[BITList] A Wiltshire Connection [Stourton]

Mon Dec 9 12:48:27 GMT 2013

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Hoare, Sir  (Richard) Colt, second baronet  (1758-1838), landowner and antiquary, was born on 9 December 1758 at Barn Elms, Barnes, Surrey, the eldest son of Sir Richard Hoare, first baronet (1735-1787), banker, and Anne Hoare (1737-1759), known as Nanny, daughter of Henry Hoare  (1705-1785), banker, of Stourhead, and his wife, Susan Colt (d. 1743). Colt Hoare's parents were first cousins. His mother died when he was six months old and his father married, second, Frances Ann Acland (1736-1800), with whom he had four sons and two daughters. Colt Hoare grew up with his half-brothers and sisters 'in a delightful and extensive villa on the Thames between Putney and Mortlake'  (Woodbridge, 71); he was particularly close to the eldest, Henry Hugh (1762-1841). He attended a preparatory school in Wandsworth run by Mr Davis and later studied at Dr Samuel Glasse's seminary in Greenford, Middlesex. He continued his classical studies with a private tutor, the Revd Joseph Eyre, while learning the profession of banker at the family bank in Fleet Street. Henry Hoare favoured his grandson by giving him a house in Lincoln's Inn Fields and an annual allowance of £2000 on his coming of age. His marriage on 18 August 1783, at Barnes, to Hester Lyttelton (1762-1785), daughter of William Henry Lyttelton of Hagley, Lord Westcote, later Lord Lyttelton, and his first wife, Mary Macartney (d. 1765), was short-lived. The couple's only surviving child, Henry, was born on 17 September 1784; Hester did not live to see his first birthday for she died on 22 August 1785. Colt Hoare never remarried. In the same year, under the terms of his grandfather's will, he inherited Stourhead, with its estates in Wiltshire, Somerset, and Dorset, and severed all connection with the bank except as a customer.

Deprived of both wife and career, and needing 'new scenes and new occupations ... to detach my mind from melancholy reflections', Colt Hoare turned his back on England and his young son and began his extensive travels abroad, equipped with an annual income of about £10,000  ('Memoirs', Colt Hoare MSS). He was away for an almost continuous period of six years. His copious notes and journals, which chronicle his travels, were written up later in 'Recollections abroad: journals of tours on the continent, 1785-1791' (1815-18), but little is revealed in them of his private life. His focus was on Italy, Rome and Naples in particular, but he travelled as well in France, Switzerland, and Spain, writing home regularly to his steward Thomas Charlton at Stourhead and to his half-brother Henry Hugh Hoare. He visited all the classical sites and immersed himself in the landscape, all the time drawing, recording, and collecting for his house and portfolio. In Rome he discovered the work of the Swiss watercolourist Louis Ducros (1748-1810), whose revolutionary style of painting he believed would have a profound influence on the English school. He brought back large-scale Italian views by Ducros for Stourhead.

After a brief return home Colt Hoare resumed his travels in 1788, 'no longer as a tourist but as a systematic antiquarian ... quitting ... the road for the path, the capital for the provinces'  (R. C. Hoare, A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily, 1819, x). He passed through the Netherlands, Germany, Venice, and Florence and finally settled in Siena. He sought to locate the major sites of the Etruscan civilization, then explored the Appian way with his sketchbook and returned south in order to visit the recently publicized Greek ruins at Paestum and those in Sicily. His romantic response to Italy was at once tempered and inflamed by a close interest in the classical authors, who turned his attraction into a passion; virtually nothing he saw was without resonance from a documented source: 'every scene bears a classic character and every district acquires double interest from the recollections it calls forth'  (R. C. Hoare, Recollections Abroad, 2.130).

The French Revolutionary War closed the continent to travellers, and Colt Hoare arrived in Britain in the summer of 1791 at a time when travel through France was still possible, if not comfortable. He never went abroad again. He carried on the habit of keeping meticulous diaries detailing his visits and journeys until his death. Each spring he would travel in the British Isles and in 1806 he went to Ireland. He had a particular fondness for Wales, as did many of his fellow antiquaries, and he made a significant contribution to its travel literature with his translation of Gerald of Wales, published as Giraldus de Barri, Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales AD 1188 (1806). He provided the illustrations for William Coxe's Historical Tour of Monmouthshire (1801) and did the same for his friend Roger Fenton in his Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire (1811). He bought a fishing-lodge at Bala in 1796; throughout his life Colt Hoare was an enthusiast for all field sports. He spent some winter months at his London house in St James's Square and in 1805 served as high sheriff for Wiltshire.

