The appearance in 1982 of volume iv part II, marks the completion of that epic task, The History of the King’s Works, which would surely never have been achieved but for the devoted editorship and authorship of Howard Colvin over a period of twenty-five years. In this last volume the section dealing with Hampton Court opens by stating that ‘although more survives of Hampton Court than any other Tudor palace, the architectural history of that great complex of buildings . . . presents many problems that neither archaeological investigation nor documentary research can fully resolve’.

Neither the physical nor the documentary evidence for Scotland’s royal castles and palaces is anything like as extensive as that for England’s, now so magisterially surveyed in the History of the King’s Works. Nevertheless, the Scottish material is not without interest and, so far as the principal royal residences of the sixteenth century are concerned, Scotland retains a higher proportion of surviving buildings. This attempt to review the planning of the royal lodgings of the period is tentative and presents no general conclusions, but its purpose will be served if it demonstrates that Scottish practice was varied and to some extent suigeneris.

It was Howard Colvin who, whilst going through the accounts, fragments and miscellanea at the Public Record Office, as well as the plans, in the late 1950s stumbled over the two halves of MPF 146 and suggested to Mr Noel Blakiston, then supervising the preparation of a catalogue of the PRO’s early maps, that the two should be reunited.

Early Stuart palace decoration has, apart from the Banqueting House, Whitehall, been almost wholly lost. In the Queen’s House, Greenwich, of Inigo Jones’s work three ceilings and some wall-decorations partially survive, but no room remains in its entirety. In particular the chimney-pieces have all gone. This process began as early as March 16621 when masons removed not only ‘the marble neech and tearmes with the marble head in a lower roome’ but also ‘a marble Chimny peice wth the white marble in another lower roome’ and bricklayers were paid for ‘making good the brickwork where the stone chimneypeices were taken downe’.

'Architecture', observed Wren, 'has its political Use'. According to him, 'publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country', architecture 'establishes a Nation' by making 'the People love their native Country, which Passion' was, he maintained, 'the Original of all great Actions in a Common-wealth'. To support his argument he cited the examples of foreign history: the cities of ancient Greece and the Low Countries, Rome, and Jerusalem.x But, had he chosen, he could have drawn examples from nearer home: from his part in rebuilding the City of London, or from his post as Surveyor- General to Charles and James II. He knew well what was expected of him and his art by the restored monarchy.

The Georgian gothick remodelling of the east range of Clock Court at Hampton Court is well known, and its attribution to William Kent, although based only on an oblique comment by Horace Walpole,1 has never been questioned.2 What seems to have escaped the notice of modern architectural historians is that the building is no longer in its original form, a number of its most distinctive features having been destroyed in the nineteenth century, greatly to the detriment of the design (PI. ia).

The throne and its surrounding canopy in the House of Lords (PI. i)1 provide a well-known and easily intelligible symbol of the position of the monarch in our parliamentary democracy. The dignity of the Crown is emphasized, as well as the essential part it plays in the government of the country, yet it is clearly set apart from ordinary political activity. All this is made obvious by the architecture, and is as effective every day as when the monarch is present at a State Opening of Parliament. The throne and its setting form the undoubted masterpiece of the House of Lords, which was described when first opened as ‘the finest specimen of Gothic civil architecture in Europe’.

When Gladstone became Prime Minister in December 1868, the Office of Works was at a critical point. ‘The Government had to decide upon the erection of a larger number of important public buildings than had probably ever been raised in any capital at one time.’ The new First Commissioner ofWorks, Austin Henry Layard, determined to rid it of much routine labour in order to free it to function effectively as a ministry of public building. His plans were facilitated by the retirement of Alfred Austin, who as secretary had been permanent head of the department since 1856.

Among a rather dingy collection of monuments in the vestibule of St John’s Hackney is an altar tomb inscribed ‘Anno d 1519 Christophoro Urswyk Rectore mia’. It has a panelled four-centred arch above a small tomb chest decorated with quatrefoils (Fig. 1). The Purbeck slab covering the chest now bears Urswyck’s brass effigy and there is a brass inscription on the back panel, but this arrangement dates only from after the transfer of the tomb to the new church built in 1797. In the old church the monument stood against the north wall of the chancel, while the effigy and inscription recording Urswyck’s death in 1521 were set in the floor in front.

John Stow the historian, writing in the 1590s about his own neighbourhood, described ‘a frame of three fayre houses, set up in the year 1590 on the high streete’, that is, what was then part of Aldgate High Street but soon to be called Leadenhall Street, ‘between Billiter lane and Lyme streete’, that is, on the south side. The way from the Royal Exchange to Aldgate along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street is one of the most ancient principal ways of the City. The site of the three houses, now of an office building called Baltic House, lies almost opposite the church of St Andrew Undershaft.

Bound into the back of the volume known as Gough Drawings A3 in the Bodleian Library are ten leaves from the notebook of an architect or surveyor. They have been used on one side and depict the floor plans of two large town houses and two elevations of the smaller house. Both sets of drawings are in ink with some use of wash for filling in the walls — in the case of the larger house it appears that the wash has been used to distinguish masonry walls from those of lighter construction which are left blank. An unusual feature of the drawings is that the paper has been cut away to show the open light wells above courts and staircases. The page size is 14½in by 11½in and the drawing scale of the larger house is one inch to 12 feet and of the smaller house one inch to 16 feet.

