Colonel William Windham I, MP (1647-1689)

Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646/9 - London 1723). Oil painting on canvas (oval), Colonel William Windham, MP (1674-1730), by Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646/9 - London 1723), signed with monogram GK, 1696. A head-and-shoulders portrait, with face turned slightly to his right, wearing a red coat with cravat, plain background within a carved oval. The sitter was the younger brother of Ashe Windham, who - as the eldest son who had already inherited Felbrigg - was painted by Kneller in larger format (alongside). This may be the portrait for which their mother paid Kneller £15 in 1696. William went into the Army, lost a leg at the Battle of Blenheim (1704), but continued to campaign in the rest of the War of the Spanish Succession, finally retiring as Colonel. In 1705 he married AnneTyrrell, daughter of Sir Charles Tyrrell of Heron Manor, Essex, and at first lived in Braxted in the same county, along with his mother. Unlike his mother and his younger brother James, he came well out of the South Sea Bubble, and was able in 1721 to buy Earsham from its amateur architect, John Buxton, who afterwards boasted that he had been paid "for every nail in it". From the line that he established there (which included Joseph Windham - see the Nathaniel Dance drawing in the Great Hall) it descended to the Dallings, and thence to the Meades, by whom it was sold in 1973. Traditionally called William, younger brother of Ashe Windham, who is represented in NT 1401174 and father of Charles Windham, who is depicted in the facing oval (NT 1401170). A payment in Mrs. Windham's account book under August 1696, is probably for this picture: ' Pd Sr Godfrey Kneller 15.0.0.', as is possibly 28 June 1697': pd a frame your picture 1.2.6.' The amounts paid for both picture and frame suggest that it must have been bust size, and not therefore applicable to the three-quarter length at Felbrigg, No.20. (Payments published by J.D. Stewart, Burlington Magazine, CXIII, 1971, pp.30ff; and again in his 'Sir Godfrey Kneller' (where Stewart also arrives at the conclusion, partly based on these payments, that Kneller was already charging ,15 for a bust-portrait in 1696, as he certainly was to by 1703). It may be that only payments for this portrait occur in Mrs Windham's accounts, and not for the half-length of Ashe Windham, because the latter had been painted earlier, in the lifetime of William Windham I (H1689), although this may be a little too early for that picture. It could also be that the recorded payments are for another - lost -head-and-shoulders of him, rather than for the present picture of his younger brother, William, since Mrs Windham's ,your' was probably addressed to her elder son. Felbrigg, Norfolk (Accredited Museum)