The Life of Robert Castell
A Cautionary Tale
Robert Castell’s life is a cautionary tale - a warning how not to indulge your creativity. Dedicated to his dream, the man wound up ruined, imprisoned, sick and then dead. His misfortune, though, did lead to founding of Savannah, Georgia.
Castell was an Oxford graduate and an inheritor of a “competent estate”, but not a man of unlimited means. His passion was classical architecture, which he saw as the cure for societies’ ills. He literally thought that good buildings would ameliorate and inspire England’s urban poor.
Castell wrote an architectural manifesto, The Villas of The Ancients Illustrated, that summarized the lessons of Vitruvius, the Roman father of architecture and an artilleryman for Julius Caesar.
He hoped that Richard Boyle, the Third Earl of Burlington, would support the effort, funding printing, but Boyle did not come through and Castell, foolishly, decide to self-publish.
“Castell borrowed money for the volume’s publication and marketed it with a missionary zeal. Sadly, not many readers shared his mission.”
After selling a dozen copies, Castell’s publisher seized all the remaining editions, and “Castell became a hunted debtor.”
He was thrown into the Fleet debtor prison, where he lasted a handful of weeks before dying of smallpox in October 1728.
Castell had a friend from Oxford, James Oglethorpe, an adventurer, soldier, Stuart-turned-Hanoverian, who, unlike Castell, was not of modest means. In fact, by 1728, Oglethorpe was a Member of Parliament who was staunch advocate for England’s poor. He had murdered a man in a duel, and his passion for the lower class was perhaps a way to make amends.
History does not record why Oglethorpe, who had purchased one of the twelve copies sold on the market, did not rescue Castell from Fleet prison, but after Castell’s death, Oglethorpe sued the prison’s warden, Thomas Cambridge and launched a parliamentary commission to study debtor’s prisons.
The commission found sixty thousand debtors in miserable conditions throughout England. Oglethorpe then pushed through Parliament the “Insolvent Debtors’ Reforms Act”, which effected the released of a tenth of England’s debtors.
But where would these debtors go? Insolvent and often ill, they crammed into the already teeming indigent neighborhoods of London.
Oglethorpe then turned his attention to this task, raising nearly half a million pounds for new British colony in the so-called “debate-able lands”, the area between the English Carolina colonies and Spanish Florida.
In 1733, Oglethorpe himself sailed with over 100 former criminals, debtors and other misfits for a new English colony named for the king of the day, George II. Months later, they established the Georgia colony around the founding city of Savannah on the Yamacraw River.
The city plan for Savannah was Oglethorpe’s monument to his dead friend, Robert Castell, as he took it from a similar city plan found in The Villas of The Ancients Illustrated.
What would Castell have thought of this? He left behind a wife, Mary, and “several small children”. I doubt he would have gained much satisfaction and history does not record what happened to his family.