Very quietly late last year the curtain came down on one of the more contentious country house sagas of recent times. For November saw the publication of Historic England’s Heritage At Risk register 2018 wherein, for the first time in the twenty-year history of this survey, the Barrington Park estate, near Burford ‘in the heart of the Cotswolds’, was nowhere to be found. The complete lack of fanfare around this milestone moment stands in stark contrast to the hullabaloo of earlier years, debate not confined to the specialist heritage media (↓) but which would spill out into the columns of the national press.
’The strange case of the squire who lets a village die’ ran the headline atop a multi-page feature in the Sunday Times magazine as far back as July of 1977: ‘Charles Wingfield lives in a mansion behind three miles of wall. His behaviour is not just strange, it is scandalous,’ the article thundered.1 At this time the main focus of concern was the conspicuous neglect of the buildings comprising Great Barrington village, half of which were then empty, ‘some virtually rubble’. But the attention of architectural conservationists soon turned to the fate of the equally imperilled ‘big house’, Palladian Barrington Park, the property of this family – like everything else hereabouts – since 1735.
In an unhelpful twist, however, the cause of this lobby was compromised to some degree by conflicting agendas.
see: Historic England
The original 18th-century core of the Grade l-listed mansion was the natural priority of the Georgian Group, ultimately at the expense of its 19th-century wings which the Victorian Society felt duty-bound to defend. Charles Wingfield was insistent he could not afford to fully restore both; he was equally adamant that, while nothing would be sold, ‘his family would not accept grants to restore Barrington Park because that would entail giving public access’.2 Indeed, this determination to maintain privacy had seen off many an interested enquirer.
‘I was refused admittance,’ records historian the late John Julius Norwich in his 1980s compendium, The architecture of southern England: ‘Visitors asking to see the house do so at their peril,’ he warned.3 One person who did manage to gain access, a decade on, was inveterate country house connoisseur James Lees-Milne, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the National Trust, and legendary piquant diarist.
‘Friday 20 Sept 1996: A fascinating experience today, reminding me of my wartime visits to remote country houses and harassed owners. We were greeted in the courtyard by young Richard [Wingfield], his parents and their architect. The whole house draped with plastic sheets under scaffolding, so exterior cannot be seen. The parents live in darkness relieved by an occasional one-horse-power electric bulb. The hall looks more or less intact, but the rest of the 1735 core as well as the Victorian wings in appalling condition. Given tea in large Drawing Room. Long talk with Mrs, a charming, gentle woman who is clearly at sea and has long since thrown up the sponge. In all my days of country house visiting I don’t remember a case more tragic than Barrington. The scenario of a Russian novel.’4
Rather more prosaically, within days of that diary entry the fate of the house at Barrington Park would be the subject of a formal public inquiry, Secretary of State John Prescott later upholding the local council’s denial of permission to demolish the wings. With (present owner) Richard Wingfield also asserting ‘as an absolute principle I would not allow people into the house’, the ensuing logistical impasse would not begin to be resolved for another decade.2
The family were not entirely without sympathy in their approach. ’No wonder the Wingfields have no desire to accept cash from the taxpayer, and allow taxpayers to stride through their home as if they owned to place, scattering sweet papers and copies of the Daily Mirror,’ wrote journalist and gleeful provocateur Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn).5 And this was by no means the first time that occupants of Barrington Park had become the talk of the chattering classes. For no sooner had the house been ‘finished and fitted up’ in the mid-18th century than it became a bargaining chip in the fallout from a sensational scandal involving the most prominent aristocrat in the county.
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Presaging the experience of latter-day scholars, in the course of researching his weighty series The Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 19th-century biographer and politician John Lord Campbell encountered unexpected hinderance in researching the final chapters of Volume Four.
British Museum
‘I have had the freest communication of family papers during the whole course of my biographical labours, with [this] single exception,’ he observed in a pointed footnote. The subject at hand was Charles Talbot (r), Lord Chancellor 1733-37 and great-grandfather of the uncooperative 3rd Baron Dynevor, of Barrington Park. ‘Lord Dynevor is in possession of all of the Chancellor’s papers, but declines us any use to be made of them, which seems to me very strange as I am sure that nothing can appear among them that would not be for the honour of his ancestor.’
