Rachel Stewart, ‘The West End house c1765 c1785: gamble

text © the authors 2002

Rachel Stewart, ‘The West End house c1765– c1785: gamble and forfeit’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. xII, 2002, pp. 135–148

T H E G E O R G I A N G R O U P J O U R N A L V O L U M E X I I

In his seminal work Georgian London, JohnSummerson argued that ‘members of the

aristocracy were not interested in their town housesto anything like the same extent that they were intheir country dwellings’ and that ‘for the most part[they] were content with the standard product of thetimes, the terrace house’. In support of his argument,he quotes John Stewart’s Critical Observations on theBuildings and Improvements of London (), inwhich the author states that ‘many a nobleman,whose proud seat in the country is adorned with allthe riches of architecture, porticos and columns . . . ishere content with a simple dwelling, convenientwithin, and unornamented without’. Yet readingTobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker, of thesame year, , we find his main character, MatthewBramble, ranting about the financial and emotionaldistress caused by ownership of the very standardand unpretentious item that Summerson, Stewart,and others, play down. We do not tend to think of theGeorgian terrace house as a luxury, despite someluxurious examples from the s, such as DerbyHouse in Grosvenor Square, and Wynn House in StJames’s Square. The London house is usuallypresented as an insignificant adjunct to the countryhouse, just the relatively standardised, functional,unprepossessing product it appears to be. Yet, asSmollett hints, there is a whole other story to be told,of which the physical evidence says little or nothing.That story can be recreated with the help ofanecdotal and documentary evidence relating toindividual residents, and other sources, such asnewspaper advertisements for houses for sale or let,

through which we can learn why Smollett presentedthe town house as an unnecessary, expensive,unaffordable burden.

* * * * * *

In Humphry Clinker, Smollett draws out the twofactors that make London life unaffordable, theexpense of living in London and the expense of thehouse itself, presenting the London house as a drainon finances, parasitic and unproductive, bothincitement to and locus of frivolous and extravagantconsumption. Smollett uses examples amongBramble’s acquaintances to demonstrate the effectsthat expenditure on living in town may have onindividuals. First, his old friend Baynard is in direstraits, having married a City woman who insisted onhaving a London house. Their money had run out,and he had proposed selling up and leaving Londonfor the country, but his wife’s distress at the thoughthad been so severe that they had continued ‘to besucked deeper and deeper into the vortex ofextravagance and dissipation, leading what is called afashionable life in town’. A period abroad had failedas an economy measure, so that they were now in thecountry, where Mrs Baynard had so successfullyundermined all the improvements made to herhusband’s estate that it had become, like a townhouse, unable to support them or itself. WhenBramble is given the opportunity to help Baynard puthis finances right, his first move is to get rid of theLondon house and to sell off its contents.

Meanwhile another acquaintance, CharlesDennison, has taken the right path, in opposition to

THE WEST END HOUSE c – c : GAMBLE AND FORFEIT

R A C H E L S T E W A R T

the one trodden so heavily by Baynard. On inheritinga poorly managed estate, Dennison quitted businessin town and retired to the country. Instead ofspending on a town house, he made his countryhouse clean and weather-tight, and his estateproductive and self-sufficient. He found that ‘heshould save sixty pounds a year in the single articleof house-rent, and as much more in pocket-moneyand contingencies’ by not living in London. Besides,he would make ‘a considerable saving on the side ofdress, in being delivered from the oppressiveimposition of ridiculous modes, invented byignorance and adopted by folly’.

The veracity of Smollett’s fictional tales is borneout by evidence from the period. Unlike the well-managed country property, the town house wasparasitic, unproductive and a drain on finances, asSmollett suggests, and it was an incitement toconsumption, not least the purchase, furbishing andfurnishing of the house itself.

It is clear from account books that people couldreadily put a price on the time they spent in London.Many people kept separate London accounts,itemising expenditure on and from their Londonhome. In a list of annual domestic expenses for tenyears from Michaelmas Lady Lee noted an‘extraordinary rise of the last three years’, andattributed it to expenses in London, where the Leeshad just acquired a house after a few years away fromthe capital to recover their finances. Of the‘extraordinary expence’ of £ s d in –, £

s d was accounted for by ‘taking care of House and weeks Housekeeping in London’. In the followingyear, –, £ s out of extraordinary expensesof £ s was incurred during fourteen weeks inLondon. Such expenditures were modest comparedwith those of more flamboyant and less cautiousLondon residents. The Duke of Dorset kept track ofbills for entertainment at his Grosvenor Squarehouse during the period to , including sumspaid to the fishmonger, confectioner, butcher,poulterer and greengrocer for dinners there

between December and May , which alonetotalled £.

The very fact of residing in Town required theoccupant to buy in the sorts of provisions andservices that were an integral part of a well-managedcountry household and estate. Smollett had plenty tosay on this subject, from the point of view of thenegative effects on the health and well-being of thetemporary resident in London. Smollett was justifiedin his implication that living in town also causedresources to leave the estate, in its wider sense, ratherthan feeding back into the interests of an extendedcommunity. For example, while he was in town, SirWatkin Williams Wynn’s kitchen accounts includedpayments for the butcher, the baker, the poulterer, thefishmonger, the greengrocer, the butterman, themilkman, the charcoalman, the cheesemonger, andthe pastry cook, whereas at his country seat,Wynnstay, Denbighshire, payments were only madeto the butcher, and the grocer, and for salt andtinning coppers.

