A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Among the members of the family noted by history, a John Greenway became a wealthy wool merchant in Tiverton in Devon in the early 16th century, built a chapel to St Peter and endowed almshouses for the poor. Ellis describes the parapet of St Peter’s as a ‘miracle of stone tracery, as light as lace’.4 Two centuries on, Thomas Greenway built the Theatre Royal in Bath in 1720, a richly ornamented building connected with the famous dandy and leader of fashion Beau Nash. But rather than Devon or Bath, Francis’s immediate family was more closely associated with the port city of Bristol and its outlying hamlets and villages.

  About three miles north-east of Bristol, unremarkable Mangotsfield was like countless other villages ranged across rural England. Occupation of the district dates back to Roman times, and the village was mentioned in the 11th-century Domesday Book as Manegodesfelle. The settlement grew around the intersection of local roads, with Downend to the north-west, Staple Hill to the west and Pucklechurch to the east. The latter had been the site of a Saxon villa or palace used by the Kings of Wessex, and to the south of Mangotsfield lay the forest remnants of the Kingswood, a vast royal hunting estate in medieval times. By Francis Greenway’s era, much of the Kingswood had been turned over to common use or leased for coalmining. The Mangotsfield villagers were poor folk, employed in the main as farm labourers and quarrymen, or miners working in the scattered coal pits of the district.

  In Mangotsfield itself, bluff gable-fronted houses faced inwards towards a small village green and the medieval church of St James. Close by stood Mangotsfield House, a distinguished red-brick building that served as the vicarage. Still standing in the 1790s was the 500-year-old manor house of William Putot (demolished in 1845), while a short distance away on Rodway Hill lay another manor house, built in the 1350s by William Blount, and said to have been used by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn while hunting in the Kingswood.

  By the time Francis and his brothers were active as masons and builders, Bristol was stirring, expanding outwards to the north and the east. Over the following century and a half, the port city swallowed Mangotsfield, and as a village green became a car park, rustic unpretentiousness was degraded to amiable though dreary suburbia.

  Nothing is known of Francis Greenway’s earliest days, where he lived in Mangotsfield or its surrounds, or where and how he was schooled. No image remains among the few remnants of the late 18th-century village to conjure the life of the boy, or to fathom from whom or where he gained a respectable knowledge of the classics and of English literature, whereby he could quote in later years from the likes of Cicero and Shakespeare, or the novels of Laurence Sterne.5

  Francis senior died in 1793 at the age of 45, leaving 18-year-old Olive as the head of the large family and proprietor of the Greenway mason’s yard, probably located at the time in Downend. Despite their tender ages at the time of their father’s death, the four eldest brothers were no doubt already well trained in the mason’s craft. They would have readily picked up the tools in his memory, keeping on building and planning, repairing and maintaining the churches and churchyards, townhouses and great country piles of Gloucestershire. ‘So persisting were most Greenways in their attachment to the arts and trades of stonework’, wrote Ellis rather quaintly, ‘that the best of them seemed to have learned their business almost instinctively at their fathers’ knees’. Without evidence, Ellis also describes the Greenways as followers of the great architects of the age, men of the calibre of Nicholas Hawksmoor, George Dance and Robert Adam. And in the wider landscape, he saw them playing in the ‘same fields of fancy as “Capability” Brown and Humphrey [i.e. Humphry] Repton’.6

  The port city of Bristol had grown rich through the 18th century on brass founding, tobacco and the ill-gotten gains of the slave trade. The city fathers and prosperous classes had money to spend on lavish construction and architectural aggrandisement. But while Bristol had grown in size and influence, it was still provincial in its outlook, and conservative and philistine in its taste. In such an atmosphere of opportunity and promise, a young Francis Greenway might have dreamt of more than the mason’s yard, of more than monumental masonry, church repairs, garden walls and ornamental statuary. Perhaps he dreamt then of a city of fine public buildings of good taste; of drawing and design; and of giving the gift of architecture to a world appreciative of his many talents, his own god-given talents received from the great architect of the universe himself.

