HOLYWELL HOUSE: A GOTHIC VILLA AT ST ALBANS
FRANCES HARRIS
HoLYWELL HOUSE, when the Dowager Lady Spencer first came to live there in November 1783, was a small and rather run-down country house on the southern edge of St Albans: one of many properties inherited by John Spencer of Althorp at the death of his redoubtable and fabulously wealthy grandmother, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. In 1746 it passed to his son, who became the ist Earl Spencer, and although in the latter's lifetime it was regarded by the family as no more than a convenient staging-post on the road to Northamptonshire/ at his death in 1783 his widow, Georgiana, fixed upon it as her dower house. The Spencers' three great houses, Althorp, Wimbledon Park, and Spencer House in St James's, now belonged to her son and daughter-in-law, and she was in any case unwilling to settle anywhere that would recall memories of her own happy married life. The house as Lady Spencer found it when she first moved in was virtually unchanged since the late seventeenth century: the product of a somewhat makeshift renovation carried out by the future Duke and Duchess of Marlborough shortly after they had acquired the property from the latter's family in 1684. It consisted of a tall, narrow, north- facing block with a hipped roof and pediment, almost certainly the work of William Talman, who had still to attain fame as the architect of Chatsworth. At right angles to it, and facing east across the extensive gardens, was a much older two-storied wing, with an open colonnade or cloister on the ground fioor and above it a low-ceilinged gallery with a further set of rooms at the soutb end. This part of the house, though it had probably undergone some alteration in the late seventeenth century, dated back in its basic structure at least to the sixteenth century, when the 'mansion house called Hallywell' had belonged to the Duchess of Marlborough's ancestor. Sir Ralph Rowlett.^ Like the Duchess, Lady Spencer was fond of Holy well, though she confessed that she had to forget Wimbledon (another of the Duchess's houses) in order to be so.^ Having moved in on 3 November 1783, only a matter of days after her husband's death, she noted in her diary that she was 'truly thankfull for the tranquillity I have felt since I came into this bouse'.'^ But she soon found that after two generations of virtual neglect, it was scarcely fit to be a permanent home. Not only was it bitterly cold and plagued with smoking chimneys, but parts of the structure had become unsound. In particular, the sheer back wall of the seventeenth-century wing had to be temporarily buttressed to keep
176 it from collapse. Her son therefore offered to have the necessary repairs carried out for her at his own expense. This renovation can be documented in some detail from the papers of the Spencer family, recently acquired by the British Library. ^ Like that of a hundred years before, it proves to have a greater architectural interest than might have been expected, providing a striking example of the influence of Horace Walpole's school of Strawberry Hill Gothic, and enabling a new name to be added to the roll-call of aristocratic amateurs who were its chief practitioners. The family's finances were still suffering from the ist Earl's twin passions of gambling and electioneering,^ and in any case the house itself scarcely seemed to warrant the employment of a major architect. The work was therefore entrusted in the first place to a Mr Shakespear, presumably George Shakespear, the one-time partner of John Phillips, and like him 'more notable as a master builder than as an architect', but 'capable of pro- ducing his own designs'"^—though this latter ability was soon to be called into question. The alterations proposed were simple enough, and confined largely to the garden side. The unsound rear wall was to be rebuilt, and the old gallery converted into a more com- fortable and modern living area by raising the height, partitioning the ends, and increasing the width by the addition of a large angular bow-window in the centre. The set of rooms at the end was to have a further, semicircular bow-window, and the whole fa9ade was then to be decorated and stuccoed to conceal the patchwork effect of old and new bricks.^ Since Shakespear somewhat over-optimistically promised to let Lady Spencer have two parts in three of the house to live in while the work was going on, she remained to oversee operations, and managed to retain her sense of humour through what was to prove a trying and occasionally alarming experience. One of her letters written during the demolition of the 'tremendous prop'd wall' is dated from 'Holywell, I can scarce add House, it looks so like a ruin'. The next day the wall was down as far as the floor of the hall:
it blows a Hurricane & I am in the literal sense of the words, keeping Open House—nothing ever look'd half so horrible. The Chimneys all seem to stand unsupported, the Stairs hang in the Air, the Ceilings are dropping—the roof is quite off in that part of the house . .. but Shakespear . . . assures me all is safe & that he shall begin building up again on Monday—one fioor a week as they must give it time to settle.
