Scandals and feuds that cost family a home bigger than the Queen's
BRITAIN'S most impressive stately home's future will be
decided in a court dispute that will drag up a past of scandal, family rifts
and class war. Wentworth Woodhouse, with a fascade wider than Buckingham Palace
and a room for every day of the year, is the subject of a £100million legal
action that last week attracted the attention of Prince Charles.
By DANNY BUCKLAND
PUBLISHED: 02:55, Sun, Jun 9, 2013
In the grimmest of ironies, the current owners are suing the
Coal Authority for compensation for subsidence caused by the honeycomb of mines
running under its land, yet it was coal that made its original owners among the
wealthiest families in the land.
The Fitzwilliams, who owned the south Yorkshire property
from 1720 until 1979, were a dysfunctional dynasty who make events at ITV's
Downton Abbey seem as scandalous as a misplayed card at whist.
The Fitzbillies, as they were known to 385 staff and the
115,000 miners employed in their 120 pits, favoured imploding on a grand scale.
Their tainted history features an epileptic Earl banished to Canada who
returned a national hero after charting a land route between the Atlantic and
Pacific and surviving disease to become one of the first non-natives to cross
the Rockies.
He died aged 37 and his buccaneering, womaniser son became
embroiled in a protracted feud with aunts and uncles who accused him of being a
changeling, a child switched at birth for a baby girl, to rob them of their
inheritance.
A cousin was disowned for marrying the grand-daughter of a
draper and another scion of the family caused controversy by becoming engaged
to Kathleen Kennedy, the vivacious sister of JFK, Bobby and Teddy from another
torn and tormented clan from the other side of the Atlantic.
They both died in a plane crash over France in 1948, three
years before a court case erupted over whether heir Toby Fitzwilliam had been
born illegitimate.
Throw in Wentworth Woodhouse losing 183 staff during the
Great War while the estate's pits made the family £12million, and rumours of
illegitimate children created by a droit du seigneur, and there is enough raw
material to keep Downton Abbey scriptwriters busy for a decade.
Grade I-listed Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, took 15
years to build but was almost sent tumbling into the abyss when the Labour
Minister of Power, Manny Shinwell, insisted that open cast pits and mines were
pursued up "to its back door", despoiling the house's formal gardens
and obliterating its pink shale driveway.
The coal was low grade but the statement was high-class war
politics: "Downton has nothing on Wentworth Woodhouse. The story of the
family is as epic as the house," says Catherine Bailey, whose book Black
Diamonds charts the dynasty.
"In 1900, they were one of the richest and most
powerful families in Britain, yet within 50 years they were stripped of power.
"Their ancestors had lived on that site since the 14th
century. The 6th Earl had eight sons, all named William after him and you would
think they were as solid as the house foundations. Yet they lost their mines,
were hounded from their house and this once great dynasty was in danger of
dying."
Prince Charles has visited the house and contacted ministers
about the need to preserve it as part of the national heritage.
The high watermark of the family's influence was marked at
the death of the 6th Earl, in 1902, who left a fortune equivalent to £3billion.
His eldest son, the epileptic William, became the source of high intrigue when
he insisted that his third child, Billy, was born in a Canadian frontier town
wooden house on the shores of Lake Superior where he had made his reputation.
Suspicion clouded the remote birth and reached fever pitch when William died
aged 37 and Billy became the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam. Relatives denounced him as a
changeling with no right to family riches.
Billy employed a private detective to trace the birth
doctor, midwife and nurse to discredit the claim. He became a hero after
winning a DSO in the Boer War, and became a Conservative MP and Mayor of
Sheffield. All the time, £6million a year profits from coal rolled in. He had
80 racehorses, land in Ireland and Yorkshire, and a London property that is now
the Italian Embassy.
Billy ruled with a gentle touch ensuring the Fitzwilliam
collieries were the safest and his workers received help during economic
blights including the 1926 General Strike, when he taught miners on pit ponies
how to play polo on his front lawn and fed them during their eight months with
no pay.
Scandal was never far away and his son Peter, who had made
at least three pit village girls pregnant before his 21st birthday, pursued the
life of a hard-drinking, gambling, womanising aristocrat. Billy, despite his
enlightened approach to his workers, had incurred the wrath of firebrand
Labour's Manny Shinwell for buying a racehorse for 8,000 guineas during the
war. His revenge was to order open cast mining on the estate, even though loyal
miners threatened to go on strike.
Peter inherited the title in 1943, aged 32, after his
father's death from cancer but it didn't stop him joining the Special
Operations Executive and volunteering for a vital mission to smuggle ball
bearings from Sweden past the Nazis. He made eight trips in motorboats and won
a DSO.
His private life became engulfed in more scandal when,
despite being married, he fell in love with Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy
at the end of the Second World War after meeting the 28-year-old widower at the
Dorchester.
Kennedy patriarch Joe had been persuaded to consider them
marrying, but tragedy struck as they took a premeeting holiday and their jet
crashed in France during a storm. The title passed to a cousin, Eric, who died
childless two years later, and then to Toby who was forced into court to prove
he was not illegitimate, following his mother's outrage that he wed below his
class. His parents had married after his birth and arcane legislation on
aristocratic inheritance ruled him out.
