John Vanbrugh

Sir John Vanbrugh (January 24, 1664?–March 26, 1726) was an English architect and dramatist, best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies: The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697). These were to become enduring stage favorites but originally occasioned much controversy.

Vanbrugh was in many senses a radical throughout his life. As a young man and a committed Whig, he was part of the scheme to overthrow James II, put William III on the throne and protect English parliamentary democracy, dangerous undertakings which landed him in the dreaded Bastille of Paris as a political prisoner.

In his career as a playwright, he offended Puritans and Dissenters, not only by the sexual expliciness of his plays, but by their messages in defence of women's rights in marriage. He was attacked on both counts, and was one of the prime targets of Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. In his architectural career, he created what came to be known as English Baroque. In this career Vanbrugh was what would be called today a "society architect", working solely for the celebrities of the day. His commission as the architect of Blenheim Palace should have been a signal of establishment acceptance, but turned into the opposite. His architectural work was revolutionary, and at the time jarred conservative opinions on the subject. Like all radicals, he was controversial, and remains so 300 years later.

Early life

Vanbrugh's family background and youth, before he became a public figure, have been relayed down the centuries as hearsay and anecdote. Kerry Downes has shown in his well-researched modern biography (1987) that even Encyclopedia Britannica[1] and the Dictionary of National Biography repeat some eighteenth and nineteenth century traditions which were originally offered as guesses but have hardened into "fact" in the process of being passed on. This accounts for several discrepancies between these authorities and the following narrative, which is based on the findings of Downes (1987) and McCormick (1991).

Vanbrugh was born in London and grew up in Chester, where the family had been driven by the major outbreak of the plague in London in 1665. Downes is sceptical of earlier historians' claims of a lower middle-class background, and shows that an 18th-century suggestion that his father Giles Vanbrugh "may have been a sugar-baker" has been misunderstood. "Sugar-baker" implies wealth, as the term refers not to a maker of sweets but to an owner of a "sugar house", a factory for the refining of raw sugar from the Barbados. Sugar refining would normally be combined with sugar trading, which was a lucrative business. Downes' example of one "sugar baker's house" in Liverpool being estimated to bring in £40,000 a year in trade from the Barabados throws a different light on Vanbrugh's social background than the picture of a backstreet Chester sweetshop which is painted by Leigh Hunt in 1840 and reflected in many later accounts.

How Vanbrugh spent the years from age 18 to 22 (after leaving school) is something of a mystery. There are no records of him between 1682 and 1686, or any shred of evidence for the persistent story that he was studying (sometimes specifically architecture) in France (stated as fact in the Dictionary of National Biography).

As Laurence Whistler pointed out more than 60 years ago, there would have been no need for a young of man of talent to go to France from England to study architecture; moreover, the first thing he would have learned in a French architect's office would have been to set out a drawing properly; the early drawings for Castle Howard show that he still drew like a novice in 1700.

The picture of a well-connected youth is reinforced by the fact that Vanbrugh in 1686 took up an officer's commission in his distant relative the Earl of Huntingdon's regiment. Since commissions were in the gift of the commanding officer, Vanbrugh's entry as an officer shows that he did have the kind of upscale family network that was then essential to a young man starting out in life.

It is worth noting, however, that in spite of the distant noble relatives and the sugar trade, Vanbrugh never in later life possessed any capital of his own for business ventures such as the Haymarket Theatre, but always had to rely on loans and backers. The fact that Giles Vanbrugh had twelve children to support and set up in life may go some way towards explaining the debts which were to plague John all his life.

From 1686, Vanbrugh was working undercover, playing a role in bringing about the Glorious Revolution, the armed invasion by William of Orange which was to depose James II. He thus demonstrates an intense early identification with the Whig cause of parliamentary democracy, with which he was to remain affiliated all his life. Returning from bringing William messages at The Hague, Vanbrugh was arrested at Calais on a charge of espionage (which Downes concludes was trumped-up) in September 1688, two months before William invaded England. Vanbrugh remained in prison in France for four and a half years, part of the time in the Bastille, before being released in exchange for a French political prisoner. His life is sharply bisected by this prison experience, which he entered at age 24 and emerged from at 29, surely a different and perhaps scarred man (Downes speculates that he must have hated the French forever after).

The often-repeated claim that Vanbrugh wrote part of The Provoked Wife in the Bastille is based on allusions in a couple of much later memoirs and is regarded with some doubt by modern scholars (see McCormick). He was able to return to England in 1693, and took part in a naval battle against the French in Camaret Bay in 1694. At some point in the mid-1690s, it is not known exactly when, he exchanged army life for London and the London stage.