The London house was also the base for thebroader consumption of essential and luxury goods.The th Duke of Beaufort’s list of ‘incidental’ bills(outside his usual household costs) settled at the endof his period of winter residence in GrosvenorSquare, in May , comprised twenty-sevencreditors, including harness makers, saddlers, bitmakers and farriers, brewers and brandy merchants,confectioners and perfumerers, purveyors of Frenchrobes, lace and millinery, glovers and hosiers, andcorn and wax chandlers. During the s theBeaufort family typically spent a maximum of onlytwenty weeks in London annually, but this accountedfor nearly per cent of their total expenditure andas much as per cent of a total of £, in .

Purchases for both town and country use were madein town, and accounts usually indicated the destinedlocation of the item or commodity bought.

Householders often could not or did not want toavoid spending on their house’s fabric, and accountsitemising London expenditure include work done on

T H E W E S T E N D H O U S E C 1 7 6 5 – C 1 7 8 5 : G A M B L E A N D F O R F E I T


the house itself. For example, the expenditure of theGriffin Griffins of Audley End on their town house inBurlington Street (rented at £ per annum) canbe tracked through their accounts, which itemiseoutlay, first, on ground rent, taxes (including rates)and repairs of the house and stables and, secondly,on furniture for the house. In the five years preceding, when they were billed for work done on theproperty by the Adam brothers, the averageexpenditure in the first category was £ and £ inthe second. These figures jumped to £, and £,respectively, in the year of the refurbishment.

Houseowners could put a price on any work done intheir London house, from the s per year that theDowager Viscountess Midleton had to pay to herground landlord, Lord Ashburnham, for opening upa window to light a dingy room in the house thatneighboured his in Dover Street, to the total cost ofextensive building, refurbishment or furnishingwork, often presented in stitched booklets itemisingwork done and materials supplied by all involved.The booklet prepared for Jervoise Clarke in inrespect of work at his house in Hanover Squareunder Charles Cameron, together with assorted loosebills, reveals that extensive refurbishment andredecoration of what was not an exceptionally bighouse cost over £,.

Many, perhaps most people refurbished ordecorated a newly acquired house and often laid outconsiderable sums to that purpose, in addition to thesometimes substantial prices paid for the propertiesthemselves. Sir Gilbert Heathcote purchased hisfather-in-law’s house in Grosvenor Square for £,

in May , together with £ s for part of thefurniture. He then spent over £, refurbishingand extending the property. Lord Clive spent £,

on his Berkeley Square house between January

and June , more than treble the sum he had paidfor the remainder of the lease. John Harris puts thetotal cost of refashioning the house at about £,.

Not all expenditure on repairs and refurbishmentswas made at the owner’s behest. A new lease

sometimes required the holder to make practicalrepairs to a house at his or her own expense. Estaterecords, such as those of Christ’s Hospital and theBedford Estate, include many details of repairingleases granted in this period, stating the number ofyears for which the lease was granted, the ‘fine’ orlump sum and the ground rent payable, and theestimated value of repairs to be organised and paidfor by the prospective lessee. Mr James Dollingpaid the Bedford Estate a fine of £ for therepairing lease on his house in Great Russell Streetfor years from Christmas , plus repairsestimated at £. In the same year Dr RichardAdams was required by the Bedford Estate to pay a£ fine for the renewal of the lease of his house,coach house and stables in Bloomsbury Square,together with repairs estimated at £. The Estatesurveyors sometimes grossly underestimated the costof repairs. In February , a house in BedfordStreet, Covent Garden was said to require repairs to avalue of £, but ultimately needed £, spent onit. The Estate generously waived the £ fineoriginally proposed. In other instances ofunderestimation, the lease length was increased ascompensation for the leaseholder’s unexpectedfinancial outlay. The Bedford Estate generallyrequired its leaseholders to continue to keep theirhouses in repair for the duration of the lease.

Large, sometimes immense, figures were spent onfurniture and furnishings, too. In Sir WatkinWilliams Wynn settled a bill totalling £, with hisupholsterer, Bradshaw, largely for furnishing hisGrosvenor Square house.The Marquess ofCarmarthen bought the house from Wynn in ,together with an unspecified amount of the furniture.In addition to building work to the value of £ in–, Carmarthen paid about £, to JohnBradburn, cabinet-maker and upholsterer, forfurniture and furnishings for the house, and theaccount ‘appears not to include the important roomson the first floor’. The most substantial of the billsfor the refurbishment of Lord Clive’s house, in



readiness for his return from India, was the £,

paid to the upholsterer Charles Arbuckle. Thedetermination not to spend much money onfurnishing a new house was not always enough toavoid the expense. In March , Mrs Francispromised her husband that she would ‘lay out aslittle as possible’ in furnishing the house which shehad recently taken in Harley Street. Yet very shortlyafterwards she wrote ‘I almost fear I shall be obligedto take too much advantage of your generosity infitting up this House, but I will be as saving aspossible’. By the following year her fears had beenrealised. ‘I asked you for £ to furnish my house’,she wrote to her husband, ‘but it was too little andshowed my ignorance in asking. I have now paidwithin a trifle of £ and yet my best room has noglasses’. The lack of mirrors remained a bugbear forMrs Francis. ‘I can’t use my room without them’, shemoaned in November of that year. In the followingJune she had hopes of finding some in a sale offurniture at a house in Grafton Street.

A move to a fashionable location broughtattendant responsibilities for fashionable furnitureand furnishings. Despite exceeding her estimationsand budget in furnishing her new house in HarleyStreet, Mrs Francis reported that her friends stillthought some of her furniture ‘not good enough’.

However, as newspaper advertisements suggest,furniture could also be readily sold off to realisefunds once a London house was no longer necessaryor affordable. Like the leasehold house itself, thelargest of chattels, furniture was easily purchasableand redeemable in an active second-hand market.

