Canonbury House is the name given to several buildings in the Canonbury area of Islington, North London which once formed the manor house of Canonbury, erected for the Canons of St Bartholomew's Priory between 1509 and 1532. The remains today consist of Canonbury Tower and several buildings from the 1790s, some of which incorporate parts of the late 16th-century manor house. Today, the Tower and the other buildings, including a 1790s building today also named "Canonbury House", are arranged around the road named Canonbury Place.
Canonbury Tower is a Tudor tower and is the oldest building in Islington. It is the most substantial remaining part of the old manor house, and is a Grade II* listed building, located east of Canonbury Square.
Canonbury House and Canonbury Tower have been owned or occupied by many noted historical figures, including Thomas Cromwell, John Dudley, Sir Francis Bacon, Oliver Goldsmith and Washington Irving.
History The buildings occupying the site of Canonbury House were developed, demolished or rebuilt in several phases.
Manor of Canonbury Before the Norman Conquest the land now contained in the triangle formed by Upper Street, Essex Road and St Paul's Road was an Anglo-Saxon manor. Passing to Norman ownership, it finally became part of the vast estates of the de Berners family. In 1253 Ralph de Berners made a grant of "lands, rents and their appurtenances in Iseldone" to the Prior and Canons of St Bartholomew'san Augustinian orderin Smithfield. The area thus became known as the Canons' Burgh. The manor lay alongside the village of Islington, between Upper Street and Essex Road (formerly called Lower Street), with a northern boundary at St Paul's Road (formerly called Hopping Lane), and from the early 17th century the southern verge was the New River. The medieval manor house may have dated to 1362.
Prior Bolton's mansion and tower In 1509 William Bolton was elected as the new Prior. Bolton substantially restored and added to St Bartholomew's, and was Henry VIII's Master of the Works for the building of the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. In the 1520s Bolton also restored the medieval Canonbury manor house as a mansion for himself, his Canons and his successors. It is uncertain how much of the Canonbury House that took shape in the 16th century was Prior Bolton's work, and most of its appearance is unknown, although its layout is still discernible today, with a range of buildings around a courtyard, and the six-storey Tower. Canonbury Tower is certainly his work; some sources give the date for the Tower as , but this is incorrect as Prior Bolton died in 1532 and was succeeded by Robert Fuller. It has been suggested that the "base of Islington's most famous historic building appears to be extremely ancient, incorporating pre-Roman work". The reason for Bolton constructing the Tower is obscure since it served no defensive purpose. However, the flat roof commanded a fine view of Middlesex and the City; even in 1807 it was observed that "Canonbury was certainly most convenient and pleasant. We can easily imagine the beautiful view they must have had from thence, even to the gates of the priory; for the smoke of London was not then so dense as it is at present; and but very few buildings intervened."
The grounds were enclosed with a brick wall, extending from the rear of the present Alwyne Road houses northward to St Paul's Road.
When the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII, St Bartholomew's and its appendages were among the last to be taken. Prior Robert Fuller surrendered the Priory and its lands to the Crown on 25 October 1539. Henry VIII bestowed the manor of Canonbury on his Chief Minister for the Dissolution, Thomas Cromwell, only a year before his execution on 28 July 1540.
In 1547 the manor was granted by Edward VI to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, later Duke of Northumberland. He was executed in 1553 for his abortive attempt to place his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, on the throne. Queen Mary I in 1556 granted the manor to one David Broke, and in 1557 to Thomas Wentworth, 2nd Baron Wentworth, who seems to have undertaken some building there.
John Spencer's "Old Canonbury House"
John Spencer initially leased the House and Tower from Wentworth for £21.11s.4d, and then bought it in 1570 for £2,000. Spencer was popularly known as "Rich Spencer" and he amassed one of the greatest private fortunes of his day. Queen Elizabeth is said to have visited him at Canonbury in 1581. He rose to become Sir John Spencer, Knight, Lord Mayor of London in 1594. Spencer took up regular occupation of Canonbury House in 1599 as a country house, and modernised the House and Tower to make them inhabitable and added the main embellishments such as stuccoed ceilings, oak panelling and oak chimney-pieces, many of which still exist and date from that period. Thereafter it is often hard to determine whether individuals were resident in the House or in the Tower, with the names being used interchangeably. Spencer's house is often referred to as "Old Canonbury House". In 1605 the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Egerton, later Earl of Ellesmere, issued a charter dated at Canonbury House and was presumably visiting.
The layout of Spencer's Canonbury House seems to have been east, south and west ranges surrounding a courtyard, with the Tower at the north-west corner, and stables nearby. Contemporary engravings show a bell turret with a cupola stood above the east range, known as Turret House. Canonbury House's walled grounds included gardens below the south range. The southern corners of the gardens were marked by the two Tudor octagonal garden or summer houses which still stand today. On the north side were gardens which at an unknown later date contained a large fish pond. The House and gardens stood in open agricultural and dairy fields with views towards London.
