Holywell House: a Gothic Villa at St Albans
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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'.