Wolfdown House

Portion of service side of Wolfdown Ho., East Front

### Architect(s)

Various, including William Joy (14th C), William Smyth (15th C),William Arnold, Robert Smythson, John Thorpe, and perhaps John Shute (16th C), Repton,‘Athenian’ Stuart, Grinling Gibbons, Hawksmoor, Robert Adam, Soane, Wren, Thomas Archer, Inigo Jones, Stone, de Caus, Gerbier, Webb, James Gibb, Wood the Elder, Wood the Younger, Henry Holland, Baldwin of Bath, Dowbiggin, &c

Sponsored by the Beechbourne *Herald & Courier*

**Wolfdown House,** the primary seat of the Dukes of Taunton, is a Grade I listed country house near to Woolfont Abbas, Wiltshire, between Wolf Down and the River Wolfbourne.

   Like Brympton d’Evercy, it has grown by accretion over a very considerable time. It came into the possession of the Dukes of Taunton from the family of the 1st Duke’s mother, Frances née Malet, Lady Holles, James 2d’s mistress. The Malets had been in possession since the Conquest, having married into and co-opted the family of the Saxon thegn whom they dispossessed, a descendant of the House of Wessex in whose dynasty the estate had been since at least the latter part of the 9th Century. Consequently, Wolfdown and its estate have been in the *demonstrably* unbroken possession of one family for somewhat over eleven centuries, at minimum.

Situate between the Wolfbourne and its Wool Ford to its North and East and the Downlands to its South and West, and hard by Wolf Down and its long-vanished chalk horse, Wolfdown dominates the Woolfonts and Downlands as it always has done. The house, evolving over the years, has been at various times a manor house, a prodigy house, a power house, and a ducal seat; it has acquired, in the process, an internationally important collection of paintings, furniture, Old Master drawings, sculptures, books, incunabula, and other artefacts.

## **History**

As an estate, the *recorded* history of Wolfdown reaches to the reign of Alfred, when it was given, out of the royal demesne, to a young member of the Royal Family of Wessex, Cynric, later glossed as an atheling. Certainly his sons, Baldred and Cwichelm *Comes,* and Cwichelm’s son Ingild Cild, held there as immediate king’s thegns; and it is probable that the present site of Wolfdown House, on a Greensand terrace and in the portion of the estate which was suitable to arable, was likewise the site of the Saxon thegn’s hall. (Professor Dennis Farnaby, Student of Christ Church, Fellow of All Souls, and Tauntonian Professor of Ancient British History and Antiquities in the University of Oxford, has suggested this may be true as to an underlying Roman and Romano-British *villa rustica* as well.)

The Wolfdown House of today rests, literally, upon Norman foundations. Almost all traces of its Norman and later mediæval iteration are lost, owing to a substantial rebuilding and extension in late Yorkist and the earliest Tudor times. Of this, in turn, only the entrance and façade, with its Tudor bay window – an oriel window of the highest order – running from the first floor, above the great entrance, to the third, now remains recognisable. For it was in Stuart times that the barons and knights of the Malet line, even those so proud as to essay a Tudor power house, were to be eclipsed by their ducal descendants the House of Fitzjames; and the fabric of Wolfdown House reflects this genetic and political fact.

The fathers and grandfathers of the Cavalier Malets in the civil war none then foresaw were enthusiasts for the accession of James 6th of Scotland as James 1st of England, upon the death of Elizabeth. They had no particular affection at that time for the Stuarts; they did, however, with much of the rest of their sprawling affinity, have substantial interests in the North and the Borders, such that it was to their advantage to have any sort of union of crowns and reductions alike in borders and in threats of raids, reivings, and ‘patriotic’ robbers.

In any case, the Malets swiftly adopted, at their London town house and at their countryside holdings, particularly their *caput* at Wolfdown, what became the Jacobean style, at its highest, ‘Court’ development. By the time of the accession of Charles 1st, Wolfdown, long a prodigy house, had become a *Jacobean* prodigy house, building upon its late Tudor essays in the Renascence style, so similar to – but rather showier, as befit the Malet dignity – to The Hall, in Bradford on Avon, Westwood, Iford, and Belcombe Court, and surpassing Montacute House in Somerset.

During the reign of Charles 1st, the Caroline stable block was erected in place of the earlier stables, magnificent in ashlar. At the same time, the Tudor-Jacobean core of the House itself was considerably expanded upon, with new wings added in Inigo Jones’ most Palladian style.

The Civil War might have brought condign destruction upon Wolfdown: Sir James, the cannily named, had been a furious Royalist, and his successor Sir Edward Gilbert Malet served under Prince Rupert. Wisely, however, when the Cavalier cause was rather obviously lost, Sir Edward handed over all the Wiltshire holdings to his moderately Parliamentary cousin Sir Edmund – an MP who had married Sir Edward’s sister Anne –, and tried to sit out the Interregnum in the family’s Somerset holdings. Sir Edward had already sent his daughter and only surviving child, Frances Charlotte Henrietta Malet, abroad, and eventually, having made Britain to hot to hold him by supporting Royalist agents and plots, fled to France and then to the Low Countries, with the Stuart Court in exile. It was only the loyalty to the Commonwealth of Sir Edmund, even after having been one of the Members extruded from the Commons in Pride’s Purge, which saved Wolfdown, ‘that nest of spies and men of blood, of minions of the man Charles Stuart, and cradle of whores’, from Roundhead vengeance. (The appellation, ‘cradle of whores’, referred to Frances Charlotte Henrietta Malet, afterward Lady Holles, who became mistress to James, Duke of York, the later James 2d and 7th, in exile, by whom she had the first Duke of Taunton.)

