Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  Chapter Fourteen

  SAVERNAKE AND ITS WARDENS

  SAVERNAKE is the only English forest which is the property of a subject; and, more than that, the succession of its Hereditary Wardens has never been broken. It has passed from father to son (or occasionally from an heiress-daughter to her son) since the first Esturmy held it from William the Conqueror, and, as Lord Cardigan says in his history of the Wardens, “what Richard Estormit held in the year 1083, is today held by his descendants”. Outwardly the forest has altered considerably. Originally there was “ no central block of woodland, but instead a whole series of straggling woods and coppices linked by wide areas of gorse, or heather, or downland. It was then a natural Hunting Ground, and as such was claimed by the king and administered under the Forest Laws”; but Savernake today is by no means an area of wild nature. On the contrary, never was a forest more grandly planned, and its character is entirely due to its Wardens. No architect was ever more the creator of a palace than were the Wardens of Savernake of their forest. It was they who planted the Grand Avenue and others hardly less grand: they laid out the eight paths which meet in the centre of the forest. They planted the famous beeches, which are not indigenous, for as late as the seventeenth century Evelyn said that there were no beeches in Wiltshire except in Grovely. Men have made of this tract of wild country a home of history and character.

  The Esturmys were originally men of the forest, and their hereditary possessions did not at first include a great house. It was the famous hunting horn which was, and is, their title to the estate. The forest goes with the horn, and so do the privileges and duties of the Warden. This has been so since the Norman days till, in this very century, the present Lord Ailesbury blew a blast on the Esturmy horn to herald the arrival in the forest of His Majesty King George VI.

  That blast is a very moving and romantic thing. It seems to hold the memories of the nine hundred years through which it has proclaimed through the forest a message more sure than can ever be expressed in human language. Beginning rather high in the scale and in almost a whispering tone, it slowly gathers into itself the full chord of Pan’s own pipes. It catches every kind of forest note, and adds to them the master tone of Humanity, and it is so penetrating that it can be heard through every mile of Savernake.

  Till the end of the fifteenth century the Wardens of Savernake had spent their lives within their forest or on their estates near by. With the advent of the first John Seymour in the Tudor period, a new era began. He, like most of his successors, was a man of the great world. He distinguished himself at the siege of Tournay, and was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was a favourite of King Henry VIII, whom he entertained several times at Wulfhall, the Esturmy house which he now possessed. Lord Cardigan gives a picture of what would in those days have been King Henry’s first sight of Wulfhall:

  “Assuming King Henry to have come from London, his first sight of the old manor house at Wolfhall would have been from ‘ Topenhan Hyll’, from which vantage point all the buildings, fields, and gardens would have been seen spread out on the sloping, but less elevated ground across the valley. ‘The parke called Topenhays’ would have been behind him; but Wolfhall had its Horse Park, its Red Deer Park, and, beyond the manor buildings, undulating Soden Park also.

  “Between these park lands lay the arable fields, besides a number of small pastures. There was an orchard, and there were several gardens. One was a walled garden, half an acre in extent: another, twice as big, was called ‘The Great Palyd gardyne’. There were two smaller areas, one known as ‘My Young Lady’s gardyne’, and the other as ‘Myn Olde Lady’s gardyne’.

  “The manor house stood in the centre of it all. The buildings were laid out in rectangular pattern: there was a Little Court, and hence by inference a Great Court. There was the chapel that Sir William Esturmy had built, the timbered dwelling house itself and many outbuildings. The place was extensive, although not lavish in accommodation.”

  Traditionally, the marriage of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour was said to have taken place in the Great Barn at Wulfhall; and we Wiltshire people have always clung to those hooks in its walls as evidence that they held the tapestries adorning the room for the wedding. Lord Cardigan, however, says that the actual ceremony took place at Whitehall, though the King was entertained in that barn certainly in 1535, in 1539 and again in 1543. These royal entertainments in a thatched farm building marked the end of the Esturmy’s rural simplicity, for the coming Seymour wardens were courtiers and statesmen rather than foresters. When Henry died in 1547, Jane Seymour’s ten-year-old son succeeded to the throne, with as his guardian his uncle Edward Seymour. In the course of that first year this aristocratic warden became Protector of the Realm, Duke of Somerset and the absolute owner of Savernake Forest. He soon realised that he possessed no house suitable for ducal entertaining, and he resolved to build himself a worthy palace. The architect was probably John of Padua, who built Somerset House in the Strand and was also the designer of Longleat for the Duke’s secretary and intimate friend, Sir John Thynne, the founder of the family of the Marquis of Bath. The Savernake palace was a tremendous project which employed hundreds of workmen, including “a lewde company of Frenchmen masons as I never sawe the lyke … the worst condicyoned people that ever I saw and the dronkenst; for they wyll drynke more in one day than three days wages wyll come to, and then lye lyke beasts on the flore not able to stonde”.

  Although the house was to be made chiefly of local stone, a brick kiln was established and sixty men worked continuously on the water conduit alone, for this was fifteen feet deep by sixteen hundred feet long. But in lieu of the triumphant completion of these plans, there may still be seen today, in the diary of King Edward VI, this laconic note dated January 22nd, 1552: “ The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between 8 and 9 in the morning”.

