‘Residences for the Poor’
THE PUGIN OF CONTRASTS
To be born, or at any rate, bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?
Lady Bracknell, in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
Every schoolboy knows who killed Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essay on Lord Clive
Historians today would not presume that British pupils knew much about the French Revolution or about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The favourite British bogey from European history is still Adolf Hitler. Historians of the Revolution often lament the durability in British minds of the guillotine, tumbrils and ‘tricoteuses’, and blame this on two books which fixed popular impressions, Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837) and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1858–60).1 It is said to be hard to get ideas into the heads of the English, supposedly a ‘nation of shopkeepers’. Yet they eventually absorbed some of the Revolution’s more liberal ideas. The Revolution famously abolished the nobility, the first of the three Estates in the French equivalent of Parliament, and, less famously, the Second Estate, the Church.
The Liberalism of the Revolution had a militant anti-clerical side, and French clergy went into exile en masse. About seven thousand of them went to England, and at one time a thousand French secular priests lived at the King’s House, Winchester, which the government requisitioned for them in 1792. The possessions of religious orders were confiscated, and as the Napoleonic armies of the ‘nouveau régime’ advanced across Europe, they suppressed monasteries and convents. So it was that, not long after the Revolution, members of English religious communities in France and Flanders also crossed into England. One effect of the Revolution was thus that members of religious orders who had been chased out of England in the sixteenth century, and had then set up English houses abroad, were again chased out and re-crossed the Channel in the 1790s. Two examples of this are communities of English Benedictine nuns, in Paris and Cambrai, who were first imprisoned then allowed to go back to their native land. These religious refugees, Benedictines principally, began to set up communities in England, as, for example, the nuns who set up at Stanbrook and at Colwich. As they had on the Continent, the communities of men continued to offer a Catholic education, which had been forbidden in England from 1559 to 1778 by laws carrying the severest penalties.2 After some years, they established their colleges once again, as for instance at Downside and Ampleforth. Walter Scott brings one of these unfamiliar beings, rare birds then in Scotland, into the Introductory Epistle to The Monastery: ‘“Am I to understand, then, . . . that I am speaking with a Catholic clergyman?” “An unworthy monk of the order of St Benedict” said the stranger “belonging to a community of your own countrymen, long established in France, and scattered unhappily by the events of the Revolution.”’3
Only a small proportion of the émigrés of the 1790s were clerics, however, and some came for reasons neither religious nor political. One was a Charlotte Charpentier, who in 1797 married an Edinburgh lawyer, Walter Scott. Another émigré was Auguste Charles Pugin, who worked as a draughtsman in the London office of the architect John Nash in 1792. An associate of Daguerre, Charles Pugin built the Diorama in the new Regent’s Park in 1823. He published Specimens of Gothic Architecture in 1821 and, in 1827, Pugin’s Gothic Furniture. His son Augustus Welby Pugin grew up in the workshop, and at the age of fifteen designed Gothic furniture at Windsor Castle. In the previous year, 1826, the castle had received a visit from Mlle Charpentier’s now celebrated husband. Walter Scott had been made a baronet at George IV’s accession in 1820. In 1822 he stage-managed the first visit of a Hanoverian monarch to Edinburgh. George donned a kilt in the Stuart tartan, and drank a whisky; Scott went home with the King’s glass in the tail-pocket of his coat, but forgot about it when he got there, sat on it and broke it. The Scott Monument stands, appropriately, in Prince’s Street, Edinburgh.
