Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole

Mr Dicky Bateman was a typical eccentric, who resembled his friend Horace Walpole in his Gothic affectation, and [John] Wilkes in his impious buffoonery. In one of the witty characterizations for which he is justifiably famous, Horace Walpole described the subject of this article — the transformation of the villa at Old Windsor owned by his friend, Richard (Dickie) Bateman — as a bout of one-upmanship between two men of taste: ‘[I] converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth […] I preached so effectively that every pagoda took the veil’. He later described the change of the style of Bateman’s house in terms of spiritual affiliation: Bateman’s house had ‘changed its religion […] I converted it from Chinese to Gothic’. Here as elsewhere in the early years of the Gothic Revival, Walpole serves as principal interlocutor, providing keen, if sharply biased, insights on many significant building projects in England. Walpole positions himself as a teacher and Bateman as a disciple whom he convinced to change his tastes from Chinoiserie (‘the fashion of the instant’) to the Gothic, the style ‘of the elect’. Walpole’s clever allegory of stylistic change as national and religious conversion was based in part on the fact that he provided the conduit for Richard Bentley and Johann Heinrich Müntz, two of his closest designers in the ‘Committee of Taste’, to design Gothic additions for Bateman between 1758-61. Rebuilt and expanded in the fashionable mode of Walpole’s own Strawberry Hill and by its designers, from Walpole’s perspective at least, Old Windsor as remodelled for Bateman served to reinforce his role as arbiter of the Gothic taste and Strawberry Hill as its paradigm.