London life’s principal concomitant expensewas, of course, the cost of the house itself,particularly if purchasing rather than renting, andawareness of the precise cost of living in Londonmight include admitting that the cost was too great.James Adair was pleased to tell his son of his move toSoho Square, in : on the positive side, hereported the house to be ‘a most comfortablehabitation having every deviseable convenience both

for you and us’; but on the negative side he admittedthat ‘it’s true it has fleec’d me pretty well’. Findingthe ideal property to buy was fraught with enoughproblems, but paying for it might have been thebiggest difficulty of all. For some lucky purchasers,the life event that prompted the purchase alsoprovided the means to afford it. William Weddellpaid £, for the house he bought in Upper BrookStreet shortly after his marriage in , partly fundedby his wife’s marriage portion. Even so, he still had toraise £, on a mortgage from Hoare’s Bank.

Some advertisers of houses for sale themselvesoffered buyers a solution to the problem of raisingcapital: pay part of the purchase price and retain therest on a mortgage with the premises themselves assecurity. For example, in August an advertiseroffered that ‘a considerable Part of the PurchaseMoney will be allowed to remain upon the Mortgageof the House for a Term of Years’; and in January another vendor offered that ‘the greatest part ofthe money may remain in the hands of the purchaserduring pleasure’. Similarly, in , Sir JohnFrederick allowed Lord George Sutton a mortgagefor a year to pay the £, purchase price of hishouse in Grosvenor Street, receiving half-yearlyinterest payments at per cent in the meantime.

Architects and builders often allowed for varyingdegrees of finish in their estimates for new houses, sothat clients or purchasers could spend more or less asthey wished, or could afford. In , WilliamChambers first quoted a price of £, for HenryErrington’s house in Cleveland Row, ‘including theexpence of three handsom ceiling and three goodMarble Chimney pieces for the best rooms’. He laterconfirmed his estimate, but broke down the priceinto £, for the house and about £ for thethree ceilings and chimney-pieces and any other‘extraordinary enrichments’ that Errington chose tohave. Chambers also confirmed to the Rt Hon EarlFitzwilliam that the price of ‘Mr Adams’s house nearCavendish Square’ was £, to £,

‘according as it is more or less richly finished’. Not



everyone reduced the initial cost of their house,despite the goodwill of architects in giving them theoption to do so. In December the Adamsprovided the Countess Dowager of Warwick with adetailed estimate for the cost of building her house inMansfield Street. Itemised separately within a total of£, s was the cost of finishing the second-floorrooms, estimated at £ s d. A note on thedocument states that this latter sum ‘was seperatedon a supposition that the two pair of stair roomsmight remain unfinished some time after all the restof the building was done, but the difference of theExpence not appearing to be sufficientlyconsiderable to [defer] the completion of the wholeplan, it was determined to be carried through atonce’. The final account anyway exceeded theoriginal estimate by more than £.

Those people who had houses newly built forthem often made payments on account. CharlesTownley’s agreement with the builder MichaelBarrett for his house in Park Street stipulated thatBarrett would be paid £ ‘when he shall have builtthe said house to the dining room floor – anothersum of £ when the said house shall be coveredin, and the remainder [of £,] when the saidMichael Barrett shall have completely finished thesaid house according to the above agreement’.

Payments were sometimes infrequent, however, anddebts run up at such a rate that they rapidly becamebeyond the immediate means of the client (as in thecase of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, discussed below).Elizabeth Montagu firmly believed that interimpayments were essential for staying within one’smeans and avoiding a hefty debt on completion ofthe house, as well as being the only conscionable andrespectable way to operate. This was clearly not apopular view, as she recognised: ‘I will own my tasteis unfashionable, but there is to me a wonderfulcharm in those words in full of all demands’. Ifothers shared her opinion that ‘the worst of hauntedHouses … are those haunted by Duns’, theycertainly did not reflect it in their behaviour, and for

some people, the consequence of not accommodatingthemselves within their means was ultimately thesacrifice of the house itself.

So, as Smollett indicated, there were two mainfinancial reasons why an occupant might have to sellor sublet a London house: the expense of living inLondon, and the expense of the house itself. Whereeither expense was too much to be borne, or notworth the payback, flexibility to change one’s mind,to sell off or rent out one’s house and contents, wasbuilt into the town-house market. Manyadvertisements emphasise that the owner of thehouse had intended to have the property for his ownuse, and had exercised taste and/or expenditureaccordingly. An advertisement in offered to let,furnished or unfurnished, ‘an elegant finishedHouse’ on which no expense had been spared by theowner ‘who intended to inhabit it himself ’, butchanged his mind for undisclosed reasons. Manypeople recognised, or were forced to recognise, thatLondon life and particularly the house itself were afinancial burden they could not afford. EdwardJefreys sold his town house because ‘sugars do notsell so well as they have done for several years past,which circumstance alone render’d me unable tobare [sic] the expence of two Houses’, while SirThomas Clavering forsook a seat in Parliament inorder to be rid of the expense of his London home.

The need to economise reportedly gave LordPembroke the nerve to ask his wife to join him andMiss Hunter in Utrecht, so that ‘the house in townmight be let, which would save some money’. MrsFrancis volunteered to sub-let her new house in townand retire to the country if her husband thought herannual expenditure too much, and he himselfreportedly claimed that ‘even with the strictesteconomy’ he found it difficult to live in London onwhat was a substantial income of £, per annum.

