Erddig

JOSHUA EDISBURY

In 1682 Joshua Edisbury was appointed High Sheriff of Denbighshire; it was to be the making of Erddig, and the unmaking of Edisbury.
The Edisbury family had been minor gentry in the county since at least the mid-sixteenth century. Joshua's father, John, was a local barrister and steward to Sir Thomas Myddelton at nearby Chirk Castle. Joshua himself was a generous, easy-going man, fond of gambling on cock-fights and always ready to bail out family and friends when they were short of money, which was often. Not surprisingly, his appointment as High Sheriff was popular in the county. The family home at Pentre Clawdd, solid and sensible though it was, must have seemed too humble for his new status, as the following year he decided to build a new house.
Edisbury chose a dramatic site on an escarpment above the winding River Clywedoga mile south of Wrexham. There seems to have already been a house here, but all trace of it was swept away by the new building. On 1 November 1683 Thomas Webb, freemason of Middlewich in Cheshire, `covenanted and agreed to undertake and perform the care and oversight of the contriving, building and finishing of a case or body of a new house'. The bricks were laid by William Carter of Chester the stone was supplied by Edward Price. Work began in 1684. Webb estimated for 'a house 85 foot long and so foot deepe' to a design that had been pioneered by Sir Roger Prattin the 1660s and had since become widely popular for British country houses: two storeys and a basement beneath a single, hipped roof and topped by a central cupola and four tall chimneystacks. The unornamented windows originally had timber casement frames, the mullions of which still survive in the basement storey. The outward appearance of Webb's house is best seen today in the central nine bays of the east, garden front, where Price's pedimented central doorcase provides the only embellishment. The plan followed the 'clouble-pile' form recommended by Pratt — two sets of rooms set back-to-back and divided by symmetrically arranged main and back stairs. Although some of the internal partitions were tinkered with by Edisbury's successors, his original conception has survived remarkably little altered.
In his estimate, Webb noted: 'The plastering I have here omitted because some of y Rooms may be wainscotted and other inferior Rooms not plastered at all.' The deeply moulded panelling which is still such a feature of Erddig was left to Philip Rogers, a carpenter from Eyton, but he was late with the work, and in September 1686 was obliged to `promise [that the staircase] shall be completed & finished by y 15th April next ensuing. The hall to be layd (out of hand) with deal, and after to be layed wth oak; y great parlour to be lay'd wth oak.' After the woodwork was finally completed, much of it was painted or grained in a variety of colours by the exotically named White Crisp Burtch of Nantwich, as Edisbury's agent reported in July 1692:
Concerning the rooms, the drabe roome I think is painted very well the pannells are resembling Yew, the stiles to prince wood [a dark-coloured, light-veined West Indian wood], and the moulding a light color.
The Doctor's Chamber [used by Joshua's brother, John] is prety well don sumewhat like Ash, I think; and vained much like the Hall. The other roome is but ordinary, I think, and plane, ether a dark browne or sumewhat like sinnimone culor.According to John Prince, a witness at Edisbury's trial in 1715, 'All the harthes and chimneys are curiously fitted some with Marble and others with freestone.' These may have been the chimneypieces put up by Edward Price, but in January 1693 William Leeke of Apley Castle offered Edisbury new chimneypieces made from 'a pretty sort of marble' he had discovered near Doddington Hall, the Cheshire home of Edisbury's wife, Grace Delves.
We know almost nothing about how Edisbury furnished his new house: the `lull inventory' made around 1709 has, glas, disappeared. In 1694 he bought a pair of silver-mounted tables and 'a large flagon' from the London goldsmith Alexander Pulford, but after Edisbury's fall these and the rest of the contents were all sold, bar a few things put aside in 'the Blue Closet'. According to family tradition, they included the remarkable six-panel screen of incised lacquer (now in the State Bedroom), which was said to have been given him by Elihu Yale.Today Yale is famous as the benefactor of the American university that bears his name, but in the 1680s he was governing Fort St George at
Madras for the East India Company. Edisbury was eager to curry favour with such a rising man, who had been brought up an the neighbouring estate at Plas Grono. So he decided to present him with `four Rundletts [casks] of Sandpatch Ale' — 74 gallons in all. On zo April 1682 Yale wrote back a letter of effusive and rather stilted thanks, sending to Edisbury in return a cask of `our best mango Atchar [chutney]' and to his wife 'A Japan Skreen'.
In 1684 Webb had estimated that Edisbury's new house would cost £677 10s 9d to build. This was hardly a vast sum, when one considers that the mason-contractor William Stanton was paid around £5,000 between 1685 and 1688 to erect Belton House in Lincolnshire.But fitting up and furnishing the building, and laying out the elaborate formal garden must have cost a great deal more, if John Prince was right when he testified in 1715 that the total bill was over £8,000.
It was certainly more than Edisbury could afford. His relations continued to pester him for money, his investments in the lead mines at Gop and Trelogan in Flintshirebegan to turn sour, and he had to borrow more simply to pay off the interest on old debts. By the late 1690s he was in dire financial straits and turned to Elihu Yale for help. Their former friendship evaporated when Yale, who had been forced to leave Fort St George after accusations of extortion and murder, demanded £4,000 in payment for a loan of half that. Edisbury's servants at Erddig remained remarkably loyal, but the miners at Trelogan became understandably restive when their wages went unpaid, despite repeated pleas to Edisbury from the mine agent. Finally, George Williams wrote in despair in October 1696:
I declare I never knew soe small a Concern as yrs. at Trelogan is in soe great a Confusion, for ye workmen have almost all run away and those few are left will not touch the sough [mine drain] upon ye former terms.
Joshua's brother, Dr John Edisbury, a successful lawyer, MP for Oxford University and, from 1684, a Master in Chancery, came to his aid, but only succeeded in being ruined with him. John was found to have stolen Chancery fees in a vain attempt to stave off his brother's creditors, and was brought to trial. In May 1712 he signed a petition to the Lord Chancellor which spelt out the brothers' plight very clearly:

[he] doth with the Utmost Shame & Sorrow acknowledge his Crimes and abhor himselfe for his breach of Trust in missaplying the money by the Orden of this Court comitted to his Charge, so that he is at present unable to pay ye same.

But forasmuch as your Petitione was Seduced into that Guilt by affection to his Brother whose Estate yor Petr then verily believed to be more than sufficient to reimburse the money lent, and all other Incumbrances whatsoever.....

