65, 59 fortifications see militarised landscapes fortified gardens, 348, 350, 360, 374–5, 385, 348 Arniston, 401–2, 400 Chatelherault, 374–5, 375 Newliston, 349 Forty-Five, the, 33 Fourdrinier, Paul, 503, 511, 510 France, 6, 7, 9, 23–4, 43 and Clerk, 98 and Edward, 335–42, 344 and Fletcher, 260–1, 265 and gardens, 293–4, 295, 306, 308, 313, 321, 350 and Holyroodhouse, 79 and hospitals, 498 and Jacobites, 249, 323, 325–6, 336–7 and libraries, 431 and palaces, 70 and women, 234 Château de Marly, 260–1, 321, 339–40, 341, 414 Château de Pont, 330, 338 Vaux-le-Vicomte, 306, 339 Verrerie, Château de la, 9 see also Paris; Versailles Francine, Alexandre Livre d’architecture, 40–2, 83–4, 41–2, 85 Francke, August Hermann Pietas Hallensis: an Historical Narration of the Orphan-House at Glaucha in Saxony, 496 Freemasonry, 46, 277, 353n32, 536n38 French weavers, 7 furnishings, 215–19, 220–1 Gairdner, Alexander, 132, 136 Gairdner, Andrew, 496 Gale, Roger, 102, 108 Galilei, Alessandro, 45 galleries and Adam, William, 396, 493–4, 495, 499, 503, 508, 512 and Drumlanrig, 112 and Edinburgh houses, 446, 449, 450, 475 and churches, 424, 493, 495

and Hampton Court, 225 and Holyroodhouse, 79, 80 and Leslie House, 83, 82 and libraries, 433, 434, 439–40, 441, 434, 436, 440 and Paris, 459 Galloway House (Wigtownshire), 271, 275, 286, 290, 274 garden designers, seedsmen and nurserymen Bain, William, 364, 589n46 Deios, Nerias, 331 Guillaume, M., 331 Mason, Peter, 330 Watton, Francis, 331 Winter, Thomas, 302, 74 see also Adam, William; Boutcher, William; Bridgeman, Charles; Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’; Bruce, Sir William; Dezallier d’Argenville; Edward, Alexander; gardeners; Kent, William; Langley, Batty; Le Notre, André; Mar, Earl of; Switzer, Stephen; Vanbrugh, Sir John Garden of Troup, Alexander, 35 gardeners Balfour, Robert, 331 Blaikie, Thomas, 9, 463 Gray in Fulham, Mr, 331 Holt in Fulham, Mr, 331 Howison, Robert, 309 Kemp in Putney, Mr, 331 Roberts, John, 331 Wilson, John, 300 see also Reid, John gardens and designed landscapes, 9, 93–4, 293–4, 300–2, 306–7, 346–78, 410, 204, 367 and Adam, 13, 307, 346–78, 392–3, 398–404, 585n8, 609n27, 348, 351–2, 357–9, 363–6, 368–75, 380, 400 and amphitheatres, mounts and earthworks, 116, 245, 248, 306, 345, 349, 374, 399, 401–2, 403, 402–3 and botany, 329 and Bruce, 297–8, 314–15, 87, 298, 315 and Clerk, 100

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626   Index

gardens and designed landscapes (cont.) and Edward, 235, 236, 300, 322, 325, 326, 329, 330–2, 339–40, 342–3, 370, 569n15, 588n40, 298, 342–3 and France, 340 and geometry, 294–5 and landmarks, 297, 314, 354–5, 362, 87, 351, 355 and nurserymen, 330–1 and physic, 329, 331, 334, 498 and Reid, 295–7 and Stair, 305–6, 349, 350, 352–3, 354, 355, 374 and terraced, 206, 308–12, 313–21 and vistas, 350–4 and walled, 370, 402, 403–4, 589n57, 371, 400 Airth, 367, 589n50, 593n44, 368 Arniston, 379, 388, 392, 398–404, 380, 390–1, 400, 402–3 Auchincruive, 368 Balcaskie, 85–7, 297, 314, 87, 315 Blair Adam, 347, 356, 357–61, 362, 588n36, 358–9, 361 Broxmouth, 347 Buchanan, 362, 364 Castle Kennedy, 305–6, 369, 374 Chatelherault, 374–6, 375 Coltness House, 312 Dalkeith, 362–4, 365 The Drum, 354, 362, 374, 385–6, 588n42, 363 Duff House, 372–3, 372 Farnese Gardens, 207–8, 211 Glamis, 76–8, 87, 88, 299, 302, 319, 74, 300 Hamilton Palace, 307, 374–7, 375 Hopetoun, 307, 354, 369–72, 377, 369–71 House of Dun, 367 House of Nairne, 240, 245, 245 Kinross House, 297–8, 314, 346, 354, 377, 298 La Mancha, 347, 354, 365–8, 366 Leslie, 314–16, 316 Newliston, 305–6, 347–56, 360, 362, 367, 369, 392, 586n9, 348, 351–2 North Merchiston, 356–7, 359, 363, 357Panmure, 236, 247–8, 340

Seaton Delaval, 306, 349, 594n56 Stowe, 306, 349, 369, 373, 527, 587n19 Studley Royal, 306, 354, 369 Taymouth Castle, 302, 347, 586n5 Thirlestane, 93–4, 319, 93, 320 Versailles, 308, 313, 321, 343–4 see also avenues and allées; Badminton; Blenheim; Chiswick; Dezallier d’Argenville; country houses, castles and gardens; cascades; étoiles, rond-points and patte d’oie; fortified gardens; Langley, Batty; plantations; Stourhead; surveying; Switzer, Stephen; Vanbrugh, Sir John garden buildings, 312, 369–375 and Adam, 369–75 Brunstane, 374, 373 The Drum, 374, 363 Duff House, 372, 372 Hatton House, 206–7, 210 Hopetoun, 131, 369–70, 369–70 Newhailes, 201, 204 Penicuik, 113–18, 115–17 Villa Farnese, 207–8, 211 and Vitruvius Scoticus, 374 Gardenstown (Aberdeenshire), 35 Gardner, John, 288, 429, 437–8, 439–41 King James Library, 430, 438–40 gate lodges, 356 gateways, 83, 123–4, 126–7, 128, 129–31, 339, 355, 364, 398, 587n26, 41–2, 85 Argyll’s Lodging, 83–4, 84 Dalkeith, 364, 365 Hatton House, 206, 210 Hopetoun, 131, 131 Panmure, 91, 123–4, 127–8, 124 Royal Infirmary, 506, 508, 506 Traquair, 129, 130 Ged, Mr (ship master), 331, 584n40 Geometria, 294, 295 geometry, 294–5 George I, King, 27 George II, King, 499, 501, 507 George III, King, 527, 529 Gerbier, Balthazar Brief Discourse, 50 Germany, 25, 98, 294

