Travel and the British country house: Cultures, critiques and consumption in the long eighteenth century

Introduction: travel and the British country house

Jon Stobart

In the summer of 1748, Sophia Newdigate was touring southern England with her husband, Sir Roger Newdigate, and a small party of friends. In her journal of the tour, she noted that, after admiring Mr Hoare’s house and gardens at Stourton, they ‘got at night to a little miserable town called Bruton where, had we not been very hungry & much tired we should have found a difficulty to eat or sleep’. The following day, they ‘proceeded on to Wells ten miles from this Place a very rocky road’.¹ Over twenty-five years later, her husband, by then aged fifty-five and on his second Grand Tour, wrote to his friend John Morduant describing the sights of Florence: ‘Our mornings are spent amongst the statues, paintings, intaglios & cameos, medals, antiquities Roman & Etruscan, of the immense collection call’d the Gallery. We have operas, comedies, balls, all mask’d …’ He also offered to shop on his friend’s behalf: ‘Can we do anything for you in this country – Books, Music, Perfumes, Sculpture, painting. Send your order we shall execute them with pleasure.’² These two incidents from the archives of a single Warwickshire family tell us much about the relationship between travel and the country house. The houses of the elite were destinations for travellers, but also places to be furnished with the souvenirs of trips to Europe and further afield; travelling was something to be enjoyed or sometimes endured because of its privations and discomforts; it sharpened the critical eye by broadening geographical and cultural experience, and it marked out the elite as a group with the leisure and money to devote to travel for pleasure. For contemporaries, then, travel was something that placed the country house into social, spatial and cultural context; but it was also something that allowed owners to acquire a range of objects not easily accessed at home – most notably treasures from the Grand Tour or more exotic goods from India. This book explores these different aspects of the relationship between travel and the country house, and particularly the interlinking of the house as a destination of travellers and a product of travel. It builds on a vast literature on country houses and their owners, but makes significant points of departure and thus offers new insights into how the country house was imagined, constructed and perceived, and how it was connected, both virtually and physically, with the wider world.

The British country house has been the subject of increasing scholarly interest in recent years, much of it focusing on the long eighteenth century, the period in which its political, cultural and social significance were probably at their greatest. From an art-historical perspective, attention has focused on the architectural and aesthetic development of the country house, traditionally seen in terms of a progression of stylistic development from baroque through Palladian and neo-classical to gothic.³ While this approach has been questioned in recent years, in both its linear approach and its focus on ideal types, the importance of the country house as the embodiment of artistic endeavour and the owner as key patron of the arts and of skilled professionals and craftsmen remains largely intact.⁴ It formed a key component of the country house as powerhouse: an expression of elite patronage and influence or, in Girouard’s terms, ‘the headquarters from which land was administered and power organised. It was a show-case, in which to exhibit and entertain supporters and good connections … It was an image maker, which projected an aura of glamour, mystery or success around its owner. It was visible evidence of his wealth.’⁵ The country house brought not simply the prestige of a large and tasteful residence; it was also the embodiment of political power which derived from land ownership and control of people, including the electorate. Small wonder, then, that country houses were places that travellers wished to visit.

A great house reflected cultural capital and political power, but also great wealth. This was derived from a range of sources, including political office, trade and finance, colonial investments or service and professional activities, most notably the law; but the most important was undoubtedly agriculture.⁶ While few great landowners farmed their land directly, effective estate management was central to building and maintaining high levels of rental income. An active land market allowed estate owners to increase and consolidate their holdings, despite the apparent restrictions imposed by practices of strict settlement and entail.⁷ These aspects of estate management have attracted considerable academic attention, but only recently has this interest in income begun to be matched by a corresponding interest in spending, as part of the recent emergence of consumption as a historical meta-narrative. Of course, the huge and sometimes ruinous sums laid out on building have long been recognised; what is new is an attempt to uncover more about the routine expenditure that underpinned household management and how consumption was related to identity, family relationships and systems of supply.⁸ The country house thus emerges as a nexus of consumption, but also a place that was constantly evolving as a result of the ongoing process of consumption.

