It was on a Sunday, while the servants were at church, that the fire broke out. It started in the library, consuming bookshelves rich in fine, old editions of the French classics, and quickly spread throughout the house with devastating effect. The Illustrated London News of 24 November reported the details:
[T]he accident seems to have originated in the library where some workmen had been employed until nearly ten o’clock on Thursday morning week. The flames were first observed through the front windows of the mansion, about one o’clock pm on that day by some persons near the spot, who hastened to the house and gave an alarm. Messengers were instantly dispatched to Maidenhead and in a very short period two engines arrived, but the fire had by that time attained so great a mastery that although an ample supply of water was at hand very little effect was produced upon the conflagration.
Queen Victoria saw the flames five miles away at Windsor and also dispatched fire engines, but to no avail. Harriet returned from Scotland to see the blackened walls of her house being pulled down.
When the house went up, so did its valuable contents. An inventory of March 1849, taken by ‘Messrs Farebrother, Clarke and Lye’ gives a snapshot of the opulent interiors immediately before they were consumed by fire. The fittings included Venetian and Brussels carpets; among the furniture were gilt bed canopies, mahogany bidets, antique oak tables and wardrobes, and tens of ebony tables and bookcases; there were globes, china jars, and a rosewood pianoforte built by Kirkman, one of the first English companies to make the instrument. The art in the house included sculptures in marble and bronze, a bust of the Duke of Wellington, and several paintings from George’s prized collection, including works by Velasquez, Lely, and Kneller.3
Harriet retreated to Stafford House to evaluate her options. For some time she considered abandoning the Cliveden project entirely, fearing that she lacked the energy to embark on yet another demanding building scheme. But over the course of 1850, as the last ruins of the charred house were cleared, Harriet resolved to rebuild her life. Charles Barry, whom the Sutherlands had employed to complete Stafford House, was currently in the midst of overseeing the construction of the new Palace of Westminster: the old palace had, like Cliveden, been consumed by fire. Despite the bureaucratic wrangling and engineering challenges of the Westminster project Barry would find the time to produce designs for a new Cliveden. Harriet and Barry would collaborate to raise the house from the ashes.
Sir Charles Barry, who drew up designs for Cliveden while he was still working on the new Houses of Parliament.
Charles Barry’s designs for the front terrace of the house, commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. The Orkneys’ house had been largely destroyed in the late eighteenth century, but Barry used plans preserved in Vitruvius Britannicus as the basis for his new design.
Chapter 8
A RESURRECTION
CHARLES BARRY WAS born in London, the fourth son of a prosperous Westminster stationer. He learnt the practical side of his profession during his time working for Middleton and Bailey, a firm of Lambeth surveyors, but the formative influence on his architectural imagination was the trip he took around Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa between 1817 and 1820. He left England alone and travelled by himself through France and Italy, before joining the artist Charles Locke Eastlake to tour Greece and Turkey. Between 1819 and 1820, Barry was employed by the archaeologist David Baillie, to record in sketches the landscapes and buildings of Egypt and Syria.
The abiding influence Barry acquired from his Continental tour was Italian. His palazzo style was an appealing alternative to the predominant Greek and Gothic styles of the time. The Travellers’ Club, his grand Italianate building in Pall Mall, appeared exactly when architectural critics were looking for an alternative to the tired fashion for Greek revival, and established him as the leading British practitioner of the Europe-wide Renaissance Revival. However, Barry was not an inflexible designer and some of his most iconic buildings were executed in very different fashion to his signature Italianate style. Most notable in this respect was his design for the Palace of Westminster, home to both Houses of Parliament. The palace had burnt to the ground in October 1834, after an oven being used to destroy the Exchequer’s old tally sticks (wooden sticks used to calculate tax) overheated and set fire to the House of Lords. A Lords committee on the rebuilding of Parliament rejected the possibility of a neoclassical replacement on the grounds that the style was too closely associated with revolutionary republicanism. The committee resolved that submissions for the competition to design a new palace should be either Gothic or Elizabethan. Barry’s winning building was Gothic in style, though his own classical predilections showed through in his proposal: the underlying proportions of the building were Palladian and he would rely on the pioneering Gothic architect Augustus Pugin to provide the detailing and the interior design.
