Aristocratic Playground

Absolutism in England came to an end in the revolutionary decades between 1640 and 1690, which led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in which the monarch rules as head of state with the consent of the people acting through Parliament. This transformative upheaval led to a new era of economic and social consolidation during the eighteenth century. It was an era which saw the rise of agrarian, commercial and financial capitalism and the establishment of parliamentary rule, albeit under a Parliament that principally served the interests of the landed classes. The century following the revolutionary settlement marks the apogee of aristocratic power and wealth in England. Their supremacy was founded upon an ideology built around aristocratic values and leadership, based on the model of Republican Rome. Legitimisation of aristocratic rule was sought through universalisation, framing their hegemony as the natural order of society through the ages. Aristocratic supremacy rested upon their economic as much as their political power. They presided over an agrarian economy that was becoming capitalist in its mode of production, in response to a revolution in agricultural practices that had begun in the sixteenth century. Leading aristocrats enjoyed enormous incomes, sustaining prodigious expenditures and profligate lifestyles. Their social lives required them to maintain both their ancestral country seat and a fine house in London. They could spend up to nine months of the year in the metropolis during the London season, which coincided with the Parliamentary term. But they were in the capital for more than political debate; London was a city of pleasure as well as politics and commerce, providing a stage upon which the whole theatre of aristocratic life could be acted out. During the Georgian era the West End of London was developed to accommodate this aristocratic lifestyle. An urban landscape of supreme elegance was created, formed of mansions, terraces and squares that were the epitome of leisured wealth and exquisite taste. Under Christopher Wren and his followers, Baroque had been the dominant architectural style in the first phase of hegemonic building in London following the revolutionary era. However, the ruling aristocratic elite considered it a foreign style best suited to the extravagances of Catholicism and the grandiloquence of absolutist monarchy. They favoured the more restrained Palladianism of Inigo Jones as a distinctively national form of classicism that would give better expression to their ideals of liberty and civic virtue. This was the style in which the West End was initially developed, in particular the aristocratic heartland of Mayfair laid out on the Scarborough, Grosvenor, Burlington and Berkeley Estates. As the Georgian era proceeded, Palladianism gave way to the more archaeologically correct Neoclassical, as deployed by the master of eclecticism Robert Adam, and then to the more extravagant Regency style used to expand the West End northwards to Regent’s Park, under John Nash, and westwards to Park Lane and Belgravia.