Chapter 16: Mausolea and Monuments

CHAPTER 16

Mausolea and Monuments

IT IS A CURIOUS BUT INDISPUTABLE fact that, although gardens are generally thought of as places of pleasure, enjoyment and relaxation, some of the greatest architectural achievements to be found in their Georgian manifestations are structures associated with death. By being integrated into the landscape park, such structures lent not just a generalised elegiac quality but also provided the owners in particular with a visual reminder of their own mortality, in a way that family memorials in the local parish church might not, except at services. The eighteenth-century English gentleman may have been subconsciously rendered susceptible to the idea by having done the Grand Tour, seeing for himself the ruins of ancient mausolea in the Roman Campagna and bringing home the mausolea-stocked paintings of Claude Lorraine and the capricci of artists such as Giovanni Paolo Panini to hang on his walls.1

A unique characteristic of the mausoleum in particular was that as its occupants were inevitably dead, their requirements were very straightforward, and therefore the architect had the kind of freedom to design ‘ideal’ structures that appealed especially to classicists and still more to neoclassicists. In the case of William Chambers, his eight speculative designs for a mausoleum for Frederick, Prince of Wales [Fig. 16.2] (who in 1751 died unexpectedly and was widely lamented, though not by his father George II), respond to both aspects. As Chambers was already in Rome in 1751 – he was there 1750–5 –he obviously made the designs when news came of Frederick’s death, and the latest is dated February 1752. Most are examples of the grandiloquent Prix de Rome neoclassicism, ultimately derived from Antique models, that Chambers had absorbed during his time in Rome, and one of these is shown in a landscape setting. However, the more intriguing is depicted in a state of picturesque decay, as if it were either an ancient specimen along the Appian Way or else a ‘folly’ ruin in an English landscape park, designed to evoke sensations of ‘sic transit gloria mundi’ (thus passes the glory of the world).2 Chambers was the only British architect to respond in this way to the prince’s death, something conceivably

16.1 Castle Howard, Yorkshire, mausoleum, interior

explained by the fact that he may have previously had

Chinoiserie House of Confucius at Kew in 1749–50.3

Until the construction of the Castle Howard mausoleum [Figs 16.1, 16.3] in its parkland setting in 1731–42, there was no such thing in England as a physically free-standing mausoleum outside consecrated ground.4 The basic concept seems to have been Sir John Vanbrugh’s, who in 1711 sketched his recollection of the cemetery at Surat that he had seen during his stay on the west coast of India in 1683–5 as a young factor for the East India Company.5 The cemetery was made up of individual mausolea, some domed, which in Vanbrugh’s recollection were classicised and pruned of their actual Mughal detail. In 1722 he tried to interest both the Duchess of Marlborough and the Earl of

& durable monument’ in their parks: for the late Duke of Marlborough and the earl himself, respectively. This, he argued, would be a return to the old burial practice ‘before Priestcraft got poor Carcasses into their keeping’.6 He failed with the duchess7 but succeeded with the earl, who shared Vanbrugh’s anticlerical sentiments and in drawing up his will in these years declared that he wished ‘to build a burial place near my seat at Castle Howard, where I desire to be lay’d.’8

It has been suggested that a number of Vanbrugh’s freehand sketches that are today catalogued as garden

16.2 (left) William Chambers, design for a mausoleum for Frederick, Prince of Wales, shown as a ruin, 1752. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 3339

16.3 (below) Castle Howard, Yorkshire, mausoleum, exterior

proposals for mausolea: for instance, one for a circular domed building in a tight enclosure with obelisks (or steep pyramids) at the angles.9 Vanbrugh died in 1726, so the Castle Howard mausoleum was in the event designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1728–9 and built in 1731–42.