Debt relating to London life was frequentlydescribed as causing ‘distress’ to both debtor andcreditor. Definitions of ‘distress’ in Johnson’sDictionary () encompass both the emotional



experience and the consequences of debt. On theone hand distress is ‘calamity; misery; misfortune’,and on the other it is ‘a compulsion, by which a manis assured to appear in court, or to pay a debt’. SirWatkin Williams Wynn’s tastes and desires clearlysurpassed the present capabilities of his budget, asituation that came to a head in relation to therebuilding of his house in St James’s Square, from. In May his steward fretted to his agent that‘so many bills are dropping in that it makes meshudder’. Sir Watkin and his agent discussed raisingmoney through the sale and mortgage of otherproperty, but the sums envisaged were never a matchfor those mentioned in connection with the expenseof the house. In September the agent tried againto present the truth of the situation to his employer,writing:

Upon looking over my Accounts I find that thePurchase Money for the House with Interest on it tothe Time of Payment was £:: and that I havealready paid on Accot of Building in St James’s Squareupwards of £ besides wch there is near £more now due to the several workmen so that thisHouse will (with what further Charges are yet to come)cost near £ and where the Remainder of themoney is to be got to pay for it I don’t know … [N]ogreater sum than £ can at present be spared to theworkmen in St James’s Square tho’ they really aremany of them much Distressed and nearly three Timesthat Sum ought now to be immediately distributedamong them … in short Sir unless something or othercan be done to prevent any further Effusion of Moneyat least for some Years to come We shall be muchdistressed …

Sir Watkin’s conscience may have led him to orderland to be sold to assuage the financial distress ofthose working on his house, but not everyone was sosympathetic, and Wynn himself was hardly a modelclient. The prestigious commission at St James'sSquare may have been good promotionally for theAdam brothers, but they constantly needed to pushfor payment. William Chambers’s letterbooks arecomparably riddled with tactful requests, tinged with

humour and ever reasonable, for payment ofsignificant sums of money:

I have pleasure to acquaint you that your house is nowCovering in, And the sorrow to assure you I never wasso poor in my Life; When your house is Covered inthere will be two thousand pounds due to me and Imust entreat you to let me have the whole or as large apart as you possibly can for I know not how to go onwithout it.

I am obliged to your lordship for the £ youwere so good to leave a Draught for at Drummonds …I wish however it had been wh was the sum yourLordship told me I should have; of this thousand thewhole must be paid on account of the Extras to Collinsand the Carver & Painters who are all very Sharp set,so that no Part of it comes to me on account of theContract, upon wh I nevertheless owe money topersons as sharp set as the above mentionedGentlemen, if your Lordship would therefore be sokind as to double the Dose it would enable me tosatisfy all these hungry Gentlemen & all things wouldgo on very smoothly this however I only mean in caseit be convenient to you.

Many of Chambers’s petitions for payment had apractical bent, emphasising that he needed themoney to buy materials, or to employ extra workmento speed up the completion of a house, or simplybecause he was building so much at the time.

The burden of debt and the experience or threatof distress, which those involved in constructionoften had in common with their clients, was madepublic by gossip and by newspapers, which listedbankrupts great and small. But the sale of a housemight itself draw unwanted publicity and suspicion.Newspaper advertisements often gave the ostensiblereason for the sale of a West End property: the ownerwas typically ‘going abroad’, ‘retiring into thecountry’, ‘leaving off housekeeping’, ‘bankrupt’ or‘deceased’. The first three reasons could easily maskfinancial distress or even be euphemisms for thefourth, bankruptcy, or for other embarrassingconditions: a ‘correspondent’ to The Town andCountry Magazine wrote that, having dropped intothe King’s Bench debtors’ prison (in a shower of



rain), he had met with ‘a baronet who was said tohave gone upon his travels’. Advertisements,therefore, often advertised something more than anintention to sell. As the name of the seller was usuallyindicated in a property advertisement, or deduciblefrom the location of the house, sales were a verypublic statement. There is also considerableevidence in private correspondence and periodicalsthat people knew who was moving in or out ofhouses and often the sums for which they werebought and sold, and there was no accounting forthe conclusions that might be drawn. The Duke ofManchester was rumoured to be retiring into thecountry and selling his house in town, and thereforesupposed to be in financial distress. The Duke didnot care for such inferences: ‘The Duke ofManchester will not now sell his house’, reportedCaroline Howe in , ‘they say he has changed hismind on hearing that every body says he is undone’.

This conclusion, erroneous or otherwise, drawnfrom rumours of the Duke of Manchester’s intentionto sell, joins other evidence that the purchase ordisposal of a town house was an indicator: on the onehand of wealth, ambition, or good fortune; on theother, of debt, failure, or bad luck.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, people went to somelengths to disguise both sales and the reasons forthem. For this reason, no doubt, the Fieldingbrothers’ Universal Register Office, a clearing housewhich charged a modest fee for selling goods andservices, including houses, was promoted as having‘the economic efficiency associated with openmarketing without the possibly compromisingpublicity associated with advertising’. In the sSir John Frederick sold his house in Grosvenor Streetand rented another in Great George Street, tellingprospective purchasers that his sole motive was to benearer the Custom House. However, as soon as hehad been paid the £, purchase price he repaid adebt of the same figure to his brother, suggesting thathis motives were pecuniary rather than practical.

The rent for the Great George Street house was £

per annum, which meant that it would have been years before he laid out in rent the figure for whichhe sold the Grosvenor Street house.

Sir William Lee, on the other hand, preferred thesorry truth to popular speculation. He was already indebt when he married in , and mortgaged landsto raise money. In August Sir William wrote tohis father-in-law, Earl Harcourt, enlisting his help inletting it be known why he had had to part with hisLondon house, because, however embarrassing itmight be, it was better than worse conjecture andrumour:

I am very much obliged to you for yr kind Letter justrecd [. I]t was not my desire to put you upon thetrouble of publishing to the World the reason of myparting with my House any more than my ownintention to do it myself[. I]f asked my only hope andwish is, that whereas there are several people may askthe reason of it, and the receiving no answer from thosethat must know the truth, wou’d certainly have a verystrange appearance [t]he true reasons may be aprized[sic] and this I trust I may depend upon from yr justiceand humanity.

