Fonthill House (‘Splendens’)

The new Fonthill House built after the fire was a substantial Palladian mansion. Visitors approaching from the north road through the grand archway would see the main front of the house, constructed of a limestone that continued to be noted for its vivid white appearance into the 1790s.¹³ It was an imposing nine-bay mansion with a giant ionic portico rising above the basement storey and proudly supporting in its pediment a tympanum displaying the arms of the Beckfords.¹⁴ The main house had flanking pavilions connected by doric colonnades, curved to embrace the entrance on the north front. The garden elevation, looking south towards Fonthill Gifford church, had rusticated window openings and heavy keystones (Figure 4.4). The house was illustrated across six plates in Wolfe and Gandon’s 1767 volume of Vitruvius Britannicus, earning a place alongside the houses of the Alderman’s contemporaries, including his wife’s cousin the 8th Earl of Abercorn.¹⁵

In the description of the house for this compendium of the houses of the British nobility and gentry, Fonthill House is noted in particular for its copper roof, unusual at that time.¹⁶ When commissioning a handsome new family seat the Alderman looked to the houses of other gentlemen of political power for inspiration, and his attention was drawn to Colen Campbell’s design for Houghton Hall of 1721. ¹⁷ Built for Sir Robert Walpole, a fellow Whig and the first Prime Minister, Houghton would have been the perfect model for the Alderman’s political and social aspirations. The influence of Houghton would also explain perhaps why a house which was conceived in the late 1750s reflects the forms of those built some twenty years earlier rather than the newer styles of its time. This is emphasised by the company Fonthill House keeps in Vitruvius Britannicus, illustrated alongside designs from 20 years before such as Lathom Hall, Lancashire (1725–40) and Moulsham Hall (1728), both by Giacomo Leoni, and Kirtlington Park, Oxfordshire (1742) by William Smith and John Sanderson, to which Fonthill bears a striking similarity.¹⁸ In comparison to the 1761 south front of Kedleston by Robert Adam also published in the volume, Fonthill seems particularly dated; a fact pointed out by a later visitor who stated ‘the house seems a good one to live in, but as a place of modern architecture, by no means equal to Kedleston’.¹⁹

It has been suggested that the new Fonthill House was the work of architect James Paine who was also working on neighbouring Wardour Castle, but the evidence points towards it being the work of Mr Hoare, ‘a London builder’.²⁰ Whether Hoare was working to his own or to another’s designs is uncertain, but it is surprising considering the Alderman’s wealth and position that he did not turn to a more established and higher profile designer. Although the Alderman himself showed no signs of being an amateur architect, he was certainly involved in the design of the new house. His concern to ensure the new building was better protected against fire led to his association with Peter Wyche at the Royal Society. Wyche presented him with a copy of Count Felix-François d’Espie’s publication on securing buildings from fire, and Beckford’s interest in the subject resulted in an invitation from Espie to visit him in Toulouse as well as a promise to send workmen from France to Fonthill.²¹ The Alderman followed this advice and when Reverend Richard Warner visited the house in 1800 he was informed by his guide, presumably the housekeeper, that the house was constructed using arches between storeys to secure it from fire as Espie had recommended.²² Work on the house probably began late in 1755 or early in 1756, and although the exterior was largely completed by the time William Thomas Beckford was born in 1760, works continued into the late 1760s. In 1762 when William and Hester Pitt visited they noted the house was like a ‘thatched cottage’, the copper roof having been blown off in a storm.²³ During the same visit Pitt’s brother-in-law, Earl Temple of Stowe, was evidently shown the Alderman’s plans for the house, suggesting that although construction had started shortly after the fire it remained incomplete at this date.²⁴ The Alderman continued to employ craftsmen at Fonthill until his death in 1770, in a continual process of improving and fitting up. In a letter to his son ca. 1768 he requests that William should watch over ‘my works and workmen’, even permitting the then eight- or nine-year-old to give them ‘necessary directions’ if needed.²⁵ These workmen may have included William Moulton, a Wiltshire builder who from 1768 through to the 1780s was operating from Fonthill House and had perhaps taken on the role of clerk of works.²⁶

The Alderman’s political life in London and nearby Bristol was increasingly gaining him a reputation in the press and Fonthill would have become more recognisable to the reading public, not just in Wiltshire but in the capital and beyond. It soon became a key house to visit on a journey through Wiltshire or on an excursion from the nearby cities of Salisbury or Bath, and by the time his son inherited it was a fixed destination on any country house tour itinerary. Accounts of visitors go some way towards filling the gap created by the lack of any collections of the Alderman’s personal papers.

