There would be difficulty in citing a sale to which the interest of ‘ancestrality’ attached in such peculiar degree as to that of part of the Townshend heirlooms, dispersed at Christie’s on March 3–7. Onward from the great days of the Armada, ancestors of the Marquess of Townshend [sic] have had their names enrolled, as admirals, soldiers, statesmen, courtiers, in the pages of English history. A malign fate decreed, however, that pictorial effigies of many of these Townshends, of those who had fought under or been associated with them, cups out of which centuries ago they had drunk, should be submitted for public competition on the ‘auction or outcry – who-bids-most’ system. One recompense there was: the pedigree of the various objects had a very definite money-equivalent.¹

Over the course of four days in early March 1904 a major collection of paintings, silver and furnishings from Raynham Hall, Norfolk, were auctioned at Christie’s, London, on behalf of the 6th Marquess Townshend (fig. 1). By the early decades of the eighteenth century the Townshends were already established as among the most ambitious aristocratic families in Britain, accruing political power, possessions and estates at a local and national level. By the late 1780s the Townshend dynasty had achieved its apogee, when George Townshend, a professional soldier and politician, was created 1st Marquess Townshend. Within a decade, however, the first of a series of misfortunes occurred when, in 1796, Lord Townshend’s son Charles was shot dead by his own brother, who was subsequently declared insane. During the nineteenth century the family was embroiled increasingly in scandal and fell financially on hard times, a demise which led to the Townshend Heirlooms sale of 1904. Although the financial crisis which led to the sale of 1904 was common enough among the British landed aristocracy at the time, due principally to the crash in land values and related income, the circumstances surrounding this sale, the cast of characters involved and its aftermath were extraordinary, not to say bizarre. It is the story of the events leading up to the sale, the auction itself and its aftermath which forms the substance of this essay.

Upon the death of George, 1st Marquess Townshend, in 1807 the title passed to his eldest son, George, Lord Ferrers (1753–1811), who had also inherited the title of the Earl of Leicester. In 1811, aged fifty-eight, the 2nd Marquess died suddenly and was succeeded in turn by his elder son, George (1778–1855). By this time, Lord Townshend had been mired in scandal as the result of an alleged homosexual affair.² On the death of the 3rd Marquess in 1855, the title passed to a cousin, John Townshend, son of Lord John Townshend, who had himself been the younger son of the 1st Marquess. In 1863, John, 4th Marquess Townshend, died at Raynham Hall in a riding accident. He was succeeded to the title by his son, John Villiers Stuart Townshend, 5th Marquess Townshend, who in 1865 married Lady Anne Clementina Duff, the daughter of James Duff, 5th Earl of Fife. The following year, in 1866, Lady Townshend gave birth to a son and heir, John James Dudley Stuart Townshend – the central character in the present narrative (fig. 2).

In 1887, aged twenty-one, John Townshend, Viscount Raynham, attained his majority and became a life tenant of the family estates. Under a resettlement of 7 February 1888, he also acquired a large number of heirlooms located at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, and Balls Park, Hertfordshire. By the early 1890s the family’s estates were heavily mortgaged and in 1895 were placed in the hands of a receiver. In order to reduce the level of debt, estates in Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Hertfordshire had been sold to pay off encumbrances, and only the estate at Raynham remained. In 1899 following the death of his father, Viscount Raynham succeeded as 6th Marquess Townshend. As it was reported a few years later, Lord Townshend relied at that time on an annual income of around £100 derived from the rent paid by the tenant of Raynham Hall, plus a further £100 provided by his trustees, and a ‘voluntary allowance’ from his mother, the Marchioness.³

At his death, the 5th Marquess Townshend had left no property, except, it was noted, ‘some valuable china and other chattels; and these the executor retained against his debt, with the intention of settling them on the family as heirlooms on the same trusts as those in the resettlement affecting the heirlooms thereby settled. Lord St Levan carried out this intention by a deed poll dated June 21, 1900’.⁴ A few years later, in February 1903, following the appointment of new trustees, a further deed of settlement was signed by Lord Townshend, in which the pictures at Raynham Hall were introduced as heirlooms. According to the terms set out in the Settled Land Act of 1882, Lord Townshend, as a life tenant, was entitled to raise capital through the sale of ‘chattels’ or heirlooms.⁵ Given that the Townshend estates were heavily mortgaged and properties were let out to tenants, the sale of family heirlooms, notably the pictures, was one of the few means of raising revenue. However, in order to expedite the sale, a court order was necessary. Accordingly, on 7 December 1903 an application was put before the Court of Chancery to sell heirlooms, including pictures, furniture and silver plate. Lord Townshend’s barrister, who enumerated the considerable debts with which the estates were burdened, noted also that Townshend’s present meagre income even meant that he was ‘in an impecunious position and unable to marry’ or produce an heir. As the judge admitted, ‘it appears impossible to me that both the Raynham estate and the heirlooms can possibly be preserved. Something has to go.’⁶ Ruling in Lord Townshend’s favour, he concluded that he ‘came to the Court for relief through no fault of his own, and it was desirable that a person with a title such as he held should be able to keep it up with fitting dignity. Under the circumstances he . . . would permit the heirlooms to be sold by auction.’⁷

