Aliya Gulamani

I hadn’t come to Wilton House for a fight. Nor was I here because I liked it; the visit was entirely research, but my husband and the Offspring Militant came along too, because visiting a stately home is a nice thing to do on a Sunday, isn’t it. So, we had lunch in the café and idled some time away in the gardens before walking round to the front door for our guided tour of the house. For a short while, everything was well. Our group of fifteen or so was ushered up the stone steps and into a hall which was surprisingly small by stately home standards but even so, full of marble, high ceilings and a crowd of portraits on the walls, some ancient and dark, a few modern and pallid. The heavy front door slammed shut behind us and then, to my slight surprise, the locks clunked into place. We were prisoners of history. Its protagonists stared down on us with aristocratic disdain and after a few minutes I felt more like a servant making an unwanted incursion rather than a welcome guest. Our guide appeared at the top of the stairwell, dressed in a tweed skirt and lambswool jumper with a scarf tucked into the neckline. She introduced herself, but I couldn’t entirely hear what she said, and so spent the next few minutes trying to work out if she was a member of the family or just part of the team. Because she kept talking about ‘us’ and looked posh, I was unsure if she lived in the house or not, until eventually I decided that she didn’t but was so identified with the house and its owners that it could probably count as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Her tour began with an introduction to the very many Earls of Pembroke who had lived at Wilton over the years, done via the portraits which hung one above another high on the walls. These included the Builder Earl, the Racing Earl and the Architect Earl who had built the house. Only later did I discover that she’d left out the Homicidal Maniac Earl, which is a pity. Her talk was thorough, but so focused on the individuals and their nicknames rather than dates that I ended up bewildered. The parade of Earls floated free in time, untethered from our more usual histories of kings or eras or indeed anything outside the walls of Wilton House. These aristocrats existed, it seemed, in a world entirely of their own construction. So far, though, I was still going along with the tour, but this did not last. The next point of interest for us to contemplate was a piece of eighteenth-century porcelain in a glass case: a sculpted tangle of limbs and tumult and weaponry, rendered artistic and civilised by shiny white glaze. ‘It’s Sèvres,’ she said, ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women. Isn’t it nice?’ I look at the Offspring Militant who raises her eyebrows in return. We do not think this looks nice, not at all. We have both been reading the same book of feminist art history and we are bored of this nonsense. What we are looking at is a prime example of the male gaze, titillation and general patriarchy. Not anything to applaud at all. That one small platitude of ‘nice’ from our guide is what sends me over the edge. From this point on, I am no longer a normal stately home visitor to be entertained and, perhaps, educated. Instead, I am at war. So, when we head up a short flight of marble stairs into a corridor of columns whose walls are painted the colour of weak orange squash, lined with marble statues, busts and sarcophagi, I start asking questions. Are these real or reproductions? Where did the Pembrokes get them from? When were they bought? There are few labels and our guide doesn’t know many of the answers either, so tries to divert our attention with a literal pram in the hall, a navy blue Silver Cross, coach-built and massive, which she assures us has been used by the last two generations of Pembroke children. She herself has seen it out on the lawn with a baby in it. It’s clear that we are not here to be educated, or improved by the art or even interested in it – that’s just the pretence under which we have been invited in. What we are really here to admire is the aristocracy itself, in this case in the form of their pram, and I do not like that idea in the slightest. As we gently shuffle past the unidentified busts and statues, our guide does give us one piece of information about them. ‘During World War Two,’ she says, ‘when the house was requisitioned by the army, the Pembrokes thought these valuable pieces needed to be protected from the soldiers. So, they hid them in the shrubbery. Except no one remembered where they had been put, or how many had been put there and so,’ tinkly little laugh, ‘the gardeners do still occasionally unearth another one.’ So far we have seen two rooms in Wilton House and I have learned, or perhaps been reminded, that these are people who are quite relaxed about violence against women and are not the natural custodians of art and heritage that they claim to be. What they are also telling me is that the only historical context in which they are interested is the bloodline of their own families. As descended through the male, of course. I may be counting the crimes in multiples, but the tour has hardly started. Next stop is the dining room, which has been redecorated by the current Countess in a style best described as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in his acid phase, with lime green walls and muddy brown accents. This has been done in order to show off a set of pictures of horses. For our guide, these are a reason to tell us even