Denbies is a large estate to the northwest of Dorking in Surrey, England. A farmhouse and surrounding land originally owned by John Denby was purchased in 1734 by Jonathan Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens in London, and converted into a weekend retreat. The house he built appears to have been of little architectural significance, but the Gothic garden he developed in the grounds on the theme of death achieved some notoriety, despite being short-lived. The estate was bought by Lord King of Ockham following Tyers's death in 1767, and the macabre artefacts he had installed, including two stone coffins topped by human skulls, were removed.
Joseph Denison, a wealthy banker, purchased the estate in about 1787, and it remained in the Denison family until 1849, when it passed to Thomas Cubitt, a master builder. At the time, Cubitt was working on Osborne House for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the mansion he designed to replace the old one was a more modest version of Osborne. It was, however, still a substantial building, in the Italianate style, with almost 100 rooms on three storeys. In the nineteenth century Denison and later Cubitt served as local Members of Parliament, for West Surrey.
The payment of death duties and the difficulty of maintaining a large domestic estate during the Second World War forced the family to begin selling parcels of land. Cubitt's mansion was abandoned until its demolition in 1953, by which time the family was living in a Regency-style house converted from the housing of the garden and stable staff in more affluent times.
What remained of the estate – about – was put on the market in 1984 and bought by Biwater, a water-treatment company. Two years later the company chairman Adrian White established Denbies Wine Estate, using on a south-facing piece of land to plant vines.
History
A farmhouse originally owned by John Denby in the mid-16th century, after whom the estate is named, stood at the heart of Denbies. The lands were sold by William Wakefield (or Wakeford) to Jonathan Tyers in 1734, to be developed as a weekend retreat. Tyers was the owner of London's Vauxhall Gardens – known at that time as New Spring Gardens – and was responsible for developing that venue into a "fashionable place of evening entertainment". A simple two-storey house in the Georgian style was built by converting some of the old farm buildings. Set on top of a hillside about northwest of Dorking, the house had views of the Surrey landscape and backed onto Ranmore Common. Tyers installed a well beside the house; a note in The Gentleman's Magazine of 1781 gives the well's measurements, recorded on 4 October 1764, as being in diameter and reaching a depth of . On that day it contained water to a depth of supplied from a spring. The front of the house had a pediment in the central wing decorated with a coat of arms; the rooms were not large but were conveniently situated. According to historian Brian Allen the house was not architecturally significant and scant information is available about it; the garden established by Tyers, however, gained notoriety.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death In contrast to the cheerful, brightly lit atmosphere of Vauxhall, the garden Tyers developed at Denbies was of a more Gothic nature. Its theme was "memento mori (or 'reminders of death')", and the development was given the name of "The Valley of the Shadow of Death". Tyers continued to live in his house in the grounds of Vauxhall after purchasing Denbies, visiting the latter only on Sundays, which, it has been suggested, may go some way towards explaining the garden's gloomy nature. David Coke and Alan Borg, authors of Vauxhall Gardens: A History (2012), have alternatively suggested that the mood of the garden may have been symptomatic of "some sort of psychological imbalance" within Tyers, perhaps even "a form of bipolar disorder". The garden's main feature was a wooded area of about , Il Penseroso, which was criss-crossed by a labyrinthine network of paths leading down to a small tributary of the River Mole.
Just outside the entrance to the wood was a small hermitage known as The Temple of Death. It had a thatched roof and internal enclosures formed by fake stonework panels, each covered in verses reminding the reader of "the vanity, the shortness and insufficiency of human pleasures". To the right-hand side of the temple entrance, hidden out of sight, was a clock that chimed every minute, which in the words of William Bowyer, was "admonishing us that Time is fleeting, and even the least portion of it to be employed in reflections on Eternity"; it was faced on the opposite side by a large white raven with a label in its mouth conveying the same message. Chained to a sloping desk in the centre of the temple was a copy of Edward Young's poem Night-Thoughts and Robert Blair's The Grave, bound in black leather.
At the end of the temple farthest from the door was a substantial monument to Robert Petre, a renowned 18th-century horticulturist. Executed in stucco and probably crafted by Louis-François Roubiliac, it depicted an angel blowing the last trump, causing a stone pyramid to crumble and revealing the corpse within to be rising from the dead.
Visitors were met at the entrance to the wood by the Latin inscription Procul este, profani, which translates as "away all you who are unhallowed", a quotation from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. The iron entrance gate was mounted between two upended stone coffins supporting the portico, each one topped by a human skull, one male one female. Each coffin was inscribed with a poem, addressed to the male and female visitor respectively. One proclaimed that "Men, at their best state, are altogether vanity", while the other reminded women that "beauty is vain". The author of the poems is unknown, but may have been Soame Jenyns, although the topographer Edward Brayley was not entirely convinced this was correct.
A large alcove close by in the garden, entered through a portal of grey Sussex marble, formed an amphitheatre that contained an effigy representing Truth crushing a mask, again probably the work of Roubiliac. It drew the visitor's attention towards two life-sized pictures by Francis Hayman, depicting a Christian and an Unbeliever as they died, set into compartments in the wall.
