From the official record of the House of Lords dated March 22, 1789:
Q. “What did you see pass between Charles Charles and Mrs. Nash in February 1779?”
A. “When I went down, I went to Charles Charles’s Room, the Cloaths were turned up on one Side; Charles Charles’s Arms were round her; she had her Shift and under Petticoat on.”
Q.”In what Posture?”
A. “In a leaning Posture.”
Q. “Were they upon the Bed?”
A. “They were in the Bed.”
Q. “What did you observe at that Time?”
A. “I had no good Opinion of them.”
At once confirming that a) divorce has long been a messy old business, and b) that Handed on is not above resorting to a bit of gratuitous salacious detail to grab the reader’s attention. The above being an extract from the proceedings of a parliamentary Bill, entitled “An Act to dissolve the Marriage of John Nash Architect with Jane Kerr his now Wife, and to enable him to marry again’. Such was the requirement of the age. The helpfully disapproving witness here being probed to establish grounds was Mrs. Ann Morgan, landlady, of Aberavon. And also, as it happens, a close relative of John Nash…
…who was not, at this juncture, ‘the celebrated John Nash’ of Regency fame but a chastened bankrupt on the long road to rehabilitation. A long and mostly Welsh road, it turned out. The implosion of an early property development enterprise in London’s Bloomsbury Square would see Nash eventually fleeing the capital to south Wales, ‘his business reputation in ruins’.1 His wife Jane had already been packed off to the Principality, her shopaholic tendencies only exacerbating the financial strain; Nash enlisted a childhood friend, the aforesaid Mr Charles Charles, ‘to ride out with her and show her the pleasures of the country’.
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink?
The suspicion of collusion ultimately doomed Nash’s divorce petition but not before several other associates had been summoned to Parliament to bear witness, among them a fellow architect, Samuel Simon Saxon. In 1785 John Nash’s modest first step on the path back to professional credibility had been a winning tender jointly with Saxon to re-roof St. Peter’s church in Carmarthen; their partnership would continue for several years.2 Today, while many landmark creations in the capital and beyond attest to Nash’s wildly successful renaissance, the name of Samuel Saxon, a pupil of Sir William Chambers at the influential Office of Works until 1782, languishes in obscurity.3 Little of his work is recorded and in fact just one house designed by him is known to survive – but it’s a gem.
‘Courteenhall is a remarkably perfect and rather unusual example of the mid-sized Georgian house of the last decade of the C18. Since it was completed no change of significance has been made.’4 The seat of the Wake family, this house and estate has passed directly from father to son, the present head of the family being Sir Hereward Wake, 14th baronet, who turns 100 later this year.
If the brief from Sir William Wake, 9th bt., had been for a practically proportioned house of stately refinement then Samuel Saxon pretty much nailed it. Humphry Repton in his ‘Red Book’ for Courteenhall (1791/93) notes that he was consulted both as to the siting of a new house and its basic form, being ‘induced to prefer that which has been so elegantly designed and executed by my ingenious friend Mr. Saxon’.5
The pair were also responsible for the creation of Buckminster Park, Leicestershire, (c.1793-8, Saxon’s only other known house, demolished in 1952 and replaced), a connection suggested to explain just how it came to be that the enviable opportunity ‘to design a completely new house on a virgin site was given to a little-known pupil of Chambers’.4
However, Handed on finds another timeline no less persuasive.
Inheriting Courteenhall and its existing Elizabethan manor house as a minor, the 9th baronet came of age in 1789. The next year would be a lucrative one, the sale of a substantial property in Norfolk yielding £18,000 whilst William’s marriage in July to Mary Sitwell of Renishaw Hall added a further £25,000 to the coffers.5 Meanwhile, on May 15 1790 it was announced after an open competition that the architect to design and supervise the building of Northampton’s new General Infirmary – just six miles north of Courteenhall – was to be a certain Mr. Samuel Saxon. Construction of the hospital duly got under way but it would seem that the attention of its designer was soon distracted:‘Mr. Saxon presumably drew his commission but he had seldom been near the building, leaving everything to his Clerk of Works.’6 Genteel, wealthy patron trumps municipal functionality? Who can say.
(Remarkably, the contemporaneous connection between Saxon’s only two known buildings continues as Courteenhall’s present occupant and estate manager, the grandson of Sir Hereward Wake, is also a sometime medic and presently attached to .. Northampton General Hospital.)
However it was that Samuel Saxon landed the job, there’s no doubting that Courteenhall bears the stamp of a focussed mind. ‘The design throughout is remarkably coherent,’ characterised by a wholly admirable restraint.7 Of local limestone ashlar, the pedimented seven-bay garden facade (top) announces itself most directly, a subtle contrast to the more understated entrance front (r).
