Secrets of the Hellfire Club

Much of the knowledge that we have of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey derives from the scandals and political debates surrounding John Wilkes, who was a key proponent of political reform in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It is easy to overlook Wilkes’s education in a rush to explore the controversies of the 1760s and 1770s. However, the nature of Wilkes’s education provides insight into the intellectual milieu of the Hellfire Club.

Wilkes was the son of an Anglican brewer, but his education seems to have been controlled by his Presbyterian mother. In 1734, she sent John and his two brothers to study with the Presbyterian schoolmaster John Worsley.[1] His father eventually had him study with Matthew Leeson, a Presbyterian minister, who abandoned his church at the age of 60 during a crisis of conscience that led him to embrace the Arian creed.[2]

In 1742, Wilkes entered Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court, to study law. He was fifteen years old at the time. It was clear that the boy did not want to become a lawyer, but entering the Inns of Court gave him access to court circles and was one way that the son of a middling brewer could expand his social network and advance his status.

Wilkes, accompanied by Leeson and another student named Hungerford Bland, enrolled in the University of Leiden in 1744. Leiden was a haven for Dissenters who could not enter Oxford of Cambridge. The young man made many friends there, including Alexander Carlyle. Carlyle recorded that Wilkes’s tutor, Matthew Leeson, was “an old ignorant pedant” who was a poor educator.[3] And, it seems that he did little to control Wilkes’s activities. The ability to break away from the strictures of rural life in England led the eighteen-year-old to a debauched lifestyle. Wilkes recounted his life at Leiden to James Boswell in Naples in 1765:

At school and college I never read; always among women a Leyden. My father gave me as much money as I pleased. Three or four whores; drunk every night. Sore head morning, then read. I’m capable to sit thirty hours over a table to study.[4]

Nevertheless, it is clear that Wilkes was a scholar – an independent one at that. This caused consternation to his tutor Leeson. As Carlyle later reported, Leeson’s

chief object seemed to be to make Wilkes an Arian also, and he teased him so much about it that he was obliged to declare that he did not believe the Bible at all, which produced a quarrel between them, and Wilkes, for refuge, went frequently to Utrecht, where he met with Immateriality [Andrew] Baxter, as he was called, who then attended [Walter Stuart, 8^th] Lord Blantyre and Mr [William] Hay of Drummellier, as he had formerly done Lord John Gray.

Abandoning Christian theology, Wilkes looked for other men who would join him in philosophical inquiry. These individuals included Andrew Baxter (1686/7–1750). Baxter and Wilkes became close friends – perhaps even lovers – and Wilkes looked to the older man as a substitute tutor.[5] Baxter was a Newtonian and supporter of Samuel Clarke against the criticisms of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his followers.[6] He engaged Wilkes in debates over natural philosophy and metaphysics. The two men held long, speculative conversations, evidenced in Baxter’s dedication of his final work to Wilkes.[7] In 1747 in an unpublished dialogue defending Newtonianism, Baxter even based his main character, Histor, on Wilkes.[8]

From his association with Baxter, it is clear that Wilkes was reading some of the works of the great philosophers of his age. And, his knowledge of the Newtonians and Leibniz and his followers was probably quite extensive. But, Wilkes pursued studies beyond what Baxter encouraged. In 1745, Wilkes presented an English translation of the works of Spinoza to Baxter.[9] Spinoza (1632-77), the central thinker of the radical Enlightenment, was decried by both moderate and traditionalist segments of the intelligentsia, who labeled him an atheist who threatened to erode the moral foundations of society.[10]

Wilkes and Baxter cultivated their friendship among a circle of Britons who formed a club, based in Leiden. They met three times a week, most often at members’ lodgings at the boarding house of Mademoiselle Van der Tasse, but sometimes at the home Mr. Gowans, a Scottish clergyman. They “drank coffee, and smoked tobacco, and chatted about politics, and drank claret, and supped on bukkam (Dutch red-herrings), and eggs, and salad, and never sat later than twelve o’clock–at Mr Gowan’s, the clergyman, never later than ten, unless when we deceived him by making such a noise when the hour was ringing as prevented his hearing it.”[11] At Mademoiselle Van der Tasse’s house, the coffee was the best in the city and a small bottle of claret cost only a shilling. Alexander Carlyle described her and the house as follows.