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Index   627

Gibbons, Grinling, 220, 223–4, 225, 224, 226–7 Gibbs, James, 9, 12–13, 275-6, 393, 183–4 A Book of Architecture, 12, 170–1, 173–4, 176, 179–82, 182–7, 385, 434 and Adam, 434, 484, 485, 486, 491, 513 and Douglas, 271, 272, 273, 275–6 and Glasgow, 407, 412, 415, 424–6 Rules for Drawing Several Parts of Architecture, 438, 440–1 Comely Bank Lodge, 182, 184, 183 Dupplin Castle, 182, 184, 184 St Martin-in-the-Fields, 277, 287, 423, 424, 493, 495 Gifford, John, 4, 127, 297 Glamis Castle (Angus), 8, 21, 73–8, 80, 87, 88, 91, 251, 554n8, 22, 300 and gardens, 76–8, 87, 88, 299, 302, 319, 74, 300 and ironwork, 124, 125 Glasgow, 19, 20, 407–17, 427–8 and churches, 422–4 and houses, 425–7 and public buildings, 417–21 and tenements, 455 and tobacco, 29–31, 408, 411, 421, 427 and urban planning, 34 Glasgow (buildings) Dreghorn Town House, 426–7, 426 Cathedral, 161 High Street, 407, 412, 477, 413 Lord Provost Murdoch’s House, 426 Merchant House, 407–8, 417 Montrose Lodging, 412–17, 413–16 Old College Library, 429, 431, 433–6, 496, 430, 435–7, 497 Shawfield House, 408–12, 409, 411 St Andrew’s in the Square, 164, 422–4, 161, 423 Ship Bank, 426 sugar houses, 408 tolbooth, 407 Thistle Bank, 427

Town Hall, 407, 417, 419–20, 422–3, 424, 425, 420, 422 Town Hospital, 417–18, 418 Trades Hall, 165, 168, 165 Trongate, 477, 411, 420 glass see building materials Gledstane, Thomas, 475 Glencoe, Massacre of, 6, 24, 59 ‘Glorious Revolution’, 5, 53, 78, 379, 387, 457 Gogar House (Midlothian), 129 gold, 17, 24 Goldsmiths’ Hall (London), 141 Gordon, Alexander, 384, 484, 486 Itinerarium Septentrionale, 386 Gordon of Rothiemay, James, 26, 197, 312, 443–4 ‘Gothic order’, 195 Gothicism, 100–13, 115–16, 612n41 Graham, James Gillespie, 168 grand cabinets, 472 grande chambre de parade, 472 Grant of Monymusk, Sir Archibald, 302 Gray, Lord, 488 Great Fire of London, 465 Greenhill Farmhouse (Lanarkshire), 23 Grimsthorpe (Lincolnshire), 349 Grose, Francis Antiquities of Scotland, 110, 110 ha-has (sunk fence), 307, 349, 350, 370, 376–8, 401 Haddington Tolbooth, 493 Haddington, Helen Hope, Countess of, 252 Haddington, Thomas Hamilton, 6th Earl of, 252, 302–5 Haddo House (Aberdeenshire), 270, 286, 484 Halifax, Earl of, 490, 172 Halmyre, Walter Murray of, 58, 60, 64, 70 Ham House (Surrey), 141 Hampton Court Palace, 70, 136, 221–2, 223, 225, 354, 139, 222 Hamilton, Anne, Duchess of, 233, 235 Hamilton, Lord Basil, 60 Hamilton, James, 4th Duke of, 60, 64, 139

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628   Index

Hamilton, James, 5th Duke of, 302, 374, 376, 378 Hamilton, Thomas, 6th Earl of Haddington Treatise on the Manner of Raising Trees, 302–4, 303 Hamilton Old Parish Church (Lanarkshire), 493–5, 513, 494 Hamilton Palace (Lanarkshire), 143, 154, 199, 209, 235, 295, 307, 345, 414 and Chatelherault, 374–6, 375 Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, 200, 203 Hanover, House of, 25, 27, 29, 31, 69, 182, 379, 387, 453, 524, 527 Harden House (Roxburghshire), 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149 145 Harrison, Stephen, 48 Hatton, Charles Maitland, Lord, 8, 89, 151, 317–18 Hatton House (West Lothian), 8, 89–90, 206–7, 317–19, 89, 210, 318–19 Haussmann, Baron GeorgesEugène, 456 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 175, 176, 200, 402 Hay, George, 71 Hay of Kinfauns, Sir George, 122 health, 310 Henri IV of France, King, 464 heritable jurisdictions, 33 herring, 16, 29 Highlands, the, 6, 21–2, 33, 56–7 Hill, Colonel John, 59 historiography, 10, 11, 12, 13, 171, 211, 234 Holland see Netherlands Holyroodhouse (Edinburgh), 5, 6–7, 8, 39–41, 43, 51–2, 382, 52, 53, 79, 197 and Blackbarony, 60 and Bruce, 39, 51–2 79–80, 149–50, 196–7, 198, 40, 52–3, 79, 197 and Douglas, 288–9 and entrance, 196–9, 40, 197 and French influence, 79 and ironwork, 124, 126 and James II and VII, 20–1 and plasterwork, 149, 150, 151, 152, 151, 152

and reconstruction, 71 and roof, 90–91, 163–4, 169, 161, 163 and Smith, 198–9, 202, 564n51, 197 and Stuarts, 78–81 and windows, 65 Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture, 301–2 Honours of Scotland, 39, 150 Hope, John, 96 Hope, Sir Thomas, 96 Hopetoun, Charles Hope, First Earl of, 252, 304, 415 Hopetoun House (West Lothian), 95, 96, 410 and Adam, William, 369–72, 393, 369–71 and Adam, Robert, 522 and Bruce, 95, 96, 129, 131, 297, 300, 370, 410, 131 and Edward, 300, 325, 331, 370 and gardens, 297, 307, 354, 369–72, 377 369–71 and ironwork, 129, 131, 132, 370, 131, 133 and Staneyhill Tower, 131 Horn, James, 127–8, 132, 135–6, 135, 137–8 hospitals see public buildings Hotel de Torcy (Paris), 342 hôtels particuliers (courtyard palaces), 79, 83 Houlbert, John, 8, 148–9, 150, 152–3, 152 House of the Binns (West Lothian), 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 554n16, 143 House of Dun (Angus), 367 House of Gray (Angus), 89 House of Nairne (Perthshire), 238–9, 241–6, 244–5 houses see castellated architecture; country houses, castles and gardens; tower houses; town houses (domestic) Hume, David, 10 Huntly Castle see Castle Lyon imperial crown spires, 39, 43, 49 imperialism, 29, 31–3 Incorporation of Mary’s Chapel, 199

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Index   629

India, 24, 32, 33, 63 industry, 23, 322, 327, 393, 407, 408, 455; see also coal; manufacturing interiors, 131, 165, 238, 285, 487–8, 495, 522 and Arniston, 257, 389, 396–8, 395–8 and Dalkeith, 214, 219, 220, 221, 225–9, 232, 224, 226–7, 229–30 and Hampton Court Palace, 221, 223, 225, 222 and leather hangings, 215, 221 and libraries, 397–9, 434–5, 439, 440, 433, 436, 440 and Pliny, 381 and tenements, 478 see also staircases invasion see Argyll, 9th Earl of; English invasion; Mamore, Campbell of; Monmouth, Duke of; William II and III, King inventories, 220, 221, 236, 250 Inveraray Castle (Argyll), 10, 12, 13, 374 Invergarry Castle (Inverness-shire), 58 Inverlochy (Inverness-shire), 59 Ireland, 8, 24, 429, 431, 432–3; see also Dublin iron see building materials ironwork, 121–40 and Caroline Park House, 121, 123, 132–5, 138, 136 and Craigiehall, 129, 132, 133–5, 138 and Dalkeith, 364, 365 and Drumlanrig, 127, 132, 134, 137 and Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, 508, 506 and Glamis, 124, 125 and Hampton Court Palace, 136, 139 and Holyroodhouse, 124, 126 and Hopetoun, 128–9, 131, 132, 370, 131, 133 and Newhailes, 132, 134 and Panmure, 123–4, 127–8, 325, 552n24 124 and Raith House, 132, 135 and Stirling Castle, 122, 122 and Traquair, 129, 130

