Some of us who show people round Marble Hill House took a busman’s holiday this week and went to visit Pope’s Grotto.
Marble Hill House
Alexander Pope is important to the story of Marble Hill because he was a great friend of the first owner of the house, Henrietta Howard. Henrietta probably moved here partly because Pope owned house a little way further up the Thames just beyond Twickenham. He was very interested in gardening and his garden was, at the time, quite well known. Unfortunately for him, most of it was on the other side of the road from his house which had a lawn stretching down to the river but little space for the elaborate garden design he wanted. So, this being the 18th century and Pope being quite well off, he built a tunnel under the road to access the rest of the garden. The tunnel was built out from the cellars of the house and the whole underground work was decorated as a grotto, which expanded to have side passages and even an underground waterfall. It was probably the inspiration for the grotto that Henrietta had built at Marble Hill, but his was much larger and more elaborate.
Grotto at Marble Hill
Unfortunately, in the course of 300 years It deteriorated quite badly. His house was demolished and a new building constructed over the grotto. People I know who saw it when we first moved to Twickenham said it was little more than a gloomy cellar with some rocks stuck on the wall. Fortunately, if 18th century grottoes are your thing, over the last few years it has been opened up and substantially restored. Although it was originally decorated with bits of mirror and glass to make a sort of shiny pretty space, Pope later developed an interest in geology and decided to make the whole thing into a sort of mystical mine decorated with different kinds of stones and minerals. We have descriptions of it from the time allowing us to replace many of the rocks that have been lost. The effect is simultaneously gloomy (it’s quite dark down there) and rather pretty. You can definitely feel transported back to Georgian times.
More on grottoes
Coincidentally, Deborah Swift has just written about grotto’s in her newsletter. Here’s the LINK. They are very different to Pope’s and Henrietta’s!
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We’re still working the last of summer for all it’s worth. This week we went to Burghley to see the house started in 1555 by William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth. He was the most important politician in the country and built Burghley as his legacy, something that would be handed down through his family, a constant reminder of his power and influence. Not that he had much time to spend there as it is buried away near Peterborough, 90-odd miles from the court in London.
It worked out pretty much as he had planned.
Although the exterior would be recognisable to William Cecil, inside it has been substantially gutted and rebuilt. Only the splendid Tudor kitchens remain largely unchanged.
The rest of the house was remodelled by the 5th Earl of Exeter in the 17th century and then again by the 9th Earl in the 18th. The great long galleries were broken up into smaller (but still enormous) rooms, mainly, it seems, to provide extra wall space to display a ridiculous number of paintings. The family still lives in the house, which must at times feel like camping out in an art gallery.
The 9th Earl commissioned Capability Brown to landscape his grounds. Brown also made changes to the house, including demolishing an entire wing that was obstructing the view!
The design of the rooms features a lot of dark wood and vast paintings of wars and ancestors. Perhaps surprisingly for the English aristocracy, there is little overlap between the two. The Cecils were not a particularly martial family but were better known as collectors. Besides their paintings, they bought porcelain (especially from Japan) and fine furniture. (There are some wonderful marquetry cabinets.) The overall effect is rather overwhelming and surprisingly unphotogenic, hence the absence of photos on this blog. The design works by just being so very, very big. It’s too large to capture well in a picture. It’s also notable for a distinct absence of lightness of touch or humour. It’s about impressing you guests (there have been visits from Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II) not about welcoming them with tea and cake.
We were there for hours and I know of a lot more about Japanese porcelain than I did when we arrived. It’s arguably the finest Elizabethan House in England and well worth a visit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there.
The grounds are beautiful. There’s an ice house for regular readers of this blog who have seen photos of the others I’ve collected. It’s the first one I’ve visited outside West London, although there are examples all round the country.
There’s a sculpture garden too, which displays some interesting works. I was relieved to discover that the 21st century family have exactly the lightness of touch in their choice of sculptures that seems to have escaped previous generations of collectors. It’s not every sculpture collection that includes a mouse on a surfboard.
If you’re visiting, make sure you leave time to look round the nearby town of Stamford, which is lovely.
There has been a lot of talk lately about how people in Britain don’t know anything about the history of the British Empire. The ‘Empire Project’, people say, should be looked at afresh. The British should face up to the reality of the things that the country did in the past.
The problem is that it’s an uncomfortable thing to do. Partly because from a 21st century liberal perspective much of the Empire Project was morally objectionable, but also because it means questioning some of the same 21st century liberal thinking about heroes of the liberation struggle.
My book, Cawnpore, was first published in 2011, long before the recent resurgence of interest in Empire. It’s set in 1857 and we are immediately mired in controversy.
I refer to the events of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny because my ‘Empire’ stories are written in the first person and that’s what people called the fighting in India then. (For the same reason, I write about Cawnpore rather than call it by its modern name of Kanpur.) Indians tend to refer to the same conflict as the First Indian War of Independence. The Indian name is slightly more accurate but both are misleading. It was definitely not a mutiny, but nor was it a war of Indians vs Europeans. In today’s terminology, it was probably best described as an insurgency.
