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Stephanie Barczewski, "How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023)
00:57:29
An interview with Stephanie Barczewski
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A
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Dr. Stephanie Barchewski, to tell us all about her book titled how the Country House Became English, published in 2023. From reaction. This is a really, really interesting book that answers a whole bunch of questions that I've had and I think probably a lot of listeners have had to examine the evolution of the quintessentially English country house. The posh manners in the films and the TV shows, anyone in the UK National Trust or English Heritage, these are the sorts of houses that, for all of those reasons, we think of in a lot of ways as being very English. Both what they look like, the values they symbolize, who lived there. And not all those connotations are necessarily positive or including of everyone who actually lives in England. And I've always been sort of curious about kind of how all of those things came to be. And this book does a fabulous job of explaining how all those things came to be. And it's a fascinating exploration over time and space. So, Stephanie, thank you so much for being with us to tell us all about it.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our discussion.
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A
Me too. Before we dive into all things English country house, however, would you mind introducing yourself a little bit and explaining why you decided to write this?
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B
Sure. So, yeah. I am a modern British, largely cultural historian at Clemson University in South Carolina in the United States. In my previous career, I have basically worked on national identity, British national identity, now kind of honing in on English a little bit more specifically. So I've approached that from two different perspectives. One looking at national heroes. So I've written about Robin Hood and King Arthur. I've written about Antarctic exploration, Scott and Shackleton in the early 20th century, and I've written about heroic failure in British culture. So the British tendency to sort of celebrate things like the Charge of the Light Brigade. And then the second way that I've looked at national identity is through the country house. So I wrote a book a few years ago on the British Empire and country houses, and I looked at both the financial impact of its imperial expansion on the country house. Hundreds and hundreds of country houses were built with imperial profits. And I tried to kind of put some numbers on that. And then also looking at the cultural impact of the Empire on country houses. So the ways in which imperial artifacts appeared in country houses and things like that. And what I found was lots and lots of imperial influence. But there was one thing that kind of stuck in my mind that I didn't find, and that was a lot of kind of full architectural influence. There's a couple of examples and we're probably going to hit on them later, I think, in our discussion of Indian style country houses in Britain. But there aren't very many. Right. When we think about a country house, it doesn't look like it comes from the Empire in any way. And that question bothered me a little bit that we found all this imperial influence, but there were also some limits on that imperial influence. And so I decided when I got done with that book, as much as I never really wanted to see another Victorian kitchen as long as I lived, because I toured hundreds of country houses, I decided that I wanted to approach the question kind of from the opposite side and to look specifically at the way that country houses remain kind of stubbornly committed to a sense of English identity, even as all these kind of external. And I, as we'll talk about, expanded the question to looking at European and influences from within the uk, so Scotland, Wales as well. But why country houses remain kind of committed to this sense of Englishness. And I wanted to know, as you alluded to in your kind of opening statement, I wanted to know how that came to be. How did we come to see country houses as being so English, given all these pressures from other places that came to bear on them? And so I started looking at that question. I also then took up the question of the kind of tension between the sort of violence. A lot of country houses had, a really violent history, but also the way in which they now embody this question of kind of continuity and stability in English identity. And so I wanted to look at those two things, so kind of coming at it from the opposite perspective, hoping that the combination of the two books would then give us a much fuller sense of what the country house was all about.
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A
Fabulous. Thank you for giving us that foundation. I admit a lot of my kind of initial interest in this was sparked from visiting, as you said, a country house where everything looked super medieval until this one room that was randomly really like fake Moroccan. And it was like, okay, this is odd, you know, and it's called a castle, but I know quite a lot about military history, and there wasn't any defensive need for a castle around here at any point. So, hang on, what is going on here? And so I think it makes a lot of sense to broaden it. It's not just Empire that is maybe funding a lot of this in some senses, but not necessarily explaining what this looks like and why. And I think that point about violence is really helpful in kind of taking us back before Empire to kind of start to unpick this. So I am going to, I think, move us roughly chronologically through the book. And if we're thinking about violence, there's obviously a number of moments in English history that could be chosen as a starting point, but perhaps one of the ones that jumps out the most and seems to have quite a large impact on kind of funding and structure and all sorts of things is the Reformation. So can you tell us about the impact of the Reformation on English country houses and perhaps especially through the example of Petworth House in West Sussex?
