Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol
Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol ( August 1, 1730 , † July 8, 1803 in Albano ) was a British bishop , art lover and eccentric .
Life
Frederick Augustus Hervey was a son of John Hervey, 3rd Earl of Bristol . He received his education at Westminster School and Corpus Christi College , Cambridge . In 1767 he was ordained Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, and a year later he became Bishop of Derry. In 1779 he succeeded his late brother, Chief Secretary for Ireland , 4th Earl of Bristol. This earned him an annuity of £ 20,000 a year on top of his other income. In 1782 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .
The travel and baufreudige Lord was among his contemporaries as eccentric and extravagant. Among others, he had the architect Charles Shanahan , possibly based on plans by James Wyatt or Charles Cameron , build a magnificent house in Downhill , Londonderry , which contained a library, an art collection and a church organ . In 1851 the building was badly damaged by fire, and a large part of the treasures collected there were destroyed. Restored in the 1870s, the property was used as Royal Air Force quarters during World War II and has been in disrepair since 1944.
The Lord also had a mausoleum built for his brother and the Mussenden Temple , which was modeled on a round temple in Tivoli and was also designed by Shanahan. The Lord had actually wanted to move the original to England, but the Pope had prevented this. The building is named after the earl's favorite cousin, Lady Frideswide Mussenden. The frieze around the dome bears an inscription according to Lucretius : "It is pleasant to see from the safe shore / The pitching of ships and hear the storm's roar." After the death of the lord, discussions were held about converting the building into a mausoleum, but the Marquess of Londonderry refused to make a grave of a building that had served for amusement. During his lifetime, Lord Mussenden Temple had also been used to watch horse races by the Anglican priests of his diocese from there. Whoever won received a larger and more lucrative community.
Lord Bristol was very fond of everything round. So he had John Soane , whom he met in Rome , build a round dog house and an oval dining room for downhill. At Ickworth House , the family seat, he had another round house built, which now contains the remains of his art collection. He also had a neoclassical establishment built in Ballyscullion by Shanahan. This structure remained unfinished and was torn down again in 1813.
His travels took him across the European continent. In the spring of 1771, accompanied by the natural scientist Alberto Fortis, he visited caves in Slovenia and Dalmatia, and during his stay in southern Italy he climbed Vesuvius . In Italy he was imprisoned for several months - either on the occasion of the conquest of Rome by the French or on suspicion of espionage.
Lord Bristol as an art collector
Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, amassed an extensive art collection, most of which he lost again through Napoleon's intervention and was only partially able to recover later. He had a particular fondness for Renaissance paintings , including works by the Mannerists . His contemporaries evidently found nothing of the earl's taste; Johann Gottfried Seume , for example, writes : “With the impertinence of wealth, this gentleman has the quirk of making the connoisseur and patron of art and of guiding taste, and so unfortunate that his judgments in Italy almost here and there when they are understood apply to condemnation alone. "
The art treasures collected in a villa in Rome were later to be housed in the rotunda of the family's ancestral home in Ickworth. After the start of the Italian campaign under Napoleon in 1797, Rome was taken in the following year and the art collection confiscated. Many paintings that Lord Bristol once collected are now in the Louvre.
Lord Bristol as a politician
The lord was a follower of the Enlightenment and tried to counter what in his eyes were the most unreasonable conditions in Ireland. He had traffic routes and bridges built, supported the poor and the persecuted, campaigned for the abolition of criminal and discrimination laws against Catholics, campaigned against the unjust tax system, according to which members of other denominations also had to pay a church tithe, and left it despite his Office as Anglican bishop that Catholic masses were held below Mussenden Temple on Mount Stewart. Such actions gave him the reputation of a rebel and public enemy. Presumably, the numerous scandal stories about the lord were spread extensively because they tried to damage his political reputation.
In the last few years of his life, the Earl suffered from severe attacks of gout . He died under miserable circumstances in Italy: after the French conquest and imprisonment of Rome, he rented a house in Florence and spent a lot of time traveling in Italy. On the road to Albano he suffered an attack of his gout disease and was brought to the house of a Catholic landowner who actually did not want to tolerate the Protestant clergy on his property and asked for neither medical nor spiritual assistance. The lord died of kidney failure. According to his last will, the corpse was taken back to his homeland. He was buried in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk .
In Ickworth the population of Derry gathered for a memorial to the Earl, in Bellarena the Bishop Hervey Summer School was founded in 2012; a poem in Crazy about Women by Paul Durcan refers to his portrait with Miss Mussenden.
Family and affairs
Lord Bristol separated from his wife Elizabeth Divers, whom he married at the age of 22 and with whom he had several children. She stayed in Ickworth while he toured the world. He considered his son, who inherited him, to be a bore. He had an affair with Countess Lichtenau , mistress of Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia ; Seume wrote in 1802 that even as an old clergyman, he “doesn't leave a girl quiet.” The caricature of Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry , which the German painter Johann Christian Reinhart created in Italy after, alludes to his sexual activities and his preference for wine Lord Bristol had grossly offended him, and which Seume later published. Emma Hamilton , who also had a relationship with Admiral Lord Nelson , was one of his love affairs, which earned him the nickname “English Casanova” .
Portraits
There are numerous portraits of Lord Bristol. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun painted it in Rome in 1789 and in Naples in 1790 , Angelika Kauffmann also in Rome in 1790. Hugh Douglas Hamilton depicted him with his granddaughter in Rome in the garden of the Villa Borghese in front of an altar that is now in the Louvre . Johann Christian Reinhart caricatured him as a centaur-like hybrid of man and pig.
Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and Fourth Earl of Bristol (1730-1803) with his Granddaughter Lady Caroline Crichton (1779-1856), in the Gardens of the Villa Borghese in Rome , National Gallery Dublin
Reinhart's caricature from 1802
Hotel Bristol
“I've been racking my brains over how Bristol got into this. In the end, Bristol is only a second-rate place, but Hotel Bristol is always great, ”wonders old Stechlin in Theodor Fontane 's novel of the same name . The name does not go back to the town of Bristol, but to the travel-loving rich Lord Bristol, who stayed in the hotels named in his honor.
literature
- William Shakespear Childe-Pemberton, The Earl Bishop. The Life of Frederick, Bishop of Derry, Earl of Bristol , Volume 1, 1923
Web links
- Frederick Hervey at Hansard (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f Frank Zumbach, A Toast to Frederick Hervey , July 16, 2010
- ↑ a b Death by tea at Ickworth , on Nationaltrust.org.uk
- ^ A b Johann Gottfried Seume, Walk to Syracuse in 1802 , ed. by Jörg Drews, Insel Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-458-35183-2 , p. 301
- ↑ Short biography on Ricorso.net
- ↑ Downhill Demesne and Hezlett House , on Nationaltrust.org.uk ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Theodor Fontane: The Stechlin . In: Elibron Classics Series . Bertelsmann Club, 1998, ISBN 0-543-89682-X , p. 295 (401 p., Limited preview in Google Book search).
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| John Hervey |
Earl of Bristol 1779-1803 |
Frederick William Hervey |
|
in abeyance (previously until 1797 John Whitwell ) |
Baron Howard de Walden 1799-1803 |
Charles Ellis |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hervey, Frederick, 4th Earl of Bristol |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bristol, Frederick Augustus Hervey 4th Earl of (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British bishop, art lover and eccentric |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 1, 1730 |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 8, 1803 |
| Place of death | Albano |