Alexander Pope was surely neither the first nor the last person to ask such a question of Blenheim Palace.Footnote ¹ Awesomely impressive and monumental, it nevertheless has struck visitors over the past three centuries as an uncomfortable place to live. And yet, how Blenheim, as well as less massive country houses, encompassed the domestic function is a question that has received very little attention from scholars. For historians of women, of the consumer revolution, of the family or gender, as well as for those writing about country houses or the aristocracy more generally, it is a question of peculiar salience. Was a country house a home, or was it not?

The general lack of interest in the domestic function of these extraordinary structures may well be due to the relative omission of women from most studies of country houses. As Dana Arnold pointed out, despite the traditionally feminine associations of words like “house” and “home,” country house studies themselves have largely marginalized or ignored women.Footnote ² Oddly enough, women are also absent from other, more general, perspectives on home. Indeed, the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is only men who have homes. Of the seventeen examples illustrating the word's most basic usages, none cite a woman's experience. The connotative meanings of “home” as the “place of one's dwelling or nurturing, with the conditions, circumstances, and feelings which naturally and properly attach to it,” are illustrated by an 1882 biography of Dickens, which informs us that the great novelist “was most English in that love of home to which he was never weary of testifying.” Maybe women are too weary of home to testify, but at least we have it on good authority that love of home is culturally produced, indeed, especially English. No illustrations of the word “home” are exemplified by women for the first ten usages of the term. Finally at definition 11d, “at home,” meaning “accessible to callers,” there is a drastic change, and all the illustrations depict women's accessibility.Footnote ³

When one considers how ancient the cultural connection is between women and home, their general absence from “home” seems remarkable.Footnote ⁴ But perhaps it is best explained by that very connection. Women, presumably, do not wish to go home because they are already there. They are part of that home to which men feel so strong an attachment. They are occasionally even accessible to callers. Perhaps women have been so inseparably associated with the home that their relationship to domestic space has been more often assumed than investigated. Yet the issue is important to the construction of both class and gender.

Elite women's alleged indifference to their country houses is, after all, central to the “luxury critique” of the eighteenth century. Preoccupied with public affairs and social life outside the home, upper-class women were accused of being thoroughly undomesticated. Such “women of fashion” were widely castigated for their allegedly spendthrift ways and for destroying homes and families through their idleness, greed, and vanity. Worse yet, in the relentless pursuit of pleasure, they removed their families from the dullness of the countryside to the gaieties of London. In consequence, the landed interest abdicated their traditional rural responsibilities and opened the way for the rise of the moneyed men. Civic virtue would be the ultimate casualty, leaving England forever weakened and corrupted.

Historians such as Dror Wahrman have exposed the political uses of the luxury critique, which simply offered an eighteenth-century gloss on the ancient moral dichotomy of country and city, while others, such as Helen Berry, Ruth Larsen, and Amanda Vickery, have challenged its descriptive validity.Footnote ⁵ Recent feminist literary scholars have even argued that elite women regarded country houses as useful “retreats” from the world.Footnote ⁶ And common sense—never mind envy—suggests that the spaciousness and beauty of country houses and their gardens might ease life's difficulties and add to life's pleasures for their inhabitants, as, no doubt, did the armies of servants.

Nevertheless, the luxury critique remains a foundational, if implicit, trope in much distinguished scholarship on different aspects of the topic. Dana Arnold, for instance, notes a decline in country seat residence during the eighteenth century, the aristocracy cynically “bestowing enough ‘benevolence’ on the labouring classes to keep them going until the next visit,” thus leaving themselves free to trot off to the race course or spa. Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley assume elite women had no impact on the design, construction, or furnishing of country houses. Instead, their sole contribution to these glorious structures was to “entreat” their husbands to spend money extravagantly. Similarly, in the single paragraph he devotes to women in his two chapters entitled “The Aristocracy at Home,” J. V. Beckett portrays elite woman as hectoring their husbands to flee the “tedium of the countryside” for the pleasures of London.Footnote ⁷

Perhaps these scholars are correct, and eighteenth-century elite women in fact played no role in the design, construction, remodeling, or furnishing of their country houses and consequently disliked residing in them. Perhaps elite women experienced their domestic lives as permanent houseguests in a gentleman's home, as at least one book title would suggest.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, the relationship of upper-class women to country house space, structurally different and more tenuous than that of their male counterparts, suggests such an interpretation. Girls rarely inherited the houses in which they were born and raised, while upon marriage they moved to the home of the groom or his parents. Widows delicately retreated to a modest dower house, so the family seat could be properly occupied by the heir. So, too, women's emotional associations and experiences of country house life might be distinctly unpleasant ones, as Anne Kugler's account of Lady Cowper has shown.Footnote ⁹ Childbirth, assault and battery, or simple boredom and constraint might not foster an attachment to place, while the constant presence of servants might be experienced as intrusive.

Other scholars, however, have suggested that the eighteenth-century country house provided a poor environment for the development of emotional attachments for men as well as for women. Places like Blenheim still functioned too much as monuments or as regional economic and political centers to serve effectively as domestic space. Indeed, Peter Mandler has written that country houses “only became homes in the late nineteenth century, when the aristocracy retreated from its public duties.”Footnote ¹⁰

The important role aristocratic women played in hosting political events and dispensing patronage often took place in the countryside, where political power was rooted in acreage and community.Footnote ¹¹ What then of the metropolitan alternative? Recent scholarship suggests that town houses, located, of course, in the heart of the Great Wen, offered too public a venue for women to regard those residences as private space.Footnote ¹² And if neither town nor country house provided such an environment, were aristocratic women in fact left grandly domiciled but emotionally homeless? Or is the expectation of “home” merely a modern, but not coincidentally bourgeois, construction that would have been meaningless to the eighteenth-century elite?

This article uses the case study method to begin answering these complex and important questions, concentrating on three episodes in the relationship of aristocratic women and their country houses over the course of the long eighteenth century: Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, and the building of Blenheim Palace itself; Frances, viscountess Irwin, and the remodeling of Temple Newsam in her widowhood, some fifty years later; and the 1809 marriage of Frances Talbot, daughter of a provincial surgeon-apothecary, to Viscount Boringdon, owner of Saltram, the largest house in Devonshire. All three women used their status and talents to play active public roles in politics and society and therefore seemed likely to confirm the domestic facet of the luxury critique. Based on rich archival material, these three examples still offered enormous potential for variety: personal differences of temperament among the three women, different paths these women took to live as mistresses of country houses, different points in the life cycles of both house and lady, and finally, change over time.

In examining the lives and careers of this trio, the primary task has been to establish whether they regarded any of their houses as homes. And if so, did they have enough control over their domestic surroundings to make them more “homelike”? Put the other way around, what were their motivations in building, organizing, furnishing, and using country house space, and how much power, influence, or control did they have in realizing those goals? And finally, how did they manage multiple residences? Did one place become the designated “home,” site of domestic intimacy and warm attachments, while others had alternative functions?

Most modern definitions highlight the home as a site for family intimacy and seclusion from the world, a place that provides such emotional and physical comfort that one can be “one's self.” Leonore Davidoff has described home as “both a place and a state of mind, homely and mundane and as such, closely associated with the family. Home implies warmth—both physical and emotional.”Footnote ¹³ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton add, “Few English words are filled with the emotional meaning of the word home. It brings to mind one's childhood, the roots of one's being, the security of a private enclave, where one can be free and in control of one's life.”Footnote ¹⁴

So, implicit in the word “home” are notions of family, self, privacy, and autonomy, a series of concepts that are problematic for the chatelaines of the eighteenth century. As Naomi Tadmor has shown, even the word “family” could and certainly did mean several things to an eighteenth-century aristocrat.Footnote ¹⁵ The duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin, and Lady Boringdon would all recognize and deem important a lineage family, that is, a family or dynasty existing over generations. But they would also recognize the kinship family, the present-day nuclear family. In assessing the experiences of these three eighteenth-century women, we must pay heed to these different interpretations of family.

