Montagu House, 22 Portman Square, London

Joanna Barker

When Elizabeth Montagu’s husband died in 1775, she found herself sufficiently wealthy to embark on the ambitious project of building herself a new house in London. She had occupied 23 Hill Street for over thirty years, and while it was an elegant town-house, it was not large enough to display the grandeur to which she now aspired.

Later in the same year she signed a 99-year lease on a large plot at the north-east corner of Portman Square, which was on high ground and had an open prospect to the north; it was regarded as a particularly healthy part of London. She engaged the architect James Stuart to design it; Stuart had worked on the interior decoration of Hill Street from 1766 to 1772, and Montagu should perhaps have taken heed of the haphazard and protracted way in which this work had been carried out. Stuart was cheaper than Robert Adam or James Wyatt, who were the obvious alternatives, and Montagu had determined that she would pay for the building out of her annual income and the eventual proceeds from the sale of Hill Street, without having recourse to debt.

Stuart’s plan included a group of five intercommunicating public rooms opening off the main staircase and a separate apartment for Mrs Montagu at the south end with her own staircase. At first the building work proceeded with due speed: by July 1777 the basement had been completed and the house had reached ground level. In December 1778 Montagu wrote to her sister-in-law Mary Robinson that the ceilings of her bedroom, dressing room and gallery were completed, and the attic was ready for papering. She claimed that “I do not know whether I am more stupid than other people, but I neither find any of ye vexation some find in building, nor ye great amusement others tell me they experience in it; indeed if it was not that a House must be building, before it can be built I should never have been a builder. I have not had a quarter of an hours pain or pleasure from the operation. I have not met with ye least disappointment or mortification, it has gone on as fast & well as I expected, & when it is habitable. I shall take great pleasure in it, for it is an excellent House, finely situated, & just such as I had always wishd but never hoped to have.”

This statement proved to be rather premature. By the summer of 1779 a problem had developed in relation to the glass for the windows, and Montagu was so frustrated by Stuart’s inefficiency that she retained Matthew Boulton to act as sub-contractor; he was an engineer and founder of the Soho Manufactory in Staffordshire. She planned to save money by using plate glass only for the windows of the main rooms and cheaper sheet glass for the rest; in addition to the cost, there was a tax on glass that varied according to weight not size. Samples were sent in July 1780, but Montagu wrote to Boulton that ‘I have very little hope of assistance from my Architect Mr Stuart who is idle & inattentive’.

Montagu also arranged for her friend Leonard Smelt to supervise the building while she was not in London. In April 1780 she expressed her frustration in a letter to him of 25th April 1780, saying that ‘I know by experience, Mr Stuart is apt to forget his promises are not fulfill’d, & talks of designs for chimney pieces, & Pillars, &c, &c which exist only in his brain …’

Nevertheless, she remained optimistic, and in June 1780 wrote to say that she hoped to move to her new house by the beginning of the following November. In March 1781 she wrote that the house was ‘finished and ready for habitation’, but she was going to Bath for her health. She finally moved to Portman Square in December 1781, and the house was opened to guests for the first time on 22nd February 1782.

Much of the interior décor remained uncompleted, and Stuart’s increasingly heavy drinking exacerbated the effect of his indolence in the years leading up to his death in 1788. Montagu turned to a new architect, Joseph Bonomi, who executed the interior of the ballroom to Stuart’s designs in 1789-90; the decoration is reminiscent of an Italian palazzo. The ballroom has been described as one of the most outstanding examples of 18th century English Neoclassicism: “The elliptically vaulted ceiling was decorated with paintings of Olympus, friezes in imitation of antique bas-reliefs and bands of intertwining laurel leaves. The door and window surrounds and piers were of green scagliola with gilded Corinthian capitals”.

Horace Walpole visited the house in 1782 and was pleasantly surprised, saying that “instead of vagaries, it is a noble, simple edifice. Magnificent, yet no gilding. It is grand, not tawdry, not larded, embroidered, and pomponned with shreds and remnants, and clinquant like the harlequinades of Adam, which never let the eye repose an instant”.

One of the most notable internal features were the feather hangings in the Morning Room. For many years Montagu had asked her friends to send her a variety of birds’ feathers, which were stitched together on canvas-mounted frames. The feather panels were not hung until 6th June 1791, when a breakfast reception was held to unveil them to the world: the many guests included Queen Charlotte and five of her daughters. The poet William Cowper celebrated the occasion in verse:

The birds put off their every hue

To dress a room for Montagu;

The peacock sends his heavenly dyes,

His rainbows and his starry eyes;

The pheasant, plumes which round infold

His mantling neck with downy gold;

The cock his arch'd tail's azure show;

And, river-blanched, the swan his snow;

All tribes beside of Indian name,

That glossy shine or vivid flame,

Where rises and where sets the day,

Whate'er they boast of rich and gay,

Contribute to the gorgeous plan,

Proud to advance it all they can.

This plumage neither dashing shower

Nor blasts that shake the dripping bower,

Shall drench again or discompose,

But screen'd from every storm that blows,

It boasts a splendour ever new,

Safe with protecting Montagu.

The grounds of Montagu House were laid out in 1778 to designs by Montagu’s friend George Simon Harcourt, 2nd Earl Harcourt (1736-1809), proprietor of Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, which was famous for its gardens.

On May Day of every year, Mrs Montagu gave an entertainment on the lawns of her house for the boy chimney sweeps of London. They were given a shilling each and feasted on roast beef and plum pudding, with dancing after their meal. One of the sweeps, David Porter, grew up to be a builder and laid out a street and square to the north of Portman Square that he named after Montagu.

Following Montagu’s death, the house passed with the rest of her estate to her nephew and heir, Matthew Montagu. He had his own town house in Manchester Square, and his aunt’s mansion was rented out for long periods. The last member of the family known to have occupied Montagu House was Henry Goulburn, MP, who married Jane Montagu (1793-1857), Matthew Montagu’s second daughter. He was Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Robert Peel’s administration.

Following Montagu’s death, the house passed with the rest of her estate to her nephew and heir, Matthew Montagu. He had his own town house in Manchester Square, and his aunt’s mansion was rented out. Matthew’s daughter Jane and her husband, Henry Goulbourn MP, who was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer, occupied the house in 1835, and her brother General Henry Montagu, the 6th and last Lord Rokeby, is shown in the 1871 census as resident there with his unmarried daughter Elizabeth.

The lease reverted to Viscount Portman in 1874 and at some point the house was cased in red brick. Much of the interior remained unchanged when photographs were taken in 1904. In 1941 it was hit by an incendiary bomb and badly damaged. By that time, James Stuart’s reputation as an architect had declined and no move was made to restore the building so it was demolished, and the plot is now occupied by a modern hotel. The gate piers are all that survive, and are now in the grounds of Kenwood House.

References:

Kerry Bristol, 22 Portman Square: Mrs Montagu and her ‘Palais de la vieillesse’, in The British Art Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 2001, pp. 72-85

Ruth Scopie, “To dress a room for Montagu”: Pacific Cosmopolitanism and Elizabeth Montagu’s Feather Hangings, in Lumen, vol. 33, pp. 123-127

Edward Walford, Oxford Street and its Northern Tributaries, in Old & New London, vol. 4, 1878, pp. 406-441

Please note that all dates and location information are provisional, initially taken from the library and archive catalogues. As our section editors continue to work through the material we will update our database and the changes will be reflected across the edition.

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