On 21 October 1826, Sir Walter wrote up his Journal: ‘After breakfast went to Windsor Castle, . . . examined the improvements going on there under Mr. Wyattville who appears to possess a great deal of taste and feeling for the Gothick architecture. The old apartments, splendid enough in extent and proportion, are paltry in finishing – instead of being lined with heart of oak the palace of the British Kings is hung with paper painted wainscot colour’.4 Scott uses ‘heart of oak’ patriotically: the ships of the Royal Navy were built of oak, and ‘Heart of Oak’, a song of the Royal Navy, claims that its men also had hearts of oak. Oaks were English, and could, after the Battle of Worcester, be royal: the inn-signs of public houses called The Royal Oak show the head of Charles II against the foliage of an oak tree, because Charles had hidden in an oak after the defeat at Worcester. Windsor Castle was the ancestral residence of English, and then of ‘the British’, kings. It was at Windsor that Edward III had founded the Order of the Garter in 1348, and in 1788 that King George III had had Benjamin West paint Gothic scenes.5
These scenes, and the paltry paper ‘wainscot’ which disgusted Scott, belong to the playful, picturesque and theatrical phase of ‘the Gothick architecture’, a phase beginning early in the century with garden follies, to the self-amusing papier-mâché tracery of Horace Walpole, to the rise of William Beckford’s terror-Gothic ‘Abbey’ at Fonthill (Plate 7), designed by James Wyatt in 1796 for the millionaire author of the Gothic tale, Vathek. In 1825, Wyatt’s 278-foot tower collapsed upon its paltry foundations. By then Gothic architecture was moving from the fancy private estates of eighteenth-century gentlemen to the centre of power of what was becoming the world’s most influential country. Scott’s home at Abbotsford lies somewhere near the middle of this evolution. Its architecture is Scottish Baronial rather than Gothic. It is homely as well as picturesque, and had oil-gas and pneumatic bells. Another modern touch (or is it eighteenth-century?) is Scott’s request for a parcel of old ‘caricatures, which can be bought cheap, for papering two cabinets à l’eau’. This comes in a letter to the actor Daniel Terry, who dramatised some of the Waverley Novels and also supplied some of Abbotsford’s decor. The decor is eclectic, most notably in the extraordinary collection of historical memorabilia made by Scott.6
The first half of the evolution of neo-Gothic architecture ended in the 1830s, at the point at which Augustus Welby Pugin made his first impact. By the time William IV died in 1837, the marginal was becoming the mainstream, and the eccentric had become the official. In 1829, Pugin had painted scenes and made costumes for an opera-ballet version of Scott’s Kenilworth at the King’s Theatre, London. In 1831, he designed Shakespeare’s Henry VIII for Covent Garden. In 1833, his Examples of Gothic Architecture appeared. But in 1834, as he watched the Palace of Westminster burn down, he rejoiced at the sight of James Wyatt’s ‘composition mullions and cement pinnacles and battlements flying and cracking’.7 The stagey and the inauthentic would no longer do.
Charles Pugin had died in 1832. In 1835, the twenty-two-year-old A.W. Pugin rejected the Presbyterianism of his English mother and publicly became a Catholic, ‘a career-damaging move in protestant England’.8 Pugin’s contribution to the Palace of Westminster was for some years not publicised. The young designer’s lively pencil had helped Charles Barry to win the commission to rebuild the Palace, and almost every detail that met the eye in the fabric of Barry’s building, put up between 1836 and 1868, was by Pugin, as were its decoration and furnishing, from the finials to the inkwells. It is thanks to Parliament’s decision and to Pugin’s success that British architects began seriously to use medieval rather than classical models for the construction of public buildings other than churches and schools.
