by Paula Byrne
13
The Crimson Velvet Cushions
Jane Austen visited many fine houses. And the inheritance of great houses is at the heart of her novels. But only the grandest families could boast a private chapel. Of all the houses Austen visited, only one had this feature. In the chapel at Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, it is still possible to see today a row of ‘crimson velvet cushions on the ledge of the family gallery’. The phrase is from Mansfield Park, where they are observed – along with a profusion of mahogany – by Fanny Price upon first entering the private chapel at Sotherton Court.1 The little detail of the cushions conveys her disappointment that the room does not seem more like a proper church. It was an observation from the author’s own experience. At Stoneleigh, as so often, Jane Austen’s sharp eye took in seemingly inconsequential minutiae and turned them to unexpected use. But what was she doing there in Warwickshire?
Following the death of the Reverend George Austen in January 1805, his widow and her daughters remained in the city till the summer, when they stayed with Edward Knight at Godmersham in Kent. There Jane is to be glimpsed going to the occasional ball in Canterbury or playing at shuttlecock and battledore with her little nephew William. Cassandra also had several invitations to Goodnestone Park, the family home of Edward’s wife, Elizabeth Bridges. In September they maintained their habit of taking a late summer and autumn trip to the seaside, but this time it was Hastings and Worthing instead of Dorset or Devon. They remained in the bracing sea air of Worthing until at least the end of November. It is not known where Jane Austen spent her first Christmas without her father. In January 1806, they were at Steventon, where there were so many memories. The girls stayed for a while with the Bigg-Withers at Manydown – facing an uncertain future, Jane might have wondered about her decision to reject Harris four years before.
Mrs Austen returned to Bath, but retrenchment was necessary. They had given up the spacious premises in which they had lodged when George Austen was alive. She found temporary accommodation in Trim Street, where Cassandra and Jane joined her in March. But within a few weeks someone offered to take the whole house, and they could afford only part of it, so they would soon be homeless. Their best hope was Frank, who was due to be married in the summer, and who generously offered them the chance to live with him and his new wife Mary in Southampton. While he was away for the wedding and honeymoon, they lived an itinerant life – first Clifton, just outside Bristol, then Adlestrop rectory in Gloucestershire, the home of Mrs Austen’s cousin the Reverend Thomas Leigh. They could not have helped noticing that, since their last visit, the Leighs had greatly improved the estate (Thomas’s nephew, James Henry Leigh, lived in the big house). The celebrated landscape gardener Humphry Repton had been engaged, at five guineas a day, to enclose the village green, plant out the cottages, move the entrance to the rectory, open up the back of the house, divert a stream through the garden and create a picturesque view of the lake, visible from both rectory and big house.2 This all provided Jane Austen with raw material to put to good use with Mr Rushworth’s improvements at Sotherton in Mansfield Park.
They left Adlestrop on 5 August in company with Thomas Leigh and his lawyer, Joseph Hill. Their destination was Stoneleigh. Their mission was to press a claim on a much greater estate. On 2 July 1806, the very day when, with what Jane recalled as ‘happy feelings of escape’, the Austen women left the city of Bath, the Honourable Miss Mary Leigh, mistress of Stoneleigh Abbey, had died. She was eccentric, diminutive and without an obvious heir. Thomas Leigh reckoned that the prize might just be his.
In 1786 the last Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh had died unmarried. Edward Leigh, fifth Baron Leigh, was, like Jane Austen’s mother, a descendant of Sir Thomas Leigh, an Elizabethan lord mayor of London. Edward was a clever young man and a scholar of Oriel College, Oxford, a keen collector of art, furniture, scientific equipment, musical instruments and books. He made substantial improvements to Stoneleigh and before settling to marriage planned to embark on a Grand Tour in 1767. Prior to this, he seemed perfectly normal and sane, but payments made in 1767 to a leading doctor specializing in mental illness, John Monro, who practised at Bedlam Hospital, and to Francis Willis, who later treated the King, suggested that he was in the first stages of serious mental illness.3 By 1774 he was declared insane. A prayer written by his sister speaks of ‘frightful imaginations’ and self-harming.
