In a Somerset village, Montacute House raises its golden, perfectly symmetrical façade, in the fine Ham stone that takes on, at sunset, tints of honey. Built at the end of Elizabeth I's reign by the Phelips family, it is one of the most accomplished and harmonious houses of the English Renaissance.
The house of an ambitious lawyer
Montacute was raised around 1598 by Sir Edward Phelips, a brilliant lawyer who would be Speaker of the House of Commons from 1604 to 1611, then Master of the Rolls until his death in 1614, and who would open the prosecution, in 1606, at the trial of the Gunpowder plotters. A new man enriched by his career, Phelips wanted a house that would proclaim his success. He probably entrusted the design to the master mason William Arnold, one of the most talented provincial architects of the time. The house was built in Ham stone (Ham Hill stone), the local golden limestone whose warm hue makes all the charm of the building. Montacute belongs to the last generation of the great Elizabethan houses: perfect symmetry, an H-plan, long galleries, generous mullioned windows. Nothing ostentatious to excess like Wollaton, but a serene balance — elegance rather than excess. Arnold strewed the façade with motifs drawn from the ornament books coming from France and Flanders: classical entablatures separating the three storeys, curved pediments above the projecting bays, shell-headed niches, and, on the upper floor, a row of statues of the Nine Worthies as Roman soldiers, set in the niches between the gallery windows.
A gallery for walking and portraits
The jewel of Montacute is its Long Gallery, the largest surviving in England: a vast panelled corridor of about 52 metres (172 feet) running the whole length of the top floor, where guests came to walk, converse and admire the portraits hung on the walls in all weathers. Today this gallery holds a collection of Tudor and Elizabethan portraits lent by the National Portrait Gallery — so that the house, designed for display, now displays the very faces of the age that saw it born. Around it, the walled gardens and the corner pavilions with their ogee roofs complete this masterpiece of harmony. The east front, today the main entrance, received in the late eighteenth century (about 1786) a sumptuous carved-stone frontispiece re-erected piece by piece from Clifton Maybank, a neighbouring house then being demolished — an elegant graft that took nothing from the unity of the whole.
What to see
- The golden façade in Ham stone, perfectly symmetrical, and its statues of the Nine Worthies.
- The Long Gallery, the largest in England, and its Tudor portraits.
- The walled gardens and the corner pavilions.
- The great hall and the interiors of the Phelips family.
Did you know?
The long gallery of Montacute, designed for the walks of the elegant of the sixteenth century, is today the hall of the faces of their time: it holds a selection of Tudor and Elizabethan portraits from the National Portrait Gallery — kings, queens, courtiers, explorers. So, in the house built to assert one man's rank, there now throng, ranged along the walls, all those who made the English Renaissance: the house has become the portrait of its own century.
Markers
Montacute House lies at Montacute, near Yeovil, in Somerset, in the south-west of England. It is today a house in the care of the National Trust, with its gardens.
Quiz
- In which golden stone is Montacute built?
- Ham stone (Ham Hill stone)
- Carrara marble
- Cornish granite
- What does the long gallery of Montacute hold today?
- Tudor portraits from the National Portrait Gallery
- A collection of armour
- A library of manuscripts
- Which lawyer had Montacute built around 1598?
- Sir Edward Phelips
- Sir John Thynne
- Sir Christopher Hatton