Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

Follow the dictates of your own conscience, the light of your own understanding; and take a firm resolution, never to do anything you may think mean, base, or dishonest, upon any consideration whatever.

  Show always a due regard, respect, and obedience to the laws and customs of your country; and particularly an inviolable attachment to those amongst them which relate to the preservation of our liberty, property and privileges, which are the natural birthright of every Briton, and have been transmitted down to us by our ancestors with so much care; since these make so essential a difference between the present condition of an inhabitant of this island, and that of those in most other kingdoms of Europe. But, above all, since you have the good fortune to be born in a country where some liberty remains, let me recommend independence to you, which properly distinguishes a freeman from a servant, or a slave; and without which no one can lay any solid, lasting, or secure foundation for the happiness of his whole life, but what must be precarious, and depend on others.

  Whereas, I believe I may safely venture to assure you that a steady conduct, and adherence to the few rules I have mentioned, with a good conscience, and contented mind, the inseparable companions of such behaviour, will effectually put it out of the power of others to make you unhappy; and always enable you to go through and support the many various accidents and misfortunes which all men are liable to, with constancy, spirit, and resolution. And at last, which I think is the greatest blessing of all, when that tribute we all owe to nature comes to be paid, will make you reflect with pleasure and satisfaction on your past life, and bring you with comfort to your grave.”

  There is at Corsham also a plaster bust of Sir Paul Methuen which is “ believed to have been done from a death mask and was used for the bust in the picture gallery. This bust entirely brings out the two dominant sides of his character, benevolence and integrity.”

  Fortunately for succeeding generations, these Methuens were connoisseurs not only of wine but of pictures, and between them they formed most of the Corsham collection of seventeenth-century Italian, French and Flemish paintings. Until the death of Sir Paul the pictures remained at his London house; but before his death he decided to leave the whole of his collection to his nephew and godson, another Paul Methuen, who, in anticipation of this legacy, bought Corsham Court to be a worthy home for his pictures when they arrived. The house had been built in 1582 by Thomas Smythe, and Paul Methuen bought it in 1776 from the trustees and executors of Benjamin Hoskins Styles of Boden Park, Wilts.

  “Styles, who died in 1737, was one of the directors of the South Sea Company and his estates became forfeited and were conveyed by the Trustees to Francis Egles as Trustee. The estates were then got into Chancery and in 1745 were put up for sale by Robert Holford, one of the Masters, and bought by Robert Neale of Corsham on behalf of Mr Paul Methuen, the estate being described ‘as part of the estate of the late B. H. Styles’.”

  It was a medium-sized Tudor house, and was greatly enlarged to hold the pictures. The first plans were supplied by Keene, who thought of the Octagon Room and designed the hexagonal leaded panes for the windows. Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown was then appointed directing architect for the whole house, and he at first devoted himself to building a state suite containing a picture gallery in three cubes, the whole thing measuring in all twenty-four feet by seventy-two. He is responsible for all the ceilings, including the coved, highly decorated ceiling in the picture gallery, and these were carried out by Thomas Stocking of Bristol. The Adam brothers designed the lovely mirrors which still hang in the gallery, and the original drawings for these are also still in the house. There is also a good deal of work by Chippendale, including some beautiful mirrors and a lovely Chippendale bed upholstered in apricot-brown velvet. When this was being shown to Mr Asquith by Lord Methuen’s sister, then a little girl, she said, with a widely ranging historical sense, “This is the Chippendale bed in which Queen Elizabeth slept.” Quick as thought, the Prime Minister replied, “Really, I knew Queen Elizabeth slept out often enough, but I never knew she slept out of her century.”

  The curtains in the library were embroidered by the women of Portugal for Sir Paul Methuen, and the heraldic tree ceiling in the breakfast room is very unusual.

  There was still room for more pictures in the house, and Mr Methuen soon added more, including the wonderful group of family portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and others of the great school of English portrait-painters, then at its height. After his death in 1795 his son, Paul Cobb Methuen, called in Nash to design some more rooms; and after Mrs Methuen had complained that when she wanted to go down the corridor, if it was raining she had to put up her umbrella, it was found that Nash’s builder was not quite the equal of the architect, and that side of the house had to be pulled down altogether. It was rebuilt by Bellamy with true nineteenth-century solidity.

