Queen's House (3 page)

Meanwhile in 1642 Goring joined the King's army. He had made a fortune in his royal service and was now prepared to spend it and his life for the King. He sent for his son to join the King's army, writing to his wife, ‘had I millions of crowns or scores of sons, the King and his cause should have them all'.
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Charles I repaid him by creating him Earl of Norwich on 28 November 1644. He was captured during the Civil War and imprisoned at Windsor Castle. On 10 November 1648 the House of Commons voted for his banishment, but on 6 March 1649 he was sentenced to death. However, he was reprieved by the influence of Speaker Lenthall, who interceded on his behalf.

In January 1649, while the new Earl of Norwich was imprisoned, facing trial and possibly death, his master Charles I had been condemned. On 30 January 1649 he took his last cold walk from St James's Palace to the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall. He wore extra warm clothing in case the people should think he shivered from fear not cold. As he climbed to the scaffold outside the first-floor window, did he glance up to the great Rubens ceiling he had commissioned? It would have brought him some consolation if he could have seen into
the future. When the great fire of 1698 destroyed the Palace of Whitehall, the Banqueting House and its Rubens was all that was saved.

After the execution of the King, Parliament ordered a commission to be appointed to arrange the sale of the King's property to pay his debts. The sale of his pictures, a total of 1,570, lasted from October 1649 to the middle of the 1650s. So one of the world's greatest art collections was scattered. The paintings were eventually dispersed among private buyers, and are now in museums in France, Spain, Austria and the USA, and elsewhere. Cromwell, however, kept some for the empty walls of Hampton Court Palace – among them, significantly, the pride of the collection, Mantegna's
Triumphs of Caesar.

The houses and land of Charles I were also sold, including the Mulberry Garden, which was still Crown property, and as such it was sold to Sir Anthony Deane, who in turn sold it to a Mr Chipp, who turned it into a place of entertainment. It was described in the Parliamentary survey of 1651, made when the King's estates were sold, as including ‘a bowling alley, a part planted with several sorts of fruit trees and another part planted with whitethorn in the manner of a wilderness or maze walk'. Throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1653–60, when other places of entertainment were closed, the Mulberry Garden behind its high red-brick wall remained open – and notorious. It was often referred to in Restoration plays: for instance, in his play
The Mulberry Garden,
Sir Charles Sedley's hero says, ‘These country ladies … take up their places in the Mulberry Garden as early as a citizen's wife at new play.'
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Sedley's granddaughter was to become the chatelaine of the house and gardens he made famous.

The diarist John Evelyn reported in his journal on 10 May 1654:

My Lady Gerrard treated us at Mulberry Gardens, now the only place of refreshment about the Town for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at: Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and closed Spring Gardens which until now had been the usual rendezvous for the Ladies and Gallants of this season.
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Throughout the Protectorate, and after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Mulberry Garden continued to flourish until it was finally
closed in 1675. During that time Mr Chipp created there a number of small booths, perfect for picnicking or courting. The diarist Samuel Pepys visited the garden in May 1668 and found it ‘a very silly place, worse than Spring Gardens, and but little company, and those of a rascally, whoring sort of people, only a wilderness that is somewhat pretty but rude'. The next year in April he took a party and enjoyed ‘a new dish called Spanish olio', which was specially prepared for them in one of the eating booths. This mixture of meat and vegetables was so tasty that he asked the cook to keep it ‘till night' when, after a walk, they returned ‘to supper upon what was left at noon … and we mighty merry'.
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The merriment cannot have been very agreeable to the tenants of Goring House on the other side of the high brick wall. Battered by the troops who occupied it during the defence of London in the Civil War, and its gardens wrecked by the fortifications dug around it, the property had been abandoned by the Earl of Norwich, who, on his release from prison after the execution of Charles I, had gone into exile with his young King. Nevertheless Hugh Audley, a major creditor of Norwich and owner of the freehold, had kept an eye on the property and seen the fabric of the house decay. He undertook some repairs and refurbishments and by the Restoration Goring House appears to have been rented out for social events. Pepys took his wife there in July 1660 to ‘a great wedding of Nan Hartlib to Mein Herr Roder, which was kept at Goring House with very great estate, cost and noble company'.
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Two years later, on 23 November 1662, Hugh Audley died, leaving, as Pepys recorded, ‘a very great estate', which included the freehold of much of the present Palace site, except the Mulberry Garden. The Ebury estate went to one of his great-nephews, Alexander Davies, and after him to his daughter. All that is now remembered of the powerful lawyer and his heiress Mary Davies are the London streets named after them. (Mary married Sir Thomas Grosvenor in October 1677, and between them they founded the great property empire now belonging to the Duke of Westminster.)

