It’s time to delve into a bit of the history of Fonthill estate and a couple of its most notorious owners in this blog, the first part of my Fonthill history series. Returning guest writer, David Aneurin Morgan, will be telling us the story of the evil Mervyn Touchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, and of the infamous William Beckford and his curious sidekick/ servant, the dwarf, Perro.
You’ll find Fonthill, a beautiful country estate, in the corner of southwest Wiltshire, near to the Dorset border. It’s been around for over 400 years and so, of course, plenty of ‘history’ has happened there within that time. One of the most well-known residents is William Beckford and you’ll be hearing about him, and his servant and companion Perro, today.
Anwyay, I’ll say no more for now and hand you over to David.
The Story of Beckford’s Dwarf
To those of us who live in Tisbury, William Beckford is as vivid as if his Abbey still towered over the tree-tops and it did tower because due to the lie of the land it actually stood 219 feet higher above sea level than Salisbury Cathedral’s spire. We all know a bit about him and how his abbey fell down – how he inherited a huge fortune at the age of ten and created a private world for himself and his art collections behind a 12 foot wall. Books paint a picture of him living in his abbey like an oriental prince surrounded by courtiers. And he did live like this until he was thirty, fêted by admirers and hangers-on in the mansion called Splendens his father had built by the lake. But he came back from his European exile a bitter man and one reason he built his gigantic folly with the wall was to protect himself from the snubs of his neighbours – what he called ‘retreating like a spider into the dark centre of its web’. He was now also a lonely man because after his wife died her family made his daughters live separately in the grounds in case he corrupted them. His only courtiers were the occasional painter or writer who stayed now and again but It ended up as a court consisting of two people, both of whom had joined his entourage as servants on his travels and were to be the two constant figures in his life, staying with him for forty years.
Franchi and Perro
The first was Gregorio Franchi, a boy-musician he fell in love with in Portugal who later became his art-buyer. The second was a young man who became the figure known as ‘Beckford’s dwarf’ or the ‘Swiss Dwarf’. His nicknames at Fonthill were Perro or Piero and although we’ll never know his full name, we’re fairly sure his christian name was Pierre. He is described as ugly, grumpy and smelly and he had a ‘grim, determined manner’. He was also slovenly despite Beckford’s efforts to dress him up. His role at the Abbey was hall-porter and he sat in a gilt costume in an armchair behind the enormous double doors to let visitors in and to make the doors look bigger because of his small size. He also became the door-keeper of Beckford’s later house in Bath and a mayor of Bath describes being let in and passed down a line of servants by Perro, who then retired to his armchair where he sat ‘grinning horribly’. He was also crafty and he would work his master into a rage, knowing Beckford would give him a guinea in remorse. All this was true but he was probably also being seen through the prejudices of the time as the storybook figure of the ‘wicked dwarf’.
Beckford’s affection for him grew along with his privileges
Beckford was so haughty with servants that he ordered them not to look at him and screamed at them if they did. But Perro was exempt and he assumed a more and more important role over the years with lighter and lighter duties. Beckford designed outfits to make him stand out from the other servants and despite his scruffiness Perro took to them and marched self-importantly about wearing them. In the early days he even led the way in processions Beckford liked to organise using his servants.
Despite Beckford’s obvious sympathy for him (‘my poor helpless dwarf’), according to visitors to the Abbey, he seems to have been anything but a pathetic figure, even if he was showing-off as compensation for his humiliation as a boy.
Where did he eat and sleep? He’s given his own little garden and is made Postman for the Abbey
Beckford also tried to give him status by letting him call bits of the Abbey his own. We read about the ‘dwarf’s garden’ with a little greenhouse and there is a drawing of Perro in a battered top hat and boots standing in his garden. One visitor recorded going along the mossed and flowered paths and meeting him there and hearing him talk about growing flowers, in contrast to his normally surly manner. Another visitor saw him ‘attending miniature flowerbeds like a furious gnome’. Visitors only really saw him close up if they knocked the enormous knocker or rang the enormous bell and he appeared in his role as door-keeper. He was normally seen at a distance, a gargoyle-like creature not human enough to need somewhere to eat and sleep. Where did he sleep? It’s hard to believe Beckford made him sleep in a crowded dorm with the other servants who wouldn’t have put up with his habits. But neither did he build him some sort of hobbit-house in the grounds. Then, by reading Beckford’s letters, I realised he lived firmly in the main building, high up in a set of little rooms like monk’s cells that Beckford had designed for his guests, and that he and Beckford even sat together reading letters. What’s sad is that even though he had a soft spot for him, Beckford still had to keep the human race at a distance and could never relax enough to call him Perro but either referred to him as ‘the dwarf’ or by a strange name he’d made up – ‘Nanibus’ (based on Latin ‘nanus’ for dwarf). However, he was now so trusted that he was made postman for the Abbey and rode to Hindon and back on his pony to catch the mail coach. He also carried messages along the confusion of corridors in the Abbey itself and we can be sure the interior made him feel as small and lost as the outside did..
