ARCADIA EB

Adam Nicolson

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780007240531
• eBook ISBN: 9780007372676
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

This ebook does not include illustrations.

A fascinating depiction from award-winning author, Adam Nicolson, of a family and a country on the hinge of modernisation.

Was our country once a better place? Has modernisation destroyed as much as it has improved? And can we see in an earlier Britain a way of living, an Arcadia, which now seems both ideal and remote?

Through 16th- and 17th-century England, the changes of an approaching modernity accelerated. With the growing power of the state, the disruption of the traditional bonds of society, the breaking of communities and the marginalisation of the great families who had once balanced the power of the crown, the new mercantile, individualist world increasingly clashed with the communal and chivalric ideals of the old.

To tell this story from the 1520s to the 1640s, Adam Nicolson takes a single great family, the Earls of Pembroke, their wives, children, estates, tenants and allies, and follows their high and glamorous trajectory across three generations of change, nostalgia, ambition, resistance and war.

'Arcadia' is a rich and detailed evocation of England on the hinge of medieval and modern, and in this wide-ranging book Adam Nicolson explores a world in transition, moving from the intrigues, alliances and vendettas of the court to the intricate, everyday business of rural communities managing their affairs in times of stress. It was an England caught up in its first taste of modernity, yet divided over how to react to it, split between the old and the new, the moment at which the world we have lost turned into the world it has now become.

1
The Dream of Perfection

Arcadianism in Renaissance England 1520–1650

ENGLAND IN the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dreamed of a lost world, an ideal and unapproachable realm of bliss and beauty. That realm had a name – Arcadia – and this book addresses the Arcadian ideal in three connected dimensions: across a long century – the arc of the English Renaissance from its birth in the 1520s to its death in the 1640s; through a family – the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, who were in the grip of that ideal over three generations, and whose standing, influence, wealth and appetite for beauty set them at the heart of English culture; and in a place – the great Pembroke estates at Wilton, spreading over 50,000 acres of the Wiltshire downs, a great house, its garden, many manors, villages, parks and hunting grounds in which something of the theatre of Arcadia could be played out. It is the story of a forgotten idealism flowering and then collapsing into the pain and brutality of civil war on the banks of a trout-filled Wiltshire chalkstream.

Looked at in a critical light, the world of the Pembrokes was one which none of us could tolerate now: it put the claims of social order far above any individual rights; it considered privacy, except for the highly privileged, a form of subversion; it was profoundly hierarchical and did not consider either people or the sexes equal; it tolerated vast excess and devastating poverty; it distrusted the idea of the market and would have loathed any suggestion, if anyone had made it, that market forces would somehow create social goods; it thought the poor worthy of pity if they remained within bounds and of punishment should they stray outside them; it distrusted the crown, not because the crown would erode individual freedoms but because it was intent on destroying older aristocratic privileges.

Anti-change, anti-state, anti-market, anti-equality and anti-individual: this first English Arcadia, in other words, set its face against the forces of modernity. It was driven by a hunger for the past and a fear of the future. If the last four hundred years have been shaped by a growth in government, the elevation of individual rights, the erosion of community, the dominance of the market and the destructive exploitation of nature, Arcadianism, the Pembrokes and the world of their estates said no to all of them.

The virtues this Arcadia cherished were the mirror image of all that: an overriding belief in the power and understanding of local community; a trust in the past and its customs; a love of nature not as a commodity to exploit but as a place in which to find rest and comfort; an independence from the power of central government; and a rejection of commercial values, relying instead on the mutuality of communal relationships. It was an organic ideal, a belief not in mutual exploitation but in the balance of different parts of society. To some extent, ever since, these have been the values of the counter-culture, an underlying thread of idealism which has run throughout the history of the modern world.

This form of Renaissance Arcadianism was the fusion of two streams which had been separate in the Middle Ages. They came together for the century this book describes, and diverged again afterwards. The period was a unique moment in English culture, a coming together of high classical ideals with a sense of the good society that was deeply rooted in England’s medieval experience.

