Inside The English Mansion Britain's Richest Son Built and Lord Byron Envied: Fonthill Abbey

[00:00:00]Somewhere in the Wiltshire Downs, behind a wall 12 ft high and 12 mi around, topped with iron spikes and built to keep out even the fox hunters, there stood a gothic tower nearly 300 ft tall.

[00:00:13]Beneath the tower was a house shaped like a cathedral with front doors 30 ft high, curtains 80 ft long, and a vista running 300 ft from the entrance to a distant altar lit by 36 candles.

[00:00:26]Inside it lived one man. His kitchens cooked dinner for 12 every single day, and every single day he ate alone and had the rest carried away.

[00:00:35]He was, by the reckoning of every newspaper in England, the richest commoner in the country, and Lord Byron gave him the title that stuck, England's wealthiest son.

[00:00:47]Every stone of that building was paid for by 3,000 enslaved Africans cutting sugarcane 4,000 mi away, and when the money that bought it finally ran out, the tower came down in a storm and took most of the house with it. This is the story of the English mansion Britain's richest son built, and Lord Byron envied.

[00:01:11]In 1662, 7 years after England seized Jamaica from Spain, a Londoner named Peter Beckford came ashore on the island with two or three enslaved Africans and no other asset worth recording in any document that survives.

[00:01:25]His first occupation there was hunting.

[00:01:27]He worked as a horse catcher in the unsettled interior, running down feral animals in country that was still being cleared out of the forest, which is about as far from the drawing rooms of Wiltshire as it is possible for a man to begin.

[00:01:40]What he understood, and what the men catching horses alongside him did not, was that the island itself was the asset.

[00:01:48]Jamaica in the 1660s was still being hacked clear, its boundaries unfixed, and its land unclaimed. And a man who could get his name onto a piece of paper in the right office would own outright what other men were still cutting their way through.

[00:02:03]In 1669, he obtained a royal patent for 1,000 acres in Clarendon Parish. And the following year, he walked into island politics >> [music] >> and never walked out.

[00:02:15]He represented St. Catherine in the House of Assembly from 1675, was appointed to the colonial council and then made its president, became Chief Justice of Jamaica in 1703, and in 1702 served as acting Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the entire island.

[00:02:34]He was the first Custos of Kingston, and they named [music] a street after him, which is a fair summary of how completely he had made the place his own.

[00:02:43]He married twice, and by the time he was finished, he had acquired 20 estates.

[00:02:48]20 estates in Jamaica in 1700 meant 20 separate engines of sugar production, each with its own mill, its own boiling house, its own overseers, and its own workforce held in place by law and by violence.

[00:03:02]The horse catcher had done it inside a single lifetime by being early, by being ruthless, and by never once leaving the island.

[00:03:11]When he died of a stroke on the 3rd of April, 1710, a contemporary wrote that he was in possession of the largest property, real and personal, of any subject in Europe.

[00:03:21]And the historian Noel Deerr later called it perhaps the greatest fortune ever made in planting.

[00:03:27]The inventory of what he left behind is the plainest possible statement of what the fortune actually was.

[00:03:33]20 Jamaican plantations, approximately 1,500 enslaved Africans, 1 and 1/2 million pounds in bank stock.

[00:03:41]The first of those three lines is real estate, the third is finance, and the second is 1,500 human beings entered in a ledger between the acreage and the shares, valued and totaled in exactly the same hand. Nobody at the time thought that arrangement strange. Which is precisely the thing worth pausing on.

[00:04:01]That was the machine. And the machine ran on for another century and a half, throwing off enough money to buy an English county, an English political career, and eventually the most extravagant private building ever raised in the country. The whole of it passed intact to his eldest son, the second Peter Beckford, who became speaker of Jamaica's House of Assembly, and who held the estates until his own death in 1735.

[00:04:27]Peter the second had a son and heir, another Peter.

[00:04:31]And that Peter died unmarried before he could inherit anything at all.

[00:04:36]Which meant that the entire accumulated fortune of the Beckford dynasty, every acre and every share and every enslaved person on 20 plantations, fell to a second son who had been shipped off to England at the age of 14 and educated to be an English gentleman.

[00:04:52]His name was William Beckford, and he was about to discover exactly how much of English public life was for sale.

[00:05:02]13 sugar plantations, approximately 3,000 enslaved Africans.

[00:05:08]An income from the West Indies estimated at 50,000 pounds a year. With a further 20,000 a year from the British estates on top of it. At a time when 50,000 pounds dwarfed the annual revenue of most English earls. That was what William Beckford inherited, and it made him one of the two or three richest individuals in the entire British Empire.

[00:05:31]He had been born in Jamaica and baptized there in December 1709, sent to England at 14, and put through the education of a man destined for public life.

[00:05:40]Westminster School, then Oxford, then medicine at Leiden. He went back to Jamaica between 1736 and 1744, served in the island's militia, and sat in its assembly, and learned the business of sugar from the inside.

