SS PETER AND PAUL. Quite on its own outside the village. Architecturally less important than for its monuments. The W tower is not high. It is of flint and has diagonal buttresses. The rest of the church is cement-rendered, the treatment dating probably from the time when James Wyatt and Sir Jeffry Wyatville, busy with the rebuilding of Ashridge, rebuilt the S aisle and porch in 1812 and added the S chancel chapel in 1819. The S arcade is of 1876, the N arcade, with octagonal piers and hollow chamfered arches, as well as the tower, C15. - SCREEN. Much renewed. - BENCHES. Some with poppyheads. - STAINED GLASS. Two Kempe windows of 1895 at the SW end. - PLATE. Mid C17 Chalice; Flagon, 1635; Paten, 1781. - MONUMENTS. An exceptionally full and varied series, especially important for the very progressive and Mediterranean style of those of the later C17 (see also Nettleden). Earlier only Elizabeth Dutton d. 1611, the usual epitaph type with kneeling figure, removed to Gaddesden from St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, when that church was rebuilt in the C18. - Elizabeth Countess of Bridgewater d. 1663, large classical monument without figures except for two small mournful putti. - Elizabeth Viscountess Brackley d. 1669, epitaph with an inscription in a delightfully scrolly writing-master’s script. - Henry Stanley d. 1670 aet. 14, epitaph with two putti. - Dr H. Stanley d. 1670, stately urn on pedestal.* - Third Earl of Bridgewater d. 1701, good epitaph. - Jane Countess of Bridgewater d. 1716, similar to the monument of 1663. Ann Norton d. 1796, by Ashton, Grecian, with mourning female figure. - John William, seventh Earl of Bridgewater, d. 1823, a masterpiece of Westmacott, with a tondo with a labourer, his wife, and child, a dog and tools and wheat-ears, very Raphaelesque. - Francis Henry, eighth Earl of Bridgewater, d. 1829, with seated female. An inscription notes specially that ‘He bequeathed £8,000 as a reward for literary men for writing essays to prove the benevolence of God as displayed in the Works of the Creation.’
* In the floor of the Vestry memorial to the infant son of Dr Stanley with an inscription which runs as follows :
TIBI GNATE USO
LUCIS BREVI FUSO
CITO QUE HIC CONCLUSO
(MISERO ME DELUSO)
HOC MEMORIALE
BREVE ET CORDIALE
CARMEN TRIPEDALE
SAXULUMQUE QUALE
CURTO NON STET MALE
LONGUM NISI NIHIL VALE
Google translate reckons it reads - You run of techniques/Light soon routing/Fast and this concluded/ (Poor me, I cheated)/This is brief and heartfelt/English-foot/Saxulumque quality/Cut has not stood wrong/Long unless it is useless - but I'm not so sure.
Little Gaddesden. He who takes his car or his bus or his legs and comes to Little Gaddesden will go back satisfied, and should he come in rhododendron time he can be guaranteed a perfect day. For here is Ashridge, with the stately tower of a house like a little walled city rising from the loveliest garden in Hertfordshire, a superb piece of England with the rhododendrons in their glory. Once a centre for political training in citizenship, the house has now become a college devoted to management education and development; it is an educational charity set up in memory of Bonar Law (who was Prime Minister in 1922).
The great house, with the park stretched in front of it for miles, full of marvellous oaks and beeches, with the terraces and the gardens and the impressive avenues, stands where stood in ages past a monastery of 20 Bonhommes who came from France in Norman days. Their monastery became a royal home for the children of Henry VIII; where we walk in gardens unsurpassed for beauty came Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and the great Elizabeth I. In these wonderful gardens played these three sovereigns of England.
Early in the 17th century Ashridge became the home of the Egertons, the Earls and Dukes of Bridgewater, famous in history as one of our great families, but chiefly because the last duke, eccentric man, had one wise idea - that of developing the resources of his coal mines by building a canal, thus becoming known to history as the founder of inland navigation in this country. He lived at Worsley in Lancashire and let his house here fall to ruins; but in the family vault of the village church he lies, this man with whom a dukedom died but whose work lives on.
