A few days ago I visited two Georgian gardens on the banks of the Thames. One of them was Marble Hill, and  the other Pope’s Grotto which I’ll write about next week.

Marble Hill  is the last complete survivor of the elegant villas  that bordered the Thames between Richmond and Hampton Court.  The gardens were not quite so lucky as the house and the grounds have been a rather bland public park for over 120 years. But things are changing and  thanks to English Heritage the highlights of the 18thc gardens are in the last stages of restoration and recreation. It is another of their very successful projects that has seen life breathed back into, amongst many others,  Brodsworth, Wrest Park, Belsay Bolsover and Eltham Palace [all of which I’ve written about here].

While the newly recreated  gardens  at Marble Hill may not be immediately amongst the most spectacular they are going to offer an authentic insight into what the early/mid-Georgian garden was like and we should all be very grateful to the English Heritage  garden team for their flair, determination and attention to detail.

As usual the photos are mine unless otherwise acknowledged

Both Pope’s Villa and Marble Hill were part of the landscape phenomenon known as “Twickenhamshire”. This was Horace Walpole’s term for the extraordinary cultural community that flourished in Twickenham and its environs, in the early/mid 18thc  where leading thinkers, writers, actors, artists and arbiters of taste  lived, worked, played and in the process developed their ideas about the arts as well as experimenting with the design of their villas and  gardens.

 

The story of Marble Hill really begins with that of Henrietta Howard who was born at Blickling in 1688. She was sufficiently well off to attract the attention of Charles Howard, the third son of her guardian the earl of Suffolk, and she was married to him in 1706. The marriage was not a happy one. A contemporary description of her husband said he was “wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, and brutal”.

Constantly short of funds, and evading Charles’s creditors, the couple travelled to Hanover in 1713 to seek  favour in the court of Dowager Electress Sophia who  under the Act of Settlement was the heir to the British throne when Queen Anne died. Following the accession of Sophia’s son as George I in 1714, Henrietta  returned to London with the royal party, and was appointed a woman of the bedchamber to Caroline, the princess of Wales. Caroline’s court  became the centre of London’s cultural and intellectual life and Henrietta met and befriended Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift, among others.

Meanwhile her husband had became a groom of the bedchamber to George I, meaning they lived in separate households, although he continued to hassle her for money. When, in 1717, the row between George I and his heir, the future George II, broke out and the Prince and Princess of Wales moved out to Leicester House Henrietta went with them.   It was probably soon after this that Henrietta  became the prince’s mistress. Far being a secret the role of mistress was almost a semi-official position. George was actually passionately in love with his wife,  and according to Lord Hervey “seemed to look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man.” 

In 1723 to ensure Henrietta’s  financial security from her husband  George put £11,500 worth of South Sea stock in trust for her – equivalent to almost 40 times her salary.- as well giving her jewellery and furniture.   This allowed her to live independently. Next through her trustees she bought 25 acres of land on  the Thames at Twickenham in 1724, and over the next few years she built Marble Hill House. It was  a textbook example of Palladian architecture, designed by Roger Morris probably advised  by Henry, Lord Herbert, later ninth earl of Pembroke.

To accompany her house she obviously needed a garden and turned to friends including Alexander Pope and  Lord Bathurst of Cirencester Park, one of the great new gardens of the day. The planning must have started almost immediately  with Lord Peterborough writing  to Pope  saying “no time is to be lost either if she intends to… Prepare for planting” and asking for  the dimensions of “marble field”.  The royal gardener Charles Bridgeman  and Pope visited in September 1724 and drew up plans  inspired by the plans and descriptions in Robert Castell’s,  1727 Villas of the Ancients Illustrated which reimagined several of the famous classical sites such as Pliny’s villa at Laurentium.

 

Accounts were submitted by Bridgeman referencing a mount, bowling green, yew hedging  and even a garden roller. Work then continued throughout the 1720s to create a peaceful pastoral refuge from court life.