The Malets having always been markedly at once a close-knit and a politically sinuous family, always having a member in any opposing camps going, it was entirely unsurprising that, upon the Restoration, Sir Edmund Malet the former Parliamentarian exchanged his possession of Wolfdown with his cousin and brother-in-law the Cavalier Sir Edward. It was even less surprising that the first Earl Fitzwarren – the future first Duke of Taunton –, that royal bastard and grandson to Sir Edward, had the estates entailed upon him, by a bit of legal legerdemain which relied in no small (if unspoken) part upon Royal influence and the clear support of the Cavalier Parliament. Well before he followed his grandfather in possession, the first Duke, as he became when his father James 2d and 7th succeeded to the Throne, began a restoration of his own, and a further expansion with it, of Wolfdown House.

*Wolf-Down House,* the Seat of the Duke of *Taunton,* naturall sonne to King *Iames* the second, is a fantasticall pyle thro’ being compound of every Taste ever which flourisht in this Countrye, brought intoe *Harmony* by meere *Accident* & ye *Providence* of *GOD*. Tho’ not *elegant* in the moderne Stile, it is very *Grand,* and, situate between the *Downes* and the *Forde* vpon *Wooll-Bourn,* amidst numerous *Antiquities,* can scarce be bettered for its prospect & its *Grandeurs*. The Duke hadd it of his *Mothers* familie, the lords Mallett, who were ever adding too itt when in & when out of Court-Favour, & handing it off one to the other as the *Fortunes* of *War* did require & their many turnings of Coate. The Duke himself is distinguisht for his greatnesse, & engageth in new buildyng in the rarest taste to draw together these *Remaines* of his Mallet familie vnder the *Dignitie* of his *State* and High Birth of the King.

His Couzen, the Duke of *Trowe-Bridge,* naturall sonne to King *Charles* the second, is seated nearbye, at *Little-Compte House,* which he hath made over in a very noble & elegant manner, tho’ loosing thereby the *romancey* charackter of it. *Little-Compte House* also was a seat of the lords Mallett, and Time hath smoothed its fields and purlieus into Harmony long since. It commaunds a rare prospect of the R. *Wilye,* and across to *Salisbury-Plaine,* and hath as its *Back-Garden,* so to say, the *Great Ridge* and much Woods, & is most parkely. Were these two Seats at the oppos’d ends of the *Countie,* both would be the better of it, having no rivals & not distracting from each by the other.

– Suppressed MS fragment, John Aubrey, *The Naturall Historie*

Under the first Duke, the Palladian manner was infused with the Baroque in the balanced fashion approved by Wren; it was under his grandson and successor, Henry ‘the Trimmer’, that the full-blown and florid English Baroque came to Wolfdown, for a time. That this style was regarded by the Whigs as a political statement – of High Toryism, suspected Jacobitism, and a sentimental regard for what Tories called ‘the old religion’ and the Whigs damned as ‘papistry’ and ‘popish treason’ – bothered the second Duke not at all. His grandfather the first Duke had been equally adamant in rejecting any Dutch influence in the reigns of William and Mary, even as he had defied his legitimate royal cousin and half-sister to demand more of him than mere acquiescence (if that) in his father’s deposition.

Subsequently, Neo-Palladianism returned to Wolfdown to eclipse some of the grander, more flamboyant, and more pointed exercises in the Baroque, not as a matter of politics, but as a matter of taste. It was at this time, under Anne, that the Palladian bridge was erected over the ornamental stream on the mile-long drive from the gatehouse to Wolfdown. Such examples of the actual and original ‘Queen Anne’ style as were indulged by the Dukes of the period were confined to edifices other than the grand suite of buildings which made up Wolfdown and its immediate environs. The Manor or Home Farm’s farmhouse, like numerous gentry and merchants’ houses owned by the Dukes in the Woolfonts, was rebuilt in that style, and seems to have inspired, if not been brazenly plagiarised for, Winslow Hall, Bucks.

The Fitzjames Dukes held themselves aloof from the Hanoverian Succession, although they did not contest it openly; architecturally, however, they fell under the spell of the dignity and consequence of the Georgian style, and Wolfdown today has been pulled together by an overall and overriding Georgian refacing and partial rebuilding. (All the same, they occasionally broke out in somewhat suspect ways: the ‘Coursing Lodge’ in Somerford Tout Saints, is only in principle a lodge for the lesser chase. It is in fact more an adolescent country house, designed by James Gibbs in his best crypto-Romanist and crypto-Jacobite style, all Italian Mannerism. Owing to the perfection of its proportions, it manages all the same, as it has done since it sprang from Gibbs’ brow in 1731, not too look ‘too vulgar-big’ – as that Kipling enthusiast the present Duke says of it. Its subtle political statement, typical of ‘The Trimmer’, has now been forgotten, but was obvious at the time. The third and fourth Dukes, like the second, did not altogether forget their Stuart connexions even as they plumped for the Georgian *style.*)

… It is only upon a mind disposed to the experience by having contemplated the ruin of Fonthill Abbey, the druidical remains of Stonehenge, the perfect modelling of Salisbury Cathedral, and the tasteful ornamentation of Wilton and of Langford, that Wolfdown House makes its fullest impression. The Duke of Taunton, as a descendant of aristocratic Cavaliers and the Stuart monarchs, is naturally concerned to outshine the Earls of Pembroke and of Radnor; and the character of a Duke must be supported: and so his *Schloss,* as we should call it, is of necessity even more a palace than are the seats of mere earls or of the Bishop. At the same time, the duke himself is in temperament a countryman and an enthusiast only for the sports and doings of the country: our Blücher *Fürst von Wahlstatt* as John Bull. He was himself in residence – he hates to go to London – and received me with a hearty cordiality, and showed me ’round his great house, which is very fine. He knew the history of the curiosities and the choice works of art within it, but was much more animated when he came to speak of his tenants, his horses, his dogs, and his sheep, and the history to *them* pertaining. His heartiness must be called almost *fierce;* but it was a welcome relief from the inhuman manners of the English. I attribute this to his being a duke all but royal of the old House, if from a bastard line: he regards lesser peers quite clearly with amused and lofty tolerance, and feels *he* has no need to parade the dignity of *his* rank. He spoke quite pleasantly of his kinsmen, such as the Lord de Clifforde and a Northern lord, on the Scotch borders, whose name I could not understand (‘Mahston’, as I heard it); but of those to whom he is not kin, he is civil but by no means very respectful.

