It looked along the river valley, which had been widened to make a picturesque lake. The building was Italian in style and Beckford spent huge sums in improving and furnishing it and putting into it, amongst other things, the famous Water Organ. Within a year the whole place had been gutted. According to Colt Hoare everything was “consumed by fire” and the Water Organ perished too. It had been worked from the reservoir on the hill, which also supplied the fire pumps. And now, while the water streamed undirected on to the tremendous roaring flames, the roof timbers crashed through the burning floors, and the organ was heard for the last time to pour forth a torrent of music. Beckford was in London when he heard the news of the disaster and his first reaction to it was that he began to scribble some notes on a piece of paper. When asked what he was at, he said, “Only calculating the expense of rebuilding it. I have an odd fifty thousand pounds in my drawer. It won’t be above a thousand apiece difference to each of my thirty children”.
As a matter of fact the new house built by Soane did cost the alderman a hundred and thirty thousand pounds and it took fifteen years to build. Robert Drysdale, the young Scottish tutor who was William Beckford’s first teacher, and whom Fanny Burney described as “a good sort of half stupid man”, wrote about 1768, “ This house, or palace if you will, is exceedingly grand, but I cannot at present enter into a particular description of it, it has been fourteen years in building and it is not finished yet.”
Fonthill Splendens was called the masterpiece of Sir William Soane, but it seemed impelled to follow the peripatetic tradition of Fonthill houses by finding itself in a slightly different position from its predecessor. It was rather south-west of the previous house and instead of facing south and looking down the lake, it faced east, standing to the west of the public road which ran between the houses and the lake. This was because its scale was too large for it to fit across the valley. It needed a situation the whole way along the lakeside to give space for the deployment of its grand plan.
Soane’s masterpiece is thus described by Britton:
“The principal front of the house forms a grand façade nearly 400 feet in length. The house is built in fine white freestone from quarries within half a mile of its site.… The centre or body of the house is in the same grand style and nearly in the same form as Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Two uniform square wings are connected with it by light ellyptic colonnades supported in the front by Doric pillars with a characteristic frieze above the Architrave.… The basement story, which is rusticated, and 13 feet 6 inches in height, contains an arched Egyptian Hall, 85 feet 10 inches by 38 feet 6 inches supported by piers of solid stone.”
The Beckfords had a family idiosyncracy for seeing their houses in terms of mathematics, and the architects seem to have caught it. The effect is grandiose rather than beautiful, and so, possibly, were the houses themselves. William Beckford, the Lord Mayor’s only son, succeeded to Fonthill Splendens in 1770, when, as we know, the house was not yet completed. Measurements appealed to him. He was always fascinated by size, and even when he was describing the emotional effect of the house on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, the mathematical aspect comes in:
“The view from the noble portico presented that of a great piazza, 600 feet by 460 feet.… You can imagine the thousands and thousands of lamps. They shone forth as soon as it was evening and did not destroy the illusion. The bold sweep of the colonnades and loftiness of the Portico certainly favoured it.”
William Beckford’s coming of age had given him complete control of his whole fortune, which Oliver could only describe in mathematical terms, saying, “he was master of a million pounds and an annual income of a hundred thousand”. With all this at his disposal, he embarked on several years of travel, in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal, returning to Fonthill for periodical visits. On one of these he was enjoying a solitary ride when he was broken in upon by a pack of hounds in full cry, and this horrible apparition had a great effect upon building at Fonthill for the next twenty years. Beckford at once encircled his whole estate with a wall twelve feet high, and he returned to an idea which he had had some years ago, of building a garden casino representing a ruined abbey with a couple of rooms which could be used as a temporary lodging. This now became an enormous project with the mathematical proportions that so attracted him. The famous Abbey was taking shape. In February 1797 he wrote to Sir William Hamilton that his
“little pleasure building contains a chapel for Blessed St Anthony 66 feet diameter and 72 high. A Gallery 165 feet in length and a tower 145 feet high.… I am not only building, but planting at a monstrous rate.… Since you saw Fonthill, 1700 acres have been added.… The great drive will extend … above thirty miles.”
The pace grew faster and faster and Beckford was not at all deterred by the fall of the first tower which surmounted the Abbey. A whole village of prefabricated houses was thrown up to accommodate the army of workmen brought in to prepare for the famous visit of Nelson in December 1800. They built by night and by day, lit at night by lamps and torches, and there was no more idea of this building being an impermanent garden decoration. It had become an enormous building dominating the whole countryside. In Flutter’s account of it published in 1823, he says:
“The first glimpse which we catch of Fonthill on the road from London, is on an eminence about 4 miles previous to entering the city of Salisbury. Looking across the barren plain and over a wooded country beyond, we see an object of extraordinary height and magnitude, rising out of the side of one of the highest hills on the horizon, It is the Tower of the Abbey at a distance of 20 miles.”
Beckford decided he would live there.
The old house was doomed. He had always hated the site and
in 1807 it was pulled down, with the exception of one of the pavilions, which was ultimately incorporated into the house built on the same site by Alfred Morrison.
About 1822 the value of West Indian property had so much declined owing partly to the abolition of the slave trade that Beckford could not continue to maintain such an enormous place. He sold the Abbey and its contents to one Farquhar for three hundred thousand pounds and he went to live in Bath. There he built a tower on Lansdowne Hill from which he could still see his great creation at Fonthill. One night, when he walked up to Lansdowne, Fonthill could not be seen. The tower had fallen upon the Abbey. The extravagant dream was over. All that now remains of Fonthill Abbey is a keeper’s lodge attached to one of the smaller towers.
In 1810 Beckford’s younger daughter married Lord Dudley, the eldest son was the Duke of Hamilton, and in 1859 their son built another Fonthill Abbey a mile or two below the old site. It was built in “Scots Baronial” style and is now owned by the Shaw Stewart family, who inherited it through a daughter of Susan Beckford.
The building at Fonthill was not yet over. In 1837 Mr Alfred Morrison had bought the pavilion which remained of the Soane house, but it was of no use to him; he was bitten by the Fonthill collector’s mania. This pretty little house would not hold his pictures, his priceless Chinese porcelain, his books or his manuscripts. Another huge house grew up round the pavilion and his widow continued to live there for some time after his death. Her son Hugh, who was now the owner of Fonthill, fell in love with a charming little Tudor manor-house at Berwick St Leonard, and carried it stone by stone to the top of the hill east of the lake. When he inherited all the collection, he made this small house into the centre of a large E-shaped mansion, which now contains the books, pictures and porcelain belonging now to his son, Major J. G. Morrison. Meanwhile Soane’s house with its later additions was demolished and the building material used to build some delightful and comfortable houses for the tenants on the estate.
Mrs Alfred Morrison disposed of the wonderful collection of manuscripts, which included the famous Nelson Papers, and she only retained at Fonthill the most precious specimens among the pictures and porcelain. The famous triptych of the Madonna and Child with saints and angels, after being tentatively ascri
bed to many painters, is now decided by experts to have been painted by an unknown man with the title of “ The Painter of the Morrison Triptych”. This picture was walled up in a monastery during the Peninsular War. There is a very striking Goya, a full-length of Charles III of Spain, in hunting dress with a yellow waistcoat and a black three-cornered hat. He wears the order of the Golden Fleece. There is a group of exquisitely delicate Clouets, some of them modestly described as “ school of”. Among these is a particularly lovely Louise de Lorraine and the tragic portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, called the “ Deuil Blanc”. There are a pair of animated “ Plein Airs” by Jan Breughel, a glorious Jewish Rabbi ascribed to Ferdinand Bol and a Rembrandt portrait of Euphraim Bonus. Other very good pictures are Drouais’ portrait of Madame Geoffrin, a Mabuse and a Lucas van Leyden, each of an unknown sitter, and the Reynolds portrait of Gibbon as a boy. The house also contains some very good drawings, including a large number of Rowlandson and many drawings of birds and animals by James Ward. Appropriately, the Beckford Room contains a collection of vividly coloured Indian drawings.
Major Morrison possesses some very choice specimens from his grandfather’s collections of Chinese porcelain. Their very descriptions in the catalogue are full of beauty; these are some of them:
“A Pair of Shaped circular Jardinieres … decorated with formal foliage and bats in white and pale blue on a coral ground—Tao Kuang—mark Sheh-te-T’ang Cheh—made for the Hall for the Cultivation of Virtue.”
Another bowl, enamelled with formal flowers on a crimson ground
was: “made at the Hall of Brilliant Decoration”.
Could anything sound more lovely than these?
“Four circular Famille Rose Plates, the centres enamelled with prunus branches, peonies and butterfly, the borders decorated with raised flowering branches in white and with gilt rime—Ch’ien Lung.”
“A Deep Dish, the centre enamelled with peony and flowering branches, the border with pink and blue diaper lambrequin panels and with flowers on brown scroll ground—15 in. diam.—Ch’ien Lung.”
“A Pair of Famille Rose Vases and Covers, enamelled with cranes insects and flowers on a white ground, the shoulders and covers with border of flowers on yellow ground—18 ½ in. high—Ch’ien Lung.”
“A Bowl, enamelled with panels of birds and flowers on white and seeded green ground and panels of phoenix and kylins on red scroll ground, the powder blue border decorated with scrolls in gold—11 ½ in. diam.—K’ang Hai.”
“A Mandarin Jar and Cover, enamelled with exotic birds, butterflies and flowers in red, gold, green and blue, with lambrequin panels round the shoulder, enamelled with flowers on gold and white ground edged in blue—K’ang Hai.”
“A Pair of Large Vases and Covers, enamelled with panels at the sides with cocks, butterflies and flowering branches on a black ground, with flowers and formal foliage in green in pink trellis—Ch’ien Lung.”
“A Mandarin Jar, enamelled with panels of flowering magnolia, pheasants, rockwork and chrysanthemums with shaped pink border round the base and flowers in green lambrequin border round the shoulder—Ch’ien Lung.”
“A Set of Six Octagonal Plates, the centres enamelled with Ladies and Boys in blue flowered borders with pale pink diaper rims—Yung Cheng.”
WARDOUR CASTLE AND THE ARUNDELLS
Wardour lies a few miles south of Fonthill, in that part of Wiltshire which approaches the Dorset border; but hereabouts the two counties have so much beauty in common that there is little by which to tell them apart. Wardour Castle really is the castle of one’s dreams. It dates from 1393, when Richard II granted permission to John, Lord Lovell, to build a castle on his “Manor of Werdour in the County of Wiltshire”, and he made a fine thing of it. The castle was in form a hexagon, with two high towers flanking the principal entrance. All the rooms and passages looked only into the inner courtyard, and a grand staircase led from it to them. As a ruin, it has great romance and charm, although the ruin is very little altered from what the castle must have been in its prime.
The Lovell family held the estate until 1485, alternately taking the side of the Lancasters and the Yorkists, and when the Wars of the Roses came to an end, Henry VII deprived them of their estate. The last of the Lovells was supposed to have lived for some years in hiding at Minster Lovells; and in 1708 a skeleton, thought to be his, was discovered in a secret chamber in the old house there. In the sixteenth century Wardour changed hands several times; but in 1547 Sir Thomas Arundell finally bought it from the then owner, Sir Fulke Greville.
Even then the tenure was not quite secure, for their unfailing adherence to the Catholic Church deprived the Arundells of their estates more than once during that unsettled century. However, in 1570 Lord Pembroke sold it finally to Sir Matthew Arundell, the father of the first Lord Arundell of Wardour. The estate remained in the family until 1944, when the sixteenth and last Lord Arundell died from the effects of the harsh treatment he had received as a prisoner of war in German hands for four years.