How many dwarfs were there? Gossip said lots but only ever one
At Fonthill almost as many legends spread about Perro as about Beckford, and he liked to encourage them. Although he only ever had one dwarf, he made the most of him and even tried to give the impression he had several. Emotionally though, there could only be one dwarf and the bond that grew between them couldn’t be duplicated. He still got a kick out of using him as a weapon to shock the local gentry but there were limits to how far he would go. When the grotto craze took over, he could have made Perro sit in the grottoes he had built on the east bank of the lake at Fonthill as a real-life troll to scare people but he respected his dignity.
Despite the huge social gap, both were misfits and did more and more as a twosome
With Franchi now away on buying trips was he thrown more and more onto the dwarf’s company? Did Perro remain the ‘grim creature’ of earlier days or did he and Beckford unbend enough for master and servant to get through to each other? It’s impossible 200 years later to know how close or not close they were. Beckford’s letters show a deepening affection but there is nothing uttered or written by Perro. Beckford may have thought that over the years he’d broken through Perro’s grim reserve but we’ve been told that Perro was crafty and capable of manipulating his master. Could this have included pretending to sympathy he didn’t feel? It’s a horrible thought, but the dwarf wasn’t stupid. Although he probably hadn’t heard of the homosexual scandal with the young William Courtnenay that led to Beckford’s disgrace, he can’t have failed to sense that however grand his master was, he was a misfit like himself. Despite the enormous social gap one senses a bond and he and Beckford did more and more together. A lovely story has come down to us describing how Perro liked to relax on a rug in Beckford’s study while Beckford wrote. And when they moved to Bath, how they played a joke on an architect who’d asked for Beckford’s view of a church he’d just built. Beckford and Perro galloped round it by moonlight without stopping. When they got close enough to see it properly, they covered their eyes with horror and spurred their horses away as fast as they could. The architect never asked for their verdict.
Where and when did they first meet?
No exact date is known but things point to 1790 -1795 during Beckford’s 11-year exile when he made repeated visits to Geneva and is known to have added servants. He is said to have rescued him from a bullying father in the spa town of Evian on the Swiss border (where the bottles of sparkling water come from). Beckford would have been in his mid-30s and Perro’s age can be guessed as about 17-19. Why did he choose him? It would be nice to think he felt a stab of pity for a deformed boy but it was more likely because he appealed to Beckford’s interest in surrounding himself with weird servants who would make Fonthill feel theatrical. He may even, that early on, have seen him as a fantastical doorman for a fantastical building not yet built. The dwarf would come into his own when it was and he was installed to contrast his small scale with the stupendous scale of the building.
Another reason for choosing him – Beckford’s court dwarf?
But Beckford’s dwarf was never just a weird servant and if we dig deeper into why he picked him, I think we can find another reason. Beckford saw himself as close to royalty but try as he might, he’d failed to be presented at two royal courts – Portugal’s and Spain’s – whose ceremony he was keen to be part of. Spain had banished its royal dwarfs in 1700 but Portugal’s may still have had them. Beckford may not have seen them in the flesh but he was awed by the idea of them. His sense of his own grandeur had taken a knock from the insults back in England. By acquiring Perro, he was acquiring the prestige of his own royal dwarf, to be added to his court at Fonthill even though others saw only a scruffy figure. It’s good to learn that Perro turned out to be nothing like the dwarfs painted by Velasquez. Beckford hid his slovenliness by dressing him up but couldn’t hide a cranky, cynical twist to his personality which establishes him as very human and very much his own man.
But over and above these reasons, we can go back in time to his boyhood imaginings when he sat dreamily in the woods surrounding Splendens and wrote about dwarfs at Fonthill before he actually had one there. One piece written when he was 14, describes a fairy troupe coming into one of the glades and asks, ‘Is it unpleasing to imagine damsels and palfreys continually arriving, escorted by knights and their attendant dwarfs?’
The Perro’s-eye view. Making Fonthill look bigger made him feel smaller.
It’s important to see Fonthill through Perro’s eyes. When we read about Perro at Fonthill, we always see him from the visitor’s point of view, as Beckford wanted him to be seen – Perro against the enormous doors – Perro’s tiny garden in the vastness of the grounds. It never occurs to us to see things from his point of view and how he must have felt ‘dwarfed’ by his surroundings. His small figure must have felt completely lost at first and it is a sign of pluck that he found his feet and fitted himself into the scene.
