| Summary: | While working towards his MA at Wadham College, Oxford in 1701, the future Professor of Poetry Joseph Trapp dedicated a poem to Henry Somerset, second Duke of Beaufort. Beaufort, a Tory, was a useful political connection for Trapp in the High-Church career he was planning, and his ancestral seat Badminton House was not far from Trapp’s birthplace in Gloucestershire. The panegyric Trapp produced, Aedes Badmintonianae, is a portrait of Beaufort’s estate, system-atically describing Badminton and its grounds and connecting their beau-ties to the moral virtues of Beaufort and his wife. The praise Trapp gives is lavish and focuses on grandeur and material wealth: the house is described as a “stately Pile,” whose “Front Majestick” “ravishes” and “confounds the Sight,” while the state rooms inside are admired for their “rich Furniture” and “sumptuous Tapestry,” adorned with “all the Pomp of Princely Luxury.” In the gardens, Trapp admires the cultivated rows of flowers that “lavishly dispense” their odors, and the profusion of exotic plants expensively im-ported from abroad: “Both the Indies flourish in our Isle.” His ideas about the proper running of a country house center on splendor and show, and in his eyes the most praiseworthy thing about Beaufort and his wife is the way they preside over a magnificent display of wealth and fine taste. The poem is an unabashed celebration of the treasures that foreign commerce and the trade in luxury goods have supplied, and beyond these of the eco-nomic power and plenty enjoyed by Britain’s landed classes during the early eighteenth century.
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