Holkham Hall

The Coke family is recorded as living in Norfolk in the early thirteenth century, but its rise to wealth and prominence turned on one man: Edward Coke (1552-1634), who served as Solicitor General, Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney General under both Elizabeth I and James I. He amassed extensive estates in Norfolk and elsewhere in England, though the Holkham property was a later addition, acquired through marriage by his fourth son, John. An Elizabethan house, Hill Hall, stood on the site at that time. The estates passed down through the family until, on his father's death in 1707, they descended to Thomas Coke, then ten years old.

Thomas Coke had been born in 1697. A cultivated and wealthy man, he made the Grand Tour in his youth and was away from England for six years between 1712 and 1718. It was probably in Italy, around 1715, that he met both Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, the aristocratic architect at the forefront of the Palladian revival in England, and William Kent, then a young artist dependent on the patronage of wealthy sponsors, Burlington among them; and it was there, in the home of Palladianism, that the idea of a mansion at Holkham was first conceived. Coke returned to England in 1718 not only with a newly acquired library but with an art and sculpture collection to furnish the house he planned. The books he bought on that tour are still in the Long Library at Holkham, and the pictures he assembled, substantially intact, include works by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Canaletto; only the Louvre's collection in Paris holds more landscapes by Lorrain.

Coke's life on his return, given over to drinking, gambling, hunting and cockfighting, delayed progress, and funding was a serious issue: he had made a major investment in the South Sea Company, and when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 the resulting losses put off the building of his planned country estate for over ten years. Plans accumulated in the meantime. Colen Campbell, who had published Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715, received payments from Coke in the early 1720s, though these appear to have been for a limited number of drawings, and there is evidence that he visited the estate in 1729. The oldest existing working and construction plans were drawn in 1726 by Matthew Brettingham, a Norfolk architect, builder and surveyor working under Coke's supervision and following the guidelines Kent and Burlington had defined; Brettingham was already the estate's architect, on £50 a year in return for "taking care of his Lordship's buildings". A plan with four wings was drawn up in 1731, and in that same year the critic Lord Hervey wrote of Coke showing him designs for "a Burlington house with four pavilions on paper", although it is not certain that this was a plan for Holkham. From July 1731 to February 1733 Coke based himself at Holkham, the longest unbroken period he spent on the estate in his life.

Work to Kent's designs on the park commenced in 1729, several years before the house was constructed, and was commemorated by the obelisk of 1730, 80 ft high, placed on the highest point of the park over half a mile south of the centre of the house and on axis with it. An avenue of trees runs more than a mile south of the obelisk. Near the far end of that avenue stand two more of Kent's garden buildings: the Triumphal Arch, designed around 1730 but completed up to two decades later, and the domed Doric Temple of 1730 to 1735. Thousands of trees were planted on what had been windswept land.

The first foundations were laid in 1734, and building continued for thirty years, until the great house was completed in 1764. Kent was largely responsible for the external appearance, basing his design, with modifications, on Palladio's unbuilt Villa Mocenigo as it appears in I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura. Coke had originally intended to face the house with Bath stone; when that proved too expensive he turned to his own brick manufactory, and the yellow bricks were cast as exact replicas of ancient Roman bricks expressly for Holkham. Brettingham, the supervising architect on site, related that Coke required and demanded "commodiousness", which can be read as comfort: a room adequately lit by one window was given only one, since a second might have improved the external appearance but could have made the room cold or draughty. The total cost of construction is thought to have been in the region of £90,000. In their study of the costs of country house building, Wilson and Mackley put Holkham at the head of their list of eighteenth-century English houses, at £92,000.

Work on the interiors ran from 1739. The first habitable rooms were in the family wing and were in use from 1740; the Long Library, the first major room to be completed, was finished in 1741, and Kent's placing of it within Coke's private apartments in the south-west wing, rather than among the state rooms of the main block, was unusual. Coke was created Earl of Leicester in 1744. The death of his childless son Edward in 1753 left him disappointed and disillusioned, and one of his last letters, written to Matthew Brettingham's son, began "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's own Country"; in it he called himself "Giant, of Giant Castle", with the King of Denmark for his nearest neighbour. Coke died in 1759, five years before the completion of Holkham, having never fully recovered his financial losses.