Following Tyers's death in 1767 the estate was sold to Thomas King, 5th Baron King (1712–1779)successor to William King, 4th Baron King (1711–1767) of Ockham in Surrey. The macabre artefacts were removed and the grounds extensively altered.
Subsequent history Whyte Soon after the death in 1779 of the 5th Baron King, in 1781 his son Peter King, 6th Baron King (1736–1793) sold the estate to James I Whyte (c. 1747–1807) of Ireland, son of Mark Whyte by his wife Elizabeth Edwards, a daughter of John Edwards of Old Court, County Wicklow, Ireland.Burke & Fox-Davies James I Whyte was described by Oliver (1829) as "Colonel Jas Whyte of Ireland".Oliver, George, The History and Antiquities of the Town and Minster of Beverley, in the County of York, Beverley, 1829, p. 496, Pedigree of "Gee of Bishop Burton" In 1772 at St George's, Hanover Square, Mayfair, James I Whyte married (as his first wife) Gertrude Gee, a daughter of James Gee of Bishop Burton Hall near Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire.Oliver The witnesses at his marriage were Richard D'Arcy Hildyard and Richard Whyte. His son and heir by his first marriage was James II Whyte (1774–1852) of Pilton House near Barnstaple in Devon, who in 1805 at St George's, Hanover Square, married Frances Honoria Beresford, a daughter of the Irish statesman Hon. John Beresford (1738–1805), a younger son of Marcus Beresford, 1st Earl of Tyrone (1694–1763) and a younger brother of George de La Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford (1735–1800).Bernard Burke, revised by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, A genealogical and heraldic history of the landed gentry of Ireland, 1912, p. 771, pedigree of "Whyte of Newtown Manor" James I Whyte married secondly Anne-Catherine Hildyard, the sister and heiress of Sir Robert Hildyard, 4th Baronet (1743–1814)William Betham, The Baronetage of England, Or the History of the English Baronets, Volume 2, 1802, pp. 66–71 of Winestead Hall, near Pattrington, East Riding of Yorkshire, by whom he had a daughter Anne Catherine Whyte, heiress of the Hildyard estates, who married Colonel Thomas Blackborne Thoroton, Coldstream Guards, of Flintham Hall, Flintham, Nottinghamshire, who adopted the surname Hildyard as a condition of his wife's inheritance.Burke & Fox-Davies Denbies remained in the ownership of James I Whyte for six years until around 1787, when it was purchased by Joseph Denison, a wealthy banker.
Denison family ownership Denison was brought up in West Yorkshire. His parents were of low rank and had little means, and it is unclear how he made his fortune. It seems that he moved to London, where he fell in with the Heywood family of bankers, later becoming a partner in their company. Richard Vickerman Taylor described the immense wealth Denison accumulated as being gained through "unabated industry and the most rigid frugality". Five years after purchasing Denbies, the Seamere estate, near Scarborough, Yorkshire, was added to his portfolio after he acquired it from the Duke of Leeds. Denison had a son, William Joseph, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Anna Maria, with his second wife. By the time of the Regency era the family were the personification of prosperity and social status. Denison senior died in 1806 and the estate and all other properties were inherited by his son, who added to the acreage of the estate by purchasing additional land from the Earl of Verulam and the Duke of Norfolk. A new driveway was installed, entering from the direction of Mickleham via some woodland, replacing the steep roadway that came from Dorking. Writing in 1830, topographer Thomas Allen described the expansive well-designed gardens as being under the direction of a "scientific and experienced horticulturist". The lawns at the front of the mansion featured sprinklings of evergreens and shrubs together with formal low-level flower beds. Local people were permitted access to the estate grounds.
Like his father, Denison junior was a banker and became a senior partner in his father's banking company, Denison, Heywood, and Kennard, of Lombard Street, London. He continued to add to the wealth inherited from his father, and when he died a bachelor on 2 August 1849 he was probably one of the ten richest British businessmen of his era. He left his fortune, estimated at £2.3 million, to his nephew Albert, on condition that he changed his surname from Conyngham to Denison. Albert was elevated to Baron Londesborough on 4 March 1850, and later that year he sold the estate at Denbies to the master builder, Thomas Cubitt.
Cubitt family ownership
Cubitt was originally a carpenter and, like Denison senior, had acquired his wealth through his own business acumen, building up a successful company and business empire. At the time he purchased Denbies, Cubitt was nearing completion of the work on Osborne House for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on the Isle of Wight. Cubitt wanted a mansion of his own to emulate that of the neighbouring Georgian country house of Deepdene owned by the affluent Hope family of bankers and at that time in the possession of Henry Thomas Hope, a patron of the arts. For the practical purpose of continuing to reside in the existing house while building took place, the new mansion was constructed on a site slightly to the southwest of its predecessor, which was demolished once the new mansion was completed in 1854.
Cubitt's new mansion