  Long before formal courses in architecture, to become Francis Howard Greenway, architect and painter (as he was soon to describe himself), the young stonemason’s son required a teacher, a master to whom he could be apprenticed. By good fortune he soon found that teacher, perhaps come to do business at the Greenway brothers’ own yard.

  FH GRINWAY COMES TO LONDON

  Some time around 1797 Francis Greenway drifted out of the shadows of provincial obscurity and arrived in London at the home of ‘Mr Nash’. Nothing is known of his impressions of the great unruly metropolis, the city of Samuel Johnson and coffee houses, of fashionable Mayfair and Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, of crime and grim poverty. But here was architecture writ large in a city growing fast and soon to be the largest in the world. London was the city of young Greenway’s dreams made real, and its impact could hardly have been anything but profound. Arriving at Mr Nash’s placed him on the threshold of what could shape up as a significant career, his own good fortune bound to that of the prominent architect John Nash. Nash was destined to become one of the most fashionable architects of the regency and reign of George IV, his name soon to be synonymous with the layout and appearance of large tracts of London. The chance to work with such a mentor opened up a world of possibility to the lad from Mangotsfield.

  The son of a Welsh millwright, London-born Nash had served an apprenticeship with the architect Sir Robert Taylor before branching out on his own as a surveyor, carpenter and builder. An indifferent early career in London soon came unstuck, with the failure of speculative ventures in Bloomsbury Square and Great Russell Street. In 1783, a bankrupted Nash retreated to the town of Carmarthen on the River Towy in South Wales and the support of his mother’s family. And so began what the architectural historian Sir John Summerson described as ‘ten years of provincial oblivion’.1

  During his exile in Wales, Nash established an extensive practice as an architect and building contractor. There he also met Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, two theorists on the picturesque in architecture and town planning who were to have a lasting influence that by extension would flow to Greenway. Towards the end of his Welsh sojourn Nash formed a partnership with the landscape designer Humphry Repton, often viewed as the successor to the great Capability Brown. As his practice expanded through the 1790s, Nash took on and trained several assistants and draftsmen, the likes of whom included Repton’s son John Adey, and Auguste-Charles Pugin, the father of Augustus Pugin of Gothic-revival and Palace of Westminster fame.

  With the city of Bristol lying a short distance across the estuary of the River Severn from South Wales, it seems inevitable that as Nash’s practice grew, he would have called on an everwidening circle of tradesmen and suppliers in the region, and he could readily have come into contact with the Greenway brothers. As James Broadbent and Joy Hughes speculated, in the late 1790s young Francis Greenway was ‘just the right age … for attachment through apprenticeship or other arrangement to an up-andcoming architect’.2 Nash was working in London again in 1796 and returned there to live the following year, building a house for himself at 28 Dover Street, and possibly taking Greenway with him.3

  A first clue as to the association with Nash lies not, however, in London but in Nash’s Welsh bolthole of Carmarthen, the site of one of only three buildings in Britain known definitively to be by Francis Greenway, or identified with him. In the late 18th century, coal and iron, the lifeblood and bones of the industrial revolution, saw previously slumbering provincial towns such as Carmarthen outgrow their medieval walls. In October 1800, the Corporation of the Boroug
h of Carmarthen ordered the removal of the old marketplace to outside the town walls, and a new market building was opened in April the following year. According to Broadbent and Hughes, no reference has been found to verify the identity of the builder or architect, but Greenway appears to have assumed the latter role.4

  Upon his eventual arrival in New South Wales in 1814, Greenway sent a portfolio of his work to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Among several designs supposedly submitted, the only scheme mentioned by name was ‘one for a Market House & Town Hall & carried into effect at Carmarthen in Wales’.5 Greenway’s addition of the ‘town hall’ was probably part of a more elaborate scheme that never came to fruition at Carmarthen. A contemporary plan of the town shows a humbler building than that alluded to by Greenway, with what appears to be a simple single-storeyed structure surrounding an open quadrangle.6 In his efforts to impress Macquarie, it would have mattered little to Greenway whether his town hall was ever realised. A humble effort or not, the connection between Nash and Greenway – master and pupil – appears to hinge on the Carmarthen Market House. The building was demolished by the middle of the 19th century and unfortunately there are no surviving illustrations to provide any clues as to its appearance or stylistic roots.

