Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

* Gray had been Walpole’s Eton intimate, and the aristocrat would employ his Committee of Taste to frame Gray’s work in the gothic arches of Bentley’s ‘exquisitely irreverent’ illustrations, making the poet the personification of their cult, an early media superstar.

      It was the beginning of a new gothic lineage that would merge with a self-conscious sense of decadence, from the macabre costume drama of the Revolutionary incroyables and merveilleuses of France, to Wilde’s Salomé and its Edwardian interpreter Maud Allan posing as a graveside angel cloaked in black chiffon as she danced to Chopin’s Marche funèbre; from the Sitwells as gothic figures on catafalques, to Diana Cooper as the statue of a gothic nun imprisoned in Oliver Messel’s medieval plaster in The Miracle; from Rex Whistler photographed by Cecil Beaton as Thomas Gray from Bentley’s portrait of the poet in the nude, to Stephen Tennant as a dead Romeo in his silver-foil-covered room, to the silver walls of Andy Warhol’s Factory and its Electric Chair, modern icons produced in a 1960s version of Strawberry Hill: a succession of silver walls, like Walpole’s hall of mirrors, reflecting its decadent narcissists.

      Deep-dyed in narcissism, gay and addicted to gossip (although also a serious man of art and letters), Walpole both represented and recorded a frivolity which pervaded English culture – a decadence which gothic, as the extreme expression of romanticism’s counter culture, would embody. Yet this was essentially seen as an unEnglish disease, as the poet Charles Churchill (himself a doomed young hedonist) wrote: ‘With our own island vices not content/ We rob our neighbours on the continent.’ For Walpole, his unhappy Grand Tour of Europe, taken with Gray in tow and in pursuit of his inamorata, the bisexual Lord Lincoln, had served both to encourage his gothic tendency and to import foreign perversions to England.

      That summer of 1755, Walpole and his circle embarked on a new tour which would confirm their deviant identities. To them, gothic – Suger’s opus modernum – represented an indefinable, fantasy past; its pointed arches were a rubric for a romantic rebellion which queried the rational progress of their age. When they discovered its ruins, sleeping unawares on the shores of Southampton Water, Netley Abbey would become a locus for their subversive masquerade. The Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site became an historical reference for what Walpole and his friends were doing at Strawberry Hill. By the time they had finished with it, it would seem as though Netley itself had been redesigned by their Committee of Taste in a new importation of foreign vice to this English shore.

      Walpole had been alerted to ‘all the beauties of Netley’ by Gray’s visit to the abbey that July. The place had deeply inspired the poet in his taste for the antiquarian and the ‘romantick’. On 6 August 1755 Gray had written, with an idiosyncratic disdain for punctuation and spelling, to another close friend, Dr Wharton. It was the first of a series of descriptions written that year which fixed Netley as a modern gothic site:

      I wished for you often on the Southern Coast, where … the Oaks grow quite down to the Beach, & … the Sea forms a number of Bays little & great, that appear glittering in the midst of thick Groves of them. add to this the Fleet (for I was at Portsmouth two days before it sailed) & the number of Vefsels always pafsing along, or sailing up Southampton-River (wch is the largest of these Bays I mention) and enters about 10 mile into the Land, & you will have a faint Idea of the South. from Fareham to Southampton, where you are upon a level with the coast, you have a thousand such Peeps & delightful Openings … I have been also at Titchfield, at Netly-Abbey, (a most beautiful ruin in as beautiful a situation) at Southampton, at Bevis-Mount, at Winchester &c …

      That mid-century summer was the season of Netley’s invention in the gothic imagination. ‘On the arrival of a few fine days, the first we have had this summer’, wrote Walpole, ‘… Mr Chute persuaded me to take a jaunt to Winchester and Netley Abbey, with the latter of which he is very justly enchanted.’ Having spent the night in Southampton, they set out to explore Netley. Walpole was ecstatic; its ruins seemed to fulfil his dreams. ‘But how shall I describe Netley to you?’ he rhapsodised to Bentley. ‘I can only, by telling you it is the spot in the world for which Mr Chute and I wish’:

      The ruins are vast, and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs pendant in the air, with all the variety of Gothic patterns of windows, wrapped round and round with ivy – many trees are sprouted up against the walls, and only want to be increased with cypresses! A hill rises above the Abbey, encircled with wood; the fort, in which We would build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey in a wood, in the very centre, on the edge of the hill: on each side breaks in the view of the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with silver and vessels; on one side terminated by Southampton, on the other by Calshot Castle; and the Isle of Wight rising above the opposite hills. – In fact they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise – Oh! the purple abbots, what a spot had they chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively, that they seemed only to have retired into the world …

      ‘… Gray has lately been here’, added Walpole, acknowledging the poet’s lyrical and romantic inspiration. Two months later Gray returned, drawn by Netley’s mysterious spirit (and possibly by the area’s ‘lusty’ boatmen). He wrote from Southampton, ‘at Mr. Vining’s, Plumber, in High-Street’ to another friend, Reverend James Brown, with a description that competed with Walpole’s to capture the dark romance of the ruins:

      I received your letter before I left home, & sit down to write to you after the finest walk in the finest day, that ever shone, to Netley-Abbey, my old friend, with whom I long to renew my acquaintance … the sun was all too glaring & too full of gauds [Gray quoted from Shakespeare’s King John] for such a scene, wch ought to be visited only in the dusk of the evening. it stands in a little quiet valley, wch gradually rises behind the ruin into a half-circle crown’d with thick wood, before it on a descent is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the broad day & from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on both sides, where the sea appears glittering thro’ the shade, & vefsels with their white sails, that glide acrofs & are lost again. concealed behind the thicket stands a little Castle (also in ruins) immediately on the shore, that commands a view over an expanse of sea clear & smooth as glafs (when I saw it) … & in front the deep shades of the New-Forest distinctly seen, because the water is no more than three miles over. the Abbey was never very large. the shell of its church is almost entire, but the pillars of the iles have gone, & the roof has tumbled in, yet some little of it is left in the transept, where the ivy has forced its way thro’, & hangs flaunting down among the fretted ornaments & escutcheons of the Benefactors. much of the lodging & offices are also standing, but all is overgrown with trees & bushes, & mantled here & there with ivy, that mounts over the battlements.

      To Thomas Gray’s romantic imagination, such visits induced an almost trance-like state, the evocative ruins ‘pregnant with poetry … One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits at noon-day’, and he visualised its abbot

      bidding his beads for the souls of his Benefactors, interr’d in that venerable pile, that lies beneath him … Did you not observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turn’d and cross’d himself, to drive the Tempter from him, that had thrown that distraction in his way. I should tell you that the Ferryman, who row’d me, a lusty young Fellow, told me, that he would not for all the world pass a night at the Abbey, (there were such things seen near it,) tho’ there was a power of money hid there.

      Veiled in its ghost stories – ‘Blind Peter’ was said to guard the abbot’s buried treasure (although such tales were also useful for smugglers using the ruins as a place to land contraband) – the reinvention of Netley was under way. Walpole and Gray’s descriptions, rivalling each other in reverie, distilled the new spirit of the place. Over the next few years their refined taste would percolate through popular culture, spawning a new cult. Such descriptions, apparently private but written quite consciously for public consumption, would summon a host of artists, writers and gothic aficionados to this Hampshire shore, determined to commune with its ghostly spirits.

      In 1761, the newly-rich Thomas Lee Dummer, William Chamberlayne’s friend at Woolston