The Waterloo Palace: unbuilt designs for a monumental residence (2024)

For the hero of Waterloo, as well as the hero of Blenheim, designs were prepared for a residence on a palatial scale, to be provided by a grateful nation

Undeterred by the lack of a site on which to build this palace, Benjamin Dean Wyatt prepared a series of sumptuous schemes for the Duke of Wellington, a selection of which were reproduced for the first time in this piece published in AR April 1974. Nothing was ever built, and in the end the Duke settled in the, by ducal standards, modest house at Stratfield Saye, a supposedly temporary arrangement which has survived until the present day. This piece was republished online in August 2019, to accompany the publication of Tom Wilkinson’s Typology: Palace in AR July/August 2019: AR House + Social Housing

‘The eldest son of Wyatt is appointed a writer to India,’ wrote Joseph Farington of Ben­jamin Dean, James Wyatt’s first born, in 1796. Early in the following year the young man took up an appointment in the Secrets Department of the East India Company’s Secretary’s office in Calcutta, but he was soon writing home sadly dis­illusioned letters about the facts and prospects of life in India. ‘Those Golden Tales you hear in England are all an illusion which serves mightily well to please the imagination, but in reality do not exist. Six years later Benjamin Wyatt returned to England. In 1796 another young man had sailed out to India, where he gained valuable ex­perience as soldier and adminis­trator; but feeling ‘I have served as long in India as any man might who can serve anywhere else’, he returned to England with a growing reputation and a knighthood. This was Sir Arthur Wellesley, who was appointed Chief Secretary to Ireland in 1807 and took Benjamin Wyatt with him as private secretary. Two years later both men gave up their work in Ireland. Welles­ley was fully occupied with the Peninsular Wars, and Wyatt had decided to follow his father’s profession.

Wellington returned to England in triumph in 1814 to receive a Dukedom and, like Marlborough a century earlier, he was offereda residence as a gift from a grate­ful nation. In 1813, when James Wyatt was killed, Benjamin Wyatt’s wife had written to Wellington soliciting his assis­tance in procuring some of the deceased architect’s appoint­ments for her husband. Whether or not this led to Wyatt’s being favoured by Wellington in 1814, he was quickly engaged in the search for a ducal palace. Within two months of the last shot being fired, Wyatt was writing to his patron about the early 18th-­century Radley House and its estate in Berkshire, which were ‘by no means what the Nation would wish them to be, or what they ought to be, for you.’

Wyatt had a clear vision of the ideal home for the nation’s hero: ‘My idea with respect to the principle to be pursued in the architectural plan of a Mansion for you is that a very magnificent & imposing effect should be produced by an accuracy of proportions, by a judicious arrangement of contiguous Rooms & by a liveliness of Design & decoration in one or two parts of the Building, rather than by the prodigious extentand magnitude of the Fabric…

I am sure that, in this way I could produce an effect, which should be so striking, that the impression.made upon the Spec­tator, upon his first entrance, should afterwards be kept up by a moderate degree of space and enrichment in the rest of theBuilding, without incurring the monstrous expense of a Fabric extended to the dimensions of Blenheim, Castle Howard & many others which, after all, have no one feature in them halfso striking as might be produced upon the principle which I have in view.’

‘the great central feature, the “striking impression made upon the Spectator”, must remain unimpaired in its monumental gran­deur’

However, before anything could be decided about the realisation of this palatial but supposedly relatively economic vision, more important matters engaged Wel­lington’s attention. Yet, within a few months of the victory at Waterloo Wyatt was in Paris, displaying for Wellington’s ap­probation and for the commentsof his friends a grand design based on his vision of the prev­ious year. Assuming a site such as Wyatt was looking for, ‘visible to travellers in several points of view, at a distance of about a mile & half from the Road, & in a situation where it would have an imposing effect’, the general composition closely followed that of the traditional French cour d’honneur, entered through a colonnaded screen and surroun­ded by buildings on three sides. It was in the entrance to the Great Court, almost 300ft square, that in one version of the design Wyatt suggested paying overt homage to Wellington and his martial glory in a rhetorical display which one might assume was probably intended to be executed by Matthew Cotes, Benjamin Wyatt’s sculptor brother. The massive piers, surmounted by military trophies, were to form the background for allegorical groups, one of which represents Wellington be­ing crowned by a hovering Victory and receiving the hom­age of the allied nations.

Quadrants were to extend the military precision of the line of Corinthian columns and pilas­ters, approximately 140 of them, around the Great Court to the palace itself, an impressive Neo-Classical design with hexa­style portico, projecting wings surmounted by attics ornamented with military trophies, anda shallow dome over a large central octagon.