Vandertasse’s was an established lodging-house, her father and mother having carried on that business, so that we lived very well there at a moderate rate — that is sixteen stivers for dinner, two for coffee, six for supper and for breakfast. She was a lively little Frenchwoman, about thirty-six, had been tolerably well-looking, and was plump and in good condition. As she had only one maid-servant, and five gentlemen to provide for, she led an active and laborious life; insomuch that she had but little time for her toilet, except in the article of the coif, which no Frenchwoman omits. But on Sundays, when she had leisure to dress herself for the French Church, either in the morning or evening, then who but Mademoiselle Vandertasse! She spoke English perfectly well, as the guests of the house had been mostly British.[12]

The members of the group who met at Van der Tasse’s made up about half of the roughly 22 British students in Leiden according to Alexander Carlyle’s estimate.[13] They included the poet Mark Akenside and his lifetime companion, Jeremiah Dyson; Hungerford Bland; the Greek scholar, Anthony Askew; John Campbell, Jr. of Stonefield with his tutor Professor Morton of St. Andrews; Alexander Carlyle; William Dowdeswell, later Chancellor of the Exchequer; John Freeman of Jamaica; John Gregory, afterwards a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and a doctor in Edinburgh; James Johnstone, later 3^rd Bt. of Westerhall, Dumfries; Charles Townshend, later Chancellor of the Exchequer; and John Wilkes. Those peripheral to this club were Mr Wetherell of the West Indies; Dr. Charles Congalton; a Mr. Keefe of Ireland; Willie Gordon, later KB; Dr. Dickson; and Nicholas Monckly, according to Carlyle, “an ignorant vain block-head”; and a Mr. Skirrat.[14]

Louis Carmontelle. Baron d'Holbach. 1766 Most importantly for Wilkes was a foreign member of the club, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), who arrived in Leiden in 1744. It is unclear to what extent d’Holbach influenced Wilkes or vice versa. D’Holbach was not yet the atheistic materialist that he would be in the following decade. But, their membership in the club pointed to the freethinking radicalism of the circle. D’Holbach and Wilkes remained close friends for life, and the budding philosopher was emotionally wrought when Wilkes left Leiden to return to England: “I need not tell you the sorrow our parting gave me, in vain Philosophy cried aloud nature was still stronger and the philosopher was forced to yield to the friend, even now I feel the wound is not cur’d.”[15] Wilkes was his closest intellectual companion, and d’Holbach wrote to Wilkes that “I want in this country a true bosom friend like my dear Wilkes to converse with, but my pretenssions [sic] are too high, for every abode with such a company would be heaven for me.”[16]

The importance of the intellectual circle at Leiden shaped all of the young gentleman to greater and lesser degrees. For both d’Holbach and Wilkes, sociability and clubability defined their public lives. When he settled in Paris, d’Holbach held twice-weekly meetings at his house on rue Royale Saint-Roche (now 8 rue des Moulins) – a center of philosophical radicalism from the 1750s through the 1780s. When he became an outlaw in 1763, partly because of his activities at West Wycombe, Wilkes eventually went to stay with d’Holbach and attend the salon. For his part, Wilkes became central to a number of coteries, including the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks (1754) and, of course, the Monks of Medmenham Abbey. Not surprisingly, several of his friends from Leiden joined him as friars.

In some ways, John Wilkes’s education was not uncommon for a middling child of a Dissenter household. He had a number of tutors, studied at the Inns of Court, and went abroad to university where he never took a degree. What made Wilkes’s education unique came as a result not of his education, but as a consequence of the sociable world of the continent. As it happened, he fell into a group of exceptional individuals – both politically minded and philosophically freethinking. To what extent Baxter, d’Holbach, or Spinoza each influenced him is impossible to gauge because many of his papers were burned by his daughter Polly. However, the radicalism of each of them and Wilkes’s own desire to push himself intellectually no doubt shaped his outlook on the world – to the extent that his notion of mores were less dominated by Christian theology and his politics were more egalitarian than many of his contemporaries.

