Strawberry Hill: Performed Architecture, Houses of Fiction and the Gothic Aesthetic

Abstract

In the April of 1763, Louis-Jules-Barbon Mancini-Mazarini, duc de Nivernais, visited Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, Walpole’s home in Twickenham. Nivernais and Walpole, who were almost exact contemporaries, had much in common. For a start, they were both politicians. Nivernais, an experienced diplomat, was acting in England as ambassador extraordinary, and earlier in the year had been involved in the negotiations for the Peace of Paris, one of the two treaties that concluded the Seven Years War.1 Walpole was the son of the eminent eighteenth-century first minister, Robert Walpole, and an MP in his own right, with what he called (using an Old English term to refer to parliament) a ‘Gothic passion … for squabbles in the Wittenagemot.’2 Besides politics, Walpole and Nivernais had many other mutual interests. Walpole was a francophile and Nivernais an anglophile. Both were connoisseurs of art, devotees of the landscape garden, and, above all, men of letters.3 The two were to remain in contact for many years afterwards (the last surviving letter that passed between them dates from 1792, by which time both men were in their mid-seventies). Nivernais’ visit to Twickenham in 1763, however, was not primarily social. His reason for calling was as much to see Strawberry Hill as to see Walpole.