JOHN SOANE ‘extremely anxious’ to defend his conduct in a letter from Lincoln Inn Fields, 1799

SOANE, Sir John (1753–1837)

Autograph Letter Signed (“John Soane”) to the Rt Hon. Henry Dundas, later first Viscount Melville, at this date Secretary of State for War and President of the Board of Control for India.

One page, quarto, on laid paper, hinged to a mount (which could easily be detached) with a contemporary filing docket in a clerical hand (“Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 22 April 1799 / Mr John Soane”). Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 22 April 1799. Old folds, light toning at the edges, a few small foxing spots well away from the text. The ink strong and black, the signature bold and large.  In excellent state.

Sir,
I have great reason to fear my conduct has been materially misrepresented to you; I am extremely anxious to have it properly understood & therefore take the liberty to request the honor of a few minutes conversation on the subject; I hope you will permit me to wait on you tomorrow Morning at 10 oClock or that you will have the goodness to name some other time that may better suit your convenience
I have the honor to be Sir. Your faithful & obedt Servt
John Soane

To The Rt Honble Henry Dundas &c &c &c

A vivid letter written by the celebrated architect  at the height of his fame.

The architect  had held the post of architect and surveyor to the Bank of England since 1788 and was eleven years into the long campaign of demolition and rebuilding that would occupy him for the rest of his career. He had been Clerk of Works for Whitehall, Westminster and St James’s, and had been attached to the Office of Woods and Forests since 1795. He had bought and remade No. 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from which this letter is dated.  He had begun the accretion of buildings and objects that  became his remarkable museum and legacy.

The recipient of this letter was Pitt’s indispensable lieutenant: Secretary of State for War, Treasurer of the Navy, president of the Board of Control for India, and the undisputed manager of Scottish political patronage. To be misrepresented to Dundas was to be misrepresented at the very centre of the state.  Richard Jupp, surveyor to the East India Company, had died that spring, and Soane was on a shortlist of three for the vacancy with S. P. Cockerell and Henry Holland. He pursued it strenuously, working every patron and contact he had with East India Company influence, and this letter belongs to that campaign — written nine days before the ballot of 1 May, to the minister whose Board of Control stood over the Company’s whole apparatus. The ballot went against all three names. A week later, Holland was comfortably elected. Soane put the loss down to the intervention of Dundas.

Soane names no charge, no accuser, and offers no defense in the letter.  He asks instead for an appointment, “ten o’clock tomorrow morning” , the hour firmly underlined in the manuscript, or any other that suits.

Soane was a bricklayer’s son who had climbed further than his profession thought appropriate. He never lost the sense that his position could be damaged by rumour. In June 1796 an anonymous verse, The Modern Goth, went about London mocking his Bank elevations.  Soane kept a copy, had it bound, and brooded on it.  He would go to the courts over hostile print twice, once in 1815 against an attack that turned out to have been written by his own son, and once in the very weeks around this letter: having identified the author of The Modern Goth as a surveyor named Philip Norris, he issued for libel and saw the case collapse in the King’s Bench on 17 May 1799.

Purchased from John Wilson Manuscripts, Cheltenham.