Bertram Arthur,
the 17th Earl of Shrewsbury died on August 10th 1856. There was no obvious male
heir to succeed him, but he had willed the succession of the earldom to Edmund
Howard, the son of the Duke of Norfolk. However, Henry John Chetwynd-Talbot,
from a distant branch of the family, contested the peerage. A lengthy case
ensued which Henry eventually won to become the 18th Earl in 1860. However,
although he would inherit the earldom and the Alton Towers estate, he was not
to be the inheritor of the great treasures that the house contained. The
ownership of these objects could not be contested, and the vast treasures,
collected by Bertram’s forbearers, would be sold by the executers of his will
in an auction conducted by Messrs Christie & Mason at Alton Towers. The
contents of the great house would take over a month to be auctioned one by one,
in a sale that began on Monday July 6th 1857, and finally concluded on Saturday
August 8th.
The
‘Catalogue of the Magnificent Contents of Alton Towers’ lists 3,981 items and
is a record and a glimpse of many of the great treasures that once adorned the
house. It took Messrs Christie & Mason six days alone, to sell the huge
collection of paintings, which adorned the Picture Gallery, as well as other
state rooms, such as the Plate Glass Drawing Room, Talbot Gallery, Long
Gallery, Octagon State Room, Music Room, Library and many others. These
paintings included many pieces by Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Rubens, Canaletti,
Caravaggio, Holbein, Rembrandt and Raffaelle to name but some. There were 708
paintings sold in total.
Other item
auctioned included a great collection of armour and weaponry that had filled
the armoury; sculpture and statutory, bronzes, marbles, porcelain, ornaments,
silverware, glassware, relics and the huge collection of furniture. Some of the
more unusual items included a waxworks collection, a piece of Mary Stuart’s
bedcurtain and a piece of wheel iron from Pompeii. Although many highly
personal ornaments from the former Earls’ private apartments were included,
some items escaped the sale, such as a rosary which had belonged to Mary Queen
of Scots and the alter from the Chapel. The trappings of a functioning estate
were also sold off including kitchenware, carriages, horses and the wines from
cellars. The collections of valuable plants from the conservatories were sold
in a separate auction, as were the books from the libraries.
Such a
collection, by modern standards would be priceless. The catalogue allows us to
imagine the house at its most magnificent in mid 1850s – an architectural
masterpiece inside and out, adorned with the lavish trappings of art,
furnishings and artifacts. This golden age of Alton Towers, would spread but a
few short years. Although the 18th Earl would gradually re-furnish the house,
it would not be with comparable treasures. The age of building, expansion and
adornment, funded from the immense wealth of particularly the 15th and 16th
Earls had ended.
© Dr Gary J.
Kelsall, 2007