architectural persona which drew inspiration from the Antique. The design of the mausoleum grew out of a 1728 design based on that of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way, a large masonry cylinder on a square podium. This developed into a domed cylinder surrounded by

result is indebted to published reconstructions of circular Roman buildings by Italian architects, and a fairly close comparison can be made with Pietro Santi Bartoli’s version of a mausoleum on the Appian Way published

in 1699, especially for the low dome with stepped base.10 Another model was Donato Bramante’s tempietto at S. Pietro in Montorio in Rome. Ultimately, the Antique precedent for a circular Doric temple was probably that to Venus at Knidos in Asia Minor, emulated successively by Julius Caesar in his gardens on the Quirinal Hill and then by Emperor Hadrian in his villa at Tivoli.11 When Lord Burlington criticised the close spacing of the columns in 1732, Hawksmoor gave a learned seven-page rejoinder citing Vitruvius and Ancient Roman monuments. Apart from the practical problems that a wider spacing might have caused in a building of this scale (it is 76 feet [23 m] high), it is this which distinguishes the mausoleum from more conventional rotundas. Combined with the low curvature of the dome, it produces a closed tight form altogether appropriate to its solemn purpose; Sir John Summerson compared the colonnade to a grim palisade.12

The interior, with its ring of giant Corinthian columns recessed into the mass of the wall, is

without gilding. The main chamber has a solemn but religious imagery except for angel heads. There is an

There are no monuments at all in the main chamber, as all the interments are in the crypt, where deep loculi extend into the immensely thick walls, being closed

It is pure architecture, and Horace Walpole said it was enough to tempt one to be buried alive.14

The mausoleum sits on its hill on a far-spreading platform of bastions, designed at Burlington’s instigation by his protégé Daniel Garrett,15 whereas Hawksmoor seems to have envisaged the building standing simply on its eminence, which is of rock. Garrett’s bastions could be said to anchor the structure in the landscape, as they are of massive rusticated masonry; less satisfactory is the balustrading, which is just too polite and trivial.16 Kerry Downes called it ‘the most splendid garden building of all’,17 and certainly it is a key feature in the disposition of the heroic landscape of Castle Howard. This was recognised later in the century when the 5th Earl commissioned canvases of the landscape from William Marlow and Hendrik de Cort showing the visual role of the mausoleum (painted in 1772 and c.1800 respectively, and still hanging at Castle Howard). Looming on its far hilltop, it seems to beckon ominously, and indeed it was Hawksmoor’s own requiem, as he died in 1736 without seeing it complete.

The sale of Hawksmoor’s estate after his death included no fewer than 62 drawings for mausolea, so doubtless had he lived he would have continued to design further examples. In any case, perhaps prompted by Castle Howard, free-standing mausolea began very gradually to proliferate from the 1730s, but still mainly in churchyards. The Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley, as well as designing a wonderful canopied bridge for the park at Boughton House,18 sketched a domed mausoleum on a chiselled mound for the 2nd Duke of Montagu in 1742,19 but neither was built before the duke died in 1749. By 1760 there were, in addition to Castle

Howard, just four examples on non-consecrated ground, all architecturally minor.20 Then in 1764–5 came the unique mausoleum at West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Standing on the hillside immediately to the east of the parish church,21 likewise visible from within the park and occupying a yet more prominent site since it was on axis with the London road into High Wycombe, it too was the creation of Sir Francis Dashwood – or Lord Le Despencer as he became after 1763 – who paid for it with money left to him by his friend George Bubb Dodington in 1762. Dodington said this was for ‘an arch or a temple’ on one of Dashwood’s estates, but Dashwood used it for what was perhaps the largest mausoleum to be built in Europe since Antiquity. It is hexagonal and open to the sky – in fact a columbarium, with urns in niches for the ashes of the deceased – but surprisingly seems to have no Antique precedent.

mausolea that are not only given parkland settings but are, in some cases, architecturally ambitious; indeed,

England. The background to this is that the cultural and intellectual changes associated with the Enlightenment transformed attitudes to death. Although England continued to be a conventionally church-going society, with most landowners supporting the Established Church as a necessary pillar of society, there was an increasing scepticism towards religious doctrine and a growth in anticlerical feeling. A few individuals

even funerals with no ceremony at all (as Lord Byron

One of the earlier and most handsome examples of the new fashion is the mausoleum at Bowood House, Wiltshire [Fig. 16.4]. Commissioned by the widow

