The "Brotherton Temple" in Pusey is a garden temple built in 1759 by William Brotherton as a memorial oratory for his wife, Elizabeth Pusey. It's located in Pusey House. near Faringdon Berks.
Pusey House, which was built in 1753 was believed to have been built from the designs of John Wood, architect, of Bath but it is now thought to have been designed by John Sanderson
The Pusey family owned the Pusey estate and lived there from at least the 12th century, in a house probably sited close to the church. Having rebuilt the church in 1745, John Allen Pusey (died 1753) built the present house 1746-8, probably employing the architect John Sanderson (it was formerly attributed to John Wood of Bath (Country Life 1976)), and apparently laying out the park and pleasure grounds around the same time.
A lake is shown by the 1760s (John Rocque, 1761), and the mid-18th-century Chinoiserie bridge presently crossing the lake is close in style to Abraham Swan's designs for Chinoiserie-style bridges published in 1757.
Mrs Brotherton's Temple also dates from this period (around 1759). From 1828 the estate was owned by Philip Pusey (1799-1855), the elder brother of Edward Pusey, who was the founding father of the Oxford Movement. Philip Pusey made alterations to the gardens, constructing Italianate terraces planted with many species of plants.
The garden is shown in
a series of photographs of the 1890s (Country Life). Mr and Mrs Michael Hornby
bought the site from the Pusey family in 1935, employing Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
(1869-1944) to form the long, continuous terrace along the south front, and
significantly expanding the borders and planting following the Second World
War. The site remains (1998) in private ownership.
The last member of the original Pusey family died in 1710.
Several families changed their name to Pusey in order to inherit the estate.
It was one of the last Pusey descendants, John Allen, who instigated the building of the present Pusey House. It is a five bay two-and-a-half-storey mansion with two-storey wings.
Allen had come into the estate through his mother, who was a
Pusey heiress, and he added the name of Pusey to his own. It was he who built
the little parish church in the classical style which houses a fine marble
monument to himself and his wife by the sculptor Scheemakers.
John Allen Pusey died childless and his sisters, Mrs. Elizabeth
Brotherton nee Pusey and Miss Jane Pusey, inherited the estate jointly. The
temple at the end of the herbaceous border is a memorial to Mrs. Brotherton and
contains a statue of her and busts of the four cardinal virtues. It was erected
as a memorial by her sister Jane Pusey who was to die unmarried, the last of
the Puseys of Pusey.
The statuary has been attributed to Joseph Wilton but I have yet to be convinced.
The single storey Temple is built with limestone ashlar; with a copper roof. Semi-circular
arch over entry; bracketed cornice and quatrefoil frieze beneath parapet. Domed
roof. Interior: blind arcading; 4 round-headed niches in corners have busts on
fluted pedestals of the four Virtues and in the centre of the temple stands a
statue of Mrs. Brotherton
The images below from the Conway Library Archive.
Available on line.
Elizabeth Brotherton nee Pusey.
The Plinth is Inscribed: SACRUM/ CONJUGI PARITER AD AMICAE AMORIS
LONGAEVI/ FIDEI INVIOLATAE/ CONSTANTIAE/ INSOLITAE/ VIRTUTUSQUE QUIQUID EST
HUMANIORES/ MONUMENTUM HOC ET EXEMPLAR / POSUIT / GULIEMUS BROTHERTON / MDCCLIX.
The dog at her feet representing Fidelity.
The argument has been put forward that Joseph Wilton was the sculptor because the dog at her feet resembles that on the 1782 Monument at St Mary's Church Linton, Cambridge to Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Sclater Bacon with statues of Hope and Faith by Joseph Wilton under a bequest of £1000 from her half brother Peter Standly d1780, whose bust appears on the obelisk. Whilst the dog is similar it is something of a stretch to base the attribution on the similarities of the dogs.
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Modestia.
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Prudentia.
The Shugborough monument with the relief by Scheemakers, stands in the tradition of the garden temple. (see my post on the Ansons at Shugborough) It is, in many respects, a temple to love and death combined. A few years before its completion, another and equally important classical garden temple devoted to grief was begun in the gardens of Pusey House in Berkshire.