[00:05:55]The inheritance itself had come to him by accident, in the way these things usually do.

[00:06:01]He was a younger son, and the estates should have gone to his elder brother Peter, but Peter died unmarried in 1735, and the entire accumulated fortune of four generations fell on a man who had been educated to be an English gentleman and had every intention of becoming one.

[00:06:19]So, sugar in the middle of the 18th century was the oil of its age.

[00:06:23]It was the most profitable commodity in global trade, and Britain was consuming it in quantities that would have been unimaginable a hundred years earlier, which meant that every spoonful stirred into an English cup of tea was bought in the most direct way imaginable, with enslaved African labor.

[00:06:42]The Beckfords sat at the top of that chain and collected. They did not cut cane, they did not run mills, and in the alderman's case, they did not even live on the island for most of the year.

[00:06:53]What they did was own, and owning was the only part of the operation that generated wealth rather than consuming it.

[00:07:00]The machinery underneath them was brutal in a way that the drawing rooms of London never had to look at.

[00:07:06]Enslaved people on the Beckford estates worked 12 to 16 hours a day cultivating and milling cane under a tropical sun, under punishments enforced by overseers, with mortality rates from disease and exhaustion that were simply built into the operating assumptions of the business.

[00:07:23]In law, they did not exist as persons.

[00:07:25]They could not own, inherit, testify, marry, or refuse, and the entire structure of Beckford wealth rested on keeping that legal fiction intact for as long as it could be maintained.

[00:07:36]In 1760, the system delivered its own verdict on itself.

[00:07:41]Enslaved Africans on Beckford's Esher plantation in St. Mary Parish rose and joined Tacky's War, one of the most strategically sophisticated slave rebellions in the history of the Caribbean, marching with hundreds of others who had already overwhelmed the garrison at Fort Haldane in Port Maria and were sweeping through the parishes.

[00:08:01]The colonial government put it down with overwhelming force.

[00:08:05]Around 400 rebels were executed. Their leader, Tacky, was shot by a maroon sharpshooter, and rebel leaders were burned alive in front of the surviving enslaved population as an instructional exercise. The suppression cost the government £15,000 and the destruction of property was reckoned at 100,000.

[00:08:26]Alderman Beckford absorbed the loss, recorded it, and carried on. There is no record of him reconsidering anything.

[00:08:33]What the rebellion demonstrated to anybody willing to look at it directly was that the enslaved population understood their situation with total clarity and were prepared to die to end it.

[00:08:45]And the response of the plantation interest was to make the dying more spectacular.

[00:08:51]Beckford took the money to England and started buying.

[00:08:58]In March 1770, the house at 22 Soho Square was hung with a banner bearing a single word, liberty, embroidered in white letters 3 ft high, in celebration of the release of the radical John Wilkes from prison.

[00:09:14]The man who hung it owned 3,000 human beings. William Beckford had bought the Fonthill estate in Wiltshire in 1744 on returning to England for good, and when the original house burned down in 1755, he responded with a line that tells you everything about the scale he was operating at.

[00:09:33]"I have an odd £50,000 in a drawer," he said. "I will build it up again."

[00:09:38]He did, and he called it Fonthill Splendens, and the name is worth hearing for what it is.

[00:09:45]A man announcing in Latin that his house is magnificent, in case anybody driving past had failed to work it out.

[00:09:53]It was a grand neo-Palladian pile, modeled loosely on Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

[00:09:59]A nine-bay central block over three floors, with quadrant colonnades sweeping out to free-standing five-bay pavilions. Its north front carrying four giant Ionic columns, [music] its interiors fitted out in the taste of the 1760s, with painted ceilings and elaborate chimney pieces, and walls hung in velvet and damask.

[00:10:19]He dammed the stream to make Fonthill Lake, built grottoes along the shore, and set a north lodge of vermiculated rustication at the entrance to announce that a man of consequence lived beyond it.

[00:10:31]Then he bought the rest of English public life. Within four years of settling in England, he was an alderman of Billingsgate Ward, then member of Parliament for the City of London, then Sheriff of London, and finally, twice over, Lord Mayor.

[00:10:45]He financed and championed the rise of William Pitt the Elder, the greatest statesman of the age, and Pitt's ascent owed a real debt to Beckford sugar money.

[00:10:55]He backed Wilkes, supported press freedom, and spoke for parliamentary reform, and the City of London adored him for it.

[00:11:02]Some of that was genuine conviction.

[00:11:05]He does appear to have believed in his English life in the things he said about liberty and about the rights of Englishmen against an overbearing crown, and the men who cheered him in the city were not being cynical when they cheered.

[00:11:19]And in 1758, he wrote to Pitt urging the capture of the French colony of Martinique on the grounds that the island's Negroes and stock were worth above 4 million sterling.

[00:11:30]"For God's sake, attempt the capture without delay." he wrote. Negroes in stock, human beings and livestock entered in the same clause, priced as a single line item.