The notion of self is at least as problematic and as important for an understanding of how domestic space is used and understood by its residents. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton note that the “home is a shelter for those persons and objects that define the self; thus it becomes, for most people, an indispensable symbolic environment.”Footnote ¹⁶ One of the complications for our purposes is that in the eighteenth century, the notion of “self ” was highly contested in ways important to this project. As I have shown in earlier work, the concept of “rank” was then being challenged as an artifice, a “mask” that kept hidden the “real” person. That aristocratic women maintained a sense of rank even at home was taken as symptomatic of their corruption. Home was supposed to be the ultimate site of sincerity, and in pretending to rank, even there, noblewomen violated its sanctity.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet as Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton argue, “The goal of a private self posits authentic being as something logically prior to experience and cultivation, a kind of elementary form, making it seem as if it were possible to think and feel and act and be a self prior to socialization through culture and language.”Footnote ¹⁸ Like them, I reject any notion of self that preexists cultural inscription. Instead, the development of self is a dynamic, dialectical, and ongoing process as the individual struggles to identify and signal its place within the cultural and physical environment. One's position in the social order is not outside of self but deeply embedded within it. This understanding of self is an especially useful one for historians because it enables us to evaluate historical characters by their outward manifestations—their actions, purchases, and written comments, for example—the only evidence we in fact have. It enables us to avoid making moralistic judgments about what does or does not qualify as “authentic.” The self develops, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton argue, through interaction with objects, in that a person chooses which objects to cultivate and therefore what kind of self will emerge out of that interaction. Household objects in particular, they argue, constitute an ecology of signs that both reflect and shape the owner's self.Footnote ¹⁹

The mid-eighteenth-century Lady Oxford, herself heiress to the Cavendish dukes of Newcastle, provides a simple example of the utility of these theories. Under the laws of coverture, her ancestral home, Welbeck Abbey, went to her husband, Robert Harley, during the course of her marriage, although he left her a life interest in the great house. In her widowhood, she returned to live at Welbeck, decorating it as a monument to her ancestors. “It is impossible to describe the bales of Cavendishes, Harleys, Holleses, Veres and Ogles: every chamber is Tapestried with them, nay, and with 10,000 other fat morsels,” wrote Horace Walpole, “all their histories inscribed, all their arms, crests, devices, and sculptures.” In so doing, Lady Oxford was privileging the lineage family over the kinship family or household, creating an ecology of signs that could be read by anyone. Welbeck nevertheless remained an expression of Lady Oxford's personal identity because her sense of self was derived, at least in part, from her place in the lineage family. In her widowhood, Walpole continued, she collected and displayed the “portraits and reliques of all the great families from which she descended, and which centered in her.”Footnote ²⁰

But in creating such an environment at Welbeck, Lady Oxford was not creating a home. I define a home as an environment in which one privileges comfort and convenience over grandeur and display, in which primary attention is paid to rooms and objects for the kinship family—the members of the family alive at the time of the subject, as opposed to her ancestors and descendants or the vertical relationships with dependents. In a home, emotional attachments to objects and spaces exist primarily because of personal histories rather than dynastic ones. These are not, of course, entirely discrete concepts. Family portraits in the eighteenth century, like photographs in our day, can function in either mode. If the portrait is of someone still living, or of a parent or grandparent known, well-beloved, and remembered, that portrait is a sign of the emotional attachment between the deceased and the living. It can then function as an appropriate way of decorating a “home” environment. Ancestral portraits, however, of long-dead persons, stirring no personal memories or associations, signify the lineage family. They are not constitutive of a “home.”

Conspicuous consumption, of course, is by no means incongruous with the family home. What was different in the eighteenth century was the host of nonfamily members resident, the devotion of major portions of space to nonfamily functions, and a privileged attention to lineage. “There is a Glare of Grandeur,” Mrs. Delany complained after inspecting Welbeck in 1755, after Lady Oxford's death. “It wants agreeableness.”Footnote ²¹ But Lady Oxford, in fact, shared that sentiment. A decade earlier she wrote to her friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that although “it was most agreeable to my health” to remain “in this country where my ancestors had lived so long,” while at Welbeck “I must see more company than I chuse.” Lady Oxford solved the problem by building herself a separate cottage of two floors, “consisting of a small cubic hall, an octagon-shaped dining room, a drawing room, a bed-chamber and a dressing room.” She proposed taking only two servants with her, spending half the week at Welbeck and half at the cottage, Cavendish Lodge.Footnote ²² She had a home on her estate, but she also had a country house. Public and private, home and nonhome were completely separated, the distinction reified in bricks and mortar, gilt and porcelain. But this was not something imposed upon her from the outside, nor was Lady Oxford confined to the private sphere of life. She physically moved back and forth between her two residences during the course of a given week. At Welbeck she was “accessible to callers.” At Cavendish Lodge, she was not.

In assessing the lives of the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin, and Lady Boringdon, we will be looking at three women who were, in varying ways, integrated into elite society and who, like Lady Oxford, cultivated that identity. Nevertheless, their domestic choices could be made in the direction of glorifying the lineage family or in enhancing the comfort and convenience of their kin family: husband, children, and grandchildren. They might or might not have an emotional attachment to any given domestic space, and that attachment might or might not be related to kin family attachments. But above all, we must address the question of agency. We must look not only at the signs the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin, and Lady Boringdon have left in their domestic environments but also at the restrictions and opportunities they had for creating a symbolic language of the household.

We begin with the example of Sarah, duchess of Marlborough. She and her husband, John Churchill, the first duke, had established a dynasty that would remain at the center of English history for the next three centuries. Yet, in part because of her failure to appreciate Blenheim Palace, the duchess has been regarded critically. A typical judgment is that of Gervase Jackson-Stops and James Pipkin, who describe her as “autocratic, parsimonious, and ultimately philistine.”Footnote ²³ They revere Blenheim as “a monument of the Queen's glory, … a combination of castle, citadel and monument,” rather than merely “a private Habitation for a duke.”Footnote ²⁴ That, of course, was the duchess's problem with it, for at the time of Blenheim's construction, a “private Habitation for a duke” was precisely what she wanted. Indeed, throughout her long life the duchess struggled to establish a house that could function both as a home and as a suitable seat for the powerful couple.

Born in 1660, Sarah Jennings (or Jenyns) inherited her famously quarrelsome personality from her kinship family, who were both litigious and impecunious. Her commitment to the financial independence of women probably came from the miserable experience of her mother, whose fortune, designated for the support of herself and her younger children, had been “diverted” by Sarah's father, Richard, MP for St. Albans. The consequence was a series of acrimonious lawsuits brought by various kin—his mother, his wife, his sisters, and a brother—all of which Richard evaded through claims of parliamentary privilege.Footnote ²⁵ In recalling that feelings of “home” often reflect one's early childhood, Sarah's memories were of women being cheated out of their portions and jointures, of too little money to go around, and of each man and woman fighting for him- and herself against other members of the immediate kin group. Sarah must have learned to trust no one but herself. Sarah nevertheless expected to feel at home and spent much of her life attempting to create a domicile that would provide the emotional sustenance that continually eluded her.

