A Forger's Progress: The Life of Francis Greenway

For Tim and Judith

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Alasdair McGregor 2014

First published 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: McGregor, Alasdair, 1954– author.

Title: A Forger’s Progress: the life of Francis Greenway/Alasdair McGregor.

ISBN:  9781742233789 (hardback)

9781742241821 (ePub/Kindle)

9781742247021 (ePDF)

Subjects: Greenway, Francis, 1777–1837

Architects – New South Wales – Biography.

Architecture, Colonial – New South Wales.

Building – Australia – History.

Dewey Number: 720.92

DESIGN Di Quick

COVER DESIGN Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

COVER IMAGES Convict [Hyde Park] Barrack Sydney NSW, c. 1820, artist unknown, SLNSW: Major James Taylor, The Entrance of Port Jackson and Part of the Town of Sydney, 1823, NLA: Francis Greenway, Plan and Elevation of the Governor’s Stable and Offices at Sydney, New South Wales, 1820, Mitchell Library, SLNSW: Lachlan Macquarie, Memorandum for Mr Greenway, 4 July 1817, Greenway papers, A 1451, Mitchell Library, SLNSW.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

CONTENTS

Introduction: a forger’s progress

1  Earthly reward: 800 acres and 16 cows

2  FH Grinway comes to London

3  A ‘ruinous architectural triumph’

4  A curious and noteworthy crime

5  Bristol Newgate: ‘white without and foul within …’

6  The blighted voyage of the General Hewett

7  A state of ‘infantile imbecility’

8  To copy a courthouse

9  FH Greenway, 84 George Street

10  Three shillings a day and a government horse

11  Bright prospect: the Macquarie Tower, 1816–20

12  Pain and humiliation: the Barrack Square incident

13  A mansion for the viceroy: Government House, 1816–20

14  Transportation: ‘an object of considerable terror’

15  A ‘palace for horses’: the Government House stables, 1817–21

16  Follies, fountains and fugacious toys, 1818–20

17  ‘… a neat handsome fort’: colonial defences, 1816–21

18  ‘… an idea of grandeur’: the Hyde Park Barracks, 1816–19

19  Walls of spite: St Matthew’s and St Luke’s, 1817–24

20  Feeding body and soul: St Andrew’s and the market house, 1819–22

21  Fragments of a plan: St James’ and the Supreme Court, 1819–27

22  A ‘vile conspiracy’: the Parramatta Female Factory, 1818–21

23  ‘… for the sake of a numerous family’

24  From George Street to the ‘City of the World’

Measurements and currency

Buildings mentioned in the text

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION: A FORGER’S PROGRESS

An image by 19th-century photographer Henry King shows the wide arc of a stone seawall jutting out into Sydney Harbour. Rowing prams ride lazily alongside, while boatmen sit yarning, perhaps waiting for a fare. From behind the water’s edge, a second stone wall steps back and up – dark and forbidding – and ends in a castellated tower at the left-hand edge of the photograph. While undoubtedly absorbing as a depiction of lost Sydney, King’s image becomes one of fascination when tagged as Bennelong Point, one of the most famous locations in the world. The walls and tower were part of Fort Macquarie, designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, and built by convict labour between 1817 and 1821.

More than 180 years later, the British art historian Dan Cruickshank stood on Bennelong Point in a scene from his popular BBC television series Around the World in 80 Treasures.¹ Of course, Cruickshank had come to see the Sydney Opera House, the obvious candidate as one of his 80 ‘treasures’. But after enthusing over the poetry of the building’s famous shells, the historian nonetheless concluded that Jørn Utzon’s Opera House was flawed, an undoubted masterpiece let down by its compromised interiors. ‘Very sad’, lamented Cruickshank, who then went searching elsewhere for his treasure.