Citation: Jason M. Kelly, “The Education of an Eighteenth-Century Squire: John Wilkes (1725-1797),” Secrets of the Hellfire Club Blog (25 March 2012), https://hellfiresecrets.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/the-education-of-an-eighteenth-century-squire-john-wilkes-1725-1797/

[1] Peter David Garner Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.

[2] Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk: Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time (Cambridge, 1860), 168–69.

[3] Ibid., 138.

[4] James Boswell, The Journals of James Boswell: 1762-1795, ed. John Wain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 143–44.

[5] George Sebastian Rousseau, “‘In the House of Madame Vander Tasse’: A Homosocial University Club,” in Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses : Sexual, Historical, ed. George Sebastian Rousseau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 111–12.

[6] A Collection of Papers, Which Passed Between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, in the Years 1715 and 1716 (London, 1717).

[7] Andrew Baxter, An Appendix to the First Part of The Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (London, 1750), iii.

[8] John Almon, ed., The Correspondence of the Late John Wilkes: With His Friends, Printed from the Original Manuscripts, in Which Are Introduced Memoirs of His Life, 1805, 15; Arthur Hill Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (Yale University Press, 2006), 14.

[9] Rousseau, “‘In the House of Madame Vander Tasse’: A Homosocial University Club,” 118.

[10] Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jonathan Irvine Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

[11] Carlyle, Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, 167.

[12] Ibid., 166.

[13] Ibid., 167.

[14] Ibid., 171.

[15] D’Holbach to Wilkes, 9 August 1746, Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d’Holbach: a Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (Columbia University, 1914), 6.

[16] D’Holbach to Wilkes, 3 December 1746, Ibid., 10.

2 Comments | tags: d'holbach, eighteenth century, john wilkes, leiden, radical enlightenment, wilkes | posted in History

March 8, 2012

A Nymphaeum and a Temple to Venus in an Eighteenth-Century English Garden

By Jason M. Kelly

The Temple of Venus was one of the earliest features of West Wycombe’s gardens, which Sir Francis Dashwood began designing in the 1740s. It is a round temple, perched on a small hill. Below it was a section of the garden, known as Venus’ Parlor, which was cleared when Humphrey Repton re-landscaped West Wycombe beginning in 1796. As a consequence, Dashwood’s baroque figurative program for this section of the garden was destroyed. However, from remaining evidence, we can piece together what it looked like.

A view by William Hannan from the 1750s portrays the temple as it originally looked.

On a manmade hill, a circular temple – an allusion to the rotunda at Stowe but situated in gardens with a very different moral program – housed a copy of the Venus de Medici. A path led down the hill to a grotto built underneath the temple. A design for the grotto still exists in the Dashwood collections.

It appears that this section of the garden followed the design of a nymphaeum similar to those found in the gardens of Renaissance Italian villas. In effect, it is similar to Palladio’s nymphaeum for the Villa Barbara, although on a much smaller scale.

Palladio. Nymphaeum. Villa Barbaro, Veneto, Italy. ca. 1550s.

The oval entrance to the grotto alluded playfully to sexuality and temptation, with symbols that all but the most obtuse visitor could understand. Perched above the “door of life” – as John Wilkes later referred to it, was a lead copy of Giambologna’s sixteenth-century Mercurio – an iconic figure throughout the early modern period.[1] The lead Mercury can be seen in Hannan’s view. While Mercury’s association with commerce and communication are well known, eighteenth-century libertines often associated Mercury with sexual commerce as well.

While few textual descriptions of the site exist – and those that do are dubious descriptions – the tone of the site is embodied in John Wilkes’s description of West Wycombe. In 1763, he wrote that “you find at first what is called an error in limine; for the entrance to it is the same entrance by which we all come into the world, and the door is what some idle wits have called the door of life.”[2] He continued that Lord Bute had encouraged Dashwood to erect a Paphian column – a reference to the Temple of Venus at Paphos on Cyprus – in front of the entrance:

There are in these gardens no busts of Socrates, Epaminondas, or Hampden [a reference to the Temple of Ancient Virtue and the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe]; but there is a most indecent statue of the unnatural satyr [the famed Satyr with a Goat in the King of Naples’ collection]; but at the temple I have mentioned, are two urns sacred to the Ephesian matron, and to Potiphar’s wife, with the inscriptions Matronae Ephesiae Cineres, Dominae Potiphar Cineres.[3]

The reference to the Ephesian matron was from Petronius’ Satyricon in which the chaste Matron Ephesia despairs at her husbands death and begins to starve herself in his tomb. Eventually, she is seduced by a soldier who brings her food. Potiphar’s wife was the woman who attempted to seduce Joseph in the biblical story. Thus, two of the most “sacred” items in the gardens were models of female infidelity.

