High art, low behaviour

Works from a roguish 18th-century MP’s Dorset estate far exceed expectations at Lawrences of Crewkerne

- Huon Mallalieu

WAS the 1st Viscount Gage the Sue Gray of the 18th century? Perhaps a closer parallel might be Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. In the wake of the 1715 Jacobite Rising, a commission was set up to dispose of estates forfeited by rebels. Two of the commissioners, Denis Bond and John Birch, MPs and lawyers both, were responsible for the fraudulent sale of the vast Derwentwater estates. It was an inquiry led by Gage that exposed them in 1731, when the two were expelled from the Commons and the sale annulled.

A few weeks later—plus ça change—Bond was mired in another scandal, this one concerning the funds of a charity. Nonetheless, it is recorded that as ‘a pillar of the church as well as of the bar, he was made churchwarden of St George’s, Hanover Square, in 1735. At the time of his death [in 1747], he was engaged in building a small chapel in his grounds from the remains of a ruined priory’.

The Bonds of Grange, as they were known after the purchase of those ‘grounds’, the Creech Grange estate in Purbeck, Dorset, do not seem to have been (pace Wikipedia) connected to the Bond of the Mayfair streets, but did produce a long line of MPs, lawyers and clergymen and remained at Creech Grange until 1975.

Bond’s predecessor Nathaniel employed local architect Francis Cartwright to remodel the house and new furniture was ordered from the Bastards of Blandford, the dynasty of architects, master builders and carvers responsible for rebuilding the town after ‘God’s dreadful Visitation by Fire’ in 1731. Their significance was re-established by the work of the late Sir Howard Colvin from the 1940s. In 1931, COUNTRY LIFE devoted two articles to the house and another to the gardens.