Country Houses Dan Cruickshank's Written in Stone

The story of the buildings of Ulster, is the story of the people

who have lived on this land and left their mark on its history.

And here, history has left us with a remarkable legacy of buildings,

from ancient forts and mighty castles,

to prestigious public buildings and grand country houses.

These historic buildings are windows into our past.

In this series, I'm going to explore some of the most remarkable

architecture of Ulster,

tell the stories of the people who created it,

and see how both buildings and people were shaped by history.

When King William III defeated James II in the early 1690s, a period

of relative peace returned to Ireland,

but a new, dominant society emerged.

One in which political and economic power was in the hands

of a minority of overwhelmingly Anglican landowners.

This was a country for men on the make.

Backed by laws which penalised Presbyterians and Catholics,

this Protestant elite got its hands on the confiscated

estates of defeated or exiled Gaelic landowners.

In Ulster, some of these landlords were getting wealthy by encouraging

an emerging linen industry.

They were turning the province into the most prosperous in Ireland.

Before long, these families wanted homes that reflected

their prestige and their wealth and their political power.

It was the age of the Protestant ascendancy,

and its main architectural expression was the country house.

These houses began to appear early in the 18th century,

and by mid-century, the Anglo-Irish were building obsessively.

After an era of conflict and land grabbing, the owners built

these houses to express their wealth and social aspirations, and to make

it clear that they were now part of the Irish landscape,

here to stay.

This is Springhill House, near Moneymore in County Londonderry.

One of the most attractive houses in Ulster.

The original construction dates back to the late 17th century,

when it was built by the Conyngham family.

They were settlers from Ayrshire in Scotland who moved to

Ulster during the plantation.

Now, the staircase is absolutely wonderful.

It is at the heart of the house built by Goodwill Conyngham,

and there he is, a portrait of Goodwill.

He married a Miss Anne Upton, from Templepatrick, and Goodwill

was obliged to build this house as part of their marriage contract.

This was a sort of prenuptial agreement which

he signed in 1680, and it obliged him,

"to erect a convenient dwelling house of lime and stone.

"Two stories high, with necessary office, houses, gardens

"and orchards."

This house was new built in 1689, but Goodwill Conyngham,

rather than staying here to look after his new home,

or indeed, after his new wife,

rushed to Derry to help with its defence during the Great Siege.

And in the house is a remarkable memento of that siege,

it's this gun.

This gun was used from the ramparts of Derry, helping in its defence.

An incredible piece, the barrel, I should say,

dates from the siege.

The rest of the gun was rebuilt in the early 19th century,

the percussion cap here would have been a flintlock originally,

but the barrel is sensational.

Look at it, it is so beautiful.

And it is a long gun, which means, that for the time -

it's a smoothbore -

but, for the time, it would have been very accurate indeed,

somebody would have been on the wall at Derry using this piece to

snipe at the attackers.

It's an incredible piece,

a real monument in this house to the,

I suppose, Protestant ascendancy

after the successful defence of Derry.

Goodwill Conyngham became a member of King William's Supreme Council.

The Conynghams, or members of the Protestant ascendancy,

welcomed the peace and political stability that came after 1690.

It brought them security,

security to acquire and develop estates

they already owned, for themselves and their descendants.

So that houses like this, Springhill, in the 18th century

developed from modest affairs into things altogether more palatial.

Two splendid new wings were added when the house was extended in 1765.

These days, Springhill is cared for by the National Trust,

and Melanie Marsh is the house steward.

Well, this room is very different to the main body of the house,

it's lighter, and this, of course, is one of the wings added

in about 1765 by William,

who was the grandson of the builder of the house?

Yes, that's right.

Tell me about him, the third William, William the grandson.

-Yes, we actually know him as Fashionable William...

-Ah.

..and we have a portrait of him just over here in the centre.

It's this gentleman here, yes.

So, what sort of character was he, he looks like he is in regimental...

so he was a military man?

Yes, he was a military man, he was involved in the Seven Years War,

and he also spent a lot of time travelling around Europe, as well,

which is how we give him the nickname Fashionable William,

he loved the grand tours of Europe, and he didn't really want to

come back to Springhill, so these additions to the house

were his way of making it suitable for his lifestyle.

And that is the point, these wings make the house larger,

look grander, and also more fashionable.

This is the sort of drawing room one would get in, I suppose,

in a London house, or in an English country house.