It is no surprise that Repton cleared the site of its most explicit references to sexuality, libertinism, and anti-virtue in 1796. Likewise, it is perhaps not surprising that Dashwood’s descendants would commission a replica of the original grotto in the 1980s. By this time, West Wycombe had become an important National Trust Property – not only because of its architecture, but because of the ability of its illicit history to draw visitors. In 1982, Quinlan Terry completed his reconstruction of the grotto and temple for Sir Francis Dashwood. This commission was part of an overall plan to re-infuse the landscapes of West Wycombe with references to the world of the Hellfire Club, a draw for tourists which was meant to raise both the profile and income of the estate.

Citation: Jason M. Kelly, “A Nymphaeum and a Temple to Venus in an Eighteenth-Century English Garden,” Secrets of the Hellfire Club Blog (8 March 2012), https://hellfiresecrets.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/a-nymphaeum-and-a-temple-to-venus-in-an-eighteenth-century-english-garden/.

[1] Not only did Giambologna produce several copies himself (Museo del Bargello, Florence; Villa Medici, Rome; Museo Nazionale, Naples originally in Farnese collection; Kunsthistorisches, Vienna), but collectors such as Sir Hans Sloane and Lawrence Dundas added copies to their own collections. See, for example, Johann Zoffany’s Lawrence Dundas and Grandson in the Zetland Collection and Jeremy Warren, “Sir Hans Sloane as a Collector of Small Sculpture,” Apollo (2004): 8.

[2] New Foundling Hospital for Wit, vol. 3 (London, 1784), p. 78.

[3] New Foundling Hospital for Wit, vol. 3 (London, 1784), p.

2 Comments | tags: garden design, landscape design, libertinism, quinlan terry, venus, west wycombe | posted in Architecture, Art, History

March 2, 2012

Francis Dashwood, Portraiture, and the Origins of the Hellfire Club

By Jason M. Kelly

The Monks of Medmenham Abbey, more popularly known as the Hellfire Club, were one of thousands of associational groups that formed in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth century. During the 1750s and early 1760s, they met at the estate of Sir Francis Dashwood, a baronet whose family derived their wealth from trading silks in the Levant. Dashwood took numerous grand tours in the 1720s and 1730s, travelling to France and Italy, but also to Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He was well known for his interest in architecture and politics, as well as women and wine. And, like many of his fellow Britons, he had a particular fondness for masquerade, which found itself expressed through a penchant for dressing up as priests, monks, and popes.

Definitive proof of the group’s existence is not available until the 1750s. However, a variety of circumstantial evidence points to the origins of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey in the Grand Tour world of the 1730s and 40s. On his Grand Tour in 1740, Dashwood was signing letters to his friends as “St. Francis,” and in a letter to Lord Boyne, he noted that he longed “to make a party of Monks with you into the Country, remember that I am a Franciscan.”[1] He had travelled with Boyne on a tour to Italy in 1730-31, and it is possible that this was a reference to their earlier revelries on the continent.[2] But, in any case, it suggests that Dashwood was already holding parties where he dressed up as a friar as early as the 1730s. His letter to Boyne further indicated that he had composed a dozen songs for Lord Middlesex – perhaps the same songs that he performed a few weeks later in a mock conclave upon the death of Pope Clement XII. Written from Rome, this note to Boyne may be the first evidence of Dashwood’s interest in a creating a group in which members masqueraded as clergymen.

In 1740, Charles de Brosses reported that Dashwood and William Matthias Stafford-Howard, 3^rd Earl of Stafford – “mauvais catholiques” as he called them – caused a “vrai scandalum magnatum” by holding the mock conclave and impersonating Cardinal Ottoboni.[3] From “[c]e damné Huguenot” came a “repertoire de chansons libertines contre la papauté.” [4] A portrait – probably from the late 1730s or early 1740s – portrays Dashwood as a somber Franciscan friar. This is the first recorded evidence of him portraying himself as a member of the Roman Catholic church. In it, his left hand rests on a Bible next to a momento mori.