Irvin, Christopher, 194, 194 Irvin, John, 194, 194 Islay, Earl of see Argyll, Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Italy, 43, 45, 98, 206–7 and Fletcher, 254, 264–5 and gardens, 308, 309–10 Poggio a Caiano, 265 Poggio Reale, 96, 97 see also Rome; Venice Jacobites, 6, 7, 24, 31–2, 33, 552n27 and 1708 Rising, 241 and 1715–16 Rising, 27, 233, 234, 246–50, 249 and 1745–6 Rising, 27, 249 and Adam, Robert, 518 and Douglas, 271–2 and France, 323, 325–6, 336–7 see also anti-Jacobitism Jamaica, 9, 33 James IV of Scotland, King, 7, 48, 51, 122 James V of Scotland, King, 43, 79, 122 James VI and I, King, 4–5, 16, 47–8 James VII and II, King, 5–6, 20–1, 23–4, 80, 325 379 and Catholicism, 196 and Fletcher, 253 and Holyroodhouse, 51, 52 James, John The Theory and Practice of Gardening, 300, 302, 306, 403, 301, 350, 367 see also Dezallier d’Argenville Jerusalem, Temple of Solomon, 44–6, 48 Jesuits, 21 jettied frontages, 449 Johnson, Dr Samuel Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, 440 Johnston Estate (Renfrewshire), 355 joiners Lloyd, Malachi, 216 Roberts, Thomas, 216, 217 Walker, William, 228–9 Jones, Inigo, 11, 48, 76, 111, 172, 212, 262, 382, 387, 393, 415, 419, 438, 527, 530n6, 546n48 and Adam, 386 and Banqueting House, 48, 333

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630   Index

Jones, Inigo (cont.) and ceilings, 141 and Fletcher, 261–2 and Smith, 195 see also Kent, William Jonkin, David, 475 Josephus, 46 Juvarra, Filippo, 184 Kellie Castle (Fife), 146, 152 Kelso, 105 Kennedy, John, 511 Kent, William, 377, 393 The Designs of Inigo Jones, 174, 273, 385, 597n20 and Temple of British Worthies, 527 Kilbaberton, Sir James Murray of, 7, 93 Kilkerran House (Ayrshire), 368 Kimbolton Castle (Huntingdonshire), 132 Kinnaird Castle (Angus), 8, 95 Kinross House (Kinross), 8, 12, 78, 83, 92, 112, 127, 128, 139, 153, 200, 243, 335, 154 and gardens, 297–8, 314, 346, 354, 377, 298 Kip, Jan and Knyff, Leonard, 334 Britannia Illustrata, 171, 331, 332, 345, 354 Kircher, Athanasius, 193, 195, 212 Latium, 205–6 Turris Babelis, 200, 203 Kirkcaldy Gladney House, 486–7 225–9 High Street, 146 Law’s Close, 146, 148, 148 Kirke, Thomas, 315 Kirkwood, Robert Plan of the City of Edinburgh, 357, 357 Kit-Kat Club, 175 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 231 L-plans, 73, 75, 83–4, 90, 131, 434 La Mancha (Peebleshire), 347, 354, 365–8, 392, 366 lairds, 19, 22, 262, 271, 322, 404, 552n14 land engineering, 351 landmarks, 354–5

landscapes, 73, 76–8, 306–7; see also gardens Langley, Batty, 440 New Principles of Gardening, 306, 356, 377 Practical Geometry Applied to the Useful Arts of Building, Surveying, Gardening, and Mensuration, 383 Langlois, Nicolas (publisher), 337–9 Laud, Dr William, Archbishop of Canterbury, 48 Lauder, Sir John, 315, 318 Lauderdale, John Maitland, 1st Duke of, 8, 89, 92–3, 149, 151, 253 Laurie, John, 453 Le Muet, Pierre Le manière de bien bastir, 339, 457, 459, 467, 338, 458 Le Nôtre, André, 296, 306, 313, 321 lead see building materials Leers, Reinier, 333–4 Leith, 218, 219, 220, 229, 270, 480, 217 and Edward, 325, 331, 341 Lennie House (Midlothian), 128–9 Leoni, Giacomo, 173, 174, 385 I Quattro Libri, 382–3 Leslie House (Fife), 82–3, 143, 154, 155, 314–16, 82, 316 Lessels, John, 503 Lether, Dr Gregory, 262–3, 264, 267, 263 Levellers, 27 Lhwyd, Edward, 328, 329 liberal arts, 108, 294 libraries, 384–5, 397–9 and universities, 429–41, 496, 429–30, 433, 435–8, 497 lime see building materials Lincoln Cathedral, 106 Lindores, William, 143–4, 149, 150 Lindsay, Sir David, 294 linen, 27, 29, 31, 33 Linlithgow (West Lothian), 19 French Ambassador’s House, 146, 147–8, 147 Palace, 312 litigation, 32, 78, 269, 271, 279–80, 368, 574n2, 576n33 Loch Leven Castle (Kinross), 297, 314, 346, 352, 358, 360, 377

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Index   631

Lochmaben Town House (Dumfriesshire), 269, 271, 276, 286, 287, 275 Lockhart of Carnwath, George Memoirs Concerning the Affairs of Scotland, 111 logements de plain-pied see tenements Loggan, David, 50, 49 loggias, 9, 94–6, 381, 396, 445, 446 Logie, James Scott of, 63 London, 48–9, 185–6, 195, 261–2 and Edward, 330–3 and Glasgow, 421–2 and tenements, 481 London (buildings) Arlington House, 332, 333 Banqueting House, Whitehall, 48, 333 Buckingham House, 221, 225, 229, 331, 228 Cumberland House, 527 Hampton Court Palace, 70, 136, 221–2, 223, 225, 354, 139, 222 Houses of Parliament, 526, 527 Inns of Court, 481 Kensington Palace, 70, 221 Lindsey House, 262, 414 Ranelagh House, 327 Rochester House, 327 St Paul’s Cathedral, 48 St Paul’s Church, 262 Sayes Court, 327 Schomberg House, 333 Soho House, 216 Somerset House, 419, 420, 490, 421 St James’s Park, 332–3, 332 St Martin in-the-Fields, 423, 424–5 Temple Bar, 48 Vanbrugh Castle, Greenwich, 103 Whitehall Palace, 141 Wimbledon Palace, 313 see also Chiswick House; Ham House London Plasterers’ Company, 149 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio An Allegory of Good and Bad Government, 266 Lorimer, Sir Robert, 122 Louis XIV of France, King, 23, 24, 70, 260–1, 325, 604n10

