The History of Compton Verney
11th - 15th Century
The first record of a settlement at Compton Verney was the late Saxon village of Compton. It had good communications, being served by the Fosse Way, which ran north-south half a mile from the site and led from the Roman settlements of Cirencester to Leicester. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 (a survey carried out for the Norman king, William the Conqueror, to record land ownership and values), the village was divided into two manors. The largest manor was held by the Count of Meulan, and this was inherited by the Earls of Warwick, who held it in the king’s name.
Some time before 1150, the manor was granted to Robert Murdac and the village became known as Compton Murdak, passing by inheritance to the heirs of the Murdak family. In 1370, after two hundred years of Murdak ownership, Sir Thomas Murdak surrendered the estate to Edward III’s unscrupulous mistress, Alice Perrers.
Soon after this, in 1435, it was acquired by the ruthless and ambitious Richard Verney, (1435-1490) with the assistance of his younger brother, John Verney, Dean of Lichfield, and the powerful Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. The Verney family had begun acquiring lands in the area of Compton Murdak and the surrounding villages in the 1430s before purchasing the estate. By about 1500 it was so closely associated with them that it began to be known as Compton Verney. According to William Dugdale they also built a manor-house there in about 1442. In 1656 Dugdale wrote in The Antiquities of Warwickshire:
“Richard Verney Esquire (afterward Knight)… built a great part of the House, as it now standeth, wherein, besides his own Armes with matches, he then set up…towards the upper end of the Hall, the Armes of King Henry the Sixth.” (William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, London, 1656, p 435, new edition edited W. Thomas, 2 volumes, London, 1730, volume I, 565).
16th - 17th Century
The house was further extended in the period 1500-1650, probably after the advantageous marriage of another Richard Verney (1574-1630) to Margaret, daughter of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. Richard inherited her family estates and claims to the barony of Willoughby de Broke.
Very little is known about this early house at Compton Verney. A drawing by Wenceslaus Hollar of about 1655, published by William Dugdale, shows a great hall, a long south wing with gabled dormer windows and chimneys looking down to the lake. It had octagonal turrets at either end, kitchens to the left (south west) and a chapel. The first surviving inventory of the house, which dates from the middle of the Civil War in 1642, describes a house of thirty rooms (including a hall, two parlours, seventeen bedrooms, an armoury and study as well as servants’ quarters and outbuildings), furnished with velvet, tapestry and pictures to a total value of £900. A silk and wool embroidery showing Lucretia’s Banquet and sold in 1913 to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, may be one of the original pieces hanging in the Great Hall from this period.
Until now, the Verneys had not pursued their claim to the title of barons Willoughby de Broke, a title that came through the female line. However, when Richard Verney (1683-1711) inherited the estate from his great-nephew William in 1683, he decided to exert his claim to the barony. In 1696 the House of Lords accepted the claim and Richard Verney became the 11th Baron Willoughby de Broke.
18th Century
Richard Verney’s son, George, 12th Baron Willoughby de Broke, fellow of New College, Oxford and Dean of Windsor, inherited the estate in 1711 and decided to rebuild the house and re-landscape the gardens. This was a period when medieval houses such as the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House were being remodelled in the classical style and new country seats such as the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim Palace in nearby Woodstock were being built. George, 12th Baron, commissioned an extensive reconstruction of the earlier house, whilst preserving much of the plan of the original building. There is no evidence concerning his choice of architect, although the names of Sir John Vanbrugh (employed at Blenheim Palace) and Francis Smith of Warwick have been associated with the project.
A map of the site from around 1736 shows that the house was now a square block, with stables to the north. These still exist and were built by the Scottish architect James Gibbs in about 1735. Formal gardens were added to the north and south, and the main approach to the house ran east to west, with an ornamental canal on the west lawn. A visitor, John Loveday of Caversham, described the house in 1735, writing:
“Just on the right of the road between Little Keinton [sic] and Wellsburn [sic] is the seat of the Hon. Mr Verney . . . It stands low and is built of Stone; the front is towards the Garden and has 11 Windows . . .
“Below there is an handsome Gallery or Dancing Room…The Gardens, with the room taken up by the house contain 20 Acres. The Gardens rise up an hill, and are well-contrived for Use and Convenience. There are Views down to a Pond; of these Ponds there are 4 in a string, which make a mile in length” (quote from S.Markham: John Loveday of Caversham, Salisbury,1984, p.190).
The basic layout of Compton Verney in the 1730s can be reconstructed from the surviving evidence, which includes two inventories dating from this period. It was a courtyard house, entered from the east, through an archway with a cupola in the now-lost east wing. The main apartments were in the west and south wings, with the servants’ quarters on the north side where the service buildings were. The west wing was dominated by the Great Hall, which probably occupied the same site as the original medieval Hall built in the 1440s. The Great Staircase (now lost) led up from the Hall to the main apartments above.
Although there is little surviving trace of the magnificent landscape laid out by George, 12th Baron, a plan of their layout can be seen on the estate map of about 1736. This shows that the Baroque landscape were dominated by a chain of five ponds, one of which, marked ‘new pool’, was presumably created at this time. The avenue running east to west formed the main approach to the house. Formal gardens were planted immediately north and south of the house, and south of the lake there was an area of plantations crossed by avenues. George, 12th Baron, had thus remodelled the house and gardens at Compton Verney, to create an estate that was suitable for a family with a new title. When both his sons died, his great-nephew, John Peyto Verney, (1741-1816) became 14th Baron and luckily inherited the neighbouring estate of Chesterton, raising the family’s income to about £4000 a year. This additional income and his marriage in 1761 to the sister of Lord North (from nearby Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire) may have been what encouraged John Peyto Verney to improve the estate and completely remodel the house as George had done.
