Eileen Harris, ‘Jacobites and Horses at Nuthall Temple’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. xx, 2012, pp. 77–86
text © the authors 2012 JACOBITES AND HORSES AT NUTHALL TEMPLE
EILEEN HARRIS
uried under the M motorway lie the charred Thomas Wright of Durham, philomath and teacher Bremains of Nuthall Temple (Fig. ), the last and of mathematics, astronomy, drawing and surveying to largest of the four Palladian Rotunda villas built in a close-knit circle of aristocrats who, having him on England in the eighteenth century: Mereworth the spot for months at a time as a resident tutor and Castle in Kent (Fig. ), designed by Colen Campbell friend, took the opportunity to consult him on around – for The Hon. John Fane, later improving, embellishing and modernising their seventh Earl of Westmorland; Lord Burlington’s houses, parks and gardens. Chiswick House, circa – (Figs. & ); and It was entirely by chance, by accident not by Foot’s Cray Place, also in Kent (Fig. ), designed by intention, that Wright became an architect. He was a Daniel Garrett around – for Bourchier Cleeve competent and exceptionally inventive amateur with and demolished in . an innate ability as a draughtsman. But he was not a Whereas the first three villas were within easy professional designer of buildings. Nor, in fact, was reach of London, Nuthall was in the Midlands, on he an orthodox Palladian, as can be seen from the the outskirts of Nottingham. It was begun in for Six Original Designs of Arbours and Six Original Sir Charles Sedley, second Baronet, to designs by Designs of Grottos which he published in and
Fig. . Nuthall Temple, Notts, entrance front.
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Fig. . Mereworth Castle, Kent, entrance front.
respectively, and from the garden front and which the fourth Duke of Beaufort was president interior of Nuthall Temple (Figs. & ). How did from until his death in . Sedley come to commission an amateur like Wright Beaufort, whom the Tories regarded as ‘the head to design him a new house at Nuthall, and why did it of their party’, was a prominent supporter of have to be so manifestly Italianate? Frederick, Prince of Wales; a ‘most determined and The link between Sedley and Wright was unwavering Jacobite’; and one of the chief ‘Remitters’ probably forged around or by Charles Noel who collected money for the Pretender. He and Somerset, fourth Duke of Beaufort, who at the time John Fane, seventh Earl of Westmorland, were was Wright’s principal patron at Badminton. Sedley’s foremost among the English Jacobites who met with association with Beaufort was mainly political, Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, during following close upon his election as Tory MP for his clandestine visit to London in September . Nottingham in May and his leading role in the The Earl (who succeeded in ) – a member of the Jacobite demonstration at the Lichfield races in August leading Whig family of Kent and one of Cobham’s of that year. In Sedley was made a member of ‘cubs’ – turned vehemently against the Government the Honourable Board of the Loyal Brotherhood, a in and became a zealous Tory and Jacobite in high-Tory drinking club with Jacobite leanings of retaliation for his dismissal from the army without
THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME XX JACOBITES AND HORSES AT NUTHALL TEMPLE compensation for voting in favour of an increase of Thomas Wright is not part of the political the Prince of Wales’s allowance. equation spelled out above. Unfortunately, however, The Palladian villa built for John Fane at his mumbo jumbo fans are bound to add Jacobitism Mereworth was about eleven miles from Scadbury to freemasonry which they have beaten to death to Manor, near Southfleet, which was the ancient seat of little or no avail. Having identified the fourth Duke the Sedley family from the fourteenth century until of Beaufort as the person who introduced Sedley to when Sir Charles Sedley’s mother (Elizabeth Thomas Wright, and the seventh Earl of Westmorland Frith) inherited Nuthall. It was in a house at Oxton, and his villa at Mereworth as the source of the idea – some ten miles from Nuthall, that Sir Charles was just the idea , nothing more – of building a Palladian born in and where he lived – not at Scadbury in Rotunda villa, I now want to look in some detail at the Kent. It was probably to commemorate the Sedley architecture of Nuthall Temple, the only complete family’s ancient Kent origins in their comparatively and substantial house designed by Wright. new Nottingham estate and, at the same time, to Unlike the conventional ‘Rotunda’ villas of proclaim his own Tory-Jacobite allegiance that Sir Mereworth and Foot’s Cray, Nuthall was based on Charles decided to build a distinctive Palladian villa Scamozzi rather than Palladio: in particular on like that of his senior cohort, the Earl of Westmorland, Scamozzi’s Villa Rocca Pisana in Lonigo near Vicenza at Mereworth (Fig. ). How Foot’s Cray Place (Fig. ), (Fig. ) and Villa Molini near Padua (Fig. ). From situated between Scadbury and Mereworth, fits into La Rocca Pisana Wright took the octagonal dome, but the picture remains a tantalizing mystery which I hope unusually set it within a balustraded viewing platform to solve in future by pursuing its elusive builder, and fenestrated it with eight tripartite openings (Fig. ). Bourchier Cleeve. Although La Rocca Pisana also gave him the authority
Fig. . Foot’s Cray Place, Kent. Engraving after Samuel Wale in Dodsley’s London & its environs described , .