‘Mrs and Miss Austens will be of the party’: letter from Thomas Leigh to Joseph Hill
He left his estate to his sister Mary, to whom he was extremely close. She was also described as ‘half-mad’. Thereafter, his Lordship specified, Stoneleigh should go ‘to the first and nearest of my kindred, being male and of my name and blood that shall be living at the time of the determination of the several estates’.4 So an heir had to be sought among the various branches of the Leighs. The Reverend Thomas Leigh and his nephew James Henry were well in the frame. Thomas Leigh’s lawyer advised him to take immediate possession – hence the hasty trip with the Austen women. But there was also the possibility that he might resign his claim to the estate in return for a substantial pay-off and annuity. In that case, there was a possibility that Mrs Austen’s brother, Leigh-Perrot, would inherit. This was of interest to the Austen family because their son James was Leigh-Perrot’s heir. Perhaps the day would come when he might inherit Stoneleigh and find quarters for them in one of its many wings.
Stoneleigh Abbey looks as one might imagine the fictional Pemberley. A first glance at its palatial exterior and it could be mistaken for Chatsworth.5 It is sometimes said that Pemberley was based on Chatsworth, since it is in Derbyshire. Austen may have seen Chatsworth when she went north to visit Edward Cooper, but Stoneleigh is a likelier model: it was the biggest house she ever stayed in.
Sitting in 690 acres of parkland overlooking the River Avon, deep in Warwickshire, the Abbey was founded in 1154, when Henry II granted lands to a small community of Cistercian monks. Following the dissolution of the monasteries the Abbey passed into the hands of Thomas Leigh. This was where, as Mrs Austen’s family never ceased to remember, Sir Thomas Leigh, grandson of the second Thomas, entertained Charles I when the gates of Coventry were shut against him. As a reward, Charles gave Leigh a barony. For four hundred years, then, Stoneleigh Abbey had been the country seat of Jane Austen’s elevated relatives, the Leighs. Edward Leigh, the third Lord Leigh, built the imposing baroque façade, the West Wing. The west range is in ashlar stone, fifteen bays long, three and a half storeys high.
The group arrived on 5 August and stayed for nine days. Joseph Hill, the lawyer who travelled with them, was agent and executor for Mary Leigh as well as friend and lawyer to the Reverend Thomas. He was the right man to be with at the time. He was also a great friend of Jane Austen’s favoured poet, William Cowper. Hill was made Secretary of Lunatics in 1778, good preparation for service to mad Mary. During most of his life Cowper, who suffered from depression bordering on madness, was financially dependent on Hill. In his honour Cowper wrote an ‘Epistle to Joseph Hill’, which was published along with Jane Austen’s beloved The Task, describing him as ‘honest man, close-buttoned to the chin,/Broad-cloth without, and a warm heart within’.6 Joseph, clearly sensitive to mental illness, assisted the Leighs, both Edward and Mary. He was a remarkable man and one yearns for a fragment of the table talk he shared with Jane Austen at Stoneleigh. She may have heard tales of the last days of poor Cowper, who had died in deep depression in 1800.
Mrs Austen immediately wrote to Mary Lloyd, giving a vivid description of the house and grounds. She captures its vastness – forty-five windows in the main range, twenty-six bedrooms in the new part alone, ample grounds ideal for walking:
And here we all found ourselves on Tuesday … Eating Fish, venison and all manner of good things, at a late hour, in a Noble large Parlour hung round with family Pictures – every thing is very Grand and very fine and very Large – The House is larger than I could have supposed – we can now find our way about it.
