What a difference a few centuries can make. When this declaration is said about a piece of historic architecture, it is rarely good news. Fortunately for Houghton Hall, it is indeed a celebration. Construction on the mansion began in 1722 and was completed in 1735, its purpose being a country house for Sir Robert Walpole, the 1st Earl of Orford and Britain’s first de facto prime minister. The elaborate setting he had put such tremendous energy into creating, which he had only a decade to enjoy, experienced years of neglect by his heirs until it was inherited by Walpole’s youngest son Horace, who passed it on to George James, the 4th Earl of Cholmondeley. George James was Horace’s great nephew, as his father, the 3rd Earl, had married Sir Robert Walpole’s daughter, Lady Mary.
I learned of this remarkable building through research I conducted for an essay about Horace that is included in my book Lives Illuminated—now available in print and on Kindle. When I saw that the mansion was the centerpiece of Houghton Hall: Portrait of an English Country House, I knew a post about the book would make a terrific companion piece to my essay about the British aristocrat. Published by Rizzoli and written by the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, who is at the helm of the current generation managing the mansion, and Andrew Moore, a well-respected art historian, their enlightening text is brought to life by rich images, many captured by photographer Derry Moore. From the start, the book celebrates that Robert Walpole tapped British architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, along with designer William Kent, to realize a building that would eclipse its role as a gentleman’s country home to become a veritable museum that draws visitors to its statuesque rooms today.
In his foreword to the book, the 7th Marquess describes the visual beauty that unfolds on a trip from London to Northwest Norfolk where the mansion is located, noting how the landscape “seems to flatten out, with dark, fertile fields crisscrossed by waterways and reed-filled ditches; and the skies become wider and more luminous above stands of poplar trees and the occasional brick farmhouse.” He situates the reader with, “This is the Fenland, stretching from Ely up to Wisbech and across to Peterborough; reclaimed from salt marshes several centuries ago, and now some of the most valuable farmland in the country. Beyond this remote and sparsely-populated region lies Kings Lynn and the towns and villages along the Norfolk coast; an area that was rich and prosperous even further back, thanks to the wool trade with the Baltic ports.”
The Marquess lists the early families with key positions in the county, including the Walpoles, who were landowners at Houghton as far back as the thirteenth century, though it was Sir Robert who enlarged the estate significantly by acquiring thousands of acres from neighboring landowners. “Any book on Houghton must focus first of all on the ebullient figure of Sir Robert; but also on the coterie of architects, designers, and craftsmen who were involved in its great creation,” the 7th Marquess wrote. He credited Horace and Sir Robert’s political allies, many of whom were frequently entertained at the estate, for the wealth of information that exists about the mansion and its surroundings. Horace—shown below in a painting by the portraitist Rosalba Carriera, who captured him in 1741 when he stopped in Venice while on his Grand Tour—remains one of the quirkiest and most fascinating eighteenth-century aristocrats I’ve ever come across. He is also one of the most opinionated dandies to have walked the earth and his feelings about Houghton Hall were pointed, especially when the estate became his responsibility for a short time.
This painting of him, which hangs at Houghton Hall, is considered to be one of Carriera’s masterpieces, as the watercolorist presents him with a confident gaze and captures the refinement of the embroidery on his waistcoat. The portrait was realized long before he took the reins of Houghton as the 4th Earl of Orford in his seventies. Horace was deeply disappointed in his father’s heirs who preceded him because they dropped the ball on their responsibility in maintaining the estate. In a letter he wrote to his close friend Sir Horace Mann, he expressed his concerns about the death of his brother Robert, the 2nd Earl of Orford. His fears for the future of the building and its gardens, which he called “prodigious,” stemmed from the character of his brother’s son George, who would become the 3rd Earl of Orford. Calling him “the most ruined young man in England,” Horace said he felt his own personal loss at the hands of this relative could be considerable.
“It is no small addition to my concern,” he told Mann, “to fear or foresee that Houghton and all that remains of my father’s glory will be pulled to pieces.” Horace dreaded this outcome even before George had control because the 2nd Earl’s widow had quickly remarried and was helping herself to the spoils her son had inherited so she could adorn her own estate. Things grew more precarious once George took control of the property. In a letter Horace wrote to George Montagu in 1761, he described how it felt to visit the estate after an absence of sixteen years. Once he expressed how enchanted he had been to be walking through the stately rooms and viewing the paintings, he lamented that the overgrown gardens were overrun with rabbits: “many fond paths I could not unravel,” he told his friend. After he reminisced to Montagu about how he had hated Houghton and its solitude when he was young, Horace said he had always loved the grounds that surrounded the mansion. He then admitted that he regretted he had realized so late how smitten he was with the experience in Norfolk. In spite of his nostalgic mood, Horace was clear-eyed about what a burden the estate could be. “Houghton, I know not what to call it, monument of grandeur or ruin!” he exclaimed before telling Montagu he’d chosen to sit in his father’s dressing room so he could try and understand what drove the 1st Earl to create the extravagance he did.