Low Countries, 7–8, 98; see also Netherlands Low, Thomas, 155 Lybell, 269, 280, 574n2, 576n33; see also litigation McArthur, John, 412–13, 413 MacFarlane, Alexander, 9 MacGibbon, David, 121 McGill, Alexander, 13, 129, 131, 407, 504 Montrose Lodging, 412–5, 415, 416 MacKay, General Hugh, 59 McKean, Charles, 520 The Scottish Chateau, 12, 73, 77 MacKenzie, Sir George, 204, 208, 510 Macky, John, 299, 312, 347, 586n9 MacRae, James, 32 Maecenas, Gaius Cilnius, 98, 384 Maitland, William History of Edinburgh, 499, 511 malt tax, 27, 379, 410 Malton, James, 433 Mamore, John Campbell of, 64–5, 67–9 Mansart, François, 93, 260 manufacturing, 15, 17, 23, 28–9, 33, 251, 393; see also industry Mar, John Erskine, 23rd and 6th Earl of, 7, 70, 77, 182, 233, 243, 247, 299, 480, 588n40 and Alloa Tower, 161, 299, 161 and Comely Bank Lodge, 182, 184, 183 and Edward, 322–3, 324, 325, 327, 330, 331, 334, 339–40, 343, 345 marble, 8, 221, 222–4, 225, 226–8, 341, 224, 226–7, 229–30; see also building materials Mariette, Pierre (publisher), 337–9 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, 174–5, 306, 347 Marlborough, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of, 234–5 Marot, Daniel, 224 Marot, Jean, 173 Marx, Karl, 519 Mary II, Queen, 5, 6, 51, 52–3, 221 Mary Queen of Scots, 70, 352, 361 Maryburgh (Kinross), 358–60, 361, 359

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632   Index

masons, 8 Adam, James, 434 Aikenhead, John, 486 Brown of Inveraray, John, 287 Carfrae, Patrick, 480 Cation, David, 419, 423, 425 Cation, James, 424 Cross, James, 422, 423, 424, 425 Gowan, Alexander, 279 Laurie, George, 453, 491 Laurie, Thomas, 491 Lawson, John, 419 McCall, James, 491 McPherson, James, 289 Nasmith, Mungo, 419–20, 424 Neilson, Samuel, 509 Nisbet, Alexander, 76, 88, 123, 551n13 Nisbet, William, 277, 279 Patterson, George, 269, 279–80, 281 Riach, Alexander, 486 Sangster, William, 486 Smart, Andrew, 488 Tennant, Robert, 419 Wilson, Henry, 499 Winter, Thomas, 493, 593n41 see also Baxter, John; Mylne, John; Mylne, Robert; Nisbet, Alexander; Wallace, William Master of Works, 51–71 Maule, Harry, 480 Maule family, 91, 249, 250; see also Panmure mausoleums, 208, 372, 208, 510 Mavisbank House (Midlothian), 100, 113, 114, 354, 384 Maxwell, Sir John, 425 medicine, 34 Médicis, Catherine de, 234 Medina, Sir John, 66 Meldrum, John Urquhart of, 64–5, 69, 66 Meldrum House (Aberdeenshire), 67, 67 Mellerstain (Berwickshire), 374, 393 Melville, Alexander, 132 Melville, George Leslie, Lord, 53–4, 55, 61–2, 94, 214, 215 Melville House (Fife), 61–2, 94–5, 139, 154, 208, 243, 410, 62, 95 Merchant Company, 500

Mesomedes of Crete Hymn to Nemesis, 266–7 Methven Castle (Perthshire), 87–8, 91, 558n29, 88 mezzanines, 243, 335, 446, 499, 470 Michieli, Andrea, 45 militarised landscapes, 6, 58–9, 59 military engineers, 60, 65, 70, 382, 388, 392, 432, 441; see also Slezer, Jan Military Survey of Scotland, 305, 307, 388, 305 military works, 59–60, 65 mining see coal Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 456 Mollet, André Le Jardin de plaisir, 313 monarchy, 6, 52, 81, 139, 313; see also Hanover, House of; Stuart, House of; monarchs under their names monasteries, 293–4 Monmouth, Duchess of see Buccleuch, Ann Scott, Duchess of Monmouth, Duke of, 67, 213, 229, 264, 232 Monro, Alexander, 504, 509 Monro, John, 503, 504 Montesquieu, C. L., 466 Montrose, 1st Duke of, 364, 412, 414–15, 417 monuments, 8, 100, 101–2, 105, 113, 314, 520, 527 and Covenanters’, 509 and funerary, 46, 47 and Pictish, 77–8 and triumphal, 386 Monymusk (Aberdeenshire), 302 Morer, Thomas, 442, 450, 478, 481 Morris, Roger, 10 Mortier, David Nouveau Théâtre d’Italie, 173 Morton, James Douglas, 4th Earl of, 310, 311 mounts see gardens multi-occupancy, 452, 455, 456, 466, 473, 476, 481 Muness Castle (Shetland Islands), 311–12 Murphy, Bailey Scott English & Scottish Wrought Ironwork, 121, 126, 130, 136

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Index   633

Murrayfield House (Midlothian), 271, 274 Mylne, John, 42, 83, 88–9, 121, 143 Mylne, Robert (1633–1710), 41–2, 83, 92, 103, 191, 196, 198, 199, 273, 541n79 and Holyroodhouse, 39, 46, 79 and tenements, 478–9, 480, 452 Mylne, Robert (1733–1811), 9 Nairne, Sir David, 325, 330, 341 Nairne, Margaret Murray, Lady, 233–4, 238–9, 241–6, 249–52 Nairne, William Murray, 2nd Lord, 233, 239, 241–2, 243, 249 National Covenant (1638), 5 nationalism, 10, 20 Naudé, Gabriel, 441 Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, 431 Navigation Acts (1660–71), 20, 25 neo-Classicism, 281, 381, 382, 385, 386, 404, 488 and Adam, Robert, 522, 525 neo-Gothic, 7 neo-Palladianism see Palladianism neo-Romanesque, 9 Netherlands, The, 264, 265, 313, 333–5 De Voorst House, 334–5 Honselaersdijk, 334 Huis ten Bosch, 334–5 Rotterdam, 16, 24, 220, 221, 264, 333 Sorghvliet, 334 see also Amsterdam; Dutch Republic New Model Army, 19 Newbattle Abbey (Midlothian), 62, 200 Newbiggin see Penicuik Newhailes (East Lothian), 132, 201, 398, 410, 134, 204 Newliston (West Lothian), 305–6, 347–56, 360, 362, 367, 369, 392, 490, 586n9, 587n26, 348, 351–2 Niddry Castle (West Lothian), 295, 351–3, 351 Nine Years War, 23–4 noblesse d’épée/de robe, 463

North Berwick, 297 North Merchiston (Midlothian), 356–7, 359, 363, 357 Norway, 8, 158–9, 160, 169 Nunnington Hall (Yorkshire), 123 ‘oblique’ architecture, 196, 200–1, 207, 212 observatories, 9, 508, 67 Ogilby, John Entertainment, 50, 49 Ogilvie of Boynd, 341 ‘Old Pretender’ see Stuart, James Francis Edward Oliphant, John, 439, 439 Oliphant, Katherine, 387 orders, 78, 43–4, 112, 199, 200, 212, 269, 274, 526 Barbaric Doric, 200, 202, 202 Composite, 48, 50 Corinthian, 39, 48, 50, 84, 112, 225, 419, 424 Doric, 39, 40–41, 43–4, 440, 487 Ionic, 43–4, 112, 398, 434, 490, 498, 507 Scots Doric, 39 Tuscan, 116 overseer of the royal works see royal architects Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of, 179–80, 182 Oxford Ashmolean Museum, 327–9 Queen’s College, 431 and libraries, 432, 434 Paisley Oakshaw Trinity Church, 165 palaces, 7, 70–1 Culross, 16, 17 Falkland, 312 Hamilton, 143, 154, 199, 209, 235, 295, 345, 414 Hampton Court, 70, 136, 221–2, 225, 354, 139 Kensington, 70, 221 Linlithgow, 312 Whitehall, 141 see also Blenheim Palace; Dalkeith Palace; Holyroodhouse; palazzi; Versailles

