Banqueting House: The Garden of Euphues

These arbours were really garden rooms and were often both ornate and permanent. They took many forms. Sometimes they were small rectangular buildings at the corners of the garden, shelters from which to look out over the surrounding country. Many of the more modest ones survive, the most notable at Montacute in Somerset. From the point of view of the garden's design these are extensions of the principal building, linked to it and emphasizing the architectural nature of the whole as guardrooms and gate-houses do. Others were very much more elaborate and were known as banqueting houses, their function really being that which is now normally fulfilled by a marquee at a garden party or fete champetre. In 1581 a banqueting house made at Whitehall for the entertainment of some French ambassadors was 332 feet in circumference, with a canvas roof painted like clouds and constructed of holly and ivy and decorated with hanging baskets filled with bay, rue `and all manner of strange flowers garnished with spangles of gold', and festooned with pomegranates, oranges, pompions, cucumbers and grapes. In another sense it is pointless talking about the function of these houses. Their function was the least thing about them, they were jeux d'esprit; the adult equivalent of a child's leaf-hut in the shrubbery, playthings. One of the most remarkable was a three-storied arbour built in a lime tree at Cobham in Kent, with stairs leading from floor to floor and the whole capable of holding at least fifty men. On the one hand they are related to the hermitages of Buen Retiro, and on the other to the grottoes of Bernard Palissy; among their descendants are the courtiers' pavilions at Marly and the temples of eighteenth-century Stowe.