Honey-coloured Montacute House is one of the glories of late Elizabethan architecture.
Offered 'for scrap' in 1931, Montacute was rescued for the National Trust as one of its first great houses. It has been filled with furniture, fine tapestries and a collection of Tudor and Jacobean portraits on loan from the National Portrait Gallery.
Montacute was built in the last years of the 16th-century by Sir Edward Phelips, as a symbol of his rising career. Sir Edward had made his fortune as a lawyer and was enjoying a successful political life, having entered Parliament in 1584.
© NTPL / Rupert Truman
He commissioned the house in 1588, almost certainly employing local builder William Arnold to create a magnificent new home for him. The date 1601 is carved over the east doorway, the likely year when the building was completed.
Montacute was to be the Phelips family home for more than 300 years.
Gothic tradition mixed with Renaissance ideas
Montacute survives as one of the best preserved of Elizabethan mansions.
Its architecture is an exquisite pastiche of Gothic tradition and new Renaissance ideas that were arriving from the continent at the time.
© NTPL / Rupert Truman
The local golden Ham Hill stone and glittering windows of Montacute’s tall East Front show Arnold’s skill in exploiting colour, light and scale.
Visitors to the newly-built Montacute would have spied the East Front first from the approach road.
Designed to be accordingly magnificent, it incorporates classical detail, made fashionable by the Renaissance. Pairs of shell-headed niches line the ground floor and the statues of the Nine Worthies (biblical, classical and medieval figures including Julius Caesar and King Arthur) perch in niches on the top storey.
© NTPL
Montacute has undergone major alterations only once in its 400 year history.
During the 1780s a later Edward Phelips grafted a new façade on to the centre of the West Front. He used ornamental stonework taken from another 16th-century house, Clifton Maybank near Yeovil. The stone's carving celebrates the marriage of a Phelips ancestor.
Montacute in decline
The agricultural depression in the late 19th-century took its toll on the whole estate at Montacute.
The house was gradually stripped of its contents, as they were sold off by the family. The Phelips finally left their ancestral home in 1911, after which Montacute was leased to a succession of tenants.
© NTPL
In 1915, the house was taken over by the illustrious Lord Curzon, an early advocate of preserving the ancient buildings of England. He invested in redecorating Montacute.
However, Montacute was put up for sale in 1929 and valued ‘for scrap’ at £5,882 in 1931.
The revival of Montacute
In 1931, Ernest Cook, the grandson of Thomas Cook (of the travel company fame), funded the purchase of Montacute by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). They presented it to the National Trust, to safeguard it for ever, for everyone.
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