  Aside from kindling the fires of Greenway’s architecture, his association with Nash might also have incited a certain recklessness in such a headstrong young protégé, considering his misadventures of a few years hence. Summerson described Nash as, despite his early setbacks, retaining a ‘single-minded passion for one thing above all others – architecture. Architecture as his own original creation; architecture as an artistic gamble; and, best of all, architecture achieved in highly speculative projects, with big money and sharp wit’.7 Many a heady and exciting yet risky lesson was to be learned from such a master.

  Around the time the Carmarthen Market House was being built, Francis Greenway’s name actually surfaces in London, providing further evidence for his association with Nash. In 1800, when exhibiting drawings or paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, he gave his address as ‘At Mr. Nash’s’.8 The academy boasted the likes of the architect Sir William Chambers, and the painters Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin West and Johann Zoffany among its present or past members. Even being accepted to show at such an institution was an honour for the 23-year-old provincial builder and would-be architect.

  But his connection with Nash might not have been as auspicious as that with the Royal Academy. Listed as ‘F.H. Grinway [sic] Architect’ in a 1905 complete dictionary of exhibitors, he again showed drawings or paintings in 1802 and 1803, but was no longer recorded as residing at ‘Mr. Nash’s’.9 It seems Greenway might now have struck out on his own in an attempt at solo practice, or was simply seeking employment elsewhere. And, given his later patterns of behaviour, an almost inevitable falling-out with Nash might also have been the motivation behind such a move.

  Greenway’s address for his second and third Royal Academy submissions was given as New Palace Yard, a central geographic location that was also no doubt central to his professional aims. New Palace Yard itself had seen its share of political tumult and executions over the centuries: Titus Oates, perjurer and fabricator of the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II, was pilloried there in 1686. Within the yard Greenway either resided at Oliver’s Coffee House or used the address for the convenience of his mail and as a place of business.

  To the right of the northern entrance to Westminster Hall, Oliver’s Coffee House had operated for at least 70 years; in February 1731 tickets were on sale there for a performance of ‘Mr. HANDELL’s [sic] Te Deum and Jubilate’.10 Oliver’s was one of several coffee houses in New Palace Yard, among countless other haunts throughout the city. London’s coffee houses had been the rage of the 18th century as meeting places and venues for political and intellectual debate, the Victorian-era historian and politician Lord Macaulay observing that ‘the coffee-house was the Londoner’s home’.11 Some became private hotels, dining rooms or gentlemen’s clubs, and they were often places of commerce. ‘There were coffee houses for every trade and profession’, wrote Peter Ackroyd, where ‘lawyers met clients and brokers met each other, merchants drank coffee with customers and politicians drank tea with journalists’.12 The London Stock Exchange had begun life in Jonathan’s Coffee House in Change Lane in the 1690s. Whether Greenway actually resided at Oliver’s is not known, but it might readily have served as a place for him to meet potential clients or employers, show them a portfolio of drawings, and ply them with his eager charms. Either by accident or design, he was also handy to the offices of the Board of Works – just half a mile away in Little Scotland Yard in Whitehall.13 A potential source of government employment, the board had been responsible for overseeing the building and maintenance of royal residences since 1378.

