So what exactly made Strawberry Hill’s architecture so suspect? It was Walpole’s contemporary interpretation of the Gothic aesthetic. In his time, critics of Walpole and Strawberry Hill merged architecture and sexuality in a discourse of “degeneracy.” The prominent historian Thomas Babington Macaulay said that the “grotesque house with pie-crust battlements” was the product of Walpole’s “diseased and disordered mind.” Another typical critic ascribed Walpole’s architectural and personal “whim and foppery” to his very “ nature.” Palladian classicism, meanwhile, was, in the words of one of its most famous practitioners, Inigo Jones, “masculine and unaffected.” This was a “third sex” that was “neither male or female.” Reeve argues that it foreshadowed “the modern category ‘homosexuality.’” It was based “in part on the perception of a mixture or corruption of genders: the adoption of ‘female’ manners rendered males effeminate, a regular adjective for men of the third sex.” The prominent historian Thomas Babington Macaulay said that the “grotesque house with pie-crust battlements” was the product of Walpole’s “diseased and disordered mind.”