Public life

London

Vanbrugh's London career was diverse and varied, comprising playwriting and architectural design as well as attempts to combine these two overarching interests. For a chronological overview of events, achievements and business ventures, which overlap in a way that is confusing to a reader and apparently sometimes was to Vanbrugh himself, see Vanbrugh timeline below.

The Kit-cat Club

Vanbrugh was a committed Whig and member of the Whig Kit-cat Club, indeed was regarded as its most popular and beloved member, in line with the charm of personality and talent for friendship to which contemporaries refer over and over again. The Kit-cat Club is best known today as an early 18th-century social gathering-point for culturally and politically prominent Whigs, including many artists and writers (William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Godfrey Kneller) and politicians (the Duke of Marlborough, Charles Seymour, the Earl of Burlington, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Sir Robert Walpole).

Politically, the club promoted the Whig objectives of a strong Parliament, a limited monarchy, resistance to France, and the Protestant succession to the throne. Yet the Kit-cats always presented their club as more a matter of dining and conviviality, and this reputation has been successfully relayed to posterity. Downes suggests, however, that the Kit-cat club's origins go back to before the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and that its political importance was much greater before it went public in 1700, in calmer and more Whiggish times. Proposing a role for an early Kit-cat grouping in the armed invasion by William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution, Downes cites among others Horace Walpole, son of Kit-cat Sir Robert Walpole, who claims that the respectable middle-aged Kit-cat club members "generally mentioned as a set of wits" were originally "in reality the patriots that saved Britain", in other words were the active force behind the Glorious Revolution itself. Secret groups tend to be poorly documented, and this sketch of the pre-history of the Kit-cat Club cannot be proved. But as we have seen, young Vanbrugh was indeed back in 1688 part of a secret network working for William's invasion. If the roots of the Kit-cat Club go back that far, it is tempting to speculate that Vanbrugh in joining the club was not merely becoming one of a convivial London "set of wits" but was also linking up with old friends and co-conspirators. A hero who had done time in French prison for the cause need not have doubted a warm welcome.

The Haymarket Theatre

In 1703, Vanbrugh started buying land and signing backers for the construction of a new theatre in the Haymarket, designed by himself and intended for the use of the actors' cooperative (see The Provoked Wife below) led by Thomas Betterton. Vanbrugh and his associate William Congreve hoped by this enterprise to improve the chances of legitimate theatre in London, which was under threat from more colorful types of entertainment such as opera, juggling, pantomime (introduced by John Rich), animal acts, travelling dance troupes, and famous visiting Italian singers. They also hoped to make a profit, and Vanbrugh optimistically bought up the acting company, making himself sole owner. He was now bound to pay salaries to the actors and, as it turned out, to manage the theatre, a notorious tightrope act for which he had no experience. The often repeated rumor that the accoustics of the building Vanbrugh had designed were bad is exaggerated (see Milhous), but the more practical Congreve had become anxious to extricate himself from the project, and Vanbrugh was left spreading himself extremely thin, running a theatre and simultaneously overseeing the building of Blenheim, a project which after June 1705 often took him out of town.

Unsurprisingly under these circumstances, Vanbrugh's management of the Haymarket Theatre showed "numerous signs of confusion, inefficiency, missed opportunities, and bad judgment" (Milhous). Having burned his fingers on theatre management, Vanbrugh too extricated himself, expensively, by selling the business in 1708, though without ever collecting much of the putative price. He had put a lot of money, his own and borrowed, into the theatre company, which he was never to recover. It was noted as remarkable by contemporaries that he continued to pay the actors' salaries fully and promptly while they were working for him, just as he always paid the workmen he had hired for construction work; shirking such responsibilities was close to being standard practice in early 18th-century England. Vanbrugh himself never seems to have pursued those who owed him money, and throughout his life his finances can at best be described as precarious.

Marriage

In 1719, Vanbrugh married Henrietta Maria Yarborough, who was 29 years younger. In spite of the age difference, this was by all accounts a happy marriage, which produced two sons. Unlike that of the rake heroes and fops of his plays, Vanbrugh's personal life was without scandal.

Vanbrugh died "of an asthma" in 1726 in the modest town house designed by him in 1703 out of the ruins of Whitehall Palace and satirized by Swift as "the goose pie". His married life, however, was mostly spent at Blackheath (then not considered part of central London at all) in the house on Maze Hill now known as Vanbrugh Castle, a miniature Scottish tower house designed by Vanbrugh in the earliest stages of his career.