Home for the turbulent Jennings family was Holywell, a three-story Tudor cottage set on twenty acres at the edge of St. Albans. Soon after marrying John Churchill in 1678, Sarah bought out her sister's share in the inheritance of the house. The young couple hired William Talman, then a promising young architect, to fix up the place.Footnote ²⁶ Having been raised herself at Holywell, it was where Sarah would raise her own children and where, in later years, she cared for both the dying duke and her grandchildren following the death of their mother. It was as close to “home” as any place she lived but was hardly a country house. It was, instead, “a sad thing and stands as ill as possible,” the duchess later wrote of Holywell, hemmed in, as it was, by the city of St. Albans, the abbey, and the river Ver. “I could live very contentedly in such a place if I had no better,” she once wrote. But “better” was, of course, precisely what the ambitious young woman wanted.Footnote ²⁷

Sarah, however, soon found herself in the unenviable position of being a courtier without having a courtier's personality. By the turn of the century the future of her family depended upon her continued favor with Queen Anne, whom she found stuffy and dull.Footnote ²⁸ When the inevitable happened and Sarah lost her place at court, she also lost the lodgings that had been the Churchills’ only residence in town. By then—1711—she was a duchess, and her husband was a war hero, but they still had no country residence but Holywell. “I have removed most of my things out of St. James,” she told Mr. Craggs, her man of business, but she did not know what to do with them. When she asked the queen, she received the peremptory response that “she might take a lodging for 10 shillings a week and put my Lord Marlborough's goods in.”Footnote ²⁹ Craggs helped Sarah move the stuff to St. Albans.Footnote ³⁰

Holywell was hardly adequate to the support of a dukedom. The solution should have been at hand. In 1705 Queen Anne had offered to build a monument honoring the duke of Marlborough. When he expressed a preference for land and a need for a suitable home, she offered him the royal manor of Woodstock, containing the ruins of the legendary love nest of Henry II and the Fair Rosamund, which the queen thought could be renovated and made habitable. Instead, Churchill hired Sir John Vanbrugh, the most financially and imaginatively extravagant architect available, to build something entirely new.Footnote ³¹

The duke apparently approved of Vanbrugh's plans for constructing a grandiose monument to himself without consulting Sarah. Her quarrels with the famed architect have become legendary, but her husband had placed her in an impossible situation. He had received no firm commitment from the crown as to how much money could be spent. Initially the government had offered £20,000 to make the old manor of Woodstock habitable. When Vanbrugh complained that that sum was totally inadequate, Christopher Wren himself investigated, reporting to the treasury that the costs of building the new palace in Oxfordshire were likely to exceed £100,000. Sarah was both horrified and embarrassed. She urged her husband to manage more carefully the “publick money.”Footnote ³² Charming and courteous, Marlborough confined his hostilities to the battlefield, avoiding personal confrontations as much as possible. He ignored Sarah's complaints. Off in France, however, he urged Vanbrugh to continue the great work.Footnote ³³

In tracing Sarah's concerns, we can see that she would have preferred something that would have more closely approximated a home designed for the comfort and convenience of those who live there. According to her, even if the palace were ever finished, Vanbrugh's conception was unlivable. Bedrooms with twenty-two-foot-high ceilings would require “going up as many steps to bed.” The principal floor's design “made it quite impossible to live in the house, unless one were willing to live in the cellar and make money by showing the house to strangers,” she wrote presciently.Footnote ³⁴ Even Jackson-Stops and Pipkin admit that one can hardly imagine a less inviting room in which to enjoy a meal than the enormous saloon, which originally lacked a fireplace and was located a quarter of a mile from the kitchen.Footnote ³⁵ It was nevertheless intended to be the state dining room. That was certainly not to Sarah's tastes, which ran to the practical and are reflected only in Blenheim's highly advanced water system, providing her with hot and cold running water in what was originally the palace's only bathroom, located directly under her bedroom and connected to it by a back staircase.Footnote ³⁶

The duchess of Marlborough was no happier with the grandiosity of the landscaping than she had been with the palace's interior. She had been appalled when she visited the building site in 1711 and saw that Vanbrugh was literally making the earth move. “This bridge you will know is not at all necessary to bring you to the house,” she wrote her man of business, “nor is there now watter under it nor can there bee any without adjusting the medows.”Footnote ³⁷ Craggs wanted to join her, but as she pointed out ruefully, she had no place to put him, having “no family home” but only “an ugly inn” in which to stay.Footnote ³⁸ Here we see her using the word “home” in a modern sense, as associated with family—the kinship family—and also with friendship. A family home was a place where she could welcome and accommodate personal guests. This is confirmed by her description of Althorp, the Spencer family home, which was her ideal country house. Althorp “was so contrived,” she wrote, “that one might live comfortably there with a few friends.”Footnote ³⁹ Again, the association she makes is of comfort—physical and emotional—with friendship. I will call these relationships horizontal. They are not dynastic, and yet they go beyond the bounds of the immediate family. They were relationships important to Lady Irwin and Lady Boringdon as well, as we shall see, and are central to Mark Girouard's notion of the social house, whose era, he posits, began about 1720. The social house was one in which horizontal relationships among the polite were dominant.Footnote ⁴⁰ The duchess of Marlborough, however, spent much of her life trapped in the baroque, with its emphasis on grandiose, uncomfortable verticality in both architecture and social life.

Nevertheless, Sarah was not hostile to the notion of dynasty—indeed, she, like her husband, had worked hard to found one. But the duke and duchess had different ideas of what they owed their posterity. Sarah's dissatisfaction with Blenheim was not only a question of her personal tastes. She was also afraid that the government would cease funding the ambitious project and that the duke would then have to use his own funds to complete the palace. This, of course, is precisely what happened. “I have no mind to fall out with Sir John,” she told Craggs in 1716, only months before she, in fact, fell out with the architect, “much less to vex the D of Marl: at a time when his health is so bad. At the same time I think I owe it to him and to my family to prevent, if I can, having a great estate thrown away in leveling of hills, filling up precipices and making bridges in the air, for no reason that I, or anybody else can see, but to have it said after that Sir J.v.b. did that thing which never was done before.”Footnote ⁴¹

After the duke suffered a stroke in May 1716, the duchess took direct control of the project, firing Vanbrugh in the hopes of finishing Blenheim so the duke could move in before he died. She hired a modest cabinetmaker, James Moore, who succeeded in this effort. By the summer of 1718, the family wing was ready to be lived in, although the palace as a whole remained incomplete.Footnote ⁴²

Vanbrugh and the duchess had, among other issues, disagreed about the fate of the old manor house of Woodstock. Vanbrugh had lived in it during the years he was superintending the works and thus had sufficiently renovated the old structure to make it habitable. Like him, subsequent architectural historians have criticized Sarah for her apparent failure to appreciate the history of the place. But buildings, like consumer goods, can mean different things to different people. For Sarah, a married woman whose handsome husband was frequently away, the story of Henry II and the Fair Rosamund was neither historic nor romantic: it was adulterous. She had no intention of glorifying such a place. Instead she demolished the manor, later playing with the idea of putting the phallic obelisk on its site, to “please Sir John best, because it would give him an opportunity of mentioning that King whose scenes of love he was so much pleased with.”Footnote ⁴³

Sarah's sense of home, her practicality, and, above all, her possessiveness are seen in the inventory of Blenheim's contents she completed four years before her death. The duke, who died in 1722, had bequeathed her a life interest in the palace before it went to their grandson, leaving the duchess free to dispose of her own substantial property. This required distinguishing those articles belonging to the dukedom, which would remain at Blenheim, and possessions she had acquired separately and could bequeath separately, although the articles may have been used to furnish the palace. In this, we see how she had been able to invest the palace with signs of herself, despite her lack of control over its construction.

Sarah's personal effects could be found in any part of Blenheim Palace and not only in the family's private quarters. In the state bedchamber, for instance, there was a Rubens, Family with Our Savior, that she had purchased with her own money, as she notes in the inventory. That is all she says about the great painting. Many other items designated in the inventory, however, bespeak the duchess's long public career and personal memories and associations. In a room described as “the Bedchamber where Lady Delawar lay,” there was a “yellow Damask Bed lined with white Sattin Embroidered and a very old suit of tapestry hangings wch the Queen gave me to furnish part of my lodgings at Windsor Castle which afterwards I sent to St. Albans and afterwards to Blenheim from thence to save buying furniture for that room.” Since no information was required beyond the identification of items, the fact that Sarah felt it necessary to mention “to save buying furniture for that room” suggests that that was important to her.Footnote ⁴⁴ The tapestry hangings not only signified her various moves but her frugality, of which she remained very proud.

