William Paulet would live through four Tudor reigns, dying in 1572 at the remarkable age of ninety-seven, a testament to the acquisition of riches and his own swiftly-changing political and religious allegiances. In the meantime, Netley continued in its new function as a grand house. In 1560 it passed to Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, son of the Protector Somerset, who that August entertained Elizabeth I on one of her royal progresses, as Southampton’s mayor proudly – or perhaps nervously – observed: ‘The Queenes Maiestees grace came from the Castle of Netley to Southampton on the XIII of August.’
For the next century or so, the building remained somewhere between an abbey, a mansion and a castle, a fortified retreat secure enough for Seymour’s Royalist son to be confined there during the Interregnum. The abbey retained some sacred duties – one of the Seymours was baptised in its chapel in 1665 – although when it became the property of the Earl of Huntingdon, the new owner converted the west end of the chapel into a kitchen and ‘other offices’. But by the eighteenth century, this draughty architectural portmanteau had become decidedly old-fashioned, and its latest owner, the apparently disinterested Sir Berkeley Lucy, began to sell off chunks of the ruins for building materials.
Abbey stones had already found their way into local houses and churches, but these came from secular parts of the building, not its consecrated chapel. In 1703 an eminent Southampton builder, Walter Taylor, grandfather of the mill-owning industrialist, made a deal with Lucy ‘for the purchase of so much of its materials as he could carry away in a certain space of time’; other chroniclers record that Sir Berkeley ‘sold the whole fabrick of the chapel’. Taylor’s God-fearing family urged him ‘not to be instrumental in destroying an edifice which had been consecrated to the worship of the Deity’, and although such imprecations did not persuade Taylor to abandon his plans, ‘they dwelt so much on his mind as to occasion a dream one night, that the arch key-stone of the East window fell from its situation, and fractured his skull’. Another version has the ghost of a monk appear to the transgressing developer, threatening him ‘with great mischief if he persisted in his purpose’.
Taylor duly reported his dream to his friend Isaac Watts, schoolmaster and father of the Methodist composer, who, like Taylor, was a Dissenter, and had been gaoled for his beliefs. Watts gave what the Victorian historian William Howitt frowningly described as ‘somewhat Jesuitical advice’, instructing Taylor ‘to have no personal concern in pulling down the building’. Ignoring his friend’s warning, Taylor went ahead and ‘tore off the roof (which was entire, till then) and pulled down great part of the walls’. But,
in an exertion to tear down a board from the window loosed the fatal stone, which fell upon his head, and produced a fracture. The wound was not, at first, deemed to be mortal, but the instrument of the surgeon unhappily slipped, in the operation of extracting a splinter, entered the brain, and caused immediate death.
The moral of the story was plain: human greed invited God’s retribution, and the abbey’s ghosts would avenge the destruction begun by an ungodly king. The tale became part of the growing myth of Netley. Even a century later, William Howitt’s proposal that the tragedy actually benefited the abbey seemed to infer that Taylor had been a sacrifice required for its perpetuation: ‘the accident had the good effect of staying the demolition of the Abbey, which has since been uninjured except by time and tourists’. Netley had again managed to save itself by another lucky circumstance, just as Paulet’s domestic conversion had stopped it falling down. Taylor’s hapless fate – wrapped up in the abbey’s legends – had preserved these crumbling stones.
By the mid-eighteenth century Netley’s ruins had taken on an increasingly feral air, as though Nature had appointed itself as the abbey’s new guardian. Ivy crept up over the walls as if to hold them together, and mature trees grew to create a leafy new canopy for the now roofless nave; descendants of the sheep originally kept by the monks wandered the ruins. Beyond, the grounds ran down to a view of the open water, decoratively framed by more trees. It was a truly picturesque sight, a natural focus for those who sought the sublime sensation of ‘ruins, ivy, owls, moonlight, musing melancholy and life’s passing pageant’.
The century had in turn seen Nature tamed: ‘Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain’, as the poet John Clare wrote from his asylum, driven there by the predations of the enclosures which prevented him from making his living either as farm-worker or poet. And with Nature thus controlled, men could indulge their taste for the sublime and the picturesque, as though England were a panorama spread before them, framed by their own aesthetic. Tiring of ‘improved’ landscapes, they now looked for something more thrilling, and found it in gothic.
Eighteenth-century art historians believed that gothic architecture was inspired by the tall forests of northern Europe; they saw its sacred arches, crockets, spires and columns as stone versions of ancient woodland – the antiquarian James Hall even built a wicker ‘cathedral’ in his garden to demonstrate the ancient provenance of the style. For the rarefied tastes of the eighteenth-century connoisseur, it was a delicious meeting of art and life to be savoured: this gothic abbey returning to its arboreal inspiration, shaped by the deep, dark, mysterious woods themselves, still surrounded by the very pagan spirits which its Cistercian builders had sought to dispel.
When it was built, Netley’s abbey must have stood out from the landscape like a piece of ostentatious modern architecture, but it had now been subsumed by the land, made decrepit by Nature and blunted by Time, and in the process had become a place of myth and legend. And within that myth, the abbey found its new identity by reaching back, through its medieval past, and into the dark ages of Europe’s forested depths – perhaps even to their old gods and rituals, their supernatural mysteries. In an era of cool rationality, Netley reacted by becoming a natural artifice, a set-piece of theatrical bravura composed by Man and framed by Nature – a fantastic escape from that rational age.
In fact they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise – Oh! the purple abbots, what a spot had they chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively, that they seemed only to have retired into the world …
HORACE WALPOLE, 1755
In the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole, dilettante son of Britain’s first prime minister, undertook a tour of Hampshire with his friend, John Chute. Along with their mutual friend, the architect and artist Richard Bentley, this bachelor trio formed a ‘Committee of Taste’ to supervise the creation of Walpole’s house on the banks of the Thames at Strawberry Hill, where he was reinventing gothic in stone and stained glass. With its romantic name, castellated turrets and towers and strange chapel in the woods, Strawberry Hill was a three-dimensional expression of the imagination which would inspire the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, written by Walpole in 1764.
As a maligned victim of the Renaissance, gothic was ready for a revival. Scathingly coined by Vasari in the sixteenth century to represent the barbarian destroyers of classical Rome and Greece, Walpole’s rehabilitation of a pejorative term was an act of genteel subversion. ‘His taste as expressed in Strawberry Hill was one of a deliberate rebel counter-culture’, wrote Walpole’s biographer, Timothy Mowl. ‘He was delighted by his own identity and concerned, like a public relations expert, to communicate it to us down the years …’ Walpole was, wrote Mowl, ‘one of the most successful deviant infiltrators that the English establishment has ever produced’, and his Committee of Taste both used and hid behind the fantasy of gothic in the same way that later ‘decadents’ used it to both promote and mask their identities.
The dandyism of Walpole and his successors stood against an age of mass production. It was an individuality symbolised by the romantic figure of the Solitary