After considering and rejecting the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Cruickshank settled on a third, ‘much more surprising contender’. He described it as the city’s ‘hidden gem, a charming little Georgian church’. A short walk up Macquarie Street from Bennelong Point lies the Anglican Church of St James, secreted away among the banal, the bland, and the plain ugly of modern commercial Sydney. ‘St James’ may look like any old late Georgian classical church’, Cruickshank admitted, ‘but it tells the story of how Australia was built, of how a noble nation evolved out of a penal colony’. For Cruickshank, it was the historical context of St James’ that was so inspiring:

When this church was started, the city was less than 50 years old, and more to the point, it was a penal settlement … a sort of shantytown; so this church’s grandeur is astonishing. It is metropolitan in its ambition; it is a declaration really, that one day, this town of convicts, Sydney, would be a great city.

Well might Francis Greenway, the architect of this ‘little Georgian church’, have snorted agreement at such a claim!

While Cruickshank’s thoughts on St James’ Church were limited by the medium of television, his essential conclusion is profound. His message appeals to our generation as we continually search for meaning in our past. But Greenway and his sometime benefactor, protector and irritant, Governor Lachlan Macquarie – and his wife Elizabeth – were concerned about a future, one rooted in the transformation of a ragtag place of banishment and perdition into a confident society of emancipists and free settlers. A number of their schemes and dreams were self-indulgent and even silly, ill suited to the needs of the times, but the progressive energy of their vision of a nascent Australia cannot be denied.

St James’ and Fort Macquarie are examples of Greenway’s divergent architectural styles – one well mannered and classical, the other romantic and picturesque. Such apparent stylistic anomalies were unremarkable for architects of his time – only the prejudices of later ages adjudge them mismatched. The aesthetic of Greenway’s classicism sits well with modern tastes for simplicity and order, yet Victorian-era Sydney – still troubled by the convict ‘stain’ – found his buildings bleak and mean. A mid-19th-century commentator thought the austere, though finely proportioned, convict barracks opposite St James’, ‘quite destitute of any pretensions to architecture’, yet found the recently completed Government House (not a Greenway building) ‘magnificent and imposing’. Ironically, the governor’s new Gothic-revivalist lodgings were designed specifically to complement Greenway’s earlier government stables.²

But while style and taste shift with each restless generation, the challenge for any architect is to respond sensitively and intelligently to the environment and time in which they work. For a short time Greenway’s star shone brightly in the antipodean sky. He was highly accomplished, though not the genius he might have considered himself to be. His limits were real, and the challenges he faced in New South Wales were particular and daunting, made worse by his tactless and hotheaded nature. Yet, he skilfully overcame paltry budgets, shortages and poor-quality materials, adapting his designs to a restricted palette and limited means. He fought with his convict labour force whose skills were patchy at best, but managed to cajole acceptable work from their unwilling bodies.

Make no mistake, New South Wales in the first half of the 19th century could still be a harsh place, despite the Macquaries’ beneficence. And while the colony grew and matured, its remoteness remained immutable. For Cruickshank, this only heightens Greenway’s achievements, and the value of St James’ Church in particular. It was ‘absolutely haunting in this barren location, at the other end of the world, a town of pain, where one gets a spectacular church built, a church as good as anything in Britain at the time’.

As much as my narrative is about architecture, style, and fine buildings rising against the odds, it is far more the story of a man beset by contradictions and demons, a story of crime and self-destruction, punishment, redemption and decay. It is not a pretty story, but neither is it ugly. It is hauntingly sad, yet somehow ennobling. It is the story of the doomed hero, the one who, despite an abundance of talent, squanders his life at the altar of conceit. Greenway’s life might be described as a ‘forger’s progress’, to borrow loosely from William Hogarth and the unfortunate fate of the libertine Tom Rakewell.

