This is the second blog in the history series connected to the rather unsavoury past of the Fonthill estate in south-west Wiltshire, from guest writer David Aneurin Morgan. It’s a reminder that despite the beauty of a place such as Fonthill, there is always a chunk of dark history to be found.
Fonthill – House of Horrors
Before you read any further I should explain that as well as being into all things ghostly I have a taste for real-life mysteries with a bit of shock value and this is a real shocker that happened 400 years ago a mile and half from Tisbury. So if you’re faint of heart or easily shocked, stop reading now.
You’ve probably driven or walked lots of times along that straight bit of road that leads to the Inigo Jones Arch with Fonthill Lake on your right and meadow on your left. But I bet you’re unaware that a few yards past the cricket pitch on your left, under a flat piece of turf, is the crypt of the old medieval church of St Nicholas into which precious bits of carving and monuments of the Mervyn and Cottington families were buried as junk by Beckford’s father when he bought the estate in 1744 and had the church demolished. They could easily have been set up in the new church he built on higher ground where the Victorian Holy Trinity one now stands . And the fact that he didn’t hints that it was more than just the new owner of Fonthill making a clean sweep. It feels in fact as if he wanted them out of sight and if we dig into Fonthill history we realise that it was the relics of one particular family – the Mervyns that he probably wanted hidden.
The Weirdness of The Seven Fonthills
When I moved to Tisbury it struck me as odd that there had been so many houses called Fonthill and that four of them had stood on the same spot along that bit of road leading to the Arch. The story of Fonthill is a story of demolitions as a series of rich men bought the estate, knocked everything down and created new Fonthill Houses that seem to have sprung up like mushrooms before vanishing again and reappearing in a new guise with the same name. There were two Fonthills before Beckford’s – the Mervyn’s dating from the 1550s and Lord Cottington’s in the 1600s and each man built a wall round his estate which got higher and longer each time, isolating them more and more from the surrounding villages. And in the case of the Younger Beckford in the 1770s, producing a man so cut off that he ended up half-mad, living in a kingdom of his own creation.
Scores of books have been written about Beckford and what he got up to behind his wall – How he built a fake Abbey higher and higher until it fell down – How he held a night time reception for Nelson and Lady Hamilton with rows of servants dressed as monks with flaming torches – How he hired a dwarf to open the giant doors of the Abbey to make them look bigger – How he had tunnels dug under public roads to duck through on his morning ride without seeing anybody – How he created grottoes glittering with crystals and planted with alpine flowers – How he had music lessons from Mozart….
Mervyn Touchet – Our Own Marquis De Sade
The outside world was naturally curious about goings-on behind the walls of these private estates unlike our modern Fonthill one with its monthly newsletter. So it’s hard to realise that they really were circumscribed places where the owners were a law unto themselves. Tisbury gossip e.g. said Beckford’s father kept black slaves chained in the grottoes, which was rubbish, but the whole country, not just Tisbury, was curious about what the younger Beckford got up to and their wildest guesses were right.
What the books leave out is that 150 years before Beckford there was an owner of Fonthill who wasn’t just gossipped about because of his mad extravagance but whispered about with real suspicion. And this man was stranger, more perverse and more interesting even than Beckford. If I was intrigued when I moved here by how many Fonthills there had been, I was gobsmacked to learn about this other man. And it was hard not to feel that he had been hushed up.
His Fonthill House of Horrors
So who was he? He was Mervyn Touchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven who lived in the FIRST of the many Fonthills – the Tudor one that stood roughly where the cricket pitch now is on the way to the Arch, with the old church next to it on its right. Above-ground, all traces of his house have gone and the only relic we have of him may be Bitham Lake above the house, which he or his father may have dammed to make a fish pond. Beckford was a frivolous eccentric who built a fake Abbey but if what the 2nd Earl is accused of doing was true, HIS Fonthill was lived in by an English version of the Marquis de Sade and gossip about his Fonthill would have been about it as a place of cruelty and orgies.
There are several paintings of Beckford. We have one image of the Earl – a crude woodcut of him in a doublet and a white Puritan-type collar. Behind his beard and moustache we see a weakish rather sad-looking Cavalier. If there had been a News of the World of 1630 it would have printed his woodcut all over the front page and called him a monster. But even in 1631 what he did hit the headlines in crude pamphlets and was reported as far away as America. When he died, people In London plastered his hearse with verses attacking his morals but down in Wiltshire people blanked him out as if he hadn’t existed. There isn’t even a folk tale about him.
‘A House Infested by Debauchery’
What follows is a list of what he was accused of and how it led in 1631 to him being tried for his life. The story starts with his happy marriage to his first wife Elizabeth who died young leaving him with six children. He then (fortune-hunting) married a woman much older than himself – Anne Stanley, daughter of the Earl of Derby.. The marriage was loveless from the start and soon they were at loggerheads, trying to blacken each other’s character. She accused him of being over-familiar with the servants and not doing his job as head of the household by keeping it in order. Things came to a head when a couple of handsome vagrants called at the house seeking work and to spite his wife he made them his favourites and let them rule over the other servants.
‘Henry Skipworth arrived at Fonthill seeking work and in the space of a year was sitting at the table and had to be addressed as ‘Master’. Several years later Giles Broadway arrived at the house and was treated in the same way and Castlehaven gave him an annual pension of five hundred pounds’.
