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THE MAKING of THE English Gardener

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

During the summer months, to escape the heat and unhealthy conditions of London, it was the custom of Queen Elizabeth I to go on progress around her realm. Thus in late May 1583, she paid one of her many visits to Theobalds, the great house built near St Albans in Hertfordshire by William Cecil, Lord Burghley. One of those present noted: 'She was never in any place better pleased, and sure the house, garden and walks may compare with any delicate place in Italy.'

This was a great compliment, for although Elizabeth Tudor never visited Italy – indeed, never left England – she appreciated that the most fashionable ideas in design were being brought back and applied to architecture and to the layout of gardens. She loved flowers, as can be seen in the iconography that was adopted in her portraits, where the Queen is often depicted with her favourites, such as the eglantine rose and the heartsease or pansy. And of course the Tudor rose, the heraldic hybrid, is never far away. Elizabeth also recognised how the symbolism of gardens could be used in the cult of Gloriana that she so carefully nurtured.

However, unlike her father, Elizabeth was neither a great builder nor a creator of gardens. At his death in 1547, it is estimated that Henry VIII owned nearly sixty houses of varying sizes, all with accompanying gardens. Some were sold or given away in the following decades, but Elizabeth was responsible for the upkeep of several elaborate examples, such as those at Hampton Court, Richmond and Greenwich, with finances that were always perilous. Instead she left her courtiers to create the exciting new gardens of the late sixteenth century, bestowing upon them her patronage and favour. These courtiers responded by developing and elaborating upon the style of gardens that had been introduced by the Queen's grandfather, Henry VII, and by her father, Henry VIII.

In the 1560s there developed an inner circle of courtiers who were creating fine gardens around their 'prodigy' houses: William Cecil, Robert Dudley, Christopher Hatton and Bess of Hardwick. The early Elizabethan court might be divided into three groups. 'The old guard' of great families of the Middle Ages had had their wings severely clipped by the internecine conflicts of the Wars of the Roses, and by Henry VIII's pathological suspicion of overweening subjects. As a result, the Percies, the Nevilles, the Cliffords and above all the Howards were still recovering financially from these perilous years, and were not in the costly business of building great new houses or creating magnificent gardens. This handed opportunity to the 'new men', like William Cecil, from relatively modest backgrounds but benefiting from a humanist education, who built their careers on service to the Crown. Lastly came the dashing courtiers who contributed to the heady and complex mythology of the Virgin Queen, such as Robert Dudley and Christopher Hatton. As a woman, Bess of Hardwick does not fit into this rough and ready categorisation, but her way of overcoming her modest background was to acquire four husbands, three of whom do represent the different groups: William Cavendish was a 'new man', William St Loe was a dashing courtier, and her last husband, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, came from one of the oldest noble families.

The chronicler William Harrison had some interesting observations to make about the development of gardens in England. In his Description of England dating from 1577, he argued that gardening flourished during the late thirteenth century, but with the civil wars that broke out in the fifteenth century, the cultivation of vegetables, herbs and flowers was neglected, and only late in the reign of Henry VII was gardening able to flourish again. Comparing old gardens to dunghills, Harrison noted with fervent pride how the introduction of flowers, 'medicinable herbs' and 'new seeds out of strange countries' had increased in the last forty years. Harrison was probably the son of a London merchant adventurer, and therefore had a particular message, emphasising the pride of the nation, and its trading links with the rest of the world. Yet the uneasy times imposed by the Wars of the Roses certainly diverted the Crown and the leading noblemen of England from keeping pace with the latest European developments in the design of gardens and in the range of plants to be cultivated. Moreover, Harrison was speaking from practical experience, for he had his own garden, more than 300 feet in length, where he cultivated over 300 different plants, 'no one of them being common or usually to be had'.

Our knowledge of the early Tudor grand gardens is very patchy, reliant on occasional contemporary descriptions, and on portraits where a garden might be glimpsed in the distance. Despite his notoriety as a skinflint, Henry VII had a fine garden laid out at his palace of Richmond. He had spent many years of exile in Brittany, and latterly in France, but it was the lavish style of the Burgundian court that most influenced him. When his elder son Arthur, Prince of Wales, married Catherine of Aragon in 1501, it was recorded that under the windows of the royal apartments were 'most fair and pleasant gardens, with royal knots alleyed and herbed; many marvellous beasts, as lions, dragons and such other of divers kind, properly fashioned and carved in the ground ... with many vines, seeds and strange fruit, right goodly beset, kept and nourished with much labour and diligence'.