Many times when struggling to understand Francis Greenway I reached for Malcolm Ellis’s account of his life, first published 65 years ago. Of the quixotic Greenway’s character, no one could say it better:

All his criteria were artistic. Whether he transgressed manmade laws of conduct seems to have been with him a matter of expediency. To flout the absolute basic laws of art and of the Grand Architect of the universe was, however, in his sight a capital crime against the Holy Inspiration.³

Ellis’s Francis Greenway: His Life and Times, with its wonderfully fastidious, almost obsessive command of original sources, was also an essential companion when navigating a maze of crusty early 19th-century official correspondence. Ellis helped me cut into the officialese of the likes of John Thomas Bigge and Lord Henry Bathurst, replete with the idiosyncratic capitalisation and spelling of the day, and there mine the human foibles and prejudices common to any age. Much of the style of Ellis’s narrative seems to bleed from Greenway’s own era, his characters universally referred to with appropriate formality as Mr Greenway, Mr Bigge, Mr Kitchen and so on. Ellis was a notoriously combative figure himself, and his pithy insights and acerbic wit are perfectly matched to Greenway’s own feisty disposition. In such a context, I make no apology for quoting liberally from Ellis. And from the specific to the broader historical landscape, Ellis’s Francis Greenway was but an offshoot of his magisterial Lachlan Macquarie (1947), a book that remains the definitive work on the era.

A more recent work without which I am sure my reading of Greenway’s life would never have reached a satisfying conclusion is James Broadbent and Joy Hughes’s 1997 monograph, Francis Greenway: Architect. Not only did the two authors shine a brilliant scholarly light on Greenway’s buildings, his architectural influences and context, but their précis of his life was ever a steady guide when I became lost down the twisted alleyways of early Sydney. Their catalogue raisonné identifies 82 works, either known to be by Greenway, attributed to him or with which he had some association. An invaluable assemblage of painstaking detective work, it was always to hand.

Of those 82 buildings, less than a quarter are extant today. A few were never built, while most were long ago swept away by a tide of growth and change. The loss of many works of quality is to be mourned, yet despite such destruction, combative Mr Greenway’s spirit lies distilled in a handful of treasured buildings. Distilled but not diminished, he stubbornly lectures us all on the grandeur of scale and the beauty of line, reminding us of what we still have, and what we can never regain.

EARTHLY REWARD: 800 ACRES AND 16 COWS

The walls of the small hut were made of rough-sawn eucalypt slabs, and the roof framed in saplings and covered in sheets of stringy bark. There were just two rooms at first, with mud floors and no glass in the miserable openings that passed for windows. Sheets of calico were all there was to keep out the rain and cold. In the middle of the main room was a table made from four planks and secured to uprights sunk into the earthen floor. Two rough benches served as the only seating.

At Tarro, approximately 15 miles north of the convict settlement of Newcastle, and not far off the road from Hexham to Wallis Plains, the hut stood on a grassy ridge overlooking a tight bend in the Hunter River and a stretch of low cultivated ground growing wheat, potatoes, maize, pumpkins and watermelons.

William Howard Greenway had built the hut with the help of convict labour some time around 1827 on Howard Farm, an 800-acre grant of land made to his father a few years before. Born in England, William had arrived in New South Wales as a small boy in 1814, and had later become a builder of sorts around Sydney. He worked with his architect father and claimed to have helped with the building of Australia’s first lighthouse. But following the death of his mother in 1832, the Greenway family fortunes went into decline and William left Sydney for good, taking his two sisters and two of his three surviving brothers with him to Howard Farm.

To accommodate the family, he extended the hut in a rather desultory fashion and added two bedrooms, although rather than a dirt floor, these extra rooms were afforded the luxury of roughly sawn planks for floorboards. And of the original virgin bush that comprised the Greenway land grant, census records show that by 1828 just 30 acres had been cleared, with only half that area under cultivation. A herd of 16 cows grazed the land.

John Wallace, a young engineer from England who in 1846 married the youngest Greenway sister, Agnes, recalled William as ‘idle and pleasure hunting’. He was unable to stick at business in Sydney, and the hut ‘was all after years and years [that] William had provided for his sisters and brothers’.¹

In his final days, the hut also became the last miserable home of William’s father, Francis – likewise distinguished by the middle name of Howard. Francis was no farmer, and the grant of land had been made to him by the colonial government in 1821, partly in compensation for remuneration forgone, but also to shut him up. Although they never met, Wallace knew Francis Greenway by reputation among the family, describing him as a ‘violent tempered man, dictatorial and quarrelsome’.

