William Waldorf Astor

Two Temple Place hovers somehow outside of any architectural style or particular time period. It owes much to Tudor style and perhaps that of the French Renaissance (Quiney 1979), but has Gothic elements and whimsical modern details such as the telegraph on the entrance lamps and the microscope among the library carvings. William Waldorf’s England seems an England more myth than reality, and even the reality was long disappeared. Some of the most striking work in Two Temple Place are the Ivanhoe series of statues in the Great Hall, drawn from Walter Scott’s medieval romance, including Robin Hood. Little John and Maid Marian were clearly too good to miss – they are not in the novel but appear among our sculptures. Even his choice of four Shakespeare plays are dominated by romantic and tragic heroines: Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Desdemona and his beloved Anne Boleyn. Anne, the tragic heroine of Hever, appears twice in Two Temple Place. William Waldorf came to own an autograph, embroideries made by Anne, her book of hours and even her rosary supposedly carried to the executioner’s block. The ultimate collector’s piece was of course Hever itself, purchased in 1903. His inventory at Two Temple Place, now sadly long gone, included autographs, letters, and embossed and inscribed items from the libraries of many of those in the Great Hall frieze including Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Cardinal Richelieu, the Duke of Marlborough and Marie-Antoinette.

His children insisted that his two greatest historical interests were Napoleon and Cesare Borgia. Perhaps it is the London location and the public nature of the decorative scheme that mean those characters do not make an appearance. The Borgia interest comes one assumes from his time in Rome as a diplomat. In keeping with WWA’s sense of right, fury at being wronged in popular print, and care for the young heroine figure, he wrote an article in the North American Review in 1886 mounting a stout defence of Lucrezia Borgia’s morality: “the stain upon her is from surroundings she could neither change nor escape”, an unusually modern and liberal sentiment for Astor. Is she is one of the unidentified ladies of the Great Hall?

Advice to a new editor at the Pall Mall Magazine (to which Astor contributed stories himself, sometimes despite the original refusal of his editors) is instructive: “the stories should preferably have a strong love interest… you should keep clear of all reference to religion, the more serious sort of sex questions, drunkenness and politics. The stories should of course all have a happy ending and be entirely wholesome throughout”