To Hugh Robert Hughes Esquire.
Sir,
We your Tenantry residing on the Kinmel Anglesey and Carnarvonshire Estates beg leave with sentiments of profound respect most cordially to welcome you and your amiable and accomplished Bride to Wales, and to offer you our warmest congratulations on your arrival at Kinmel the Hall of your Ancestors to take up for the first time your residence among us. We beg to assure you that we hail the event with feelings of not ordinary satisfaction and pleasure attended as it is with the most auspicious hopes arising from your high and benevolent character and it is our earnest prayer that the Almighty may be pleased to spare you and yours through a long course of years in the full enjoyment of the choicest blessings of this life and of all the honours connected with your high and influential position in Society.32
They were keen that he should have children and somehow get himself a title, that the rupture caused by the difficulty with the Dinorbens should be seamlessly mended.
It was a pair of goals he shared and he soon started on the task, fathering two sons and five daughters on Florentia and ensuring by a deep engagement in the London Season that the family would begin to find its way back into the national élite. Each year from April to early July, when Parliament was sitting, the governing class of Britain gathered in rented houses in Mayfair and Belgravia. There were public events – the Derby at Epsom, balls – but the heart of the Season was the ferocious round of dinners, breakfasts and lunches to which the great of imperial Britain invited each other, a mass bout of concentrated networking, not only to introduce girls to husbands but to establish the social ligatures on which the government of the country relied. Boiled down to its essence, the Season was the meeting of money, lunch and power. Anyone with a hope of acquiring a title would need to thrive there.
The Hugheses’ London visitors’ book for the 1850s and ’60s, a monument to social ambition, has survived.33 For the three months of the Season they rented 39 Grosvenor Square for about £960.34 It was a spacious, high-glamour house, first built in 1727, but heavily adapted for the use of its many elite clients.35 In 1857, the Hugheses arrived in mid-April from the country, spending £92 13s. 6d.36 on bringing family and staff from Denbighshire. Within a day or two the social life began and it lasted from 23 April until the Season tailed out at the beginning of July, seventy-eight days in all. HRH and Florentia held parties, or at least tried to, on sixty of them, a relentless round of entertainment, gathering in the great and rich of England from the surrounding streets and squares of Mayfair and Belgravia.
The social ambitions were enormous. Among the invitees were 4 dukes and duchesses, 4 marquises and marchionesses, 23 earls and countesses, dowager and otherwise, 12 viscounts and their wives, 40 lords or ladies and 30 knights or baronets and theirs. Very nearly 4 in 10 of the Hughes’s intended guests were titled. Along with a scattering of admirals, colonels and politicians – Mrs Gladstone and Mrs Disraeli both came, on separate occasions – the family from Kinmel managed to land 48 members of the titled élite as their guests in Grosvenor Square.
They asked a total of 292 people to these parties but a faint air of unsuccess hangs over the whole business. There were 11 days on which no one accepted their invitations and 15 when they had to make do with a single guest at dinner (33 per cent of dinners with one acceptance or none). Dining with the Hugheses was not, apparently, a hot ticket and it got worse as the weeks went on: a 59 per cent acceptance rate in April, 49 per cent in May and 39 per cent in a catastrophic June. The worst day was 13 June: 7 invitations issued (Mrs Walpole, Mrs Liddell, Dowager the Lady Hinton, Lord and Lady Bloomfield, Lady Charlotte Portal, Mr Beaumont and le Comte Alfred de Choiseul), only 1 of whom, Lady Charlotte, accepted. This was part of a disastrous run between 12 and 18 June when the Hugheses asked 19 people to dinner and only 5 came. It was a house of immense wealth; it was not one brimming with delight. Like old Lady Macleod in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, published in 1864, who was ‘a devout believer in the high rank of her noble relatives’,37 HRH and Florentia ‘could almost worship a youthful marquis, though he lived a life that would disgrace a heathen among heathens’. It doesn’t seem as if they were worshipped back.
