Sleeping under the stars

When most of us say that we are going to look up our stars, we mean that we are going to flick through a magazine and chuckle at our horoscopes. When John Crichton-Stuart, third Marquess of Bute, said he was going to look up his stars, he meant that he was going to retire to his sitting-room in Mount Stuart, the house he had built on the Isle of Bute. There he would gaze up at the elaborate map of the stars that decorated the domed ceiling.

Detailing the position of the stars and planets at the exact time of his birth on 12 September 1847, the ceiling, like the rest of the decorations in the room and indeed the rest of the house, reflected the Marquess’s wide range of interests. As well as being one of the greatest architectural patrons of his age, fluent in 21 languages, a scholar of the natural world, a heraldist and a keen theologian, the Marquess was fascinated by astrology.

The astrological chart was the result of a consultation between William Frame, the room’s designer, and the Cardiff astrologer W.C. Jordan of Roath. Jordan cannily wrote to Bute in 1885 and noted that his time of birth gave him "a stature very similar to the old Duke of Wellington and... to Napoleon III".

It was not the sort of horoscope that you will find in the back of a magazine these days but it must have been intentionally flattering nonetheless.

While empirical knowledge and astrology are not easy bedfellows in the 21st century, it was not so hard for the Victorians to reconcile science and horoscopes.

For the past six years, Andrew McLean has been the archivist at Mount Stuart. Researching and cataloguing the family records that date back to the 14th century, McLean’s work is that of a historical detective, pulling together clues from the past. "The third Marquess was a very unconventional Victorian aristocrat," he says. "He didn’t hunt, fish or ride and he supported the anti-vivisection movement. He was pro the idea of a Scottish parliament and was instrumental in securing the first female professorship at St Andrews University. At the time, a lot of his ideas were laughed at as being eccentric. Just over a hundred years after his death, he looks a bit more of a visionary.

"It is also worth remembering that the parameters of science were not as rigidly defined as they are today. Both the Marquess and William Gladstone were interested in psychic phenomena and were open to the idea that there was something else out there. At the same time, the Marquess had a long correspondence with Lord Kelvin about scientific advances."

The third Marquess also set off what was possibly Scotland’s most high-ranking case of keeping up with the Joneses - or rather the Crichton-Stuarts. Mount Stuart was the first house in Scotland to have an indoor heated swimming-pool, a telephone and electricity. Queen Victoria promptly had Balmoral wired up when she learned what was afoot at Mount Stuart.

As well as looking forward, the Marquess looked back and medieval history was one of his favourite subjects. Surrounding the star chart on the ceiling is a round of castellated battlements which reflect his interest in medieval architecture. Surrounding them in turn is a jelly-mould ceiling depicting multi-hued exotic birds and flowers.

The theme of the natural world is continued in the carved walnut panelling of the walls. Alongside little panels of hourglasses with wings showing time flying, there are more humorous tableaux. A bear playing the bagpipes, a toad playing the lute and a rat who seems to be trying to escape the constraints of his panel all put a smile on the various faces of anthropomorphism.

When the third Marquess passed away in 1900, much of the impetus for the work on Mount Stuart died with him. During the First World War, the adjoining conservatory was used as an operating theatre for wounded servicemen and the Horoscope Room served as its pharmacy. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the sixth Marquess, the late John Bute, started thinking about a facelift for

the place.

He took the Horoscope Room as his bedroom and had it revamped. Muralist Tom Errington, who also worked on the house’s Marble Chapel, freshened up the astrological chart and added

in Pluto, which had been discovered after

the original chart had been made. He also

extended the astrological theme down the walls to

include a frieze with representations of all the

star signs.

One of the most imposing features of the bedroom was the bed that the Marquess had built for himself. Walnut wood was sent from Britain to Australia where Sue Wraight carved it into a fun place to sleep.

At the foot of the bed, one of the bedposts shows a carved Reynard the Fox lulling the Marquess to sleep by playing a psaltery. At the other side of the bed, Grimbard the Badger is getting ready to rouse the sleeper with bagpipes. The Marquess is represented by Noble the Lion, who sits atop the canopy with his eyes drooping and crowned with a night cap.

The family’s role as patrons of the arts is commemorated in the folding doors that lead through to the conservatory. Glass engraver and harper Alison Kinnaird engraved them with pictures of people playing the fiddle, bagpipes, lowland pipes and clarsach. Each of the four windows shows one of the four seasons in the background, with different flowers denoting the changing flora.

In the autumn window, a small bee is engraved. The third Marquess used bees to signify the B for Bute and it adds a small reminder of the man who started the massive Mount Stuart project.

Since he died before all of the work to the ancestral home was finished, it is moot as to whether the third Marquess could have forecast how Mount Stuart would look today. Then again, perhaps he saw it in the stars. n

Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, 01700 503 877, is open to the public from May till September