Edensor, 3m NE of Bakewell
Ducal palace in parkland setting (P)
Chatsworth is, above all, a house in a landscape. It lies on the slope of a valley against a backdrop of wooded hills. I have seen it blazing golden in an autumn sunset, or rising serene above a spring mist. Floodlit at night, it appears like a luxury liner sliding quietly down its valley. In any mood, Chatsworth is spectacular. Yet it defers to the landscape. It does not shout, like Blenheim, or roar like Castle Howard.
The house is another creation of Bess of Hardwick. It came into her ownership through her marriage to Sir William Cavendish, father of her only children, and has passed down the Cavendish line ever since. The house was used by Bess's last husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, to incarcerate Mary Queen of Scots, and was then rebuilt during the 1690s. The occasion was the elevation of 1st Duke of Devonshire for his part in the Glorious Revolution. The Cavendishes have always been Whigs or Liberals (and even Social Democrats).
The house is no longer owned directly by the family. Devastating death duties in 1950 led to its transfer in perpetuity to an independent trust. But the family rent part of the house and the Duke and Duchess play a leading part in its management. Chatsworth pioneered this form of arm's-length preservation, keeping a house intact yet linked to the family. Accessibility has been traditional since the 17th century. In 1844 the house was open every day in the year, Sundays not excepted. Instructions were that 'The humblest individual is not only shown the whole but the Duke has expressly ordered the waterworks to be played for everyone.' In the 1850s, with the coming of the railway, Chatsworth received 80,000 visitors a year.
Entrance from the road is down a winding drive that displays the main facade to best advantage. This front, of 1700-3, was built after the 1st Duke had quarrelled with William Talman, who had designed the south front to the right. Talman was Christopher Wren's rival in the Office of Works. Wren was a Tory and Talman a Whig. To the purist, the exterior of Chatsworth is rough and provincial, its orders truncated and resting on a bare ground floor. The glory of its exterior derived from its scale.
This glory was enhanced with the arrival in the 1760s of Capability Brown. He landscaped the River Derwent and tamed the rough pasture and hillside. Further changes occurred in the early l9th century when the 6th 'Bachelor' Duke converted Chatsworth from great house to palace. He removed the old village of Edensor from view and had Joseph Paxton install greenhouses and a gigantic fountain beneath the great cascade behind the house. Jeffry Wyatville was commissioned to build the extensive north wing, including a belvedere, theatre, sculpture gallery and grand dining room. It is next to this wing that the public enters the house.
The hall leads into the north corridor with its coloured marble pavement, a prelude to the majestic Painted Hall. Much altered over the years, this hall is the heart of Chatsworth. It retains the ceiling painted for the original building of 1699 by Laguerre, depicting the triumphs of Julius Caesar, supposed precursor of William III as champion of English liberty. The staircase rises through a magnificent screen to a landing with metalwork balustrades by Jean Tijou. Half hidden beyond is another staircase rising to the state rooms, as if one grand stair is not enough for Chatsworth. The walls are decorated with grisaille panels and the niches filled with statues by Colley Cibber. On the landings is a set of old baby-carriages, a child's Rococo sleigh beautifully crafted.
The state rooms at Chatsworth are unusually on the second floor, behind Talman's south front. The reason for this arrangement is not clear. The family rooms are below and the assumption is that the 1st Duke decided to convert into state rooms an upper Long Gallery surviving from the earlier Tudor house. Hardwick's most formal rooms were - and are - on the top floor. The 6th Duke later referred to them as his 'dismal, ponderous range of Hampton Court-like chambers'. When the house was a girls' school during the Second World War, these rooms were dormitories, surely the most splendid in the land.
Restoration has made them less dismal. They are merely magnificent. The state dining room, in which it is said that nobody has ever dined, has a ceiling by Verrio. It includes the 1st Duke's housekeeper, Mrs Hackett, whom Verrio did not like, 'cutting the thread of life' with scissors. The sumptuous wood carving is 'school of Gibbons' and some of the furniture is by William Kent. The state drawing room contains a set of Mortlake tapestries, copied from the Raphael cartoons now in the V&A, and another ceiling by Laguerre. The state music room has a trompe-l'oeil violin painted on its door. The stamped leather wall-hangings, introduced c1830, are anachronistic and exotic, as is the Russian malachite writing table. Viewing this room is like eating an over-rich box of chocolates. The state bedroom follows with more leather wall-hangings and ceilings by Laguerre. The furniture is by Boulle. The last in the sequence, the state dressing room, enjoys the finest views, both south and west.
The route now enters the 19th century, with corridors and stairs added to the central courtyard by Wyatville for the 6th Duke. In the Sketch Gallery are portraits of the family and more Mortlake tapestries, while the west staircase includes paintings acquired by successive dukes, from Tintoretto to Lucien Freud.
The chapel survives from the 1st Duke's rebuild. Its superb alabaster reredos contain; Verrio's Doubting Thomas over the altar and carvings by Gibbons and others. The eccentric Oak Room beyond was acquired by the 6th Duke from dealers who looted Continental monasteries in the 1820s and 1830s. It has twisted columns forming a sort of sanctuary in the middle and was used as a smoking room.
The route passes back through the Painted Hall and climbs to the libraries via the Oat Stairs, with its antler chandelier and Grinling Gibbons' limewood cravat. Here begins what amounts to a second Chatsworth, the Regency wing designed by Wyatville for the 6th Duke, The 1st Duke's Long Gallery was converted into the first of three libraries. It contains what is still England's finest book collection in private hands, although it is only a fragment of that owned by the family in the 19th century. Death duties saw the loss to America of the Caxtons and Shakespeare First Folios. It was perhaps a fitting transference of old wealth to new, but a great loss to Chatsworth.
The 19th-century house in no way outguns the 17th century, but it reaches a sort of climax in Wyatville's Great Dining Room. Here the Bachelor Duke came into his own, describing eating here as 'like dining in a great trunk, and you expect the lid to open'. Here are paintings by van Dyck and Mytens, and the Gainsborough of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, acquired by Chatsworth in 1994. Beyond are more paintings and sculpture in the gallery, arranged as a homage to Canova and to Regency taste generally. It is hard to convey the sheer richness of this place. It is the National Gallery of the North and yet a home.