Among the heirlooms at Raynham Hall mentioned in the application were about four hundred pictures, ‘some having been there for generations’. It was proposed now to sell the most valuable pictures, for an estimated £20,000, leaving about two hundred pictures at Raynham. In the course of the court application there was one dissenting voice, that of Colonel Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend (fig. 3), Lord Townshend’s second cousin, and heir presumptive, who would have succeeded to the title and estates should the 6th Marquess have died without male issue. While Colonel Townshend did not oppose the sale of family furniture or silver plate, he filed an affidavit in which he expressed ‘a very strong objection to the sale of any portraits of members of the Townshend family, or of persons possessing for historical or political reasons any close connections with or interest to the family’.⁸ The judge, in rejecting his plea, observed that, despite Colonel Townshend’s protestations, ‘it does not appear . . . that there is any particular picture he has any affection for, or that he really knows anything about them.’ Also, unlike the impoverished, unmarried Marquess, he had married the daughter of ‘a man of large wealth’ and were he eventually to inherit the Townshend estates his father-in-law would provide him with an allowance.⁹ The wealth of Colonel Townshend’s father-in-law, as it transpired, proved a significant factor in the trajectory of the ensuing auction.

In order to understand the highly personal circumstances surrounding the 1904 Townshend heirlooms sale it is necessary to track back to the early years of John, 6th Marquess Townshend. His father John, the 5th Marquess, had been a larger than life figure, a noted philanthropist and somewhat eccentric social reformer, characterised in a cartoon of 1870 as ‘The Beggar’s friend’, owing to his espousal of a range of liberal causes directed towards the welfare of the poor.¹⁰ He appeared to have been less interested in his own offspring, and his son’s upbringing was deeply troubled. When he was eight years old, Viscount Raynham’s mother ran off with a notorious old philanderer, Lord Edward Thynne. During his early years Viscount Raynham had spent time at Raynham Hall and the family’s other country residence, Balls Park in Hertfordshire, although in later years, when his parents moved to Paris, Raynham and his younger sister were farmed out to relatives, including their uncle, John Townshend St Aubyn, 2nd Baron St Levan, at St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, and their grandfather, the Earl of Fife. Of restricted physical growth and mentally frail, Viscount Raynham was, aged seventeen, placed at St Mark’s College, Chelsea, a religious institution, founded by the National Society for Promoting Religious Education. At the time he was lodging in Chiswick with a certain Reverend Kitcat.¹¹ It was around 1892, while staying with Kitcat, that he met Arthur Geoffrey Robins, then an assistant clergyman at the church of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street.¹² Robins was to have a profound impact on Lord Raynham’s future life and fortunes, and it was he who ultimately masterminded the sale of the Townshend heirlooms.

Arthur Geoffrey Robins was born in 1860, the son of the Reverend Arthur Robins, a well-respected cleric, who was chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria and chaplain to the Prince of Wales and the Household Guards. A colourful character, who penned popular fiction as a hobby, Robins was known affectionately during his time as rector of Holy Trinity, Windsor, as the ‘Soldier’s Bishop’. He was also the son of the legendary London art dealer and auctioneer George Henry Robins, whose sales had included the auction over twenty-three days of the celebrated contents of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in 1842 by the Earl of Waldegrave. A compulsive interest in selling art and the financial rewards which could accrue from it were traits inherited by his grandson, Arthur Geoffrey Robins.

