Vanbrugh Revisited - by Simon Scott Plummer

To commemorate the anniversary, the Soane Museum is holding an exhibition. Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture runs until June 28.

Sir John Vanbrugh – who died 300 years ago, on 26th March 1726, aged 62 – was a man of protean abilities.

In the second half of his life, he became Britain’s greatest architect of country houses. Before that, Vanbrugh (1664-1726) had been a soldier and spent four years in French prisons, including the Bastille, and had then volunteered for naval service and taken part in the 1694 Battle of Camaret Bay in Brittany.

His next venture was the London stage, where he became one of the leading Restoration playwrights. His best-known comedies were The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife.

While continuing to write, he burst onto the architectural world with the palatial house built for the 3rd Earl of Carlisle at Castle Howard, Yorkshire. That commission led to a request from the Duke of Marlborough to design Blenheim Palace near Oxford, and over the next 20 years a succession of great houses, from Northumberland to Dorset, followed.

As if this were not enough, Vanbrugh was also a civil servant, as Comptroller of Works and Surveyor of Waters and Gardens, became the second-most senior herald in the College of Arms, and built and ran his own theatre in London’s Haymarket.

How did the Restoration playwright, with a leap and a bound, turn himself into a famous Baroque architect?

There was luck. William Talman, designer of England’s first aristocratic palace, Chatsworth, fell out with Lord Carlisle over Castle Howard, who then turned to Vanbrugh, a kinsman and a fellow Whig. Then there was the assistance of Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), who had been trained by Wren and had expertise in architectural drawing and managing construction work, which Vanbrugh yet lacked. The two were to co-operate throughout most of Vanbrugh’s career – a serendipitous partnership of two men of genius.

Further commissions came through the Kit-Cat Club, to which Vanbrugh belonged. The members, a Whig élite of aristocrats and intellectuals, met once a week to drink in a London inn.

Vanbrugh brought to his new profession great self-confidence, no doubt bolstered by his success as a playwright, and the ability to visualise and transfer to paper the ordering of masses of masonry to dramatic effect.

At Castle Howard, to light the Great Hall, he introduced a huge central dome, for the first time in an English country house. At Blenheim, he did the same with a clerestory. Coming new into architecture, he was ready to innovate. Both he and Hawksmoor were boldly idiosyncratic – and were criticised as such, as taste turned towards the more symmetrical strictures of Palladianism.

What are the distinguishing marks of Vanbrugh’s style? In 1706, he wrote, ‘’Tis certainly the Figure and Proportions that make the most pleasing fabrick, and not the delicacy of the Ornaments.’ He also mentions his pride in making ‘a Noble and Masculine Shew’.

His buildings are characterised by their manly vigour, seen most clearly at Blenheim, the part-private house, part-national monument given by a grateful nation to the warrior who had defeated the French in 1704.

This palace, with its beautiful honey-coloured stone tinted with orange, does not lack ornament – just look at its skyline – but its façades and fenestration are relatively plain. The overall impression is of powerful mass, a quality complemented by the bastion-like bridge over the River Glyme in the valley below.

Vanbrugh was sensitive to the romance of the past. In a fascinating letter to the Duke of Marlborough, he pleads for saving Woodstock Manor (pictured left), the royal hunting lodge where Henry II had dallied with his mistress, Rosamund Clifford. Just as people in the past associated Woodstock with the king’s ‘Affections’, he writes, so they would in future come to see the palace built by Queen Anne for her hero.

The argument got him nowhere – part of the deteriorating relationship with his clients, which, after the Duke’s death in 1722, led to lawsuits initiated by the Duchess, and her forbidding him to enter the park and see the building for which he is most famous. But it did establish him as a proto-conservationist.

In 1707, he wrote of restoring to the much modernised Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire ‘Something of the Castle Air’ and proceeded to crown it with battlements. The third house he built for himself, Vanbrugh Castle in Greenwich, is castellated, and medieval references abound in his use of towers and turrets – in the service court at Castle Howard; at Blenheim; on the north front of Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire; and at Seaton Delaval, Northumberland.

At Kings Weston, an Italianate villa near Bristol, currently being restored by its American owner, John Barbey, the arcaded chimneys lend a crenellated effect.

It is in the interior of his buildings that Vanbrugh is literally theatrical. Arcading is his proscenium arch, the views through it the receding flats of a stage.

The effect is most spectacular at Castle Howard and most perfect at Grimsthorpe, whose hall was judged by Pevsner to be ‘unquestionably Vanbrugh’s finest room’. There you look through two-storeyed arcading towards the wrought ironwork of a double staircase from ground to first floor, on which stand doorways based on a design by Michelangelo.

Blenheim has the same feature, as do Kimbolton, Seaton Delaval and Audley End in Essex, a Jacobean house where Vanbrugh refashioned the south end of the Great Hall. At Kings Weston, the hall, which led the eye to the cantilevered staircase in the saloon, was filled in after his death.

One of the glorious legacies of the 18th century is the landscape fashioned around great houses. We do not know in detail what part Vanbrugh played in the layout of gardens and parkland by landscape designers such as Charles Bridgeman, George London, Henry Wise and Stephen Switzer.

But there is ample evidence of what he placed in them: the bridge at Blenheim; the Rotondo (since altered) and the two lake pavilions at Stowe (Viscount Cobham’s Whig Elysian Fields in Buckinghamshire); the twin-towered Belvedere at Claremont in Surrey; and the Bagnio and Temple at Eastbury Park, Dorset.

His and Hawksmoor’s influence on landscaping is most clearly seen at Castle Howard. For a start, Vanbrugh switched Talman’s proposed alignment of the house through 180 degrees so that it sits north-south on a ridge.

A great axis runs straight as a die for over four miles, starting from the monument to the 7th Earl of Carlisle, erected in the 19th century, continuing through the Carrmire Gate, with its flanking battlements, and the Pyramid Gate, passing the obelisk raised to Marlborough’s victories, and skirting the Great Lake.

Elsewhere in the park are Hawksmoor’s Pyramid and Mausoleum and Vanbrugh’s exquisite Temple of the Four Winds, based on the Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, showing that he was quite capable of mastering the Palladian style.

Vanbrugh was ever a man of the theatre, and there are two structures that, having suffered since his death, bear heightened witness to the drama of his architecture. The first is the central block of Seaton Delaval, uninhabited since a fire in 1822. The impact of this gaunt shell, the walls of its hall stained with molten lead, its mighty façades blackened by industrial pollution, is overwhelming.

The second is what little is left of Eastbury Park, once a palace on nearly the same scale as Blenheim.

A gateway of Roman grandeur, decorated with scrolls, leads into its remaining courtyard. Two Scots pines seeded themselves on it years ago. One died this year but the owner, Ronald Farquharson, has planted a new one.

This surreal marriage of arch and tree calls to mind Panini’s paintings of Roman ruins. I like to think that Vanbrugh, classicist and innovator, would have approved.

Charles Saumarez Smith’s biography Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture is out on 20th November. A show of the same name is at Sir John Soane’s Museum, 4th March to 28th June 2026