Pleasure in her own frugality seems to have been a major component of the duchess's emotional response to objects. That quality, as well as her possessiveness, is reflected in the way she was able to mentally dismember items of furniture, parts of which were of her purchase and parts of which were not. There were, for instance, “Seven Square Stools” on the principal floor, “the frames only belonging to the Trust and the upper cases but the covers that are rich Gold Embroidered upon Blew are the Dutchess of Marlborough's own furniture,” she added. Most of the furnishings in her bedchamber belonged to the trust, “except a very deep valence on the outside of the bed of a very rich embroidery which was made of the duchess of Marlborough's cloathes,” she recorded.Footnote ⁴⁵ Frances Harris suggests that Holywell, Sarah's childhood home, was comfortably shabby, and it may well be that that was the style that most made Sarah feel secure—and at home. If so, it is no wonder that Blenheim always seemed so alien to her.Footnote ⁴⁶

When the duke died, that grandiose monument to himself remained as yet unfinished. Yet Holywell was too small for the sort of sociability the duchess of Marlborough anticipated. It also held too many memories for a woman who long outlived not only her husband but many of her children and grandchildren as well. “This place is convenient and suits well enough,” she wrote of Holywell, “yet ’tis so dismal to be here alone in a Place that makes me reflect upon many Scenes of happiness, none of which can ever return, that I cannot bear to stay.”Footnote ⁴⁷ A wealthy woman in her own right, she purchased land at Wimbledon for the purpose of providing herself, at long last, with a suitable country house, appointing a clerk of the works who could be relied upon to do as he was told, which, as she told her favorite granddaughter, Lady Diana Spencer, “no architect will.” She wanted a design that was both “plain and clean,” boasting a principal floor accessible without stairs, important because of her increasing frailty. It was completed in 1732.Footnote ⁴⁸ “If I am good for anything,” the duchess once remarked, “it is to furnish a House in a useful manner.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Her own domestic needs thus satisfied, the duchess was ready to add to Blenheim's monumental qualities with an appropriately placed obelisk honoring Marlborough's victories and a Rysbrack statue of Queen Anne, whose generosity, after all, had made the palace possible.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although she had placed items of personal significance to her within its walls, she had not created Blenheim's ecology of signs. Her personal possessions could not be left there. In building Wimbledon, however, she could shape an environment to suit her sense of self, possessions very much included. She was then free to supply Blenheim with elements for what it in fact was: a house but not a home. Multiple houses served different functions.

But the majority of aristocrats, unlike the duchess of Marlborough, did not build even a single new house, even in the early eighteenth century. The costs of building a house “from scratch” were so high that, as Wilson and Mackley have shown, most aristocrats preferred renovating old structures, preserving their house's dynastic associations in the process.Footnote ⁵¹ The young women who married into these older houses thus found themselves in buildings suited to a medieval lifestyle, designed for the reception and accommodation of large numbers of male retainers and dependents. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton tell us that in organizing a household, individuals can reject those signs that are at variance with the self they are cultivating. “Household objects are chosen and could be freely discarded if they produced too much conflict with the self.”Footnote ⁵² But this would prove difficult for married noblewomen of the eighteenth century, whose desire for homelike surroundings might conflict with their identity as loyal and deferential wives, their respect for a husband's lineage, and owing to the laws of coverture, their own lack of autonomy during marriage. Nor, of course, could one choose or discard an inherited and entailed house. But one could, eventually, renovate.

Our second case study, Frances, Lady Irwin, provides an illustration of a woman who ultimately remade an older country house to suit personal ideas of domestic space, creating an ecology of signs organized primarily around the needs of her kinship family. A politically shrewd manager of the Sussex borough of Horsham, Lady Irwin was also an avid art collector.Footnote ⁵³ She was therefore a woman with a powerful public identity. Nevertheless, like the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin wanted her country house to be a home. She would be far more successful.

Heiress of a fabulously wealthy merchant and MP, Frances Shepheard married Charles Ingram, later ninth Viscount Irwin, in 1758. Temple Newsam, Frances's marital home in Yorkshire, was as ancient as it was vast. There had been a house on the site even at the time of the Domesday survey. The house she came to as a bride was largely the creation of Sir Arthur Ingram, the founder of her husband's dynasty, who had purchased and largely rebuilt Temple Newsam in 1622. It retained both the charm and the inconvenience of an old house. Temple Newsam was an asymmetrical three-sided building, although the three wings, having been built separately, were out of alignment, making it difficult to pass from one wing to another or from one floor to another. The south wing contained the Great Hall on the ground floor and a Great Chamber above, where tenants, retainers, and other dependents were originally accommodated. As Jackson-Stops and Pipkin put it, “The development of the country house is largely concerned with the retreat of the family,” as private rooms, beginning with the Great Chamber, “steadily became more public, and comfort and seclusion became increasingly prized.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Christopher Christie points out that the “captivating idea of a retreat from large, grand formal spaces was always present in the mind of the upper classes.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Blenheim Palace indeed had been very modern in its provision of a private family wing. That would not be possible at Temple Newsam, where the family could never afford more than piecemeal changes.

The modernization of Temple Newsam had begun under Henry, the seventh Viscount (Frances's husband's uncle), who transformed the north wing's enormous Jacobean Long Gallery into a Picture Gallery, library, and bedchamber, changes very much consistent with eighteenth-century taste.Footnote ⁵⁶ Frances's huge dowry offered the promise of further renovation. Although her husband commissioned John Carr, Capability Brown, and Robert Adam to draw up plans for alterations, he only actually hired Brown, the landscape gardener, to make improvements during his lifetime.Footnote ⁵⁷ Josiah Wedgewood may have been correct when he told Brown that his own life, as a maker of fine ceramics, was as “devoted to the service of the Ladys” as Brown's career as a landscape architect “was to that of the Noblemen and Gentlemen.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In other words, Wedgewood's expectation was that men were interested in exteriors; women, in interiors. Frances's husband, Lord Irwin, certainly adhered to that principle.

Fortunately, Frances liked Temple Newsam immediately. As a bride, she wrote long detailed descriptions of the pleasures of country life in the company of an adoring husband. “Think, if you can, without the extremest envy,” she wrote her closest childhood friend, the as yet unmarried Lady Susan Stewart, “on a party my husband and I had yesterday evening by moonlight,” in which they enjoyed the early spring flowers, the nightingales, and the evening air. “The sort of happiness one receives is really what makes life desirable,” she added. “How much more charming is a husband who tastes and enjoys these apparent trifles and who can live happy and always Chearful for weeks tête-á-tête with his wife.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Lady Irwin's early affection for Temple Newsam continued throughout her life. There are at least two dimensions of that attachment that are worthy of notice. The first is that she consistently associates Temple Newsam with her husband and children, her immediate, or kinship, family. In 1766, after eight years of marriage, she wrote Lady Susan from Temple Newsam that “a bright day, serene air and merry children make up the sum of my enjoyments and really when my half [her husband] is here fill my world with delight and pleasure.” The following year she expressed a desire to stay at Temple Newsam, as opposed to going to either London or Hills, the family's Elizabethan house in Sussex, because she would have to leave behind her two youngest children, both toddlers. “I cannot bear to think of entrusting the two little tendrils which twine around my neck as well as my heart,” she told Lady Susan.Footnote ⁶⁰

The second feature is Lady Irwin's expressed preference for a country life. Lord Irwin may have been the one who hired Capability Brown, but Frances, despite Wedgewood's theories, was an active woman who shared in her husband's outdoor interests. “The weather from being very bad is become quite like summer,” she wrote in April 1766. “I enjoy it excessively and I am out of doors all day long. Mr. Brown has put us in a woeful dirty pickle, but my gravel walk,” which she had designed and built for outdoor exercise, “is always a resource and much made use of.”Footnote ⁶¹ In addition to creating a gravel path, she had her own flower patch, doing the planting on a cold March day in Yorkshire.Footnote ⁶²

There is a clear moral dimension to Lady Irwin's preference for country life. She constantly compares Temple Newsam to London, “where the operas are thronged and loo tables crowded … and the grandees appear most hideously,” she wrote Lady Susan in 1759. Ten years later the theme was the same. “When the delight” of country life is compared “to those occasioned by the pleasures of London,” she told Lady Susan, “the advantage is absolutely on our side. So much freshness and beauty is certainly a match for paint and perfume.”Footnote ⁶³ Lady Irwin's association of country life with morality, and London's with artificiality and, therefore, immorality is most blatant in her letter to Lady Susan of April 1766. “I leave you to Ranelagh and all its charms,” she writes. “While I am contented to secure health and tranquility in a most quiet sphere, without being troubled with the pangs of envy, or tortured with political horrors … I work, I read, I walk, I talk, and all without the trouble of making believe, as you are all forced to do in London from morning till night.”Footnote ⁶⁴

