16 ★ FTWeekend 9 November/10 November 2019House Home
T
his month work starts to
revive one of thejewels in
London’s crown. Marble
Hill in Twickenham is an
early 18th-century
Georgian masterpiece, built for the
Prince of Wales’s mistress, Henrietta
Howard. The house, overlooking the
Thames, was begun in 1724 and
finished by 1729. She did not live in
it full-time until the mid-1730s when
she was in her late forties and her
services at court were no longer so
desirable. Meanwhile it was a
playground for nearby talent, stars
whose company I would dearly love
to have kept.
The poet Alexander Pope had a
famous villa just along the river.
Another poet, John Gay, author of
The Beggar’s Opera, resided nearby.
The satirical genius Jonathan Swift,
author ofGulliver’s Travels, visited
often and even spoke of marrying
Henrietta, until she put him down in
1727, writing that she would prefer
them to be “dumb as well as deaf
forever”than to discuss the topic again.
She had been “a slave”, she told him,
for 20 years to her atrocious husband
Lord Suffolk, which had put her off
marriage. The artist and designer
William Kent, the inimitable
“Kentino”, was another frequent
visitor, as was Pope’s beloved Great
Dane, Bounce, who was almost as tall
as the hunchbacked poet.
Marble Hill cost about £12,000,
largely paid by Henrietta’s royal lover
who had set up a trust fund forher,
worth at least £11,500. It disobeyed the
principles of modern fund
managementby being largely in one
stock: the South Sea Company.
Henrietta survived the company’s
eventual crash and even remarried to a
Yorkshireman in 1735, living to78.
English Heritageis now responsible for
Marble Hill and intends to make it
accessible to us all. Beside work on the
house and its fascinating interior,it is
about to replant and reshape thegarden which runs down to the
Thames. National Lottery funds have
pledged £4.1m and the rest of the
£1.9m budget is to be raised by appeal.
Here is why. In 1727 Henrietta’s royal
lover became King George II. Swift,
recently rebuffed by her, wrote a poetic
dialogue between nearby Richmond,
the Queen’s retreat, and Marble Hill,
the mistress’s Palladianpetite maison.
In it, the two houses wittily fear for
their future. Marble Hill recalls how in
Henrietta’s absence Swift used to raid
her wine cellar andsteal her garden’s
artichokes. Itwarns that worse may
happen if it is sold: “Some South Sea
broker from the City/ Will purchase
me, the more’s the pity;/ Lay all my
fine plantations waste,/ To fit them to
his vulgar taste”. In 1727, those brokers
had no FT Weekend to shape their
style.Now that they do, some ught tooknock off English Heritage’s appeal and
dispel Swift’s forebodings.
Proposals for change in the
landscape always attract controversy,
especially in locally-loved
Twickenham. Marble Hill’s grounds
include rugby and cricket pitches, all to
be enhanced by English Heritage. The
restoration of the garden will lead to a
net gain of 342trees. Nonetheless, a
counter-campaign, Love Marble Hill,
has been running. English Heritage has
patiently addressed it in study days
and presentations, justifying all it
intends to do. The arguments have led
to important discoveries.
In 1999, in her admirable book
Alexander Pope: The Poet and The
Landscape, Mavis Batey, then president
of the Garden History Society, linked a
detailed plan for the gardens of Marble
Hill, from around 1724, to the poetPoetry emotion
Pope himself. Her main argument was
a similarity between twiddles in the
garden plan and twiddles found among
Pope’s notes on pages of his translation
of Homer’sOdyssey, in progress at the
time. I wrote to the redoubtable lady,
questioning her ingenuity, as she quite
often questioned the competence of my
FT columns. She replied crisply that
she was sure she was right and that
further evidence would prove it.
Wonderfully, it now has.
In the run-up to the new revival,
Megan Leyland of English Heritage
returned to the pages of Pope’sOdyssey,
now in the British Library. In my
schooldays I used to sketch gardens on
notepaper during lessons in ancient
history: the history bored me, but since
then has been my life’s work.
Translating Homer, Pope did much the
same, doodling bits of garden on the
back of his pages. Just before the pages
with the twiddles that Batey had
emphasised, Leyland found a sketch
with the words “Plum Bush” in Pope’s
handwriting.That is the name of the
open field beside Marble Hill. The great
lady has been vindicated. The twiddles
belong with Marble Hill and the plan of1724, repeating them, is Pope’s own
work. It shows a garden in great detail,
complete with flowery beds on its main
axis, a melon garden beside the house
and serpentine paths winding
fashionably through shrubs and
woodland. It picks up comments in
letters by Pope and others at the time.
With John Watkins of English
Heritage I visited the little grotto in one
side of Marble Hill’s garden. Pope’s
grotto nearby was famous and this
smaller one may well go back to his
instigation. Pope’s detailed plan was
worked over by another great
landscaper, Charles Bridgeman, in the
1720s. It stands, nonetheless, as a direct
witness to the poet’s garden taste and
activity, one that literary studies of him
had not fully appreciated.
English Heritage’s restoration will
not return to Pope’s proposal: parts of it
probably remained on paper only. A
second survey survives, showing
avenues, a horseshoe-shaped lawn and
so forth. In keen disputes, supporters
of Love Marble Hill claimed that this
plan too was only a paper proposal.
They scored a bull’s-eye by finding
evidence to date it. It was drawn on the
back of a sketched map of Scotland
which, they showed, waspublished in- It was drawn by a surveyor linked
to Marble Hill’s trustees. It makes the
garden-plan drawn on the back of it a
work of that late period. Nonetheless,
English Heritage is right to adopt its
details. It was drawnas a survey of a
garden that already existed, as remarks
in letters confirm. Unlike Pope’s plan, it
was not a prospectus.
In the house a portrait of Henrietta
hints at her charm and self-assurance. I
remain mentally married to another
Twickenham visitor, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, wit, traveller and
unsurpassed letter writer. In 1719 she
spent a year in Twickenham and
rebuffed the admiring Pope. If she ever
rebuffs me, I will transfer to Henrietta,
picturing us in bed in her pillared
Marble Hill bedroom, reading print
copies of FT Weekend nd looking outa
down avenues replanted by English
Heritage. “I know the thing that’s most
uncommon”, Pope wrote of her, “(Envy
be silent and attend!)/ I know a
reasonable Woman/ Handsome and
witty, yet a friend.” What better is
there? Her house and home deserve
every pound being requested. As Pope
remarks, she was also rather deaf.
Reading the FT to each other over
breakfast, we would make a well-
matched couple.
The south front of Marble Hill —Nigel Corrie/Historic EnglandRobin Lane Fox
On gardens
The restoration of Marble Hill
revives the part the Twickenham
house and garden played in
18th-century lives and loves
NOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20196/ - 17:29 User:elizabeth.robinson Page Name:RES16, Part,Page,Edition:REU, 16, 1