ABSTRACT
All the floors of Murray’s first-floor rooms (i.e. between the Staircase and the Long Gallery) were renewed in the 1890s by the 9th Earl of Dysart. Their oak parquetry, of geometric design, is copied from the surviving floor of 1673 in the Queen’s Bedchamber, then the climax of the State Apartment, which was extended by the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale after their marriage in 1672. The Duchess, Countess of Dysart in her own right, was the daughter and heiress of William Murray. Beautiful, intelligent and extravagant, her marriage to the Duke gave her the means to aggrandize her family home with royal splendour. John Evelyn described Ham in 1678 as ‘furnish’d like a Great Prince’s’ and ‘inferior to few of the best Villas in Italy itself’. The
Queen’s Bedchamber was completed in 1673 for a state visit by Queen Catherine of Braganza. The room is still named after her, despite being converted into a drawing room in c.1744 by the 4th Earl of Dysart. For this purpose, the four-inch high dais for the state bed was an inconvenience, but despite being relaid at the same level as the rest of the floor, its superb marquetry was retained (see Plate 65). The resulting asymmetry of the drawing room floor, with marquetry at one end only, clearly mattered less to the 4th Earl than the preservation of one of the two finest floors in the house.
