Jacobean Taste

Enter Hatfield and all the ingredients of Jacobean court mentality hit you like a wave. First, there is a certain anti-quarianism. Although the house is planned in a new way — no courtyards, a clustering of rooms into large and massy blocks, an open Italian loggia on the ground floor over which the Long Gallery runs — there is a recognisable medieval pattern in one's arrival into a screens passage, with the great hall on one side and the kitchens on the other. The great Marble Hall itself reproduces the heart of a medieval house, and the staircase beyond it leads to the richer and more private rooms of the Cecils themselves. This is a deeply traditional arrangement of a great man's house; no break here with the antiquity of England. But the place is dripping in Jacobean style, governed above all by the sheer love of stuff, the early modern lust for substance. Every element of the Marble Hall, with its screen at each end and its original tables and benches still in situ, is carved and enriched as no later taste would have contemplated. Bushy-bearded and vast-breasted hermaphrodites stare out from the hugely enriched screens. On the great staircase beyond it, every post is carved with intricate decoration, every pillar surmounted by a figure, heraldic lion or almost-classical, slightly disproportionate boy, playing the bagpipes or holding aloft not quite spherical spheres. In the seventeenth century both boys and lions were gilded, as was the huge carved pendant which hangs from the ceiling above them. Even the gates at the foot of the staircase, put there to prevent dogs from going upstairs, are pimpled and bobbled, no line left uncurled, no surface plain. In the long gallery on the floor above, to which the staircase gave access, yard after yard of decorated joinery extends in a long disappearing perspective in front of you, the ceiling patterned in interlocking arabesques, the painted fireplaces a display of the classical orders, many of the gilt and jewelled, rock crystal and pearl treasures on show collected by the Jacobean Cecils to decorate this place: it is the most beautiful surviving room of Jacobean England. Enrichment was all and that is one of the keys to Jacobean England: love of decorated stuff. In 1609 Cecil would set up England's first shopping mall on the Strand, called Britain's Burse, in tribute to his sovereign's dream of unification. The world of Britain's Burse was the world 'Cecil-Hatfield' (as its creator wanted it called) was intended to crown and was also the milieu from which the King James Bible would emerge. The country and the world were growing and bursting at the seams. The explorers of the previous century had 'so muche enlarged the boundes of the Worlde, that now we have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination'. The globe had suddenly become elastic and from all the new corners came the delicious luxuries. Things had never been so rich. Goods were pouring into England: silks, lace, Venetian glass, tin-glazed cer-amics, fine thick Italian paper, German swords and armour, Turkish carpets and Venetian instruments, metal-threaded tex-tiles like the wonderful Italian silk worn by James's Queen Anne, in which the peacock eyes sparkle across its glimmered surface. They came from the other end of the earth. 'What doe you lacke?' one of Ben Jonson's sales boys asked, 'What is't you buy? Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes? China
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We have twice and thrice so much scope for oure earthlie peregrination... chaynes, China braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China cabinetts.' At the grand opening of the Burse — with celebratory text by Ben Jonson — Cecil provided a special shop for the king and his wife and children over whose door was written: 'All other places give for money, here all is given for love.' Delicious and perfect presents were provided for the king and queen and princes. Throughout the little stalls of the Burse (no hammering of metals and no sale of vegetables, no dogs, no fighting and no whores allowed) all the most modern and glamorous objects of the mer-cantile world were on sale: eastern satins, golden bracelets, fans, umbrellas, sundials, silk-flowers, perspectives (precursors of the telescope), musical instruments, toy automata and singing birds were all on sale. Everything seemed to be from China or Virginia. For the true elite, England in the first decade of the seventeenth century was life on satin pillows. It was a culture of repetition, of piling richness on richness, in love with the exotic and with the exotic enriched. It wasn't enough to have a china bowl; it should be set in a gilded mount. It wasn't enough to have a wonderful dress; it should be slashed to show the more wonderful material beneath. Every surface was to be alive with decoration and illustration. Embroidery was to overlace richness. Plainness was poverty and unless courtiers looked glorious, they, or what they were seeking, could scarcely be considered. The Earl of Suffolk wrote to Sir John Harington with sage advice on coming to court: I would wish you to bee well trimmed; get a new jerkin well bordered, and not too short; the king saith, he liketh a flowing garment; be sure it not be all of one sort, but diversely coloured, the collar falling somewhat down, and your ruff well stiffened and brisky. We have lately had many gallants who failed in their suits for want of due observance of these matters. The King is nicely heedfull of such points, and dwelleth on good looks and handsome accoutrements.
