Wentworth Castle is a grade-I listed country house, the former seat of the Earls of Strafford, at Stainborough, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, England. It is now home to the Northern College for Residential and Community Education.
An older house existed on the estate, then called Stainborough, when it was purchased by Thomas Wentworth, Baron Raby (later Earl of Strafford), in 1708. It was still called Stainborough in Jan Kip's engraved bird's-eye view of parterres and avenues, 1714, and in the first edition of Vitruvius Britannicus, 1715. The name was changed in 1731. The original name survives in the form of Stainborough Castle, a sham ruin constructed as a garden folly on the estate.
The estate was in the care of the Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust from 2001 to June 2019 and was open to the public year-round seven days a week. Despite massive restoration, the castle gardens were closed to the public in 2017 amidst a funding crisis. In September 2018 it was announced that the National Trust planned to enter into a new partnership with Northern College and Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council to reopen the gardens and parkland to the public. The gardens and parkland reopened to the public on 8 June 2019.
History The original house, known as the Cutler house, was constructed for Sir Gervase Cutler (born 1640) in 1670. Sir Gervase then sold the estate to Thomas Wentworth, later the 1st Earl of Strafford (of the 2nd creation). The house was remodelled in two great campaigns, by two earls, in remarkably different styles, each time under unusual circumstances.
First building campaign
The first building campaign to upgrade the original structure was initiated by Thomas Wentworth, Baron Raby (1672–1739). He was the grandson of Sir William Wentworth, 1st Baronet, father of Thomas Wentworth, the attainted 1st Earl. Raby was himself created 1st Earl of Strafford (second creation) in 1711.
The estate of Wentworth Woodhouse, which he believed was his birthright, was scarcely six miles distant and was a constant bitter sting, for the Strafford fortune had passed from William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford, the childless son of the great earl, to his wife's nephew, Thomas Watson; only the barony of Raby had gone to a blood-relation. M. J. Charlesworth surmises that it was a feeling that what by right should have been his that motivated Wentworth's purchase of Stainborough Castle nearby and that his efforts to surpass the Watsons at Wentworth Woodhouse in splendour and taste motivated the man whom Jonathan Swift called "proud as Hell".Swift, Journal to Stella, noted by M. J. Charlesworth, "The Wentworths: Family and Political Rivalry in the English Landscape Garden" Garden History 14.2 (Autumn 1986:120–137) p. 120.
Wentworth had been a soldier in the service of William III, who made him a colonel of dragoons. He was sent by Queen Anne as ambassador to Prussia in 1705–11 and on his return to Britain, the earldom was revived when he was created Viscount Wentworth and Earl of Strafford in the Peerage of Great Britain. He was then sent as a representative in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Utrecht, and was brought before a commission of Parliament in the aftermath. With the death of Queen Anne, he and the Tories were permanently out of power. Wentworth, representing a clannish old family of Yorkshire, required a grand house consonant with the revived Wentworth fortunes. He spent his years of retirement completing it and enriching his landscape.
Wentworth had broken his tour of duty at Berlin to conclude the purchase of Stainborough in the summer of 1708, and returned to Berlin, armed with sufficient specifications of the site to engage the services of a military architect who had spent some years recently in England, Johann von Bodt. who provided the designs.Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 3rd ed. 1995 (Yale University Press) 1995. s.v. "Bodt or Bott, Johannes von, (1670–1745)". Wentworth was in Italy in 1709, buying paintings for the future house: "I have great credit by my pictures," he reported with satisfaction: "They are all designed for Yorkshire, and I hope to have a better collection there than Mr. Watson."Letter quoted by Charlesworth 1986:123. To display them a grand gallery would be required, for which James Gibbs must have provided the designs, since a contract for wainscoting "as by Mr Gibbs" survives among Wentworth papers in the British Library (Add MS 22329, folio 128). The Gallery was completed in 1724.Colvin 1995, s.v. "Gibbs, James"; see Terry Friedman, James Gibbs (1984:123–25, 321f, and pl. 124). There are designs, probably by Bodt, for an elevation and a section showing the gallery at Wentworth Castle in the Victoria and Albert Museum (E.307–1937), in an album of mixed drawings which belonged to William Talman's son John.Lawrence Whistler, in Country Life 92 1952:1650, and John Harris, in Architectural Review July 1961, attributed the drawings, which had been annotated in a different ink W.T. del. et inv. to William Talman. Margaret Whinney classed them among attributed designs for which there is not adequate evidence, and, finding them too competent and too French for Talman, ascribed them to Bodt (Whinney, "William Talman" Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18.1–2 [January 1955:123–139] p. 136f, figs. 39ab). Her attribution has been followed, e.g. by Terry Friedman, "The English Appreciation of Italian Decorations" The Burlington Magazine 117 No. 873, Special Issue Devoted to French Neo-Classicism (December 1975:841–847) p. 846 note 27. the gallery extends 180 feet, 24 feet wide, and 30 high, screened into three divisions by veined marble Corinthian columns with gilded capitals, and with corresponding pilasters against projecting piers: in the intervening spaces four marble copies of Roman sculptures on block plinths survived until the twentieth century.Horace Walpole, who couldn't praise the house and grounds highly enough (see below) dismissed the contents of the Gallery: "but four modern statues and some bad portraits" (quoted by Rosalys Coope, "The Gallery in England: Names and Meanings" Architectural History 27, Design and Practice in British Architecture: Studies in Architectural History Presented to Howard Colvin (1984:446–455) p. 450.