 

In 1727, shortly after the accession of Henrietta’s lover George II,  Jonathan Swift published a witty poem purporting to be a dialogue between her house at Marble Hill and George’s at Richmond Lodge just down the river.  This extract from it  implies that Henrietta was running out of money:

“My house was built but for a show,
My Lady’s empty pockets know;
And now she will not have a shilling
To raise the stairs, or build the ceiling…”

and warning

“Some South Sea broker from the city,
Will purchase me, the more’s the pity,
Lay all my fine plantations waste,
To fit them to his vulgar taste;
Changed for the worse in every part,
My master Pope will break his heart.”

 

The following year Henrietta’s  marriage  ended in legal separation with her husband  bought off by an annuity probably paid by the new king.  However they were not divorced so when he succeeded and became the 9th Earl of Suffolk in 1731 she still became Countess. As a noblewoman she couldn’t be a mere “woman of the bedchamber” and instead was made Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline.  Her new post involved much lighter duties, and she wrote I shall now often visit Marble Hill: my time is become very much my own’. She maintained her relationship with the king, but despite that her political influence with him was minimal, one suspects to the annoyance of many of her friends like Pope, Gay and Swift who were all highly unsympathetic towards the court and its Whig leanings.

Henrietta’s estranged husband  died in 1733 and the following year her relationship with George finally ended. She was pleased, resigning her positions at court and retiring to Marble Hill, leading Pope to write : ‘There is a greater court now at Marble-hill than at Kensington, and God knows when it will end.’  In fact although she entertained her artistic friends she did not miss or attempt to rival the court at all.  In 1735, aged 47,  she married George Berkeley  and the two divided their time between Marble Hill and her new town house at 15 Savile Row. Assisted by Berkeley, with whom she enjoyed a very happy relationship until his death in 1746, she continued to extend and modify the Marble Hill estate. In later life Henrietta was befriended by Horace Walpole, who shared her interest in architecture and helped her design the Gothic farm, although sadly that did not last long beyond her death on 26 July 1767.

Marble Hill was left  to her nephew Lord Buckinghamshire, for his lifetime while the rest of her estate passed to her great-niece Henrietta Gertrude Hotham (1753–1816) who, in her turn,  inherited Marble Hill in 1793.  In 1825 the estate was sold to Jonathan Peel, brother of Prime Minister Robert Peel  who over the next few decades developed the gardens as seen in the plan below.  His widow was to be the last resident, but after her death  in 1890 the house was put up for sale but failed to sell.  Eventually it was bought by William Cunard who tried  unsuccessfully to develop the site for housing in 1898.

Inigo Thomas writing in  Country Life in February 1900, described the gardens as “a very tangle, as the house has stood untenanted since the stable clock stopped one morning at half-past nine fourteen years ago. … On the river front is an arrangement of groves and gardens so overgrown as to be only traceable with difficulty, but full of broad effects for the brush The accompanying plan shows the main features of the lay-out, which, though very late in date, is good and compact and simple.”

Cunard’s proposals led the local community to launch  an ‘indignation campaign’ to save the parkland for its amenity value and in  1902 the estate was bought by London County Council. The following year  they  opened the house and grounds to the public but  it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that  the house was restored to a close approximation of its appearance in Henrietta’s day. With the abolition of the Greater London council in 1986 Marble Hill was transferred  into the hands of English Heritage, who have managed it ever since. In recent years, with the help of the Lottery, they have worked to renovate the house and restore grounds. Some of the decisions proved a little controversial but extensive consultations eventually won the day for a major restoration project.  You can follow the ins and outs of this if you’re interested on the English Heritage website.

Now let’s turn our attention to the garden and its restoration, and here I’m drawing on the extensive information on the English Heritage website.

As Emily Parker explains  in her history of the grounds up until about 10 years ago the only clue we had as to the layout of the garden was the Heckell engraving  made in about 1749 [detail below – full image above] and its derivatives.

In 2014 when English Heritage was compiling a new conservation management plan for the site they turned their attention a large map in Norfolk Record office which had never been properly studied before. Amazingly it showed the site in c1749 complete with a key to the major features.  These included a Green House, Ice House and Ice House Seat, Flower Garden, Ninepin Alley and a Grotto. It also shows the layout of the garden, allowing us to recognise – for the first time – that it really was based on ideas from classical literature and the gardens of ancient Rome. It shows lots of detail of planting and clearly reflects fashionable garden design in the 1720s although by the late 1740s  when it was drawn up  this style of garden was no longer being advocated.