The ‘true reasons’ are evident in a note Sir Williammade of his debts around , in which he notes thesale of his ‘House in Town’ for £, as a relativelysmall credit in a statement that totalled his debts atover £,.

An owner could dispose of a London town housewhen it was no longer required, when the money tiedup in it had to be realised, or when it was impossibleto support financially. But sometimes the decision torealise the capital bound up in the house and itscontents was taken out of the owner’s hands. Inaddition to the meanings given above, ‘to distress’was also the act of making a legal seizure, ‘toprosecute by law to a seizure’ and ‘to harass; to makemiserable’. Whether or not the town house and itscontents were the cause of debt, they became itstarget. Contemporary theatre made clear the linkbetween ‘dissipation and extravagance’ and‘executions’ in town houses – by which creditorstried to recoup some of their losses by targeting the



house and property of the debtor. In Sheridan’sSchool for scandal (), for example, CharlesSurface has suffered successive executions in hishouse, in which ‘not a thing [was] left but someempty bottles that were overlooked, and the familypictures which [were] framed in the wainscot!’ Thelink between gambling debts and executions in townhouses was frequently made, as when the notoriousgambler, Stephen Fox, had an execution in his UpperBrook Street house in . The Marquess ofBath’s house in Arlington Street, made notorious byhis wild drinking and gaming parties, was often fullof bailiffs, as a consequence of the damage done tohis fortune by extravagant play.

Reports of executions were common in privatecorrespondence and no doubt in town gossip: ‘TheFoleys have had an execution in their House and alltheir goods are actually carried off; Lord Foley says,he neither can nor will assist them’, reported MrStanley in . Bankruptcies as public as that ofSir George Colebrooke, on the failure of his bankinghouse, meant that the public witnessed, through thepress and gossip if not in person, the sale of theproperty for the benefit of creditors. Colebrookehad been in financial difficulties for some years. InMarch Caroline Howe reported that he wouldhave to sacrifice his grand house in Arlington Streetto satisfy the demands being made on him,

although the house was not reported as sold untilApril . In this instance, and no doubt in others,the town house was the first property to go, ahead ofany threat to the country property, perhaps because itwas both easier to get rid of (being more saleable andless restricted by entailments) and easier to dowithout. Colebrooke moved to the less fashionableSoho Square, where he rebuilt a house that hadstood empty for two years. But his bank continued indifficulties and ‘the erection of this new house …and the decoration of its fine interior no doubtincreased his financial embarrassments’ and in

or he sold the house to Joseph Banks.

The distinction between the source and the

target of the debt may not always have been clear, butevidence of the costs involved in supporting townliving suggests that London houses, their contentsand running costs, must have contributed to, if notinstigated many a householder’s financial problems.The sums involved in executions could bestaggeringly high. In March , Judith Milbankereported from London to her aunt that ‘Lord Onslowhad an Execution in his House last week for anhundred and sixty thousand pounds & is quiteruined’. The execution came as a great shock toOnslow’s wife, ‘who knew nothing at all of his Debts,& to comfort her he told her it was greatly owing tohis having kept two or three Women whose expenseslay very hard on him’. Keeping a mistress oftengenerated expenditure on the purchase or rent andfurnishing of another town property and no doubtthe sort of attack that Onslow’s house fell prey to.There is, and was, much said of the numbers of keptwomen, particularly in Marylebone, and even in theabsence of statistics it is clear that mistresses werefrequently set up in their own furnished premises.

In the same year, seemingly a bad one forexecutions, Judith’s sister Sophie Curzon reportedthat ‘Lord Derby has had sad work in his house; hehad four executions all at a time’. Thus a house thathad been handsomely, lavishly, and prominentlyrefurbished by the Adams only a few years before, atgreat but unknown expense, was already the subjectof physical and verbal attack. Sophie Curzon herselfwas at the mercy of executioners two years later,when she and her husband had the property in theirtown house sold for the benefit of creditors. By

the Curzons were obliged to give up the housealtogether, and moved in with relatives in town.

Sometimes relatives were less accommodating,declining to offer financial assistance and sometimesthemselves the instigators of seizures. The sculptressMrs Damer suffered badly in when herhusband, the Hon John Damer, faced with debts of£,, shot himself. His father, Lord Milton, hadrefused to help him out and was harsh to Mrs Damer



after the tragedy, ‘seizing even her personalbelongings in order to defray his son’s debts. In thebeautiful house where she had lived so unhappily,but surrounded by every luxury, Mrs Damer nowfound herself treated like a beggar’.

One reason why executions were focused on thetown house was surely that the creditors themselveswere London-based, as part of the construction tradeor of the wider range of essential and luxury tradespatronised by the Duke of Beaufort, for example. Agood London house had a key role in establishingwhat we could call ‘social credit’. One aspect of thiswas the financial credit that a good social ‘figure’could attract. A correspondent to the LondonChronicle in moaned, with some justification,that unregulated credit was ‘an evil of the firstmagnitude, when applied to the encouragement of …forgeries; furnishing men of no property with mostfallacious appearances’. The cyclical link betweencredit and power may explain many purchases oftown houses in fashionable areas in this period.Where one need ended and another began wassometimes hard to distinguish: if a man decided heneeded a London house, then that house not onlygenerated the need for the money to finance it, mostlikely in the form of credit, but also became themeans by which he could attract credit to support hislife there.

During the funding crisis over the rebuilding anddecorating of St James's Square, Sir Watkindesired his steward and agent to be as secret aspossible about his financial affairs and to take care ofhis credit, or it would ‘be in a strange situation’.

