Sir John Vanbrugh

Sir John Vanbrugh, an Englishman of Dutch extraction (known in his earlier days as ‘Van Brugg’ or ‘Vanbrook’), whose extraordinary career encompassed remarkable activities as dramatist, architect, and opera impresario, not to mention erstwhile soldier-adventurer, East India Company man, prisoner in the Bastille, Comptroller of the Works, Surveyor of the Gardens and Waters, and Clarenceux King of Arms, has left many manuscript witnesses to his multifarious achievements, although few to those of a purely ‘literary’ character. At his death on 26 March 1726 he left papers which included an unwitnessed autograph will (still preserved: *VaJ 523), as well as an unfinished play (used by Colley Cibber and now lost). His detailed and biographically revealing account books for the period 1715-26 were also saved (*VaJ 15-16), being kept among papers of his widow, Henrietta Maria (formerly Mrs Yarburgh, 1693-1776), once at Heslington Hall and now at the Borthwick Institute, University of York. His literary manuscripts have otherwise gone the way of most such manuscripts of their period and, after printing or other use, have disappeared without trace.

Letters

By far the greatest number of surviving manuscripts of Vanbrugh — the great majority his autograph originals — are his letters. With their colour, flair, wit and poise, they are not the least vivid witnesses to his life, his personality and his natural writing ability, and, after those of Etherege, must rank as the second most important series of surviving letters by any Restoration dramatist. The majority of Vanbrugh's letters hitherto discovered have been published (in various sources, the most recent or most standard of which are recorded below). They have been largely listed (though with references generally only to printed sources) in Downes (1987), pp. 517-25 (superseding the earlier list in his Vanbrugh (1977), pp. 267-73). Excluding various documents, reports and memoranda recorded separately below (though the distinction between these and ‘letters’ is admittedly somewhat arbitrary), Downes's list may usefully be corrected and expanded: see VaJ 18-384.

Of these surviving letters, as well as other documents by Vanbrugh, by far the most relate to his work on Blenheim Palace for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. It is no accident that they were preserved, since the formidable Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, saved, annotated and often had copied Vanbrugh's letters as evidence to be used in her protracted legal suit against him. Her extensive annotation and docketing of many of the letters (in her peculiar scrawly script and orthography, with remarks such as ‘an insolent paper sent by S^r John’, ‘S^r John Van: brutal letters…of no use but I would keep them’, and ‘the account in these leters is all false’, often written on integral blank leaves, along with docketing by Edward Northey, Thomas Bury and others) leave no doubt as to her feelings about Vanbrugh and often bear witness to the ‘abusive language’ which some of her contemporaries complained about having to bear from her. Those forty-seven letters addressed to the Duke or Duchess of Marlborough, as well as many related documents, were formerly preserved at Blenheim Palace, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, and were briefly summarised in HMC, 8th Report, Appendix, Part I (1881), pp. 1-60 (see pp. 25, 39, 54). Since 1978 they have all been part of the Blenheim archive acquired by the British Library (Add. MSS 61101-61710, supplementing the earlier acquisition of Add. MSS 19591-19618). For general information about this collection, see J. P. Hudson, ‘Cataloguing the Blenheim Archive’, Archives, 14 (1979), 88-91, and the British Library calendar, Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: The Blenheim Papers, 3 vols (London, 1985). The original letters were unavailable to Geoffrey Webb, when editing them for the Works in 1927-28, and his texts of most of the letters are printed from a set of transcripts (with the inevitable occasional error) made by the historian Archdeacon William Coxe (1747-1828), now preserved also in the British Library (see particularly Add. MSS 9092, 9094-9113, 9118-9123). A few other letters, unknown to Webb, have been printed from the originals in Whistler and elsewhere, as noted below.

A collection related to the Blenheim Papers and also in the British Library (acquired in the nineteenth century) is the Newcastle Papers. They contain fifty-one letters by Vanbrugh to the Duke of Newcastle, who was married to Marlborough's granddaughter, Lady Harriet Godolphin.