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B
Sure. So when we, you know, we think about the Reformation, we have to think about it as well. You know, it is one of the most violent events in English history. And it was violent in a kind of human sense, but it was also really violent in an architectural sense. Right. I mean, we have to think about this. This moment in the 1530s when, you know, Henry VIII kind of, with a stroke of a, dissolves the monasteries, and then suddenly these Institutions, which are not just physical institutions, they're cultural institutions, they're social institutions. So these monasteries are dissolved, they cease to exist in a relatively short span of time. It's not quite instantaneous, but it's. Within a decade or two they're gone. And then you have these massive buildings. These buildings are just. They're the skyscrapers of their era. They're these monumental buildings, by the standards of the time, that are standing there. And no one can figure out kind of what to do with them. One obvious thing to do with them is to convert them to country houses. So you get a lot of that going on. You get initially a kind of cheap way to do it, which is you basically take the cloister, which is conveniently kind of set up as living accommodation, you can convert that to a country house. And then as time goes on, builders start to get a little bit more ambitious in converting houses. And probably anybody who's been in maybe a couple of dozen country houses in England has probably been in a house that had some sort of pre Reformation heritage. And so this sense of this kind of architectural violence of the Reformation is really reflected in these country houses. But there's also lots of other interesting ways in which this story gets embodied by country houses. And Petworth is a great example, right? I don't know how many of your listeners have been to Petworth, but Petworth is this house in Sussex. It sits in this beautiful countryside, it's in this very nice village, and it sits there and it's got this kind of fantastically austere facade. And so you stand there kind of in the Downs of Sussex, looking at it, and it's this house that just kind of gazes implacably at you, right? It's a very kind of defiant house in a lot of ways. And it almost looks like an alien intrusion. And you almost look at this house and you go, what is this thing doing here? And how did it get here, this monumental thing? Well, it's kind of a Reformation story in a way, because the Percy family, right, so the Percy's of this famous, really powerful family from Northumberland, way up in the north of England in the Middle Ages. And so they get powerful because they back the right horse and a lot of the kind of royal struggles of the Middle Ages. But as we start to get to the end of the Middle Ages, so the wars of the Roman Rose's era and then into the 16th century, they start to back the wrong horse a lot of the time and they make some decisions that put them on the wrong side of English politics. And this particularly happens at the time of the Reformation. They retain a lot of the Percy's, retain their allegiance to Catholicism. They support Mary Queen of Scots in the struggle over the English throne in the late 16th century. And Elizabeth I, for fairly obvious reasons, gets kind of fed up with them. But they're powerful. So she, you know, she chops off a few Percy heads here and there, but she can't just, you know, smash the family to bits. So what she does is she basically says, okay, you're going to come down. You're not going to live up, way up in Northumberland anymore, where you get up to all kinds of mischief and I can't keep an eye on you because it's so far away. She says, you're going to come down to the secondary property that they have in Sussex, right, where Petworth is, and you're going to stay there so that I can keep an eye on you. And so the Percy's basically adapt to that by starting to build this kind of grander and grander house at Petworth. And that all culminates in the late 17th century, when this house that we see today, which is basically built as a rival to Versailles, right, the Duke of Northumberland, sorry, the Earl of Northumberland at the time, takes a look at it and says, I'm going to build something that's just as good as Versailles, because he's still very, very powerful. And so he builds this house and. Which is only there because of what happens during the Reformation, right? It's an example of what happens, you know, this kind of massive upheaval of the Reformation that has a huge impact on people's lives, including lives of the lives of very, very powerful people in England. And I think Petworth is a really fascinating example. You know, you look at it today, you would never think that, right? It's this, you know, again, this just implacable thing that looks like it's been standing there forever, but it's actually the product of this very violent and very chaotic period in English history.
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A
And I'm so glad you focus on it in the book. And that's obviously why I've asked you about it here, because we do tend to think of the impact of the Reformation in that sort of first way you talked about. Oh, okay, so they turned the monasteries into country houses, or they tore down the building materials and used it to build somewhere else, or they funded it. And all of that is true. But there's these other aspects of it as well that I think helps ground this Idea that the Reformation really had quite a lot of impact and the violence of it wasn't just sort of a one off thing in terms of influence on the English country house. Which leads me to my next massive point in English history. Obviously skipping over a whole bunch of things in the middle. But fine, that's what we're doing. It's an interview. Anyone who wants all the details, please read the whole book. It's fascinating. Moving to our next moment, the English Civil War. What then are the long term impacts and significances in this incredibly violent conflict? Especially because this conflict really does have a lot of like directly targeting private property going on back and forth and back and forth over quite a long time. So how does this impact the Englishness of country houses both during this violence and in the after effects of it?
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Sure, yeah. And I think that, you know, the point you alluded to before, that this is all it's, I mean, we talk about now, where historians talk about. I'm not a historian of the Reformation, but historians of the Reformation talk about the long Reformation, right, that this, that these events have these impacts. They're hugely violent, hugely disruptive and they have this impact that goes on not just for decades, but for centuries. Right. And so we can see that short term impact again, you know, the Reformation, right. Lots of houses are converted in the kind of decades after the 1530s to country houses, but then a house like Petworth embodies how this goes on for decades and decades and centuries later. Same thing happens with the English Civil War. Right. So we can talk about, and, you know, probably can readily imagine that the Civil War has an incredibly violent impact in an immediate sense on country houses. So I was able to identify country houses that were damaged or destroyed during the Civil War, most of them by the parliamentary forces, about two thirds, about a third by the Royalist forces reflects, right, what ultimately happens in the war, which is to the parliamentarians, when there's a couple of really unlucky houses that actually get destroyed by both sides, they're just in a really bad place. And, you know, as the war goes back and forth, they get, they get destroyed or damaged by both. And so. But as we think about the Civil War also, the impact of it goes far beyond that kind of immediate physical disruption because it also has a huge financial impact on families, particularly families who back the Royalist side, right. They are often subjected to very heavy fines for picking the king. Also, we have to think about that elite families, they lose access to their rents and to other things because their tenants basically leave either to go fight in the war because they're forced off the land by the violence that's going on during the Civil War. I mean, I think probably most of your listeners know, right, is this incredibly violent event per capita in England. It's more. It kills more people than either the First World War or the Second World War does. Right? So it's the most violent event really in English history. And so this destructiveness of it, it just has these lingering echoes that go on again for decades and for centuries. So if we want to pick out another good example of that, right, we can look at a house called Little Morton hall in Cheshire. Right. So Cheshire is the land of black and white. Tudor people love to go tour the country houses there because again, they think they reflect this of unchanging, continuous England that has just been around for centuries and centuries. Little Morton looks like just a picture book. Sort of what we think of as kind of a half timbered Tudor manor house. Right. It's a beautiful, wonky, lovely house and everybody goes to see it. It's very popular for that reason. But Little Martin hall only survives in that condition because the family who owns it is bankrupted by the Civil War. And so they can't really do anything with the house. They put caretakers in it for the course of the kind of 18th century, and it just kind of sits there gradually falling into a state of decrepitude. And by the early 19th century, as romanticism kicks in, right, it starts to be painted by artists with, you know, chickens roaming around the entrance hall and things like that, and people start to kind of embrace this sort of, you know, romantic agelessness that house embodies. But in fact, that very continuity of the house, it's a historical accident. It's an accident again, brought about by the violence of the Civil War and the way that violence has, you know, not just immediate impacts, but these lingering impacts, impacts that go on for a very long time.