[00:11:41]The man who would hang liberty in 3-ft letters across his own front elevation saw no contradiction whatever.

[00:11:48]Neither did almost anybody around him, which is the part that ought to be uncomfortable because it means the contradiction was not a personal failing, but a national one distributed evenly across every man in that room and every man who drank the tea. His entertaining ran on the same scale as everything else and one banquet cost him 10,000 lb and seated among the other guests, 23 earls.

[00:12:12]On the 23rd of May, 1770, he did the thing that made him immortal in the city.

[00:12:18]Standing before King George the III at the Guildhall in flat breach of every protocol governing how a subject addressed a monarch, he publicly admonished the king, demanded the dissolution of Parliament, and the removal of the royal counselors, and invoked our happy constitution as it was established in the glorious and necessary revolution.

[00:12:39]The king, by all accounts, was angrier about the breach of protocol than about anything the man had actually said.

[00:12:46]The city of London was so delighted that it put up a life-size statue of him in the Guildhall surmounted by a tablet with his words engraved in gold, and the statue is still there.

[00:12:58]Three weeks after that confrontation, on 21st June 1770, he died of what his physicians called a flying gout, aged 60.

[00:13:08]He left the plantations, the enslaved people, the fortune, Fonthill splendens, and the Soho Square house to his only legitimate child.

[00:13:17]The boy was 10 years old.

[00:13:24]In 1812, in the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lord Byron wrote four words that fixed a man's reputation for two centuries.

[00:13:33]England's wealthiest son.

[00:13:35]He was writing about William Thomas Beckford. And the line he built around it, addressing him by the name of the caliph in his own famous novel, ran There thou, too, Vathek, England's wealthiest son, once formed thy paradise.

[00:13:51]Byron was not exaggerating. The boy who inherited in 1770 came into a million pounds in cash, the 6,000 acre Fonthill estate with Splendens standing on it, several Jamaican sugar plantations, and approximately 3,000 enslaved human beings.

[00:14:09]His contemporaries put his annual income at £100,000.

[00:14:13]His biographers have since concluded it was probably nearer 50,000, which was still a sum that placed him in a financial universe with no other inhabitants. The newspapers called him the richest commoner in England, and the phrase followed him for the rest of his life.

[00:14:29]What that money bought him in childhood was an almost monastic loneliness.

[00:14:34]He was raised at Fonthill under his mother, Maria Hamilton, and a severe private tutor in a seclusion that suited neither his appetite nor his temperament. And the education they gave him was the education of a prince with no court.

[00:14:48]At five, he was given three piano lessons by the 8-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

[00:14:54]An encounter he spent the rest of his life inflating for the benefit of admiring biographers, at one point claiming to have handed Mozart the melody of Non più The claim is almost certainly nonsense, and the influence was almost certainly minimal.

[00:15:10]But the fact that he told the story for 60 years tells you something about the man he became.

[00:15:16]Someone who needed his own biography to be more extraordinary than it already was, which, given what it actually was, took some doing.

[00:15:24]The man who actually shaped him was his drawing master, Alexander Cozens.

[00:15:30]Cozens was a landscape painter of genuine strangeness who styled himself, on evidence nobody has ever been able to verify, as the illegitimate son of Peter the Great of Russia, and he taught the boy to see the world the way a painter sees it, as atmospheric mass, as compositional drama, as emotional force, rather than as a collection of objects.

[00:15:52]He taught him, in other words, to look at a hillside and see a mood. The two of them corresponded for years and eventually fell out.

[00:16:00]For architecture, Beckford was put under Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House, who gave him proportion, grandeur, and an understanding of how a building talks to the person standing in front of it.

[00:16:13]His father had left him the finest private library in Wiltshire, and he ate it, in the classical languages, in philosophy, in natural science, and literature, developing a habit of several books a day that he kept up into old age. At 21, he went on the Grand Tour, and in 1782, he moved through Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome, sketching obsessively, buying paintings, and studying medieval ruin and Renaissance grandeur where they actually stood.

[00:16:43]He was looking, without knowing it yet, at the thing he would eventually build.

[00:16:47]Ancient grandeur overtaken by time, scale that had outlived its purpose, beauty going quietly to pieces in the sunlight.

[00:16:57]The memoir he produced from the journey, Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, was published in 1783, and immediately suppressed by his own family, who found its emotional frankness intolerable and bought up the edition.

[00:17:12]He came home the most aesthetically educated young man in England, saturated with images of scale and beauty and decay.

[00:17:19]He was also still unquestionably its richest, and there was nothing in his head that his money could not eventually be made to build.

[00:17:30]For 3 days at Christmas in 1781, the interiors of Fonthill Splendens ceased to be a house at all.

[00:17:37]Beckford had brought in Philippe de Loutherbourg, the theatrical designer who had reinvented stage spectacle at Drury Lane with the Eidophusikon, a machine for simulating natural light and weather, and turned him loose on the Egyptian Hall.

