From "Earls of Creation"

Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst (1684-1775)

1.       1. Politics and friendships

During his ninety-one years Allen Bathurst was able to carry out the most ambitious as well as the dearest scheme of his heart, namely the creation and embellishment of his estate.  Since he began the task when he was a comparatively young man, and followed a persistent course of operations, he was able to enjoy its fulfilment.  And enjoy is the appropriate word.  For he was one of the unashamed enjoyers of everything life had to offer.  Seldom is a man so fortunate as he was.  And seldom is a great arboriculturist granted by the fates nearly three-quarters of a century in which to watch the trees that he has planted grow to maturity.

The subject of this essay was not, properly speaking, born in the purple; and he was a Tory.  Neither of these contingencies was a disadvantage to him.  He redressed the first, with an ease that was habitual, by getting himself made a peer at a very early age.  He profited from the second by having to leave political office on the brink of a career, which many lesser men would have regretted, and by devoting himself to the pastime from which he has earned a lasting reputation.

Although Allen Bathurst was not exactly patrician by birth, he came of gentle and distinguished stock.  The Bathursts had long been settled near Boteherst, which is the name of a wood near Battle Abbey in Sussex, and doubtless derived their surname from Boteherst.  The foundation of their fortune was laid in Henry VI’s reign by the progenitor of the family who was a clothier.  Lord Bathurst’s great-grandfather rose to aldermanic rank and built himself a country house, where he reared a large family.  His fourth son, George, bought a Northamptonshire estate.  George Bathurst had a still larger family than his father.  His fifth son, Ralph, was President and re-founder of Trinity College, Oxford, after the Restoration.  His sixth, Bejamin, was more successful than any of his brethren. He became a Member of Parliament and a knight.  At one brief period he was Governor of the East India Company.  His greatest triumph was entry into royal circles.  He was made Treasurer to the Princess Anne of Denmark on the establishment of her household, and, when she succeeded to the throne, her Cofferer.  In this enhanced position he flourished but two years,  and died in 1704.

Sir Benjamin Bathurst married as successfully as he did everything else.  In fact, he probably owed his entry into court circles to his wife’s family.  Lady Bathurst was Frances, second daughter of Sir Allen Apsley of Apsley in Sussex.  Her father, having fought with the cavaliers in the Civil war, was rewarded with the post of Falconer to Charles II.  Although the Apsley wealth derived from the iron trade, the Falconer’s wife and daughters were soon accepted by the Princesses Mary and Anne on a footing of close intimacy.  Many letters, abounding in nicknames and exclusive, if rather infantile jokes, passed between the Princesses and the young Apsleys, and are preserved at Cirencester House.

Of this union Allen Bathurst was born on 16th November 1684.  The boy was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, of which his uncle Dean Bathurst was still President.  The Dean was then nearly eighty, a man of vast learning and some wit.  The undergraduates were deoted to him because of his pleasantries and eccentricities.  His only weapon of correction was mild ridicule.  At the same time he used to keep a whip, which he would brandish in the College gardens for the innocent pleasure of arousing an ill-founded alarm in the breasts of freshmen, as yet unacquainted with his benevolent disposition.

Before being sent to Oxford Allen Bathurst was already betrothed, if not more solemnly plighted.  His grandmother, Lady Apsley, the friend of royalty, was autocratic as well as grimly humorous.  She arranged a contract between her son Peter Apsley’s daughter, Catherine, and the child’s first cousin, Allen Bathurst.  So in 1692 when the boy was eight and the girl four they were married “in jest to please their grandmother”.  The tiny wedding and guard rings have survived.  Evidently the children viewed the affair with no displeasure, for when they were practically grown up a wedding ceremony was re-enacted in 1704.  The marriage proved a fruitful, and probably a happy one.  Catherine Bathurst produced four sons and five daughters.  If her epitaph in Cirencester Church is to be believed, “by her milder virtues”, compared with those of her lord, she “added lustre to his great qualities.  Her domestic economy extended his liberality, her judicial charity his munificence; her prudent government of her family his hospitality.  She received the reward of her exemplary life” in 1768 at the mature age of seventy-nine.  A cynic might interpret from the careful phraseology of the epitaph that Lady Bathurst was just the very slightest bit mean.

In the year of Allen Bathurst's proper marriage his father Sir Benjamin died.  The young man now found himself a person of affluence and a landed gentleman with a stake in the county of Gloucestershire. Nine years previously old Sir Benjamin had purchased the Oakley property, to the West of the town of Cirencester, from Anne Poole, Countess of Newburgh.  The son felt it incumbent upon him to assume the responsibilities of his newly acquired station.   He did not have long to wait before others felt the same way on his behalf.  In 1705, before he had reached is majority, he was elected Tory Member of Parliament for Cirencester.  He was at once plunged into debate upon the Union with Scotland, which ehe supported.  For seven years he assiduously attended the House of Commons, where he became an ardent champion of two friends, the executors of Charles I, the brilliant and equivocal Tory malcontents, Henry St. John and Robert Harley, in their efforts to stop Marlborough's wasteful and expensive campaigns on the Continent.  In 1712 he was one of a dozen Tories raised to the peerage, becoming 2nd Earl of Newburgh, in order to induce the Lords to accept the Treaty of Utrecht, which his cousin, Thomas Wentworth, 3rd Earl of Strafford, at that time Ambassador at the Hague, had negotiated.  As Baron Bathurst he continued to serve The Tory case.  For two more years his party remained in power until, with the death of Queen Anne, all hopes of a Stuart succession quickly evaporated.  The Tories being discredited, the Whig supremacy was summarily established.  It was to last for two generations. 

Bathurst did not allow this reversal of political fortune to distress him unduly.  With his natural equanimity he cheerfully accepted whatever the future held in store.  He may even have welcomed the social changes he saw ahead.  He was lucky perhaps not to suffer the more serious deprivations which, with the advent of the new dynasty, befell certain Stuart supporters more prominent than himself.  He had been present at Kensington Palace when Queen Anne, whose health for years caused apprehension and speculation about her successor,  finally expired.  "Everything has been so quiet since her death," he wrote to his cousin Strafford, "and we go on so unanimously in both Houses of Parliament."  And he added, either to tease his cousin or else deliberately to perplex the censors if his letter to Holland should be opened, "the Tories in the House of Commons are the persons that appear most forward to do the King's business." Such a way of meeting adversity certainly implied a calm resignation and a cool fearlessness.   The last quality was one he displayed on later occasions.   He was utterly indifferent to public opinion when adherence to his loyalties was called upon. No considerations of place induced him to swerve from them. During Walpole's administration he boldly spoke against the persecution of Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford - which St. John and Harley had long since become -  Queen Anne's ministers then in deep disgrace. He publicly charged the Directors of the South Sea Company with intentionally defrauding the public and urged that they might be brought to justice. When his old friend, Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, was impeached in 1723 for Jacobite treason, Bathurst in the House of Lords leapt to his defence, although he must have realized that his case was indefensible. He bitterly attacked the bishops for their relentless hostility. He could hardly understand their inveterate hatred and malice, he declared, "unless they were infatuated like the wild Indians, who fondly believe they will inherit not only the spoils, but even the abilities of any enemy they destroy". 

How far Bathurst himself was implicated in the same activities as the Bishop of Rochester is doubtful. It is fairly certain that the Old Pretender looked upon him as a likely supporter, and with some reason. Two years after the abortive landing of James in Scotland in 1915, the Prince's agent, the Earl of Mar, was advised that his master would do well to thank several English sympathizers for their financial assistance. Amongst them was named Lord Bathurst who, Mar's correspondent wrote, had advanced £1,000. Again, Mar in a letter of the same year to James referred to Bathurst "as a very pretty gentleman of a plentiful estate and a true lover of Patrick (the Pretender's pseudonym) as his father was.... This is not the first money he has given for his service to my knowledge, nor will it be the last, I believe." Whether these advances of money meant more than an understandable sympathy for the unfortunate heir to the Stuart dynasty, to whom the Bathurst family owed its present happy position in the world, may never now be revealed. A letter, written several years after Bathurst's death by Horace Walpole to the Rev. William Mason, suggests that it did. Walpole was referring to the 2nd Earl Bathurst, then Lord Chancellor of England. "Ceste tête à perruque, that wig-block the Chancellor, what do you think he has done? Burnt all his father's correspondence with Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, etc.-why do you think? Because several of the letters were indiscreet. To be sure he thought they would go and publish themselves, if not burnt, but indeed I suspect the indiscretion was that there were some truths which it was not proper to preserve, considering considerandis. That is just what I should like to have seen. There was otherwise so much discretion, and so little of anything else except hypocrisy in all the letters of those men that have appeared, that I should not so much regret what discreet folly has now burnt." If, then, Allen Bathurst was in his youth involved in the Atterbury Plot, a commendable discretion in middle age did not prevent him from doing all in his power to serve his old friend during, and even after, his trial and exile. Bathurst's concern in the Stuart predicament inevitably waned with the course of time. During a debate in the Lords in January 1726 he said there was no longer occasion to mention the Pretender's name in order to raise fears in the public, "when all were agreed his was an expiring interest".