The Church of England had in the 1820s begun to build city churches in what came to be called Commissioners’ Gothic. By this date the Church Commissioners were alive to the fact that Gothic rib vaulting allowed a large space to be roofed, and lit by large windows in the thin walls between the columns; slender pillars of iron could also be used. Thus, a large Gothic church could be built using less stone than a smaller classical one. The Commissioners’ appreciation of the economic advantage of building in Gothic was a side-effect of the serious scholarly attention given to Gothic buildings over three decades. The architect John Carter had drawn and measured the cathedrals and abbeys of England, the Society of Antiquaries publishing his albums of engravings from 1795 onwards. John Milner, a Catholic priest at Winchester, was the first to realise that the key to Gothic was not the decorativeness which had attracted eighteenth-century amateurs, but the engineering of the pointed arch. Milner used Carter as his architect for a chapel at Winchester. Milner also saw that the styles of Gothic churches had changed over time. Archaeology had shown the columns of classical temples evolving from simple Doric to fine Ionic to flowery Corinthian (the classical ‘orders’), while late Roman building in cement had been quite different. The stage-by-stage evolution of classical orders offered Milner a model, which itself seemed to imply an analogy to the growth and decay of living things. This organic analogy suggested a further correlation with the rise and fall of civilisations: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been followed by the fall of the thousand-year French monarchy. In 1811 Milner identified three stages in the historical evolution of Gothic, calling them First, Second and Third Pointed, of which the Second or Middle Pointed order, illustrated by the forms of York Minster of about 1300, was the apex of the pointed style.9
In 1819 the architect Thomas Rickman published his Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, with the practical aim of making churchmen ‘more capable of deciding the various designs for churches in imitation of the English styles’.10 Rickman, an enterprising Quaker, was to win a large number of these church commissions for himself. He took over Milner’s three ‘pointed orders’, but called them ‘English styles’: Early English, Decorated English, Perpendicular English. He added an introductory fourth period, before Early English, for the Romanesque of Durham Cathedral. This style he called Norman. Milner had seen the evolution of the pointed orders as exhibiting growth and decline. Mr Rickman’s ‘English’ titles proved more popular than Father Milner’s ordinal numbers. Northern European Romanticism was nationalist, and English patriotism had been stimulated by Napoleon. Rickman’s Attempt appeared in 1819, the same year as Ivanhoe, in which ‘Norman’ (Prince John) also gives way to ‘English’ (King Richard I, supported by Robin Hood). It was not until rather longer after the final defeat of Napoleonic France at Waterloo in 1815 that it was generally admitted that the first language of the kings of England from 1066 until 1413 had been French; that the patriotism of the rulers of Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet England had not been insular; or that Gothic architecture, though it had developed differently in the part of the kingdom known as Outre-Manche, had originated about 1140 in the Île de France. By 1841, however, scholarship had advanced enough for the readers of Pugin’s True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture to be reasonably informed about church architecture in the Middle Ages.
The aim of this study is to link, correct and supplement received accounts of various aspects of the Medieval Revival rather than to rehearse those accounts. Pugin’s achievements as an architect are not reviewed here; rather, one or two points are offered on his orientation and his reputation. Pugin did not begin as an architect and was both more and less than an architect. His gift was for design, which came to him as readily as fiction came to Dickens. He designed furniture, buildings and objects of many kinds in various media, including glass, clay, metal, cloth, paper, wood and stone.11 He also designed books, and wrote incisively. Except for architectural historians, Pugin’s contribution is not best conveyed by listing the quantities of furniture, churches and other buildings that he designed and made. This profusion came from his grasp of the fundamentals of design and his quickness of hand and eye, but also from the total conviction of his faith. The craftsman became an apostle of The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture.12 Pugin declared that good architecture is not an elegant arrangement of neo-classical appearances clothing a well-proportioned body but springs naturally from fitness to purpose and truth to materials. The functionalism which distinguishes modernist from Victorian architecture originated with A.W. Pugin. One of his ‘true principles’ was that an honest chair or table, door or house expresses the society which makes it. Pugin was the first to define principles which John Ruskin later elaborated with equal zeal and at far greater length. Pugin was also the first in his generation (as William Cobbett had been in his, and William Blake in his) to