TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED

See Also: BESS S BOYS; THE COUNTESS S TRAVAILS; DISTRICT CHANGE Strand; HERITAGE Lost London; HOTELS; ROYAL RESIDENCES; ROYAL RESIDENCES, DISAPPEARED; TOWNHOUSES

Albemarle House

George Monck had been raised to the peerage as the Duke of Albemarle. His son and heir was an intemperate youth, whose spendthrift ways dissolved much of the great fortune that his father had left to him in 1670. He was a member of a gang of young rakes that was led by the Duke of Monmouth, the oldest of King Charles II's illegitimate sons.

The Popish Plot was discovered in 1679. It involved political interests using the unexplained murder of a prominent magistrate as a means of whipping up anti-Catholic sentiments. The purpose of this stage-managed sectarianism was to try to block the possible accession of James Duke of York to the throne. He was the king s younger brother and heir-apparent. For Monmouth, the Plot held out the prospect that he might be legitimated and thereby be given the possibility of succeeding his father. However, Charles was determined that James would continue to be his heir. The 2^nd Duke of Albemarle opted to support the monarch s stance. This choice terminated his friendship with the sovereign s son.

Albemarle staged the first recorded modern boxing match in 1681. It took place between his butler and a butcher. Two years later the duke s financial embarrassment had reached such a pitch that he sold Albemarle House, his Piccadilly residence, to developers.

Charles II died in February 1685. York became King James II. Four months later Monmouth sailed from The Netherlands with an invasion force. He landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset. The new monarch charged Albemarle with leading the government s military response. The peer proved to be an inept soldier. The rebellion was suppressed in large part through the efforts of the Earl of Marlborough. The duke returned to court in disgrace. He resigned from all of the military offices that he held. He then withdrew to one of his country estates where he skulked. His miseries were compounded by the fact that his wife was beginning to show signs of personal eccentricity. These were the early symptoms of the profound mental illness that was to afflict her in later life.

The Nuestra Se ora de la Concep i n had been a Spanish galleon that had sunk in the West Indies in 1641. The location of her wreck was known and an undertaking was mounted to salvage from it the treasure that she had been carrying. Albemarle was one of the principal investors in the venture. It was successful. He received 40,000 from its profits. In part, this restored his material fortune.

This positive experience prompted the duke to ask James II to confer the Governorship of Jamaica upon him. The monarch appointed him to the office. After arriving on the island, the peer s health went into a steep decline. His personal physician, Hans Sloane, prescribed repeated bleedings for him. These may have denied the duke a chance to recover. He died less than a year after he had disembarked.

Location: Albemarle Street, W1S 4BY (purple, yellow)

See Also: TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED Montagu House

Arundel House

The 3^rd Duke of Norfolk (d.1554) was a loyal servant of King Henry VIII. Two of his nieces - Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard - married the king.

The duke s great-great-grandson, the 14^th Earl of Arundel (d.1646), amassed the first large art collection in England. The earl s grandson, the 6^th Duke of Norfolk, was also a great collector. Arundel House was pulled down in 1678. The Howard family and some of their titles are commemorated in the names of the streets that were built upon the mansion s site - Arundel, Howard, Norfolk, and Surrey.

In 1722 the trustees of the 8^th Duke bought No. 31 St James s Square. The townhouse became known as Norfolk House. The Howard family moved out of the building in 1938. The following year it was demolished.

Location: Arundel Street, WC2R 3DX (purple, brown)

Surrey Street, WC2R 2ND (purple, orange)

31 St James s Square, SW1Y 4JR (purple, grey)

See Also: CORONATIONS Hereditary and Feudal Office-Holders; TOWER OF LONDON Tower Green

Bateman House

Bateman Street takes its name from the Bateman family of financiers. Sir James Bateman was a wine importer turned financier, who became one of the principal figures in the early history of the South Sea Company. He served as the Lord Mayor of London and bought Shobdon Court estate in Herefordshire. He died in 1718 and the company subsequently embarked and what became Britain s first great financial scandals.

In 1725 King George I raised the merchant s son, William (d.1744), to the Irish peerage as a viscount. The monarch remarked that he could make the scion a lord but not a gentleman.

The viscount s son, the 2^nd Lord Bateman (1721-1802), was happy to refer to himself as a great farmer .

