¹ Cf., e.g., Hussey, Christopher, English Country Houses: Early Georgian (2nd edn., London, 1965), 39 ff.Google Scholar; and Beard, Geoffrey, Craftsmen and Interior Decoration in England (Edinburgh, 1981), 101.Google ScholarColvin, H M., Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (London, 1978), 520Google Scholar, recorded internal alterations carried out in 1763-5 by Timothy Lightoler, but this hardly dented the overall impression of Smith's single authorship.

² Most of the Leigh papers relating to the building of Stoneleigh are now kept in the Record Office at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon (hereafter S.B.T.). Though they are very copious, there are many gaps; no separate building book was kept and the accounts mix payments to builders and craftsmen with those to other tradesmen, normally without identification. Account books kept by different agents sometimes overlap, so that some payments are recorded more than once. The duplication and incompleteness make it impossible to work out more than a rough guess at how much some stages of the building cost.

³ Visitors should not be confused by the neo-Norman passage built within the transept, which, partly because it incorporates genuine Norman capitals, is deceptively convincing.

⁴ The small ground-floor arches on the north front are eighteenth-century insertions.

⁵ S.B.T., DR/18/31/447, 10 May 1720.

⁶ The estimate is kept at Stoneleigh. Its full text runs:

‘An Estimate to build the front of a House for the Right Honble ye Lord Leigh at Stonely according o t a draught given in p F. Smith. The front about 170 Feet long to the Outside of the Pilasters. The Garden Front to be returned about 14 Foot, the said Front to be built with such Breaks, Pilasters, Rusticks, Window Stuff, Door Case, Fanos, Cor-nish, Plint and Rails & Bannister as the draught directs. The first Story from the level of the Ground to the top of the Hall Floor 11 Foot or thereabours.

The hall and Chamber story to be 13 Foot Cleareth. The Upper Story to be 10 Foot. The Walls of the Cellar Story to be of three foot two inches thick. The Wall ofthe Hall Story to be 2 foot 9 inches thick up to the Cornish. All the outside building to be done with New Stone, my Lord to get the stone and bring it to the place. The inside to be built with the stone of the old Building. For to build the outside & inside & All the above said front, Walls according to the lengths as above and as with such Breaks as the Draught directs for the sum of 545 Li.

If yr Lship please to build it but two Stories high t i will be done for Li 463.

My Lord to find all Materials & to bring them convenient to the Building, to find all Scaffolding, Ladders, Tressells, Tackle, Ropes, & to pull done the old building and to dig the foundations ’

⁷ See below, p. 275.

⁸ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/38. The agreement gives dimensions and specifies parpen walls for the staircase, but for other details refers to Smith's draught (now lost). Though the building was to be finished by June, the second half of the payment was only due in September.

⁹ At Ombersley, when the main building work was finished, Smith received ‘by my Master's orders’ £100 ‘over and above the agreement’. See An Account of What is Disbursed in Building a New House at Ombersley for my Master Samuel Sandys Esq. p me Thomas Cooke (kept at the Hereford and Worcester County Record Office, St Helen's, Worcester), p. 62, 4 Apr. 1727. Smith's estimate for Ombersley is also at St Helen's.

¹⁰ S.B.T., DR/i8/3i/447.

¹¹ History, Victoria County, Warwickshire, vi (Oxford, 1951), 232.Google Scholar

¹² See below, pp. 274-5.

¹³ William Thornton's Beningborough (North Yorks.)) finished in 1716, is similarly proportioned but less magisterially dominant than either Stoneleigh or Wentworth.

¹⁴ Downes, Kerry, English Baroque Architecture (London, 1966), 95,Google Scholar observes that Stoneleigh ‘lacks the variety and climax of the great houses’.

¹⁵ It is distinguished, therefore, from houses with a continuous cornice below the attic, which, to judge numerically, Smith apparently came to prefer.

¹⁶ See Godber, Joyce (ed.), The Travel Journals of Philip Yorke, Bedfordshire Hist. Soc, 47 (1968), 142.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The plan is in a portfolio kept at Stoneleigh: see below, note 49.

