Building for England: John Cosin’s Architecture in Renaissance Durham and Cambridge, by Adrian Green

Abstract

This is a succinct and richly illustrated (26 plates, many in colour) account, by Adrian Green, of the building campaigns of John Cosin (1595–1672) in the diocese of Durham and the university of Cambridge. It chronicles Cosin’s patronage of mostly local craftsmen and pattern-book designs at Brancepeth, the rich living to which he moved with his new wife, Frances Blakiston, in 1626, and as a prebend of Durham Cathedral, where he was at the forefront of Bishop Neile’s avant-garde antiquarian ceremonialising of space and liturgy. It shows Cosin, who grew up in mercantile Norwich and was educated at Gonville and Caius College, briefly treading a larger stage in attempting the realisation of the Duke of Buckingham’s plans to provide the university of Cambridge with a new ceremonial and academic centre. Destined to remain forever stillborn, unlike the vision of Laud and Sheldon for Oxford, these grand designs contrast with Cosin’s success in building on a smaller scale and in more vernacular form elsewhere. The controversy provoked by his decoration of the new chapel of Peterhouse, built by his predecessor as master of that college (Matthew Wren), echoed that already generated in Durham and helped to force Cosin into exile in Paris in 1644. Little Parisian inspiration (other than books and expressions of envy of the work of bibliophiles such as Mazarin) seems to have returned with him when he was elevated to the see of Durham shortly after the Restoration. Yet his zeal to build eventually transformed the civic as well as the ecclesiastical architecture of the city, and endowed it with the new learned space of Cosin’s Library, zealously overseen from decrepitude in London by its ancient patron at the close of the 1660s. Cosin remodelled both castle and guildhall at Durham, and hall and chapel at his country residence at Bishop Auckland. He was in the end a patron who intervened in almost all the places where his power reached: erecting monuments to his mentor, Bishop Overall in Norwich, and to his wife at Peterborough (where he was a canon); completing Wren’s work at Peterhouse in the 1630s and helping to restore it in the 1660s; making his mark in heraldic blazon where he could not otherwise rebuild.