JUNE 1822
The auctioneer appointed to the Wanstead sale was Mr George Robins of Regent Street, a swaggering forty-five-year-old cockney whose guttural vowels made him sound like an East End market trader.1 This did not deter his fondness for flowery language, and his flamboyance on the rostrum made him a target for society wits.2 The commission at Wanstead was so high profile, it would make him famous. It took Robins several months to catalogue all the splendid contents in the vast house and various specialists were called in to assess the library and wine cellars.3 There was such an abundance of sculpture, tapestry, furniture and artwork that the auction would last for thirty-one days.4
Newspapers reported that many items were ‘worthy of attention in this extraordinary sale, the mere inventory of which fills a catalogue of four hundred quarto pages, which is published in three parts of five shillings each’.5 Bursting with superlatives, Robins used extravagant language to tantalize buyers with flowery descriptions. Everything was ‘magnificent . . . superb . . . splendid . . . costly antique Buhl . . . ornately carved with Cupid Figures . . . inlaid with ivory and valuable gems’. Desirable items included sofas and pier tables designed by William Kent, plus some truly magnificent pieces of antique French buhl.
Thirty thousand people attended the first day of the auction on 10 June 1822. The swarming crowd had to be controlled by policemen and media interest was intense. One newspaper recorded: ‘The out-houses are furnished with refreshments of every description, and the place has the appearance of a country fair. Numbers lately were disappointed from seeing the celebrated Grotto, as several persons that were permitted to view it . . . conveyed away fragments and did considerable mischief.’6
By the end of the first day, the contents of four bedchambers plus the Green Damask Velvet Sitting Room had been sold. One hundred and sixty-five lots raised a total of £656 13s. Over the following days, contents continued to be sold, room by room. The splendid Genoa velvet window curtains, bordered with costly gold lace and silk tassels, sold at around £45 a pair; sumptuous Grecian scroll-back and end sofas fetched somewhere between £50 to £100; silk Axminster carpets, bordered with the family crest and arms, raised between £30 to £55, depending on the size.
Corresponding regularly, Merrick Shawe kept William apprised of events. Shawe wrote:
I went to Wanstead on Friday last but the crowd was so great that I could do nothing but give some directions for the security of the property in the house and also to protect the gardens and grotto from damage . . . we were obliged to apply for ten more police men in addition to the nine already there. Mr Bertram, Robins’ man, assured me there were 30,000 to view the house on Saturday.7
At this stage, even saintly Shawe was losing patience. Having worked tirelessly for over two years, he was growing tired of William’s unrealistic demands and expectations. He finished his letter on an unusually harsh note, saying:
I wish you were here for a variety of reasons. The real pressure of affairs here would soon reduce your ideas within a moderate compass. All your notions, believe me, want paring down as much as ever. When you look at your means and your rental, etc., you look through a magnifying glass. When you look at the probable expense you look through a microscope. Now, your affairs require that you should do exactly the reverse.8
Paintings and sculptures were sold on the eighth, ninth and tenth days of the auction. It was no secret that the sixth Duke of Devonshire had always coveted the bronze statues recovered from Herculaneum, which stood in the Great Hall at Wanstead House. His agent, George Spencer Ridgeway, appeared with strict instructions to acquire specific items irrespective of the cost. The duke purchased a number of lots to adorn his residence at Chatsworth House, paying just £231 for the three ancient sculptures, a fraction of their actual worth. However, he paid handsomely for the two chandeliers that illuminated Kent’s painted ceiling in the Great Hall. Described in the sale catalogue as ‘magnificently carved, richly gilt and surmounted by a superb spread eagle destroying a snake’, they sold for a total of £593 5s.
The contents of the Grand Salon were auctioned on the sixteenth day of the sale. The famous oriental ebony chairs, once owned by Elizabeth I, splendidly carved and inlaid with ivory, sold for between £31 and £38 a pair. They were ‘knocked down at an enormous price. Graham of Waterloo Place, was the purchaser’.9
On the seventeenth day, the tasteful furniture in William’s dressing room and study was up for grabs. His treasured rosewood and buhl library table fetched £93 9s; the ten-foot-tall rosewood bookcase, £52 10s; the flamboyant purple morocco sofa and chairs, £49 7s; his set of nine handsomely cut scent bottles, £1 11s; and his cherished marble and copper bath, £31 10s.