Here the making of a religion out of marital love was most emphatically expressed: the patron chose to commemorate his wife in the form of a Greek Temple to Female Virtue 28
Thus, he did not remarry despite having no surviving children and he died without direct heirs. Again, out of attachment to his wife, he elected not to seek male heirs of direct blood. Instead, he left the title of his estate to his nephew by marriage, Philip Bouverie, the second son of Viscount Folkstone of Longford Castle.
He was also resolved not to have this inheritance damage the
interests of his two sisters, so left them in full life trust, with annuity, of
the Pusey estates at Berkshire.
One of these sisters expected financial independence and
made a romantic marriage to William Brotherton, a friend of her brother.
After John Allen Pusey's death, William Brotherton, who was
wealthy but of lesser social standing than his wife, elected to live under her
roof at Pusey along with her sister.
He died in 1759, after her, leaving no male issue. By this
time, the Pusey estate, in which he had only a tenancy, had devolved solely to
his sister-in-law. It remained in her possession for twenty-five years, passing
to Philip Bouverie, who assumed the name Pusey- Bouverie, after her death in
1784.
Craske makes the point that from 1753 to 1784 life at Pusey was largely conducted as a matriarchy.
The will of William Brotherton is a remarkable document.30
It shows that by the time of his death in 1759, Brotherton
had already begun this Temple, as a monument to his wife, though it remained
unfinished. The foundations of the structure must have been laid out by his
death, for he ordered that his body was to be borne to the church at Pusey
through his gardens and that 'it might be rested at the statue (or where I intend
the statue to be erected) to the memory of that best of women, my dearest wife
He gave instructions for a funeral that it was to be carried
out in the identical manner to that of his wife. Moreover, true to the ideals of
the man of feeling who was most comfortable in the company of women, he wrote the
following instructions for the placement and carriage of the coffin, to be placed
in the vault at Pusey, as near as possible my dearest wife...
I mean that the coffins, contrary to modern usage, should
actually touch each other. It being my intent to be buried close to her and my
dear sister, Jane Allen ……
It is my further desire that my body should be conveyed thither and along the same pathas the corpse of my dear wife.
Brotherton desired that this ritualistic behaviour was not to be confused with display. Indeed, the whole purpose, in a curious inversion of the ideal behaviour of widows, was to ensure his utter invisibility in the eyes of posterity and state his complete subservience to the memory of his wife.
A codicil to the will added a request for the Temple:
“It is my earnest desire that the statues, bustos, termes,
and tempoli and everything relating there to be erected and placed there by me
in the ground at Pusey, or intended so to be to the memory of my dearest wife,
should be completed and finished according to the plan I have settled for the
purpose and that the inscription be inserted upon the pedestal and nothing more
related to myself.
And, as I think it is become far too common a practice in
putting up monuments and inscriptions in memory of deceased people and that it
takes away or lessens. At least the merit of others that are put up, it is,
therefore, my desire that no obelisk, bust or statue be put upon my account or
in memory of me either in the churchyard, gardens or pleasure grounds at Pusey
and thereby I will that any person putting up such or any inscription (except
the inscription upon the pedestal aforesaid) shall be entitled to lose or
forfeit all benefits they might have, or be entitled to, under my estate”.
These were forceful instructions, essentially a threat to disinherit any person who chose to commemorate him. Here, therefore, the desire for a monument to appear to be secret, private and intimate reached its most extreme expression.
Brotherton's intentions were, quite simply, wife worship and
beyond that wornan worship.
For this reason, the Temple was dedicated not just to her
but female virtue in general. The inscription remembered Mrs Brotherton as an
example to other women but was so privately situated that he can only have been
intended to be a family paragon.
Therefore, the Temple can be interpreted as a structure for upholding
the standards of feminine virtue in the effective matriarchy that continued for
twenty-five years beyond Brotherton's death.