  Somerset’s son, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, had to abandon the projected palace, for Queen Elizabeth imprisoned him for years in the Tower of London with his wife Lady Katherine Grey, whom he had been rash enough to marry clandestinely. She was too near in the succession to the throne to be allowed to marry whom she would. They now lie together in a noble tomb at the east end of the south aisle of Salisbury Cathedral. She had died in the Tower in 1568, and he was an old man of over eighty at the time of his death in 1621. His effigy was placed beside hers, though on a somewhat lower level which accorded with their different social ranks. The incription on the tomb says that they were “A matchless pair, who, after experiencing in many ways the hazards of a wavering fortune, at length repose here together in the same union in which they lived”.

  Before Lord Hertford’s death his grandson had got himself into much the same sort of scrape through another clandestine marriage. Lady Arabella Stuart, who was at least twelve years older than Sir William Seymour, was by no means deterred by the fate of Lady Katherine Grey, and she insisted on marrying Sir William. She was caught in an unsuccessful attempt to escape with her husband to the Continent, and she too died imprisoned in the Tower.

  Throughout his long life William Seymour, Lord Hertford, lived at Tottenham Lodge, where the family had now built a more modest residence than that planned by the Protector. Lord Clarendon says of him that “ he loved and was even wedded so much to his ease that he loved his book above all exercises … and had even contracted such a laziness of mind that he had no delight in an open and liberal conversation”.

  He none the less played an important part in the Civil War, and when it came to the point of King Charles’ trial, this “lazy” man, in company with the Duke of Richmond, Lord Southampton and Lord Lindsay, said that being Privy Councillors, they were responsible for the King’s acts, and so they should stand in the dock in his place. This offer was refused, for the Parliamentarian wanted nothing less than King Charles’ head. But after the King’s death the Marquis of Hertford was one of those who secretly buried him at Windsor. Good for a lazy man.

  Lord Hertford a
lso supplied Charles II with a good deal of money while he was abroad, and he was at Dover to meet the King when he returned to England. Charles at once restored to him the dukedom of which the Protector Duke had been deprived, and in the preamble to this Act of Restoration, the King describes him as “an extraordinary person who hath merited as much of the King my father and myself, as a subject can do”. A month later the duke was dead, and he was succeeded by his grandson William, aged nine.

  THOMAS TROPENELL AND GREAT CHALFIELD

  In the year 1908 there was discovered beneath the whitewash in the dining-room at Great Chalfield a fresco which can hardly be anything but a contemporary portrait of Thomas Tropenell, the owner of the house from 1437 to 1488. This picture is an immensely interesting study. It depicts a man of the fifteenth century as he was seen by one of his own generation, and the portrait is not only strange and remote to us today but also contains something universal. The longer one looks upon this silent bearded countenance, the more one realises what profound and independent personalities were developed by those men who lived their own lives in their own countryside, seeing few people from outside, and growing silently from their own roots. Such a life is very rare today.

  Tropenell lived before the day of the specialist, while outstanding men could still “take all learning to be their province”, although their studies were not in books but in the life of their own countryside. The face is astute and secretive, and it is also very thoughtful, while an unsympathetic observer might think that it justified the opinion of a contemporary that Thomas Tropenell was a “perillous covetous man”.

  This is the face of a wool merchant, but unlike the merchants of today Tropenell was not a merchant who chiefly frequented the Stock Exchange. He could doubtless himself shear the sheep which he sent to Steeple Ashton for sale, and he would also have known the true value of each fleece when it reached the market. When he acquired Great Chalfield, and so became a landowner, he would handle his estate in the same business-like way in which he had previously handled his flocks and herds; and it was for this reason that he compiled the famous Tropenell Cartulary, a word defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “ a place where papers or records are kept … or the book containing them”. Tropenell’s aim was first of all to establish his title to his property, and most of this manuscript collection consists of leases and lawsuits and settlements. Only by the way did the book become that store of historical documents which Aubrey in the seventeenth century pronounced to be “the best key to open the knowledge of the old and lost families which is my search”.

  So the wool merchant was no mean historian, and before long his interest in the human beings of his own day led him to enter Parliament. He was Member for Bedwin in 1429 and for Bath in 1449.

  The Cartulary was lost for many years but is now back in its original home in the care of Mr Robert Fuller, the present owner of Great Chalfield; but the famous manuscript which bears his name does not really tell so much about the man as does the group of buildings which owes so much to him. This manor-house is at first sight a typically peaceful English country home. It lies within an ancient moat which now has more of the character of a mill stream than a moat. The ancient mill itself has gone but was working till fifty years ago. The original house was probably built by the Percy family, and when Thomas Tropenell acquired it in the fifteenth century, it was in a very dilapidated condition. It then had a clearly defensive character, which it did not altogether lose when he made it into

  “a thoughtfully balanced architectural composition, retaining the idea of a central hall lit on both sides and with gable-ended roof like Penshurst. But he formed a block at each end of a pair of liveable wings coming forward on the north side as gables, each having the dominant feature of a highly enriched oriel. And on the inner side of these two principal gables there exist two smaller ones, perfectly alike as to their upper storeys.… South of the hall Tropenell built a complete quadrangle of ‘Houses of office’ which had disappeared prior to 1837, but on the north side Chalfield has the rare good fortune of being now as its first builder left it.”