Location: Bateman Street, W1D 4AH (red, yellow)

Beaufort House

During the early 1520s the Tudor statesman and scholar Sir Thomas More had a riverside house built in Chelsea. There, he was visited by figures such as the humanist theologian Desiderius Erasmus and the painter Hans Holbein. In 1529 More succeeded Cardinal Wolsey as King Henry VIII s Lord Chancellor. In 1534 he antagonised the monarch and was imprisoned in the Tower of London. His estates were confiscated.

In the early 17^thC the Earl of Middlesex lived in the building. The property s gateway was designed by Inigo Jones.

In 1682 the house was acquired by the Dukes of Beaufort. In 1738 the property was bought by the physician Sir Hans Sloane. He had it pulled down and gave its gates to the architect-peer the 3^rd Earl of Burlington who re-erected them at Chiswick House, his Middlesex seat. In 1766 Beaufort Street was built on the site of Beaufort House.

Location: Danvers Street, SW3 5AN. To the west of the junction with Cheyne Walk. (purple, red)

See Also: ESTATES The Cadogan Estate; SIR THOMAS MORE; STREET FURNITURE Gates, The Green Park Gates

Chelsea Manor House

See Also: PALACES, DISAPPEARED & FORMER Chelsea Palace

The Cheynes

Charles Cheyne was a Buckinghamshire landowner. In 1654 he married Jane Cavendish, the ardently Royalist eldest daughter of the exiled Royalist general the 1^st Duke of Newcastle. Cheyne used his wife s dowry to buy something royal - the Manor of Chelsea. In 1681 he was ennobled in the Scottish peerage as Viscount Newhaven. During the 1685-8 reign of King James II, Newhaven sold the land upon which the Royal Hospital at Chelsea was subsequently built.

The 2^nd Viscount laid out Cheyne Row and Cheyne Walk. In 1712 he sold the manor to Sir Hans Sloane. Sir Hans used the manor house for storing his collection of curios and antiquities in. He did not live in Chelsea until 1742.

In the 1780s the property was demolished. Nos. 19-26 Cheyne Walk were built upon the site.

Location: 19-26 Cheyne Walk, SW3 5RA (orange, grey)

See Also: ESTATES The Cadogan Estate

Chesterfield House

The 4^th Earl of Chesterfield was one of the leading politicians of his day, being noted for the power of his oratory. The peer spent a large proportion of his career in opposition. Deafness forced him to retire into private life. He had a literary dimension to his life, his most famous work being the posthumous Letters to His Son (1774), which is an epistolary book on manners and how to achieve worldly success. Chesterfield assisted his own by not wedding the mother of the son to whom the letters were addressed. Instead, he married the Countess of Walsingham, an illegitimate daughter of King George I.

Location: Chesterfield House, 8 Chesterfield Gardens, W1J 5BQ. A ten-storey apartment building occupies the site. (blue, brown)

Craven House

Sir William Craven was a merchant tailor, who made his initial fortune from wholesaling cloth within England. He extended his business activities into moneylending. In 1607 he acquired a 62-room mansion house that stood upon the southern side of Leadenhall Street. Three years later he was elected as the Lord Mayor of London.

In 1648 the East India Company acquired Craven House and used it as its principal office building.

Location: 12 Leadenhall Street, EC3V 1LP (purple, turquoise)

See Also: DISTRICT CHANGE City Merchants; HOTELS The Dorchester Hotel; TRADING COMPANIES The East India Company; DICK WHITTINGTON

Exeter House

Sir Thomas Palmer was a renowned soldier. Following the death of King Henry VIIII (1491-1547), he threw in his lot with the Duke of Somerset. In 1551 he switched his loyalties to the Duke of Northumberland and betrayed his former patron s treasonous activities. In 1553 he participated in the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey upon the throne. The effort did not succeed. Northumberland, Palmer, and their associates were convicted of reason and executed.

Palmer had built a house on land that lay to the north of the Strand. Queen Elizabeth I gave the property to Lord Burghley, who enlarged it. He bequeathed it to his eldest son the 1^st Earl of Exeter. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, the house accommodated a number of courts of law. In the 1670s the building was demolished and the land developed into Exeter Exchange, Exeter Street and the southern portion of Burleigh Street.

Location: Exeter Street, WC2E 7DS (purple, red)

See Also: ESTATES The Cecil Estates

Website: https://burghley.co.uk (The Exeters country house in the Soke of Peterborough.)

Fife House

The 1^st Earl of Fife (1697-1763) detested the English but felt that he had to spend time in London. He shipped a load of Scottish soil to London. This was spread over a vacant plot that he had acquired in Horse Guards Avenue. He then had a house built upon this.