Such caution is indicative of the need to hide thefeeble financial base on which much opulencerocked. This secrecy, and the ‘masking’ displaysthat it engendered, became part of the vicious circleof luxury, as well illustrated in Fanny Burney’sCecilia (). Living well beyond their means in anew property in Portman Square, and entirelydevoted to gambling and keeping abreast of fashion,the Harrels are repeatedly threatened with an

execution in their house. They are saved by theirwealthy visitor, Cecilia, who then looks for someexpression of remorse and some change in theirhabits and creed, but is horrified to find that theirextreme distress quickly dissipates and is replaced byMr Harrel’s determination not only to visit thePantheon but also to ‘take another measure forremoving all suspicion. This was to give a splendidentertainment at his own house to all hisacquaintance, to which he meant to invite every bodyof any consequence he had ever seen, and almostevery body he had ever heard of in his life’. TheHarrels are quite clear and insistent in their reasonfor diving back into the pool of luxury so soon afternearly drowning in it: rumours of their financialdistress may already be circulating; it is thereforeimperative that they counter them by appearing tohave their ‘credit rating’ intact, because it is on thatrating that their social credibility depends, and viceversa. Appearances were, for some, the only means ofkeeping up appearances. Living in the right sort ofhouse in the right sort of place perhaps generated thepower to become indebted.

‘Private’ debt could be a very public matter, oftenadvertised, as I have said, by the sale of a town houseor its goods. In Cecilia, Burney described theentertainment value of attending sales at the townhouses of the financially broken, as advertised by thelikes of Mr Christie:

‘I am come,’ cried [Miss Larolles] eagerly, ‘to run awaywith you … to my Lord Belgrade’s sale. All the worldwill be there; and we shall go in with tickets, and youhave no notion how it will be crowded.’… ‘And do you intend to buy any thing?’ ‘Lord, no; but one likes to see the people’s things’.

As debt was public, and the town house was often itsvictim, the house itself became a London spectacle.As with many entertainments held at private houses,admittance was by ticket. The sale for the benefit ofcreditors was the ultimate public scrutiny to which atown house and its contents could be subjected, and



over which the owner had least control of his or heraudience. It is possible, therefore, that a grand failurein a well-furnished and tasteful house in a goodlocation was the next best thing to a grand success inthe same surroundings.

For all that credit and debt seem to have been anaccepted way of life, Margaret Doody argues (inconnection with Cecilia) that ‘society itself hasinvented the concept of “ruin”, the great communalsneer. With an “execution in the house” the publicidentity is annihilated’. Credit and what it affordstherefore combined to create public identity, wheretrue financial substance was wanting. When bothsubstance and credit were wanting, the individualcould no longer retain a public identity in the politeWest End and the relinquishing of house, contents orboth was symptomatic of its loss.

* * * * * *

The anecdotal and documentary evidence join forcesto confirm Smollett’s suspicions that a Londonhouse was something many people would be well ridof. Many letters refer to abandoning city life for aperiod in order to recoup finances, a strategyvalidated by the contemporary financial evidence. Atleast in this period, town residence was certainly notthe economy that the Stones have suggested,

raising the question of whether it ever was and, if so,whether the balance had changed in or by this time.Investment in making a figure in London, includingthe cost of the house itself and its finish andfurnishing, was a gamble. Many residents clearlyplayed too deep and the house (and perhaps thepublic identity it contributed to) was the forfeit.

On the other hand the desire (or need) to reside

in the West End, permanently or temporarily, musthave been sufficient to warrant a high level ofexpenditure, in spite of the attendant financial risk.Although both eighteenth-century and twentieth-century writers have styled such expenditure andover-expenditure irrational, it was often a rationalgamble in expectation of a profit, not necessarilyfinancial. The town house was, as Smollettsuggested, a drain on finances – in terms of thenecessary and incidental purchasing that it induced –and it provided nothing tangible in return, beyond itsown exchange, or rental, value. But, even if Smollettomitted to acknowledge as much, the return on thehouse – its power – lay elsewhere, as part of thecycles of political, financial and social credit at playin later eighteenth-century London. Manyhouseholders showed their awareness of this fact bytheir willingness to spend on and in the West Endhouse. Yet it must have been necessary to strike anice balance between sufficient expenditure to get adecent property in a good location, in soundcondition, tastefully and fashionably fitted out, andthe need to avoid the sort of over-expenditure thatmight necessitate a sale in which those same qualitiescame into play.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I am grateful to Dr Christine Stevenson for hercomments on an earlier draft of this article. Theinformation in notes 19–22 is cited by kindpermission of the Marquess of Tavistock and theTrustees of the Bedford Estate.



John Summerson, Georgian London, rd edn.,London, , .

John Stewart, Critical observations on the buildingsand improvements of London, London, , –.

Tobias Smollett, The expedition of HumphryClinker, ed. with an introduction by Angus Ross,Harmondsworth, , .

Smollett, op. cit., –. While this practice was not universal, I have foundmany examples in the course of my research. SirRobert Burdett, among others, also included in hisLondon accounts the spending money given to hisfamily members and allowed to himself, so that eventheir personal expenditure in London can betracked [Matlock, Derbyshire Record Office,D//, Household accounts for Sir RobertBurdett, –].

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office,Hartwell papers, Ref D/LE/E/.

Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, Sackvillepapers, U A, bills for entertainment atGrosvenor Square –, including /,‘Abstract of Bills for Dinners at Grosvenor Squarefrom December th to May the th ’.

Badminton, Badminton muniments, RA //. Ibid., RA //.

For example, Sir Robert Burdett included thepurchase of chimney pieces and Chippendale chairsin his figures for London expenditure, but clearlymarked them as meant for his country property atForemark [Matlock, Derbyshire Record Office,Burdett papers, D//, entry for February].

John Burnett, A history of the cost of living, London,, .