Dr Edisbury died in disgrace the following year; Joshua, who had been declared bankrupt in 1709, left Erddig for euer and seems to have spent the rest of his life in London. He is last heard of in 1716, when he was living `at the Blew Spires in the Old Bayley'. After that, silence.
In Edisbury's absente, the house was let out to a Mr Alport. The principal mortgage on the estate was held by Dr Edisbury's Chancery superior, the Master of die Rolls Sir John Trevor, who was also a member of" one of the oldest families in Denbighshire. Trevor's reputation for political duplicity was not helped by a ferocious squint. He certainly did not endear himself to John Williams, the Erddig steward, who reported to Edisbury the gradual dissolution of all that he had created with a mixture of sadness and loyal efficiency. Like the housekeeper Elizabeth Lea and the rest of the stall, Williams did his best to adjust to the new regime, but was peremptorily rebuffed when he tried to show Trevor round in September 1709:
I ask'd his honour if he would be pleased to see the other Gardens (no) and when he came in I asked if he pleased to see the house (no) I also ask'd him if he would be pleased to drink anything that I had which he pleased viz. wine or Clarett (no).
John Williams left the Edisburys' employ that month; it is typical of the man that he should have written to Mrs Edisbury apologising for the distress his departure had caused her.

JOHN MELLER

On 28 January 1714 John Meller became the 'best purchaser' of Erddig, having offered £17,000 for the estate. However, it was not until August 1716 that he finally succeeded in buying out Sir John Trevor. Melier came from a Derbyshire family and had grown rich as a barrister in the Middle Temple; indeed he succeeded John Edisbury as Master in Chancery after his disgrace. However, in almost every other respect, Melier was a different character from the Edisburys. He was plain-spoken and 'not apt to flauer his Freinds', as one of his pupils put it. Meticulous in accounting for every penny he spent, he coolly rebuffed the claims of needy relatives. His sister Aliza thought him `hard-laced'. When his brother-in-law Simon Yorke's wholesale grocery business got into difficulties, he wrote:
You must have known long since what way is the custom of the Queens Bench, and therefore if there was a necessity for the Money you should have applyed to your own relations and provided in time for it. For my part I find Money scarce enough with all my outgoings.
Simon ended up in debtors' prison, and his spendthrift son John Yorke was obliged to seek his fortune abroad, having apologised that 'the chiefest of my Extravagancy has been in Books'.
When Melier finally acquired the estate, he was already si, but still a bachelor, and therefore a promising catch. Joshua Edisbury's sister Martha Lloyd sought to rescue the family's Position in the county by marrying him off to her daughter Patty. Nothing came of the match, and Meller remained single, with a sister acting as housekeeper at Erddig in the early days. In 1732 the antiquary John Loveday remarked that Meller was 'not very agreeable to ye Countrey'. His part in the downfall of a popular local figure must still have rankled. As a fierte antiJacobite, he was also politically out of sympathy with many of the Denbighshire gentry; indeed in 1731 the beleaguered Prime Minister Robert Walpolewas keen to offer him any help he could against the local Tory magnates.
John Melier may have been an unlovable man, but he was neither a miser nor a philistine. He owned a large London house in the fashionable quarter of Bloomsbury Square, for which Sir James Thornhilldesigned a trompe-l'oeil portico. When he bought Erddig, he at once set about extending the house to the north and south by the addition of two-storey wings, each of two bays. He left the exterior of the central block as Webb had built it, apart from inserting more fashionable sash windows on the first and second floors. Thanks to Meller's meticulous accounting and an inventory of 1726, we are able to envisage his interiors and document in unusual detail his superb furniture, rauch of which still survives at Erddig. Loveday was suitably impressed after his visit in 1732, describing it as furnished:
... in y° grandest manner, & after ye newest fashion... Above Stairs a Gallery hung w' y' Sibylls, all lengths [twelve in all]. The Stair-case & Rooms are wainscotted w' Oak, & have r convenience of Dressing Rooms, & Rooms for Servants. They are furnish'd w' Mohair, Coffoy [caffoy — a cut-wool velvet], Damasks, &c. The grand Apartments are below Stairs [ie on the ground floor].
Loveday's tour of the grand Apartments' would have begun with the Entrance Hall in the centre of the west front. Here and in most of the principal rooms there were new marble chimneypieces and window seats commissioned from the sculptor Robert Wynne of Ruthin who was also working in the 1720s for the Myddeltons at Chirk. A gilded leather screen helped to keep out the draughts, which have always been a problem in this room. As a room of passage, there was little need for other furniture: in 1726 there were ten leather black hall-