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634   Index

palazzi, 43, 45, 183, 206, 265, 432, 446, 449, 490 Barbaran da Porto, 45 Barberini, 193 Caprini, 43 Pignatelli , 206 Thiene, 432, 490 see also Venice Palladianism, 382–3, 414, 438 and Campbell, 170, 172, 173–4 and Dutch, 264 and Edward, 335, 336 and English, 410 and Fletcher, 260, 261, 264 and Glasgow, 409, 410 and plans, 336 and Smith, 94–5, 191, 192, 193, 199–200, 211–12, 410 see also Palladio, Andrea Palladio, Andrea, 172, 335, 382–3, 393, 401 Quattro Libri, 44, 173, 174, 385 Panmure, George Maule, 2nd Earl of, 91–2 Panmure, George Maule, 3rd Earl of, 127 Panmure, James Maule, 4th Earl of, 233, 249 Panmure, Lady Margaret Hamilton, Countess of, 233–4, 235–6, 238, 241–4, 246–52 Panmure House (Angus), 88–9, 90–1, 146, 235–7, 247–9, 250–1, 571n49, 236–7 and Edward, 235–6, 241 and garden and tree planting, 236, 247–8, 340 and gateway, 91, 123–4, 124 and ironwork, 123–4, 128, 127–8, 124 Paris, 337–40, 342, 604n10 and tenements, 455, 456, 457, 459, 461, 463–9, 472, 473, 480–2, 458, 460, 462, 470–1, 473 Paris (buildings) Abbaye of Saint-Germain-desPrés, 472, 474, 475 Hotel de Torcy, 342 Les Halles, 459, 461, 468–9 Louvre, 43, 45, 48, 81 Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, 468–9, 472–3 Rue Childebert, 472, 474–5

Rue de la Ferronnerie, 463, 469, 472, 470–1 Rue Tiquetonne, 457, 459, 459–62, 464–5 see also Versailles parks, 307, 376–7, 378, 587n19 Parliament, 5, 6, 20, 63–4, 69, 466, 478 and English, 25, 69 and post-1707, 27, 65, 182, 251, 379, 526–7 and Protectorate, 54 and Scottish, 69, 235, 387, 408, 26, 54, 159 parterres, 297, 299, 307, 308, 312 and Aberdour, 310–11, 311 and Adam, 349, 350, 360, 370, 374, 375, 401 and Arniston, 397, 399, 401, 400 and France, 338–9 340 and Mollet, 313 see also topiary Passe, Crispin de, 294 pastoralism, 19 Paterson, George, 437–8 Paton, David, 480 patriotism, 29, 33–4, 57–8, 63–4 patte d’oie see étoiles, rond-points, patte d’oie Patterson, George, 269, 279, 280 pavilions see garden buildings Pembroke, Anne Clifford, Countess of, 234 Pembroke, Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of, 384 Pencz, Georg, 294 Penicuik House (Midlothian), 100, 113–18, 257, 114–17 and Knight’s Law Tower, 116, 117–18, 116–17 Old Penicuik House (‘Newbiggin’), 113–14, 114 Perth Amboy (NJ), 20 Perth Mercat Cross, 103 Peterhead, 16 Picardy (Edinburgh), 7 Philip II of Spain, King, 44, 196 Phillips, Henrey, 229 physic gardens, 329, 331, 334, 498 piano nobile, 94, 434, 446, 452 Picts, 11, 77–8 picturesque, 76, 108, 347, 350, 375, 526

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Index   635

‘Pillars of Seth’, 46 Pinkie House (East Lothian), 141, 161, 162, 162 planetary deities, 294 planned villages, 34 Gardenstown, 35 Maryburgh, 358–60, 361, 359 plantations, 252, 294, 302–5, 359, 74, 350 and colonial, 16, 17 plasterers Albourn (younger), Thomas, 155 Grove, John, 149 Johnstoun, John, 145 Kinsman, Joseph, 141 Low, George, 155 Low, Thomas, 155 Nicoll, John, 144 Scott, John, 159–60, 169, 145 see also Albourn, Thomas; Baine, James; Clayton, Thomas; Dunsterfield, George; Enzer, Joseph; Houlbert, John; Lindores, William plasterwork, 8, 141–55, 166, 397, 553n2, 555n40 Abbey House, 153 Arniston, 397, 395–6 Balcaskie, 146, 149–50, 150 Castle Menzies, 146–7, 148, 556n40, 147 Dalry, 553n3, 142 French Ambassador’s House, 146, 147–8, 147 Harden House, 144–5, 146, 147, 148, 149 145 Holyroodhouse, 149, 150, 151, 152, 151, 152 House of the Binns, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 554n16, 143 Kinross House, 153, 154 Law’s Close, 146, 148, 148 Prestonfield House, 152–3, 153 Wemyss Castle, 143–4, 146, 148, 149, 150, 144 pleasance, 294 Pliny the Younger, 310, 381 plumbers Bland, John, 159 Craig, Robert, Jr, 424 Poitiers, Diane de, 234 policies, 293

politics, 4–7, 10–11, 56–7, 387–8, 520 and economy, 15, 25–7 and Fletcher, 253, 267 and women, 233–4, 246–7, 249–50 poll tax, 476, 478 Pollok House (Renfrewshire), 425 Pope, Alexander, 381–2 popes Alexander VI, 309, 310 Innocent VIII, 309–10 Pius II, 310 Port Glasgow (Lanarkshire), 20, 21 portego, 446, 449 Porteous Riot, 28, 28 portraits, 8, 67, 80, 144, 198, 220, 229, 384, 393, 425, 480, 507, frontispiece, 33, 66, 227, 231, 232 Pratt, Sir Roger, 195 Presbyterianism, 166, 524 Prestonfield House (Midlothian), 152–3, 153 Price, Francis The British Carpenter, 438 prisons, 67, 103, 407, 491, 520, 523, 529 privacy, 94, 449, 450, 453, 456, 467–8 Privy Council of Scotland, 6, 54, 56, 154, 461 proportions, 46, 91, 235, 294 and Adam, William, 484, 486, 490, 503 and Ancient Rome, 382 and Arniston, 393 and Clerk, 116 and Douglas, 273, 283, 287 and Edinburgh, 451 and Fletcher, 254, 255, 263 and gardens, 313, 594n56 and libraries, 440–1 and Paris, 456 and Smith, 201 Protectorate see Parliament Protestantism, 5, 21, 186 public buildings, 417–18, 483–513 Bridewell (Calton) Gaol (Edinburgh), 520, 523, 529 Dean orphanage (Edinburgh), 500 Edinburgh Charity Work-house, 499, 509–11, 510