Spencer had no son but had a daughter, Elizabeth. She had fallen in love with William Compton, 2nd Baron Compton, who succeeded his father in 1589 when only 21 and went to the royal court of Queen Elizabeth, borrowing from John Spencer when he had spent what his father had left him. Spencer did not regard marriage to his daughter as a suitable way of liquidating the debt, so he opposed it and confined his daughter in Canonbury Tower. She and Lord Compton eloped: supposedly the young lord, disguised as a baker's boy, drove his cart over the fields to Islington and Elizabeth Spencer was lowered from a window in a baker's basket and escaped to marriage in 1599. Sir John disowned his daughter, costing the couple a fortune variously estimated at from three hundred to eight hundred thousand pounds. However, a son was born to the Comptons in 1601, and Spencer was partially reconciled through the efforts of the Queen, saying that having now no daughter he would adopt the child as his son. The reconciliation was completed with the birth of a second child, a daughter, in Canonbury House and the immense fortune found its way to them on Spencer's death in 1610. Compton then became "in great danger to loose his witts" and later "so franticke that he is forced to be kept bound". He recovered, and then spent "within lesses than eight weekes...£72,000, most in great horses, rich saddles and playe", and on gambling, entertaining and extending the country seat at Castle Ashby House, Northamptonshire, and not on Canonbury House, which was let. The young lord eventually became Lord President of the Council in 1617, and in 1618 was created 1st Earl of Northampton.
From 1616 to 1625 the House was leased to Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher and statesman, who was at first Attorney General and the year after Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He became "lessee from Lord and Lady Compton of the ‘Mansion house and garden thereunto belonging called Canbury House’, together with some adjacent fields."
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, politician and statesman, lived in Canonbury House between 1639 and 1641. He later held senior political office under both the Commonwealth of England and Charles II.
In the English Civil War, Spencer Compton, 2nd Earl of Northampton and his six sons supported the King's cause. The Earl was killed at the Battle of Hopton Heath. The family was fined £40,000 during the Commonwealth, sold property and mortgaged Canonbury House, where they took up residence. The mortgage dated 1661 included "all that capital messuage and Mansion House commonly called Canonbury alias Canbury House, and all that tenement called the Turret House situated and being at the end of the courtyard and the Park, to secure £1751". A son was born to James Compton, 3rd Earl of Northampton at Canonbury House in 1653 and another died aged five in 1662. No other Earl or Marquess of Northampton has since resided there.
In the 1750s, some of the mansion's outbuildings and former stables became a tea-garden called, confusingly, "Canonbury House". Later renamed Canonbury Tavern, or Canonbury House Tavern, it had a bowling green, gardens, and accommodated corporate, parochial and club dinners. From 1808, the facilities on offer included a shrubbery, bowling green, Dutch-pin and trapball grounds, and a butt used for firing practice by Volunteers and others. It was rebuilt as the Canonbury Tavern, which Benjamin Disraeli mentions in his 1880 novel Endymion.
Letting of Canonbury House and Tower During the 18th century Canonbury House and Tower were let, part of them in separate rooms, and often as summer lodgings to gentlemen seeking a rural retreat close to London. An advertisement of 1757 described furnished or unfurnished apartments with a good garden, summer house and coach house, and access to an excellent cold bath. Canonbury House was still enclosed by the brick wall that sloped down to the New River running through the Islington dairy fields, and was a restful spot for visitors seeking peace.
At Christmas 1762 the novelist, playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith took a room in the House which he occupied for about eighteen months, allegedly often using it to hide from his creditors. It is uncertain whether any of his novel The Vicar of Wakefield was written in Canonbury Tower, where tradition has it that Goldsmith occupied the Spencer Room. On Sunday, 26 June 1763 James Boswell noted in his London Journal: "I then walked out to Islington to Canonbury House, a curious old monastic building now let out in lodgings where Dr. Goldsmith stays. I took tea with him and found him very chatty." In the summer of 1767 Goldsmith again lodged at Islington, this time in the Turret House.
An earlier literary lodger was Samuel Humphreys whose libretti for three of Handel's early oratoriosEsther, Athalia and Deborahdate from 1730 to 1738, when he died in Canonbury House. Handel "had a due esteem for the harmony of his numbers".
The publisher John Newbery was in residence between 1761 and 1767. Newbery wrote numerous books for the young with titles such as "Logic made familiar and easy". His best known creation was Goody Two-Shoes.
The troubled poet Christopher Smart was allowed by Newbery to live at Canonbury House in the 1750s.
Ephraim Chambers, an encyclopaedist whose principal work was the Cyclopædia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1728, died there in 1740. He was unrelated to the founders of the 19th-century Chambers's Encyclopaedia.
Another lodger was the printer and journalist Henry Sampson Woodfall, who edited the Public Advertiser in which from 1769 for three years the Letters of Junius appeared, to the great discomfiture of the government. Woodfall was tried for printing the letters and accused of seditious libel, but went free after the judge decided in favour of a mistrial. His grandfather Henry Woodfall invented the characters Darby and Joan.