I’ve been away from this blog for a while because there are so many more interesting things to do in summer than sit writing at my computer. I even got out of town for a few days to visit Norfolk – which, it turns out, is not nearly as flat as people say it is.
The main attraction of Norfolk for me was that it was Blickling Hall, the childhood home of Henrietta Howard. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Henrietta Howard because of the time I spend working in the house that she retired to – Marble Hill in Twickenham.
There is a portrait of her at Blickling, wearing a masquerade costume for a ball. It was painted around 1720, when she would have been in her early thirties and was at living at court.
Henrietta grew up at Blickling Hall which sits in open country about 15 miles north of Norwich. It was built in the early 17th century on the site of Anne Boleyn’s childhood home. It’s owned by the National Trust, who describe it as Jacobean, but Sir Henry Hobart, who had it built, wanted the architecture to preserve the historic links to the Tudor house, even as he demolished the old building. The result is a bit of a mish-mash of Tudor and Jacobean style, further confused by the architect’s enthusiasm for Flemish gables, which give a distinctive Dutch feel to the place.
Photo credit: By DeFacto – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43384700
Inside, it’s even harder to make sense of the architectural style, as successive owners have made major changes to it over the centuries. Henrietta’s brother, John Hobart, modernised it in the 1740s. Henrietta, who had always loved Blickling, gave him a lot of advice on the changes which saw the long gallery transformed into a library to house a collection of 10,000 books.
It’s an impressive room. Its 17th century ceiling has somehow survived to today.
I particularly like this panel, which apparently urges young women to consider the qualities of an older husband.
A few years later, after John Hobart’s death, there were more changes when his son (confusingly, also John Hobart) moved the main staircase and made another matching stair to produce the dramatic double staircase that now dominates the entrance hall. Henrietta was dying by the time he had the staircase made but she was in touch with him over other changes, which included having a new suite of rooms decorated with Chinese wallpaper.
Henrietta had put Chinese wallpaper in the dining room at Marble Hill House and we know that John talked to her about his own wallpaper as some of the sheets were marked with her name. Buying paper from China was not straightforward, although there were agents to help arrange it. All the papers were hand painted to order, so you had to provide details of the design you wanted and the exact size of the area to be papered.
The paper arrived in small sheets rather than rolls, so fitting it all together was quite an exercise and often mistakes meant it didn’t quite fit.
It seems likely that In this case, the sheets were bought at auction (hence Henrietta’s name with a lot number on them) rather than being painted to fit the space. It seems that the blue ‘sky’ at the top of the wall may well have been painted onto backing paper in England so as to meet the ceiling, with the mountains being cut out to fit against the new background. A closer examination than we were able to make is also supposed to show some painted figures added to cover errors where the seams don’t quite match.
The wallpaper here (which is original) looks very different from the hand painted Chinese wallpaper at Marble Hill, which is a modern reproduction using designs suggested by the Victoria & Albert Museum, based on sample they have from the period. The Marble Hill wallpaper was originally put up in the early 1750s – more than ten years before that at Blickling Hall.
The new suite John Hobart had made includes an elaborate state bedroom which is divided in two with a row of columns – a design which copies (on a grander scale) the way in which Henrietta designed her own bedroom at Marble Hill.
Blickling Hall was lived in as a private house until the Second World War (the last owner died in 1940) and there were many changes made to create a pleasant home in the 1930s, making the interior a jumble of architectural styles from Jacobean through Georgian into 20th century. The National Trust was bequeathed it in 1940 and let it to (presumably rich) tenants until 1960, when restoration started. The house and grounds are now open to the public.
The Mausoleum
There is a mausoleum on the estate, a fair walk from the house. It’s a pyramid, an impressive 45 feet (13.7 metres) high. It was built by Caroline, the first John Hobart’s daughter. Henrietta Howard’s father had died in debt and she had known poverty as a young woman. (Her husband basically beat her and stole her money.) It says a lot about her rise in society (and the sinecures she got for her brother while she was the king’s mistress) that her niece was able to raise the equivalent of £200,000 in today’s money to build this memorial to Henrietta’s brother.