more about the Racing Earl, but it’s also a reminder of just how much the upper classes like horses. And pictures of them. In Wilton, along with most stately homes, the prized Raphaels and Dutch landscapes are matched by an even greater number of paintings of horses, dogs and the family who own them. The best art, if you are an aristocrat, is a picture of something you own or are related to. We progress through more galleries of drawings and paintings, followed by further rooms full of sofas and large swagged curtains. Eventually we arrive at the grandest part of the house, which in Wilton is the Cube Room and Double Cube Room. These are very much as described, as long as the kind of cube you are imagining is a huge, heavily carved and gilded cube thirty foot high, painted with pagan gods, swags of fruit and foliage, imaginary animals and lots of heraldry. These two rooms in Wilton, particularly the Double Cube, are renowned as great treasures of England: perfectly proportioned works of Baroque designs, unparalleled in their preservation, the peak of our creativity as a nation and therefore the perfect example of Why We Visit Stately Homes. In my current mood I could disagree with every single one of those statements but most of all I simply don’t like the decoration. There’s too much gold and carving everywhere, the ceiling paintings hang heavy like thunder clouds laden with gods, and the whole effect of scale, swags and excess is more like being in an Italian church that wants to remind you of your own insignificance and mortality than anywhere you would want to call home. I don’t think I am alone in feeling this either. My guess is that very few visitors really like the décor of the Double Cube Room, or even feel improved by seeing it. Who, now, would actually want to decorate a room like this? Only Mayfair hotels and Donald Trump; the rest of us would probably prefer to go to IKEA. But if we’re not here for the art and we hate the furniture, what on earth are we all doing standing in a big overblown room pretending to admire the details? Right now, I have no idea. When I do examine the details, they don’t stand up to much scrutiny either. The doors of these grand rooms are tall and simple, made of dark wood and polished up to a deep shine in which the Offspring Militant can check her outfit because she’s got past being angry now and is just bored. But this craftsmanship and gleam came at a price. To start with, the doors are made of mahogany, logged by enslaved people in the Caribbean, the trees cut down to make space for the sugar plantations. And that shine comes from the labour of generation after generation of maidservants, who worked here underpaid, over-controlled and barely seen as human. But they are not part of the story of these rooms; let’s get back to talking about Earls, shall we? Goodness knows there are enough of them around. All the pictures in the Double Cube Room are portraits, mostly by Van Dyck and in the main featuring Pembrokes. Impressive, but quite self-centred. And it’s not just the paintings which give this impression. I’m also starting to notice that heraldry is everywhere in the house. I’d already clocked it on the stained-glass windows behind the statues in the cloister, but in these rooms it’s also painted on the cornicing and walls, carved into the fireplaces and even forming the bell pushes for summoning servants. I find myself thinking that the upper classes are either immense egotists who want to stamp their mark on everything they own, a bit like a small child in the 1970s who’s been given a Dymo labelling kit, or they are very dim and need constant reminders of who they are and where they belong. I’m cross and tired now and just want some cake, but as we head for the exit, our guide points out a small square of reinforced glass set into the floor. Below this is some carved white stone, the same as the walls above, but this piece is different because it’s even older than the rest of the house. This small piece of pillar is all that remains of Wilton Abbey, which was once one of the great nunneries of Saxon and medieval England, a storehouse of female learning and power. That is, until the Reformation, when the site and buildings were bought at a knock-down price by Sir William Herbert, who just happened to be steward to King Henry VIII. He paid just £55 for something which had been stolen from the church. Almost every stately home is built from either exploitation or someone else’s money, and in most cases a combination of both. As this piece of stone remind us, Wilton is no exception. With that, we are ushered out the door to look at an oak planted by a recent Earl and a Palladian bridge that we aren’t allowed to walk on. The way out is, as ever, via the gift shop. But to get there we pass through the back courtyard, which is hosting two exhibitions in the former laundries and coal stores. One is a collection of Cecil Beaton photographs of the house, which turn out to be just printed copies stuck to the wall. A further room holds a mangle and a few other pieces of galvanised metalware, attended to by two mannequins, standing lopsidedly in the white aprons and caps of maidservants: one brief reminder that all this gold and idleness was very much reliant on other people doing a lot of hard work. As time goes on and I visit more houses, this is what will perhaps irritate me more than anything else I see, but for now I am all argued out. The one thing I do know is that I will never look at a stately home in the same way again.