Horace Walpole's innuendo may have been actuated by malice, since he never cared for Bathurst, who was his father's consistent opponent. On the Whig Prime Minister's fall from power in 1742 Bathurst was made a Privy Councillor and Captain of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. Horace greeted these returns to favour, brought about as they were by his father's disgrace, with an ironical ode in the style of The Country Maid, of which one stanza runs thus:

Dear Bat, I'm glad you've got a place, 

And see things thus have changed their face,

You'll give opposing o'er:

'Tis comfortable to be in, 

And think what a damned while you've been#

Like Peter, at the door.

In 1757 Bat was made Treasurer to the young Prince of Wales Horace, alarmed by the accumulating honours, fervently hoped he would not be made the Prince's Governor. This particular fear was groundless, but with the succession of George III Lord Bathurst was granted a pension of £2,000 a year from the Irish revenues. Sinecures and pensions were in the eighteenth century the expected rewards of honourable, as well as dishonourable, men in public life. And Bathurst, who consistently inveighed against corruption, had never wavered from the Tory cause. In 1772-the year his elder son was made a peer for sitting on the woolsack-he was created Earl Bathurst. By then he was an almost legendary figure, venerated in parliamentary circles for his prudence, his integrity and his longevity. In 1775 Burke in one of his greatest speeches in the House of Commons occasioned by the outbreak of the War of American Independence paid a flattering tribute to the old statesman, then in the last year of his life. In moving! certain resolutions for conciliating America, Burke drew attention to the fact that Bathurst's life had coincided with the development and, as it seemed then, the decline of England's colonial prosperity.

In spite of being a Tory Bathurst was a man of liberal principles. When the brutal Captain Porteous of the Militia was killed by the mob in Edinburgh, Lord Carteret in the Lords spoke vehemently against them, and the Scots in general. Lord Bathurst expostulated that the Scots were, on the contrary, a brave people who had been provoked beyond endurance by ill usage. He always took the part of the persecuted, and his natural benevolence favoured peace and freedom of the individual. "The liberty of the press, he wrote on one occasion to the Earl of Strafford, who was anything but liberal in his views-Lord Chesterfield once referred to his 'excess of bloated pride'-'is the greatest liberty of the subject, and therefore all little inconveniences which arise from it, are to be submitted to

Allen Bathurst was one of those carefree creatures who fairly swim through life, for whom the current is seldom treacherous, and the winds of heaven never too boisterous. He was astute and well-informed, without being intellectual. The chief gift the gods gave him at his birth was that least definable, often least desirable, yet always most covetable attribute-charm. The recipient of it may get away with murder. He will come unconsciously to rely upon it as the unfailing stand-by in every difficulty or emergency of his life. It will finally seduce him from effort, possibly nullify his talents, and destroy his soul. It will almost certainly make him unreliable in day to day affairs and in business relationships. Bathurst did not escape some of these pitfalls. There are frequent references in the letters of his friends to his volatility and his erratic behaviour. These failings, which exasperated them, were nevertheless the occasion of much banter and invariable forgiveness.

"The account you send me of my brother," Benjamin Bathurst writes in 1738 to their staid cousin, Strafford, "does not in the least surprise me, he has more than once in my opinion quitted his best friends for those I think very indifferent. He flys about in life as in his journeys, still pursuing something new, without taking the least delight in anything he once has known." Such strictures may be thought a little too severe, but coming from a younger brother are perhaps excusable. Alexander Pope, who loved Bathurst unfeignedly, alludes in letters to his unpredictable movements. He never knows, he says, where he will be off to next. To their mutual friend, Edward, Lord Harley, he complains of his unpunctuality and inability to keep appointments. Matthew Prior has the same criticism to make. 'Lord Bathurst's proceedings with the prose man [by whom their shared correspondent and gossip, Erasmus Lewis, is meant: he, Prior, being Bathurst's 'verse man' is admirable; T'is a picture,' he writes in 1720 to Harley, half vexed and half amused. "His lordship having chid me that I never saw him, and desiring me to ride over to Riskings (Bathurst's property at Iver in Buckinghamshire), I did so on Monday, and when I came thither I found he was gone to Cirencester the Friday before; good again, I think this may be added to the piece." Nevertheless, Prior's resentment did not last for long. Within a few days he wrote again to Harley: "I am at Riskings with Batty: we drink to your health; moderation."

A gad-about, he was in Pope's opinion one of the two most impetuous men he knew, the other being Lord Peterborough, the shifty, intriguing condottiere, whom Bathurst in no other respect resembled. Always 'pursuing something new', was one of his brother's diatribes, as though a perpetual curiosity and a certain inventiveness in his restless nature was unbecoming to a lord's station in society. Here we have a typical instance of it. 'Lord Bathurst came here the other morning,' Lady Strafford is writing to her husband from her house in St. James's Square. 'He has a most extraordinary fancy for a conveyance at Cirencester that outdoes your contrivances, but I am sure I would not goe in it; he designs to buy the bottom of an old barge that holds twelve people, and to put it upon the carredg of a waggon, and so to have it drawn about with six horses, and a table in the middle....I find he sees Lady Suffolk often.' This was in 1735.

The tart and very feminine postscript in Lady Strafford's letter reads like one of those sly allusions to Bathurst's habitual gallantries, about which he himself was engagingly frank. In the case of Lady Suffolk there was at the time no shred of evidence to suggest an amorous intrigue. Ten years before, Lady Strafford's little shaft might have been nearer the mark. Then Bathurst was an assiduous visitor at Marble Hill, where he helped Mrs. Howard, as she then was, with the layout of her garden. It is true ill-disposed persons-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of them -  disseminated rumours with the result that the Prince of Wales, who was supposed to be Mrs. Howard's lover, dismissed him from his drawing-room. The two were old friends by now and Lady Suffolk was just about to embark upon a second, extremely happy marriage. Besides, there is reason to suppose that Bathurst's amours were conducted upon a less exalted plane. Pope in his letters to his friend frequently teased him about his fascination for women and the coming and going of his mistresses. Any casual encounter was grist to his mill; and he let who cared know it. The promiscuous nature of Bathurst's liaisons was attended with occasional threats to health and purse. Swift congratulated him in 1730 on his recovery from what he described as the disease of a young man, [which] foretells a long life, if that be any satisfaction in such a world'. Only five years before he had been at death's door, apparently from the same cause, as well as deeply in debt to the amount, so it was being put about, of £25,000. And 'which way has this money gone?' was the inquiry. "In wenching? I never heard that he played"

Good living, however, does not seem to have impaired an exceptionally robust constitution. Good fun was always at his elbow from youth to extreme old age. We hear of him at the age of twenty-nine with Lord Jersey, 'two of the prettiest peers in England ... tucking up in bed some other lord with a young lady. He loved dancing immoderately. 'He loves a glass of good wine," wrote his aunt, Lady Wentworth, about this time. He also loved snuff, and would be his cousin Strafford, when Ambassador at The Hague, to send him the best procurable in Holland. One of the last glimpses of Lord Bathurst is through the eyes of a dinner guest at Cirencester when his host was already a nonagenarian Bathurst's son, the highly principled and abstemious Lord Chancellor, was present. Shortly after the meal he withdrew, and the father cried: "Come, now the old gentleman's gone, let us crack another bottle!"

John Gay in some verses, entitled 'Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece', written to celebrate his brother poet's completion of the translation of Homer, referred in one line to Bathurst,

whom you and I strive who shall love the most.

There can be no doubts in the mind of a peruser of the letters which passed between the leading writers of the age that his contemporaries were deeply devoted to him. His spontaneity, his uninhibited pleasure in their society, his affectionate welcome of, and his unstinted generosity to, his friends were irresistible. Boling broke and Oxford were unvarying in their love for one on whose public support they could always depend. Congreve, Prior Swift and Gay were his constant guests for months at a time. A country parson from one of Bathurst's Northamptonshire livings reminded his patron in a fulsome dedication of his translation of Gelli's Circe how one night at his lordship's dinner table he met assembled no less a company than Lord Lansdowne, Prior. Congreve, Gay, Fenton and Pope. It could never be said of Bathurst that he treated a man of genius like the glow-worm, whose light is admired but left to adorn a ditch. The men of letters among his friends were mostly a feckless lot; when they had any money they did not know how to keep it. So Bathurst acted as their banker, invested their surplus capital in his own estate development, and saw that they received a regular and safe return. "The two hundred pounds you left with me,' Gay writes to Swift on 16th May, 1728, are now in the hands of Lord Bathurst, together with some money of mine, all of which he will repay at Midsummer.' On Pope's death one of his bonds for £2,000, on which he had already received £1,500 interest, was released by Bathurst, who had been his financier, to the poet's executors.

Of all these men, the one who was most intimate with him, who best understood and valued his good qualities was Pope.

Ok teach us Bathurst/ yet unspoil'd by wealth! 

That secret rare, between the extremes to move

Of mad good nature, and of mean self-love.