Twenty-two of the extant twenty-nine letters by Vanbrugh to the Earl of Carlisle, for whom he built his masterpiece, Castle Howard in West Yorkshire, and dating from 1700 and 1721-6, are still preserved there among the Howard family muniments. They are also synopsised in HMC, 15th Report, Appendix, Part VI (1897), pp. 28-33, 36-42, 46-52.

Twelve letters to the publisher Jacob Tonson were (like Dryden's letters to him) formerly among the muniments of the Baker family at Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire, and were summarised in HMC, 2nd Report (1871), Appendix, pp. 69-72. The Bayfordbury archives were dispersed chiefly in a series of auctions at Sotheby's (25 January 1904; 17 December 1924, lots 782-9; 1 July 1925, lots 771-89) and Christie's (17 December 1907, lots 150-68; and 5 November 1945, lots 54-193, lot 193 being a collection of about sixty miscellaneous Tonson papers including six unspecified letters by Vanbrugh). Geoffrey Webb edited most of these in Works from photographs of the originals. All the letters, including two of which the originals were unknown to Webb in 1927-28, were printed in various issues of The Gentleman's Magazine in 1804, 1836, 1837, and 1839. At present, the whereabouts of only five of the original letters to Tonson is known (*VaJ 25, *VaJ 26, VaJ 299, *VaJ 339, *VaJ 373).

Nine letters to the Earl (later Duke) of Manchester, 1699-1708, were formerly owned by the Duke of Manchester and kept for a number of years on deposit in the then Public Record Office. They were sold with the rest of the Manchester Correspondence at Sotheby's, 24 July 1987, lot 257 and are now at Yale (see *VaJ 22, *VaJ 47, *VaJ 52, *VaJ 60, *VaJ 66, *VaJ 67, *VaJ 81, *VaJ 82, *VaJ 95). Some of these letters were printed earlier in The Athenæum in 1861, and (those of 25 December 1699, 18 July 1707, 24 February, 16 March and 22 March 1707/8) in The Duke of Manchester, Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne, 2 vols (London, 1864), II, 53-7, 227-9, 289-91, 318-20, 323-5. They were also briefly summarised in HMC, 8th Report, Appendix, Part II (1881), pp. 90-1, 95, 97, 99, 101.

The eight letters to Henry Bowes Howard (1687-1757), fourth Earl of Berkshire and later eleventh Earl of Suffolk, in the Wiltshire and Swindon Archives (Suffolk and Berkshire Papers, 88/9/25), are the latest cache to be discovered and were first published in Clyve Jones, ‘“To dispose in earnest, of a place I got in jest”: Eight New Letters of Sir John Vanbrugh, 1722-1726’, N&Q, 234 (December 1989), 461-9. This discovery signals the possibility that even more letters by Vanbrugh may come to light in due course.

One unspecified letter by Vanbrugh dated 1724, which might conceivably supplement those for that year recorded below, was sold at Sotheby's, 2 August 1820 (James Bindly sale), lot 75, to Carpenter.

Other Documents Written or Signed by Vanbrugh

Of the various other extant examples of Vanbrugh's hand, clearly the most substantial — and indeed they are the most extensive autograph manuscripts by him to survive — are his account books for the period 1715-1726 (*VaJ 15-16). His own annotated exemplum of his printed pamphlet Sir John Vanbrugh's Justification Of what he depos'd in the Duke of Marlborough's late Tryal [1721] is also notable (*VaJ 17).

Besides these, there are a considerable number of miscellaneous documents written or signed by Vanbrugh (VaJ 385-528). Many of them are preserved in his originals (either autograph or scribal and signed by him, some simply docketed by him), many others in contemporary copies, and some even written entirely on his behalf. They range from fairly substantial reports and memoranda, written in one or other of his official capacities, to routine warrants and submissions signed by him in company with his professional colleagues. No doubt many other such documents exist, including, for instance, further widely-dispersed grants of arms signed by Vanbrugh and his fellow heralds; further reports by the Board of the Office of Works among the Treasury Papers in the National Archives at Kew; and various of the extant accounts relating to expenses of the Queen's Theatre, probably prepared at least in part by him (such as those anonymous scribal accounts printed in Coke Papers, pp. 28, 40-1, 67-72, 75-7, 86-8). Some of the scattered Vice-Chamberlain Coke papers were transcribed in the nineteenth century by the prompter James Winston (British Library, Add. MS 38607), and an anonymous nineteenth-century transcript is in the New York Public Library, Performing Arts Division (Drexel MS 1986, ‘Coke “English Operas”, 1725’).

