Perhaps no building more perfectly mixes classicist and English aesthetics than England’s Wilton House. With an exterior of locally sourced stone, it blends into rural Wiltshire, England. The classical proportions, emphasis on symmetry, and use of rectangular features conform to the aesthetic principles of ancient Roman architect Vitruvius and Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The lack of exterior columns—which originally allowed people to be in open air while shielded from the hot Mediterranean sun—fit the northern geography and climate.
Given the adaptation of core classicist principles to the Wilton House design, it should not be surprising that it has been used as the setting for stereotypically English scenes in over two dozen movies and television shows, including “Sense and Sensibility,” “Young Victoria,” “The Bounty,” “To Kill a King,” “Emma” and “The Crown.” Neither should it be surprising that the Wilton House was largely the design of England’s greatest classicist architect—Inigo Jones.
Constructing Wilton
Construction of Wilton took place in three distinct phases—all within Jones’s lifetime. The first was in the early to mid-1630s, when Jones was at the height of his career, famously designing both the Whitehall Banqueting House and the Queen’s House. The second phase took place from 1640 to 1642. And the final phase followed the damage caused by a fire in 1647.
Both the late 17th-century writer John Aubrey and documents discovered in the 1960s demonstrate that Jones was indeed too busy to personally design the initial construction of Wilton for the earl of Pembroke, who was a close friend of Jones’s leading patron, King Charles I. Instead, Jones agreed to supervise the work by the brothers Solomon and Isaac de Caus, whom he sometimes employed. This was rather like a modern case of the head of a modest-sized architectural firm assigning a commission to one of the firm’s junior architects. Jones provided the basic parameters, advised on particular points, and approved the final design while the de Caus brothers worked out most of the details.
Matters had changed by 1640, with Charles I facing rebellion in Scotland and opposition within what became known as the Long Parliament. With the king having neither the time nor the money for architectural projects, Jones was able to oversee work at Wilton more closely and make some improvements to the design. In 1642, the English Civil War broke out, pitting Charles against the “Parliamentarians” (about half of Parliament’s members). Jones became a military engineer for the Royalist armies. Parliamentarian victory over the Royalists’ left Jones’s career in tatters. Royalists with the wealth to hire him had fled the country or paid astronomical sums to retain their freedom. His appeal to potential patrons outside Royalist circles was limited.
Fortunately for both Jones and the Wilton House, the earl of Pembroke was independently minded. Despite his friendship with King Charles, he had fought against him—though as a moderate Parliamentarian who spent much of the war working for a peaceful compromise. When the Wilton House was damaged by fire, the earl had the means to repair it and was more than happy to again turn to Jones. He may even have wished to signal support for division of power between the king, lords, and commons against a radical faction in the Parliamentarian army—which soon purged the Parliamentarian political leadership, beheaded the king, and took power for itself.
Crediting the Master Architect
Despite that clear record, some historians persist in maintaining that Jones’s influence on Wilton was muted. But why? The reason, refuted at length by Giles Worsley in his excellent book “Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition,” is that many researchers erroneously consider Jones a somewhat “behind the curve” imitator of 16th-century Italian classicism. Jones was the first architect to introduce the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to Britain. Because Jones sometimes designed works that came close to re-creating Italy (such as Queen’s House with its white stone), these are interpreted as “proof” that these represented his only style and that less Italian-oriented works must have been the work of someone else—despite all evidence to the contrary.
To add to the misunderstanding, the decades of Jones’s greatest fame also saw the new Baroque style emerge and become dominant. Because of that, the older classicist style became ossified and imitational, when in reality architects continued to appropriate its principles in original ways.
Jones was at the forefront of that creative classicism and inspired it in others. Though he left no school of strict imitators, his work quickly became an influence on both English and Dutch architectural works such as Thorpe Hall and Coymanshuis. Later still, his aesthetics became an influence first on Sir Christopher Wren and then on the Georgian architecture of the 18th century. Given that legacy and the beauty of his own creations, it is not surprising that many consider Jones to be his country’s single preeminent architect.