  There are few further clues as to Greenway’s activities in London, or the length of time he spent there, but dissection of the titles of his Royal Academy submissions does shine a flickering beam on his architectural proclivities and personal aspirations. From Nash’s office in 1800, Greenway exhibited drawings or paintings of ‘The Saxon Gateway, College Green, [Bristol Cathedral] Bristol’ and ‘West door, Magdalen College chapel, Oxford’. In 1802, he submitted a work, or works, entitled ‘Chapel, Library, etc., [designed for the side of a quadrangle] at Bristol’. This second appearance at the academy may have been with Greenway’s own designs executed under a new-found autonomy, but it is his exhibit for 1803 that is most intriguing of all. The catalogue lists a work named ‘Thornbury castle restored, with a canal brought from the river Severn up to Thornbury’.14

  The so-called Thornbury Castle, 15 miles north of Bristol, was actually a Tudor country house begun in 1511 by Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham. After Stafford was accused of treason and deprived of his head in 1521, Henry VIII seized his estates, including the unfinished Thornbury Castle.15 Although Thornbury was returned to the Stafford family during the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary, its buildings had already fallen into disrepair. The castle remained totally uninhabited until 1720, and then passed from the Stafford descendants to their relatives the Howards, through a sale to Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk, in 1727. Horace Walpole visited in 1774 and found Thornbury still largely abandoned, noting that ‘the ruins are half ruined. It would have been glorious if finished’.16

  What is so intriguing, then, is that Greenway describes his work as ‘Thornbury castle restored, with a canal …’ The canal refers to a project begun by Edward Stafford to connect his estate at Thornbury with the River Severn, just three miles to the west. Stafford’s aim may have been to turn Thornbury into a port with ready access to the great estuary beyond. As Lord of Glamorgan, Stafford also owned an extensive estate in South Wales, including Newport Castle on the River Usk, near its junction with the Severn estuary. The castle featured an elaborate water gate, and it seems likely that Stafford envisaged his ducal barge gliding easily between Thornbury, Newport and his estates beyond. But like those for the castle itself, his untimely death put paid to such grandiose plans.17

  Broadbent and Hughes noted that Thornbury Castle was a ‘well-known and illustrated antiquity’, and so, rather than simply create another romantic impression of a crumbling ruin in a picturesque setting, Greenway appears to have come up with a scheme to bring the castle to a splendour dreamt of by its original owner.18 He also imagined the completion of the canal begun more than 250 years before. It seems unlikely he would have gone to such trouble without a strong motive beyond the purely artistic. So was he commissioned to undertake this project, or was it a speculative scheme? As either, it may also have been a project worked on under the supervision of John Nash. With an absence of detail other than Greenway’s catalogue description, it is impossible to determine his motivation, but the fact of Thornbury’s ownership by the Howard family leads to further intriguing speculation.

  At some time in his early adult life, Greenway assumed the middle name Howard, and,
as with much else concerning his life in England, his motives are open to considerable interpretation. Ellis noted that ‘in the Greenway family there is a belief that the “Howard” in his name came in through the Tripp family’.19 (Francis Greenway’s paternal grandmother was a Mary Tripp.) There was a Capel Howard Tripp born in London several years after Francis, and a number of Howard Tripps are recorded in and around Gloucestershire through succeeding generations. The name Capel also appears to have had familial significance, Francis calling his eventual fourth son Charles Capel Greenway. Those Howard Tripps were undoubtedly kinsmen of Francis, but did he assume the name merely to style himself in a distinctive fashion among his immediate relatives, or did he have a grander, more ambitious motive?

  The Tripps of Somerset, Gloucestershire’s neighbouring county, claimed a familial connection with the Howard family and the dukes of Norfolk dating back to the 15th century and the reign of Henry V.20 To Greenway, it probably mattered little whether the relationship was tenuous or substantive. Proven or otherwise, it could serve a real purpose for an ambitious young architect. And, whether his work at Thornbury was at the behest of the Howards or was perhaps floated to impress them as potential patrons, either of his own volition or under someone else’s tutelage, flagging a family connection could do him no harm.

  Dreams of noble attachment would linger long in Greenway’s imaginings; asserting the connection, he would name his second son William Howard, and also his eventual grant of land in New South Wales, Howard Farm. Thornbury itself found a picturesque echo in one of his unrealised schemes for Lachlan Macquarie’s contentious and pretentious Government House in Sydney. ‘I was allowed to design it in the castellated style’, Greenway recalled years later. ‘In my sketch … I took as a model Thornbury Castle, only much bolder in size of the towers and other parts of the building.’21