By the time he was employed to work on Cliveden, Barry had received many commissions from the Sutherlands. In the 1830s he had transformed Trentham Hall from an unfashionable, ‘supremely hideous’ Georgian house into an impressive Italianate mansion. He had also worked on Dunrobin, for which he produced designs in a Scottish baronial style, a fusion of French and Scottish architecture introduced to Scotland in the days of Queen Mary.1 Barry had a reputation for being rather doctrinaire about achieving consistency of style within a project. For instance, when converting Trentham into an Italian style, he wanted to alter not only the unfashionable Georgian parts of the house, but also the old Norman church. ‘When Barry was changing the exterior of plain old Georgian Trentham into the semblance of an Italian palace, he had the incredibly bad taste to suggest that the church, with its fine old Norman pillars, should be converted into a building more suitable to the Italian fashion of the hall,’ Ronald Gower recorded in his memoirs. ‘Luckily,’ he continued, ‘my parents had better taste than their architect.’2 Budgeting was also not high on Barry’s agenda, and his first design for Cliveden was put aside ‘for economic reasons’ – quite a feat given the size of the Sutherland fortune.
Barry’s second attempt at a Cliveden proposal looked to the past, taking inspiration from the Orkneys’ Cliveden as it appeared in the architectural manual Vitruvius Britannicus. He kept Winde’s grand terrace, Archer’s two wings, the colonnades joining the wings to the main house, and the roof hidden by a distinctive parapet lined with urns. Italianate architecture had also been very popular during the Restoration period, then partly due to the influence of Inigo Jones, who, like Barry, had travelled extensively in Italy, and was heavily influenced by the Renaissance architecture of Vincenzo Scamozzi and Andrea Palladio. Contemporaries of the Restoration era often likened Buckingham’s first house to the Villa Aldobrandini. More than 200 years later, Barry’s conception of Cliveden inspired comparisons to the same architectural canon. In the words of Ronald Gower: ‘Anyone who has seen the Villa Albano near Rome, and compares it with Cliveden, will see the likeness between them.’3
Perhaps the most distinctively 19th-century feature of Barry’s new house was its use of cement cladding to disguise the brickwork underneath. Prior to the 19th century, many Italianate buildings had been executed in red brick, but in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, an inexpensive alternative to red brick became available. ‘Roman Cement’, which could be sculpted to look like stone, was invented in the 1780s by James Parker, a clergyman and manufacturer, and patented in 1796. The product was not in fact like anything used by the Romans, but the brand name is revealing of the contemporary fashion for neoclassical buildings, in which cement was often used as a cheaper alternative to real stone. The product really took off in the 1820s, when the patent expired and various manufacturers began selling their own improved version of the building material. In an age when brick was often associated with ‘plain’ institutional architecture, such as workhouses, schools, and asylums, cement cladding had a certain aspirational appeal. Indeed, an aversion to brick probably explains Ronald Gower’s dislike of O
rkney’s Cliveden: ‘To judge by last century prints of the place,’ he wrote, referring to the images in Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, ‘the old building was plain unto ugliness.’4
The rebuild began in earnest in 1850 and the majority of the work was completed in the following year. An insight into the course of the early building is given by a letter of June 1850, from Barry to Harriet. Barry’s correspondence to the duchess generally exhibits a degree of affection, and a familiarity with her family. Their letters also show Harriet to have taken an active role in adapting Barry’s designs to her own preferences. ‘My dear Madam,’ Barry began his letter of 12 June 1850, ‘There will not be any difficulty in shifting the Breakfast Room for Cliefden to adjoin the Drawing Room, as you wish now, or getting a good entrance to it from the staircase, as well as an independent entrance to the Dining Room in a lobby adjoining the staircases which will amend the necessity of making the Breakfast Room a passage room to it.’5 The new layout described in Barry’s letter exists today.