“How wise a man at once, and how weak!” Horace lamented. “For what has he built Houghton? For his grandson to annihilate, or for his son to mourn over.” Two decades later, as if he’d had ample time to reflect on the true crux of the problem, Horace wrote Governor Pownall in 1783, “If Sir Robert had not the comfort of leaving his family in affluence, it was not imputable to his King or his country. Perhaps I am proud that he did not. He died forty-thousand pounds in debt. That was the wealth of a man that had been taxed as the plunderer of his country! Yet, with all my adoration of my father, I am just enough to own that it was his own fault if he died so poor. He had made Houghton much too magnificent for the moderate estate which he left to support it; and, as he never—I repeat it with truth, never—got any money but in the South Sea and while he was paymaster, his fondness for his paternal seat, and his boundless generosity, were too expensive for his fortune.”
Horace’s letters turned angrier once he learned of the sale of a large number of Sir Robert’s paintings, which Horace had taken great pains to catalog and publish in a book he printed on the Strawberry Hill Press titled Aedes Walpolianae in 1747 and reprinted in 1752. Friends like Laetitia Hawkins were well aware of how much the actions of his nephew George upset him. “The sale of the Houghton collection was, as may be supposed, heart-breaking to him,” she wrote. Cholmondeley mentions the event in his foreword: “In the following pages, we have also tried to portray the house through the diverse characters of its later owners, and hope to challenge the reputations that have come down from previous accounts; particularly of the ‘mad’ Earl of Orford, Sir Robert’s grandson, who was in fact perfectly sane—although undoubtedly eccentric—for the greater part of his life; and who tried hard to make up for the sale of Sir Robert’s magnificent picture collection to the empress Catherine of Russia by commissioning works from contemporary artists.”
Each of the nobles who once held Houghton’s survival in his or her hands is presented as the book moves along, some flattered more than others. George James, as the 1st Marquess of Cholmondeley, had a commanding place in the story. “His raking youth could have spelled disaster, were it not for a canny business sense that won him the Houghton inheritance and made him one of the most substantial landowners in the country,” the estate’s current steward wrote. “In sharp contrast, his two sons, both evangelical Christians, had to deal with rioting and unrest at the time of the Great Reform Bill; and later did much to improve the education and living conditions for those who worked on the land.” The 7th Marquess added that the estate in the twentieth century owes its extant richness to the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley and his remarkable wife Sybil Sassoon. “Their knowledge and taste helped to transform the interiors—and Sybil used her inherited fortune to carry out essential repairs and restoration, and save the fabric of the house from dry rot and deathwatch beetle,” he explained. “Later, after the Second World War, an influx of fine eighteenth-century furniture and paintings from the estate of Sir Philip Sassoon, Sybil’s brother, added a note of sophistication and glamour to the house.”
The 7th Marquess noted that when the house was opened to the public in 1976, visitors were astounded to find it had retained so much of its original character and atmosphere. “Since I took over the running of Houghton nearly twenty-five years ago,” he added, “both the house and its surrounding estate have seen many changes. Apart from continuing renovation work, which has included a complete rewiring and replumbing of the house, we have been able to embark on a number of exciting projects, such as the replanting of the walled garden and the reinstatement of the original design of hedges and alleys in front of the house.” In 2013, more than sixty of the original paintings Sir Robert had collected were lent to the Cholmondeleys by heritage organizations and museums. “This unique opportunity to rehang the state rooms as they had once looked enabled us to understand and appreciate William Kent’s great vision for the house in its entirety,” the 7th Marquess wrote. “The early part of the book is therefore illustrated with images from this exhibition that show Houghton almost as it was in Sir Robert’s time, and of course it substantially still is.”