[00:17:52]What Loutherbourg mounted there was a 3-day entertainment of lighting effects, costumed pageants, and stage delusions, all of it calculated to dissolve the line between architecture and fantasy until the guests could no longer reliably tell which of the walls around them were real and which were painted.

[00:18:10]It worked on the host more than on anybody else.

[00:18:14]Whatever the guests took away from those 3 days, what Beckford took away was the discovery that a building could be made to lie.

[00:18:21]That light and fabric and staging could persuade a room full of intelligent people that a wall was somewhere it was not, and he never forgot it. It was during this period that Beckford began writing Vathek, the oriental novel of a caliph who builds a tower to reach heaven and is damned for it.

[00:18:39]And the party in the Egyptian Hall is the point at which his imagination and his money begin pointing in the same direction.

[00:18:47]Then some years later, English society closed its doors to him.

[00:18:51]The reason was a scandal touching his sexuality, and the effect was total.

[00:18:56]A man with a hundred thousand a year in the finest library in Wiltshire found himself socially unwelcome in the country whose liberty his father had embroidered on a banner.

[00:19:06]He did not beg to be let back in. He did not write letters or cultivate patrons or spend a decade quietly rehabilitating himself in the way that a less wealthy or less proud man would have been obliged to do.

[00:19:20]He built a wall.

[00:19:22]The barrier, as Beckford called it, ran roughly 12 mi around the estate, though some accounts put it as low as six or eight.

[00:19:29]It stood 12 ft high. It was surmounted with iron spikes, and it was built with such thoroughness that not even the fox hunters could get through it. Which in Wiltshire, in the 1790s, was the practical test of whether a wall was serious. Inside it lay 7,000 acres, and Beckford set about turning that landscape into a piece of architecture in its own right.

[00:19:51]>> [music] >> Which is a thing that only a man with unlimited money and unlimited time can seriously attempt. He planted thousands of trees with his own hands, thickening the woodland year on year until the estate had the dark canopy he wanted. A forest through which a building could emerge, rather than simply stand in a field being looked at. That distinction mattered enormously to him. Every other great house in England was designed to be seen across open parkland from as far away as possible, which was the entire point of open parkland, and Beckford was proposing the exact opposite.

[00:20:25]He was, in effect, growing his own approach, and he was prepared to wait a decade for the trees to reach the height at which they would do what he needed them to do.

[00:20:35]The approach itself was the Great Western Avenue, a dead straight mile of stately trees, and the whole processional route was calculated for psychological effect. You were admitted at a gate. You then drove for a full mile through forest that closed in around you as you went. And by the time the building finally showed itself, the scale of the avenue had already prepared you to accept whatever appeared at the end of it as natural and inevitable, however impossible it actually was. The wall did not announce a country estate.

[00:21:06]It announced a kingdom sealed against a country that had told its owner he was not welcome.

[00:21:12]All it lacked now was a palace at the center.

[00:21:15]And Beckford knew exactly which architect he wanted.

[00:21:19]Which turned out to be the single worst decision of his life.

[00:21:25]Sometime in the 1760s, a young Englishman lay flat on his back on a ladder slung 300 ft above the floor of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome with no cradle beneath him and no rail at his side, making measured drawings of the underside of the dome.

[00:21:41]His name was James Wyatt, and he spent 6 years in Italy doing that sort of thing.

[00:21:48]He came home in 1768 with the whole architectural history of Europe in his bones, and in 1772, he announced himself with the Oxford Street Pantheon, an assembly hall loosely modeled on its Roman namesake that combined vast classical grandeur with a strange intimacy.

[00:22:06]And Horace Walpole, the most feared arbiter of taste in England, called it the most beautiful edifice in England.

[00:22:13]The Pantheon did something that classical buildings in England very rarely managed, which was to be enormous and intimate at the same moment, and it made Wyatt's name overnight.

[00:22:25]George III, whose own taste ran to Gothic, called him the first architect of the kingdom.

[00:22:31]The king was not wrong about the talent.

[00:22:33]He was working with incomplete information about the man.

[00:22:37]By the time Beckford came to him in 1796, Wyatt had assembled a record of professional negligence that would be hard to match anywhere in the English profession, before or since.

[00:22:49]He took on far more commissions than any human being could execute, and then neglected each of them in rotation.

[00:22:55]In 1 year as Surveyor General, he missed 50 consecutive weekly meetings at the Office of Works.

[00:23:02]His supervision was so absent that one of his own subordinates was eventually discovered to have been on holiday for 3 years without anybody noticing he had gone.

[00:23:13]He spent his later career, in one biographer's phrase, in cloud-flecked years, mostly drunk.

[00:23:19]And his restoration work on the medieval cathedrals of Salisbury, Durham, Hereford, and Lichfield was so cavalier and so destructive that the preservationist critic John Carter coined a name for him that has never come off.

