As so often, my new year of visits has begun during the week of the Cheltenham horse racing festival. I used a free day before the racing action kicks off to take an hour’s drive from the Cotswolds across to Northamptonshire and Canons Ashby. Perhaps not the most imposing property in the Trust’s portfolio, this is more of a family home rather than a bold status symbol, but it has a wealth of history and was well worth the efforts needed to save it for future generations of visitors.
Very unusually in NT history, the Trust actually targeted the property and approached the owners themselves when they heard it might be turned into a hotel. The spearhead of this preservation project in 1980 was Gervase Jackson-Stops, who was an advisor to the National Trust and had grown up near Canons Ashby. He brought the Trust together with other stakeholders (including the Landmark Trust, which still offers a holiday apartment in the tower) to save the property and he is commemorated in the Priory Church alongside the house. With absent owners (then living in Africa), the house had fallen into decay, so the Trust immediately faced many challenges, including wet and dry rot, a garden jungle, a leaking roof, and a south front (see main picture above) that was bowing outwards under the weight of the ornate plaster ceiling in the Drawing Room.
In addition, the Trust also brought back many of the house’s older features that had been painted or panelled over by later generations of the resident Dryden family. This included the dramatic fireplace in the Drawing Room, the grisaille wall paintings in the Spenser Room, and the wooden panels in the Winter Parlour (later the Servant’s Hall). It always seems miraculous how conservators can peel away a top layer of covering paint without also damaging what lies beneath, but the miracle workers were at it again.
Turning to the history of the house, it has certainly had an interesting past despite being owned by the same family for over 400 years. The name Canons Ashby is derived from the old term for farmstead (‘ashby’) and the religious folk who once occupied a large priory on the site. The priory was founded in the 12th century and the canons (different from monks in that they pray for others rather than for their own salvation) lived a happy and secure life in this rural idyll until Henry VIII came along and decided their time was up. To be fair to old King Henry, it sounds as if the canons had become rather dissolute in their ways, so the Dissolution of their priory was perhaps justified. Less justified perhaps is what happened to the vast priory church, which was largely destroyed, leaving a building that is now only a quarter or a fifth of its original size. The church tower can still be seen from a long way off and the building feels rather large to serve such a small community, but it would have been positively cathedral-like in its pomp. Visitors can pop across the road to look around the church, which is full of memorials to centuries of dead Drydens as well as a model of the building as it once was. Today, it is surprisingly modest and plain inside, perhaps fitting for a place of worship for a Puritan family.
Once the canons had been ‘dissolved’ in 1535, the property was bought from the Crown in 1537 and a year later purchased again by Sir John Cope. His daughter, Elizabeth, married a John Dryden and moved into the house, thus beginning the centuries-long tenure of Drydens. My companion commented on the familiarity of the name Dryden and I said it was most famous because of the poet, but “I am sure he was no relation”. Oops, silly me! There is a portrait of John Dryden, former Poet Laureate, in the Dining Room and we were told that his branch of the family might once have inherited the house had they not been staunch Catholics and persona non grata to the Northants Drydens. The volunteer also told me that Dryden was the only Poet Laureate to be sacked from the position, again due to his Catholic inclinations. He was complimentary about Dryden’s poems so now I have another reading mission on my already extensive ‘to do’ list (insert rolling eyes emoji here!)
But I digress into poetry… let’s get back to the relevant Drydens. They were rather fortunate in the destruction of the vast priory church as they used a great deal of the rubble to build their manor house, expanding a former farmhouse into a far more striking abode. Elizabeth and John built the tower and west wing of the house, later adding the Great Hall and Long Gallery above it (so far so Tudor). Other signs of the Tudor décor include the painted panels in the Winter Parlour, complete with their Puritanical Latin quotations above.
