Three Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall. The wealth of newly industrialized England and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius of Charles Barry called them up out of the past and their native sunshine. Under the encrusting grime of the Reform Club the eye of faith recognizes something agreeably reminiscent of the Farnese Palace. A few yards farther down the street, Sir Charles's recollections of the house that Raphael designed for the Pandolfini loom up through the filmy London air -- the Travellers' Club. And between them, austerely classical, grim like a prison and black with soot, rises a smaller (but still enormous) version of the Cancelleria. It is Tantamount House.
Barry designed it in 1839. A hundred workmen laboured for a year or two. And the third marquess paid the bills. They were heavy, but the suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield had begun to spread over the land which his ancestors had stolen from the monasteries three hundred years before. "The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has from the sacred writings and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. " Rich men with uneasy consciences had left their land to the monks that their souls might be helped through Purgatory by a perpetual performance of the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. But Henry VIII had lusted after a young woman and desired a son; and because Pope Clement VII was in the power of Henry's first wife's daughter's cousin, he would not grant him a divorce. The monasteries were in consequence suppressed. An army of beggars, of paupers, of the infirm died miserably of hunger. But the Tantamounts acquired some scores of square miles of ploughland, forest and pasture. A few years later, under Edward VI, they stole the property of two disestablished grammar schools; children remained uneducated that the Tantamounts might be rich. They farmed their land scientifically with a view to the highest profit. Their contemporaries regarded them as "men that live as though there were no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothing to others, men that be never satisfied. " From the pulpit of St. Paul's, Lever accused them of having "offended God, and brought a common wealth into a common ruin. " The Tantamounts were unperturbed. The land was theirs, the money came in regularly.
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