The knots 'alleyed and herbed' are probably the compartments that were shown in a sketch of Richmond Palace by the Flemish artist Anthony van Wyngaerde, made in the 1550s. In the late fifteenth century grand gardens in Europe began to be organised into compartments containing beds for plants. These beds were usually about two metres in width, allowing gardeners ease of access from the surrounding paths, and the number of compartments and their shape varied according to the space available. Intricate patterns, or knots, could be planted using herbs such as rosemary, hyssop or thyme, and Wyngaerde's drawing suggests that one of the compartments at Richmond was laid out in the form of a labyrinth or maze. The taste for carved beasts was a mediaeval one, but the Tudors particularly harnessed them as part of their iconography, as can be seen in Cambridge, on the gatehouse of St John's College, which displays the badges of Lady Margaret Beaufort and of her son Henry VII.

The chronicler of the marriage of Arthur and Catherine goes on to record 'pleasant galleries' in the lower part of the garden at Richmond. These galleries can also be seen in Wyngaerde's sketch – open below, and with large bay windows above, very much a feature of Burgundian garden palaces. Richmond Palace has long gone, but at Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire, the canted galleries that would have looked down upon the garden have survived. Thornbury was built by Edward Stafford, third Duke of Buckingham, and remained unfinished when he was executed for treason by Henry VIII in 1521.

After Buckingham's fall, Thornbury was seized by the Crown, but left as a ruin – perhaps a reminder of the fate of over-ambitious nobles. But Henry VIII behaved quite differently with his other great acquisition, the palace and gardens at Hampton Court, ceded to him in 1528 by the very man who had engineered Buckingham's fall, Cardinal Wolsey. Over the next decade Henry ordered a major recreation of the gardens on the site between the palace and the river. A series of irregular walled compartments was developed, reminiscent of enclosed gardens within mediaeval castles, but with windows inserted in some of the walls to provide visual links. Beyond the privy garden was a triangular mount garden, a bowling alley and yet more compartments running down to the gate on the Thames. A veritable flurry of garden buildings was erected, some as viewing platforms, others as banqueting houses, the grandest of which was the 'Great Round Arbour'. Set on top of a mount that had been planted with thousands of trained shrubs, this remarkable building consisted of storeys of glittering glass, crowned by a bulbous dome according to another sketch made by Wyngaerde. Also scattered throughout the gardens were heraldic beasts, nearly one hundred in all, echoing those that rose above the roofs of the palace itself. The whole effect must have been highly theatrical, while there was no doubt that the leading actor was the King himself, a Renaissance prince in all his power and glory.

A detailed glimpse of the effect achieved at Hampton Court can be seen in the background of a painting of the family of Henry VIII, painted by an unknown artist towards the end of his reign, and now in the Royal Collection. In the outermost sections of the picture are two archways, with household servants peeping through. Behind them are rectangular beds of flowers surrounded by rails painted in the Tudor colours of green and white. Sitting atop decorated pillars are heraldic beasts holding banners. These details are thought to be from the privy gardens of the palace of Whitehall, another property seized from Cardinal Wolsey by the King. In the left-hand section the lodgings of Princess Mary are shown, painted externally with grotesques, giving an overall effect of an enormous amount of detailed decoration and colour.

Detail in the back of another painting provides another clue in this very patchy mosaic, and one to the style of more modest gardens. A miniature of the family of Sir Thomas More, painted in the late sixteenth century by Rowland Lockey as a copy of a lost painting by Holbein, shows in the distance a garden (Plate V). This is thought to be More's garden in Chelsea, on the bank of the Thames. Through an open arch, the garden is glimpsed surrounded by high brick walls, within which are low hedges enclosing individual beds. On one of the walls, overlooking the Thames, is a tall building that may have housed More's library and chapel, where 'he passed much of his time in retirement and devotion'. According to Cicero, a man with a garden and a library has all he needs: unfortunately More also had a monarch with matrimonial problems.

The layout in the painting resembles the gardens depicted in the so-called 'Agas' map of Tudor London, where a whole series of details are shown, such as vineyards, orchards, and hedged plots. Strung out along the Strand are the houses belonging to various members of the Tudor court, including that built in the late 1540s for Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector to his nephew, Edward VI. One of the members of his household was the botanist William Turner, author of the first English herbal, who is credited with creating a physic garden for Somerset at Syon House, upstream on the Thames. He may well also have supervised the design and layout of the garden at Somerset House, which appears to be laid out in a series of compartments. Another member of the household at this period was William Cecil, and these gardens no doubt provided the inspiration for his lifelong love of gardens and plants.

William Cecil was born in 1520 in Bourne, a small town in Lincolnshire, the son of a middle-ranking officer in the royal household. After attending schools in Grantham and Stamford, he went up to Cambridge, to St John's College, joining a circle of leading classical scholars, including Roger Ascham and John Cheke, who were both to become tutors to the royal family. In 1540, soon after leaving Cambridge, he married Cheke's sister Mary. Cecil began to study law at Gray's Inn, but in 1543 Mary died, leaving the young lawyer with one son, Thomas. Two years later he married Mildred, the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, lawyer, soldier, member of Henry VIII's bodyguard, and a self-taught scholar. Mildred was one of a quartet of formidably clever daughters, and Cecil had now entered a cultivated circle enjoying excellent connections with the royal court.

