ABSTRACT
On Saturday 16 May 1747, the antiquarian Samuel Gale (1682-1754) wrote to his friend and fellow antiquarian the Reverend William Stukeley (1687-1765):
Yesterday I went in great state in a coach & four early in the morning to visit the Duke of Chandois’s noble palace at Cannons, which, alas! is now to be sold purely to be demolished for the sake of the beautifull materials. The aedifice has already suffered for want of its lord, & with him quite upon the decline, methinks I see vast havoc amongst vases, statues, some of which are already fallen to the ground, the tearing down the fine painted ceilings, the works of Leguerre (sic). the noble stuckos, & gildings, which must be all crumbled into common mortar, & in a few days fluted marble Ionic columns, bustos, pictures, & well carved marble chimneypieces, will be all dissipated to the 4 quarters of the isleand; the chapel, I believe, will be last destroyed … Such is the sad vicissitude of human grandeur. Half a century has seen a great estate raised & reduced to nothing’.2