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A
Thank you for explaining that. Given those two answers, it seems almost strange to remember the point you raised at the beginning that today English country houses are calm, are peaceful, are sort of the status quo, but that is how they're thought of today and have been for a while. So obviously, at some point we have to transition from what we've just been talking about, which is English country houses as sites and being impacted by pretty staggering amounts of violence to, you know, now the calm, peaceful bit. So how do country houses play a role in the broader English history project of going, yeah, okay, those things happened in the 16th and 17th centuries. But it's over now. Now everything's calm and nice.
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Yeah. And in some ways, right, you're asking a bigger question about the trajectory of English history. Right. England goes from this incredibly chaotic and unstable place in the 16th and 17th centuries to by the 19th century, right. It's the center of this metropolis that is ruling the world, right? Not quite the whole world, but a quarter of the world's population. And we do have to think about how does that transition take place, right? And then what role do country houses play in it? And so what we're gonna see, the 18th century is the focal point, right. When I was coming along as a grad student, right. Many, many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that the 18th century was the kind of unsexy century. Right. The 17th century was cool because it had the Civil War. The 19th century was cool because everybody loved the Victorians at that point. I don't know why we've kind of lost our love for the Victorians, I think, in British history. But the 18th century was the kind of boring century, right? Not much happened. I mean, I was told, don't do the 18th century. Cause you'll never get a job doing the 18th century. When I came along in the 19th century. But that has massively changed because I think we've come to recognize the 18th century as this crucial century of transition in which again, England and Britain as a whole transformed from being this kind of second rate European power that was kind of plagued by political chaos. This is the century where it happened. So we've recovered the kind of importance of events like the Seven Years War in that sort of trajectory. And so we start to see that reflected in country houses. As the English political landscape becomes more stable, as England becomes more powerful, right. Britain as a whole, but England as the center of it, they're transformed from symbols of instability, as we've been talking about, to symbols of continuity and stability. So as the Reformation and the Civil War start to recede in time, we could take a look at the Gothic style which re emerges in the 18th century, first in the kind of fantastical Strawberry Hill kind of way, and then in the kind of castellated Gothic style of the late 18th century. The Gothic style has previously been tainted by its association with Catholicism, Right. That the Reformation is still too new and too raw and in some ways too unsettled. Right. Because of the Civil War and because a lot of the kind of questions aren't really settled until. Not just until the Glorious Revolution, but even for some decades beyond that that England will remain solidly Protestant. But once that question gets settled, then the Gothic style can cease to be an embodiment of Catholicism and can start to be seen as reflecting this commitment to English history, right, to the continuity of English history. As people in England start to look for things in their own past that they can celebrate as embodiments of cultural nationalism, then they can look back to these medieval English buildings and start to reinterpret them in a very, very different way. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities for country house architecture moving forward.
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A
Does that help us understand, then, how ruins of medieval buildings, especially including religious buildings that were, as we've already talked about, right, violently torn down during the Reformation? Those medieval ruins now at this point that we're talking about in chronology and even today are like, oh, it's picturesque and lovely. Isn't it nice that we have these ruins of these medieval buildings, and yet that's not where we were not that long ago. So is this sort of part of that transformation of these ruins?
