Dyrham Park
To Dyrham Park, a National Trust property I’d not visited before. It’s a gem of a place, set in a fold of hills in the southern escarpment of the Cotswolds, a few miles north of Bath. It isn’t a grand palace but a comfortable country house, the fruit of toil on behalf of monarchs and the nation in general by its owner and builder, William Blathwayt (c. 1649-1717).
My visit was not an innocent, pleasurable jaunt, however, because I’d been tipped off that Dyrham’s history was being distorted in all the usual ways. I was disappointed to find that this is doubly true: not only is the account of William Blathwayt and his age deformed, but a fascinating temporary exhibition in the house was made incomprehensible by historical inaccuracy and bias.
William Blathwayt (1649-1717) by Michael Dahl
Blathwayt’s story is easy to tell properly. He conducted a remarkable career as an utterly reliable administrator and dedicated public servant. Beginning as a clerk in the British embassy in The Hague in the 1680s (where he mastered the language and developed a
taste for all things Dutch) he was successively Surveyor and Auditor-General of Plantation Revenues, Secretary at War from 1683, and a member of the first Board of Trade in 1696. He was also MP for Bath, 1693-1710. He served five monarchs in all – Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Queen Anne – and negotiated the changes of regime easily because he was indispensable. Much of his life was dedicated to organising and provisioning British armies fighting in the Low Countries against the French in the 1690s and 1700s in the Wars of the League of Augsburg and of Spanish Succession. In the 1690s he accompanied William III on campaigns in Flanders, serving as acting secretary of state.
Much of the wealth he accrued came from the holding of offices, for which he was richly rewarded by the grateful British state. Some of it came, no doubt, from kick-backs and rake-offs when contracts were signed. No one is in any doubt that Blathwayt’s marriage to Mary Wynter was hugely advantageous. Mary inherited the old Tudor manor of Dyrham from her father in 1689 and on this valuable property her husband built Dyrham Park, designed by the Huguenot architect Samuel Haudroy and the more famous William Talman.
Mary Wynter, Mrs. William Blathwayt (1650-1691) by Michael Dahl
After the death of his father, Blathwayt was brought up by his uncle, Thomas Povey, another deft public servant and a founder of the Royal Society, who successfully negotiated the political turbulence of the 1650s and Restoration. Both Blathwayt’s uncle and great uncle, Thomas’s father, were functionaries of state and of the fledgling empire, and Blathwayt followed in a similar career, in his case auditing the colonial accounts. But Blathwayt never visited the Caribbean or the Americas at any stage. He never owned plantations, nor did he have anything to do with slavery in a personal capacity. We don’t hold civil servants responsible today for policies we dislike: why should we hold them responsible in the past?
He apparently built up his knowledge of British colonies by studying maps, travellers’ stories, and financial accounts. He used his friends and contacts to purchase and import goods from the colonies and Europe. Sometimes they were gifted to him, as in the case of timber from Virginia for the panelling and staircases at Dyrham; sometimes purchased, like the Carrara marble from Italy. They were not stolen or looted.
If we want to understand Blathwayt, John Evelyn’s entry in his diary for 18th June 1687 says it all:
‘I din’d at Mr. Blathwayt’s. This gentleman is Secretary of War, Clerk of the Counsel, etc., having raised himself by his Industry from very moderate Circumstances. He is a very proper handsome person, and very dextrous in businesse, and has besides all this, married a very great fortune’.
Despite Blathwayt’s endeavours, information in the house and in a permanent exhibition on Dyrham, tries desperately to link him to a malign history of empire. A video in the house tells us that ‘as a key figure in colonial matters, he benefitted directly from economies fuelled by the transatlantic slave trade’. ‘Directly’ is never defined, of course, but it surely suggests something akin to slave trading, slave ownership, and personal colonial exploitation. Instead, Blathwayt was a public servant, an accountant. Similarly, the National Trust’s guide to the textile exhibition speaks of ‘Dyrham Park’s tangible links to the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the British colonies’ but gives no examples or evidence of tangibility. The house contains very little that can link it to slavery, in fact, with the exception of a pair of stands in the form of two black slaves each holding up a scallop-shell dish. These were purchased by Povey rather than Blathwayt: the uncle was an investor in the Royal African Company and the stands were inherited by the nephew.
The otherwise excellent and informative guide to Dyrham by Dr. Rupert Goulding, a senior National Trust curator, does its best to implicate Blathwayt in colonial guilt but the whole thing reads as forced. One senses that the author’s heart isn’t in it – that Goulding is too good a historian and too knowledgeable about Dyrham to make colonial accusations. ‘Colonial’ paintings at Dyrham are featured in the guidebook, but it’s the influence of Dutch goods, Dutch style and Dutch art which predominate across the house. Many of these artefacts were purchased when Blathwayt was a young diplomat in the 1680s, and then later when organising the Flanders campaign in the 1690s.
Dyrham is a brilliant example of the politics and culture of the age of William and Mary, in short, despite attempts to frame it in the wrong way. Blathwayt was not a freebooting colonialist but a supremely gifted bureaucrat and organiser. Nor was a man whose career was focused on European warfare and statecraft – on winning wars against the French and their allies – a notable founder of empire. The National Trust, too quick to bend in the wind of fashion, is making historical mistakes and confusing visitors: it tells them to think ‘colonialism’ when the house and its history are really about the Anglo-Dutch political and military connection.