  Reynolds’picture of Paul Cobb Methuen and his sister Christian, as children, is perhaps the most winning canvas in the house, though that same little boy as a young man in a blue coat, painted by Gainsborough, runs it very close.

  Frederick Paul Methuen (1818–91) married the daughter of the Reverend John Sanford, who in the 1830’s had made a fine collection of Italian pictures. After his death these were added to the Corsham galleries and were accompanied by the careful Sanford’s detailed lists of dates of purchase and prices paid.

  Possibly the most remarkable thing at Corsham is the “Pandolfini Cartoon by Correggio which is very closely related to the ceiling frescoes in the Duomo at Parma and may have originally been intended as a working drawing for it but never used”. There are two Flemish pictures of outstanding importance, Van Dyck’s “Betrayal” and his “Head of a Man in a Ruff”. The exciting picture of Mexico City, painted by the Mexican artist Christoval Vallalpando towards the end of the seventeenth century or a little later, is a vigorous topographical painting of the Great Square on a busy day, with hundreds of figures, booths, coaches, carts and carriages. In the background are the volcanoes of Popocatapetl and Tlaxcala.

  O shining Popocatapetl

  It was thy magic hour:

  The houses, people, traffic seemed

  Thin fading dreams by day,

  Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

  They had stolen my soul away.

  Hans Holbein’s portrait of Dame Alice More is a very lovely thing, and the Fra Filippo Lippi “Annunciation” came from a chapel of the cathedral at Pistoia.

  The personal contributions of the Methuen family to the Corsham pictures are, of course, the portraits of successive members of the family, but every generation has also added something to the scholarly catalogues and criticisms of the collection. These add greatly to the interest of the house.

  BOWOOD

  Bowood is a part of the ancient forest of Chippenham, and from Saxon days was the property of the English kings. In 1653, a “Survey and Valuation of Bowood Park being late parcell of the possessions of Charles Steuart, late king of England” was made for its then owners, the Commonwealth. In it, the site of the present house is described as “the lower lodge with a little poor barn and stable standing near the said lodge, with yards, gardens, and Orchards thereunto adjoining and belonging”. The present lake is spoken of as “a little fishpond”, and the result of this survey and valuation was that the whole estate was split up and sold to various purchasers, in whose hands it remained until the Restoration. Then there “crept out of his hole” one Orlando Bridgeman, to whom King Charles had, on April 11th, 1644, mortgaged the Bowood estate for £3330. Bridgeman now petitioned the Crown for a re-grant of Bowood, which, after a certain delay, was allotted to him for a yearly rent of £30, on the understanding that he undertook to plant every year “ten young trees of oake at least” and “to save and defend them from browse of cattle and other spoils and harm, that they may grow up and become tymber for his Majesty’s use and benefit in time to come.”

  This shows the far-sightedness of estate managers in those long-distant days when forestry had not
yet become a recognised science. It was then only an art, and, like all the arts, it was taken seriously by the country gentlemen of the time.

  By 1679 Bowood had come into the possession of Bridgeman’s grandson, the second Orlando Bridgeman, who, unlike his father and grandfather, was no financier. In fact, he came pretty near to bankruptcy, and, to save him from final disgrace, his friends at court gave him a West Indian governorship. But before he took up the appointment, it was announced that he had been “drowned by misadventure in the Thames”.

  The rest shall be told in the words of Sophia, Lady Shelburne, who, thirty years later, was on her honeymoon at Bowood. A few days before, she had been married by Dr Hort to William, Lord Shelburne, and in her diary she writes:

