BETWEEN the architecture of Elizabeth's reign and that of James I there is unbroken
continuity. The new king, wisely and cautiously and much to the relief of his English
Court, swam with the Elizabethan stream. In the person of Robert Cecil he maintained
the Burghley dynasty in high office; he regularly progressed through his kingdom, after
a fashion necessarily less romantic but at least as expensive as Elizabeth's. Elizabethan
architecture became Jacobean without the least symptom of crisis. And yet there was a
change: it is reflected in our instinctive use of 'Jacobean' as distinct from 'Elizabethan' as
a stylistic and not merely a chronological expression, and the fact is that, although, as we
have seen, the 'Elizabethan' style has no very solid existence, the 'Jacobean' style has.
From the last decade of the sixteenth century, we begin to recognize a widespread con-
stancy to certain plan-shapes and silhouettes and to a vocabulary of detail which varies
little throughout the country, and is characteristic only of the years of James's reign and
the decade immediately preceding it.

All these characteristics are, indeed, merely intensifications of certain aspects of Eliza-
bethan architecture, as seen, for instance, in Longleat, Worksop, and Wimbledon. After
those houses, which must have been enormously influential, the conception of a great
house as a romantic pile, full of incident and surprise from every point of view, had not
much further to go, but it could and did crystallize into many variations and re-combina-
tions; and the Jacobean generation exploited it to the full. Striking mass arrangement and
silhouette were the main objectives; the actual disposition of the rooms within a house
excited little imaginative interest. The only really notable tendency was to abandon the
traditional placing of the hall lengthwise to the main front and entered indirectly through
a screened passage. From Hardwick onwards we find that a number of larger houses have
the hall placed at right angles to the main front and entered directly on its long axis. That
was a highly important innovation. Apart from it, however, planning remained tradi-
tional or empirical, and we find rooms packed, often rather grotesquely, into pre-
determined plan-shapes -- 'uniform without, though severally partitioned within', as
Francis Bacon ¹ puts it. Thus, the bay-window of a summer parlour may match exactly
the window of the dry larder in the opposite wing.

The general character of the Jacobean house owed much to the increasing employment
of Flemish carvers and other foreign craftsmen. As the sixteenth century passed into the
seventeenth, the number of immigrants at work on tombs, fireplaces, entrances, and other
distinct architectural features was considerable. There were the families of Holleman,
Johnson (or Janssen), Stevens, Cure, and Colt, most of them working in London, all
of whom erected tombs in the first quarter of the seventeenth century and many, if not
all, of whom were engaged on parts of houses, such as fireplaces and entrances. We have
already seen how Gerard Holleman supplied the fireplaces for Kyre Park (p. 28 ). In the

-44-