C , 0 



14 



of fjaha- 



By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, F.S.A. 

 ^TIO was John of Padua? 



M This is a question which has been very often asked, but 

 hafVever yet been satisfactorily answered. Yet an answer, if one 

 could be found, ought to be interesting to Wiltshire people, seeing 

 that this person is traditionally said to have designed the finest 

 house in their county— Longleat, the seat of the Marquis of Bath; 

 - He is not named by our oldest topographers, Leland and Camden, 

 and the writer who appears the first to mention him is Walpole, in 

 his " Anecdotes of Painters," where Dallaway, the editor, adds, ill 

 a no te But who was John of Padua ? what was his real name ? 

 how educated ? and what were his works previous to his arrival fj 

 England ? No research has hitherto discovered with satisfaction ." 1 

 Mr. Digby Wyatt also, in a very interesting essay (1868) " On the 

 Foreign Artists employed in England in the Sixteenth Century," 

 says :_-«No research has yet clearly made out who < Johannes de 

 Padua/ the celebrated architect who mainly took the place of 

 Holbein as Henry the Eighth's chief designer, really was." 8 

 In the following paper I propose to shew 



I. Who " John of Padua" may really have been. 



II. What little probability there is that he could have 



anything to do with the building of Longleat. 

 I.— All that is hitherto really known about him is, that at Easter 

 34 Hen. VIII. (A.D. 1542), he began to be employed in the servicj 

 of King Henry, and that two years afterwards, by letters patentj 

 dated 30th June, 1544, an allowance was granted to him (thj 

 payment commencing retrospectively from Easter, 1542) of tw 

 shillings a day "for good service in architecture and various M 



i 



i "Anecdotes of Painting," Edit. 1828, vol. i., p. 216 

 ■ Mr. Sarsfield Taylor has some severe remarks upon the style of 

 reputed to have been introduced by Holbem and the un-xdentrfied John C 

 Padua. (" Origin of the Fine Arts," vol. i., 243 and 262.) 