When he came to tackle the much older fabric of the gallery, Shakespear was less con- fident. The builder in him reasserted itself over the architect, and he declared that it would not after all be safe to raise the ceiling height, because it would 'shake that part of the house too much to cut through the ceiling beams', and because the walls of the gallery were not strong enough to bear the additional weight. Even if they were to be taken down to ground level for strengthening, he feared that 'the routing among the foundations of so old a building, might shake some other parts'. Faced with Lady Spencer's despair at the prospect of'a low & stifling' room, and with the threat of being displaced in favour of Henry Holland, who was 'clever in contrivances', Shakespear did somehow manage to achieve an extra two feet in height 'without medling with the walls or roof. But their differences over his designs for the outside of the house
177 were less easily resolved. Inspired by the existing Gothic arches of the cloister and by the neo-Gothic pattern books of William Halfpenny, Shakespear had produced what Lady Spencer considered 'a strange hodge-podge of Gothic & modern' for the garden front, and defended it stoutly against her objections. Unable to manage him herself, she referred him to her friend Lord Harcourt. George, 2nd Earl Harcourt, was an acquaintance of Horace Walpole, and a friend of Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford, the amateur architect who had provided some of the designs for Strawberry Hill. His enthusiasm for genuine Gothic architecture and for the imitative form of it practised by these two was unbounded and voluble. The study of Gothic antiquities, he told Lady Spencer, 'is my favourite pursuit, and my admiration for our ecclesiastical architecture quite a passion, which I perceive grows stronger every day'. With this passion went an indifference to, if not a positive distaste for, classical models (the former he called the 'poetry', the latter the 'prose' of architecture),^and a violent antipathy towards the neo-Gothic inventions made fashionable by William Kent and popularized by William Halfpenny a generation earlier. Both Harcourt's sentimental medievalism and his insistence on specific precedent and authority for every element of modern Gothic design were apparent in the advice he had already offered Lady Spencer concerning a new housing for the ancient well which gave Holywell its name. The canopy, he recommended, should be copied as closely as possible from an illustration in Pennant's Tours of Wales of an oratory at Shrewsbury 'in the purest Gothic style'. A bench might be added, since this would serve as a garden seat, and at the same time 'give to the whole an air of propriety, as if designed as a resting place for the diseased, or for the wearied pilgrims, who may be lead by ill health or devotion to this sacred fount'. But she must take care that no other 'modern vagaries' were introduced.^° His reaction to Shakespear's plan was therefore predictable enough. One glance told him that it 'could not be endured by any eyes the least conversant with picturesque effects . . * eyery part of every part was execrable'. What outraged him most, as he explained to Lady Spencer, ^^ was that there was 'no authority for anything in it, except for the Gothic buildings of Kent which I assured him were not Gothic at all', and the pattern books of Halfpenny, though 'out of civility, I omitted the last mentioned name'. In general he recommended the builder ''never to attempt to invent, but to execute only such things as were to be found in real Gothic buildings, and not the modern vagaries miscalled by that name'. Having 'sat up till half an hour after one, carefully examining, and accurately remarking on every separate part of this same vile plan', he then proposed a series of altera- tions, reassuring Lady Spencer, who was concerned at the expense to her son, that 'I see no reason why Halfpenny's Gothic should be less costly than real Gothic'. In place of Shakespear's 'abominable idea' of 'a heavy regular parapet', he recommended battlements, which would 'give propriety and produce effect' as well as concealing the roof. This suggested the further notion of obliterating, or at least partly disguising, Talman's plain and unexceptionable north front (which he found 'hideous'), by running up a high battlemented wall to hide the roof and pediment, so producing the effect of a tall turret at
