In 1607 King James I told his chief minister, Robert Cecil, that he wanted Theobalds, the great Cecil house in Hertfordshire on which the family had lavished a generation of building. Cecil could hardly refuse a king. The estate he received in compensation was the old royal palace at Hatfield, built around 1497 by Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, and used by the Tudor monarchs as a nursery palace for their children. It was where Princess Elizabeth had spent most of her childhood and where, in November 1558, she had received the news that she was queen. Cecil seems to have decided almost at once that the old palace was no longer fit for purpose. He had three of its four wings pulled down in 1608, salvaged the brick, and used it as the raw material for a new house immediately adjacent. The result, Hatfield House, was completed in 1611, the year before Cecil’s death.
The man in charge of the work was Robert Lyminge (fl. 1607–1628), a master carpenter who would later go on to design Blickling Hall in Norfolk along very similar lines. Lyminge had supervisory rather than purely architectural authority, and a number of other figures contributed to what the house eventually became. Simon Basil, Surveyor of the King’s Works, was consulted on the technical design. Inigo Jones, then at the beginning of his career, visited Hatfield in October 1609 and is generally thought to be responsible for some of the detailing of the south front and possibly the central clock tower. Ideas current in the survey drawings of John Thorpe, the most prolific paper architect of the period, lie behind the symmetrical E-shape plan, although there is no evidence that Thorpe had any direct hand in the building. The plasterwork was the responsibility of the Royal Master Plasterer, Richard Dungan, who died in 1609 with the work barely begun, and was completed by his successor James Leigh between 1610 and 1612. Leigh’s compressed strapwork ceilings, with their grids of intersecting roundels, heraldic devices and acanthus scrolls, mark Hatfield’s particular contribution to the development of Jacobean plasterwork: more elaborate, flatter in pattern and more densely worked than Dungan’s earlier ceilings at Knole.
The Grand Staircase, with its massive oak balustrade and the running scrollwork that climbs each newel post, was the work of the carver John Bucke, whose shop also produced the carved screen in the Marble Hall. The newel posts carry small standing figures, one of which is traditionally identified as John Tradescant the Elder, Cecil’s plant collector and the designer of the formal gardens. The figure is appropriate. Tradescant was sent by Cecil to the Low Countries and France in 1611 to bring back fruit trees, vines, tulip bulbs and rarities for the new gardens, and his work at Hatfield is the foundation of the family’s later horticultural reputation.
The Marble Hall is the heart of the house. It is two storeys high, with a black-and-white chequered marble floor and the carved screen and gallery by Bucke at the east end. The ceiling is original, with Leigh’s plasterwork above and an elaborate compartmented timber framework below. In its first state the ceiling carried Jacobean reliefs of the Twelve Caesars in the panels, painted in colours and gold leaf to harmonise with the strapwork. In 1878 the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, the future Prime Minister, replaced the Caesars with a series of allegorical and mythological scenes painted by the Italian artist Giulio Taldini, who had worked elsewhere for the family. Taldini’s panels, framed by the Jacobean mouldings, are still in place, and the warm gold and russet palette of the present hall is essentially Taldini’s design rather than Cecil’s. The Long Gallery, 170 feet long after a remodelling of 1781, was originally finished in white plaster; the gold-leaf ceiling now visible was applied in the 1830s by the 2nd Marquess, James Brownlow William Gascoyne-Cecil (1791–1868), who had been struck by a gilded ceiling on a visit to Venice and decided to bring the effect home. The same Marquess oversaw a wide programme of redecoration after a serious fire in November 1835, in which the west wing was gutted and his mother, the 1st Marchioness, lost her life.
The chapel was part of the original construction of 1607–12, but the area was severely damaged in the 1835 fire and the present interior, including the altar, reredos and pews, dates almost entirely from the rebuilding that followed. What survived intact, and what makes the chapel one of the most precious early Stuart interiors in England, is the great east window of stained glass, made in 1610 by three glass-painters of differing nationality: Richard Butler of Southwark, “Lewis Dolphin”, a French painter whose name is usually now read as Louis Dauphin, and Martin van Bentheim of Emden in East Frisia. The window shows twelve Old Testament scenes, beginning at the upper left with the visit of the Angel to Abraham and reading down through Moses in the bulrushes, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Jacob’s dream, Jonah and the whale, the Passover, Samson and Delilah, the sacrifice of Isaac, Naaman in the Jordan, David and Goliath, Elisha raising the Shunamite woman’s son, and Elijah ascending in the fiery chariot. The combination of an English glass-painter, a French one and a German one working together in 1610 is itself characteristic of Cecil’s outlook: he was a minister who had run Elizabeth’s intelligence service, who corresponded across confessional lines, and who liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of the best European craftsmanship of his day.
Cecil never enjoyed the house for long. Lord Treasurer since 1608 in addition to his older role as Principal Secretary, exhausted by overwork and chronic ill health, he died at Marlborough on 24 May 1612, while travelling back from Bath, only forty-eight years old. Hatfield passed to his son William, the 2nd Earl, and from that line, eventually, to the marquesses of Salisbury who hold it now. The fabric of the house has remained in continuous Cecil ownership for the four centuries since, an exceptional case in English country-house history, and the rare survival of so much of the original building, ceiling and glass is, more than anything else, a function of that unbroken tenure.
References
Airs, M. (1995) The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History. Stroud: Sutton.
Cecil, D. (1973) The Cecils of Hatfield House: An English Ruling Family. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Croft, P. (ed.) (2002) Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils 1558–1612. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Croft, P. (2002) King James. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Historic England (n.d.) List Entry 1173363: Hatfield House. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1173363 (Accessed: 21 July 2025)