Architectural Drawings

Vanbrugh's architectural drawings — important as they are — lie essentially outside the limits of the present survey. Suffice it to say here that identifiable collections or examples of architectural drawings relating to his work, made by various draughtsmen, a number of them drawn or annotated by Vanbrugh himself, include plans in All Souls College, Oxford; in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; in Blenheim Palace; in the Bodleian (notably Gough drawings a. 3-4 and MS Top. Oxon. a. 37* [for Blenheim Palace]); in Bristol Record Office (33746 [volume of 125 drawings of Kingsweston House and other works, c.1730, not in Vanbrugh's own hand]); in the British Library (Add. MS 33064, f. 276r; K.35.28.e., et alia, and King's Library collection); in Elton Hall, Cambridgeshire; in Huntingdon Record Office; in Lincolnshire Archives Office (Ancaster MSS); in the National Archives, Kew (Works MSS); in the Royal Library, Windsor; in the Royal Naval College, Greenwich (on deposit in the National Maritime Museum); in Sir John Sloane's Museum; in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and elsewhere.

Many of these are discussed and illustrated in Downes (1977 and 1987); in Whistler; in David Green, Blenheim Palace (London, 1951); in Architectural Drawings in the Library of Elton Hall by Sir John Vanbrugh and Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, ed. Howard Colvin and Maurice Craig (Roxburghe Club, Oxford, 1964); in various volumes of The Wren Society (including Vols. VI, VII and XVII [Oxford, 1929-30, 1940]); in Charles Saumarez Smith, The Building of Castle Howard (London, 1990); in Frank McCormick, Sir John Vanbrugh: The Playwright as Architect (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1991), and elsewhere, and see also the account in Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1660-1840 (new edition, London, 1995).

The Verse Canon

Vanbrugh appears to have written verse on at least one occasion — indulging in a literary activity hardly unusual for Restoration dramatists — though it has been overlooked by his modern editors. To a Lady More Cruel than Fair, which had at least some circulation in manuscript (VaJ 4-12), was published (as by ‘Mr Vanbrook’) in Poetical Miscellanies: The Fifth Part (London, 1704), pp. 245-6. This publication is of further interest in relation to Vanbrugh for two reasons. One is that it contains (on p. 317) another poem, The Rival, which has, on occasions, been ascribed to Vanbrugh in contemporary manuscript copies (see VaJ 1-3), although it appears anonymously in the edition itself and has also been ascribed to William Walsh. The other is that what appears to be a presentation exemplum of this edition made by Vanbrugh himself — one inscribed three times, presumably by the recipient, ‘Hic Liber est Vanbrugh dono mihi quem dedit olim’ — is extant in the library of the late John Sparrow (sold at Christie's, 21 October 1992, lot 127). Whether this volume (which contains no other telling annotations) supports the latter attribution, or the possibility of Vanbrugh's greater involvement in this edition than has hitherto been supposed, is a matter of conjecture.

Two other poems which appear in musical settings attributed to Vanbrugh are also given entries below (VaJ 0.5, VaJ 3.5), although their association with Vanbrugh may be because they were perhaps introduced into later productions of plays by him.

Dramatic Works

The canon of Vanbrugh's dramatic works is, on the other hand, well established and is represented in Works (1927-8). It includes (III, 169-263) an unfinished fragment adapted from ‘his Original Papers’ by Colley Cibber as The Provok'd Husband: or A Journey to London (1728). Cibber's original agreement for this purchase of the copyright in this play, signed by him and, as witnesses, by Anne Cibber and Catherine Brown, 15 September 1727, is in the British Library (Add. MS 38728, f. 43r). A contemporary manuscript transcript of the first edition, written on 166 leaves in two hands, annotated by a theatrical producer and evidently used as an acting copy, is in the Bodleian (MS Eng. misc. d. 353). A fragment of a manuscript copy of The Provok'd Husband, comprising the beginning of Act I of the play, with lists of dramatis personæ and players, in the hand of Charles Boyle, fourth Earl of Orrery (1676-1731), together with an Italian translation, is in Edinburgh University Library (H-P Coll. 326).