[00:23:32]The Destroyer.

[00:23:34]He would die in 1813 in a carriage accident on the Marlborough Downs, intestate, having burned through one of the largest practices in the country.

[00:23:43]And his widow, Rachel, would be bailed out of debtors' prison by the government, which then paid for a lavish funeral and buried him in Westminster Abbey.

[00:23:53]The state, in other words, could not decide whether to prosecute him or to canonize him, and settled on both.

[00:24:00]This was the man Beckford chose, and the choice was both inspired and catastrophic, because there was nobody alive in England who could have drawn what Beckford wanted, and nobody alive in England less likely to stand over a building site and make sure it got built. And the commission Beckford originally gave him was not for a house.

[00:24:19]It was for a ruin.

[00:24:20]Beckford wanted a Gothic folly, a decorative fragment of imagined medieval glory, to stand in the woods and be looked at. The kind of thing half the landowners in England were putting up in their parks.

[00:24:32]Somewhere between the drawing board and the foundations, he changed his mind and decided he would live in it instead.

[00:24:40]That single change of mind is the hinge of the entire story.

[00:24:44]He had spent years moving through medieval Europe with his eyes open, absorbing the proportions of Salisbury and of Cologne, and he understood exactly what those buildings had been designed to do to the person standing underneath them.

[00:24:57]They were built to overwhelm, to awe, and above all to silence.

[00:25:01]What Beckford proposed to do was take that effect out of the service of God and put it into the service of one private man in a Wiltshire wood behind a wall with no congregation and no bishop and nobody to answer to.

[00:25:16]He was not building a house.

[00:25:18]He was building the sublime and the first stone went into the ground in 1796.

[00:25:27]500 laborers worked at Fonthill in relayed shifts day and night and the ones on the night shift worked by torchlight.

[00:25:34]The effect seen from the surrounding hills was one of the great spectacles of Regency England and the mirror of literature described the astonished traveler who might see the tower rising under their hands, the trowel and torch being associated for that purpose and the high and giddy dancing of the lights and the strange effects produced on the woods and architecture below.

[00:25:58]Beckford himself was seen up on the hillside above the works watching, wasting the coldest hours of December's darkness in feasting his sense with this display.

[00:26:08]And the writer who recorded it thought the whole spectacle verged on something more than human.

[00:26:13]There was no practical reason for any of it to happen at night. The mania for speed governed every decision and the speed itself had become part of the pleasure.

[00:26:23]When winter threatened to stop the work, he kept fires burning through the nights so that the cement would not freeze.

[00:26:31]And he burned them for no reason beyond his own refusal to wait until spring.

[00:26:36]When the local supply of wagons proved inadequate, he commandeered every cart and wagon in the surrounding district bringing the agricultural work of an entire stretch of Wiltshire to a standstill.

[00:26:47]And then, [music] in a gesture that was entirely in character, delivered free coal and blankets to the local poor by way of compensation.

[00:26:55]When the workforce was still not big enough, he sent agents to Windsor Castle and lured 460 men off the royal apartments at St. George's Chapel, bribing them away from the king's own building works with the offer of an increased ale ration.

[00:27:10]He stripped labor from the sovereign's chapel to finish his own, and there is no record of anybody stopping him because there was nobody with the standing to try.

[00:27:19]One anecdote catches the whole enterprise in a single image.

[00:27:24]Beckford ordered his men to rush a new kitchen to completion so that a meal could be cooked in it.

[00:27:30]The kitchen was finished, the meal was cooked, the meal was served.

[00:27:34]The walls fell down as soon as dinner was over.

[00:27:37]Nobody appears to have treated this as a warning. The building had told them in the plainest language available to a building exactly what it was going to do, and the work went on at the same pace the following morning.

[00:27:49]The problem underneath all of it was that the tower was a fraud.

[00:27:54]Every cathedral builder in Europe since the 12th century had known that a structure of that height required solid masoned stone standing on deep footings, and that the footings were the part you did not economize on because they were the part nobody would ever see.

[00:28:09]Wyatt gave Beckford neither. He built a timber framework and stuccoed it over with cement, a technique he called compo cement.

[00:28:18]And its load-bearing properties came nowhere near what a 280-ft tower demanded. The first tower fell down while it was still going up. Beckford watched the sections come down with as much composure, in the words of one witness, as if the flames had not been devouring what it would have cost a fortune to repair, which suggests that he had begun to regard even destruction as part of the show.

[00:28:42]He ordered it rebuilt. The second tower fell down, too. He ordered it rebuilt a third time in proper stone, and that one stayed up for as long as he owned the place.

[00:28:52]Through all of it, Wyatt kept vanishing, failing to appear on site, leaving workmen standing about without drawings, unreachable for weeks together. So that the wealthiest private individual in the country spent his days out in the mud directing the placement of stonework himself.