A comprehensive landscape survey in 2016 using non-invasive techniques such as aerial photography, LiDAR, geophysics, analytical earthwork survey and tree stump identification provided significant evidence that the 1747 plan which was to be the baseline for the recreation was accurate.

Approaching the house from the road  you walk down what was known as the Sweet Walk. Once a serpentine walk through woodland it was filled with sweet-smelling flowers and shrubs and was probably originally planted by Lord Bute who had a house in Montpellier Row.  The land was later acquired by Henrietta in 1748 and incorporated into the Marble Hill estate.   It runs along the side of the Great Field, which is now simply a flat grass area with sport’s pitches, but then was meadowland used for grazing cows and sheep. On the far side, now all vanished were Henrietta’s coach house, stable yard and kitchen garden.  The Sweet Walk ends at the Stable block – now the cafe-  built between 1825 and 1827 for the then owner Captain Jonathan Peel, brother of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel.

The pleasure grounds lie on the other side of the house. The first part to be reached is the ice house which stands in “The Thickett” which was  then partly but is now fully fenced.

The area is being replanted and has a woodland path leading  to the north-facing door of the ice-house with most of the brick building beautifully concealed under a heavily planted  earth mound.

 

On the south side is the newly recreated icehouse seat which lies on the edge of the pleasure grounds.

Immediately in front of the Ice House grounds and the House itself was the Cross Avenue which ran the entire width of the pleasure grounds. In Henrietta’s day it was probably wider than it is currently because Peel narrowed it planting along the edges.  At the opposite end, and to the east of the house were the service buildings, her specially built cottage for her china collection, a greenhouse   and  small  orchard. Although the service wing was largely demolished in 1909 the orchard area has been replanted.

There is an oval lawn surrounded by what are thought to have been pergolas, slightly raised above the level of the lawn.  It  leads down a slope into what is described as The Meadow Ground on the 1747 plan. This was a large lawn flanked by avenues and groves of trees which  stretched down to the Thames, although now there’s a public footpath along the river bank.  Previously that right of way  used to run across the grounds in front of the house until Henrietta had it moved.

Behind the four pergolas were four garden areas described as “quarters”. These had become overgrown and largely impenetrable but have proved to be probably the most interesting surviving garden features.

The north-easterly area is unnamed on the original plan but has now been named the Woodland Quarter. It had simple gravel paths and was planted with bulbs such as aconites and shade loving -plants including periwinkle. These will be reinstated and others added to the surviving older trees and shrubs.

To the south of it was an oval of planting around a flat rectangular area which has now been identified as a Ninepin Alley or skittle ground, [for more on the game see this earlier post]  This has been restored, and maybe one day they’ll provide some pins for visitors!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the eastern side of the oval lawn were two more very different quarters. On the northern side was the Flower garden which has wiggly serpentine walks through woodland.  This is in the process of being replanted. In the central section plants are arranged by height in strips leading up to a central group of shrubs and a tree. All the plant selections are contemporary and some attract interest because, like jalapa mirabilis they are rarely seen these days. Others like spartium  or Bladder senna because they are not usually seen growing in these conditions.

The final quarter is the largest and contains the grotto. This was decorated with shells and minerals by Henrietta and her niece, Henrietta Hotham themselves. Fragments of these embellishments, which included specimens from  as far away as the caribbeanan were found during aracheological excavations in 2008 and 2021.

Henrietta also built a second grotto although  its site is not known and by 1816 it had vanished. By then even the main grotto was “forsaken and dilapidated”.  Eventually it was  completely lost and had to be re-excavated. In order to make it safe for public access new retaining walls have had to be built, but they are in keeping and work very well with the surviving elements English Heritage are now fund-raising to restore the interior. 

So, all in all,  I say congratulations once again to the English Heritage gardens team!

Marble Hill House is Grade I listed while the Park is designated Grade II* on  Historic England’s Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

If you want to know more about Marble Hill the best place to start is the English Heritage website where there is a huge amount of well-presented information, both about the history and the processes involved in the restoration.  There is also a guidebook to the house on-line.