All these facets of the form and function of the country house place it into a variety of different frameworks and contexts, each with its own story to tell. We thus see the house set within worlds of collecting and connoisseurship, power and privilege, wealth and patronage; but also of goods, commerce and trade. There remains, however, a need to examine more closely the ways in which these various contexts were articulated and experienced through the geographical mobility of people: that is, their ability and readiness to travel between places in pursuit of business and pleasure. The relationship between travel and the country house was complex and contingent. It varied according to the means and motivations of individual landowners and their social and political ambitions, personal tastes and family circumstances; and, of course, it shifted over time.

Cultures of travel: country house visiting

The eighteenth-century country house was a well-established focus for travel and the destination for many journeys. This built on a long tradition of the country house as a site for hospitality: a place where travellers, at least those of a certain status, could expect to be welcomed even if they were unknown to the owner of the house. Yet this continuity was cut across by marked changes in the number, character and motivation of visitors. Country house visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were generally drawn from the elite; they came to view the cabinets of curiosities and increasingly the artistic collections to be found at the great houses.⁹ This was the age of the virtuosi, whose interests and tastes were wide-ranging and whose collections were similarly eclectic. Perhaps most famous was that found in Sir Walter Cope’s London house, where fine paintings were admired alongside a rhinoceros horn, a chain made from monkey’s teeth, an Indian canoe and clothes from China, Java and Arabia, among many other things.¹⁰ Collectors and visitors alike were driven by curiosity for things that were rare and unusual, opulent and costly. However, this approach to collecting was already being satirised in the 1670s, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso centring on the exploits of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack. From the early eighteenth century onwards, curiosity and eclecticism were increasingly replaced by taste and discernment, and collections were more narrowly focused on the arts – paintings, sculpture, medals, marbles and books – all framed in the grand and symbolic architecture of the house itself.¹¹ Visiting country houses was much more about personal improvement and refining taste: learning and testing what comprised ‘good’ taste, not least by gazing at and critically assessing collections made on the Grand Tour (see Chapters 1 and 4).

The twin attractions of great houses and great collections focused attention onto a particular canon of places, especially for overseas visitors. Tinniswood argues for a gradual expansion of geographical horizons, from a small number of royal palaces and prodigy houses in and around London to a series of regional groupings, including Houghton, Holkham, Blickling and Raynham in Norfolk, and Longleat, Stourhead, Mount Edgecumbe and Saltram in the south-west – a transition also seen with overseas visitors (see Chapters 5 and 7).¹² Within these, there were certain places that stood out, most notably Blenheim, Chatsworth, Wilton and Stowe. At these great houses and to a lesser extent elsewhere, guidebooks were increasingly available for the visitor, in part as a response to a growing thirst for accurate information about house interiors, particularly the collections of paintings. If the visitor was lucky and of high status, he or she might be shown round by the owner, but this task was often left to servants, usually the housekeeper, whose knowledge was increasingly found wanting. Guidebooks thus offered the visitor more reliable descriptions and attributions of paintings, a trend which, as Anderson demonstrates, Arthur Young both exploited and fed into (Chapter 6). Some guidebooks cost a few pence and were meant for use in situ, while others were expensive commemorative volumes, intended for gentlemen’s libraries, and could be well illustrated and expensive items.¹³

Guidebooks may have helped to supply more reliable information to discerning visitors, but the basic process of house visiting remained largely unchanged throughout the eighteenth century: the prospective visitor either sent a servant ahead or simply knocked on the door and asked to be admitted. Yet two important things had changed. First, there was a growing presumption that one would be allowed in; indeed, the irascible John Byng complained vociferously when he failed to gain entry to Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire, arguing: ‘Let people proclaim that their great houses are not to be view’d, and then travellers will not ride out of their way with false hopes.’¹⁴ Second, the number of people seeking admission was growing and their social status was becoming more mixed – both trends that compromised the exclusivity of the country house. The private tours made by William Hanbury (Chapter 4) and Sophia Newdigate in the 1720s and 1740s were very different from the day trips undertaken later in the eighteenth century by urban middling sorts such as Abigail Gawthorn.¹⁵ Mandler has argued that the mid-eighteenth-century landowner needed to make his house ‘sufficiently permeable’ to allow visitors to ‘appreciate and, preferably, report on his achievements’; but the increasing press for admission in some places meant that restrictions, in terms of tickets or opening hours, were necessary. Moreover, the new set of visitors sometimes failed to behave themselves, resulting in complaints about vandalism and theft.¹⁶