The 1540s and 1550s were perilous times in England, especially for anybody close to the court. Cecil managed to ride out the storms remarkably well. Although he was one of the secretaries to Lord Protector Somerset, he survived his fall, and instead became secretary to the King, Edward VI, through the favour of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. With the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1553, he retired from public life, building up his library and turning amateur architect, making modern improvements to the old house at Burghley in Northamptonshire that his father had purchased a quarter of a century earlier. He also made at least two visits to the Low Countries, keeping contact with Protestants who had fled there with the restoration of Catholicism in England. These journeys had, perforce, to be discreet, but it is thought that on one visit he stayed with the merchant and financier Sir Thomas Gresham in Antwerp and probably saw the garden of the castle of Wacquem with its elaborate use of water. Many castles and manor houses in this period were surrounded by moats, but Wacquem also had two gardens surrounded by water, one of which could be reached only by boat. These visits turned out to be Cecil's only opportunities to see Continental gardens at first hand. Thereafter he would have to rely on the descriptions of others, by word of mouth or through books and engravings.

Life changed radically for William Cecil with the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. He became her secretary, and in 1561 was given the lucrative position of Master of the Court of Wards. Now he had the money to be able to acquire properties, and to create fine gardens. He bought a house on the Strand in London, which became both his home and base of operations as Principal Secretary. Pulling down the old house, he created a model of architectural symmetry involving two courts, with extensive gardens running northwards to the open fields of Covent Garden. A recently discovered survey, now at Burghley House, has colour washes that give some indication of the appearance of the gardens. On the western side was a kitchen garden, on the east an L-shaped area which was probably Cecil's private garden. In the centre was his 'great garden' with a central path aligned to the main entrance of the house, an early example in England of the axiality held important by Renaissance architects. The 'great garden' was divided into three parts. To the west was a square enclosed by brick walls, with a mount in the centre, and four trees planted at the corners. To the east was an orchard laid out in a pattern of quincunxes. The central part had compartments divided by broad paths, and probably each compartment had an enclosing fence or trellis.

Three years after the acquisition of the London house, Cecil bought Theobalds, an old-fashioned moated manor house near St Albans on the main road northwards, now the A1. Elizabeth I paid her first visit to Theobalds in the July of 1564, but did not stay overnight because Cecil was planning improvements. And what improvements! Over the next thirty years he spent huge sums developing the house so that ultimately it boasted five courtyards. When the house was fit for the accommodation of the Queen, her apartments overlooked the gardens, which were as grand in scale as the house, and covered twice the area of Henry VIII's ambitious gardens at Hampton Court Palace. In one year alone, Cecil spent £955 on running costs for Theobalds, of which £148 were allotted to the gardens.

Contemporary descriptions of gardens from English sources tended to focus on the overall impression of magnificence but remain rather vague about details. However, two German travellers who visited Theobalds right at the end of the sixteenth century have left a record of some of the features. In 1598 Paul Hentzner described entering the garden through an ornate loggia that Cecil had decorated with a genealogy of his family. From there he noted 'one goes into the garden, encompassed with a ditch full of water, large enough for one to have the pleasure of going in a boat, and rowing between shrubs.' This is reminiscent of the garden that Cecil may have seen half a century earlier at the château of Wacquem.

The second German traveller, Baron Waldstein, made his visit in 1600, and recorded that there were 'columns and pyramids of wood and other materials up and down the garden', an echo of the ornaments in the gardens of Henry VIII. He also noted 'quite a large obelisk of alabaster surmounted by a figure of Christ'. Such religious iconography would have been so unusual in Protestant England that it has been suggested that Waldstein was mistaken, and this was in fact the statue of a gardener. Much more characteristic of the age were hidden water pipes fed from a conduit that sprayed unwary visitors – the Tudors' idea of a good joke. Water again featured in a summerhouse, 'in the lower part of which, built semi-circularly, are the twelve Roman emperors in white marble, and a table of touchstone; the upper part of it is set round with cisterns of lead, into which the water is conveyed through pipes, so that fish may be kept in them, and in summertime they are very convenient for bathing.'

Also mentioned was an extraordinary feature:

In the first room there is an overhanging rock or crag ... made of different kinds of semi-transparent stone, and roofed over with pieces of coral, crystal, and all kinds of metallic ore. It is thatched with green grass, and inside can be seen a man and a woman dressed like wild men of the woods, and a number of animals creeping through the bushes. A bronze centaur stands at the base of it. A number of columns by the windows support the mighty structure of the room: these columns are covered with the bark of trees, so that they do in fact look exactly like oaks and pines.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE MAKING of THE English Gardener by MARGARET WILLES Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Willes. Excerpted by permission of YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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