IN July 1763, Horace Walpole visited Drayton House in Northamptonshire. The house belonged to a sprightly octogenarian, Lady Betty Germain, who had inherited it more than 40 years earlier. That Lady Betty—who had since made her home with the Duke and Duchess of Dorset, lodging in a four-room apartment at Knole in Kent—seldom visited Drayton for more than six weeks a year, did not mean that Drayton was neglected. Indeed, its upkeep earned Walpole’s enthusiastic commendation. ‘The old furniture and customs She has kept up most religiously,’ he wrote, ‘and maintained the house in the most perfect order and preservation. There is scarce a house in England so entire in the old-fashioned manner.’
Maintained in a state of crisp geometric perfection were the Dutch-style formal gardens laid out at the beginning of the century. Walpole also applauded the house’s dense picture hang and Lady Betty’s decoration, ‘crammed with old china’.
Lady Betty had a passion for Oriental and blue-and-white ceramics. As a young woman, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne, she had seen at close quarters the lavish decorative schemes created at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace by the Queen’s late sister, Mary II. By the time of her death in 1694, Queen Mary had assembled a collection of nearly 1,000 pieces of blue-and-white porcelain and Dutch Delftware, which were displayed in rich profusion on decorative wall brackets, above door frames and fireplaces—as Daniel Defoe remembered them, piled ‘upon the Tops of Cabinets, Scrutores [desks], and every Chymney-Piece,
