1990:
Stourton And Stourhead
This part of the world was possessed, since before the Norman accession, by the Stourtons, a family who once had a castle here.
They had several claims to fame. Sir William Stourton was elected Speaker of the Commons shortly before he died in 1413. Sir John Stourton was held in high esteem by Henry VI and was made Baron and Lord Stourton of Stourton in May 1448.
Like all families, the Stourtons had their ups and downs but they seem to have had more than their fair share of misfortune.
Charles, the 8th Lord Stourton, was hanged in Salisbury Market Place on 6th March 1556 for committing a double murder. Following a long-standing feud, he killed the Hartgills, father and son, because they thwarted his plans to obtain a written promise and bond from his mother, the Dowager Lady Stourton, not to remarry.
One of the Hartgills had been a steward of the estate during the time of the 7th Lord Stourton and had been dismissed for suspected dishonesty.
It is said the Hartgills met their demise in a field near Stourton and that Charles held a candle while his accomplices cut the throats of the two victims. Their bodies were later buried in a dungeon. At his trial at Westminster Hall, Charles refused to plead at first but he later confessed. He was sentenced to death and because he was a peer of the realm he had the ‘honour’ of being hung with a silken rope. His accomplices were hung in chains at Mere. After Charles’ execution some of the Stourton family estate was forfeited but the 9th Baron was restored “in blood” by an Act of Parliament in 1575.
Further Stourtons held the land and property at Stourton until it was purchased in the 18th century by Henry Hoare, the son of a former Lord Mayor of London. Henry Hoare demolished the old Stourton House and erected a small Palladian mansion nearby, built to the design of Colen Campbell.
The house remained intact until a fire gutted the central part of it on 16th April 1902. Fortunately, the wings containing the library and the picture gallery were untouched by the fire and all the contents of the state rooms on the ground floor were saved.
Sir Henry Hoare (6th Bart. 1865 – 1947) had the house restored with the help of Sir Aston Webb and Mr Doran Webb of Salisbury.
It was Henry Hoare II (1705 – 1785) who was responsible for much of the landscape we see at Stourhead today. Although he probably managed the estate during his mother’s lifetime, he did not come to live at Stourhead until her death in 1741. Like his father before him, Henry Hoare II was a merchant banker in Hoare’s Bank, founded by his grandfather Sir Richard Hoare (1648 – 1718).
As well as laying the foundations of the library at Stourhead, Henry transformed the landscape here between 1744 and 1785. He made a dam across the headwater of the River Stour to form an artificial lake about 300 yards away from the House. With the help of the Palladian architect, Henry Flitcroft (a Hampton Court gardener’s son, who was a protégé of Lord Burlington and rose from being an apprentice joiner to the rank of Comptroller), he laid out the vistas and the ornaments around the lake.
These included the Temple of Flora (1744), the Grotto (1748), the Pantheon (1754), the ornamental five-arched bridge (1762), and the Temple of Apollo (1765).
St Peter’s Pump, which formerly stood near St Peter’s Church, at the west corner of Peter Street, Bristol, and was removed by an Act of Parliament in 1766, was erected on a grotto base at Stourhead in the same year, over the top spring of the River Stour in a valley known as Six Wells Bottom.
The River Stour flows onward, out of Wiltshire, through Dorset, to meet the sea at Christchurch in Hampshire. By a curious coincidence, the River Wylye, which rises about a mile away from the source of the Stour, to the west of Kilmington, takes a different meandering course, past Warminster and on to Wilton, where she meets the Avon that finally flows into the sea also at Christchurch! A third river, the Brue, has her watershed near Stourhead, and flows west through Somerset, giving her name to the town of Bruton.
Sir Henry and Lady Hoare gave Stourhead House and its contents, the gardens and over 2,000 acres of land, to the National Trust in 1946. Their only son, Henry Colt Arthur Hoare (born 1888), was a Captain in the Dorset Yeomanry and died of wounds he received in 1917 while in action during the First World War. Sir Henry and Lady Hoare died within a few hours of each other in March 1947. Sir Henry left the remainder of the estate to his cousin, Henry Peregrine Rennie Hoare.
The devoted work of the National Trust ensures the upkeep and attention the Stourhead Estate requires, and preserves for the nation what is undoubtedly the only 18th century garden created by an amateur that remains as it was originally conceived. Many visitors have thought it to be unparalleled part of our English heritage and its beauty has not failed to escape the pens of several writers over the years.
William Hazlitt described the delightful Stourhead scene in 1824. He wrote: “You descend into Stourton by a sharp-winding declivity, almost like going underground, between high hedges of laurel trees, and with an expanse of woods and water spread beneath. It is a sort of rural Herculaneum, a subterranean retreat. The inn is like a modernised guard-house; the village church stands on a lawn without any inclosure; a row of cottages facing it, with their white-washed walls and flaunting honeysuckles, are neatness itself. Everything has an air of elegance, and yet tells a tale of other times.”