The private palaces of London : past and present

Front matter

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Preface

IN this work I have endeavoured to rehabilitate in some way the characteristics of the more important of the famous London houses which have long since passed away, as well as to give an account of the annals of those which still remain ; together with references to the notable people who have, from time to time, been connected with them. So far as existing mansions are concerned, I have also attempted to give some idea of the beautiful objects which are contained in them — particularly the pictures, without setting down mere lists of painter’s names and subjects treated; and I have tried, by producing, where possible, some interesting -provenance, or by connecting these works of art with some interesting figure, to avoid making my account of them a merely bald catalogue which, valuable as such a compilation is in itself, is rarely very exhilarating to the general reader.

The difficulty, which it would be mere affectation to ignore, of doing this has been so largely modified by the generous help extended to me by the owners of the great mansions I have described, that I feel that if I have attained any measure of success it is due to their kindness, and to the interest they have shown in this work. Many of them have afforded me personal help ; many have placed at my disposal privately printed catalogues, and have permitted documents to be searched for the elucidation of some obscure point in the history of their mansions, and have, besides, given me other aids to accuracy of description ; while all of them have permitted me to see all I wanted to see, and to describe all I have attempted to describe ; and I here most gratefully acknowledge their many kindnesses.

My thanks are also due to many of the private secretaries and other representatives of these owners, who have also aided me in my researches.

With regard to the chapter on the old houses in Whitehall, I have, of course, largely based it on that portion of Canon Sheppard’s ‘The Old Royal Palace of Whitehall which specifically deals with them, and is particularly rich in its record of old leases and other documentary evidence, without which it would have been impossible to give in many instances a connected genealogy of these interesting residences. I have browsed

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much here, and with a light heart, because I received the author’s generous and ungrudging permission to do so.

So far as the past private palaces, other than those in Whitehall, are concerned I have made use of the rich topographical literature dealing with London which we possess ; but, as usual, to no one work am I more indebted than to Mr. Wheatley’s London Past and Present.

Waagen and Passavant, Smith and Mrs. Jameson, have helped me much with regard to the great picture collections I have had occasion to deal with ; while from innumerable other works on art and artists I have culled here and there a fact which has often enabled me to say something more about a picture than to merely set down the name of its painter or the nature of its subject.

I am only too well aware that I might have done better — but I have done as well as I could, and above all I have endeavoured to “ set down nought in malice ” ; and if among my readers there be some to whom what I try to describe is well known, and therefore vieux jeu , I would ask them to remember that my chief aim has been to make known to those who may not be so familiar with these great houses, the beautiful things that are contained in them, and the intrinsic interest that centres in each.

With regard to the illustrations of this book the first ten are reproductions from old prints and drawings in the Crace Collection ; those of the three pictures in the Bridgewater House Gallery are from photographs taken by Mr. J. F. Hollyer of 9 Pembroke Square, Kensington ; while those of the interiors and exteriors of the various houses are reproduced from photographs taken by Messrs. Bedford Lemere & Co. of 147 Strand, W.C., Mr. H. N. King of 8 Avenue Road, Shepherd’s Bush, and Mr. Reginald Haines of 4 Southampton Row. All these photographs are copyright, and I wish to associate myself with my publishers in acknowledging the courtesy of the abovenamed gentlemen in allowing these reproductions to illustrate so graphically my pages.