see the warping effects of much of England’s industrial prosperity upon the lives of her people, to attack it with passion and wit, and to offer a moral critique of architecture as expressing social ideals. This was the principle enunciated at Ruskin’s inaugural lecture in 1870 as Slade Professor of [Fine] Art: ‘the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues’.13 Pugin’s critique was shared, and expressed with differing emphases, by Thomas Carlyle and then by others, including Benjamin Disraeli, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and William Morris. Pugin also pioneered, without theorising it, the kind of working relationship between individual craft and design and high-volume workshop production for which Morris is admired. According to Clive Wainwright, ‘Pugin was setting new standards for craftsmen and reviving lost craft techniques twenty years before Morris and Co. was founded.’14
The leaders of the Medieval Revival came from very different backgrounds. Pugin was a designer who grew up in the workshop. Carlyle, the son of a stonemason, worked hard to establish himself as a writer. As a lay preacher, he commanded a national audience in the 1840s. By contrast, Ruskin had available to him the fortune his father had made as a sherry importer, and William Morris, his disciple, inherited capital his father had accumulated on the stock exchange. As wealthy Oxford undergraduates, Ruskin and Morris dreamed of becoming working men. As adults, they lectured and wrote advocating the ideal of the craftsman. Ruskin founded the medieval Guild of St George, and Morris tried to recreate a medieval workshop. A talented draughtsman and painter, Ruskin was primarily a writer, and Morris much more a writer than is now remembered. Yet in their copious publications, and in those of Carlyle, there is nowhere an acknowledgement of the fact that a master of design, who was also a master of craftsmen, had already achieved in many fields what they were to advocate, before they had begun to advocate it. ‘Morris, like his mentor Ruskin, never paid public tribute to his debt to Pugin.’15
This silence about Pugin on the part of the leading advocates of a return to medieval ideals was not professional jealousy but anti-Catholic prejudice. Pugin’s ardently avowed Catholicism meant that he received no public commissions; for his work at Westminster he was discreetly paid by Barry. Any explicit Catholicism was unacceptable to many in England in 1835, and not only to those of strongly Protestant upbringing such as Carlyle and Ruskin. It was against his own inclinations and in the teeth of opposition that the Duke of Wellington, an Anglo-Irish Prime Minister concerned for the future governability of Ireland – a part of the United Kingdom since 1800 – had in 1829 forced Catholic Emancipation through Parliament. His Catholic Relief Act, lifting most of the remaining civil disabilities imposed on British Catholics, was unpopular in the 1830s and became more unpopular in the ‘Hungry Forties’, during which 220,000 of the Queen’s Irish subjects crossed from the smaller to the larger of the British Isles.16 It was only after Pugin’s campaigning Catholicism faded from public memory that English architects who admired his ‘true principles’ began to imitate his churches. The Pugin exhibitions and publications of the 1990s said little about his Catholicism.
Pugin first announced his new convictions in 1836 in the first edition of Contrasts: or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste. Contrasts is the most entertaining and influential manifesto in the history of English art and architecture. The text is short, but each page-opening carries copper engravings satirically juxtaposing the worst in modern urban building – and social provision – with the best of their idealised medieval counterparts.
In the upper half of the engraving ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’ (see Plate 8), Pugin’s ‘MODERN POOR HOUSE’ is based upon Jeremy Bentham’s design for a ‘Panopticon’, his Greek name for a device in which all can be seen. This was Bentham’s ingenious idea for a rational and economical modern prison in which the pens for prisoners could be overseen by a single warder in a central turret. The lantern in the turret is so designed that the overseer can see without being seen, and absent himself for periods during which the prisoners will still feel that they are being watched. (Bentham’s design unconsciously parodies the rational idea of God as an all-seeing but invisible landlord favoured by Deists and Freemasons of the eighteenth century, when the divine was sometimes represented by a large Eye set high in the triangle of a classical pediment.) The entrance to the Poor House has a pediment, and the windowless octagon occupies a blank space cleared within a pleasantly bosky landscape; the parish church is remote and diminished. The surrounding panels show One of the Poor Men; the Master, with leg-irons, manacles and scourge; the Diet of gruel; the Convoy of the coffin, marked ‘For Dissection’, and a dissecting table superscribed with ‘A Variety of Subjects Always Available for Medical Students’; and ‘Discipline’, a mother about to be locked away from her children. These gaolers and dissectionists are precisely the unfeeling agents of social control caricatured in the early novels of Charles Dickens, who was, like Pugin, born in 1812.