The question of who designed Holkham has challenged architectural historians, and contemporaries, almost since the time of the hall's construction. Brettingham claimed authorship when he published The Plans, Elevations and Sections, of Holkham in Norfolk in 1761, describing himself as sole architect and making no mention of Kent's involvement; he had called the building of Holkham "the great work of [my life]". Horace Walpole challenged the claim immediately and attributed the designs to Kent. In a later edition of his father's work, Brettingham's son acknowledged that "the general idea was first struck out by the Earls of Leicester and Burlington, assisted by Mr. William Kent". Brettingham himself had attributed the design of the Marble Hall to Coke.

Historians writing in the early twentieth century generally downplayed the roles of both Burlington and Coke; those writing later in the twentieth century and in the twenty-first have found evidence of greater involvement, at least of Coke. Rudolf Wittkower noted in 1974 that "the history of Holkham has not yet been worked out in detail and Kent's debt to the two noblemen has not been solved", and pointed to Burlington's design for the four wings at Tottenham House in Wiltshire as evidence of his hand at Holkham; John Harris, writing in the 1990s, demonstrated that the Tottenham designs post-dated Kent's for Holkham. Bill Wilson, revising the Norfolk volume of the Pevsner Buildings of England series in 2002, judged Coke's input central, with Brettingham employed first as draughtsman and supervisor and Kent later in a more responsible role, while Timothy Mowl, in his 2006 biography of Kent, allowed Coke a greater part in the central block but attributed the pavilions to Kent alone.

The Holkham archivist Christine Hiskey published a cache of twelve letters from Coke to Brettingham, covering the period 1734 to 1741, in Architectural History in 1997. In the first of them Coke writes of having received Burlington's approval for "our whole design", indicating that the earliest plans for the central block, without the four flanking pavilions, were drawn up by Coke and Brettingham; Hiskey concluded that the two men worked closely together on the planning of the house "no less than its execution", while acknowledging that the letters by no means fully clarify the individual contributions. In her 2016 book on the hall she set out further evidence for Coke's own hand, including four purchases of drawing materials and mathematical instruments "for his lordship's use" at key points in the genesis of the house: in 1720; in 1731, when the plan with four wings was drawn up; in 1734, when work began on the family wing; and from 1739, when construction commenced on the main block. The argument was still running after the exhibition William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, held in New York and London in 2013 and 2014, with Frank Salmon arguing that it was above all Kent who was responsible for the overall design, against the curator Leo Schmidt, whose doctoral thesis was on the architecture of Holkham and who had argued for greater early involvement by Brettingham, Coke and Campbell.

Coke's will provided for his widow to remain at Holkham and complete the house. Margaret Coke (1700-1775) has often been credited with no more than presiding over the furnishing; in fact she oversaw the completion of many rooms, the Marble Hall among them, had the stables and coach house built, and finished the landscaping of the park. The chapel of 1760 was among the last rooms completed and was entirely under her supervision, and work on the interiors ran on until 1773. She engaged Capability Brown on an annual retainer of 50 guineas, and he directed efforts at Holkham from 1762 to 1764, planting trees, landscaping the ground and laying out a network of roads. She wrote of her "great desire to accomplish the approaches and distant decorations of Holkham in the manner the [.] Earl designed them", and set above the main entrance within the Marble Hall an inscribed plaque carrying her posthumous tribute to her husband. By 1770 the park covered 1,500 acres.

