Wilton House
Following the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII presented Wilton Abbey and its attached estates to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke.
Shakespeare's theatre company performed there (As You Like It may have been the chosen work),[1][2] and there was an important literary salon culture under its occupation by Mary Sidney, wife of the second Earl.
William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, the scion of a distinguished family in the Welsh marches, was a favourite of King Henry VIII.
These were given to "William Herbert, Esquire and Anne his wife for the term of their lives with certain reserved rents to King Henry VIII.
"[6] When Edward VI re-granted the manors to the family, it was explicitly "to the aforenamed Earl, by the name of Sir William Herbert, knight, and the Lady Anne his wife and the heirs male of their bodies between them lawfully begotten.
[8] According to John Aubrey's Brief Life, Herbert was briefly dispossessed under Mary I of England:"In Queen Mary's time, upon the return of the Catholique religion, the nunnes came again to Wilton Abbey; and this William, Earl of Pembroke, came to the gate which lookes towards the court by the street, but now is walled up, with his cappe in his hand, and fell upon his knees to the Lady Abbess and nunnes, crying peccavi.
Sidney turned Wilton into a "paradise for poets", and the circle included Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Sir John Davies, Abraham Fraunce, and Samuel Daniel.
King James, Anne of Denmark, and Prince Henry stayed at Wilton in November and December 1603, due to plague in London and gave an audience to two Venetian ambassadors, Nicolò Molin and Piero Duodo.
It seems at this time Jones was too busy with his royal clients and did no more than provide a few sketches for a mansion, which he then delegated for execution to an assistant Isaac de Caus (sometimes spelt 'Caux'), a Frenchman and landscape gardener from Dieppe.
A document that Howard Colvin found at Worcester College library in Oxford in the 1960s confirmed not only de Caus as the architect, but that the original plan for the south facade was to have been over twice the length of that built; what we see today was intended to be only one of two identical wings linked by a central portico of six Corinthian columns.
The second wing however failed to materialise – perhaps because of the 4th Earl's quarrel with King Charles I and subsequent fall from favour, or the outbreak of the Civil War; or simply lack of finances.
Because of the uncertainty of the fire damage to the structure of the house, the only work that can be attributed with any degree of certainty to the new partnership is the redesign of the interior of the seven state-rooms contained on the piano nobile of the south wing; and even here the extent of Jones' presence is questioned.
State rooms in English country houses were designed, named, and reserved for the use of the visiting members of the royal family.
By the Edwardian Period, large house-parties had adapted the state rooms to use as salons for playing bridge, dancing, talking, and generally amusing themselves.
It has been said that Jones' original studying in Italy of Palladio and the other Italian masters was paid for by the 3rd Earl, father of the builder of the south front containing the state rooms.
In 1705, following a fire, the 8th Earl rebuilt some of the oldest parts the house, making rooms to display his newly acquired Arundel marbles, which form the basis for the sculpture collection at Wilton today.
The negative points of his 'improvements' to modern eyes are that he swept away the Holbein porch, reducing it to a mere garden ornament, replacing it with a new entrance and forecourt.
The forecourt was bounded by the house on one side, with wings of fake doors and windows extending to form the court, all accessed by Chambers's repositioned arch, crowned by a copy of the life-size equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
While not altogether displeasing as an entrance to a country house, the impression created is more of a hunting estate in Northern France or Germany.
The original Great Hall of the Tudor house, the chapel and De Caus-painted staircase to the state apartments were all swept away at this time.
The Tudor tower, now the last remnant of William Herbert's house, escaped unscathed except for the addition of two 'medieval' statues at ground floor level.
Today nearly two hundred years later Wyatt's improvements do not jar the senses as much as they did those of the great architectural commentators James Lees-Milne and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell writing in the 1960s.
The centrepiece is an ashlar arch, designed c.1758–62 by Sir William Chambers as a garden feature, and carrying a lead statue (probably of earlier date) of Marcus Aurelius on horseback.
[14] Washern Grange, south of the house and on the other side of the Nadder, is said to be a 1630s rebuilding of an earlier stable block, and incorporates a 14th-century barn which presumably belonged to the abbey.
After the parterre had been replaced by turf, the Palladian Bridge (1736–37, Grade I listed)[18] over the little River Nadder, 90m south of the house, was designed by the 9th Earl in collaboration with architect Roger Morris.
Empress Catherine the Great commissioned another copy, known as the Marble Bridge, to be set up at the landscape park of Tsarskoye Selo.
The house has been used for filming, including: Romance with a Double Bass (1974);[28] Barry Lyndon (1975);[28] The Music Lovers;[28] The Bounty (1984);[28] Treasure Houses of Britain (1985);[29] Blackadder II;[28] The Madness of King George (1994);[28] Of Mirrors, Paintings and Windows: Spectatorship in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995);[28] Mrs Brown (1997);[28] Pride & Prejudice (2005);[30][28] The Young Victoria (2009);[28] Outlander (2014);[28] The Crown (2016);[28] Tomb Raider (2018);[31][28] Emma (2020);[28] Bridgerton (2020);[32][28] and The Diplomat (2024).