He has something of the air of his distant cousin, whom I met once in Vienna, the *Reichsgraf* von Malet von und zu Malet zu Kirchham und Pettau, that distinguished officer; and once entertained him here in Wiltshire, in company with the Graf von Malet’s fellow traveller, the Graf von Taaffe (the seventh Viscount Taaffe in Ireland). What a Romantic, nostalgic Jacobite dinner that must have been! It would have been worthy of the pen of Scott.

The Duke’s great house, Wolfdown, is a curious jumble of styles, which seem to have simply been grafted on one another with the passing centuries, until the deposition of his forefather James the Second, and not since [*sic*]; and it is a treasury of paintings by the old masters. Best of all, he took me ’round his gardens and park – he seemed all the happier to be out of doors – which are magnificent, having been improved by Brown and then by Repton in the best English manner. Yet all the while, though content that I should admire these, he spoke interminably of sheep and wool and flocks, and asked, Did we in Germany have such sheep, and, What was the state of the wool trade in Germany? He is a most unusual and eccentric man; it is hard to credit that he is also, when called upon by his nation, a formidable and ungovernable voice in the House of Lords, with strong opinions and, it is said, no little influence.

– *Tour of a German Prince,* Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau, 1830

Satisfied with Wolfdown in its accretionary character and Georgian finish, successive Dukes of Taunton thereafter left things strictly alone, save for enthusiastically advancing the plumbing and, very early on, wiring the old pile for electricity in an expensively unobtrusive fashion. Standing at one remove from Victoria and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas (the Queen Empress is said to have asked if the Tauntons were actual Jacobites; her heir, the future Edward 7th, who knew them on a shooting, stalking, and Turf level, assured her they were not: they were simply too grand for mere royalties), the Dukes of the Victorian and Edwardian eras made no moves to add on the appalling architectural twiddly bits of the period or otherwise to deface what they had inherited.

The death, unmarried and at a young age, of the ninth Duke at Flers-Courcelette in 1916 caused an abeyance in the Fitzwarren earldom, upon which the ducal succession depends; consequently, the Trustees preserved the architectural status quo, until the abeyance was resolved in favour of the tenth Duke in 1975. The tenth Duke made only technological improvements to Wolfdown; his son and successor Charles, Duke of Taunton, the current Duke, has been similarly minded to preserve Wolfdown as is, with minor exceptions. His tenure has seen the creation of a nearby neo-Georgian estate for retired Gurkhas and their families; and, the present Duke being a railways enthusiast and self-described ‘anorak’, it is he who turned an otiose withdrawing room into the Brunel Room (see below).

It is owing to this period of abeyance that Wolfdown must cede the palm as the oldest continuously occupied house in the UK to Saltford Manor, Somerset.

### **World War II**

Excepting the Civil War, Wolfdown House and its demesne has never faced a greater threat to its architecture than during the Great War and the Second World War. In both instances, the demesne, including the Downlands which are now in great part an SSSI as being never-ploughed ancient grassland, were saved from any Digging for Victory by their being offered as pastoral land for cavalry remounts in the Great War and for wool sheep for uniforms in both conflicts. Wolfdown House itself was spared in the Second World War by the swift decision of the Trustees to offer it as a reserve site for the PM and Cabinet in the event of invasion, and, as the Cabinet dithered, granting it meanwhile to the RAF as a command HQ and a subsidiary link in Chain Home. The defence of Bristol in the Blitz was part-directed from Wolfdown House, as part of a chain of stations to back up RAF Filton, RAF Rudloe Manor, and RAF Zeals. The current Duchess, otherwise Professor the Baroness Lacy *suo jure,* has noted that, ‘the 10 Group AVM and then the Station O/C, using the place for quarters and a command centre, had no intention of wrecking it or living like pigs rather than like gentlemen – as I suspect the Trustees wagered upon. And then, of course, Ike used it at times in the run-up to D-Day. Not, really, unlike the circumstances which preserved St Vincents Hall, in Grantham – which, you know, Bomber Harris and Barnes Wallis took over’: which is perfectly true, and what saved the place. Subsequently, in the run-up to OVERLORD, it was used by elements of SHAEF, and General Eisenhower stayed there upon occasion during that period (see Eisenhower Bedroom, below).

## **Architecture**

The earliest architecture of Wolfdown was naturally the work of local, provincial builders, carpenters, and masons, and very early architects, who *may* have included William Joy in the 14th Century, William Smyth in the 15th, and, in the 16th, William Arnold, Robert Smythson, John Thorpe, and perhaps John Shute.

Subsequently, work has been done at Wolfdown by, amongst others, Repton and Brown without; ‘Athenian’ Stuart; Grinling Gibbons; Hawksmoor; Adam; and Soane, within. Wren did a good deal of work for the Dukes of Taunton, and Thomas Archer designed the Music Room; Inigo Jones, aided by Stone and de Caus, was a major contributor to the renovations and extensions of the early Stuart period; after the Restoration, Gerbier, briefly, and Webb, carried on some of his designs. James Gibb did some discreet work at Wolfdown even during its Georgian obsessions; in that period, Robert Adam, Wood the Elder, Wood the Younger, Henry Holland, and Baldwin of Bath and his successor Palmer, did very well out of the ducal pockets. The present chapel has a few Wren and Dowbiggin touches to it, though it is in the main Perpendicular – and of a sumptuousness which were startling even in a royal palace, although begun by merely baronial and knightly Malets. The present Duke has stated that he should like to think this evidence of religious devotion on the part of his ancestors, but is inclined to put it down to sheer secular arrogance: a verdict in and with which most architectural historians concur.

