The Tudor Prodigy Houses of England
Prodigy houses are large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either “noble palaces of an awesome scale” or “proud, ambitious heaps” according to taste. The prodigy houses stretch over the periods of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture, though the term may be restricted to a core period of roughly 1570 to 1620. Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm. Many are therefore close to major roads, often in the English Midlands.
The term originates with the architectural historian Sir John Summerson, and has been generally adopted. He called them “… the most daring of all English buildings.” The houses fall within the broad style of Renaissance architecture, but represent a distinctive English take on the style, mainly reliant on books for their knowledge of developments on the Continent. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was already dead before the prodigy houses reached their peak, but it has conveniently been said that his more restrained classical style did not reach England until the work of Inigo Jones in the 1620s, and that as regards ornament, French and Flemish Northern Mannerist decoration was more influential than Italian.
Elizabeth I travelled through southern England in annual summer “progresses”, staying at the houses of wealthy courtiers,on these trips she went as far north as Coventry, and planned a trip to Shrewsbury (where she planned on watching plays staged by Thomas Ashton), but this leg was cancelled because of illness.
The hosts were expected to house the monarch in style, and provide sufficient accommodation for about 150 travelling members of the court, for whom temporary buildings might need to be erected. Elizabeth herself was not slow to complain if she felt her accommodation had not been appropriate, and did so even about two of the largest prodigy houses, Theobalds House and Old Gorhambury House (the former destroyed, the latter ruined).
Partly as a result of this imperative, but also general increasing wealth, there was an Elizabethan building boom, with large houses built in the most modern styles by courtiers, wealthy from acquired monastic estates, who wished to display their wealth and status. A characteristic was the large area of glass – a new feature that superseded the need for easily defended external walls and announced the owners’ wealth. Hardwick Hall, for example, was proverbially described as “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.” Many other smaller prodigy houses were built by businessmen and administrators, as well as long-established families of the peerage and gentry. The large Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire, was built between 1593 and 1600 by Robert Smythson for Thomas Tailor, who was the recorder to the Bishop of Lincoln; “Tailor was a lawyer and therefore rich”, says Simon Jenkins.
The first “prodigy house” might be said to be Henry VII’s Richmond Palace, completed in 1501 but now destroyed, although as a royal palace it does not strictly fit the definition. Hampton Court Palace, built by Cardinal Wolsey but taken over by the king on his fall, is certainly an example. The trend continued through the reigns of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and into the reign of James I, when it reached its height. Henry was a prolific builder himself, though little of his work survives, but the prudent Elizabeth (like her siblings) built nothing herself, instead encouraging her courtiers to “…build on a scale which in the past would have been seen as a dynastic threat.”
Others see the original Somerset House in the Strand, London as the first prodigy house, or at least the first English attempt at a thoroughly and consistently classical style. With some other Châteaux of the Loire Valley, the Château de Chambord of François I of France (built 1519–1547) had many features of the English houses, and certainly influenced Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace.
Important political families such as the Cecils and Bacons were serial builders of houses. These newly-risen families were typically the most frenetic builders. Sites were chosen for their potential convenience for royal progresses, rather than being the centre of landholdings, which were looked after by agents, or any local political powerbase.
The term prodigy house ceases to be used for houses built after about 1620. Despite some features of more strictly classical houses like Wilton House (rebuilding begun 1630) continuing those of the prodigy house, the term is not used of them. Much later houses like Houghton Hall and Blenheim Palace show a lingering fondness for elements of the 16th-century prodigy style.
In the 19th century Jacobethan revivals began, most spectacularly at Harlaxton Manor, which Anthony Salvin began in 1837. This manages to impart a Baroque swagger to the Northern Mannerist vocabulary. Mentmore Towers, by Joseph Paxton, is an enormous revival of a Smythson-type style, and like Westonbirt House (Lewis Vulliamy, 1860s) and Highclere Castle (by Sir Charles Barry 1839–42, used for filming Downton Abbey), is something of an inflated Wollaton. The royal Sandringham House in Norfolk includes prodigy elements in its mixed styles. Apart from private houses, elements of the prodigy style were popular for at least the exteriors of all other types of public buildings, and office buildings designed to impress.
Many of the houses were later demolished, in the English Civil War or other times, and many smothered by later rebuilding. But the period retained a prestige, especially for families who rose to prominence during it, and in many the exteriors at least were largely retained. The north fronts of The Vyne and Lyme Park are examples of a slightly incongruous mixture of the Elizabethan and Palladian in a single facade.
Examples of Prodigy Houses
Essentially intact;
(especially on the exterior)
Burghley House, Cambridgeshire
Longleat House, Wiltshire
Hatfield House, Hertfordshire
Wollaton Hall, Nottingham
Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
Longford Castle, Wiltshire
Castle Ashby House, Northamptonshire
Montacute House, Somerset
Bramshill House, Hampshire
Aston Hall, Birmingham
Charlton Park, Wiltshire
Barrington Court, Somerset
Astley Hall, Chorley, Lancashire
Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire
Fountains Hall, North Yorkshire, built with stone from Fountains Abbey next door
Charlton House, London, relatively modest, to house James I’s young son
East Barsham Manor, Norfolk
Burton Constable Hall, Yorkshire (exterior)
Early Henrician examples;
Hampton Court Palace
Hengrave Hall, Suffolk
Sutton Place, Surrey
Part-destroyed
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Audley End, Essex, part destroyed
Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, part destroyed shell
Layer Marney Hall, Essex, Henrician and only ever part-built
Berry Pomeroy, Devon, Built by the Seymours but never completed.
Now destroyed;
Nonsuch Palace, Surrey, a royal palace of Henry VIII, now destroyed
Theobalds House
Holdenby House
Old Gorhambury House, Hertfordshire
Worksop Manor
Rocksavage, Cheshire
Wimbledon House
Oxwich Castle, West Glamorgan, substantial ruins remain
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