For the Alderman the knowledge that his house would be compared to other great houses of the county by guests and by tourists would have been a strong inducement to ensure that it would impress anyone who encountered it. Nearby estates included Wardour, Longleat, Longford and Bowood, but it would have been Stourhead, the seat not of the nobility but of the Hoare banking family, that the Alderman would perhaps have been most keen to emulate and surpass. By 1766 Henry Hoare, who had inherited his father’s Palladian mansion and would create the famed landscape at Stourhead, held several of the Alderman’s mortgages with a yearly premium of £2,240.²⁷ As a fellow commoner and man of trade, Hoare was also someone to whom the Alderman would have wished to convey financial solvency, or at least the appearance of it.

No expense was spared in the fitting up of Fonthill House and visitors’ accounts of the furnishing during the Alderman’s lifetime reveal a balance between the house as a political and social asset and as a family home.²⁸ The two most informative accounts of Fonthill House at this time are the diary of the Countess of Shelburne at Bowood House and letters from William Beckford’s tutor Robert Drysdale, who reveals that by 1768 the house was still not completed.²⁹ The Countess and her husband travelled often from Bowood to Fonthill, and Drysdale’s letters also note visits made by the Bishop of Salisbury and Lord and Lady Arundell from Wardour.³⁰

Drysdale appears to have developed a partiality for Elizabeth Beckford, the Alderman’s step-daughter from his wife’s first marriage, and he laments the lack of company for her, revealing much about a young man’s perception of the age and staidness of those who visited the house. While the house was extravagant and even opulent, the visitors were perhaps more in line with the seriousness of both Mrs Beckford’s religious demeanour and the Alderman’s public role. Political allies visited, especially William Pitt, but as Gauci has pointed out it was not to be the stream of powerful men that the Alderman had originally imagined.³¹

All the necessary services were moved out of the main house and accommodated in the pavilions, allowing the ground floor of the mansion (Figure 4.5) to become the main family living space including a parlour, eating room and library. The principal floor above (Figure 4.6) centred upon the double-height Organ Hall, surmounted by a ceiling painting of Apollo and the Muses, by the Italian artist Andrea Casali, although the organ itself was still absent from its intended space in 1768. The theme of Apollo was continued in the chimney piece of the Organ Hall and it was to be these two elements – quantities of paintings by Casali and elaborate chimney pieces – that dominated most accounts and knowledge of the house. Behind the Organ Hall sat the Grand Salon, and to the east the State Bedchamber hung in crimson velvet (and still awaiting the bed in 1768). Next to that was the State Dressing Room, with paintings by ‘great masters’ and a proudly displayed ‘sweet and pretty picture’ by Casali of the young master Beckford.

The bulk of the family portraits were exhibited to guests in the Grand Dining Room, including likenesses of Mr and Mrs Beckford by Casali and portraits of the Alderman’s father and grandfather by Hoare. From the Grand Dining Room visitors could return to the Organ Hall through the Tapestry Room, where a series of Gobelins tapestries would eventually be installed. The suite of rooms to the west of the Organ Hall was dominated by the Picture Gallery (or Great Gallery) and a staircase top-lit by a ‘large skylight’.³² Knowledge of the furnishing of Fonthill House is limited, although the fittings included chimney pieces by John Francis Moore and Thomas Banks.³³ Accounts also show payments to cabinet makers, upholsterers and paper hangers, including £1,500 paid to Chippendale for ‘glasses’.³⁴ Miss Beckford refers to the carver of frames for tables and glasses as ‘Vauxhall’, although it could also have perhaps been Foxhall, who was paid regularly, furnishing the house and taking on the role of agent for the Alderman.³⁵ It has been suggested that Casali advised Beckford on his collection and the artist’s works certainly dominated many of the rooms, both in ceiling paintings and on the walls.

The only known drawings for full interior schemes of the house at this time are by Robert Adam and show designs for the south-east parlour and south-west library on the ground floor, with corresponding ceiling designs dated May 1763.³⁶ Whether any aspect of these schemes was ever executed is unknown, but it seems unlikely, given that no comments are recorded by visitors. On the other hand the library was later refitted by James Wyatt.

While Adam was working on designs for the interiors at Fonthill he also produced a series of alternate designs for a new bridge, presumably on the site of the five-arch bridge across the lake that can be seen in the Joli paintings. The first design for a triple-arched bridge surmounted by a reclining river god is annotated and labelled for Fonthill.³⁷ The other two are titled ‘for Mr Beckford’ and it can be assumed they too are options for Fonthill (see also Chapter 15).³⁸ An intriguing elevation drawing by Adam labelled ‘A design for William Beckford Esq. at Fonthill’ (Figure 4.7) does not correspond with either the dimensions of Fonthill House, or with any reasoning as to why the Alderman, with the house already underway in the first years of the 1760s, would want to alter the newly built elevations. The explanation is likely to be that while this was a design made for Mr Beckford at Fonthill, it was not actually a design for Fonthill, but rather for the alteration of a completely different house on another estate that the Alderman had just purchased.³⁹