1761 and completed by 1765, this is a relatively early design by Robert Adam.22 Sober and restrained, it lacks the sublimity of Castle Howard (though likewise of the Doric order) or the grandeur of James Wyatt’s mausolea at Cobham and Brocklesby. The interior is as logical and luminous as a Florentine Renaissance

inside of a large egg. The warm Bath stone contrasts with the white marble of the solitary monument, that

The actual tomb chamber below is approached down a ramp at the rear. Relatively few of the loculi are occupied, two of the later eighteenth-century earls being buried in Westminster Abbey. Now largely enveloped in nineteenth-century rhododendron plantings, the mausoleum occupies what in the eighteenth century would have been a commanding hilltop position, perfectly visible from the distant mansion and thereby

Hard on Bowood’s heels came the mausoleum at Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland, built in 1766 by an unknown architect to house the remains of Sir John Delaval’s only son and heir, Jack Delaval, whose untimely death the previous year (said to have been brought about when he was kicked in the groin by a dairy maid he was attempting to seduce) ended the long Delaval line.23 Standing well to the south-east of Vanbrugh’s forceful mansion, it comprises a central domed square preceded by a hefty Doric portico, and has additionally two-bay transepts and a broad apse. It was never consecrated (supposedly because Sir John could not agree a fee with the Bishop of Durham) and it is not clear that young Jack was actually interred in it.24 The small medieval church still stands close to the house within the ha-ha, and was the burial place of the

medieval Delavals, but perhaps by the late eighteenth century the family felt that space was running out and a separate mausoleum was called for – that, and the fact that the Delavals were not the most obviously Godfearing of families.

The mausoleum as an architectural opportunity prompted two of Wyatt’s most perfect masterpieces. His design25 for the one at Cobham Hall in Kent [Fig. 16.5] was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1783 and completed in 1787. Wyatt had already in 1773–4 worked at the Hall for the 3rd Earl of Darnley, who had been on the Grand Tour and was a member of the Society of Dilettanti, so was an unusually wellinformed client. In his will of 1767 the earl left the money (up to £10,000) and quite detailed instructions as to the site – a hill in the park – and form. He suggested it should have four façades supporting a pyramid ‘high enough to be conspicuous’, containing a chapel with a dome. When he died in 1781 his heir was just 14 so his widow implemented his wishes. Wyatt started work

16.4 (above left) Bowood House, Wiltshire, mausoleum 16.5 (above right) James Wyatt, design for the Darnley mausoleum at Cobham Hall, Kent, 1783. © Sir John Soane’s Museum, SM 47/10/20

on the design in 1782. He carried out the instructions while drawing on well-established precedents, going back ultimately to Halicarnassus and the Pyramid of Cestius, and also William Chambers’s design for a temple for the 2nd Earl of Tilney, made in Florence in the mid-1750s and published in 1759 (this has the pairs of Doric columns on the diagonals, here supporting sarcophagi rather than urns).26 It is the sort of scheme beloved of Prix de Rome students, but there is no Chambers, whom Wyatt admired and who was himself a Francophile. Although well suited for its purposes, including the chapel, it was for some reason never as the main eyecatcher in the park.27 It is basically a temple with a pyramid on top, which some (such as John Soane) criticised as a solecism, but it was generally highly regarded.

at Brocklesby, Lincolnshire [Figs 16.6, 16.7], overlapped with the one at Cobham Hall. The design was inspired by two Roman temples Wyatt had seen, those of Vesta at Tivoli and in Rome. These female Antique models were appropriate for a building dedicated to the memory of Sophia Aufrere, the wife of Charles Pelham, who died in 1786 aged 33. It had been a youthful love match, with Sophia leading a life of (relative) rural simplicity at was the additional Antique model of the cylindrical mausoleum of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way. The Roman references were reinforced by the choice of site, an ancient burial mound that was traditionally thought to be Roman (though more probably was Saxon). A tall rusticated plinth rises out of a deep moat, that a low dome. This might elsewhere just amount

16.6 Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire, mausoleum, exterior

indicated by the neoclassical sarcophagi set in niches in the cella wall. The interior, with its ring of richly veined Corinthian columns of Derbyshire alabaster and inlaid

