Exploring Heritage
A gem of late 17th-century architecture, this newly restored manor house boasts one of the best surviving Baroque interiors in the country
William Blathwayt was on the battlefield. Thunderously noisy, smoky, confused, and a long way from home, this was not a comfortable place to be. As England’s influential (and extremely wellremunerated) secretary of war, Blathwayt was a bureaucrat, not a soldier. As such, he was tucked a distance from frontline action – but nowhere was safe. In a battle of 1695, when the English were fighting in Flanders, Blathwayt had been standing by Michael Godfrey, deputy governor of the newly formed Bank of England. The man had been speaking one moment; the next, a cannonball struck his head from his shoulders.
Despite any horrors unfolding in front of him on this particular day, Blathwayt had more pressing things on his mind. Hundreds of miles away, back home at Dyrham Park – then in the shire of Gloucester - his new mansion was taking shape. Fashionable leather wall hangings had recently been delivered, made by Martinus van den Heuvel, one of the most acclaimed workshops in the Dutch Republic.
‘These hangings were very expensive – five shillings per square; we have the bill. There were three rooms covered in this leather: the garden vestibule alone has 300,’ says Eilidh Auckland, property curator for Dyrham. ‘In a letter written from the battlefield, Blathwayt gives specific instructions that they should be hung on a damp day.’
Dutch townhouse
Blathwayt was a man of detail - he would never have reached the giddy heights he did without that pinpoint focus. During a career spanning some 40 years and two competing kings – James II and his nemesis William of Orange – Blathwayt helped establish the war office, served as an MP, and played a key role in administering England’s North American and Caribbean colonies.
His marriage to Dyrham heiress Mary Wynter, in 1686, provided him with the opportunity to create a house to match his soaring ambitions. During the marriage negotiations, Blathwayt made clear his intention of doing away with the existing Tudor mansion and constructing a new one on the Wynter family seat. Mary, sadly, would never see it. She died in 1691, a year before the project began in earnest.
Stand outside the original 17thcentury entrance on the west front, and Blathwayt’s career is writ large in architectural form. Here, with its central section and two projecting wings, it is something akin to a Dutch townhouse in scale and shape. This is the work of Samuel Hauduroy, the first architect Blathwayt commissioned. Hauduroy, little known at the time, was a Dutchophile (unsurprising considering Holland-born William of Orange was by now on the English throne),
