Aylesbury House

[Aylesbury House.] Aylesbury Street, says Mr. Pinks, is so called because in old times the garden-wall of the house of the Earls of Aylesbury skirted the south side of the thoroughfare. Aylesbury House was probably a name given to part of the old Priory of St. John, where the Earls of Elgin and Aylesbury resided about 1641. Robert Bruce, second Earl of Elgin, who lived here in 1671, was a devoted Cavalier, and an ardent struggler for the Restoration, and was made Earl of Aylesbury in 1663 by that not usually very grateful king, Charles II., to whom he was privy councillor and gentleman of the bedchamber. At the coronation of that untoward monarch, James II., the Earl of Aylesbury bore in procession St. Edward's staff, eight pounds nine ounces in weight, and supposed by credulous persons to contain a piece of the true cross. The earl died in 1685, the year he had been appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household. Anthony Wood sums up the earl as a good historian and antiquary, a friend to the clergy, and a "curious collector of manuscripts."

[Aylesbury House] By far the biggest of the houses [St. John's Square] at this time was the former Prior's Hall, to which belonged gardens and buildings, including the chancel of the priory church (Ills 130, 133). In 1612 this site was purchased by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, for his London residence; the chancel later became his private chapel.¹³ After 1623, when Cecil succeeded his father as Earl of Exeter, the buildings were known as Exeter House.¹⁴ He died there in 1640, and the house subsequently descended by marriage to the Bruces, later Earls of Ailesbury, from whom it acquired the name Ailesbury or Aylesbury House. (fn. 15) They were the leading residents of St John's until the 1680s, regularly visited there by, among others, Charles II's natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the politician Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, a former captain of Cromwell's bodyguard.¹⁶

It was during the Bruces' residence that Hollar made his views of St John's Court, showing Ailesbury House and the church (Ills 131133). Like the Cecils, the Bruces used the chancel as a private chapel: by this date it comprised only the central aisle, the remainder, on the ground floor at least, having been converted to domestic use. They retained porters to man the gates at either end of the court, and in 167982 Lord Ailesbury erected a new 'great Gateway' to the house, in front of the chapel, topped with two lions (carved by Thomas Cartwright the Elder).¹⁷

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¹⁴ GEC

¹⁵ TNA, PROB11/239, sig. 356: LPL, MSS 2732/1415: GEC

¹⁶ W. E. Buckley (ed.), Memoirs of Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury. Written by himself, 1890, vol. i, p. 21

¹⁷ Wilts. & Swindon RO, 1300/670, p. 66; 1300/671, pp. 1445, 2723: Gunnis, p. 87