At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. Comparable for size and style with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury were as dramatic as the building and destruction of Canons, the seat of the ‘princely Chandos’ at Edgware. Of Canons, however, no stone remains, while at Eastbury a wing and colonnade are left, standing sinister, sundered and riven, the melancholy relics of a once proud but hospitable mansion.
DODINGTON
Eastbury was begun on a scale of princely magnificence{251} by George Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, having presumably made some fine pickings in that capacity, determined to spend them on becoming a patron of the Arts and an entertainer of literary men, after the fashion of an age in which painters were made to fawn upon the powerful, and poets to sing their praises in the blankest of blank verse. Every rich person had his henchmen among the followers of the Muses, and they were petted or scolded, indulged or kept on the chain, just as the humour of the patron at the moment decreed. Unfortunately, however, for this eminently eighteenth-century ambition of George Dodington, he died before he could finish his building. All his worldly goods went to his grand-nephew, George Bubb, son of his brother’s daughter, who had married a Weymouth apothecary named Jeremias Bubb. Already, under the patronage of his uncle, a member of Parliament, and an influential person, George on coming into this property assumed the name of Dodington; perhaps also because the obvious nickname of ‘Silly Bubb’ by which he was known might thereby become obsolete.
George Bubb Dodington, as he was now known, immediately stopped the works on his uncle’s palace, and thus the unfinished building remained gaunt and untenanted from 1720 to 1738. Then, as suddenly as the building was stopped, work was resumed again. The vast sum of ￡140,000 was spent on the completion. Tapestries, gilding, marbles, everything of the most costly and ornate character was employed, and the grounds which had been newly laid out eighteen{252} years before, and in the interval allowed to subside into a wilderness, were set in order again. The reason of this sudden activity was that Dodington had become infected with that same ‘Patron’ mania which had caused his uncle to lay the foundation stones of these marble halls. He was at this period forty-seven years of age, and in those years had filled many posts in the Government, and about the rival Whig and Tory Courts of the King and the Prince of Wales. Scheming and intriguing from one party to the other, he had always been ambitious of influence, and now that even greater accumulations of wealth had come to him, he set up as the host of birth, beauty, and intellect in these Dorsetshire wilds.
The gossips of the time have left us a picture of the man. Fat, ostentatious, extravagant, with the love of glitter and colour of a barbarian, he was yet a wit of repute, and had undoubtedly some learning. He possessed, besides, a considerable share of shrewdness. If he lent ￡5000 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and never got it back, we are not to suppose that he ever expected to be repaid. That was, no doubt, regarded as practically an entrance-fee to the exalted companionship of a prince of whom it was written, when he came to an untimely end:—
But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.
A WHIMSICAL FIGURE
That same Fred thought himself the clever man when he remarked ‘Dodington is reckoned clever, but I have borrowed ￡5000 of him which he will never see again’; but Dodington doubtless imagined the sum to have been well laid out; which, indeed,{253} would have been the case had not the prince died early. M?cenas was, in fact, working for a title, and this was then regarded as the ready way to such a goal. They say the same idea prevails in our own happy times; but that ￡5000 would not go far towards the realisation of the object. But, be that as it may, Dodington did not win to the Peerage as Lord Melcombe until 1761, and as he died in the succeeding year, his enjoyment of the ermine was short. As, however, the working towards an object and its anticipation are always more enjoyable than the attainment of the end, he is perhaps not to be regarded with pity, or thought a failure.
One who partook of his hospitality at Eastbury, and did not think the kindness experienced there a sufficient reason for silence as to his host’s eccentricities and failings, has given us some entertaining stories. The State bed of the gross but witty Dodington at Eastbury was covered with gold and silver embroidery; a gorgeous sight, but closer inspection revealed the fact that this splendour had been contrived at the expense of his old coats and breeches, whose finery had been so clumsily converted that the remains of the pocket-holes were clearly visible. ‘His vast figure,’ continues this reminiscencing friend, ‘was always arrayed in gorgeous brocades, and when he paid his court at St. James’s, he approached to kiss the Queen’s hand, decked in an embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches; the latter in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty and broke loose from their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.’ That{254} must have been a sore blow to the dignity of one who possessed, as we are told, ‘the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard towards women, with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman to men.’
Rolling down the Exeter Road, from his London mansion, or from his suburban retreat of ‘La Trappe,’ at Hammersmith, in his gilded, old-fashioned chariot, he gathered a variety of literary men at what Young calls ‘Pierian Eastbury.’ Johnson, sick of the Chesterfields and the whole gang of literary patrons, scornfully refused Dodington’s proffered friendship; but Fielding, Thomson, Bentley, Cumberland, Young, Voltaire, and others were not slow to revel in these more or less Arcadian delights. Christopher Pitt wrote to Young, congratulating him on his stay here:—
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;
Where a new Eden in the wild is found,
And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
While Thomson, moved to it by the Burgundy or the more potent punch, has celebrated palace and park in his Autumn.
RUINED EASTBURY
Dodington had either no stomach for fighting, or else was a good fellow beyond the common run, as the following affair proves. Eastbury marches with Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one of Dodington’s keepers with his dogs in a part of the Chase called Burseystool Walk. The keeper was warned that if he was found there again, his dogs would be shot and himself prosecuted; but despite this warning he was found near the same spot a few{255} days later, when the Ranger, having a gun in his hand, put his threat into execution and shot the three dogs as they were drinking in a pool, with their heads close together, in one of the Ridings. Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a challenge to the Ranger over this affair, and the Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend to call on the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter; but by that time Dodington had thought better of it, and instead of making arrangements to shed the enemy’s gore, invited both him and his friend to dinner. They met and had a jovial time together, and the sword remained unspotted.
On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of ￡200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair. No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures, objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary fragment.
There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is still to be seen.{256} Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered found this the only way out of his trouble.
When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was tied.