In 1742, Dashwood commissioned George Knapton to paint him as a Franciscan. It was one of over twenty portraits that Knapton completed for the Society of Dilettanti, which required its members to present Kit-Kat style paintings of themselves to the organization.[5] In a reference to his grand tour alter ego, Dashwood plays the role of SAN: FRANCESCO DI WYCOMBO. In his hands, he holds a goblet on which is inscribed the words MATRI SANCTORU[M] – “the mother of the saints.” The phrase had a double-entendre, referring, in part, to the metaphysical status of the Roman Catholic Church as mother of all Christians. On the other hand, the wine and the Venus de Medici reminded the viewer of the corporal world – of the senses, of desire and lust. It was the sexualized body of women that actually produced saints. To encourage this reading, Knapton removed the hand of the Venus revealing “the hallow’d gloom of maidenhead thicket” as John Wilkes would later describe it.[6] But, removing the hand of the Venus provided the viewer with another reading as well. At the time, there was much debate about the quality of craftsmanship on the statue’s extremities. Jonathan Richardson declaimed the fingers as “excessively long” with poor detail.[7] Removing the hand suggested that Dashwood had come to a similar conclusion, deciding that it was an inferior restoration. So, in addition to portraying himself as a libertine, Dashwood evoked his taste and knowledge of classical statuary.

By 1745, evidence suggests that Dashwood may have been organizing a club at West Wycombe. George Bubb Dodington wrote to Dashwood about a small group that met at Dashwood’s residence, “I must confess, I never mett with more Improvement, as well as Entertainment, in so small a Company; & do verily believe, there are as many Sallies of true Witt, & Humour in Them, as most of the Societies in Town, which most pretend to Both can boast of.”[8]

In the early 1750s, Dashwood once again commissioned a painter to represent him as a member of the clergy. Adrien Carpentiers showed Dashwood dressed as Pope Innocent III. He performs the act of transubstantiation next to a herm topped with the visage of his wife Sarah Ellys, described by Walpole as “a poor forlorn Presbyterian prude”[9] Her relationship with her rakish husband was no doubt strained. Two months before their wedding in 1745, Dashwood was writing to friends bragging that he was “employing 20 of the 24 hours wither upon [his] Belly, or from thence, like a Publick Reservoir, administering to those of other People, by laying [his] Cock in every private Family that has any Place fitt to receive it.”[10]

The first certain evidence of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey meeting comes from a letter from Richard Grenville, Earl Temple to Dashwood from October 1754. He refers to three other members of a club – a “wicked company” of John Wilkes, Paul Whitehead, and Sir George Lyttelton – who celebrated a “Love feast” and sat together at a “table of the Saints.” While the references are obscure, later documentation reveals that these were all members of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey and that the religious symbolism was used widely in their private writings and letters to each other. Earl Temple wrote to Dashwood,

It is very gracious and kind in the pious Aeneas, after his conversion, after the Love feast, to keep up that of friendship with one, who has so slender a claim to be admitted to the table of the Saints; but I am sorry to hear you are exalted to so high a story of faith and godliness, because great may be the fall thereof, and this Scotch taste of architecture is so contrary to the fashionable style of building in this country, that I fear it will never prevail, and that you will return to your humbler roof of mortality and every social virtue, with as much ardor, as if you had never deviated into the higher regions of cherubim and seraphim, or the conversion of [John] Wilkes, compared with that of St. Paul [Whitehead]; however, if I should live to see you in the bosom of our father Sir George [Lyttelton], I shall only now and then drink to the pious memory of the delightful moments I have passed in your wicked company, and begin to attach myself to all the interested pursuits of this world, as the sure road to a better.[11]

In 1757, Dashwood commissioned William Hogarth to mimic Knapton’s painting in yet another portrait as a member of the Roman Catholic clergy. Sir Francis Dashwood at His Devotions, modelled on Agostino Carracci’s St. Francis Adoring the Cross portrays him leering at a naked, prostrate woman. An open book, referring to the poems of Ovid, and a masquerade mask lie nearby as a tray of fruits and wine tumbles to the floor, referring the viewer to the excess of Carnival and the attendant rites of Bacchus and Venus. The nimbus over his head is the profile of his friend and fellow Medemenham Monk John Montagu, 4^th Earl of Sandwich. This is a pivotal piece in the history of the group, one which will be the subject of future posts.