The ‘Contrast’ below is an ‘ANTIENT POOR HOYSE’, an idealised monastic set-up which sits happily in a leafy and cultivated landscape. The Gothic buildings look natural in a wooded landscape, an organic analogy which appealed to Romantics north of the Alps, notably Ruskin.17 In this engraving, Pugin’s buildings are weirdly prophetic of some of the public schools erected later in the century. The left range of buildings is probably almshouses, for this imagined community is dedicated to that charitable care for the poor which is enjoined upon Christians: the hospitality of the hospital and the hospice, institutions which medieval Christianity developed to serve the community. The panels again show the Poor Man and the Master; the Ale, Cider, Bread, Meat and Cheese which formed the Diet of hospitable medieval England; the clergy burying their Brother; and a gentle fraternal kind of Discipline: Merry England as Merciful England.
To his revised edition in 1841, Pugin added further Contrasts, in which the letterpress is more explicit. Thus the ‘Catholic Town in 1440’ has a key identifying sixteen buildings, only one of which, ‘Guild hall’, is not ecclesiastical. Set in a rural landscape, a river flows outside a city wall bordered by trees, and church spires point heavenwards. In ‘THE SAME TOWN IN 1840’, the spires have largely been replaced by factory chimneys, and the riverside is dominated by a wall of rectangular factories and warehouses. The trees have gone. The key identifies a Lunatic Asylum, Iron Works and the chapels of several sects. Christian unity has been replaced by sectarianism and the madhouse. The Panopticon appears again, as The New Jail, situated on open ground previously available for public recreation, lying between the new Gas Works and the New Parsonage House and Pleasure Grounds. The parson’s gentlemanly family home, a neo-classical building, stands pleasantly, with its private garden, on top of the medieval graveyard and in front of the medieval church.
Contrasts is an original combination of several traditions: witty polemical cartoon, architectural satire and a polarised moral vision of a prophetic, revolutionary and Romantic kind. Early examples of the latter were Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), also illustrated with the author’s engravings. Pugin’s vision of English life during the Wars of the Roses is amusingly serene, and should be taken not literally but symbolically. His extreme caricature serves a satirical purpose. For Pugin, the increase of industrial production has come at a dire human and spiritual cost, visible in the greed, cruelty, social division and harshness of urban life. In setting the present against the best of the past, Contrasts uses the technique of the English neo-classical satirists Dryden, Pope and Johnson. But Pugin’s standard of a good society is taken from Catholic Christendom in late medieval England, not from the Rome of Augustus and Maecenas. To object that his Christendom is idealised is to mistake the genre; the English Augustans did not dwell on the fate of Cicero at the hands of Mark Antony or of Ovid under Augustus, nor upon the lot of women, slaves or gladiators.
In the same year as the second edition of Contrasts, Pugin published The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. These he states with his usual directness: ‘First, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; second, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.’ In 1843 he produced An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. The words ‘Pointed or Christian’ in the first title depart from family tradition. Between them, Pugin père et fils had published three titles on ‘Gothic’ architecture and furniture, illustrated with specimens or examples, which were also samples of what might be supplied by the Pugins. The son now called the architecture he professed not Gothic but Christian, and offered not examples but principles. Pointed architecture is Christian and classical architecture is pagan, a polemical simplification not derived from history. Nero had indeed martyred Christians, and classical temples were dedicated to the worship of pagan gods. Yet in the fourth century, when Christianity was first tolerated and then supported by the Emperor Constantine, the first public Christian assemblies were held in halls of a kind known as basilicas. A basilica, or ‘royal’ hall, had a double colonnade. Today the four Major Basilicas in Rome are rectangular: they are not pointed but they are Christian. Only from the mid-twelfth to the late fifteenth century was Gothic the style for building churches in parts of Western Europe. Church architecture in Italy had returned to classical models before the Reformation: Bramante levelled old St Peter’s to build the basilica which Michelangelo was to complete. The architecture of the Catholic Reformation is not Gothic, and in 1843 the Gothic churches of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, though originally Catholic, were in Protestant hands. Most Catholic churches in post-Reformation Britain were neo-classical.