Worse awaits the unsuspecting visitor in the shape of a short film made to accompany the temporary exhibition ‘Journeys: Asafo Flags from the Karun Thakar Collection’. Thakar, who was born in Kenya of Indian background, educated in Britain, and who now lives here, has been collecting textiles from around the world over the last forty years. Three National Trust houses are showcasing selections from his wonderful collections this summer. Dyrham is displaying Thakar’s collection of Asafo Flags. You can see the supposedly explanatory film about these here:
Asafo flags were made by military companies of the Fante people who lived in the coastal areas of the Gold Coast – today’s Ghana. They date, roughly, from the period between the 1850s and the 1970s. These companies took on other functions as well, bringing civic order and services to Fante communities. Their flags are a striking form of folk art, depicting aspects of Fante life, history, and proverbial beliefs, though, as the guide book puts it, ‘many different meanings can be read into each one’. Strikingly, almost every one of the two dozen or so flags on display includes very prominently the Union flag of the supposed colonial oppressors, the British themselves, sewn into corners. If these are anti-colonial symbols you could have fooled me.
The history is important, of course. In the 19th century the British served as protectors of the Fante (and also the Ga people) who were constantly menaced by the expansionary Ashanti (Asante) empire. The Ashanti kept and traded slaves and indulged in human sacrifices. There were five Anglo-Ashanti wars in all. No one would deny that the British hoped to gain strategically and economically from control of the coast of West Africa. But at the same time we were engaged in humane reforms there, trying to stop slave trading and ritual murder. Had the British wished to conquer and absorb this region into the empire it would have been possible in the 1820s, if not earlier. In fact, it wasn’t until 1901 that the Ashanti lands became a British protectorate, and only for a short time. Three decades later Ashanti self-rule was restored.
In the film shown to visitors the National Trust Senior National Curator for Social History, Emma Slocombe, begins by telling Thakar that ‘the house was funded with money from [that] colonial enterprise’ but, as we’ve seen, it was funded from Blathwayt’s salaries and fees. Then Thakar is talked at (rather than to) by Gus Casely-Hayford, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum East. He says:
The 1870s at the peak of empire. The British they send a force to what is today Ghana but was then the Gold Coast. They build a protectorate there. They capture the king and they send him into exile and they exploit the gold, the bauxite, everything…they recognise that even though they’ve colonized these people, that they’ve enslaved these people, they’re exploiting their resources, they haven’t broken them…
There seems to be a confusion here between the Ashanti, imperial in their own way, whom the British fought and eventually subdued, and the Fante whom the British protected and who made the Asafo flags. Remember also that the Ashanti Wars were fought by the British to end slavery, not to impose it themselves.
Casely-Hayford then politicises the collection on the basis of a single flag which he interprets as a symbol of resistance against the British. All the rest of the flags are either proverbial or private in their meaning. But Gus is sure: ‘It’s in things like your collection of flags that we can get a sense of how individuals in small subtle way refused to completely comply’. With whom they were pressured to comply, or because of what, is not made clear.
Casely-Hayford lauds the flags’ stories ‘of pride and endurance’ and admits to feeling ‘you know, a little bit emotional’. He’s very concerned about ‘all of the challenges that the colonial period threw at them that they created an incredible cultural contribution’. He lauds collections of objects from ‘the global south’ and the stories they tell ‘that just are not told by our national museum collections well.’ The camera occasionally cuts from Gus to Karun. Poor Karun sits there, unable to get a word in –it’s his collection, after all – as Gus exudes vague anti-colonialism. One senses that he’d rather talk about the flags than the politics.
At no point does Casely-Hayford mention the Fante people, who made these flags, or discuss what the British tried to do in West Africa in this period: rid the region of slave trading and slavery, introduce free trade between the tribes and also with the British to assist pacification and wealth creation, and protect the smaller tribes from the Ashanti. Anyone watching this film would imagine the worst about Britain and its role in the region. Perhaps Casely-Hayford does know the history. But he leaves the audience with the uneasy feeling that this is an exhibition about colonialism and resistance to British depredations and coercion. It isn’t.
Grasping the history is not helped by non-sequiturs like this from the textile exhibition guide: ‘Although the slave trade was abolished in 1807, Britain remained in power until Ghanaian independence in 1957.’ Where does one start in dealing with a statement like that?
I left Dyrham saddened by two further examples of the National Trust’s distortion of British history. Colonialism is all the rage, even when it’s marginal to the history and culture of a house that tells us about the influence of all things Dutch, and about the wars fought by the English in Europe rather than the Caribbean. Worse still is the imputation that the exhibition of Asafo flags is a monument to anti-colonialism. Almost the reverse is true: the Fante needed and welcomed the British.
Before Dyrham was passed to the National Trust it was purchased by the Land Fund in 1946. The Fund was established to secure notable estates and properties for the nation as a memorial to those who died in the Second World War. It’s of no help to people today to mangle history like this. As for those who died for their country, they deserve better.