Nollekens; recesses in the outer wall provide space for three monuments to earlier family members that Charles Pelham had commissioned in Rome as early as 1769, when he was a wealthy but sophisticated young man of 19. Unlike at Cobham there is no altar, and the light

The setting of the building is exquisite, at the conclusion of a curving 2-mile (3-km) ride through the park from the house,28 set around with huge cedar trees

Lincolnshire surroundings. Thus, Brocklesby acquired one of the greatest of architectural adornments to be

found in a Georgian landscape park, almost – though not quite – on a par with the mausoleum at Castle Howard.29

Eighteenth-century western architects were well

ancient architecture. By the time the Rome-born architect Joseph Bonomi designed the mausoleum at Blickling Hall in Norfolk [Fig. 16.8], built in 1794 to house the remains of the 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire and his two wives, the pyramid was a well-established element of the neoclassical vocabulary and its simple geometry appealed greatly to European architects such as ÉtienneLouis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. The Blickling mausoleum, originally visible from the Hall down a long form (though, as has been seen, a pyramid formed the roof of the slightly earlier mausoleum at Cobham), and its starkness is mitigated by the elegant portal, which leads to a domed central chamber as at Hawksmoor’s Castle Howard pyramid.30 Blickling’s example was followed immediately at Gosford House, Lothian, where the mausoleum was commissioned by the 8th Earl of Wemyss and built to the designs of Thomas Harrison of Chester in 1795–8. Sitting in a spacious circular walled enclosure with an outer moat, it is a very solemn, somewhat intimidating building, comprising a square plinth with baseless Doric porticoes on each side, and above that the massive pyramid.31

16.7 Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire, mausoleum, interior

16.8 Blickling Hall, Norfolk, mausoleum

The Forbes Mausoleum at Callendar House, Falkirk, is currently embosomed in trees and invisible from more than a few metres away, but when built in 1815–16 it would have been visible on its hillside from the mansion, which sits perhaps half a mile (0.8 km) away across the lake. From there it would have provided both a handsome point de vue and a memento mori. It comprises a drum with encircling Greek Doric peristyle, raised on a lofty rusticated base, a powerfully muscular design by Archibald Elliot (1760–1823), commissioned by the trustees of the late William Forbes. Elliot divided his professional life between Edinburgh and London, and his stylistic preferences between castellated Gothic and austere Greek Revival.

In the Georgian period, unlike the Victorian, mausolea (and especially those in parkland locations) were overwhelmingly classical, perhaps because in the Age of Reason this was felt more solemn and resonant, whereas for some the Gothic had become associated with hermitages and architectural play-acting. An exception, albeit a minor one, is that at The Priory in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth. Thomas Espin, an artist and amateur architect, designed a charming Regency Gothic villa for himself in 1818, and by the time of his death four years later had also designed and built his own mausoleum in the grounds. It is in the same idiom as the house, only treated as if it were a little summerhouse, and it faces across a pool to a Gothic folly composed of medieval bits of Louth Abbey.

It could be said that the fashion for building mausolea that doubled as ornaments to a garden or landscape received the ultimate royal approval when, following the death of her mother the Duchess of Kent in 1861, Queen Victoria commissioned a Brocklesbytype structure for the royal gardens at Frogmore, Windsor. This was designed so that, in the event of the duchess being interred elsewhere, it could function instead as a summerhouse.32

MONUMENTS

Mausolea of the kind described had just two functions: to house the dead and to contribute to the appearance of the landscape. Monuments have a more diverse range of roles and certainly come in enormously varied shapes, sizes and designs. Some commemorated

particular people or events. Some were simply copies of Antique structures, manifestos for a particular development in modern architecture. Some were

whimsical or enigmatic.