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636   Index

public buildings (cont.) Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, 34, 417, 501, 503–9, 513, 505–6 George Watson’s Hospital (Edinburgh), 417, 500–3, 502 Hammermen’s Hall (Edinburgh), 138 Merchant House (Glasgow), 407–8, 417 Orphan Hospital (Edinburgh), 496–500, 498, 500 Parliament Hall (Edinburgh), 159, 169, 477–8, 26, 52, 159 Robert Gordon’s Hospital (Aberdeen), 484–8, 492, 513, 489 Surgeons’ Hospital (Edinburgh), 511–13, 512 Town Hospital (Glasgow), 417–18, 418 Trades Hall (Glasgow), 165, 168, 165 Trinity Hospital (Edinburgh), 496 see also churches, libraries; tolbooths and town houses Queensberry and Dover, Duke of, 8, 127 Quellin, Arnold, 8 Raith House (Fife), 132, 410, 135 Ramsay, Allan, 425, 34 Reformation, 101, 105, 111, 121; see also Counter-Reformation Reid, John The Scots Gard’ner, 9, 293, 294–7, 316–17, 319, 296 Reid, Robert, 51, 71, 437, 439, 430 rent, 468 Restoration see Charles II, King reused buildings, 208–9, 211 Revolution (1688), 5, 53, 78, 379, 387, 457 Ripon Minster (Yorkshire), 354 Risings see Jacobites River Clyde, 407, 417 Roberts, Thomas, 216–17 Robertson, Thomas, 477, 479 Robertson, William, 10, 529 Robinson, Benjamin, 218, 220, 221, 225 Roman camps, 353, 359, 361, 386, 401, 588n35

Roman Empire, 98–9, 100, 101–2, 334, 381–4 and Adam, William, 353, 359, 361, 386 and Adam, Robert, 525–6 and Arniston, 393, 398 and inspiration, 379–83, 389, 404 and insula (apartment block), 455–6, 603n4 Rome, 98, 111, 191–3, 200, 204, 207–8, 211–12 and Adam, Robert, 518, 522, 526 Rome (buildings) Arch of Titus, 48 Barberini Palace, 193 Chapel of Reginald Pole, 205, 209 Collegio Romano, 192, 193, 195, 212 Farnese Gardens, 207, 211 The Forum, 207 Il Gesú, 204, 207 Oratory of St Philip Neri, 204, 207 S. Ivo alla Sapienza, 43 St John Lateran, 45 St Peter’s Basilica, 8, 43, 201, 525, 526 Scots College, 191–3 Temple of Peace, 45 rond-points see étoiles roof construction, 90–1, 156–69, 262–3, 288–9, 161–2, 164, 263 and gabled, 466, 467 and ogee, 207–8 George Heriot’s Hospital Chapel, 156–169, 157–8, 166–7 Parliament Hall, 159, 159 Pinkie House, 161–2, 162 Trades Hall, 165–6, 169, 165 Tron Church, 159–60, 169, 160 Yester House, 164, 169, 164 Ross, Charles A Map of the Shire of Lanark, 411 Ross, Thomas, 121 Rosslyn Chapel and Castle (Midlothian), 108–10, 109, 110 Rothes, John Leslie, 7th Earl of, 83, 143 Roy, General William Military Survey of Scotland, 305, 307, 388, 305 royal architects, 6–7, 13, 51–2, 62, 70–1, 93, 342; see also Bruce, Sir William

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Index   637

Royal Bank of Scotland, 29 royal court, 5, 7, 461, 518 Royal Society, 323, 329, 330, 333, 334 royal works, 7–8, 59–60, 64, 83, 92, 122–3, 341; see also palaces Royston see Caroline Park Rozencrantz, Erik, 8 ruins, 113–15, 207 rum, 408 Runciman, James, 509 Russell, Jack, 418 Sadeler, Jan, 294 St Andrews, 19, 101, 105, 287–8 Holy Trinity Church, 8 King James Library, 429, 431, 436–41, 430, 438–40 Parliament Hall, 439 St Salvator’s (United) College, 271, 287–8, 289, 288 St Andrew’s Chapel (Holyroodhouse), 52 St Clair, Col James, 108–9 Salisbury Cathedral, 107, 107 salt, 16 Saltcoats, Sir Patrick Murray of, 54, 56 Saltoun Hall (East Lothian), 253–8, 414, 256–61 Sandby, Paul, 507 Sandby, Thomas, 300 Sanfelice, Ferdinando, 206–7 sanitation, 463 Sanquhar Tolbooth (Dumfriesshire), 276, 419, 484, 491–3, 492 sash windows, 8, 65, 215, 220 Schaw, William, 4–5, 46, 55, 47 schools see public buildings Scotch Baronial, 10, 13 Scotichronicon, 10 Scots pine, 159, 297 Scott, Sir Francis, 56 Scott, Lord Henry, 231 Scott, Sir Walter, 321, 386 Scottish Historical Landscape, 77, 346, 347, 398 Scottish rafter foot, 162, 163 scrolls, 132–4 sculpture see statuary Seafield, Sir James Ogilvy, Earl of, 63

Seaton Delaval (Northumberland), 306, 349, 594n56 Second Castle Age, 10, 12 Secretary of State, 6, 53, 388, 419, 480 sedan chairs, 508 serfdom, 17–18 Serlio, Sebastiano, 43, 93, 96, 385, 490, 507, 97 servants, 198, 219, 236, 247, 410, 412, 427 and communal living, 449, 451, 495 and hospitals, 508 Sharp, Archbishop, 8 Shawfield Riot, 27–8, 586n17 Sherard, Dr William, 329 Sheriffmuir, battle of, 69, 247 Sibbald, Sir Robert, 323, 327, 329, 330, 334 shipping, 16, 24, 30 shops, 419, 446, 451, 456, 457, 459 and Edinburgh, 475, 478, 480 and Paris, 468, 472, 473 Shrewsbury, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of (‘Bess of Hardwick’), 234 silver, 17, 24 Simpson, William, 412, 414 Skene, James, 30 skewputts, 9, 89 slate see building materials slavery, 11, 29, 31, 408 Slezer, Jan, 8, 11, 92–4 Theatrum Scotiae, 81, 171, 206, 317 and Brechin Castle, 238 and Dunkeld, 81, 81 and Hatton, 318–19 and Thirlestane, 92–4, 92–3, 320 Sloane, Sir Hans, 323, 329, 330 Smetius, Johannes Smetij Antiquitates Neomagenses, 334 Smith, James (younger), 127–8 Smith, John, 488, 487 Smith of Whitehill, Mr James, 4, 7, 13, 52–3, 55–6, 121, 129, 132, 154, 191–212, 410, 490, 479–80 and Blackbarony, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 62 and Caramuel, 191, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204

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638   Index

Smith of Whitehill, Mr James (cont.) and garden pavilions, 206–8 and ironwork, 121, 127–8, 129, 132, 130 and Master of Works, 52–3, 55–6, 58, 59, 60–1 and Mylne, 199, 479 and Palladianism, 94, 191, 192, 193, 199–200, 211–12, 410 and reused buildings, 208–9, 211 and Rome, 191–5, 196, 200, 204, 206, 208, 211–12 and Vignola, 201–2, 207, 204–5, 211 Canongate Kirk, 52, 129–30, 202–3, 204, 522, 206 Dalkeith Palace, 209–11, 214–15, 213, 223, 229–30 Drumlanrig, 127, 191, 200–2, 201–2 Durisdeer Church, 202 Hamilton Palace, 154, 199, 209, 235, 414 Hatton House, 206–7, 210 Holyroodhouse, 198–9, 202, 564n51, 197 MacKenzie Mausoleum, 204, 208, 208, 510 Melville House, 62, 94–5, 154, 208, 410 62 Methven Castle, 87–8, 91, 88 Montrose Lodging (Glasgow), 412 Newhailes House, 201, 410, 204 Queensberry House, 191, 193, 202 Traquair, 129, 211, 130 smiths Baine, William, 127 Blair, Alex, 325 Corbett, Walter, 127 Gairdner, William, 127 Hadden, Thomas, 122 Sinclair, James, 123, 127 see also Aitken, William; Callander, John; Gairdner, Alexander; Horn, James; Tijou, Jean smithwork see ironwork smuggling, 28 Smyth, Patrick, 87 Society for Improving Arts and Sciences, 34 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 496

