‘John Osborne, the Salisbury House “Porticus”, and the Haynes Grange Room’

During recent research in the archives at Hatfield, Joseph Friedman discovered in a folder of mostly nineteenth-century material relating to the London estate of the Cecil family a remarkable elevational drawing (Fig. 1). Measuring over 1,5 metres long, in three sheets originally pasted together, it can be identified as a long-lost design of c.1605-10 for a ‘Porticus’ in the riverside garden of Salisbury House, the Strand Palace of Sir Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, built between 1599 and 1613 (Fig. 2). Hitherto the Salisbury House Porticus has only been known from an elaborate specification in the Public Record Office, written by an unidentified ‘Osburne’, which describes in extraordinary detail the proportional and constructional features of a two-storey colonnaded building to be erected at the bottom of the garden of Salisbury House, overlooking the River Thames (Appendix). The Porticus in the Hatfield House archives is the corresponding scale drawing for this specification. It can be shown to be in the same hand as the specification, both being the work of John Osborne (c.1550-1628), the Remembrancer or record keeper in the Exchequer of Robert Cecil.