## **Exterior**

Although drawn together by the long-standing and invariant choice to use the ‘lambent honey’ of ashlared, and, where apt, rusticated, Chickmarsh stone, a ‘Bath’ oolitic limestone of the highest quality and durability, the quarries for which are owned by the Dukes of Taunton as they were by the Malets before them, the Wolfdown exterior is unquestionably rather the result of evolutionary accretion than of planning. It is recorded that Lutyens, visiting strictly as a social guest for a Friday to Monday (the term ‘weekend’ is not used at Wolfdown), simply threw up his hands upon first seeing the exterior. Even the Georgian touches have not effaced, nor were they meant or allowed to efface, the essential character of the house as something which grew as it were organically. All the same, as it represents the best work of each period, and has a uniformity of material in its diversity of design, it is one of the most satisfying, as it is one of the most original, country houses in the United Kingdom.

The main gatehouse is Georgian in its present state; the Tudor gatehouse was taken down and reassembled as a secondary gatehouse where the bounds face a lesser thoroughfare. The main gates are in wrought iron and gilt, by Jean Tijou.

Records reflect that there were in earlier times formal Elizabethan gardens around the house; these were replaced in succession by Charles Bridgeman and then by William Kent, whose work in turn was heavily altered when Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was brought in to do the grounds over. Subsequently, Brown’s work, in turn, was modified in part, and considerably extended, by Humphry Repton. The present iteration of the gardens in the most mature English naturalistic style is the unaltered work of Gertrude Jekyll, and regarded as the greatest of her commissions.

The drive from the main gatehouse to the surround, and thence, commonly, to the Palladian porte-cochère at the West Front, is slightly over a mile; after it crosses the Brown-Repton ornamental stream by its Palladian bridge, it is lined and arched over by mature oaks.

Excepting the Home Farm and the new-built neo-Georgian Gurkha housing, much of the adjacent Downlands may also be regarded as being in the nature of a ‘wild park’ for Wolfdown. After the wool trade moved largely away from the West Country, successive Dukes, whose income derived from their London property and increasingly from their Essex grants on the Thames, elected to preserve the sheep country as it was. In consequence, it functions effectively as a parkland.

The immediate estate of Wolfdown as such is just at 16000 acres (about 6475 ha), or 25 square miles (ca. 64.75 sq. km). (The total amount of the Duke’s landed holdings, including those outwith Wilts, is reported as being 113,174 acres, approximately the size of one-third of the area of Greater London).

It is appropriate here to note that the W&CR station – technically a halt, but, as His Grace’ all but lodge-gate station, a magnificent Brunelian terminus in fact – of Abbas Rural, nearby, is based upon Brunel’s original plans for Bath Spa station.

## **Interiors**

### **State rooms**

Notable amongst the rooms of state are

**The State Drawing Room,** with chimneypieces designed by Gerard or Garrett Christmas, but executed by his sons John and Mathias, is otherwise the later work of John Webb. Its air of almost regal magnificence were difficult to overstate, but it is even for a State Room rather too grand to be anything save icily forbidding. The ceiling is by Rubens.

**The State Dining Room** is if anything grander than the State Drawing Room, and yet more freezingly lofty in its air. Nor, it must be said, and *has* been said, notably by Alec Clifton-Taylor, a great friend to the present Duke’s late mother, can it have been a pleasure to dine in: in accordance with the fashion and etiquette of the time, it is well removed from the servants and from Wolfdown’s seven great kitchens. This kept the aristocracy from enduring the smells of cookery; but it condemned them to having nothing save stone-cold meals. William Kent seems to have tackled this commission as a challenge to marmoreal chastity, and, lamentably, pulled it off.

### **State Apartments**

Owing to the political consequences of the Hanoverian Succession, the State Apartments in their final iteration were never used for their intended purpose; nor were they used by James 2d as had been planned, he having been forced to flee the country before the date of his intended visit to his natural son’s great house. The only royalties to have occupied State Apartments at Wolfdown, and those of a prior construction at that, were Charles 1st, Charles 2d, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and the Prince and Princess of Orange (the later William and Mary) prior to the accession of James 2d and 7th. The visit of Charles 2d to what was by then his nephew’s grand house was not, according to persistent and probable rumour, his first visit to Wolfdown: he is said to have spent a night there during his escape after Battle of Worcester, although in the Caroline stable block, not in a State Apartment. Heale House, where he had taken refuge, was rumoured to have been on the list of places to be searched, and it has been maintained since 1651 that the disguised king sheltered instead at Wolfdown on the night of 10/11 October in that year.

### **Subsequent alterations**

**The Eisenhower Room** was in effect carved out of the former State Apartments reserved to the Heir to the Throne, and is so named for its most famous wartime occupier. It is notable for its painted ceiling by Angelica Kauffman.

### **Secondary rooms**

Amongst the notable secondary rooms, so far as any such can be thus labelled at Wolfdown, are

**The Chinese Room,** one of the show-pieces – to the current Duke’s dismay – of Wolfdown House, which has a sort of pale imitation at Claydon House in Bucks.

It is proverbial at Wolfdown that there are two sorts of person.

There are those who can sleep peacefully and without the least qualm (or notice) in the Chinese Room, stuffed as it is with Chinese Chippendale; priceless and desperately fragile porcelain, celadon, and lacquerware; Imperial yellow wallpaper (Canon Judith Potecary naturally made a feminist reference, on first seeing it, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman) writhing with Han-purple dragons; and, most worrisome of all to nervous sleepers – or insomniacs, by that juncture – life-sized porcelain statues of robed, impassive Chinese, invigilating the suite like a terracotta army, and alarmingly life-like – particularly in half-light.

And, of course, there are those who cannot.

Canon Paddick has slept there several times, with the only notable result being his once remembering, the next Sunday, to make a special intention for the Church in China. Professor Farnaby, having scholarly interests in the history of beast worship, zoolatry, and the like, and specifically in horse-cults, has also put up there, quite happily: the Chinese Room contains several famous artefacts, objects of art and virtue, which are specially of interest to him: Tang *sancai* horses and camels, *qilin* tapestries, and that sort of thing.)

It is a positive favourite of Lady Agatha Prothero-Fane’s, whose father the Admiral had, not unrelatedly, held several China Station commands before going on to commands in the North America and West Indies Station.