  “After supper Dr Hort told us the melancholy story of Sir Orlando Bridgeman, to whom Bowood formerly belonged, and from whose family the late Lord Shelburne purchased it. Sir Orlando had a wife and son and daughter, all very amiable. Sir Orlando was appointed to go as Governor to Barbadoes, but he had distressed his circumstances so much that he found it impossible, and growing desperate went into his closet and wrote a farewell letter to Lady Bridgeman and to his son, and one to the King to state his case, and to recommend his family to his protection. After he was missed, these letters were found, and his family making all the search they could after him, found clothes which they knew to be his, lying by the side of a river, and after drawing it for a great while, a corpse which they supposed to be him, tho’ dis-figured by lying so long under water. The family were then satisfied of their misfortune; all his effects were sold, and the son dying soon after, left Lady Bridgeman with only her daughter to partake of her distress. At some distance of time there came a beggar man to the town of Oxford, and desired to speak to some particular person in it, to whom he discovered himself to be Sir Orlando Bridgeman and said that he had wrote those letters, and gone to the water side with the design of drowning himself, which, however, he had not been able to resolve upon. Desiring that this might be told to his family whom he wanted to see, but who had no means of relieving him and being found out, he was confined in the goal at Gloucester, where he ended his life.”

  Bridgeman’s supposed suicide took place in 1738, and his actual death in 1745. After this Bowood seems to have drifted about for some years in the hands of “receivers”, till eventually it was bought in 1754 by Lord Shelburne, who found the Bridgeman house in a very dilapidated condition. He at once employed an architect named Henry Keene to alter and enlarge the house, but his work was not at all satisfactory. In 1763 Shelburne was succeeded by his son, afterwards the first Marquis of Lansdowne. Bowood itself was left to his mother and he at once bought it from her for £15,000. The new owner was most dissatisfied with Keene’s work, and allowed very little of it to remain, while he engaged Robert Adam to improve the house. On and off Adam was in charge of the building from 1762 to 1770. Unfortunately he never had quite a free hand at Bowood, as he had to fit his plans to the work of other architects who had played about with the place. But he did his best to improve the south entrance front by building a tall pedimented portico with the family coat-of-arms inserted within the pediment. He gave the whole façade of the west front the right proportions by his large pediments supported by brackets and he altered the shape of the windows. He virtually refashioned the interior of the big house, concentrating particularly on the Great Room (now the dining-room), the Front Hall, the South-East Corner Room, and the Cube Room. He also built the Diocletian Wing and the Orangery, the latter of which, standing at right angles to the house, is complete, pure and untouched Adam.

  As Lord Kerry said in 1922, “The elements of proportion, as may be seen in every house built by the Adam brothers, form not the least part of their designs, and it is clear that the interior of the then existing house was much cut about to bring it into conformity with their ideas.”

  Lord Lansdowne also spent immense sums in making the park and the grounds under the supervision of “ Capability” Brown, and round them had been formed a large estate, every acre of which he had purchased, including a little copyhold which was first granted “at the rent of a rose” to a tenant in 1328. He filled the house with pictures, ancient marbles, furniture, French silk for the walls of the sitting-rooms, and Chinese wallpapers for some of the bedrooms. In fact, in 1775 the house and grounds stood practically the same as they stand today.

  A paper lately discovered at Bowood shows the advice given by an anonymous writer to Lord Lansdowne at this time:

  “Measures must be taken that everything may be done with propriety, decorum, and dignity with an arrangement; if otherwise all will be mudling hugger-mugger and no appearance of what is becoming.…

  “All this must be followed with resolution and vigour; so as no projects can possibly make an impression upon the mind. If there is any alteration, the consequences are misery, dependency, and a total destruction of the qualities of the heart and head which ought to belong to a Nobleman or Gentleman who intends to act a proper part in publick and private affairs.”

  After all this it is hardly astonishing to find that, according to Bentham, Lord Lansdowne was already, in 1781, indebted to the extent of £300,000, and on his death his eldest son was unhappily forced, for financial reasons, to denude the house and sell most of the contents. He built himself a small castle at Southampton, and Bowood was uninhabited during his tenure of the title and the Wiltshire estates. When he died in 1809, he was succeeded by his half-brother as third Marquis, who did his best to buy back as much as possible of the Bowood estate and to refurnish the house. He employed Barry for any essential architectural alterations, and made a fresh and beautiful collection of pictures, most of which are still in the house.

  The famous screen by Raphael now in the National Gallery included originally two prædellas. One of these is in America, but the other is at Bowood.

  There is a gay and gorgeous picture by Van der Meulen which shows Louis XIV driving in a coach with his queen and Madame de Montespan. They are on their way to watch a battle, and for this event they all seem to be dressed in their very best clothes and to be accompanied with much pomp.