Construction was sufficiently advanced by March–April 1714 that surviving correspondence between Strafford and William Thornton concerned the disposition of panes in the window sashes: the options were for windows four panes wide, as done in the best houses Thornton assured the Earl, for which crown glass would do, or for larger panes, three panes across, which might require plate glass: Strafford opted for the latter.Remarked on by Hentie Louw and Robert Crayford, "A Constructional History of the Sash-Window, c. 1670-c. 1725 (Part 2)", Architectural History 42 (1999:173–239) p. 188. The results, directed largely by letter from a distance,Robert Benson, 1st Baron Bingley, the Tory politician and amateur architect, may have "looked after" the project in some way (Colvin 1995 s.v. "Benson, Robert, Lord Bingley"). are unique in Britain. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner found the east range "of a palatial splendour uncommon in England."Pevsner, The grand suite of parade rooms on the ground floor extended from the room at the north end with a ceiling allegory of Plenty to the south end, with one of a Fame.
Bodt's use of a giant order of pilasters on the front and other features, suggested to John Harris that Bodt, who had been in England in the 1690s, had had access to drawings by William Talman. Talman was the architect of Chatsworth, considered to be England's first truly Baroque house. Indeed, there are similarities of design between Wentworth's east front and Chatsworth. Both have a distinctly Continental Baroque frontage. Wentworth has been described as "a remarkable and almost unique example of Franco-Prussian architecture in Georgian England".Colvin 1995, s.v. "Bodt or Bott, Johann von". The east front was built upon a raised terrace that descended to sweeps of gravelled ramps that flanked a grotto and extended in an axial vista framed by double allées of trees to a formal wrought iron gate, all seen in Jan Kip's view of 1714, which if it is not more plan than reality, includes patterned parterres to the west of the house and an exedra on rising ground behind, all features that appear again in Britannia Illustrata, (1730).Noted by Kenneth Lemmon, "Wentworth Castle: A Forgotten Landscape" Garden History 3.3 (Summer 1975:50–57) p. 52. An engraving by Thomas Badeslade from about 1750 still shows the formal features centred on Bodt's façade, enclosed in gravel drives wide enough for a coach-and-four. The regular plantations of trees planted bosquet-fashion have matured: their edges are clipped, and straight rides pierce them.Illustrated in Lemmon 1975 fig. p. 53. All these were swept away by the 2nd Earl after mid-century, in favour of an open, rolling "naturalistic" landscape in the manner of Capability Brown.Brown is not documented as working at Wentworth Castle.
First earl's landscape
Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford planted avenues of trees in great quantity in this open countryside, and the sham castle folly (built from 1726 and inscribed "Rebuilt in 1730", now more ruinous than it was at first) that he placed at the highest site, "like an endorsement from the past"Charlesworth 1986:123. and kept free of trees missed by only a few years being the first sham castle in an English landscape garden.It was preceded Charlesworth noted, only by Sir John Vanbrugh's long bastion wall at Castle Howard and by Strafford's cousin Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst's "Alfred's Tower" at Cirencester Park, which might have provided the inspiration. For its central court where the four original towers were named for his four children, the Earl commissioned his portrait statue in 1730 from Michael Rysbrack, whom James Gibbs had been the first to employ when he came to England;M. I. Webb, Michael Rysbrack 1954:161f (dated "c. 1730"); Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, rev. ed., s.v.. "Michael Rysbrack". the statue has been moved closer to the house.
A staunch Tory,He was encumbered by James Francis Edward Stuart, the "Old Pretender", with the useless Jacobite title of "Duke of Strafford" in 1722. Lord Strafford remained in political obscurity during Walpole's Whig supremacy, for the remainder of his life. An obelisk was erected to the memory of Queen Anne in 1734, and a sitting room in the house was named "Queen Anne's Sitting Room" until modern times. Other landscape features were added, one after the other, with the result that today there are twenty-six listed structures in what remains of the parkland.
2nd Earl at Wentworth Castle