The breakfast room at Marble Hill House features a table set for morning tea.
The house was built for Henrietta Howard, who moved into it in 1734 when she left the court of King George II. The breakfast room, east facing to get the morning light, is the room where she would have taken the first meal of the day. At the time, breakfast would have been a very light meal — probably just bread and butter taken with tea. The room would not just have been used for breakfast. It’s where she would have entertained morning callers — mainly women friends who would have been entertained informally over a cup of tea.
Taking tea was a useful social ritual. In a world where men dominated, the tea table was the realm of the woman of the house. Although both sexes drank tea, men often drank coffee, usually in coffee houses where no decent woman would be seen. The tea party was therefore a predominantly female preoccupation and whether guests were male or female, it would be the woman of the house who poured the tea.
Tea, all of it imported from China, was a valuable commodity and it would be kept in a locked tea box with the mistress of the house holding the key. A servant would bring in a kettle of boiled water which would be placed on a stand with a small spirit burner or a live coal underneath to keep it hot. The hostess would then unlock her tea box, place a little tea in the pot and add hot water. You can see the pot in the centre of the table. Note that it is very small.
The tea would be poured into the cups. Henrietta’s are Chinese and have no handles, which was the fashion for tea cups at the time. (Coffee cups had handles.) Tea was almost invariably taken with milk and sugar and a milk jug and a sugar bowl are shown on the table. The sugar will have been chipped off a sugar loaf and would have looked like rather irregularly shaped sugar cubes. People generally liked their tea quite sweet and lumps of sugar would have been added using the sugar tongs, unfortunately hidden away behind the chinaware in this photograph. (Some people were uncomfortable with the idea that all their sugar was the product of slave plantations in the West Indies and a few, like Mary Shelley, refused sugar on principle.)
Once the tea was drunk, the dregs would be emptied into the slops bowl on the table and the pot would be topped up. With good quality tea, more tea would not need to be added immediately but you could get a second ‘wash’ from the leaves remaining in the pot. (Traditionally, with china tea, the first ‘wash’ should be discarded, though English tea drinkers do not tend to do this.) Dr Johnson, who was a great tea drinker, was known to drink twenty or more cups in a session, driving one poor hostess to suggest he might prefer to take his tea in a bowl.
Henrietta had been a leading lady in the court and, even after she had left, she would have been very conscious of maintaining high social standards at home. She was also a very enthusiastic collector of chinaware that had actually been shipped over from China. Chinese stuff was very fashionable and she had a lot of it. (She even had an extension built to house her China collection — now gone, like the collection it held.) The porcelain on the table is Chinese. It wasn’t until 1710 that at Meissen, near Dresden, Europeans managed to produce an equivalent quality of porcelain. Meissen chinaware was still an expensive import. In Dr Johnson’s house, you can see a similar tea set of Meissen porcelain (below).
This is not quite as old as the set at Marble Hill and it is much more European in style. The cups are larger and have handles. The teapot has a shape much like today. The same elements are there though: the sugar bowl, the tongs, the slops bowl.
Both include a porcelain tea caddy (called a tea canister at the time). These containers were the way that tea was stored in China and the design followed the tea to England before being replaced by the wooden lockable tea boxes in the course of the 18th century. At Marble Hill, we tell people that the tea was probably kept in a locked box and the china tea cylinder is essentially decorative, but the fact that the later Meissen set includes a tea cylinder suggests that tea was still served from such containers well into the 18 century.
Gradually tea became more affordable. By 1742, Scotland’s senior legal officer, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, complained that “the meanest families, even the labouring people in Scotland, made their morning meal of tea to the disuse of ale”. By 1784, Pitt’s Commutation Act effectively reduced the tax on tea from 119% to 12%, setting tea on its way to becoming the national drink of Britain. Locked tea chests were no longer necessary.
Tea caddies in our kitchen and not a locked box in sight
One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is the details of language that turn up. Guessing the dates that words or phrases were in use is tricky. I recommend that historical writers get a copy of the Complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives the earliest recorded use of words in their context. It was very useful when an editor objected to ‘garbage’ in the late 18th century because it seemed too modern. I was referring to bodies after the Battle of the Nile floating ‘like garbage’ in the Mediterranean (in Burke and the Bedouin). I had just thought it sounded right, but I had to check. It turns out that the word was originally used of offal and waste thrown out by butchers, so garbage was exactly the correct word – though it was mainly a happy guess.