178 the end of the house. As for Shakespear's designs for the bow-window at the end of the gallery, *that semi-circular projection is not only no bow-window, but bears not even the most distant resemblance to one'. He substituted a new design, with elaborate Gothic windows and a gabled roof; 'nothing', he told Lady Spencer in relation to the latter sug- gestion, 'will so much contribute to give an air of i-eal antiquity to your house, and con- sequently to make it picturesque'. The old cloister arches, being 'really Gothic', were to be retained, and 'in order to give an antient & corresponding appearance to the whole front', the existing seventeeth-century windows facing the gardens were to be given 'a plain Gothic moulding' around the frames. Since Shakespear was beginning to doubt whether stucco would stand on the old brickwork, Harcourt advised 'neat rough-cast' with stone- coloured mortar, to make it appear at a distance of the same type and age as the stonework of St Albans Abbey; with climbing plants trained against it 'an antique effect [would] be immediately produced'. 'N.B.', he added, in an appeal to the highst authority, 'Strawberry Hill House is only rough cast.' In order to make sure that imitation rather than invention prevailed in the ornamentation of the house, he sent Lady Spencer sketches of 'a real Gothic window & battlement, which may be of use to you, to keep Mr Shakespear in order'. And he 'supplicated' her to take the builder personally to the Abbey, and there make him copy the various ornaments, pinnacles, and buttresses, so as to leave no room for his 'inventive genius' to 'mongrelize' them. At this point Harcourt called in Lord Camelford, who 'blessed himself at the sight of Shakespear's plans 'as being the most curious performance he ever saw, Esher House (the work of Kent) not excepted'. He approved of Harcourt's modifications, and agreed to revise the plans accordingly, 'which he can do', Harcourt assured Lady Spencer, 'because he can accurately draw architecture, which I cannot'. Meanwhile Shakespear, 'violently out of humour' at this interference by amateurs, took to his bed. Since neither Harcourt nor Camelford could supply his professional expertise, work on the house came to a stand- still, and Lady Spencer had to go to London to mediate between them. Eventually Harcourt, by treating the builder 'with a kind of vulgar facetiousness which suited his taste', ^^ managed to win him over, and the alterations proceeded according to Camelford's revised plans. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century illustrations of the house show that all Harcourt's suggestions appear to have been followed, except (presumably for reasons of common sense as well as expense) that of adding battlements to the north front (fig. i). Harcourt had predicted that the garden front, if finished according to his taste, would be 'pretty picturesque & tollerably chaste, which is more than can be said for every part of the house on Strawberry Hill'. Though the result was not to everyone's liking. Lady Spencer answered all objections with 'the best plea I have, that it was Convenient & I lik'd it', and comforted herself with the opinion of a kindly friend, that he had seen 'many places that have struck him as great Magnificent fine beautiful, but he never saw any that had impressed on his mind the Idea of Comfort so much as this'.^^ The gardens at Holywell, with the magnificent backdrop of the Abbey, their changes of level as the ground fell away towards the river, and their free access to water along the
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bO H southern boundary, had always been the property's chief claim to distinction. But the geo- metric pattern of parterres and water-gardens, which had been the pride and the personal creation of the ist Duke of Marlborough in the 1690s, was utterly unacceptable to the taste of the later eighteenth century, and by Lady Spencer's day it had been allowed to fall into ruins. Regarding the garden as her 'grand object in point of pleasure as [well as] profit', she at once commissioned a new design from Samuel Lapidge, the former assistant of Capability Brown (who had died only a few months before), and head gardener at Hampton Court. ^"^ The changes he introduced can clearly be seen by comparing the plan of Andrews and Wren of 1766, with that of Thomas Godman of the early nineteenth century (fig. 2). The square entrance courtyard was provided with entrance lodges and an oval gravel sweep enclosing a plantation of trees, while in the main garden an asymmetrical pattern of flowing curves was substituted for the old rectilinear layout. The different areas were linked and enclosed by a serpentine walk, known as the 'grand tour', and there was extensive planting of trees and shrubs, carefully contrived to form natural-looking groves and clumps along its length. The rectangular canal which formed the principal feature of the water-gardens was given a more lake-like appearance by rounding the corners and raising a small artificial island at one end. Provided with a pair of swans to keep down the weeds, the long sheet of water gave 'a thousand charms by its reflections to every object within its reach'.