chairs pushed back against the walls, two marbletopped pier-tables and a large Dutch table. The Entrance Hall also seems to have been used as a games room, with a pair of backgammon tables and a three-cornered table at which to play ombre, a three-handed card game popular in the early eighteenth century.
The Hall was flanked, on the right, by the Eating Parlour (now the Drawing Room), which had crimson silk curtains and a tea-table, together with all the implements needed for making and serving tea. This room catches the afternoon sun. (There was a separate room for breakfast upstairs.) To the left was the Little Parlour (now the Library), which had tasselled green curtains, a square Dutch table and one of the few pictures in the house. Loveday mentions 'an excellent picture of ye Virgin & Babe' and 'a good Picture of a jocose Frier'.
Having left his hat on the brass stand in the passage by the back stairs, Loveday would have crossed the Hall and passed through a central door (now gone) into the Saloon — the typical late seventeenth-century arrangement. One should imagine Meller's Saloon two-thirds its present size and dominated by a set of eight walnut side-chairs and settee. With their exceedingly rare dark crimson and yellow caffoy loose covers, they were designed to match the crimson and yellow curtains that once hung here. This was only the first example of carefully co-ordinated colour schemes of increasing sumptuousness and complexity.
Loveday remarked on the `very fine Glasses' at Erddig. Melier certainly seems to have been Fond of his own reflection. For throughout the principal rooms there is mirror glass everywhere, in frames by the finest London makers of the day. The smaller pair of sconces still in the Saloon, with their gilt gesso frames and glass candle branches, bear all the characteristics of the work of John Belchier whose workshop in St Paul's Cathedral churchyard supplied much of the fine furniture at Erddig. In 1726 these mirrors would have hung above Marble Tables with Walnutree Fraims' (now gone).
Following Baroque convention, the principal apartment was entered from the Saloon and occupied the south-east corner of the ground floor. The first in this suite of increasingly private and lavish rooms was the Withdrawing Room, which today is part of the Saloon. Silver and crimson set the note for the furnishings. The set of eight side-chairs and settee, `ye frames of wch are plated with Silver', had loose covers of flowered crimson Spitalfields velvet, to match the crimson velvet curtains and window cushions. A silvered table, topped with mirror glass and with `Mr Millar's Arms work'd in y middle', came in 1726 from the workshop of John Belchier. (At this time Belchier was also making new glass for St Paul's Cathedral.) To hang on the pier above, he supplied a large Sconch with a Silver Frame & 2 pairs of Glass Arms'. Both table and sconce are now in the Tapestry Room. Another silver-framed mirror (now gone) hung over the chimneypiece.
Beyond was the climax of the suite, the Best Bedchamber (now part of the Dining Room). Here the main colours were green, white and gold, the mood exotic. Dominating the room was the State Bed, superbly fitted out with white Chinese embroidered silk hangings by a 'Mt. Hurt'. This was probably John Hutt, who had workshops near Belchier in St Paul's churchyard. Belchier himself seems to have been responsible for the fabulous carved and gilded hawks' heads on the bed-head. Between November 1722 and January 1726 Meller spent no less than £26216s on furniture from Belchier. Again, there were matching curtains and window cushions in embroidered white silk. The foreign flavour of the bed was taken up in the three Soho tapestries that hung round the room (those now in the Tapestry Room), which featured oriental scenes. The antiquarian Loveday was particularly taken with 'Hen. 8th's Dressing Table . . . of Tortoise-Shell thick-inlaid with fine Brass' (now in the Saloon). This ambitious provenance is typical of Erddig: the table is actually late seventeenth-century and French — one of the earliest documented examples of Louis XIV Boullework in Britain. Above was another of Belchier's gilt pier-glasses, surmounted by grotesque gilt masks and curling foliage (also now in the Saloon). In it would have been reflected the glowing colours of '6 gold stuff chairs with green japan frames' and '2 gold stuff stools and green japan frames' (now in the State Bedroom).
There was plenty more furniture lacquered in red, green and black in the rest of the house. The most spectacular surviving piece is the gilt and scarlet japanned bureau-cabinet, probably made by Belchier (now also in the State Bedroom). If the outside was as vibrant a scarlet as the inside is today, then it must have made a truly dazzling impact among the largely blue furnishings of the `Blew Mohair Room'. The upstairs furnishings were in general plainer, walnut pieces with less spectacular textiles than those in the rooms below. The main room on the first floor was the panelled gallery. Although the paintings of Sibyls noted by Loveday have gone, it has otherwise changed little, still running across the centre of the house from east to west. Similar axial galleries were once to be found in the slightly earlierKingston Lacy in Dorsetand Wimpole Hallin Cambridgeshire.
In 1732 Loveday ended his tour of the house with the words: 'The Chappel is not quite finish'd, ye pews &c. Oak.' This is perhaps explained by the fact that the Chapel occupies the far end of the north wing which Meller further extended together with the south wing before 1726. The new extensions included oval 'bulls-eye' windows and arcades on the west front. Apart from the Chapel, the new wings also allowed more space for proper dressingrooms and closets off the main bedchambers — an improvement that met with Loveday's approval. Most of the new work seems to have been completed by 1724, when Meller's steward, Richard Jones, wrote to him: Since your Honour lef Erthig there has been 4 Coaches full of Gentry to see the Hall ... they all admired the Hall and furniture Mitily.'
Meller did not have much longer to enjoy his newly furnished house. In 1726 he was already complaining of his 'indifferent state of health which makes business troublesome', and by the early 1730s his eyesight was failing. His sister Anne recommended the herb Eyebright as a remedy: 'I had the distilled water of it and thought it no way unpleasant being sweetened with sugar you may also make a tea of it or have it dried powdered to take in any manner you please.' It can have brought only temporary relief, as on 23 November 1733 he died. His memorial byPeter Scheemakersin Marchwiel churchbears a simple Latin inscription, which ends with a plea for resurrection: `Resurgam'.

SIMON I AND PHILIP I YORKE

Who would inherit Erddig? Meller had no children and no very high opinion of his relatives — apart from his sister Anne, who came to live at Bloomsbury Square after the death of her husband in 1723. Meller looked to her younger son Simon in London to supervise the prompt completion and delivery of his valuable new furnishings for Erddig. Simon Yorke signed himself 'your most Dutiful Nephew', and so he proved, writing to his uncle in December 1720: 'The Tapestry Weaver called here, to acquaint me that ye other piece of Tapestry was finish'd. . . I shall not now send it into ye Country without order because I believe that ye Roads being full of water the Tapestry may possibly receive damage.' The Soho tapestries arrived safely; indeed Meller was so pleased with his nephew's efficiency that he bequeathed Erddig to him.

