The assembly rooms remained the focus of Clifton social life for 30 years until the completion of the larger Victoria Rooms in 1842. In 1830, at the height of its popularity and prestige, elevenyear-old Princess Victoria and her mother the Duchess of Kent stayed in the hotel on their tour of southern England.
As for the fabric of the building itself, Greenway’s assertive face to The Mall has survived for more than two centuries, although unfortunate 1840s and late-19th-century alterations have compromised the clarity and rhythm of his composition. The building functioned as a hotel and assembly rooms until 1856, when the assembly rooms became the home of the Clifton Club, which they remain to this day. The fashion for ‘taking the waters’ had largely passed by the middle decades of the 19th century, and the then outmoded hotel was converted into apartments and shops.
With the passage of two centuries and the restless flux of architectural taste, critical assessments of the only surviving English façade by Greenway’s hand have been mixed. Timothy Mowl alluded to the obvious influence of the earlier 18th-century architect William Halfpenny and his 1743 Coopers’ Hall in King Street, Bristol. As with Greenway’s temple-fronted pavilion in the centre of his elevation to The Mall, Halfpenny’s building featured dramatic attached columns propping up an attic storey and pediment. Mowl felt that Greenway’s effort was ‘equally odd’ and lacking perfect architectural manners, yet described its exterior, in a delicious turn of phrase, as ‘loutishly personable’.12 The renowned art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was not nearly so charitable, writing in the late 1950s that, in his ‘desire for variety’, Greenway had committed that cardinal architectural sin and abandoned the rules of classical composition.13 Finally, perhaps James Broadbent and Joy Hughes were more objective, concluding that while Greenway pays tribute to William Halfpenny and his Coopers’ Hall, they felt the Clifton Hotel and Assembly Rooms ‘show an independent talent’.14
Timothy Mowl described Francis Greenway as the ‘tragic hero of [the] middle years of Clifton development’, although for Francis and his brothers the loss of the Clifton Hotel and Assembly Rooms was but one act in that tragedy.15 It seems that the saga of the Clifton terraces, a ‘ruinous architectural triumph of unlucky speculators and bankrupt small-time building firms’, played an even greater part in the Greenways’ downfall.16 In the case of Francis, the terraces would see him cast onto the wrong side of the law and lead almost to the forfeit of his very life.
After 1800 there began among the Clifton terraces the ‘long consolidation of what had been thrown up so quickly’.17 But in a buyer’s market completions remained piecemeal, and while finished shells of buildings abounded, they persistently lay vacant, waiting for their internal fit-out. As Mowl remarked, ‘unlucky Cornwallis, long known simply as the Lower Crescent, was still being fitted up in 1835’. And into this crescent of uncertainty stepped the Greenway brothers around 1809, intent on speculating their way to financial success through the completion of a number of the unfinished buildings.
The Greenways may have already been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when they contracted with a Lieutenant Colonel Richard Doolan to complete number 34 Lower Crescent. Doolan had spent more than 25 years on active service with the East India Company before retiring to Bristol in 1807 and marrying the following year. Ellis described him as a ‘peppery Benedick’ and one ‘who was proving to be very refractory ore’.18 In other words, the recent abandonment of his bachelorhood had done nothing to soften the colonel after years of soldiering.
Whether their troubles were precipitated by the work for Doolan at number 34, or collective misfortunes from a number of projects, the Greenways were swiftly and surely cast into the financial mire. The notice from the London Gazette in The Times for 17 May 1809 read: ‘O. Greenway, J. T. Greenway, and F. H. Greenway, Bristol, stone masons, to surrender May 30, 31, June 27, at Rummer Tavern, All Saints-lane, Bristol’. At the appointed hostelry, the Greenway brothers were to:
Make a full discovery and disclosure of their estate and effects, when and where the creditors are to come prepared to prove their debts, and at the second sitting to choose assignees, and at the last sitting, the said bankrupts are required to finish their examination, and the creditors are to assent or dissent from the allowance of their certificate …19
Three weeks before, the Bristol Gazette had carried the following notice:
The creditors of Francis Greenway of the Parish of Clifton, in the Co. of Gloster [sic] Architect and Builder, are respectfully requested to meet on Monday next, at 12 o’clock at noon at the Royal York Hotel at Clifton, to take into consideration the state of his affairs and in the meantime to send an account of their respective demands on him to the office of John Cornish, Solcr., Small Street, Bristol.