Society of Antiquaries, 102–3, 384 Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland, 251, 301–2, 305 Society of Roman Knights (‘Equites Romani’), 384, 591n12 Solomonic associations, 39, 43, 45–6, 47–9 Somerville, Ann Bayntun Rold, Lady, 385 Somerville House see Drum, The Soufflot, Jacques-Germain, 513 Southesk, James Carnegie, 5th Earl of, 247, 249, 331, 339, 571n47, 581n2, 584n40 South Sea Bubble, 29 Spain, 16, 31 Alhambra, 48 El Escorial monastery, 196 Spence, Captain, 218, 219, 331, 584n40 Spencer, Herbert, 519 sphinxes, 410–11 spices, 215, 251, 408 spruce, 159, 304 stables and coach houses, 355, 356, 367, 393, 412, 459 Stair, John Dalrymple, 1st Earl of, 54 Stair, John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of, 305–6, 347–9, 352–3, 374 staircases, 83, 94, 111–2, 118, 123, 139–40, 142–3, 153, 221, 273, 275, 278, 280, 288, 311, 316–7, 337, 339, 367, 372, 398, 419–20, 427, 434, 445–8, 449–50, 452–5, 457, 468, 469, 475, 477, 478, 484, 487, 491, 495, 499, 503, 508, 541, 154, 317, 337 and Caroline Park, 121, 123, 132–4, 138, 136 and Craigiehall, 132, 133–5, 138 and Dalkeith, 220, 225–9, 229, 230 and Drumlanrig, 127, 134, 201, 137 and Holyroodhouse, 124, 126 and Hopetoun, 132, 133 and ironwork, 121, 124, 126, 131–5, 139, 136–8 and Newhailes, 132, 134 Staneyhill Tower (West Lothian), 131, 353

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Index   639

state terrorism, 57 statuary, 8, 266–7, 395, 413 Steill, Patrick, 479–80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 478 Stewart see Stuart, House of Stewart, Walter, 312 Stirling, 19, 463 Argyll’s Lodging, 41, 83–4, 93, 463, 68, 84, 86 see also Stirling Castle Stirling Castle, 7, 43, 46, 48, 51, 58, 60, 67, 111, 241 Chapel Royal, 4–5, 43–9, 558n27, 558n43, 44 and ironwork, 122, 122 and plasterwork, 153 Stirlings of Keir, 33 stone see building materials stonecarvers Boyse, Peter Paul, 8 Cation, David, 419, 423, 425 Lawson, Gavin, 423 Van Nerven, Cornelius, 8 store system, 29, 31 Stornoway, 16 Stourhead House (Wiltshire), 262 Stowe (Oxfordshire), 306, 349, 369, 373, 527, 587n19 Strathmore, Charles Lyon, 6th Earl of, 302 Strathmore, Patrick Lyon, 1st Earl of, 73, 75–8, 88, 299 Strathmore, Patrick Lyon, 3rd Earl of, 21, 319 Book of Record, 76, 299 Stuart, House of, 5, 6, 48, 78, 80 Stuart, James ‘Athenian’, 9–10 Stuart, James Francis Edward (‘Old Pretender’), 233, 325, 336 Stuart’s Town (S. Carolina), 20 Studley Royal (Yorkshire), 306, 354, 369, 376 Stukeley, William, 101, 103, 384, 591n12, 104 sugar, 20, 31, 408 summer houses see garden buildings Summerson, Sir John, 13, 176–7, 191 surveying, 294, 350, 355 Surveyor of the King’s Works, 50, 90, 198 Sutherland, James, 329, 334 Sweden, 17, 25, 122

Switzer, Stephen, 349, 356, 377, 385–6, 393 Blenheim Palace, 306, 349 Ichnographia Rustica: or the Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation, 306, 356, 377, 385, 387, 401 Introduction to the General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks, 385 Tait, Alan, 346, 347, 377 Talman, William, 184, 262, 263 Tarbat, Sir George MacKenzie, Lord, 8, 55, 62 Tarbat Parish Church (Easter Ross), 200 taxation, 19, 27, 389, 410, 604n11 Taymouth Castle (Perthshire), 302, 347, 586n5 temples see garden buildings tenants, 19, 22, 23, 247, 294, 456 and Adam, 359 and Edinburgh, 475 and Venice, 446, 449, 451 tenements, 19, 455–82, 603n4, 603n8 Gladstone’s Land, 446, 456, 475–7, 447, 476 James’s Court, 478 John Knox’s House, 447, 473–5 Leith, 480 Milne’s Court, 452, 478, 481, 452 Writers’ Court, 479, 480 terraced gardens, 308–12, 313–21 Aberdour, 310–11, 311 Airth, 367, 368 Balcaskie, 314, 315 Barncluith, 314, 375 Castle Campbell, 311 Chatelherault, 374, 375 Clunie Castle, 308–9, 309 Coltness House, 312 Drummond Castle, 317, 321, 317 Hatton House, 207–7, 317–18, 210, 318–19 House of Nairne, 240, 245, 245 Leslie House, 314–16, 316 Moray House, 312, 312 Thirlestane, 319, 320 Test Act (1681), 21

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640   Index

Thirlestane, Sir Francis Scott of, 63–4 Thirlestane Castle (Berwickshire), 8, 92–4, 112, 92–3 and gardens, 93–4, 319, 93, 320 and plasterwork, 8, 151 Thirty Years War, 17 Thistle, Order of the Knights of the, 52 thistles, 39, 124, 127 Thomson, James, 491 Thomson, James (poet), 381 Thorpe Hall (Cambridgeshire), 123 Tickencote Church (Rutland), 107–8 Tijou, Jean, 139 A New Book of Drawings, 136 timber see building materials tobacco, 19, 20, 29–31, 34, 408, 412, 421, 427 Tod, Thomas, 499–500, 500 tolbooths, town houses and town halls, 271, 276–7, 286–7, 417, 483–4, 488, 491–3 Aberdeen, 419, 483–4, 483 Campbeltown, 269, 271, 272, 286–7, 287 Dundee, 419, 488–91, 513, 489 Edinburgh, 444–5 Glasgow, 407, 418, 419–21, 422–3, 424, 425, 420, 422 Haddington, 493 Lochmaben, 269, 271, 276, 286, 287, 275 Sanquhar, 276, 419, 484, 491–3, 492 Tollin, Léonard, 468 Tonson, Jacob, 175 Tontine heads, 420–1 topiary, 342–4, 413, 342–4 Torcy, Colbert de, 325, 330, 341, 342 Tories, 182, 186 tower houses, 12, 21, 87, 90, 91, 206, 211, 524, 61 Arniston, 379, 387, 393, 396, 398 Balcaskie, 314 Clunie Castle, 308–9, 309 Methven, 87–8, 91, 88 town halls and public town houses see tolbooths, town houses and town halls town houses (domestic), 19, 425–7, 463, 426