The epitaph on Simon Yorke's monument in Marchwiel church calls him 'a pious temperate country Gentleman, of a very mild, just and benevolent character, as the concern for his death did best testify; An Advantage which Amiable Men have over great Ones.' He was certainly not to be numbered among the `great Ones' like his cousin, Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, who was Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756. He was content to enjoy his good fortune, developing the garden at Erddig (see Chapter Seven), but doing little to the house. It was only after a certain amount of goodhumoured chivvying from his lawyer friends that in 1739, at the age of 43, he decided to marry the nineteen-year-old Dorothy Hutton, heiress to her brother James's Hertfordshire estate of Newnham. An engraved glass beaker in the Saloon celebrates their marriage.
In May 1740 Simon brought his new wife back to Wales; a neighbour observed the scene: `Everybody's eyes was fixed and all their attention upon his young Bride, who acquited herself soe well at that time [in her] then publick station that she gained the Applause of everybody.' She could relax with a game of billiards at the table which was installed in 1742 in what is now-the Tribes Room. 'I hope', one of Simon Yorke's friends wrote, 'that Mrs Yorke is become proficient in the skill of pocketing.' However, she seems to have found running Erddig a struggle. Disagreements about the servants' wages caused her sleepless nights, 'but whilst I keep house I shall never pinch my Servants. A large house in Wales is the worst thing in the world to manage.' She longed for a smaller, more convenient home in London, but her mother-in-law continued to occupy the Bloomsbury Square house until her death in 1748, and the Yorkes seem to have visited the capital only rarely after their marriage. Instead they rented a house in Chester during the winter, when Erddig was closed up.
On 29 July 1743 their only son was born. It is perhaps to Philip Yorke more than anyone that Erddig owes its special character. Although he was the first owner to have been born on the estate, he spent much of his early life away from Denbighshire, at schools in Wanstead in Essex and then in Hackney. Phil, as his mother called him, was a cheerful, precocious child. An avid reader from an early age, he was fond of the theatre and of dressing up; at five he was already asking his mother to send his favourite silver waistcoat, and at the same age he decided to become a vegetarian. A sister, Anne Jemima, did not arrive until he was eleven. She was delicate, musical and doted on by her mother, who splashed out on a Jacob Kirkman harpsichord for her in 1769. After a year at Eton, Philip went up to Cambridge in 1762, where he was an industrious student and, like most students, critical of his teachers, whose lectures he thought `neither extraordinary clever or Entertaining'. He found the `concise and laconick Stile' of Tacitus `peculiarly obscure, at least to my Faculty of resolving', but was keen to take on a private tutor to improve matters. He was soon writing long letters to his father discoursing learnedly on Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. 'Your father is tired', his mother reported anxiously, and in 1767 Simon Yorke died, when Philip was 23. He seems to have left his mother to look after Erddig, while he remained in London at Lincoln's Inn, where he had just been called to the Bar.
Philip's closest friend at Cambridge had been Brownlow Cust, the son of Sir John Cust of Belton in Lincolnshire, the Speaker of the House of Commons. Around 1767 he fell in love with Brownlow's sister, Elizabeth. There was, however, one major obstacle to the match — Philip's uncle, James Hutton. Philip and the whole of his family were acutely aware that his future prospects, and even perhaps the future of Erddig, depended on securing Hutton's inheritance, and that depended on getting his approval for the marriage. The first signs were not encouraging, and as a result Sir John Custstarted to get cold feet. Brownlow Cust revealed his father's anxieties to Philip in September 1767:

And when I hinted to him Mr H's disapprobation of your marrying, it struck him very much. He has been taught from his infancy so much to dread divisions in a family, that he wou'd fear very much for his daughter marrying into one that was divided. And as to fortune he apprehends there wou'd scarcely be a sufficiency between you.

On Sir John's approval rested Elizabeth's dowry of £10,000. In January the following year Philip steeled himself to visit his uncle at Newnham. After an agonising wait, finally, at to o'clock on the last evening, Hutton revealed his intentions. He said that his only objection had euer been his nephew's lack of fortune. (Philip restrained himself from pointing out that it was in his uncle's power to remove that objection at a stroke.) Hutton confirmed, `My Fortune I have made to descend to. you,' although at the same time 'he muttered — that I treated the Expectancy from him more familiarly than it might deserve.' Their conversation went on till one in the morning, but at last Philip was able to report to his prospective father-in-law: 'I am now totally delivered from all apprehensions of my Uncle's displeasure.' Nevertheless, the next two years were a period of intense anxiety for Philip. Could his uncle be relied on not to revoke the will? As Dorothy Yorke is said to have remarked at the time, `My poor brother is dying slowly of drunkenness and debauchery, and when I remonstrate with him he damns my eyes.' Hutton had a mistress living in his London house in Park Lane, and a sinister character named Chilton hovered in the background, who might persuade him in a moment of weakness to change his mind.
In the end Philip and Elizabeth decided to get married anyway, on 2 July 177o. The final months of their engagement were darkened by the deaths of Elizabeth's father and then, at only sixteen, of Anne Jemima. For the Yorke and Cust families it was to be a year of two weddings and three funerals — perhaps the most important year in Philip Yorke's life. They need not have worried: when Hutton died shortly after the wedding, his will was found to

be unaltered. Philip inherited not only the Newnham estate but also a fine collection of pictures and china, including the famous late seventeenthcentury Delft orange-tree pot now in the Tapestry Room. Most of these remained in the Park Lane house, where Dorothy spent the rest of her long widowhood, until her death in 1787. She had got her wish for comfortable London lodgings, which she shared with her maid, Betty Ratcliffe. Betty created a series of astonishingly intricate models from mica, mother-of-pearl and glass, which were cherished by successive generations of Yorkes and now stand in the Gallery .
With the Hutton inheritance and Elizabeth's dowry, the Yorkes were able to start doing up Erddig, which was now almost Ioo years old. Even before they were married, Elizabeth had begun to order new furnishings. In March 177o she wrote to her fiance:
I am peculiar in one thing, I hate to be disappointed . I have (perhaps not done wisely) not cut my Coat according to my Cloth, but my Cloth to my room; I have got quantity of charming Chintz, you must not be angry, you cannot with me.

And the following day:
Tradespeople of every sort are most tiresome to deal with — I sent several messages after my Chair since I wrote, but not receiving satisfaction, I went myself yesterday, ... all I could get for my trouble was to hear it was impossible to be done.... One must have somebody to scold (as it is a very constitutional exercise) and a Cabinet maker as well as any. Whilst I am in this humour (ie out of humour) don't expect to escape tho' so distant; I did expect the account how much paper would be wanted for the new dressing Room.

In 1771 more major alterations began. Philip Yorke was not a man to make changes merely for the sake of fashion. He left the garden front as he found it, but the brickwork of the west front, exposed to the prevailing winds, seems to have needed attention, so he decided to recase the whole front in stone. The first block was laid in April 1772 by the mason William Worrall. However, there is some uncertainty about who was responsible for the design. A local Shropshire architect, William Turner of Whitchurch, was paid for replacing the arcades and `bull's-eye' windows in Meller's wings with new sash-windows, and Turner's cousin Joseph and a Mr Franks were also consulted. But among the Erddig papers are a payment dated January 1774 to James Wyatt, an undated memorandum headed `Subjetts to take Mr Wyatt's opinion upon', and an elevation drawing for the west front, which seems to be in Wyatt's hand. Wyatt was still in his twenties, but had already made a national reputation. He was also both busy and dilatory, and it seems unlikely that he was closely involved. The changes he proposed were very similar to those he was to make in 1776 at Belton — another house of the 1680s — for Elizabeth's brother. Some were accepted: a three-bay pediment was put up, and the cupola removed. But Philip baulked at reducing the wings to single-storey arcades lined with Doric columns and flanked by pedimented pavilions. The result, it has to be admitted, is rather unsatisfactory. The stone chosen was dour and the lack of any window ornament gives the faade a distinctly barracks-like quality. For this we may perhaps blame Joseph Turner, who later built gaols at Ruthin and Flint.
Wyatt also advised an the new stableyard, spacious kitchen and other domestic offices that were laid out to the south of the house and completed in