During the mid-1890s the young Viscount Raynham became increasingly dependent on the Reverend Robins whom he looked up to for advice and friendship. Lord Townshend’s future wife, who met Robins for the first time shortly after the Heirlooms sale, remembered him as ‘a slim, dark, aesthetic looking individual, with strange and compelling eyes. His manners were excellent, but when he smiled an unusual turn of the lip indicated hidden depths, which one sensed might easily become dangerous.’¹³ In 1895 Robins, married with a wife and two small children, was appointed vicar at the church of St Barnabas, Leeds. According to Robins, it was at the suggestion of Mrs Frances Cashel Hoey, a friend of Lady Townshend, that Viscount Raynham came to live with him, although Viscount Raynham recalled that it had been Robins’s own idea.¹⁴ At that time Viscount Raynham’s income was composed of an allowance of £500 from his mother, the Marchioness Townshend, and £200 from his executor, Lord St Levan. Crucially, it was shortly after moving to Leeds that Robins entered into an agreement of employment with Viscount Raynham, who paid him an annual salary of £250 in return for which he supplied his various needs.¹⁵ Between 1897 and 1899, Lord Raynham’s allowances were channelled systematically into Robins’s bank account – a practice which intensified over the next few years, as Robins strengthened his grip on all aspects of the young Viscount’s life.

On 6 October 1899 the 5th Marquess Townshend died in Paris, aged sixty-eight. The body was taken back to England and interred in the family vault at All Saint’s Church, Hertford, with Viscount Raynham, his mother and sister, and other members of the family in attendance. On 17 November, Viscount Raynham assumed the title of the 6th Marquess Townshend. By this time Raynham Hall was let out to tenants, as was Balls Park, which was purchased by the Faudel-Phillips family of bankers outright in 1901. Although Lord Townshend could not reside at Raynham Hall, he moved back to the estate, when in March 1900 he appointed Arthur Robins as his personal chaplain, and presented him with the living of East and West Raynham, which came with a healthy income of £800 per annum.¹⁶ Lord Townshend duly took up residence at the rectory at West Raynham, alongside Robins, his wife and young family. The church at West Raynham was by now a ruin, and St Mary, East Raynham – situated a stone’s throw from Raynham Hall – functioned as the church for both parishes. At this time Lord Townshend and Robins began to make frequent forays to Raynham Hall (fig. 4) and in the course of his explorations, Robins’s interest in the collection was piqued as he became increasingly familiar with the pictures, china, plate and furnishings. Although Robins later denied that he had even been a picture dealer, he confessed that he was ‘picture “mad”’.¹⁷ As Lord Townshend’s future wife recalled, the ‘Robins establishment was run on Bohemian lines, and displayed one marked characteristic – a frenzied interest in the treasures at Raynham’.¹⁸

Life in the purlieu of Raynham Hall came to an end abruptly in 1901, due to a scandal involving a liaison between Robins and a young woman named Frances Ridsdale, whose father was vicar at the nearby parish of St Martin’s, South Raynham, and who was related to Lord Townshend through her maternal grandmother.¹⁹ As a result, Robins resigned his living, and although Lord Townshend attempted to have him reinstated the Bishop of Norwich refused his request. Robins therefore relinquished his clerical position by taking advantage of the Clerical Disabilities Act.²⁰ In November 1901 Lord Townshend left West Raynham, renting a house at Westover, Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. There he lived with Robins, his wife and children, including a new arrival, Robins’s fourth child, Arthur Prichard Townshend Robins.²¹ They were also accompanied by Frances Ridsdale, although her status in the household remains uncertain.²²

By now Robins had no means of employment other than remuneration for services rendered to Lord Townshend. His energies thenceforth were concentrated on raising money through the private sale of items from Lord Townshend’s collection. They included, in the first instance, a large quantity of china stored in a locked room at Raynham Hall, including ‘vases, jars, crested plates, and dinner and breakfast sets’, which Robins and Lord Townshend viewed for the first time around June 1900. As Lord Townshend recalled: ‘The door of the china room at Raynham had a notice painted on it stating that the contents were the property of the Marquis Townshend’.²³ China was also removed from Balls Park (fig. 5) prior to the sale of the house in 1901 and, together with the pieces from Raynham Hall, was deposited at the rectory at West Raynham, where it was put on display on the billiard table for inspection by local dealers who purchased it cash-in-hand.²⁴ Those pieces which remained unsold were transported to the south coast, where they were sold by Robins to dealers in and around Brighton. As Lord Townshend himself stated subsequently, he had ‘remonstrated with Robins about the quantity of china taken away by the dealers, but the reply was that these things were of no use . . . that they were better sold and that he must consider others in the matter, meaning . . . Robins himself’.²⁵ As it transpired, the china constituted part of the heirlooms settlement, and as such could not be simply disposed of without a court order, a fact which Robins chose to overlook.²⁶