¹⁸ S.B.T., DR/18/3 /47/55/8.

¹⁹ Letter quoted in Stoneleigh Abbey Guide (Jarrold Colour Publications, 1984), 3f.Google Scholar

²⁰ S.B.T., DR/18/4/39; DR/18/31/724.

²¹ Rossi, Domenico de, Studio d'Architettura, Civile, 3 vols. (Rome, 1702-1721), 1, pls. 65, 87, 89.Google Scholar

²² Archer's authorship, still incompletely documented, is now generally accepted. It is possible that he had introduced this order to the interior of Heythrop, which was all lost in the fire of 1831; its exterior still vividly shows the marks of Rossi's influence. Borrominesque capitals are also found in the south-west of England where the earliest dated examples are at Crowcombe Court, Somerset, (1735) by Smith's former pupil, Nathaniel Ireson; others appear in work by John and William Bastard. See Oswald, Arthur, Country Houses of Dorset (2nd edn., London, 1959), 32Google Scholar.

²³ The pilasters at the foot of the staircase hall at Stoneleigh have an apparently unique set of capitals, with oddly attenuated, not to say weedy, acanthus foliage (pl. XXXVIIc).

²⁴ See above, note 9. In this book all the payments are recorded item by item and craftsmen by craftsmen, generally in the form ‘to Mr So-and-so for the use of Mr Smith’—a formula used to designate jobs included within the contract and hence to be set against what was due for the overall estimated charge.

²⁵ S.B.T., DR/18/1/814, 814a. Eborall's younger brother George worked at Stoneleigh in the 1740s, so we cannot be quite certain who owned the bond, but it is likely that it represents a debt due for work done some time previously. Smith himself on occasion lent money to his clients, but it is most unlikely that Lord Leigh would have borrowed $260 from a craftsman.

²⁶ This was in commemoration of a visit in 1858 when in fact she and Prince Albert slept on the first floor in a suite specially decorated for the occasion in a generally Louis XVI style.

²⁷ One slight niggle must here be put to rest: in 1763 Timothy Lightoler (on whom see below, 274ff.) included among instructions to the carpenter Thomas Stokes that he should ‘get up the Brageting in the Best Stairs’ (S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/51). ‘Braggeting' is a mysterious word unacknowledged in the O.E.D. except as an obsolete form of ‘bracket’. It certainly had specialist technical uses in the eighteenth century: Smith on one occasion refers to braggeting on the nosing of the stairs and must mean what Abraham Swan in The British Architect (London, 1747), 7,Google Scholar does indeed call a bracket: the carving round an S-shaped scroll which was standard form, often as at Stoneleigh concealing the ends of the soffit moulding. William Earle, who made the great staircase at Delbury, Shropshire in 1753, presumably means something of this kind when he charges for ‘working all the mouldings and stringboards and braggets’ even though this staircase has no ‘brackets’ of the familiar kind (building accounts at Delbury; copy in Shropshire County Record Office, Shrewsbury). But Earle also charges for so many feet of ‘braget-ting to all the plaster cornice’ and so does George Eborall in the chapel at Stoneleigh (S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/55/3): they must mean the wooden armature for the plasterer to work on. Lightoler's directions go on in the same sentence to require ‘the whole to have proper grounds for finishing the plaster to’. So it seems certain that he is talking throughout of preparing the walls for plaster decoration that we can prove was not done until the 1760s. For forty years Smith's noble staircase climbed among bare walls to an equally bare upper storey.

²⁸ The note is attached to the index of his portfolio of drawings: see below, note 49.

²⁹ See above, note 27.

³⁰ S.B.T., DR/18/5/2006, 2178.

³¹ Lady Leigh's settling of her husband's debts in 1738 (S.B.T., DR/18/1/81 4 and 814a) includes £43.11s. 3d. out of a rather larger sum claimed by one William Hiornes, an apparently illiterate plumber and glazier who cannot therefore be the capable mason/architect who with his brother eventually succeeded to the Smith practice in Warwick and to principal responsibility for Stoneleigh. Hiorn in one of its variant spellings was a common name among the Warwickshire building trades: the overlapping of names provides many teasers in interpreting the Stoneleigh accounts, especially since the agents are not consistent in their spelling. Thus there is once a Thomas Blakesley who may or may not have been Thomas Blockley the locksmith (who once appears as Blackley in William Smith's bank ledger and as Blakeley in the Earl of Aylesford's); ‘Mr Wright’ was more often one of the Stoneleigh agents than the stuccoist of the chapel. And there are of course numerous Smiths. Lady Leigh's account includes £77 paid to the unrelated John Smith (a Warwick mason who was evidently employed on many estate works) and £75 for building a house at Hunningham to ‘Mr Smith the carpenter’ who may or may not be the same as Richard Smith who lived on the estate or Richard Smith who made my Lord's coffin for £11. 5s.; any of them may have been William Smith's younger brother who did practise as a carpenter. And when in 1741 Richard Smith, who was also ‘Mr Smith the joiner’ was paid £44. us. li'Ad. for ‘work done for Lady Leigh in the chapel, was it at Stoneleigh or at Guy's Cliffe, where the dowager went to live?

³² Or £334 if he is also Thomas Blakesley: see above, note 31.

³³ Thomas, son of the distinguished Warwick smith Nicholas Paris, crops up now and again, once in 1738 for making rails and pilasters (S.B.T., DR/18/5(1738)), but his payments and those to his brother William are mostly very small and mostly for repairs and cleaning.

³⁴ A third might be the elegant Doric conservatory near the north-east corner of the house, whose in large arched windows are entirely in the Smith tradition; but that is unlikely to have been built before the proposal in the portfolio (see below, p. 275) to make a symmetrical south front, which the conservatory would have half-hidden; and it may be compared with the Hiorn design for a conservatory at n i Gopsall (R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection, London, K. 10/14/10).

³⁵ S.B.T., DR/I8/3/47/55/6; DR/18/31 / 204,457,458.

³⁶ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/51/22; DR/18/31/ 203.

³⁷ See William Smith's ‘Acct. of the Workmen's Bills’ 12 Jan. 1744/5: S.B.T., DR/18/3/ 47/55/3. Eborall's entry reads: ‘Geo: Eboralls bill for Materials & work done before y^e Chapell was begun.’ This cannot mean before any chapel was begun; for Eborall's itemized bill makes plain that he was working in an existing room (see above, note 27). So we should read ‘before work on the chapel was begun’.

³⁸ See Stokes's weekly account of work done in 1763-4: S.B.T., DR/18/31/206.

³⁹ S.B.T., DR/i8/3/47/55/6.

⁴⁰ His detailed and informative bill is S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/55/5. For further information on Wright, see Whitehead, David, ‘A note on John Wright’ Warwickshire Hist., v(2), 59–63Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Is this therefore square measure? But cornice was normally charged by linear measure and it is hard to understand how it could be converted to square. On the other hand 18d. per linear foot would certainly be too little.

⁴² A knee in carpentry is ‘a piece of timber naturally or artificially shaped, so as to fit into an angle’ and to knee is to fasten with a knee or knees (O.E.D.).

⁴³ Country Life, clxxvi (13 Dec. 1984), 1848.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ This marriage, entertainingly enough, provided a post-mortem link between the Leighs and their architect: for Catherine Berkeley's sister, Dorothy Calcott, had a daughter Katherine who married Francis, son of Francis Smith's daughter, Elizabeth Stokes.

⁴⁵ S.B.T., DR/18/5 (1748).

⁴⁶ S.B.T., DR/18/17/4/7-8.

⁴⁷ Since we are dealing with the eighteenth century, I use the term by which the room was known then: it has long been the saloon, having ceased to be used as an entrance since the building of the gilt hall to the east, c. 1830.

⁴⁸ S.B.T., DR/i8/3/47/55/7. Smith's implied claim for due ‘profit' reflects partly his own labour i n measuring the work, partly his general supervision and partly no doubt his overall responsibility for the designs.

⁴⁹ The portfolio is kept at Stoneleigh. It contains altogether thirty-two drawings, of which nineteen are included in Lord Leigh's index; six more, listed i n the index, are missing or have not been identified.

⁵⁰ Beard, , op. cit (note 1).Google Scholar

⁵¹ Kent, William, The Designs of Inigo Jones, Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Publick and Private Buildings. Publish'd by William Kent, With some Additional Designs, 2 vols. (London, 1727), 1, 55–6.Google Scholar

⁵² ‘Supposed’ because the only evidence I have found relates to figure work on the ceiling; but the attribution may be correct. (Okeover building accounts and correspondence, Derbyshire County Record Office, Matlock, 231M/E 88.)

⁵³ S.B.T., DR/18/17/4/9.

⁵⁴ Only one payment calls for comment, which cannot be made because there is no explanation: the sombrely named Bethell Grimes, apparently a paviour, who had previously received only trifling amounts for hair and quarries and for setts, was suddenly in 1758 paid £161 (S.B.T., DR/18/31/ 453, 460).

⁵⁵ S.B.T., DR/18/31/203.

⁵⁶ S.B.T., DR/18/3 /47/52/4, 6.

⁵⁷ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/51/2; DR/18/31/ 206. Stokes was conceivably a relation of Francis Smith's son-in-law, John Stokes: cf. above, note 44.

⁵⁸ S.B.T., DR/18/31/459, 461. Gomms' work included making (to Lightoler's design) an extremely pretty rococo communion table for the chapel. It is currently on show in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

⁵⁹ See above, note 49.

⁶⁰ Contrast, however, the total absence of any attempt at an architectural link which characterizes the north front as it is.

⁶¹ This may mean that the library was to be above the music room (a rather risky idea) or that a two-storey room, combining the two functions, was intended. One elevation shows the attic windows of the middle five bays as blanks, implying a two-storey room, perhaps with coving, on the chamber floor.

⁶² S.B.T., DR/18/3 /47/51/38.

⁶³ Stoneleigh portfolio (see above, note 49). The evidence for which of the two blocks came first appears on the plan of the principal floor, which distinguishes between old work and ‘new improvements’: not all the new improvements shown came off; but, since the easternmore of the two blocks (which does still exist) is shown as new and the western as old, there is no reason to question which was the model and which the copy. This is confirmed by the existence ofthe unexecuted design for amending the east front—a proposal which would have been impossible if the laundry block had already been built.

⁶⁴ Cf., for example, unexecuted designs for stables at Gopsall, Leics. (R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection, London, K.10/11/13, 14).

⁶⁵ The plaid parlour is the former dining parlour, immediately south of the hall.

⁶⁶ The title page states that the book is engraved from the designs of William and John Halfpenny, Robert Morris and T. Lightoler; the date is ‘Mdccvlh’. This has been conjecturally corrected to Mdccxlii; but in 1742 Lightoler was only fifteen and the rococo style ofhis contributions would be impossibly advanced for that date. The easiest correction is to Mdcclvii, though this would apparently mean two editions in the same year and William Halfpenny had died in 1755; Mdcclii is another possibility. Lightoler's chimney design is on pi. 68 and the Hiorn drawing in the R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection, London (K. 10/11 /19). The designs for Platt Hail are kept at the house, now a museum of costume.

⁶⁷ Country Life clxxxi (19 Mar. 1987), 108–9.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Where he married in 1752: ibid. His wife, Mary Smith, was the daughter of an evidently unrelated Warwick carpenter.

⁶⁹ For the Hiorns, see Gomme, Andor, ‘William and David Hiorn’ in Brown, R. (ed.) The Architectural Outsiders (London, 1985), 45–62Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ S.B.T., DR/18/5/4192. The chimneypiece shown in the signed drawing was installed in what is now the private library at the south end of the east wing.

⁷¹ Ibid.

⁷² S.B.T., DR/18/5/4203. Bastard's share was £30, Fox's £69. us. Fox was clearly a carver of considerable skill; and numerous anonymous chim-neypieces of this period in London and elsewhere are very likely his work. Bastard was a nephew of the well-known master-builders of Blandford: see Colvin, , op. cit. (note 1), 97.Google Scholar The description of the carving is as follows: ‘In the Cornice the little Oge with three Leaf Grass, the Ovolo in Bedmould with Eggs and Tongues; in the frize each side of Tablet, Groops of Laurel and Oak Leaves, with Acorns and Berrys tied together with Ribbons; the Tablet with a Lyon laying on a Rock, with Decoration of Tree work, in the Architrave, the Ovolo with Shells and Tongues, the Bead at foot of ditto with Beads & Spaces, the Astragal with twelve raffled Flowers & Ribbons, the Torus to the Plinth of the Terms with six raffled Floors and double Tongues, the Terms with Herculeses Heads, with a Lyon mask'd in the top with the Skin hanging down over the Shoulders tied in a Knott, and hanging down in the front.’

⁷³ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/51/2.

⁷⁴ Perhaps the left-hand half was intended simply to mirror the right-hand.

⁷⁵ This is written above a line which has been crossed out and appears to have read ‘need no truss; in them Selves and soficently Screw to geather’. Can this refer to some form of bolted scarf-jointing? Whatever the explanation, Lightoler seems to have been very unsure of the structural principle he was invoking.

⁷⁶ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/52/5. This is one of the plans on which the dimensional crosses appear.

⁷⁷ See above, p. 273.

⁷⁸ The four-column idea was also incorporated into the principal-floor plan prepared for one of the north-front designs.

⁷⁹ S.B.T., DR/18/3/47/51/7.

⁸⁰ The hall at Foremarke (1759) has columns under girders near the ends of the room, though they are more evenly spaced than at Stoneleigh.

⁸¹ S.B.T., DR/18/31/461.

⁸² Country Life, clxxv (28 June 1984), 1913.Google Scholar

⁸³ Stokes, in a nice example of phonetic spelling, writes ‘fenishon’.

⁸⁴ Lightoler, , op. cit. (note 65), pl. 80.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Country Life, clxxvi (13 Dec. 1984), 1847–8.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ There is a curious irony in that Sloth's primrose path is portrayed as leading towards a Palladian mansion.

⁸⁷ Not the lion of Cythaeron, for Hercules already has his club, though one cannot easily make out the lion's cave.

⁸⁸ One ofthe portfolio ceiling drawings includes a panel of a young boy wrestling with a wild animal (perhaps a boar)—no doubt a sketch for something Herculean (pl. XLIVC).

⁸⁹ Letters of Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone (Dodsley, London, 1775), 79, 4 Jan. 1749.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Thus William Smith in one of the Ditchley accounts refers to Charles Stanley as ‘the Italian’: Oxfordshire County Record Office, Oxford, Dil I/p/IS.

⁹¹ When the 1740s seemed to be the date Charles Stanley, who had been suggested by Hussey, Christopher, op. cit. (note 1), 40,Google Scholar remained a possibility, and one only has to look at the drawing-room ceiling at Okeover, 1745 (one ofthe very few fully authenticated Stanley ceilings in this country), to realize how precarious it is to attempt to attribute plasterwork on grounds of style alone. For Stanley cannot have done anything at Stoneleigh: he left England precipitately and for good in 1745 and died in 1761. Derbyshire County Record Office, Matlock, 231 M/E 91; Beard, , op. cit. (note 1), 285Google Scholar.

⁹² He would thus have been at least in his sixties at the date of the Stoneleigh plasterwork. But Giuseppe Artari was even older when finishing Briihl: see Beard, , op. cit. (note 1), 243Google Scholar.

⁹³ Godber, , op. cit. (note 16), 161.Google Scholar