INTRODUCTION
Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (SGS), in Lincolnshire, was founded in 1710 and is arguably the oldest antiquarian society still in existence in the UK. It boasts among its early members the antiquarian William Stukeley (1687–1765). Surviving among its papers are many by Stukeley; some given personally by him and others collected since. One of the more important of these is a little-known and very personal set of forty-four family-related drawings, comprising illustrations of Stukeley’s various houses and gardens in Lincolnshire and London, family portraits and other matters relating to his family. These drawings range from doodles to extremely important and unique illustrations of his properties and members of his family. Several drawings are complemented by parallels in other institutions and in some cases produce a synergy. For example, a drawing in the Gentlemen’s Society of the St Peter’s area of Stamford (SPAGS.2015.01.11)Footnote 1 enabled an unlabelled and unidentified drawing in the Bodleian Library, Oxford,Footnote 2 to be identified as Stukeley’s Hermitage garden in Austin Street, adjacent to St Peter’s Hill.
The Spalding collection, which ranges in date from 1720–64, comprises thirty-two topographical drawings, five family portraits, a family tree, six miscellaneous drawings and, in addition, two manuscript and printed lists. Apart from a single drawing of Barrington Court in Gloucestershire,Footnote 3 the themes are all personal, relating to Stukeley and his family. Of the forty-four items in the collection, the larger part – twenty-one – is of Stamford: his properties in Barn Hill, St Peter’s Hill and Austin Street. The four drawings of Grantham include the only known illustration of the façade of his house,Footnote 4 while the plan of its upper floorFootnote 5 is a clue to the alterations he made, or intended, during his occupation (1726–9). The two drawings of the garden, drawings 19 (fig 1) and 21, are ground-breaking in that they reveal what are almost certainly thought experiments in garden design and represent a revolutionary approach to re-imagining ancient monuments as garden features.
Fig 1. Stonehenge imagined as a garden feature in Stukeley’s garden in Grantham, Lincolnshire (n.d. but possibly 1728/9). SPAGS.2015.01.19r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
STUKELEY, GARDEN DESIGN AND HENGE MONUMENTS
It was at Grantham that Stukeley began his first experiments in garden design and gradually these coalesced with his thoughts on the Druids, developed during his recent fieldwork at Avebury and Stonehenge. Stukeley’s Grantham garden was of a suitable size for experimentation and it is interesting to see the progression of his ideas in his three years there. In April 1727 he wrote to his friend, Samuel Gale,Footnote 6 telling him of his work in the garden and, although he signed the accompanying drawing with his druidical name (‘Chyndonax’), there is no mention of Druids in the text; the large garden circle is merely ‘my circus or amphitheatre’. The following year, after he had expanded his garden to double its size, he again wrote to Gale noting that he was making a ‘temple of the druids’ and made an overt reference to Stonehenge.Footnote 7 Spalding drawing 21Footnote 8 takes the story much further and is a full-scale re-creation of Stonehenge as a garden feature. Everything Stukeley presents in his published plan of StonehengeFootnote 9 is represented by plantings of different sizes in the garden: the inner circle of bluestones, the five sets of trilithons (represented by pairs of trees) and the differently sized stones of the two outer circles.Footnote 10 It is a massive step forward from the more prosaic illustrations in the Bodleian Library.Footnote 11 That he was also thinking about and developing his ideas on the Druids is shown in a letter to Samuel Gale of February 1727: ‘I begin now & then to peep over my old papers & drawings. & among antiquity matters Abury seems to touch my fancy the most at present, & probably … I shall publish it in a year or two.’Footnote 12 He was being unduly optimistic, and both Stonehenge and Avebury in fact had to wait until 1740 (Stonehenge: a temple restor’d to the British Druids) and 1743 (Abury: a temple of the British Druids) respectively for publication.