Historically, therefore, as Catholic critics pointed out, the equation asserted by Pugin in ‘Pointed or Christian’ holds true only in Northern Europe and in the parts of the Mediterranean conquered by Normans or Franks, and only for four of the ten centuries of Catholic Christendom. Pugin’s fundamental interest, however, was not in the historically accurate but in the authentically sacred. His imperative was not that the old northern architecture should be archaeologically recreated, but that churches should again be built which not only glorified God but also enabled the fullest worship of God in the liturgy. His view of classical architecture as indelibly pagan owes less to European history than to family history. To the son of a French architect who had left Paris at the time of the Revolution, classical architecture radiated the chill of those eighteenth-century academicians and philosophes who regarded the Gothic as irrational superstition and the classical as human reason rightly expressed. The Temples of Reason erected by French Revolutionaries were classical in form, and they installed neo-classical statues of the goddess of Reason in the Gothic churches they desecrated. For Pugin, the Gothic was holy, the classical unholy. His passionate conviction that a real church required a rood-screen seemed fanatical to some English Catholics, including J.H. Newman. Nevertheless, for many English people to whom Pugin’s imperatives are quite foreign, the idea of a church is not easily dissociated from the forms of the Gothic.18
By a curious irony, the fire at Westminster in 1834 was the accidental result of a decision to modernise the government’s accounting system. The fire was lit by officers of Parliament in the stack of wooden tally sticks which had been used by the Exchequer ever since medieval times to record the transactions of expenditure, and which had accumulated in the cellars. The flues caught fire, and, although there was no human casualty, the effect on the fabric exceeded the worst that might have been hoped for by Guy Fawkes. The bonfire got rid of the tally sticks but also of pretty well everything else above ground, except for Westminster Hall and St Stephen’s Chapel. The Commons Select Committee, appointed in March 1835 to report on plans ‘for the permanent Accommodation of the Houses of Parliament’, decided in December that the new building must be in the ‘national’ style, specifying ‘Gothic or Elizabethan’. (These were stylistic alternatives, not two names for the same style.)
The Houses of Parliament, an illustrated volume by various hands, appeared in the year 2000, introduced by the then Director of the Institute of Historical Research at London University, David Cannadine. Professor Cannadine remarks that the ‘national’ style ‘was deemed, rather implausibly, to be Gothic (or Elizabethan)’ by the Commons Select Committee. It is true that Gothic had not been much used for buildings other than churches or colleges for a long time.19 But that Parliament should choose Gothic as the English style should not seem implausible to a historian. Parliament is a medieval institution, as Parliamentarians knew. Since the eighteenth century, children’s history books had told how England had been ruled by kings and queens for nine centuries, but also that in English law the monarch was obliged to consult Parliament and required Parliament’s consent. The same books pointed out that some kings had neglected this duty, and that sharp reminders of it had successfully been presented to a few of them, including King John, Edward II, Richard II, Charles I and James II.
Parliament chose also to rehouse itself on its old site, a place surrounded by Gothic buildings, standing reminders of the medieval origins of the English nation, Church and state. Amid the smoking ruins of 1834 stood Westminster Hall and St Stephen’s Chapel, and, close by, Westminster Abbey. Edward the Confessor had founded his minster to the west of the city, but governmental buildings had crept out towards it. Edward’s successors were crowned in the Abbey and many of them were, like him, buried there, including Henry VII, who, at the east end of the Abbey, had built a Lady Chapel in the richest Perpendicular style. This splendid model is across the road from the west end of the parliamentary precinct. The Abbey had been ‘finished’ by Christopher Wren, and Nicholas Hawksmoor had given its West Front Gothic towers; for to the neo-classic mind, a Gothic abbey should be regularly and completely Gothic. Westminster Hall, the scene of the deposition of Richard II and such trials as those of Thomas More and Charles I, had been built by William Rufus, son of the Conqueror, and rebuilt with great magnificence by Henry Yevele for King Richard II, who in Plate 9 is shown admiring the great roof. Perhaps the largest civic building in the Europe of its day, Westminster Hall still stands with Hugh Herland’s original hammerbeam roof. For part of the period of construction, the Clerk of the King’s Works was Geoffrey Chaucer, who in 1400 was buried in Westminster Abbey in what became Poets’ Corner.