On Saturday 29 April, two days after this notice to his creditors, Francis Howard Greenway was declared bankrupt. His brothers John and Olive were included in the same entry in the docket book of the Registers of Commissions of Bankruptcy.20
But amid all the flurry of ‘discovery and disclosure’, the distress of creditors’ meetings and the looming anguish of surrender and selling up, a significant event took place that is puzzling for more reasons than its unfortunate timing. Thursday 27 April, the very day of the notice to his creditors in the Bristol Gazette, was also the day on which Francis Greenway, the pending bankrupt, was married.
At St Michael the Archangel on the Mount Without, a church of Norman origin just to the north-west of the centre of Bristol, 31-year-old Francis Howard Greenway married Mary Moore.21 Francis’s brother and sister John Tripp and Mary were witnesses to the ceremony. The parish register listed the groom as an architect, while his bride, in the accepted fashion of the time, was described as a ‘spinster’. Both resided in the parish. Nothing is known of the background of the bride, although she was born around 1779 and was approximately 30 at the time of her nuptials – unusually old for a first-time bride in that era, if indeed she actually was a spinster.22
The wedding’s timing, apart from its proximity to the Greenway brothers’ bankruptcy, seems both irregular and intriguing. Judging from the ages of the two first-born Greenway children, by early 1809 Francis and Mary’s parental days would appear to have been already well advanced; George had been born in 1806 and William Howard was a babe in arms. Neither child had been baptised at the time of the wedding. It is therefore possible that Francis and Mary had been living together for several years, maybe from as early as 1805, when Francis returned to Bristol from London. But if this were the case, their living arrangements breached the societal norms of the day. By the beginning of the 19th century it was no longer considered normal or acceptable for a first-time bride to be pregnant or anything other than a virgin. And given Mary Greenway’s later reputation as a chaste and virtuous woman, a de facto relationship seems totally out of character. Moreover, the Marriage Act of 1753 had deemed marriages outside the sanction of the Anglican Church to be invalid.
The alternative explanation is that theirs was indeed a more recent relationship and that Mary was a widow with two children from her first marriage. There is no record of Francis having been previously married. There is, however, a record of a Mary Moore marrying a James Tripp in Bristol in 1796.23 If this were the same Mary Moore, she would have been of a believable age for marriage – about 17 at the time. But it is the bridegroom’s family name of Tripp, and its connection with the Greenways through Francis’s paternal grandmother, that makes this alternative explanation convincing. As James Tripp died in 1808 and was buried in Bristol in that year, we can speculate that Francis married the widow of his relative a year later and took responsibility for her and the two children. The only inconsistency here is that Mary was listed in the St Michael’s parish register under her maiden name and, as noted, was described as a spinster.
Then there is the proximity in the timing of the wedding to the Greenway brothers’ slide into bankruptcy. Perhaps the connection is purely circumstantial, and Francis and Mary were
simply overwhelmed by a torrent of unfortunate events. Alternatively, the timing may have been determined by the arrival of Mary’s second baby. The brothers’ business woes had probably been brewing for months, but if Francis and Mary had been living as a de facto couple for several years, why choose the eve of financial calamity to formalise their union? Whether a second marriage for Mary or the tidying up of their domestic situation, might there also have been some legal imperative in the timing of the marriage that would somehow quarantine Francis’s personal assets? Was a legal union a final opportunity before bankruptcy to make provision for his wife-to-be and children, or might Mary’s marriage have confirmed a dowry or allowance from her family?
Whatever the reasons, whether Mary was a widow or had lived with Francis for several years and already borne him two children, the timing could not have been worse. The bailiffs would soon be knocking on Francis and Mary’s door. On 6 May 1809, barely a week after the wedding, the Bristol Mirror carried a notice:
TO BE SOLD BY AUCTION
By Mr. STEPHENS
On the Premises of Mr Greenway at ASHTON, 3 miles from Bristol, on Monday next, the 8th day of May inst.
