Somerset House
Somerset House is a large neoclassical building complex situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadrangle is built on the site of a Tudor palace originally belonging to the Duke of Somerset. The present Somerset House was designed by Sir William Chambers, begun in 1776, and was further extended with Victorian era outer wings to the east and west in 1831 and 1856 respectively. The site of Somerset House stood directly on the River Thames until the Victoria Embankment was built in the late 1860s.
The great Georgian era structure was built to be a grand public building housing various government and public-benefit society offices. Its present tenants are a mixture of various organisations, generally centred around the arts and education.
Old Somerset House
16th century
In the 16th century, the Strand, the north bank of the Thames between the City of London and the Palace of Westminster, was a favoured site for the mansions of bishops and aristocrats, who could commute from their own landing stages upriver to the court or downriver to the City and beyond. In 1539, Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, obtained a grant of land at "Chester Place, outside Temple Bar, London" from his brother-in-law King Henry VIII. When his nephew the young King Edward VI came to the throne in 1547, Seymour became Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector. In about 1549 he pulled down an old Inn of Chancery and other houses that stood on the site, and began to build himself a palatial residence, making liberal use of other nearby buildings, including some of the chantry chapels and cloisters at St Paul's Cathedral, which were demolished partly at his behest as part of the ongoing dissolution of the monasteries. It was a two-storey house built around a quadrangle, with a gateway rising to three storeys, and was one of the earliest examples of Renaissance architecture in England. It is not known who designed the building.Before it was finished, however, the Duke of Somerset was overthrown, attainted by Parliament and in 1552 was executed on Tower Hill. Somerset Place, as the building was referred to, then came into the possession of the Crown. The duke's royal nephew's half-sister, the future Queen Elizabeth I, lived there during the reign of her half-sister Queen Mary I. The process of completion and improvement was slow and costly. As late as 1598 John Stow refers to it as "yet unfinished".
17th and 18th centuries
In the summer of 1604, Somerset House was the location for the negotiations, known as the Somerset House Conference that culminated in the Treaty of London and concluded the nineteen-year Anglo-Spanish War. The treaty was signed on 28 August, at Whitehall Palace, by the Constable of Castile who was lodged at Somerset House. The conference was the subject of an oil-on-canvas painting depicting the 11 representatives of the governments of England, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, seated around a conference table, probably in Old Somerset House.During the 17th century, the house was used as a residence by royal consorts. In the reign of King James I, the building was the London residence of his wife, Anne of Denmark, and was renamed Denmark House. She commissioned a number of expensive additions and improvements, some to designs by Inigo Jones. In 1609, Simon Basil and William Goodrowse made steps and terraces in the garden. Anne of Denmark built an orangery and employed a French gardener and hydraulic engineer Salomon de Caus. He built a fountain known as Mount Parnassus with a grotto carved with sea-shells and a black marble female figure representing the River Thames. The fountain was topped by a statue of Pegasus. A surviving cistern for the fountain in nearby Strand Lane was misidentified as a Roman bath.
The refurbished palace was the setting for elaborate entertainments at the wedding of Anne's lady in waiting Jean Drummond on 3 February 1614, including a masque Hymen's Triumph written by Samuel Daniel. On 22 May 1614, Christian IV of Denmark paid a surprise visit to his sister. In 1619, King James granted the palace to Prince Charles. Frances Coke, Viscountess Purbeck was appointed keeper of Denmark House, and Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham frequently stayed there.
After the death of King James in April 1625, his body was brought from Theobalds to lie in state at Denmark House. The state rooms were hung with black cloth. At this period there was no chapel at Denmark House, and so the Great Hall was adapted, and the body moved there before the funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Between 1630 and 1635 Inigo Jones built a chapel where Henrietta Maria of France, the wife of King Charles I, could exercise her Roman Catholic religion. This was in the care of the Capuchin Order and was on a site to the southwest of the Great Court. A small cemetery was attached and some of the tombstones are still to be seen built into one of the walls of a passage under the present quadrangle.