She expected to find ‘everything about the place very fine and all that’, but she had not anticipated its being ‘so beautiful’ in the modern way – she had imagined ‘long Avenues, dark rookeries and dismal Yew Trees’. But there were ‘no such melancholy things’. Instead she found that ‘The Avon runs near the house amidst Green Meadows bounded by large and beautiful Woods, full of delightful Walks.’7 She continued with a description of the interior:
I will now give you some idea of the inside of this vast house, first premising that there are 45 windows in front, (which is quite strait, with a flat Roof) 15 in a row – you go up a considerable flight of steps (some of the offices are under the house), into a large Hall, on the right hand, the dining parlour, within that the Breakfast room, where we generally sit, and reason good, tis the only room (except the Chapel), which looks towards the River, – on the left hand the Hall is the best drawing room, within that a smaller one, these rooms are rather gloomy, Brown wainscot and dark Crimson furniture, so we never use them except to walk thro’ to the old picture Gallery; Behind the smaller drawing Room is the State Bed chamber with a high, dark crimson Velvet Bed, an alarming apartment just fit for an Heroine, the old Gallery opens into it – behind the Hall and Parlour a passage all across the house containing 3 staircases and two back Parlours – there are 26 Bed Chambers in the new part of the house, and a great many (some very good ones) in the Old. There is also another gallery, fitted up with modern prints on a buff paper, and a large billiard-room. Every part of the house and offices is kept so clean, that were you to cut your finger I do not think you could find a cobweb to wrap it up in. I need not have written this long letter, for I have a presentiment that if these good people live until next year you will see it all with your own eyes.8
Mrs Austen clearly had something of a Gothic imagination, what with her expectation of dismal yews and her image of that ‘alarming apartment just fit for an Heroine’.
The Abbey is entered through the hall or saloon, a spectacular room decorated with rococo plasterwork depicting the myth of Hercules. The rooms to the left of the saloon, which Mrs Austen thought dark and gloomy, are north-facing which makes them feel cold. The women preferred the rooms to the right which are filled with light and warmth.
Mrs Austen was herself an excellent ‘huswife’ and she greatly enjoyed inspecting the kitchen garden, bursting with ripe fruit in the summer sunshine:
I do not fail to spend some time every day in the Kitchen Garden where the quantities of small fruit exceed anything you can form an idea of … The ponds supply excellent fish the Park excellent Venison; there is also plenty of Pigeons, Rabbits, and all sort of Poultry, a delightful Dairy where is made Butter food Warwickshire Cheese and Cream ditto. One man servant is called the Baker, He does nothing but Brew and Bake. The quantity of Casks in the Strong Beer Cellar is beyond imagination.
After morning prayer in the family chapel, they had breakfast of ‘Chocolate, Coffee and tea, Plumb Cake, Pound Cake, Hot Rolls, Cold Rolls, bread and butter, and dry toast for me’.
Despite her preference for ‘dry toast’, Mrs Austen loved her food, as did Elizabeth Twiselton, the Dowager Lady Saye and Sele, who was known to be an epicure. She was also there at Stoneleigh, as her daughter Julia was married to James Henry Leigh of Adlestrop, another strong claimant to the estate. They too had travelled hot foot to the big house. Lady Saye and Sele’s husband had cut his throat with his own razor in 1788 before stabbing himself with his sword. She told Jane and Cassandra tales of how, following her husband’s suicide, she ate only boiled chicken for two weeks and had never eaten it since: ‘Poor Lady Saye and Sele’, wrote Jane’s mother, ‘to be sure is rather tormenting, tho’ sometimes amusing and affords Jane many a good laugh.’9 She later amused them by asking with grave importance ‘if the macaroni was made with Parmesan’. There was a deathly silence before the servant replied ‘Yes, my lady.’
According to her niece Caroline, Jane Austen made a conquest at Stoneleigh in the person of a visitor called Robert Holt-Leigh, a Member of Parliament from Wigan. Mrs Austen said that he was ‘a single man, the wrong side of forty; chatty and well bred and has a large estate’.10 Jane herself left no account of the visit (there are no surviving letters for the whole of 1806), so we have no way of knowing whether the little group discussed cousin Cassandra Hawke’s sentimental novel or cousin Cassandra Cooke’s Gothic thriller, but many details from Stoneleigh Abbey found their way into Austen’s novels. It is possible that the idea of a newly modernized neoclassical house retaining its Gothic name of Abbey gave her some ideas for Northanger Abbey – we have no idea what the name or the character of the big house was in the early version of that novel, which by this time Austen had already sent to a publisher. What is much more certain is that the geography and architectural detail of Stoneleigh Abbey bear a strong resemblance to the description of Sotherton Court in Mansfield Park.