Harriet not only had the task of overseeing the building and interior decoration of all her six homes – she was also responsible for managing them. A head servant was tasked with the practical day-to-day running of each Sutherland property, but Harriet was expected to oversee his work and ensure that the many departments within the household functioned efficiently. Mistress of the house was a two-pronged role that required correct management of servants as well as guests, and Harriet was the commander-in-chief of a vast workforce. At Stafford House, there was a minimum of 41 servants in attendance, including a tutor, governess, secretary, cook, eight housemaids, three kitchen maids, a butler, steward and housekeeper. At Cliveden, household staff numbered around 27 during the week, and increased to as many as 50 at weekends.6 Each of the main rooms in the house was equipped with a cord that was attached, through a system of wires, to a corresponding bell in the basement. The master board of 27 bells, each one labelled according to its room, can still be seen in the basement.
The pay given to staff varied enormously between roles, and between different households. Generally, it seems that the wage scales of the large aristocratic households became more hierarchical in the course of the 19th century. The Sutherlands may have been ahead of their time in this respect, as by the 1840s they were already paying a wide range of salaries even within the same department. Their laundry maids were paid between £1 and £37. At the top end of that scale was Madame Rousseau, who worked alongside a lady’s maid, a personal confectionery maid and a French needlewoman as one of Harriet’s four body servants.7 Just as Harriet’s role as Mistress of the Robes to Victoria implied more than a mere service relationship, so the most intimate and demanding roles around the Sutherland house allowed for friendship and support that extended far beyond formal obligation, and could be reciprocal. One long-standing servant of whom Harriet was particularly fond was Mrs Penson. In a time when most servants lived in fairly sparse dormitory accommodation, the inventory for Mrs Penson’s room at Cliveden is remarkable. In 1861, the contents of her room included a ‘scroll frame Couch on mahogany bedstead and throw over chintz hangings’, a ‘rosewood frame lounging chair … spring stuffed and covered in loose chintz canvas’, a ‘crimson baize cover table’, a ‘zebrawood centre table… on pillar and carved claw’, ‘two japanned circular washstands’, a ‘handsome satinwood winged wardrobe’, a ‘foot Ottoman’, and a ‘time piece in Brass case and stand’.8
There was one area of domestic management from which Harriet was spared. George was responsible for controlling the expenditure of each household, a task he was not well suited to – contemplating finances made him ‘deaf and stormy in the head’; he left most of the work to his estate manager James Loch, who was as frugal as George was extravagant.9 Despite Loch’s sharp sense of economy, the Sutherlands were, like Frederick and Augusta, caring employers, often arranging entertainments for their household staff and local artisans. On one occasion, they ‘granted access to the magnificent grounds of Cliveden’ for a fete for the families of workmen who had contributed to the rebuilding of the house. All the shops in Maidenhead were closed that afternoon to enable shopworkers to attend, and Harriet and George laid on ‘a variety of amusements’ including pleasure boats to transport the partygoers along the Thames. Very much in the spirit of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the Maidenhead Musical Society and Coldstream Guards arrived by barge to entertain revellers with music. The ‘conservatories and gardens of Cliveden were thrown open’, so that visitors could inspect the flowers and shrubs or saunter through the shaded groves. Harriet was given ‘three hearty cheers’ twice, and dancing continued well into the evening – as well as on the boat home.10
The rebuilding of Cliveden and management of domestic life was not the only project that occupied Harriet in 1851. She had become actively involved in promoting and supporting plans for a ‘Great Exhibition’. Since the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, there had been calls for an equivalent British exhibition, to celebrate and promote the nation’s achievement in manufacturing, commerce and the arts. A small exhibition in December 1844, hosted by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, was considered by its organisers to be a failure, having drawn only 150 people.11 However, a slightly more effective repeat exhibition in January 1845 attracted the attention of Prince Albert, the president of the Society, who had a personal interest in the subject of design and manufacture. With the encouragement of Prince Albert, the Society began working on plans for a much larger event, the scope of which would be international, embracing foreign productions as well as British ones. In January 1850 Queen Victoria established a royal commission that would be responsible for the administration of the exhibition.
The success of the event depended on the support of the leading manufacturing and commercial players of the time, both for the exhibits and for subscriptions.12 The Sutherlands, of course, with their unlimited capital and industrial might, were needed to champion the project. At 11 o’clock in the morning of 21 February 1850, Harriet attended a meeting of Westminster residents at Willis’s Rooms in St James to discuss the best means of promoting the exhibition. Bubbling with excitement, she dashed off a letter to Queen Victoria giving a ‘very enthusiastic account’ of the meeting and its ‘beautiful & interesting speeches’.13 One of these speeches was delivered by Harriet’s brother Lord Carlisle, who set out the aims of the exhibition in the rather optimistic and grandiose style that had come into fashion among the aristocracy after the much-feared revolution of 1848 failed to materialise in Britain. It was ‘but natural and becoming at the period of the world at which we [are] arrived, that industry, that skill, that enterprise, should in turn have their own ovation, their own triumph, their own high holiday,’ he proclaimed.14 Harriet’s attendance at this and other local meetings to promote the Great Exhibition shows the extent of her influence on the event. But newspaper accounts name only the attendees who gave speeches, who were all men.
In fact, Harriet was so impressed by the meeting that she invited a number of friends to Stafford House to discuss the best means of women supporting the event. This informal ‘Ladies’ Committee’ included Countess Granville, Lady John Russell, Lady Mary Stanley, and a number of other influential aristocrats. The committee collected subscriptions, and within a few weeks had raised a remarkable £975.15 The Illustrated London News of 9 March carried a picture of the committee meeting in the grand hallway at Stafford House. Harriet had discovered a natural aptitude for rallying and organising those around her. Following the establishment of the Ladies’ Committee, Harriet continued to attend other important events in support of the exhibition. Most notable among these was the Mansion House banquet of 21 March 1850, at which Prince Albert outlined his idealistic vision for exhibition: ‘We are living at a period of most wonderful transition,’ he said, ‘which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end – to which all history points – the realisation of the unity of mankind.’ Harriet immediately wrote to the queen afte
r the banquet, expressing zealous admiration for Albert’s speech.16
In just over nine months a gleaming beacon of modernity, built from glass and cast iron, was erected in Hyde Park. At more than one-third of a mile long, the colossal Crystal Palace, designed by the engineer Joseph Paxton to be assembled from prefabricated parts, was the largest enclosed space in the world. Among its supporters, it became a symbol of the self-confidence and rightful optimism of the Victorian age. On 1 May 1851, a misty-eyed Queen Victoria and her prince consort opened the Great Exhibition. It was ‘the greatest day in our history’, Victoria declared; she would return 13 times with her children before the exhibition closed. Winterhalter evoked the spirit of the Exhibition in his painting The First of May 1851, which depicted Crystal Palace bathed in celestial light.
Crystal Palace brimmed with more than 100,000 exhibits and 14,0 exhibitors. ‘Every possible invention and appliance for the service of man found a place with its embracing limits; every realisation of human genius, every effort of human industry,’ the exhibition guide stated.17 There were sections devoted to raw materials, machinery and manufactures; there were model homes, electric telegraphs and adding machines; there were courts designed to resemble different times of history and different places on earth; there was a stuffed elephant, an 80-blade sportsman’s knife and a steam hammer that could with the same degree of accuracy forge the main bearing of a steamship or gently crack an egg. Queen Victoria was particularly enamoured with a bed that automatically tipped its occupant into a bath in the morning. In five months, six million visitors – more than double the population of London at the time – paid their one-shilling admittance. Harriet was a frequent visitor and, on one occasion, took her six-year-old son Ronald to the exhibition. Thirty years later, Ronald was still mesmerised, rhapsodising with childish glee in his memoirs about ‘the splendour and height of the roof; the sensation of being within an enchanted place’. He was particularly taken with the ‘Turkish court’ where he was given dates to eat, and the ‘German department’, decorated with ‘stuffed frogs and weasels’, as well as some elms which had been adorned with ‘crystal fountains and marble statues’.18
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 27