Playwright

At least three factors may have contributed to Vanbrugh's embarkation on a playwriting career in 1696. He had possibly already blocked out his reflections about marriage into the scenes that were to become The Provoked Wife; he arrived in London during a flash of public interest in the stage, where a drama of conflict was playing out between star actors and their monopoly employer; and a new comedy staged in January, 1696, Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, had a final scene that to Vanbrugh's critical mind demanded a sequel.

The Relapse

Cibber's Love's Last Shift

Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded, which inspired Vanbrugh to write a "reply" in the form of The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, had been written and produced in the eye of a theatrical storm. London's only and mismanaged theatre company, known as the United Company, had split in two in March 1695 when the senior actors began operating their own acting cooperative, and the next season was one of cutthroat rivalry between the two companies.

Colley Cibber, an inconspicuous young actor still employed by the parent company, seized this moment of unique demand for new plays and launched his career on two fronts by writing a play with a big, flamboyant part for himself to play: the modish, Frenchified fop Sir Novelty Fashion. Backed up by Cibber's own uninhibited performance, Sir Novelty delighted the audiences. This farce character would be picked up and taken further by Vanbrugh, and so would the serious part of Love's Last Shift, in which wifely patience is tried by an out-of-control Restoration rake husband. In a climactic final scene, Cibber's perfect wife is celebrated and rewarded, as the cheating husband kneels to her and expresses the depth of his repentance. This drawn-out scene enjoyed brief notoriety as a tear-jerker (see Dobrée).

Today, Love's Last Shift has long been regarded as unplayable, and is read only by scholars, some of whom express distaste for Cibber's businesslike combination of four explicit acts of rakish exploits with one of sententious reform (see Hume). If Cibber was indeed deliberately attempting to appeal simultaneously to rakish and respectable Londoners, he succeeded: Love's Last Shift was a great box-office hit.

Sequel: The Relapse

Vanbrugh's sequel, offered to the United Company six weeks later, goes on to question the justice of women's position in marriage at this time. He sends new sexual temptations in the way of not only the reformed husband but also the patient wife, and allows them to react in more credible and less predictable ways than in their original context, lending the flat characters from Love's Last Shift a dimension that at least some critics are willing to consider psychological (see Hume).

In a trickster subplot, Vanbrugh provides the more traditional Restoration attraction of an overly well-dressed, exquisite and well-adjusted town fop, Lord Foppington, a brilliant re-creation of Cibber's Sir Novelty Fashion in Love's Last Shift (Sir Novelty has simply in The Relapse bought himself the title of "Lord Foppington" through the corrupt system of Royal title sales). Critics of Restoration comedy are near-unanimous in declaring Lord Foppington "the greatest of all Restoration fops" (Dobrée), by virtue of being not merely laughably affected, but also "brutal, evil, and smart" (Hume). Colley Cibber, who made his name as comedy actor with his performance of the part of Sir Novelty, contributed by his stage mannerisms, as well as by the play he had composed, to Vanbrugh's inspiration for the comic creation of Lord Foppington.

The Relapse, however, came very close to not being performed at all in the 1690s and with the appropriate original Love's Last Shift cast. The company was in desperate straights due to the walk-out of all its senior performers, and had great difficulty in finding and keeping actors of sufficient skills for the large cast required by The Relapse. Members of that cast had to be kept from defecting to the rival actor's cooperative formed by the rebels, had to be "seduced" (as the legal term was) back when they did defect, and had to be blandished into attending rehearsals which dragged out into ten months and brought the United Company to the threshold of bankruptcy. "They have no company at all", reports a contemporary letter in November, "and unless a new play comes out on Saturday revives their reputation, they must break" (see Milhous). That new play, The Relapse, did however turn out a tremendous success which saved the company, not least by virtue of Colley Cibber again bringing down the house with his second impersonation of Lord Foppington. "This play (the Relapse)", writes Cibber in his autobiography forty years later, "from its new and easy Turn of Wit, had great Success".

The Provoked Wife

Vanbrugh's second original comedy, The Provoked Wife, followed soon after, and was performed by the rebel actors' company. This play is different in tone from the largely farcical The Relapse, and adapted to the greater acting skills of the rebels. Vanbrugh had good reason to offer his second play to the new company, which had got off to a brilliant start by premièring Congreve's Love For Love, the greatest London box-office success for years. The rehearsal of The Relapse at the parent company in the autumn of 1696 had been a nightmare for all involved. Vanbrugh was probably also by this time on terms of friendship with the manager of the actors' company, the legendary Thomas Betterton. The actors' cooperative boasted the established star performers of the age, and Vanbrugh tailored The Provoked Wife to their specialties. While The Relapse had been robustly phrased to be suitable for amateurs and minor acting talents, versatile professionals like Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, and the rising young star Anne Bracegirdle were able to do justice to characters of depth and nuance.