The lush pages of the book present the cast of Walpolian and Cholmondeley characters, and the evolution of the mansion under their watch through the centuries. The particularly stunning vignettes show the tapestries in their near pristine condition, the abundance of mahogany that was harvested in the West Indies, the bas reliefs against the stone walls of the entry hall, and the vignettes in the library holding row upon row of books with gleaming spines. “Sir Robert was caricatured by his opponents as a gross country squire with pretentions to refinement,” the current Marquess wrote. “Yet the erudition displayed in his Library—with many well-thumbed classics from his days as a scholar at Cambridge—contradicts this narrow view; as does the attention to detail and quality evident in every corner of the house. His personal involvement with the building and decoration of Houghton can hardly be questioned, just as his taste for certain artists is apparent in his instructions to agents or friends who were buying pictures for his collection.” Cholmondeley added that the mansion presents the most perfect example of William Kent’s decorative genius in the country, and is unique amongst England’s great historic houses in retaining so much of its original furniture and fabrics.
The preservation has been so particular, many of the rooms have remained practically unchanged over the centuries. “Even the silver braid used as a fringe on a velvet bed-cover can be traced to a specific order from one of the suppliers in London—and surviving documents provide an extraordinary immediacy when discussing the decoration of the house,” the current Marquess explained. The book goes into detail about the collaboration between Horace and George James when a Colonel Horatio Walpole—a descendant of Sir Robert’s brother Horatio—disputed the will. In all three versions of the document, Horace succeeded his nephew George, though the latter flip-flopped between the Cholmondeleys and the colonel’s family when the different versions were codified. The claimant was hell-bent on getting his hands on the estate because he intended to sell off the mansion’s contents to line his own pockets.
Horace didn’t have the cash reserves to serve as the insurance the Orford executors were demanding in order to keep the mansion’s contents intact so he hatched a plan with George James to delay until the money could be raised to settle the lawyers’ nerves that their firm wouldn’t be left in the lurch when it came time to be paid. Their ultimate goal was to secure the estate for the Cholmondeley family. George James’ mother, Hester Lady Malpas, gave her son 5,000-pounds to begin the acquisition and George James sold another piece of property to afford the rest of the demand, which was over twice that amount. When the suit finally went to trial, Colonel Walpole lost his claim and the Cholmondeley family’s history with the home began in earnest. George James went at once to see Horace at Strawberry Hill to tell his uncle that it was his intention to make Houghton Hall his residence. As a gesture of good will, Horace decided to send some family portraits to Houghton’s new inhabitant.
The Strawberry Hill reference in the book illustrates how the apple didn’t fall far from the tree when it came to Sir Robert’s youngest son, as the gothic mansion Horace built was his own architectural statement to his own legacy, one that is mentioned a number of times in Cholmondeley’s narrative. Horace was the last of the Walpoles to lie in the family vault on the property surrounding Houghton Hall after being interred there on March 13, 1797. It’s an interesting footnote to his history that his resting place is on the grounds of the storied mansion that at times repelled and at times fascinated him, and that the estate has continued to evolve around him through some dizzying ups and downs. Thanks to the determination of the last several generations of Cholmondeleys, the ups seem to be here to stay, which bodes well for the storied mansion.
“In the first few years, we dealt with most of the lacquer and gilt gesso furniture, while the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge embarked on cleaning and restoring the picture collection,” the 7thMarquess said as he described the depth of the family’s commitment now. “We also tackled the Library, and over a three-year period, every book was painstakingly dusted, and the bindings given a light oil, to counter the dry environment that had prevailed for so many decades.” I believe Horace would be extremely pleased with such attentiveness, particularly the efforts to preserve the books because he was such a strong advocate for the published word.
Houghton Hall Remastered © Saxon Henry, all rights reserved. Saxon is an author, journalist, poet, and strategist whose books include Lives Illuminated (Print) (Kindle), The Modern Salonnière, Anywhere But Here, Stranded on the Road to Promise, Four Florida Moderns, and Collaborations: A Houston Penthouse.
References:
Letters of Horace Walpole, Vol. 1. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890, pp. 130-131. [1736-1764].
Letters of Horace Walpole, Vol. 2. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890. [1764-1795].
The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, Vol. 3. London: C. Sherman & Co., 1842, pp. 138-140; p. 328. [1759-1769]
The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, Volume 4. London: C. Sherman & Co., 1842, pp. 415-417. [1770-1797]
Hawkins, Laetitia. Anecdotes, Biographical Sketches, and Memoirs. London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1822, p. 102.
Full title of Horace’s catalog of Houghton’s paintings: Aedes Walpolianae, or a Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Seat of the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (Interleaved with Drawings by Isaac Ware for: The Plans, Elevations, and Sections of Chimney Pieces, and Celings of Houghton Hall in Norfolk…1735) [also known as “The Walpole Album.”]