Professor Cannadine describes the Royal Commission appointed to judge the competition as ‘essentially conservative’ and its members as ‘all of them patrician amateurs with interests in the Gothic and the picturesque’. Since the Select Committee had already determined upon ‘Gothic or Elizabethan’, an interest in Gothic architecture was a qualification in a Commissioner. The amateurs did well in awarding the prize to Barry, though his Palace is indeed both Gothic and picturesque. Internally, Barry’s building answered the requirements of his brief and of a site which contained two older structures.20 Externally, Barry’s river frontage has an 800-foot facade of notable symmetry. Perpendicular has few pointed arches. Pugin, sailing along the Thames, remarked to a friend: ‘All Grecian, Sir: Tudor details on a classic body.’21
But the Select Committee’s choice of ‘Gothic or Elizabethan’ had more to do with political theory than with architecture. This point has been overlooked because word-usage has changed. In 1835, ‘Gothic’ and ‘Elizabethan’ were not simply architectural terms. Today, ‘Gothic’ is an adjective which (except in popular culture) expects an architectural noun, as ‘Elizabethan’ does not. In 1835, the narrowing of ‘Gothic’ to its specialist meanings had hardly begun; the first recorded use of the word ‘medieval’ is dated 1817. In 1834, the wider sense of ‘Gothic’ was current, and, for Parliamentarians, the bearing of the word was not architectural but ideological. ‘Gothic’ had long been a standard term in accounts of English constitutional law, and current in political discourse.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the second of the senses of ‘Gothic’ as follows: ‘Formerly used in extended sense, now expressed by TEUTONIC or GERMANIC.’ The Dictionary’s first illustration of this sense is dated 1647 and taken from ‘N. BACON, Disc. Govt. Eng. I. xl. 96.’ Nathaniel Bacon was a Puritan MP who held office under Oliver and Richard Cromwell. The title of Bacon’s treatise is The Historical Discovery of the Uniformity of the Government of England from Edward III to Elizabeth. The Dictionary quotation is: ‘Nor can any Nation upon earth shew so much of the ancient Gothique Law as this island hath.’22 Bacon, a Parliament man, saw national history as rooted in ‘ancient Gothique Law’. Such Puritan and Parliamentary ideas were music to Whigs, but in the eighteenth century were also accepted by the Tory opposition, as is shown by two of the Dictionary’s further illustrative quotations: ‘1721 SWIFT Letter to Pope 10 Jan Wks. 1841 II.551/2 As to Parliaments, I adored the wisdom of that Gothic institution which made them annual. 1735–8 BOLINGBROKE On Parties 102 Maintaining the Freedom of our Gothick Institution of Government.’
Jonathan Swift had begun his career as secretary to Sir William Temple, but joined the Tory opposition when the Whigs failed to support the Church of England. Bolingbroke was the exponent of democratic Toryism. These quotations from the Dictionary show both sides of English Parliamentary politics appealing to ‘ancient Gothic law’. Swift adores annual Parliaments, and Bolingbroke sees the ‘Institution of Government’ as Gothic. The manner in which these political writers use the word implies that ‘Gothic’ had a self-evident value, rather in the way in which Western politicians now use the word ‘democratic’. Enough has been said to show that Parliament had long felt entitled to think of itself as historically a Gothic institution, in a sense of the word which has since become obsolete. For its architectural choice, then, Parliament had historical and constitutional reasons which had nothing to do with aesthetics, the picturesque or amateurism.