[00:29:09]Because his architect could not be found.

[00:29:13]And out of that chaos somehow rose the most extraordinary interior anybody in England had ever stood inside.

[00:29:23]The finished tower stood somewhere between 276 and 280 ft above the ground.

[00:29:29]Which made it the tallest feature ever placed on a private house in England.

[00:29:34]The spire that was planned for it [music] would have carried the whole thing to something near 450 ft. Which is roughly 50 ft higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

[00:29:44]That was the ambition stated in stone to outbuild the cathedral in a private garden for the private satisfaction of one man who had been told he was not fit for polite company.

[00:29:55]Even without the spire, it could be seen for miles across the downs.

[00:29:59]A slender Gothic pinnacle standing up out of the forest canopy like a cathedral that had wandered off and got lost.

[00:30:08]The plan beneath it was cruciform, four long wings radiating from a single enormous octagonal hall. And the whole building was designed in the language of extremes.

[00:30:19]The front doors were 30 ft high, and the windows above them were 50.

[00:30:24]A visitor coming through the great pointed arch found himself in a hall 68 ft long, 28 wide, and 78 high with an oak roof divided into panels and hung with baronial shields. Three windows of painted glass on the right shedding what the mirror of literature called a mellow luster across the upper steps.

[00:30:47]And a music gallery carried above the entrance behind a screen of Gothic stonework with a small stained glass Madonna and child set above it.

[00:30:56]Along the left-hand wall stood three recesses hung with crimson curtains and in the central recess, presiding over the whole of it, was a marble statue of the alderman.

[00:31:07]Beckford's father stood there in his Lord Mayor's robes holding a copy of Magna Carta.

[00:31:13]The man who had priced Negroes and stock in the same clause was set at the door of his son's house in marble holding the founding charter of English liberty in both hands.

[00:31:23]There is no evidence that anybody who walked past him ever remarked on it.

[00:31:28]The staircase that climbed out of that hall was singled out by the guidebook writers of 1822 as one of the most striking interior views anywhere in England. A broad shallow ascent whose width matched rise so exactly that a visitor walking up it felt the building opening rather than narrowing.

[00:31:46]Beyond it through a matching arch was the room that every visitor without exception described as the most extraordinary interior in the country.

[00:31:54]The great octagon rose 132 ft to its vault.

[00:31:59]Eight clustered columns carried eight enormous arches and four of those arches held pointed windows of painted glass copied directly from the windows of the Batalha Monastery in Portugal where Beckford had spent years of his life. Uh, the other four were hung with curtains and the curtains were the trick.

[00:32:15]They ran to 80 ft of fabric longer than the nave of a good many English parish churches falling from arches 50 ft up.

[00:32:24]By concealing where the arches ended, they made the eye believe that the space continued beyond them without limit so that the room read as infinite.

[00:32:33]Above the arches ran an open gallery and from the gallery sprang a fan vaulted groining that carried a lantern lit by eight more painted windows.

[00:32:42]The light coming down through all that colored glass changed the room hour by hour, rose-tinted across the clustered shafts in the morning, deep gold at midday, violet in the shadows at dusk. And contemporaries who stood in it reached for the only comparison available to them. It resembled, one of them wrote, a magic palace more than any abode of luxury contrived by human art.

[00:33:07]And from the middle of that room, if you turned and looked north, you could see 300 ft down the length of the building to a single point of light.

[00:33:20]The vista was the whole point. Beckford had laid out the long axis of the building so that a single uninterrupted sightline ran more than 300 ft from the great front doors, through the hall, up the staircase, across the octagon, and away down the northern corridor to the blaze of light in the oratory at the far end. And it was visible entire from either end.

[00:33:42]At night, he lit the whole of that distance with no more than 24 candles.

[00:33:47]The eye, given nothing else in the darkness to fix on, was dragged the whole length of the house toward that far-off light.

[00:33:54]It is a stage director's trick executed at architectural scale. And Beckford, who had watched Loutherbourg do exactly this with lamps and gauze in the Egyptian Hall 40 years earlier, had calculated it to the inch. What waited at the end was the oratory, built as five sides of an octagon, every wall a lancet window of stained glass carrying gold fleur-de-lis on purple grounds.

[00:34:19]Slender gilt columns rose in the angles and fanned at their capitals into burnished gold reticulation against walls of crimson damask.

[00:34:27]On the altar stood an alabaster statue of St. Anthony of Padua, Beckford's patron saint, beneath a silver-gilt lamp and flanked by 36 lighted tapers in silver-gilt candelabra.

[00:34:40]And before it lay a blue carpet woven with the pattern of a Latin cross.

[00:34:46]Beneath the altar lay a second carpet, crimson velvet bordered in gold, and the sanctuary that opened off it repeated the theme.

[00:34:54]Its walls in crimson damask beneath a freeze of gilt flowers.

