John Vanbrugh - Early Life and Background

Early Life and Background

Born in London and baptised on 24 January 1664, Vanbrugh was the fourth child (of 19), and eldest surviving son, of Giles Vanbrugh, a London cloth-merchant of Flemish-Protestant background, and his wife Elizabeth, widow of Thomas Barker (by whom Vanbrugh's mother had the first of her twenty children, Vanbrugh's elder half-sister, Elizabeth), and daughter of Sir Dudley Carleton, of Imber Court, Thames Ditton, Surrey. He grew up in Chester, where his family had been driven by either the major outbreak of the plague in London in 1665, or the Great Fire of 1666. It is possible that he attended The King's School in Chester, though no records of his being a scholar there survive. Another candidate would have been the school at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, founded by Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. It was also not uncommon for boys to be sent to study at school away from home, or with a tutor.

Downes is sceptical of earlier historians' claims of a lower middle-class background, and writes that a 19th-century suggestion that Giles Vanbrugh was a sugar-baker has been misunderstood. "Sugar-baker" implies wealth, as the term refers not to a maker of sweets but to the owner of a sugar house, a factory for the refining of raw sugar from Barbados. Sugar refining would normally have been combined with sugar trading, which was a lucrative business. Downes' example of one sugar baker's house in Liverpool, estimated to bring in £40,000 a year in trade from Barbados, throws a new light on Vanbrugh's social background, one rather different from the picture of a backstreet Chester sweetshop as painted by Leigh Hunt in 1840 and reflected in many later accounts.

In order to dispel the myth of Vanbrugh's low origins, Downes took pains to explore Vanbrugh's background, closely examining the family and connexions of each of his four grandparents: Vanbrugh, Jacobs or Jacobson, Carleton, and Croft, summing up the characteristics of each line and concluding that, far from being of lower middle class origins, Vanbrugh was descended from Anglo-Flemish or Netherlandish Protestant merchants who settled in London in the 16th and 17th centuries, minor courtiers, and country gentry. The complex web of kinship Downes' research shows that Vanbrugh had ties to many of England's leading mercantile, gentry, and noble families. These ties reveal the decidedly Protestant and sometimes radical milieu out of which Vanbrugh's own political opinions came. They also gave him a very wide social network that would play a role in all sections of his career: architectural, ceremonial, dramatic, military, political, and social.

Taken in this context, though he has sometimes been viewed as an odd or unqualified appointee to the College of Arms, it is not surprising, given the social expectations of his day, that by descent his credentials for his offices there were sound. His forebears, both Flemish/Dutch and English, were armigerous, and their coats of arms can be traced in three out of four cases, revealing that Vanbrugh was of gentle descent (Jacobson, of Antwerp and London [the family of his paternal grandmother Maria daughter of Peter brother to Philip Jacobson, jeweller and financier to successive English kings, James I, and Charles I, and monied backer of the Second Virginia Company and the East India Company; Carleton of Imber Court; Croft of Croft Castle.

After growing up in a large household in Chester (12 children of his mother's second marriage survived infancy), the question of how Vanbrugh spent the years from age 18 to 22 (after he left school) was long unanswered, with the baseless suggestion sometimes made that he had been studying architecture in France (stated as fact in the Dictionary of National Biography). In 1681 records name a ‘John Vanbrugg’ working for William Matthews, Giles Vanbrugh’s cousin. It was not unusual for a merchant’s son to follow in his father’s trade and seek similar work in business, making use of family ties and connections. Recently, however, Robert Williams proved in an article in the TLS ("Vanbrugh's Lost Years", 3 September 1999) that Vanbrugh was in India for part of this period, working for the East India Company at their trading post in Surat, Gujarat where his uncle, Edward Pearce, had been Governor. However, Vanbrugh never mentioned this experience in writing. Scholars debate whether evidence of his exposure to Indian architecture can be detected in any of his architectural designs.

The picture of a well-connected youth is reinforced by the fact that Vanbrugh in January 1686 took up an officer's commission in his distant relative the Earl of Huntingdon's foot regiment. Since commissions were in the gift of the commanding officer, Vanbrugh's entry as an officer shows that he did have the kind of family network that was then essential to a young man starting out in life. Even so in August 1686 he left this position when the regiment was ordered to help garrison Guernsey.

In spite of the distant noble relatives and the lucrative sugar trade, Vanbrugh never seemed to possess any capital for business ventures (such as the Haymarket Theatre), but always had to rely on loans and backers. The fact that Giles Vanbrugh had twelve children to support and set up in life may go some way towards explaining the debts that were to plague John all his life.