Argyll’s Lodging (Stirling), 41, 83–4, 93, 463, 68, 84, 86 Cockenzie, 161–2, 162 and Edinburgh, 447–8, 450, 451, 452–3 French Ambassador’s House (Linlithgow), 146, 147–8, 147 Hotel de Torcy (Paris), 342 John Knox’s (Edinburgh), 447, 473–5 Lord Provost Murdoch (Glasgow), 426 Montrose Lodging (Glasgow), 412–17, 413–6 Moray House (Edinburgh), 312 Provost Skene’s House (Aberdeen), 166, 166 Queensberry (Edinburgh), 191, 193, 202, 211 Rochester House (London), 327 Shawfield (Glasgow), 408–12, 409, 411 and Venice, 445–7, 448–9, 450–3 see also hôtels particuliers; tenements town planning, 417–19, 425–8 trade, 16, 17–20, 24–5, 63, 64, 70, 407, 420–1, 453 tramp-trading, 16, 20, 33 Traquair, 4th Earl of, 129, 211 Traquair House (Peeblesshire), 129, 211, 271, 130 Treaty of Union (1707), 6, 9, 10, 11, 24–7 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 31 trees, 294, 302–5, 330–1, 359, 363–4 and topiary, 342–4, 413, 342–4 trellis, 370 triumphal arches, 115, 122, 206, 372, 397, 529, 395 trussed roofs, 164–7 Tweeddale, John Hay, Earl of, 54–5, 56, 57, 62, 302 Tyninghame (East Lothian), 252, 302–5 and Binning Wood, 252, 304–5, 305 uccelliere (aviaries), 207–8, 211 Ulster, 17

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Index   641

Union of 1707 see Treaty of Union Union of the Crowns (1603), 5, 11, 16, 19 United Kingdom, 25–7 university libraries see libraries urbanisation, 17, 18, 19; see also tenements urbanism, 520, 525 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713), 31 Van Campen, Jacob, 43 Van Nost, Jan, 8 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 10, 182, 377, 393 Castle Howard, 171, 177, 178, 401–2, 180–1 Eastbury, 354 Exact Description of the Palace of Blenheim, 171, 174–9, 186–7 Grimsthrope, 349 Seaton Delaval, 306, 349, 594n56 Vanbrugh Castle (Greenwich), 103 and Vitruvius Britannicus, 177–82, 186–7, 180, 186 see also Blenheim Palace Varro Res Rusticae, 381 vaults, 91, 108, 161, 163, 202, 243 and Adam, William, 491, 493, 508 and Arniston, 397 and Douglas, 288 and Fletcher, 254, 256, 265 and libraries, 433 and McGill, 415 Veitch of Dawyck, John, 64–5 Venice, 442–54, 443, 445 Arsenale, 444 Ca’ da Mosto, 446–7 Ca’ Farsetti, 446–7 Ca’ Loredan, 446–7, 448 casa-fondaco (Venetian merchant house), 445–6 Civic Granaries, 444 Jewish Ghetto, 447, 450 Palazzo Dolfin, 449 S. Zaccaria, 43 Terreni Nuovi, 451–2 Versailles (France), 70, 81, 224, 226, 306 and Edward, 339, 340, 342 and Fletcher, 260, 265 and gardens, 308, 313, 321, 343–4 Vertue, George, 103, 104

Vetusta Monumenta, 103, 104 Vignola, G. B., 201–2, 440, 211 The Regular Architect, 207–8, 205 Villalpando, J. B. In Ezechielem explanationes, 45, 48 Vingboons, Philips, 264, 265 Virgil, 379, 381, 384 Vitruvius Britannicus, 11–12, 170–4, 176–82 185–7, 262, 382, 385, 386, 414, 434, 438, 490, 512, 513, 172, 180 Buckingham House, 225–6, 228 Castle Howard, 177, 180 Drumlanrig, 191 Shawfield, 409–10, 409 Somerset House, 419, 420, 490, 421 Wanstead House, 178, 180 and Vanbrugh, 177–82, 186–7, 180, 186 see also Campbell, Colen Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus De Architectura, 113, 382, 431 Vitruvius Scoticus (Adam), 12, 374, 386, 484, 486, 490, 493, 496, 512, 513, 592n25 and Arniston, 391–2, 398, 399, 394, 397 and Dalkeith House, 223 and Dundee Town House, 488, 490, 489 and garden buildings, 374 and George Watson’s Hospital (Edinburgh), 502, 502 and Holyroodhouse, 52 and Leslie House, 82 and Old College Library (Glasgow) 496, 436, 497 and Orphan Hospital (Edinburgh), 498, 498 and Panmure House, 236–7 and Robert Gordon’s College (Aberdeen), 485 and Royal Infirmary (Edinburgh), 505, 507, 513, 505 wage labour, 19 Wallace, William, 191 walled gardens, 370, 402, 403–4, 589n57, 371, 400 Walpole, Horace, 527 Walpole, Sir Robert, 31, 379, 388

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642   Index

Waltham Cross (Hertfordshire), 103, 104 Wanstead House (Essex), 170, 178, 180–1 War of the Spanish Succession, 24–5, 27, 31 War of the Three Kingdoms and the Commonwealth, 73–4 Wardhouse of Insch (Aberdeenshire), 269, 273, 278, 283–6, 285–6 Ware, Isaac Complete Body of Architecture, 438 Watson, Alexander, 488 Watson, George, 500 Watt, John, 355, 355 Wemyss Castle (Fife), 143–4, 146, 148, 149, 150, 144 West Green (Culross), 146 West Indies, 24 Whigs, 387, 388, 524 White, James, 218 Whitfield, George, 499 Wilbraham, Lady Elizabeth, 234 wildernesses, 304, 349, 350, 360–3, 365–6, 368, 370, 373, 375, 377, 385, 390, 399; see also plantations William II and III, King (William of Orange), 5, 6, 23–4, 51, 52–3, 202, 221 and allies, 334–5 and death, 325 and Fletcher, 264 windows, 65, 484 and sash, 8, 65, 215, 220 Winter, Thomas, 302, 74 Winton House (East Lothian), 141 Wodrow, Robert, 324–5, 328, 334 women, 22–3, 234–5, 252, 308, 374; see also Buccleuch, Ann Scott, Duchess of; Nairne, Margaret Murray, Lady; Panmure, Lady Margaret Hamilton, Countess of woodcarvers Boyse, Peter Paul, 8

Gibbons, Grinling, 220, 223–4, 225, 224, 226 Manners, Henry, 8 Van Nerven, Cornelius, 8 Van Santvoort, Jan, 8 Woodhall House (Lanarkshire), 349, 408 workhouses, 34, 509–11, 510 Wotton, Sir Henry, 199 Wren, Sir Christopher, 70, 171, 176, 182, 185, 195, 199, 262–3, 499, 263 and St Paul’s Cathedral, 48 and Trinity College Library, 431, 432 Wright, John Michael, ii wrights, 576n33 Chrystall, William, 487 Cleghorn, Alexander, 553n8 Cleugh, John, 480 Douglas, William, 289–90 Finlay, Andrew, 288 Fleming, William, 424 Heriot, James, 509 Hogg, Alexander, 279 Johnston, Alexander, 279 McVey, William, 509 Paterson, Andrew, 65 Porteous, James, 198 Robertson, John, 424 Sandilands, Thomas, 165–6 Wilson, John, 423, 424 see also Bain, James; Craig, John; Dreghorn, Allan; Dreghorn, Robert; Gardner, John; Scott, John wrought-ironwork see ironwork Wyck, Jan, 320 yeomen, 19, 22 Yester House (East Lothian), 13, 164, 164 York, Duke of see James VII and II, King York Buildings Company, 247, 249, 571n49 York Minster, 106

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