The small hut on the grassy ridge beyond the edge of civilisation must indeed have been a wretched abode for the five children and their father. Again, Wallace noted a ‘violent quarrel when the father came up from Sydney’. And it was there on Howard Farm, in September 1837, that Francis Howard Greenway died at the age of 59, possibly of typhoid fever.

His passing went unnoticed and unrecorded in Sydney, or anywhere else for that matter. If he was remembered at all at the time it might have been as the choleric associate of the former governor, Lachlan Macquarie, and for their short-lived collaboration in the pursuit of civic progress.

Even the death of the indolent William in 1894 was marked by an obituary that described him as a ‘most observant as well as an educated man’.² But for Greenway the father there were no public obituaries, and no crowds to nod in sombre agreement as eulogies were spoken softly over his coffin. Perhaps not even his children cared for their querulous father, as there is no known grave for Francis Howard Greenway. In the absence of a clergyman, the local schoolmaster from East Maitland read the burial service on 25 September 1837.³

It was a bitterly sad end for a man who had dined at the governor’s table, courted the favour of the English aristocracy, and claimed the illustrious Arthur Phillip as a friend and patron. He had exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, immersed himself in the study of the Ancients and worked with John Nash, the most fashionable architect of his day. He had dreamt of a city the equal of any in architectural beauty and refinement, a city of cathedrals and grand public buildings, broad avenues, generous squares and flowering gardens. And in his own completed works he had fought against ignorance and indifference to bring civility and aesthetic good manners to a benighted gaol at the outer limits of the British Empire, only to be repaid with a miserable piece of land in the wilderness. Ridiculed and rejected, he had spent the final years of his life in desperate poverty, an enduringly obstinate and proud yet disillusioned man obsessed with setting the record straight – according to his own lights – and righting the injustices an uncaring world had wrought upon him. But by the late 1820s no one was listening, and he might as well have expostulated to the cows that grazed languidly by the bend of the Hunter River.

From noble public buildings imbued with the civilising power of architecture to a rude hovel on the barbaric frontier – such was the decline and fall in less than two decades of Francis Howard Greenway.

He began his life nearly 60 years before in Gloucestershire, as the fourth son among an eventual brood of eight children born to Francis Greenway and Ann (née Webb). Francis was a Mangotsfield man from near Bristol; Ann was from the Cotswolds village of Colerne in nearby Wiltshire. The first four Greenway boys appeared in quick succession: Olive was born in 1775, then twins William and John Tripp in the following year. This latest baby boy arrived soon after and was baptised on 23 November 1777 in the 13th-century parish church of St James, Mangotsfield. He was simply called Francis, after his father; he would add the middle name of Howard himself in adult life. Mary and Elizabeth followed, before two more boys, Daniel and Charles, both of whom died young.

Francis Greenway senior was a stonemason and builder, one of generations of West Country Greenways, Grinways or Greenaways, steeped for centuries in the ways of quarrymen, architects, builders, masons and weavers. Proud of their formidable skills, the masons of the West Country had some of the best stone in the British Isles to work with – the hard, blue and red pennant sandstones of South Wales and Bristol, and the famous honey-coloured limestone known as Bath stone.

Among the members of the family noted by history, a John Greenway became a wealthy wool merchant in Tiverton in Devon in the early 16th century, built a chapel to St Peter and endowed almshouses for the poor. Ellis describes the parapet of St Peter’s as a ‘miracle of stone tracery, as light as lace’.⁴ Two centuries on, Thomas Greenway built the Theatre Royal in Bath in 1720, a richly ornamented building connected with the famous dandy and leader of fashion Beau Nash. But rather than Devon or Bath, Francis’s immediate family was more closely associated with the port city of Bristol and its outlying hamlets and villages.