The Provoked Wife is a comedy, but Elizabeth Barry who played the abused wife was especially famous as a tragic actress, and for her power of "moving the passions", i. e. moving an audience to pity and tears. Barry and the younger Bracegirdle had often worked together as a tragic/comic heroine pair to bring audiences the typical tragic/comic rollercoaster experience of "Restoration tragedies" with comic subplots, most recently in Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage. Vanbrugh takes advantage of this schema and these actresses to deepen audience sympathy for the unhappily married Lady Brute, even as she fires off her witty ripostes. In the intimate conversational dialogue between Lady Brute and her niece Bellinda (Bracegirdle), and especially in the star part of Sir John Brute the brutish husband (Betterton), which was hailed as one of the peaks of Thomas Betterton's remarkable career, The Provoked Wife is something approaching a Restoration problem play about the subordination of women in marriage. A scene where Sir John Brute performs drunken pranks in drag outraged some sections of Restoration society, as did the whole premise of the plot, that a wife trapped in an abusive marriage might consider either leaving it or taking a lover.

Changing audience taste

In 1698, Vanbrugh's argumentative and sexually frank plays were singled out for special attention by Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, particularly for their failure to impose exemplary morality by appropriate rewards and punishments in the fifth act. Vanbrugh laughed at these charges and published a joking reply, "A Short Vindication of The Relapse and The Provoked Wife From Immorality and Profaneness", where he accused the clergyman Collier of being more sensitive to unflattering portrayals of the clergy than to real irreligion. However, rising public opinion was already on Collier's side (see Restoration comedy). The intellectual and sexually explicit Restoration comedy style was becoming less and less acceptable to audiences and was soon to be replaced by a drama of sententious morality. Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, with its reformed rake and its sentimental final reconciliation scene, can be seen as an early forerunner of this drama.

Although Vanbrugh continued to work for the stage in many ways, he produced no more original plays. The numerous other plays that bear his name, from Aesop (1696, adapted from Boursault) to The Mistake (1705, adapted from Molière), are either adaptations of earlier English plays or translations from the French. With the change in audience taste away from Restoration comedy, Vanbrugh turned his creative energies from original composition to dramatic adaptation/translation, theatre management, and architecture.

Architect

As an architect (or surveyor, as the term then was) Vanbrugh is thought to have had no formal training (compare Early life above). His inexperience was compensated by his unerring eye for perspective and detail and his close working relationship with Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor, a former clerk of Sir Christopher Wren, was to be Vanbrugh's collaborator in many of his most ambitious projects, including Castle Howard and Blenheim. During his almost thirty years as a practising architect Vanbrugh designed and worked on numerous buildings. More often than not his work was a rebuild or remodel, such as that at Kimbolton Castle, where Vanbrugh had to follow the instructions of his patron. Consequently these houses, which often claim Vanbrugh as their architect, do not typify Vanbrugh's own architectural concepts and ideas.

Vanbrugh's chosen style was baroque, which had been spreading across Europe during the 17th century promoted by, among others, Bernini and Le Vau. The first baroque country house built in England was Chatsworth House designed by William Talman three years before Castle Howard. In the race for the commission of Castle Howard, the untrained and untried Vanbrugh astonishingly managed to out-charm and out-clubman the professional but less socially adept Talman and to persuade the Earl of Carlisle to give the great opportunity to him instead (see Downes, 193—204). Seizing it, Vanbrugh instigated European baroque's metamorphosis into a subtle, almost understated version that became known as English baroque. Three of Vanbrugh's designs act as milestones for evaluating this process:

Castle Howard, commissioned in 1699;
Blenheim Palace, commissioned in 1704;
Seaton Delaval Hall, begun in 1718.

Work in progress on each of these projects overlapped into the next, providing a natural progression of thoughts and style.

Castle Howard

Charles Howard, the 3rd Earl of Carlisle and fellow member of the Kit-cat Club, commissioned Vanbrugh in 1699 to design his mansion, often described as England's first truly baroque building. The baroque style, at Castle Howard, is the most European that Vanbrugh ever used.