But there was a political dimension to this. HRH’s ambitions to go up in the world would certainly be helped by a seat in Parliament and in 1861 his chance came. In May, Thomas Lloyd-Mostyn, the sitting Conservative member for Flintshire, died suddenly aged only thirty-one and HRH put himself forward. But there was to be a sharp contest for the vacant seat, as the 24-year-old Lord Richard Grosvenor, popular and grand, a younger brother of the 1st Duke of Westminster, was standing as a Liberal against HRH, the Conservative. In a fatal and early error, HRH had split his party by printing an address to the electors in which he ran down the virtues of the budget proposed the year before by Gladstone, Chancellor in Lord Palmerston’s government. Gladstone had not only raised income tax to the scandalous level of 10 pence in the pound, or just over 4 per cent; he had begun to canvass the idea that votes should be extended to the skilled working class. Many Conservatives felt great loyalty to Gladstone and would not have him criticized; HRH felt deep antipathy towards him.38
The only answer was money and HRH started out on a stupendously expensive election campaign.39 His election cash book survives, a meticulous account of breathtaking corruption. His first action was to draw out £3,410 in cash from the family bank, which he began distributing to the electorate. Over £1,550 was paid out in varying amounts for ‘professional services’ to strings of Flintshire gents in all the districts of the county, esquires and reverends happily mopping up the money. Printing and advertising came to a mere £178, but another £1,500-odd in smaller amounts was given to people for ‘canvassing’, for hire of committee rooms, for refreshments or for service as ‘messengers’. Everyone in this class of recipient was described simply as ‘Mr’.
These are enormous amounts of money, the equivalent in 2010 of £238,000, using the retail price index as a multiplier, or £2,200,000, using average earnings. The money was distributed to a small electorate over the course of a campaign that lasted just over two weeks. It was a style of electioneering which had long allowed the gentry to buy their way into Parliament and which was only eradicated with the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act.
Setting up election committee rooms in pubs, ‘treating’, or giving dinner and drinks as a means of persuasion, or even simply handing out cash: all this was part of mid-nineteenth-century electioneering, as it had been since the seventeenth century. HRH’s election bill undoubtedly meant he did it all. But to no avail. The Grosvenors had purses just as long and HRH was short on another commodity: charm.
The election was held on Saturday 25 May.
The rival candidates, Lord Richard Grosvenor and Mr. Hughes, were stoutly upheld by their partisans, the former winning the show of hands, the latter demanding a poll. The struggle turned on the question whether Flint approved of the Budget and the Government of Lord Palmerston. Mr. Hughes’s seconder, Mr. Roper, openly challenged Mr. Gladstone with using his influence in the county to defeat the Conservatives.40
Wales was about to embark on its long and powerful Liberal career, fuelled by the energies of the nonconformist churches. Hughes could probably depend on the votes of his tenants – voting was entirely in public before Gladstone’s Secret Ballot Act of 1872 and tenants could not afford to alienate their landlord – even though at least half of them would have been Welsh monoglot speakers and almost certainly nonconformist. This combination ensured that a large landowner would have a head start in any vote but the slightly stuffy, established-church, English-speaking and self-important Conservatism of HRH was not the style of the future.41 Almost inevitably, ‘The Liberal candidate has carried the day,’ The Spectator reported the following week. ‘Lord Richard Grosvenor took the lead at the poll and steadily kept it, ending a winner by a majority of 322. The numbers were: Grosvenor, 1254; Hughes, 932.’42
Grosvenor went on t
o a distinguished ministerial career and a peerage in his own right; HRH never tried politics again and never rose above plain H. R. Hughes, Esquire.
This defeat by a younger, smarter and more brilliant man cannot have been easy and after it, HRH’s ambitions and energies went inward and downward. The incomes from the Anglesey mine had for many years been in decline as the orebody was worked out and from now on, Kinmel itself would become the focus of his life. HRH began building there and over the next fifteen years created one of the most extraordinary agglomerations of gentry fantasy grandeur this country has ever seen. In doing so, he spent most of what his grandfather had made for him.