1774, as the date-stone over the entrance arch proclaims. But, again, the work seems to have been put in local hands; he can hardly have been responsible for such old-fashioned details as the timber mullion windows. In 1788 Philip called him back to design a new tower and a monument for Marchwiel church.
Much work was also done inside during the early 1770s, although again Philip was loath to get rid of anything old and interesting. In February 1771 he wrote to his steward John Caesar:

I would not have, upon Recollection, any Rummage yet made in the Lumbcr Room; among the many old, and strange things there. Perhaps somcwhat on my view, may strike my convenience and therefore I wish nothing should be parted with from thence, till I have duly considered it.

Wyatt supplied new mahogany doors and tried to prevent the Hall and Drawing Room chimneys from smoking. (Philip had a dread of fire which can perhaps be traced back to 1751, when his cousin Charles Yorke had been almost killed in a blaze which also, and just as importantly to him, destroyed Lord Somers's famous collection of historical manuscripts.) The Hall and the new Drawing Room, created from the old Eating Parlour, received marble chimneypieces in the Neo-classical style, which were probably carved by John Devall the Younger, a craftsman much used by Wyatt. To complement them, 'Mr Rose the Plaisterer's men' put up Neo-classical plaster friezes in August— September 1773. Joseph Rose the Younger was another of Wyatt's favoured craftsmen, which suggests that he may have supervised the decoration of there rooms.
By the 1770s it had become unfashionable to have the bedrooms on the ground floor, so Meller's great bed was moved upstairs, and a new State Bedroom, hung with Chinese painted wallpaper, was created there to receive it. The Best Bedchamber became a dining-room and the Withdrawing Room was incorporated into an enlarged Saloon. In 1775 Philip's growing collection of books and manuscripts was brought down from the Study, in its rather remote position above the Chapel, to the Little Parlour, which was fitted up as the Library. The furniture that Philip had inherited from Melier and Hutton was cherished, but new pieces were also bought from the London upholsterers Michael Thackthwaite, Edward France and John Cobb and the carver Thomas Fentham.
For the first time there was need for more than one bed in the nursery at Erddig. In eight and a half years Elizabeth gave birth to seven children; the two eldest, Simon and Etheldred, were painted together in a pastel portrait (now in the Chinese Room), which has a fine frame by Fentham. Then on Sunday 31 January 1779 Philip wrote in the family Bible:
This day at twenty minutes past one, to my irreparable Loss, and very just and great affliction, my most dear and honoured Wife, Elizabeth Yorke, departed this life, having nearly compleated her thirtieth year, being born on the 24th. of February 1748-9 (and married to me, the 2d July 177o: On the Sunday fortnight preceding her death, She was brought to bed of a

Daughter, between one and two months before her expected time, and the Fever which followed her delivery (in itself very dangerous & critical) left us in a few days, little hopes of her Recovery. Under the strongest Impression of her End, She supported herself (without complaints) with the greatest Composure, and strength of Mind, and with surprising Recollection as to all such things, as became the awfulness of that Time, and occasion; for in the beginning, and towards the conclusion of that fatal illness, she was free from Delirium.
He submitted himself to God 'with all humility and Resignation, and in his good and appointed time to be added to those ashes, wherewith my first Love and worldly affection, is buried.' With his usual thoroughness, he gave detailed instructions to John Caesar for her funeral: the oak coffin, covered in black cloth and fitted with black coffin furniture, a small engraved silver plate and no `Glaring Ornaments', was to be laid in the family vault at Marchwiel; a funerary hatchment was to be hung from the Gallery window. That Christmas must have been a bleak one at Erddig, but Philip still found time to buy Molls for my little Girls'. In 1782 he married Diana Meyrick, a widow who bore him a further six children and with whom he grew old more or less happily.
Philip Yorke was MP for Helston in Cornwalland then for the Cust pocket borough of Grantham,but he never spoke in the Commons, disliked going to London and was not much interested in national politics. As he wrote to his cousin Lord Hardwicke about the American war in 1775: '1 do assure your Lordship this most unnatural and bloody contention in America makes me quite sick at heart. A continental war seems to me preposterous and impractical.' Like his father, he was much happier being a country gentleman — organising the Denbighshire militia and serving as High Sheriff in 1786. His real passions were good talk, historical research and his park and estate (see Chapters Seven and Eight), around which he rode somewhat uncertainly. His neighbour, Charles 'Nimrod' Apperley, called him 'the worst horseman I ever saw in a saddle'. Philip had been elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries at the early age of 24, and much of his later life was spent in his Library absorbed in abstruse genealogical scholarship. In 1784 the old billiard-room in the basement became the Tribes Room, embellished with the coats of arms of the ancient ruling families of Wales. The culmination of his research wasThe Royal Tribes of Wales, published in two handsome folio volumes in 1799.
Philip was interested not only in the histories of the famous. He began the Erddig tradition of having the house and estate servants painted, and added verses describing their lives which he was honest enough to call `Crude-ditties' Typical is that for the portrait of the housemaid Jane Ebbrell, painted by John Walters of Denbigh in 1793, when she was 87:

To dignifie our Servants' Hall
Here comes the Mother, of us all;
For seventy years, or near have passed her,
Since spider-brusher to the Master;
When busied then, from room to room,
She drove the dust, with brush, and broom
And by the virtues of her mop
To all uncleanness, put a stop:
But changing her housemaiden state,
She took our coachman, for a mate;
To whom she prov'd an useful gip,
And brought us forth a second whip:
Moreover, this, oft, when she spoke,
Her tongue, was midwife, to a joke,
And making many an happy hit,
Stands here recorded for a wit:
0! may she, yet some years, survive,
And breed her Grandchildren to drive!