The old English stream was one of the lingering afterglows of feudalism. The country, in this view, was less a state than a gathering of individual communities or manors. Within each manor, the lord held sway not as a tyrant but as a father. The wellbeing of the manor depended on an understanding between the lord and his tenants. The lord would offer hospitality, protection and stability. The tenants would offer their labour and part of their goods. The sense of security which came from this rooted hierarchy was communal and depended on obedience and submission to the general good. The good society of the manor was an organism founded on the acceptance by all parties of power on one side and powerlessness on the other. But custom involved an acceptance of rights on all sides and power was to be exercised with justice and grace, just as the defence of the ‘little common wealth’ of the manor was to be conducted with courage and vigour. This social arrangement of mutual but unequal good was the great medieval legacy. Its belief in honour, nobility and duty, beyond mere financial relations, lay at the heart of the idea of the chivalric knight which would play such a part in the aristocracy’s view of themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The classical idea of Arcadia had disappeared in the Middle Ages. Bliss for medieval man was a heavenly not a worldly condition. No picture appears in the Middle Ages of a deliciously heavenly place on earth. When medieval poetry or painting looked at rural life, it was for something charming and simple, not a dream of perfection. Medieval man had to die to be happy.

Throughout Europe, that changed with the rediscovery of the classics in the fifteenth century. As Europe itself began to urbanise, the urban fantasies of classical Rome began to resonate with the cultural elite and Arcadia, a place of rural bliss conceived as an escape from the stresses of the city and the court, could once again take up the role it had played in antiquity. Its particular atmosphere had been, in essence, the invention of Virgil. The Greeks had celebrated two kinds of primitivism: the soft version of the Golden Age, often set in Sicily, where there was plenty and happiness and none of the vices of modernity; and the harder kind, often found in the harsh Greek province of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, a tough, wild mountain country, where there were no comforts and none of the sweetness of groves and purling brooks, but whose shepherds were admirably virtuous and honest and comforted themselves in their primitive lives with their songs and their pipes.

Virgil, in the Eclogues he wrote in the mid-30s BC for his rich Roman audience, fused these two realms. In his hands, Sicily, with the jewelled flowers of its everlasting spring, and the ease of a perfect existence where no work was ever needed and all time could be filled with talk of love, was joined to the Arcadian virtues of plain speaking and honesty, a sense of goodness removed from the slick brutalities of court. Sweetness and virtue became one and that combination is one of the reasons Arcadia could appeal to the great of Renaissance Europe: it held out the possibilities of happiness to the most sophisticated of men and women, a vision of release generated by the very urban, competitive world of which they were a part.

To that imaginary realm of virtuous sweetness, Virgil added another element. Arcadia was not part of heaven. It was an earthly condition and subject to mortality. Even in Arcadia death was there: Et in Arcadia ego. The beauty and perfection was tinged with sadness, and the sadness worked not as a destroyer of the beauty, but as a poignancy, an addition to it, a melancholy sense of the transience of earthly things which served, paradoxically, to enhance them. Virgil’s Arcadia recognised that beauty on the point of disappearance had the added beauty of evening light, of impending loss as a glow on the untouched cheek.

This was the rich and suggestive classical inheritance which the Renaissance took up: perfect, sweet virtue made more perfect in a dropping light. In England, and nowhere more than at Wilton, it became allied to the other vision of perfection, the ideal of wholeness and social calm to be found – at least notionally – in the medieval manor, a world at ease with itself, where custom could govern next year as it had the last.