With this wonderful bay window,

looking towards the entrance drive, this expresses his aspirations,

bigger space, bigger house, grander rooms for entertaining.

Of course, this is only one of the wings, I mean, is it paired up with

one on the other side of the house that looks the same from outside?

The other one contained another bedroom

and what was possibly a library,

and then above the top of that

would have been the day and night nursery.

Although William never had children, he did actually marry,

and he married a lady called Jean Hamilton.

Her dress is actually here on the bed, here at Springhill,

and also one from her daughter, Jenny Hamilton, who was, ironically,

later on also to become the mistress of Springhill.

-How fascinating, so he inherited these stepdaughters through the marriage?

-Yes, yes.

And this is the dress of the wife?

-And one of the daughters.

-Yes.

Now tell me a little more about the daughter.

Jenny Hamilton and her three sisters lived up at Derry, they were

sent by Fashionable William, their stepfather, to live with his sister,

Anne, and the idea behind that was that they would find suitable

husbands, not being many available here in Moneymore.

Fashionable William was extravagant, and his relationship

with his father, George, was somewhat troubled as a result.

Yes, and here's the portrait.

What an alarming character! Very disapproving.

Not at all like Fashionable William.

It was actually Fashionable William who got into such debt of a few

thousand, when the estate was only making a few hundred a year,

so, obviously very disapproving of his son's activities

and was writing to him continuously, imploring him

to come back to Springhill, which he did eventually in his 50s.

This family history offers a rather fascinating portrait of the

Protestant ascendancy in Ulster.

His father builds a house in the 1680s,

lays down the roots of the family here.

He, George, builds on that,

and his son, Fashionable William, squanders it, to a degree.

He doesn't really want to be here - spend, spend, spend.

Fashionable William was known for his extravagant spending

which his father despaired of.

He did intend to settle in the end,

he just wasn't for doing it for a long period of his life, really.

DAN LAUGHS

Fashionable William married late and never fathered an heir,

so the house eventually passed to his sister's son, George Lenox,

who adopted the name Lenox-Conyngham.

Like the house's builder, George was also a military man,

and Springhill's military associations would continue.

In the 20th century,

it became a focus of activity for the UVF during the Home Rule crisis.

The Lenox-Conyngham family lived here until 1957,

when they bequeathed the house to the National Trust.

This is Rosemount House,

built by another Scottish family at Greyabbey, in County Down,

on a beautiful site overlooking Strangford Lough.

In the early 17th century,

this estate was part of a huge swathe of land acquired by

Hugh Montgomery,

a soldier of fortune who had prospered under King James I.

But these good times were not to last.

The Montgomerys fell foul of Oliver Cromwell when they declared

their allegiance to Charles II after the end of the Civil War in England.

This was a near disaster.

In December 1649, Parliamentary forces crushed

opposition in Ireland, and the Montgomerys were

driven into debt and obliged to sell vast tracts of their lands.

The burden of debt would haunt the family into the next century.

The Rosemount estate was part of the property

sold by the Montgomerys, but it stayed in the family's hands,

because it was bought by a cousin, William Montgomery.

It is his descendants who live in the house today.

So good to see you.

Very nice to see you.

I say, what a wonderful staircase this is.

Well, I absolutely love it, it just seems to float here in the hall.

The staircase is from, I suppose, the second or third house on the site?

-The third house, yes.

-Third, right.

And probably dates a little bit later -

that house was built in 1762,

but, as we will see, the house was altered at the end of that...

Ah, right. Who designed it? Do you know?

We just don't know, I think it was probably

a combination of William Montgomery, who was the builder...

He was the builder, oh, now,

here we see William Montgomery now, looking...

oh, this is rather famous, he's got this sort of letter which was

meant to have been some kind of bill...

The final account from the builder, yes,

hence his slightly less than happy look.

So, can you tell me more about William?

Well, he was quite a figure in this part of the county,

he was MP for Hillsborough,

and he was also a Justice of the Peace.

He also, at that time, still owned estates in Scotland where

what's now Portpatrick was called Port Montgomery.

I'm intrigued, too, by the house that was created,

either by him, or certainly under

his control in the 1760s, it's a fine piece of work for that period.

I think what is interesting,

is that he was almost certainly his own architect,

but, what we do see is that the house evolved, I am quite sure

that this room looked very different when it was first decorated.

