I am a sucker for those time-line charts that bring unrelated events together. What were the Chinese, or the Mughuls, up to when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne? Were the Aztecs building pyramids at the same time as the Egyptians? (No).
The current brilliant exhibition of King Charles I’s collection at the Royal Academy made me realize how my own patrons, John Tradescant père et fils, witnessed, and were part of, the most thrilling moment in the history of English taste, when the Renaissance arrived in England.
There was nothing colourless about the Tudors; they revelled in bright colours. In gardens painted figures, posts and fences must have produced a sort of fairground feel, where today even in winter we scrabble around for any plant in flower or with coloured leaves; paint would somehow be an admission of failure.
But the Stuarts, when they came to the throne, brought richer, more saturated colours, style, lustre, elegance, brilliance, confidence and swagger to the court. Shakespeare wrote his greatest plays. Inigo Jones, designer of Royal masques, went to Florence to see how the Medicis did it. I find it hard to believe Shakespeare didn’t go to Italy too. Charles I invited Rubens to London. Van Dyck came and went and finally stayed. We have the landmarks of the Queen’s House at Greenwich and the Banqueting House. What do we have in the way of gardens?
Hatfield House is the obvious place to look, and Mollie, the late marchioness, managed to invoke their great gardener in her marvellous knots and parterres. I always think of Ham House in Richmond for the feel of the Stuart court, although in reality it was given its present rich patina after the Restoration – and by the National Trust. The truth is we don’t have a Tradescant garden design, but Trad père would surely have been more Tudor than Stuart, and Trad Junior more in the renaissance spirit.