Two other plays written wholly or partly by Vanbrugh are not known to have survived. One is the farce Squire Trelooby, which was adapted from Molière's Monsieur de Pourceaugnac in 1704 by Congreve, with Vanbrugh and Walsh allegedly contributing ‘an act’ each. As John C. Hodges has demonstrated (in ‘The Authorship of Squire Trelooby’, Review of English Studies, 4 (1928), 404-13), this play is not to be identified with the anonymously published independent translation Squire Trelooby published in 1704 and actually by John Ozell. It may, however, lie behind James Ralph's The Cornish Squire of 1734, a comedy alleged by Ralph to have been adapted from an occasionally ‘imperfect’ manuscript of the Congreve-Vanbrugh-Walsh piece ‘sent to me by a Gentleman, who has had it in his Library several years’. Although suspecting that Ralph's account is not entirely trustworthy — he might conceivably have been passing off a spurious concoction as the work of Vanbrugh and others to ensure a more favourable reception — Hodges concedes the possibility that Ralph's version may be an ‘imperfect’ and modified witness to the lost original. Ralph's receipt for payment by John Watts for the copyright of ‘a Comedy call'd the Cornish Squire’, dated 1 January 1733[/4], is in the British Library (Add. MS 38728, f. 181r).

The other ‘lost’ play is Snagarell; or, The Cuckold in Conceit, adapted from Molière, and acted at the Haymarket Theatre on 22 March 1706/7. A prologue for it, headed ‘Prologue to the Cuckold in Conceit Made for Norris to speak to the Ladies’ and beginning ‘The Play You've seen being short, we now present’, survives in a manuscript in the hand of Arthur Maynwaring among the Marlborough Papers formerly at Blenheim (now British Library, Add. MS 61462, f. 5r). It is edited (but without noting its connection with Maynwaring) in Philip Roberts, ‘Vanbrugh's Lost Play: The Prologue’, Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 12 (1973), 57-8. It is also edited in Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Prologues and Epilogues of Arthur Maynwaring’, Philological Quarterly, 50 (1971), 610-29 (p. 626).

In addition to the interesting quotations from The Provok'd Wife in a legal indictment of 1702 recorded below (VaJ 14) and an apparently unnoticed adaptation of his farce The Country House (VaJ 13), a few other items relating to Vanbrugh's established plays may be noted. A late-eighteenth-century manuscript copy by Edmond Malone of The Confederacy A Comedy Alter'd from S^r John Vanbrugh was offered in the Joseph Lilly sale at Sotheby's (27 January - 1 February 1873, 6th day), lot 1943, and is now at Yale (Osborn MS c 218). An exemplum of the 1706 quarto edition of The Mistake, Vanbrugh's adaptation of Molière's Le Dépit Amoureux, at Pennsylvania State University bears a manuscript cast list relating to the Lincoln's Inn Fields revival of 1715. This is discussed in Jeanne S. Meekins, ‘A Manuscript Cast for a 1715 Revival of Vanbrugh's “The Mistake”’, N&Q, 227 (December 1982), 527-8. A prompt-book of John Fletcher's The Pilgrim, as adapted by Vanbrugh (London, 1700), prepared for eighteenth-century productions, was in the collection of prompt-books given by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps to the Morrab Library, Penzance, and was sold at Sotheby's, 27 May 1964, lot 702. It is now at the University of Texas at Austin (Prompt Books Box 1, No. 87). This prompt-book, a microfilm of which is at Edinburgh University Library (Mic. P. 311), is discussed, with facsimile examples, in Leo Hughes and A. H. Scouten, ‘The Penzance Promptbook of The Pilgrim’, Modern Philology, 73 (1975-6), 33-53, where the prompters and productions concerned are identified: the first set of markings being by William Chetwood for the Drury Lane revival of 1738; the second set by Richard Cross for Garrick's Drury Lane revival of 1750; and the third set by James Wrighten for Thomas King's Drury Lane revival of 1787.