Their son Erasmus (the first baronet) inherited in 1584 and he added the bold fireplace in the Drawing Room, today much altered so it is a hotch-potch of designs and eras. This sums up the house as a whole, with a jigsaw-like quality to the architecture. Although this would not appeal to architectural purists, it somehow never feels completely wrong and there is something attractive about the house’s mongrel nature. As far as the aforementioned fireplace is concerned, it brings together old Tudor design with Elizabethan painted panels and Delft tiles, so although the casual viewer can probably see that it isn’t entirely ‘right’, the eye is still drawn to it as soon as you enter the room. It was once covered over with off-white paint and I was hoping there would be a picture of it in this state somewhere, just to see how different it was, but sadly that had to be left to my imagination.
The dramatic vaulted ceiling in the Drawing Room is another winner. Added in 1632 to mark the third marriage of Sir John Dryden, 2nd Bt, it is a weighty feature and was largely responsible for the bowed south frontage after later structural changes reduced its stability. The fireplace itself also bears scars from the ceiling’s imposition on the room with cracks and misalignments in the mantel.
The next – and perhaps most drastically – influential Dryden was Edward, who inherited unexpectedly in 1708. The previous owner had died childless, and the house (but not the title) came down to Edward, who was a nephew of Poet Dryden. His Georgian sensibilities led to major alterations to Canons Ashby, with the South Front turned into the main focal point, and he created the series of terraced gardens, which draw the eye down from this frontage towards the lakes in the valley. Edward also moved fireplaces from the south front to opposite walls and added Georgian-style sash windows, markedly contributing to the weakness of the entire South Front and creating all the future structural problems. I got an idea from the volunteers that Edward was not the most popular of the house’s owners. He did contribute some valued interest in the house, however, including the tapestry-covered furniture with curved legs in the Tapestry Room, which was ground-breaking for its time.
[As a minor aside, the volunteer in the Tapestry Room seemed very familiar to me, so after a conversation about the room, I asked if he perhaps volunteered anywhere else. He asked me if I had been to Stowe House recently, which placed him immediately as the man who had guided our tour of the house in 2023. The NT can be a small world and it is always nice to get reacquainted with excellent guides. Sadly, I forgot to ask his name and I didn’t note it down at Stowe either, so he remains anonymous. Perhaps I’ll find him popping up somewhere else in future and can put this right!]
Further generations of Drydens (some of whom married into the family and changed their names to fit) made few significant changes to the house. Lack of funds was a contributing factor, but perhaps we should be thankful for this as Edward’s alterations would probably have been far more substantial had he been able to afford it.
The last resident worth mentioning is Henry the Antiquary, 7th Bt, who inherited around the same time as Victoria came to the throne and whose reign at Canons Ashby broadly mirrored her own reign. He made copious notes and drawings about the house, while his daughter Alice chronicled life at Canons Ashby with her trusty camera, both of which actions have been a boon to the Trust’s proprietorship. Henry’s book room is an intellectual’s paradise, with his desk littered with instruments and drawing implements and the walls lined with books. It was also amusing to note that the cupboards below the bookshelves were used to house some of Henry’s gardening tools as he was a keen horticulturist.
Although Canons Ashby may not be the most striking property I have ever visited, it was a lovely place to spend a slightly gloomy morning in March. And it is clear that it has a certain ‘something’ about it. This was evident in the ample corps of volunteers who clearly love this place, and it meant that every room was accessible with no out-of-bounds closures. I was also a little surprised to find that the house was even open on a Monday in March, and when so many other houses are struggling to get room guides or staffing for longer opening periods, Canons Ashby appears to be doing much better, which is testament to its continuing staying power. Rising as it did from the rubble of a destroyed church, maybe the house is a little blessed?
Highlights: Drawing Room, Henry’s Book Room
Refreshments: Redbush tea and chocolate chip cookie; cheese and onion pasty
Purchase(s): Guidebook; ‘Apples Never Fall’ (Liane Moriarty), ‘The Last House on Needless Street (Catriona Ward), ‘Finders Keepers’ (Belinda Bauer), ‘The Paying Guests’ (Sarah Waters), all from the secondhand bookshop (and just when the to-be-read pile was coming down!)
Companion(s): Nigel
National Trust Challenge 