History Scotland Magazine: Review - The Scottish Chateau, Charles McKean

The Scottish Chateau: The Country House of Renaissance Scotland

Charles McKean

Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2001. ISBN 0750923237 pp.viii+312, 204 b/w & 29 colour illustrations. Hardback 25

The emergence of modern nationalism, beginning around the time of the French Revolution, undermined the old international cultural hierarchies, centred on Rome (or Versailles). Each country was now potentially autonomous, free to construct its own history according to its own criteria. In architecture as in other areas, there was no single, unified authority of the antique any more. What replaced it, in most countries, was an authoritative ideal of national medieval architecture, a golden age of romantic community and dashing, knightly chivalry, which was said to have prevailed right up until the arrival of international Renaissance classicism in the fifteenth-seventh centuries. In most places, this national golden-age architecture was identified above all with Gothic cathedrals, but in Presbyterian Scotland it was instead associated with the secular architecture of castles and palaces of the era of the Stewart dynasty. The particular recipe of Romantic values attributed to their baronial builders was conditioned by the martial-race imperialism of Victorian Scotland: in the view of pioneering Scottish antiquarian Robert W. Billings, for example, these were noblemen who cared for nothing but eating, drinking and fighting. Of course, that picture was wildly historically inaccurate, and with the establishment of modern archaeology it was rapidly and comprehensively discarded: after 1918, in the wake of the slaughter of the trenches, people wanted to see medieval Scotland not as the blood-soaked nursery of a warrior race, but as a civilised, normal society. As early as 1926, W. Mackay Mackenzies Rhind Lectures argued that really, the so-called military architecture of the Middle Ages was the architecture of a social class. And in the mid and late twentieth century, investigations into Scottish castellated architecture became a matter of painstaking social history, refined by successive generations of scholars such as John Dunbar and Geoffrey Stell.

In more recent years, however, the growth of modern Scottish nationalism has shifted the terms of debate away from this academic territory, by requiring more boldly grandiose claims to be made about the castellated heritage: to be national icons, Scottish castles must no longer be normal, but special and even outstanding. The initiative passed to the discipline of art history, whose highly subjective methods of evaluation allowed everything potentially to be elevated to a special status. Yet to claim that status, it was necessary to make international comparisons, which in turn could undermine the autonomy of the national. The ultimately circular character of this argument had been betrayed back in 1944, in the claim by German art historian Wilhelm Pinder that In the end, actually, the whole of German art is one single special achievement. In Scotland, what this meant was that the castles could no longer be seen merely as social documents built by anonymous masons. Now, they had to be works of art designed by architects. But, as works of art, they would have to be judged in the context of international artistic movements, above all the Renaissance from the fourteenth century onwards, and established as participants in those movements. In one sense, that was highly convenient, in view of Scottish political nationalisms espousal of the ideal of Europe as a counterbalance to Britain. Yet the Renaissance, with its revival of the authority of classical antiquity, was most commonly thought to have been a movement of cultural centralisation, cosmopolitanism, and reduction of local diversity: hardly, at first glance, ideal territory for the rhetoric of national pride.

Scottish architectural historians formulated two main responses to this quandary, both involving a sharp division between pre- and post-Renaissance castles, with the former retaining their relatively straightforward status as anonymous archaeological monuments, but the latter re-interpreted as the conscious products of sophisticated designers and intellectuals. The first response, by writers such as Aonghus MacKechnie and Deborah Howard, was to argue for a full and early participation by Scotland in mainstream Renaissance classicism, noting the latters considerable regional diversity, and claiming that the court style of early seventeenth century royal works closely paralleled the early classicism of other northern European countries. But this faced the difficulty that it nevertheless clearly relegated Scotland, at best, to a kind of second division in an international classical league, and the many projects of new castellated architecture, castles such as Craigievar and Castle Fraserthe buildings, after all, for which sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland is internationally best known todayseemed like complete aberrations.

Over the past decade, Charles McKean has developed a second, very different response, and this important book presents the initial results of his researches. He wants, in effect, to have the best of both worlds. He, too, argues that there existed a complex world of architects, patrons, designers, steeped in Renaissance humanism. But he argues that they consciously chose not to follow but to reject the forms of classical antiquity. As most of Europe moved in one direction away from castellated architecture, Scotland moved in the other. This was not because of conservatism, still less because of the barbaric militarism of the nineteenth-century view. Rather, it was a conscious, culturally informed decision by an up-to-date elite of patrons and designers, a decision to retain and accentuate the traditional castellated forms, for reasons of nostalgic picturesque romanticism that were essentially no different from the motives of medieval styles in the nineteenth century. And he sidesteps the obvious objection that an anti-classical Renaissance is a contradiction in terms, by arguing that the castellated style was only an external dress. Just as David Bryces picturesque houses combined modern services and regular, classical planning inside with turrets and corbelling outsideso, McKean argues, did Scottish houses of the Renaissance period. He emphasises this message by using the French word chateau rather than castle, as a way of emphasising that these were romantic rather than practical castles.