Location: Horse Guards Avenue, SW1A 2ET (purple, yellow)

Leicester House

Leicester House (1635) was the townhouse of the Sydney family, who were the Earls of Leicester from 1618 to 1743. The property is best remembered for having been the home of various members of the Hanoverian dynasty, who were a particularly dysfunctional royal family. In 1717 the Prince of Wales (the future King George II) quarrelled with his father King George I. He moved out of his apartments in St James s Palace, and took up residence in Leicester House. In 1742 the now George II s son Frederick Prince of Wales did likewise. (His son, the future George III, was denied the opportunity to maintain the tradition since Frederick died while he was a boy.)

The building was demolished during the early 1790s.

Location: Leicester Place, WC2H 7BP. The street occupies the site.

See Also: MUSEUMS, DISAPPEARED & LATENT The Holophusikon; ROYAL RESIDENCES, DISAPPEARED; ROYAL STATUES King George I, Leicester Fields

Londonderry House

The 30-storey London Hilton (1963) was built on site of Londonderry House, a townhouse that was long one of the most notable features of Park Lane.

Location: 22 Park Lane, W1K 1BE. (The London Hilton hotel stands upon the site of Londonderry House.) (blue, orange)

The Sort of Grandee Who Makes You Wonder

The widowed Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald became besotted with Edith, Marchioness of Londonderry. They conducted an amit amoureuse. He wrote letters to her that were addressed to My dearest friend of all . He signed them Your attendant ghillie. One Labour M.P. is reputed to have commented of the premier, A few months ago he sang The Red Flag, but now he whistles The Londonderry Air.

In 1931 MacDonald formed the National Government. This led to his expulsion from the Labour Party. The politician s administration won the subsequent general election. The marchioness s husband, the 7^th Marquis of Londonderry, was appointed to the Cabinet as the Secretary of State for Air.

In the mid-1930s the government opted to respond to the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany by backing a policy of appeasement towards it. The Secretary embraced this line enthusiastically. Over the years 1934-8 he made a number of journeys to the country. During these he had several meetings with Hitler, whom he stated was very agreeable . The peer s actions proved to be too much for most of his colleagues. One person was moved to comment that he was The sort of grandee who makes you wonder why there was no British revolution.

Monmouth House

The Duke of Monmouth was the eldest illegitimate son of King Charles II. In 1685 he led a rebellion against his uncle King James II. It failed and he was executed.

Location: 27-29 Soho Square, W1D 3ER (purple, orange)

Montagu House

The mansion Montagu House (1686) had been built in Bloomsbury for the 1^st Duke of Montagu. His grace had had grand ideas about the style in which he should be accommodated. He had stretched his fortune to have them put into practice. He decided to restore his finances by trying to marry, as his second wife, the widowed Duchess of Albemarle. Her grace was extremely wealthy, she had also become extremely insane. She refused to consider any proposal that was not from a crowned head. Faced with this situation, Montagu told her that he was the Emperor of China. The couple wed in 1692.

Montagu s son by his previous marriage, the 2^nd Duke, inherited the property. He found it to be too large for his tastes and chose to reside in a house off Whitehall.¹ In 1755 the stately pile was acquired by the trustees of the British Museum to house the institution. The Museum had grown out of the collection of curios that had been amassed by Sloane, the 2^nd Duke of Albemarle s physician.

Location: Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG

See Also: THE BRITISH MUSEUM The Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art; MENTAL HEALTH; TOWNHOUSES, DISAPPEARED Albemarle House

¹. The 2^nd duke s home was in Privy Gardens. This was located on what is now Richmond Terrace, on the eastern side of Whitehall, slightly north of the mirror position of the entry into Downing Street.

Newcastle House

The great 17^thC equestrian William Cavendish 1^st Duke of Newcastle created Newcastle House in Clerkenwell,

Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle s (1623-1673) book The Blazing World (1666) is regarded as being one of the first works of science fiction.

Location: Newcastle Row, EC1R 0AL (orange, blue)

See Also: HORSES Horsemanship

Northumberland House

Northumberland House (1605) was the townhouse of the Percy Dukes of Northumberland. Over 1748-50 David Garrett remodelled the front of Northumberland House on Charing Cross so that it combined Gothic and Neo-Palladian. Despite its great beauty and the opposition of the Percies, the building was pulled down in 1874 and replaced by Northumberland Avenue. The road was intended to provide access for a bridge across the Thames. The crossing was never built.