Castle Howard, with its immense corridors in segmental colonnades leading from the main entrance block to the flanking wings, its centre crowned by a great domed tower complete with cupola is very much in the school of classic European baroque. It combined aspects of design that had only appeared occasionally, if at all, in English architecture, Webb's Greenwich Palace, Wren's unexecuted design for Greenwich, which like Castle Howard was dominated by a domed centre block, and of course Talman's Chatsworth. A possible inspiration for Castle Howard was also Vaux-le-Vicomte in France.

The interiors are extremely dramatic, the Great Hall rises 80 feet (24 m) into the cupola. Scagliola, and Corinthian columns abound, and soaring arches linking galleries give the impression of an opera stage-set—doubtless the intention of the architect.

Castle Howard was acclaimed a success. This fantastical building unparalleled in England, its facades and roofs decorated by pilasters, statuary, and flowing ornamental carving ensured that baroque became an overnight success. While the greater part of Castle Howard was inhabited and completed by 1709; the finishing touches were to continue for much of Vanbrugh's lifetime. The west wing was finaly completed after Vanbrugh's death.

The acclaim of the work at Castle Howard led to Vanbrugh's most famous commission, architect for Blenheim Palace.

Blenheim Palace

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough's forces defeated King Louis XIV's army at Blenheim, a village on the Danube in 1704. Marlborough's reward, from a grateful nation, was to be a splendid country seat, and the Duke himself chose fellow Kit-cat John Vanbrugh to be the architect. Work begun on the palace in 1705.

File:Blenheim East Gate.gif

Vanbrugh's monumental East Gate at Blenheim Palace: more the entrance to a citadel than a palace. Vanbrugh, cunningly slightly tapered the sides to create an illusion of even greater height and drama.

Blenheim Palace was conceived to be not only a grand country house, but a national monument. Consequently, the light baroque style used at Castle Howard would have been unsuitable for what is in effect a war memorial. The house had to display strength and military glory. It is in truth more of a castle, or citadel, than a palace. The qualities of the building are best illustrated by the massive East Gate (illustration, left), set in the curtain wall of the service block, which resembles an impregnable entrance to a walled city. Few realise it also serves as water tower for the palace, thus confounding those of Vanbrugh's critics who accused him of impracticability.

Blenheim, the largest, non-royal, domestic building in England, consists of three blocks, the centre containing the living and state rooms, and two flanking rectangular wings both built around a central courtyard: one contains the stables, and the other the kitchens, laundries, and storehouses. If Castle Howard was the first truly baroque building in England, then Blenheim Palace is the most definitive. While Castle Howard is a dramatic assembly of restless masses, Blenheim is altogether of a more solid construction, relying on tall slender windows and monumental statuary on the roofs to lighten the mass of yellow stone.

File:South portico.gif

The portico on the South facade of Blenheim Palace does not have a conventional pediment and is decorated only by a large stone trophy.

The suite of state rooms placed on the piano nobile were designed to be overpowering and magnificent displays, rather than warm, or comfortable. Cosy, middle class comfort was not the intention at Versailles, the great palace of Marlborough's foe, and it was certainly not deemed to be a consideration in the palace built to house the conqueror of Versailles' master.

As was common in the 18th century, personal comfort was sacrificed to perspective. Windows were to adorn the facades, as well as light the interior. Blenheim was designed as a theatre piece from the 67 foot (20 m) high great hall, leading to the huge frescoed saloon all designed on an axis with the 134 foot (41 m) high column of victory in the grounds, with the trees planted in the battle positions of Marlborough's soldiers.

At Blenheim, Vanbrugh developed baroque from the mere ornamental to a denser, more solid, form, where the massed stone became the ornament. The great arched gates and the huge solid portico were ornament in themselves, and the whole mass was considered rather than each facade.

Seaton Delaval Hall

Vanbrugh's final work, this northern, seemingly rather bleak country house is considered his finest architectural masterpiece (see all architectural references below). The reasons for this are not immediately apparent to the viewer; by this stage in his architectural career Vanbrugh was a master of baroque, he had taken this form of architecture way beyond the almost flamboyant continental baroque of Castle Howard, past the more severe but still decorated Blenheim to a point of pure sophistication. Vulgar ornament was almost disguised, a recess or a pillar was placed not for support but to create a play of light or shadow. The silhouette of the building was of equal, if not greater, importance with the plan of rooms. In every aspect of the house subtlety was the keyword; this is the secret of Seaton Delaval.