Thus from his heart the poet addressed his noble friend in Epistle III of the Moral Essays. The Epistle is dedicated to Bathurst, and takes the form of a dialogue between the friends. The poct, who has been charged with toading to the great, and whose words of rancour have been likened to poisoned barbs that spare neither enemy nor even ally, was consistently loyal to Bathurst. He termed him ' preserver of ancient honour'.  He found in the extrovert character, and the robust physique of the imperturbable Bathurst a refuge from the thoughts that tormented his own hypersensitive mind and the pains that racked his own misshapen body. "Your head and your limbs are of so good a make," he tells the peer less with envy than with admiration, that the more active the machine is made to play, the better it works: with such weak ones as mine, the least extraordinary motion puts 'em out of frame." There are, on the other hand, frequent petulant complaints of Bathurst's utter neglect of him. Bitterly he asks him to recall that there was at the latter end of Queen Anne's reign, a poet of the name of Pope'. More often his letters express volumes of unashamed, exquisite adoration, which are touching in their simplicity of meaning and childlike lack of restraint. 'I never leave you,' he writes on 6th August, 1735, 'but I wish to say a hundred things to you, and when you go away for any time, I feel my sense of the loss of you tenfold, as men do of the loss of life, when it nears its end, though they never know how to make a right use, or possess a full enjoyment of it. You cannot know how much I love you and how gratefully I recollect all the good and obligation I owe to you for so many years. I really depend on no man so much in all my little distresses, or wish to live and share with no man so much in any joys or pleasures. I think myself a poor unsupported, weak individual, without you.' A more sincere profession of attachment and dependence could hardly be imagined.

We do not know how Bathurst responded to these effusions. It was not in his nature to reciprocate in the same measure. He may indeed have been slightly perplexed, for he was too sympathetic towards human frailty to be embarrassed by words like the following, addressed to him three months later: 'I dream of you still, and you are the object of my dotings; like an old woman that loves the man that had her maidenhead.' His letters to Pope express a tender concern for him and breathe the gentle affection of an elder brother towards the man who was, indeed, four years his junior. He too can reproach his friend for not writing. 'You are perpetually roving,' he writes in what one suspects is a mild offensive calculated to parry a similar charge against himself and one must shoot flying (to speak in the language of the country) to hit you.' He indulges in a fraternal badinage which he knows will flatter the poet's sensibilities like nectar laced with laudanum. 'I have often seen you write in your sleep, nay to my knowledge you translated half Homer when you were scarce awake; how easy then,' he pleads, 'wou'ld it have been for you to have write me half a dozen times in all this time. He urges Pope either to let them moet in London, or to come and stay. I would quit the finest walk on the finest day in the finest garden to have your company at any time' is meant as a concession not to be treated lightly. And on another occasion: 'If you refuse coming I'll immediately send one of my wood-carts & bring away your whole house & gardens, & stick it in the midst of Oakley-wood, where it will never be heard of any more, unless some of the children find it out in Nutting-season & take possession of it thinking I have made it for them. It was protective and affec

tionate injunctions such as these which warmed the cockles of the lonely and hypochondriacal poet's heart and made him feel wanted and cared for. He must come and stay, Bathurst repeats, and bring John Gay, if he is not too busy with his new work, The Beggar's Opera.

It is a fact that a large part of the painful translation of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad into rhymed couplets was accomplished by Pope either while staying with Bathurst at Cirencester or Richings, or while his friend was his guest at Twickenham. Pope regarded the truly immense undertaking as the one work by which his name would be ensured remembrance by posterity. He translated at incredible speed, with an apparent facility which was deceptive. The tension and sweat involved were mitigated to a large degree by the presence in the house of some friend, with whom he felt perfectly at ease, and with whom he need exercise no ceremony. Bolingbroke and Bathurst were far and away his closest companions. Of the two Bolingbroke had first place in his esteem. The brilliance of his mind matched his own. Pope admitted that there was no man whom he admired more unreservedly. But to be with him was an intellectual exercise which, however stimulating, was exhausting over a long period. Bathurst, as we have seen, appealed to Pope as the very complement of himself. His openness, his disregard of all obstacles, and his gay vitality were balm to the other's jangling nerves. Moreover Bathurst was wiser, if less incisive than Bolingbroke. And his company made less demands. Pope probably took liberties with him which he would not have dared to take with the other, Bathurst hints at it obliquely in a letter to Pope. "My charitable vanity or folly supplies bread to many industrious labourers, and therefore I would think no further, is an allusion to Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington, sent to him for his comments before publication. And he goes on, 'I have often thought myself the better for your company, though you have slept all the time you have been with me - a slightly rueful recognition of their intimate relationship, but one implying the highest tribute a friend can pay to another. Certainly Bathurst used to recount, long after the poet's death, how Pope would translate Homer in the mornings, the words tumbling over each other before he recaptured them on paper. At breakfast he would recite, first the Greek text with great rapture, then his own translation. Having done this, he would subside into his chair in a state of utter exhaustion. After a while he would ask his host for comments, when the old eager light would return to his eye, as he rebutted or accepted cach criticism in its turn. He was so anxious for friends' approval that once he sent to a lady the present of some cherries wrapped in his manuscript translation, for lack of other paper, with the request that each scrap be returned, with comments, by the bearer.

"Bathurst was negative, a pleasing man,' was the terse and ungracious verdict of Samuel Johnson, who would admit no other of Pope's circle of noble friends to be such as that a good man would wish to have his intimacy with them known to posterity Whatever diversity of opinions historians have reached in interpreting the characters of Bolingbroke, Oxford, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Suffolk and others of the noble circle whom the doctor censured in one explosion of middle-class disapproval at least his contemporaries agreed over that of Lord Bathurst. "That excellent lord,' Edward Digby, a co-publisher in 1729 with Oxford and Bathurst of the Dunciad, calls him in a letter to the poet. And he says in words that must have made the recipient's little heart glow with pride and love: "With him I know not by what connection, you never fail to come into my mind, as if you were inseparable."

On his death in 1744 Pope bequeathed as a small gesture of gratitude to his protector and patron three canvases in grisaille by Sir Godfrey Kneller of the statues of the Farnese Hercules, the Venus de Medici, and Apollo. They had been expressly done for him by the painter, as we are to understand from the following lines in Pope's Miscellanies:

What God, what genius, did the pencil move

When Kneller painted these? 

Twas friendship warm as Phoebus, kind as love

And strong as Hercules 

They hang today in the house at Cirencester which Lord Bathurst built for himself and where the poet used to stay, sometimes for months on end.

These strange, full-length pictures in chiaroscuro were, indeed, Pope's last gift to Allen Bathurst. They are by no means his only memorial at Cirencester. On the contrary, the whole vast property owes much of its inception to the poct. For the strongest bond between these men was not the political sympathy of two Tories over a long period dominated by Whig philosophy and government, not literary interests, not intermittent bursts of ageless conviviality - strong as these ties undoubtedly were - but the love and practice of silviculture and landscape design.  It was in these sciences that Bathurst was a master.  In Pope he found an eager participator, albeit the amateur to his professional,who was also a scholar of that deep classical learning which in the eighteenth century went into the composition of gardens and parks.  Pope's brain and vision, and Bathurst's taste and practical experience of forestry combined to produce the largest area of Early Georgian landscape layout to survive in Britain.

2.  Cirencester House

The correspondence which passed between the friends until Pope's death in 1744 began at least as early as 1718, in which year Pope made his first visit to Cirencester. A broken chain of letters from that date onwards has been preserved. It is very likely that the peer and the poet had been acquainted long before. Since they moved in the same circles and since Bathurst's villa at Richings and Pope's at Twickenham were within easy reach of London and each other, carlier visits were possibly exchanged and views on gardening pooled during Queen Anne's reign. Unfortunately, much of their correspondence has been destroyed, or lost, so that little sequence in the progress of the work at Cirencester can be gleaned from what survives.

The house which Sir Benjamin Bathurst went to live in when he bought property at Cirencester in 1695 was known as Oakley Grove. It bore little resemblance to the present Cirencester House, which stands on the same site and incorporates some of the ancient walls. An engraving by Kip, dated 1712, shows Oakley Grove to have been an E-shaped structure with gables and end wings projecting towards the town. It had been built for Sir John Danvers early in the seventeenth century. Danvers cannot have lived in it for more than a very few years, because he sold it in 1615 to the Pooles. His ancestors had acquired what was known as the tything of Oakley fairly soon after the Dissolution of St. Mary's Abbey of Cirencester, founded in the twelfth century by the Black Canons of the Order of St. Augustine. It amounted to that half of the monastic property which lay to the west of Cirencester town; the other half, lying to the north-east. went to a Richard Master, whose descendants, the ChesterMasters, still own the greater part of it today.

It was the Jacobean house to which Allen Bathurst was brought when eleven years old, which he inherited, and where he entertained Queen Anne and her husband one August night of 1708 on their journey to Bath. After the Queen's death six years later Bathurst found himself out of office. An entirely different sort of life confronted him. It held no terrors for him. Unlike most of his Tory colleagues who clung to politics and the court Bathurst was relieved that his public services were at least temporarily suspended and that he was obliged, as much from prudence as inclination, to retire to the country. He proceeded to set about improving his inheritance. Two things were immediately necessary: the rebuilding of the out-of-date Jacobean house and the creation of a park according to the latest notions of taste and propriety. He began with the house.