Dan, you can see what I was talking about when I said

how very different the flavour of this room is to the dining room,

where you have got this very typical Irish, mid-18th century plasterwork.

The family tradition is, they had a house in Dublin

and they brought the stuccodores from Dublin to carry out this work.

So, the house evolves during the second half of the 18th century,

as different members of the family are in control.

I mean, what happens after the time of William the builder?

William the builder's son, elder son, was another William,

and he was killed towards the end of the American War of Independence.

Rather strangely, on the other side, was another Montgomery,

also from this area, who became a general in Washington's army,

who died in a failed attempt to capture Quebec from the British.

-They both died?

-Yes.

-On different sides. They were cousins.

And Richard was always known in my family as the rebel general,

while in America, of course, he's a great national hero.

You get a Montgomery County in every state in America,

all called after him.

-And all related, ultimately, to this house and bit of land.

-Yes.

At the top of the main staircase is a wonderful print marking

the death in 1776 of cousin Richard during a failed

attack on British forces in Quebec.

This Montgomery would become one of America's first national heroes,

while William Montgomery, the heir of Rosemount,

slipped quietly into obscurity.

After William's death in 1781, the house passed to his brother,

the Reverend Hugh Montgomery.

He made many improvements to the house when he married

Emilia Ward, the daughter of the 1st Viscount of Bangor.

Hugh encouraged his new bride to make Rosemount her own.

The happy marriage, the union of two significant Anglo-Irish families,

found a magical expression here

in the gothic marriage room

that the young couple created together.

In the late 18th century, the gothic carried certain associations.

It was cultured, romantic, but also a whiff of decadence.

This was expressed mostly through the gothic novel,

but also through architecture.

So, rooms like this were no simple mute essays on interior decoration.

They spoke of freedom from convention, of liberty, of sensuality.

Hugh and Emilia were happy together here at Rosemount,

but outside these walls, Ulster was in turmoil.

The closing decades of the 18th century were

marked by political crisis.

There was Revolution in France, and here in Ireland, a great desire for

political reform and social change, culminating in the Rebellion of 1798.

As the United Irishmen took up arms to break the connection with Britain,

there was fighting in the towns and villages close to this estate.

Although not a United Irishman, Hugh Montgomery was considered as worthy

of suspicion by at least one powerful Government figure - Robert Stuart.

Stuart, one of Hugh Montgomery's neighbours,

was given the task of putting down the Rebellion.

There were executions in this area.

A Presbyterian minister was

hanged near the walls of Greyabbey Meeting House...

..just a short walk from Rosemount House.

Though he took no active part in the Rebellion,

the shadow of suspicion hung over Hugh Montgomery.

Such suspicions may well have been confirmed two years later,

when, in 1800, Montgomery refused to support the Act of Union that

created the United Kingdom and swept away the Irish Parliament.

That action could have caused great trouble for Montgomery,

but, despite having a powerful enemy as a neighbour, Robert Stuart,

the future Foreign Secretary, Montgomery lived out his days

here at Rosemount in peace,

dying, as this monument tells us, at the age of 61 in 1815.

But the Act of Union would have a profound and often devastating

impact on the lives and fortunes of many of Ulster's landed gentry.

Among them was the ambitious but ill-fated Armar Lowry-Corry,

the 1st Earl Belmore,

whose estates were here in County Fermanagh.

Lowry-Corry's intriguing tale is linked to this remarkable house,

Castle Coole.

This is a statement, a declaration in stone of wealth,

taste and political power.

This house says, "The family is here to stay."

This is the ancestral home, the palace,

of an Irish political dynasty.

It's magnificent.

It represents a golden age of Ulster's Protestant ascendancy.

But I can't help thinking that Lowry-Corry was tempting fate.

This is Armar Lowry-Corry, the creator of Castle Coole.

Painted in the 1780s, I should think,

shown in somewhat casual attire, dressed for riding.

There's his riding crop.

Gosh, he looks confident and pleased with himself.

He'd have inherited his father's seat as MP for County Tyrone

in the Irish Parliament in Dublin.

A position of great value for any Irish landowning family,

it brought prestige, power, influence and, with a bit of luck,

wealth and titles for the family itself.

Lowry-Corry also sought advancement through marriage.

But he was to suffer more than his share of bad luck.