By the end of the third week, prices were dwindling miserably. Bargains were there for the taking, as the contents of Catherine’s magnificent Blue Damask State Bedchamber went up for auction. Incredibly, the splendid antique French buhl Parisian armoire, inlaid with elaborate gilt and tortoiseshell mouldings and friezes, of arabesque design, raised just £19 19s.10
The cavernous wine cellars at Wanstead House were renowned and huge crowds reappeared on the twenty-sixth day to purchase the rare and fine wines. There was an abundance of stock, with hundreds of crates of Madeira, claret and port stacked from floor to ceiling. Each lot comprised three dozen bottles. Three cases of Superior Old Claret could be purchased for around £17; Old East India Madeira sold for around £16; Curious Old Sherry fetched around £13. Wooden barrels filled with Old East Indian Madeira raised £130 each. The takings at the end of the day were an astounding £2,642 15s 6d.
Many of the heirlooms that held huge sentimental value for Catherine were sold for a pittance. The ancient sculptures went for the price of dinner at Grillion’s; her precious buhl armoire was sold for the handful of gold sovereigns that William had scattered so liberally in the dust. The chandeliers with the family crest would now be displayed at Chatsworth House. The Earl of Pembroke had snapped up carpets and curtains for Wilton House, along with a set of William Kent sofas ornately carved with mermaids and seashells. Various items would go to Leeds Castle in Kent. Naturally, this was heart-breaking for the Tylney Long family, but William had the opportunity to make one small gesture by saving the family portraits, which held great sentimental value for Dora and Emma. These were the only items the sisters wanted and, as Merrick Shawe had pointed out, they were of no real worth to anyone outside the family. Rather than granting their wish, William instructed the auctioneer to withdraw the portraits from the sale, claiming that he would purchase them himself, as a gift for Catherine. True to form, however, he never actually got round to settling up with Robins. As a result, the paintings were put into storage and many of them went missing as the years went by. After Robins’s death, they formed part of his estate and were eventually sold at auction in 1852. The portrait of Catherine painted by Alfred Edward Chalon on her coming of age was never recovered.
From William’s point of view, the auction was a complete catastrophe because it took place at the worst possible time, when the country was in a deep recession and the market at its most depressed. The splendid contents of Wanstead were sold for a fraction of their value and worth. The sale raised a total of just £32,395 6s 6d, around half the amount William needed to repay his creditors. It would later come to light that the huge shortfall was in part due to underhand dealings by the crafty cockney auctioneer. Robins would become renowned for using every trick of the trade, drafting in ‘well-placed accomplices or winking at dealers’ rings which, while they defrauded the vendor, increased the auctioneer’s business’.11 Merrick Shawe had been wary, warning William,
I do not like your plan of making Robins take £10,000 worth. Who is to pay the £500 interest? Your estate cannot pay, and you are adding a heavy weight to your encumbrances. The £6,000 agreed to by Mr Robins is too much if it can be avoided.12
It appeared that Robins had set his commission at a flat rate of somewhere between £6,000 and £10,000. If William had had any business acumen whatsoever, he should have paid the auctioneer a percentage of the sale value, as this would have given Robins an incentive to achieve the highest possible price. Instead, Robins sold off contents well below value to his own friends and associates – while squirrelling away items under the counter for himself.
In another masterstroke, Robins shrewdly kept all the money collected on the door – five shillings for a catalogue, which admitted three to view. This added up to a huge amount considering the crowds that flocked to Wanstead daily, over a period of two months. Even before the sale began, 20,000 copies of the catalogue were sold to people attending the viewings. Newspapers reported, ‘We really envy Mr Robins the honour of being the author of a work of which twenty thousand copies have been sold, even though under the humble title of an auctioneer’s catalogue.’13 Added to this, 30,000 people attended the first day of the auction, plus thousands more over the following weeks. Taking everything into account, Robins would have earned around £10,000 simply from the sale of his catalogues. With all his dodgy dealings, Robins probably earned almost as much money from the auction as William did. If William had been more astute, the auction would not have been so calamitous for him. Still deeply in debt, he would have to remain in exile for the foreseeable future. Very little had been gained, despite all the heartache and loss.