THE COLLECTION’S TOPOGRAPHICAL DRAWINGS
There is only one drawing of Stukeley’s birthplace in Holbeach in the collection (fig 2), and it was made in 1756 when he was aged sixty-eight, long after his return to London.Footnote 13 By naming an adjacent lane and including three identifiable churches as horizon features, the drawing is unique in containing enough information to pinpoint definitively the location of the house at the northern end of Barrington Gate, Holbeach (TF361246). This drawing is also unique in being the only depiction of the plantation between the house and the church that Stukeley’s father had planted.Footnote 14 Stukeley’s final villa in Kentish Town,Footnote 15 leased in 1759 from St Bartholomew’s Hospital while he was rector of St George’s, Queen Square, 1748–65, is represented by five drawings, all of which, apart from a single sketch of the fireplace in his bedchamber,Footnote 16 are concerned with the designs for his garden and ‘mausoleum’ (a repository for his paintings) rather than the house itself (fig 3). The sketches of the site here put the complementary sketches in the Bodleian into context.Footnote 17
Fig 2. Stukeley’s birthplace at Holbeach, in Lincolnshire (August 1765). SPAGS.2013.01.32r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
Fig 3. ‘Chydonactis Mausoleum’ in the garden of Stukeley’s Kentish Town villa, in London (1764). SPAGS2015.01.37r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
The Stamford drawings are the jewel of the collection and comprise over half the total. This author first saw them in 1979 while preparing displays for the new Stamford Museum. It was the fascination of these completely unknown and uncatalogued drawings that led him to resolve to research and catalogue them and make them more widely known. In the event, this had to wait some years until retirement, and the initial result was a paper published in an earlier volume of the Antiquaries Journal.Footnote 18 That the Stamford drawings dominate the Spalding collection is no surprise. Grantham may have seen the great leap forward in Stukeley’s thinking on garden design, but he lived there only three years, while he spent almost eighteen years (from 1730 to 1748) in Stamford as vicar of All Saints’ church. It was not only the length of time he spent in the town that gave rise to the larger number of drawings; in 1741 Stukeley bought a new house with a two-acre garden in Barn Hill, and fell in love with it. He spent two years refurbishing the house, then devoted equal energy to creating a garden from a farmyard and a ramshackle collection of buildings round it,Footnote 19 recording every detail of work as he went along. He was still working on the garden when he left Stamford in early 1748.
Stukeley’s stay in the town was not trouble free, particularly in the first few years, and it took several years for him to settle in. He came to Stamford as a low churchman and Whig to a Tory and Jacobite town dominated by the earl of Exeter of nearby Burghley House. He met difficulties at Browne’s Hospital, the almshouse where he was a governor and auditor, but his severest trial came at the 1734 general election when he vigorously supported the Whig cause against a hostile nobleman and town.Footnote 20 After 1737, and the loss of his first wife Frances, things began to settle and in the 1740s, with his new interest, his Barn Hill house and garden, he intended to stay in Stamford for the rest of his life.Footnote 21 But in November 1747 he succumbed to the temptation of his friend the duke of Montagu, who offered him the prestigious living of St George’s, Queen Square, in London,Footnote 22 and Stukeley left Stamford in early 1748.
Of the twenty-one Stamford drawings, five date from before 1740: two of his rectory on St Peter’s Hill (fig 4), two connected with his Hermitage in Austin Street (fig 5) and a general view of the St Peter’s areaFootnote 23 that shows both his vicarage and Hermitage. The remainder of the twenty-one are of his Barn Hill property: from the state in which he found it (drawings 16 and 30Footnote 24 ), plans and illustrations of the house and details of various features in the garden – for example, the statue of Phut (drawing 18), the Temple of Flora (drawings 9 and 10) and the Mount (drawing 13). Five drawings show stages in the design of the layout of the garden, which, with the drawings in the Bodleian Library, notably Gough Maps 16 and 230, give an indication of the progression of Stukeley’s ideas. Stukeley retained the ‘druidic’ circles he had developed at Grantham, but now as an ordained Anglican minister, his overt references to the Druids were fewer.Footnote 25 A magnificent overview of the whole property drawn in 1743 shows a late version of the design of the garden and the druidic circles have a wide path running through them which Stukeley later converted into a bowling green.Footnote 26 What is also noticeable in this drawing is the random planting beyond the circles, his ‘wild forestiere’ form (as he called it), in a deliberate attempt to break away from the formality of earlier gardens.