[00:34:59]The corridor that led to all of this was arched along its entire length, carrying a freeze of 38 emblazoned shields with bronze lattice doors opening into side recesses that visitors compared to medieval confessionals.

[00:35:13]The comparison was not accidental.

[00:35:16]Beckford had built himself a cathedral with no congregation, and every architectural gesture in the place was borrowed from a religion he did not practice, deployed in the service of a private mood.

[00:35:29]Off the main axis lay St. Michael's gallery and King Edward's gallery, hung with the paintings, and the Lancaster state bedchamber, furnished throughout in ebony inlaid with ivory.

[00:35:41]That was where Beckford slept, in the middle of a building designed to accommodate a court, on a single narrow bed.

[00:35:48]The palette across the entire house was silver, gold, crimson, and purple, drawn from medieval ecclesiastical tradition, and calculated to produce an atmosphere that was religious and theatrical and very faintly infernal all at once.

[00:36:03]13 rooms had no windows at all. The long central corridor was unheated for most of its length, and 60 fires burned in the rest of the house purely to keep the stone dry rather than to keep anybody warm, which produced, by every account of anyone who spent a winter in it, an effect of magnificent and absolute cold.

[00:36:23]The contents matched the shell.

[00:36:26]Francis Eginton, the finest stained glass painter working in England, produced 32 figures of kings and knights along with lancet windows throughout the building.

[00:36:35]And Beckford paid him 12,000 pounds for the work, which was more than most country gentlemen saw in a decade.

[00:36:43]The library ran to roughly 20,000 books, every one of them bound in Beckford's own house style, so that the shelves read as a single object.

[00:36:52]The paintings included works given to Raphael, Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, Bronzino, and Canaletto, which made the collection one of the finest ever assembled by a private individual anywhere in Europe, hanging in a house that almost nobody was permitted to enter.

[00:37:11]And in 1799, Beckford invited a 24-year-old watercolorist named Joseph Mallord William Turner to spend 3 weeks on the estate.

[00:37:22]Turner filled an entire sketchbook with pencil studies, measurements, and atmospheric notes, and produced five finished watercolors from the residency.

[00:37:31]Each one caught the building at a different hour, from dawn through to dusk, in exactly the sequence of light effects Beckford had specified.

[00:37:40]The tower rising through morning mist, the abbey caught in hard noon light, the west front at sunset with the last of the day burning along it.

[00:37:49]They were hung at the Royal Academy in 1800, and for a brief moment, the English public got to look at Fonthill Abbey at second hand, through the eyes of the only man in the country who could paint light.

[00:38:00]Those five watercolors are now in Edinburgh, in Toronto, in Manchester, and in Montreal, which is to say that the most enduring thing Fonthill ever produced was scattered across two continents, like everything else in the house.

[00:38:21]Beckford moved into the unfinished Abbey in 1807 and stayed until 1822.

[00:38:26]And for those 15 years, he dined alone and had the surplus carried away afterwards.

[00:38:32]He used one bedroom. He had built a house on the scale of a cathedral, staffed it, heated it with 60 fires, filled it with the finest pictures in private hands in Europe, and lived in a single room at the end of it on a narrow bed eating alone.

[00:38:47]His servants were young men to whom he gave flamboyant nicknames, Miss Long and Miss Butterfly and Mr. Prudent Well Sealed Up. And he kept a menagerie and rode alone and wrote in his journals and the wall kept everybody else out. The Abbey was open to guests exactly once.

[00:39:05]At Christmas in 1800, Admiral Horatio Nelson came to stay, the hero of the Nile, bringing with him his mistress Emma Hamilton. And in an arrangement that respectable England found unforgivable, Emma's husband, Sir William Hamilton, as well. Every one of them was an outcast in some direction.

[00:39:23]Beckford for his sexuality and Nelson and Emma Hamilton for a romance the country could not stop discussing and would not forgive.

[00:39:30]For a few days, the house that polite society refused to enter held the three most talked about people in England and nobody else at all.

[00:39:39]Then the sugar failed. The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 began the long erosion of plantation profitability and Beckford, who had been an absentee landlord his entire adult life and had opposed abolition when the question was put to him in 1796, was in no position to manage the decline of estates he had never troubled to visit.

[00:40:02]He then lost two of his most valuable Jamaican plantations in a legal action.

[00:40:07]By 1821, he owed roughly 145,000 pounds and could no longer pay the interest on it.

[00:40:15]In 1822, he put Fonthill Abbey and everything in it into the hands of the auctioneer James Christie, and the country lost its mind.

[00:40:23]The building had been sealed behind that wall for a quarter of a century, and now suddenly, for the price of a guinea, anybody could walk in.

[00:40:33]More than 7,000 copies of Christie's illustrated catalog were sold, each one doubling as an admission ticket, and six or 700 people came through the gates every day.

[00:40:45]The Times reported that he is fortunate who finds a vacant chair within 20 mi of Fonthill, and that the solitude of a private apartment was a luxury which few could hope for. And every farmhouse and cottage for miles was billeting the fashionable public.