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B
Absolutely right. So I think you're right. We tend to see that as part of the kind of emergence of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century, as part of the kind of picturesque movement. But I think the process actually starts earlier, and I think it has more to do, or at least it has as much to do with the kind of political imperatives of the time as it. As it does with these kind of aesthetic imperatives in terms of. Of changing kind of aesthetic standards. Because one interesting thing that we start to see in the 18th century, and we're probably all familiar with it, but we haven't really thought about it much, is that suddenly the ruins of medieval abbeys start to pop up as these really prominent landscape garden features. So we get maybe a dozen examples of that. The most famous one, you know, probably, maybe the one that some of your listeners have visited, is Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, right. Which is just this fantastic landscape garden, which is. Yeah, it's gorgeous with this giant ruin of a medieval abbey in it. And it's like, what is going on there? Right. That's really weird. I mean, for me, whenever you see something new kind of happening, and it's not the only example, again, there's about a dozen of these around England. And so when you take a look at that, I think if you'd gone back a century or so, again, that kind of sense of chaos that these buildings embodied was too raw, right. It was too recent for them to be celebrated. So they were sort of kind of pushed aside, and nobody quite knew what to do with them. But by the time we get to the 18th century, when a lot of these political questions and these religious questions have been more settled, the chaos is kind of receding into the rear view mirror and suddenly they can become cause for celebration, right? This is the triumph of liberty over tyranny. This is the triumph of Protestant Enlightenment over Catholics. Superstition, Right? And so these sort of. So what we had before was maybe some nostalgic laments about, oh, you know, the poor, the poor abbeys, these beautiful buildings were destroyed, but now the ruins themselves are being celebrated, right? They're not. The ruins aren't seen as something reflecting bad things that happened in the past. The ruins are now seen as a kind of victory, you know, they're a victory trophy almost of the triumph of the right side, right, of the Protestant side. And so by the second half of the 18th century, these monastic ruins don't signify a break with the past anymore, Right. They don't symbolize this moment of violent disruption in the 1530s with the Reformation, but they symbolize this long, gradual historical trajectory which has led to England becoming, as it was put in, 1066 and all that top nation, the most powerful nation in the world, which England is starting to be by the time of the Seven Years War. And these abbeys become a symbol of that long trajectory. The Reformation is clearly a huge event. We're all familiar with maybe Linda Colley's arguments about Protestantism in the 18th century and how it becomes this bulwark of British nationalism at a time when Britain is becoming the most powerful nation in the world. And I think these ruins really fit into. They become symbols, right, of that very triumph of Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation is seen as the foundation of England's greatness in the 18th century. And so they can now be celebrated as again, parts of this long historical trajectory that has led to this moment of English great greatness.
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I also found that reading that in the book, that that explanation helped me understand why, of course, obviously the fictional. But why it's called Downton Abbey, right. That sounds like a Catholic name. And names are often the things that when massive events happen in a society, names are often the things that get changed. So why is it that such a Catholic name would still make sense? And it sounds like this is part of that story.
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B
Yeah. And I would also mention that the real house, right, that Downtonebbe's based on is Highclere Castle, right, Which is another. It's another medieval echo. So even though it doesn't have necessarily the religious connotations. It's still embodying that kind of long transition from the medieval past which, again, has led to this moment.
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A
So one thing that you mentioned briefly earlier on that I'd love to bring in now is, of course, if we're talking about identity formation, one of the biggest impetuses for that is, of course, identity in opposition to somewhere else. Right. We are this because we are not that to some degree. So if we're moving chronologically through this period of kind of England now becoming a big deal and saying, you know what, we're calm and stable now, obviously the counterpoint is the French Revolution, right? They're chaotic across the water, but look at us. We have this wonderful, stable system. Now, of course, we can have all sorts of historical qualms about the extent to which that was true, but what impact did the French Revolution have on this Englishness of English country houses?
- [25:28]
B
Yeah. And obviously, we've had historical. Other historians have written about the context of this intense rivalry with France, the second Hundred Years War in the 18th century. So they might point to the contrast between French absolutism and the fact that England has a parliament. Right. This is a great source of national pride in these sorts of arguments. And then again, the kind of religious context, Protestantism is better than Catholicism. And I agree. I think we can argue that maybe this has been oversimplified a little bit. We can argue even about the kind of concept of othering as a basis of national identity. But I do think at this moment, in the 1780s and 90s, and I think maybe the specifics of this have been underplayed a little bit. This moment when the French Revolution happens, and we all know the kind of trajectory of interpretations of the French Revolution in England. At first, everybody goes, oh, good, the French are gonna get rid of that absolute monarch. They're gonna become more like us. They're gonna have a parliament that actually means something. And then as the revolution gets more revolutionary, right, we start to get Edmund Burke going, ooh, you know, this is not really what we anticipated. This is nothing like us. And we start to see, you know, I mean, Burke's reflections on the revolution of France is the classic statement of it, right? This idea that England is old and it has these traditions and it has this continuity. And that idea becomes really powerful in this moment. Right. Whatever we think of the broader sense of othering against the French in the 18th century, in this moment, I think this idea is really, really powerful. And again, this has kind of architectural Implications. So the destruction of the Bastille. Right. The destruction of old buildings generally in France, which there's a lot of beyond of these old medieval buildings, beyond just the Bastille in France, as a result of the French Revolution, starts to have this kind of massive symbolic importance in England. And we start to look at, oh, in England, like, what's going on architecturally with country houses and with other buildings as well. Well, buildings are being built to look like castles. Right. This is when the kind of castellated Gothic style comes in. And my argument is that this a reaction to the French Revolution. And obviously all historians worry about overplaying their arguments a little bit. Right. And so one thing I wanted to do in this book was to actually try to, when I could, to measure things kind of statistically. So I had, you know, for a cultural historian, I have a kind of surprising amount of charts and graphs and things in the book. And one of the charts I had was looking at the kind of rise of the castellated Gothic style. And you think, okay, I can make a chart and it's going to be maybe a little bit apparent. Right. And then I can kind of run with that and make a. A sort of nuanced argument. Well, no, when I did the chart of when castellated Gothic houses started appearing, I mean, after 1790, like, there was the most dramatic spike in the chart you could possibly imagine. I mean, it was crazy how apparent it was. And to me, that says, well, there's something really powerful going on there that was causing this surge in a very immediate sense. Oh, what could that be? Well, I think the logical answer is it was indeed this kind of reaction in England to the French Revolution. And that's why we start to see these castles. The point the English are making, the point that, hey, you French might be destroying your castles and trying to remake the world, but here in England, we're better because we embrace the past and we are building new castles here. So these castles, old castles and new castles, become the physical embodiments of a national superiority that's bestowed again by continuity. Continuity becomes this very key contrast with the French. It becomes yet another marker of difference with the French that's added to these earlier markers. And so it. It helps to heighten this sense of kind of English distinctiveness from France and then from the continent more generally. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary Nights from Backyard Jams to sold out arenas. There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsively. Responsive. Jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
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- [29:54]
A
Distributor and yet, if we're talking about the French Revolution, England is no longer really the country we're talking about at that point. We've got acts of Union going on. We have all sorts of things. So we've got Britain and yet we're still here talking about, about English country houses. And in fact, even though we still have Great Britain, we're still talking about English country houses. So if we leave, you know, we've thought about France for a moment, if we even go kind of closer to home. Why has there never been a British style of architecture, a British country house, and it's still all about the English one?