^^ But even while these changes were taking place, the movement towards the picturesque, affecting gardens as well as architecture, was making the more well-mannered landscapes of Capability Brown seem outmoded. Within a few years Lady Spencer was obliged to take steps to make at least part of the small area at her disposal more 'Wild & Picturesque', though for a time it seemed that the disruption would be out of all proportion to the result. 'The whole town has been in an uproar at the size of the immense misshapen trees I have been bringing down for this last fortnight', she wrote to a friend, 'All the Machines & Tackle I have borrowed or hired are broken with their Weight, the Labourers are worn out', and the gardens 'torn to pieces'. In despair she wished her 'poor Garden & bridges could ever get back to their former tameness'. Yet in the end the effect was surprisingly pleasing: 'my little Island which was as flat as a pancake is much improved by having the ground on it varied & the bridge is for all the World (as the Servants say) as if an old tree had fallen down'. The old pollards which had been used to fashion a covered seat in the form of'a sort of Cave or Cell', looked as if'they had grown on the spot... for Ages', and the view from them was 'uncommonly pretty'.^^ Lady Spencer's many affectionate descriptions of Holywell (in verse as well as in her letters), ^^ together with a handful of prints and sketches, are now all that remain of this partial attempt at a Gothic villa. To accommodate their alterations of the 1680s, the Churchills had obtained permission to divert a short section of the road in an arc to the west of the house. One hundred and fifty years later the increasing inconvenience of this outweighed the picturesqueness and historical associations of a house which had outlived its day and which, after Lady Spencer's death in 1814, no longer had the
181 ^. Plan of St Albans by Andrews and Wren, 1766: detail showing Holywell House and grounds. Add. MS. 32351, fol. 23
Fig. 2b. Plan of St Albans, 1822, by Thomas fe\S^ Godman: detail showing Holywell House and _^
1 James Boaden (ed.). Private Correspondence of British Architects 1660-1840 (London, 1978), David Garrick (London, 1831-2), vol. ii, p. 179: P- 633- Lady Spencer to Garrick, 6 October 1776. In the 8 The account of the alterations which follows is Duchess's later years, its principal use was also as taken from the Althorp Papers: letters from *a quiet inn' for the family on their way north; see Lady Spencer to Mrs Howe, 18 March, 6, 7, 9, Gladys Scott Thomson (ed.). Letters of a Grand- 14, 15, 21, 22, 26, 28, 30 April, 5 May 1784; Mrs mother (London, 1943), p. 63: to the Duchess of Howe to Lady Spencer, 8 April 1784. Bedford, 8 August 1732. 9 Ibid.: Harcourt to Lady Spencer, 13 May 1783. 2 F. Harris, 'Holywell House, St Albans: An Early 10 Ibid.: 19 February 1784. Work by William Talman.'", Architectural His- n Ibid.: 29 April, 2 May, 3 June, 13 July 1784, for tory, xviii (1985), pp. 32-6. The original appear- all Harcourt's proposals concerning Holywell. ance of the garden wing can be deduced from 12 Ibid.: Lady Spencer to Mrs Howe, 5 May 1784; evidence in the Althorp Papers concerning its Harcourt to Lady Spencer, 2 May, 3 June 1784. alteration in 1784, particularly from the letters of 13 Ibid.: Harcourt to Lady Spencer, 15 June 1784; Lady Spencer and Lord Harcourt cited in nn. 8 Lady Spencer to Mrs Howe, 30 April 1784, and 11 below. These papers, recently acquired by 22 June 1785. the British Library, have not yet been perma- 14 Ibid.:HarcourttoLady Spencer, 24 March 1784; nently numbered or arranged. Lady Spencer to Lady Duncannon, 16 January 3 Althorp Papers: to Caroline Howe, 3 May 1784. 1784; Lady Spencer to 2nd Earl Spencer, 4 Ibid.: Lady Spencer's miscellaneous correspon- 20 March 1784; Colvin, Dictionary, p. 506. dence, box 14: diary notes of the days following 15 Ibid.: Lady Spencer to Mrs Howe, 17 March her husband's death. 1784, 12 June 1785, 6June 1803. 5 Ibid.: Lady Spencer to Lady Duncannon, 16 Ibid.: to Mrs Howe, 29 July, 8 August 1804, 3 February 1784; to Mrs Howe, 5 February, 12 April 1805. 9 April 1784; Mrs Howe to Lady Spencer, 8 April 17 There are several drafts and copies of some very 1784. pedestrian verses by Lady Spencer, entitled 6 Sir Denis Le Marchant {ed.). Memoir of John 'Holywell House June 1788', in box 10 of her Charles, Viscount Althorp, 3rd Earl Spencer miscellaneous correspondence in the Althorp (London, 1876), p. xix. Papers. 7 Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of
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