Chelmsford, Essex Record Office, Braybrookepapers, D/Bby A–, monthly general accounts.

London, London Metropolitan Archives, Acc/, August .

Winchester, Hampshire Record Office, Clarke-Jervoise papers, M//.

Hertford, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies,D/ECd F.

English Heritage Historians’ files, WM , noteson Berkeley Square. Clive had bought theremainder of the lease of the house, which he hadpreviously rented, for £, in .

John Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight of thePolar Star, London, , .

London, Guildhall Library, Christ’s HospitalArchives, tenancy agreement books; Woburn Abbey,Bedford Estate Office, Bedford Estate proposalbooks.

Woburn, Bedford Estate Office, Proposal Book D,p. .

Ibid., Proposal Book D, p. . Ibid., Proposal Book E, pp. , . See for example ibid., Proposal Book E, p.

regarding the lease of a house in Tavistock Row, August , increased from to years.

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Wynnstaypapers, /.

FHW Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XL,London, , .

English Heritage Historians’ files, WM , noteson Berkeley Square. The total cost of theextensive refurbishment was £,.

Beata Francis and Eliza Keary (eds.), The Francisletters by Sir Philip Francis and other members of thefamily, London, , I, , , , , entriesfor and March, May ; June, November ; June in Mrs Francis’sjournal.

Francis and Keary, op.cit., I, , entry for November in Mrs Francis’s journal.

London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Adairpapers, IX, January [].

Jill Low, ‘French taste in London: William Weddell’stown house’, Country Life, December , ,.

Public Advertiser, August ; Morning Post andDaily Advertiser, January .

Woking, Surrey History Centre, Frederick papers,//, agreement dated February ; ibid.,//, account book entries for October , March .

London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Chambersletterbooks, I, fols. v, , letters from Chambers toErrington, n.d. and May .

Ibid., fol. , Chambers to Fitzwilliam, []. London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Hamilton

and Greville papers, I, fols. –. Dan Cruickshank, ‘Queen Anne’s Gate’, Georgian

Group Journal, II, , .



N O T E S

London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Montagucorrespondence, fol. , Elizabeth Montagu to MrsRobinson, July []: ‘till ye whole wascompleted I would only pay on account, so thatthere was not a possibility of a final settlementbetween me and these gentry … I had ye satisfactionof getting a receit [sic] in full of all demands from yevarious artificers … My house never appear’d to meso noble, so splendid, so pleasant, so convenient, aswhen I had paid off every shilling of debt it hadincurred’.

Ibid., fol. , Mrs Montagu to Mrs Robinson, July[].

Public Advertiser, December . Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office,

D//P///, Edward Jefreys to Sir Geo.Jerningham, April ; Malcolm Elwin (ed.), TheNoels and the Milbankes (Macdonald: London,), , Mary Noel to Judith Milbanke, October : ‘Mrs Bland told me she knew for acertainty that Sir T[homas] C[lavering] haspositively said he shall decline being again inParliament, that he is parting with his House inTown, & intends to live intirely [sic] in the Country,being in very bad Circumstances’.

Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Correspondence of Emily,Duchess of Leinster (–), Dublin, I, , ,letter from Lady Caroline Fox to the Marchioness ofKildare, March .

Francis and Keary, op.cit., I, , journal entry for May ; II, , editors’ note.

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Wynnstay, fols. –, Francis Chambre to Wynn, September . Chambre’s extensive comments onSir Watkin’s direct and indirect expenditure on hisnew house can be found in correspondence in ,fols. –, , –, –, , –, , .According to the Survey of London the house in StJames’s Square was bought for £,, and inexcess of £, was spent on rebuilding it[Sheppard, op.cit., XXIX, ].

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Wynnstay, fols. –, Wynn to Chambre, June . Thephenomenon of delayed payments, often amountingto thousands of pounds, was not exclusive to thisperiod, but formed part of an annual and perennialpattern of aristocratic expenditure.

Ibid., fol. , Samuel Sidebotham to FrancisChambre, February , for example.

London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Chambersletterbooks, I, fol. v, Chambers to HenryErrington, October .

Ibid., fol. v, Chambers to Lord Melbourne, August . Melbourne still owed Chambers£, when he sold the house in [M. H. Port,‘West End palaces: the aristocratic town house inLondon –’, London Journal, XX, ,note on p. ].

See, for example, British Library, Add MS. ,,Chambers letterbooks, I, fols. , v, v, and v.

See, for example, The Town and Country Magazine,in which very lengthy lists of bankrupts appeared inDecember and January , a periodsuggested by other sources as particularly bad forpatrons, too. In respect of tradesmen, Julian Hoppitremarks that ‘at the centre of fashion, Londonbusinessmen were open to a constantly changingrange of opportunities making for success and aconstantly changing pattern of uncertainty makingfor failure. Fashion heightened opportunities andrisks’ [Julian Hoppit, Risk and failure in Englishbusiness –, Cambridge, , ].

Mr King, of Brompton Grove, near Knightsbridge,was unusual in selling his household furniture andletting his house and stabling in order to retire intothe City [Public Advertiser, January ].

If we are to believe the ‘letter’, even death, the fifthreason for sale, might not always be taken at facevalue, for another overspender in the King’s Benchprison is a macaroni officer who had been reportedas killed in America [Town and Country Magazine,April , ].

See, for example, Town and Country Magazine, June, : ‘Mr. Thomas Bradshaw, minister to theJunto, has just bought of the duke of Athol for fourthousand pounds, a house for his town residence,opposite to Lord Bute’s, in South Audley-street’; orElwin, op. cit., , Mary Noel to Judith Milbanke, January : ‘Mr Lambton has bought the Dss ofAncaster’s house in Berkeley Square, & given sixthousand pounds for it’.