- [30:30]
B
Yeah, this was a really weird and obvious point, right, that I hit when I started thinking about these issues. I mean, certainly we can talk about British country houses in the sense that there are country houses all over Britain, right? And we can even talk about, you know, there's no adjective for United Kingdom ish, right? But we could talk about United Kingdom ish country houses because there's also country houses in Northern Ireland and in Ireland, right, when Ireland was still part of the Union. And so we can talk about that. But what's a British country house? Right? Can we imagine what a British country house looks like? I mean, if we envision one, it's probably an English country house. It's probably an Elizabethan manor house or maybe one of the Palladian houses of the 18th century. We can envision a sculpt Scottish country house, right? It probably looks, it's probably the baronial style, something like Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford is probably the most famous example of that. And then a Welsh country house, right? What does that look like? Well, it probably looks a lot like an English country house to us. There's not really A distinctive Welsh country house style. So what on earth is going on there, Right? Why does never a kind of hybrid British style emerge that you could point to a house as kind of having influences from Wales, influences from England, influences from Scotland. I don't know of any example of a house that really does that. And so my argument was that in Britain, right, you had these strong fortified military borders, or quasi military borders between England and Scotland and between England and Wales until really in the Welsh case, into the 16th century, and in the Scottish case, really almost right up until 1700 and even after that, right, because of Jacobitism, it's a little bit fraught. And that means that these borders, instead of becoming a zone where you can start to see architectural styles merging and blending, right, as things go back and forth across the border. Border. The borders are these really weird zones of distinctive border style buildings, which are essentially fortified buildings, right? You're losing fortified buildings in the rest of Britain, you know, after the kind of late Middle Ages, but they last a lot longer on those borders. They become these very distinctive and odd kind of architectural zones. You don't have this really on the European continent, right? You don't really have a lot of fortified borders occasionally, but not very often. So you do actually get a lot more kind of nationally hybrid architectural styles on the continent. It doesn't happen in Britain, which is really strange. And again, my argument is because of the kind of distinctiveness of these border zones, that means that in England, right, you get kind of increasingly English buildings, and as England comes to dominate, right, the rest of the uk, then you get the kind of that dominance that's been developed kind of behind these borders, sort of being exported to other parts of the UK. We see that really in the 18th century in particular, right, when the kind of shared Palladianism and neoclassicism of the 18th century, Scotland follows a kind of complicated trajectory, right? When we enter the era of modern nationalism in the late 18th century, we do see a distinctive Scottish style of architecture emerging, as I've already alluded to, in the form of the Scottish baronial style. But it's really an expression of the kind of romantic form of nationalism, the cultural nationalism that prevails after the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. So that kind of explains, right, why we get a distinctive Scottish style of architect. Again, not a British one, right, but we get a Scottish one kind of alongside the English one. In Wales, it's even more complicated because it's hard to go back to the Middle Ages in Wales. For Welsh architectural styles, because the dominant architectural form of the Middle Ages is the castle, and that is very tainted, right. By its associations with the conquest of Wales by Edward I, who builds his iron. His famous iron ring of castles. Right. So Carnarvon, Conwy, Harlech, et cetera, et cetera, after he conquers Wales. And so what you get is you get the Welsh culture. Nationalism, therefore, kind of takes other forms. So you get this kind of dominant English form which prevails in England and Wales, and then you get this kind of Scottish cultural nationalism that arises as Scottish nationalism looks for other paths in the late 18th and 19th centuries besides the political one. But you never get an actual British style developing the kind of historical roots of what you need for those kinds of hybrid historical forms. Sorry, hybrid architectural forms are just not there.
- [34:43]
A
Thank you for explaining that. It is kind of, as you said, such an obvious thing. And yet, hang on, it does require some sort of poking at. I'd love to ask you about a quote in the book where you talk about how English country houses became a space in which Englishness was increasingly displayed in hierarchical and racial terms. Again, if we're thinking chronologically, we're very much in the era of empire here. So when, how and why did this sort of use of English country houses for these sorts of things become such a phenomenon?