Built between 1718 and 1728 for Admiral George Delaval, it replaced the existing house on the site. It is possible that the design of Seaton Delaval was influenced by Palladio's Villa Foscari (sometimes known as "La Malcontenta") built circa 1555. Both have "rusticated facades", similar demilune windows over a non porticoed entrance. Even the large attic gable at Villa Foscari hints at the clerestory of Seaton's great hall.

The design concept Vanbrugh drew up was similar to that employed at Castle Howard and Blenheim: a centre block between two arcaded and pedimented wings. However, Seaton Delaval was to be on a much smaller scale. Work began in 1718 and continued for ten years. The building is an advancement on the style of Blenheim, rather than the earlier castle Howard. The principal block containing, as at Blenheim and Castle Howard, the principal state and living room, forms the centre of a three sided court. Towers crowned by balustrades and pinnacles give the house something of what Vanbrugh called his castle air.

Seaton Delaval is one of the few houses Vanbrugh designed alone without the aid of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The sobriety of their joint work has sometimes been attributed to Hawksmoor, and yet Seaton Delaval is a very sombre house indeed. Whereas Castle Howard could successfully be set down in Dresden or Wurzburg, Seaton Delaval firmly belongs in Northumberland and in that landscape. Vanbrugh, in the final stage in his career, was fully liberated from the rules of the architects of a generation earlier. The rustic stonework is used for the entire facade, including on the entrance facade, the pairs of twin columns supporting little more than a stone cornice. The twin columns are severe and utilitarian, and yet ornament as they provide no structural use. This is part of the furtive quality of the baroque of Seaton Delaval: the ornamental appears as a display of strength and mass.

The likewise severe, but perfectly proportioned, garden facade has at its centre a four columned, balcony-roofed portico. Here the slight fluting of the stone columns seems almost excessive ornament. As at Blenheim, the central block is dominated by the raised clerestory of the great hall, adding to the drama of the building's silhouette, but unlike Vanbrugh's other great houses, no statuary decorates the roof-scape here. The decoration is provided solely by a simple balustrade hiding the roof line, and chimneys disguised as finials to the balustrading of the low towers. Vanbrugh was now truly master of the baroque. The massing of the stone, the colonnades of the flanking wings, the heavy stonework and intricate recesses all create light and shade which is ornament in itself. Unfortunately, a fire in 1822 destroyed the interiors of the central block (Colvin).

Only Vanbrugh could have taken for his inspiration one of Palladio's masterpieces, and while still retaining the humanist values of the building, alter and adapt it, into an unrivalled form of subtle, sophisticated baroque unseen elsewhere in Europe. English baroque had arrived.

Architectural reputation

Vanbrugh's prompt success as an architect can be attributed to his friendships with the influential of the day. No less than five of his architectural patrons were fellow members of the Kit-cat club. In 1702, through the influence of Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, Vanbrugh was appointed comptroller of the Royal Works (now the Board of Works, where several of his designs may still be seen). In 1703, he was appointed commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, which was under construction at this time, and succeeded Wren as the official architect (or Surveyor), while Hawksmoor was appointed Site Architect. Vanbrugh's small but conspicuous finishing touches to the nearly completed building were considered a fine interpretation of Wren's original plans and intentions. Thus what was intended as an infirmary and hostel for destitute retired sailors was transformed into a magnificent national monument. His work here is said to have impressed both Queen Anne and her government, and is directly responsible for his subsequent success.

Vanbrugh's reputation still suffers from accusations of extravagance, impracticability and a bombastic imposition of his own will on his clients. Ironically all of these unfounded charges derive from Blenheim—Vanbrugh's selection as architect of Blenheim was never completely popular. The Duchess, the formidable Sarah Churchill particularly wanted Sir Christopher Wren. However, eventually a warrant signed by Lord Godolphin, the parliamentary treasurer, appointed Vanbrugh, and outlined his remit. Sadly, nowhere did this warrant mention "Queen" or "Crown". This error provided the get-out clause for the state when the costs and political infighting escalated.

Though Parliament had voted funds for the building of Blenheim, no exact sum had ever been fixed upon, and certainly no provision had been made for inflation. Almost from the outset, funds had been intermittent. Queen Anne paid some of them, but with growing reluctance and lapses, following her frequent altercations with her one time best friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. After the Duchess's final argument with the Queen in 1712, all state money ceased and work came to a halt. £220,000 had already been spent and £45,000 was owing to workmen. The Marlboroughs went into exile on the continent, and did not return until after Queen Anne's death in 1714.