In 1772, he married the aristocratic Lady Margaret Butler.

But she died just three years later,

and so two more marriages were to follow.

Splendid painted portraits of the first wife and of the third wife are

displayed in the drawing room, but not a portrait of the second wife.

However, hidden away within Castle Coole is this lovely drawing of her.

Look at that.

Lady Harriet Hobart.

Drawn, this is dated here, in 1780 in Dublin.

The very year she married Armar.

And before that year was over, 1780, she'd absconded with another man.

That, of course, explains why there isn't a portrait of her painted

and hanging on the wall.

She wasn't around long enough to be painted.

Lady Harriet seemed the perfect match for his ambitions.

That marriage brought him the title Lord Belmore and her English

aristocratic connections should have secured his future.

But her scandalous affair left Belmore distracted.

The present Lord Belmore has his own theories about why

their relationship unravelled in such a spectacular way.

It was an arranged marriage, but she ran off with Lord Ancram and it

caused a great scandal at the time, and they had to seek a divorce,

which in those days meant having your friends

-push an Act of Parliament through.

-That's an astonishing thing.

So the second marriage, this power marriage, didn't work,

it falls apart, but then, I suppose rather amazingly,

as all that happens, he concentrates on the construction of this house,

-he goes ahead with it as a sort of therapy, I suppose?

-Yes.

The great thing about Armar, who built the house,

was that you could say he got it right.

Everyone knows that this house was built as a monument to good taste.

Of course, the quality of the house is astonishing, the design,

the materials, the execution all outstanding,

and of course the Portland stone that faced it was brought all

the way here from the south of England.

It must have cost your ancestor a fortune.

Yes, I think he did his calculations quite well at the beginning, but

like all ambitious building projects, it just went out of control.

Expense was no concern for Belmore.

He chartered a brig to bring Portland stone from Dorset

and constructed a quay at Ballyshannon to ferry it up the Erne.

Castle Coole was the work of two architects.

The first, Irishman Richard Johnston,

who conceived the plan for the house and its arrangement of rooms.

But he was dismissed in favour of the leading English

architect of the times, James Wyatt.

The house is considered one of Wyatt's neo-classical masterpieces.

What's interesting is to look at the Johnston elevation,

this is of the side of the house with the big bow window in the middle,

this is really much as built, isn't it?

Yes, I think under Johnston's plan it was a much softer

building on the eye.

Wyatt was brought in as a very fashionable English architect

to really firm up on Johnston's plans.

You see here the Wyatt version of the same designs.

Wyatt takes the design by Johnston

but he tricks it out with fashionable neo-classical details.

It's possible to see it very much as a transplant from England,

fashionable English architect, in the neo-classical manner.

There's a fusion, isn't there?

Because there are these particular Irish characteristics.

Indeed, the big bay on the centre of this elevation is an Irish idea.

This magnificent house would be a wonderfully Irish affair, a brilliant

mix of fashionable neo-classical design with distinctly Irish

elegance and details,

Such as the staircase, rising magically through space

and light to a generous top-lit hall, an Irish speciality.

And at the top of the staircase, in this somewhat shady colonnade,

lurks a surprise through these doors.

A wonderful explosion, unexpected, of space and light.

These vestibules on the first-floor staircases are something

peculiar to Irish country houses.

This is a typically Irish space, realised by James Wyatt

and inspired by the atriums of Roman houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The breathtaking achievement of Castle Coole reflected

Belmore's status and his confidence in his own political future.

But all that was to change

when the Act of Union did away with the Irish Parliament.

Lord Belmore borrowed heavily to complete Castle Coole

and to further his influence in the Irish Parliament.

And then, in 1800, at the stroke of a pen, all was over,

and his influence and his fortune greatly decreased.

The consequences for the Earl were, well, catastrophic.

He became ill, retired to England and died in 1802,

before he had the chance to live in the wonderful house he'd created.

Lord Belmore died in debt, to the tune of £133,000,

a fortune at the time,

70,000 of which he'd spent on this house.

His son Somerset, the 2nd Earl, had little understanding

of the catastrophic reversal of their fortunes after the Act of Union.

He continued to spend lavishly on furnishing the house,

virtually bankrupting the family.

These houses are a testament to the political ambitions, to the ideals

and the struggles of the families that built them and lived in them.

And now, even if reduced in number,

they are Ulster's architectural jewel.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd