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Nicholas Stone’s Goldsmiths’ Hall: Design and practice in the 1630s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

John Newman
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Extract

This paper is intended to achieve two aims, first to rescue from semi-oblivion a major London building of the early seventeenth century, and secondly to disentangle a little further that obscure and knotty problem, the manner in which Inigo Jones’s ideas on architecture were disseminated in England.

The Goldsmiths’ Company, one of the leading craft companies in the City of London, rebuilt its Livery Hall in the second half of the 1630s to the design of Nicholas Stone. Goldsmiths’ Hall was again rebuilt almost two centuries later when, in 1829, it gave place to the present hall, Philip Hardwick’s noble classical essay. Stone’s hall is familiar from several indifferent prints, but the drawings here reproduced for the first time provide a reliable record, full enough to allow a serious assessment of Stone’s design. Since the publication in 1896 of Sir Walter Prideaux’s Memorials of the Goldsmith’ Company it has been known that it was the King’s Surveyor, Inigo Jones, who advised the Company in 1634 not to patch up its medieval buildings but to erect a complete new hall. The Memorials, extracts from the Company’s Court Minute Books, have formed the basis of the so far very limited discussions of the seventeenth-century hall, yet the Court Minute Books themselves tell a much fuller and more revealing story. They also make it clear that the shell of Stone’s building survived the Great Fire of 1666, as George Vertue had noted. Prideaux’s introduction misleadingly raised doubts whether the prints did not show a post-fire rebuilding of Nicholas Stone’s façade.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 14 , 1971 , pp. 30 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1971

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References

Notes

1 Acknowledgements: The Court of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, for permission to publish; Miss S. M. Hare, Dr Margaret Whinney and Dr A. E. J. Hollaender, for help and advice.

2 The fullest is in Lees-Milne, The Age of Inigo Jones (1953), 145.

3 Walpole Society xviii (1929–30), 91 Google Scholar.

4 Prideaux, Memorials i, p.xxviii, and references in the Court Minute Books.

5 Stow, J., A Survay of London (1598), 244 Google Scholar.

6 The narrative is reconstructed from the entries in the Court Minute Books. Dates of meetings should be taken as references to the minute books. I have converted dates to make the year begin on 1 January; thus for example 21 January 1634 of the minutes appears here as 21 January 1634/5.

7 ‘Plott’ is the word in the minutes, and has wherever it occurs been taken to mean ‘plan’ and not any other sort of design.

8 The most recent had been in 1625. See Steele, R. Tudor and Stuart Proclamations (Oxford 1910), vol.i, 167 Google Scholar.

9 SirSummerson, John in Proceedings of the British Academy 1 (1964), 185 Google Scholar.

10 See Pinhorn, M., ‘Early Stuart Architecture’, Blackmansbury iv (1967), 94 Google Scholar for evidence that the most striking new house in Aldersgate, the Earl of Thanet’s palazzo-fronted mansion, was begun c. 1631.

11 Calendar of State Papers Domestic (1634–35), 374–375 Google Scholar.

12 Burridge can probably be identified as John Burridge, Master of the Tylers and Bricklayers Company, 1648 and 1663. He was again employed by the Goldsmiths in the reconstruction after the fire of 1666. Osborne will have been the senior partner, if he was William Osborne, Master for the third time in 1624.

13 H. M. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects 1660–1840 (1954), 321. Jerman had been Master of the Carpenters’ Company in 1633.

Walpole Society vii (1918–19), The Note-book and Account Book of Nicholas Stone, passim.

15 In 1632.

16 Sainsbury, W. N., Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1859), especially p. 270 Google Scholar.

17 The Carpenters’ articles (Goldsmiths’ Company, O/E ii, 2), dated 18 July 1635, give Hugh Jerman’s name. The Minute Book (sub 3 Dec 1634) specifies his relationship to Anthony Jerman.

18 The total expenditure on rebuilding the hall recorded in the minute books between 26 June 1635 and June 1639 is £6323.19.2. This probably represents its cost quite accurately.

The principal craftsmen employed, besides those engaged previously to Stone’s appointment, were: joiner, Jeremy Kellett, who had worked for Stone in 1633 (Walpole Society vii, 96); carver, Taylor, probably Zachary Taylor, who in 1631 had collaborated with Kellett in making the pulpit of St Paul’s, Covent Garden (Survey of London xxxvi, 1970, 280); carpenter, Ffesey; plasterers, Waters and Kinsman, presumably Joseph Kinsman, who worked at Ham House, Surrey, in 1637–38 (Edwards &Ward-Jackson, Ham House, a Guide, 1950, 23); and mason, Mills. This last name is hard to interpret. One would expect Stone to have hand-picked his mason; yet the only recorded Mills among the Masons’ Company at this time was William Mills, who worked at the Tower of London in 1637 and 1640 (Lees-Milne, op. cit., 146), but whose activities are not otherwise known. The possibility should not be excluded that Stone called in Peter Mills, who belonged to the Bricklayers’ Company and practised his trade, becoming City Bricklayer in due course, but who is best known as a ‘surveyor’ in the 1650s and 1660s, his major work being the stone-built Thorpe Hall, near Peterborough. Peter Mills would technically have been ‘intermeddling’ in carrying out mason’s work, but he could no doubt have got away with it under the auspices of the King’s Surveyor. For intermeddling and related practices see D. Knoop & G. P. Jones, The London Mason in the Seventeenth Century (1935), 15–17. Peter Mills held land leased from the Goldsmiths’ Company in Flower-de-Luce Court, on the south side of Goldsmiths’ Hall (Court Minute Books, June 1668). His design for the main doorway at Cobham Hall is an almost exact copy of the main gateway of Goldsmiths’ Hall.

19 Jenkins, F. I., Architect and Patron (1961), 45, 117Google Scholar; Martienssen, H., in Architectural Review (1964), 277 Google Scholar.

20 An earlier gift to Jones, of plate worth £10, was made immediately following his action in ordering 150 ft of Portland stone for the company (Court Minute Books, April 1635). The application for Portland stone stated in support that the new building was ‘a publique worke for a never dyeing body’.

21 Britton, J. (ed.), The Natural History of Wiltshire (1847), 84 Google Scholar.

22 Avray Tipping, H. in Country Life xlvi (1919), 112 Google Scholar.

23 Walpole Society vii, 127 Google Scholar.

24 Both sets are in the Company’s archives.

25 Court Minute Books, sub 15 Sept 1666,22 March 1666/7,27 May and 12 June 1667 and 19 Feb 1667/8, and Goldsmiths’ Company Archive 85, a booklet entit led Expences of Rebuilding the Hall 1667 & 1668 provide this information. Thomas Bagford, writing in The Monthly Miscellany for 1708, stresses the fact that the walls of Goldsmiths’ Hall survived the Great Fire, demonstrating the strength of their construction.

26 SirSummerson, John, Inigo Jones (Harmondsworth 1966), fig. 46Google Scholar.

27 de Beer, E. S. (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford 1955), ii, 81Google Scholar. See also Drapentier’s engraving of the house in H. Chauncy, The Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700).

28 Court Minute Books, sub 30 March 1636.

29 Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte I’opere d’Architettura (1619), Book 7, 143

30 Walpole Society vii, 137.Google Scholar

31 Beazley’s elevation, in omitting the quoins at the outer angles, differs from all the other views and must be wrong.

32 RIBA Burlington-Devonshire Collection, 11/2(5). Reproduced e.g. in Summerson, Mgo Jones, fig. 20.

33 The contract with Mills the Mason ‘to make the two chimney peeces in the gallery of portland stone & marble as Mr. Stone shall direct him …’ is copied into the minute books sub 28 July 1638.

34 For the derivation of a design from a source in Serlio cf. the Covent Garden piazzas as analysed by SirSummerson, John in Proceedings of the British Academy 1 (1964), 178–179 Google Scholar.

35 B. de Monconys, Journal des Voyages, 2nd pt (Lyon 1666), 75.