Charlecote House
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Charlecote Park () is a grand 16th-century
country house image:Blenheim - Blenheim Palace - 20210417125239.jpg, 300px, Blenheim Palace - Oxfordshire An English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a Townhou ...
, surrounded by its own deer park, on the banks of the River Avon in Charlecote near
Wellesbourne Wellesbourne is a large village in the civil parish of Wellesbourne and Walton, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. In the 2021 census the parish had a population of 7,283, a significant increase from 5,84 ...
, about east of
Stratford-upon-Avon Stratford-upon-Avon ( ), commonly known as Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon (district), Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands (region), West Midlands region of Engl ...
and south of
Warwick Warwick ( ) is a market town, civil parish and the county town of Warwickshire in the Warwick District in England, adjacent to the River Avon, Warwickshire, River Avon. It is south of Coventry, and south-east of Birmingham. It is adjoined wit ...
in
Warwickshire Warwickshire (; abbreviated Warks) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the West Midlands (region), West Midlands of England. It is bordered by Staffordshire and Leicestershire to the north, Northamptonshire to the east, Ox ...
, England. It has been administered by the
National Trust The National Trust () is a heritage and nature conservation charity and membership organisation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Trust was founded in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley to "promote the ...
since 1946. It is a
Grade I listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...
and is open to the public. The park and gardens are listed Grade II* in Historic England's Register of Parks and Gardens.


History

The Lucy family owned the land from 1247. Charlecote Park was originally built in 1558 by Sir Thomas Lucy, and Queen
Elizabeth I Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was List of English monarchs, Queen of England and List of Irish monarchs, Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. She was the last and longest reigning monarch of the House of Tudo ...
stayed in the room that is now the drawing room. Although the general outline of the original Elizabethan house remains, the present house is of mostly Victorian construction. Successive generations of the Lucy family modified Charlecote Park over the centuries until George Hammond Lucy ( High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1831) inherited the house in 1823 and set about recreating the house in its original Tudor style. Charlecote Park covers , backing on to the River Avon.
William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
was said to have poached rabbits and deer in the park as a young man, and to have been brought before the magistrates.Terry A. Gray, ''The Lost Years'', Palomar College.
From 1605 to 1640, the house was occupied by Sir Thomas Lucy. He had twelve children with Lady Lucy, who ran the house after he died. She was known for her piety and for distributing alms to the poor each Christmas. Her eldest three sons each inherited the house in turn, then it fell to her grandson Sir Davenport Lucy. High up on one wall in the Tudor great hall is the 1680 painting ''Captain Thomas Lucy'' by Sir
Godfrey Kneller Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (born Gottfried Kniller; 8 August 1646 – 19 October 1723) was a German-born British painter. The leading Portrait painting, portraitist in England during the late Stuart period, Stuart and early Georgian eras ...
, dated 1680. It includes what is believed to be one of the earliest depictions of an enslaved black presence in the West Midlands. The painting includes a young black groom in the right hand background, dressed in a blue livery coat and red stockings and wearing a gleaming, metal collar around his neck. The National Trust notes that "It is not known if Kneller painted this unidentified figure from a model or if it is a portrait of a real groom in Captain Lucy's household". In 1735, a black child called Philip Lucy was baptised at Charlecote.Beyond the Grave
Alison Benjamin, 21 March 2007, The Guardian, Retrieved 26 November 2015
The lands immediately adjoining the house were further landscaped by
Capability Brown Lancelot "Capability" Brown (born c. 1715–16, baptised 30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783) was an English gardener and landscape architect, a notable figure in the history of the English landscape garden style. Unlike other architects ...
in about 1760. This resulted in Charlecote becoming a hostelry destination for notable tourists to Stratford from the late-18th to mid-19th century, including
Washington Irving Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He wrote the short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy ...
(1818), Sir
Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European literature, European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'' (18 ...
(1828) and
Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne (né Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associat ...
(c 1850). Charlecote was inherited in 1823 by George Hammond Lucy (d. 1845), who in December 1822 had married Mary Elizabeth Williams of
Bodelwyddan Castle Bodelwyddan Castle (), close to the village of Bodelwyddan, near Rhyl, Denbighshire in Wales, was built around 1460 by the Humphreys family of Anglesey as a manor house. It was associated with the Williams-Wynn family for around 200 years from ...
, Wales, upon whose extensive diaries the current "behind the scenes of Victorian Charlecote" are based. Seven years of major renovation and rebuilding, including an extension on the river side, were commenced in 1829 after a builder's survey had revealed grave defects in the fabric. G.H.Lucy's second son, Henry, inherited the estate in 1847 from his elder brother. In 1848, Mary Elizabeth Lucy had the "wretched old Anglo-Norman church" in the Park pulled down. A new church, built to her design, was completed and opened in February 1853. In 1890, artist
Edith Mary Hinchley Edith Mary Hinchley ( Mason; 23 January 1870 – 16 October 1940) was a British painter, suffragist, and humanist. Early life and education Edith Mary Mason was born in 1870 in the Chelsea area of London where her father was a florist and nurs ...
worked on a family tree image on deerskin that involved the creation of 500 heraldic shields. She did the work because she was a genealogist and a friend of the family. The "Lucy Deerskin" is still at Charlecote Park. After the deaths of both Mary Elizabeth and Henry in 1890, the house was rented out by Henry's eldest daughter and heiress, Ada Christina (d. 1942). She had married Sir Henry Ramsay-Fairfax, (d. 1944), a line of the Fairfax Baronets, who on marriage assumed the name Fairfax-Lucy. From this point onwards, the family began selling off parts of the outlying estate to fund their lifestyle. In 1946, Sir Montgomerie Fairfax-Lucy, who had inherited the residual estate from his mother Ada, presented Charlecote to the National Trust ''in lieu'' of death duties. Sir Montgomerie was succeeded in 1965 by his brother, Sir Brian, whose wife Alice researched the history of Charlecote and assisted the National Trust with the restoration of the house.