Subsequently, from the late seventeenth century onwards, this amalgam of classical and medieval inheritance bifurcated again. Arcadianism in the eighteenth century lost its social dimension. In the making of the great parks, and in the taste for the refined Meissen figures or Fragonard prettinesses, the pink-cheeked shepherdess and her satin-suited swain, set in the smoothed contours of the English landscape school, the slick of suavity around a Palladian house and the most expensive wallpaper ever devised, there was no political or social freight, beyond at least the expression of gentlemanly ease. Arcadia in the eighteenth century became décor, not a hope for society. Its money-cushioned languor became a commodity, to be bought, an accessory to market-success, not a criticism of individualism, market or state. This eviscerated Arcadianism became effete, the symbol of everything against which the hunger of the Romantics for a vivid reality would react. Eighteenth-century Arcadia had lost its soul and become the country in a Savile Row suit, decorated with hermitages and tree clumps which were no more than pale, polite ghosts of their great Renaissance forebears.

Before that sleek compendium of good taste conquered the world, there was another Arcadia, a knobblier, more complex, more troubled and more vital thing, amalgamating those classical and medieval inheritances and as a result having a life across an extraordinarily wide range. Everything from land and estate management to hunting, the way you stood, the way you dressed, the way you loved and married, architecture, garden design, poetry, drama, painting, court politics, attitudes to the common law, royal authority and the constitution were caught in its coils. The idea of the perfect world was far more than an aesthetic category in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This amalgamated English Arcadia, which is the subject of this book, was the elite dream of happiness. It is an ideology that has appealed ever since to those who have not subscribed to the mainstream: political conservatives, the Romantics, the young Karl Marx, William Morris, early conservationists and modern Greens. It came to play a central part in the shaping of America and in America’s own inherited idea that it was the Arcadian dreamland of the European subconscious: the place of abundance and liberty, of an easy civility between its agrarian citizens, a country which bore the duty which came with those benefits, to be a beacon and model to the world.

You need look no further than Jefferson’s 1782 Notes on the State of Virginia to recognise the central place which the Arcadian ideal had taken up in the American mind. ‘Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.’ The hard-working, soil-engaged rural farmer, the descendant of the yeoman who worked the Pembroke manors in the Wiltshire chalklands, is for Jefferson the purest man who ever lived.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set upon those, who, not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

Expressed through something of a fog of Enlightenment latinity, this is nevertheless a heartland statement for American Arcadianism: the market corrupts; nothing is more nauseating than a customer; only the soil and air, the intimate connection with the realities of growth and subsistence, can provide the pure moral environment which America – and Arcadia – requires.

This was the tradition which aimed to shape the American West. Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862 gave full title to 160 acres of America to anyone who lived on and worked the land for five years. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of the continent became the greatest experiment in Arcadianism the world had ever seen. It was not, at least in theory, a question of freehold, but the establishment of a moral community. The land handed out in this way was not to be considered a marketable property. It could not be sold to satisfy any debts and it could not be worked on behalf of anyone else. Guided by the idealism of the federal government, the idea of the English yeoman, self-sustaining on his hard-worked acres, more attuned to the earth than to the market, was laid out in section after section across the plains and mountains of a new continent. The reality, needless to say, was very different: rapid accumulation of vast estates by a variety of subletting agreements, which were in effect sales; a far more business-like approach to farming than any yeoman model might have envisaged; a scale of enterprise made necessary by the harsh environments which the inherited yeoman ideal simply didn’t fit: all of this inevitably steered American land and farming towards a more market-based model than Jefferson or Lincoln would ever have envisaged.

But the river of belief which this tradition represents needed an outlet, and it emerged in three of the greatest contributions America has made to the world: the national park, the leafy suburb and the environmental movement which emerged from them, all products of an American Arcadianism which took root and blossomed in the late nineteenth century and which from there spread to conquer the world. They were each other’s siblings. The greening of the city, the emparking of the wilderness, and the belief that human enterprise needs to be part of an ecological community: all three represent the fusion of nature and culture on which the Arcadian ideal relies.