Apart from time spent touring, Colt Hoare's energies were fully occupied with developing his inheritance at Stourhead and with his ambitious publishing projects on the ancient and modern histories of his own county. He embarked on grand tree-planting schemes in the gardens, and his election as a fellow of the Linnean Society (1812) recognized his particular contribution to the cultivation of exotic plants; according to one expert, 'his collection of Geraniaceae exceeds every other in this country'  (R. Sweet, Geraniaceae, 5 vols., 1820-22, 1.18). He had been elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and admitted to the Society of Dilettanti in 1792. Building work at Stourhead began in 1792 and continued after the outbreak of war with France. After 'finding in the mansion house, as it was, not sufficient room for either his collection of paintings or library of books he made in the year 1800 a considerable addition ... by adding two wings'  (A. Hoare, introduction). In the picture gallery Colt Hoare gave pride of place over the chimney-piece to his most important Italian purchase, The Adoration of the Magi by Ludovico Cardi (Cigoli) (1605), but it was the library which was his most 'significant contribution to culture'  (Woodbridge, 251). He gave his collection of Italian topographical and historical works to the British Museum in 1825 but in its place he collected nearly every book on the history and topography of the British Isles. He created in his house the scholarly atmosphere of a medieval monastery, without any of the discomforts, and provided most of the documentary sources required by himself and his collaborators for their work on the history and archaeology of Wiltshire. This unique collection of books and drawings was dispersed in the Stourhead heirloom sales (Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge, 1883 and 1887). The library was handsomely furnished by Thomas Chippendale the younger, whose ailing business, after he was made bankrupt in 1804, relied heavily on Colt Hoare for survival.

Colt Hoare's ambition, however, was to be an author, not just a collector of books. In this he had the invaluable assistance of William Cunnington of Heytesbury, a tradesman turned antiquary, who was excavating the prehistoric barrows in his neighbourhood. He was the moving spirit behind the team that produced the first volume (in three parts) of The Ancient History of South Wiltshire in 1812. Colt Hoare was the financier and author. As a survey of Wiltshire barrows it is incomplete but Colt Hoare was commended: 'No antiquary had ever the same means or opportunities before Sir Richard Hoare and no-one ever availed himself more entirely of the advantages which he possesses'  (Quarterly Review, 5, 1811, 118). The second volume, The Ancient History of North Wiltshire, appeared in 1819. Cunnington had died in 1812 but Colt Hoare gave him the final word: 'to him alone the discovery of the numerous settlements of the Britons, dispersed over our hills, must be justly attributed' (R. C. HoareAncient Wiltshire, 2.126).

Colt Hoare's characteristic desire to promote British artists established him as a significant patron. He continued his grandfather's close association with the watercolourist Francis Nicholson, who recorded the now maturing landscape at Stourhead, and with Samuel Woodforde, who painted the full-length double portrait of Colt Hoare and his son for the collection of family portraits in the hall at Stourhead. Sir John Leicester of Tabley introduced him to the young Turner, who painted a series of watercolour views of Salisbury Cathedral between 1794 and 1806 for Colt Hoare. Furthermore, Turner copied one of Colt Hoare's own drawings for his oil of Lake Avernus with Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil in 1815. These works were sold in 1883.

Colt Hoare's son, Henry, showed little interest in anything more serious than the life of pleasure available to a well-born young man of means. He married Charlotte Dering and they had one daughter, Ann, born in 1808. Relations between Colt Hoare and his daughter-in-law were not warm and, following his son's nervous breakdown in 1811, there ensued a bitter period of disharmony between father and son. Henry's instability and propensity for debt led to further unhappiness. He and Charlotte separated, and Colt Hoare was plagued by demands to settle his son's debts at a time when the country was in the grip of an economic crisis. Henry died at Hastings in 1836.