There it is—the late eighteenth-century sense of self—expressed in 1766 by a most unlikely suspect, a noblewoman. Lady Irwin associates morality with sincerity, with the countryside, and with domesticity. London is the site of politics and pleasure but also of ambition, vanity, pretense, and envy, symbolized by the notorious pleasure gardens. Still, even a country house posed dangers to the complacent and the wealthy. Lady Irwin was sympathetic to the view that too much luxury was weakening. “I don’t believe there is anything more certain of destroying a good constitution than £20,000 a year with an indolent disposition,” Lady Irwin wrote on the occasion of Lady Rockingham's illness. “It requires great exertion to use exercise and stir about when the will is not so inclined and the sofas appear in every corner of the room.”Footnote ⁶⁵

One might be tempted to argue that Lady Irwin “protests too much” and that she overdoes her love of the country, that she is pretending to a morality and an ethic she does not herself feel. But if we recall the definition of self offered at the beginning of this article, we can see very readily that Lady Irwin chose, in fact, to cultivate a rural, domestic self. If we think she was only doing so to “fit in,” then she was cultivating what Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton regard as a highly integrative self, rather than differentiating herself from the mob of others mouthing similar platitudes. As Lawrence Klein has argued, “Pretension is just an arbitrarily condescending way to characterize processes of fashioning and refashioning.” “Identity,” he adds, “is not an essence but a set of skills. … As soon as pretensions become social practices, they take on a reality and authenticity of their own.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, Lady Irwin's self-fashioning as a country woman is her way of cultivating a self no less authentic than any other mode would be.

Lady Irwin's attachment to Temple Newsam, however, was specific to that place. Her husband had also inherited from his grandmother a second country house, Hills, in Sussex, for which Lady Irwin never developed the same level of affection. This may be simply because she spent much less time there. Eleven years into her marriage, she had not yet seen Hills, an Elizabethan house, although Capability Brown had been working on its landscape for some time. In August 1774, she finally tells Lady Gower, “We have passed a very pleasant month at a place I like exceedingly belonging to my spouse in Sussex. … It has agrémens to make it mighty agreeable for a short time.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This suggests that she regarded Hills as, at best, a holiday retreat. In her widowhood, however, she would spend more time there, not to relax but to supervise and manage her borough of Horsham, which returned two members to Parliament. Until then, as James Lomax has written, she actively avoided leaving Temple Newsam. Far from feeling confined there, she hoped “my hub will let me rest my old bones at home.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Indeed while Lady Irwin had three places of residence, including the house in town she had inherited from her father, she only had one home, and that was Temple Newsam. She makes that point clearly. “Next Friday I propose returning to London,” she wrote from Hills in 1779, “and hope after staying there a few days to pay bills and pack up to set out for my own real home at Temple Newsam.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Widowhood seems only to have enhanced her attachment to her Yorkshire country house. “I have been here a month,” she reported from Temple Newsam in August 1778, shortly after Charles's death at Bath, “and find a kind of satisfaction in this place, which I am a stranger to everywhere else.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Charles's death left the forty-four-year-old Frances a wealthy woman with a life interest in Temple Newsam. Her thirty-year widowhood finally gave her the opportunity to renovate the great house. Although she took bids from several nationally distinguished architects, Lady Irwin ultimately hired a local workman, William Johnson. Perhaps, like the earlier duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin felt it was easier to maintain authority over an obscure craftsman than it was over a celebrity. Or perhaps the two women were less impressed by prestige than their husbands had been: they simply wanted value for money.

Lady Irwin's purpose was to make Temple Newsam an attractive home for her grown children. Her eldest daughter, Isabella, had married the marquess of Hertford's heir and had gone off to a country house (and a life of notoriety) of her own. The widowed Lady Irwin dreaded the possibility that her four younger daughters would follow suit. “I cannot bear to have my creatures taken away and be left by my poor old self forlorn and solitary,” Lady Irwin wrote when she found her second daughter on the brink of matrimony.Footnote ⁷¹

Perhaps only coincidentally, the four remaining daughters made less distinguished marriages. By the time the remodeling was completed in the 1790s, they and their families had indeed come to live with Lady Irwin. Her renovations provided appropriate living quarters for this entire extended family. Temple Newsam's large multifunctional rooms were transformed into modern, smaller, more specialized spaces to suit individual family members. The first-floor Jacobean Great Chamber had become a series of new bedchambers and dressing rooms for her daughters and granddaughters, while her own suite of apartments and those of her sons-in-law were scattered throughout the other two wings of the house. The downstairs Great Hall, no longer receiving a retinue of dependents, was remodeled and curtailed in size and now functioned only as an enlarged entrance hall. A parlor and terrace room, where the family could dine informally, was created at one end of the truncated space. Curiously, no room was designated as a “drawing room.” Perhaps in a household so dominated by women there were rarely enough men from whom to withdraw.

Lady Irwin constructed her own ecology of signs at Temple Newsam, choosing and discarding at will, paying little heed to the house's history. She furnished the new rooms in the latest taste, choosing simple neoclassical designs and lightweight cotton fabrics in pastel shades of blue and green, which would have contrasted strongly with the richly colored damasks of Temple Newsam's older interiors. The new rooms were wallpapered, which has been considered disparagingly as a “feminine influence” because it created a sense of intimacy in an interior space, precisely what we would expect in a “home.”Footnote ⁷² She cultivated a self that was conventional, domestic, and family oriented.

Nevertheless, Lady Irwin's architectural changes were neither timid nor minor. And although these primarily affected the south wing, changes there had repercussions elsewhere. To provide Temple Newsam with exterior symmetry, she demolished the projecting block where the kitchen had been. Relocated in what was once the chapel across the courtyard in the North Wing, the kitchen was now adjacent to the cook's room, scullery, servants’ hall, and a rabbit warren of work spaces and servants’ quarters, all located under the Picture Gallery.Footnote ⁷³ That too was an appropriately eighteenth-century mode of design, separating the kinship family from the dependent members of the household.

The Temple Newsam inventory, completed after Lady Irwin's death in 1807, gives us a glimpse of how the various rooms were used during her lifetime. The Irwin inventory was a legal document containing a list and valuation of Lady Irwin's property, compiled by experts in each of the four areas into which her moveable property was divided: farm property, pictures, china and plate, and household furniture and goods, including linens. Items were left where they had been at Lady Irwin's death, those indoors being identified by the rooms in which the compilers found them.Footnote ⁷⁴ What the Irwin inventory gains in accuracy it loses in sentiment, by comparison with that compiled by the duchess of Marlborough a half century earlier. The Temple Newsam inventory, for instance, contains no explicit statement of who purchased what or what the history of an object might have been. Nevertheless, the descriptions are so complete that we can still learn a great deal about Lady Irwin's household.

The ground-floor breakfast parlor she had created included a dozen “backstools,” fabric-covered armless chairs, akin to the modern dining room chair, as well as two matching armchairs. Those fourteen are described as being covered in “the needlework of Lady Irwin,” which “are not valued but by the directions of Lady William Gordon,” her second daughter and one of the signers to the inventory, but as heirlooms “to go with the house.”Footnote ⁷⁵ James Lomax suggests that Lady Irwin and her daughters, like Ingram women before them, were skilled at “elegant and useful leisure,” designing as well as executing patterns for bed hangings and handkerchiefs as well as for upholstery.Footnote ⁷⁶

Dressing room furnishings indicate that these rooms had practical as well as social functions: men's dressing rooms had basins and bottles and shaving equipment. Despite Lady Irwin's apparent hostility to gaming, she nevertheless provided her dashing son-in-law Lord William Gordon with a “loo table” in his dressing room. Women's dressing rooms had “bedets” and commodes as well as items of great luxury. Lady Irwin presumably chose the furnishings for her own first-floor dressing room. Although larger than her bedroom, at 22 feet;×20 feet; the dressing room was crammed with possessions accumulated over her lifetime. According to the inventory, this space contained four backstools, two Queen Anne chairs, a sofa, a couch, and four black-matted chairs. There were also fourteen tables, including game tables, a secretary, another work table, and a backgammon table. There were tables with and without drawers and with and without bookshelves as well as bookcases. Furnishings were upholstered in everything from calico and cotton to damask and silk, although green and white patterns regularly recur. As the inventory's editor noted, no present-day curator would “have dreamt of displaying so much and of such variety” as that which Lady Irwin kept in her dressing room. “This room,” the editor concludes, appears “as eclectic and crowded a mixture of objects as any High Victorian drawing room.”Footnote ⁷⁷