London, British Library, Althorp papers, F,undated letters [?] from Hon Caroline Howe toLady Spencer.

Peter M. Briggs, ‘“News from the little World”: acritical glance at eighteenth-century Britishadvertising’, Studies in Eighteenth-century Culture,XXIII, , , n. .



Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office,Hartwell papers, D/LE/D/, letter of July from Henry Bridgeman to Sir William Lee; Woking,Surrey History Centre, Frederick papers, //.fol. , entries for and March .

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire Record Office,Hartwell papers, D/LE/D/, Sir William Lee toLord Harcourt, August .

Of this figure, around per cent was accounted forby work undertaken at or in connection withHartwell House, Buckinghamshire, where extensivework was done in the s by Henry Keene, whosebuilding accounts were not settled until .

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary, rd edn., London, . Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The school for scandal,

, Act I, Scene . Dorchester, Dorset Record Office, Fox-Strangways

papers, D/FSI/Box B, Bundle . London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Department

of Woodwork, Architecture files, Box A, Arlington Street. A brief history of the building(leaflet).

London, British Library, Add MS. ,, Liverpoolpapers, H Stanley to Charles Jenkinson, August.

In his study of business failures in the eighteenthcentury, Julian Hoppit recognises the problems withdefinitions of bankruptcy in the period. Thelayman’s definition was similar to our own, but inlaw ‘only some of those who were insolvent weredealt with as bankrupts; others were dealt with byalternative legal mechanisms; and some escaped thelaw altogether, though not necessarily theircreditors.’ It is likely that executions in town houseswere instigated by agents appointed to act on behalfof assorted creditors, within the type of alternativelegal mechanism mentioned by Hoppit, and byindividual creditors operating alone. Outside ofbankruptcy, the creditor who chased his debts firstwas most likely to succeed [Hoppit, op. cit., , ].In practice, the balance between chasing hard andsoon enough to get paid, and being flexible enoughto attract essential business, must have been difficultfor tradesmen and professionals, including thoseinvolved in construction, to achieve.

London, British Library, Althorp papers, F, HonCaroline Howe to Lady Spencer, March []:‘Sr G. Colebrook’s House in Arlington Street is Ihear to be sold, and it is imagined the call upon him

is so great, that he will be obliged to part withGatton, tho’ should this be so, he will not only beable to pay every body, but remain a very rich man,for it seems he has laid out great sums in thepurchase of west-indian Estates and as he cannotsell them again when he pleases, it necessitates himto part with so much of his English property as willanswer the present demand’.

Public Advertiser, April : ‘We hear that SirGeorge Colebrooke has sold his House inArlington-street to the Female Coterie for ,l.’

Sheppard, op. cit., XXXIII, , . Elwin, op. cit., , Judith Milbanke to Mary Noel,

February . Contemporary comic plays are a good indication of

both the prevalence and the knowledge of trends, astheir humour rested largely on their topicality. Forexample, in The First Floor, by James Cobb ()an upholsterer presses a young man, Whimsey, forpayment ‘for furnishing Miss Fanny Flighty’s housein Newman-Street’ (Act II, Scene ), while in TheHeiress, by General John Burgoyne (), Promptoffers to set up his favoured young girl, and hermatronly companion, in ‘a pretty snug house, in apleasant quarter of the town, where [they] would bemuch more commodiously lodged: the furniturenew, and in the prettiest taste’ (Act I, Scene ). Inreal life, William Hickey’s acquaintance FannyTemple ‘inhabited an excellent house in QueenAnne Street’, all paid for by ‘a gentleman of rank andfashion’, while Bob Potts’s then mistress EmilyWarren was installed in ‘a handsome, well-furnishedhouse’, in Cork Street, dubbed by Hickey ‘ascomplete a one as ever I saw in every respect’ [PeterQuennell (ed.), Memoirs of William Hickey,London, , , , with reference to the lates and respectively].

Elwin, op. cit., , May , Sophie Curzon toMary Noel from London.

Ibid.,, Judith Milbanke to Mary Noel, December , – (editorial note). TheCurzons had been spending on the certainty of aninheritance on Lord Scarsdale’s death. However, thepromise of money in the future was not alwayssufficient to overcome shortages in the present, or tomaintain the confidence of creditors.

A. M. W. Stirling (ed.), The Hothams, being thechronicles of the Hothams of Scorborough and SouthDalton from their hitherto unpublished family



papers, London, , II, – (editorial note,source not given).

Elizabeth McKellar has drawn attention to the dualmeaning that the word ‘credit’ had, ‘encompassingboth the notion of personal credibility and theconcept of credit-worthiness’ [Elizabeth McKellar,The birth of modern London: the development anddesign of the city, –, Manchester, , ].

– April, , p. , quoted in Hoppit, op. cit.,.

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Wynnstay, fol. , Wynn to Samuel Sidebotham, March ; ibid., fols. –, Wynn to Chambre, June .

In his discussion of credit in the eighteenth century,B. L. Anderson confirms that there is evidence that‘the enthusiasm for credit led contemporaries to

serious over-extension and failure, occurring whenthe size of a man’s assets could no longer supportthe volatility of his credit … At worst the outcomeinvolved abscondment, the debtors’ prison, or asuicide, all were common enough’ [B. L. Anderson,‘Money and the structure of credit in the eighteenthcentury’, Business History, XII, , ].

Frances Burney, Cecilia, or, memoirs of an heiress(), ed. by Peter Sabor and Margaret AnneDoody with an introduction by M. A. Doody,Oxford, , , .

Burney, op. cit., . Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: the life in

the works, New Brunswick, , . Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An

open elite? – England –, Oxford, , ,.



Documents

Rachel Stewart, ‘The West End house c1765 c1785: gamble