Colt Hoare was reserved in his manner and intellectual in his tastes but his evident enjoyment of society leads one to suspect that he would have embraced family life. He faced the breakdown in his relationship with his only child while struggling with gout, rheumatism, and increasing deafness, ailments that were to plague him for the rest of his life. Increasingly confined to Stourhead, he went to Bath for relief and assiduously worked on his county history of Wiltshire, taking as his immediate model John Nichols's History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester. The first part, 'The hundred of Mere', appeared in 1822; it described most of Colt Hoare's own possessions. In all, fourteen parts were published on the hundreds of south Wiltshire, under the title The History of Modern Wiltshire (1822-44), usually bound in six volumes. The last two hundreds were written after Colt Hoare's death in order to complete the project. His last fieldwork was to see the Roman Pitney pavement uncovered at Somerton. He published a report on this excavation in 1831, which has proved invaluable as the pavement was destroyed five years later.

Colt Hoare died on 19 May 1838 at Stourhead and was buried in the family mausoleum in the churchyard of St Peter's, Stourton. His memorial, a marble statue by R. C. Lucas, is in Salisbury Cathedral. The estate passed to his half-brother Henry Hugh Hoare. In due course Stourhead passed to the National Trust and became one of its finest properties.

Victoria Hutchings 

Sources  K. Woodbridge, Landscape and antiquity: aspects of English culture at Stourhead, 1718 to 1838 (1970) + Hoare's Bank Archive, London, Colt Hoare MSS + R. C. Hoare, The journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare through Wales and England, 1793-1810, ed. M. W. Thompson (1983) + Stourhead, Wiltshire, National Trust, rev. edn (1990) + R. C. Hoare, Recollections abroad during the years 1790, 1791, 2 vols. (1815-18) + R. C. Hoare, 'Memoirs', c.1815, Stourhead, Colt Hoare MSS + A. Hoare, 'Catalogue of Pictures at Stourhead', 1898, Stourhead + DNB
Archives BL, Modern English and Reader Services, Humanities and Social Sciences, authorial copy with annotations of his pedigrees and memorials of the family of Hore + BL, corresp. relating to antiquities at Camerton, Add. MS 33665 + BL, journal of Elba tour, Add. MS 41761 + Brighton and Hove Library Service, Brighton, wash drawings + Cardiff Central Library, tour journals + CUL, notes on works of art and journal of tours in Italy + Devizes Museum, Wiltshire, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, travel notebooks and journals, accounts, drawings, and papers + Devon RO, collections relating to Bruton Abbey, etc. + Hagley Hall, Hagley, genealogical account of Lyttelton family + Hoare's Bank Archive, London + NL Wales, Welsh tour journals + NMG Wales, drawings + S. Antiquaries, Lond., archaeological papers relating to Wiltshire + Stourhead, Wiltshire + Wilts. & Swindon HC, diaries, journals, corresp. and papers; notebook as a justice of the peace + Yale U., Beinecke L., drawings | Bath Central Library, corresp. with John Skinner + BL, letters to Aylmer Lambert, Add. MS 28545 + Bodl. Oxf., letters to W. P. Carey + Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Sir Thomas Phillipps + Devizes Museum, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, letters to John Britton + Devizes Museum, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, letters to William Cunnington + priv. coll., letters to second earl of Radnor + Som. ARS, letters to Samuel Hazell relating to excavations at Littleton + Tabley House, Cheshire, de Tabley MSS + Wilts. & Swindon HC, letters to Lord Bruce
Likenesses  W. Hoare, oils, c.1780, Stourhead, Wiltshire · S. Woodforde, oils, 1795, Stourhead, Wiltshire [see illus.] · S. Woodforde, oils, exh. RA 1802, Stourhead, Wiltshire · S. C. Smith, oils, c.1831, Stourhead, Wiltshire · H. Edridge, pencil and watercolour drawing, Stourhead, Wiltshire · W. Hoare, pastel drawing, Stourhead, Wiltshire · R. C. Lucas, statue on monument, Salisbury Cathedral · R. C. Lucas, wax bust, Stourhead, Wiltshire · F. Nicholson, watercolour, Stourhead, Wiltshire · attrib. S. Woodforde, oils, Stourhead, Wiltshire
Wealth at death  owned 11,000 acres in 1791; estate intact at death; mansion house and contents; also London house: 1827, schedule of lands, Stourhead archive, Wilts. & Swindon HC · est. income £9000-£10,000 p.a.; was 'high in the group of 300 wealthy men below the great landed nobility': Woodbridge, Landscape, 145

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