Edmond Huskisson, by contrast, cannot bear it. (Rupert, Master of Dilton, naturally, simply makes philosophical little jokes about AI, John Searle, and philosophy when the Chinese Room is mentioned.)

**The Charles 1st Room** is a former State Apartment, containing various relics of the King and Martyr, including a chair of state. It tends to be reserved for stops by Rory, Marquess of Badenoch, has a magnificent plastered ceiling, and is hung with tapestries inherited from the private collections of the House of Stuart.

**The Brunel Room** houses the present Duke’s famous Scalefour models of the Great Western Railway and of the Woolfonts & Chickmarsh, hugely vast, superbly accurate, and impeccably modelled. A Frith, two Cuneos, and a Newbould have pride of place amongst the ancestors and their horses and hounds on the walls.

**The Octagon Room,** a room of mirrors (in Baroque gilt frames) with an Antonio Verrio painted ceiling: which, *pace* the suspicions of Edmond Huskisson, was never used by the aristocracy for orgies and abstruse sexual positions, but was rather devoted over the generations to verifications of the nice adjustment of a wig or a day cravat. It has seen much more yet, over the years, in the way of tutorial exasperation than of vanity, its primary function having been that of instruction, having been conducted by generations of fencing masters and dancing masters, often French and regularly despairing rather too dramatically.

Only the march of technology has saved its being used nowadays for a similar purpose. His present Grace has instead created a modern equivalent, with cameras and a monitor, in the nets, where, even as the actions are recorded for later review, the screens show in real time what the CCTV has seen, as bowlers and batsmen perfect their craft for the Woolfonts Combined XI. This is all the better for the Wolfdown servants, who should otherwise have been forever sweeping up shards of shattered looking-glasses, broken by cricket balls.

Even now, ladies of the House occasionally resort to it for at least the final confirmation of the perfection of their attire on the grandest occasions, the sort of nights on which the tiaras came out. It is regarded as the very devil to dust, and His Grace has instructed that whatever housemaid has that duty of a particular fortnight is to receive a step in pay for the period.

**The (State, or Greater) Music Room,** created by Thomas Archer from 1714 to 1730, and decorated by Laguerre, is, rather by feel than by science, the acoustically perfect ‘shoebox’ later achieved by the Musikverein’s *Goldener Saal,* the *Gewandhaus,* and the *Concertgebouw.* It has seen both Handel and the young Mozart amongst its performers and conductors; nowadays, it is where The Fonts record charity CDs.

**The Etruscan Room,** by Robert Adam, is an exercise in Neo-Classicism in the grand manner; Betjeman said wryly that stopping there was like living inside a vase. It tends to amuse Lord Maynooth, who is commonly put up in it.

**The Carnelian Room,** its name having the obvious derivation, was the subject of ecstasies by Whistler: who was therefore never invited again, it being damned cheek to admire a man’s house and furnishings. Its furnishings and themes are Classical / Hellenistic, and the overall design is by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. Edmond Huskisson has been up there in the past, when he had managed to reach the end of Teddy Gates’ lengthy patience.

**The Lesser State Dining Room,** with its painted ceiling by Thornhill, and its Turkey red colour scheme, was designed to be one in the eye for Blenheim. It succeeds, and the sixth Duke of Devonshire rather clearly had it in mind when he created his own, Regency dining room at Chatsworth: a common subject of jests between the current Duke of Taunton and ‘Stoker’, the present Duke of Devonshire. It remains in regular use, even for meals *en famille.*

**The Delft Room,** so named for obvious reasons, is a typically English domestic interior (in the great house manner), with much linen-fold panelling, in which a rather startling chimneypiece of Delft tiles is surpassed only by a stunning quantity of canvases by Vermeer, Paulus Potter, de Hooch, Maes, Houckgeest, and Hendrick Corneliszoon van Vliet.

**The Long Gallery,** a Tudor survival with perhaps the best plastered ceiling in Britain, possesses excellent panelling which is hardly to be seen, as it is now one of the primary picture galleries at Wolfdown, and stuffing with Old Masters.

**The Greater Library** (there are several) at Wolfdown, much of it the work of Grinling Gibbons, has bays rather whimsically named for their subjects: secular Latin books in ‘Ostia’; secular Greek, in ‘Piræus’; Hebrew books and Old Testament theology in ‘Jaffa and Askelon’; and general Christian theology and New Testament commentaries, and acres of old sermons duly printed and bound, of a strongly Anglican tradition, occupying ‘Whitby’. The dukes of Taunton, being Stuarts, although on the less dangerous side of the blanket, are and have ever been so High Church, and so sympathetic to the Old Religion, as to be Anglo-Catholic; and, being Stuarts, with the same proviso, felt a certain proprietary interest in the C of E: not least in case of the present duke, who is both learned and devout. The incumbents of the benefice and their curates have always been, and are very much nowadays, made free of the library as they list: a library which might, in everything save the grittier sciences, give points to Bodley.

The private ducal **Chapel of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Wolfdown House, Woolfont Abbas,** is Grade II\* listed. Its altar rails, like the main gates to the demesne, are primarily the work of Tijou, renewing and expanding upon surviving portions of railing by Ghiberti.

