Penrhyn Castle
Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandygai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, constructed in the style of a Norman castle. The Penrhyn Estate was founded by Ednyfed Fychan. In the 15th century his descendant Gwilym ap Griffith built a fortified manor house on the site.
In the 18th century, the Penrhyn Estate came into the possession of the 1st Baron Penrhyn, in part from his father, a Liverpool merchant, and in part from his wife, Ann Susannah Warburton, the daughter of an army officer. Lord Penrhyn, who was elevated to the peerage in 1783, derived great wealth from his ownership of slave plantations in the West Indies and was a strong opponent of attempts to abolish the slave trade. Lord Penrhyn's wealth was used in part for the development of the slate mining industry on his Caernarfonshire estates, and also for the development of Penrhyn Castle. In the 1780s, Lord Penrhyn commissioned Samuel Wyatt to undertake a reconstruction of the medieval house.
On Lord Penrhyn's death in 1808, the Penrhyn Estate was inherited by his second cousin, George Hay Dawkins, who adopted the surname Dawkins-Pennant. From 1822 to 1837, Dawkins-Pennant engaged the architect Thomas Hopper, who rebuilt the house in the form of a Neo-Norman castle. Dawkins-Pennant, who sat as Member of Parliament for Newark and New Romney, followed his cousin as a long-standing opponent of emancipation, serving on the West India Committee, a group of parliamentarians opposed to the abolition of slavery, on which Lord Penrhyn had served as chairman. Dawkins-Pennant received significant compensation when, in 1833, emancipation of slaves in the British Empire was eventually achieved, through the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act.
In 1840, the Penrhyn Estate passed to Edward Gordon Douglas, through his marriage to Dawkins-Pennant's elder daughter, Juliana. Douglas, who assumed the surname Douglas-Pennant, was elevated to the peerage as the 1st Baron Penrhyn of the second creation in 1866. He, and his son and heir, George, continued the development of their slate interests at Penrhyn Quarry, and of the supporting infrastructure throughout North-West Wales. Firmly opposed to trade unionism at their quarries, their tenure saw bitter strikes over union recognition and workers' rights, culminating in the Great Strike of 1900–1903, the longest dispute in British industrial history. Little development took place at the castle during this time, which was not the family's principal residence and was mainly used as a holiday home in the summer months, but the interior was enhanced by Lord Penrhyn's creation of a major collection of paintings. These provided the setting for entertaining guests, who included Queen Victoria, her son Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and William Ewart Gladstone. The castle passed from the Douglas-Pennant family to the National Trust via the National Land Fund in 1951.
Penrhyn Castle is a Grade I listed building, recognised as Thomas Hopper's finest work. Built in the Romanesque Revival style, it is considered one of the most important country houses in Wales and as among the best of the Revivalist castles in Britain. Its art collection, including works by Palma Vecchio and Canaletto is of international importance. In the 21st century, the National Trust's attempts to explore the links between their properties and colonialism and historic slavery have seen the castle feature in the ensuing culture wars.
History
Early owners
In the 15th century, the Penrhyn estate was the centre of a large landholding developed by Gwilym ap Griffith. The land had originally been granted to his ancestor Ednyfed Fychan, Seneschal to Llywelyn the Great. Despite losing his lands temporarily during the Glyndŵr Rising, Gwilym regained them by 1406 and began the construction of a fortified manor house and adjoining chapel at Penrhyn, which became his family's main home.17th and 18th centuries
The fortunes of the Pennant family were begun in the late-17th century by a former soldier, Gifford Pennant. Settling in Jamaica, he built up one of the largest estates on the island, eventually comprising four or five slave plantations for the cultivation of sugar cane. His son, Edward, rose to become Chief Justice of Jamaica and by the beginning of the late 18th century the family had accumulated sufficient funds to return to England, invest their profits in the development of their English and Welsh estates, and manage their West Indian properties as absentee landlords.Edward's grandson, Richard Pennant, acquired the Penrhyn estate in the 18th century, in part from his father, John Pennant, a Liverpool merchant, and in part from his wife, Ann Susannah Pennant, the only child of Hugh Warburton, an army officer. Richard expended his sugar profits on the creation and subsequent development of his North Wales estate, centred on Penrhyn. Recognising the potential for the industrialisation of slate production, he greatly expanded the activities of his main slate mine, Penrhyn Quarry, and invested heavily in the development of the transportation infrastructure necessary for the export of his slate products. A major road-building operation culminated in the creation of Port Penrhyn on the North Wales coast as the centre of his operations that saw the Bethesda quarries become the world's largest producer of slate by the early 19th century. The profits from sugar and slate enabled Pennant to commission Samuel Wyatt to rebuild the medieval house as a "castellated Gothic" castle.
Richard Pennant was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool, and sat for the city until elevated to the Irish peerage as 1st Baron Penrhyn in 1783. Between 1780 and 1790 he made over thirty speeches defending the slave trade against abolitionist attacks, and became so influential that he was made chairman of the West India Committee, an informal alliance of some 50 MPs dedicated to opposing abolition.