About three miles north-east of Bristol, unremarkable Mangotsfield was like countless other villages ranged across rural England. Occupation of the district dates back to Roman times, and the village was mentioned in the 11th-century Domesday Book as Manegodesfelle. The settlement grew around the intersection of local roads, with Downend to the north-west, Staple Hill to the west and Pucklechurch to the east. The latter had been the site of a Saxon villa or palace used by the Kings of Wessex, and to the south of Mangotsfield lay the forest remnants of the Kingswood, a vast royal hunting estate in medieval times. By Francis Greenway’s era, much of the Kingswood had been turned over to common use or leased for coalmining. The Mangotsfield villagers were poor folk, employed in the main as farm labourers and quarrymen, or miners working in the scattered coal pits of the district.

In Mangotsfield itself, bluff gable-fronted houses faced inwards towards a small village green and the medieval church of St James. Close by stood Mangotsfield House, a distinguished red-brick building that served as the vicarage. Still standing in the 1790s was the 500-year-old manor house of William Putot (demolished in 1845), while a short distance away on Rodway Hill lay another manor house, built in the 1350s by William Blount, and said to have been used by Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn while hunting in the Kingswood.

By the time Francis and his brothers were active as masons and builders, Bristol was stirring, expanding outwards to the north and the east. Over the following century and a half, the port city swallowed Mangotsfield, and as a village green became a car park, rustic unpretentiousness was degraded to amiable though dreary suburbia.

Nothing is known of Francis Greenway’s earliest days, where he lived in Mangotsfield or its surrounds, or where and how he was schooled. No image remains among the few remnants of the late 18th-century village to conjure the life of the boy, or to fathom from whom or where he gained a respectable knowledge of the classics and of English literature, whereby he could quote in later years from the likes of Cicero and Shakespeare, or the novels of Laurence Sterne.⁵

Francis senior died in 1793 at the age of 45, leaving 18-year-old Olive as the head of the large family and proprietor of the Greenway mason’s yard, probably located at the time in Downend. Despite their tender ages at the time of their father’s death, the four eldest brothers were no doubt already well trained in the mason’s craft. They would have readily picked up the tools in his memory, keeping on building and planning, repairing and maintaining the churches and churchyards, townhouses and great country piles of Gloucestershire. ‘So persisting were most Greenways in their attachment to the arts and trades of stonework’, wrote Ellis rather quaintly, ‘that the best of them seemed to have learned their business almost instinctively at their fathers’ knees’. Without evidence, Ellis also describes the Greenways as followers of the great architects of the age, men of the calibre of Nicholas Hawksmoor, George Dance and Robert Adam. And in the wider landscape, he saw them playing in the ‘same fields of fancy as Capability Brown and Humphrey [i.e. Humphry] Repton’.⁶

The port city of Bristol had grown rich through the 18th century on brass founding, tobacco and the ill-gotten gains of the slave trade. The city fathers and prosperous classes had money to spend on lavish construction and architectural aggrandisement. But while Bristol had grown in size and influence, it was still provincial in its outlook, and conservative and philistine in its taste. In such an atmosphere of opportunity and promise, a young Francis Greenway might have dreamt of more than the mason’s yard, of more than monumental masonry, church repairs, garden walls and ornamental statuary. Perhaps he dreamt then of a city of fine public buildings of good taste; of drawing and design; and of giving the gift of architecture to a world appreciative of his many talents, his own god-given talents received from the great architect of the universe himself.

Long before formal courses in architecture, to become Francis Howard Greenway, architect and painter (as he was soon to describe himself), the young stonemason’s son required a teacher, a master to whom he could be apprenticed. By good fortune he soon found that teacher, perhaps come to do business at the Greenway brothers’ own yard.

FH GRINWAY COMES TO LONDON

Some time around 1797 Francis Greenway drifted out of the shadows of provincial obscurity and arrived in London at the home of ‘Mr Nash’. Nothing is known of his impressions of the great unruly metropolis, the city of Samuel Johnson and coffee houses, of fashionable Mayfair and Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, of crime and grim poverty. But here was architecture writ large in a city growing fast and soon to be the largest in the world. London was the city of young Greenway’s dreams made real, and its impact could hardly have been anything but profound. Arriving at Mr Nash’s placed him on the threshold of what could shape up as a significant career, his own good fortune bound to that of the prominent architect John Nash. Nash was destined to become one of the most fashionable architects of the regency and reign of George IV, his name soon to be synonymous with the layout and appearance of large tracts of London. The chance to work with such a mentor opened up a world of possibility to the lad from Mangotsfield.