Allen Bathurst was, at this turn of his fortunes, just thirty years old, with another unforeseen sixty years before him. He had for a decade combined the roles of serious politician and gay Lothario. There were no adolescent pranks of his companions to which he was not party. He drank, he danced with the best. He wore the most expensive and finely chosen clothes. He had a splendid physique and a handsome face. He was, we are told, by no means displeased with the figure he cut in the world. It would have been surprising had he any misgivings about his person, which was attractive according to written accounts. There is a portrait of him at Cirencester taken in 1714 by Kneller. It shows him in the plenitude of youth and power. But it is of a stiff dummy in Coronation robes. The face is sadly prosaic, a stodgy pudding of a face, and, one surmises, hardly a living likeness. Another portrait taken ten years earlier in company with his demure and fawn-like child wife, by Michael Dahl, is more revealing. The face here is that of a boy, but that of a personage. The long, rather protruding, pointed nose, and the cleft chin are distinguishing features, repeated in an even better portrait by Kneller taken in 1719. Yet another likeness is the bust done by Nollekens when Bathurst was advanced in age and dignity. This bust, of which one copy was provided for Lord Cobham's Temple of Friendship at Stowe, and another, now in the library at Cirencester, has been set beside that of Lady Bathurst (also by Nollekens) over their monument in Holy Trinity chapel of Cirencester church. Both are so skied in front of a window, and so obscured by dirt that it is very difficult to see them properly. The wife's bust is that of a woman advanced in age, frail and gaunt, with hair scooped back from hollow temples over her ears to hang in a neckerchief behind the head. The sinews of her throat are scraggy, the nose is sharp and thin, the cheek bones are high. In spite of her wan and tired air she carries her head proudly and defiantly. The husband looks comparatively robust and was perhaps younger than the wife at the time of his sitting. At any rate his face is full; the chin is heavy, the eyebrows are arched, the look is quizzical. He wears a Roman toga across his chest. Altogether he is jovial and complacent.

Nowhere in the surviving correspondence does Lord Bathurst refer to any plans for the alteration of his house. Yet if he did not totally rebuild Oakley Grove, then he certainly transformed it. To all outward and inward appearances the present Cirencester House is a different building from its predecessor. Having demolished the wings of the Danvers house Bathurst was left with a rectangular structure which he then proceeded to play about with. Work was probably begun in 1715 and finished by the end of 1718. In August of the last year Bathurst wrote to Pope that he was still being disturbed with the noise of saws and hammers, which has no other ill effect whatsoever attending it but only that it is apt to melt money sometimes'.

The finished thing, it must be admitted, was not an outstanding success. With its two plain fronts, without orders and almost devoid of ornamental features, Cirencester House can hardly be termed a gem of architecture. But it has its points of interest. The chief is perhaps its old-fashionedness. Its style accords with the Bathurst family's declared Toryism. On the whole Tory builders still favoured the old Wren style of country house, which was homely, with its straightforward plan of two large rooms on either front and two entrance doors upon an axis. The Tory landowners were stoutly opposed to Italian ideals and foreign craftsmen. It was the progressive Whigs who were to sponsor the Palladian villa type of country house, which they usually magnified two- or three-fold, and sometimes decorated with contemporary rococo patterns, often by Italian stuccoists imported from Venetia. The Whig process had only just begun, and in 1710 William Benson's Wilbury Park near Amesbury was the first country house to be built on a Palladian model, taken from John Webb's Amesbury Abbey itself. The architect of Cirencester House was very possibly Bathurst himself. Mr. Hussey has suggested that Bathurst may have had at the back of his mind his old college, Trinity, which his uncle largely re-edified in a very insipid style with, it is said, the advice of Wren, and that he even engaged an Oxford builder, such as one of the Townesend family, to conduct operations. Whoever the designer was, his work was neither very inspired nor very well executed. After Bathurst's death in 1775 his son's agent reported that the structure was already extremely unsound. The 2nd Earl feared he would have to pull it down and begin all over again. His Countess even protested, 'I shall be quite afraid of sleeping in it', owing to the roof timbers being in so rotten a condition. Curiously enough, Allen Bathurst did not seem to interest himself unduly in the form or style of his new house. Beyond replacing the Jacobean structure, which to his eyes must have been quite barbaric, he was not very particular. His remark to Pope, when the work was finished, 'I trust to you to give an account how it comes to be so oddly bad', strikes a note rather of indifference than surprise.

A second point of interest is the house's closeness to the town. The Whig grandees went to great pains to isolate their country seats, sometimes at the expense of numerous lesser dwellings and cottages in the near vicinity. In order to dwell in detached splendour, remote from the common herd, it was no uncommon thing to remove a whole village out of the way and re-erect it in some more discreet spot. The Tories on the other hand still liked to maintain the time-honoured squire's connection with the village community, of which they prided themselves on being members if autocratic ones. Bathurst evidently associated himself with this squirearchical notion. One front of his house can almost be described as being on the town street, from which it is only separated by a high wall and a massive semicircle of yew, reminiscent of the baroque forecourt of St. Peter's, Rome, in extreme miniature. This conscious conceit was possibly suggested by Pope.

Bathurst's motives for rebuilding on so extensive and costly a scale were, then, more political or social than aesthetic. He was simply following the prevailing rage of the day for some sort of change. Sir John Summerson has calculated that between 1710 and 1740 as many as one hundred and forty-eight great country houses were built, or rebuilt, in England alone. They were a symbol of the general confidence of the age and a token of the security and wealth of the newly established class of gentry to which Bathurst belonged. His friend, Jonathan Swift, had satirized this very propensity for building in Gulliver's Voyage to Laputa. When Gulliver arrived at the country house of the Lord Munodi, he was overcome with admiration of the noble structure, raised according to the best rules of ancient architecture, by the fountains, gardens, walks, avenues and groves which adorned it, all disposed with exact judgment and taste. He gave unqualified praise to what he saw. To his surprise his encomiums were received in melancholy silence. After supper, when no third person was by, his host confided to him with a sad air that he had been obliged utterly to destroy his beloved old home and its plantations, and to rebuild and re-cast them after the present mode', unless he were prepared to submit to the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance [and] caprice', as well as to earn his sovereign's lasting displeasure.

There was much similarity, as of course Swift intended. between the Lord Munodi's absurd situation and that of Bathurst and his contemporaries in that both the inhabitants of Laputa and Great Britain often felt driven to greater expense than they could well afford merely to keep abreast with their neighbours, and to maintain their prestige in ministerial and court circles. Only in Bathurst's case the difference lay in his not feeling compelled to adopt the latest 'mode', which in poor Munodi's involved employing 'a most ingenious architect who had contrived a new method of building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downwards to the foundation'. His methods, on the contrary, were unimpeachably conservative and traditional, perhaps defiantly so, in order to flaunt his Tory allegiance. He appeared to show no ostensible interest in the new Palladianism notwithstanding his subscription to Leoni's English translation of Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, published in 1915. The curious factor is how Bathurst earned some little reputation as a builder in these early days. Lord Bute in a letter of 1715 to Lord Strafford compared his own low taste in architecture to the consummate experience of Lord Bingley (the builder of Bramham Park house and creator of its then unrivalled gardens), and the rising merit of Bathurst'. Lord Strafford eagerly sought his cousin's approval of his new gallery at Wentworth Castle. And yet the man whose knowledge of building he so much admired had written to him not long ago: "I think any house good enough to sleep in,' and consistently discouraged other amateurs from dabbling in architecture.

3. Cirencester Park

If Bathurst's house shows little originality, his park is quite another matter.  The first was undertaken by himself alone, the second in collaboration with Poe and other friends, who furnished him with the most convincing arguments draw from classical precedent.  His own first-hand experience of the growth of trees and shrubs supplied the necessary, practical knowledge.

Kip's view of the old Danvers house showed the lands to the west of it, before they were covered with Lord Bathurst's plantations. Those lands then appeared to be open, rolling wolds and thinly-scattered woodlands of no unusual contour or beauty. In 1716 Bathurst bought from the executors of Sir Robert Atkyns who had been Gloucestershire's first and eminent historian, a large area to the west of, and contiguous to, his own property. It comprised Oakley Wood and the manor of Sapperton, where, on the east slope of a valley and close to the parish church, stood a picturesque Tudor manor house, the home of the Atkyns family. With that utter disdain of the eighteenth-century man of taste for all non-classical architecture of whatever period or style-unless it were deliberately mock medieval, Moorish or ChineseBathurst razed the old house to the ground some years later. The distance of Sapperton from Cirencester is five miles as the crow flies. Bathurst proceeded to make of the intermediate area a series of conjoined parks, united by one immensely long avenue, and, in the words of Mr. Christopher Hussey, 'the finest example surviving of plantation on the pre-landscape model'. The extended property on which he was now free to impose a uniform layout was remarkable for this reason: it comprised the original estate, a flat table-land, whose springs feed the infant Thames (its source was actually on his acreage) and the western valleys, whose streams belong to the Severn watershed. Thus the property offered that variety of contour which to the landscape creator is a boon seldom granted. Bathurst lost no time in profiting to the full from what his own good fortune and astuteness had acquired.

As Christopher Hussey has pointed out, Cirencester Park is a forest, with rides and glades cut out of it, rather than grassland streaked with woods and coppices. The difference probably accounts for its survival after two hundred years. Bathurst's method was to amalgamate several different regions by planting trees where none previously existed, and out of the dense growth created to carve and mould the shapes he had in mind. If beech was his staple crop, chestnut, elm, and oak were liberally introduced, with a sprinkling of wild cherry, yew, and occasional coniferous trees. He laid great emphasis upon seasonal colouring, and his calculated efforts to achieve it contribute to his deserved reputation as a great planter.