- [35:22]
B
Yeah, so, again, it's a long process, right? That was one thing I got into when I decided to write this book. You know, when I wrote about empire and country houses, I could. I could really kind of stick to the post 1700 period, you know, which I'm pretty comfortable with. This one required me to go back, you know, in some cases, as I've been talking about in the Middle Ages and certainly back into the 16th century, you see this long evolution, right, of the way that the presence of empire is reflected in country houses. So if we take a look at when English colonization first begins in the late 16th and early 17th century, we. What we see is a lot of curiosity, right, about the places that the English are starting to explore. And so we see these kind of fascinating. What you start to see is kind of indigenous Americans, right, being depicted in country houses, that you'll see carvings of them or plaster work embodiments, some of them over fireplaces and things like that. The English are sort of going, ha. This empire thing's kind of new. It's kind of interesting. We're intrigued. But it's a relationship of largely interest, right. Rather than any kind of hierarchy. We start to see as the Empire evolves. What they're trying to build essentially in the 18th century is a kind of colonial settler society, right. America is the kind of focus of the empire. Now we can talk about that. Obviously, there's a lot of unfree peoples populating the West Indies and the North American colonies as well. And that's something that I did talk extensively about in my previous work on empire and the country had house. But the way it's being perceived from London, right, is that tragically and horribly, those people don't really count. And what we're interested in is these white colonial settler societies. And so we're trying to build these kind of little Englands or little Britons all over the place, right? And so there's an emphasis there on trying to have the country houses in the empire be copies, like little copies, right, of the country houses that are being built back in the metropolis. So we might think about something like, I live in South Carolina, right? So Drayton hall, which is. Is this famous plantation house on the coast of South Carolina, is this really elegant little miniature. It's not that small, right. But it's smaller than an English house would be. Smaller version of an English Palladian house. Right. It's a really lovely kind of piece of architecture, but also reflects this sense of the metropolis and empire trying to build a kind of shared common society. After the loss of the American colonies, right. When historians start to talk about the second British Empire, right, which is a very, very different empire, right? An empire empire that is inhabited by large numbers of non white subjects, it becomes a much more hierarchical empire. And so you start to see different imperatives being felt that now country house architecture, when it has these shared imperial connections, it has to reflect this sense of hierarchy, right. That these kind of European style buildings become symbols of England's right to rule over these people, peoples.
- [38:27]
A
Which is of course in many ways still a legacy that these country houses are grappling with today. And I was wondering if you could maybe, obviously, drawing, as you said on your previous book as well as in this one, tell us a bit more about kind of the different ways in which the empire manifested itself in country houses. As you said, there's such a difference between, between the early British Empire and the later one. So to what extent did it change? Especially kind of towards the end, the things that we might recognize in films or even visiting those houses today, kind of what caused the change in how empire manifested itself in these places?
- [39:07]
B
Yeah, I think in the late 18th century, right. There's this moment a really Interesting moment, Right. And, you know, this moment when India replaces America, I think. I think that the British have a decision to make about how they're going to rule the empire. Right. And we might think about. As a counter example to what actually happens, Right. We might think about Quebec. Now, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I'll bring it back in a second. Right. Quebec. So Britain gets Quebec in the Seven Years War, Right. We probably all know that. And then they have a decision to make about how are we going to try to rule Quebec. And this is at a time when they're struggling with how are we going to rule America as well. That's not going very well. Well. And so what they decide to do in Quebec, to put it, you know, this is simplistic, but, you know, I think basically accurate is they decide to let Quebec continue to be Quebec. They don't try to Anglicize it particularly. They allow the French to keep their laws, to keep their educational system, the French Canadians, to keep their laws, to keep their educational system, to keep their language. Right. There's no attempt to force everybody to speak English. And they amazingly, I think, given the context of the 18th century, allow them to actually continue to practice the Catholic religion. Now, I think we can probably argue that in some ways they're doing that because these people are white. Right. Which means that there's a sort of difference in their. In their conception of how they're going to rule them. But I think it's still very interesting as an alternative imperial model. Right. And it's sort of why Quebec remains, you know, kind of Quebec to this day. And I think it's always very interesting thinking how that goes all the way back 250 years to that period. And I think we actually see similar things going on in a funny sort of way with. With the English trying to figure out what are they going to do after the loss of the American colonies with this new empire. How are we going to rule it? Are we gonna rule it by force? Right. By coercion? Or are we going to rule it by trying to understand and trying to get to know and to sort of embrace the difference with these people who we are ruling? And there's a funny sort of moment, and as much as it seems kind of. I think it almost sounds anachronistic what I'm about to say, because it's a very modern concept of thinking about, you know, kind of ethnic difference. But they do actually experiment with this a little bit architecturally. So we see in the very late 18th century. And right at the beginning of the 19th century, we see the only time when there is serious imperial architectural influence in England. And that mostly comes from India. Right. India is now, after the loss of the American colonies, is the focal point of the empire. And so we start to see Indian style architectural elements being introduced. So Warren Hastings, the governor, and then eventually disgraced governor of Bengal, puts an Indian style dome on his house, Daylesford. And then the most famous example is Sezincote in the Cotswolds, which, you know, it's a kind of under visited house. It's still in private hands, it's not National Trust or anything. And so people don't tend to go see it. But if you want to see one of the most interesting country houses in Britain, hands down, go see says and cut. Because it is the only fully Indian style country house ever to be built in Britain. Right. But that moment doesn't last as the empire continues to grow. Right. So we know by the 19th century it's a quarter of the