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21 PART II DESCRIPTION OF HADDON HALL BY S. RAYNER
STATE BED CHAMBER. Adjoining the Ante-room on the north side, is the State Bed
Chamber [see Plate 33: B], which seems to have been fitted up about the same time with
the Long Gallery. It has a frieze and cornice like the preceding, formed of rough plaster,
ornamented with coats of arms, and the crests of the families of Vernon and Manners,
(Boars’ heads and Peacocks), in alternate succession [see Plate 24]; and over the chimney
“is an enormous bas-relief, of the same clumsy composition, representing Orpheus
charming the beasts.” King’s Observations on Ancient Castles. This room is hung with
tapestry, exhibiting designs from Æsop’s Fables, and woven at the famous manufactory
of the Gobelins at Paris. Here is the State Bed, which at one time was removed to
Belvoir, where George IV [reigned 1820-1830], then Prince Regent, is said to been the
last person who slept in it. A view of this bed, with its rich furniture of green velvet,
lined with white satin; and of the room in which it stands, is given in Plate 24.
THE EARL’S BED CHAMBER. There is a suite of three tapestried rooms between the
Drawing Room and the Chapel. on the south side of the Lower Court Yard, used as a
Bed-chamber, Dressing-room, and Valet’s room, when the Earl of Rutland resided at
Haddon. An entrance from the Drawing Room, leads through the Dressing-room to the
Earl’s Bed-chamber, which is hung with tapestry adorned with groups representing
hunting parties and the sports of the field; in which the figures are curious and interesting,
as affording patterns of costume in the seventeenth century.
The room beyond this is noticed by Mr. King as “very remarkable, having an odd
cornice, with a quadruple frieze, three of four feet in depth, formed of plaster, and
adorned with a running foliage of leaves and flowers, in four compartments, like bands,
one above another. The room is hung with arras, as the others are; but from a quaint sort
of neatness appearing in the whole of it, more than in them, I am much inclined to call it
my Lady’s Chamber. There is behind the tapestry, a door leading to the steep flight of
narrow steps which descent into the great [lower] court [see Plate 4], not far from the
arch belonging to the Chapel, and which gave her an opportunity of going thither, rather a
nearer way than the rest of the family, and without crossing so much of the great court.”
King’s Observations on Ancient Castles.