At Sotherton Court the view from the west front ‘looked across a lawn to the beginning of the avenue’, exactly as at Stoneleigh. Both houses have a wood, a stream and a ‘wilderness’. The Abbey is situated far away enough from the church so that residents and visitors would not be disturbed by hearing the bells ringing, just as the village of Stoneleigh is at some distance from the great house. It has an ostentatious excess of windows – ‘more’, as Henry Crawford puts it, ‘than could be supposed to be of any use than to contribute to the window tax’.11 Under the guidance of Mrs Rushworth, the party are given a tour of Sotherton Court whose rooms are described as ‘all lofty, and many large, and amply furnished in the taste of fifty years back, with shining floors, solid mahogany, rich damask, marble, gilding and carving’12 – all reminiscent of Stoneleigh. Family portraits line the walls, including a woman called Elizabeth Wentworth, whose romantic story mirrors that of Anne Elliot in Persuasion.13
Above all, Jane Austen uses the details of Stoneleigh Chapel to flesh out the important scene in Mansfield Park where Mary Crawford discovers that Edmund is to be a clergyman. Mrs Rushworth takes her guests to the Sotherton family chapel via the servants’ entrance, below the overhanging family gallery furnished with those ‘crimson velvet cushions’ peeping over the ledge. Sotherton Chapel is a ‘spacious, oblong room … nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand … no arches, no inscriptions, no banners’.14 Edmund Bertram points out that the family ancestors are not buried here but in a local church, just as the Leigh ancestors were buried in the local church. All of these details are taken from the Stoneleigh visit.
And then of course there is Pemberley:
It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; – and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.15
Mr Darcy’s Pemberley and Mr Knightley’s significantly named Donwell Abbey in Emma seem organically connected to the surrounding countryside. They appear to have evolved naturally and gradually rather than to have been designed to display the taste of a particular person. Donwell has ‘ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight – and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up’.16
It would appear that the Reverend Thomas Leigh did the right thing in pressing his claim with the Austen women at his side. He became tenant of Stoneleigh for life. He moved in and, as at Adlestrop, but on a much grander scale, Humphry Repton was hired to make improvements. To help clients visualize his designs, Repton produced ‘Red Books’ (so called for their binding) in which he proposed an idealized view with explanatory text and watercolours to show ‘before’ and ‘after’ views. The Stoneleigh Abbey Red Book is one of his
finest and largest, although not all of the improvements he suggested were implemented. Still, he did widen the River Avon in front of the house to form a lake. A picturesque stone bridge was built, based on a design of Inigo Jones, and an inspirational reflective pool was created to mirror in its stillness the south façade. Repton regarded the estate as one of his more important commissions. It is tempting to think that he was discussed by the family during the Stoneleigh visit, as he is mooted as the right man to undertake the improvements at Sotherton in Mansfield Park: ‘I should be most thankful to any Mr Repton who would undertake it, and give me as much beauty as he could for my money.’17
Humphry Repton (with umbrella) personally supervises the widening of the Avon as one of his ‘improvements’ at Stoneleigh
The unmarried Reverend Thomas Leigh died in 1813, at which point his nephew James Henry Leigh took the life tenancy. He and his wife Julia (Twiselton), a beautiful and forceful woman, made further improvements to the landscape and oversaw extensive interior redecoration. Their son Chandos then inherited. He would eventually be made Baron Leigh of the second creation. At the time of Jane Austen’s visit to Stoneleigh he was Lord Byron’s fag at Harrow.
As for Mr Leigh-Perrot, Jane Austen’s uncle, he resigned his claim in favour of a large lump sum and an annuity. Jane Austen perhaps hoped that he might have pressed further. She does not appear to have been a fan of James Henry Leigh. She referred to the Reverend Thomas Leigh on his death in 1813 as ‘the respectable, worthy, clever, agreeable Mr Tho. Leigh [who] died the possessor of one of the finest Estates in England and of more worthless Nephews and Nieces than any other private Man in the united Kingdoms’. In the next breath she turns to her aunt, Mrs LeighPerrot: ‘There is another female sufferer on the occasion to be pitied. Poor Mrs L. P. – who would now have been Mistress of Stonleigh had there been none of that vile compromise, which in good truth has never been allowed to be of much use to them. – It will be a hard trial.’18 Just for a moment, she would have allowed herself the fantasy of her brother James, the LeighPerrots’ heir, becoming the eventual owner of Stoneleigh.