Fig 4. The former St Peter’s rectory, Stukeley’s first residence in Stamford, Lincolnshire (1743). SPAGS.2015.01.14r. Drawing: reproduced by courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
Fig 5. Preliminary sketch for Merlin’s Cave, at the ‘Hermitage’, Stamford, Lincolnshire (1737). SPAGS.2015.01.02r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
Comparing the sketches of the gardens at Grantham, Stamford and Kentish Town reveals the evolution of Stukeley’s thoughts on garden design: from a literal representation of druidical circles at Grantham, a more relaxed view of them in Stamford, together with a desire to introduce informality and more colour into garden design, and a return in Stukeley’s old age to a more overt druidic symbolism at Kentish Town.Footnote 27
Of the non-topographical drawings, there are five portraits of Stukeley and his pre-1739 family,Footnote 28 a family tree and two miscellaneous papers relating to his own and his perceived family history. The two self-portraits, both conceits, show Stukeley in his thirties: one, (drawing 06, fig 6) showing a medallion portrait of Stukeley being hoisted on to an obelisk by putti in a garden setting, the other (drawing 05, fig 7), dates from 1720 and is a full-face portrait drawn as a sculpted bust. It is more formal and more accomplished than most of his live figure drawings. Drawing 36 depicts William’s father, John, lying in his coffin (by Turing,Footnote 29 the only picture in the collection not by Stukeley); drawing 33, his first wife Frances (c 1696–1737), and drawing 08, his infant daughter Mary (1737–48). It is perhaps significant that his wife and daughter are the only two members of his first family with portraits in the collection and both died young. The couple of miscellaneous papers illustrating Stukeley’s career and perceived family history are: a single sheet from the Catalogue of the Fellows … of the Royal College of Physicians (‘drawing’ 15) that lists fellows elected with him in 1720 and which, until 1759, Stukeley annotated with their deaths. It was in that year also that Stukeley became ‘Father of the College of Physicians æ 74’,Footnote 30 on the death of Sir Edward Hulse in the April. The other paper, a list of books belonging to the fourteenth-century prior of Peterborough, Hugh de Stivecle, is in the collection because Stukeley imagined, erroneously, that his family originated from Great Stukeley (Huntingdonshire), and Stivecle is the spelling of the Stukeleys found in a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century documents. Like so many middle-class families with aspirations, Stukeley was keen to establish his pedigree. Upon no evidence at all he was convinced that his mother’s family, Bullen, was descended from Anne Boleyn (1501–36), and he himself, from the Stivecle family. Drawing 35 is one of many family trees scattered throughout his papers, and the Spalding version, adorned with the appropriate family arms, traces his and his first wife’s lineage back to their respective grandparents. The drawing must date from after 1729 when he married Frances Williamson, and probably before her death in 1737.
Fig 6. A self-portrait of William Stukeley being hoisted onto an obelisk by putti (n.d. but probably 1720s, during Stukeley’s Grantham period). SPAGS.2015.01.06r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
Fig 7. Self-portrait of William Stukeley drawn in the form of a sculpted bust (n.d., but probably between 1730 and Reference Stukeley1740). SPAGS.2015.01.05r. Drawing: reproduced courtesy of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society.
PRESENTATION OF THE DRAWINGS
Type of paper used
Most of the drawings are on watermarked paper. Some indicate English papermakers: drawings 05 and 06 bear the arms of the City of London; while drawings 07, 18, 19, 31 and 37 depict the royal arms of Queen Anne from 1707–14, from the Act of Union until her death. There are possibly also some Dutch watermarks: drawing 35 bears the Arms of Amsterdam and drawings 04, 09, 10, 14, 22, 30 and 33 have Vreiheit watermarks, Footnote 31 that is, a crowned lion rampant guardant holding seven arrows, each representing a province of the seven provinces of the Netherlands, standing on a base labelled Vryheyt (various spellings), all within an encircling belt bearing the motto Pro Patria Eiusque Libertate (‘For Country and Her Liberty’). Bearing the same motto is the Pro Patria watermark, a crowned lion rampant holding a scimitar and seven arrows in its paws, set in an hortus inclusus, with a seated Maid of Holland, a Britannia-like figure, holding a lance topped with a cap of liberty and the Pro Patria motto. The Pro Patria watermark is found on drawings 13, 15 and 20. Watermarks do not tell us as much as one would like and can only be an extremely rough tool in dating and provenancing paper. For example, the arms of Queen Anne were used for well over twenty years after her death, the papermakers not bothering to change the watermark on the mould, while the reputation of Dutch papermakers was such that it led some English and Irish papermakers to adopt the Pro Patria watermark for a considerable period in the eighteenth century.Footnote 32
Bound drawings
As noted above, it was in 1979, when this author was preparing displays for the new Stamford Museum, that he first came across the forty-four Stukeley drawings in the rooms of the SGS. They were then bound into a single volume, and, as noted at the time, ‘sewn between stiff boards, 410 × 305mm’ (16⅛in × 12in). Much of the sewing was broken and the boards were detaching, but most drawings were loosely attached to each other and the outer covers. The individual drawings had paper strips at the gutters that allowed them to be sewn into the stiff boarded volume. The illustrations were impressive, with an interest extending far beyond the Stamford illustrations, and the author was determined to look into them more closely at some future date. This turned out to be many years later and after retirement. Sometime after 1979, at an unknown date but before 2011,Footnote 33 the volume was disbound and the drawings placed in separate archival-quality folders. This was a help towards their preservation, but it was unfortunate that the volume’s boards were discarded at this time; they could have been of help in dating its compilation. As a consequence of spreading the drawings through twelve separate archival sub-folders, where concentration on size seems to have been the determinant for order, the original order of the volume was lost. In 2015, when the author began cataloguing the drawings, many of them were still sewn together and this, together with dirt staining patterns outlining the shapes of adjacent drawings, and a sequential range of photographs taken in 1979, enabled an attempt to be made to recover the original order of the drawings. This is reflected in the subsequent numbering of the inventory. The cataloguing was a leisurely affair and considerable background research was undertaken to reveal provenance and to record as much detail as possible on the individual drawings. The detail of this allowed the Society to apply successfully to the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2016 for a grant towards the conservation of the drawings. A grant of £9,800 was awarded and conservation work was undertaken by Graeme Gardiner of Preservation Solutions, Essex. The drawings were cleaned and mounted in standard sized mounts that fitted into purpose-built standard sized reusable frames. The drawings are now kept in a special buffered case and, when not on display, stored securely.
ESTABLISHING PROVENANCE
Until recently the drawings presented a puzzle, and the SGS did not know how it had acquired them or how they fitted in with other Stukeley drawings it possesses. The oldest members of the SGS affirmed the drawings had been with the Society for the whole of their memberships and there was a belief, reinforced by the knowledge that Stukeley had donated ‘a parcel of loose prints’ to the SGS in January 1747,Footnote 34 that they might in fact have been donated by Stukeley himself. Though Stukeley was an early member of the Society, this unfortunately turned out not to be the case; the drawings were anciently bound, not in a bundle, and the latest drawing dates from 1764.
The Phillipps Collection
One of the drawings (39) has in ink on its verso ‘Phillipps MS 18983’,Footnote 35 in what looks like a nineteenth-century hand, a decisive pointer to provenance. Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart. (1792–1872)Footnote 36 was perhaps the greatest bibliophile of the nineteenth century. He was a Manchester industrialist, a man of leisure, who collected in excess of 60,000 manuscripts and books during his lifetime. He was an irascible and eccentric character and, because of this, all efforts during his lifetime and after to save his collections for the nation came to nothing. Over many years after his death the collections were gradually dispersed, mainly through Sotheby’s London saleroom,Footnote 37 the last one being as late as 1977. Fortunately, Phillipps published a catalogue of his collections in stages between 1837 and 1871 and, in the later versions, entry no. 18983 states: ‘Stukeley’s Collection of Drawings, &c, Inter alia A Portrait of his Father. large 4to. M. H. bds. ch s. xviii.’ Large quarto, though an imprecise term, fits the original Spalding album size, as do the keys in the catalogue, ‘M’ and ‘H’ denoting shelf heights of 18in and 14in. The mention of ‘a portrait of his father’ is important as drawing 36 is a sketch of Stukeley’s father, taken after his death, March 1705/6, lying in his coffin.Footnote 38 The assiduous work of A N L Munby,Footnote 39 a Phillipps scholar who spent many years scouring the nation’s auction houses and their catalogues recording the dispersal of the Phillipps collection, has made tracing the later history of items in the collection much easier. In Munby’s copy of a Sotheby’s sale of 9 June 1910, lot 761 is described:
‘761 Stukeley, Thirty-five Water-colour Drawings by William Stukeley, the antiquary
folio. xviii CentThis collection includes drawings of his father, himself and Mary and Frances Stukeley, with views of his houses and gardens at Stamford and Kentish Town, antiquities, etc.Footnote 40
Munby annotated this entry ‘18983 £3 – 4 Q’, the marginalia denoting Phillipps ms 18983, bought by ‘Bernard Quaritch Rare Books’ for £3. 4s. 0d. The extra details of the portraits of Frances and Mary, and the gardens at Stamford and Kentish Town (the Grantham drawings are unlabelled) prove conclusively that this sale catalogue entry refers to the Spalding Stukeley collection of forty-four drawings. Bernard Quaritch confirms that it bought the lot on behalf of an Ashley K Maples,Footnote 41 and Ashley K Maples (1868––1950) was honorary secretary of the SGS (1899––1930) and then its president (1930–50).
Unfortunately, there is no mention of the drawings immediately post-1910 in the Society’s accessions registers, minutes or annual reports. Ashley Maples was a collector in his own right, and it is most possible that he bought the collection personally with the intention of later donating or bequeathing it to the Society. Approaching forty years later, while listing surviving Stukeley papers for the 1950 edition of his Stukeley biography, Stuart Piggott noted that the whereabouts of those papers formerly in the collections of Sir Thomas Phillipps Bart. were not known, and he specifically mentions Phillipps ms 18983.Footnote 42 SGS was among the institutions he visited to inspect their Stukeley holdings and the crucial question is whether Phillipps ms 18983 was there then and he missed them, or they were not. At that time material in the Society’s collections was often missed by visiting scholars owing to the lack of catalogues or finding aids in the archive, but it can also be pointed out that the Stukeley album in its then binding was a fairly hefty object and pretty unmissable. Also, the then curator and secretary, Mr G W Bailey, was an artist who would be more likely than most to know about the artistic objects in his collection. On balance it would seem unlikely that the Stukeley collection of drawings SPAGS.2015.01.01–40 was in the Society before 1950. Ashley Maples died in February 1950 and bequeathed his collections to SGS, but there was immediate turmoil that mitigated against the careful receipt and cataloguing of bequests. The will was overturned and a legacy amounting to about £30,000 was denied the SGS. It seems the will had specified the SGS as ‘residuary legatees’ and this would fail in law unless the SGS was a charity, which it was not. As far as can be seen, this did not apply to objects bequeathed to the SGS by Ashley Maples, but the furore the upset caused to the SGS meant attention was diverted from the everyday jobs of accessioning and cataloguing. In the accounts the SGS holds detailing the problems the will caused,Footnote 43 there is a list covering four foolscap pages of ‘articles selected by SGS’ from Ashley Maples’ house, plus a one-page supplementary list, but nothing like the drawings are mentioned. A two-page list giving an overview of Ashley Maples library similarly contains nothing that could be interpreted as the Phillipps ms 18983 drawings. The 1950s minute books, accession registers and annual reports have also been pored over, but there is no mention anywhere of the Stukeley drawings SPAGS.2015.01.01–40. In fact, there are only odd mentions of Ashley Maples’ bequeathed items coming into the SGS’s collections at this period. Weighing up the wholly inadequate evidence, it can be stated firmly only that the drawings came into the SGS between 1910 and c 1960 (a terminus post quem based on the memories of the oldest members in the Society in 1979), but the suspicion is that they were held on to by Ashley Maples and slipped into the Society unnoticed and unrecorded soon after his death.
It will probably never be known where Sir Thomas Phillipps acquired the collection, but an analysis of the various sale house catalogues by Munby and the numbering of manuscripts in Phillipps’ Catalogus give a clue to when it was purchased. Manuscript 18983 appears in part iii of Phillipps’s catalogue, which comprises mss 15718–20000.Footnote 44 Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, records receiving the pre-publication sheets for mss 15718–17872 in May 1863,Footnote 45 but the only other clue to judging when part iii was finished is that part iv, mss 20001–23837, was completed and published by 1871. Phillipps was just over half way through compiling part iii by May 1863, and ms 18983 is three-quarters of the way through the remainder. This may suggest that ms 18983 was probably purchased after 1865. The catalogue itself contains a few inserted dates and only two entries away from ms 18983 is ms 18981 (misprinted as 18681) which states: ‘T.P. [Thomas Phillipps] Book Bills, 1866’. A little before are mss 18969 and 18970, catalogues of printed books ‘bought by T.P. at Thirlstane, 1866–7’.Footnote 46 It is therefore suggested that Sir Thomas Phillipps probably purchased ms 18983 c 1866–7.
Before then there is no evidence for the drawings’ existence, but some inferences can be made. In size and date range the drawings make up a disparate collection although connected by the strong family theme. The choice of contents seems quite deliberate and, as the date of the last drawing dates from a year before Stukeley’s death, suggests compilation was post mortem and most probably by a family member. Much of Stukeley’s estate passed to Richard Fleming, Stukeley’s son-in-law and executor, the husband of Stukeley’s daughter, Frances. She, Richard or a later member of the family are the most likely candidates for the compilation. The vast bulk of Stukeley’s papers passed to the St John family, through the marriage in 1788 of Richard Fleming’s daughter, Frances, to the Reverend John Francis Seymour St John, prebendary of Worcester Cathedral. The St Johns retained the papers until the 1920s and 1930s, when they were sold at auction. Phillipps ms 18983 must somehow have become separated from the main bulk of the St John Stukeley papers at some time in or before the mid-1860s when it was purchased by Sir Thomas Phillipps.
CONCLUSION
The Spalding drawings are a unique collection with an involved but traceable history. For a century they disappeared from view and eluded the inspection of scholars and, although they have been safely housed and cared for during the last seventy years, their full value and contextual importance was not fully appreciated. Over the last ten or so years they have been accessed more, but generally this has been restricted to Lincolnshire researchers.Footnote 47 With the full realisation of their importance, the SGS has determined to make their existence more widely known. The collection has a double value: that of being a unique personal and family album; and the light it throws on Stukeley’s houses and gardens, particularly the evolution of his thoughts on garden design. Together with complementary drawings in the Bodleian, they are an undoubted treasure trove.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author should like to acknowledge the debt owed to a number of people in the preparation of this paper. First of all, the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society for allowing access to the drawings and allowing their publication. The author should particularly like to thank officers and members there: Professor Michael Chisholm, Diana and Michael Honeybone, Tom Grimes and Nick Casswell. Alice Ford-Smith, archivist at Bernard Quaritch Rare Books, identified the 1910 sale at which the drawings were sold; Peter Bower and Jean Stirk of the British Association of Paper Historians led the author on an excursion into the previously unknown – to him – field of watermarks; Tim Halliday helped disentangle the claimed connection between Stukeley and Hugh de Stivecle. The author should like to offer special thanks to his wife, Dianne, for her patience in reading the many revisions of the draft of this paper.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003581520000141.
ABBREVIATIONS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations
- Bodl
Bodleian Library, Oxford
- LRS
Lincoln Record Society
- SGS
Spalding Gentlemen’s Society
- SPAGS
Prefix to SGS inventory numbers
Bibliography
Primary sources
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.c.538
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.d.719/18
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.e.121
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.e.126
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.e.138
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.e.196
Bodl, ms Eng.misc.e.667/5
Bodl, Gough Maps 16
Bodl, Gough Maps 230
Bodl, mss Phillipps-Munby.d.18