An ancestor universally honoured at Talbot’s untimely death in 1737 when ‘the political parties on both sides vied with each other in his praise’6, his demise prompting Alexander Pope to elegise:
At Barrington shall English bounty stand
And Hensol’s honour never leave the land
The lawyer son of the bishop of Durham, becoming MP for that city, by the mid-1720s Talbot was combining his role as Solicitor-General with a thriving private practice supposedly generating ‘the enormous fee income of £7,500 a year’.7 But his association with the two estates cited by Pope would have rather more to do with advantageous wedlock than well-earned wealth.
see: Hitched
In 1708 Charles had married Cecil Matthews (d.1720), heiress of the Hensol Castle estate in Glamorgan, which house (left) he would significantly remodel c.1735. The zenith of Talbot’s professional ascendancy had arrived in November 1733 with his appointment as Lord Chancellor, being raised to the peerage as the 1st Baron Talbot of Hensol. But only two months earlier he had suffered the loss of his eldest son, Charles, not long returned from an edifying two-year Grand Tour under the sponsored tutelage of poet James Thomson (‘Rule, Britannia!‘). Step forward second son, William, fresh from the pursuit of rather more earthly pleasures down in deepest south Wales.
‘We are well informed that in the environs of Hensol, in Glamorganshire, some striking features of his lordship may be traced in several young men and women of that neighbourhood,’ Town & Country Magazine would scurrilously report many years later in surveying the rakish exploits of William, (by now) first Earl Talbot.8 His early servant-girl dalliances behind him, Charles’ new heir attempted settling down to conventional married life – but it didn’t last long.
In 1734, seven days after his 24th birthday, Lord Chancellor Talbot’s eldest surviving son was elected MP for Glamorgan; three months earlier, another strategic arrangement had seen his marriage to 15-year-old Mary de Cardonnel, sole heiress of wealthy former Secretary of State for War, Adam de Cardonnel (d.1719), at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square. Likely with an eye to the happy couple’s future, Talbot pere quickly invested a goodly portion of his young daughter-in-law’s matrimonial booty in some prime Gloucestershire real estate.
Since 1553 the manor of Great Barrington had been held by the Bray family who had expanded the manor house and developed its formal grounds (as captured by Kip in 1712, right). But, whatever the Talbots’ thoughts on their new property, within a year of its purchase fate would force their hand. ‘My Lord Chancellor has a pretty place about 12 miles off, but a sad house, and finds himself oblig’d to build,’ wrote Lord Bathurst (of Cirencester Park) to the Earl of Strafford in September, 1736, being reference to a recent damaging blaze. ‘He has not begun yet,’ Bathurst continued, ‘he has very good stone near him but .. it is such a kind of place which .. can’t possibly make a noble seat, but it may be made a pretty thing.’
see: Georgian Prints
Which was, it transpired, quite a prescient call since any notions of vaulting architectural ambition were foregone in favour of what was ‘essentially a Palladian villa, more usually associated with a residence near a town than a principal landed seat’.9 Stylistic details both inside and out at Barrington have long caused suggestion of the hand of William Kent to linger: ‘Were the Tapestry Room’s owl-crested mirror in Chiswick House, Kent’s authority would never be questioned,’ while abandoned entrance gate piers a mile from the house (now overgrown beside the A40) are also ‘thoroughly Kentian’.10 However, ‘there seems good reason to credit Francis Smith of Warwick with a design as refined, elegant and correct as anything by his more famous contemporaries’.11
see source
see source
The curious contrast between the five-bay arrangement of the S front and the entrance side where coupled pilasters define just three (r) has been attributed to an internal plan which betrayed Smith’s relative unfamiliarity with the smaller, villa scale.11
But while the construction of Barrington had been initiated by Lord Talbot and Francis Smith, the house would have to be completed by their sons, William and William. For Smith died in 1738, a year after the unexpected death (‘to the great misfortune of his Country’) of his client the 52-year-old Lord Chancellor, at the town house he had built in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Talbot may have missed out on the culmination of the Gloucestershire project but he would at least be spared the mortification of the events which would soon overtake its intended occupants.
The now exceedingly well-set 2nd Lord Talbot of Hensol and his still-teenaged wife were by this time the parents of a daughter, Cecil, and in 1739 Mary bore William a son and heir (who would die in infancy). But the second birth had been difficult and her husband would later claim ‘the midwife had told him that if she had any more children it would kill her’. Being thus ‘deprived of her sexual services’, the lusty lord soon returned to his old ways.12
see: Geni
Some forty miles south-west of Barrington Park, at the opposite end of the county, lies the mighty Badminton Estate, seat of the dukes of Beaufort. At this time the ten-year marriage of Henry, the ‘sickly’ 3rd duke and his wife, heiress Frances Scudamore, was childless and strained. William Talbot (r) would encounter the duchess early in 1740. ‘She was looking primarily for love, he for a sexual partner, and they were both of them young, healthy, self-centered and reckless. They were made for each other. Within months of their first meeting they had become lovers.’12
Regular assignations in London ensued, the couple’s initial concern for secrecy quickly giving way to incaution. For one out-of-town rendezvous the duchess and her groom rode to a rural location where Talbot was waiting with his self-driven chaise. Though the groom had repaired to a respectful distance, all would soon be revealed to him when the back of the carriage came apart, so vigorous was the activity therein. Payoffs and promises for him and other members of the duchess’s staff kept the lid on the affair for a while, but an eventually suspicious duke could always offer more. The dirty linen would be aired during Beaufort’s excruciatingly public divorce proceedings in 1742.12
Meanwhile, back at Barrington Park blameless Mary, Lady Talbot was naturally distraught as the affair unravelled. But she appears initially to have entertained hopes that all might not be over between her and her wayward husband, that an informal trial separation might help.
‘He can come down and visit me two or three days out of a week. When [it] is over, if we like living together we can, if we don’t I shall in some measure have weaned myself.’13
see: National Trust
But Talbot insisted he would continue to see the duchess, and Mary was advised that unless formal terms of separation were negotiated she might lose everything. ‘I cannot bring myself to part from him and yet to have my very cloathes seized seems horrible,’ she wrote to a friend. And so, while declaring that ‘this separation seems like tearing my soul from body’, her future, and that of Barrington itself, would at last be decided:
‘My Lord has come into settling upon me…either £3,000 per annum clear, or the Barrington Estate with one thousand clear which I chuse.’‘13
Seemingly an act of self-affirmation, Mary’s likeness would be painted by leading portraitist Allan Ramsay in 1742.
Unsurprisingly, the bloom would soon come off Lord Talbot’s affair and he moved on – and on. As Horace Walpole noted, ‘the Duchess of Beaufort was not the only woman of fashion who lived openly with him as his mistress. Strong, well-made and very comely but with no air, he had some wit, and a tincture of disordered understanding,’ but was thought over-promoted when made High Steward of the royal household (being a favourite of the Princess of Wales), also created Earl Talbot, in 1761.
His public image would take a knock the following year, however, when The North Briton newspaper’s ridicule of Talbot’s conduct at the coronation of George III resulted in a preposterous duel with its author, radical journalist John Wilkes, in the garden of the Red Lion pub in Bagshot, Surrey (r).
In the calmer waters of the Windrush Valley, meanwhile, newly-separated Lady Mary would settle into her responsibilities at Barrington, and raising the couple’s daughter. ‘To be sure a landed estate requires great care,’ she had recognized when deliberating her settlement options, ‘but it would likewise prove perhaps an amusement.’ A rather expensive and somewhat hazardous amusement, she would before long discover.13
‘4 Aug, 1744: I am at present disabled by a pain in my arm, which I have caught by standing amongst my workmen, of which I still have a great many all at my own expense, and a monstrous one it has been to me. Yet where I have spent one shilling for ornament, I have spent two guineas for use, and yet there is still a great deal to do. But nobody that saw the place last year would know it again this.”13
The development of the park at Barrington was the focus of much of Lady Talbot’s attention in these early years as solo chatelaine (de Cardonnel family property in Hampshire and elsewhere now being sold to bolster funds). Pleasure grounds ‘of around 120 hectares’ encompassed a circuitous walk punctuated by strategically sited seats and classical structures offering arcadian vistas, or repose [details]. Some decades on, the maturing beauty of Barrington Park would be celebrated in a new engraving for which Lady Talbot paid artist Thomas Bonner £35 in 1778.
(The following year this picture would be published in Rudder’s New history of Gloucestershire whereafter it was promptly ripped off by Westminster Magazine. Claiming copyright infringement and £1,000 in damages, Thomas Bonner sued the proprietors of the 5,000-circulation current affairs monthly who admitted in court that their indifferent copy had “disgraced” their April 1780 edition, distribution of which had been halted. The case was thrown out on a technicality but back issues would instead feature a miscaptioned illustration of Brancepeth Castle, Durham.)
see: The Frick Collection
Also in 1780, and less than two years before his death, Earl Talbot, 2nd Baron Talbot of Hensol would be granted an outwardly superfluous third peerage named for a place with which he had no direct association. But with his existing titles and Hensol Castle entailed upon a male heir (his nephew), and Barrington Park the property of his estranged wife, William lacked a suitably significant legacy to impart to his only (legitimate) child. Cecil – painted (r) by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1762 – had in fact already made good on missing out on a Welsh estate having married the heir to another, George Rice of Dynevor, Carmarthenshire.
So it was that Talbot now became additionally ennobled 1st Baron Dynevor, with specific remainder to his daughter who duly succeeded as Baroness in her own right in 1782.
Following the example of her mother at Barrington, Lady Cecil was much involved in development of the parkland around Newton House at Dynevor (little-altered today) and, after George’s death in 1779, ‘successfully managed the estate alone’. Countess Talbot died in 1787, her daughter only five years later whereupon Cecil’s son George Talbot Rice succeeded to the family estates as 3rd Baron Dynevor. His marriage to a daughter of the 1st Viscount Sydney produced seven surviving children: a son, George, and six spinster daughters, the latter remaining together their entire lives, and comprising a remarkable household at Barrington.
see: Bedfordshire Archives
Reassuring its readers in November 1849, The Welshman & General Advertiser was happy to ‘unhesitatingly assert .. that Lord Dynevor was in perfect health on Monday last, at Barrington Park’, and was definitely not dead, as The Times had erroneously reported three days earlier.14 The London newspaper had jumped the gun by two-and-a-half years; having already inherited (from a cousin) the Trevor estates of Bromham, Bedfordshire (r) and Glynde in Sussex, son George, 4th Lord Dynevor…
… could easily continue to accommodate his sisters in Gloucestershire. During their brother’s lifetime, Frances, Cecil, Harriet, Caroline, Katherine and Maria Rice all lived together at Barrington Park, taking responsibility for the estate’s villagers seriously. ‘One of the ladies was in their Barrington school every morning, and if any [neighbouring] Taynton child should be absent, one or other of them would cover the mile and a half, each way, to be informed of the reason. There are working people in the district who look back to this time as an El Dorado.’15
see: ME Wynn & Co.
This benevolent (feudal) idyll was interrupted in 1869 when George died. Having fathered only daughters, the Dynevor title and lands now passed to a cousin, Rev. Francis Rice, while Barrington was placed in trust for his then 19-year-old grandson, Edward Wingfield. The Rice sisters relocated en masse to Matson (r), a Gloucester house offered by their cousin, Lord Sydney, and would continue to fund good works locally.
Somewhat ironically, this mass exodus ushered in the first significant expansion of the house at Barrington Park.
Historic England
Historic England
Plainly anticipating a sizeable brood, Barrington’s freshly married new young squire Edward Wingfield commissioned substantial east and west wings from architect J. Macvicar Anderson. His designs – ‘remarkably tactful’9 or ‘overweening’16, according to taste – were apparently ‘not executed until the 1880s’17 (by which time Anderson’s clients had produced seven children). The entrance front would also gain a de rigueur porte-cochere at this time (left).
Mervyn Wingfield succeeded in 1901 but in contrast to his father’s optimistic expansionism, Wingfield’s fifty-year tenure was clouded by vicissitudes which afflicted many a landed estate in his time, introducing an air of retrenchment which was to characterise Barrington Park throughout the 20th century. The agricultural depression post-WWI prompted the sale of several farms and many small properties; income and investments took a further significant hit in the financial crash of 1931.
Giving evidence at a rates appeal in 1934 Col. Wingfield revealed the state of gloom by then already besetting the mansion at Barrington Park. ‘There were many rooms, in particular [former] servants’ rooms, which were dilapidated and unfit for habitation. The domestic quarters were in a semi-basement, nineteen steps below ground level and were dark, dreary and damp.’18
see: BFI [video]
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“A house the size of Barrington Park, with or without extensions, is never going to be practical for family life, is it? Whatever you do, aren’t you still going to have the problem of not wanting to watch ‘Neighbours’ in the Tapestry Room, or the Georgian hall?“2
So suggested uncomprehending counsel for Cotswold planning authority to present owner Richard Wingfield at the 1996 public inquiry into the proposed demolition of Barrington’s 19th century extensions. Restoration of the latter in addition to the house’s original core would increase costs by at least 50%, a burden the determinedly self-financing Wingfields insisted they could not then entertain. Years of stalemate ensued (though thorough repair of Great Barrington village was under way).
Fast-forward to 2010 and approval is granted for the renovation and discreet modernisation of Barrington Park in its entirety, ‘Mr and Mrs Wingfield [having] reconsidered their own plans for the use of the house’ following the death of Charles Wingfield in 2007. Planning officials now welcomed ‘the attention to detail and sympathetic approach to the repair of this important building’ under the continuing supervision of architects Inskip+Jenkins (who were also busy with their well-received restoration of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill at this time).
see: Sinclair Johnston
The comprehensive scheme of works included: complete re-roofing; repair and restoration of the 18th-century interiors, ‘bringing the important reception rooms with their outstanding contents back into use’; refurbishment and repurposing of the wing interiors to provide ‘a convenient family house for the 21st century’ (complete with passenger lift).17
see: Civic Security
Removal of the Victorian porte-cochere has returned the entrance front to its original form, the Georgian Venetian door arrangement once more revealed, while the salvaged stone steps (stored since 1882) reinstate ‘the generous approach which related the original house to the parkland’.17
see: Historic England
see: Collin West
Parkland wherein the Grade II* dovecote and temples (‘of considerable inventiveness’), and other C18th structures, about which there was similarly ‘serious cause for concern’, have now also been removed from the At Risk Register.19
At least one of these buildings, like the house itself, can be seen from a distance, the Barrington Park Estate being ‘unfortunately NOT open to the public’. Fully organic since 1995, the 5,000-acre traditional farming enterprise is now “heavily into” the Environmental Stewardship scheme promoted by Defra/Natural England whereby farmers and landowners ‘are paid for effectively managing their land in a manner which protects and enhances the environment and wildlife’.
Recording the forlorn scene he had encountered at Barrington Park back in 1996, James Lees-Milne foresaw ‘absolutely no alternative to demolition of the Anderson additions in order to preserve the Kentian villa. The family are asking for no financial assistance, and would be unable to live in the present house, were it to be reinstated’. Little could he have imagined that the chorus of concern in his time would be confounded, the ‘Russian novel’ having contrived something akin to a fairytale ending…
see: Google Maps
[Barrington Park Estate][Map PDF]
Handed on 