Under a Distress for Rent
ALL the HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE comprising field bedsteads and furniture, feather and millpuff beds, blankets, quilts and counterpanes; mahogany tables, chairs, chests of drawers; pier and swing glasses; carpets, kitchen furniture, a valuable collection of books, etc.
This was hardly an auspicious start to married life for Francis and Mary Greenway. On the same day as their household possessions were being heaved onto dealers’ wagons and carted away, Francis was required to attend a second meeting of creditors at the Royal York Hotel.
And so the wearying and distressing process continued. On 30 June, again at the Rummer Tavern, a meeting was held regarding the disposal of building materials left on site in the Lower Crescent.24 Then on 25 July, the contents of the Greenway brothers’ yard at Limekiln Street were sold by auction. To the insistent tap of the auctioneer’s gavel, out went their supply of paving stone and a ‘valuable stock of marble in blocks, handsome chimney pieces, slabs and valuable ornaments … [as well as the] collection of figures in plaster of Paris, some in imitation bronze, from the most approved models of the Ancients’.25 All the while Minerva – from whom all architectural wisdom sprang – stood mute above the Doric doorway as her acolytes’ creative lives were cast asunder.
Olive and John Tripp Greenway eventually came to a satisfactory accommodation with their assignees and continued to build until about 1820, working from the yard in Limekiln Street. Timothy Mowl contends that the ‘superior’ concave face of Cornwallis Crescent looking towards the wild garden was probably the work of the two brothers. Surviving to this day ‘it … creates, with its grand terrace, a remarkable private world that can only be viewed from a mile or more away … through a veil of trees’.26 Olive went on to build churches at Winterbourne and Frenchay. His most notable design was the Gothic-revival Christ Church at Downend. John Tripp Greenway died in 1831, while Olive died in 1846.
But to one so proud as Francis Greenway, bankruptcy was no temporary financial setback to be simply endured in submissive compliance. To him it was a blow to the soul of the artist. The loss of the assembly rooms cut deeply, not only into his exchequer but also into his sense of professional worth. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was seeing another architect take every accolade upon the completion of his first major project, while he was ignored. The wounded bull is the most dangerous of animals – erratic and ready to lash out unpredictably. Inevitably, Greenway proved to be that beast.
A CURIOUS AND NOTEWORTHY CRIME
For a time after his insolvency, Greenway’s life appears to have regained a semblance of workaday order. As with his brothers, his creditors had granted Francis a certificate in bankruptcy and he was occupied in clearing his debts, seeking work wherever he could, building and repairing, pricing new projects, making statuary for the aristocracy and cutting paving stones. In late 1810, for instance, he was involved in repairs to St James’ Church in Mangotsfield.1 Life could easily have settled back to one of hard toil and honest reward. John Nash’s bankruptcy had ultimately done him no harm, so why should Greenway’s road to financial recovery have been much different? What, then, sent him careering headlong into the unforgiving arms of the law?
It seems that the grand opening of the Clifton Hotel and Assembly Rooms might have unleashed the wounded beast, until then sullenly but quietly picking over the weeds of his misfortune. Within a few weeks of the widely publicised opening of the building, Francis Greenway perpetrated an impulsive criminal act of astonishing stupidity that would mark him for the rest of his life. In January 1812, he presented a forged promissory note appended to a building contract. And it was not just any contract, but that with the refractory Colonel Doolan at 34 Lower Crescent, Clifton. This note stated that Doolan had agreed to pay £250 on top of the contract price for his house.