The estate of Penicuik House in Lothian was progressively embellished by its successive mideighteenth-century owners, both of them talented and knowledgeable amateur architects, with structures that evoke but do not actually copy Ancient Roman models. Sir John Clerk, 2nd Baronet, died in 1755 having sketched designs for several of these, notably the Knights Law Tower, the Hurleycove and the so-called Centurion’s Bridge.33 His son Sir James, 3rd Baronet, had been on a very extended Grand Tour before he inherited, and was equally capable of designing ornamental structures. The Ramsay Monument [Fig. 16.9] is said to date from 1759, although it seems to be shown on an estate map of 1757. It commemorates the poet Allan Ramsay, highly rated in Georgian Scotland, rather than his artist son, who is better known south of the Border,34 and terminates the axial view south from the mansion. It comprises an arch surmounted by an obelisk, which in turn is pierced by oval apertures that decrease in size upwards: not a

landscape context.

Newhall, a Lothian estate a few kilometres from Penicuik, has not one but two monuments to Ramsay Snr. On the lawn in front of the house is a kind of truncated obelisk, dated 1810 and topped by an a few hundred metres away is a proper obelisk, this time with a portrait medallion suspended from a bow of ribbons carved on one face, all very delicate and precise. The reason for these monuments is that Ramsay’s pastoral drama of 1725, The Gentle Shepherd, is set around Newhall and its environs; John Forbes, owner of Newhall at the time, was a close friend and patron. In 1783 Thomas Dunmore bought the estate for his grandson and ward Robert Brown. The latter was responsible for the architectural embellishments, and in 1808 he published an edition of The Gentle Shepherd accompanied by a map identifying the various locations ground by plaques with appropriate quotes.

16.9 Penicuik House, Lothian, Ramsay Monument

In 1783 the 1st Lord Muncaster, of Muncaster Castle on the western fringe of the Lake District,35 erected a monument to the meeting in 1461 between the fugitive Henry VI and a shepherd who had guided him down the hill to the castle [Fig. 16.11]. It is out of sight of the castle, but the setting has a parkland feel and a sublime backdrop of mountains. Three telescopic octagonal stages of rough masonry are topped out by a

ship. The arches and internal niches are Gothic, with cross-loops as an additional medieval touch.

At the opposite extreme as regards sophistication and elegance is the Monument of Lysicrates [Fig. 16.10]

Completed in 1770 and also known as the Lanthorn of Demosthenes, the monument copies the Greek original illustrated by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart in The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. The Choragic Monument of Lysicrates was built in Athens to support the tripod won by a cyclic chorus in 334 bce of the original and supplied the missing tripod and bowl that it would have had for libations. At Shugborough the tripod was of bronze made in the Soho Manufactory of Matthew Boulton at Birmingham. Like the Greek

16.11 Muncaster Castle, Cumbria, monument to Henry VI

16.10 Shugborough House, Staffordshire, Monument of Lysicrates (with recreated tripod, now gone)

original, this has long since disappeared, as has

Shugborough, on a knoll between the entrance drive and the river, was apparently chosen by the client Thomas Anson. William Chambers, no admirer of either Stuart or things Greek, wrote that it:

is in reality not quite so large as one of the sentry boxes in Portman Square… its form and proportions resemble those of a silver tankard excepting that the

in Greece, although so pompously described and elegantly represented in several late publications, seem to deserve much notice.36

Extreme opposites of sophistication can likewise be that is, empty tombs whose supposed occupants are actually buried elsewhere. At the rustic end of the spectrum is the Bradyll Monument at Conishead, Cumbria [Fig. 16.12], a robust little building of its location on a very exposed ridge. This slopes eastwards towards Conishead and the upper reaches

mountains. Of triangular plan, it was built in 1792 by William Gale-Bradyll, owner of Conishead Priory, to commemorate several members of his family. His maternal grandfather Christopher Wilson, owner of Bardsea Hall, married Margaret Bradyll. Christopher thereby inherited Conishead and changed his name dome upon a triangular body upon a circular plinth, with buttresses and sharp pinnacles at the angles. Each of the three sides has a Gothic niche, and each once contained a funerary urn, the sides being oriented to face the houses of the three families: Bardsea (Wilson), Conishead (Bradyll), and Whitehaven (Gale). Only one urn survives, with death dates ranging from 1772 to 1814.

