Worsley, Lucy 1973-

views updated

Worsley, Lucy 1973-

PERSONAL:

Born 1973. Education: Oxford University, earned degree; Sussex University, doctoral degree.

ADDRESSES:

Home—England.

CAREER:

Curator and writer. Historic royal palaces, Great Britain, chief curator. Formerly an inspector of Historic Buildings for English Heritage and worked for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

MEMBER:

Royal Historical Society (fellow).

WRITINGS:

Bolsover Castle, edited by Louise Wilson, English Heritage (Wiltshire, England), 2000.

The Architectural Patronage of William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle, 1593-1676, University of Sussex (Sussex, England), 2001.

(With David Souden) Hampton Court Palace: The Official Illustrated History, Merrell (New York, NY), 2005.

Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion, and Great Houses, Bloomsbury USA (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lucy Worsley is the chief curator for historical royal palaces in England. These include the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the State Apartments at Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, and Kew Palace. Worsley is also a writer who has written guidebooks and articles on a range of English country houses.

In her 2007 book Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion, and Great Houses, the author provides an inside and vivid view of a seventeenth-century nobleman and his household. In the process, she explores the turbulent decades surrounding the English Civil War. The author focuses specifically on William Cavendish, a cultured man with a passion for architecture, horses, and women. He taught the art of teaching horses to dance, called manège, and built several beautiful houses. His life was a roller coaster that went from commissioning some of the seventeenth century's most beautiful and spectacular country houses to failing in a critical battle in the English Civil War.

Noel Malcolm, writing in the London Telegraph, noted: "Here was a man for whom ‘conspicuous consumption’ seems altogether too dry and clinical a term. When Charles I briefly visited his Nottinghamshire home, Welbeck Abbey, in 1633, Cavendish spent roughly … 5,000 pounds on entertaining him." Cavendish taught Charles I's son to ride and served as a general in the king's army in the north during the Civil war. He is famous for his defeat at an important battle in 1644. He eventually went into exile to return triumphantly when Charles II came to the throne.

"I first met William Cavendish in June 1995," the author writes in an article on her home page. "Taking a book at random from my university history library, I found myself one rainy afternoon starting to read Mark Girouard's Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (Yale, 1983). I ended up devouring it before dinner, crouched on the hairy carpet of my college room, and remaining motionless so long that the carpet's corduroy stripes became permanently tattooed into my knees." The author goes on to note that the book is about Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture. She also writes: "The book's climax was my first glimpse [via photographs] … of Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire. I was instantly smitten by this building, and by its builder, William Cavendish."

Noting that the author "writes with unusual insight into the experience of grand-home life," Amanda Miranda Seymour went on to comment in the same London Times review: "Worsley's powerful imagination focuses with great effect on the settings that she evokes with bright and telling detail." Judith Flanders wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the book "is filled with … absorbing information, covering a vast range of topics, from building practices (glass was once such a luxury that when a great house was unoccupied, the glass was removed and installed in another house) to the vacillations between courtly excess and courtly penny-pinching (at a masque in 1603, the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth's priceless dresses were used as a sort of aristocratic dressing-up box)."

The author went on to write The Architectural Patronage of William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle, 1593-1676. Her next book, Hampton Court Palace: The Official Illustrated History, is a collaborative effort with David Souden. The book examines one of the finest palaces in Europe. It is located on the River Thames south of London. In the process, she examines court life in England from 1529 to 1737. The authors pay special attention to the palace's architectural ensemble, including its original sixteenth-century buildings and the famous formal gardens. In addition, they explore the lifestyles of monarchs, mistresses and courtiers.