Wentworth Castle is a stately home and estate near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. It was originally the seat of the Earls of Strafford. An older house existed on the estate, then called Stainborough, when it was purchased by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby (later Earl of Strafford), in 1711. The precise date of the name change is not known, although it was still Stainborough in Jan Kip's engraved bird's-eye view of parterres and avenues, 1714, and in the first edition of Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715 (illustration, left). The original name survives in the form of Stainborough Castle, a sham ruin constructed as a garden folly (illustration below) on the estate.
The house was constructed in two great campaigns, by two earls, in remarkably different styles, each time under unusual circumstances. The castle's gardens were restored in the early 21st century, and are open to visitors.
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The first building campaign to the original structure was initiated by Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1672-1739),who was the grandson of Sir William Wentworth.
The estate of Wentworth Woodhouse,of which he believed was his birthright, was scarcely six miles distant and was a constant bitter sting, for the Strafford fortune had passed from the great earl's childless son to his wife's nephew, named Watson; only the barony of Raby went to a blood-relation. M.J. Charlesworth surmises that it was a feeling that what by rights should have been his that motivated Wentworth's purchase of Stainborough Castle nearby and that his efforts to surpass the Watsons at Wentworth Woodhouse in splendour and taste motivated the man whom Jonathan Swift called "proud as Hell".[1]
Wentworth had been a soldier in the service of William III, who made him a colonel of dragoons. He was sent by Queen Anne as ambassador to Prussia in 1706-11 and on his return to Britain, the earldom was revived when he was created Viscount Wentworth and Earl of Strafford in the Peerage of Great Britain. He was then sent as a representative in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Utrecht, and was brought before a commission of Parliament in the aftermath. With the death of Queen Anne, he and the Tories were permanently out of power. Wentworth, representing a clannish old family of Yorkshire, required a grand house consonant with the revived Wentworth fortunes, he spent his years of retirement completing it and enriching his landscape.
He had broken his tour of duty at Berlin to conclude the purchase of Stainborough in the summer of 1708, and returned to Berlin, armed with sufficient specifications of the site to engage the services of a military architect who had spent some years recently in England, Johann von Bodt. who provided the designs.[2] Wentworth was in Italy in 1709, buying paintings for the future house: "I have great credit by my pictures," he reported with satisfaction: "They are all designed for Yorkshire, and I hope to have a better collection there than Mr. Watson."[3] To display them a grand gallery would be required, for which James Gibbs must have provided the designs, since a contract for wainscoting "as desined by Mr Gibbs" survives among Wentworth papers in the British Library (Add. Mss 22329, folio 128). The Gallery was completed in 1724.[4] There are designs, probably by Bodt, for an elevation and a section showing the gallery at Wentworth Castle in the Victoria and Albert Museum (E.307-1937), in an album of mixed drawings which belonged to William Talman's son John.[5] the gallery extends one hundred and eighty feet, twenty-four feet wide, and thirty high, screened into three divisions by veined marble Corinthian columns with gilded capitals, and with corresponding pilasters against projecting piers: in the intervening spaces four marble copies of Roman sculptures on block plinths survived until the twentieth century.[6] Construction was sufficiently advanced by March–April 1714 that surviving correspondence between Strafford and William Thornton concerned the disposition of panes in the window sashes: the options were for windows four panes wide, as done in the best houses Thornton assured the earl, for which crown glass would do, or for larger panes, three panes across, which might requite plate glass: Strafford opted for the latter.[7] The results, directed largely by letter from a distance,[8] are unique in Britain. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner found the east range "of a palatial splendour uncommon in England."[9] The grand suite of parade rooms on the ground floor extended from the room at the north end with a ceiling allegory of Plenty to the south end, with one of a Fame.
Bodt's use of a giant order of pilasters on the front and other features, suggested to John Harris that Bodt, who had been in England in the 1690s, had had access to drawings by William Talman. Talman was the architect of Chatsworth, considered to be England's first truly Baroque house. Indeed there are similarities of design between Wentworth's east front and Chatsworth. Both have a distinctly Continental Baroque frontage. Wentworth has been described as a "a remarkable and almost unique example of Franco-Prussian architecture in Georgian England".[10] The east front was built upon a raised terrace that descended to sweeps of gravelled ramps that flanked a grotto and extended in an axial vista framed by double allées of trees to a formal wrought iron gate, all seen in Jan Kip's view of 1714, which if it is not more plan than reality, includes patterned parterres to the west of the house and an exedra on rising ground behind, all features that appear again in Britannia Illustrata, (1730).[11] An engraving by Thomas Badeslade, ca 1750, still shows the formal features centred on Bodt's façade, enclosed in gravel drives wide enough for a coach-and-four. The regular plantations of trees planted bosquet-fashion have matured: their edges are clipped, and straight rides pierce them.[12] All these were swept away by the second earl after mid-century, in favour of an open, rolling "naturalistic" landscape in the manner of Capability Brown.[13]
Strafford planted avenues of trees in great quantity in this open countryside, and the sham castle folly (built from 1726 and inscribed "Rebuilt in 1730", now more ruinous than it was at first) that he placed at the highest site, "like an endorsement from the past"[14] and kept free of trees (illustration, left) missed by only a few years being the first sham castle in an English landscape garden.[15] For its central court where the four original towers were named for his four children, the earl commissioned his portrait statue in 1730 from Michael Rysbrack, whom James Gibbs had been the first to employ when he came to England;[16] the statue has been moved closer to the house.
A staunch Tory,[17] Lord Strafford remained in political obscurity during Walpole's Whig supremacy, for the remainder of his life. An obelisk was erected to the memory of Queen Anne in 1736, and a sitting room in the house was named "Queen Anne's Sitting Room" until modern times. Other landscape features were added, one after the other, with the result that today there are twenty-six listed structures in what remains of the parkland.
The first earl died in 1739 and his son succeeded him. William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford (1722-1791) rates an entry in Colvin's Biographical Dictionary of British Architects as the designer of the fine neo-Palladian range, built in 1759-64 (illustration, upper right). He married a daughter of the Duke of Argyll[18] and spent a year on the Grand Tour to improve his taste; he eschewed political life. At Wentworth Castle he had John Platt (1728–1810)[19] on the site as master mason and Charles Ross ( -1770/75) to draft the final drawings and act as "superintendent"; Ross was a carpenter and joiner of London who had worked under the Palladian architect and practiced architectural ammanuensis, Matthew Brettingham, at Strafford's London house, 5, St James's Square, in 1748-49. Ross's proven competency in London in London doubtless recommended him to the Earl for the building campaign in Yorkshire.[20] At Wentworth Castle it was generally understood, as Lord Verulam remarked in 1768, "'Lord Strafford himself is his own architect and contriver in everything."[21] Even in the London house, Walpole tells us, "he chose all the ornaments himself".
Horace Walpole singled out Wentworth Castle as a paragon for the perfect integration of the site, the landscape, even the harmony of the stone:
"If a model is sought of the most perfect taste in architecture, where grace softens dignity, and lightness attempers magnificence... where the position is the most happy, and even the colour of the stone the most harmonious; the virtuoso should be directed to the new front of Wentworth-castle:[22] the result of the same judgement that had before distributed so many beauties over that domain and called from wood, water, hills, prospects, and buildings, a compendium of picturesque nature, improved by the chastity of art."[23]
With the extinction of the earldom with the third earl in 1799, the house and all the Wentworth estates including Wentworth Woodhouse, passed to William FitzWilliam, 4th Earl FitzWilliam, then to members of the Vernon-Wentworth family. The paintings were sold by Captain Bruce Canning Vernon-Wentworth at Christie's, 13 November 1919.[24] Bruce Vernon-Wentworth, who had no direct heirs, sold the estate to Barnsley Corporation in 1948.[25] Wentworth Castle was emptied at a house sale,[26] and the estate was divided up. The house was a teacher training college until 1978 and then was used by Northern College.[27] It was featured in the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition "The Country House in Danger".The great landscape that Walpole praised in 1780 is now "disturbed and ruinous", the second earl's sinuous river excavated in the 1750s reduced to a series of silty ponds,[28] and the M1 Motorway passes within view.
Wentworth Castle was featured on the BBC TV show "Restoration" in 2003, when an attempt was made to restore the Grade 2 Listed Victorian Conservatory to its former glory. Unfortunately, the Conservatory[29] did not win in the viewers' response; subsequently, the Wentworth Castle Trust took the decision in 2005 to support the fragile structure further with a scaffold. Unfortunately, the building is now in a perilous condition, and without urgent funding the structure will be lost forever. The restoration of the Conservatory will cost in the region of £2.5m.
Wentworth Castle is the only Grade I Listed Gardens and Parkland in South Yorkshire; it contains twenty-six individually listed structures. It opened fully to visitors in 2007, following the completion of the first phase of restoration, which cost £15.2m.[30]