## **Art**

The Wolfdown collections are the rival, at least, of any country house or castle in the country, and peg level with various national collections. A partial list of their treasures includes:

* *Innumerable* Ben Salmons

**by Vermeer:** (mostly in or near the Delft Room, Wolfdown)

* *House Standing in Delft*
* *A Man Washing His Hands*
* *Jupiter, Psyche, & Mercury*

**by Hals:**

* *Youth Playing a Lute*
* *Portrait of a Gentleman in Black (?Rombout Hogerbeets)*
* *Portrait of Hendrick Coning*

**by Raphael:**

* Numerous cartoons
* *Christ and S Veronica (on loan to Abbas church as the 6th Station of the Cross)*

**by Rembrandt:**

* *Portrait of a Youth in a Blue Doublet*
* *Portrait of a Soldier*
* *Portrait of an Old Woman*
* *The Madness of Nebuchadnezzar*
* *Christ & the Doctors in the Temple*
* *Head of Moor (drawing)*
* *The Expulsion from Eden (drawing)*
* Var. etchings & drawings

**by Hogarth:**

* *The Scotch Congregation (not displayed)*
* *Danaë*

**by Poussin:**

* *The Transfiguration*
* *Psyche & Eros*
* *Saul & the Witch of Endor*
* The *‘Wolfdown’ Et in Arcadia Ego*
* Var. drawings

**by Rubens:**

* *Susannah & the Elders*
* *Bel & the Dragon (The Exploits of Daniel) (diptych)*
* *Cincinnatus at the plough*
* *Sisera Slain by Jael*

**by van Baburen:**

* *Christ Cursing the Fig Tree*

**by Paulus Potter:**

* *Three Bulls*
* *Four Horses in a Meadow*
* *The Sheepdog*

**by Cuyp:**

* *Sheep by a River*
* *Dordrecht from the West*
* *Family in a Wooded Landscape*

**by Mytens:**

* *S Luke*
* *A Family Christening*

**by de Bray:**

* *Portrait of a Youth*

**by Steen:**

* *The Village Funeral*
* *Hay-Making*

**by de Hooch:**

* *Soldier and Serving-Maid in a Courtyard*
* *S Paul Before Felix*

**by Flinck:**

* *The Infant Samuel*
* *The Judgement of Solomon*

**by Fabritius:**

* *The Baptism of John*

**by van de Velde:**

* *Autumn Landscape*

**by van Ostade:**

* *The Poulterer*

**by van Honthorst:**

* *Christ Before Pilate* (on loan to Abbas church as the 1st Station of the Cross)
* *The Choirmaster*
* *Lady at the Virginal*

**by van Ruisdael:**

* *Landscape with Windmills near Alkmaar*
* *Oaks and a Mill Race*
* *Storm approaching the shore of Bergen*

**by Saenredam:**

* *Hoofdwacht, Haarlem*

**by van der Heyden:**

* *Grote Markt*
* *Canal view*

**by Berckheyde**
* *Janskerk, Haarlem*

**by Titian:**

* *The Punishment of Tantalus*
* *G Mucius Scævola defying Lars Porsena*

**by Stubbs:**

* *White Barb stalked by lion*
* *HG the duke of Taunton, a groom, and ‘Cinna’*
* *HG the duke of Taunton riding out on ‘Cinna’, Tidnock Hall*
* *Racehorses belonging to HG the duke of Taunton being exercised at Epsom*
* *TG the dukes of Newcastle and of Taunton at Shooting, with Spaniels*
* *Racehorses belonging to HG the duke of Taunton being exercised at Doncaster*
* ‘*Pied-de-Grue’ Winning the St Leger Stakes*
* ‘*Custos’ Winning the Doncaster Gold Cup (study)*

**by Constable:**

* *Wolfdown House from the Lodge Gates*
* *Wolfdown House from the Wool Ford*
* *The Old Inn at the Wool Ford* (on loan to The Woolford House Hotel)

**by Gainsborough, excluding portraits:**

* *Tidnock Hall*
* *The Park, Wolfdown House*
* *Clentwood House*
* *The Home Farm, Clentwood House*
* *The Park, Melverley Court*

**Portraits by Holbein, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Dobson, van Dyck, Kneller, Kauffman, Sargent, Zoffany, Raeburn, John Lavery, Orpen, Whistler, Orchardson, Winterhalter, Sant, Wissing, Walker, &c (and var. deadly caricatures by Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray, & Cruikshank)**

**by Kauffman:**

* *Achilles in his tent*
* *S Catherine*
* *S Barbara*
* *S Margaret of Antioch* (on loan to Magna church)

**by Fuseli:**

* *Prospero and Ariel*

**by Canaletto:** (on loan to Taunton House)

* *Fitzwarren House (‘Old’ Taunton House) from the S James’s Park Canal* (NB: Now the lake in S James’s Park)
* *The S James’s Park Canal from Fitzwarren House (‘Old’ Taunton House)*

**by Morland:**

* *The Compleat Angler (the River Wolfbourne, at Woolford)*
* *Spaniels in a landscape*
* *Pigs [Gloucestershire Old Spots] at the Home Farm (Wolfdown House)*

**by Landseer:**

* *Spaniels*
* *The Prize Ram*
* *The Parish Bull*

**by Holbein:**

* *The Dowager (Lady Malet)*

**by van Eyck:**

* *Bathsheba*

**by Carpaccio:**

* *The Trial of S Stephen*

**by Leonardo:**

* *Leda & the Swan*

**by Claude Lorrain:**

* *Dido & Belinda*

**by Cooper:**

* Var. miniatures

**by Caravaggio:**

* *The Temptation of S Antony* (not on public display)

**by Rowlandson:**

* *The duke of Taunton, hunting*
* *The duchess of Taunton, with hunter*
* *The Duke of Taunton’s Hunt*
* *Lord Templecombe Facing a Fence*

**by Munnings:**

* *The Hunt, Wolfdown House*
* *Lord Templecombe* (the ninth Duke as a youth)

**by Raeburn:**

* ‘*Dilton’ (the duke of Taunton in Highland Dress)*

**by Macnee:**

* *The Master of Dilton’s children*

**by Ramsay:**

* *The Duke of Taunton at Camserney*

**by Nasmyth:**

* *Castle Camserney*
* *Luineag*

**by Farquharson:**

* *Snow and Sheep at Camserney*

**by Roettiers:**

* Var. medallions, &c(including Simon of Cyrene, on loan to Abbas church as the 5th Station of the Cross)

