Based on a lecture given to the Society on 27th February 2008
ROBERT MYLNE, JAMES 'ATHENIAN' STUART
and the troubles at Greenwich Hospital 1775-82
By Robert Ward
Robert Mylne, the architect, was Clerk of Works at the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich from 1775 until 1782, throughout which time James ‘Athenian’ Stuart was the Surveyor. While Mylne held that post two of the most dramatic events in the Hospital’s history took place: the Baillie scandal and the Chapel fire, and this paper will consider their effect on Mylne.
By 1775 Greenwich Hospital, designed by Wren and completed by his successors, was one of the most architecturally important groups of buildings in England. Its location at the end of a loop in the Thames meant that every ship bound for London had a lingering and changing view as the site approached, passed and then receded, and a French visitor describes the shouted conversations between the pensioners and the crews of passing vessels, exchanging news of the sea.
Conceived in the decades after France had built the magnificent Hôtel des Invalides for its servicemen, Greenwich Hospital had a similar dual function, first as a home for maimed or aged seamen and second – but no less important – as a conspicuous public token of the nation’s veneration for sea power and those who secured it.
Its management was in the hands of Governors and Directors, some of whom also held paid offices at the Hospital, under the First Lord of the Admiralty, who at the time of Mylne’s appointment was John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Sandwich was not universally admired in his own time – one letter to the press called him ‘a true votary of Satan ... an example of how far human nature may be corrupted and depraved.’ 2 Time has been kinder to him and historians now see him as a reforming influence on naval administration and shipbuilding, who did a great deal to make the shipyards more efficient. He also introduced a system for promotion, based on merit rather than influence, and this made him unpopular among those who had benefited from the earlier practice.
The care of the fabric was in the hands of a Surveyor, who was also a Director of the Hospital, assisted by a Clerk of the Works who was not. Neither post was demanding by this time as the Hospital buildings were largely complete.
James ‘Athenian’ Stuart (1713-88) had already been the Surveyor for seventeen years at the time of Mylne’s appointment as Clerk of Works.
James ‘Athenian’ Stuart
Little is known of his origins, of which he gave different versions, but he probably grew up in poverty near St Paul’s Cathedral before being apprenticed to a fan painter. He then left England when he was about 27 and stayed away for 14 years, returning in 1754 or 55. In Italy he found patrons to support his studies. He drew and measured classical ruins in Rome and later in Athens with Nicholas Revett, returning with a portfolio of drawings and watercolours, eventually published as The Antiquities of Athens many years later.
He developed a modest architectural practice, designed interiors and furniture, and was knowledgeable on antiquarian matters. His appointment to Greenwich Hospital came in 1758, by the patronage of the then First Lord, Admiral Anson. For Stuart, the post was profitable and undemanding, bringing a regular income of £200 a year, which combined with his own private work to make him reasonably affluent.
His personality was sociable and amiable and his drinking was notorious, often in what was described as low company. As a result he suffered from gout, which crippled his hands so that, as early as 1766, he had difficulty using a pen. Perhaps for these reasons he was slow to finish a task and his notebooks are said to have been full of abandoned projects.
Robert Mylne,
engraved from a drawing made in Rome when he was 24
Twenty years younger than Stuart, Robert Mylne [1733-1811] was of a different stamp. He was born in Edinburgh to a family who had held the post of Master Masons to the Scottish Crown since the 1500s but had fallen on harder times when the Act of Union moved government and influence to London. Robert learnt about stone from his father, a mason who also designed houses, and was then apprenticed to a carpenter before setting out to join his younger brother William to study in Paris. The two went on to Rome, largely on foot, and subsisted there on irregular pittances from home, studying architecture and antiquities under Piranesi and at the Academy of St Luke. William returned to Edinburgh after four years, but Robert stayed another year eking out his allowance with some tuition and then distinguished himself by being the first Briton to win the first prize for architecture in the Academy’s triennial competition. He already knew the value of publicity and wrote asking for William to put suitable notices of his achievement in the Edinburgh and London papers. He then travelled to London for the first time, arriving in 1759 and planning a career designing houses for the wealthy Britons he had met as they visited Rome on the grand tour.
By chance his arrival coincided with a competition held by the Corporation of London for what would be London’s third bridge, at Blackfriars. Although Mylne was only 26 and had no structure to his name his design was preferred to about sixty others, in part thanks to his pseudonymous booklet that carefully pointed out the faults of all the major competing designs and explained the merits of his own. 4 Mylne was then appointed by the Bridge Committee to put his design into execution, and built Blackfriars Bridge to budget, unlike Westminster Bridge a few years earlier, and far more cheaply.
As the bridge slowly grew other appointments followed, as Surveyor of St Paul’s, Canterbury and Rochester Cathedrals and Engineer to the New River Company, London’s largest waterworks. As well as his private practice designing houses and public buildings he was kept busy laying out approach roads north and south of the new bridge and embanking the north side of the river from St Paul’s to Somerset House. He socialised in learned and literary circles: his dinner guests included Johnson and Boswell. By 1775 he was married with a young family and living in a comfortable house by the reservoir at New River Head next to Sadler’s Wells.
New River Head, Clerkenwell in about 1795,
showing (behind the wall, centre the Water House where Robert Mylne lived with his family.
The smoking tower to its left is Smeaton’s engine house. (Courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives)
By now his income was over £1,000 a year, which left an annual surplus that he used to buy investments that he eventually left to his children. As to his character, he always demanded the highest standards from himself and others. Things had to be done properly or he would find out why – not always an endearing trait, as he once explained in a letter when some parts had been supplied incorrectly –
"I never give up a question of that nature till the party
is discovered and has confessed the matter –
and that for the good of all concerned in future."
Then in 1775 he accepted the post of Clerk of Works at Greenwich Hospital, at a salary of just £90 a year, prompting the question why he should have chosen to take a poorly paid job that would make him apparently subordinate to Stuart.
One clue may be found nine years earlier when the post of Master of Works in Scotland fell vacant. Hearing that it would probably go to one Hamilton, an MP who would thereby have to vacate his seat and lose much influence, Mylne wrote – fruitlessly as it turned out – to a patron suggesting that if he could have the post he would pay all its salary to Hamilton. That way, he explained, Hamilton would have the profits of the office without losing the benefits of being in Parliament, while Mylne would have the honour of a royal appointment together with "satisfying a pride of being Surveyor to those buildings erected by my ancestors."
The Clerkship at Greenwich Hospital would similarly give him the chance to care for distinguished buildings, and Mylne is known to have held Wren in high esteem. We also know something of his attitude to money from a letter he wrote to his mother at the time of his marriage to the girl he loved, who had no fortune: "money I always despised because I could procure it by Industry." He may also have expected that Stuart’s days were numbered and that by taking the lesser post he would be well placed to succeed him. Finally, the Hospital records show that it was the influential Sandwich who proposed Mylne for the post, so he had a number of reasons for accepting it.
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