In addition to organising and profiting from the sale of items from the Townshend collection, Robins became embroiled in schemes to find Lord Townshend a wife. It was with this aim in mind that he organised a trip to America in the spring of 1902, intending to ensnare a wealthy heiress who, in exchange for a title, might inject some much-needed funds into the Townshend coffers. Subsequent newspaper reports of the trip contained lurid accounts of Robins’s quest to acquire powers of mesmerism in order to hypnotise Lord Townshend into doing his Svengali-like bidding. Robins himself claimed that he had merely consulted a couple of clairvoyants while in Chicago and in New York, and the so-called mesmerism of which he was accused involved little more than an attempt to provide Lord Townshend with ‘breathing exercises’.²⁷ In the event, the trip to America proved fruitless, although on their return to England Robins introduced Lord Townshend to an exotic widow named Evelyn Diana Tourner Sheffield, to whom Lord Townshend made a formal proposal of marriage in September 1903. However, as was revealed early in 1905, when she took Lord Townshend to court for breach of promise, Mrs Sheffield, the daughter of a Southampton publican, who had herself come to London as a barmaid, was far less exotic or wealthy than she claimed to be.²⁸ Although Robins’s plans to find Lord Townshend a wife stalled, in the intervening period he became deeply involved in monetising the Townshend collection, beyond the revenue he had obtained through the sale of the family china. To this end, in February 1903 he persuaded Lord Townshend to appoint him, together with a solicitor, John Abercrombie Holdsworth, as his executor and trustee.²⁹ With these new powers Robins was now, as he himself later noted, in a position to advise that certain family heirlooms should be sold to assist in paying off debts on the Townshend estates.³⁰ Approval was duly granted via the court order of December 1903.

The public auctions of heirlooms from Raynham Hall commenced at Christie’s on Thursday 3 March 1904 with a sale of silver and silver-gilt plate, which went for a total of £4350. The main attraction was the so-called Bacon Cup dating from 1574, engraved with the arms and motto of Sir Nicholas Bacon (1509–1576), first Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I. The cup, which had passed through marriage from Bacon’s granddaughter to the Townshend family, sold for £2500.³¹ Among other items was a silver-gilt christening cup presented by George I to his godson George, later 1st Marquess Townshend (1724–1807), and another presented by George II, to the 1st Marquess’s son, Lord John Townshend (1757–1833).³² Following a sale of furniture on Friday 5 March, the principal heirlooms sale took place at 1 p.m. on Saturday 5 and Monday 7 March, ‘comprising important pictures by Old Masters and family portraits’.³³ When the sale of pictures had first been flagged up in the press in December 1903, The Times opined that the greater part of the collection ‘may be taken to consist of old family portraits, which possess little attraction (except to Americans on the look-out for ancestors), and for the most part possess a wooden similarity, which renders them anything but pleasant to live with’. It did concede, however, that it included ‘some important and many highly-interesting pictures, more particularly portraits’.³⁴ As it transpired, the sale proved to be very popular, and during the two days leading up to it, the pictures were inspected by ‘many persons interested in art, including Lord Rosebery, Lord Ribblesdale, and other well-known connoisseurs’. And on the first day of the sale itself, Christie’s ‘great room was far too small to accommodate the crowd who were desirous of participating in the proceedings’.³⁵

Over the course of the two days 196 works of art featured in the Townshend heirlooms sale, the majority being family portraits, with a smattering of Dutch landscapes and genre pictures. The only old-master painting of real distinction was Belisarius by Salvator Rosa, from the 1650s, which had been presented by Friedrich William I, King of Prussia to Charles, 2nd Viscount Townsend as a diplomatic gift. The picture had taken pride of place at Raynham Hall (fig. 6) since its arrival in the 1720s, when it was installed in an extravagant frame as a centre-piece in the spacious double-storey dining room designed by William Kent, which itself became known as the ‘Belisarius Chamber’. Celebrated as a paradigm of the ‘heroic sublime’, Rosa’s image was valued both as a pictorial icon and in financial terms, being valued in an inventory of 1810 at £5000.³⁶ Despite its renown, Belisarius sold in 1904 for only £273.³⁷ Its low sale value was a barometer of how taste had changed over the latter part of the nineteenth century, by which time the international art market had become captivated by British eighteenth-century portraiture, of which Raynham boasted many fine examples.