The son of a Welsh millwright, London-born Nash had served an apprenticeship with the architect Sir Robert Taylor before branching out on his own as a surveyor, carpenter and builder. An indifferent early career in London soon came unstuck, with the failure of speculative ventures in Bloomsbury Square and Great Russell Street. In 1783, a bankrupted Nash retreated to the town of Carmarthen on the River Towy in South Wales and the support of his mother’s family. And so began what the architectural historian Sir John Summerson described as ‘ten years of provincial oblivion’.¹

During his exile in Wales, Nash established an extensive practice as an architect and building contractor. There he also met Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, two theorists on the picturesque in architecture and town planning who were to have a lasting influence that by extension would flow to Greenway. Towards the end of his Welsh sojourn Nash formed a partnership with the landscape designer Humphry Repton, often viewed as the successor to the great Capability Brown. As his practice expanded through the 1790s, Nash took on and trained several assistants and draftsmen, the likes of whom included Repton’s son John Adey, and Auguste-Charles Pugin, the father of Augustus Pugin of Gothic-revival and Palace of Westminster fame.

With the city of Bristol lying a short distance across the estuary of the River Severn from South Wales, it seems inevitable that as Nash’s practice grew, he would have called on an everwidening circle of tradesmen and suppliers in the region, and he could readily have come into contact with the Greenway brothers. As James Broadbent and Joy Hughes speculated, in the late 1790s young Francis Greenway was ‘just the right age … for attachment through apprenticeship or other arrangement to an up-andcoming architect’.² Nash was working in London again in 1796 and returned there to live the following year, building a house for himself at 28 Dover Street, and possibly taking Greenway with him.³

A first clue as to the association with Nash lies not, however, in London but in Nash’s Welsh bolthole of Carmarthen, the site of one of only three buildings in Britain known definitively to be by Francis Greenway, or identified with him. In the late 18th century, coal and iron, the lifeblood and bones of the industrial revolution, saw previously slumbering provincial towns such as Carmarthen outgrow their medieval walls. In October 1800, the Corporation of the Borough of Carmarthen ordered the removal of the old marketplace to outside the town walls, and a new market building was opened in April the following year. According to Broadbent and Hughes, no reference has been found to verify the identity of the builder or architect, but Greenway appears to have assumed the latter role.⁴

Upon his eventual arrival in New South Wales in 1814, Greenway sent a portfolio of his work to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Among several designs supposedly submitted, the only scheme mentioned by name was ‘one for a Market House & Town Hall & carried into effect at Carmarthen in Wales’.⁵ Greenway’s addition of the ‘town hall’ was probably part of a more elaborate scheme that never came to fruition at Carmarthen. A contemporary plan of the town shows a humbler building than that alluded to by Greenway, with what appears to be a simple single-storeyed structure surrounding an open quadrangle.⁶ In his efforts to impress Macquarie, it would have mattered little to Greenway whether his town hall was ever realised. A humble effort or not, the connection between Nash and Greenway – master and pupil – appears to hinge on the Carmarthen Market House. The building was demolished by the middle of the 19th century and unfortunately there are no surviving illustrations to provide any clues as to its appearance or stylistic roots.

Aside from kindling the fires of Greenway’s architecture, his association with Nash might also have incited a certain recklessness in such a headstrong young protégé, considering his misadventures of a few years hence. Summerson described Nash as, despite his early setbacks, retaining a ‘single-minded passion for one thing above all others – architecture. Architecture as his own original creation; architecture as an artistic gamble; and, best of all, architecture achieved in highly speculative projects, with big money and sharp wit’.⁷ Many a heady and exciting yet risky lesson was to be learned from such a master.