The day after the Queen's death the Marlboroughs returned, and were reinstated in favour at the court of the new King George I. The 64 year old Duke now decided to complete the project at his own expense; in 1716 work re-started and Vanbrugh was left to rely entirely upon the means of the Duke of Marlborough himself. Already discouraged and upset by the reception the palace was receiving from the Whig factions, the final blow for Vanbrugh came when the Duke was incapacitated in 1717 by a severe stroke, and the thrifty (and hostile) Duchess took control. The Duchess blamed Vanbrugh entirely for the growing extravagance of the palace, and its general design: that her husband and government had approved them, she discounted. (In fairness to her, it must be mentioned that the Duke of Marlborough had contributed £60,000 to the initial cost, which, supplemented by Parliament, should have built a monumental house.) Following a meeting with the Duchess, Vanbrugh left the building site in a rage, insisting that the new masons, carpenters and craftsmen were inferior to those he had employed. The master craftsmen he had patronised, however, such as Grinling Gibbons, refused to work for the lower rates paid by the Marlboroughs. The craftsmen brought in by the Duchess, under the guidance of furniture designer James Moore, completed the work in perfect imitation of the greater masters, so perhaps there was fault and intransigence on both sides in this famed argument.

Vanbrugh was deeply distressed by the turn of events. The rows and resulting rumours had damaged his reputation, and the palace he had nurtured like a child was forbidden to him. In 1719, while the duchess was "not at home", Vanbrugh was able to view the palace in secret; but when he and his wife, with the Earl of Carlisle, visited the completed Blenheim as members of the viewing public in 1725, they were refused admission to even enter the park. The palace had been completed by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

That Vanbrugh's work at Blenheim has been the subject of criticism can largely be blamed on those, including the Duchess, who failed to understand the chief reason for its construction: to celebrate a martial triumph. In the achievement of this remit, Vanbrugh was as triumphant as was Marlborough on the field of battle.

Legacy

Vanbrugh is remembered today for his vast contribution to British culture, theatre, and architecture. An immediate dramatic legacy was found among his papers after his sudden death, the three-act comedy fragment A Journey to London. Vanbrugh had told his old friend Colley Cibber that he intended in this play to question traditional marriage roles even more radically than in the plays of his youth, and end it with a marriage falling irreconcilably apart. The unfinished manuscript, published by Cibber and today available in Vanbrugh's Collected Works, consists of scenes of a country family travelling to London and falling prey to its sharpers and temptations, while a London wife drives her patient husband to despair with her gambling and her consorting with the demi-monde of con men and half-pay officers. As with The Relapse at the outset of Vanbrugh's dramatic career, Colley Cibber again became involved, and this time it was he who had the last word. Cibber, now poet laureate and successful actor-manager, completed Vanbrugh's manuscript under the title of The Provoked Husband (1728) and gave it a happy and sententious ending in which the provocative wife repents and is reconciled: a eulogy of marriage which was the opposite of Vanbrugh's declared intention to end his last and belated "Restoration comedy" with marital breakup. Cibber considered this projected outcome to be "too severe for Comedy", and such severity was in fact rarely to be seen on the English stage before the influence of Ibsen.

On the 18th-century stage, Vanbrugh's Relapse and Provoked Wife were only considered possible to perform in bowdlerized versions, but as such they remained popular. Throughout Colley Cibber's long and successful acting career, audiences continued to demand to see him as Lord Foppington in The Relapse, while Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife became, after being an iconic role for Thomas Betterton, one of David Garrick's most famous roles. In the present day, The Relapse, now again to be seen uncut, remains a favorite play.

With the completion of Castle Howard English baroque came into fashion overnight. It had brought together the isolated and varied instances of monumental design, by, among others, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Vanbrugh thought of masses, volume and perspective in a way which his predecessors had not.

He also had the unusual skill, for an architect, of delivering the goods that his clients required. His reputation has suffered as a result of his famed disagreements with the Duchess of Marlborough, yet, one must remember his original client was the British Nation, not the Duchess, and the nation wanted a monument and celebration of victory, and that is what Vanbrugh gave the nation.

His influence on successive architects in incalculable, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh's friend and collaborator on so many projects continued to design many London churches for ten years after Vanbrugh's death. Vanbrugh's pupil and cousin the architect Edward Lovett Pearce also continued to develop Vanbrugh's work after his death.

Vanbrugh is remembered throughout Britain, by inns, street names, university halls, and schools named in his honour, but one only has to wander through London, or the English country-side dotted with their innumerable country houses, to see the ever present influence of the architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh.