The design of the Great Court itself with quadrant corners is reminiscent of James Wyatt’s Gothic or Castellated Palace at Kew, George Ill’s ill-fated com­mission which was begun in 1801, halted in 1811 and finally de­molished in 1827. For the house itself, planned around a central staircase, James Wyatt’s Ash­ridge, Hertfordshire (1808-13) and Dodington Park, Gloucester­shire (1797-1817), as well as the Gothic Palace at Kew, were probably the family sources.

The design of the exterior has close affinities with James Wyatt’s later buildings, such as Dodington Park and the un­executed designs for DowningCollege, Cambridge. The com­ponents which can be found in these might be regarded as the Wyatt heritage, and one remem­bers that Benjamin Wyatt’s wife, writing to Wellington on behalf of her husband, had truly said he had ‘been brought up under the tuition of his Father, and of course persues his stile, and taste in Architecture’. These Wyatt characteristics appeared in York by Jeffry (eg Dinton House, Wiltshire, 1812-17, the unexecuted designs for a House of Assembly in Quebec, 1812, and a great palace for the Earl of Yarborough at Brocklesby, Lin­colnshire, 1820), by Lewis William (eg Willey Park, Salop, 1813-15), by Philip (eg Wyn­yard, Durham, c1828), as well as in other designs by Benjamin. They can all be regarded as descending from the James Wyatt exteriors which exhibited that quality describedby Charles Robert co*ckerell as ‘a cold & old stateliness which appales & awes me’.

The planning of the palace drew some criticisms from Wellington and his friends in Paris, and Wyatt found it necessary to produce alternatives. There was no decisive action about the site on which the Waterloo Palace was to be erected. Wyatt was still hoping that a part of the New Forest would be avail­able, but he did not allow the lack of a location to deter him. He was willing to make amend­ments to his first idea, but the great central feature, the ‘striking … impression made upon the Spectator, upon his first entrance’, must remain unimpaired in its monumental gran­deur. Undoubtedly, the entrance to the house, through the great portico into the entrance hall which was to rise through two floors to a shallow vaulted ceiling and be lit by a central lantern, would ‘arrest the attention of whoever came into it’. The lower parts of the end walls were to be decorated with statues and lamps in niches, above which was to be a Neo-Classical frieze depicting scenes of battle; the upper parts were to be filled with large paintings, probably of Wellington’s victories. But Wyatt would not have ex­pected a visitor to linger in the entrance hall, for beyond it, through a screen of arches and columns, would be seen the stair­case hall rising up to a great coffered dome and oculus. This was obviously the cherished part of his design, and its expense was justified by the slightly specious reasoning that as there would be a central area ‘at all events’, it might as well be roofed over and made use of.

‘It was another of those illusions which served “mightily well to please the imagination, but in reality do not exist”’

Like the exterior of the building, the staircase hall derived from a design by James Wyatt – his first and most famous, the Pantheon in London. By 1815, the domed building in Oxford Street had been rebuilt more than once, but it was evidently a vivid memory in Wyatt’s experience and was lovingly recalled in his design for the upper half of the staircase hall. There is an abrupt change and meagreness of detail in the lower half. ‘Wyatt’s Idea for a Staircase … is Grand but still, like all his work, poor in parts’, thought Thomas Rickman in 1817, but that Wellington was satisfied with his proposed palace is evident from Wyatt’s letter dated November 1815, in which he was ‘happy to learn that you continue to approve the Plan as now arranged.’ It must be assumed that the approval was sufficiently explicit to cause working drawings to be made, and Wyatt referred to them in the same letter:

‘Not a moment shall be lost in preparing the Drawings … but it is not possible to do them in a very rough way; the tediousness of making Drawings of that nature consists chiefly in the precision with which it is nece­ssary to draw the various lines, first in pencil and then in ink, and if those lines were not drawn with precision, the parts beingvery minute, the Drawings would not be intelligible.’

By the end of 1815 a set of 86 working drawings had been made, and the final presenta­tion set of the grand design was sent to Wellington on 28 Decem­ber. Yet there was still no site for the palace.

This did not prevent Wyatt from discussing the decoration with Wellington. Three weeks after sending the drawings, he wrote about various marbles that might be used, referring to previous conversations in Paris. Thedetails included in the set of working drawings indicate Wyatt’s delight in rich decora­tion; the design for a doorcase in the State Drawing-room specifies different woods, purple Botany Bay and amboyna, all heightened with burnished gold. Similarly, the details of the cornice and frieze for the same room specify a lavish application of matt and burnished gold, such as could be found later in Wyatt’s work in Londonderry House and Apsley House and in Wyatville’s at Windsor Castle and Chatsworth.