E. B. C.

Introduction

IF we sought for one particular feature distinguishing London from the other capitals of Europe, apart from its immense proportions, it would probably be found in the number of its large houses many of which are indeed the private palaces that I have here called them. The chief streets of the Metropolis are easily equalled and excelled by those in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna ; its churches, numerous as they are, and, in many cases, architecturally fine, can hardly compare with those in many of the lesser continental towns ; its parks and open spaces do not greatly excel in beauty those of Brussels or Paris ; but its great houses are, as they have always been, a distinctive note in the picture, and, mutatis mutandis , may, in many cases, compare with those palaces for which Venice was once famous. But there is this difference between these mansions on the banks of the Thames and those on the shores of the Adriatic ; the latter have in most instances passed from their once high estate to more utilitarian uses, and their chief glory lies in the beauty of their exteriors ; whereas, if the majority of the London palaces cannot lay claim to such outwardly striking attributes, nearly every one of them contains such a wealth of beautiful objects — pictures, furniture, china, and a thousand and one objets d’art — that they may defy comparison with the chateaux of France, and even with Venetian palazzi in the days of their prosperity.

In many cases, too, these old houses remain in the hands of the great families whose names have been associated with them for generations, and where this is not the case, they have been lucky enough to pass into the possession of those whose instinct and pride it seems to be to preserve intact the past traditions connected with them.

Here and there, indeed, we find some great mansion which has had a later genesis in the accumulation of wealth ; others that have passed into alien hands ; but in either case, as if a tutelary deity had guarded the ghosts that haunt its stones or the spot on which it has been raised, its owners have either emulated the spirit of an earlier day by filling it with the precious relics of antiquity, or have preserved with reverent care its former characteristics, and have, in many cases, restored to their old home those treasures of art which formed, in a bygone age, its chief adornment, and which in the course of time had been alienated, for a period, from it.

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Subject to the inevitable fate which it would seem must almost necessarily overtake even the finest buildings of this kind in a great and growing city like London, some of the great houses that have remained till within our own recollection in private hands, have either passed away or have been converted to alien, if so far as the general public is concerned better, uses. Harcourt House in Cavendish Square, which is to-day represented by a huge, and considering its position in such a “ quadrate,” incongruous block of residential flats, and Ashburnham House, once at the corner of Hay Hill and Dover Street, have been subjected to such a transformation ; the wonderful Northumberland House at Charing Cross is now almost forgotten, so entirely has the remembrance of its Jacobean faQade and its famous Lion been effaced by building development, and the construction of the street that by its name alone preserves its fleeting memory ; while many of the great houses in Whitehall have either entirely disappeared or have been transformed into portions of Government offices, curiously intermixed with more modern and elaborate erections, so that they have the air of some human relic of an earlier period, who has “ out-stayed his welcome while,” and still wears the garb of a day that is gone.

But besides these which we have ourselves seen pass away or suffer a change as startling as it seems inevitable, there remains to be recorded a large number of great houses which are known to us merely by the pencil of the artist or the pen of the topographer.

In the first place there is the remarkable series of noble mansions which once existed in the heart of the City itself. These old private palaces, or Inns as they were formerly called, once shed lustre over streets now so wholly commercial as the Minories or Aldersgate Street, and districts now so unfashionable as Clerkenwell and Holborn ; then there was that long line of palaces which extended on the south side of Fleet Street and the Strand, from Devonshire House which occupied a large portion of the site of the present Devonshire Square, to York House the magnificent residence of the brilliant Buckingham the memory of whose more than royal establishment is to-day preserved only by the names of the streets that exhaust the words of his chief title. Where now are Bedford House and Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, which in their day were so much the wonders of London, that foreigners were wont to be taken to see them as among the great sights of the capital ? Where is Clarendon House, which, immemor sepulcri, the great Chancellor raised at infinite pains and expense, and could hardly be said to have inhabited, and which in the eyes of popular indignation was a concrete proof of his time-serving and apostacy ? “ Where are the

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snows of yester-year ? ” You shall as soon find them as you shall Troy, or the traditional Maypole of the Strand !

