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Re-Dating Westwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Andor Gomme
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Extract

Westwood House (Fig. 1) is a prodigy among the prodigy houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in its different way as innovative and almost as remarkable as Wollaton, of whose site its commanding hilltop, two miles north-west of Droitwich in Worcestershire, is strongly reminiscent. Yet it has received comparatively little attention from historians and is correspondingly little known. This is evidently in part due to a persistent misdating and misinterpretation of its building, almost every subsequent writer having accepted unquestioned the authority of T. R. Nash in his Collections for the History of Worcestershire, published in 1781–82. Nash states unequivocally that

Westwood was formerly a lodge and banqueting room belonging to the mansion-house at Hampton, the antient seat of the Pakingtons; whose house here was probably built the latter end of Henry VIII, for Leyland in his Itinerary, volume VII, p. 13 says, ‘Pakington hath a veri good new house of brike, called Hampton-court, a vi mile of from Wicestre, somewhat Northward.’ During the Civil Wars of Charles I the house was burnt down; and the family making large additions to the lodge, by adding four wings, Westwood became thence forward the seat and mansion-house of the Pakingtons.

Type
Section 7: Country Houses
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 310 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 Nash, , Collections for the History of Worcestershire, I(1791-92), p. 537 Google Scholar.

2 Cooper, , Houses of the Gentry (New Haven & London, 1999), p. 122 Google Scholar.

3 The area of each floor is about two and a half times that of Ralegh’s nearly contemporary ‘lodge’ at Sherborne, with which Westwood has several times been paralleled. The hall and great chamber in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s Worksop Manor Lodge are 12½ m long. Dr Gapper reminds me that the slightly later Lulworth Castle — undoubtedly built as a lodge, with the family seat of the Howards remaining at Bindon Abbey three miles to the north — is 25 m square, with a 13 m hall and 16 m great chamber. Lulworth however was designed to, and did, receive visits from the king: was Lusty Pakington likewise expecting Elizabeth? Though she often stayed in quite modest houses, it would be in character for him to provide for her on the most lavish scale.

4 In Walpole’s Anecdotes (1826 edn, 1, p. 326), Westwood is said to be of 1590 — ‘architect unknown’. The elevation of the tower is interestingly akin to that of the garden front of a design for ‘Little Salisbury House’ in Strand, London, made by Simon Basil in 1600 (Bodleian Library: Gough drawings A381: cf. Architectural History, 27 (1984), p. 110, pl. 4b). With his high favour at the Court, Pakington could well have been able to call on the services of the Comptroller of the Queen’s Works.

5 The marriage made him stepfather-in-law to Francis Bacon, who was subsequently obliged to find against his mother-in-law when she brought an action against her estranged husband.

6 The Buildings of England: Worcestershire (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 286.

7 Quoted without reference in Jewett, Llewellyn & Hall, S. C., The Stately Homes of England, 2nd series (n.d. [1877]), p. 175 Google Scholar. I have not so far been able to trace their source.

8 The previous earldom died in 1614 with Henry Howard (first Earl of the first creation), who was neither married nor Lord President.

9 Unless — but it is hardly conceivable — Pakington had imported a vast number of mature trees. That by at latest 1625 (when he died) the woods were well enough grown to impress the visitors in this way indicates that the surrounding grounds, designed to focus on the present entrance, were planned and laid out when, or soon after, the tower was built. It was also in 1618 that Pakington obtained licence to impark 1,000 acres at Westwood, Hampton Lovett and other surrounding parishes ( VCH Worcestershire, III (1913), p. 237, citing Pat. 16 Jas. I, pt iv), but these were evidently additions to the land immediately surrounding the house.

10 Richard Morris pointed out to me that, since the entablature which frames the Restoration ceiling projects by several inches in front of the frieze, the latter was, with the rest of the walls, probably covered by wainscot when the room was redecorated in the 1680s. The bizarre collocation would therefore date from Hardwick’s operations in the 1840s.

11 ‘The Pakingtons of Westwood’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, n.s., XIII (1936), pp. 28-49: see in particular pp. 36 & 39ff.

12 Admittedly the reference to ‘white freestone’ might seem to point more obviously to that on the original tower than to the wings.

13 This information was briefly summarized in The Pakingtons of Westwood, by the fifth and sixth Barons Hampton (privately printed 1975 and based on an extensive study of the archives now on deposit at the Worcestershire CRO, St Helen’s Worcester: BA3835 & 5117; microfilm 970.5.349 — unfortunately so far only skeletally catalogued). They also found (ibid., p. 13) that in 1622 a hundred-year lease was given on Hampton Court in order to provide a jointure for Pakington’s daughter-in-law, indicating that the family were no longer living there; and it may or may not — in view of the uncertain relationships between husband and wife — be significant that, while in 1619 Lady Pakington was writing from Hampton, in 1624 she wrote from Westwood.

14 Visible also at the west corner (of the former kitchen), though obscured by later alterations at the north. See Fig. 7.

15 The ogee cupolas at the ends of the wings are an early twentieth-century improvement by Blomfield, copying those on the gatehouse and the two (out of four) surviving garden pavilions: they replace straight pyramids, shown already in Kip’s engraving but whether original to the early seventeenth-century additions is not known.

16 Cooper, op. cit., pp. 122 & 336 n. 47.

17 Kip’s engraving, admittedly of nearly a century after the Northampton visit, shows a parterre and orchard to the north-east of the house; the only ridings which directly approach are those leading to the gatehouse. See also n. 8 above. Dr Maguire suggests that the north-east door always led to the garden.

18 Seep. 166.

19 Book of Architecture (Robert Peake’s English edition, 1611), III, iv, fol. 55.

20 Cf. ibid., IV, viii, fol. 46.

21 The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture (1563): ‘Corynthia’, plate opposite the first page of D.iii.

22 My thanks to John Peacock for pointing this out and for inventing the term ‘friezelet’.

23 RIBA, Smythson I/26 and II/11: see Architectural History, 5 (1962), pp. 91 & 109; also Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (1983), p. 130.

24 The portico order, including the necking on the shafts, is notably close to that of the chimneypiece in the great chamber at Montacute, now agreed to be the work of Arnold.

25 Thorpe, T.93 & 97: see Summerson, John (ed.), ‘The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe’, Walpole Society, XL (1966), pls 43 & 45Google Scholar.

26 For Bidston see Cooper, op. cit.; p. 120 (figs 114–15); for Bradford-on-Avon, see Girouard, , Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (1966), p. 153, fig. 16 & pl. 117Google Scholar. Research in collaboration with Dr Alison Maguire has shown that — contrary to the indication in Girouard’s plan — the hall at Bradford always occupied only the three central bays of the south front.

27 See Girouard (1983), pp. 184 & 188, figs 11 & 12.

28 Cooper (op. cit, pp. 122-24) proposes that two drawings by Thorpe for what he refers to as ‘an unidentified lodge’ may actually be preliminary plans for Westwood. But as Summerson points out (‘Book of Architecture’, p. 95), the plans are for a structurally cruciform house; the neat jigsaw of rooms that he lays out have in fact more in common with Sherborne than with Westwood.

29 Rooms on the top floor and in the north-west rank have always been served by secondary stairs opening on to the main landing.

30 The gallery is now subdivided but originally stretched laterally across the width of the house directly above the stairhall.

31 It was certainly big: in an inventory of 1689 (Barnard, art. cit., p. 46) the staircase is said to have held eight chairs, twelve cushions, two stands, one clock and case, and twenty-three pictures.