A sense of lineage family is much less evident in Lady Irwin's acquisitions than that of her personal self and immediate kin. Even family portraits that had once hung in the Picture Gallery had been taken down and replaced with Dutch landscapes.Footnote ⁷⁸ While this might smack of the game of conspicuous consumption—as opposed to that of dynasty—there are nevertheless hints that paintings were acquired and hung primarily for her own pleasure, rather than to establish her credentials as a woman of wealth and taste. The most valuable painting she acquired was a Claude, a painter very popular with the eighteenth-century aristocracy. Rather than hanging it in the Picture Gallery, however, she kept it in her cluttered dressing room, along with eighteen other paintings, the Claude providing her with inspiration for what “one's mind ought to be.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Another clue to the personal nature of the art collection is that unwittingly offered by famed agricultural writer Arthur Young, who complained after a visit to Temple Newsam in Lady Irwin's time that the paintings were not labeled and that the person who “shows the house,” presumably the housekeeper, “knows neither the subject or painter of scarce any.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Unlike the Marlborough inventory, which focused on the acquisition of household goods for Blenheim Palace, Lady Irwin's highlights their placement and value at the time of her death. Yet the inventory also demonstrates her need to inscribe herself on Temple Newsam. During the early years of her widowhood, Lady Irwin purchased a fire engine for the estate. On each of the twenty-three large leather water buckets it contained is written in large, clear letters and numerals, “irwin 1785.” In 1800 she set about furnishing what was left of the Great Hall, purchasing twelve hardback mahogany “hall chairs,” each painted with her own initials.Footnote ⁸¹ If these imprints suggest Lady Irwin's need to leave her personal stamp on the house, another feature makes that statement even more boldly. Her name was engraved on the external wall of the south wing she had had remodeled, where it is easily read to this day. Women, like men, could have an edifice complex.

The individual in present time and the dynasty are not, in fact, entirely discrete concepts. Lady Irwin used the possessions she had in her lifetime to impress herself on her posterity. Dynasty is what makes the life of the individual important. In addition to the physical signs of herself that Lady Irwin left at Temple Newsam, she was a careful steward of the estate, taking responsibility for the household accounts.Footnote ⁸² Lady Irwin's management of the parliamentary borough of Horsham in her widowhood, often at great cost, in time, effort, and money, provided her with the opportunity to have her Tory political views represented in Commons. It was also an expression of concern for the lineage. The borough was part of the family's resources, and it had to be used wisely for the family's benefit, just as good housekeeping represented the stewardship of Temple Newsam itself. Indeed, Lady Irwin fought a lengthy and successful battle to keep Horsham's burgages out of the hands of the duke of Norfolk, a radical Whig.Footnote ⁸³ So her sense of the lineage family is one oriented toward the future, toward stewardship and preservation, rather than in glorifying the past.

Lady Irwin showed little interest in maintaining the historic quality of her home. Perhaps this was because Temple Newsam had not belonged to the Ingram family prior to the Jacobean period. Nevertheless, given her love of Temple Newsam, it is perhaps surprising that Lady Irwin showed relatively little interest in the history of a house that had belonged to the Knights Templar and was the reputed birthplace of Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots's ill-fated second husband. Indeed, Sir Walter Scott set one of Ivanhoe's scenes at Temple Newsam.

To appreciate that past would be to move on to a later, more romantic era.Footnote ⁸⁴ Lady Irwin appears to have been a very comfortable member of the polite, civilized, Augustan age, who valued the modern and the classic far more than the barbarisms of the intervening years. That her tastes were conventional does not make them any the less genuine. Deborah Cohen has argued that among the elite, distinctiveness was conferred by land, title, and lineage, and therefore individuality did not need to be earned. “Aristocrats,” she asserts, “did not secure their status by their household possessions.”Footnote ⁸⁵ That, of course, is inescapably true. Yet possessions are not acquired or appreciated only for the acquisition of social status. Lady Irwin's example suggests a more nuanced story. Like the duchess of Marlborough, she did identify with her possessions and, in the case of Temple Newsam, with her home in its entirety, as her name emblazoned on the exterior of the south wing testifies.

Lady Irwin's emotional response to place is clearly different from that of the duchess of Marlborough, who in her widowhood avoided memories of happier times that had become unbearable because they were irretrievable. Lady Irwin, by contrast, wanted to be surrounded by the personal memories with which her home was associated. Most of all, she had a powerful emotional attachment to Temple Newsam itself as the site of both dwelling and nurturing. It was most definitely both her house and her home.

The third case is that of the 1809 marriage of Frances Talbot to John Parker, then Viscount Boringdon and later first Earl of Morley, owner of Saltram House. This is the story of a young woman who fit herself into a lineage home and made of it a personal home. But it is a very different story from that of Lady Irwin. Lady Boringdon brought no wealth of her own to the marriage. This may have put her in a less powerful position with regard to house and husband than that of her predecessors. If both self and lineage would turn out to be lesser issues for Fanny, autonomy would be a greater one. Still, she came to feel very quickly “at home” in Saltram, regarding it as her proper dwelling, a source of nurturance, and a focus of deep attachment.

Although the Talbots were not entirely without pretensions to gentility, Fanny's deceased father had only been a provincial surgeon-apothecary, while her brother was a clergyman.Footnote ⁸⁶ Still she was genteel enough to have been painted by Opie in 1802. She had probably studied painting and drawing in Paris and by the time of her marriage already enjoyed an artistic reputation.Footnote ⁸⁷ But the family was not well off, and she did not normally travel in the same social circles as did her wealthy and well-connected groom. Indeed, Lord Boringdon apparently spent several weeks in Norfolk with the Talbots prior to the wedding, buying Fanny a lace veil so she could be suitably attired for the ceremony.Footnote ⁸⁸

The disparity in rank was not the only challenge Fanny faced in marrying Lord Boringdon. First of all, he had three “natural” sons, the legacy of a long affair he had had with a highly placed married woman. Second, Fanny would be his second wife: the first one, Lady Augusta Fane, had eloped, pregnant, with her lover, leaving a three-year-old son behind. The highly sensationalized divorce was finalized only six months before Fanny's wedding. If one were to guess, however, that a chastened Lord Boringdon had chosen a safe, demure little bourgeoise for his second wife, one would be wrong. Fanny was in fact a bright, witty, energetic, artistic, and athletic woman who wrote letters that still effervesce like champagne. Indeed, when the novels Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility appeared in print, it was widely assumed that Fanny Boringdon was the “anonymous lady” who had written them. She in fact corresponded with Jane Austen, whose brother was the Parker family chaplain.Footnote ⁸⁹

Fanny Talbot married Lord Boringdon without having seen the house where she would spend the rest of her life. Her predilection for Saltram, however, was well established before she had ever been there. “How I long for Saturday,” she wrote her old friend and new sister-in-law, the Honorable Theresa Villiers, “when I shall really see the place of all others in the universe I most desire to see … oh how I long to get to Saltram!”Footnote ⁹⁰ Her comments suggest that she expected to like Saltram and regarded it as her new home before she had seen it—that is, well before it could become a site of family memories and attachments. She never expressed a preference for a London life rather than a rural one either. Although she would also have an impressive town house in fashionable Portman Square, her country house was to be her home.