  The Reynolds “Strawberry Girl” is well known, but less well known is the amusing and imaginative portrait by Sir Joshua called “The Infant Johnson”—Samuel Johnson as a baby according to Reynolds’ imagination.

  Other fascinating pictures are Zoffany’s “Mrs Salusbury” (the mother of Mrs Thrale); Gainsborough’s “ Study of Cows in a Landscape”; “ Peg Woffington”, possibly by Hogarth; a small Dutch picture called “The Little Nurse”, by Maes; and a lovely group of Turner watercolours.

  EPILOGUE

  PORTRAIT OF A COUNTY

  IN the minds of the inhabitants, Wiltshire possesses a definite personality, yet a stranger is often uncertain as to the actual point when he enters it. It is almost impossible to say just where the county begins, although, after a mile or two, there is no longer any doubt that the outlines are those of the county of Wilts. What the Russian philosopher Birdyaev said of the human form could as well be said of this county, with its distinct though unassertive separateness.

  “The form of the human Body,” wrote Birdyaev, “is the victory of the spirit over natural chaos.… Its form is not a phenomenon of the Physical world … it is not only of the soul … it is spiritual.… The face of Man is the summit of the cosmic process.… This is Personality in its entirety.”

  Some other counties, though not all, have this kind of personality—this “victory of the spirit over natural chaos”; the personality of Wiltshire takes possession without any sudden transformation of the scene. The traveller may be leaving behind him Hampshire, with its herds of forest ponies scampering and snuffing in the heather; or Somerset and savage haunted Sedgemoor; or Gloucester, all pears and cheese; but each of these falls from memory after five miles of Wiltshire. And why? Wiltshire cannot boast of any outstanding feature. Salisbury Plain has the indefinable beauty of a still and tideless sea. The
level of the Plain is high, so it is literally possible for Wiltshire men to look down upon the rest of the world; but the word “ plain” sounds like a flat country and gives no impression of great height.

  Yet the Plain is far from flat. Without going so far as Samuel Pepys, who described the road from Salisbury to Stonehenge as filled with “ great hills fit to fright us”, it soon becomes apparent that only the vastness of the Plain blinds the traveller to the immense variety of its surface. It is possible to meet an army on the march and to look back a few minutes later to find that it has entirely disappeared—swallowed up in an unperceived hollow in the downs.

  Stonehenge plays many a sly trick on the approaching visitor. From two or three miles away it looks like a few birds perching on the grass. “ Is that all?” you ask. Then it disappears altogether for a mile or two, to spring into sight again, looking like a herd of elephants close at hand. The overwhelming size of the monoliths is not realised till one stands directly under the great trilithons. Then Stonehenge has the atmosphere of some other planet, vaster than ours, where space and time possess a new significance.

  Then, to take the opposite extreme, on Salisbury Plain littleness is great. The flora of the chalk downs includes some of the smallest blossoms in the world, and there comes a week in the year when these almost invisible little flowers break simultaneously into bloom in their myriads. The fresh colour streams over the earth in such volume that it seems to change the very substance of the soil and not only its surface. In their little day these infinitesimal flowers rival in importance the eternal curves of the downs.

  The little streams which intersect Salisbury Plain hide themselves so modestly that it does not at first appear how much they have to do with the beauty and character of the county. Yet they were its first artists. “ Capability” Brown himself could never approach them as landscape gardeners, for they were the sculptors who literally carved out the Wiltshire we see. Those playful little trout streams which tinkle so innocently through the valleys were the actual creators of the landscape. They cut their way through the yielding chalk till they reached the hard subsoil. They are responsible, too, for more than the physical geography of the county: to them is due the placing of its buildings, from the soaring spire of Salisbury Cathedral to the barns and byres on the farms. The villages of South Wilts follow a very definite plan. Nearly all of them were sited by the West Saxons, who settled beside the rivers from which they could water their flocks. They turned away from the grand Imperial roads which in Roman times had kept the population on the high ground, for the Saxons originally looked no further than the next river crossing. There they built their hamlets, as the village names still testify. Woodford, Wishford, Codford, Britford, Wilsford and the rest; they still have their prebridge names.