Today

The
Great Hall A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, castle or a large manor house or hall house in the Middle Ages. It continued to be built in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries, although by then the family used the great cha ...
has a barrel-vaulted ceiling made of plaster painted to look like timber and is a fine setting for the splendid collection of family portraits. Other rooms have richly coloured wallpaper, decorated plaster ceilings and wood panelling. There are magnificent pieces of furniture and fine works of art, including a contemporary painting of Queen Elizabeth I. The original two-storey Elizabethan
gatehouse A gatehouse is a type of fortified gateway, an entry control point building, enclosing or accompanying a gateway for a town, religious house, castle, manor house, or other fortification building of importance. Gatehouses are typically the most ...
that guards the approach to the house remains unaltered. On display at the house is an original letter from
Oliver Cromwell Oliver Cromwell (25 April 15993 September 1658) was an English statesman, politician and soldier, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in British history. He came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, initially ...
, dated 1654, summoning then-owner Richard Lucy to the
Barebone's Parliament Barebone's Parliament, also known as the Little Parliament, the Nominated Assembly and the Parliament of Saints, came into being on 4 July 1653, and was the last attempt of the English Commonwealth to find a stable political form before the inst ...
. Also on display is a 1760 portrait of George Lucy by
Thomas Gainsborough Thomas Gainsborough (; 14 May 1727 (baptised) – 2 August 1788) was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists o ...
, which cost Lucy the sum of eight
guineas The guinea (; commonly abbreviated gn., or gns. in plural) was a coin, minted in Great Britain between 1663 and 1814, that contained approximately one-quarter of an ounce of gold. The name came from the Guinea region in West Africa, from where m ...
. A set of archives for the Lucy family at Charlecote is held by the Warwickshire County Record Office. The house also has a display of carriages and a period laundry and brew room. In April 2012, Charlecote Park featured as the venue for
BBC1 BBC One is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It is the corporation's oldest and Flagship (broadcasting), flagship channel, and is known for broadcasting mainstream programming, which includ ...
's ''
Antiques Roadshow ''Antiques Roadshow'' is a British television programme broadcast by the BBC in which antiques appraisers travel to various regions of the United Kingdom (and occasionally in other countries) to appraise antiques brought in by local people ( ...
''. Charlecote Park has extensive grounds. A
parterre A ''parterre'' is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the ...
has been recreated from the original 1700s plans. The livestock at Charlecote includes fallow deer and Jacob sheep, which were brought to England from Portugal in 1755 by George Lucy.


Notes


Bibliography

* ''Charlecote and the Lucys: The Chronicle of an English Family'' (OUP, 1958) Alice Fairfax-Lucy * ''History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 3'' (1835) John Burke. Lucy of Charlecote pp 97–101. () * * ''Mistress of Charlecote: The Memoirs of Mary Elizabeth Lucy 1803-1889.'' (Victor Gollancz 1983) Alice Fairfax-Lucy.


External links


Charlecote Park webpage at the National TrustWikidata List of Paintings at Charlecote ParkPhotos of Charlecote Park and surrounding area on geograph
{{Authority control Fairfax family residences Country houses in Warwickshire National Trust properties in Warwickshire Grade I listed buildings in Warwickshire Grade I listed houses Historic house museums in Warwickshire Gardens in Warwickshire Gardens by Capability Brown Grade II* listed parks and gardens in Warwickshire Stratford-on-Avon District