These early visual depictions and writings point to a decades-long development of the group. The association seems to have emerged from the male libertine sociability of the Grand Tour and the rage for masquerade that was such a feature of elite social life in the early eighteenth century.

[1] Dashwood to Boyne, 30 January 1740 NS, West Wycombe Archives, copy from an unidentified auction catalog in the West Wycombe Archives.

[2] Brinsley Ford and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 / Ingamells, John. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1997), 278.

[3] Charles de Brosses, Lettres d’Italie du Président de Brosses, vol. 2 (Paris, 1986), 445.

[4] Charles de Brosses, Lettres d’Italie du Président de Brosses, vol. 2 (Paris, 1986), 445.

[5] Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009), 37–56.

[6] Reprinted in A Select Collection of the Most Interesting Letters on the Government, Liberty, and Constitution of England, vol. 2 (London, 1763), p. 37. This was an extension of Public Advertiser, 2 June 1763.

[7] Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (London, 1722), 55.

[8] George Bubb Dodington to Dashwood, 5 October 1745, Bodleain MS D.D. Dashwood (Bucks) C.5 B11/1/5, 1r.

[9] Walpole, Corr., 19.224

[10] George Bubb Dodington to Francis Dashwood, 5 October 1745, Bodleain MS D.D. Dashwood (Bucks) C.5 B11/1/5. The marriage took place on 11 December 1757 according to Joseph L. Chester and George J. Armytage, Allegations for Marriage Licences Issued by the Bishop of London, 1520 to 1828, Harleian Society, vol. 26 (London, 1887), p. 345.

[11] Earl Temple to John Wilkes, 12 October 1754, The Grenville Papers: Being the Correspondence of Richard Grenville Earl Temple, K.G., and the Right Hon: George Grenville, vol. 1, ed. William James Smith (London: 1852), 125-7.

2 Comments | posted in Art, History

February 26, 2012

West Wycombe and Its Architecture

By Jason M. Kelly

Sir Francis Dashwood, Bt. (1708-1781), is the person with whom the landscape of West Wycombe has become synonymous. Dashwood was raised by a guardian, his uncle John Fane, 7^th Earl of Westmoreland, after his mother’s death in 1710. It is through Westmoreland that Dashwood was first introduced to one of the great interests of his life, architecture.

Westmoreland hired Colen Campbell to design his seat, Mereworth Castle, Kent (1723-5).

Based on Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, it is one of the earliest examples of Burlingtonian Palladianism, making a conscious effort to cite classical examples in its interiors. His gardens included follies, such as Campbell’s 1725 interpretation of Titus’ Arch in Rome.

Dashwood’s further developed an interest in landscape and architecture on several grand tours, which took him not only to France and Italy, but to Germany, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. In fact, he was travelling as early as 1726, with tours in 1730-1, 1733, 1735, and 1739-40. With his companions on these tours, he formed a variety of institutions whose members had active interests in architecture and antiquities, including the Egyptian Society, the Divan Society, and the Society of Dilettanti.[1] As sites of homosocial conviviality, these organizations shaped Dashwood’s social world. And, when he redesigned West Wycombe from the 1740s, they played a role in influencing his architectural program.

Dashwood’s country house and grounds were on the south side of West Wycombe’s high street. On the northwest side of the village was a hill on which sat the parish church, St. Lawrence. As a supporter of the concept that public works projects should be voluntarily funded by local gentlemen in times of need – in fact, to this ideal he supported a poor relief bill in 1747 – Dashwood was responsible for a series of architectural and topographic works that put locals to work.[2] With the crop failures of 1750, Dashwood employed the agricultural workers of West Wycombe to excavate chalk from the hill, which he used to repave the Oxford road. The flint that was excavated with the chalk was used in new buildings across the estate and in the town. It provided an unfinished rustic look that was popular at mid century.[3]

