Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II
By Adrian Tinniswood
Basic Books, 2021

The UK cover for popular historian Adrian Tinniswood’s new book Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II is an eye-catching confrontational photo of Deborah Mitford, the Duchess of Devonshire, standing with her children in Chatsworth chapel looking miserable. It’s foursquare but predictable: it puts a well-known face on the whole strange phenomenon of the somewhat-lost world of the English country house. 

We may never know the exact cultural calculus that determined this Debo portrait would not adorn the US edition of the book, and it would be a strange calculus indeed that would explain the replacement: a black-and-white photo of an ornate country house bedroom - and the buck-naked young couple nonchalantly enjoying the day. The banner of the subtitle tastefully covers the naughty bits, but even so, readers will experience whiplash.

It’s probably a canny decision, though, because it captures the feeling of whiplash that runs throughout what is easily Tinniswood’s most entertaining book. Readers expecting an unalloyed picture of decline - the standard tack in books about great leafy landed estates - will find a surprise on almost every page here. As Tinniswood reminds his readers, this wasn’t just a story of one big house after another closing its doors and handing over the keys to the National Trust:

For every impoverished country squire watching in horror as the taxman chipped away at the foundations of his ancestral seat, there was another who managed to carry on, writing angry letters to the Times about financial ruin and then ringing for his butler to take them to the post. And when country houses did come on the market, as they did in increasing numbers, there were new people ready to step in and buy themselves a piece of the past, ready to take their place in the community and able to compensate for the lack of a fat entry in Debrett’s with a fat bank balance.

Tinniswood’s adroit choice of vignette and anecdote can often convey, without ever quite endorsing, the effete tedium that often filled these places:

People came and went at Mottisfort just as they had before the war. If the weather was good, they lay about in the gardens, reading and talking or went walking in the woods. They came together for dinner or afterwards talked some more or played word games.

But there’s a wry humor backing his stories (since there are plenty of English country houses that are still in private hands and still functioning as family homes, a book like this will always be mostly stories) that turns the book into a surprisingly antic thing. Readers can encounter a female zoologist shooing escaped lions back into their cages with a broomstick, and Tinniswood can relate anecdotes out of Asa Briggs with the comedic precision of PG Wodehouse:

But one could only take so much. Lady Elizabeth Basset and her husband Ronald, who lived in a sixteenth-century house on Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield estate, were surprised one day to hear their gardener, who hated foreigners, threatening to knife their Spanish butler. She rushed out, grabbed the gardener by his collar, and told the unfortunate butler to run for it. But he only got as far as shutting himself in the dining room before the gardener broke away and put his fist through the dining room window. “I felt I had to sack him,” said Lady Elizabeth.

Despite its subject, Noble Ambitions is ultimately as much a story of hardy survivors as it is a chronicle of aimless decadence. It takes all the strengths of Tinniswood’s earlier book The Long Weekend and improves on them. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.