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Fig. . Vincenzo Scamozzi, Villa Rocca Pisana, plan and Fig. . Vincenzo Scamozzi,Villa Molini, plan and elevation, L’idea della architettura universal , . elevation, L’idea della architettura universal , . for the portico in antis, his broad, hexastyle portico is Edward Lovett Pearce, a cousin and protégé of Sir closer to Molini’s hexastyle loggia, as were the flanking John Vanbrugh (Fig. ). This sketch is part of a pedimented windows. The rusticated basement and collection of Pearce and Vanbrugh drawings (now at the attic storey were also inspired by Molini. the V&A) which was once at Stillorgan House near Lord Burlington’s Scamozzian villa at Chiswick Dublin where it was quite likely to have been seen by was bound to come into the picture. Its octagonal Thomas Wright when he was in Ireland from to Lower Tribune with eight free-standing Tuscan , its owner, Joshua, second Viscount Allen of columns (Fig. ) evidently appealed to Wright and Stillorgan, being one of his patrons. Sedley more than the circular halls of the Italian The balustraded walkway surrounding the dome villas. The small vestibule preceding the hall at was one of five vantage points from which the hunt Nuthall, though wider than the `Rotunda’ – like and the exercising of Sedley’s seventy-two race passage at Chiswick, would nonetheless have greatly horses could be watched (Figs. & ): the portico enhanced the experience of entering the tall, top-lit, in antis was one, another was the balustraded roof of richly decorated central space with its eight free- the semicircular bow on the garden front, and there standing Composite columns (Figs. & ). were also two fairly large, single-storey extensions A similar configuration of spaces – portico-in- (containing kitchens and offices) on either side of the antis, small vestibule and octagonal hall – appears in villa whose flat, balustraded roofs were accessible a sketch-plan of a villa by the Irish architect Sir from the first-floor reception rooms through French
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Fig. (above). Chiswick, elevation of the entrance front. Drawing by Henry Flitcroft, probably for William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones , , vol. I, pl. Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (Boy [ ] ). Fig. (right). Chiswick, plan of the basement floor. Drawing by Henry Flitcroft probably for William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones , , vol. I, pl. . Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (Boy [] ).
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Fig. . Nuthall Temple, plan of the principal floor. Engraving in Woolfe & Gandon’s Vitruvius Britannicus , IV, pl. .
Fig. (above). Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, Sketch-plan of a villa (detail). Victoria and Albert Museum .
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Fig. (right). Andrea Palladio, Villa Almerico ‘La Rotunda’, plan, half elevation and half section. Woodcut in I Quattro libri dell’architettura , bk II, . windows. What the source of these unusual lateral villa comparable to Mereworth with maximum viewing platforms was, I do not know. The profile provision for viewing his favourite equestrian sports. of the perrons on Palladio’s Villa Rotunda might However, the Italianate-Scamozzian display was only have suggested the idea (Fig. ); so too might the wanted on the principal front. Elsewhere, on the single-storey platforms flanking the north front of garden front and in the interior, Wright had much Badminton House which were used for viewing the more freedom of choice and it was to English rather stag hunts across the park. They were, of course, than Italian precedents that he looked. well known to Wright and would have been of The most distinctive feature of the west-facing interest to Sedley. garden front (Fig. ) was its central, open-base Whatever its sources, Wright’s executed designs pediment framing a two-storey semicircular bow with for Nuthall Temple – published by Woolfe and a Venetian window above, which gave access to the Gandon in Vitruvius Britannicus IV in – were a flat roof as a viewing point. The Venetian windows on perfect solution to Sedley’s demands for an Italianate the piano nobile on either side of the bow were inserted
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Fig. . Nuthall Temple, garden front. around by James Wyatt, replacing Wright’s niches less common in the eighteenth century than canted in pedimented Gibbs surrounds. A remarkably ones. Vanbrugh, Pearce and Halfpenny were notable similar arrangement of semicircular bow and open- exceptions whose work may have inspired Wright. base pediment was to be found at Russell Farm But was there a precedent for the combination at (Fig. ) on the Cassiobury estate near Watford, Russell Farm and Nuthall Temple of a segmental bow Hertfordshire, which was designed by Wright and and an open-base pediment, or was this Wright’s built by Stiff Leadbetter for the Dowager Countess invention? The idiosyncratic garden front and the riot of Essex in , just before Nuthall Temple. of rococo plaster decoration and wrought ironwork On the whole, large semicircular bows, which in the interior (Fig. ) are more characteristic of Wright also introduced (complete with semi-domes) Wright, the inventive amateur, than the conventional on the east front of Horton, Northants, in , were Scamozzian facade.
