An ode to ancient customs

The genre of country-house poetry in the 17th century is preoccupied by the ideas of hospitality and retirement. Clive Aslet considers the significance of these themes

- Clive Aslet

THIS has been the most frustrating of years for those of us wanting to visit country houses. A magnificent spring coincided with lockdown, compelling would-be tourists to stay in their own homes rather than visit other people’s. We have been forced for part of the year into a state of ‘retirement’, as the 17th and 18th centuries would have had it.

Retirement came in many forms during that period. Grottoes and hermitages were places to mope, perhaps with a specially employed hermit to mope for you (at Selborne in Hampshire, visitors found that the hermit was Gilbert White’s brother in fancy dress). During the Regency, cottage ornés made retirement even more of a game, offering an air of simplicity that was patently sophisticated and perfectly genteel.

Retirement, however, had been celebrated two centuries before this, in a vein of poetry praising the country house. To Penshurst by Ben Jonson (Fig 1) is the first poem in English to be addressed not to a patron, but to his home. Penshurst in Kent (Fig 2) was then owned by Sir Robert Sidney, who, at the time of writing, 1612, had become Viscount Lisle and was on his way to being 1st Earl of Leicester, a dignity to which he was elevated in 1618. Penshurst had been granted to Lisle’s grandfather, Sir William Sidney, by Edward VI; Sir William had enlarged the house, adding a very early Classical loggia in 1579, if a dated rainwater head is to be believed, and the President’s Tower, reflecting his position as Lord President of Wales.