19th and 20th centuries
inherited the Penrhyn Estate on Richard Pennant's death in 1808. He continued the approach adopted by his second cousin: developing the Penrhyn Quarry; opposing the abolition of slavery; serving in Parliament; and building at Penrhyn. Dawkins-Pennant's ambitions for his castle, however, far exceeded those of Richard Pennant for his: the building that Thomas Hopper created for him between 1820 and 1837 is one of the largest castles in Britain. The cost of the construction of this vast house is uncertain, and difficult to quantify as many of the materials came from the family's own forests and quarries and much of the labour from their industrial workforce. Cadw's estimation suggests the castle cost the Pennant family around £150,000, equivalent to some £50m in current values.The German aristocrat and traveller Hermann, Fürst von Pückler-Muskau recorded his visit to Penrhyn in his memoirs, Tour of a German Prince, published in 1831. He noted the ingenious design of the bell pulls: "a pendulum is attached to each which continues to vibrate for ten minutes after the sound has ceased, to remind the sluggish of their duty." He was even more impressed by the scale of Dawkins-Pennant's ambition; reflecting that castle building, which in the time of William the Conqueror could only be carried out by "mighty" kings, was by the early 19th century, "executed, as a plaything, — only with increased size, magnificence and expense, — by a simple country-gentleman, whose father very likely sold cheeses."
The elder of Dawkins-Pennant's two daughters, Juliana, married an aristocratic Grenadier Guardsman, Edward Gordon Douglas, who, on inheriting the estate in 1840, adopted the hyphenated surname of Douglas-Pennant. Edward, the grandson of the 14th Earl of Morton, was created the 1st Baron Penrhyn in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1866. In accordance with his father-in-law's wishes, he assembled a major collection of pictures for the castle. He was succeeded by his son, George Douglas-Pennant, 2nd Baron Penrhyn, in 1886. He was, in turn, succeeded by his son, Edward Douglas-Pennant, 3rd Baron Penrhyn, who lost his eldest son, and two half-brothers, as casualties in World War I.
Hugh Douglas-Pennant, 4th Baron Penrhyn, who inherited the title and estates in 1927, died in June 1949, when the castle and estate passed to his niece, Lady Janet Pelham, who, following family tradition, adopted the surname of Douglas-Pennant. In 1951, the castle and of land were accepted by the Treasury in lieu of death duties, and ownership was transferred to the National Trust.
21st century
The National Trust has held custodianship of Penrhyn Castle since its transfer by the government in 1951. It has worked to conserve the house and its setting, and to develop its attraction to visitors. In 2019/2020 Penrhyn received 139,614 such visitors, an increase over the two previous years. In the 21st century, the Trust has sought to develop its understanding and coverage of the links between the house and colonialism and slavery. The Trust's 2022 Penrhyn Castle website records: "we are accelerating plans to reinterpret the stories of the painful and challenging histories attached to Penrhyn Castle. This will take time as we want to ensure that changes we make are sustained and underpinned by high quality research." A large collection of Douglas-Pennant family papers is held by Bangor University and was catalogued between 2015 and 2017.Slavery and slate
Slavery
For much of the 20th century, conservation bodies such as the National Trust largely ignored the issues of slavery and colonialism in relation to their properties. This position began to change at the very end of the century. In 1995, Alaistair Hennesey published a pioneering article on Penrhyn and slavery in History Today. Of Penrhyn, Hennesey wrote, "there is no building which illustrates so graphically the role which slave plantation profits played in the growth of British economic power." In 2009 the Trust organised a symposium, Slavery and the British Country House, in conjunction with English Heritage and the University of the West of England, which was held at the London School of Economics. At the conference Nicholas Draper, discussed the records of the Slave Compensation Commission and their value as a research tool for exploring links between the slave trade and the country house.In 2020, the Trust published its Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery. The appendix to the report recorded that George Hay Dawkins-Pennant was compensated under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 for being deprived of 764 slaves, being paid £14,683 17s 2d. The report itself provoked a strong reaction. The Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs challenged the Trust's priorities; writing in a joint letter to The Daily Telegraph, "History must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit 'snowflake' preoccupations. A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image." The columnist Charles Moore decried the report and stimulated criticism across a range of British media outlets. A complaint against the Trust's report was lodged with the Charity Commission.
Olivette Otele, Professor of Colonial History and the Memory of Slavery at the University of Bristol, explored the dominant narrative presented at Penrhyn after a visit in 2016. She examined the prevalent history of the Pennants as social, industrial and agrarian improvers and noted the absence of discussion of the slave-owning origins of their wealth. In 2020, the naming of a road in Barry as Ffordd Penrhyn provoked protests over the perceived links with Penrhyn Castle, "the capital of slavery in Wales."
Although it had already begun consideration of the links between its properties and the British colonial heritage, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, including the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, led the Trust to acknowledge that these protests had given their efforts a greater impetus. Writing at the time of the interim report's publication, Dr Katie Donnington wrote of the Trust's approach, "Is it scones and tea and a bit of Jane Austen-type fantasy? Does it do critical social history? Or is it a place of escapism where there is a resistance to being confronted with the unsettling realities of empire, race and slavery?"