world's population, it's 50 million square miles. This idea that the empire can kind of be an extension of the metropolis, as had been the case earlier, and when it contained a predominantly white settler population, that just doesn't hold anymore. Right. The British are trying to figure out how they're going to rule these large numbers of non white peoples. This is obviously, and most of your listeners will be familiar with this as well. It's happening alongside a hardening of racial attitudes which I think is connected right to this transition in the empire. So we go in the early 19th century from the British believing that non white colonial subjects can be, through their enlightened rule, quote, unquote, can be transformed into people like themselves by the mid 19th century. There is a clearly biological sense of race in which these differences are seen as much more immutable. And as the British have this transition in their kind of mode of thinking about the empire, so the Quebec style model loses and a much more hierarchical and powerful model wins. Power based model wins. Then European buildings now have to, to kind of symbolize that. And so we start to see classical buildings being built in the empire that embody that. We also see this filtering back home in country houses. Because how we see the empire mostly manifesting itself in country houses in the 19th century is in two ways. One, they become repositories for trophies that are collected from imperial wars. So something like the defeat of Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam in 1799, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, country houses are just littered with items that come back from these sorts of imperial wars. They secondly become kind of quasi museums for the display of exotic artifacts sometimes in a kind of anthropological sense. Right. So you get these kind of little anthropological museums in country houses that very much highlight the difference, right. The emphasis now on difference between. And difference in the 19th century almost always means superiority, right? Difference between means superiority over between Britons and their colonial subjects. And one of my favorite ways in which this manifests actually is the exotic animals that are actually brought back right from so beginning again kind of in the late 18th century and then continuing into the 19th century, country house owners will import animals from all over the Empire. The rules on doing this are very lax by modern standards at the time. And so to this day, Britain has all these kind of non native species that are kind of roaming the countryside that are result because these animals eventually inevitably get out. They escape from these kind of private menageries and deer parks and things like that. And so if you've ever seen a muntjac, right, when you're driving around Britain, they're pretty shy, but there's a lot of them. So a lot of people have probably seen them. My personal favorite is the Chinese water deer, which is. Which is roaming around Norfolk and Suffolk in the Norfolk Broads. These are really relics of this period in which the Empire is displayed in this way that's kind of emphasizing the exoticism and the difference of the Empire from Britain itself.
- [45:31]
A
And what I found really interesting about this is that in a lot of ways to. That makes sense, right? There's so many aspects of English and British culture that are influenced by the British Empire and bringing things into English and British culture that weren't there really before the Empire. And yet there's still, of course, this whole idea of competing with Europe or competing with the continent. So although there were ways in which the English country house could still be an English country house house, even with all these imperial influences being brought in, to what extent was maintaining the Englishness of an English country house still about somehow resisting anything that might be from the continent?
- [46:18]
B
Yeah. And I should probably say at this point that another influence that really was powerful in the kind of initial conception of this book was Brexit. Right. You know, when Brexit happened, I mean, I think like a lot of people, you know, I was shocked. I didn't think it would ever happen. And then it did. And very quickly we had to kind of, as historians, right? We had to come to grips with, whoa, what was that all About. And I think it became apparent pretty quickly that it was about Englishness, right. I mean, the fact that 2/3 of Scots voted to remain in the European Union, you know, it was really English votes, right. That carried Britain out of the eu and so it became, you know, we have to kind of see it as an expression in a certain sense of Englishness. And that led me to thinking about England's long relationship and very complicated and not always happy relationship with the European continent. Right. And it led me to what I think was an important question about English culture, which is, you know, is Englishness something that is pure and untainted by continental influence? Right. Which is, you know, I think what the sort of, you know, to put it crudely, the kind of Brexit side might argue. Or is it something where continental influences filter into England and then are transformed into something. Something distinctively English in the way that, you know, we can talk about France as a part of Europe, but we can also talk about, you know, we. Nobody would say there's not a French distinctive architectural. Or haven't historically been French distinctive architectural styles. Right. And I think there's a tension in, you know, I think. I think the French would quite happily say, yes, we are European, but we're French at the same time. I think in England, that tension is much more. Is much more visceral, Right. This idea that can we be English and European at the same time? I don't really know. Right. And I think that, again, was very prevalent in the kind of Brexit debate. And so in country houses, we see this tension being manifested over and over again. Right. The Elizabethans admire Renaissance classicism, but they never fully embrace it. Right. Inigo Jones in the 17th century tries to introduce a fully kind of continental style classicism into England. The Civil War kind of puts paid to that. And then by the 18th century, that classical influence in England has been anglicized into what we now call call the English Palladian style. And then all of this, again, you know, this trajectory that I've alluded to over and over again kind of culminates in the 19th century, right. When we start to see resistance, active resistance to continental influence. So, you know, we see some attempts to build French style houses in England. So the classic example would be Waddeston in Buckinghamshire, but that's a Rothschild house, right. So that's kind of coming from this kind of European banking family. There's also a lot of anti Semitism that filters into the way that Waddesdon is viewed. So that's viewed as a kind of alien intruder. And then at the end of the 19th century, we get the vernacular revival, this intensely English and arts and crafts is kind of associated with it as well, or has some of the same cultural influences at work. And this intensely English type of architecture. Right. That is really kind of emphasizing the kind of insularity of English identity with. With kind of no, you know, no kind of foreign influences allowed.