The house was built up again on the eve of Waterloo by his cousin the seventh earl, and it is not unworthy of its great foundation, though it is the work of the restorer-destroyer Wyatt, at whose door lie so many architectural sins in our churches. It has a magnificent front of about 1000 feet from tower to tower, and one of the noblest halls built in its century, nearly 100 feet high, with a great stone staircase, splendid windows, and nine statues looking down from its walls, most of them benefactors of the monks, all sculptured by Richard Westmacott, the fashionable sculptor of the day. They stand in niches round the walls, an impressive company with five royalties among them: Edward Earl of Cornwall, founder of the monastery, his father and his mother; the Black Prince who came over here from his Berkhamsted manor and remembered the monks as he lay dying; and Edward VI who lived here with his sisters. The other four statues are of St Benedict, the first rector of Ashridge (Richard Watford), Bishop Cantelupe of Hereford, and one of the monks.
The house that Wyatt built has been transformed into a college, but it has all been finely done, and the stateliness of this place, the charm of its beautiful little chapel, is still unspoiled. The chapel is a rare delight, with elegant panelled benches, stained windows, and a delicately carved roof borne on wall-piers crowned with noble fan vaulting. Down below we walk in the vaults that have been here all the time, under the stone roof where the old monks walked, where the wines were kept in the days of the Tudors and the Dukes. The chapel adds a spire to the great towers and turrets which make the house look like a small walled city.
And all about it is one of the loveliest gardens in the loveliest garden country in the world. Was ever such a terrace, such living walls of box, such trimmed yews in living urns, such laburnum canopies, such cedars, oaks, and firs, such masses of old fashioned flowers? We walk down a grass lane with rhododendrons piled like houses on either side, red and mauve, yellow and white. Was ever such a dazzling mass of colour? And beyond it all stretch three avenues lined with Wellingtonias; we have not seen so many of these great pines in any garden; we feel that Kipling must have seen them when he wrote:
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views
Of borders, beds, and shrubberies, and lawns and avenues.
These three avenues run, we imagine, for a half mile, and at the bottom of one of them we came to a ring of trees. In the centre of this ring we found a kind of altar with an open book carved on it, on which we read that God is a spirit and that Blessed are the pure in heart. We walk on and on and come to another ring, the old monks’ garden with arches cut through its circular hedge, leading us back to the lawns again.
One of the great avenues in the park, lined with beeches and nearly a mile long, frames at one end the tower of Ashridge House and at the other a slender column to the canal-making duke. Facing the village entrance to the park is a marble fountain with a tall cross on top of it, and behind it a round stone seat inscribed to the memory of Lady Marian Alford, who died in 1888 at Ashridge, her son, the second Earl Brownlow, having inherited it from his grandfather after the House of Lords had been called in to settle his claim. No mean artist herself, Lady Marian was a patron of art, and our Royal School of Art Needlework grew up at Kensington under her influence. One who knew her said that she was a perfect grand dame, not able to harbour an ignoble thought, incapable of a small action. It was she who, when somebody protested to her about burning the candle at both ends, said that surely that was the way to make both ends meet. Here she was much beloved, and she built the home for 11 poor widows still known as the Bede Houses.
Not far off is an interesting 16th-century manor house in which are two painted panels of Queen Elizabeth I, one showing her as a child walking in Ashridge Park with her attendants, the other showing her at the moment of her summons to ride from Ashridge to the Tower at the command of her sister Mary. The same little house which in her day stood opposite the north-east entrance to the park is there still, a black-and-white medieval home with an overhanging storey behind a row of apple trees. It keeps its 15th-century hall roof of open timbers, and is still called John of Gaddesden’s House, after the first Englishman to become Court Physician.