To step back a stage, the success of the Whigs in securing the succession of the German-speaking George I of Hanover in 1714, and in having ensured that the British monarch would be Protestant, was accompanied by a revival of the idea that the English constitution had originally been Germanic, northern and free, not Roman and absolutist, like that of Louis XIV. It was believed that in Anglo-Saxon times, under what Swift refers to as ‘that Gothic institution’, kings had ruled by the consent of regular meetings of the Witenagemot, or assembly of the wise. Later in the nineteenth century, William Stubbs published much historical evidence tending to substantiate this view of early English constitutional history. There is also literary evidence that early English kings used to consult. In his account of the conversion of Northumbria in 632, Bede has King Edwin say to the Roman missionary Paulinus that he would accept the new religion if this had the consent of his wise men, whom he then proceeds to consult.23 Likewise, the formula used by King Alfred in writing to the Bishop of Worcester shows a king deferring in exactly this way: ‘me thyncth betre, gif eow swa thyncth’ – ‘it seems to me better – if it also seems so to you’.24 The ‘Norman Yoke’ view of British history, at one time treated by academic historians as an English joke, is like all historical generalisations an interpretation of selected evidence: a legal construction. Its real origins, however, lie less in Germanic customary law than in the legal fiction, in Thomas Cromwell’s preamble to Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, that England had never accepted Roman jurisdiction.25
There is no evidence that the Saxon conquerors of Britain, for all their respect for law, were instinctive practitioners of village-green yeoman democracy of the kind we read of in medieval Iceland. Saxon war-leaders, before they settled down and became kings, made slaves of some of those they had conquered in battle. Also, the first written Old English laws, those of Ethelbert of Kent of 604, are already Christian. According to the popular version of (de-Romanised) Gothic-Germanic constitutionalism, the Francophone companions of William the Bastard were high-handed aristocrats and their kings autocrats, until they were checked by ‘English’ barons at Runnymede, as recorded in Magna Carta, 1215. Such national and racial designations can mislead, since if the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were originally of Germanic stock, so were the Danes, the Normans and indeed the Franks. The idea that the ‘Norman Yoke’ was thrown off by liberty-loving Englishmen, first elaborated in the period leading up to the Civil War, informed the Whig historiography of Macaulay’s History of England of 1849–55. As the Gothic theory was invoked by eighteenth-century Tories such as Swift and Bolingbroke, the theory became Parliamentary, not Whig.
In 1741, Richard, Viscount Cobham, a prominent Whig, had erected in the gardens of his house at Stowe a ‘Temple of Liberty’. Cobham had this remarkable building designed for him by James Gibbs, a Scottish Catholic and a classical architect best known for his St Martin-in-the-Fields, on what is now Trafalgar Square. Cobham’s Temple was dedicated to Liberty, and had accordingly to be in the Gothic style. ‘Temple of Liberty’ plays on Cobham’s family name, Temple. It has statues of the Seven Saxon Worthies, and bears the motto ‘I am not a Roman’. ‘Roman’ alludes to the Church of Rome, the Roman empire, and to the continental empires of France and of Spain, whose Catholic monarchs ruled absolutely: without the due consultation of their free people such as had in the past been observed by Germanic kings such as Alfred of Wessex – and should in future be observed by the dynasty who had come to England from Hanover.26
Ivanhoe had opened with ‘the . . . free spirit of the Saxon constitution’, and propounded the ‘Norman Yoke’ view of social history, in words addressed by a fool, Wamba, son of Witless, to a thrall, Gurth, son of Beowolf. In 1843, Thomas Macaulay pronounced that the history of England was emphatically a history of progress.27 In the same year, Thomas Carlyle compared Gurth’s position favourably with that of a modern industrial worker in free and democratic England. The work in which he did so, Past and Present, uses the technique Pugin pioneered in Contrasts (1836, 1841). Two years later, similar contrasts between ideal medieval and modern industrial conditions were invoked by Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil, as we shall see in the next chapter.