A Vanbrugh timeline

Sir John Vanbrugh (January 24, 1664?–March 26, 1726) was an English architect and dramatist, best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies: The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697). These were to become enduring stage favorites but originally occasioned much controversy.

Vanbrugh was in many senses a radical throughout his life. As a young man and a committed Whig, he was part of the scheme to overthrow James II, put William III on the throne and protect English parliamentary democracy, dangerous undertakings which landed him in the dreaded Bastille of Paris as a political prisoner.

In his career as a playwright, he offended Puritans and Dissenters, not only by the sexual expliciness of his plays, but by their messages in defence of women's rights in marriage. He was attacked on both counts, and was one of the prime targets of Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. In his architectural career, he created what came to be known as English Baroque. In this career Vanbrugh was what would be called today a "society architect", working solely for the celebrities of the day. His commission as the architect of Blenheim Palace should have been a signal of establishment acceptance, but turned into the opposite. His architectural work was revolutionary, and at the time jarred conservative opinions on the subject. Like all radicals, he was controversial, and remains so 300 years later.

Early life

Vanbrugh's family background and youth, before he became a public figure, have been relayed down the centuries as hearsay and anecdote. Kerry Downes has shown in his well-researched modern biography (1987) that even Encyclopedia Britannica[2] and the Dictionary of National Biography repeat some eighteenth and nineteenth century traditions which were originally offered as guesses but have hardened into "fact" in the process of being passed on. This accounts for several discrepancies between these authorities and the following narrative, which is based on the findings of Downes (1987) and McCormick (1991).

Vanbrugh was born in London and grew up in Chester, where the family had been driven by the major outbreak of the plague in London in 1665. Downes is sceptical of earlier historians' claims of a lower middle-class background, and shows that an 18th-century suggestion that his father Giles Vanbrugh "may have been a sugar-baker" has been misunderstood. "Sugar-baker" implies wealth, as the term refers not to a maker of sweets but to an owner of a "sugar house", a factory for the refining of raw sugar from the Barbados. Sugar refining would normally be combined with sugar trading, which was a lucrative business. Downes' example of one "sugar baker's house" in Liverpool being estimated to bring in £40,000 a year in trade from the Barabados throws a different light on Vanbrugh's social background than the picture of a backstreet Chester sweetshop which is painted by Leigh Hunt in 1840 and reflected in many later accounts.

How Vanbrugh spent the years from age 18 to 22 (after leaving school) is something of a mystery. There are no records of him between 1682 and 1686, or any shred of evidence for the persistent story that he was studying (sometimes specifically architecture) in France (stated as fact in the Dictionary of National Biography).

As Laurence Whistler pointed out more than 60 years ago, there would have been no need for a young of man of talent to go to France from England to study architecture; moreover, the first thing he would have learned in a French architect's office would have been to set out a drawing properly; the early drawings for Castle Howard show that he still drew like a novice in 1700.

The picture of a well-connected youth is reinforced by the fact that Vanbrugh in 1686 took up an officer's commission in his distant relative the Earl of Huntingdon's regiment. Since commissions were in the gift of the commanding officer, Vanbrugh's entry as an officer shows that he did have the kind of upscale family network that was then essential to a young man starting out in life.

It is worth noting, however, that in spite of the distant noble relatives and the sugar trade, Vanbrugh never in later life possessed any capital of his own for business ventures such as the Haymarket Theatre, but always had to rely on loans and backers. The fact that Giles Vanbrugh had twelve children to support and set up in life may go some way towards explaining the debts which were to plague John all his life.

From 1686, Vanbrugh was working undercover, playing a role in bringing about the Glorious Revolution, the armed invasion by William of Orange which was to depose James II. He thus demonstrates an intense early identification with the Whig cause of parliamentary democracy, with which he was to remain affiliated all his life. Returning from bringing William messages at The Hague, Vanbrugh was arrested at Calais on a charge of espionage (which Downes concludes was trumped-up) in September 1688, two months before William invaded England. Vanbrugh remained in prison in France for four and a half years, part of the time in the Bastille, before being released in exchange for a French political prisoner. His life is sharply bisected by this prison experience, which he entered at age 24 and emerged from at 29, surely a different and perhaps scarred man (Downes speculates that he must have hated the French forever after).

The often-repeated claim that Vanbrugh wrote part of The Provoked Wife in the Bastille is based on allusions in a couple of much later memoirs and is regarded with some doubt by modern scholars (see McCormick). He was able to return to England in 1693, and took part in a naval battle against the French in Camaret Bay in 1694. At some point in the mid-1690s, it is not known exactly when, he exchanged army life for London and the London stage.