Colworth House

Summary

Colworth up to 1720

The chantry of Lowick and the lands, including the manor of Colworth, was granted to Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, in 1546. It passed to a junior branch of the Montagu family who held it till 1691.

The Montagus’ house at Colworth was probably built by the family. W.O. Corbett found Elizabethan red brick walling about eight feet down near the centre of the present house during the restoration work done on the house by Unilever in 1949. The map of the estate of 1715 shows a classic E-shaped house on the site of the present house.

In 1691 the Montagus decided to concentrate their resources on the other estate at Lackham in Wiltshire. They sold the Colworth estate to John Wagstaff, citizen and mercer of the City of London. In 1715 he sold it on to Marc Antonie, steward to the Duke of Montagu. Antonie was born at Stamford, Lincolnshire, married Anne Beke from a well-todo Buckinghamshire family and had worked for the Montagus of Boughton since the 1680s. This had included long journeys with various members of the family to the Holy Land, France, Spain, Italy and Germany. He went on Winwood Montagu's fatal trip to Hanover in 1702, where drinking to the Hanoverian succession proved a little too much for him. This seems to have been Antonie's last trip abroad and for the rest of his life he was based in England either at Boughton House or at Montagu House (on the site of the present British Museum). His London house seems to have been near there with no country house of his own. In addition to supervising the running of the Montagu estates in Northamptonshire, Beaulieu and London, Antonie paid the various artists and craftsmen employed at the Duke's residences including all the finest French Huguenot artists.

In 1714, Antonie decided to rebuild Colworth. With all his knowledge of continental styles and particularly his connections with Huguenots, one would have expected him to build in the French style, a miniBoughton perhaps. In fact he had built a simple square house of three storeys with eight rooms on each floor (represented by the centre block of the present house). Even the entrance front lacked a pediment, if Gordon's tiny sketch on his map of 1736 is to be believed.