By some way the most expensive painting in the Townshend heirlooms sale was a modest head-and-shoulders portrait by George Romney of Georgiana Anne, Lady Townshend, wife of Lord John Townshend and great-grandmother of the 6th Marquess, which sold for £3307 10s (fig. 7).³⁸ As The Times commented, the price fetched by this one portrait was ‘more than Romney earned at portraiture in any one of his best and most productive years’.³⁹ Other eighteenth-century British portrait painters featured prominently in terms of prices in the Townshend sale. They included Thomas Gainsborough, whose late portrait of the young Robert Adair, which had apparently been discovered hanging on a nail in ‘one of the neglected garrets’ at Raynham, fetched £2000.⁴⁰ John Hoppner’s head-and-shoulders ‘Portrait of a Lady’ was sold for £1417, despite the identity of the sitter being unknown.⁴¹ The sums fetched by both these portraits indicates the extent to which even relatively minor British portraits were prized by collectors, provided that they had a ‘decorative’ quality and aristocratic provenance. One British picture which sold for a lesser amount, although of far greater historical significance and quality, was Hogarth’s portrait of the actor James Quin, which had been in the collection of the 5th Marquess Townshend since 1867, although its precise date of acquisition is unknown.⁴² Purchased by Agnew for £756, it was sold on at cost price to the National Gallery: ‘a gem from the Townshend collection purchased for the nation’ (fig. 8).⁴³

The British artist who attracted the greatest attention, however, was Joshua Reynolds, who had captured, through a series of Grand Manner portraits, the power and prestige of Townshend dynasty in its prime.⁴⁴ Works by Reynolds in the sale included, notably, the full-length portrait of George, 4th Viscount and 1st Marquess Townshend, in armour, of about 1778 (fig. 9), the full-length of his younger brother, Charles Townshend, in the robes of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, painted about ten years earlier, and the flamboyant full-length of George, Lord Ferrers, son of the 1st Marquess, dressed in the uniform of the 15th King’s Light Dragoons, which Reynolds had exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1775.⁴⁵ One other major full-length by Reynolds flagged up before the sale was the portrait of Anne, Marchioness Townshend, wife of the 1st Marquess – ‘perhaps the most important of all’, according to The Times.⁴⁶ However, as it transpired, the painting, together with another by Reynolds previously at Balls Park, had ‘mysteriously disappeared within the last three or four years’.⁴⁷ Concern over the ‘missing’ picture was reflected in press comment in various newspapers, together with a reward of £100 for information leading to its whereabouts, placed by Robins’s solicitor in the The Daily Chronicle.⁴⁸ In fact, unbeknown to Robins, the painting had been sold in 1877 by another branch of the family to the art dealer Henry Graves, and by the time its ‘disappearance’ was discovered, it was installed in a country house collection in Lancashire.⁴⁹ It re-emerged at auction in the late 1920s and found its way to California, where it was subsequently donated to the De Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco.⁵⁰ What purported to be an associated version in pastels by Reynolds of the full-length oil portrait was featured in the 1904 sale, fetching just over a thousand pounds. It is more likely, however, to have been a copy by another artist.⁵¹

In terms of the quantity of Townshend family portraits offered at the 1904 sale, a significant proportion was composed of seventeenth-century formal and official portraits, including Horatio, 1st Viscount Townshend by Peter Lely (fig. 10) and Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend by Kneller.⁵² Also by Kneller was the full-length portrait of Elizabeth Pelham, first wife of the 2nd Viscount.⁵³ Beyond the portraits of the Townshends and their relations, the sale included the series of full-length military portraits, known as the ‘Vere Captains’, commissioned by Horace Vere, Baron Vere of Tilbury, a number of which had been exhibited by the 5th Marquess at the Royal Academy as recently as 1890.⁵⁴ The portraits which had decorated the Red Saloon at Raynham Hall, following the remodelling of the interior by William Kent in the early decades of the eighteenth century, form the subject of a case study by Edward Town in the current project.

Inevitably, given the prominent position of the Townshends at court, the sale boasted a number of royal portraits, including full-lengths of Queen Anne and Queen Caroline by Kneller, James II, also by Kneller, his first wife, Anne Hyde, by Lely, and a full-length of George II by Charles Jarvis.⁵⁵ Of greater art-historical significance, however, were two earlier portraits of Charles II as a boy (fig. 11) and his sister, Princess Mary. In the sale they were attributed to Daniel Mytens, and the portrait of Princess Mary was identified incorrectly as Princess Henrietta. As The Times noted: ‘If the names of the personages are correct, it is difficult to see how these very fine portraits could have been painted by Mytens, who is known to have returned to Holland about 1630 and died there about 1642; they are distinctly suggestive of Vandyck, but he died in 1641’.⁵⁶ The Art Journal also rejected the Mytens attribution, stating confidently that they were by Justus Sustermans.⁵⁷ Despite questions concerning their authorship, their quality was reflected in the prices they fetched at the auction, purchased respectively for £483 and £535 by Agnew’s and sold to the banker Robert Henry Benson. A few years ago, in December 2018, the pictures, having descended through the Benson family, were sold by Sotheby’s, now attributed correctly to Van Dyck, for £2,620,000 and £790,000.⁵⁸