The Custs' local poet, William Henry Chambers, composed verse of more conventional eulogy on the death of Philip Yorke in 1804 at the age of 61, after suffering 'with spasms on his chest':

When rich men die, who living claim'd respect
From riches only, on the scutcheon'd hearse
In awful grandeur waves each sable plume,
And pomp supplies the place of true regret;
But, when the man of worth exchanges life
For bliss eternal, how comfortless th' expanse
He seems to leave behind! Nor Passing-bell
Nor Rites-Funereal our attention claim;
But every thought to one emotion yields,
Sorrow awhile envelopes us around
And un-availing anguish reigns supreme.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

About Philip's successor, Simon Yorke II, 'There is not a great deal to say,' as the family historian, Albinia Cust, admitted. Indeed the same is true of all the four Simon Yorkes. (Like the kings of Denmark, the Yorke sons had a choice of only two names.) In character, he seems to have most resembled his amiable grandfather. Having been educated at Eton, he celebrated his coming-of-age at Erddig in 1792. The marble cistern now in the Dining Room was filled with punch, which was dispensed liberally. Charles Apperley (then fourteen) consumed so much that he had to be put to bed upstairs in a drunken stupor.
After Simon inherited Erddig in 1804, his stepmother moved back to her family home, Dyffryn Aled, with her children, but he remained on good terms with his young halfbrothers and sisters, taking a friendly interest in their education and careers. In 1807 he sold the Newnham estate for reasons that his banker, Thomas Birch, explained: 'lt will enable you to disencumber the Rest of your property, and I hope save a little money into the bargain, for it is always desirable to have some ready money, let a man's Property be ever so large.' In the same year he married Margaret Holland from Teyrdan near Abergele; a view of her home can be seen on the South Landing. They were to have six children, two of whom died in infancy. John Cust sent a Vulliamy bronze inkstand as a wedding present. Simon's halfbrothers and sisters clubbed together to buy the couple a very large Spode dinner service. As a friend who organised its delivery remarked, 'The Service you will soon receive is not for every day use: you will think it magnificent, and very ample as to quantity.' There had clearly been a major accident in the scullery, as Simon's aunt Anne Reynardson also offered day-to-day china. His halfbrother Piers sent a set of silver forks and a sideboard, and Simon himself ordered more plate from Rundells, the royal goldsmiths, in 1808. All these were put to use in the Dining Room, which his father had created from the Best Bedchamber.Simon was a sociable man, who enjoyed visiting his numerous Cust and Yorke cousins in East Anglia and having them to stay at Erddig. The Dining Room must have been inadequate for his needs, as in 1826 he began the last major change made to the house. He removed Meller's dressing-room and closet to create a larger room and had it completely redecorated in Regency taste. The plasterers Vowells and Batty put up the deeply coffered plaster ceiling and frieze, and the yellow scagliola columns came from the London workshops of Browne & Co. The suite of 22 dining-chairs, made

by Gillows of Lancaster, was a present from Margaret's brother John Holland. The room was designed by Thomas Hopper, who was already working in North Wales building the vast neoNorman Penrhyn Castle in Caernarvonshire. That project was consuming all his energies, as he apologised to Simon Yorke in April 1829:
It has annoyed me very much that I have been so hard pressed for twice when I have been in Wales as it has prevented my having the pleasure of waiting on you. It would gratify me very truly to see you again although your work is done, but I hope & trust that if you think that I can be of any service you will command me. I fear I led you into more expense than you intended & I feel reluctant to make a charge but I know if I did not it would displease you and I will therefore say £35 but less would quite satisfy me. I paid £25 for the Chimney piece and whenever you have an opportunity of paying into Mess" Herries Farquhar and Co Bankers St James St as much less than £60 as you please you will oblige me but it is no matter how long times.
Simon Yorke clearly made good use of his new Dining Room, as in later life he was tormented with rheumatic gout. While the Dining Room was being modernised, work was also going on in the rest of the house. The Agent's Office and Housekeeper's Room received new fittings, the Still Room was wainscotted and paved, and the school room and bedroom were altered, perhaps because the last of their children was now away at school.
Albinia Cust remarked, quite rightly, 'The Squires of Erddig were not Art collectors in the stritt meaning of the term.' However, like his father, Simon II cherished what they had, getting the paintings cleaned and varnished in 1820 and commissioning engravings of some of the earlier family portraits. In 1830 he also added to his father's series of portraits of the Erddig servants, writing explanatory verses in the same vein. Among those painted was the carpenter Thomas Rogers, who was to work at Erddig for 73 years. He had more reason than most to be so loyal, for in 1815 he had been seized by a press gang while repairing estate cottages at Plas Grono. He pleaded with his captors for a last chance to see his master before being sent to sea. As soon as Simon Yorke II discovered what had happened, he bought him out of naval service.
Although Simon Yorke III owned Erddig throughout almost the entire reign of Queen Victoria, he did even less to it than his father. With his grandfather's fear of fire, he ordered the blue glass bottles that can be seen in the Housekeeper's Room and hanging in the corridors. Fortunately, he never had to use these primitive early fire extinguishers. He also arranged the furniture in the Saloon more or less as we see it today, and had the steps up to it built in 1863.
In 1846 Simon III married one of his Cust cousins, Victoria, a daughter of Sir Edward Cust, the master of ceremonies in the royal household. Victoria Cust was a goddaughter of the Queen, who sent her a bracelet as a wedding present. The Queen's Golden Jubilee in 1887 was celebrated with a fete at Erddig. When the Queen made a royal tour of North Wales two years later, she was invited to visit the house, but preferred to stay near Llangollen. Victoria Yorke never got over the royal snub; in later life she referred to the Queen dismissively as 'Old Mother Bunch'. The Yorkes were content to live quietly at

Erddig, rarely leaving the house apart from holidays at the villa Victoria had bought in Barmouth. Simon III continued the family tradition of writing bad verse, which was mocked by his wife. He wrote to their son Philip in 1894: 'I am quite convinced that your mother loves me dearly — but hath a rather curious way of showing it, in regard to my rhyming propensities.' Paintings gave way to photographs of the servants, who were commemorated in uniformly optimistic terms. Simon III also commissioned more traditional memorials, like the funerary hatchments to the Butlers John Davies and George Dickinson that now hang in the Servants' Hall.
The Yorkes' preservationist instinct was also inherited by Simon III's younger brother John. He had commanded the Royal Dragoons in the Crimean Warand been severely wounded during the Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. He kept the shrapnel splinters removed from his leg in a snuff-box. In 1876 he bought Plas Newydd, the home of the 'Ladies of Llangollen', Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and devoted the rest of his life to preserving it. In 1778 'the two most celebrated virgins in Europe' had eloped from their repressive families and set up home together at Plas Newydd. Here they lived for the next so years, reading, writing and gossiping, sketching, embroidering and filling the house with all manner of curiosities. It became a popular destination for the growing number of visitors to North Wales in the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth came in 1824 and wrote of:

Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb
Even an this earth, above the reach of time!