**by Hilliard:**

* Numerous miniatures

**by Archambo:**

* Wine urn

**by de Lamerie:**

* Salt cellar, &c

**by Laguerre:**

* Var. frescoes, painted ceilings, &c

**by Meissonnier:**

* Var. silver & furnishings; snuff-boxes

**by Vecchietta:**

* The ‘Neptune’ Standing Salt

**by Bernini:**

* *Bust of Henry, Cardinal York (Henry 9th)*
* Standing Salt *(‘Britannia’)*

**by Ghiberti:**

* Altar rail, Chapel, Wolfdown House (part; another portion is by Jean Tijou)
* *The Deposition* (on loan to Abbas church as the 13th Station of the Cross)

**by Uccello:**

* *S Leonard* (on loan to Abbas church)

**by Cellini:**

* ‘Classical’ medals
* *Mercury*
* The ‘Triton’ Standing Salt
* The ‘Nerites Wooed by Poseidon’ Standing Salt
* *Anteros*

**by Harold Knight:**

* *The Dowager Duchess of Taunton with Her Spaniels*
* *The Keeper, Wolfdown House, with Mastiff*

**by Gilpin:**

* *Spaniels (owned by the Duke of Taunton)*
* ‘*Swiftbourne’ with the Duke of Taunton and a Groom*

**by Boultbee:**

* *The Stud at Tidnock Hall*

**by JN Sartorius:**

* *The Hunt, at Wolfdown House*
* *Spaniel at Wolfdown House*

**by JF Sartorious:**

* *The Duke of Taunton’s Hunt*
* *Huntsmen and Hounds at Clentwood*

**by Ansell:**

* *The Hunt, Wolfdown*

**by Herring Snr:**

* *The Taunton Entrants, Doncaster, St Leger Stakes*

**by Herring Jnr:**

* *The Hunt: Halt at the Boar*
* *A Check: the Duke of Taunton’s Hunt*
* ‘*Buckle’ with Grooms*

**by Barenger:**

* ‘*Malmsey’, the Duke of Taunton’s Hunter*
* *The Taunton Stud*

**by Towne:**

* *Hunters and Hounds*

**by Lady Butler:**

* *A Frontier Skirmish at the Khyber Pass*

**by Fane:**

* *Lt-Gen. Sir Denzil Fitzjames and the Nawab of Hubli*

**by Home:**

* *Col. Sir Charles James Fitzjames and the Nawab of Hubli*

**by Frith:**

* *The St Leger*
* *Encænia*
* *Fair Day, Upper Clatter*

**by Maclise:**

* *Tales From Froissart*

**by Dadd:**

* *Tam Lin*
* *The Exodus of Israel from Egyptian Bondage*

**by Ruskin:**

* Var. drawings

**by Dyce:**

* *Spes Scotorum*

**by Whistler:**

* *Nocturne: Jubilee Beacons on Wolf Down*

**by Alma-Tadema:**

* *The Floralia*
* *Portrait of Lord Templecombe*

**by Turner:**

* *Wolfdown House*
* *Ulysses and the Suitors*
* *Harvest Home, Tidnock Hall*

**by Leighton:**

* *The Veneralia*
* *The First Philippic*
* *Doge Dandolo*
* *The Dowager Duchess of Taunton*

**by De Wint:**

* *Pebbury Rings*
* *Hay-Making, the Home Farm, Melverley Court*
* *The Old Orchard, Wolfdown House Home Farm*
* *Ploughing, Tidnock Hall Home Farm*
* *The Orpheus Pavement, Clentwood*

**by Bonington:**

* *Old Mill, the Vexin*
* *Henry V before Agincourt*

**by Chantrey:**

* *Bust of the Duchess of Taunton*
* *Bust of Bishop Fitzjames*

**by F Walker:**

* *Ghillies at Luineag*
* *Gipsies, Woolford, the Coppice*
* *Evensong, Woolfont Almshouse*

**by Bevan:**

* Var. horse-and-landscape paintings

**Rare books and maps, &c:**

* The ‘Wolfdown’ First Folio
* The ‘Gutenberg’ Bible (vellum)
* *Hypnerotomachia Poliphili* of 1499
* Ovid(Caxton)
* Cicero, var., *editio princeps editions*
* Pliny, *editio princeps*
* Aristotle, *var., editio princeps editions*
* Asser, *editio princeps*
* Alcuin
* Gower
* Hobbes
* The‘Wolfdown’ *Mappa Mundi*
* Letters, var., incl. to and from Scott, Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith, Bolingbroke, Burke, Waugh, Eliot, Betjeman, &c

**Antiquities**

* The ‘Wolfdown’ amphoræ of Exekias
* The ‘Wolfdown’ cage cup
* The Marton Hoard krater

**Plaquettes & medallions** by Alberti; Donatello; Seven Virtues by Flötner (Tidnock Hall chapel); Pisanello; Delaune; Roettiers; GP de Pomis; Pingo; Poggini; Dupré; J Duvivier; Tardieu the elder; Tardieu *fils*

**Coins, including some curious rarities:** French-struck guineas of Charles 2d during the Interregnum; Five-Guinea coins (including ‘Vigo’s from Anne’s reign), and also including some of Charles 2d’s and James 2d’s – some French-struck after 1689; Jacobite guineas and half-guineas by Roettiers, French-struck; Shrewsbury & Oxon Triple Unites; Jacobi; Caroli; Rose ryals; Spur ryals; Unites; Laurels and half-laurels; Elizabethan sovereigns; Scots and Irish coinage; &c.

## **The Dower House**

The Dower House of *circa* 1450 had been preserved externally as it had been built, a classic sample of pre-Tudor, Yorkist architecture without, with what Pevsner judged ‘a perfect Jacobean interior’.

## **Gardens, grounds, and parkland**

The ‘policies’ of Wolfdown House have been subject to successive improvements and changes for a considerable period of time, such that the gravel surround may well be the least-changed feature of its exterior and grounds.