Location: Northumberland Avenue, WC2N 5AQ (grey, grey)

See Also: BRIDGES; COACHES Coach Precedence; LEARNED SOCIETIES The Royal Society, The Smithsonian; SLUMS & AVENUES; WESTMINSTER ABBEY Memorials and Graves of Notables, The Percies

The Wizard Earl and Thomas Harriot

The 9^th Earl of Northumberland s intellectual pursuits led to his being dubbed the Wizard earl .

The scientist Thomas Harriot s was a client of Sir Walter Raleigh. In the early 1590s the explorer s standing at court began to decline and in 1596 he sailed to Guiana in search of El Dorado. Northumberland assumed the role of being Harriot s patron. He granted the man a pension of 80 p.a. for the rest of his life, the use of a house on the Syon Park estate, and underwrote the cost of a small staff to help the fellow in his researches.

Harriot discovered the sine law of refraction in 1601. This accounts for why light is refracted when it passes from one transparent medium into another. He also appreciated that red, yellow, and blue lights are refracted differently from one another. The German astronomer and mathematician Johann Kepler was a keen student of his work. In 1606 the two men conducted a correspondence. During it, Harriot was careful to reveal only a portion of his discoveries.

The same year Northumberland was arrested for supposedly having had knowledge of the Gunpowder Plot and for having failed to inform the government of it. He was tried and convicted. Some people came to believe that in the Tower of London the earl and Raleigh maintained a School of Night . Harriot was supposed to be its master.

The scientist was acknowledged to be a figure of European renown; however, it was to the frustration of his friends that he published so few of his findings. At his death he left his papers to the earl. Subsequently, some of his works were published. This led to an appreciation that he had been the greatest mathematician of his era.

Location: St Christopher s Graveyard, The Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, EC2R 8AR. Harriot died in a house in the street. He was buried in the Church of St Christopher-le-Stocks, which was located on a site that is now covered by the south-western corner of the Bank of England.

See Also: SIR ISAAC NEWTON; THE TOWER OF LONDON Prisoners, Sir Walter Raleigh

Piccadilly Townhouses

Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a row of great townhouses was built on the northern side of Piccadilly to the west of Swallow Street - Berkeley House,¹ Burlington House, and Clarendon House. The only one to survive is Burlington House.

Location: Piccadilly, W1J 8HP (orange, brown)

Berkeley Street, W1J 8EJ (orange, purple)

See Also: HOTELS The Berkeley; TOWNHOUSES Burlington House

¹. Berkeley House (1665) stood on a site that was bordered by Stratton Street and Berkeley Street. In 1696 the property was sold to the 1^st Duke of Devonshire. The 3^rd Duke had William Kent design a new Devonshire House (1737). This building was the home of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (d.1806). In 1918 the building was sold by the 9^th Duke and demolished.

Albemarle House

The 1^st Duke of Albemarle bought Clarendon House c.1664 and renamed it Albemarle House. Twenty years later the building was pulled down and Albemarle Street was built upon the site.

The 1^st Duke of Albemarle s son and heir was an intemperate youth. His spendthrift ways dissolved much of the great fortune that his father had bequeathed to him. He was a member of a gang of young rakes that was led by the Duke of Monmouth, King Charles II s oldest illegitimate son.

The Popish Plot was discovered in 1679. It involved political interests using the unexplained murder of a prominent magistrate as a means of whipping up anti-Catholic sentiments. The purpose of this stage-managed sectarianism was to try to block the possible accession of James Duke of York to the throne. He was the king s younger brother and heir-apparent. For Monmouth, the Plot held out the prospect that he might be legitimated and thereby be given the possibility of succeeding his father. However, Charles was determined that James would continue to be his heir. Albemarle opted to support the monarch s stance. This terminated his friendship with the sovereign s son.

This positive experience prompted the duke to ask James II to confer the Governorship of Jamaica upon him. The monarch appointed him to the office. Upon arriving on the island, the peer s health went into a steep decline. His personal physician, Hans Sloane, prescribed repeated bleedings for him. These may have denied the duke a chance to recover. He died less than a year after he had disembarked.

Location: Albemarle Street, W1S 4HJ (purple, yellow)

Devonshire House

The intertwined letters DH can de discerned on the replacement building s exterior.

Location: Devonshire House, 1 Mayfair Place, W1J 8AJ (orange, red)

See Also: FRUIT Bananas, The Cavendish

David Backhouse 2024