Deep in the heart of Cotswolds, less than half an hour from where Shakespeare grew up, stands a strange and curious house — a mini Mughal palace set in gardens complete with a Surya temple and guarded by Nandi bulls.
Its green onion-shaped dome paired with chhatris and overhanging chhajjas, the peacock-tailed arches that frame its first floor windows, its Orangery covered with cupolas, finials and coloured glass that once housed “an aviary of exotic birds”, today seem almost eccentric and extraordinary in a neighbourhood that has long been considered the ultimate in genteel English idyll.
Yet Sezincote has always been just that — unfamiliar, distant, eccentric and unique.
Behind it lies the story of three brothers and through them the story of an entire generation of young men — some barely out of their teens — who sailed for a “strange” and distant land they often knew very little about. Many among them were forced by circumstance rather than choice, others by a sense of adventure, but nearly all of them by the lure of “quiet trade” that guaranteed a sure ticket to “get-rich-quick”.
In 1763, John Cockerell was a young lad of 14 when he set sail for India. The eldest son of a middle class family with high ambitions, he first found employment in the household of Sir Robert Barker, commander-in-chief of Bengal.
He rose quickly through the ranks and in 1776 was in the pay on the military staff of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India. Hastings was just not a professional acquaintance, he was a personal friend too.
Rising quickly through the ranks was important, for without it personal trade was virtually impossible. But what was equally important was who they knew. So often, these young men who went out with virtually nothing and returned as Nabobs with huge fortunes from the East, formed a close and symbiotic web of friendships that lasted all their lives. They often inter-married, lent money to one another and occasionally helped each other to a peerage or a seat in Parliament. John remained loyal to Hastings all his life.
John Cockerell returned to England in 1794 after a long and successful military career in the East India Company army. His final years were spent with Lord Cornwallis fighting Tipu Sultan in the Mysore Wars. In just over three decades, the young man had amassed extensive wealth, a rich career and a close circle of very influential friends.
He returned to England with an Indo-Portuguese mistress and a retinue of Anglo-Indian children, all set to enter English society “as a respectable gentleman”, with a “house, carriage, a few servants and a gardener so that he could ‘embrace some Eligible, tho’ moderate systematic Establishment”.
He bought Sezincote from the Earl of Guildford, and instructed his brother, the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell to make “simple alterations” and build him a home close to his friend Warren Hastings, who had recently retired and set up home in nearby Daylesford.
The life and career of John Cockerell in India and his subsequent return to England as a Nabob in the late 18th century was anything but unique. Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, young men of similar age — Robert Clive was 18 when he landed in Madras — made the long and perilous journey fraught with uncertainty, disease and death.
Until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 which drastically reduced journey times to four weeks, a typical sailing on an East Indiaman in the late 18th century took about six months. But often ships at the mercy of the weather — like The Winchester in 1744 — ran aground, suffered severe damages and had to divert to Brazil, before finally reaching Madras at the end of 15-month journey.
Those who survived this somewhat dangerous voyage, often didn’t survive the first Indian monsoon. In An Indian Affair Archie Baron gives a startling statistic. Between 1707 and 1775, 57 per cent of Europeans died of sickness in Bengal. There was little awareness of basic hygiene or tropical medicines. Cholera and death from alcohol poisoning were rampant. A common legend said that “two monsoons are the age of a man in India”.
However, those that did make it beyond the “two monsoons”, went on to lead full lives. They learned the languages, worked as clerks and writers, and the enterprising amongst them rose up the ranks quickly and carved out distinguished military careers, often with flourishing businesses on the side. They married or lived with Indian and Eurasian mistresses, travelled widely, collected along the way and wrote copious diaries and kept journals. And then it was time to return “home”.
But for these returning Nabobs, England was a very different place. The old aristocracy was crumbling and without money. The Nabobs on the other hand were buoyant with huge riches from private trade in the East and were not shy to use it. They bought seats in Parliament and peerages and crumbling country estates from the often penniless aristocrats. The story of Sezincote and John Cockerell had so far followed a very familiar path.
That, was soon to change. John Cockerell died in 1798, leaving Sezincote to his two brothers, Charles and Samuel Pepys and sister Elizabeth. Within three years, Charles bought out his siblings for a total of £38,000 and commissioned his brother Samuel Pepys to once again “alter” the house. But this time, Samuel Pepys had a very different brief.
Like his brother John, Charles was also a recently returned Nabob. He had followed his brother into the services of the “John Company” starting as a writer in Bengal in 1776. Within eight years, he had become the postmaster general in Calcutta in 1784. What followed from there is an incredible story of enterprise, networking and ambition that saw Charles Cockerell at the centre of his fellow Nabobs.
He was a friend of Warren Hastings and gave “helpful” evidence at the latter’s impeachment in 1795. He was also a friend of Richard Wellesley, Governor-General of India (1797-1805).
Charles had lent Wellesley huge sums of money to fund the Mysore War in 1799. Wellesley returned the favour by supporting his his baronetcy in 1809.
While still in Company service, Charles had joined the very successful agency house of William Paxton, a firm which solely profited from transferring private funds of the Nabobs from Bengal to England. When Paxton left for England Charles assumed the management of the agency in Calcutta. The agency house now known as Paxton, Cockerell and Trail, became the most successful agency house of the period and was a household name among the Nabobs.
By the time Charles returned to England and bought his siblings’ share in Sezincote, he was a rich, influential widower, only in need of a wife and a country estate to match his flamboyant nabobish styles.
The rebuilding of Sezincote now began in earnest and was to last the next 18 years. It was the labour of love of three men — Charles, his brother Samuel Pepys and the artist Thomas Daniell — all with East India Company connections, embarking on a unique project that more than 200 years on, is still “the only Indian country house ever built in England”. It was both extravagant and extraordinary, and would later inspire the Royal Brighton Pavilion.
Samuel Pepys was an architect and had never been to India. However, he greatly benefited from his family connections and often worked on grand commissions from friends like Warren Hastings and William Paxton.
Thomas Daniell on the other hand, was a celebrated Oriental artist who along with his nephew William, had in the course of his nine years’ travels, amassed an enviable portfolio of Indian landscapes and a knowledge of the country previously unknown in early 19th century England.
And thus work began in earnest around 1805, with Samuel Pepys as chief architect and Charles taking a keen interest and consulting Thomas Daniell at every stage. However, Charles dared to go where no Nabob before or after him had ever ventured. While most Nabobs were content to use their Eastern riches to reinvent themselves into country squires, Charles not only built Sezincote as an Oriental paradise, he even commissioned Thomas Daniell to paint a series of eight paintings of the completed house to be used as exhibition pieces in London.
Today, Sezincote stands largely unaltered from the vision of these three men, who conjured an idea of India more than 200 years ago with architectural, landscape and religious motifs drawn from both Hindu and Islamic traditions — chhatris, chhajas, Surya temples, serpent fountains, Nandi bulls and lingams. Despite it exotic exterior, the interiors of Sezincote always remained strictly neo-classical, conservative and conformist — the functional home of an early 19th century Nabob, whose Eastern riches would help him to buy peerages and Parliament seats and a place in genteel English society.
Swagata Ghosh is a former journalist who works in the Department of Publishing and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