A pathway leads us by Lady Marian’s Bede Houses, through the fields, to the medieval church. It stands among cedars, flowers, and trimmed yews. The tower and the nave arcades are 15th century. Here in this small place we found ourselves back among the people of the great house long ago. There is a girl kneeling at prayer between stone pillars, a little widow of 16 who died in Shakespeare’s day, granddaughter of Thomas Egerton, trusted minister of Queen Elizabeth I and devoted friend of Essex. Here lies her father with many other Egertons, including John, the second earl, who played the elder brother in Milton’s Camus when it was first acted under his father’s patronage at Ludlow Castle; and on down to the last Duke of Bridgewater who gave us our first canal. Among their memorials is a beautiful relief of a shepherd family with their little sleeping child. The timbers of the nave roof are 500 years old, and there is a fine old chest with great strappings of iron. The south aisle and porch were rebuilt in 1812 by James Wyatt, the rebuilder of Ashridge, and the south chapel added in 1819. There was much renovation in 1876. Some of the seating is 17th century.
Little in name but great in achievement and interest is this village, and all round it are magnificent beech woods and commons high with bracken, great oaks, walnuts, and wild cherries, now part of our National Trust. It is a veritable sanctuary of wild life and wild beauty.
Francis Egerton, last Duke of Bridgewater, was the ugly duckling of his family. Born in 1736, he was so puny and slow of mental development that, as his brothers died, it was proposed to secure the succession to a distant heir, but nothing was done and he became duke at 12, lived neglected for the next five years, and then was led through Europe by a tutor who stirred his mind and made a man of him.
Returning to England, he owned and rode racehorses and became engaged to one of the beautiful Miss Gunnings, then the widowed Duchess of Hamilton. As she would not consent to hold aloof from her sister Lady Coventry, whose life the duke considered scandalous, he broke off the match, and from that time forth would not even have a woman as a servant in his house.
Driven in upon himself, he turned his thoughts to the improvement of communications with his rich coalfield at Worsley. The idea of a canal was his own, but his plan was to build a succession of locks down to the Irwell, and another flight of locks up the opposite bank, and so across country.
Fortunately he was introduced to James Brindley, who persuaded him to amend his scheme, to build an aqueduct across the river and make the canal at one level throughout. Experts ridiculed the project as a madman’s illusion. To send heavy barges and even ships across a bridge spanning a river with craft already upon it, certainly seemed a startling proposition in an age that knew nothing of inland navigation by artificial methods; such a thing as a canal independent of river supply had not yet been contemplated.
But Bridgewater went on. It was a strange combination, the rich and eccentric nobleman and the engineer who had to do his calculations in his head and was never sure whether navigation should be spelled navacion or novogation. But they blended perfectly, and, thanks to Brindley’s unflagging fertility of resource, they built their canal with its aqueduct and its miles of waterway in the heart of the coalfield itself. Worsley and Manchester were linked by water for a distance of nearly ten miles and in July 1761 the first barge-load of coal made its way along the canal at half the former cost. A more ambitious enterprise followed, the making of a canal from Longton Bridge to connect Manchester and Liverpool. Fierce opposition had to be met, and immense difficulties overcome. There were times when the duke’s steward had to borrow £5 from tenants for wages, and when nobody would discount a £500 bill bearing his signature. But he went on undaunted, brought the work to a successful conclusion, and, having laid out £220,000 on his two canals, found himself master of an income of £80,000, a fitting reward of his courage and enterprise.
Lancashire owed him much for its industrial prosperity, but he felt that he owed still more to his country, and at a moment of national danger he gave £100,000 to a patriotic fund. He left a splendid collection of pictures and some ancient sculptures. The marbles he had bought in Italy during his youth, and they were found at his death unopened in the packing-cases in which they had been brought to England more than fifty years before. We must presume that in his energetic life he had no time for such enjoyments. He died in London in March 1803 and the dukedom died with him.
The great house, with the park stretched in front of it for miles, full of marvellous oaks and beeches, with the terraces and the gardens and the impressive avenues, stands where stood in ages past a monastery of 20 Bonhommes who came from France in Norman days. Their monastery became a royal home for the children of Henry VIII; where we walk in gardens unsurpassed for beauty came Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and the great Elizabeth I. In these wonderful gardens played these three sovereigns of England.
Early in the 17th century Ashridge became the home of the Egertons, the Earls and Dukes of Bridgewater, famous in history as one of our great families, but chiefly because the last duke, eccentric man, had one wise idea - that of developing the resources of his coal mines by building a canal, thus becoming known to history as the founder of inland navigation in this country. He lived at Worsley in Lancashire and let his house here fall to ruins; but in the family vault of the village church he lies, this man with whom a dukedom died but whose work lives on.
The house was built up again on the eve of Waterloo by his cousin the seventh earl, and it is not unworthy of its great foundation, though it is the work of the restorer-destroyer Wyatt, at whose door lie so many architectural sins in our churches. It has a magnificent front of about 1000 feet from tower to tower, and one of the noblest halls built in its century, nearly 100 feet high, with a great stone staircase, splendid windows, and nine statues looking down from its walls, most of them benefactors of the monks, all sculptured by Richard Westmacott, the fashionable sculptor of the day. They stand in niches round the walls, an impressive company with five royalties among them: Edward Earl of Cornwall, founder of the monastery, his father and his mother; the Black Prince who came over here from his Berkhamsted manor and remembered the monks as he lay dying; and Edward VI who lived here with his sisters. The other four statues are of St Benedict, the first rector of Ashridge (Richard Watford), Bishop Cantelupe of Hereford, and one of the monks.
The house that Wyatt built has been transformed into a college, but it has all been finely done, and the stateliness of this place, the charm of its beautiful little chapel, is still unspoiled. The chapel is a rare delight, with elegant panelled benches, stained windows, and a delicately carved roof borne on wall-piers crowned with noble fan vaulting. Down below we walk in the vaults that have been here all the time, under the stone roof where the old monks walked, where the wines were kept in the days of the Tudors and the Dukes. The chapel adds a spire to the great towers and turrets which make the house look like a small walled city.
And all about it is one of the loveliest gardens in the loveliest garden country in the world. Was ever such a terrace, such living walls of box, such trimmed yews in living urns, such laburnum canopies, such cedars, oaks, and firs, such masses of old fashioned flowers? We walk down a grass lane with rhododendrons piled like houses on either side, red and mauve, yellow and white. Was ever such a dazzling mass of colour? And beyond it all stretch three avenues lined with Wellingtonias; we have not seen so many of these great pines in any garden; we feel that Kipling must have seen them when he wrote:
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views
Of borders, beds, and shrubberies, and lawns and avenues.
These three avenues run, we imagine, for a half mile, and at the bottom of one of them we came to a ring of trees. In the centre of this ring we found a kind of altar with an open book carved on it, on which we read that God is a spirit and that Blessed are the pure in heart. We walk on and on and come to another ring, the old monks’ garden with arches cut through its circular hedge, leading us back to the lawns again.
One of the great avenues in the park, lined with beeches and nearly a mile long, frames at one end the tower of Ashridge House and at the other a slender column to the canal-making duke. Facing the village entrance to the park is a marble fountain with a tall cross on top of it, and behind it a round stone seat inscribed to the memory of Lady Marian Alford, who died in 1888 at Ashridge, her son, the second Earl Brownlow, having inherited it from his grandfather after the House of Lords had been called in to settle his claim. No mean artist herself, Lady Marian was a patron of art, and our Royal School of Art Needlework grew up at Kensington under her influence. One who knew her said that she was a perfect grand dame, not able to harbour an ignoble thought, incapable of a small action. It was she who, when somebody protested to her about burning the candle at both ends, said that surely that was the way to make both ends meet. Here she was much beloved, and she built the home for 11 poor widows still known as the Bede Houses.
Not far off is an interesting 16th-century manor house in which are two painted panels of Queen Elizabeth I, one showing her as a child walking in Ashridge Park with her attendants, the other showing her at the moment of her summons to ride from Ashridge to the Tower at the command of her sister Mary. The same little house which in her day stood opposite the north-east entrance to the park is there still, a black-and-white medieval home with an overhanging storey behind a row of apple trees. It keeps its 15th-century hall roof of open timbers, and is still called John of Gaddesden’s House, after the first Englishman to become Court Physician.