How is this bold, even polemical theory substantiated? McKean argues at the outset that there are few documentary or other primary sources, but that this deficiency can be compensated by the descriptive evidence contained in the remarkable maps of Timothy Pont, with their tiny, detailed sketches of late sixteenth-century buildings. To supplement this, McKean also brings to bear a detailed, architects eye scrutiny of existing houses, and correlates these with extensive secondary historical background evidence, especially concerning the patrons. The original state of now-ruinous castles is reconstructed through imaginative impressions of the houses in all their brightly-harled glory: more generally, the books illustrations are of excellent quality. Although, factually speaking, the hard evidence that lies at the core of McKeans thesis is of the same basic character as that used by McGibbon and Rossessentially, the remains and records of the built fabricthe result could hardly be more different. The Scottish Chateau offers the reader a beguiling portrait of a lost world of courtly, learned society, its richly variegated phases of culture clearly differentiated (in most cases, into the reigns of kings) and woven into a gripping narrative. The book is thoroughly unified by the lively, racy style of the author, and will hopefully administer the coup de grace to any lingering remnants of the barbaric castle theory among the interested general public.

As the book is an academic as well as a general account, however, we also need to examine more closely the question of how it tackles the shortage of documentary evidence on the subject, to avoid the danger of a purely conjectural approach. The crucial point about McKeans bold theory is that it is not really concerned with architectural forms, but with ideas. He proposes a fundamental reassessment not of what the buildings looked like, but of what motivated their designers and builders. He argues that the design of Renaissance castles was determined by a conscious, collective ideology, which was adopted by the entire elite stratum of national society, and which resulted in a coherent architectural style. This kind of unified movement is more normally associated with post-eighteenth-century modern society, with its systems of mass communication and mobilisation, andcrucially for the historianits copious documentary records. The situation is very different in the sixteenth century. Ponts maps are remarkable and exquisite objects, but they tell us nothing about peoples opinions in the sixteenth century: what is needed is hard documentary evidence. But the evidence which at present exists, or is known to exist, largely takes the form of disconnected snippets.

That is the fundamental difficulty of this subject, and here it has to be said that, in contrast to his exhaustive and authoritative analyses of the built evidence, McKean does not always make the best use of this slender resource. In some cases, material that would clearly have been favourable to his thesis is not fully exploited. For example, the way in which the very word castle was used in the sixteenth and seventh century seems to have clearly carried connotations of a conscious, nostalgic romanticism; yet McKean is so determined to avoid the word castle in favour of the un-historical term chateau that this real piece of evidence is neglected. In other cases, surviving evidence points to more complex and ambiguous opinions on the part of designers and patrons. For example, the 1670-9 reconstruction of Glamis Castle by the third Earl of Kinghorne with symmetrical, but castellated wings of his own design was discussed by the earl at length in surviving family papers. This evidence shows him wrestling with a conflict between, on the one hand, a desire for symmetry and uniformitie and a strong dislike of these old fashions of tours and castles, and, on the other hand, a desire to celebrate ancestral prestige and safeguard my Great Hall, which is a room that I ever loved. McKeans conclusion skates over this conflict, and homogenises Glamis with his general argument of Scottish opposition to classicism: ...by adopting his forefathers language of gables and towers, [Kinghorne] chose to persist with the national architecture.... If, in one of the few well-documented cases we have, an individual patron/designer is shown to have been so torn between castellated heritage and an essentially classical impulse towards order and symmetry, then to argue for any kind of unitary outlook or ideology on the part of the landed classes as a whole, without much firmer evidence, seems a little premature.

The conclusion must be, then, that this book is the first stage of a definitive treatment of the Scottish Renaissance castle. So far, McKean has taken the McGibbon and Ross legacy of evidence drawn from the built fabric, expanded and enhanced it, brought it up to date, and proposed a novel and polemical interpretation of its cultural context. He should now follow up this invaluable work with an exhaustive search for the documentary evidenceevidence that will undoubtedly emerge, given a sufficiently painstaking approachto sustain his bold and exciting theory of the romantic Renaissance castle.

Miles Glendinning
Royal Commission on the
Ancient and Historical
Monuments of Scotland