ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW
ON Friday we went to see—oh! the palace of palaces! and yet a palace without crown, without coronet —but such expense! Such taste! Such profusion!’ So begins Horace Walpole’s enthusiastic description of Osterley Park, Middlesex, in a letter dated June 21, 1773, to his muse on domestic subjects, Anne, Countess of Upper Ossory.
Osterley had been acquired in 1562 by the Elizabethan founder of the Royal Exchange, Sir Thomas Gresham, and redeveloped by him as a grand courtyard house. What commanded Walpole’s admiration two centuries later, however, was not the Tudor building, but its complete overhaul by the vastly wealthy banking family, the Childs.
Walpole’s emphasis that this was a palace without a crown or coronet—in other words, that it was neither royal nor aristocratic—is significant. It was built instead with money from the City of London; as Walpole describes it, ‘a shop is the estate’. If title was the conventional adjunct of great wealth, Osterley represented something quite different: mercantile wealth as derived from Britain’s trading empire.
The unrivalled scale and reach of Britain’s trade was on display throughout the house, as Walpole noted: ‘Mrs Child’s dressing-room is full of pictures, gold filigree,