Copyright (c) 2013 Mathew Jenkins
The half century which is covered by our period, including the reigns of the later Starts and of William of Orange, is remarkable in architecture for the sudden expansion after the check given by the disturbances of the Civil War and the insecurity of the Commonwealth. The genius of Inigo Jones did not get free play, and he left few domestic buildings on his death in 1651. His pupil and successor, John Webb, carried on Inigo Jones's traditions of house building and decoration with a difference, and his period entirely came to an end a decade after the Restoration on his retirement, when Wren was chosen to succeed Denim in the Royal Surveyor ship. The Italian character of Inigo Jones's style suffered some change in Webb's hands; Wren had no Italian training, and it was the influence of Holland that became paramount in England from 1660. Charles II., during the greater part of his exile, lived there; and many English Royalists spent years there, or, like John Evelyn, made wit was in effect a grand tour, in which Holland was treated as an educational as Northern Italy.
Holland's commerce between the years 1651 and 1672 seems to have reached its greatest height. The Dutch had in their hands almost the entire carrying trade of Europe; they were first in the field in trade with the East, and it is been estimated tit during the seventeenth century the foreign trade and navigation of Holland was greater of all Europe besides. The influence of a people with such a pronounced instinct for domestic luxury, spreading even among the lower middle classes, is not surprising. The interest felt by the exiles and travelers in Holland was disseminated by a number of travel books published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, in which the magnificence of the town ill of Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis, and the House-in-the-Wood, was recounted at full length. For instance, in Sir William Lower's journal of the Voyage of Charles II. in Holland in 1660, there is a detailed description of the dining-room of " Prince Maurice his house."
"There is more than one door that gives entrance into the dining-chamber which makes one of the fairest pieces of the whole building; and in entering through the middle door, which is over against the great stairs, one of the fairest and costliest in all Europe, because it is double, most large, and all built of a most rare Indian wood, one discovers it fully, so that we see at one end the same time the cross-barred windows . . . the two chimneys of both sides, and in the midst above an overture which makes a roundel like the foot of a lamp, shut with glass, and environed with a gallery, or with a baluster, which makes the tower of the lover or open roof. From the centre of the lover descended low a Royal Crown, very gallantly made, in the midst of four lustres or Chrystal Candlesticks. The hall was furnished with ordinary Tapestry, which is of crimson damask." "There is not any state in Europe where the people are so rich as Holland," writes a later admirer. Owen Feltham speaks admiringly of the costliness of their interior decorations, "not only in hangings and ornaments, but in pictures which are found even in poorer houses." Their skilled artisans were ready to emigrate at the decline of this prosperity after 1672, and Dutch carvers and merchants figure constantly in con­temporary accounts and diaries, such as that of John Hervey, Earl of Bristol. One Dutch architect, Captain William Wynne (or Winde) practised in England; and the English architects formed a style on Dutch models which was already established before the advent of Wren, with whom it is generally associated. The English, if not inventive, were always quick to adapt, and by the close of the century we had little to learn from the Continent in architecture or the decorative arts. Shared Charles's tastes for building and planting, and his additions to Hampton Court were doubtless a model for the decoration of many of the houses of the courtiers and nobility. In this reign a fuller French influence makes itself apparent, and there was an infinitely stronger bond of social intercourse between the French and English people than ever has existed since the French Revolution.
French craftsmen were not wanting after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and to this French Huguenot immigration is due the presence in England of Daniel Marot, who styled himself "architecte des appartements de sa majeste Britannique " in his pattern book published in 1712. France, under Louis XIV., or at any rate during the earlier and more prosperous portion of this long reign, was the centre of immense activity in architecture and the arts; and even after this prosperity had abated, French influent, continued to affect Germany, Italy, Holland and England, more or less irresistibly, until the late eighteenth century.
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