The Arundells have ever been gallant soldiers. Sir Thomas Arundell, surnamed “The Valiant”, volunteered as a young man to fight against the Turks in the army of the Emperor Rudolph II of Germany. Of Sir Thomas’s exploits in the Battle of Cran (1595) it is recorded that:
“In a dreadful Battle, in which the Turks were at length defeated, Lord Arundell of Wardour, a volunteer in the German Army, broke from the line, and hewing down six Turks with his sabre or broadsword, wrested the great standard of their Prophet out of the hand of a seventh, and brought it safe to the General who commanded the Army. He was dangerously wounded, but not mortally.”
For this heroic deed “the Emperor advanced him to the degree and honour of a Count of the Empire, the title to descend to his heirs for ever, of both sexes”. Queen Elizabeth’s comment on this was, “That as chaste wives should have no glances but for their own husband, so should faithful subjects keep their eyes at home, and not gaze upon foreign Crowns.” But James I created Sir Thomas the first Baron Arundell of Wardour.
Heroism in war was not, however, a prerogative reserved for the males of the family, and the most famous defender of Wardour Castle was Blanche, Lady Arundell, who during the Civil War, with a garrison of only twenty-five fighting men, held out against an attacking army of thirteen hundred. The name of Blanche, Lady Arundell, is as well known as any in the dramatic English history of the seventeenth century, and here it shall be told in contemporary words. Mercurius Rusticus (said by Britton to be a “ kind of newspaper”) was written by Bruno Ryves, chaplain to Charles I, and it originally appeared in numbers during the Civil War. It says:
“On Tuesday the second of May 1643, Sir Edward Hungerford, Chief Commander of the Rebels in Wiltshire, came with his forces before Warder Castle in the same county.… But finding the Castle strong, and those that were in it resolute not to yield it up except by force, called Colonel Strode to his help: Both these joined in one made a Body of 1300 or thereabouts. Being come before it they summoned the Castle to surrender.… The Lady Arundel (her husband being then at Oxford and since that dead there) refused to deliver up the Castle and bravely replied That she had a command from her husband to keep it, and she would obey his command.… Lastly, Now when the Rebels had brought petards and applied them to the garden door (which if forced, opened a free passage into the castle) and balls of wild fire to throw in at their Windows, and all hope of keeping the Castle was taken away, now, and not till now, did the Besieged sound a parley.… The Articles of Surrender were these:
“First, that the ladies and all others in the Castle should have quarter. Secondly, that the ladies and Servants should carry away all their Wearing Apparel, and that six of the Serving Men, whom the Ladies should nominate, should attend upon their persons, wheresoever the Rebels should dispose of them. Thirdly, That all the Furniture and goods in the house should be safe from Plunder and to this purpose one of the six, nominated to attend the Ladies, was to stay in the Castle, and take an I
nventory of all in the House, of which the Commanders were to have one copy and the Ladies another.
“Being on these terms Masters of the Castle, ’tis true they observe the first article, and spare the lives of all the Besieged, but as for the other two they observe them not in any part: as soon as they enter the Castle, they first sieze upon the several Trunks and packs which they of the Castle were making up, and left neither the Ladies or servants any other wearing clothes but what was on their backs.
“The Articles of Surrender were no sooner made than broken, as the besiegers ransacked the castle, and took every thing, wearing apparel, etc. There was in the castle, one extraordinary chimney-piece, valued at 2000l. this they destroyed. There were likewise rare pictures. These, in their wild fury, they break and tear to pieces; a loss that neither cost nor art can repair.
“They lead the ladies, and lady’s children, two sons and a daughter, to Shaftsbury; they bring five cart loads of their richest hangings and furniture from the castle to Shaftsbury, and plundered the whole castle.”
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