The total sum raised in the two days of picture sales of the Townshend Heirlooms was £35,943, plus £4307 13 s 1d at the silver sale, and £722 18s 6d obtained for the furniture. In terms of the financial benefits that accrued to Lord Townshend, the sales had proved a great success for the auctioneer, almost doubling the pre-sale estimate of around £20,000. Yet there were differing views concerning its merits in terms of national heritage assets. Just prior to the auction The Times stated: ‘The predominant feeling, as one looks at this interesting assemblage of historical portraits, is one of regret that they are to leave their old home and to be scattered all over the world. At Raynham, they meant a great deal; they were the authentic illustrations of a great historic past, of the men of one family who through many generations had done noteworthy services to their country’.⁵⁹ In contrast, The Spectator, in an up-beat article published immediately after the auction, argued that such sales were ‘very largely only a means of circulating these treasures, and of their removal from one setting to another’. It continued:

While a certain percentage is lost, or goes abroad, the order and tranquillity of English society tend to attract and retain precious possessions. They settle here on their way down the river of time, as gold settles in the quiet eddies of some auriferous stream. This must continue so long as the United Kingdom is the chosen home and retreat, not only of overseas Englishmen who have made fortunes, but of American and cosmopolitan millionaires who, with all the world to choose from, buy or build English country houses.⁶⁰

Such sentiments were music to the ears of auctioneers and dealers, who were then profiting handsomely from the enforced redistribution of art treasures at home and abroad.

A review of the purchasers of pictures at the Townshend Heirlooms sale reveals that the majority were established art dealers, notably Agnew’s, Colnaghi & Co., Duveen, Leggatt Brothers, Vokins, Thomas Wallis of the French Gallery, Asher Wertheimer, as well as the newcomers Gooden & Fox. The dealers acted, for the most part, on behalf of private clients, who had an interest in particular items. They included Henry Brassey (1870–1958), grandson of Thomas Brassey, the great railway contractor and engineer. Brassey bought nine portraits, including six of the full-length Vere Captains, and a portrait of Eleanor (Nell) Gwyn.⁶¹ His purchases coincided with his acquisition in 1904 of Apethorpe Palace, Northamptonshire, from the financially distressed Fane family, and formed part of his scheme of refurbishment.⁶² Another prominent buyer was Sir George Faudel-Phillips (1840–1922), who had purchased Balls Park from Lord Townshend in 1901. Among his purchases were several portraits of members of the Harrison family, who had brought Balls Park into the ownership of the Townshends though intermarriage in the eighteenth century, and a full-length of George I by Kneller.⁶³ Presumably, the works that interested him most were also those that had hung at Balls Park prior to their removal by Robins and Lord Townshend, and his acquisition of the property. A third buyer who deserves to be mentioned was Charles Fairfax Murray (1849–1919), the noted connoisseur and philanthropist, who gifted the five portraits he purchased at the sale, along with a group of other British portraits, to Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1911.⁶⁴ Finally, there was the merchant banker and collector Robert Henry Benson (1850–1929), who bought several of the full-length Vere Captains as well as the portraits of Charles II as a boy and Princess Mary, now known to be by Van Dyck.⁶⁵

By far the most prodigious purchaser of works of art at the Townshend Heirlooms sale was a family member, the aforementioned Colonel Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, cousin of the 6th Marquess. Colonel Townshend was a fascinating character in his own right.⁶⁶ Born in 1861, he was, like the 6th Marquess, the great-grandson of Lord John Townshend, although his own family’s fortunes had suffered a significant decline and his father was employed as a railway clerk. A career soldier, Charles Townshend served with distinction in a series of Imperial campaigns in the Sudan and the North-West Frontier of India and was regarded generally as a war hero. A flamboyant character, driven by ruthless ambition and an immense ego, Townshend was also obsessed with his aristocratic lineage and potential inheritance. As he noted ruefully in his diary on a visit to Balls Park in 1895, ‘A splendid family like ours, and Lord Townshend cannot afford to live at Raynham Hall . . . or at Balls Park . . . To think of it all, and the last century there was no family more powerful than ours . . . I wonder if ever I shall be the means of restoring some of the prestige to the family.’⁶⁷