I hadn’t come to Wilton House for a fight. Nor was I here because I liked it; the visit was entirely research, but my husband and the Offspring Militant came along too, because visiting a stately home is a nice thing to do on a Sunday, isn’t it. So, we had lunch in the café and idled some time away in the gardens before walking round to the front door for our guided tour of the house.
For a short while, everything was well. Our group of fifteen or so was ushered up the stone steps and into a hall which was surprisingly small by stately home standards but even so, full of marble, high ceilings and a crowd of portraits on the walls, some ancient and dark, a few modern and pallid. The heavy front door slammed shut behind us and then, to my slight surprise, the locks clunked into place. We were prisoners of history. Its protagonists stared down on us with aristocratic disdain and after a few minutes I felt more like a servant making an unwanted incursion rather than a welcome guest.
Our guide appeared at the top of the stairwell, dressed in a tweed skirt and lambswool jumper with a scarf tucked into the neckline. She introduced herself, but I couldn’t entirely hear what she said, and so spent the next few minutes trying to work out if she was a member of the family or just part of the team. Because she kept talking about ‘us’ and looked posh, I was unsure if she lived in the house or not, until eventually I decided that she didn’t but was so identified with the house and its owners that it could probably count as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
Her tour began with an introduction to the very many Earls of Pembroke who had lived at Wilton over the years, done via the portraits which hung one above another high on the walls. These included the Builder Earl, the Racing Earl and the Architect Earl who had built the house. Only later did I discover that she’d left out the Homicidal Maniac Earl, which is a pity. Her talk was thorough, but so focused on the individuals and their nicknames rather than dates that I ended up bewildered. The parade of Earls floated free in time, untethered from our more usual histories of kings or eras or indeed anything outside the walls of Wilton House. These aristocrats existed, it seemed, in a world entirely of their own construction. 
So far, though, I was still going along with the tour, but this did not last. The next point of interest for us to contemplate was a piece of eighteenth-century porcelain in a glass case: a sculpted tangle of limbs and tumult and weaponry, rendered artistic and civilised by shiny white glaze. ‘It’s Sèvres,’ she said, ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women. Isn’t it nice?’ I look at the Offspring Militant who raises her eyebrows in return. We do not think this looks nice, not at all. We have both been reading the same book of feminist art history and we are bored of this nonsense. What we are looking at is a prime example of the male gaze, titillation and general patriarchy. Not anything to applaud at all.
That one small platitude of ‘nice’ from our guide is what sends me over the edge. From this point on, I am no longer a normal stately home visitor to be entertained and, perhaps, educated. Instead, I am at war.
So, when we head up a short flight of marble stairs into a corridor of columns whose walls are painted the colour of weak orange squash, lined with marble statues, busts and sarcophagi, I start asking questions. Are these real or reproductions? Where did the Pembrokes get them from? When were they bought? There are few labels and our guide doesn’t know many of the answers either, so tries to divert our attention with a literal pram in the hall, a navy blue Silver Cross, coach-built and massive, which she assures us has been used by the last two generations of Pembroke children. She herself has seen it out on the lawn with a baby in it. It’s clear that we are not here to be educated, or improved by the art or even interested in it – that’s just the pretence under which we have been invited in. What we are really here to admire is the aristocracy itself, in this case in the form of their pram, and I do not like that idea in the slightest. 
As we gently shuffle past the unidentified busts and statues, our guide does give us one piece of information about them. ‘During World War Two,’ she says, ‘when the house was requisitioned by the army, the Pembrokes thought these valuable pieces needed to be protected from the soldiers. So, they hid them in the shrubbery. Except no one remembered where they had been put, or how many had been put there and so,’ tinkly little laugh, ‘the gardeners do still occasionally unearth another one.’
So far we have seen two rooms in Wilton House and I have learned, or perhaps been reminded, that these are people who are quite relaxed about violence against women and are not the natural custodians of art and heritage that they claim to be. What they are also telling me is that the only historical context in which they are interested is the bloodline of their own families. As descended through the male, of course.
I may be counting the crimes in multiples, but the tour has hardly started. Next stop is the dining room, which has been redecorated by the current Countess in a style best described as Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen in his acid phase, with lime green walls and muddy brown accents. This has been done in order to show off a set of pictures of horses. For our guide, these are a reason to tell us even more about the Racing Earl, but it’s also a reminder of just how much the upper classes like horses. And pictures of them. In Wilton, along with most stately homes, the prized Raphaels and Dutch landscapes are matched by an even greater number of paintings of horses, dogs and the family who own them. The best art, if you are an aristocrat, is a picture of something you own or are related to.
