conscious of her innocence, had an inventory made which proved the accusation unfounded. Mr. Craggs went of himself to my Lord Oxford, now Lord Treasurer, to say that the Duchess's behaviour had been, to say the least of it, misrepresented. But his lordship replied there could be no mistake. Had not the Queen herself, in spite of her obesity and her gout, gone to view the apartment, and "been much displeased at the taking away of the brass locks, which she believed were mostly her own"? 1 It seemed that Blenheim would be spoiled for the sake of a few pieces of ironmongery her Majesty believed were peculiarly hers. But perhaps she saw that the affair was tending to the unbecomingly burlesque; that to vent the accumulated fury of years on this account, to erect brass locks to symbolic heights was absurd; in any case the matter was allowed to drop. "In the conclusion his lordship [Oxford] was so good as to say that he was sorry anything should happen to put the Queen out of humour, and the best way was to say no more of it, for he had prevailed with her Majesty to sign a warrant for twenty thousand pounds to go on with Blenheim." 2 This, however, was not until the 17th July, and though Lord Oxford said he would procure a further grant as soon as possible, Vanbrugh disposed warily of the money. "I acquainted the chief undertakers with what has passed at the Treasury; upon which encouragement they went on with the work, without insisting that all the money then issued should go to the discharge of the debt, which otherwise they would have done." 3 However, in the late summer he was given enough to finish off the work of the building season,4 and it looked as though all would be well. 2 Thomson, ii, Appendix. 3 Coxe, iii, pp. 409 seq. 4 Add. MSS. 9123, 10th Aug. 1711, and Journal to Stella, 19th Aug. 1711. I 1 Molloy, ii. But on the last day of the year the great Duke was ignominiously dismissed all his posts, and in the following spring the Queen ordered the work at Blenheim to cease. The Duke was about to shoulder the burden himself, and went so far as to ask Vanbrugh for an estimate of the year's work,' but he shortly afterwards went abroad: not, it has been suggested, without a hint from Oxford that he held certain papers relating to that old old story of the proposed attack upon Brest. A little later he was followed by his wife, who left Abigail Hill, now Lady Masham, to reign in her stead; and although the new favourite did so discreetly ("Som says the Queen has order'd her to live very privatly that she may not get the envy of the Peaple like the Duchess of Marlborough Lady Strafford commented) she was the more secure. It seemed as though all were over, that the great house would remain unfinished, to decay perhaps into oblivion, or be known as Queen Anne's Folly. The architect's vision of fame and place faded away with the great soldier's dream of a noble fireside by which he would spend the remainder of his days in company with his beloved wife. A glorious age seemed to be passing away, while the glamour of a family and the stones of a splendid edifice crumbled together into forgetfulness to the sound of malicious laughter. But if there was nothing to hope for the future of the man who had once swayed the destinies of Europe, for the Prince of the Empire, for the man to whom more than to any other the monarch owed her throne, the highest posts in two minor departments of the Crown were still within sight for the man who, in his own phrase, had begun life in the Bastille, and with whom nobody, not even the Duchess of Marlborough, could successfully quarrel. 1 Add. MSS. 19605, 15th June 1712. 2 Wentworth Papers, p. 285. 3 On the Sea of Events 1705-1714 IF, once Blenheim was begun, Vanbrugh was too busy to write plays, he had still to attend to his official duties. As Crown surveyor even a famous architect had to carry out the meanest works, and it surprised nobody that the creator of St. Paul's, not to mention of dozens of gems of architecture, should be haled before the Lords to explain why the scaffolding for the Sacheverell trial would not allow for each peer to have as many seats as usual.1 The Board of Works, no doubt, had plenty of humdrum tasks for Vanbrugh to do, such as that of erecting the waterworks in Kensington, which he did in what Leigh Hunt called his no nonsense' style, though such cannot have been congenial to one who loved to "hew jests and humours out of stone". And amid all his duties, with such time as he could snatch from his plaguy troubles at Woodstock, or official heraldic journeys to Hanover (which must have come as a blessed respite), he was building Castle Howard, finishing Whitton Hall, and restoring Kimbolton Castle. Nor was this all. For in 1706 he found himself, with a certain Williamson and his old enemy Gregory King, appointed commissioner to settle all King William's debts, military and civil.3 This can have been no mean labour, though it may have been some satisfaction to him if his application to 'ye Collonel' some years previously had been unfruitful. Yet in spite of this immense and varied activity, 1 Wentworth Papers, p. 110. 3 Luttrell, 10th June 1706. 2 Nichols. Vanbrugh had time to build for himself. Finding his domicile at Greenwich not central enough for so busy a man, he decided to construct a small, but snug, bachelor's pied-à-terre, upon a portion of that site of Whitehall left bare by the great fire of 1698. It was quite unpretentious, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, it proved an irresistible temptation to the wits. Swift, to whom Vanbrugh's versatility was an offence, diverted himself hugely with both it and the multifariousness of its builder. "Van", he wrote in 1706, Van, (for 'tis fit the reader know it) [He was determined not to let that pun be wasted.] To build in speculation still. "Great Jove!" he cried," the art restore To build by verse as heretofore, And make my muse the architect; What palaces we shall erect! Fit to invade, or prop, the skies" ... Jove consents to bestow this gift, and Vanbrugh, hoping the ruler of Olympus will not notice, steals a French farce which he proceeds to transcribe; and The building, as the poet writ Rose in proportion to his wit, each act producing a corresponding portion of the house, K even the epilogue having its usual, if impolite, counterpart in stone and mortar. At last all was finished, and, Poets from all quarters ran To see the house of brother Van : Look'd high and low, walk'd often round Brother Van did not at all care for those verses; he was beginning to have a sense of his own dignity. It was true that he had borrowed pretty freely from the French, and perhaps a very large palace would not correspond with his muse; but if the literary criticism was fair, was it altogether fitting to treat the architect of Castle Howard -not to mention the Clarenceux King of Arms—in quite so flippant a manner? Swift might be allowed to say these things, but the worst of it was that others of less wit, even the Duchess of Marlborough, used to tease him with those lines. It rankled; he quarrelled with the author, and even four years later when he met Dr. Swift at dinner, they were 'very civil and cold '.1 But this had not been the irrepressible satirist's only offence. In 1708, still unable to swallow the fact of Vanbrugh's architectural knowledge, and immensely tickled by the contrast of the builder of Blenheim being also the designer of the ridiculously tiny house by the Thames, he had written, Van's genius, without thought or lecture 1 Stella, 7th Nov. 1710. |