Pope’s poem ‘Of Taste’, his Epistle to Lord Burlington, published in December 1731, has rightly been regarded as one of the major statements of Burlingtonian orthodoxy. Written to accompany the publication of a group of engravings from the earl’s collection of Palladian drawings, many of the poem’s balanced couplets appositely express the ideas of that coterie of classical purists in architecture and also in garden design. The reputation of the poem as a statement of architectural orthodoxy, such that it was bought by the contemporaries anxious to find ou.t what it was that the Palladians intended, was all the more prominent in the absence of any other statement from the Burlington circle, at a time when Kent or Ware were publishing only engravings.

The use of Liardet’s stucco by Robert and James Adam has often been noted. The dispute with John Johnson, about alleged infringement of the patent, is well known because of the pamphlet warfare which occurred in 1778 and because it was for many years regarded as a leading case in patent law. But Liardet v. Johnson was only the first of three major lawsuits which embroiled the brothers between 1777 and 1787. Although they were successful it was a pyrrhic victory. By 1780 the deficiencies in the stucco were becoming apparent. The brothers faced a major claim for damages from Lord Stanhope and their agreement with Liardet collapsed in recrimination.

It is tempting to speculate as to what architectural wonders the younger George Dance might have achieved had he not been tied for the greater part of his working life to demanding routine duties as Clerk of the Works — a title later raised to the more dignified form of Architect — to the Corporation of London. Certainly the handful of important commissions which materialized during those years proved him to be a designer of outstanding distinction whom C. R. Cockerell was later to acclaim as 'the complete Poet architect of his day'. Many of his notable conceptions, however, such as the Port of London warehouses, the double bridge over the Thames, and the grand southern approach to St Paul's Cathedral, were frustrated, while much of his time was spent in dealing with the daily quota of petty tasks and endless complaints. Of his major works there are now only two survivors, the façade to Guildhall, and the little church of All Hallows, London Wall. His development of the Finsbury Estate remains in outline only, and the finest of his buildings, Newgate Gaol, was demolished in 1902 although it was reasonably well recorded in photographs. The later and smaller prison which Dance built a few yards to the north of Newgate Street was doomed to an even shorter life and no photographs of it are known to exist. This was the Giltspur Street Compter, and its story deserves to be told since Dance was clearly anxious that its main façade should accord with his larger gaol, and that the two should complement each other in providing a visually imposing approach to the heart of the City from Holborn.

In the Bank Stock Office at the Bank of England, built in 1792, Soane created an interior of a kind previously unknown in England and not found elsewhere except in a type of Byzantine church with which few English architects were familiar and which none would have regarded as an acceptable model for imitation. The building, demolished about 1925, may be described as follows (Pis ia, 2b and 9b): It was cruciform, consisting of a square central area or ‘crossing’, extending from which were two deep arms (north and south) and two shallow arms (east and west).

First, a paragraph of bibliographical reminiscence which explains the choice of my subject for this Festschrift. In the late 1940s I found some eighty letters written in the period 1685-1700 by the soldier-architect, Captain William Winde (?—1722). They were addressed to his cousin, Lady Mary Bridgeman, and concerned the remodelling of Castle Bromwich Hall, Warwickshire, in which she and her husband, Sir John Bridgeman, lived. I published brief extracts from some of the letters in an account of Castle Bromwich Hail, and supplied details of mentions of other houses by Winde for incorporation in the first edition (1954) of Howard Colvin’s Dictionary.

Badminton has long been one of England’s puzzle houses. It was always known that the late seventeenth-century house illustrated by Kip and Knyff had been greatly altered and enlarged by c. 1750, its overall appearance transformed into something like the house we see today. When Christopher Hussey wrote up Badminton for the Early Georgian volume of English Country Houses the only known document was a note by Pocock of 1754 that Worcester Lodge, that ‘spectacular triumph of the English genius for park buildings’ as David Verey calls it, ‘is a design of Kent’. Pocock wasn’t always right, but no one has ever questioned this statement; and Hussey understandably, but rashly, went on to claim for Kent everything else that was done at Badminton in the eighteenth century.

On 28 December 1698 Tobias Bachope signed the masonry contract for one of the most notable buildings in the history of early eighteenth-century architecture in Scotland, Hopetoun House near South Queensferry in West Lothian. The house is really two buildings: a supremely elegant and mature work by Sir William Bruce, sometime Master of the King’s Works in Scotland, built between 1699 and 1702, and a showy baroque façade replacing Bruce’s original front which was contrived by William Adam and the first Earl of Hopetoun from about 1721 and built between then and 1746.

This article is tended to draw attention to the existence of a house, Woodhall House, Lanarkshire, which until 1981 was unknown outside its locality. Since then a series of early twentieth-century photographs has been discovered and an early nineteenth-century gouache has been purchased by Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, which shows a general view of the house in its setting. Publication of some of the only known views of the house may help to identify the designer.

In the 1720s the family of Dundas of Arniston,1 already long distinguished at the Scottish bar, entered on the three generations of their greatest achievement and influence. Their estate of Arniston had been acquired in 1571. Here, in about 1620, their mansion was built by the founder of the family’s law dynasty, James Dundas, who was knighted by King James. In the next six generations their protagonists numbered two knights (Sir James and his son), six MPs for Midlothian, four Lords of Session, two Lords President of the Session and a Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. While not, it was generally felt, particularly remarkable for intellect they were admired for equally important qualities, notably a strict regard for justice — to the extent that the second Sir James, created a Lord of Session in 1662, felt unable to compromise over the Test Act even under the liberal interpretation allowed by Charles II, and his seat was therefore suspended. He lived retired on his estate, dying in 1679.