And then there are those great mansions that either exist in the shape of more recent erections on their sites ; or those which have, by a process of rebuilding, lost their original characteristics, and have become identified with other usage. Of the former, there comes to mind Berkeley House, the splendid forerunner of the present Devonshire House, and old Montagu House, Whitehall, on the site of which the far more magnificent present Montagu House now stands ; among the latter may be mentioned Burlington House, over which the architect-earl who built it took such infinite pains, and which is now, with its added Piccadilly front, the home of the Royal Academy, and the headquarters of several learned societies ; and Melbourne House, once the home of Lord Melbourne (not the Prime Minister but his father), and afterwards exchanged by him with the Duke of York for York House, Piccadilly, which is now known to all Londoners as “ The Albany,” from the Royal Duke’s second title. Then there is Newcastle House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the former town residence of the eccentric Duke of Newcastle, the hero of half-a-hundred stories, but now the splendid legal offices of a well-known firm ; and Uxbridge House, in Burlington Gardens, the fine work of Vardy and Bonomi, to-day occupied as the Western Branch of the Bank of England ; and, to mention but one more instance, there is Schomberg House, Pall Mall, of which but a fragment remains, but which is sufficient to enable us to realise how imposing must have been the entire building before the War Office alienated its centre and east wing.

But, notwithstanding all these, and how many others, that have passed away or have been converted by the exigencies of time into other uses, so many great mansions are still with us, most of them fraught with historic memories, most of them haunted by the ghosts of the great and beautiful of a past day, all of them filled with such a wealth of splendid objects the outcome of the artistic endeavour of all ages and of all countries, that London, as I began by saying, may still glory in the possession of an unrivalled series of private palaces.

Nothing helps to show more clearly the vagaries of fashion in the matter of residential locality, or the unhasting, unresting flow of citizens westward, than the relative position occupied to-day by these great houses, with that occupied by their forerunners. As we have seen, the City was naturally, when we remember the limitations of London in those days, the first fashionable quarter ; as time went on some more daring spirits ventured so far westward as Charing Cross and the Strand ; others selected the open country of Bloomsbury ; and yet others found

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INTRODUCTION their way into Lincoln’s Inn Fields ; but with the reign of Charles II. and the inception of St. James’s Square by Lord St. Albans, the inauguration of the west end, somewhat as we know it to-day, began, and the great houses of Piccadilly sprang into existence. Later still, when Sir Richard Grosvenor commenced the development of the immense property now covered by Mayfair, which had come to him through Mary Davies, an impulse was given to the erection of fine houses in this quarter, and even the magnificent Chesterfield — the glass of fashion and the mould of form — did not disdain to erect the splendid mansion which luckily still exists although shorn of its ample gardens, in a spot where, as he once humorously said, thieves and murderers so abounded that he would be obliged to keep a watch-dog.

Nowadays, however, the case is very different. The private palaces of London cluster together, if not within that circumscribed radius which Theodore Hook considered the quintessence of fashion, at least within what we, in our enlarged ideas, are apt to regard as the centre of fashionable life. Piccadilly and Park Lane, and the area known as Mayfair of which these famous thoroughfares form two sides, and their immediate vicinity is where we must now look for the residences of the wealthy and the great. True there are some splendid houses north of Oxford Street ; there is Portman House, in Portman Square, and Hertford, formerly Manchester, House in Manchester Square, although this is now, of course, a public gallery, to name but these ; there is Montagu House in Whitehall, and there are the magnificent dwellings in Belgravia ; but, so far as the great mansions with which I here deal are concerned, it is in the more restricted area that we shall chiefly find them.

And this brings me to the subject of the selection I have made. In the first place, it was obviously impossible to be exhaustive ; I mean, to deal with every great house in London which, either from its associations, or from the beauty and interest of its contents, might seem to have claimed a place in these pages.

With regard to the mansions which are no longer in existence, I have endeavoured to say something about the most interesting and the most important of them, but I have not said anything about those that once congregated together in Chelsea, for two reasons ; in the first place because, although many of them were fraught with interest, they were none of them of such magnitude as to be considered exactly as palaces, although parenthetically I am aware that in the case of some I have included, a somewhat wide extension of this term has been necessary ; and secondly because they were in former days looked upon as suburban residences, many of their owners at the same time alternately occupying

INTRODUCTION xm houses in London itself ; while their sites have only become incorporated with the City by its extraordinary extension in more recent days.1 For the same reason, as well as for the better one that it has had a book specially devoted to it, I omit the beautiful and particularly interesting Holland House from this work.