Even before the election defeat, he had done some significant building. Between 1852 and 1855, the Mayfair-based Scotsman William Burn designed a huge neo-baroque set of stables and carriage houses next to Lord Dinorben’s ‘Grecian villa’: manly, rusticated, symmetrical, it could be a mansion in itself.43
For the time being, HRH left his uncle’s Hopper house as it was and began to attend to the estate, building cottages in the village of St George just outside the park gates, and a little neo-classical lodge there in which a woodman was housed. Just down the road, at another entrance to the park, Burn designed another lodge with thickly mustachioed bargeboarding on the gables and HRH’s monogram over another woodman’s door.44
But in 1866, Hughes met the architect who would transform Kinmel. William Eden Nesfield was thirty-one, at the height of the most inventive and energetic phase of his career. He was comfortable in the company of the rich and grand. There was none of HRH’s tense awkwardness about him. He had been to Eton, where his father, William Andrews Nesfield, was the drawing master. The father had become the most sought-after landscape designer in mid-Victorian England, living in comfort in one of the Nash terraces off Regent’s Park, and designing elegant gardens among many others for the Dukes of Norfolk and Northumberland (among the Hugheses’ guests at 39 Grosvenor Square – the Northumberlands actually came). By the mid-1860s, the son had already designed model farms or dairies for the Earl of Sefton at Croxteth Hall in Lancashire and for the coal millionaire Alfred Miller Mundy at Shipley Hall in Derbyshire.
The young Nesfield was rich, a drinker, a charmer of both men and women, a large-spirited, gifted Bohemian, previously a pupil of William Burn’s. Now, with his friend Norman Shaw, he was taking mid-Victorian architecture away from the strict seriousness of Gothic antiquarianism towards a wholly new and more delightful approach, striving for eclectic, witty buildings, filled with light and air. It is not difficult to imagine Hugh and Florentia Hughes falling for this shimmering Nesfield double act.45
HRH commissioned a model farm from the son and an accompanying garden from the father, at Llwyni, down on the flat land below Kinmel where he and Florentia could feel happy. They might have been surrounded by, and were certainly drawing their rents from, hundreds of small, under-capitalized and impoverished Welsh farmers, for almost none of whom the great agricultural revolution of the previous hundred years had meant much, and most of whom were living in damp hovels, but that did not prevent the Hugheses from having Nesfield create for them an exquisite, Welsh, half-gothicized, towered Petit Trianon, with carefully drawn and beautifully made ironwork on doors and windows, and a yard with cowsheds and pig pens outside.
By 1866 it was ready, with a dairy, a shaded verandah and a tall dovecot, the buildings scattered all over with flowery ‘h’ monograms – lower case; the atmosphere too sweet for any ‘H’s – and coats of arms surrounded by sunflowers in pots.
The father laid out an orchard and ‘croquet panel’, with a hexagonal rustic hut, a little stream dammed to make a duck pond, with ‘strawberry slopes’, a ‘natural bank for wildflowers’, standard currants, raspberries and gooseberries, dwarf apple and cherry standards, a mulberry or spiral pear, a dahlia bed and some cages for ‘fancy fowls’.46
Inside, there were panels of flowery, stained glass and an atmosphere designed for happiness and delight. The whole place, by intention, was miles away from the angry nonconformists who had failed to elect HRH to Parliament, from the disdain of the dead uncle and from the grandees of the London Season who had refused their invitations to dinner. This was the gentry in wonderfully expensive retreat.
Hughes had now got the taste for building and constructed a new nonconformist chapel and some cottages down on the marshy flats between Llwyni and the coast, largely, it was said, to get the sound of their singing out of the village of St George so that when he and Florentia were at church they could pray undisturbed.
In 1868, more adventurously, and clearly taken with the cheerful and elegant game playing of Nesfield’s architecture, Hughes now commissioned from him the beautiful Golden Lodge at another of the park gates. This is a palace in miniature, covered in carved flowers in pots, with disproportionately huge coats of arms, both ‘H’s and ‘h’s. Giant dormer windows are bursting with yet more sunflowers under the curved pediments, and a frieze around the whole building is spotted with what Nesfield called ‘pies’ – the inspiration was from patterns on Japanese porcelain – but which in fact look more like hybrids of sunflowers with tartes tatins.
Golden Lodge had left the play-farm architecture of Llwyni behind and looks like what it was: a trial run for HRH’s grandest project of all and by far the grandest construction in this book – the rebuilding and quintupling in size of the 1840s house he had inherited from his uncle.
On 25 May 1868, Nesfield made a note in his sketchbook: ‘Went to Hampton Court. Mr. Hughes, Mrs. Hughes and children. Mr. Hughes drove his drag – very pleasant – hot.’47 It seems clear that on that hot May afternoon, HRH asked Nesfield to remake a version of Christopher Wren’s great brick and stone façades, to build a new Hughes version of Hampton Court Palace in Denbighshire.