We progress through more galleries of drawings and paintings, followed by further rooms full of sofas and large swagged curtains. Eventually we arrive at the grandest part of the house, which in Wilton is the Cube Room and Double Cube Room. These are very much as described, as long as the kind of cube you are imagining is a huge, heavily carved and gilded cube thirty foot high, painted with pagan gods, swags of fruit and foliage, imaginary animals and lots of heraldry.
These two rooms in Wilton, particularly the Double Cube, are renowned as great treasures of England: perfectly proportioned works of Baroque designs, unparalleled in their preservation, the peak of our creativity as a nation and therefore the perfect example of Why We Visit Stately Homes. In my current mood I could disagree with every single one of those statements but most of all I simply don’t like the decoration. There’s too much gold and carving everywhere, the ceiling paintings hang heavy like thunder clouds laden with gods, and the whole effect of scale, swags and excess is more like being in an Italian church that wants to remind you of your own insignificance and mortality than anywhere you would want to call home.
I don’t think I am alone in feeling this either. My guess is that very few visitors really like the décor of the Double Cube Room, or even feel improved by seeing it. Who, now, would actually want to decorate a room like this? Only Mayfair hotels and Donald Trump; the rest of us would probably prefer to go to IKEA. But if we’re not here for the art and we hate the furniture, what on earth are we all doing standing in a big overblown room pretending to admire the details? Right now, I have no idea.
When I do examine the details, they don’t stand up to much scrutiny either. The doors of these grand rooms are tall and simple, made of dark wood and polished up to a deep shine in which the Offspring Militant can check her outfit because she’s got past being angry now and is just bored. But this craftsmanship and gleam came at a price. To start with, the doors are made of mahogany, logged by enslaved people in the Caribbean, the trees cut down to make space for the sugar plantations. And that shine comes from the labour of generation after generation of maidservants, who worked here underpaid, over-controlled and barely seen as human. But they are not part of the story of these rooms; let’s get back to talking about Earls, shall we?
Goodness knows there are enough of them around. All the pictures in the Double Cube Room are portraits, mostly by Van Dyck and in the main featuring Pembrokes. Impressive, but quite self-centred. And it’s not just the paintings which give this impression. I’m also starting to notice that heraldry is everywhere in the house. I’d already clocked it on the stained-glass windows behind the statues in the cloister, but in these rooms it’s also painted on the cornicing and walls, carved into the fireplaces and even forming the bell pushes for summoning servants. I find myself thinking that the upper classes are either immense egotists who want to stamp their mark on everything they own, a bit like a small child in the 1970s who’s been given a Dymo labelling kit, or they are very dim and need constant reminders of who they are and where they belong. 
I’m cross and tired now and just want some cake, but as we head for the exit, our guide points out a small square of reinforced glass set into the floor. Below this is some carved white stone, the same as the walls above, but this piece is different because it’s even older than the rest of the house. This small piece of pillar is all that remains of Wilton Abbey, which was once one of the great nunneries of Saxon and medieval England, a storehouse of female learning and power. That is, until the Reformation, when the site and buildings were bought at a knock-down price by Sir William Herbert, who just happened to be steward to King Henry VIII. He paid just £55 for something which had been stolen from the church. Almost every stately home is built from either exploitation or someone else’s money, and in most cases a combination of both. As this piece of stone remind us, Wilton is no exception.
With that, we are ushered out the door to look at an oak planted by a recent Earl and a Palladian bridge that we aren’t allowed to walk on. The way out is, as ever, via the gift shop. But to get there we pass through the back courtyard, which is hosting two exhibitions in the former laundries and coal stores. One is a collection of Cecil Beaton photographs of the house, which turn out to be just printed copies stuck to the wall. A further room holds a mangle and a few other pieces of galvanised metalware, attended to by two mannequins, standing lopsidedly in the white aprons and caps of maidservants: one brief reminder that all this gold and idleness was very much reliant on other people doing a lot of hard work. As time goes on and I visit more houses, this is what will perhaps irritate me more than anything else I see, but for now I am all argued out. The one thing I do know is that I will never look at a stately home in the same way again.

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A visit to Wilton House aka the beginning of this book

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