Not everything was changing, however: polite social visits remained a central element of elite sociability throughout the eighteenth century.¹⁷ For those travelling, overnight stays with country house owners were common and signalled a deeper integration into country house culture and one that meant that sojourns at inns were only occasionally necessary.¹⁸ Receiving accommodation in this way, which William Hanbury enjoyed while his untitled travelling companion did not (see Chapter 4), signalled social standing and was predicated on a shared social identity (as titled landowners) and sometimes family connections with other country house owners. It was underpinned by the ownership of a carriage, which not only remained a defining characteristic of the elite and a very public demonstration of wealth and standing, but was also of immense practical value for travel, especially for women, because it allowed flexibility that stage coaches could not offer.¹⁹

The critical eye: travel and taste

Closely linked to the importance of the house as a destination for travellers is the notion of travel as a point of critical comparison for ideas of taste, discernment and elite material culture. For the British, the key source of cultural inspiration is generally seen as the Grand Tour. Despite the shifting social and gender makeup of tourists and the varied and sometimes contradictory functions of the tour, it remained a central part of the social and cultural education of the elite through the eighteenth century and beyond.²⁰ French and Dutch places were important places to call en route, but Italy was the key destination, where considerable attention focused on the ancient ruins (especially in Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum) and also the architecture of the Italian Renaissance and especially the re-imagining of Roman villas by Palladio and others. These influences had begun to seep into the design of British houses from the sixteenth century, classical columns and motifs being found at Nonsuch, Burghley House, Hardwick Hall and many others;²¹ they reached their full flowering in eighteenth-century Palladianism and neo-classicism. These styles were inspired by the Grand Tour and by an envisioning of Britain as the inheritor of the values and authority of the Roman Empire, with landowners sometimes explicitly portraying themselves as Roman senators – a conceit seen most famously seen at Robert Walpole’s Houghton Hall.²²

The classical influences on British architecture are often explored through the lives of key individuals or the construction of key houses. Among the former are patrons and gentleman-architects like Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, and Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, both of whom made extensive continental tours, although the latter relied more on his reading of Palladio than on direct observation of classical ruins.²³ The influence of Burlington in particular was immense, his trips to Italy being paired with travels between the houses of his numerous friends, whom he advised when designing their new houses. Just as important were the professional architects and designers who made their own tours of the Continent, sometimes in tandem with their patrons. William Kent travelled in Italy in the 1710s and 1720s, meeting up with Leicester and Burlington and gathering first-hand experience of both ancient Rome and Palladio’s villas in the Veneto. A generation later, Robert Adam set off on a Grand Tour with the Earl of Hopetoun and, after falling out with his patron, stayed on in Rome to study architecture, while James Stewart visited Naples and then Greece in the company of another budding architect, Matthew Brettingham the younger.²⁴ These travels and the ideas and tastes that they inspired were embodied in some of the most iconic country houses of the eighteenth century. Burlington’s interpretation of Palladian villas is perhaps best seen in his own house at Chiswick, but Holkham Hall, built to house the Earl of Leicester’s vast collection of paintings and sculptures gathered on the Grand Tour, is the fullest realisation of Burlington-inspired neo-Palladianism. These formed models of fashionable good taste that were repeated and emulated up and down the country (see Chapter 1). Much the same was true of the Grand Tour’s influence on garden design. Although seen as perhaps the quintessential English contribution to design, country house gardens were profoundly influenced by landowners’ experiences of classicism in Italy, both through paintings of imagined classical landscapes by Claude Lorrain and more directly in the buildings that punctuated and structured English landscape gardens (see Chapter 2).²⁵

In addition to this direct impact on the form and structure of the British house and garden, Roey Sweet argues that European travel also served to develop and hone the aesthetic criteria by which places were assessed.²⁶ Her focus is primarily on the reaction of British tourists to the great Italian cities, but they deployed the same criteria of taste, virtue, erudition, sociability and domesticity, and engaged in similar cultural practices to those visiting English country houses. Importantly, they also deployed a common language of aesthetics, which runs through the journals and letters that were an essential accompaniment of any Grand Tour and which emphasised both rational and emotional or sentimental responses to the world, including ideas of the picturesque, sublime and beautiful.²⁷ Seeing places and palaces elsewhere in Europe also enabled British travellers to define the distinctive qualities of their own houses. These increasingly centred on ideas of cleanliness, convenience and comfort, qualities that they often found missing in the places they visited. In Italy, for example, Rome was particularly vilified for its dirtiness, and both Venice and Naples were also found wanting; only Florentine streets were clean and free from bad smells.²⁸