A most pleasing exterior which is more than matched within: ‘[That] Saxon was an architect of very considerable ability [is] most clearly shown by the interiors.’8
At one remove from the long entrance hall, ‘the thin, cantilevered treads of the principal staircase’, top-lit by a glazed oval dome, rise against marbled walls, ‘a rare survival’. (Picture: Tom Jamieson / Courteenhall Events@Facebook). Beneath fine decorative friezes fluted columns articulate each of the principal spaces, the apsidal end of the library, ‘beautifully contrived with doors curved to fit’, exemplifying Saxon’s sure-footed finesse.9
Sitting at the heart of the 3,000-acre estate, Courteenhall’s presence is one of graceful reticence. The same can hardly be said, however, of the stables across the park, born with ideas above their station and which predate the house by perhaps two decades. Credited to John Carr of York and now converted for residential use – move in! – the always incongruously scaled block…
… was erected for the mostly absent 8th baronet seemingly in an effort to keep up with the (hunting mad) Joneses locally. In fact, prior to his father deciding otherwise, his own family literally were the Joneses round here.
The Wake Joneses to be precise. The Wake lineage can be definitively traced back to at least the C13; from 1265 they were lords of the manor of Blisworth immediately next door to Courteenhall before selling in 1532. The happenstance which would see them boomerang back here 140 years later suggests a certain predestination about the Wakes’ habitation of this particular corner of England.
In the grounds at Courteenhall is a C17 schoolhouse (r) now partly converted for residential use and latterly the home of Sir Hereward and Lady Wake. A Latin inscription above the main door records that the school had been endowed by Sir Samuel Jones, the acquisitive son of a wealthy London merchant, who bought the Courteenhall estate in 1647. With no children of his own Jones’ intended heir was his nephew, Sam Pierrepoint, until some offence by the latter saw him cut out of the will.
Fortune now favoured the only other Samuel in the family, the fifth son of Sir Samuel’s niece, wife of Sir William Wake, 3rd bt., on condition of taking the name. But the drought of direct heirs continued. Two ‘Wake Jones’ nephews and a distant cousin later Courteenhall (and several other properties) came to Sir William, 7th bt., who had been born and elected to stay a Wake. The name had been reclaimed ‘but it was Samuel Jones who supplied the seat and inheritance upon which a succession of Wakes have lived happily ever after since’.10
Today, the family’s distinctive heraldic emblem, the “Wake Knot“, has taken on a coincidental resonance at Courteenhall with happy couples now able to tie their own against the backdrop of Samuel Saxon’s comely creation. The house was among those featured in the The New Vitruvius Britannicus (1802, left), ‘plans and elevations of modern buildings by the most celebrated architects’.
(The demolished Buckminster Park was also included. Hard to believe today but Courteenhall faced the same post-war fate until wiser counsel prevailed.5)
With such an elegant early calling card, to find the architect still keeping good company and apparently well in the game some twenty years on (r) is no great surprise; the mystifying scarcity of his work, however, most certainly is…
[Courteenhall Estate][G.II* listing]
I always enjoy your posts (more please!) but today’s was among the best. A fascinating story and excellent pictures. The link to the story of the silver cup was particularly charming and put a very human face on the house and its owners. Thank you!
Dan Bergsvik
Sent from my iPad
A belated thanks for those gratifying words, Dan, much appreciated. Can’t hold out much hope of increasing productivity though, I’m afraid – wish I could turn these things round faster myself but the ideas/words are ‘blood from a stone’ most times. Thanks again..
Lovely article, a fascinating read! You might like to watch this programme on the BBC iPlayer, available until 22 September, which features Sir Hereward Wake being interviewed for Nationwide in the 1970s. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03xszb5/nationwide-an-alba-series-1-3-na-heileananislands
Apologies, John, for some reason your comment had completely passed me by. Very interesting to see the old Nationwide footage and to hear Sir Hereward (who turned 100 last month). From memory, the Scottish property in question is no longer part of the estate though whether this dispute played any part I know not!
👍
It would be of interest for historical record and appreciated by those that attended school during WW2 that this be included within this article – albeit as an after thought perhaps – when St. Lawrence College (both Junior and Senior) were taken in from the School’s Ramsgate location by the ‘Wake’ family as an escape from the potential dangers of the effects of the War. The connection has remained and those of us who experienced the hospitality of the family should not forget this kindness.
Many thanks for this information, David, it is an association I was not aware of and is rightly acknowledged. For those interested to learn more, a commemorative visit to Courteenhall is described here (p33): http://www.olsociety.co.uk/resources/olnews2009_red.pdf.
(Personally, I was also interested to note that the great Anthony Buckeridge of ‘Jennings’ fame was a past master at the school – another nice discovery.)
Thanks once again for supplying this deserving addendum.