Then, according to his wife, the Earl and Broadway’s held her down while Skipworth and other servants raped her in order to make her pregnant with Skipworth’s child who would be the new heir, disinheriting his son George. He then had Lady Anne’s daughter raped by servants even though he had married her to George when they were younger. And to add to the craziness, gave a servant a thousand pounds as a dowry to marry the Earl’s own daughter. From then on Countess Anne and George joined forces against him. George reported to the authorities that his father was trying to disinherit him and the Countess accused him of rape and sleeping with his men servants and that his house was ‘infested with debauchery’. He was arrested and sent for trial in London.
How He Mocked Her Wedding Night
During the trial the Earl and his wife flung accusations at each other, and their accusations got more and more outrageous. She claimed that on their wedding night he had mocked her by getting his servants to ‘parade their nudisms in the bridal chamber for her to choose the —-est’. And got Skipworth ‘to lie between man and wife in the marriage bed’. His page Lawrence Fitzpatrick argued back that Lady Castlehaven was ‘insatiably lustful’ and had cuckolded Castlehaven with Skipworth. He swore that she was ‘the wickedest woman in the world’ and her innocence does seem in doubt because during the trial verses were circulated accusing her of adultery. It’s rumoured that a child was actually born but that ‘she foully did away with it’.
Castlehaven denied everything, arguing that the whole thing was a plot to get his estate but strangely he did admit to being in love with Skipworth. And he justified this as Oscar Wilde did at his trial quoting the bible story of the perfect love of David and Jonathan. But we take this with a pinch of salt when we learn that his other name for Lawrence was ‘Florence’. We get a touching picture of a typical bedtime at Fonthill when Fitzpatrick let slip how ‘Castlehaven lay with Broadway while I lay at the bottom of the bed keeping their feet warm’.
A Traitor to His Class – Sentenced to Death
The outcome was that Castlehaven was found guilty and sentenced to death. In 1631 he was beheaded on Tower Hill in London. Two of his servants – Lawrence Fitzpatrick and Giles Broadway, were also sentenced to death,
Broadway protesting that he had been lured to the house by Skipworth and trapped in a set-up he couldn’t get out of. Both were hanged and Castlehaven’s estate was confiscated by Charles I and granted to Francis, Lord Cottington in 1632 who built the SECOND Fonthill House. Despite appealing, Castlehaven’s son never recovered it although he was allowed to keep his title as 3rd Earl. As for Lady Anne she seems to have vanished back to her family and no more is heard of her.
So – real News of the World stuff. But we need to see it through the eyes of the time. Beckford himself would have been front-page news because of his affair with young William (‘Kitty’) Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon, which made him flee to the Continent. But his affair was seen as part of his exotic behaviour. Castlehaven was different. Beckford had chosen a lover from his own class but Castlehaven – and it’s clear his wife was right about him being gay – had committed the crime of choosing men below his station. He had turned the social order upside down and let down his class. But what really condemned him was that by trying to get Skipworth to produce an heir, he had committed the unforgivable aristocratic sin of letting his line be broken by a commoner.
It’s a Weird Wiltshire Mystery
So what was really going on in that Fonthill House of the early 1600s? And this is the mystery we need an answer to. Perhaps someone more sensitive than me can walk along that stretch of road and pick something up. Was the Earl really our local Marquis de Sade accused by an innocent wife or was he framed? Or were the Earl and the Countess as bad as each other? What is true is that an aristocratic household seems to have been taken over by a sort of mad and bad behaviour which affected everybody in it. Another factor which led to the guilty verdict is that he was a Catholic and the Attorney General said at the trial that ‘his house had been taken over by evil because he had abandoned his god’. Our modern explanation would be that it was a case of folie-a-deux (madness of two) where ONE person’s behaviour (his) spread to people around him like measles until they were all doing it.
House From Hell or Free Love Commune Before It’s Time
For me, his wife’s account at the trIal rings true but before we label him a monster, is there any other way we can explain him? I think there is although it sounds a bit far-fetched. Perhaps instead of being a monster he was a sort of socialist before his time – a gay man and aristocrat who despised his rank and saw sex as a sort of social leveller that made everybody equal if they joined in. Seen in this light, perhaps the rape of his wife and daughters wasn’t sadism but an attempt to get them to join in. His tragedy was that his idea of a free-love commune belonged more to the 1960s than the 1630s and it’s not surprising that local history has wiped it so completely from its memory.
A snippet I’ve just read is that Beckford knew all about him and admired him. In a typical Beckford whopper, he claimed that he was related to him..
Ground Radar and Its Ghostly Shadows
But not every trace of the wicked Earl and his household has gone. The team of landscape historians and archaeologists who put together the recent superb book ‘Fonthill Recovered’ used magnetometry and picked up traces of rubble under the cricket pitch where his mansion stood and traces of a rectangular structure next to it that might be by part of the church and possibly even the crypt . If we combine this with Colt-Hoare’s statement in his History of Modern Wiltshire,1822 that Beckford’s father had the monuments of the Castlehavens ‘tumbled into the crypt’, we’ve now got a reason why he did it plus a fascinating link to Fonthill ONE with all its troubles.
If we peeled the turf back we could reveal the bodies of Castlehaven’s ancestors but not his body. After being beheaded he was buried in the Chapel of the Tower with other wicked people without their heads – particularly a woman with six fingers accused of being a witch. Her name was Anne Boleyn.
David Aneurin Morgan
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