This love of variegation, of the multiplicity of things, overlay something else: an appetite for the undeniably solid. The hunger for substance was Victorian in its intensity. There is no Augustan or eighteenth-century conception of fineness or slenderness. Chippendale would not have thrived in Jacobean England. What was valuable to a Jacobean was robust and huge. Tables and sideboards sprouted fat melons clamped to their legs. From the high, plain and virginal concealment of Elizabethan taste, women's necklines plunged through the first decade of the cen-tury to a deep, bosom-revealing immodesty. At court masques, the queen and her attendant ladies would appear dressed in noth-ing but the finest silk gauze. The two tastes lay within each other: a love of stuff, of the material thing, was wrapped in a baroque entrancement with the flickering, the dramatic, the elaborated and the enriched. The interplay of these two aesthetic principles, of show and, in Hamlet's famous phrase to his mother, of 'that within which passeth show', is one of the governing tensions of the great Jacobean translation of the Bible. Beauty was about firmness but it was also about brilliance; clarity vied with glitter; candour with bitter irony; simplicity with complexity; a vision of the pure with a relishing of the lush. In public the grandees who would have filled the rooms of Hatfield wore the strict and dignified blacks of the statesman (it was said to be a Spanish habit, a sober, imperial style). In private, all controls were off. The Earl of Northampton, the Henry Howard who had been Cecil's go-between with James before the accession, a complex, political self-promoter, retired from a day dressed in nothing but black to sleep in a bed of Chinese lacquer, overdecorated with silver branches and his own coat of arms on the headpiece, with 'the toppe and valance of purple velvett striped downe with silver laces and knottes of silver, the frindge blewe silke and silver with 8 cuppes and plumes spangled suteable, the 5 curtanes of purple taffeta with buttones and lace . . . of silver, the counterpoint of purple damaske suteable laced.' To wash, at night and in the morning, he had a generous silver basin, in the form of a shell, and a ewer in the shape of a mermaid. The rosewater sprang out into the bowl through the mermaid's large and protuberant nipples. At Hatfield, Cecil also had a sumptuous bed, with its tester, valance and headpiece of crimson velvet, embroidered with his arms. But that lushness and fullness of Jacobean decor, of the Jacobean sense of the beautiful, required one further element: illumination. No buildings in English history until the twentieth century had such enormous light-admitting windows as these great private prodigy houses. The rooms encrusted with the beloved substantiality were also flooded with the all-revealing light. 'Light', Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote, was `God's eldest daughter [and] a principal' beauty in a building'. All rooms were arranged with a thought to how the light from the windows would fall into them at different times of the day. Modern conservators, struggling to preserve the gorgeousness of fabrics in vastly overlit rooms, are grappling with precisely the combi-nation of qualities Jacobean taste required. Outside the walls of London, north of the Tower, enormous factories were set up to satisfy the demand for glass. Experts in glass were brought in from the Netherlands. And the grandees who commissioned the glass palaces had their portraits painted in the total, flattening light those windows provided. That depthlessness of Jacobean portraiture, in which there is no chiaroscuro, no moulding shadow, is often seen as a simple technical failure, the chasm between Holbein and Van Dyck. Cecil, like James, hated being painted, which is why nearly all images of him repeat the same, copied pose, in which his flat white face seems to lack definition, or even a third dimension. In portrait after portrait at Hatfield, as elsewhere, his face, with its unresponsive eyes, looks like an oval cut out of paper. But perhaps this two-dimensionality is a symptom of something else: the clarity of a pure unshadowed Protestant light.

from: God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson