Wentworth Castle
Encyclopedia
Barnsley
Barnsley is a town in South Yorkshire, England. It lies on the River Dearne, north of the city of Sheffield, south of Leeds and west of Doncaster. Barnsley is surrounded by several smaller settlements which together form the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley, of which Barnsley is the largest and...
in South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire
South Yorkshire is a metropolitan county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It has a population of 1.29 million. It consists of four metropolitan boroughs: Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, and City of Sheffield...
. It was originally the seat of the Earls of Strafford
Earl of Strafford
Earl of Strafford is a title that has been created three times in English and British history.The first creation was in the Peerage of England in 1640 for Thomas Wentworth, 1st Baron Wentworth, the close advisor of King Charles I...
. An older house existed on the estate, then called Stainborough, when it was purchased by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby
Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (1672-1739)
Lieutenant-General Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford , KG , known as Thomas Wentworth, 3rd Baron Raby from 1695 to 1711, was a diplomat and First Lord of the Admiralty....
(later Earl of Strafford), in 1711. The precise date of the name change is not known, although it was still Stainborough in Jan Kip
Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff
The inexorably linked careers of Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff trace a specialty of engraved views of English country houses, represented in minute detail from the bird's-eye view that was a long-established pictorial convention for topography...
'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
Folly
In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of garden ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs...
(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.
The first building campaign
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The estate of Wentworth Woodhouse
Wentworth Woodhouse
Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house near the village of Wentworth, in the vicinity of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. "One of the great Whig political palaces", its East Front, long, is the longest country house façade in Europe. The house includes 365 rooms and covers an...
,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
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
called "proud as Hell".
Wentworth had been a soldier in the service of William III
William III of England
William III & II was a sovereign Prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau by birth. From 1672 he governed as Stadtholder William III of Orange over Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel of the Dutch Republic. From 1689 he reigned as William III over England and Ireland...
, 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
Treaty of Utrecht
The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, comprises a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in March and April 1713...
, 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. 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." To display them a grand gallery would be required, for which James Gibbs
James Gibbs
James Gibbs was one of Britain's most influential architects. Born in Scotland, he trained as an architect in Rome, and practised mainly in England...
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. 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
William Talman (architect)
William Talman was an English architect and landscape designer. A pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, in 1678 he and Thomas Apprice gained the office of King's Waiter in the Port of London...
's son John. 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. 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
Crown glass
Crown glass is either of two kinds of glass:*Crown glass was a type of hand-blown window glass.*Crown glass is a type of optical glass used in lenses....
would do, or for larger panes, three panes across, which might requite plate glass: Strafford opted for the latter. The results, directed largely by letter from a distance, are unique in Britain. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, FBA was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture...
found the east range "of a palatial splendour uncommon in England." 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
William Talman (architect)
William Talman was an English architect and landscape designer. A pupil of Sir Christopher Wren, in 1678 he and Thomas Apprice gained the office of King's Waiter in the Port of London...
. Talman was the architect of Chatsworth
Chatsworth House
Chatsworth House is a stately home in North Derbyshire, England, northeast of Bakewell and west of Chesterfield . It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been home to his family, the Cavendish family, since Bess of Hardwick settled at Chatsworth in 1549.Standing on the east bank of the...
, 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". 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 allée
Allee
Allee may refer to:* Alfred Allee , U.S. sheriff.* J. Frank Allee , U.S. merchant and politician.* Warder Clyde Allee , U.S. ecologist, discoverer of the Allee effect.* Verna Allee , U.S. business consultant....
s 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 parterre
Parterre
A parterre is a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging, and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern. Parterres need not have any flowers at all...
s to the west of the house and an exedra
Exedra
In architecture, an exedra is a semicircular recess or plinth, often crowned by a semi-dome, which is sometimes set into a building's facade. The original Greek sense was applied to a room that opened onto a stoa, ringed with curved high-backed stone benches, a suitable place for a philosophical...
on rising ground behind, all features that appear again in Britannia Illustrata, (1730). 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
Bosquet
In the French formal garden, a bosquet is a formal plantation of trees, at least five of identical species planted as a quincunx, or set in strict regularity as to rank and file, so that the trunks line up as one passes along either face...
-fashion have matured: their edges are clipped, and straight rides pierce them. 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
Capability Brown
Lancelot Brown , more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape architect. He is remembered as "the last of the great English eighteenth-century artists to be accorded his due", and "England's greatest gardener". He designed over 170 parks, many of which still endure...
.
The first earl's landscape
A staunch Tory, 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 second earl at Wentworth Castle
The first earl died in 1739 and his son succeeded him. William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford (1722-1791)William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford (1722-1791)
William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford , styled Viscount Wentworth until 1739 was a peer and member of the House of Lords of Great Britain.-Ancestry and career:...
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
John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll
Field Marshal John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, 1st Duke of Greenwich KG , known as Iain Ruaidh nan Cath or Red John of the Battles, was a Scottish soldier and nobleman.-Early Life:...
and spent a year on the Grand Tour
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...
to improve his taste; he eschewed political life. At Wentworth Castle he had John Platt (1728–1810) 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
Matthew Brettingham
Matthew Brettingham , sometimes called Matthew Brettingham the Elder, was an 18th-century Englishman who rose from humble origins to supervise the construction of Holkham Hall, and eventually became one of the country's better-known architects of his generation...
, 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. At Wentworth Castle it was generally understood, as Lord Verulam remarked in 1768, "'Lord Strafford himself is his own architect and contriver in everything." 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 virtuosoConnoisseurA connoisseur is a person who has a great deal of knowledge about the fine arts, cuisines, or an expert judge in matters of taste.Modern connoisseurship must be seen along with museums, art galleries and "the cult of originality"...
should be directed to the new front of Wentworth-castle: 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 naturePicturesquePicturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's...
, improved by the chastity of art."
Later history
William FitzWilliam, 4th Earl FitzWilliam
William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam PC , styled Viscount Milton until 1756, was a British Whig statesman of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1782 he inherited his uncle Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham's estates, making him one of the richest people in...
, then to members of the Vernon-Wentworth family. The paintings were sold by Captain Bruce Canning Vernon-Wentworth
Bruce Canning Vernon-Wentworth
Bruce Canning Vernon-Wentworth was a British army officer and Conservative Party politician.The eldest son of Thomas Frederick Charles Vernon Wentworth of Wentworth Castle near Barnsley, Yorkshire and Dall House, Rannoch, Perthshire and his wife Lady Harriet Augusta Canning de Burgh, daughter of...
at Christie's
Christie's
Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
, 13 November 1919. Bruce Vernon-Wentworth, who had no direct heirs, sold the estate to Barnsley Corporation
Barnsley
Barnsley is a town in South Yorkshire, England. It lies on the River Dearne, north of the city of Sheffield, south of Leeds and west of Doncaster. Barnsley is surrounded by several smaller settlements which together form the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley, of which Barnsley is the largest and...
in 1948. Wentworth Castle was emptied at a house sale, and the estate was divided up. The house was a teacher training college until 1978 and then was used by Northern College. 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, and the M1 Motorway
M1 motorway
The M1 is a north–south motorway in England primarily connecting London to Leeds, where it joins the A1 near Aberford. While the M1 is considered to be the first inter-urban motorway to be completed in the United Kingdom, the first road to be built to motorway standard in the country was the...
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 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.