In fact, Lord Boringdon first took his new bride to Portman Square after their wedding. It was at that “palazzo” as she called it, where Fanny first met her little stepson, who poignantly enough mistook her for the mother who bolted.Footnote ⁹¹ Although over the course of her lifetime the family would annually come to Portman Square for the London “season,” Fanny never regarded the town house with the same affection with which she regarded Saltram. Indeed, she shared the earlier Lady Irwin's expressed disdain for the sophisticated life of the city. Although Lady Boringdon's primary complaint seems to have been the want of physical exercise, she made a connection between physical and mental health that Lady Irwin would have recognized. Accustomed to horseback riding in Devonshire, Fanny tried vigorous and prolonged walking when in town. “As I have always been so much accustomed to air & exercise,” she explained to her sister-in-law, “if I was to be deprived of it like many London ladies I shd. lose all my faculties mental and Corporal and fall into a state of utter imbecility.”Footnote ⁹²

Fanny was immediately enraptured by Saltram. “The place is a thousand times more delightful than all the fertility of my imagination had conceived,” she gleefully reported to her sister-in-law, a few days after finally arriving there.Footnote ⁹³ The largest house in Devonshire, Saltram is beautifully situated overlooking Plymouth harbor. Boringdon's grandparents had wrapped a Palladian mansion around the core of a Tudor house, while his parents had improved the interior with the help of Robert Adam, creating one of the architect's finest sets of rooms. Unlike the arrangement of either the baroque Blenheim or the remodeled Temple Newsam, Fanny Boringdon's Saltram was generally divided into private rooms upstairs and public rooms down. But there are exceptions: an impressive suite of Chinese-wallpapered rooms being upstairs, while some of the downstairs rooms, particularly the library, were used by family members even in the absence of guests. Saltram “completely unites all the comforts and luxuries of life,” she told her sister-in-law. “What a happy fate is mine!”Footnote ⁹⁴

Becoming mistress of Saltram also presented Fanny with responsibilities for which she was completely unprepared. Even prior to leaving Norfolk, for instance, she was expected to hire a nursemaid and “governante” for the little stepson she had not yet met.Footnote ⁹⁵ Greater challenges awaited Fanny when she arrived at Saltram. Neither her husband nor the housekeeper had anticipated the problems an outsider would encounter in running so large a house and meeting the enormous social responsibilities that came with it. “I made a terrible blunder,” she wrote Theresa, “in totally losing my way,” while conducting the first houseguest to her room, only a week after moving in herself. “I am determined to have guideposts put up in the house as I shall never learn the geography,” she sighed. Before the end of September, Lady Boringdon had a much larger house party to deal with, receiving a “little gentle scold” from her husband for forgetting to order beds for the guests. Nevertheless, Fanny assured her sister-in-law, she had now begun to officiate at “the head of affairs with a most undaunted demeanor” and can even serve “the soup at dinner without the least danger of spilling it in a fright which was far from the case when I first took my place at the head of the feast.”Footnote ⁹⁶

The difficulties of social isolation and new responsibilities could well have been compounded by the general lack of autonomy Lady Boringdon experienced as the chatelaine of Saltram. During the course of her years at Saltram she frequently mentioned the large parties of guests arriving and departing, all of whom were, at least initially, complete strangers to Fanny. Some she learned to like, while other guests tried her patience. Many guests simply announced themselves, while others were invited, occasionally leading to the presence of an unlikely and undesirable collection of people simultaneously being housed, fed, and entertained at Saltram. Although Lady Boringdon initially knew none of her husband's connections beyond his sister, she was not allowed to invite anyone without his prior approval. He was very pleased with himself in 1810 for giving her permission to invite her brother to Saltram. Recall Lady Irwin's comment that she hoped her husband would allow her to remain at Temple Newsam. So there is a real question of how much autonomy, if any, married noblewomen had over their own movements, as well as the movements of others into and out of their houses.

By 1826, however, Lady Boringdon—by now the Countess of Morley—was managing the Saltram estate when her husband was away for six weeks. In her letter to Mary, Countess Grey—wife of the great Whig leader—she suggests that “my judgment is now considered sufficiently sound to be treated with the regulation of the Bill of Fare.” “When will you attain such confidence and distinction?” she asks her friend. It is hard to tell whether she is joking or whether, in fact, she really has had so little ability to make decisions in her own house, even as to what should be eaten.Footnote ⁹⁷

Not surprisingly, therefore, Lady Boringdon's transformations at Saltram were more modest than those of Lady Irwin at Temple Newsam. Nor, of course, did she ever build a house of her own, as did the duchess of Marlborough. During the first year of her tenure at Saltram, Fanny replaced the old-fashioned Genoese silk velvet on the walls of the Morning Room with crimson flock wallpaper, a pier glass, and curtain poles, while elsewhere she introduced the striped wallpaper and Greek Revival furniture typical of Regency style.Footnote ⁹⁸ She also had a flower garden of her own. Like Lady Irwin and the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Boringdon's tastes ran to the practical as well as the stylish. Most of all, like the duchess of Marlborough, she valued good plumbing. Castle Howard, it turned out, failed to live up to her standards. “I am much struck by the magnificence of this place—it really is Princely,” she wrote after her first stay there in 1825. “But alas,” she sighed, “what avail Splendid Saloons and Gorgeous Galleries” when one has “basins no bigger than breakfast cups to wash in—’tis a bitter concern.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Nevertheless, despite the apparent difficulties of new responsibilities, social isolation, and lack of autonomy, it would be absolutely incorrect to portray Lady Boringdon as a permanent houseguest marooned in a gentleman's house. Saltram in fact quickly became home to the apothecary's daughter from Norfolk. Two critical factors specific to Lady Boringdon's relationship with Saltram probably enabled her to develop a strong attachment to the house. The first is that her marriage proved to be an emotionally satisfying one. Like Lady Irwin, Lady Boringdon would quickly come to associate her country house with the warmth and intimacy of her relationship with her husband. One of the first times she uses the word “home” in the emotionally appropriate terms later enunciated by the Oxford English Dictionary was in early October 1809, a few weeks after moving into Saltram. The Boringdons had just passed a miserable evening at the home of a Mrs. G, who represented “the very quintessence of vulgarity,” she told her sister-in-law. The real highlight of the evening, Fanny concluded, “was when I arrived at my own home and seated comfortably round the fire,” and she and her husband “began to narrate the events of the Evening.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ So what really made Saltram a home was not the Adam saloon or the Reynolds portraits but the comfortable intimacy of husband and wife.

Neither the presence of those luxuries nor the assumption of new responsibilities precluded that sense of comfortable intimacy so critical to our definition of “home.” If anything, the constant presence of strangers in her house seems to have highlighted the intimacy Fanny Boringdon felt with her husband when the guests were gone. A few days after Mrs. G's unendurable soiree, Fanny writes, “what a comfort to be alone—we have a few hours of purgatory to go through,” referring to the time between the departure of one set of houseguests and the arrival of the next. Fanny consistently associates Saltram with the word “comfort” in both its physical and emotional senses. Two years later, after making a country house tour themselves, the Boringdons returned to Saltram, and Fanny was in “The third Heaven at being got home again, never having been warm since I left this dear comfortable old room,” probably referring to her first-floor boudoir.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Home meant comfort, warmth, and intimacy. The fireside trope was a familiar one to this newly coroneted member of the Regency aristocracy.

The second critical factor enabling Lady Boringdon to feel “at home” at Saltram was that she was, in two major ways, well suited to the new situation and responsibilities placed upon her. Saltram would provide her with an appropriate site for the cultivation of self. First, having been given enormous social responsibilities, Fanny quickly developed into a notably gracious and energetic hostess. She was not entirely lacking in either initiative or autonomy, although presumably her husband had to approve her plans. But her own social ambitions had not ended with marriage into the peerage. A year later she decided it was time to bring the waltz to Devonshire and planned a ball and supper for over 200 guests. Before the event took place, she realized it would be a failure unless someone apart from herself and her husband knew how to perform the racy new dance. So she invited some forty people to stay a few weeks in advance, engaging a dancing master “to provide regular Training as a racehorse at Newmarket” would be given. The ball itself, which took place in the exquisite Adam saloon, was a great success. “We had two rows of seats” for those watching the waltzers, she told Mrs. Villiers, “the back row elevated higher than the front, and in all affording a comfortable anchorage for about 200 persons’ posteriors.” Supper was served in the Great Dining Room for about 120 people, while tables were laid for the remaining guests in the library and the adjoining Morning Room.Footnote ¹⁰² A few days later Lord Boringdon bragged proudly that “it was universally thought” that his wife “danced more gracefully and better” even than Lady Charlotte Edgecombe, and he hoped the newspapers “gave proper notice of the Ball.”Footnote ¹⁰³ A proud and pleased husband, his comments lacked the dignity of dynasty. He cared what other people thought—even local newspaper readers.

