'Cardigan’s Courtyard'

 

For atmosphere and balm to the senses, you surely cannot beat a cathedral cloister, an Oxford “quad”, a Cambridge court or, above all, a country house courtyard. There are, alas, precious few examples of the latter and even they are not always accessible.

 

Last week therefore I rejoiced to find a most noble yet also beguilingly intimate specimen in Northamptonshire. This was at Deene, the seat of the Brudenell family since 1514 and now immaculately maintained by Edmund Brudenell and his wife Marian, eldest daughter of that formidable figure, the late Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Lord Dilhorne, the Lord High Chancellor.

 

Apart from their soothing qualities, courtyards often provide vital clues to the architectural history of a building. Certainly the Deene courtyard is the core of a house built over six centuries – growing from a typical quadrangular medieval manor into a Tudor and Georgian-Gothic pile.

 

To the east the original Great Hall (now the Billiard Room) contains part of a late 13^th century doorway. The Elizabethan Great Hall, spanning the courtyard, has an elaborate porch adorned by a frieze of mermaids and cherubs and bearing the arms of Sir Edmund Brudenell (grandson of Sir Robert, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, who acquired the property).

 

Inside the Great Hall which Sir Edmund had built, there is some fine panelling and a spectacular hammerbeam roof of sweet chestnut. The other interiors are a sympathetically arranged mixture of 16^th and 17th century austerity (though with robustly carved ceilings and overmantels) and Georgian splendour.

 

The contents are of high quality. The Bow Room is dominated by Reynold’s remarkable portrait of Lady Mary Montagu from the neighbouring seat of Boughton, who married George Brudenell, 4^th Earl of Cardigan.

 

Of the smaller rooms, I was very taken by the Octagon, a charming little turret chamber imaginatively hung with Richard Foster’s modern portraits of Deene’s faithful retainers. But the overriding presence at Deene is, of course, Sir James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan of Light Brigade fame. From the various portraits – not least de Prade’s impression of the bewhiskered old thruster leading the Charge in his Cherry-picker trews – he seems to have borne a resemblance not so much to Trevor Howard (who played him in Tony Richardson’s flawed film) as to another of my favourite actors, Ronald Fraser.

 

There is plenty of Cardigania on show including the head and tail of his charger, the redoubtable Ronald, who also led his funeral procession.

 

I was fascinated by the old photographs of Lord Cardigan’s outrageously merry widow (née Horsey de Horsey, though you would have thought that one Horsey should have been enough). She survived him by 47 years, during which her eccentricity – not to mention what Mr Brudenell candidly describes as “nymphomania” – knew no bounds. One of her more curious habits, when not galloping over gravestones in the churchyard, was to arrange herself in a coffin and ask people how she looked.

 

Among the exhibits at Deene is a 1950s letter from Max Beerbohm to my revered colleague Kenneth Rose describing how nearly half a century earlier he had been taken to see “the aged but unvenerated Lady Cardigan” at Deene: “She wore a wig of bright gold curls and was plastered with paint, and was dressed in the fashion of a débutante in the 1870s, and held in her hand a huge red rose”. After singing a song at the piano “she kissed her finger tips to us with great vivacity. It was all very strange and conducive to deep thought”.

 

In a different way the old bawd’s next-but-one successor at Deene, George Brudenell was also fairly eccentric. “Although he lived into the 1960s, my father was of another age,” recalls his son Edmund, “and quite undismayed by the lack of electricity and heating or the shortage of bathrooms. The kitchen was so far away that during the war my mother used to ride there on a bicycle”.