Catherine Toal writes: The beauty of an historic Irish house is shot through with horror. That castellated manor rising at the end of the grassy avenue was a barracks in Cromwell’s time. And don’t even think about what the view from this remote abbey must have looked like around 1847. If only such places were truly historical. I don’t mean that they are the prototype for our current problem with houses, despite a few hundred having been burned down between 1919 and 1923. Or that they aren’t among our most valuable treasures. A visit to the estates in public ownership is a joy open to all. It’s just that sometimes awkward facts about the past get discreetly covered over.
A striking example can be found at Mount Stewart, a National Trust property on the Ards Peninsula in Co Down and family seat of the Earls of Londonderry. When I first visited, it was late July, and the main street of the nearest town, Comber, fluttered with Union-Jack and Ulster-flag bunting. The coronation of Charles III had recently taken place, and a kind of entrance arch curved over the road, showing King Billy and a scene from that other sequence precious to Northern Protestant memory, the Battle of the Somme. The new inclusion, among the insignia of the Twelfth, of a present-day male monarch, both of whose namesakes lived in the seventeenth century, seemed to bring 1690 closer, however much the actual Charles III, who showed an irritable temperament at his Northern Irish investiture, might dislike such a retrograde implication. The arch made Comber look like a recaptured enclave in the Williamite wars.
My great-grandfather, a Protestant, had been a farrier at an estate near Lough Neagh, and died at the Somme. After genealogical somersaults of a type more common before the Troubles, our whole family was now ‘Catholic’ (I grew up in the South), and tended to regard expressions of fervour such as those visible that day in Comber as evidence of a people duped by a landed ruling class. To see these flags in the townland of another large country estate, amid emblems of the cataclysm in which my great-grandfather died, was a reminder of the accidents of identity. From a nationalist perspective, Mount Stewart boasts the epitome of aristocratic perfidy: its most famous proprietor was Lord Castlereagh, architect of the Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801.
With the distance of time, Castlereagh seems more fascinating for the way his life fits the violent fluctuations of the Revolutionary era, similar in this regard to the radical Romantic poets, Shelley and Byron, who utterly loathed him. Heir to wealth and political influence built on the Indian colonial gains of Scottish planter forebears, Castlereagh almost drowned in Strangford Lough when a schoolboy. Admired for his skill in helping to realign post-Napoleonic Europe at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, he was blamed in England for the 1819 massacre at Peterloo, when cavalry charged a rally in Manchester calling for parliamentary reform, causing eighteen deaths. As if unable to sustain this contradiction between establishment honour and public infamy, Castlereagh went mad while still in office, slitting his own throat with a penknife.
Despite such forbidding associations, the first impression generated by Mount Stewart is one of warmth and welcome. The russety slate of its columned porch and sweeping side-wings convey the sense almost of a hearth, and the entrance stretches level with the gravelled ground, rather than towering loftily above grand gardens. The gardens themselves are whimsical instead of showy, fanning out from the side of the house and meandering around the back in a riot of fanciful shapes: a plant, tree and cement menagerie. Toward the front, the lawns give way to an enticing and gentle panorama overlooking a lake. Inside the house, a cosiness emanates from olive-green, dark pink and mustard colours, and from the joyfully domed main hall, arrayed in white, with marble statues. Perhaps the strongest sense of warmth comes from the hospitable guides, who appear, articulate and kindly, in each room, offering a spontaneous story about an aspect of the contents.
Best known among these are probably the gilt-coated chairs from the Congress of Vienna, which appear in that famous painting of the delegates by Jean-Baptiste Isabey. Less imposing, though certainly more disturbing, and clearly visible on the mantelpiece in the library, is a twentieth-century trinket: the figurine of an SS flag-bearer. It was a gift to the seventh Earl of Londonderry, either from Joachim von Ribbentrop, his house guest in 1936, or (in the same year) from Hermann Göring, whose Brandenburg hunting lodge Londonderry visited several times before the war. The porcelain company that manufactured the piece was established by Heinrich Himmler to introduce Nazi insignia into German domestic life, and provide presents for functionaries of the regime. After 1937, production increasingly relied on slave labour from Dachau concentration camp.
Notably, the story of this ornament does not feature in the lore of the house. An exhibition to the left of the entrance hall, though it foregrounds the family of the seventh Londonderry, concentrates on his part in the first government of Northern Ireland, when he and his wife, Lady Edith, ‘[brought] their sense of aristocratic duty to Ulster’. ‘Diplomacy and public duty’ pervading ‘every aspect of their existence’, they made Mount Stewart ‘a place for conversation and inclusivity’. ‘Luckily,’ the text goes on, ‘Lady Edith had natural charm, and an ability to reconcile people of different classes and political persuasions with [sic] a love of art and culture.’ This summary alludes to Londonderry’s brief tenure as minister for education, when he tried (and failed) to introduce non-denominational primary-level schooling. His efforts might be seen as at once progressive and doomed by the partisan and contested jurisdiction he was helping to administer. The emphasis on ‘inclusivity’ rings oddly, also in view of the first Northern Ireland cabinet’s abolition of proportional representation, which copper-fastened majority rule at all levels.
At the door of the library, the guide on the day I visit waves his hand over the porcelain ornaments in the room, and says that they are mostly caricatures of bygone Westminster luminaries. The SS figurine, though on display, isn’t mentioned. Not that its presence is uniquely damning for the seventh earl’s biography. In Making Friends with Hitler, Third Reich expert Ian Kershaw argues that Londonderry’s later career formed part of a wider British aristocratic investment in appeasement. Humiliated by his dismissal as secretary of state for air in 1935, and animated by strongly anti-French and anti-communist views, Londonderry seems to have become a kind of freelance broker for rapprochement with Germany in attempted imitation of the diplomatic bravura of his ancestor, Castlereagh. Hardly hindered in this project by antisemitic prejudices ‘quite normal in his class’ (so the historian Geoffrey Best once put it), he regarded the emerging persecution of German Jews primarily as a baffling strategic blunder. Once the Munich Agreement was breached, however, he was on board with the war effort, and was never an actual proponent of Nazism in the way that some other upper-class appeasers (such as the Duke of Westminster) were.
When dealing with the seventh Londonderry’s generation, the brochure for Mount Stewart focuses on Lady Edith and her achievements as a host, gardener and organiser of local volunteers during the war. Her portrait also emblazons its cover. The section on the sixth earl seems by contrast frankly political, stressing his anti-Home-Rule agitation and signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912. The presentation of the house calls to mind a phrase that recurs in a now-classic novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Through his contemporary notoriety as a putative Nazi sympathizer, the seventh Londonderry offered one inspiration for Ishiguro’s material. Both the earl at the centre of the novel’s plot, and his faithful butler, the narrator, refer to ‘errors, trivial in themselves’ that ‘may have a larger significance’. This formulation confesses even as it covers up their respective evasions. Mount Stewart’s exhibition text sometimes resembles the butler’s flattering euphemisms. In deploying Lady Edith to finesse the reputation of her husband, the brochure forgets that she too was at one point a very public admirer of Adolf Hitler, publishing in 1936 a laudatory article about meeting this ‘man with wonderful farseeing eyes’. Perhaps we are all considered too avid for ‘cancellations’ to tolerate complexity. But when it comes to the historic house – as with many other monuments of the past – ugliness (and far worse) remains ingrained in beauty.
20/12/2024
