The fickle finger of fate

Once as reviled as he is now revered, John Nash stumbled, rose and fell again. Carla Passino retraces the life of the man with the face of a monkey

- Carla Passino

HE was made for triumph, acclamation and a life as gilded as the garlands that frame the Royal Alcove he designed in Buckingham Palace’s Throne Room. Instead, John Nash— the man who turned the drudgery of mere Buckingham House into the splendour of a palace, the man who gave the country its triumphal Marble Arch, the man that had London ‘eclipse [Napoleon’s] Paris’—was nearly obliterated by his political affiliations, a penchant for overspending and a difficult personality that made him the Marmite of his times.

A ‘wild, irregular youth’ by his own admission, Nash had a disastrous start to adult life. In 1775, at 23, he had married Jane Elizabeth Kerr, the daughter of a Surrey surgeon, who soon revealed herself to be as liberal with her graces as she was with his money. As his marriage imploded, Nash’s business took a hit: the houses he had developed in Bloomsbury failed to sell and he was declared bankrupt. But the man with the ‘face of a monkey’, as diarist Harriet Arbuthnot brutally described him, had the resilience of a phoenix. Cutting his losses, he moved to Carmarthen, where he kept ‘the best company of Bon Vivants’, hunted ‘with the most desperate sportsmen’ (according to architect William Porden) and set up an architectural practice that soon proved successful.