This sort of horizontal sociability would remain important to Fanny Boringdon for the remainder of her life. While the superb rooms on the ground floor of Saltram provided an impressive and appropriate site for this kind of lively sociability, the space was also much more informal than the state rooms of earlier centuries, which had provided venues for vertical hospitality. When guests were few, however—or on the rare occasions when there were none—the family stayed for the most part in the house's first floor. This apparently discomposed Fanny's brother, the Reverend Thomas Talbot, who complained after his visit of the lack of state in which his newly grand sister lived. “The whole lower part of the house is abandoned, the library excepted,” he complained. “Our breakfast of the plainest description and the dinner the same.” No servants were in attendance, and while one could be summoned “by a hem or a whistle,” Lord Boringdon performed “by a Dumb Waiter the whole Ceremony himself.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Apparently, comfortable intimacy, which required more physical separation from domestics, was a style attractive to both husband and wife.

If Lady Boringdon's social self was cultivated at Saltram, so too was her artistic one. Nor was this sympathy a matter of mere coincidence. While yet contemplating marriage to the obscure Fanny Talbot, Boringdon had been impressed by “her knowledge of painting,” which was “certainly equal to any of the London cognoscenti.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ That was what he expected of the chatelaine of Saltram. Both his mother, Hon. Theresa Parker, and his grandmother, Lady Catherine Parker, had been artistic and were largely responsible for the eighteenth-century renovations to Saltram, which have proven so happy. Both women were also critical to the development of the house's painting, porcelain, and ceramic collections. Indeed, Lady Catherine is said to have been the first person to put a drawing pencil into the hands of a precocious neighbor, the young Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds frequently stayed at Saltram, as did Angelica Kauffman.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ So the country house and its unlikely new chatelaine in 1809 in fact complemented each other.

Fanny Boringdon found, in Saltram, a most suitable environment for a woman of her interests and talents. Only a few days after moving in she took what she described as “the first great act” of her “reign,” through a “mighty revolution in the economy of the Library,” as she told Mrs. Villiers. “I have presumed to bring out all Sir Joshua's admirable portraits from their hiding places,” she continued, to “hang them up over the book shelves—the room is more improved than anything you can imagine and the Pictures themselves which are really invaluable,” and had never been “seen or heard of, … now appear to the greatest advantage.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Apparently so, since they remain to this day where Fanny placed them.

Yet the motivations of her choice are not clear. Since the paintings she put on display were family portraits, we could argue that she was making a curtsey in the direction of “dynasty.” And yet, her action seems more a nod in the direction of Reynolds's celebrity and, perhaps, an appreciation of the quality of his work. The artist is mentioned by name—the ancestors are not. We recall that Lady Irwin had removed ancestral portraits from the painting gallery, but there is no evidence that those had actually been put away in storage. But that seems to have been done with Lord Boringdon's ancestors. Perhaps ancestry had become boring—old-fashioned—in the modern new world of Regency England. Indeed, Lord Boringdon's own edifice complex seems to have been oriented very much to the industrial, building among other things, the Laira Bridge, which, when it opened in 1827, was the second-largest iron structure in existence. His industrial adventures would keep the family in financial difficulties for generations to come.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In addition to her growing responsibilities as wife, mother, hostess, and chatelaine, Fanny retained a lifelong interest in painting. Her own work included watercolors depicting Saltram's beautiful environment of woods and water, as well as picturesque views of the Continent. She also did oil copies of Old Masters, some of which remain on display at Saltram.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ More subtle, perhaps, than Lady Irwin's name on the exterior wall of Temple Newsam and less ephemeral than her own sociability, Fanny Boringdon nevertheless had inscribed herself on Saltram. Despite all the obstacles she had encountered, she had made the house a home.

However, Fanny Boringdon seems less powerful than her two predecessors, Lady Irwin and the duchess of Marlborough. She had assimilated into the ecology of signs she found at Saltram, rather than creating a new one. For some scholars this might be suggestive of the old domesticity thesis, the world of women apparently contracting in the early nineteenth century. But before we identify historical chronology as the culprit, we must remain aware that Fanny was a woman of no fortune, being compared with two unusually wealthy women. Until we have a wider basis for comparison, more heiresses as well as more of the unportioned and those in unhappy or arranged marriages as well the more contented, the effects of change over time cannot be established with any confidence.

A few preliminary conclusions can, however, already be drawn. Despite differences of time, temperament, and situation, all three women we have looked at—the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin, and Lady Boringdon—assumed that their country houses should function as homes, as sites of emotional and physical comfort, family intimacy, and personal attachment. All three women enjoyed multiple residences but developed emotional attachments to specific residences, although not, in the first case, to Blenheim Palace. All three women had what we might call public dimensions to their lives, as courtier, politician, and hostess, but it would be artificial to distinguish these as separate spheres of their existences. Indeed, Lady Boringdon's hospitality at Saltram seems to span both dimensions. Like the layout of Temple Newsam's interior or the duchess of Marlborough's furnishings, the public and the private, the sociable and the solitary, are interwoven in these women's lives and homes. The notion that country houses could not function as homes before they were divested of their public functions in the late nineteenth century proved not to be the case.

Yet all three women encountered obstacles, both practical and emotional, in their ability to control their domestic environments. The conflict between submission to husbands and authority over households and dependents, as identified by Ingrid Tague, was one all three women would have recognized in their own lives.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Deborah Cohen has recently argued that home decorating became a feminist issue in the nineteenth century, as women struggled to take control over the domestic environment that was reputed to be their “sphere.” As Cohen points out, prior to the passage of the Married Women's Property Acts, that control was enjoyed only on the sufferance of the husband. As Victorian journalist Frances Power Cobbe insisted, “the making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right. … It is only a woman who can turn a house into a home.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Our study adds credence to that argument.

Nevertheless, all three women we studied wanted to make a home of their country house environment. Far from begging their husbands to take them to London, they expressed a clear preference for life in an English country house. Country houses were highly valued as sites for family intimacy, the companionship of friends, and physical and emotional comfort. These elite women appreciated the beauties and pleasures of the rural landscape, and practicality was privileged over the “glare of grandeur.” These elite women formed emotional attachments to specific objects and spaces. Both Lady Irwin at Temple Newsam and Lady Boringdon at Saltram found their country houses provided them with suitable environments for the cultivation of self. Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, however, could not say the same of Blenheim. It provided an environment dedicated to the military glory of her husband, from which she was excluded. Blenheim remained alien to her, and she, to it. Far from accepting this as normative, Sarah's frustration and anguish have echoed down the ages.

For historians of the family, the eighteenth century has long lurked as the Victorian prelude. Domesticity has been considered a nineteenth-century phenomenon, although possibly given a head start in response to the French Revolution and the rise of Evangelical religion. One would not expect to find it any earlier than that and certainly not in the aristocracy. Domesticity, as Davidoff and Hall taught us, was the peculiar contribution of the Victorian middle classes, whose genius was to be found in hearth and home.Footnote ¹¹² When this literature focuses on the aristocracy, it assumes that any claims of home loving are disingenuous, a cynical sign of the class's embourgeoisement.

After our glimpses into the lives of the duchess of Marlborough, Lady Irwin, and Lady Boringdon, such an assessment of the aristocracy seems inadequate, possibly a twentieth-century version of the eighteenth-century luxury critique. Our three case studies suggest another interpretation might be in order, one that focuses on a domesticity that could be said to be indigenous to the aristocracy. Christopher Christie is correct in his assertion that there might have been “a spirit of domesticity” in the country houses of eighteenth-century England.Footnote ¹¹³ While there is undoubtedly more work to be done, these three examples suggest that, contrary to expectations, the eighteenth-century country house might be very much a home.