For this and further prompt-books of plays by Vanbrugh, see Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth Century British and Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York, Westport, Conn., & London, 1987), pp. 212-13 (Charles Macklin's part-book for The Provok'd Wife, in Harvard Theatre Collection, TS 1197.54.5, and David Garrick's prompt-book of the play, in Folger, Prompt P 42) and Barry N. Olshen, ‘The Original and “Improved” Comedies of Sir John Vanbrugh: Their Nineteenth-Century London Stage History’, Restoration & Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, 13 (1974), 27-52. Olshen cites, inter alia, marked-up prompt-books of The Confederacy (1792 edition in the Newberry Library, and 1793 edition in the Harvard Theatre Collection), and of The Provok'd Husband (various American prompt-books in the Harvard Theatre Collection, and a manuscript production book used probably in Philadelphia by William Burke Wood, now in the New York Public Library, Performing Arts Division).

A Prologue and Epilogue to Vanbrugh's Esop — the first ‘spoke by Dick Barton’ (‘Fain wd we shew w^t progress we have made’), the second ‘spoke by Cooper’ (‘Did ever ever — sbud I was afraid’) — are copied in a collection of English and Latin poems of c.1729 in the Folger (MS W.a.300, f. 71r-v). A few songs allegedly relating to plays by Vanbrugh are similarly insertions made in later stage productions. For instance, ‘A Song in the Comedy call'd Aesope sett by M^r. [Richard] Leveridge’ (beginning ‘Should I once change my heart’) appears in an early-eighteenth-century manuscript music book in the Bodleian (MS Mus. Sch. C. 95, pp. 256-7); another copy appears in the Bodleian (MS Mus. Sch. C. 97, f. 7v at end). What purports to be a song in Vanbrugh's adaptation of Fletcher's The Pilgrim (beginning ‘Oh happy happy groves’) also occurs in the Bodleian (MS Mus. Sch. C. 95, p. 66). ‘A Scotch Medley. Introduced in The Provok'd Wife’ (beginning ‘We're gaily yet, and we're gaily yet’) is edited in Works, I, 184, from an octavo leaflet printed in Salisbury in the mid-eighteenth century (British Library, 11621.i.11, No. 25). For Dryden's ‘Secular Masque’ in The Pilgrim, see the Introduction to John Dryden. above.

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous papers relating to Vanbrugh's life and works are legion, and many have been cited by his biographers. They include papers (such as the archives of the Bastille) relating to his imprisonment in France in 1688-92 [see Downes (1977), pp. 247-52, and Paul Hopkins, ‘John Vanbrugh's Imprisonment in France 1688-1693’, N&Q, 224 (December 1979), 529-34], as well as the widely dispersed documentation relating to his career as an operatic impresario, in charge of the Queen's Theatre, Haymarket. For discussion of these papers (including a number of those recorded below) see particularly Downes (1977 and 1988); Whistler; Ronald C. Kern, ‘Documents relating to Company Management, 1705-1711’, Theatre Notebook, 14 (1959-60), 60-5; Philip Olleson, ‘Vanbrugh and Opera at the Queen's Theatre, Haymarket’, Theatre Notebook, 26 (1971-2), 94-101; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, ‘An Annotated Guide to the Theatrical Documents in PRO LC 7/1, 7/2 and 7/3’, Theatre Notebook, 35 (1981), 25-31, 77-87, 122-9; and Judith Mulhous and Robert D. Hume, Vice-Chamberlain Coke's Theatrical Papers 1706-1715 (Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1982); as well as the multi-volume The London Stage 1660-1800 (Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1960-8; Index 1979); Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900, vols I and II (revised editions, Cambridge, 1952); and Milhous and Hume's Register.