After the Restoration, Norwich had returned from Holland and tried to regain possession of Goring House. Failing in this, he begged Charles
II at least to recognize the hurried, and unsealed, grant of the Mulberry Garden that his late lamented father had agreed in 1640. The King was about to compromise and grant him a lease of the garden when Mr Chipp appeared on the scene with his title, which had been bought in good faith. It is possible that Charles II welcomed an excuse not to part with such a useful parcel of land. George Goring, 1st Earl of Norwich, died at Brentford in January 1663. His son, the 2nd Earl of Norwich, continued the legal battle but the King announced he would retain the freehold and compensate anyone who could prove a right to it. No one could. Mr Chipp continued to run his ‘entertainment' business, but now he paid rent to his landlord, the King. Charles II's decision to keep the freehold of the four-acre Mulberry Garden would later have important consequences.

On 29 March 1665, John Evelyn, then a civil servant, recorded in his diary, Went to Goring House, now Mr Secretary Bennett's, ill built … but the place capable of being made a pretty villa.'
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‘Mr Secretary Bennett' had leased Goring House after his first attempt to buy it had failed, owing to the early death of Alexander Davies in the plague epidemic of 1665. The new owner was the young Mary Davies. Her inheritance was in trust, so selling any part of it was difficult. Bennett was to build on the site of Goring House, not a villa but a palatial mansion.

The Earl of Arlington and Arlington House

When Charles II and his courtiers returned after the Restoration they brought with them French taste in architecture, furnishings and landscape gardening. Influenced by the French King Louis XIV's great gardener, André Le Nôtre, Charles II redesigned St James's Park. Now the occupants of Goring House could look out over the forecourt to a long, straight canal bordered by shady avenues. Here the King played the game ‘pall-mall' or wandered with his courtiers and yapping spaniels to inspect his aviaries in Birdcage Walk. St James's Park had ceased to
be a hunting ground, and it was now the stage on which that most visible of kings could play his own distinctive royal role.

The new owner of Goring House, Mr Secretary Bennet, at this time was one of the wealthiest and most influential men at the Court of Charles II. Henry Bennet, later made Baron with the title Lord Arlington, was educated at Westminster School and studied theology at Christ Church, Oxford, where perhaps he acquired the pompous manner for which he was later mocked. He fought with Charles I in the Civil War, and was wounded. Afterwards he always wore a black patch on his nose, perhaps as a reminder to the King of his loyal cavalier service. He escaped to the Continent and made himself a master of languages and foreign affairs. In 1657 he was knighted by the exiled Prince and the next year was sent by Prince Charles as ambassador and agent to Madrid, where he remained until after the Restoration. There he made many useful contacts who were only too ready to pay him handsomely for his services as a Spanish agent.

When Charles II returned to the throne, Bennet turned to politics, becoming MP for Callington in Cornwall in 1661; the following year he became Secretary of State and a close adviser to Charles II. In 1665 the King created him Lord Arlington. In the same year he married a rich Dutch wife, Isabella de Broderode, who was the granddaughter of the illegitimate son of Prince Henry Frederick of Orange.

His power grew, and with it came immense wealth. As his influence grew, so did the hatred of his enemies. The 2nd Duke of Buckingham called him an ‘arrant fop from head to toe'. But he was much more than that. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay summed him up:

he had some talent for conversation and some for transacting ordinary business of office. He had learned during a life passed in travel and negotiating, the art of accommodating his language and deportment to the society in which he found himself. His vivacity in the closet amused the King; his gravity in debates and conferences imposed on the public, and he had succeeded in attaching to himself, partly by services, partly by hopes a considerable number of personal retainers.
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According to the Comte de Gramont, Arlington assumed to perfection

the gravity and solemn mien of the Spaniards, a scar across the bridge of his nose, which he covered with a little lozenge shaped plaster, gave a secretive and mysterious air to his visage … he had an overwhelming anxiety to thrust himself forward which passed for industry … and an impenetrable stupidity which passed for the power to keep a secret.
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But in fact, as Macaulay judged, he had the art ‘of observing the King's temper and managing it beyond the men of his time'.