Royal occupation of Somerset House was interrupted by the Civil War, and in 1649 Parliament tried to sell it. They failed to find a buyer, although a sale of the contents realised the very considerable sum of £118,000. Use was still found for it however. Part of it served as an army headquarters, with General Fairfax being given official quarters there; lodgings were also provided for certain other Parliamentarian notables. It was in Somerset House that Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's body lay in state after his death in 1658.
Two years later, with the Restoration, Queen Henrietta Maria returned and in 1661 began a considerable programme of rebuilding, the main feature of which was a magnificent new river front, again to the design of the late Inigo Jones, who had died at Somerset House in 1652. However she returned to France in 1665 before it was finished. It was then used as an occasional residence by Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II. During her time it received a certain notoriety as being, in the popular mind, a hot-bed of Catholic conspiracy. Titus Oates made full use of this prejudice in the fabricated details of the Popish Plot and it was alleged that Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, whose murder was one of the great mysteries of the age, had been killed in Somerset House before his body had been smuggled out and thrown into a ditch below Primrose Hill.
Somerset House was refurbished by Sir Christopher Wren in 1685. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Somerset House entered on a long period of decline, being used for grace and favour residences. In the conditions of the time this meant almost inevitably that little money could be found for its upkeep, and a slow process of decay crept in. During the 18th century, however, the building ceased its royal associations. Though the view from its terraced riverfront garden, open to the public, was painted twice on his London visit by Canaletto, it was used for storage, as a residence for visiting overseas dignitaries and as a barracks for troops. Suffering from neglect, Old Somerset House began to be demolished in 1775.
Somerset House (Sir William Chambers, 1776)
Since the middle of the 18th century there had been growing criticism that London had no great public buildings. Government departments and the learned societies were huddled away in small old buildings all over the city. Developing national pride found comparison with the capitals of continental Europe disquieting. Edmund Burke was the leading proponent of the scheme for a "national building", and in 1775 Parliament passed an act, the , for the purpose of, inter alia, "erecting and establishing Offices in Somerset House, and for embanking Parts of the River Thames lying within the bounds of the Manor of Savoy". The list of public offices mentioned in the act comprised "The Salt Office, The Stamp Office, The Tax Office, The Navy Office, The Navy Victualling Office, The Publick Lottery Office, The Hawkers and Pedlar Office, The Hackney Coach Office, The Surveyor General of the Crown Lands Office, The Auditors of the Imprest Office, The Pipe Office, The Office of the Duchy of Lancaster, The Office of the Duchy of Cornwall, The Office of Ordnance, The King's Bargemaster's House, The King's Bargehouses".Somerset House was still technically a royal palace and therefore Crown property, with most work being done by the King's Master Mason, John Deval. The building had been placed in trust for the use of Queen Charlotte in the event that her husband King George III predeceased her. Therefore, the 1775 act annulled this arrangement and instead provided for another property, Buckingham House, to be vested in trust for the Queen on the same terms.. In due course, the King outlived the Queen and the property reverted "to the use of His Majesty, his heirs and successors". By virtue of the same act, Ely House in Holborn was sold and the proceeds applied to the Somerset House project.
Initially a certain William Robinson, Secretary to the Board of Works, was commissioned to design and build the new Somerset House, but he died in 1775 shortly after being appointed. So Sir William Chambers, Comptroller of the King's Works, was appointed in his stead, at a salary of £2,000 per year. He spent the last two decades of his life, beginning in 1775, in several phases of building at the present Somerset House. Thomas Telford, then a stonemason, but later an eminent civil engineer, was among those who worked on its construction. One of Chambers's most famous pupils, Thomas Hardwick Jnr, helped build parts of the building during his period of training and later wrote a short biography of Chambers. The design influenced other great buildings: Charles Bulfinch's Massachusetts State House, begun in 1795, has been described as a work "frankly derivative" of Somerset House.