Arabella Illingworth reflects on the latest Spetchley Park sale.
There is always something rather sad about the dispersal of the contents of a family home. High or low, rich or poor, the stories that attach themselves to hovel and homestead alike have one shared narrative: continuity and rupture. For most of us the process is painful but relatively simple: the setting aside of a few treasured heirlooms; the gathering up of photograph albums; the collecting of simple and even silly souvenirs that speak to us and us alone of what has been and is no longer. The rest is a day’s work for the firms that specialise in house clearances, or a profitable morning for a man with a van from a local charity shop.
Most of us are untroubled by the business of the gilded cage of a stately pile. Not the Berkeleys of Spetchley Park in Worcestershire, however, whose final disposable items were offered at Sotheby’s Royal & Noble sale in January. In 1651 the original Tudor house at Spetchley was razed to the ground on the eve of the Battle of Worcester; the family camped out in the stable block until 1811, when the present elegant Palladian mansion was built by Robert Berkeley to a design by John Tasker. By then the Berkeleys were Catholics again; Tasker was, too, and in the years leading up to Catholic Emancipation had a number of Catholic clients eager for his services.
The new house at Spetchley included a fine chapel; neoclassical like the rest of the house, a few details were added to the sanctuary in the 19th century. The Berkeleys returned to the faith in the 1690s; Spetchley was served by the Jesuits for a hundred years, after which the makeshift chapel was registered as a place of public worship and the family retained a secular priest as domestic chaplain. This lasted until the Second World War (Spetchley was earmarked as a potential HQ for the British cabinet, in case of invasion and the loss of London), when it was taken over again by the Jesuits and served from St George’s, Worcester, before returning to the secular model a few decades later.
Edward Elgar, a noted Catholic neighbour, was a regular visitor to Spetchley. In the Berkeleys’ edition of The Dream of Gerontius he noted that he had been inspired to write parts of the score of his religious masterpiece by the pine trees on the estate, since when they have been known as “Elgar’s pines”. The house has a long and distinguished history, then, in the Catholic history of the area – and Worcestershire is hardly short of recusant inspiration, given the outposts of the faith that survived in that part of England after the break with Rome and the subsequent instigation of the Penal Laws.
Quite apart from furniture and fittings from the rest of the house – and oh! for pockets deep enough to have been able to acquire some of the pieces – among the lots offered at Sotheby’s were a number of ecclesiastical items that spoke eloquently of the beauty and richness of worship at the chapel at Spetchley Park. The pieces of religious interest were dotted through the auction, and spoke of the former integrity of the chapel with the rest of the house. Vieira Portuense’s Mystical Marriage of St Catherine had a guide price of £12,000 but fetched five times as much – it was the best religious painting in the sale.
On the whole the statues were of better quality – or rather had weathered better the test of time. A little early-16th-century statue of the Virgin and Child, from the Spanish Netherlands, went for £2,000 (it won my vote as the sale’s loveliest item). A handsome 19th-century German carving of Our Lady in contemplation reached £500, while a contemporary and rather garish glazed Immaculate Conception raised ten times more. As ever, there is no accounting for taste.
A breathtaking freestanding crucifix after Giambologna – fine 17th-century work in silver and ebony and inlaid with the instruments of the Passion – sold for £12,000. A pair of 18th-century French scrollwork reliquaries sat uncomfortably among the framed items; perhaps we may comfort ourselves that technically it was the containers that sold for £1,600, and that the relics (which of course cannot be bought or sold without committing simony) must therefore have been a free gift that happened to go along with them.
A scrawl on the back noted that they had originally hung in the Irish College at Paris – suggesting an evocative link between the recusant Berkeleys and priests being trained in exile on the continent. I hope that the story has been researched and written down, for it seemed an odd and forgetful inclusion.
Most poignant of all were the vestments, though; clearly the Berkeleys historically invested heavily in the beauty of holiness. A magnificent opus anglicanum-style purple cope (with some 15th-century details) was covered with four-winged angels on wheels carrying scrolls and surrounding an embroidered Virgin and Child. Three complete five-piece low-Mass requiem sets, including a fine 16-century Spanish one in black velvet and golden thread went for a surprisingly low £3,000. A pristine floral cope by the Roman clerical outfitter Giovanni Romanini – 19th century but in 18th-century cut – embroidered all over with birds and butterflies, fetched £8,000.
And so it went on. Chasubles, copes, chalice veils, altar hangings – all of the highest quality and in the best possible taste – have now been scattered to the four winds. Perhaps they will be used in Catholic worship once more, rather than simply be set aside as museum pieces. That said, one could hardly blame a secular collector with an interest in this sort of thing for wanting to acquire them, such was their appeal. There is a rumour among the metropolitan ecclesiastical cognoscenti that a huge pile of fair linen albs, amices, palls and purificators have found their way to the sacristy of the London Oratory, and that we shall see them again soon enough.
Arabella Illingworth read Art History at the University of Edinburgh
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