Through his influence with the King, Arlington had secured the lease of Goring House and in 1677 a ninety-nine-year lease of the Mulberry Garden, which he later closed. The ‘rascally whoring sort of place' was no fit neighbour for the King's Secretary of State.

In modern terms he was more than a millionaire but even so he was often in debt. His wife, Isabella, was as extravagant as her husband and soon filled Goring House with sumptuous furnishings, pictures and ornaments. Arlington's mansion was becoming a palace fit for the entertainment of a king, and grand enough to impress the great nobles and foreign ambassadors who came to consult him, and sometimes to pay him. ‘Ambassadors using so noble a House with so much freedom, gives cause to conclude that they paid dear for it,' wrote the anonymous author of a tract in 1671.

Pepys, then a civil servant in the Admiralty, came to report to the minister at Goring House on 12 July 1666. Apparently Arlington was ‘not up being not long since married, so after walking up and down the house, being the house I was once at at Hartlib's sister's wedding, and it is a very fine house and finely finished'.
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In 1667 Arlington acquired another vast mansion at Euston, near Newmarket, Suffolk, where he could entertain the King, his courtiers and mistresses during race meetings. On 23 June 1667 Pepys reported that a friend was ‘concerned by my Lord Arlington in the looking after some buildings that he is about in Norfolk, where my Lord is laying out a great deal of money …'
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It was here that the King was to bring his new French mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, for a mock marriage.

In his two houses, Euston and Goring House, Arlington is said to have employed 1,000 servants. According to Pepys, there was ‘nothing
almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom': an ambitious man had to accommodate himself to the times. Even the upright Evelyn watched with fascination the King's frolics at Euston and Goring House. Arlington was, Pepys observed, the confidant of the King's ‘pleasure and much in favour with one of the King's mistresses', Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine (later Duchess of Cleveland), the imperious beauty who dominated Charles II for many years. It was this close connection with both the King and his mistress that provided Arlington with his greatest political coup. On I August 1672 the King gave his natural son by the Countess of Castlemaine as husband to Arlington's only daughter and sole heir, Isabella. Isabella was only five years old at the time and her husband Henry Fitzroy, 1st Duke of Grafton, was nine, a rough, though handsome boy. Evelyn watched the marriage ceremony with concern and disapproval.

I was at the marriage of Lord Arlington's only daughter (a sweet child if ever there was any) to the Duke of Grafton, the King's natural son by the Duchess of Cleveland; the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating, the King and all the grandees being present. I had a favour given me by my Lady but took no great joy of the thing for many reasons.
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Seven years later, when Isabella had reached the age of consent, the marriage was confirmed. On 6 November 1679 Evelyn was

this evening at the remarriage of the Duchess of Grafton to the Duke … she being now twelve years old. The ceremony was performed in my Lord Chamberlain's (her father's) lodgings at Whitehall by the Bishop of Rochester, His Majesty being present. A sudden and unexpected thing (when everybody believed the first marriage would have come to nothing) … I was privately invited by my Lady her mother to be present. I confess I could give her little joy and so I plainly told her; but she said the King would have it so, and there was no going back: & this sweetest, hopefulest, most beautiful child, and most virtuous too, was sacrificed to a boy that had been rudely bred, without anything to encourage them but His Majesty's pleasure. I pray God the sweet child find it to her advantage who if my augury deceive me not will in a few years be such a paragon as were fit to make the wife of the greatest prince in Europe. I stayed supper where His Majesty sat between the Duchess of Cleveland (the incontinent mother of the Duke of Grafton) and the sweet Duchess the bride.
My love to Lord Arlington's family and the sweet child made me behold all this with regret. Though as the Duke of Grafton affects the sea, to which I find his father intends to use him, he may emerge a plain, useful, robust officer and were he polished, a tolerable person for he is exceeding handsome, by far surpassing any of the King's other natural issue.
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