The tenor of the completed Temple was much dictated by the
choice of Joseph Wilton as sculptor, recently returned from Italy. His
authorship is known because the statue of Mrs Brotherton has a lapdog at her
feet that is carved from a model that Wilton later re-used in his monument to
Elizabeth Bacon and Peter Stanley at Linton, Cambridgeshire (c.i782).
Setting himself up as London's most knowledgeable classicist
sculptor of the day, Wilton was careful in his deployment of classical
iconography. His shop made busts of the female virtues Modesty, Prudence,
Temperance and Truth, which were set into the four corners of the Temple. Their
complex attributes appear to have been designed according to the instruction of
Joseph Spence's Polymetis.31
The statue of Mrs Brotherton is both a portrait effigy and a
fifth female virtue, that of Fidelity or Constancy, as indicated by the
attendant dog 32
Brotherton's Latin inscription explicitly refers to her
faithfulness. In his estimate, she had been both a constant companion and friend.34
William Brotherton's tendency to invert the traditional
understanding of the superiority of husband to wife, his assumption of the
widow's rather than widower's role, was a family tradition, rather than a
personal predilection. Brotherton’s brother-in-law, John Allen Pusey, had
rebuilt Pusey church in 1744 - 45 in the form of a simple cruciform Christian
temple.
The whole building was set up in memory of Pusey's wife,
Jane, the woman next to whom Brotherton desired to be interred.36
A monument to Jane had been commissioned from Scheemakers and erected in the family pew in the south aisle.
This was also a widower's tribute but had been commissioned with some involvement of Brotherton. The latter clearly felt responsible for this work, for he left a fund to 'clean and strengthen the monument to my dear friends Mr and Mrs Allen Pusey in the south aisle'.
There are indications that this monument too was designed to
signal the inversion of conventional values of patriarchy. Lady Jane Pusey
appears as the principal figure and her husband as a bust on an attached socle
above her.
The form was a variant on Scheemakers's monument to John
Piggott at Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire, a tomb erected by his widow in
which the paterfamilias is the reclining principal figure. By allowing his wife
the main role of reclining figure and reducing his own image to an attendant
bust, John Allen Pusey was presenting himself as the secondary figure in the
marriage.
Earlier husbands, in the 1730s, had responded to their
wives' deaths by erecting monuments to themselves and their wives, as matching
busts or effigies. Here, Pusey refused to be presented as part of such a
dynastic couple. There were dynastic reasons for this, since the estate devolved
to her relations, but there are also clear indications of a family value system
that revolved round matriarchy. This tendency to look to women to provide the
moral leadership of the family is further communicated by William Brother- ton's
instruction that the vicar at Pusey should preach a sermon 'on the merit of women
not any particular woman there deposited but the virtues in general of that sex'.
The Pusey and Brotherton high regard for women was shared by
a group of friends and relations of their kinship group. Brotherton chose as
his executor a Lincolnshire squire named Christopher Neville who had some years
before employed Henry Cheere to make a monument to the memory of his beautiful
young wife, which was erected at Auborn Old Church in Lincolnshire in about
1746.
He left his money to his wife's nephew, Edward Bouverie, brother to the eventual inheritor of Pusey, Philip. This branch of the family also had tendencies towards wife worship. Edward's brother William, who as the eldest son and heir to Lord Folkstone took the title of the Earl of Radnor, also erected a monument to a beautiful young wife Harriet, the heiress of the Pleydell family.
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The Monument in All Saints Church at Pusey,
Peter Scheemakers.
Jane and John Allan Pusey d. 1742 and 1753; with a broken pediment and Roman Ionic pilasters frame reredos with bust over the reclining female figure holding book.
All Saints’ Church was built in 1744 by John Allen Pusey and
stands in the grounds of Pusey House. Cruciform in shape, the church is notable
for its classical simplicity and has changed very little since it was built.
For more photographs of the church see the excellent -
https://thechurchexporer.blogspot.com/2021/08/all-saints-pusey.html
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The North Chapel has oval tablet by William Bird for M. Dunch, d.1679.
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