English Cooking: Derbyshire Pt 2: Chatsworth House

You might recall Kylie telling you that the Legh family (later to become the Lords Newton, now extinct) of Lyme Park were granted their land because of heroism in cutting off the arms of Frenchmen in historically significant battles (Crecy was about as significant as Agincourt, but not as well known).

Not so the Dukes of Devonshire. In the 16th century, one of their ancestors had a spare £10,000 lying around (at a rough estimate, this is about £400 million today) and said, "Well, I could buy that house in France, but the title Earl of Devonshire is up for sale. I think that has a nice ring to it; what do you think, dear?"

This seems to have been the last imaginative spark in the family tree, as the first four Earls of Devonshire and the seven Dukes of Devonshire who followed them were all called William Cavendish. Either that, or the same man impersonated his own offspring for a long time.

In 1688, King James II was a rather unpopular fellow on account of not believing in the Book of Common Prayer or Parliament, so a bunch of nobles, including William Cavendish, the fourth Earl of Devonshire, invited his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William, to come and put together a little coup d'etat, er, I mean, Glorious Revolution.

This was, of course, technically treason, but it turns out that treason is only illegal when it doesn't work. In that case, you get hung until only moderately uncomfortable, cut down, castrated, disemboweled and cut in pieces - without anesthetic! Imagine the risk of gangrene! If the treason works, though, you get promoted from Earl of Devonshire to Duke of Devonshire, which presumably gets you a better quality cream on your Devonshire Tea.

All this while, the Earls and Dukes of Devonshire must have been rather confused. Not only do they not live in Devonshire, but rather a similar-sounding place called Derbyshire, when they get around to looking into it, it turns out that there is no such place as Devonshire, as any resident of Devon will tell you. It all makes you wonder if they originally bought the title from one of those online Colleges of Heraldry. One day an email popped up; "Congratulations! You have been referred to us as someone of specially noble countenance and, after a careful review of your CV, we can confirm that you qualify for the title of Earl of Devonshire. All you need to do to secure this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is to send £10,000 to the address below..."

Anyhow, apart from organised treason, what the Lords of Devonshire have spent most of their time on for four hundred years is their house, Chatsworth, and it shows. The place is huge, ornate and, well, huge. After the Glorious Coup, William was so grateful he promised to come and stay with the now-Dukes of Devonshire, so they had an enormous set of rooms constructed for him to stay in. Either the weather didn't suit, or there was a Catholic conspiracy to crush, or something, because he never came, and the rooms were not used until George V came to stay - in 1930.

It is mostly these state rooms that you tour through when you visit as a tourist, or 'bloody poor person' as they are known in the stately home trade. And really you couldn't take much more in; they are astonishing. For Australians, it is hard to get your head around the idea that this is someone's house. For starters, as I think I have already said, it is huge. Lyme Park, while no doubt a worthy Pemberley, is positively poky by comparison. And, while the Lords Newton donated Lyme Park to the National Trust a long time ago, consigning it to years of 'preservation in its original state,' ie. deterioration, Chatsworth is still owned by the Devonshire/Cavendish family and maintained by them. Think the biggest Australian art gallery you've ever seen, then a bit bigger and with better artworks.

We spent three hours in the gardens and two in the house; most of the house you don't get to see, just the state rooms. Walking around, you realise that it would be impossible for someone to construct something like this today. It takes four hundred years of building, buying and collecting to produce something of this sort. Each new Duke must have dreaded assuming the title; "Oh, blast, Dad added the North wing to the house; what am I going to do to top that?" It didn't stop them trying. Consider this:

You might look at this image and think, "Hmmm, nice house; I like the neo-classical lines in particular." You would be wrong, though; this is the stables. The Dukes are enormous patrons of the arts, and the gardens have a large collection of sculpture, including this rather impressive unit:

It just sits there, powered by the water flowing out the top, opening and shutting. It is about eight feet high, and is one of those pointless but beautiful things that make life interesting. There is also this slightly odd specimen:

The gardens are just full of amazing things. There is the Grand Cascade, clearly visible on Google Maps (the dark brown thing running east-west in the bottom right):

Also clearly visible on the satellite view is the replacement great conservatory, which we didn't actually see (yes, the garden is that big), which brings me to a rather nice story connected with the house. In the mid-19th century, one of the Dukes of Devonshire was terribly worried about how he was going to beat his father in the household renovation stakes. He looked out of his window in his London residence, Devonshire House, and noticed that the gardens next door had a certain flair to them. He sent one of his flunkies to find out who it was with all these great gardening ideas, and promptly head-hunted him; his name was Joseph Paxton. For a number of years, Paxton was given a blank cheque, to, "I dunno, build some nice stuff in my garden," and most of the more ambitious bits of the garden, ie. most of the garden, were designed by Paxton. Eventually this culminated in the great conservatory, which I haven't a photo of because it isn't there any more. Wiki has a photo of it. Just after this was finished, Queen Victoria dropped in for tea and took a turn about the garden. She asked who had built that rather fetching conservatory, and promptly head-hunted him. He went on the design the Crystal Palace, which also isn't there any more. For this effort he was knighted, and became a member of parliament. Not bad for a gardener. The conservatory was coal-heated, requiring 300 tons of coal a year to produce a tropical climate for growing, I dunno, flowers and stuff.

The first Duke had a more indoorsy bent, and was responsible for the state rooms. The first of these that you see is, surprisingly enough, the entrance hall. Once again, they found an artist and said, "Look, we kind of like the Sistine Chapel, but we don't want to be quite so grand with the subject. How about... I dunno, scenes from the life of Julius Caesar? Perhaps with a ceiling showing him being made a god or something. Let yourself go." Here's an attempt at showing the result:

It hasn't turned out terribly well (the ceiling is actually rectangular, as was the fashion then) but taking photographs of large murals painted on the ceiling is harder than it looks. This is only one of six scenes from the "life" of Caesar depicted, though somehow they didn't think to make his murder one of them. Perhaps it would be too depressing for the guests; the weather does that well enough already.

I walked into this entrance hall and though, "Wow! I've got to get photos of this; surely the best of the house." Terribly naive, I'm afraid. As you walk from room to room, you become rather numb. All of the state rooms have ceilings by the same artist. Sometimes they seem to be really digging for ideas; one Duke grabbed his interior designer and said, "Look, I don't like that door. Do something to it, like, I dunno, stick a violin on it or something."

Chandeliers are positively common-place:

Kylie gets credit for that photo. Stair-cases are there only partly as a way of getting from one level to another, but mostly as a place to put the works of art that didn't fit anywhere else:

This is one of five libraries in the house:

The formal dining room:

A slightly more successful panorama, though not entirely so. It was just too big to take with the lens I have on my camera. The portraits are, by the way, a selection by Anthony van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough. So there; where's your Gainsborough on the dining-room wall, then, eh?

It just goes on and on. In the end I felt a bit shell-shocked; it seems obscene that one family should have so much wealth. But then, if they didn't, we wouldn't have this fabulous collection of works of art or this beautiful house to put them in, would we? Of course, a large number of the art works were collected (ie. stolen from people who were too poor to matter) overseas (so they were foreigners, too, serves 'em right), and if they hadn't collected them, where would they be now? stuck in some moldy tomb or temple or museum or something.

For me, the best bit came at the end of the tour; one of the recent dukes, I forget which, thought neo-classical sculpture was nice and bought most of it: