Wentworth Woodhouse
Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house in the village of Wentworth, in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England. It is currently owned by the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust.[3] The building has more than 300 rooms, with 250,000 square feet (23,000 m2) of floor space,[4] including 124,600 square feet (11,580 m2) of living area. It covers an area of more than 2.5 acres (1.0 ha),[citation needed] and is surrounded by a 180-acre (73 ha) park, and an estate of 15,000 acres (6,100 ha).
The original Jacobean house was rebuilt by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquis of Rockingham (1693–1750), and vastly expanded by his son, the 2nd Marquis, who was twice Prime Minister, and who established Wentworth Woodhouse as a Whig centre of influence.[5] In the 18th century, the house was inherited by the Earls Fitzwilliam and the family of the last earl owned it until 1989. It now belongs to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust and is undergoing restoration.
History
The English Baroque, brick-built, western range of Wentworth Woodhouse was begun in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, (after 1728 Lord Malton)[6] after he inherited it from his father in 1723. It replaced the Jacobean structure that was once the home of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, whom Charles I sacrificed in 1641 to appease Parliament. The builder to whom Wentworth's grandson turned for a plan for the grand scheme that he intended[7] was a local builder and country architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe,[8] who had a practice in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Tunnicliffe was pleased enough with this culmination of his provincial practice to issue an engraving signed "R. Tunnicliffe, architects"[9] which must date before 1734, as it is dedicated to Baron Malton, Watson-Wentworth's earlier title.[9] However the Baroque style was disliked by Whigs, and the new house was not admired. In c. 1734, before the West Front was finished, Wentworth's grandson Thomas Watson-Wentworth commissioned Henry Flitcroft to build the East Front "extension", in fact a new and much larger house, facing the other way, southeastward. The model they settled on was Colen Campbell's Wanstead House, illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715.
That same year the rebuilding was already well underway. In a letter from the amateur architect Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby to his father-in-law Lord Carlisle of 6 June 1734, Sir Thomas reports that he found the garden front "finished" and that a start had been made on the main front: "when finished 'twill be a stupendous fabric, infinitely superior to anything we have now in England", and he adds "The whole finishing will be entirely submitted to Lord Burlington, and I know of no subject's house in Europe will have 7 such magnificent rooms so finely proportioned as these will be."[10] In the 20th century, Nikolaus Pevsner would agree,[11] but the mention of the architect-earl Burlington, arbiter of architectural taste, boded ill for the provincial surveyor-builder, Tunnicliffe. It is doubtless to Burlington's intervention that about this time, before the West Front was finished, the Earl of Malton, as he had now become, commissioned Henry Flitcroft to revise Tunnicliffe's plan there and build the East Front range. Flitcroft was Burlington's professional architectural amanuensis— "Burlington Harry" as he was called; he had prepared for the engravers the designs of Inigo Jones published by Burlington and William Kent in 1727, and in fact Kent was also called in for confabulation over Wentworth Woodhouse, mediated by Sir Thomas Robinson,[12] though in the event the pedestrian Flitcroft was not unseated and continued to provide designs for the house over the following decade: he revised and enlarged Tunnicliffe's provincial Baroque West Front and added wings, as well as temples and other structures in the park. Contemporary engravings of the grand public East Front give Flitcroft as architect. Flitcroft, right-hand man of the architectural dilettanti and fully occupied as well at the Royal Board of Works, could not constantly be on-site, however: Francis Bickerton, surveyor and builder of York, paid bills in 1738 and 1743.
The grand East Front is the more often illustrated. The West front, the "garden front" that Sir Thomas Robinson found to be finished in 1734, is the private front that looked onto a giardino segreto between the house front and the walled kitchen garden, intended for family enjoyment rather than social and political ambitions expressed in the East Front.[13] Most remnants of it were redesigned in the 19th century.[14]
Wentworth Woodhouse was inherited by Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, briefly Prime Minister in 1765–66 and again in 1782. He received Benjamin Franklin here in 1771. The architect he employed at the house was John Carr of York, who added an extra storey to parts of the East Front and provided the porticoes to the matching wings, each the equivalent of a moderately grand country house. James "Athenian" Stuart contributed designs for panels in the Pillared Hall.[15] The Whistlejacket Room was named for George Stubbs' portrait that hung in it of Whistlejacket, one of the most famous racehorses of all time.[16] The additions were completed in 1772. The second Marquis envisaged a sculpture gallery at the house, which never came to fruition; four marbles by Joseph Nollekens were carried out to his commission, in expectation of the gallery; the Diana, signed and dated 1778, is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Juno, Venus and Minerva, grouped with a Roman antique marble of Paris, are at the J. Paul Getty Museum.[17] Wentworth Woodhouse, with all its contents, subsequently passed to the family of the Marquis's sister, the Earls Fitzwilliam.
Royal visit of 1912
King George V and Queen Mary visited South Yorkshire from 8 to 12 July 1912 and stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse for four days. The house party consisted of a large number of guests, including: Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang, the then-Archbishop of York; the Earl of Harewood and his Countess; the Marchioness of Londonderry; the Marquis of Zetland and Lady Zetland; the Earl of Scarborough and Lady Scarborough; the Earl of Rosse and Lady Rosse; Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and Lady Mina Beresford; Mr Walter Long and Lady Doreen Long; and Lord Helmsley and Lady Helmsley.[18]
The royal visit concluded on the evening of 11 July with a torchlight tattoo by miners, and a musical programme by members of the Sheffield Musical Union and the Wentworth Choral Society. A crowd of 25,000 gathered on the lawn to witness the King and Queen on the balcony of the portico, from which the King gave a speech.