Again there are a number of great houses in Belgravia, which from their size at least might have been thought appropriate for inclusion here ; but it is only their size that would under any circumstances give them a claim to be included in these pages, for necessarily from the relatively recent development of the ground on which they stand, they can pretend to no historic interest, and such splendid piles as Seaford House, Belgrave Square, and Cadogan House, Chelsea, must therefore be passed by with this bare allusion.

Then in Piccadilly, Bath House, and No. i Stratton Street, so long associated with the Baroness Burdett-Coutts ; Hope House, and Hertford House, now clubs and both bearing the name of former illustrious owners, as well as Lord Rothschild’s fine mansion next to Apsley House, could hardly be included, splendid as they are, because had they been, then Curzon House,2 and Alington House ; No. 9, Chesterfield Gardens, Lord Leconfield’s London mansion ; and Bute House, to mention but these, could not have been left out ; and had these been dealt with, there would then have been innumerable important mansions in the great squares with equal claims to be considered, and there would have been no end to the book or its draft on the patience of its readers.

Selection in such cases is always rather a difficult matter ; if, as I hope, I have avoided its being an invidious one, I may reckon myself lucky. To evolve a logical definition of what may be rightly included in a book dealing with Private Palaces is, I fear, almost impossible ; the relative size of a house, though in itself alone obviously no certain criterion, must at least be considered ; historic, personal or intrinsic interest should also be present, while due weight must be given to architectural features, and the beauty of internal decorations and value, monetary as well as sentimental, of the contents ; and although it is of course a fact that there are thousands of fine mansions in London fulfilling some one or

1 Those who are interested in the matter will find details of the old Chelsea houses in L’Estrange’s Village of Palaces.

2 I have been sorely tempted to make an exception in favour of this beautiful mansion, not only because of the charm of its interior with its splendid hall and mahogany staircase, where hang two pieces of superb tapestry for which great sums have been offered ; its fine rooms with their lovely marble mantelpieces and their thousand and one objects of interest and value ; pictures and decorative furniture, and bric-a-brac ; but also because Lord Howe has kindly extended every facility to me for examining the house and its contents ; but unfortunately the scheme of this work makes it impossible for me to do more than merely allude to it in this slight way.

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more of these conditions, the great houses I deal with are, I venture to think, those alone that combine them all.

So far as their beautiful contents are concerned all of them are notable ; some, such as Bridgewater, Stafford and Dorchester Houses, particularly so, on account of the wonders of artistic achievement which hang on their walls or are scattered about within their vast rooms ; some are pre-eminently noticeable on account of their architectural features such as Chesterfield House, Lansdowne House, and Spencer House, and to mention more modern instances, Dorchester House, and Montagu House ; others, if less ambitious, have still some claims in this respect, and are besides hallowed by personal memories ; and of these are Apsley House and Devonshire House, Norfolk House and Portman House.

But these I have named are merely special examples of characteristics which are more or less present in them all, and it is because they are endowed with such attributes that it has seemed to me that such a title as that of Private Palaces is not inappropriate to any of them.

In dealing with these splendid mansions of the past and the present, a reflection inevitably forces itself upon the mind ; a reflection, I am bound to admit, which is not altogether a pleasant one. We have seen how many of those great houses which our forefathers, erected with such loving care and at such vast expense, and each of which no doubt they considered aere perennius, have passed away, and how heavily “ Time’s destroying hand ” has dealt with them. What then are we to suppose will be the fate of some of those which to-day would seem to be armed so as to defy Time ? Some we know are held on leasehold tenure, and when their term has run, may be ruthlessly demolished ; others stand proudly in the midst of ever-changing conditions of building development ; will they be, in their turn, attacked, and if so — what then ? And lastly, if a century and a half ago the westward movement began to carry fashion into what then seemed the outskirts and wilds of the Town ; may not a lesser space of time be sufficient to accentuate this movement so much that what to us are now the unfashionable portions of greater London may become the centre of the fashionable life of the future, as select as Mayfair and more sought after than Belgravia ?