The Blenheim papers in the British Library contain many other references to Vanbrugh, not least various letters and legal papers relating to his long-running and acrimonious dispute with the Duke and (especially) Duchess of Marlborough over the building of the Palace and his involvement in the suit of the master masons Edward Strong Sr and Jr. This culminated in the hearing in the House of Lords, involving the Duke of Marlborough as appellant and the two Strongs as respondents, on 23-24 May 1721, an event which has been described as ‘one of the most strenuously contested and copiously documented of eighteenth-century appeal causes’: see Frances Harris, ‘Parliament and Blenheim Palace: The House of Lords Appeal of 1721’, Parliamentary History, 8 (1989), 43-62. Among the related documentation — including some of the Blenheim letters and documents noted below — are British Library Add. MSS 19611-19618, 61356; and Add. MS 38056. The last item is the Duchess's correspondence with her counsel, Sir Thomas Pengelly, including (ff. 70r-1r) a copy of Vanbrugh's answer of 24 October 1718 to the earlier complaint of the two Strongs and (ff. 48r-69r) a copy of the Duchess's account of her dealings with Vanbrugh and of his letters to her. This volume was once owned by the Rev. T. W. Webb and recorded in HMC, 7th Report (1879), Appendix, p. 684. ‘The Case of his Grace the Duke of Marlborough’, the widely circulated document compiled to the Duchess's instructions and to which Vanbrugh's Justification (*VaJ 17) is an answer, survives in a number of copies in the British Library (Lansdown MS 817, ff. 70r-80r) and elsewhere (her own copy being Add. MS 61356, ff. 95r-102r). Some related material is also among legal papers of Francis North (1673-1729), second Baron Guilford, in the Bodleian (MS North b. 22, ff. 300-2v).

Among other miscellaneous documents relating to Vanbrugh are two items now in the Robert H. Taylor Collection at Princeton: namely a letter about him by his fellow herald Peter Le Neve, to Sir Thomas Wheate, 1704; and a receipt for fees due to Vanbrugh and Henry St George for a grant of arms to Henry Durley, signed by Henry St George only, 2 August 1709. Samuel Stebbing's entertaining report on Vanbrugh's visit to Hanover to invest the Electoral Prince of Brunswick with the Order of the Garter, a letter dated from Hanover, 18 June (N.S.) 1706, survives in a later transcript by Mrs Sarah Sophia Banks in the British Library (Add. MS 6321, ff. 59r-61v). The Royal Letters Patent signed by Queen Anne, 22 April, appointing Vanbrugh as her envoy to the Electoral Prince of Brunswick is among Lady Vanbrugh's papers in the Borthwick Institute at the University of York (in YM/VAN.4). Besides various other documents mentioned below and Vanbrugh's account books (*VaJ 15-16), Lady Vanbrugh's papers include such related documents as the bill of sale to Vanbrugh for all the equipment of the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre signed by Betterton and other members of the company, 15 October 1706 (in YM/VAN. 5) and various letters and documents by Vanbrugh's brother, Sir Charles Vanbrugh, and by his son Charles. Official copies of George I's patents appointing Vanbrugh as, respectively, Comptroller of the Works (24 January 1714/15) and Surveyor of the Gardens and Waters (15 June 1715), with the King's instructions on the latter appointment (19 August 1715), are in the National Archives, Kew (Work 6/11, pp. 23-4, 26-7, 31-2). Vanbrugh's banking transactions for the period from November 1714 to May 1715 are recorded in Current Account Ledger No. 18 of C. Hoare and Co., 37 Fleet Street, London EC4.

Vanbrugh's name, and the receipt of memoranda and reports from him, are frequently mentioned in the Treasury Books, now in the National Archives, Kew. His name also crops up, sometimes in a satirical context, in contemporary poems. Two such occur, for instance, in early-eighteenth-century verse manuscripts among the papers of the Fane family, Earls of Westmorland, in the Northamptonshire Record Office (see W (A) Misc. Vol. 20, ff. 90-1, and in Box 4, parcel IV, No. 4). Some later notes on Vanbrugh written by the Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783-1861), in his Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum (Volume VI), are in the British Library (Add. MS 24492, ff. 98v-100r).

Peter Beal