The accessions from Alexandria served, also, to initiate another improvement. When, in 1802, they reached the Museum, its contents had so increased that the old house afforded no adequate space for their reception. They had, like some famous sculptures of much later acquisition, to be placed in sheds which scarcely preserved them from bad weather, and were even less adapted to facilitate their study. |1804, July 2.| |Parliamentary Debates, vol. ii, col. 901, seqq.| The Trustees made their first application to Parliament for the enlargement of the Museum Building, ‘in order to provide suitable room for the preservation of invaluable monuments of antiquity which had been acquired by the valour, intrepidity, and skill of our troops in an expedition seldom equalled in the annals of the country.’ And before presenting their petition they determined that increased facilities should be given for the admission of the Public, as soon as they should be enabled to make an adequate increase in the staff of the establishment.
When the extension of the British Museum came first to be discussed in the House of Commons (somewhat grudgingly and captiously it must, in truth, be acknowledged), upon the application of the Trustees, some of their number were already aware that an accession was likely soon to accrue through the munificence of a fellow-trustee, which would make a new and extensive building indispensable. Charles Towneley had already made a Will in virtue of which—as it stood in 1804—the Towneley Marbles were devised in trust for the British Museum, on condition that the Trustees thereof should, ‘within two years from the time of the testator’s decease, set apart a room or rooms sufficiently spacious and elegant to exhibit these antiquities most advantageously to the Public,—such rooms to be exclusively set apart for the reception and future exhibition of the antiquities aforesaid.’ Circumstances not foreseen in 1802, when Colonel Towneley’s Will had been first made, led afterwards to a change in the mode in which his noble Collection was to be received by the Public. But its preservation and public accessibility, in one way or other, had long been resolved upon.
The Towneleys, of Towneley, rank among the most ancient and distinguished commoners of Lancashire. They can trace an honourable descent to a period antecedent to the Conquest. They have been seated at Towneley from the twelfth century. Several of them have given good service to England, in various ways, in spite of the obstacles and discouragements which, for many generations, clave to almost every man whose convictions obliged him to adhere to the Roman Catholic Church, and so to incur the pains and disabilities of recusancy. Of these they had their full share. One Towneley had been mulcted in fines amounting to more than five thousand pounds, simply for remaining true to his belief, and had been, for that cause, sent (with an ingenuity of torment one is almost tempted to call diabolic) from prison to prison across the breadth of England, and back again.[[60]] Another Towneley was driven into an exile which lasted so long that when he returned into Lancashire everybody had forgotten his features and his voice, except his dog. But neither fine, imprisonment, nor banishment, had converted them to Protestantism. Hence it was that Charles Towneley, the Collector of the Marbles, received his education at Douay, and contracted all the strong formative impressions of early life and habit on the Continent.
He was born, in the old seat of the family at Towneley Hall, on the 1st of October, 1737. |Life of Charles Towneley.| His father, William Towneley, had married Cecilia, sole daughter and heir of Richard Standish, by his wife Lady Philippa Howard, daughter of Henry, Duke of Norfolk. The hall—which has not yet lost all its venerable aspect—was built in part by a Sir John Towneley in the reign of Henry VIII, and its older portions (turrets, gateway, chapel, and library) suit well the fine position of the building, and the noble woods which back it. Of the founder two things still remain in local tradition and memory. He took the changes made under the rule of Henry—or rather of Thomas Cromwell—so much in dudgeon, that when Lancaster Herald came to Towneley, upon his Visitation, he refused to admit him, saying, ‘Do not trouble thyself. There are no more gentlemen left in Lancashire now than my Lord of Derby, and my Lord Monteagle.’ The other tradition of this same Sir John is, that he enclosed a common pasture called Horelaw, and so made the peasantry as angry with his innovations as he was with Cromwell’s. Some of their descendants may yet chance to assure the inquisitive stranger, that his ghost still haunts the park, crying aloud in the dead of night—
‘Lay out! lay out![[61]]
Horelaw and Hollingley Clough!’
At Douay Charles Towneley received a careful education, moulded, of course, under the conditions and the memories of that celebrated College. When he left its good priests he was already the owner of the family estates—his father having died prematurely in 1742—and he was plunged, at once, into the gaieties and temptations of Paris. All the Mentorship he had was that of a great uncle who had become sufficiently naturalised to win the friendship of Voltaire, and to be able to turn Hudibras into excellent French. The dissipations of the Capital overpowered, for a time, the real love of classical studies which had been excited in the provincial college. But the seed had been sown in a good soil. The study of art and of classical archæology, in particular, presently reasserted its claims and renewed its attractions. It was a fortunate circumstance, too, that family affairs required the presence of Mr. Towneley in England on the attainment of his majority.
He had left Towneley very young. He came back to it with more of the foreigner than of the Englishman in his ways of life and manners. But he was able to win the genuine regard of his neighbours, and to take his fair share in their pursuits and sports, although he could never—at least in his own estimation—succeed in expressing his thoughts with as much ease and readiness in English as in French. Late in life, he would speak of this conscious inability with regret. Whether needfully or not, the feeling, no doubt, prevented Mr. Towneley from turning to literary account his large acquirements.
What he had seen of the Continent had given him a desire to see more of it, and the bias of his youthful studies pointed in the same direction. In 1765, after a short stay in France, he went into Italy, and there he passed almost eight years. They were passed in a very different way from that in which he had passed the interval between Douay and Towneley. That long residence abroad enabled him to become a very conspicuous benefactor to his country.
He visited Naples, Florence, and Rome, and from time to time made many excursions into various parts of Magna Græcia and of Sicily. At Naples he formed the acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton and of D’Hancarville. |Towneley’s Artistic Researches in Italy.| |1765–1778.| At Rome he became acquainted with three Englishmen, James Byres, Gavin Hamilton, and Thomas Jenkins, all of whom had first gone thither as artists, and step by step had come to be almost exclusively engrossed in the search after works of ancient art. The success and fame of Sir William Hamilton’s researches in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and of those, still earlier, of Thomas Coke of Holkham (afterwards Earl of Leicester), had given a strong impulse to like researches in other parts of Italy. Towneley caught the contagion, and was backed by large resources to aid him in the pursuit.