  This description of the house is taken from the late Mr. Avray Tippings’ account of it. A few yards from the house is a beautiful little chapel which is now the parish church and contains interesting architectural features from every century between the thirteenth and the present. An ancient runic carving links it with something remote in the distant past. The nave roof and font are thirteenth-century, while Thomas Tropenell in the fifteenth century added a porch and bell tower at the west end of the plain thirteenth-century nave. He rebuilt the chancel and built a chapel on the south side of the nave, filling it with frescoes most of which are hardly visible now, although a manuscript exists written by an eighteenth-century rector which describes them in detail before they were whitewashed over.

  The church and house show Tropenell to have been before anything else an artist. No ordinary wool merchant would have left behind him all those frescoes or troubled to create such a house with its fine lines, its wealth of amusing ornaments, its gargoyles, its vivid little pair of wrestlers carved on the wall near the gate and, more than all, the three stone masks in the gallery, their eyes and mouths hollowed out so that the ladies could peer through them unperceived to watch their feasting husbands in the hall below. Great Chalfield is full of such unusual details. The front door has still its alarming unexpected welcome for the visitor. When he rings the bell, the first result is the opening of a wicket which is set in the main entrance. The entrant must perforce duck his head to pass through it, and so he goes in head first. If he is suspected to be an enemy, the warder chops off his head directly it appears, and that ends his visit.

  From the Cartulary we learn that the first owner of Great Chalfield was one Sir Harry de Percy, Knight, who may have lived in the time of King John. The manor remained in the family till after the death of Sir Harry Percy III about or shortly after 1356. Lady Constance, his widow, remained in possession during her lifetime, having no less than three husbands after Sir Harry’s death. The Cartulary says of this Sir Harry Percy that he “ toke to his second wyf, Constaunce, bedfelaw and cosyne to maister Robert Wayville, bishoppe of Salisbury, born to no lond, neither to none armes”. The less said about Constance the better. There is a great deal about her in the Cartulary; for though “ born to no lond” she was obviously a land-grabber, causing generations of lawsuits about the ownership of the property both during and after her life.

  When one looks at this peaceful abode it is surprising to find that it is connected with such amazing characters as Constance and later with the bigamous Duchess of Kingston. She really was connected with the Tropenells, for she was the daughter-in-law of Rachel Baynton, ninth in direct descent from Thomas Tropenell.

  CHARLTON PARK

  Charlton was originally part of the estate of Malmesbury Abbey, and until the Reformation there seems to have been no house on the site of the present Charlton Park. Henry VIII sold much of the abbey lands to William Stump, one of those opulent tradesmen that the King always delighted to honour, and Stump handed it on to his daughter when she married Sir Henry Knevet, the builder in 1607 of the first block of Charlton House. This was a prosperous-looking mansion typical of the period when the Elizabethan was giving place to the Jacobean taste in architecture. This house makes one of the fronts of the house of today, and it forms the nucleus of a fine quadrangular house; the west front of this was added by Inigo Jones, and the east front by Henry, the twelfth Lord Suffolk, in 1772–6.

  The following plaque is affixed to the roof of the eighteenth-century wing:

  This edifice was rendered such as it is under the skilful direction of Matthew Brettingham, architect under the careful superintendence of James Darley, Clerk of Works. Thomas Carter, Steward.

  Begun A.D. 1772

  Finished A.D. 1776

  by Henry, Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire,

  Then Principle Secretary of State To The Best of Princes


  The house is therefore a mixture of architectural styles, all of them coming from those centuries when good taste was still inherent in the nobility of England.

  It must have been in the Inigo Jones part of the house that the first Lord Suffolk received, in 1665, a party of evacuees from London. These were very unlike most of those whom we knew in the late war. Their main preoccupation was not which of them should use the kitchen range, for they all brought with them their own mental fire and light and required no tinder boxes to set it going. They included some of the wittiest writers and talkers of the wittiest period in English history.

  How much the world owes to the plagues of the past! Not only is Boccaccio’s Decameron a legacy from the Florentine Plague of 1348, when one of the stories was told every night to a group of people who had been banished from Florence; but few people realised that much the same thing happened at Charlton in 1666. Lord Suffolk’s evacuees included his son-in-law Dryden, who stayed at Charlton while the Plague closed the London theatres for two years, Lord Buckhurst (described by Addison as “one of the best critics as well the best poet of his age”), Charles Sedley and Sir Robert Howard, a younger son of the house, also a famous dramatist in his day. These Restoration wits were more than brilliant talkers. They really created the Art of Criticism, which for the next two hundred years was to be a learned, as well as an entertaining, branch of literature.