Fortunately, Colonel Townshend was able to restore some measure of prestige through the financial backing of the fabulously wealthy French banker Count Louis Cahen d’Anvers (1837–1922), whose daughter, Alice Cahen d’Anvers, he had married in 1898. At the time of the auction, Colonel Townshend was posted in India and it was only on his return home later in the year that he found a telegram from Count Cahen d’Anvers, informing him that he had purchased many pictures at the sale, thus saving them for the Townshend family.⁶⁸ In total, Cahen d’Anvers purchased more than thirty works.⁶⁹ Indeed, a survey of the most expensive and most significant family portraits in the sale reveals Townshend’s father-in-law to have been the purchaser. They included Romney’s portrait of Georgiana Anne, Lady Townshend (lot 95); Reynolds’s full-length portraits of the 1st Marquess Townshend (lot 89), Charles Townshend (lot 91), and George, Lord Ferrers (lot 93), as well as his head-and-shoulders portraits of the 1st Marquess Townshend (lot 90) and Charles Townshend (lot 92). Among his other acquisitions were Kneller’s full-length portraits of Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend (lot 83) and his first wife, Elizabeth Pelham (84), as well as Hoppner’s portrait of an unknown lady of the Townshend family (lot 62), Lady Charlotte Compton, first wife of George, 1st Marquess Townshend by Thomas Hudson (lot 35) and the full-length portrait of Sir Edward Vere (lot 51), cousin of Sir Horace Vere, the commissioner of the ‘Vere Captains’ series. In addition, Townshend purchased at least one non-family portrait, Gainsborough’s portrait of Robert Adair (lot 59).⁷⁰

Townshend’s acquisitions were spread eventually across several properties. At his home, Vere Lodge, in Raynham, Norfolk, which he purchased in 1911, he displayed at one time Gainsborough’s Robert Adair, Hoppner’s unknown lady, Reynolds’s head-and-shoulders portrait of the 1st Marquess and the full-length of Sir Edward Vere.⁷¹ Other paintings were kept in France, in houses owned by his father-in-law. Reynolds’s Lord Ferrers and Romney’s Lady Townshend were displayed at Count Cahen d’Anvers’s country house, the Château de Champs-sur-Marne, while Reynolds’s full-length of the 1st Marquess was housed there or in his opulent Paris mansion, L’hôtel Cahen d’Anvers, constructed in 1880 by the leading French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur.⁷² Given Destailleur’s contemporaneous construction of Waddesdon Manor for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the Vale of Aylesbury, it is fascinating to recall that as Cahen d’Anvers was placing Reynolds’s Grand Manner portraits in his French properties, similar relocated portraits by Reynolds were already installed at Rothschild’s English chateau at Waddesdon.⁷³

In theory, the success of the Townshend Heirlooms auctions of March 1904, which raised just over forty thousand pounds, should have eased Lord Townshend’s monetary problems, at least in terms of the debts incurred on the estate.⁷⁴ In reality, matters deteriorated significantly on both the personal and financial front, in no small measure due to the continued machinations of Arthur Robins. Although the full story of Robins’s activities in the wake of the Heirlooms sale, and the extraordinary role played by Lord Townshend’s future father-in-law and his wife, lie beyond the remit of the present study, a brief summary of the unfolding of events over the next few decades is provided here by way of a conclusion.

In May 1904, only two months after the Heirlooms sales, Lord Townshend, ‘with an income diminished almost to vanishing point’, appointed Robins as his agent for a ten-year term on a vast salary, as well as altering his will in his favour.⁷⁵ In the spring of 1905, following the failed attempt in court by the widowed ex-barmaid, Mrs Sheffield, to seek damages against Lord Townshend for a breach of promise of marriage, Robins was introduced to a barrister named Thomas Sutherst, an ‘opportunist’, blessed with ‘eloquence and persuasive powers’.⁷⁶ On the pretence of being able to extricate Lord Townshend from his financial problems through a substantial loan, Sutherst – who was in fact heavily in debt – offered the hand of his own daughter, Gwladys, in marriage (fig. 12).⁷⁷ Although Gwladys, then aged eighteen, was evidently an attractive and talented young woman, the sole interest of both Robins and Sutherst was financial gain. Accordingly, on 9 August 1905, following a whirlwind courtship, Lord Townshend was frogmarched down the aisle at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.⁷⁸ Following a brief honeymoon in Paris, the couple officially set up home at 45 Brook Street, Mayfair – although shortly afterwards Lord Townshend moved back to Brighton to live with Robins and his family. Evidently fearing that he would remain under Robins’s control indefinitely, Sutherst hatched an elaborate plot to lure Lord Townshend back to London where he was placed under lock and key in the Brook Street residence on the grounds that doctors had certified him to be insane.

