UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON FACULTY OF HUMANITIES Department of History ‘X’ Marks the Spot: The History and Historiography of Coleshill House, Berkshire by Karen Fielder Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2012 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY Doctor of Philosophy ‘X’ MARKS THE SPOT: THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLESHILL HOUSE, BERKSHIRE by Karen Fielder Coleshill House was a much admired seventeenth-century country house which the architectural historian John Summerson referred to as ‘a statement of the utmost value to British architecture’. Following a disastrous fire in September 1952 the remains of the house were demolished amidst much controversy shortly before the Coleshill estate including the house were due to pass to the National Trust. The editor of The Connoisseur, L.G.G. Ramsey, published a piece in the magazine in 1953 lamenting the loss of what he described as ‘the most important and significant single house in England’. ‘Now’, he wrote, ‘only X marks the spot where Coleshill once stood’. Visiting the site of the house today on the Trust’s Coleshill estate there remains a palpable sense of the absent building. This thesis engages with the house that continues to exist in the realm of the imagination, and asks how Coleshill is brought to mind not simply through the visual signals that remain on the estate, but also through the mental reckoning resulting from what we know and understand of the house. In particular, this project explores the complexities of how the idea of Coleshill as a canonical work in British architectural histories was created and sustained over time. By considering how past owners of Coleshill subscribed to the notion of the canonical house this thesis contributes new knowledge about architectural ideology and practice in the long eighteenth century. Furthermore an examination of the pivotal moment when the house was lost in the mid-twentieth century sheds new light on how approaches to historic architecture impacted on ideas of national heritage at the time. This allows us not only to become more cognizant of the absent house, but the practice of formulating architectural histories is itself exposed to scrutiny. i ii CONTENTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ............................................................................................ i ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... i FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ...................................................................................................... i DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY ..................................................................................................... i Doctor of Philosophy .............................................................................................................. i ‘X’ MARKS THE SPOT: THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLESHILL HOUSE, BERKSHIRE ............................................................................................................................... i by Karen Fielder ...................................................................................................................... i CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................. iii List of figures ........................................................................................................................ vii DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP .......................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ xiii Definitions and abbreviations ............................................................................................. xv INTRODUCTION: ‘X’ Marks the Spot ..................................................................................... 1 Coleshill House ................................................................................................................... 1 The Site of the House ......................................................................................................... 4 The Research Method ........................................................................................................ 7 The Historiographic Archive .............................................................................................. 9 The Documentary Archive ............................................................................................... 10 The Historiographic Myth ................................................................................................ 11 Architectural Historiography ........................................................................................... 13 Structure of the Thesis .................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER 1: The Historiography and Mythography of Coleshill House ........................... 23 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 23 Visual Historiography: Coleshill House and its Image .................................................. 27 Eighteenth-Century Engraved Plates ........................................................................... 27 Nineteenth-Century Pictorial Representation ............................................................. 45 Country Life and Twentieth-Century Photography ..................................................... 49 Coleshill House: The Jonesian Masterpiece and Narratives of Biography .................... 58 Eighteenth-Century Jonesian Revival ........................................................................... 58 Nineteenth-Century Attribution ................................................................................... 59 Jones and the English Renaissance ............................................................................. 62 The Reattribution of Coleshill House .......................................................................... 65 Coleshill’s Classical Mythography: Narratives of Style .................................................. 75 Stylistic Periodisation ................................................................................................... 75 iii The English Renaissance Classical House .................................................................. 76 Popular Histories .......................................................................................................... 82 The Demolished House ................................................................................................ 84 The Palladian House ..................................................................................................... 89 The Astylar House ........................................................................................................ 94 CHAPTER 2: ‘To Make Coleshill House Compleat’: Coleshill House in the Long Eighteenth Century ............................................................................................................ 101 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 101 Sir Mark Stuart Pleydell .................................................................................................. 106 The Pleydell-Bouveries ................................................................................................... 112 Sir Mark’s Alterations and Lord Burlington .................................................................. 115 Jacob’s Alterations ......................................................................................................... 120 Repairing the House ...................................................................................................... 129 Improving Amenities ..................................................................................................... 139 Spatial Replanning ......................................................................................................... 142 Altered Interiors ............................................................................................................. 145 The Altered Setting ........................................................................................................ 158 CHAPTER 3: ‘The Most Regretted of All Lost Houses’: Coleshill and the National Trust ............................................................................................................................................ 185 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 185 The Acquisition Proposal ............................................................................................... 193 Coleshill and Ernest Cook ............................................................................................. 198 Fire! ................................................................................................................................. 205 Rebuild the Ruin? ........................................................................................................... 207 The Ministries ................................................................................................................