IN MARK GIROUARD’S foundational study of the architectural work of Robert Smythson, the keep or Little Castle at Bolsover is bewitchingly described as “a dream-world ... an almost untouched expression in stone of the lost world of Elizabethan chivalry and romances.” Yet Girouard finds the building difficult to fathom. “Bolsover is like nothing else in England.” He salutes the imaginations of Robert and John Smythson, father and son, and their talent for adapting a variety of sources, but he argues that this building’s individuality springs largely from the characters of Sir Charles Cavendish, who commissioned the work in 1612, and his son William, 1st Duke of Newcastle, who completed it after his father’s death in 1617.

Girouard observes that Charles’s “castle mania” fitted with the bravery and martial pride of a man who had fought in the Dutch wars and who was exceptionally skilled in horsemanship and fencing. However, he suggests that it may also have stemmed from a mixture of romanticism and snobbery, born of the union of new (Cavendish) money with ancient Northumberland lineage in the marriage of Charles to Katherine Ogle. He detects a change of direction, a more relaxed approach to the design, when William inherited his father’s unfinished project. John Smythson was sent to London to study the new buildings associated with Inigo Jones, returning with examples that he only partly understood. However, for Girouard, William, “the sprawling Duke,” may in truth have “preferred something a little more bizarre.” In characterizing his architectural taste, Girouard observes that William “suffered from a certain flabbiness”: a lack of drive or organizing capacity and an extravagant love of music and “soft pleasures.” He notes comments by contemporaries which reveal that these weaknesses underlay his failure as a Royalist commander and his compromised reputation at court. For Girouard, William’s poetic and dramatic writings had no shape, and his scientific dabblings were superficial. He was perhaps a little absurd.