Critical appreciation and even direct inspiration for remodelling one’s own house could also be gained from visiting other houses in Britain, a practice that links to and reflects Colin Campbell’s attempts to valorise British architecture in his Vitruvius Britannicus.²⁹ Seeing not just the great houses, but also the rapidly growing number of new and improved gentlemen’s seats, provided an opportunity to exercise and sharpen aesthetic judgement in a way that paralleled what was happening on European tours. Mrs Lybbe Powys is well known in this regard, but she was part of a much wider tradition that included women as well as men.³⁰ Returning once more to Sophia Newdigate, we read her easy dismissal of Wooton Farm near Chertsey as ‘a mere box built of bricks’ and Goodwood as simply ‘indifferent’; yet we also see considered critiques: the garden buildings at Stowe were too numerous; the Duke of Queensbury’s garden at Amesbury was ‘in a stiff formal taste’, and its new Chinese house lost its authenticity and effect because it was made of flint, ‘no very proper material for the purpose’.³¹ Of particular significance are her observations and comments on gothic architecture, both domestic and ecclesiastical, which undoubtedly formed the context of Sir Roger Newdigate’s progressive gothicisation of their Warwickshire home, Arbury Hall, and underline the importance of learning from other houses, but also a wider set of buildings, including cathedrals and medieval guildhalls – the British equivalent of classical temples and villas.³²

Travel also extended beyond Europe: the wider horizons of imperial travel offered another strand of influence on taste, attitudes and identities. Postcolonial perspectives have created a strong focus on the relationship between empire and nation; the ‘other’ encountered when travelling in India, North America and later Africa was an important influence on British identity.³³ At the same time, however, it also focused the attention of travellers onto the everyday: domestic arrangements, social customs and material culture. The experience of travelling or residing in Britain’s colonies could have a profound impact on attitudes to domestic life and tastes in architecture and domestic decoration, most strikingly at Nabob houses such as Sezincote.³⁴

Bringing it home: travel and consumption

Travel was a means of bringing home goods as well as ideas; it was central to processes of collection and consumption, and to constructing the material culture of the country house. As with travel, the most famous and arguably important source of cultural treasures was the Grand Tour. One of the earliest and most influential collections was that assembled by the Earl of Arundel. He travelled on the Continent in the early 1600s and acquired a huge collection of paintings (including many Old Masters), drawings, sarcophagi, altars, coins, medals and manuscripts; but perhaps his most famous acquisitions were a series of classical statues, later donated to Oxford University.³⁵ These feature in the background of Daniel Mytens’s famous portrait of Arundel, arranged in a long gallery, while some of his paintings appear behind the matching portrait of this wife, Lady Alethea. The collection was not just an integral part of the Arundel’s identity as a connoisseur and an influential courtier, but was also integral to the form and decoration of his house, because, as Girouard puts it: ‘collections, once formed, had to be put somewhere’.³⁶ This link between travel, collecting and building is repeated in many other great houses. Holkham Hall can be seen, in part, as a gallery to house the collection of paintings, sculptures and so on amassed by the Earl of Leicester on his Grand Tour. A generation later, Henry Blundell had two galleries built at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire to house his collection of around 500 pieces of sculpture acquired on the Continent; the second was designed as a replica of the Pantheon in Rome, thus bringing together Roman architecture and artefacts. His desire to make his collection well known and an influence on taste led him to publish two illustrated folios; but, as Campion notes of Lord Hervey in Chapter 1, bringing people to these great collections was another way of sharing one’s taste and bolstering one’s cultural capital.³⁷