There is, however, no indication in these drawings of the French Rococo style that Wyatt was to revive so successfully in the 1820s; everything was in the Wyatt Neo-Classical tradition. Wyatt’s enthusiastic search for richly decorative materials re­ceived a setback in February 1816 when he presented his scheme to the Trustees. With obvious disappointment he had to report to Wellington that ‘Nothing in the form of a Judge­ment was passed upon them nor indeed was a single expression ofdistinct praise uttered by either of the Trustees upon any one part of the Design’. He was mortified by one of the omis­sions; ‘the Hall and Staircase, among the other principal features, drew forth no remark whatever’ There were criti­cisms of the garden front and a suggestion that a pediment might be an improvement instead of the heavy attic, and some of the Trustees objected to the ugliness of the dome over the staircase. Wyatt answered the first by explaining that he had ‘pur­posely given a grave character to the Attic in the Centre of the Garden Front’ which would be contradicted by a pediment; and as for the second, he explained that ‘the form and proportion of exterior of the Dome of the Pantheon at Rome … had been his model on this occasion’. Reference to such a precedent should have been sufficient to silence criticism, but afterwards Wyatt tried out various alterna­tives based on the Trustees’ comments. After the meeting, he was ‘at a loss to judge what Course the Trustees are likely now to take with respect to the Plans’, sensing a reserve in their behaviour to him; but in April Wellington instructed his architect to revise the design ‘with every attention to economy’, eliminating the Great Court and planning the kitchen and stables in a detached building close to the house but screened from it by planting.

The result was another series of drawings ‘show­ing a newly projected arrange­ment for introducing many of the Domestic Offices into the Body of the House’, but suggesting few alterations in the appearance of the house itself. At the same time Wyatt was still looking at other properties. In February 1816 he went toinspect Colin Campbell’s Hough­ton Hall in Norfolk, and in the following August he reported on the recently completed Exton Hall in Rutland; but he be­lieved there were personal reasons why no decision was forthcoming to build the Waterloo Palace. He wrote in confidence to Wel­ington of his ‘persuasion that there is, in a very high qttarter … the greatest possible jealousy of the House which is in contem­plation for Your Grace,37 .”caused by disappointment and mortifica­tion at the failure of a certain projected plan with respect to another great Building’. This letter suggests why Beckford called Wyatt ‘His Bitterness Benjamin’, but it might well refer to the Prince Regent’s annoyance that John Nash had been warned just over a year earlier that it was ‘not intended that any steps whatever should be taken towards erecting a New Palace’ for his royal patron who was then expressing his recurrent dissatisfaction with Carlton House. However, Wyatt evidently thought it worthwhile to continue developing his ideas.

Stratfield Saye, a medium-sized 17th-century house with 18th-­century interiors, was bought for Wellington by the Trustees in 1817. In the following year, by which time another scheme had been prepared, Wyatt scorns to have been sure enough of the demolition of the old house and the eventual erection of his design to make a dimensioned plan ‘for the purpose of being sent to France as a Guide for the forms and dimensions of Carpets to be made at the Savonnerie Manufactory’; but by then other architects were at work on a design for the palace. Thomas Lister Parker, a Yorkshire land­owner who was a friend of the Prince Regent and a collector and antiquary of some distinc­tion, wrote to Thomas Rickman with the information that ‘a new House is wanted for the Duke of Wellington in the Castellated Style for Stratfield Saye’. Early in 1818 he completed plans, elevations and sections of what hecalled the Wellington Castle or Palace. At the same time C. R. co*ckerell and C. H. Tatham were making designs, although on whose authority all these were commissioned, or what was the nature of the intended competition, is not clear. Then, in March, Parker wrote to tell Rickman that Wyatt was ‘to build Stratfield Saye and that it is to be Grecian’. Certainly, the week before this news was given, Wyatt told Wellington that ‘Lords Camden, Bathurst & Grenville had been to look at the plans, but not yet Lord Harrow­by. They appeared to be pleased, made a few observations, but appeared satisfied with explana­tions’. He could also claim the support of the influential Sir Charles Long, a close friend of the Prince Regent and a recog­nised authority on questions of taste; it was reassuring that such a connoisseur found ‘no feature or provision of the Plan as it now stands which … requires to be altered’ and that he entirelyagreed with Wyatt’s emphasis on the great staircase which had remained a constant element in all the designs and of which another fine perspective was made in 1818.

However, in February or March a decision was taken to retain and modify the existing house at Stratfield Saye for the time being; Wyatt’s account was paid for the 171 drawings he had prepared, and the idea of the Waterloo Palace faded away. It was another of those illusions which served ‘mightily well to please the imagination, but in reality do not exist’.

This piece was originally published in AR April 1974, and republished online in August 2019, to accompany the publication of Tom Wilkinson’sTypology: Palacein AR July/August 2019: AR House + Social Housing