This is, of course, but daring conjecture ; but what has been, may well be again ; and if such a day does ever come, and books continue to be read, as it is not improbable they still even then may be, the equivalent to Macaulay’s New Zealander will perhaps be glad to learn something of the grandeur of these great houses, and will wonder at the wealth and artistic beauty that was accumulated within them.

Contents

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PREFACE . vii

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Chapter I Past City Palaces

CONSIDERING that no such iconoclastic movement as that which on two notable occasions devastated Paris, or, by a superb effort of indignant patriotism, practically wiped out Moscow, has ever occurred in London, it might at first seem strange that so many great private dwellings are but things of the past, and their very sites only known to those who have given themselves to the particular study of ancient landmarks, did we not remember that building development has done what popular excitement has never been able to compass, and indeed has never, except on one occasion,1 seriously attempted. Many of the great houses that are no longer in existence were situated in the eastern portion of London, which fashion began to desert over two hundred years ago, and where they once stood, streets and squares now feebly perpetuate in their names the glories of these once splendid palaces. In this way such noble buildings as Devonshire, Salisbury, Rutland, Northampton, York, and Northumberland Houses are now but memories, and the ample proportions of some of them can but be approximately guessed at by the accounts left by early topographers.2

Again in Piccadilly, three particularly fine mansions have disappeared, Clarendon House, Burlington House (where the imposing buildings known by that name now stand), and Berkeley House, which formerly occupied

1 The Gordon Rioters would have destroyed more than one great private dwelling had they not been checked.

2 The great buildings appertaining to the Church, which congregated along the banks of the Thames south of the Strand and Fleet Street, can hardly be included among private dwellings.

A the site of Devonshire House ; to say nothing of Lanesborough House, where St. George’s Hospital is now situated.

In Whitehall, where once clustered a number of fine private residences, the magnificent but modern Montagu House is the only great mansion which can be regarded in any way as a private palace ; Rutland, Richmond, Portland, Pembroke, Carrington, Fife, Dover, Rochester, and Wallingford Houses have all disappeared ; and Gwydwr House alone survives as the headquarters of one of the Government offices.

Berkeley House, in Spring Gardens, is no more ; nor, if we turn our steps to Bloomsbury, shall we find any trace of Southampton House, once the glory of Bloomsbury Square, or of Montagu House which has long been swallowed up in the vast buildings of the British Museum.

Chandos House in Cavendish Square, which indeed was never completed, is as forgotten as Nineveh ; and all that remains of the vast conceptions of the “ Princely Chandos ” are the two ends of the wings which he had allocated to the use of his servants, one of which was once occupied by a royal princess, and the other has now been metamorphosed into the seemingly inevitable fiats ; while Harcourt House, close by, has in our own day been demolished in favour of the same class of dwellings.

Other instances might be given, as showing that the exigencies of building development have proved more hostile to the older houses of London than many revolutions would probably have been.