Acquiring these objects required a deep purse. Some objects could be obtained from London auction houses, and copies were produced by men such as John Cheere, making trips to Italy unnecessary.³⁸ Nonetheless, discerning collectors viewed the Grand Tour as an important opportunity to collect antiquities, original art and copies of both. Indeed, reproductions could be almost as exclusive as originals, in part because of the difficulties in obtaining permission from the owner to copy the original piece. While some aristocratic collectors were able to use their influence and knowledge to undertake negotiations with owners and suppliers themselves, most were reliant on intermediaries. Sir William Hamilton was especially useful to British visitors to Naples; the way in which Lord Hervey pressed him for help in acquiring permission to take copies of some of the king’s statues (Chapter 1) illustrates how influential he was thought to be. Similarly in Florence, Sir Horace Mann not only helped to ‘make the place agreeable to all his countrymen’, as Sir Roger Newdigate noted, but also assisted collectors in their acquisitions.³⁹ Agents or antiquarians often operated as middlemen, linking the supply of excavated objects with eager collectors, but agency was also shown by tourists themselves: they were willing and able to be useful to their friends at home.⁴⁰ This extended from the sweeping offer made by Sir Roger Newdigate to his friend John Morduant, which we saw earlier, to the commissioning of relatives to make purchases while travelling. Thus, the Marquess of Rockingham wrote to his son Lord Malton that ‘if when at Rome you chuse to lay out 4 or 500£ in Marble Tables, statues, as you Shall judge agreeable to you I will answer your Bills to that summ’.⁴¹

All this made the Grand Tour an important exercise in collecting as well as a cultural and social experience: one that could have an important influence on the materiality of the British country house. Of course, Europe was not the only place from which goods were brought back. Travel within Britain often meant returning with goods chosen and purchased whilst away from home. As with the spread of ideas, however, there was also a burgeoning flow of goods from the colonies, many of them sent or brought back by East Indiamen, planters and others. These included decorative pieces, such as painted screens, ivory cabinets and japanned furniture, which might also be acquired from the East India Company sales in London, but also a wide array of more personal items, from shawls to paintings to hookah pipes.⁴² These had a profound impact on the material culture of certain houses, most notably the dwellings of the co-called nabobs. Richard Benyon, for example, returning home in 1744 from a spell as Governor of Madras, brought with him rosewood furniture inlaid with ebony and ivory, Chinese porcelain and Indian textiles, among many other things, and installed them all at Englefield House in Berkshire. More famously, Warren Hastings returned to Britain with significant quantities of ivory furniture and other Indian goods, which formed the centrepiece of the decorative scheme for his new house at Dayleford.⁴³ In the eighteenth century especially, it was not simply the wealth, but also the cultural threat posed by the taste and material culture of nabobs that caused anxiety.⁴⁴ And, of course, it was travel to and employment in India that allowed these men to bring home both Indian tastes and Indian goods.⁴⁵

Key themes

This collection engages with all these aspects of elite travel and its mutually constructive relationship with the country house. It includes new empirical research on houses across the British Isles, from Stourhead in Wiltshire to Brahan Castle in Ross, and from Downhill House in County Londonderry to Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. The focus is on the long eighteenth century, although the chapters by Edwards and Filor in particular stretch the boundaries at either end, and the range of subject matter is deliberately broad to emphasise and explore the variety and complexity of the relationship between travel and the country house: from the conceptual to the tangible, from artwork and antiquities to locks and windows, and from the objectification of foreign cultures to the intense practicality of spending on horses and hay. While each chapter presents its own arguments, three broad themes run through the book.

The first theme concerns the contingency of motivations for and practices of travel relating to the country house. As discussed above, the relationship can appear clear and straightforward. At Stourhead, for example, John Harrison demonstrates in Chapter 2 that many of its classical buildings were closely modelled on key sites in ancient Rome, most notably the Pantheon and the Temple of the Sun at Balbec. This brought something of the classical civilisation to rural Wiltshire, yet the transfer was filtered through the lens of practicality and the aesthetics of an English garden. Dimensions and proportions were altered, classical allusions blended and arrangements shaped around the broader folds of the landscape. This borrowing and blending is no surprise, but it is easy to forget how these practices were often very particular to the spatial context. This comes out more clearly in Campion’s analysis of the travel and collecting of Lord Hervey (Chapter 1). In many ways, Hervey was the ultimate Grand Tourist, travelling to the Continent on several occasions, visiting many ancient sites (including some that were newly excavated) and collecting a wide range of original pieces and copies, the latter including his faux Apollo Belvedere, copied from the original with the Pope’s permission. However, what he did with these collections when they were brought back to Britain varied according to the character and function of his various houses. Helen Clifford has argued that Sir Lawrence Dundas used his various houses for different purposes, each one having a ‘role within the family’s personal, dynastic, political, social, cultural and economic situation’.⁴⁶ In a similar manner, Hervey used his Grand Tour acquisitions to produce different effects and to make particular statements about himself and his status at Downhill, Ballyscullion and Ickworth.