‘The earth does not argue,’ Walt Whitman wrote in 1881, ‘is not pathetic, has no arrangements, does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.’ Those famous, lolloping words are themselves the descendants of an English Arcadian ideal, of which for about a hundred years, from the 1540s until the disasters of the English Civil War a century later, Wilton was the headquarters. This was where the only known performance in Shakespeare’s lifetime of As You Like It was staged for James I in December 1603. This was where ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything’ could seem, for a moment or two, like a reality. Here the good life, love and the good society could be found in rural seclusion; here you could ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world’; and from here the realm of business, city and the court could all, by comparison, be seen as the source of wickedness and corruption.

Arcadia, for a powerful interval, came to be identified with this house, this place and this landscape. Those who were drawn to the Arcadian balm that Wilton could offer were the very people who were striving and struggling to win and thrive in the royal court at Whitehall. Wilton, par excellence, was the power house which saw itself as the Shepherd’s Paradise. This was the Palace in the Trees, the stage set where nothing was more expensive than simplicity. It was where ‘old custom made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp,’ and where only courtiers and their powerful friends were on hand to taste it.

Increasingly, in the seventeenth century this ancient dream of the perfect world, closely identified with the ancient aristocracy on its ancient estates, was under threat, consciously or not, from both sides: from an increasingly efficient, hungry and autocratic state; and from a rising surge of individualist appetite. Arcadia was a dam set against that double tide. It was, in many ways, an organised and deeply entrenched world but it was not to last. The civil war, which in part at least can be seen as a war between the royalist forces of that growing state and the parliamentary defenders of the ancient constitution, had broken this world. Even from the 1660s, after the monarchy had been restored, the time of the first English Arcadia was looked back on with regret and longing. A moment had passed.

2
A lovely campania

The Wiltshire Downs as a theatre for pastoral

EARLY ON a summer morning – and you should make it a Sunday when England stays in bed for hours after the sun has risen – the chalk downland to the west of Wilton slowly reveals itself in the growing light as an open and free-flowing stretch of country, long wide ridges, which have ripples and hollows within them, separated by river valleys, with an air of Tuscany transported to the north, perhaps even a Tuscany improved. Seventeenth-century scientists thought the smoothness of the chalk hills meant they were part of the sea-floor that had appeared after Noah’s flood had at last receded. It was old, God-smoothed country and pure because of it.

This morning, you will have it to yourself. At first light, the larks are up and singing, but everything else is drenched in a golden quiet. Shadows hang in the woods and the sun casts low bars across the backs of the hills. You will see the deer, ever on the increase in southern England, moving silently and hesitantly in the half-distance. It is a place of slightness and subtlety, wide and long-limbed, drawn with a steady pencil. In the steeper coombes, on the slopes which the Wiltshiremen call ‘cliffs’, the grass is dotted with cowslips and early purple orchids. Gentians and meadow saxifrage can still be found on the open downland. Chalkhill Blue butterflies dance over the turf. Fritillaries and White Admirals are in the woods. The whole place, as Edward Thomas once described the shape of chalkland, is full of those ‘long straight lines in which a curve is always latent …’

This feeling of length – slow changes, a sense of distance – is at the heart of the Wiltshire chalk. It is not a plain, because everywhere the ground surface shifts and modulates, but it is nowhere sharp. It is full of continuity and connectedness...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1: The Dream of Perfection
• 2: A Lovely Campania
• 3: And is Not Euery Manor a Little Common Wealth?
• 4: A Countrey of Lands and Mannours
• 5: Customarie Services and Composition Piggs
• 6: I’ll Be A Park and Thou Shalt Be My Deer
• 7: Little Earths Kind of Paradise
• 8: So Mutable are Worldly Things
• 9: Two Incomparable Brethren
• 10: Elizian Fields and Ayery Paradises
• 11: The Most I Can Look For is to Scape Undoing
• 12: Hear This, O Ye That Swallow Up The Needy
• Keep Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• About the Publisher