Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire

Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire [http://www.lamporthall.co.uk] is a beautiful house with lots of stories of the Isham family, who lived there and repeatedly extended it over four hundred years.  Sir Gyles Isham, the twelfth baronet, restored it from wartime neglect and safeguarded its future with a preservation trust:  oddly, he seems to have left the house short of beds, so that the rooms on the upper floor are variously furnished.

One of these rooms is dominated by a particular painting that is mentioned in the guidebook only as “‘Roman Charity’ from the school of Rubens”.  In the group I joined there was a gentleman specialising in egregious questions who asked what was going on in this unusual scene.

Our guide remarked that she only ever explained the painting if asked.  The grey-bearded man in the painting was in prison – which explained why he was shackled and stark naked.  The lady in the painting was his daughter, and was carrying a baby.  The baby, the guide pointed out, indicated how it was that the daughter was in a position to give her imprisoned father “sustenance”.

I checked out afterwards that this is the legend of Myco (the father) and Pero (the daughter), which is recorded by the Roman historian Valerius Maximus, writing at the time of Christ.  I found this at a site http://www.breastfeeding-mom.com/factoids.html.  What would we do without Google?

So if you visit Lamport Hall, you don’t need to ask about the painting.

Kelmarsh Hall, Northamptonshire

It’s not uncommon for people to fall in love with a house, but it’s exceptional to marry its owner.

Nancy Lancaster (1897-1994), the daughter of a Virginian railroad magnate, had first married the grandson of the founder of Marshall Field, the Chicago department-store, and secondly his cousin, Ronald Tree, who bought Nancy’s grandfather’s home, her birthplace, Mirador, which she improved.

The Trees moved to England in 1927 and rented first Cottesbrooke Hall, Northamptonshire, and then took a ten-year repairing lease of the nearby Kelmarsh Hall, originally designed by James Gibbs (c1727-32), and owned by Claude ‘Jubie’ Lancaster.  Nancy modernised and redecorated the place, expressing her exceptional talent for sumptuous, under-stated design.  In the six years that the Trees lived at Kelmarsh she transformed the house and its garden.

In 1933, the year that Ronald Tree became Conservative MP for Market Harborough, the couple moved to Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, also by Gibbs, where Nancy collaborated with Lady Sybil Colefax to turn a cold, neglected Palladian house into an idyllic home that epitomised upper-class comfort and hospitality.

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, contributing to Nancy Lancaster’s Daily Telegraph obituary [August 20th 1994], describes the influential effect of knowing Ditchley in Nancy’s time:

Her genius (and that is no exaggeration) was her eye for colour, scale, objects and the dressing-up of them; the stuffs the curtains were made of, their shapes and trimmings, the china, tablecloths, knives and forks.

Even the bathrooms were little works of art.  Warm, panelled, carpeted, there were shelves of Chelsea china cauliflowers, cabbages, tulips and rabbits of exquisite quality…

The tea tables had no cloths but were painted brilliant Chinese red.  Anyone could have done that, but no-one else did.

Towards the end of the Second World War Ronald began an affair, and the Trees divorced in 1947.  A year later Nancy married her own lover, the owner of Kelmarsh Hall, ‘Jubie’ Lancaster, and moved back to what she described as her favourite home.

In 1950 she bought out Sybil Colefax’s business, Colefax & Fowler, and began a tempestuous professional partnership with the decorator John Fowler.  This association produced some of the most influential decorative schemes of the mid-twentieth century – Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, Mereworth Castle, Kent (then owned by Nancy’s son, Michael Tree) and Wilton House, near Salisbury.  Their trademark cool eclecticism, innovative, subtle use of colour and preoccupation with comfort have become known as the “English Country House Style” – an appropriate generalisation for the work of a British designer and an American home-maker.

John Fowler’s theatrical instructions to owners, National Trust grandees and artisans alike, are well known, yet Nancy could hold her own.  On one occasion she told a decorator, “Paint it the colour of elephant’s breath.”  She specified such colours as caca du dauphin and vomitesse de la reine.  It’s remarkable what one can get away with in French.

Even though their pioneering investigations into historical decoration, scraping surfaces with a threepenny bit, have now been superseded by more sophisticated research techniques, their creative tension between historicism and creativity, and masculinity and femininity, define a turning point in British decorative art.

However much she loved Kelmarsh, her third marriage lasted only until 1953:  on her divorce she moved to Haseley Court, Oxfordshire.  After a fire in 1971 she sold the Court and moved into the adjacent Coach House for the rest of her long life.

Jubie Lancaster’s sister Cicley set up the Kelmarsh Trust [http://www.kelmarsh.com] to maintain the house and its estate after her death in 1996.

The comprehensive study of Nancy Lancaster’s life and work is by Martin Wood, Nancy Lancaster:  English country house style (Frances Lincoln 2005).

Deene Park, Northamptonshire

Deene Park, Northamptonshire [http://www.deenepark.com] has belonged to the Brudenell family since 1514:  its current owner, Mr Edmund Brudenell, is directly descended from the purchaser, Sir Robert Brudenell, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in the reign of Henry VIII.

Across the generations, the Brudenells have held the titles Duke of Montagu, Marquess of Ailesbury, Earl of Cardigan.  Of all the illustrious ancestors, one who stands out in national history is James, 7th Earl of Cardigan (1797-1868), the man who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava (1854).  His modern reputation was compromised by Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account The Reason Why (1953) and Trevor Howard’s portrayal of him in the film The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).

In fact, the Battle of Balaclava was simply an incident in a life lived hard and fast.

As Lord Brudenell he was shunted into the pocket borough of Marlborough at the age of 21.  As a result of his most determined political stand, abstaining over the Catholic Emancipation Act, he was removed from this seat.  He purchased the parliamentary seat of Fowey, Cornwall, only to see it abolished two years later under the 1832 Reform Act.  He then spent the equivalent of £1½ million on being elected, legitimately by the standards of the day, to the new constituency of Northamptonshire North.  Five years later he had to move to the House of Lords on inheriting his father’s title.

His emotional life was similarly turbulent.  He seduced the wife of a childhood friend, Elizabeth Tollemache Johnstone, whose husband roundly declared her “the most damned bad-tempered and extravagant bitch in the kingdom” and divorced her.  She married Lord Brudenell in 1826, but by the time she became countess eleven years later they had separated.  There were no children.

In the months before Elizabeth died in 1858, Lord Cardigan formed a liaison with Adeline de Horsey, 28 years his junior.  Two months after Elizabeth’s death, they took off to Gibraltar in Cardigan’s yacht, married, and travelled on to receive a papal blessing in Rome.  Queen Victoria and British society never forgave them.

They enjoyed ten years of happy marriage, punctuated with what a family history describes as “trivial infidelities”, and she lived on as the epitome of the term “merry widow” until 1915.

Cardigan’s portrayal in The Charge of the Light Brigade, at most impressionistic and certainly not entirely accurate, hardly begins to capture the drama of his life.  There’s another film to be made out of the life of this least boring of Victorians.

Deene Park contains numerous portraits and mementos of the 7th Earl and his countess Adeline, who between them lived there for 78 years.