The estates had passed in 1759 to Coke's nephew Wenman (c. 1717-1776), and in 1776 to Wenman's son Thomas (1754-1842). After a parliamentary career of modest success and a more renowned vocation as an agrarian reformer, Thomas became known as "Coke of Norfolk" and was made Earl of Leicester of the seventh creation in 1837. Devoted to Holkham, he made few changes to the house, writing that he would "never venture rashly to interfere with the result of years of thought and study in Italy". His innovations in animal husbandry and crop rotation, and his granting of unusually long leases to encourage his tenants to invest, saw the annual rent roll rise from just over £2,000 to over £20,000.

Coke planted over a million trees on the estate and employed the architect Samuel Wyatt to design over 50 buildings, among them a series of farm buildings and farmhouses in a simplified neo-classical style and, in the 1780s, new walled kitchen gardens covering 6 acres. Wyatt's designs culminated around 1790 in the Great Barn, half a mile south-east of the obelisk. The earl's wife brought in Humphry Repton, who created a "Red Book" full of landscape gardening ideas for Holkham. The lake west of the house, originally a marshy inlet or creek off the North Sea, was created between 1801 and 1803 by the landscape gardener William Eames. By Coke's death in 1842 the park had grown to its present extent of over 3,000 acres. The tenants of the estate paid £4,000 for the Leicester Monument, designed by William Donthorne and erected between 1845 and 1848: a Corinthian column 120 ft high, surmounted by a drum supporting a wheatsheaf, its plinth decorated with bas-reliefs carved by John Henning Jr and its corners carrying an ox, a sheep, a plough and a seed-drill, all referencing Coke's agricultural innovations.

In 1850 Thomas Coke, 2nd Earl of Leicester, called in the architect William Burn to build new stables to the east of the house, in collaboration with W. A. Nesfield, who had designed the parterres. Work on the terraces surrounding the house started at the same time and continued until 1857; it included the monumental fountain of Saint George and the Dragon, dated to about 1849 to 1857 and sculpted by Charles Raymond Smith, placed to the south on axis with the house. Burn also designed the large stone orangery east of the house, which is now without its roof or its windows.

The second earl (1822-1909) followed his father as a countryman and served as Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk for 60 years. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth earls were soldiers, or in the last instance a pilot, serving in the Boer War and in the First and Second World Wars. The fourth earl, Thomas Coke (1880-1949), considered donating the hall to the National Trust but did not proceed with the plan. The sixth earl, Anthony Coke (1909-1994), a cousin of the fifth earl, was living in South Africa when he inherited in 1976 and determined not to move to England, sending his son Edward (1936-2015) to manage Holkham instead. Edward succeeded in 1994 and is credited with reviving the estate; his obituary in the Daily Telegraph recorded that he transformed the hall "from a crumbling ancestral home to a major tourist attraction".

The enormous costs of building and furnishing Holkham nearly ruined the heirs of the 1st Earl and left them financially constrained from altering the house to suit later fashions, so it has remained almost untouched since its completion in 1764. The hall was given Grade I listed building status in 1951, and the park is listed, also at Grade I, on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. Some 40 listed buildings sit on the estate, with the garden temple, the Triumphal Arch and the Leicester Monument at Grade I, and the Church of St Withburga, the vinery, the obelisk, the kitchen garden and the Great Barn at Grade II*. Not everything has stayed: sales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the disposal of some of the library's rarest and most valuable works, the Codex Leicester going in the 1980s. From the art collection, Titian's Venus and the Lute Player was sold to the Met in New York in 1931. The hall is open to the public and remains the family home of the Earls of Leicester of Holkham. The wider estate has reduced from 40,000 acres in the mid-twentieth century to 25,000 in the early twenty-first, but works as a country estate with over 200 full-time staff, making it the area's largest employer. Thomas Coke, 8th Earl of Leicester, who inherited in 2015, has sought to diversify the estate's income and lessen its dependence on agriculture; Holkham Estates saw a turnover of £35 million in 2017. Christine Hiskey's history of the house, which the earl called "arguably the most important, certainly the most authoritative, book ever written on Holkham", was published in 2016. The estate archive, of over 100,000 documents dating from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, was refurbished in 2023, and the walled garden was restored between 2020 and 2022.