Wilton House is an English country house at Wilton near Salisbury in Wiltshire, which has been the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke for over 400 years. It was built on the site of the medieval Wilton Abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII presented Wilton Abbey and its attached estates to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke. The house has literary associations. Shakespeare's theatre company performed there (As You Like It may have been the chosen work),F. E. Halliday (1964). A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore: Penguin, p. 531. and there was an important literary salon culture under its occupation by Mary Sidney, wife of the second Earl.
The present Grade I listed house is the result of rebuilding after a 1647 fire, although a small section of the house built for William Herbert survives; alterations were made in the early 19th and early 20th centuries. The house stands in gardens and a park which are also Grade I listed. While still a family home, the house and grounds are open to visitors during the summer months.
Tudor phase
William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, the scion of a distinguished family in the Welsh Marches, was a favourite of King Henry VIII. Following a recommendation to Henry by King Francis I of France, whom Herbert had served as a soldier of fortune, he was granted arms. In 1538, he married Anne Parr, daughter of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal and sister of the future queen consort Catherine Parr (1543–1547) and Sir William Parr, 1st Baron Parr of Kendal (later Marquess of Northampton).Susan James. Catherine Parr: Henry VIII's Last Love, The History Press, 2009.Katherine Parr, editor Janel Mueller. Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence, University of Chicago Press, 30 June 2011. pg 6.
Following the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry presented Wilton Abbey and its attached estates to Herbert. The granting of such an estate was an accolade and evidence of his position at court. The first grants, dated March and April 1542, include the site of the late monastery, the manor of Washerne adjoining, and also the manors of Chalke. 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."Sir Nevile Rodwell Wilkinson. Wilton House Guide: A Handbook for Visitors, Chiswick Press, 1908. pg 80. 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."Anthony Nicolson. Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War, Harper Collins, 3 November 2009. pg 63-4.
Herbert built Wilton House, probably on the same site as the abbey, between 1544 and 1563. 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. Upon Queen Mary's death, the Earl came to Wilton (like a tygre) and turned them out crying, 'Out, ye whores! to worke, to worke—ye whores, goe spinne!"Brief Lives', chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696; edited by Andrew Clark, p. 316, Volume I A-H at the Internet Archive
The Wilton Circle were an influential group of 16th-century English poets, led by Mary Sidney and based at Wilton. Sidney turned Wilton into a "paradise for poets", and the circle included Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Sir John Davies, Abraham Fraunce, and Samuel Daniel.
They are described as "the most important and influential literary circle in English history" and Mary Sidney has been called a "patroness of the muses".
Hans Holbein It has long been claimed, without proof, that Hans Holbein the Younger re-designed the abbey as a rectangular house around a central courtyard, which is the core of the present house. Holbein died in 1543, so his designs for the new house would have had to be very speedily executed. However, the highly ornamented entrance porch to the new mansion, removed from the house around 1800 and later transformed into a garden pavilion, is to this day known as the "Holbein Porch" – a perfect example of the blending of the older Gothic and the brand-new Renaissance style.
Whoever the architect, a great mansion arose, an early prodigy house by a courtier of the Tudors. Today only one other part of the Tudor mansion survives: the great tower in the centre of the east facade. With its central arch (once giving access to the court beyond) and three floors of oriel windows above, the tower is slightly reminiscent of the entrance at Hampton Court. It is flanked today by two wings in a loose Georgian style, each topped by an Italianate pavilion tower.
Royal court at Wilton in 1603
The Tudor house built by William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, in 1551 lasted 80 years. 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.Horatio Brown, Calendar State Papers, Venice: 1603-1607, vol. 10 (London, 1900), p. 116 no. 164. The court at Wilton was entertained by John Heminges and the King's Men who were paid £30 for a play on 2 December.Peter Cunningham, Extracts from the Revels at Court (London, 1842), p. xxxiv. They are said to have performed As You Like It.Tresham Lever, Herberts of Wilton (London, 1967), p. 77.
Inigo Jones On the succession of the 4th Earl in 1630, he decided to pull down the southern wing and erect a new complex of staterooms in its place. It is now that the second great name associated with Wilton appears: Inigo Jones.
The architecture of the south front is in severe Palladian style, described at the time as in the "Italian Style;" built of the local stone, softened by climbing shrubs, it is quintessentially English to our eyes today. While the remainder of the house is on three floors of equal value in the English style, the south front has a low rusticated ground floor, almost suggesting a semi-basement. Three small porches project at this level only, one at the centre, and one at each end of the facade, providing small balconies to the windows above. The next floor is the piano nobile, at its centre the great double-height Venetian window, ornamented at second floor level by the Pembroke arms in stone relief. This central window is flanked by four tall sash windows on each side. These windows have low flat pediments. Each end of the facade is defined by "corner stone" decoration giving a suggestion that the single-bay wings project forward. The single windows here are topped by a true pointed pediment.
Above this floor is a further almost mezzanine floor, its small unpedimented windows aligning with the larger below, serve to emphasise the importance of the piano nobile. The roofline is hidden by a balustrade. Each of the terminating 'wings' is crowned by a one-storey, pedimented tower resembling a Palladian pavilion. At the time, his style was an innovation. Just thirty years earlier, Montacute House, exemplifying the English Renaissance, had been revolutionary; only a century earlier, the juxtaposing mass of wings that is Compton Wynyates, one of the first houses to be built without complete fortification, had just been completed and was considered modern.
Attributing the various architectural stages can be difficult, and the degree to which Inigo Jones was involved has been questioned. Queen Henrietta Maria, a frequent guest at Wilton, interrogated Jones about his work there. At the time (1635) he was employed by her, completing the Queen's House at Greenwich. 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 whole was to be enhanced by a great parterre whose dimensions were 1,000 feet by 400 feet. This parterre was in fact created and remained in existence for over 100 years. 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.
It is only now that Inigo Jones may have taken a firmer grip on his original ideas. Seeing De Caus' completed wing standing alone as an entirety, it was considered too plain – De Caus' original plan was for the huge facade to have a low pitched roof, with wings finishing with no architectural symbols of termination. The modifications to the completed wing were of a balustrade hiding the weak roof line and Italianate, pavilion-like towers at each end. The focal point became not a portico but the large double height Venetian window. This south front (illustration above), has been deemed an architectural triumph of Palladian architecture in Britain, and it is widely believed that the final modifications to the work of De Caus were by Inigo Jones himself.
Within a few years of the completion of the new south wing in 1647, it was ravaged by fire. The seriousness of the fire and the devastation it caused is now a matter of some dispute. The architectural historian Christopher Hussey has convincingly argued that it was not as severe as some records have suggested. What is definite is that Inigo Jones now working with another architect John Webb (his nephew by marriage to Jones' niece) returned once again to Wilton. 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. It appears he may have been advising from a distance, using Webb as his medium.
The state rooms
The seven state rooms contained behind the quite simple Mannerist south front of Wilton House are equal to those in any of the great houses of Britain. State rooms in English country houses were designed, named, and reserved for the use of the visiting members of the royal family. State rooms usually occupy an entire facade of a house, and are nearly always of an odd number because the largest and most lavish room (at Wilton the famed Double Cube Room) is placed at the centre of the facade, with symmetrical sequences of smaller (but still very grand) rooms leading from the central room to either side, ending at the state bedrooms, which are at either end of the facade. The central salon was a gathering place for the court of the honoured guest. The comparatively smaller rooms in between the central room and the state bedrooms were designated for the sole use of the occupant of each bedroom, and would have been used for private audiences, withdrawing rooms, and dressing rooms. They were not for public use.