THE ELIZABETHAN STYLE
iating enough, the real strength of English building lay in less out-
landish designs. One of the earliest, if not the earliest, in an unmis-
takable Elizabethan style is Longleat in Wiltshire, begun in 1567
(pi. lxxxh). Here you find strap work only very inconspicu-
ously on the top balustrade. The portal is small and in the Italian
style; with its Tuscan Doric columns it appears surprisingly re-
strained. Ornament is sparingly used. The effect is one of sturdy
squareness. The roof is flat, the hundreds of many-mullioned, many-
transomed windows are straight-headed, and the bay windows
project only slightly and have straight sides. This English squareness
and the predominance of large expanses of window creates some-
times, for instance at Hardwick Hall and even more in the garden
side of Hatfield House, a curiously modern, that is 20th-century,
effect. More often these large windows, the windows of Perpendic-
ular tradition, are combined with the plain customary English tri-
angular gables. Small houses of this type are still as asymmetrical as
of old, larger houses are symmetrical at least in plan, of C or E
shape or, if larger, still developed round courtyards. There is a great
deal of difference between Longleat and Burghley, but it took a
William Cecil and a Raleigh, a Shakespeare and a Spenser, and many
clear-minded, hard-headed and strong-bodied businessmen to
make up the England of Elizabeth. Yet it is one England, of one
spirit and one style in building, vigorous, prolific, somewhat boast-
ful, of a healthy and hearty soundness which, it is true, is sometimes
coarse and sometimes dull—but never effeminate and never hysterical.
Compared with the gulf that separates buildings like Burghley
House (or Audley End of 1603-16, or Hatfield House) from Inigo
Jones's supreme achievements, the Queen's House at Greenwich,
designed in 1616, though not completed until immediately before
the Civil War, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall of 1619-22,
the change in English architecture between 1500 and 1530 seems
almost negligible. Only now England experienced what Prance had
experienced before the middle of the-i6th century, and experienced
it far more stardingly, because Inigo Jones transplanted whole
buildings of purely Italian character into England, where such men
as Lescot, Delorme and Buflant had only transplanted features and—
up to a point—the spirit that stood behind them.
Inigo Jones (1573-1652) began, it seems, as a painter. At the age
of thirty-one he appears as a designer of costumes and stage-settings
for one of the masques which were a favourite entertainment of the
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