It is not improbable that one of Bathurst's first motives was to emulate his rich and powerful neighbour, the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton. The newly-risen in early Georgian times were incredibly naive in their efforts to assert their social equality with the old-established families. The contemporary park at Badminton, now only known to us through plans by Kip and others, embraced an immense area of the countryside. It belonged to the seventeenth-century Le Nôtre style of layout. A rectangular area, enclosing the house, was plotted into strictly formal lawns, orchards, mazes and parterres. Outside this area long, straight avenues, crossing open country, radiated from one focal point, a mile or more from the house. If Kip's accuracy may be relied upon, no less than twenty-three rides met at the rond-point. It is significant that Bathurst did not follow this particular style of landscape, and, in fact, studiously avoided making his house a prominent feature of the layout. It might, as it turned out, have been better had he done so, for the relation of house and park at Cirencester is oddly equivocal.

Horace Walpole in his chapter on Modern Gardening' had the grace to concede that Bathurst's influence upon park landscape was very considerable. He praised him for having made planting subservient to utility and ornament and, more important still, for having created scenes of unsurpassed beauty. He recognized in him one of the first to explode the false taste of Le Notre and King William's gardeners. Bridgman and then Kent, whom Walpole admired inordinately, were in fact the very first to break away from the tyranny of the formal strait-jacket, of which Versailles is the most notable victim. But Kent evolved another type of garden, which, important though it was in its influence, did not approximate so closely to the picturesque landscape (universally accepted in Walpole's middle age) as Bathurst's at Cirencester. What Kent aimed at was a limitation of landscape. At Chiswick and at Rousham he may have leapt the fence', but he created small elysiums of confined dimensions. Bathurst on the other hand was centrifugal in his aims. There was nothing confined about his bold conception, which sought to embrace the wide world as its domain. And indeed Bathurst's park, although conceived at a time when Le Nôtre's was still the accepted form of layout among country house owners in England, had certain affinities with the naturalistic school of the future. Bathurst lived to witness and even to be affected by the dominant ideals of Capability Brown. He may have remained faithful to the scheme he had formulated in his young manhood, but he inevitably modified it in certain particulars as the years proceeded. Furthermore, the park, though far advanced, was not completed until after his death. The Home and Oakley parks were still separated during his lifetime, and quite a mile of the eastern extremity of the great Broad Walk was planted by his successor after 1775.

The decisive influence upon Bathurst's original conception may well have been the famous short essay which Pope contributed to the Guardian in 1713. In it were laid down several maxims which Lord Burlington and Kent adopted, and instantly put into practice at Chiswick. I shall come to them in a later chapter. But Pope's cogent theme, with which he opened his essay, established an entire ly novel principle in garden layout. His words began as follows:

There is something in the amiable simplicity of unadorned nature, that spreads over the mind a more noble sort of tranquility, and a loftier sensation of pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer scenes of art.

This was the taste of the ancients in their gardens, as we may discover from the descriptions are extant of them [sic]' 

He thereupon proceeded to quote from Virgil and Homer in order to illustrate those principles which the Burlingtonians so avidly adopted.

To us, accustomed to admire the simplicity of unadorned nature, Pope's exordium may at first seem trite, and hardly worth reiterating. But in 1713 his words were considered subversive. Until that date the gardens of Europe had, ever since they were first made in medieval times, remained thoroughly formal and artificial. They were a silent protest against the savage wildness of the country outside their bounds. At first they amounted to a few beds in the shape of knots of flowers, or herbs, within high palings. As the Renaissance advanced, terraces expanded, and statues and fountains were introduced. In all their varieties gardens remained cabined and confined. Straight canals, straight alleys, straight vistas always intersected at right-angles. Nothing was allowed to grow naturally. Flowers were regimented, hedges were pleached, yews were treated in topiary and trees trimmed. By the time Queen Anne was on the throne English gardens had truly adopted the grand manner of the Continent. They were still formal, and axial. Then Alexander Pope in one short essay announced that all such gardens were in a deplorable taste, that the ancients had known better and should be imitated, in that they allowed nature to rampage, untamed and unadorned. Instead of gardens being controlled and ordered so as to produce 'nice scenes of art', they were to blend with and even ape hostile nature, hitherto only found outside a domain and shunned by all persons with pretensions to civilization as rude and horrid.

Bathurst was one of the first landowners to carry out Pope's injunctions on an immense scale. He truly 'saw', in the phrase of Horace Walpole, 'that all nature was a garden', but unlike Kent, to whom these words were applied, he made his garden literally comprise fields and valleys, streams, woods, open spaces and prospects. Compared with the parks of a later generation Bathurst's will strike us as formal enough, for straight vistas, often with classical temples punctuating the extremities, are still the rule with him, as they were with Kent. But the irregularly shaped woods through which they cut, the glades upon which they opened, and the occasional serpentine walks which threaded a way from one section of the park to another, constituted the revolutionary beginnings of the new movement in landscape design. Added to these innovations, the romantic buildings, with which Bathurst diversified his grounds, had never before been seen in England.

Pope was well pleased with Bathurst's beginnings on his park. After a first visit to Cirencester around midsummer of 1718 he wrote delightedly: 'My Lord, to say a word in praise either of your wood or you, would be alike impertinent, each being, in its kind, the finest thing I know, & the most agreeable. I can only tell you very honestly (without a word of the high timber of the one, or the high qualities of the other) that I thought it the best company I ever knew, & the best place to enjoy it in.' The reference to high timber is presumably ironical, for Bathurst's new plantations must at this stage have been in their infancy. The gentle irony is borne out by the verses Pope enclosed in his letter:

Woods are, not to be prolix, 

Collective bodies of straight sticks; 

It is, my Lord, a mere conundrum 

To call things woods, for what grows und'r 'em, 

For shrubs, when nothing else at top is, 

Can only constitute a coppice.

 But if you will not take my word

, See Anno quart. of Edward, third. 

And that they're coppice calld, when dock'd

Witness Ann. prim. of Henry Oct.

 These instructive lines about Oakley Wood the poet put into the mouth of John Gay, who had not yet visited it, but was enthusiastic over Pope's account of its natural beauties. 'He has already planted it with myrtles and peopled it with nymphs,' Pope added. In any case Pope was making his mother spend a month or two at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire in order to facilitate his journeys to her from Cirencester where 'I will not fail to be with you,  whatever time you shall pass there in August'. 

However, on 14th August Bathurst was pressing Pope to seize the 'opportunity of this warm weather to inhabit the silvan seat' in Oakley Wood. 'It will destroy the pleasure if I perceive that you are not as free with it as if it were entirely your own.' To which Pope replied, 'I never was more earnest for any innocent thing than to enjoy the Silvan Bower this season.'

The Silvan Bower has disappeared. It may have stood on the site of Alfred's Hall, which was not begun until 1721. It must not be confused with Pope's Seat, which survives, a Doric temple with raised centrepiece, flanked by niches, facing south across the Seven Rides down an avenue, focused upon the spire of Kemble church, and down another terminated by Queen Anne's Column. Pope allowed himself to be driven to the Silvan Bower, where he would compose an hour or two in the mornings, be served with refreshments by an attentive servant in livery, and brought back to the house later in time for dinner. On other days, when he felt more robust, so he told his dear friends, Teresa and Martha Blount, he would go hunting on the downs, 'eat heartily, talk tender sentiments with Lord B or draw plans for houses or gardens, open avenues, cut glades, plant firs, contrive waterworks, all very fine and beautiful in our imagination'. It is unlikely that he would be allowed by his solicitous host to sleep the nights in the Bower. In a letter of the 18th September Pope revealed that his August visit did take place, and that he and Bathurst after heated discussions in the daytime fell asleep over their game of commerce in the evenings. 'I believe you are by this time immers'd in your vast wood,' refers to the rides and vistas which Bathurst must have been cutting through Oakley Wood as a consequence of their daily discussionsand evening ruminations before the effects of port overcame them. "Everywhere I think of you, and everywhere I wish for you,' the poet added wistfully on his return home.

Pope is soon back again. These early days are critical for the future of Cirencester Park, and there is endless planning still to be done. On 8th October he is writing to the two Blount sisters: 'I am with my Lord Bathurst, at my Bower, in whose groves we had yesterday a dry walk of three hours. It is the place that of all others I fancy & I am not yet out of humour with it, tho I have had it some months: it does not cease to be agreeable to me so late in the season; the very dying of the leaves adds a variety of colours that is not unpleasant. I look upon it as a beauty I once loved, whom I should preserve a respect for, in her decay. And as we should look upon a friend, with remembrance how he pleased us once, tho' now declin'd from his former gay and flourishing condition. This condescending assessment of the beauties of autumn strikes us, who no longer feel obliged to seek excuses for our appreciation of them, as either insincere or affected. And why, unless the season induced melancholy reflections, Pope should have regarded his Bower, which must have been newly built and was to him a matter of only a few months' acquaintance, in this nostalgic spirit, remains unexplained.

Two years pass, and Pope is writing to Bathurst in 1720 about Cirencester's elysian groves.

I could say, almost in the style sermon, the Lord bring us all, etc.! Thither may we tend, by various ways, to one blissful bower; thither may health, peace, and good humour wait upon us as associates; thither may whole cargoes of nectar (liquor of life and longevity) by mortals called Spa-water, be conveyed; and there (as Milton has it), may we, like the deities

on flowers reposed, and with fresh flowerets crowned

Quaff immortality and joy

 In September 1721 Pope is at Cirencester once more. He is still enthusiastic over the improvements. On 15th he writes to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: 'how had I despis'd, & totally forgot my own little colifichies, in the daily views of the noble scenes, openings, & avenues of this immense design at Cicester? No words, nor painting, nor poetry (not eyen your own) can give the least image proportionable to it. ...' And in May of the next year he makes claim to much of the results that unfold before his eyes. To a friend he speaks of the glories of Oakley Wood: 'I look upon myself as the magician appropriated to the place, without whom no mortal can penetrate into the recesses of those sacred shades. I could pass whole days, in only describing ... the future, and as yet visionary beauties, that are to rise in these scenes: the Palace that is to be built, the pavilions that are to glitter, the colonnades that are to adorn them; nay more, the meeting of the Thames and the Severn, which (when the noble owner has finer dreams than ordinary) are to be led into each other's embraces thro' secret caverns of not above twelve or fifteen miles, till they rise and openly celebrate their marriage in the midst of an immense amphitheatre, which is to be the admiration of posterity a hundred years hence.

By 'the Palace that is to be built' Pope is not, of course, referring to Cirencester House which by 1722 was already finished, but to the Wood House in the middle of Oakley Wood. It is interesting that Bathurst was already contemplating the junction of the  Thames and the Severn. Posterity did not, in fact, have to wait a hundred years, and Bathurst died a mere fourteen before the 2-mile Sapperton Tunnel, with its crenellated Gothic and its sober classical openings, was dug under his property and the Thames and Severn Canal formally opened by King George III in person. The ceremony took place in 1789. One cannot help wondering if on that notable occasion any tributes were paid to the man, whose finer dreams had conjured up the very vision then being enacted on land, which his taste and judgment had so signally beautified.

The next letter in the series comes from Bathurst and is dated 21st October, 1723. It concerns the Wood House. Bathurst had been suffering from giddiness, for which he was blooded and purged on successive days. In spite of this disability he boasts - and how well he knows that Pope will admire his courage and resilience - of having daily visited his plantations either on foot or horseback. 'I am resolved,' he says, 'to begin the alterations of my wood house, and some little baubling works about it, which you shall direct as you will. I have tired myself with computations and designs of things which cannot be completed in my own time, and I am now resolved to follow the rules of Horace, who in one place says,

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam: and in another,

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. 

That Pope interested himself in the form the Wood House took is indisputable. That Bathurst was chiefly responsible for the design and entirely so for its execution there is little doubt. A great deal of thought, work and correcting was put into a concoction of small importance - small, architecturally, yes: but, as it turned out, of great consequence academically. The Wood House, King Arthur's Castle, or Alfred's Hall, as it was ultimately named when it had assumed the shape it presents today, was the ancestor of Sanderson Miller's tower on Edgehill (which in Horace Walpole's words "preserves the true rust of the barons' wars', and has been held to be the archetype of all such castellated follies, although actually built twenty years after the Girencester one was begun) of Dunstall Castle at Croome, the tower at Hagley, the eye-catcher at Wimpole, and, later still, of those countless imitation castles with which James Wyatt, John Nash, and Thomas Hopper adorned the romantic landscapes of the early nineteenth century.

Bathurst evidently began upon this toy in 1721, for in that year Bishop Atterbury in a letter hoped 'my lord may have as much satisfaction in building the house in the wood and using it when built, as you have in designing it. In 1732 he was still busying himself about it, as he explained to Pope on 24th July: 'I have now almost finished my hermitage in the wood, and it is better than you can imagine, and many other things are done that you have no idea of. However there is enough remaining to employ you for a week at least, and occasion the consumption of a quire of paper in draughts. I will venture to assert that all Europe cannot show such a pretty little plain work in the Brobdingnag style as what I have executed here."

By the Brobdingnag style - although Lilliputian would seem a more accurate standard of measurement-Bathurst must have had his friend, Dean Swift, well in mind. For Mrs. Pendarves (later Delany) writing to the Dean of St. Patrick's from Cirencester on 24th October, 1733, says: "My Lord Bathurst talks with great delight of the pleasure you once gave him by surprizing him in his wood, and showed me the house where you lodged. It has been rebuilt; for the day you left it fell to the ground, conscious of the honour it had received by entertaining so illustrious a guest, it burst with pride! It is regrettable that Swift's reply does not exist to tell us whether he was more gratified by the honour done him, or by relief at his miraculous escape from destruction. He may have had very different memories of his sojourn there, if a sentence in a letter of his to Bathurst in 1735 can be taken seriously. He then reminded Bathurst of an occasion when 'Mr. Pope, poor Gay, and I were forced to lodge at one of your fariners, and walk two miles to dinner, with your two thousand five hundred acres of garden, and not a codling to eat'. The Wood House, Mrs. Pendarves continued in her epistle to the Dean, is 'now a venerable castle, and has been taken by an antiquarian for one of King Arthur's. This misunderstanding must have pleased its creator inordinately. That his folly of only a few years existence should take in some self-important, omniscient, old professor of archaeology was just what the gay lord hoped for above all things.

A comfortable capacity for self-deception is, we all know, the first essential ingredient of the successful folly-maker. Bathurst did not lack it. And the more far-fetched a learned allusion to antiquarian derivations, the more plausible and the more acceptable it became to him. A pedantic friend advised Bathurst that the old scribal name for Oakley, Achileia, was to be identified with the Egleah of Asser's Life of Alfred the Great. Since it was common knowledge that Alfred had not a little to do with the peacefulsojourn of the Danes at Cirencester, after their defeat by him at Edington, the association of the Saxon monarch with Oakley Wood was quickly taken for granted. Hence the re-christening of the erstwhile Wood House, or King Arthur's Castle.

Alfred's Hall is today very romantic in its secluded clearing of Oakley Wood. The ruin is draped with ivy and enclosed by a grove of appropriately melancholy yews. Its round tower has one pointed window, which should not deceive the least discerning antiquary. The hall, to which the tower is attached, contains two inserted windows of genuine Tudor date, brought by Bathurst from Sapperton Manor, which he had ruthlessly demolished. Indeed the folly has much Tudor, and even some medieval masonry oddly inserted in its walls. Bathurst confessed that he had brought a 'great quantity of very good hewn stone from the old house at Sapperton to the great centre of Oakley Wood'. The hall itself has an open roof, its heavy timbers supported on projecting corbels. The windows are suitably filled with coloured glass, on which a baron's coronet and two stag supporters are emblazoned. Whenever he came to decorative detail the most hardened Georgian 'Goth' found it difficult entirely to escape from his own Vitruvian age. The fireplace has a large stone lintel, on which are carved impeccably classical swags. The whole building outside is crenellated, it is true, but remains transparently, delightfully sham.

Bathurst had spoken of 'some little baubling works' around the hall. Many of these have now gone. Rudder's History of Gloucestershire, published in 1779, gave two little engravings which showed a gatehouse at the rear and some carefully contrived ruins, as of cloisters, on the east side of the main building. Some walls survive, and a decayed, pointed gateway of tufa stone, piquantly hollowed by artless time so as to resemble a heap of skulls: and, strangely indeed, in the open yew grove a genuine Renaissance chimneypiece of interlaced carving and, casually thrown within the ghostly fireplace, a quatrefoil window-head covered with moss.

It is unlikely that Alfred's Hall was used for accommodating Lord Bathurst's guests. But it was a useful objective for al fresco meals on summer evenings, when the shadows cast by the black yews evoked in the breasts of romantic Georgians suitable nostalgic yearnings for Saxon deeds of valour. It was also the scene of an annual music meeting, where the country people assembled to pass the day in fiddling, dancing and drinking. After an immense bucolic feast at their lord's expense they all dispersed, as best they could, at nightfall.

Throughout the latter part of the 1720s few letters between Bathurst and Pope relating to the progress of the park and its adornments survive. But there is no reason to suppose that there was any break in the correspondence. In October 1724 Bathurst wrote as affectionately as ever a long letter, mildly complaining about his social duties in the neighbourhood. 'I was forced to entertain [to dinner) ... two or three odd people, who were not fools enough to be laughed at and yet were far from having sense enough to make a conversation; a most accursed mediocrity. After this I was obliged to make a visit to a country neighbour. I found him in his hall. I may properly say I found him, for I looked sometime before I could discover him, being enveloped in thick clouds of tobacco. So much civility was paid to me that I was obliged to remove out of the great hall into a little parlour, which by misfortune had just been washed. The honest friends who had just been entertaining him before were to follow us into this parlour, and the agreeable smoke which had filled a larger hall was to be transferred to the little room, with the addition of a good deal of other smoke which proceeded from a chimney that had not been incommoded with fire since last Christmas, and consequently the soot helped to the delightfulness of the smell. Not to trouble you further with this description, our drink was as bad as our conversation, and I have had too much of each.' The most aloof arcadians—and the good-natured and convivial Bathurst was not one of them, nor, one suspects, so bored as he pretended to be — are obliged to suffer worse afflictions than these described. It was certainly not the only occasion on which Bathurst would have liked to be better employed. Six years later, in describing Cirencester to Swift as 'this dominion, which I prefer to any other', he added darkly: 'There are Yahoos in this neighbourhood.'

In the autumn of 1725 he went on a long northern expedition to Derbyshire and Staffordshire on private business. His travels included a visit to Lord Carlisle at Castle Howard to see the works in the grounds there and, in its owner his cousin's absence, to Wentworth Castle. He found Lord Strafford's house, gardens and menagerie much improved since his last visit. The columns in the long gallery had just been set up, to make that apartment very magnificent; and the gardens, by being opened to the park, had benefited considerably.

In September 1728 Pope visited Cirencester while Bathurst was away. Posts were so slow and unreliable, journeys so long and exhausting, and inns so few and often unaccommodating, that the owners of large country houses expected their friends to turn up without warning. If they happened not to be at home, the servants decided who were cherished favourites and set about to make them comfortable as their masters would have done, had they been there. When however Pope got to Bath he wrote a collins to his absent host that was slightly critical. 'I saw the steeple of Ciceter stand on one side over' the house. He disliked the resulting asymmetry, which he must have overlooked on countless previous visits, and advised the steeple's forthright demolition. He noticed 'the great vista in Oakley Wood to the said steeple by being widened beyond its former hedges, bordered now only with some low thing, which I took to be a box-hedging on either side'. This was the great Broad Ride now five miles long which is the axis of the whole park. It was, as Pope implied, cut out of Oakley Wood, and was focused upon Cirencester church tower, although in his day it had not yet been extended by a mile towards the town end. The Ride is today completed by a mature avenue, chiefly chestnut and beech, whose low skirts sweep down and brush the scythed grass. 'I beheld,' the poet continued ironically, 'with singular satisfaction every tree that bore the least pretence to high timber, totally cut down and done away. Whereby I see with delight the bare prospect you have made."

The devastation, to which Pope took exception, was presumably in the preparation of either the vast circus, called Seven Rides, where Pope's Seat now is, about a mile from the town end of the park, or even of the wide clearing further west, where are to be found the Round House, the Square House and Ivy Lodge. It must be remembered that to derive his effects in Oakley Wood Bathurst was faced with felling, instead of planting trees. And the felling of fine mature trees always distressed Pope. The shock was all the more disturbing because he had obviously not been consulted by his friend beforehand. He furthermore noticed what he called 'High Wood' being pierced for a ride which would call for some building at one end. He would not advise an obelisk, but volunteered no positive suggestion.

In 1730 Bolingbroke wrote to Bathurst: 'Are you planting? Are you levelling? What are you doing? [The Earl of] Essex thinks, with me, that the marriage of the line of the great park with the house is practicable, but that it requires the phlegm he is master of rather than your lordship's impetuosity to contrive.' It was all very fine for Bolingbroke, the most impatient of men, to accuse Bathurst of impetuosity-all his friends did that. Had he, Bathurst, not already been at work on his park for at least fifteen years? And did he not intend so to continue until the last breath was left in his body? Anyway, he must have known that Bolingbroke and Essex were talking nonsense; or else their memory of his property was very faulty. Not even the phlegm of the latter peer could contrive to marry the great Broad Ride from Oakley Wood with the house, short of making a kink in its hitherto straight course to the south-east. Pope's advice was one thing. He was the inaugurator of the new garden style on which the Cirencester planting was based. Besides his visits were so frequent that he knew the park only less well than the owner thereof. Walpole was undoubtedly right in his dictum that the proprietor, if he be a man of taste, must be the best designer of his own improvements. He sees the site through all the seasons of the year, at all times of the day. 'He knows where beauty will not clash with convenience, and observes in his silent walks, or accidental rides, a thousand hints that must escape a person who in a few days sketches out a pretty picture, but has not had leisure to examine the details and relations of every part.'

On 1st October of this year Pope refers in a letter to Bathurst to his lordship's order of British elm trees from a nursery in Isleworth, and provision of leaden statuary for the park. His friend, Patty Blount, who has always a partiality for you, notwithstanding your eternal neglect', proposes to substitute herself as an ornament, and put herself with the statues in the waggon from London. Pope's letters were not, as we have seen, always in this facetious vein. His criticism could sometimes be bitter, if not unjust. Bathurst writing to Lady Suffolk in July, 1734, says: 'Pope endeavours to find faults here, but cannot; and instead of admiring (as he ought to do) what is already executed, he is every day drawing one a plan for some new building or other, and then is violently angry that it is not set up the next morning.'

During the ensuing two years Bathurst was again in serious financial difficulties, owing to reckless over-spending. In the late summer of 1735 he felt obliged to sell one estate; but instead of investing the proceeds-which he would have advised a friend to do in like circumstances-promptly bought another. He found it extremely hard to retrench, and was already laying designs for the next season's planting. To leave Cirencester for London, and even for Richings, was becoming increasingly distasteful to him. Nevertheless it was a duty to attend Parliament during the sessions, 'at least whilst there is any hopes that a vote may be of use', he confided in Lord Strafford. And he ended a long letter to him with the disingenuous regret, calculated no doubt to shock his staid and correct cousin, that he had not had himself castrated years ago. Then he might not have got more children than I am now able to maintain, considering the just and necessary taxes we are all obligd to pay to support the exigencies of the government, who have labour'd under a long and fruitless peace. And less than twelve months later, in July 1736, he confessed to Strafford that he had undertaken a scheme too large for his pocket, and must now leave it to a son or grandson to complete. Meanwhile he would allow his imagination of what the park might become in fifty, or sixty years' time, to supply what his exhausted purse was failing to put in train.

All these admissions of financial exhaustion read very sadly: and, as they were addressed to a close member of the family, they were doubtless meant to sound pitiful. What the true position was, we may never know. At all events, one month had not gone by when Bathurst (on 14th August) was inditing to Pope a long letter, full of very ambitious schemes indeed. It is one of the most important of his letters in all the series to the poet, because it throws a very particular light upon his activities.

He begins by exhorting Pope, who is about to stay at Stowe, to come on to Cirencester. "One day's journey further will make but little odds," he says in that engaging manner which brushes aside all obstacles like cobwebs, once he has set his mind on something. "Now to show you that I have a most manifest want of you at this present juncture I send you the enclosed plans. The plans, which no longer exist, probably related to the temple, now called the Hexagon, which is set on the north side of the Broad Ride, before Pope's Seat is reached, and faces the transverse ride, leading to the main Cirencester-Tetbury road. "That marked , Bathurst goes on, 'was drawn first. Afterwards I had a mind to have a cupola on purpose to try the effect of the Cornish slate, which we can have from Bristol at a pretty casy rate. In fact no cupola was put on the Hexagon, which actually has a shallow parapet to the roof. The apex is crowned with a ball. In the plan marked b the building is described and the ground plot. It must be of that shape because it is to answer three walks, and the materials must be the same as those with which the seat was built, because they are already brought to the place, and because I think that rough stone exceedingly pretty, and am ready to stand all the jokes of Rusticus expectat, etc. 

[Horace's Epistle I,ii,42, contains these lines:

...qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,

rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis at ille

labiture et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

He who puts of the hour of night living is like the bumpkin waiting for the river to run out yeton it glides, and on it will glide, rolling in waters for ever!]

This building will be backed with wood, so that nothing can be seen but the three sides.' So far this description applies correctly to the existing Hexagon, which is backed by trees, and does face three walks, so that only three of its sides, which are open, are visible from the front. As for the materials, they are the same as those used for the poet's Seat, namely what Bathurst calls a rough stone, which is very hard-wearing. The surrounds of the openings, like those of Pope's Seat, are treated in frost work. I design the ribs of the cupola shall be done with lead, which I will gild or paint of gold colour, which being set off by the blue slate will look admirably well. I will certainly make the three arches like that in the plan marked, but I am in doubt how to settle the fascias and the cornice, etc. Now I leave it entirely to you either to come and settle this affair yourself or send the directions."

As I have already said, the cupola was not carried out. The purpose of the long quotation is to postulate that Bathurst was his own architect of the Hexagon, with the assistance and approval of his friend, Pope, who had likewise co-operated with him to a large extent in the formation of the park. There is therefore reason to assume that Bathurst may also have designed the other temples and follies on the estate, as well as the house itself.

The letter continues: "Another building is to be erected after wards to answer the other diagonal which will also overlook the lake, no contemptible body of water, I can assure you. It will be at least as big as the canal at Riskins. As for the lake, this is the first time we hear of it. Such an adjunct was considered indispensable to a Georgian country gentleman's seat. As long ago as 1718 Pope noted the deficiency when in a letter, otherwise full of encomiums, he remarked, "there wants nothing but a cristal rivulet to purl through the shades'. With great trouble and in order to have water within view of the house Bathurst channelled it from several well springs. Far from resembling the formal canal popular in his youth, the lake at Cirencester was irregular in shape, and made to look as natural as possible-a complete departure from precedent and even ante-dating the large serpentine lake at Stourhead certainly not begun before 1741. At Richings Bathurst had previously deviated from the dead straight line in water so as to follow the natural contours of the land. He claimed to be the first person to have done so. Lord Strafford, thinking it could only have happened out of poverty, begged his cousin to tell him in confidence how much more it would have cost to make the canal - it was five hundred and fifty-five yards long - straight. In order to make believe the Cirencester lake was larger than it actually was, Bathurst carefully disposed clumps of trees at its either end.

Finally, Bathurst concludes his long letter of 14th August by informing Pope: 'I have also begun to level the hill before the house, and an obelisk shall rise upon your orders to terminate the view. The foundation of the building (i.e. the Hexagon), described in the enclosed plan will be laid by the time of Pope's visit, and one arch up; but I will do no more before you come, if by the next you tell me that you will be so good to your faithful servant."

The immense task of reducing the height and levelling the resulting excavation of the hill on the far side of the lake, and directly in view of the house, was certainly carried out. Bathurst had long cherished a secret determination to do reverence to that sovereign, who had been the girlhood friend of his mother and the fount of his own honours. Queen Anne was the last reigning Stuart, and the Bathursts had always faithfully served that family. Had not six of his father's brothers lost their lives fighting for King Charles 1? The years when it would have been indiscreet for him, a suspected Jacobite, to raise a memorial to the Queen, were passed. He could now safely proceed. So nice was his judgment that he deemed the existing hill where the memorial could best go, to be just too high and just the wrong shape. He did not hesitate to alter it to suit his requirements.

Pope, however, was by no means in favour of an obelisk. It 'can bear no diameter to fill so vast a gap', was his instant reply. "unless it literally touches the skies'. He advised instead 'a solid pyramid of 100 ft. square, to the end there may be something solid and lasting of your works', which was perhaps a caustic hint that no other building of his friend was likely to bring him immortality. In the end neither an obelisk nor a pyramid was constructed. A Doric column of marked entasis with a statue of the Queen on the top, was raised in 1741. This noble monument on its regular plateau is seen axially from the house, and diagonally from Seven Rides. Moreover, it marks the end of a straight line which runs from Cirencester church tower through the centre of the pediment of the park front of the house. In other words, Bathurst had borne in mind Pope's querulous jibe of September 1728 about the church steeple not appearing to be centralized with the house. Instead of demolishing it, which might, even in George II's reign, have aroused unpleasant controversy with the vicar, Bathurst planted his avenue before the house in alignment with it.

On 6th September Bathurst wrote once again to his cousin Stafford. Without a trace of embarrassment or shame, as though quite unmindful of his pleas of poverty less than two months previously, he announced his hill-levelling operations  “I have cutt through one of he hills and lett in a view up one of the diagonals, which terminates upon a  little building which I have erected; next summer I shall build another in answer the other diagonal, and cut thro’ that hill.” The little building, which was shortly to have a fellow, is probably one of the pair of temples called the Horseguards.  They stand on either side of the Broad Rode, to the west of Hermitage Bottom (a deep declvity dividing Oakley from Sapperton Wood), and before the clearing, known as Ten Rides, is reached. As well as facing down the Broad Ride to the church tower, they look obliquely, or at least used to before the rides were choked, in a south-westerly and north-easterly direction respectively.  The Horseguards are simple erections, each with a very tall opening, as though to accommodate a mounted life-guardsman of gigantic stature, between Ionic pilasters, which are rather too attenuated.  They are frankly amateurish.

Having spoken of the levelling he had already done, Bathurst proceeded to describe his designs upon the hill opposite the house for the Queen Anne memoiral.  “All this levelling work,” he wrote complacently, “will not amount to above £50 or £60, and the situation of the house will appear good again as it does at present.”  No wonder his cousin considered allen to be a little crazy.

Bathurst’s correspondence in the latter part of his life either declined, or has not been preserved.  There are occasional amusing references to him by his friends. “Lord Bathurst is in Gloucestershire, where he plants, transplants and unplants;  thus he erects an employment for himself independent of a court,” was the casual remark of one friend in the summer of 1737.  In October of the following year Frederick, Prince of Wales, was entertained at Cirencester, from which the obvious deduction to be made is that Bathurst was at the time not persona grata at the court of his father, George II. In 1739 he was obliged to part with Richings to Lord Hertford.  Then in July 1741 another friend related to Dean Swift that “Lord Bathurst is at Cirencester, erecting pillars and statues to Queen Anne”.  It is the last glimpse we have through the written word of his building activities at Cirencester.

He was in fact to be as active as ever for another thirty-four years, and his head was teeming with new ideas as it was in his youth.  Bolingbroke was constantly referring to his spending most of his days out of doors, on horseback, and so remaining stronger and younger than his own sons.  He must too have gone on building.  There are no records to tell us precisely when he built the three engaging Gothic houses in and around the wide clearing before Oakley Wood. There can be little doubt that, fortified by Pope’s outspoken comments, which this good-natured and unassuming peer invariably heeded, he designed them himself. The relation they bear to Alfred’s Hall precludes any other authorship.  The Square House derives its name from  its artificial pele tower, boasting pointed two-light windows.  It and the annexe in the tower are crenellated.  The Round House is distinguished by a circular tower, with pointed single-light windows.  It has a sort of defensive machiocolation running round the parapet, in Norman dog-tooth pattern.  On the parapets are blind loops, for imaginary cross-bows.  At the rear an extension bears a crenellated hexagonal chimney.

The last of these early precursors of the neo-Gothic revival is Ivy Lodge. It is a more ambitious and delightful fantasy than either the Square or the Round House.  It consists of a two-storey block facing south, with a double flight of steps leading to a pointed front door.  There are a round-headed window and a pair of blind roundels on the façade.   On either side of the block are low screens – pierced with pointed couple windows – linked to flanking wings which are gabled, stepped and crenellated.  The east wing conceals one end of a medieval barn facing east.  The west screen and wing are in reality a blank wall, with nothing whatever behind it .  The word folly, which conjures up an eccentric, useless piece of architecture, fit only for show, does not fairly describe these threee buildings.  Bathurst certainly intended them to be adornments to his great park;  but also to be farm dwellings, which they have always been, and still are. 

As the years went by Bathurst visited London less and less, and stayed at his beloved Cirencester for longer and longer periods.  “Your lordship who is  a lover of the country,” he wrote to Stafford after one of his parliamentary visits to Westminster, “may judge of the mortification it was to me to be kept so long away from a place I am fond off, and confin’d to a place I dislike extremely….”  Nevertheless, the man who once told Lady Suffolk that the four most desirable things in life were “old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read”, could never become a hermit.  His perpetual vivacy, of which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had occasion years ago to complain, and his insatiable curiosity impelled him to exchange opinions in the mart of all new ideas, which is London. He positively welcomed new faces.  In 1767 he introduced himself at a party to Laurence Sterne, who was delighted with him.  The author of Tristram Shandy recounted, with customary vanity, how Bathurst declared that his company rekindled old desires to be with men of genius again.  For were not all the peer’s  closest intimates, the pride of their generation, now dead? “This nobleman, I say,” Sterne wrote to his daughter, “is a prodigy: ofr at eighty-five he has all the wit and promptness of a man of thirty.  A disposition to be pleased, and a power to please others beyond whatever I knew:  added to which, a man of learning, courtesy and feeling…the good old lord toasted your health three different times”.  The gesture was characteristic, coming from one who, with his tongue in his cheek, had solemnly averred to the Dean of St. Patrick’s “that woman’s milk is the wholesomest food in the world”.  He was now looked upon as Methuselah. People would nudge each other in passing him in St. James’s Square, and tell old anecdotes that linked him with a past age: how he was deducated by a distinguished scholar, his uncle, born in James I’s reign: how as a young man once standing at the bar of the House of Lords beside a nonagenarian whom he asked how long it was since he was in the Chamber, he received the repy, “Never, my lord, since I sat in that chair:” and, watching him point to the throne he recognized the decayed features of Tumble-down Dick, the second Lord Protector of England; and how the great Burke, in one of his higheest flights of oratory, had related his life’s span to the rise and disintegration of Britain’s colonial empire.

To within a month of his death he rode two hours a day round his park, and drank, without fail, his bottle of claret or madeira after dinner.  He died at Cirencester in 1775, and was buried off the north aisle of the church in the same tomb as his wife.  The monumental inscription is worded perhaps rather more gravely than befits his true character, which, however serious at times, was never solemn.  “In the legislative and judicial departments of the great Council of the Nation” – one can pictuer his son, the hatchet-faced Lord Chancellor, rehearsing these pious phrases – “he served his country 69 years with honour, ability and diligence.  Judgment and tast directed his learning, Humanity tempered his wit, Benevolence guided all his actions.  He died regretted by most & praised by all.”  The trappings of death were in the eighteenth century invested with a traditional pomposity, and if the epitaph leaves out the lighter list of the deceased’s virtues, it certainly includes nothing that is undeserved.  

Bathurst’s proper memorial in this transitory world is still to be seen, and what is more, enjoyed. After nearly two hundred years it has miraculously survived, owing to his descendants’ unceasing care and maintenance.  Of all the arts that of landscape design is about the most ephemeral.  The 2nd and then the 3rd Earl Bathurst completed, while slightly altering, the 1st Earl’s layout.  Their successors have, however, conscientiously cherished its original features.  The skeleton of an early eighteenth-century park on an immense scale is intact.

As was only to be expected, change of taste caused the generation after Allen Bathurst’s to find many faults in a style of planting, which it considered neither natural nor picturesque enough.  John Byng, who visited Cirencester in 1787, recorded in his diary that Lord Bathurst “did wonderful things here: but I cannot think with taste, as he adher’d to the formal style of his youth”.  It would indeed have been strange if he had not.  And Bigland’s Gloucestershire of 1791 declared that “The several buildings…are in themselves neither sumptuous nor beautiful,” and the “park so justly admired….may decline a comparison with those in a modern and more correct taste.”  “The modern taste” is considered by all ages the only “correct” one.  …