Despite owning Fonthill, the Alderman clearly continued to look for new ways to buttress his social position and in 1762 he purchased the estate of Witham Friary in Somerset.⁴⁰ Witham represented an even more direct route than Fonthill did to placing the Beckfords symbolically within the pages of English history. Founded as a friary in 1178 and declared Mother House of the Carthusian order in 1441, Witham was surrendered to the Crown in 1539 and then granted to Ralph Hopton, Knight Marshall of the Palace and Gentleman in Thomas Cromwell’s Household.⁴¹ The estate eventually passed to Sir William Wyndham, who employed the architect James Gibbs to remodel the remaining buildings and form a new house.⁴² Charles Wyndham, Earl of Egremont, sold the estate to John Pennant, the West Indian planter from whom the Alderman purchased it in 1762. The purchase was only made possible through the Alderman taking on heavy mortgages.⁴³

It is possible that the Adam drawing with the Fonthill title was actually for the remodelling of the existing Gibbs house at Witham. The condition of the house at Witham was noted as being poor in 1761 and this perhaps prompted the Alderman to commission Adam to make alterations and repairs when he purchased the building the following year.⁴⁴ In the end, the Alderman chose not to alter the existing house but to build an entirely new mansion at Witham, just as he had done at Fonthill, after the fire. His employment of Adam suggests that by 1762 he was more aware of the architectural climate of the day than he had been in 1755, and was better placed to seek a leading designer of fashionable residences.

Lady Shelburne recorded that the Alderman intended to move his household to Witham from Fonthill.⁴⁵ Witham was better located than Fonthill for communication between London and Bristol and had higher status. The history of the estate stretched back to the Reformation and his association with the estate allowed the Alderman to imply that his family also had ancient lineage and might have been given the property by Henry VIII. Of course most of the Alderman’s contemporaries would have been well aware of Witham’s recent change in ownership. The historic associations it presented, however, would have been invaluable to a commoner such as the Alderman who wished to strengthen his political position; he was coming under increasing attack following the resignation of his close associate Pitt.⁴⁶

The Fonthill builder William Moulton appears to have been responsible for some of the work at Witham.⁴⁷ However, although both elevations and a plan were illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1771 it is uncertain if Witham was ever more than a shell of a house. Lack of any other images and its omission from accounts of tours in the area suggests that Witham remained unfinished and unoccupied.⁴⁸

The key event that must have encouraged the Alderman in commissioning a modern house by Adam at Witham and proposing new works at Fonthill was his election as Lord Mayor of London in 1762. His rise through the political landscape of the City of London had already seen him receive both praise and censure, and what better way to reinforce the statement of his move to a position of power in London than the elaborate gesture of maintaining not just one grand country seat, but two. The Alderman went even further when, in 1763, with Fonthill House still not yet completed and the project at Witham underway, he purchased the estate of Eaton Bray in Berkshire, which must have stretched even his extensive finances.⁴⁹

Two additions at Fonthill House by the Alderman stand out as moments in his path to claiming identity through the building. The first was reported in June 1767, when ‘a large whole length statue of Alderman Beckford’ was transported from the house of sculptor John Francis Moore to Fonthill, where it was to be placed in ‘a niche in the large gallery built for that purpose’.⁵⁰ The imposing statue had already been exhibited in London at the Free Society of Artists. It shows a stately Beckford clutching Magna Carta in one hand and posed perhaps mid-debate. It is likely the Alderman had been intending just such a statue from the beginning of the gallery’s conception, and his image would remain in its niche throughout his and his son’s ownership of the house. It is a portrait in marble of a proud and determined politician, which must have had a marked impression upon viewers (Figure 4.8). His son would later place the sculpture in a high niche in the great entrance hall of Fonthill Abbey, an imposing figure overseeing a pseudo-baronial hall.

The combination of Moore’s statue and Casali’s ceilings gave the gallery at Fonthill an added significance in the creation of the ‘Beckford brand’. In the gallery ceiling, alongside other works by Casali designed to show Beckford as a learned man of the Enlightenment, was a canvas depicting the personification of architecture (Figure 4.9). In this work (now at Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire) the figure of Architecture proudly presents to all who look up to her a portrait of Fonthill House. Thus the Alderman displayed to his visitors the ideal of architecture represented by his own architectural creation, hanging above his own likeness. Images built of stone and hewn from marble confirmed the elegance, steadfastness and above all strength of the man.⁵¹

By 1768 Fonthill House was still incomplete and the following year the Alderman took up the Mayoralty of London for the second time. In 1770 he famously supported the MP John Wilkes in a speech representing the rights of the mercantile man to King George III. The Alderman died shortly afterwards and a large statue of him was commissioned for the London Guildhall with the full text of this speech carved upon it. The statue, as well as prints and medals created by the Alderman’s supporters in his honour, ensured that his image would be immortalised and that the name of Beckford would continue to hold status within the city long after his death.