As a boy General Yorke had known the Ladies, who had stuffed his pockets full of oranges when he had been thrown from his pony. He set about turning the house into a museum in their memory, but also imported further exhibits, added new wings, and fitted up oak battens to give the faeade a suitably quaint neo-Elizabethan appearance. In 1877 his sister-in-law sent over box, magnolia, pampas grass and fig trees from Erddig for the garden; he in turn gave her the gates at the end of the Moss Walk. Thanks to his efforts, Plas Newydd survived, and is now owned by Glyndwr District Council.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As a child Philip Yorke II caught butterflies in the garden, which the butler George Dickinson helped him Chloroform and mount for the family museum — a diverse assortment of curiosities, from an Indian bus ticket to a swordfish blade and a Zulu assegai. (Philip's younger brother Victor was to die in the first Boer War of 1881.) Philip did not get on with his father, who seems to have bullied him into marrying Annette Puleston in 1877. The marriage was a disaster from the start: Philip spent their honeymoon painting watercolours, and Annette left him shortly afterwards without a word, having apparently begged a lift on a milk float. He explained what had happened to a friend:

I write in bitter grief to you to teil you that I know nothing of her. She left me a fortnight ago, while we were staying with some friends of mine, the Humberstones of Glan-y-Wern.

She went off with her maid without ever wishing me Adieu or any one else in the house. Since then I have heard nothing of her, beyond that her maid came over to Erddig to ask for her things. I, not unnaturally, refused to see the hateful creature (who, I believe, is the cause of my wife's estrangement from me), and as no note came with her, I know nothing more of her, and I must look forward to a lifelong misery and loneliness, as I am doing now.

Years later they met by chance in the street: 'Is it peace, Philip?' `Madam, let me show you to your carriage.' They never spoke again.
Philip spent the next 20 years touring Europe and the Holy Land, painting, writing and taking photographs. He returned, not to Erddig, but to London, where he worked among the poor of the East End. The Stigma of his separation excluded him from much of Denbighshire society, but seems to have drawn him closer to his servants, whose welfare became his overriding concern.
Annette died in 1899, and Philip was at last free to begin a new life. He shared the contemporary passion for cycling, riding over 6o miles in a day even in his fifties. He found a soulmate in another keen cyclist, Louisa Scott, the daughter of a Wiltshire vicar. After a tea-party at Erddig in the summer of 1899, to which the local children were invited, she wrote in her diary: `Mr Yorke is a paragon of goodness. Each child had a present as well as a good tea, games, boats etc.' Then by the flickering light of oil lamps they stood in the Entrance Hall reciting J. F. Edisbury's `To the Cyclise:

If you want to know how to eure real rheumatic
Please listen to what I am going to sing —
Just buy a bicycle — with tyres pneumatic
And — with very slight practice — you'll find it the
thing.

Louisa returned to Erddig several times, until in February 1902 she wrote in her diary:

13th February. We had a delightful drive & Mr. Yorke was most polite .

14th February. (St Valentine's Day). One of the happiest days of my life. Mr Yorke & 1 walked to Wrcxham and coming home he said such pretty things to me & called me his `sister'. . . . In the evening we learned Palmistry & at 12. 15, under the picture of the former Philip Yorke (by Gainsborough) he asked me to become his wife. It seems a dream. I can hardly believe it is true.
15th February. The sense of my coming duties & responsibilities almost frighten me, but I have Philip to help me in my difficulties.

One of these responsibilities was to find a satisfactory housekeeper. This proved far from easy. Indeed, one housekeeper, Ellen Penketh, was taken to court for falsifying the household accounts. Although the judge instructed the Jury to convict, they sided with Mrs Penketh and acquitted her. For once the sunny tone of Philip's verse disappeared, when he praised her successor, Miss Brown:

Her coming we may here remark
Brought to a dose a period dark,
For long on us did Fortune frown
Until we welcomed good Miss Brown,
One whom this latter did replace
Did for five years our substance waste,
As foul a thief as e'er we saw,
Tho' white-washed by Un-Civil Law.

Success is said to spoil people; in reality, more are spoilt by failure, as the unhappy life of Simon Yorke IV illustrates. It all began so well, with general celebration on the estate in 1903, when the 54-yearold Philip II at last produced a male heir. A brother, Philip III, arrived two years later. Their father was determined that his children should enjoy the happy childhood he had been denied, and this they had, although he was old enough to be their grandfather. Simon was sent to Cheltenham College, but had to be withdrawn when his work proved not up to standard. He only managed to get into his greatgreat-grandfather's Cambridge college, Corpus, at the sixth attempt, and was then obliged to settle for an Ordinary rather than an Honours degree. He turned to rowing, but even here was surpassed by his brother.
Simon Yorke belonged to the generation just too young to have fought in the First World War. When his father died in 1922, he was still only nineteen, and the running of the estate was left to his mother until he came of age two years later. She organised a grand party at Erddig for the occasion. Group photographs of the family and servants were taken on the garden steps, but these images of a large and comfortable community are misleading. The size of the household stall had shrunk radically

during the war and never returned to its former level; many of those photographed had been hired only for the day. By the mid- 1920s, the estate was in serious financial trouble, but Simon's only response was indignant bluster:
I hope something will be done about my cash at or before the Trustee Meeting. lt is a perfect disgrace not having been able to get my £5oo when it was due last November. I wonder how they think I am going to live here — I hear we were overdrawn £ 1000 before last Rent Day; a pretty good start!
At this key moment, when he desperately needed professional advice, he parted company with the agent who looked after most of the estate. The stall became increasingly reluctant to work for meagre wages in an uncomfortable and dilapidated house. Five left in one day in April 1927: Mrs Yorke suspected a `Bolshevik plot'. Like Dorothy Yorke in the 1760s, she hoped for 'happy marriages for the boys to ladies with some money'. But neither of them was the marrying kind, and she became increasingly alarmed by Simon's 'clesultory and slack ways'.
During the 1930s the estate disintegrated rapidly, and the coming of the Second World War, the nadir of so many country houses, only made matters worse. Simon went into the army, but proved a hopeless soldier, at one point managing to loose a steam-roller that had been left in his charge. Life at Erddig in the austere post-war world was no better. The greatest danger was the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947. Coal had supported the estate since the eighteenth century; now it threatened to undermine it, quite literally. Officials from the National Coal Boardannounced that Bershamcolliery intended to drive shafts directly under the house. Simon protested, but to no avail. The south wing began to sink, cracks appeared in the walls, water poured through the leaking roofs on to the State Bed, and wet rot became rampant. Simon refused even to accept government compensation, `as much of government money has been subscribed by people worse off than himself'. During the 1940s and '50s the stall shrank to two, and only the housekeeper, Mrs Lloyd, lived in. Simon became a recluse, leaving the house only to attend scout