This comes to mind because I was recently writing about the early 19th century and I referred to soldiers’ gear, which a reader said they thought was too modern. I had the feeling I had heard of ‘gear’ being used right back to knights in armour and it turns out I was right. The OED gives me ‘On ich wulle mid mine gære’ from 1305 when it often referred to ‘warlike accoutrements’. I thought the modern equivalent would be ‘kit’ but here I was mistaken in the other direction. The word was recorded, again in a military context, as early as 1785: ‘The kit is likewise the whole of a soldier’s necessaries, the contents of his knapsack.’
Napoleonic re-enactor with his kit
Phrases bring problems too and the OED won’t help here. I remember reading that an author had been criticised for referring to people in the early 20th century as ‘hanging out’ with each other, but research revealed that this was definitely a term used at the time.
EDIT: And just a few days after writing this, I have come across this from a vicar in 1858 (thanks to Eva Chatterji’s excellent blog): “Felt very Mondayish today; so I took a holiday, and went to some pony races…”
It’s because of things like this that the simplest paragraph in a historical novel can lead to ridiculous amounts of research. I’m not sure that readers really appreciate it, but if you don’t like checking that sort of thing, then writing historical novels is probably not for you.
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.
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.
I’ve blogged in the past about Henrietta Howard and her home at Marble Hill in Twickenham, where she lived after leaving the court of King George II in 1734. Unkind courtiers at St James’s Palace suggested that she was abandoning the glittering centre of London society for a dull life in the countryside, which Twickenham then was. After she had been only a year at Marble Hill, though, Alexander Pope, the poet, was to write: ‘There is a greater court now at Marble Hill than at Kensington’.
Marble Hill House
Why did Henrietta choose to settle in Twickenham, and what was it about her life at Marble Hill that made such a centre of intellectual society?
She knew Twickenham because George spent much of the summer at Richmond. It had long royal associations (the Tudor palace there was particularly fine) and Kew Palace, where George III liked to spend time with his family, still stands in Kew Gardens. On the river between the court at Saint James’s in Kensington and Hampton Court Palace to the west, Twickenham, and what was known as the Arcadian Thames, was a fashionable place to live, with many fine houses along the river. Ham House (currently owned by the National Trust) is the best remaining example, but there were many others. Alexander Pope lived on the river, a mile or so to the west. It was not an especially fine house but he had a large garden that was much admired and, of course, his famous grotto.
Alexander Pope in his grotto (Contemporary sketch by William Kent)
Pope was a friend and (at least until she remarried) an admirer of Henrietta Howard and the fact that he lived in Twickenham was a consideration in her choosing the place as her home. And, as is the way of these things, Pope’s fame as a poet (it’s difficult nowadays to appreciate how well-regarded he was) meant that other literary types were attracted to the area and several of these became regular visitors to Marble Hill. Besides Pope, there was John Gay, the playwright, whose Threepenny Opera’s satirical swipes at the government had caused a scandal, Jonathan Swift, another satirist and the author of Gulliver’s Travels and, later, Horace Walpole, whose eccentric house at nearby Strawberry Hill was to start the English Gothic revival.
John Gay’s portrait in Marble Hill House
A close friend from Henrietta’s days at court, Kitty Hyde, the Duchess of Queensbury, lived just across the river at Hall Place in Petersham. (Horace Walpole, who found her irritating, remarked that at least they had the river between them.) The Duchess was an interesting woman, a great beauty and known as an eccentric even in an age of eccentrics. She was banished from court in 1728, over her championing of John Gay’s satirical works and responded: “The Duchess of Queensberry is surprised and well pleased that the King hath given her so agreeable a command as to stay from Court.”
All these people were part of Henrietta’s circle, but there were many more famous names living in Twickenham or nearby. Joshua Reynolds, the artist, (two of whose portraits now hang in Marble Hill House) lived on Richmond Hill with a view that stretched out across the Arcadian Thames towards Twickenham. Hogarth was nearby in Chiswick. (There’s a painting of his displayed at Marble Hill as well.) Horace Walpole (in 1755) produced a convenient list: “We shall be a celebrated as Baiae or Tivoli … we have very famous people: Clive and Pritchard, the actresses: Scott and Hudson, the painters: my lady Suffolk [Henrietta Howard]: Mr Hickey the impudent lawyer: Whitehead the poet: and Cambridge, the everything.”
Richard Cambridge (1717-1802) moved to Twickenham in 1751, taking a house just a few minutes walk along the river from Marble Hill. Cambridge is not remembered these days but was a well-regarded poet at the time and a man who seemed to know everybody. While Henrietta Howard entertained literary figures, Cambridge’s visitors included Lord North (Prime Minister to George III), Captain Cook (who called before his last voyage), Edward Gibbon (who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, who, it seems, were inseparable even in their dinner invitations.