Likewise, during a period of intermittent grain shortages in the 1760s, Dashwood rebuilt the parish church, St. Lawrence.[4] This was not only important for the builders, but for the West Wycombe furniture makers as well. Dashwood hired them to refit the church, which, opened on 10 June 1763 to “a suitable Anthem,” included a £6000 organ, and had “Seats covered with green Cloth.”[5] The design of this church was, no doubt, the result of his uncle’s influence. Westmoreland rebuilt the parish church of St. Lawrence, Mereworth between 1744 and 1746. The design integrated neoclassical themes such as a barrel-vaulted nave with faux-painted coffering. In conception, the later redesign of Dashwood’s St. Lawrence Church in West Wycombe was similar. It also used neoclassical themes — most spectacularly, a ceiling painted to resemble one in Palmyra. Both resemble eighteenth-century assembly rooms as much as they resemble churches.

In addition to his projects in the village, Dashwood, like his uncle Westmoreland, set out to reimagine his estate. Beginning with the house, Dashwood hired John Donowell as his architect – or, more accurately, his clerk of works – between 1755 and 1764.[6] Donowell planned the re-façade of the north and east fronts. The Palladian north front has similarities to Inigo Jones’s Somerset House, Colen Campbell’s Pembroke House (1724), as well as Isaac Ware’s design for Amisfield House, East Lothian (1756).[7] And, one historian has claimed that Isaac Ware was in fact the architect. The east side is a Roman Doric portico, which blends elements of the Ionic entrance at Mereworth Castle, designed by Roger Morris, and the Roman Doric portico on the Mereworth pavilion, probably designed by Henry Flitcroft. On the south side, a colonnade retains the Palladian themes of the north and east facades. However, it is much more daring in its execution. It hass a double-height loggia, with a pedimented center. With a baseless Roman Doric lower loggia and a Corinthian upper loggia, it is similar to Giovanni Servandoni’s St. Sulpice, Paris (1732).

While Servandoni was in England between 1747 and 1751, it is more likely that the designer was his student Maurice-Louis Jolivet, who worked as “Architect” to Dashwood.[8] The west front, redesigned by Dashwood’s fellow Dilettanti, Nicholas Revett in 1771, was the first neoclassical element of the main building. Based on the Temple of Dionysus at Teos, Revett’s Ionic portico was a dramatic innovation in architectural approach – using on-site drawings of classical temples as models for modern architecture.[9] Likewise, Dashwood redesigned his gardens. Originally “laid out in 1739, into walks which are beautified with water,” Dashwood worked with his architect – in this case, probably Jolivet, who did a 1752 survey of the park – to create a symbolic program similar to Stowe. Damming the River Wye, Dashwood created the lake and many of the paths to the north. Jolivet’s program was transformed by Nicholas Revett and Thomas Cook to reflect the picturesque aesthetic during the 1770s.[10]

Thus, the house, garden, and village church initially seem the epitome of eighteenth-century design – reflecting the changing tastes and innovations of the polite arts. That is one story of West Wycombe – the mundane story that, were this any other house, historians would have been content to tell. However, there is another side to the West Wycombe landscape. According to local traditions that have since dominated scholarly and popular lore, West Wycombe is much more than the quiet place that it pretends to be. In the landscape, a code hides – an archive of secret events that has proven too tantalizing to ignore, too profitable to reject, and too convincing to contradict.

Citation: Jason M. Kelly, “West Wycombe and Its Architecture,” Secrets of the Hellfire Club Blog (26 February 2012), https://hellfiresecrets.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/west-wycombe-and-its-architecture/.

[1] Dashwood was also a member of the Beefsteak Club, the Bucks (aka Bloods), Lincoln Club, (ca. mid 1740s), Royal Society (1746), the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (1754), and the Society of Antiquaries of London (1769).

[2] Betty Kemp, Sir Francis Dashwood: An Eighteenth Century Independent (London: Macmillan, 1967), 12, 119.

[3] Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson, Buckinghamshire, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 27.

[4] Samuel Lewis, A Topographical History of England, vol. 4 (1831), 585; Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700-1800, pp. 36-7.

[5] Barrows Worcestershire Journal, 14 June 1763; Gentleman’s Magazine (July 1763), p. 359; Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. 7, pp. 683-4.