In July 1906, at the instigation of Sutherst, who had by then fallen out with Robins, an inquiry was held at Lincoln’s Inn Old Hall into the mental health of Lord Townshend, the Suthersts’ intention being to ascertain that, due to his insanity, he was no longer able to look after his own financial affairs.⁷⁹ The inquiry proved a sensation, with lurid accounts of the removal of Lord Townshend physically from the influence of Robins by effectively kidnapping him.⁸⁰ After two weeks of evidence and cross-examination the verdict was reached: Lord Townshend, although incapable of managing his financial affairs, was found not to be insane (fig. 13). The judge, who expressed considerable sympathy for Lord Townshend’s predicament, was scathing about all who had been complicit in manipulating his life and financial affairs to their own advantage, in particular Robins and Sutherst, who, in the wake of the case, was struck off from the bar. Despite the traumatic public exposure, by the conclusion of the inquiry, Lord and Lady Townshend were apparently reconciled and the formidable Gwladys turned her attention towards the pursuit of Arthur Robins and his ill-gotten gains.

In March 1908, guided by his wife, Lord Townshend took action in the High Court to remove Arthur Robins as a trustee on the grounds of misappropriating the Townshend heirlooms and of financial misconduct. Having reviewed considerable evidence relating to Robins’s alleged misconduct, it was ordered that he should be removed as a trustee and that there should be an inquiry into the Townshend chattels, ‘with an order for payment by Robins of the value of those which had disappeared’.⁸¹ Several months later, on 30 July 1908, Lord Townshend served a bankruptcy notice on Robins in the High Court of Justice. By that time, however, Robins had left his residence in Hove and his whereabouts were unknown.⁸² In fact, as emigration records reveal, he had already left the country, having boarded the SS Marathon, of the Aberdeen Line, bound for Melbourne, on 13 May, accompanied by his wife and two sons, his occupation listed as ‘farmer’.⁸³ Robins’s death is recorded in the state of Victoria, Australia in 1910.⁸⁴ He was survived by sons and his wife, who died aged ninety-nine, in 1967.⁸⁵ Thomas Sutherst, who evidently kept in close touch with his daughter, died aged sixty-five on board the Lusitania, when, on 7 May 1915, it was sunk by a German torpedo on the way from New York to Liverpool.⁸⁶ He had been in the United States, as Lady Townshend recalled, ‘on one of his never-ending financial speculations’.⁸⁷

In May 1911, Lord and Lady Townshend moved into their ‘first real home’, a spacious residence in Avenue Road, Hampstead; ‘large and rambling rather like a country house’.⁸⁸ Over the next few years Lady Townshend, supported by her husband, pursued her career as a playwright and scenario writer for silent films, claiming to be ‘the first peeress to write for the Cinema’.⁸⁹ The biggest news, however, was the birth of a son and heir, George John Patrick Dominic Townshend, in May 1916. The British press duly rejoiced at the birth of the Townshend heir, commenting that ‘the likeness of the Townshend baby and the marquess is quite striking’.⁹⁰ The Washington Post, however, under the banner headline ‘The Mystery of the Marchioness’s Baby’, described it as ‘a startling surprise’.⁹¹ No one was more surprised, perhaps, than the hitherto heir presumptive, George Vere Ferrers Townshend, who was at that time imprisoned by the Turks, something of a war hero following a bloody year-long siege at Kut Al Mara.⁹²

In 1921, the 6th Marquess died aged fifty-five, expressing a wish to be buried in the family vault at All Saints, Hertford, Balls Park, rather than at St Mary’s, East Raynham. Shortly afterwards the widowed Marchioness moved back to Raynham Hall with her son, the 7th Marquess, and his younger sister (fig. 14). Three years later, Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, no longer heir-presumptive, died in Paris aged sixty-three, leaving his Raynham picture collection in the possession of his widow, who gradually sold them off at auction over the ensuing decades.

Meanwhile, with the improvement in the finances of the family’s estates, Lady Townshend took the first steps in restoring Raynham to its former status. She also pursued her career as writer, including in 1936 a volume entitled True Ghost Stories, which featured an account of the ‘Brown Lady’ of Raynham Hall, the supposed ghost of Dorothy Walpole, wife of 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was rumoured to haunt the oak staircase.⁹³ Shortly afterwards, evidently capitalising on the publication of Lady Townshend’s book, two photographers succeeded in capturing an image of a ghost on the same staircase at Raynham. The photograph featured in an article in Country Life magazine published on 26 December, as discussed in Jon Law's film, Figure on a Staircase: History as Haunting in the British Country House. The phantom was identified subsequently as the so-called ‘Brown Lady’ (fig. 15).⁹⁴ Although it was exposed subsequently as a fake, and Lady Townshend apparently had nothing to do with its manufacture, the image succeeded in establishing Raynham – now denuded of its valuable heirlooms – as the most celebrated haunted country house in Britain. That, however, is another curious case.