Despite its undoubted rustic charm, no one could claim that the Bradyll Monument is great architecture. In total contrast, the Rockingham Monument [Fig. 16.13] at Wentworth Woodhouse of almost the same date is unquestionably one of the outstanding pieces of Georgian landscape architecture, made even more splendid by the quartet of obelisks that tether

16.12 Conishead, Cumbria, Bradyll Monument

the main structure and create an almost piazza-like ensemble. They are not in fact part of the original concept, but were moved here from the formal bowlinggreen garden near the house at the suggestion of Humphry Repton (who produced a Red Book for the estate), although neoclassical architects liked this kind of arrangement.37 The design by John Carr is quite closely based on the Monument of the Julii near St Rémy in Provence, an exceptionally well-preserved Roman structure of c.30–20 bce [Fig. 16.14].38 First designs in 1783 were for an obelisk on a colonnaded plinth, the obelisk being the Egyptian symbol of immortality.39 These were rejected in favour of the design based on the Monument of the Julii,40 and work continued from 1785 to 1791, the total cost being £3,208 3s 4d.41

The Wentworth Woodhouse structure is in fact a cenotaph rather than a mausoleum, as no one is buried in it, and it commemorates the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, whose political eminence merited burial in Westminster Abbey. Built to a commission from Lord Fitzwilliam (Rockingham’s nephew and heir), it enshrines a white marble statue of the marquess by

16.13 Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, Rockingham Monument

16.14 St Rémy, Provence, France, Monument of the Julii

Nollekens, which has remained miraculously unscathed

was twice prime minister (1765–6 and again in 1782, the year of his death), so around the perimeter of the interior are busts of his political chums, including Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke and Augustus Keppel, while above is a dome with elegant neoclassical plasterwork. Somewhat surprisingly, although there are a further two upper stages, there is no way of reaching them as the building lacks a staircase.

Wentworth Woodhouse was preceded by a few years by another derivative of the Monument of the Julii, the monument at Downhill in County Londonderry. This was built by the ‘Earl-Bishop’ of Derry between c.1779 and 1783 in memory of his brother the 2nd Earl of Bristol, who had died in 1775; the little-known

Soane, perhaps not to its advantage. It is now something of a truncated stump on its windswept hilltop, its crowning tempietto having blown down in a storm (the so-called ‘Night of the Big Wind’) as early as 1839.42

The Congreve Monument at Stowe is also

was built on an island in the lake in 1736 to a design by William Kent, and has that architect’s inventiveness and humour even on a small scale. A monkey sits on a rustic pyramid, looking at itself in a mirror, a tribute to Kent’s friend the dramatist William Congreve, and bearing the inscription ‘Comedy is the imitation of life and the mirror of society.’

Insofar as it is utterly unlike any other Georgian landscape embellishment, the MacGregor Monument [Fig. 16.15] at Lanrick Castle near Stirling can for once be called genuinely unique. A solid tapering shaft faced

to evoke the form of a tree, complete with the stumps of lopped stone branches. At the top of this stage comes what is likely to be a representation of a multi-pointed medieval crown, of a form now more usually found in Christmas crackers. From within this rises an attenuated Doric rotunda of just three columns, and above that a solitary column originally surmounted by a classical egg-shaped urn (this now lies on the ground at the foot of the monument). The total height was estimated by Barbara Jones at about 60 feet (18 m).43

16.15 Lanrick Castle, Stirling, MacGregor Monument

The precise date of this extraordinary conceit is unknown, as is the architect. The estate had been acquired by the MacGregors from the Haldane family in 1791, and in 1803 Sir John MacGregor Murray was apparently employing James Gillespie Graham on the house, which was an old one down the slope by the River Teith. Gillespie Graham returned in 1822, 1826 and 1828, and it is tempting to wonder whether he might have made the design for the monument, or at least guided his client’s hand. Obviously, it is classical from the neck up, as it were, but so quirkily that a strait-laced classicist might perhaps have jibbed at the commission. The monument sits on a hilltop to the south-west of the site of the castle, and is now so enveloped in trees of its own height as to be quite invisible from outside the wood, and scarcely less so from within. One suggestion is that it was built to cock a snook at the Earl of Moray, the local aristocratic magnate who lived on the other side of the River Teith at Doune Castle, and who until the trees grew up would have been able to see it daily.44

Stone imitating wood provides a link with the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough [Fig. 16.16]. This constitutes an incident in the shrubbery circuit east of the

house, encountered between the Doric temple and the Chinese summerhouse, and is a fascinating composite piece. The striking rough-hewn inner arch imitating rustic woodwork is derived from Plate A of Thomas Wright’s Grottos (1758),45 and also appears on his garden plan for Badminton;46 it was in place by 1756, when it is mentioned in a poem by Anna Seward.47 It encloses Peter Scheemakers’s exquisite marble relief after a celebrated painting by Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, depicting a group of shepherds of Antiquity attempting to decipher the mysterious lettering on an ancient sarcophagus; many commentators have subsequently attempted the same exercise, none conclusively. The painting is variously dated between the late 1630s and the 1650s, but in any case was bought by Louis XIV in 1685, and in the eighteenth century it became well known through engravings. At Shugborough the outer architectural frame, of two primitivist Greek Doric columns carrying a Doric

‘Athenian’ Stuart. The two forms of primitivism, Rococo and Greek Revival, marry with perfect and unexpected success to produce one of the most idiosyncratic and mysterious garden structures of the period.

1. A good example is Pietro Bianchi’s Capriccio with the Tomb of Cecilia Metella, acquired by William Wyndham in Rome in 1739/40 and still hanging where he placed it in the cabinet at Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk.

2. A cross section of this is V&A: 3339; a design for a smaller ruined mausoleum in the RIBA Collections (SC 68/9) may relate to the project. Charles Hind points out (personal communication) that depicting a modern building in a ruined state as a presentation drawing was a French practice picked up by Chambers in Paris.

3. John Harris, Sir William Chambers, London 1970, pp. 24–5, and 33, argues for the involvement of Chambers as well as Joseph Goupy.

4. Most burials continued to be either in churches or churchyards, the former being preferred by the aristocracy as it made possible the commissioning of grandiose monuments.

5. Robert Williams, ‘Vanbrugh’s India and his Mausolea for England’, in Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (eds), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England 1690–1730, Stroud 2000, pp. 122–8.

6. Vanbrugh to the Earl of Carlisle, 19 June 1722. The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh. Volume 4, The Letters Webb, London 1928, p. 147.

7. The duke had already declared his wish to be buried in the chapel at Blenheim Palace.

8. Williams, op. cit., p. 128.

9. Museum, E.2124:1-254–1992.

10. Included in Domenico Rossi, Romanae magnitudinis monumenta, Rome 1699, pl. L.

16.16 Shugborough House, Staffordshire, Shepherd’s Monument

11. Chapter 6.

12. John Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, 5th edition, Harmondsworth 1969, p. 291.

13. Although descendants of the Earl of Carlisle have continued to be buried here, the great majority of loculi are still untenanted.

14. Letter to George Selwyn, 12 August 1772. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis et al., 48 vols, New Haven and London 1937–83, Vol. 30 (1961), pp. 256–9.

15. Behind Garrett stood Sir Thomas Robinson, the 3rd Earl’s son-in-law, himself a keen amateur Palladian architect who later worked on Castle Howard itself and considerably observation to Adam White.

16. It reminds one of Sir Christopher Wren’s irritated reaction to Burlington’s interference at St Paul’s Cathedral, substituting balustrading for solid parapets: ‘Ladies think nothing well without an edging’. Arthur T. Bolton and H. Duncan Hendry (eds), The Wren Society, 20 vols, Oxford 1924–43, Vol. 16, p. 131.

17. Kerry Downes, English Baroque Architecture, London 1966, p. 126.

18. Chapter 4.

19. Bodleian Library, MS Top.gen. d.14, f. 43v, illustrated in Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-life, New Haven and

20. Colvin, op. cit., p. 322.

21. Chapter 17.

22. The Sir John Soane’s Museum has plans associated with the executed Bowood scheme (for instance 39/75–8), as well as for a neoclassical version of the Castle Howard mausoleum.