Cambridge House
By the time Henrietta died in 1767, many of those who had been part of her circle at Marble Hill were dead. Walpole, much younger than her, was still very much alive. (His novel, The Castle of Otranto, arguably the first Gothic novel, was only published in 1764.) He visited her the day before her death, but Pope, Gay, and Swift were all gone.
Twickenham is now part of the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. The London centre of literary society and backbiting gossip has arguably moved to Islington. The authors and poets are less notable now, but Richmond is still home to actresses like Helen Baxendale, Amanda Holden, and Jane Horrocks. In the late twentieth century, it attracted a lot of musical stars (possibly because of the famous concert venue on Twickenham’s Eel Pie Island). Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend and Ronnie Wood all lived here. And, best of all, Richmond is still home to Sir David Attenborough.
If Henrietta Howard were to return to Marble Hill, she would not lack for company.
Just four weeks until Burke and the War of 1812 is published. You can already pre-order it here: Burke and the War of 1812.
I’m getting quite excited. We’re having a party and there will be various references to burning down the White House. I think that’s the only thing most Brits know about the War of 1812 and most don’t even know that. Mention ‘war’ and ‘1812’ in the same sentence and generally people think Tchaikovsky, and Napoleon invading Russia. In fact, the War of 1812 was fought between the United States and Canada (then part of the British Empire). A lot of military enthusiasts like to reenact the battles. I never had President Trump down as a historical reenactor, but apparently he is seriously considering restaging the 1812 conflict, so the book has a contemporary relevance that most of my novels set in Napoleonic times lack. I’m hoping people will notice it and that I may even see a significant uptick in sales in Canada. What the response of my American readers will be, I’m not at all sure.
Anyway, here’s the cover. I hope you like it.
In other news, it turns out that eight of my books are amongst those stolen by Meta to train their AI. I will probably be writing more about this once Burke and the War of 1812 is out and my mind moves on to other things. For now I will just say that Meta obviously has excellent taste and recommend that you read the books that they have stolen from me rather than wait for a robot to mix them in with lots of other stolen books and make something which I’m prejudiced enough to suggest won’t be that terribly good.
Here’s the list. Click on the links to be taken to Amazon to buy them:
It’s going to be a very short blog piece this week because I’m in the throes of getting Burke and the War of 1812 ready for publication. This is the eighth book in the James Burke series and I’m obviously getting better at the finishing touches because formatting it for paperback took much less time than I was expecting. I may may even be ahead of my planned publication date of 26 April. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking, though. I’ve only just got the final cover design and there’s always the danger that Amazon might object to it for one reason or another.
Some previous covers
I’d love to share the cover with you all, but apparently it’s normal to make a big deal out of the cover reveal, so I’m wondering if I should leave some time for the drum roll and general excitement. I’m not convinced that all this sort of publication build-up really helps that much for we independents. It’s different if you’re a big publisher and have to persuade retailers to stock your books, and work out what your print run is, and all that sort of thing, but that’s hardly likely to be a problem for me. Do you get excited about people talking about books you can’t buy yet? Or do you just want them to get on with publishing the things and not teasing you with promises? Let me know. Engaging with your audience is supposed to be an important part of marketing a new book but, although I’m here on my blog and on Twitter and Bluesky and Threads, engagement always seems pretty limited. Now the writing is done, I have lots of time to respond to anything people throw at me, so do feel free to ask me questions about writing, the War of 1812, or whatever. I’ll talk about tango, too, if you want.
I guess I ought to be thinking about what I’m going to write next – if I am going to write anything next. As with all my James Burke books, this one ends with a promise that ‘Burke will be back’ but I’m not entirely sure that he will be. I’m hoping that the excitement about Trump threatening to annex Canada might mean that the War of 1812 is suddenly fashionable and that this will be the book that finally breaks through and gets James Burke noticed outside the small circle (including you, dear reader) who have been following his adventures so far. If it doesn’t, I have to ask myself if I want to keep doing this. Learning to make sense of the War of 1812 came dangerously close to hard work and the book has taken me about a year to write. It’s reminded me how much easier it is to write contemporary fantasy and I know there are people who would like me to write more of the Galbraith & Pole books. Or I could just spend more time dancing (although not that much more time as we are already out two or three times most weeks and we’ll be dancing more once outdoor tango starts in the summer).
Anyway, if you want any more James Burke books, please buy this one and tell your friends to buy it too, and PLEASE post a review on Amazon. (If you’ve read any of the others and not yet reviewed – or reviewed them before I was publishing myself – please review them now.)
So that’s my life at the moment. We’re going to have a party on 26 April and someone is making a cake that looks like the White House and the icing will be singed much as the real thing was in 1814. We don’t get as far as 1814 in this book, but if there is another, I’m going to try to get the burning of the White House into that.