Perro and Beckford move to Bath
When Beckford sold the now-teetering Abbey to a gunpowder millionaire and moved to Bath with Perro in 1822, three years before the Abbey fell, he bought two houses side by side in Lansdowne Crescent, the poshest street in Bath and joined them by an arch. Just as he had given him a piece of the Abbey to call his own, so the room above the arch became known as ‘the dwarf’s room’ and he is said to have lived there. In his role as doorman at Bath, Beckford seems to have encouraged him to be rude as he liked to visitors and it’s said that back at Fonthill he got him to live on his own in the Abbey to scare away intruders before the gunpowder millionaire moved in. It’s hard to know how real or put-on his fierceness was. Beckford never tried to check it because it was a fierceness towards the outside world he himself felt, even though he was meticulously polite to anybody who managed to get past the Barrier Wall.
The gang of dwarfs myth follows them to Bath: accusations of black magic
At Fonthill where Beckford had antagonised the local gentry by banning the Hunt on his land and building the Wall, people had gossipped about his relationship with Franchi and called him Beckford’s Portuguese Orange (fruit). But at Bath with Franchi now away, the gossip turned on Perro and he and Beckford were accused of practising black magic aided by the imaginary band of dwarfs said to be living with Perro over the arch. It was Beckford’s fault for claiming to the Bath gentry that Perro fed on toadstools but he sprang to the dwarf’s defence in an angry letter – ‘I’m sick of hearing nonsense about Franchi and even sicker of absurdities about my poor helpless dwarf.’
Two places. Two lives. Two towers
Beckford’s and Perro’s story is a story of two places and of two lives that covered forty years, half at Fonthill and half at Bath. It’s also the story of two towers because Beckford couldn’t stop building and he came to Bath with the idea of building a second one. After buying the two houses, he bought the narrow strip of land behind, stretching for a mile to the top of Lansdown Hill. Here he built Lansdown Tower and by accident or design it’s on a spot where the two towers were just visible from each other. He’d already complained about missing one of the early collapses at Fonthill when he was away, and a strange opposite of his urge to build was enjoying the drama of a building collapsing into a ruin. In fact, his early idea for the Abbey was that it wasn’t to be permanent but more like a magic structure raised by one of the djinns in his novel Vathek that can vanish in a puff of smoke. Even when he had decided on a solid building, he wasn’t worried that it was being rushed into existence using laths and compo cement and might fall. His only regret must have been that he wasn’t on top of his Lansdown Tower to enjoy the ‘sublime moment’ when it did.
As Beckford and his dwarf grew old, one had to die before the other
We have to stop seeing an elderly Beckford and young Perro. By the time they moved to Bath, they had grown old together and Perro would have been a man in his mid-fifties. One of them had to die first and one sentimental account says that Perro died just before Beckford’s death on May 2nd 1844 and that they were buried together in Bath Abbey Cemetery, reflecting a lifetime of companionship. A more believable version is that Perro died in Bath before Beckford at an undetermined date and just vanishes from history. We may even have to face a brutal scenario which upsets the idea about a lifetime bond. We know the selfish Beckford had no time for people he was fond of if he got bored or they fell sick. It’s possible Perro fell sick in Bath and got abandoned by Beckford in the same way he had earlier abandoned the dying Franchi. Maybe in old age he just stopped being turned on by the grotesque and a sick Perro distracted him from tinkering with his collections or polishing his diaries for posterity.
Were they buried together then separated? Where are Perro’s small bones?
Their neat (too neat?) death-and-burial together in the Bath cemetery is contradicted by a statement that Perro died at Fonthill and is buried there. But if so, how do we explain Bath gossip about Perro and the gang of dwarfs performing black magic? Or a silhouette of Perro dated 1830 in Bath Records Office or the mayor of Bath’s account of Perro as doorman at Lansdown Crescent? So Perro is definitely alive in Bath and with Beckford. The sentimental account tells us that his grave is there in the Bath cemetery but unmarked and hard to find near the gateway that commemorates the pair. There IS a gateway commemorating Beckford but no mention of Perro nor is there an official record of his burial.
Things were turned upside down four years later by Beckford being exhumed and reburied in the granite tomb he had designed for himself in the new Lansdown Cemetery which his daughter Susan created by getting the land round the tower consecrated. Even if the sentimental version is true and they were together in the first cemetery then separated, can we really believe that anybody would have taken the trouble to bring a bag of little bones along with Beckford’s from Bath to Lansdown. Bones belonging to someone who during his lifetime had only ever been seen – except by Beckford – as ‘the odd creature’ or as ‘IT’. All we can be sure of is that instead of Perro’s, he is accompanied in his grand setting by the bones of his favourite dogs.
David Aneurin Morgan
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