The importance of viewing country houses collectively, rather than in isolation, is apparent from the perspective of the visitor as well as the owner. For domestic tourists, but especially overseas visitors, this is most readily seen in the existence of a canon of favoured houses. Ronnes and Koster (Chapter 5) and Fatsar (Chapter 7) demonstrate that visitors from the Netherlands and Hungary largely went to the same places. They built personal assessments of these country houses around their intrinsic characteristics, but their merits were also measured against other places on the itinerary, Blenheim forming the usual touchstone, and to houses and gardens back home. A similar practice is seen in Arthur Young’s assessments of the paintings hung in the various country houses that he visited and wrote about in his travel books (Chapter 6), although his comparisons are less overt. Young’s focus on paintings underlines their importance in embodying taste and cultural capital, and his attempts to offer an informed critique form a fascinating exercise in the popularisation of aesthetics. At the same time, they were being assessed in relation to those hung in other houses in a way that reflected common practice among elite visitors to country houses but was unique in published form.⁴⁷

Anderson’s analysis reminds us to look beyond the usual sources to gain fresh insights into the discerning traveller’s view of the country house. However, visiting houses was not all about refining taste either for oneself or for one’s readers. As MacArthur’s discussion of the tour undertaken by William Hanbury in the 1720s makes clear (Chapter 4), there could be a deeply practical side to observations and criticisms. Hanbury was, of course, quite capable of making aesthetic judgements, but even these sometimes had a practical dimension. He was aware of the cultural significance of the architect and the chosen style, but equally comfortable in offering a damning judgement of them. When shown the neo-Palladian Tottenham Park, designed by Burlington, he judged it to be ill suited to the English climate, its architectural form rendering it dark, damp and airless, a critique that reflected Walpole’s assessment of Chiswick House. Yet what are most striking in Hanbury’s writings are his observations on the seemingly mundane: the locks on doors and the quality and reliability of the water supply. It seems that he had in mind his owns plans to build a new house at the family seat at Kelmarsh and was eager to collect ideas as well as to view the splendours of the houses that he visited.

The second theme centres on the multi-directional movement of ideas, which were carried to and from country houses by travellers and visitors. The British elite travelled around Europe on the Grand Tour, but there was of course a flow of wealthy travellers moving in the opposite direction. Tinniswood notes their presence in the early modern period, but then they fade from view in his analysis.⁴⁸ As Ronnes and Koster (Chapter 5) make clear, however, the Dutch elite continued to come to Britain in numbers, sometimes only to see the key sites in and around London, but often to visit a range of country houses and romantic ruins, such as Kenilworth Castle, made famous by Walter Scott’s novel of the same name, published in 1821. In contrast, the neo-Palladian palace at Whitehall, much lauded by British writers because of its links with Inigo Jones, was largely overlooked. Similarly, the Hungarian travellers discussed by Fatsar in Chapter 7 gradually shifted their attention from the iconic landscapes of places like Stowe and gazed admiringly on the more picturesque and romantic vistas of Warwick Castle and later Scotland. These foreign visitors were part of a cosmopolitan European elite, drawing on a common (literary) culture that shaped their tastes and attitudes. While sometimes critical, these foreign visitors also took inspiration from the English houses that they saw. Men like Count István Széchenyi and Count György Károlyi took home to their Hungarian estates ideas about the ideal country house, including architectural details like sash windows. Both they and their Dutch counterparts were also much struck by English landscape gardens, and were an important mechanism in their growing popularity across Europe. This process is explored in detail by Harrison (Chapter 2), who notes how German, Swedish and Italian visitors to Stourhead took home with them ideas about garden design and sought to recreate on their own estates a cultural landscape originally inspired by Roman antiquity.

At the same time, influences and goods were also being brought back to British country houses by a range of people who had travelled to India, usually in service of the East India Company. We have already noted the spending power and cultural hybridity of some nabobs and the impact this had on places such as Sizencote and Englefield; but there is a danger of focusing too closely on the well-known examples of the super-rich. As Filor reminds us in her study of Mary Mackenzie (Chapter 10), the flow of Indian goods that came with returning colonial servants was far more widespread than this, especially by the early decades of the nineteenth century. Indian and Chinese goods were found in many houses and reflected strong personal ties with India;⁴⁹ Mackenzie had direct experience of