John, 14th Baron, commissioned the prominent Scottish neoclassical architect, Robert Adam, to propose alterations to Compton Verney, one of whose drawings for the elevation of the east front of the house is dated 2nd September 1760 (in the Sir John Soane’s Museum Adam Drawings, Volume 41, number 17). Adam’s proposed remodelling was much more extensive than anything that had taken place before. His drawings of the ground, first and attic storeys show what was to be retained from the original building and what was demolished. Three of the four sides of the original courtyard house (the east, north and south wings) were to be torn down, and Adam proposed the addition of a portico on the new east front and the reconstruction of the north and south wings, giving the house its present U-shape.
The building work was carried out from about 1762-1768, supervised by the Warwick architect and mason, William Horn, who was also employed locally at Charlecote House and Stoneleigh Abbey. The stone came from the estate and the surrounding local quarries of Warwick, Hornton, Gloucester and Painswick. The most important changes attributable to Adam include the removal of the Great Staircase on the west front and its replacement by a Saloon with pairs of columns, plus alterations to the Hall, as well as the creation of an attic storey above it. Adam also added a library and octagonal study to the south wing and adapted the brewhouse and bakery to the north of the house.
The floor plans of the house were published in the fifth volume of Vitruvius Britannicus in 1771, and show certain differences from Adam’s drawings, which suggests that some of the Baroque interiors had been left as they were. Robert Adam was often responsible for the interior decoration as well as the architectural design of his buildings. However, at Compton Verney he designed the decoration of only a few rooms, including the Hall and the Saloon. The rest were decorated by local craftsmen using their own pattern-book designs. His undated drawing for the decoration of the Hall in the Victoria & Albert Museum shows three large plaster picture frames placed high on the walls that originally contained large landscape paintings with classical ruins. The landscapes were painted by the Venetian artist and favoured collaborator of Robert Adam, Antonio Pietro Francesco Zucchi (1726-1795). They were removed from the house after its sale by the Verney family in 1921, and only the frames remain. It is this period in the history of the house that is captured in the famous painting by the artist Johann Zoffany, now owned by the J.Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The painting shows John, 14th Baron and his family in the breakfast room on the ground floor at Compton Verney.
Although Adam’s work on the mansion was completed in 1769, building work continued on the lesser buildings at Compton Verney until the 1780s and it was during this period that the grounds were re-landscaped. In 1769-70 the ‘Green House’ (which no longer survives) was constructed and in 1771-72 the ice-house and ‘Cow House’ were finished. In 1769, the important landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was employed to lay out the grounds in keeping with the new taste for more naturalistic landscape. He eliminated all trace of the earlier formal gardens, including the canal on the west front and the avenues running east to west. To replace them came grassland and trees, with the planting of cedars and over 2,200 oak and ash saplings. Brown also turned the lakes into a single expanse of water by removing the dam between the Upper Long Pool and the Middle Pool to make way for his Upper Bridge. In 1772 he demolished the old chapel between the house and the lake, which had been described in the diary of the antiquarian George Vertue in 1737. He replaced it with a new chapel located on the slope to the north of the house, which was built in 1776-78 and completed in 1780 for a total cost of £981 10s 4d. The tombs of earlier Verneys were moved to the new chapel, along with a mixture of English heraldic German Renaissance glass panels which had decorated the old chapel. The tombs are still on site, but the glass was unfortunately dispersed when it was sold in the last century.
19th - 20th Century
By the time of his death in 1816, John Peyto Verney, 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke, remembered as ‘the good Lord Willoughby’, had presided over the complete transformation of the house and grounds at Compton Verney. In the years following his death there were minor alterations to the building, such as the architect Henry Hakewill’s transformation of the Saloon into a Dining room in 1824 for the solitary 16th Baron, Henry Peyto Verney (1816-1862) before his marriage in 1829. John Gibson’s changes to the Hall (including the addition of a hunting frieze) were begun in about 1863 for the 18th Baron, Henry (1862-1902). There was also minor work in the grounds, including the extension of the lower lake for the 16th Baron in about 1815 by the engineer William Whitmore, and the erection of an obelisk over the old family vault near the lake in about 1848.
Since then, the history of the estate over the last 150 years has been a chequered one. Compton Verney suffered in the agricultural depression of the 1870s and 1880s, in common with other landed estates across the country, dependent as they were on agricultural rent for income. The house was let out from 1887. The last Verney to live in the mansion was Richard Greville Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke (1902-1921), whose nostalgic memoir, The Passing Years, offers a sentimental description of life in the house before he was obliged to sell it in 1921. He died two years later, in 1923.
During the next 70 the estate changed hands a number of times. The new owner in 1921 was Joseph Watson, a soap manufacturer and racehorse owner, who became Baron Manton of Compton Verney the following year, only a few months before he died. His son sold the house in 1929 to Samuel Lamb and his family, but they moved out in World War II when Compton Verney was requisitioned by the army. The grounds were used as an experimental station for smoke-screen camouflage. The house was never lived in again, although in 1958 it was acquired by Harry Ellard, a property and night-club owner, who occasionally authorised film companies to shoot in the grounds. By the 1980s Compton Verney had become semi-derelict.
Since 1993 the house has belonged to the Compton Verney House Trust. (The house was purchased by CVHT with a grant from the Peter Moores Foundation). The extensive building programme has given it a new life as an art gallery, enabling Compton Verney to open its doors to welcome visitors once again.