Around the time the Carmarthen Market House was being built, Francis Greenway’s name actually surfaces in London, providing further evidence for his association with Nash. In 1800, when exhibiting drawings or paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, he gave his address as ‘At Mr. Nash’s’.⁸ The academy boasted the likes of the architect Sir William Chambers, and the painters Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Benjamin West and Johann Zoffany among its present or past members. Even being accepted to show at such an institution was an honour for the 23-year-old provincial builder and would-be architect.

But his connection with Nash might not have been as auspicious as that with the Royal Academy. Listed as ‘F.H. Grinway [sic] Architect’ in a 1905 complete dictionary of exhibitors, he again showed drawings or paintings in 1802 and 1803, but was no longer recorded as residing at ‘Mr. Nash’s’.⁹ It seems Greenway might now have struck out on his own in an attempt at solo practice, or was simply seeking employment elsewhere. And, given his later patterns of behaviour, an almost inevitable falling-out with Nash might also have been the motivation behind such a move.

Greenway’s address for his second and third Royal Academy submissions was given as New Palace Yard, a central geographic location that was also no doubt central to his professional aims. New Palace Yard itself had seen its share of political tumult and executions over the centuries: Titus Oates, perjurer and fabricator of the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II, was pilloried there in 1686. Within the yard Greenway either resided at Oliver’s Coffee House or used the address for the convenience of his mail and as a place of business.

To the right of the northern entrance to Westminster Hall, Oliver’s Coffee House had operated for at least 70 years; in February 1731 tickets were on sale there for a performance of ‘Mr. HANDELL’s [sic] Te Deum and Jubilate’.¹⁰ Oliver’s was one of several coffee houses in New Palace Yard, among countless other haunts throughout the city. London’s coffee houses had been the rage of the 18th century as meeting places and venues for political and intellectual debate, the Victorian-era historian and politician Lord Macaulay observing that ‘the coffee-house was the Londoner’s home’.¹¹ Some became private hotels, dining rooms or gentlemen’s clubs, and they were often places of commerce. ‘There were coffee houses for every trade and profession’, wrote Peter Ackroyd, where ‘lawyers met clients and brokers met each other, merchants drank coffee with customers and politicians drank tea with journalists’.¹² The London Stock Exchange had begun life in Jonathan’s Coffee House in Change Lane in the 1690s. Whether Greenway actually resided at Oliver’s is not known, but it might readily have served as a place for him to meet potential clients or employers, show them a portfolio of drawings, and ply them with his eager charms. Either by accident or design, he was also handy to the offices of the Board of Works – just half a mile away in Little Scotland Yard in Whitehall.¹³ A potential source of government employment, the board had been responsible for overseeing the building and maintenance of royal residences since 1378.

There are few further clues as to Greenway’s activities in London, or the length of time he spent there, but dissection of the titles of his Royal Academy submissions does shine a flickering beam on his architectural proclivities and personal aspirations. From Nash’s office in 1800, Greenway exhibited drawings or paintings of ‘The Saxon Gateway, College Green, [Bristol Cathedral] Bristol’ and ‘West door, Magdalen College chapel, Oxford’. In 1802, he submitted a work, or works, entitled ‘Chapel, Library, etc., [designed for the side of a quadrangle] at Bristol’. This second appearance at the academy may have been with Greenway’s own designs executed under a new-found autonomy, but it is his exhibit for 1803 that is most intriguing of all. The catalogue lists a work named ‘Thornbury castle restored, with a canal brought from the river Severn up to Thornbury’.¹⁴

The so-called Thornbury Castle, 15 miles north of Bristol, was actually a Tudor country house begun in 1511 by Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham. After Stafford was accused of treason and deprived of his head in 1521, Henry VIII seized his estates, including the unfinished Thornbury Castle.¹⁵ Although Thornbury was returned to the Stafford family during the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary, its buildings had already fallen into disrepair. The castle remained totally uninhabited until 1720, and then passed from the Stafford descendants to their relatives the Howards, through a sale to Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk, in 1727. Horace Walpole visited in 1774 and found Thornbury still largely abandoned, noting that ‘the ruins are half ruined. It would have been glorious if finished’.¹⁶

What is