Although the wool trade moved largely away from the West Country during the ducal tenure, successive Dukes were not minded to change the Downlands, including Wodewough Wood. Their income largely derived from ground-rents for their London property, and, increasingly, for their Thames-side grants in Essex, which were already booming as London became the leading port city in the world. This process has but continued, and the rather meagre lands granted by the hard-pressed James to his natural son the first Duke are now spinning money as part of the Thames Gateway. Moreover, the Dukes had invested their income in enterprises which, the present Duke remarks, should have led to their being condemned as ‘being in trade’ had they been any lesser, even ducal, family. It was therefore unnecessary that they turn their Wolfdown holdings over to arable, of which in any case they had a sufficiency at other holdings, and quite profitably.

    The Downlands, and all the Taunton holdings connected directly with Wolfdown, some 16000 acres in all, could be, and were, therefore preserved in their prior state, as sheepwalks and pastoral land. This decision was further reinforced after 1797, when the Duke of Taunton’s Hunt was established, and the holdings became, outwith The Woolfonts villages and portions of Beechbourne and Chickmarsh, its hunt country:

**The Duke of Taunton’s Hunt**

*founded* 1797

**Kennels:** Pebdown-juxta-Pebbury

HG the Duke of Taunton MFH (Master and Chairman)

**Secretary:** Joan (Mrs Richard) Potecary CBE

**Kennel Huntsman:** Alan Larence

**Hon. Secretaries:** Sir Thomas Douty; Maud, Lady Sedgebrooke; Lettice Hart-Macey; Lady Crispin Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet (now the Hon, Lady Trulock)

**Fieldmaster:** Philip Sanger

**Countryman:** Benjamin Maunce

**Trail layers:** Will Mould; Ralph Smith

**Pack:** 32 couple, mixed

**Hunt country:** Chalk downland and bournes; numerous escarpments; some timber jumping required; part arable, largely champion; few roads; good going; numerous jumps, particularly in ploughland to North and South. Adjoins *inter alia* the South and West Wilts and the Wilton countries. Extends from the Vale cornlands near to Stoke Yarncombe through Wolf Down to the Woolheads and Pebbury Rings and, from East of Beechbourne, West beyond Chickmarsh to Sutton Whitfield.

*Affiliated Pony Club:* contact Lady Trulock

– The *Fielding & Baylor Guide to Hunts, South West Edition,* 2014

### **Elizabethan gardens**

By the late Tudor period, puzzle-, knot-, and formal gardens are documented, as is a now-vanished maze.

### **Bridgeman, Kent, ‘Capability Brown’, and Repton**

These successively, in accordance with Pope’s now hackneyed ‘grove nods at grove’, applied with great artifice ‘the finger of [ever-changing] taste’ to the landscape immediately adjoining Wolfdown as its extensive park.

### **Gertrude Jekyll**

    The great Gertrude Jekyll was commissioned to transform the gardens by the mother of the ninth duke, after the War and before the Trustees took over. She did so admirably, accommodating her plans to the overall Repton scheme subsisting, and incorporating in the garden views the ‘borrowed landscape’ of the 18th Century scheme created by Bridgeman, Kent, Brown, and Repton.

### **Stables**

The Caroline stable block, with its assertive central clock tower, is a confection in ashlared Chickmarsh stone, and scheduled as Grade II\*. It occupies the original site of the stables and falconer’s mews, and was built by the gentleman architect William Samwell, who was responsible for Charles 2d’s race-going residence at Newmarket. It now includes, with the stables and carriage house, the garage for the Duke’s fleet of Bristol and Bentley motorcars, as well as the estate’s liveried Rovers and Hiluxes.

### **Cricket ground**

His present Grace is not the first ducal cricketer produced by the Dukes of Taunton. A cricket pitch has stood in the Wolfdown parks since 1786, and is built to Test standard. The pavilion, which, with the pitch itself, is Grade II\* listed, is by John Eveleigh of Bath, and is completely Georgian in character.

## **Park, woods, and farms**

The Dukes of Taunton have never cared to have ornamental deer wandering about the landscape, although they are enthusiastic stalkers in Scotland. They prefer sheep.

They *have* preserved game birds – notably, at Wolfdown, pheasant – for many generations’ shooting, and the parklands and woods have long been managed accordingly.

### **The Home Farm**

The well-regarded farming family of Tower have had the Home, or Manor, Farm for many generations: which comes with something rather superior as tied cottages go, the Queen Anne farmhouse which inspired Winslow Hall. Under the present duke, the Home Farm serves as a model farm for the District, and has a considerable concentration in the preservation of rare British breeds; it is accredited by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.

## **Estate**

The Wolfdown Estate, as such, owns outright almost all of the villages of The Woolfonts; the Downlands and parts of the Vale; much of the Beef and Cheese Country and the arable towards Pebbury; and significant portions of Chickmarsh and Beechbourne, the Wolbournes, Wolminster, Wolchester, Staple Woolton, and the Tenter Down villages. Although the geography – and occasional flooding, along the rivers and bournes – of the area made these from the first separate manors, they have always functioned as an economic unit, and have always been held by the Malets and their Fitzjames successors.

## **In popular culture**

The Dukes of Taunton have never opened Wolfdown to the public, nor permitted its use for non-Family weddings, film shoots, or similar activities. The gardens are opened to the public on certain occasions, in aid of various charities; His present Grace has instituted Proms concerts for the District at Wolfdown; and the Fête is commonly held in the grounds. However, as seen above, it has been the subject of numerous paintings; and has appeared in the writings of, *inter alia,* Aubrey, Celia Fiennes, Addison, Steele, Pope, Dr Johnson, Cobbett, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Pevsner, Betjeman, and Alec Clifton-Taylor.

## **See also**

* Dukedom of Taunton
* Grade I buildings in Wiltshire
* Wolf Down
* Wool Ford
* The River Wolfbourne
* The Woolfonts
* The Downlands
* The Vale
* Beechbourne
* Chickmarsh
* Chickmarsh stone
* Chickmarsh Quarry
* Crispin’s Buildings, the Agincourt Estate
* The Woolfonts & Chickmarsh Railway
* Abbas Rural railway station
* Agincourt Ducis railway station
* The Duke of Taunton’s Hunt