[00:41:01]They gave it a name, Fonthill fever.

[00:41:04]They came in their thousands, most of them with no intention of buying anything, simply to see the thing that had been withheld from them.

[00:41:11]And then Beckford, >> [music] >> having whipped the nation into exactly the frenzy he wanted, canceled the auction.

[00:41:18]Working behind Christie's back through a rival auctioneer Harry Phillips, he sold the whole thing privately to John Farquhar, a Scottish gunpowder manufacturer who had made a fortune supplying the British government in India for £330,000, the building, the contents, and 5,000 acres.

[00:41:37]Fonthill had cost him roughly half that to build. He turned a profit on his own ruin, which was entirely in character.

[00:41:43]Farquhar promptly put the contents up for auction anyway.

[00:41:47]The Fonthill sale of September and October 1823 ran for 37 days, sold better than 7,000 tickets all over again, and dispersed the greatest private collection in Europe to the four winds. Beckford sent an agent to it and bought back more than 640 lots from his own former library.

[00:42:07]Byron, meanwhile, had been watching from a distance for years.

[00:42:11]He had read Vathek as a young and never got over it. And he said outright that it fed directly into the Giaour and the whole sequence of Eastern tales that made his name, which means [music] the doomed self-destroying caliph of Beckford's novel is one of the identifiable ancestors of the Byronic hero.

[00:42:30]When Byron called him England's wealthiest son, he was doing something more complicated than admiring a rich man.

[00:42:36]He was claiming kinship. Both had been driven out of English society over their sexuality.

[00:42:42]Both had built enormous edifices, one in stone and one on paper, as monuments to their own sensibilities, and both understood the particular satisfaction of being magnificent in exile.

[00:42:55]Byron went to Greece and died there chasing an ideal that was never going to arrive.

[00:43:00]Beckford lived to be 83. Then, on the afternoon of 21st December 1825, in a storm, the tower came down.

[00:43:08]It took King Edward's gallery and most of the fabric with it, and a servant was reportedly picked up and thrown the length of a corridor by the blast of displaced air.

[00:43:18]Farquhar, who had already made his money back and more, walked away unharmed and died of apoplexy shortly afterwards.

[00:43:26]Beckford heard the news in Bath, where he was by then living, and his biographers have never been able to find any evidence that he was sorry.

[00:43:35]There is a reasonable reading in which he knew exactly what he had sold.

[00:43:39]The man who had watched two towers come down during construction understood perfectly well that he had unloaded a beautiful fraud onto a gunpowder manufacturer at twice what it cost to build.

[00:43:51]The ruins were cleared around 1845.

[00:43:54]What survives is a fragment of the north wing, the Lancaster rooms, and the sanctuary and the oratory, and a turret 76 ft high, listed Grade II star in 1966, and swallowed into a private house at the end of a private drive that the public cannot see.

[00:44:10]The rest of the stone went into the buildings of the village of Teasbury, so that the most extravagant house in England now survives mainly as the walls of other people's cottages.

[00:44:21]The paintings went further. Beckford's son-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton, bought many of the greatest of them.

[00:44:27]And the rest scattered into the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Wallace Collection, and across the Atlantic into the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

[00:44:42]The estate itself passed eventually to the second Marquess of Westminster, who built a new Fonthill Abbey on it in 1846 in the Scottish Baronial style.

[00:44:52]That one was demolished in 1955.

[00:44:54]Beckford, who was not finished, moved to Bath and built another tower.

[00:44:59]Lansdown Tower rose 154 ft under a young architect named Henry Goodridge in an eccentric hybrid of Italian, Byzantine, and Greek classical, crowned with a gilded cast iron cupola modeled on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.

[00:45:14]He filled it with the best of everything he had brought back from his own sale, bought four adjoining houses in Lansdown Crescent, and knocked them into a single private domain, and built himself a second sealed kingdom, smaller than the first and made to last. That one is still standing. He died in it in 1844, aged 83, having outlived Byron by 20 years and his own Abbey by 19.

[00:45:40]He lies in Walcot Cemetery under a sarcophagus of polished pink granite that he designed himself, with bronze armorial plaques on its sides, and a line from Vathek cut into [music] it.

[00:45:51]"Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of heaven to man, hope."

[00:45:56]The Beckford story, as the BBC has put it, epitomizes the idea of the absentee plantation owner using wealth built from slavery to establish a position in British society with buildings and collections that are the status symbols of an educated cultured and civilized gentleman.

[00:46:14]That is the whole of it stated flatly.

[00:46:17]The Abbey stood for barely 30 years. It was lived in for fewer than 20 and the public was allowed to look at it for less than two seasons.

[00:46:25]The fortune that raised it was cut out of 3,000 people on the other side of an ocean who were never once asked. And when the tower finally fell in the dark on a December afternoon, it was falling for all of them.