A pathway leads us by Lady Marian’s Bede Houses, through the fields, to the medieval church. It stands among cedars, flowers, and trimmed yews. The tower and the nave arcades are 15th century. Here in this small place we found ourselves back among the people of the great house long ago. There is a girl kneeling at prayer between stone pillars, a little widow of 16 who died in Shakespeare’s day, granddaughter of Thomas Egerton, trusted minister of Queen Elizabeth I and devoted friend of Essex. Here lies her father with many other Egertons, including John, the second earl, who played the elder brother in Milton’s Camus when it was first acted under his father’s patronage at Ludlow Castle; and on down to the last Duke of Bridgewater who gave us our first canal. Among their memorials is a beautiful relief of a shepherd family with their little sleeping child. The timbers of the nave roof are 500 years old, and there is a fine old chest with great strappings of iron. The south aisle and porch were rebuilt in 1812 by James Wyatt, the rebuilder of Ashridge, and the south chapel added in 1819. There was much renovation in 1876. Some of the seating is 17th century.
Little in name but great in achievement and interest is this village, and all round it are magnificent beech woods and commons high with bracken, great oaks, walnuts, and wild cherries, now part of our National Trust. It is a veritable sanctuary of wild life and wild beauty.
Francis Egerton, last Duke of Bridgewater, was the ugly duckling of his family. Born in 1736, he was so puny and slow of mental development that, as his brothers died, it was proposed to secure the succession to a distant heir, but nothing was done and he became duke at 12, lived neglected for the next five years, and then was led through Europe by a tutor who stirred his mind and made a man of him.
Returning to England, he owned and rode racehorses and became engaged to one of the beautiful Miss Gunnings, then the widowed Duchess of Hamilton. As she would not consent to hold aloof from her sister Lady Coventry, whose life the duke considered scandalous, he broke off the match, and from that time forth would not even have a woman as a servant in his house.
Driven in upon himself, he turned his thoughts to the improvement of communications with his rich coalfield at Worsley. The idea of a canal was his own, but his plan was to build a succession of locks down to the Irwell, and another flight of locks up the opposite bank, and so across country.
Fortunately he was introduced to James Brindley, who persuaded him to amend his scheme, to build an aqueduct across the river and make the canal at one level throughout. Experts ridiculed the project as a madman’s illusion. To send heavy barges and even ships across a bridge spanning a river with craft already upon it, certainly seemed a startling proposition in an age that knew nothing of inland navigation by artificial methods; such a thing as a canal independent of river supply had not yet been contemplated.
But Bridgewater went on. It was a strange combination, the rich and eccentric nobleman and the engineer who had to do his calculations in his head and was never sure whether navigation should be spelled navacion or novogation. But they blended perfectly, and, thanks to Brindley’s unflagging fertility of resource, they built their canal with its aqueduct and its miles of waterway in the heart of the coalfield itself. Worsley and Manchester were linked by water for a distance of nearly ten miles and in July 1761 the first barge-load of coal made its way along the canal at half the former cost. A more ambitious enterprise followed, the making of a canal from Longton Bridge to connect Manchester and Liverpool. Fierce opposition had to be met, and immense difficulties overcome. There were times when the duke’s steward had to borrow £5 from tenants for wages, and when nobody would discount a £500 bill bearing his signature. But he went on undaunted, brought the work to a successful conclusion, and, having laid out £220,000 on his two canals, found himself master of an income of £80,000, a fitting reward of his courage and enterprise.
Lancashire owed him much for its industrial prosperity, but he felt that he owed still more to his country, and at a moment of national danger he gave £100,000 to a patriotic fund. He left a splendid collection of pictures and some ancient sculptures. The marbles he had bought in Italy during his youth, and they were found at his death unopened in the packing-cases in which they had been brought to England more than fifty years before. We must presume that in his energetic life he had no time for such enjoyments. He died in London in March 1803 and the dukedom died with him.
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