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The Other Hartford House

Digging out the British roots of a very American home

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The dilapidated Villa as it looked in 1935, shortly before it was demolished by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. The house she built on the site is now the official residence of the American Ambassador. Photo copyright The Wallace Collection.

The house was completely repaired and today Winfield House is in use for that purpose. Nothing remains of the former St. Dunstan's Villa on the site, but if you travel to Fleet Street, you can still hear the bells of St. Dunstans clock calling out the hours just like they did in the 3rd Marquis's youth. When destruction seemed imminent the clock was returned to the new St. Dunstan's Church, the only remnant, on that side of the Atlantic at least, of Lord Hertford's grand villa.

The dissolute Marquis did achieve a form of immortality however by reportedly being used as the model for characters in two enduring works of English literature. In Coningsby, a novel penned by Benjamin Disraeli, the Marquis is thinly disguised as the none to pleasant Lord Monmouth, who is described as being “portly and corpulent.” The author goes on to write that the secretions of Monmouth's brain were “apportioned, half to voluptuousness, and half to common sense.”

In 1936, the house was sold again to Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow, a 24 year old American beauty, better known as Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworth fortune.

Perhaps the more famous borrowing of the Marquis's character comes in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, where Lord Hertford is reinvented as Lord Steyne. Thackeray describes Steyne as having “a shinning bald head, which was fringed with red hair. He had thick bushy eyebrows, with little twinkling bloodshot eyes, surrounded by a thousand wrinkles. His jaw was overhung, and when he laughed, two white buck-teeth protruded themselves and glistened savagely in the midst of the grin.”

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