23. Notwithstanding this, a local newspaper at the time of

manners, and said that he had spent his ‘precious life of innocence and goodness’ preparing for the felicity of the next world. Delaval Delvings, Issue 17, Autumn 2015.

24. It was converted into a house in c.1900, but by 1950 was derelict. Ibid.

25. Sir John Soane’s Museum, 47/10/20.

26. William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture, London 1759, pl. XLI; John Martin Robinson, James Wyatt: Architect to George III, New Haven and London 2012, p. 176.

27. C.f. previous quasi-pyramidal structures such as the Guise mausoleum in the churchyard at Elmore, Gloucestershire, was the Blickling mausoleum.

28. Proposed by Capability Brown’s plan for the park made in 1771.

29.

likewise a neoclassical updating of the Castle Howard model, the tall drum garlanded with carved swags in an almost festive manner. Keene died in 1776 so it predates the Brocklesby project. V&A: E.880–1921. Another version is E.881–1921.

30. Chapter 14.

31. For a detailed analysis of the Gosford mausoleum, see The Earl of Wemyss, The Gosford Concept 1782–1808, privately printed 2018.

32. Colvin, op. cit., p. 344. The mausoleum for Princess Charlotte at Claremont, designed by John Buonarotti Papworth and Augustus Charles Pugin after her death in November 1817, was Gothic but had originally been designed as a teahouse for her the previous year; Colvin BD, p. 732.

33. Chapters 4 and 12.

34. Allan Ramsay Jr painted coronation portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte, which were mass produced and despatched to embassies all over Europe.

35. The 1st Lord Muncaster enlarged and Gothicised the the 1860s and 1870s by Anthony Salvin.

36. Quoted in J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival, revised edition, London 1995, pp. 88–9. Another version of the same Athenian model was incorporated in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s early nineteenth-century gardens at Alton

37. For instance, one of Chambers’s mausoleum schemes for Frederick, Prince of Wales. It is said that the Marquess of Rockingham was stung to learn that Horace Walpole had referred to the bowling green as containing ‘no less than four obelisks, and looks like a Brobdingnag ninepin alley’. A Brief Guide to the Fitzwilliam (Wentworth) Estates & the Wentworth Monuments, Wentworth 2012, p. 64.

38. Although he is not known for sure to have travelled abroad, there is a tantalising reference in a letter of 30 May 1771 that ‘Mr Carr is gone (I believe) to France’, and there are

October. By this stage he was prosperous and could well The Life and Work of John Carr of York

Alternatively, Marcus Binney has suggested Carr may have known a painting of the Roman structures at St Rémy that Country Life, 24 January 1991, p. 61. The Monument of the Julii is also incorporated in two capricci that act as overmantels at Stourhead, so the building had currency in eighteenth-century England.

39.

40. Wragg, op. cit., p. 220.

41. V&A, Vanbrugh Album, E.2124:1-254–1992, f. 209, is a somewhat squashed version of the same Antique model, with the arcaded middle stage and crowning tempietto, but minus the tall plinth. It seems to be by Edward Lovett Pearce, who died in 1733 but is known to have studied in Italy in 1723–4, so could have seen the monument en route.

42. As with the Rockingham Monument, the puzzle is how Soane knew of the Monument of the Julii; he had considered returning from Italy via France but in the event opted for a route via Germany, and his correspondence with his friend Thomas Pitt in the autumn of 1786 makes quite clear that he had never visited Provence: in any case, had he done so this would have been too late to inform the Downhill design. It is therefore evident that he must have

source. I am grateful to Sue Palmer, Sir John Soane’s Museum Archivist, for clarifying this aspect.

43. Barbara Jones, Follies & Grottoes, 2nd edition, London 1974, pp. 98–9.

44. Information from Alastair Dickson. A possible argument against this idea is that in the 1820s Gillespie Graham was working for the earl in laying out Moray Place in the Edinburgh New Town.

45. Thomas Wright, Universal Architecture: Book II, Six Original Designs of Grottos, London 1758.

46. Thomas Wright garden plan, Badminton House. See Chapter 1.

47. Cited by John Martin Robinson, Shugborough, London 1989, p. 31.