[6] Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 269–70.

[7] Pevsner and Williamson, Buckinghamshire, 729.

[8] Anne Purchas, “Maurice-Louis Jolivet’s Drawings at West Wycombe Park,” Architectural History 37 (1994): 68–79.

[9] See Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (London and New Haven: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2009).

[10] Historical Manuscripts Commission, “A Tour in Wales, 1769,” in Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Verulam, Preserved at Gorhambury (London, 1906), 243; Pevsner and Williamson, Buckinghamshire, 733.

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February 19, 2012

West Wycombe and the Dashwoods

By Jason M. Kelly

West Wycombe is a charming village in the midst of the rolling hills of Buckinghamshire. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce saved many of its buildings from imminent destruction in 1929, purchasing it in March of that year. Successfully breathing new life into the village, The Times claimed in 1934 that revenue from the village had jumped.[1] In 1933, the society turned over the property to the National Trust, which extended its holdings in the following years.[2] With Sir John Dashwood’s gift of the Church Hill in 1935, the 300-acre estate in 1943, and an accompanying endowment, the National Trust became the largest property holder in West Wycombe.[3]

West Wycombe’s origins date to Iron Age Britain, when a fort rested on the 600-foot hill that dominates the landscape. The manor was the property of the Bishops of Winchester until the sixteenth century, and records of it can be found in the Domesday Book.[4] The village’s modern origins derive from its important location halfway between London and Oxford. Today, travelers along the High Street can see cottages and houses built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.[5] Unfortunately, the traces of this urban connection remain, and much of the bucolic atmosphere for which the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce no doubt saved the village in 1929 is rattled by the A40, which runs through its center.

During the early modern period, West Wycombe passed through a series of owners until Thomas Lewes, Alderman of London, transferred the title to his brothers-in-law Sir Samuel and Francis Dashwood in 1698.[6] The Dashwoods, Levant merchants, specialized in the silk trade and were well connected in London society. The brothers’ father, Francis Dashwood, was an Alderman of London, and Sir Samuel became Lord Mayor of London in 1702 – the same year that Queen Anne knighted his brother Francis. Upon Sir Samuel’s death in 1706, Sir Francis purchased his brother’s share in West Wycombe manor from his heir, George Dashwood, for £15000.[7] At this time, Sir Francis held prominent positions in the Vitner’s Company, the Royal African Company, and the East India Company.[8] He also made politically successful alliances, marrying Lady Mary Fane (d. 1710) the daughter of the Earl of Westmoreland, in 1705. The king made Sir Francis a baronet in 1707, and an election to Winchelsea in 1708 solidified the rise in his family’s social status and influence. By the time he died on 4 November 1724, his first son, Francis (1708-81) was well positioned for a career in government.

Citation: Jason M. Kelly, “Secretism and the Cultivation of Reputation in the Eighteenth Century,” Secrets of the Hellfire Club Blog (19 February 2012), https://hellfiresecrets.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/west-wycombe-and-the-dashwoods/.

[1] Times, 6 February 1934, no. 46671, p. 11, col. d.

[2] Times, 19 February 1934, no. 46682, p. 15, col. c.

[3] Times, 23 July 1935, no. 47123, p. 11, col. e; Times, 23 December 1943, no. 49736, p. 7., col. b.

[4] Great Domesday Book, National Archives, London E 31/2/1/143v-146r.

[5] Nikolaus Pevsner and Elizabeth Williamson, The Buildings of England: Buckinghamshire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).H

[6] Magna Britannia: Buckinghamshire, vol. 1, part 3 (London, 1813), 679; Hayton et al., The House of Commons, 1690-1715, p. 843; The National Trust, West Wycombe (London, 1996), p. 1.

[7] Hayton, et al., House of Commons, p. 843.

[8] Hayton, et al., House of Commons, p. 843.

Secrets of the Hellfire Club

The Education of an Eighteenth-Century Squire: John Wilkes (1725-1797)

A Nymphaeum and a Temple to Venus in an Eighteenth-Century English Garden

Francis Dashwood, Portraiture, and the Origins of the Hellfire Club

West Wycombe and Its Architecture

West Wycombe and the Dashwoods

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