Regency Rumours (30 page)
Authors: Louise Allen
Soane’s indulgent bath house, with a grand double staircase sweeping down to a tiled pool which holds over nine thousand litres (two thousand gallons) of water, is a delightful reminder of another side of eighteenth-century life.
When the Bambridges moved to Wimpole they were faced with refurnishing a largely empty house, the contents of which had been gradually dispersed. Aided by royalties from the Kipling estate, which Mrs Bambridge inherited in 1936, they bought on their travels abroad and at auction and Mrs Bambridge continued to buy after her husband’s death in 1943. While he was responsible for two Tissots and a portrait by Tilly Kettle, she acquired portraits connected with the house and paintings by Mercier, Hudson and Romney. Porcelain figures on show are from her collection and she also added notable books to the library, including some rare editions of Kipling’s work.
Wimpole’s extensive wooded park fully matches the grandeur of the house and reflects the influence of some of the most famous names in the history of landscape gardening. The great lime avenue running to the south, its unyielding lines striking through a patchwork of fields like a grassy motorway, was originally created by
Charles Bridgeman, who was employed by Lord Harley in the 1720s to extend an elaborate formal layout which already included the east and west avenues to either side of the house.
Remarkably, these remains of what was once an extensive scheme of axial avenues, canalised ponds, ha-has and bastions survived the attentions of ‘Capability’ Brown and his disciple William Emes later in the century, both of whom set about ‘naturalising’ the park. The view from the north front, artfully framed by the clumps of trees with which Brown replaced a felled avenue, looks over his serpentine ornamental lake to a hillock crowned with a three-towered Gothick ruin. Built in 1774, this eye-catcher was based on designs by Sanderson Miller made twenty-five years before. Brown’s belts of trees defining and sheltering the park were thickened and extended by Humphry Repton, who produced a Red Book for the Third Earl in 1801, but Repton also reintroduced a touch of formality, creating the small flower garden enclosed by iron railings on the north side of the house.
Sir John Soane’s home farm to the north of the house, built in a pleasing mixture of brick, wood, tile and thatch, was also commissioned by the
Third Earl, who was passionately interested in farming and agricultural improvement. Gaily painted wagons and carts now fill the thatched barn, but the surrounding paddocks and pens make up Wimpole’s rare breeds farm.
A short distance south-east of the house is the parish church. Substantially rebuilt to Flitcroft’s design in 1749, it is all that remains of the village that was swept away to create the park. In the north chapel, the only part of the medieval building not demolished in the mid-eighteenth century, the recumbent effigy of the Third Earl,
with his coronet at his feet, dominates a number of grandiose monuments to successive owners of this palatial place, sleeping peacefully in the midst of all they once enjoyed. Banks and ditches in the grass to the south mark the house plots of medieval villagers who tilled the land centuries ago, the ridge and furrow they created still visible on a slope of old pasture.
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© The National Trust 2013
This is a work of fiction. References to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First published in Great Britain 2013
Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Melanie Hilton 2013
Front cover image of Wimpole Hall
© National Trust Images/Andrew Butler 2013
eISBN: 978-1-472-01717-8
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