ABSTRACT
Basilius would have been well content with Wootton Lodge. Wootton, built for Sir Richard Fleetwood at the start of James’s reign, was remote from court life in north-east Staffordshire. And it belonged to that period when (as Aubrey once said of Catherine Knyvett’s Charlton Park) “architecture was at a low ebbe”. 1 But Wootton – “incredibly simple, effordessly beautiful” 2 – had none of the decorative extravagance of Charlton Park, nor of Catherine’s other major residence at Audley End. That simplicity was deliberately Arcadian. And Arcadian again was Wootton’s lofty situation – “Truly a place for pleasantness, not unfit to flatter solitariness … it gives the eye lordship over a good large circuit … with lovely lightsomeness and artificial shadows”. 3