When presented for payment, the note was quickly unmasked as a forgery. And so utterly farcical was Greenway’s charade surrounding the crime, that one is tempted to speculate that being caught out was the sole purpose of such a wilful act. Yet a man of Greenway’s intelligence would surely have known the dire penalty for such a crime was death. The only assumptions that can be drawn, as architectural critic Elizabeth Farrelly put it jocularly, was that ‘he was either one brick short of an entablature or had some inkling of a greater destiny’.2
So was his crime simply some insane act born out of bitterness? Was it an attempt, as Ellis thought, ‘to vindicate himself as a moralist’ and to resuscitate his overweening pride?3 Or did Greenway gamble recklessly with his life and take a punt on being reprieved and subsequently transported to New South Wales, where he could realise that ‘greater destiny’? If the latter was his twisted reasoning, why take such a dangerous step and then endure the hardship and misery of incarceration and transportation when he could easily have slipped quietly away and begun life afresh as a free settler? Did thoughts of Nash’s self-imposed fiscal exile in Wales come to mind? Not for Greenway the vision of the miserable bankrupt skulking away to some quiet corner and there nursing the wounds of humiliation inflicted upon him by an uncaring and unappreciative world. Would then the haughty Greenway have seen himself as a victim of injustice whereby his banishment could somehow be worn as a badge of ennoblement? To all these questions, the perpetrator, as usual, left few clues and no direct answers.
In his search for motives, Ellis mused at length on Greenway’s character. ‘One of his main traits’, Ellis wrote, ‘was that he could not bear to lose a battle, even if hopeless resistance must take such form as to bring him ruin’:
Queensberry rules were put aside with his coat and his cravat. When engaged in disputation he became oblivious to all considerations save his objectives … With every weapon available he set upon the adversaries who stood between him and his aim. And since he combined qualities of determination and fury with a guileless nature … it was only natural that his should be a life of childish shifts and expedients and rude awakenings.4
His criminal acts exposed, Greenway was duly arrested and conveyed to Bristol’s Newgate Prison. There he languished for at least two months while evidence was gathered and an indictment prepared. According to a report of his trial in the Bristol Mirror, in its entirety the bill of indictment against Greenway ‘consisted of such a number of skins of parchment sewn together … extending in length 55 feet and would have occupied the Court for several hours, had it been read at full length’.5
Greenway’s trial was scheduled for Monday 23 March 1812 but was held over until the following day. On that fateful Tuesday morning, a session of the Assize of General Gaol Delivery commenced in Bristol, with eight prisoners to be tried that day. The prisoners would have been a ragtag, dirty and unkempt lot – with one exception. Dressed as a gentleman, Greenway must have stood out from the labourers, serving girls and common roughs with
whose company he had recently grown familiar. The Bristol Mirror for the following Saturday devoted a single paragraph to several of the prisoners who were arraigned before the recorder (judge), ‘Sir V. Gibbs’, and a bench of magistrates. (Sir Vicary Gibbs KC had been recorder of Bristol since 1794 and at the time was also the serving attorney-general.)
Among the prisoners on trial, John Kenley was charged with ‘cutting and stabbing an officer’ and was sentenced to death but later reprieved. Three other prisoners were convicted of stealing and sentenced to transportation for seven years, while Hannah Payne and Mary Hall were charged ‘on violent suspicion of having killed and murdered a female infant child’ and acquitted.
Nine more column inches of the Mirror were dedicated to the fate of a single prisoner – Francis Greenway – such was the curious and noteworthy nature of his crime. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and the Bath Journal similarly carried detailed reports of this one case. The summary of the indictment and the prisoner’s plea read as follows: ‘Francis Greenway, for uttering as true a certain forged instrument, purporting to be an agreement between Colonel Doolan and the said Francis Greenway, – pleaded Guilty’. And so unfolded a sorry tale:
The prisoner had contracted with Colonel Doolan, of Clifton, to complete an unfinished building at 1300 guineas, which contract, it was said, had been lost or mislaid – he afterwards became a Bankrupt and obtained his certificate. Disputes arising between the Colonel and the prisoner’s Assignees, they were referred to arbitration, and an award was made in consequence. On this reference the prisoner offered to swear that he was to have received £250 of the Colonel … independently of the 1300 guineas, and that Mr. Cooke the solicitor had made a memorandum to that effect on the face of the contract; this was denied by Mr. Cooke …
Greenway then advertised a reward of ten guineas to anyone who might stumble upon the mislaid contract. And of course, lo and behold, the precious document turned up in January 1812, left at the office of the Bristol Mercury, together with an anonymous letter magnanimously declining any reward. Greenway was said to have seized the contract and then, rushing to his assignees, insisted they commence action against Doolan for the disputed £250.
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