meetings or to go cubbing, his pockets stuffed with ginger biscuits. Visitors were not welcome, even in the grounds, where battered notices announced that all wheeled vehicles were prohibited. One by one, he cut his links with the outside wo rld. The telephone installed by his father was removed. When the postman complained about bei ig bitten by his dog, Simon simply stopped accepting deliveries to the house. There was no electricity.
Simon seems to have been fatalistic about the house and the garden, concentrating his efforts on buying up outlying pieces ofland to consolidate the estate. The early eighteenth-century furniture was becoming increasingly valuable and was in desperate need of attention, but like a true Yorke he refused to part with any of it. Although Erddig might seem to be in terminal decline, at least it was still intact. He died in 1966, leaving no will.
Simon's younger brother, Philip III, inherited at the age of 61. He had already had one heart attack, and the sensible response would have been to sell up and live in comfortable retirement on the proceeds. But Philip Yorke was never much interested in comfort or common sense. His years as the last squire of Erddig were to prove a triumphant and appropriately bizarre climax to a full and varied life. After graduating from Cambridge in 1927, he studied for the priesthood at Ridley Hall, but his unorthodox interpretation of scripture did not go down well with his teachers. He dismissed Solomon, epitome of biblical wisdom, as `one of the most brainless men in all history'. It was suggested that he find another career. Like the first Philip Yorke, he loved the theatre, and in November 1930 he joined the Northampton Repertory Company, which included such future West End stars as Max Adrian and James Hayter. However, Philip's enthusiasm could not disguise his inability to act. He turned to stage management, founding the Country Theatre Players, who toured plays by Somerset Maugham and Ben Travers round Kentand Sussexin a second- hand bus. The house may not always have been full, but the notices were complimentary:
Mr Yorke won almost overnight popularity in Bexhill— an stage and off. He was not always word-perfect on Fridays, let alone an Mondays, a circumstance that tended to keep the rest of the company an the hop. But

the swish of the waves under the Pavilion floor was good cover for the prompter.

After war service, he toured Europe by car and bicycle, returning frequently to Spain, of which he was particularly fond. Between trips there was a bewildering succession of jobs — prep. school teacher, security guard, groundsman, tour operator. In 1953 he founded Utility Tours to take holidaymakers round France and Spain in a grey dormobile christened `Tilly', which he drove himself. The regime was fairly spartan for all; as the brochure pointed out encouragingly, 'The management sleeps in the bus'. Unable to compete with the rise of the big package holiday companies, he decided to join them, becoming a courier for Horizon. Bookkeeping was never his strong point:

The invoice book which you have sent for paying the bills is perfectly ridiculous. It is filled with a conglomeration of unnecessary details in ridiculous languages and is absurdly unwieldy. Fortunately I have my musical saw with me and 1 have been able to cut the book in two. This is the best kind of economy as nobody loses by it, and the other half will do for whoever is ass enough to take on the job of working under your so-called management next year. Unfortunately I have not made the cut very straight as I think the saw wants sharpening.

Philip's musical saw and euphonium (now in the Tribes Room) were popular turns at fetes in the Wrexham area, where he also enjoyed demonstrating his skill on the penny-farthing. His theatrical training came in useful for the lantern slide lectures he gave about his travels in Spain. When he became squire of Erddig, he was asked increasingly to lecture on the house and its history.
It would be easy to pigeon-hole Philip Yorke as an eccentric, but in fact his previous careers turned out to be a surprisingly useful preparation for life at Erddig. He had a gift for improvisation; unlike his brother, he was gregarious; and his worldly needs were `about on the level of those of an unemployed oyster', as he put it. At night, he camped out in the freezing, collapsing house, having booby-trapped the doors with Heath Robinson burglar alarms made from empty evaporated milk tins, string and bamboo. Calor gas lamps, rigged up in front of eighteenth-century silver salvers, provided the only 28light. During the day, the house was once again full of people, who gathered for huge vegetarian meals in the Servants' Hall. Helpers were drafted in from the neighbourhood to begin makeshift repairs: local boys could earn a penny a bar for painting the gates. The Coal Board shored up the worst of the subsidence and the National Trust also started to Show an interest.
Philip Yorke was determined to save `this unique establishment for which my family have foregone many luxuries and comforts over seven generations'; so was the Trust. lt should have been straightforward; it was not. The negotiations were to last six and a half years. Philip was instinctively suspicious of all officialdom, and the National Trust became entangled in his mind with the Treasury to such an extent that he took to muttering angrily about the 'National Distrust'.
Gradually, the obstacles were overcome. In 1970 the Trust calculated that £800,000 was needed to provide a proper endowment for Erddig. This seemed an impossibly large sum to find until the property boom of the early 1970s transformed the calculations. Selling a small parcel of land for building raised i million; the NCB also agreed to pay £ 120,000 compensation and to stop mining under the house. The State Bed was removed to the Victoria & Albert Museum for urgently needed conservation, but Philip was insistent that Erddig's great collection of furniture should not be separated from the house. Throughout February 1973 two of the Trust's historic buildings staff, Merlin Waterson and Gervase Jackson-Stops, sat in the frigid Dining Room systematically sorting through the huge archive of family papers, which yielded a succession of exciting discoveries. Their efforts seem finally to have convinced Philip that the Trust was in earnest, as he signed the handover documents the following month.
Shortly afterwards, he was standing on the steps outside the Entrance Hall in the Tate afternoon sun, when he turned and said to a friend: probably what my father would have liked — the old place restored to its former glory.' And so — after a great deal of further work by researchers, architects, builders, conservators and gardeners and numerous enthusiastic volunteers — it has been.