Garden history
Gardens for Gloriana
Jane Whitaker (Bloomsbury Academic, £20)
TODAY, WE WOULD call it sitespecific theatre. In 1578, the visiting queen—elizabeth I, Gloriana herself—was escorted to the grove at Wanstead Park, when ‘there came suddenly among the train one apparelled like an honest man’s wife’. The rustic lady knelt before the Queen and made a speech praising the monarch’s ‘gay apparel’, adorned as it was with ‘the natural beauty of flowers’. (A dress commemmorated in Marcus Gheeraerts’ celebrated fulllength study, known as The Wanstead Portrait.)
This entertainment was organised by the Earl of Leicester, who had received the monarch with aplomb three years previously at Kenilworth Castle, on a visit lasting three weeks. That occasion has received a great deal of attention recently, as a written account of it provided the basis for the ambitious restoration of the Kenilworth garden, completed in 2009. Yet the Wanstead performance, although perhaps not as lengthy or lavish, was certainly a more intimate, sophisticated and literary event; the ‘honest man’s wife’ was a character in Sir Philip Sidney’s first known work, a masque entitled The Lady of May.
It is well known that, over the course of her 45-year reign, the
Queen visited hundreds of houses on these seasonal progresses across her realm. What may be less appreciated is that the schedule began in spring and could continue into October. Such alfresco spectacles, laid on by presumably nervous hosts, were not uncommon, and are a major emphasis of this book. Although masques and pageants are not ‘gardens’ as such, they did take place in garden and landscape settings and clearly performed as vital an estate function as the deer herd or banqueting house.
The author adds much gratifying detail on this theme. The importance of both the ‘greeting’ and the ‘farewell’ is described, with stock characters such as a ‘wilde man cladde in Ivie’ suddenly appearing out of the bushes to acclaim the
Queen. At Cowdray Park, the ‘wilde man’ linked the Queen’s attributes with those of a particular ancient oak tree.
Often, there was some ulterior, yet deliberately obvious, motive lying behind an entertainment. At Bisham in 1592, Lady Russell cast her own two teenage daughters as ‘chast nymphs’ suffering the attentions of an amorous Pan. The author speculates that this marked ‘the first occasion on which English noblewomen took speaking roles in a quasi-dramatic performance’. The widowed Lady Russell was trying to obtain positions at Court for her daughters, neither of whom had dowries. (The ploy worked—they both became maids-of-honour and one married an earl.)
Lady Russell herself even played a starring role in this entertainment, casting herself as the goddess Ceres and appearing in state on a harvest cart surrounded by nymphs, complete with ‘a crown of wheat-ears with a jewell’. This intermixing of native English themes with Classical myth was typical of such presentations.
It is salutary to learn that Elizabeth I, as is Elizabeth II today, was accustomed to bearing up in difficult conditions, aware of all the trouble being taken around her visit. At Elvetham in September 1591, she stoically endured a lengthy ‘farewell’ in ‘a most extreame rain, and yet it pleased hir Majesty to behold and hear the whole action’.
This book can make few claims to be a ground-breaking study, but represents instead an entertaining and discriminating synthesis of existing work on the gardens of the period.
Much of it could be described as a gazetteer of Elizabethan garden features—fountains, knot gardens and so forth—with useful extra detail on overlooked elements, such as temporary banqueting houses made of branches and ivy.
Frequent and judicious quotation, generally from lesserknown sources, brings the book to life. Hence one Barnabe Barnes’s sonnet of 1693, punning on ‘daisies’ and ‘dazes’: ‘And knottes whose borders set with double dazes,/doubles my dazed muse with endless doubt.’ Tim Richardson