- [49:32]
A
Thank you for explaining that. I think it makes a lot of sense of kind of these competing ideas and competing influences to go. Hang on. Okay. It's not one thing or the other. Here's how that was sort of mediated as we come towards up to the present. I'd love to ask about something you talk about in the book, which is not a violent transformation, but certainly a pretty big deal one, because, of course, what we've been discussing, we haven't needed to make it explicit. Right. English country houses are posh people's houses. There's a very certain kind of class that lives that lived there, that had access to these places. And as you mentioned a moment ago, if these houses are still in private hands, then that's very much still the case. But of course, most of these houses are not in private, private lands.
- [50:18]
B
Right.
- [50:18]
A
You can buy a ticket from English Heritage or National Trust and go walk around them as you've done to hundreds of them. And that's obviously a huge transformation in what these houses are, whose identities and values they seem open to. And yet, unlike some of the other ones we've talked about, not exactly a violent transformation. Would you mind telling us a little bit about when and why campaign and institutions developed to transform kind of who gets to go in these houses, who owns these houses, why they should be preserved as they are?
- [50:54]
B
So there's a long history of country house tourism. It really dates back to the 18th century. Right. You could show up, knock on the door of Chatsworth, if you weren't too dirty or smelly, they'd probably let you in. But what we think of as country house tourism today really starts as a product of the decline of the country house as a kind of viable entity in the traditional sense. Right. So as higher taxation and declining agricultural profits kick in, country house owners have to look for other ways to make money. Tourism is a big part of that. And so they start to open up to Taurus coming in. I think a huge moment in changing in part. Right. I think this debate is still going on as the recent struggles of the National Trust over these issues suggest. A big moment in changing the way that we perceive country houses actually occurs in the 1970s, when people start to get interested in domestic servants, because a lot of people in Britain, there were hundreds of thousands of domestic servants, right? It's like the biggest employment category in Britain in the late 18th and very early 20th century centuries. And so people start to think, oh, my ancestor was in service in this house, I'm going to go visit the house for this reason, initially, they can't see the servants quarters because nobody's ever bothered to open them up. They don't think they're very interesting. But as time goes on, more and more servants quarters start to get opened up. A big important house, there is erthink in Wales, which the National Trust has a really fantastic archive of the servants lives in the house. And the National Trust starts to develop that aspect of. Of displaying the house in the 1970s and it becomes enormously popular. One of the most popular houses to visit in England, even though it's not a very prominent house in other. In other ways that I think starts to change things in terms of country houses can be other things other than just the houses where posh people live and do posh people things. When we start to get more interested in empire, right, in the 1990s and continuing very much so, until. Until this day, then that becomes another obvious avenue that's been a really complicated one. The National Trust, I think, again, has really struggled with how to accommodate the tastes of an older generation of country house tourists with younger people and a more diverse audience in Britain who might want to see different aspects of the houses displayed. My argument would be that that's a great thing, right, that we should absolutely do that and have more of it. But it's one story among many that we can tell about country houses that get us away from that traditional model. And so I'd like to see other stories incorporated as well. Some of these stories that disrupt this idea of country houses as these symbols of continuity and stability in England. So more emphasis on the violence that underlies a lot of country houses, right? And there's a lot of country houses with priest holes in them that linger from the Reformation, where these incredibly, incredibly violent events took place. And, you know, usually they'll talk about them, but I'm not sure that they really fully incorporate those elements into the stories of the houses. Like, those houses tend to still be, oh, look at this beautiful manor house, because a lot of them are beautiful manor houses because they were owned by Catholic families who couldn't afford to rebuild them after the Reformation. Because they were poor, because they were Catholic. And so it's still the aesthetic aspects of the house tend to be emphasized, not this kind of violent history, I think. I think the tension between those two things, like, you know, a beautiful country house like Oxborough hall in Norfolk, right, which is. Which was the Catholic Bedenfield family, is a great example of that. Right. This tension between the external beauty of the house, which results from its age in a way, but the kind of complicated and violent history that sort of underlies that. And I hope in the future that the National Trust and English Heritage and the other entities that display country houses can start to bring out kind of all of these stories about country houses, houses as they've been trying to bring out more stories about the empire, which, again, is a great thing as well.
- [55:01]
A
That gives us a really good sense of what to look out for from these organizations in the future. And I second your hopes for what that might look like, but I'd love to ask, on perhaps a smaller scope than multiple national organisations, what might you be doing in the future now that this book is available for people to read?
- [55:21]
B
Well, what I'm working on now, and I alluded to it a little bit with my mention of kind of muntjac and Chinese water deer, because I got kind of interested in the kind of weird British environmental history, right? Britain's environmental history, England's environmental history and Britain as a whole is kind of super complicated and interesting. And so what I'm working on now is national parks, right? British national parks are one of the few things in Britain that are much younger than their American counterpart. The first American national, the first world global national park is Yellowstone in America, which is 1872. British National Parks are post war. The atlee government in 1951 creates the first British national parks. And I think they're these super complicated entities. They're very weird because the government doesn't own any of the land in British national parks. Very different from, again, how they operate in America and indeed in most places in the world. And so I am starting to look at national parks in Britain, how they came to be, what they embody, all the struggles over how they should be best used. And so I am very much looking forward to getting started on that in a big way.
- [56:34]
A
Well, as I, and I'm sure many of the listeners eagerly await that book. Listeners can read the book we've been discussing, how the Country House Became English, just published this year. Really quite a fascinating book that picks up and goes into much more detail about all the things we've been discussing. Stephanie, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us.
- [56:55]
B
Thank you so much for having me. It's been really enjoyable.