It was, needless to say, no slavish imitation. Nesfield added a set of cavernous, slated mansard roofs above the level stone parapets, but the ambition was palatial. The huge building, after an uncertain start and with some interruptions, was not complete until 1874.
Kinmel Park in photographs tends to look a little stolid and pompous, overblown, a giant French chateau adrift in North Wales. But that isn’t the impression when you arrive. It is, first, in a beautiful position, gazing eastwards from its entrance front across the park and the wide expanses of the vale of Clwyd. To the south there is a wooded hill; northwards the view is to the coast and a pale strip of sea. Nesfield’s sense of delight is apparent everywhere. As the architect and critic H. S. Goodhart-Rendel described it, Kinmel Park was ‘a Gothic game played with classical counters’.48
The symmetries of the building are slightly disturbed; the centre of one façade is not opposite the other. Chimneystacks vary in height. The slightly cooked salmon pink of the perfectly laid brick is set against creamy limestone dressings under green-grey slate roofs. It looks like a house designed more for a party than for power or dominance. Exaggeratedly tall, eighteen-pane sash windows surround the front door and an enormous Queen Anne-ish hood announces the main entrance. A carved keystone above each window hints at the function of the room inside: an owl and a globe outside the library; a tambourine, a violin and a comic mask outside the ballroom; fish, fruit and fowl outside the dining room.
Nesfield’s pies are scattered all over the building, inside and out, up in the cornices of the servants’ wing, scattered like frisbees on staircases and panelling inside, an attempt to stay playful in the face of the overwhelming bulk of a building which stretches over 500 feet, through various hidden subsidiary courts, from ballroom to stable.
Inside, seven giant reception rooms are laid out in front of you: a hall on the entrance front, a rackets-court-size dining room on the garden front, a saloon beside them, and beyond that an L-shaped drawing room and an L-shaped ballroom, each larger than the dining room. A beautiful breakfast room, with morning sun, is on one side of the entrance hall, a library on the other. You could fit four or five perfectly good manor houses inside this suit
e of rooms.
Next is a little nest of masculine offices: Mr Hughes’s own study and muniment room, where the deeds were kept; a business room for meeting tenants and senior employees; a top-lit, green-glazed billiard room; and a small smoking room or ‘retreat’. A giant chapel sticks out of the building towards the garden and beyond that is a maze of service rooms: the knife room, the safe room, the under butler’s room, the shoe room, the brushing room, the lamp room, the butler’s room, the groom of chamber’s room, the china room, the kitchen, the pantry, the meat larder, the cook’s kitchen, the scullery, the servants’ hall, the bakehouse, the wood room and the WCs. Then you move on to the luggage court, the carriage houses and the stables.
Lieutenant-Colonel Carstairs Jones-Mortimer was taken round the new Kinmel by HRH soon after it had been completed in 1874:
A footman accompanied them to open and close the doors. On entering a small room on the ground floor [the Colonel] asked Mr. Hughes for what purpose it was used. He confessed that he did not know, and enquired of the footman, who, with due gravity, supplied the answer. ‘It is used for ironing the newspapers, Sir.’49
On the floors above, in a labyrinthine tangle of rooms, stairs and corridors, it is impossible not to get lost. There were thirty principal bedrooms up there and enough further rooms to accommodate sixty-two servants, visiting and resident.
The Hughes filled this vast container with oceans of stuff. When the fortunes of the family finally reached the point when the great house had to be abandoned, it took nine days in June 1929 to auction off the contents.50 Even then, the greatest of the paintings had been sent up to Sotheby’s in London, to a higher-class sale: a Renaissance gentleman by Lorenzo Lotto; a beautiful seventeenth-century Portrait of a Boy with a Falcon, thought by Hughes to be by Albert Cuyp, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; an early sixteenth-century Adoration of the Magi by the Dutch painter Quentin Massys, also now in the Metropolitan; a Calvary by Cornelis Engebrechtsz now in the Rijksmuseum; strings of other Renaissance portraits, including one by Bartolomeo Veneto, several Canalettos and many others.51
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