During the Decorated period, the variety of designs for window mullions was greatly increased, producing valuable regional differences and dating criteria. Mullions have the advantage that they are generally easy to observe close-up, though one must add the caution that their vulnerable position and delicate proportions leave them more liable to restoration than some other features. This section is concerned primarily with the appearance of profiles which subsequently became common in the Perpendicular period, and these may be grouped for convenience into two families, as below. It should be noted that certain mullion types dealt with in Part I will not be reconsidered in this section.

The emergence of Irish architecture in the classical fashion may seem to have started with the appearance of Edward Lovett Pearce’s Palladian buildings in the late 1720s and 30s, followed by the tidal-wave of classical architecture by architects such as Richard Castle, Thomas Ivory, James Gandon, and many others. Was wide acceptance of classicism in eighteenth-century Ireland due to the architects’ persuasion of their patrons, or had the patrons already been predisposed to classical styles of art? Were Pearce’s patrons the first to be confronted in Ireland with all the paraphernalia of classicism, or could the parents of his patrons have taught them the essence of classical art?

Classical Irish architecture of before the eighteenth century is little known nowadays because so little has survived to the present day. A succession of internal revolts, ending with the 1922 burnings, eradicated much of the evidence of early classicism. Also the damp Irish climate and the decline of landed families heavily contributed to this toll. Only within the last thirty years, the important country house Eyrecourt Castle in Co. Galway lost its princely staircase and wainscotting (sold to the newspaper millionaire William Randolph Hearst), and has itself been left to collapse. Of the numerous houses known to have been built in the late seventeenth century only Beaulieu, Co. Louth, survives intact. The countryside is also scattered with the ruins of the plantation houses of the early part of the century. Again, the survival of any of these buildings with its interior is extremely rare.

Previous studies of the arrival and diffusion of Palladianism in England have usually concentrated either on influential architects or on the principal building types. Enquiries have centred on the work of Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, while Sir John Summerson’s Cantor Lectures of 1959 marked out the formal development of the classical country house, and its relation to the villa. The reception of the new style by groups of patrons has seldom seemed a rewarding approach, largely because few groups can be identified with sufficient precision to make them significant.

In 1977 a London art dealer acquired a volume of architectural designs that were later identified as the work of two architects: James, commonly called ‘Athenian’, Stuart (1713–88) and Sir Edward Lovett Pearce (d. 1733). Pearce had close Irish family connexions, and after some association with Sir John Vanbrugh, his father’s first cousin, he had by 1726 established himself in Ireland. The Irish provenance of this volume is also confirmed by the presence of a few minor drawings by George Papworth (1781–1855), the brother of John Buonarotti Papworth and a successful architect in Ireland. It is mysterious how these two obviously disparate groups of drawings came together in one volume in the nineteenth century. Stuart had no obvious Irish connexions, so the drawings were probably not gathered in Ireland. As J. B. Papworth had professional links with the London merchant and art-trading world, the drawings may have been acquired for his own collection and subsequently passed to his brother.

The relationship between architect and patron is of crucial importance in determining the character of any building, and nowhere more than in a country house. Here the patron not only pays for a building; he also lives in it. He might well have decided views on what a country house ought to look like, views that could be influenced by scholarship, travel, a wish to emulate or surpass neighbours’ houses, family pride, or simply a vague sense of his position as a ‘natural leader of society’. Before the rise of the architectural profession in the eighteenth century, owners of country houses often acted as their own architects, usually working in collaboration with a mason or builder. By the mid-nineteenth century this practice had virtually died out. The owner now had to find some means of reconciling his ideas on the appearance and layout of his house with those of a man who possessed the prestige that attached to professional status, and, perhaps, the arrogance of the Romantic artist who saw the country-house commission as a means of self-expression. William Talman’s arguments with his clients in the late seventeenth century gave an inkling of the ‘vexations’ that might occur when professional architect and patron, each with ideas of his own, disagreed; while Vanburgh’s arguments with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, over Blenheim reached well-known and well-documented levels of vituperation. Such conflicts were by no means isolated occurrences.

These uncompromising sentiments occur in a paper entitled ‘Architecture or Building’ read before the Birmingham Architectural Association on 3 December 1909. They were made by a tall, red-haired Scotsman in his fiftieth year at the height of his architectural career. It was this firm belief, founded in Pugin and promoted by Morris and Webb, that architecture must be based in reasonable building and the straight-forward use of materials and construction — art taking care of itself — which caused Robert Weir Schultz to speak so scathingly about the architecture of his time, most of which he dismissed as mere ‘architectonics’. His own buildings may lack the individuality of contemporaries such as Voysey, Mackintosh and Prior, or the serenity and urbanity of Newton and Macartney. Nevertheless it was the very suppression of a personal style in the furtherance of a common cause, sustained throughout a practice lasting almost fifty years, that made his work so diverse in range and manner, and indeed at times original. In attempting to grow out of the particular needs of each building and its site it approaches that of Philip Webb and especially of his acknowledged mentor, W. R. Lethaby, whose writings and few, but significant, buildings were the central inspiration of Schultz’s career. Lethaby’s definition of architecture had been set down in the volume edited by Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson, Architecture A Profession or An Art published in 1892. Those essays were written just when Schultz was commencing practice and must have shaped his own views. But Schultz’s abiding philosophy was summed up in the first paragraph of Lethaby’s essay, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’: ‘The art of architecture is thus the co-ordination of the several crafts in the achievement of right or beautiful building; and this not only in the outer form and adornment, but in the very structure and anatomy. Architecture is the easy and expressive handling of materials in masterly experimental building — it is the craftsmen’s Drama.’

Although Carlton Towers is among the more spectacular Victorian country houses, its flamboyant Gothic exterior conceals a longer history. The site has been occupied by the Stapletons since the fourteenth century and the core of the present structure is the compact three-storeyed house built in 1614 by Elizabeth, widow of Richard Stapleton and granddaughter of Bess of Hardwick. The Stapletons were practising Catholics and their house remained of necessity largely unaltered for nearly one hundred and fifty years after completion. It was only in the more tolerant days of the mid-eighteenth century that the first major changes occurred. The owner at that time was Thomas Stapleton (inherited 1750, died 1821). Excluded by his religion from politics or the army, he occupied himself, like many of his Catholic neighbours, the Gascoignes of Parlington, the Constables of Burton Constable and the Lawsons of Brough, in improving his house and estate.