Ambassador, you are spoiling us!
The National Trust has embarked on a mammoth project to catalogue its furniture collections and is uncovering some fascinating stories about ambassadorial life along the way, says Wolf Burchard
ONE of the best remembered—and most parodied—tv commercials from the 1990s wanted us to believe that the high point of the most magnificent diplomatic receptions was the serving of Italian chocolates wrapped in golden tinfoil. Ironically, the advertisement, which attempted to convey a sense of luxury and glamour for a product available in every supermarket, unintentionally heralded the sobriety of today’s ambassadorial entertainment.
The days of lavishing taxpayers’ money on ostentatious parties are (mostly) over and, although our diplomatic etiquette, shaped over many centuries, seeks to avoid cultural clashes, ambassadorial functions remain a terrifying minefield: striking the appropriate tone has become rather difficult. Too austere a party will make you question the generosity of your host, but an overly excessive one would be considered distasteful.
‘In the past, being too much of a show-off was less of a concern to European envoys’
In the past, being too much of a show-off was less of a concern to European envoys. On the contrary, it was the duty of those representing their sovereign abroad to display the wealth and therefore power of their country—usually at their own personal expense. Although the British Foreign Office gave some financial support for entertainment and kitted them out with a throne and canopy, a pair of royal portraits and an allowance for silver (COUNTRY LIFE, July 12, 2017), most of the bill had to be picked up by the ambassadors themselves.
Numerous National Trust properties once belonged to ambassadors and are therefore filled with diplomatic souvenirs and furnishings acquired abroad. Of all ambassadorial gifts in these houses, a richly carved giltwood table and matching torchères by the Franco-dutch cabinet-maker Pierre Gole is one of the most distinctive (Fig 3). It is said to have been presented to the 6th Earl of Dorset of Knole, Kent, by none other than the Sun King, Louis XIV. Charles II had famously sent Lord Dorset to France, as both womanisers were seeking to win the favour of the attractive actress Nell Gwyn and the King wanted his competitor out of the way.
The Gole suite is an extremely rare survival of French Baroque furniture. Today’s visitor to Knole will find small microphones attached to its surfaces. These are recording low soundwaves, not audible to the human ear, caused by the movement of the wood, in order to understand how it reacts to the house’s newly installed heating system.
Two further ambassadors to France lived at Knole: the 3rd Duke of Dorset and the 1st Earl Whitworth, the former representing George III in the lead-up to the French Revolution and the latter in its aftermath. Both diplomats resided at the imposing Hôtel de Charost in Paris, which was eventually purchased, in 1814, by Wellington, who made it the first permanent residence of a British ambassador.
Whitworth’s embassy was particularly short-lived. While he was still in the process of fitting out the house with the most fashion-
able pieces of French furniture, the cooling of diplomatic relations between France and Britain forced him to return home suddenly. His latest acquisitions were hastily wrapped up by the professional packer and furniture maker Martin-eloi Lignereux, with the assistance of François Benois, who would later become George IV’S pastry chef and artistic adviser. Their packing lists tell us exactly which object travelled in which crate, on which boat, led by which captain—and many of these items can still be identified among the extraordinary collections at Knole.
How exactly the massive Chinese altar table (Fig 4) came to the house remains a mystery. More than 12ft long, the piece of furniture made of deep purplish red tieli wood is very likely to have been given to or purchased by William, 1st Earl Amherst, during his (failed) 1816 embassy to Yuanming-yuan (present day Beijing)—but how did it travel to Europe? It must have been transported in a huge crate, as no European cabinetmaker would ever have been able to dismantle and reassemble the traditional Chinese construction of the table.
Amherst—yet another ambassador to have retired at Knole—is said to have refused to prostrate himself in front of the Emperor of China, which led to the ruler’s refusal to grant him an audience. Amherst then embarked on a four-month tour across the Chinese provinces, before returning home. On the journey back, the lead ship, HMS
Alceste, sank, which means that the crate must have voyaged on the second ship, the HMS Lyra.
Tapestries were much more common diplomatic gifts. Not only was their high cost testimony to the generosity of the giver, but they could also be easily transported. The French Bourbon monarchs often presented foreign envoys with Gobelins tapestries and Savonnerie carpets, such as those at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. Blickling Hall in Norfolk displays a large tapestry
(Fig 1) depicting Peter the Great on horseback at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, a defining moment in the Great Northern War during which both Russians and Swedes sought supremacy over the Baltic Sea.
This exquisite survival of Russian tapestry weaving was probably given to John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, by Catherine the Great at the end of his embassy to St Petersburg in 1765. Upon his return, Buckinghamshire remodelled Blickling, creating new interiors to exhibit the presents and perquisites he had acquired in his diplomatic role. The tapestry became the centrepiece of a new drawing room containing the Coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte by Allan Ramsay, which Buckinghamshire had taken to Russia.
Blickling also houses the crimson state canopy for Buckinghamshire’s ambassadorial throne, which has since been converted into a magnificent four-poster bed (Fig 5). Such later transformations of royal canopies became fairly customary for retired diplomats. This was also true of the 3rd Duke of Dorset’s canopy, which still survives in its bed configuration at Knole and indeed of the 2nd Viscount Townshend’s canopy that had served him as Queen Anne’s ambassador extraordinary to The Hague.
Townshend’s canopy-turned-bed has recently been acquired and reconverted by Historic Royal Palaces and is about to be installed over Frederick, Prince of Wales’s throne at Kensington Palace.
Like her father, Buckinghamshire’s youngest daughter, Lady Emily, entertained close relations with Russia’s highest echelons. In 1818, Alexander I presented her with a malachite vase so large and weighty that the Russian ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Prince Khristofor Lieven, asked her