If there is controversy about the name of the place the book is set and what to call the events at the heart of the story, that’s nothing to the differences in the way that the people in the story are viewed. (Except for my fictional narrator, almost everybody in the book is a real person.)
The story of Cawnpore, whoever tells it, is a tragedy. British forces, surrendering after a long siege, were massacred. The Indian commanders attempted to save many of the women and children who had been trapped in the siege. Later, though, all the women and children were massacred in their turn.
It was, by any standards, utterly appalling. It was used by the British to justify reprisals all across India, with the mass murder of men, most of whom were nowhere near Cawnpore and many of whom were not involved in any rebellion.
The Memorial Well on the site of the massacre, photographed in 1860
Both Indians and Europeans have much to be ashamed off. Yet until late in the 20th century, Cawnpore was taught in British history books as a story of native savagery. There was little discussion of why British troops were in India in the first place and nothing about the horrific reprisals against civilians. Now the pendulum has swung. The memorial on the site of the massacre has been removed and the park where it was has been renamed after the man responsible for the killings, Nana Sahib. He has been hailed as a hero of the liberation struggle. His image has even appeared on postage stamps.
The trouble with discussions of the rights and (multiple) wrongs of the Empire Project is that the issues are seldom as ethically clear-cut as modern commentators would like and the details of particular events have often been lost or lack context. In many ways, works of fiction can raise these issues more easily than history books. In my case, Cawnpore describes the events of 1857 as seen by a European who was there but who was horrified by the actions of both sides. The reader sees things as my fictional narrator saw them and then has to draw their own conclusions as to where their sympathies lie.
On my blog last week, I mentioned my vampire policeman, Chief Inspector Pole. Most of you know me (if you know me at all) as a writer of historical fiction, but I also write Urban Fantasy. My Galbraith & Pole stories feature a vampire who works for the Metropolitan police.
As you will have realised, Chief Inspector Pole is not you average vampire. For this series, I tried to come up with a more 21st century take on vampires.
The ultimate vampire, of course, is Dracula and the classic book about him is Bram Stoker’s novel. But if you want to write about vampires nowadays, you need to take a long, hard look at the myth. Can vampires really turn themselves into wolves or bats? Do the laws of physics not apply, so they throw no reflections and cannot be photographed? The vampires of the 19th century were truly supernatural beings, but nowadays there is so much that is almost magical about science that it seems better to make our vampires something that can at least partly be explained rationally.
My vampires like to fit in unnoticed around humans. They do, it’s true, avoid daylight – but many people nowadays live much of their lives in the dark With the aid of sunglasses and high factor sunscreen, vampires can get by. Many of them don’t like garlic, but who can blame them? Garlic certainly won’t kill them. Neither will most things, though a stake through the heart really is fatal – but so is a bullet.
My vampires like to hang out round Brompton Cemetery with its baroque sepulchres. Some even live there, but most prefer the comfort of regular houses. With money carefully invested over centuries, many can afford apartments in the nicer parts of Chelsea.
Brompton Cemetery
The whole ‘drinking blood’ thing can be problematic, but as illegal highs go, blood is quite easy to get hold of and it isn’t as if they don’t enjoy a good meal or a fine Scotch. They enjoy a lot of the finer things in life: if you have hundreds of years to develop your taste, you can become quite a connoisseur.
There are murderous vampires, of course, just as there are murderous humans. Given that Something Wicked is a twist on the police procedural genre, there has to be a murderous vampire or there wouldn’t be a story. But there are vampire policemen too, tidying up after the renegades.
If vampires were living among us, you’d think that somebody would have noticed something odd. And people do. But the government colludes with the vampires to cover things up. It’s convenient for governments to be owed favours by immortal beings who have been forced to learn how to move silently and undetected through the night and who can, when necessary, kill before vanishing away without trace.
What would happen if one of these vampires met a down-to-earth human policeman who was less than happy to keep their secret? How does a policeman solve a case when the chief suspect is a creature that no-one can know exists?
Pole and his human colleague, Galbraith, have three adventures so far. They’ve tracked down murderous vampires in Brompton Cemetery, hunted a werewolf in Westminster, and even ventured out into the wilds of mid-Wales (well outside their comfort zone) when something strange is going on on the hillsides.
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then ‘Something Wicked’ is definitely for you.
It got so hot in London that we have headed off to the hills and are spending a few days in mid-Wales. I’ve posted photos before, but they never really catch it, so I took a couple of short videos and tried to put them on TikTok. I’m not sure they are an improvement to be honest and on the WiFi available here they are painfully slow to upload. Still, the first one is available at Tom Williams (@tomwilliams4777) | TikTok so let me know what you make of it. EDIT: I’ve got the second one up too: https://www.tiktok.com/@tomwilliams4777/video/7398266204302986529
It’s the part of the country that features in Monsters in the Mist so if you want to know what it’s like you could do worse than read that. It’s very different from my historical novels, featuring vampires, secret underground lairs and lots of descriptions of wet days in Wales. It’s the third of my Galbraith & Pole Urban Fantasy series, though you don’t have to have read the first two to enjoy it. It’s just £3.99 on Kindle.
Anyway, that’s what I’m doing right now. I hope you are enjoying our brief, belated summer.