Fig. . Russell Farm,.Watercolour view (detail) Oldfield Collection, vol. , p. . Hertfordshire Record Office .
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Fig. . Nuthall Temple, the octagonal hall.
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NOTES Cruickshanks, loc. cit. , p. ; Sedgwick, op. cit. at This article is based upon a lecture given at the note above, I, p. ; II, pp. –. Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Information provided by Roger Hadfield, FRGS of Andrea Palladio at Vicenza in September . For Nuthall. Sedley was nine years old when he the attribution to Garrett and the date see H. Colvin succeeded his father as second Baronet in . and J. Harris, `The Architect of Foot’s Cray Place’, For a more detailed and discursive analysis of the Georgian Group Journal , VII ( ), pp. –. architecture of Nuthall Temple see P. Smith, loc. cit., Thomas Wright, Universal Architecture, Book I, … at note above. However, I do not agree with all the Arbours; Book II, … Grottos London: Printed for precedents cited by Smith, e.g. the pedimented the Author, [ ]. See also Thomas Wright, niches on the garden front are not only found on the Arbours and Grottos a facsimile … with a catalogue Dormitory of Westminster School (p. ); they of Wright’s works in architecture and garden design also occur on the north and south fronts of St Paul’s by Eileen Harris , (London ), Nuthall Temple, Cathedral. unpaginated. H. Colvin and M. Craig, Architectural Drawings in This supersedes my initial suggestion that the link the Library of Elton Hall by Sir Joihn Vanbrugh and was one of Wright’s Nottinghamshire patrons, ibid . Sir Edward Lovett Pearce (Roxburgh Club, ), Peter Smith, `The Architecture of Nuthall Temple’, no. , pl. LVIII. The Viscountess Allen (née in M. Airs (ed.), The later eighteenth-century great Margaret DuPass) and their two daughters, house (Oxford, ), p. , suggested the link was Elizabeth who married John Proby of Elton Hall in Robert Burdett of Foremark Hall, Derbyshire who and Frances who married William Mayne, had married Sedley’s sister Elizabeth (d. ) and were all subscribers to Wright’s Louthiana , . who met Wright on August when he was John Woolfe and James Gandon, Vitruvius travelling through Derbyshire with Norborne Britannicus , IV, pls. –. Berkeley, later Lord Botetourt, the Duke of Beaufort’s All the balustrades were also removed from the brother-in-law. See The Reliquary, Quarterly windows thereby lengthening them. See, Smith, Archaeological Journal and Review, ed. Llewellyn loc. cit., at note above. Jewett, XV, – . Botetourt, who employed Giles Worsley, `Stiff Leadbetter’, Transactions of the Wright at Stoke Gifford, Gloucestershire, was Ancient Monuments Society , ( ), pp. – . another link between him and Sedley. Giles Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables (New Haven & London ), pp. – . (London, ), p. . Segmental bows can be found on Vanbrugh’s Linda J. Colley, `The Loyal Brotherhood And The Eastbury, the east front of Blenheim Palace, Mincepie Cocoa Tree: The London Organization of the Tory House, etc.; on Pearce’s Arch Hall, Wilkinstown, Party, – ’, The Historical Journal , () co. Meath and Wardtown, Ballymacward and in ( ), pp. – . The Loyal Brotherhood was William Halfpenny’s New and compleat system of instituted in by Henry Somerset, second Duke architecture (London, ), pls. , , , . of Beaufort, who was the first president from Halfpenny, who was in Ireland in the s, may to . Horace Walpole dismissed the Brotherhood have worked as an assistant to Pearce, see online as a `Jacobite Club’: Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, Irish Architectural Archive, www.iarc.ie. See also March , Correspondence II, (New Haven, Maurice Craig, `The Quest for Sir Edward Lovett ), p. . Pearce’, The Irish Arts Review Yearbook , ( ), E. Cruickshanks, loc. cit. at note above, pp. –; Figs. & . Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons – , II (London, , p. .
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