Before I turn to some of those private palaces which are one of the glories of London to-day, I shall say something in this chapter about the great houses of the City which have passed away, and the associations that still cluster round their memories.1

Let us begin with Devonshire House, in the City, which stood on the site of the present Devonshire Square, the whole of the north side of which was occupied by it and its ample gardens. It was erected by Jasper Fisher, one of the six clerks in Chancery and a Justice of the Peace, who appears to have built it probably in the earlier portion of Elizabeth’s reign. According to Stow, it was a large and beautiful house, with gardens of pleasure, bowling alleys, and such-like ; and the seeming absurdity of a man in Fisher’s position building such an ostentatious dwelling appears to have struck the populace, who called it in consequence, “ Fisher’s Folly.” Indeed it seems that Fisher ruined himself by this building, and if he ever lived in the place, it could only have been for a relatively short time, for Pennant mentions that a Mr. Cornwallis, and after him, Sir Roger Manners occupied it, before it was taken by the Earl of Oxford,

1 It need hardly be said that there is record of many fine houses in the City which cannot be considered in the light of palaces, and therefore need not be specified.

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Lord High Chamberlain to Elizabeth, who once, at least, entertained the Queen here, on the occasion of one of her visits to the City.

The seventeenth Earl of Oxford succeeded his father in August 1562, and according to Machyn’s Diary , on the 3rd of September, he rode to London, and thence, by “Chepe and Ludgate,to Tempelle bare,” which seems to indicate that he had not then, at any rate, become possessed of Fisher’s mansion. Lord Oxford was held in high favour by Elizabeth, to whom he is traditionally supposed to have presented the first pair of perfumed gloves imported into this country. A passage in the Harleian MSS. refers to him as “ a man in minde and body, absolutely accomplished with honourable endowments.”

Although Pennant seems to indicate that Manners preceded Lord Oxford in the occupation of the house, Stow gives him as residing here after that peer. The matter is not, however, of great importance.

In the reign of James I. the Earl of Argyle was living here, probably having purchased the property after the death of Lord Oxford which occurred in 1604. It is uncertain how long he retained it; but that he was anxious to dispose of it in 1615, is proved by an entry in the East India Company’s Calendar for January 10th, of that year, where it is mentioned as being offered to the Company, but was found “ unfit for their service.” Later the Marquis of Hamilton resided here, and when he died, in March 1625, “his body was carried with much company and torchlights to Fisher’s Folly, his house without Bishopsgate.”

Soon after the death of Lord Hamilton, the second Earl of Devonshire bought the mansion, and died here, on June 20, 1628.1 The house seems to have remained in the Cavendish family till towards the end of the seventeenth century, and in November 1660, we read of King Charles, the Queen, the Duke of York, and other members of the royal family being entertained here by the old Countess of Devonshire, who died, at a great age, in 1689, and whom Strype, writing in 1720, mentions as dwelling here within his memory, “ in great repute for her hospitality.” 2 During the Civil Wars and the Protectorate it is probable that the family withdrew from the place, for the house, or more probably the chapel attached to it, was converted into a Baptist and Presbyterian meeting-house, in which connection it is mentioned by Butler in his Hudibras. Its use as a centre of sectarianism was apparently continued for some years after the Restoration, for not till 1670 was it suppressed

1 The Cavendish family had been associated with this part of the town from the time of Henry VIII. The wife of Thomas Cavendish, Treasurer of the Exchequer to the King, being buried in St. Botolph’s Church.

2 A broadside ballad, called “The Entertainment of Lady Monk at Fisher’s Folly,” dated 1660, is extant.

under the “ Act for the Suppression of Conventicles,” when it was converted into one of the places “ appointed to be used every Lord’s day for the celebration of divine worship by approved orthodox ministers.” Later, at the close of the seventeenth century, when the Penny Post was started, Mr. Murray contrived and set up his “ Bank of Credit,” at Devonshire House, where men “ depositing their goods and merchandize were furnished with Bills of current credit, at two-thirds or three-fourths of the value of said goods ” ; which was apparently a sort of glorified pawnbroker’s business ! As in the case of so many old buildings in London which [disappeared before the industrious J. T. Smith and others who followed in his steps, carefully noted such matters, the date of the demolition of Devonshire House is merely conjectural. It was probably allowed to gradually fall into ruin and decay, and when finally pulled down attracted only the notice of those specifically interested in the ground on which it stood.