His younger brother Tom inherited the earldom but the
estate, stripped of its coal income, was drained by its upkeep. As the dynasty
crumbled, he ordered 16 tons of family records on to a bonfire that reputedly
burned for three weeks.
On Tom's death in 1979 Wentworth Woodhouse, which had become
a teacher training college, was sold. It continued to disintegrate, allegedly
blighted by Shinwell's mining, but current owners Clifford Newbold and his
sons, who bought it for £1.5million, have a £200million plan for a museum,
hotel and business centre.
Prince Charles has visited the house and contacted ministers
about the need to preserve it as part of the national heritage.
As the battle for Wentworth Woodhouse's future rages,
Catherine Bailey says: "You have the story of Britain wrapped up in that house
as well as the extraordinary story of a family. It is wonderful that there is a
chance it might be saved and have a happy ending after so many tragedies."
King coal
Roy Hattersley sifts through the romance to find the reality
of a miner's life between the wars in Catherine Bailey's Black Diamonds
Roy Hattersley
Sat 14 Apr 2007 23.45 BST First published on Sat 14 Apr 2007
23.45 BST
Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey
If books had human characteristics, Black Diamonds would
suffer from a severe identity crisis. It begins with the mystery - written in
the high romantic style of Baroness Orczy - of the seventh Earl Fitzwilliam's
origins and the allegation that he was a changeling, smuggled into a Canadian
log cabin to provide the heir that Lavinia, Lady Middleton, could not produce.
It ends with the tragedy - written in the breathless prose of Elinor Glyn - of
Katherine "Kick" Kennedy (JFK's sister), who married the Marquis of
Hartington and, after his death in the war, became entangled with the
disreputable eighth Earl Fitzwilliam and died with him in an air crash.
In between the extracts from the social register, Black
Diamonds contains a great deal of worthwhile information and interesting
analysis about the state of affairs in and about Wentworth House and its
estate. Catherine Bailey contrasts the lavish lifestyle of the
Fitzwilliam-Wentworths with the grinding poverty of the miners whose sweat paid
for the aristocratic extravagance. But not even the worthy meat in the sandwich
is left unblemished by the book's regularly recurring flaw. The language in
which some of the serious passages are written reduces its best parts to the
level of society gossip. It is bad enough that the chapter on the doomed affair
between Kennedy and the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam Wentworth is heralded by the
single sentence, "The affair seemed madness from the start." But the
real offence is the "bogus reporting" which peppers the chapters on
important social questions.
The visit of George V to Wentworth - meant to heal some of
the wounds of the industrial upheavals of 1911 by producing newspaper pictures
of the king with miners - was an important indication of the establishment's
anxiety about the prospects of a general strike or worse. Black Diamonds deals
with it adequately. But it is preceded by a description of the king's arrival
which would be more appropriate to the beginning of a short story in Lady's
Home Journal. "Walking briskly through the corridors, the housekeeper
missed nothing. From time to time she stopped to adjust the arrangements in the
vases of flowers or to knead the bowls of potpourri to release their aroma into
the air."
The irritation caused by such flaws is increased by the way
in which they diminish the chapters of Black Diamonds that have something
sensible, and sometimes important, to say. The verbatim accounts of the miners'
attitude to what south Yorkshire called "graft" - not corruption but
back-breaking labour - has an air of absolute authenticity. Walter Brierley, a
miner from a pit 40 miles from Wentworth who was unemployed for four years,
longed to be back hewing coal. "The dependence on the state for money
without having honestly earned it has made me creep within myself." Arthur
Eaglestone remembered: "The most heinous of accusations lay in the
terrible phrase 'He doesn't like work'." When Bailey stops writing like a
romantic novelist, Black Diamonds admirably reflects both the true nobility of
the inter-war miners and the undoubted degradation of the aristocracy who
exploited them.
Wentworth Woodhouse comprises two joined houses, forming
west and east fronts. The original house, now the west front, with the garden
range facing northwest towards the village, was built of brick with stone
details. The east front of unsurpassed length is credibly said to have been
built as the result of a rivalry with the Stainborough branch of the Wentworth
family, which inherited Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford's minor title
of Baron Raby, but not his estates (including the notable series of Strafford
portraits by Anthony van Dyck and Daniel Mytens), which went to Watson who
added Wentworth to his surname. The Stainborough Wentworths, for whom the
Strafford earldom was revived, lived at nearby Wentworth Castle, which was
purchased in 1708 in a competitive spirit and strenuously rebuilt in a
magnificent manner.
The English Baroque, brick-built, western range of Wentworth
Woodhouse was begun in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, (after 1728 Lord
Malton) after he inherited it from his father in 1723. It replaced the Jacobean
structure that was once the home of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford,
whom Charles I sacrificed in 1641 to appease Parliament. The builder to whom
Wentworth's grandson turned for a plan for the grand scheme that he intended
was a local builder and country architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe, who had a
practice in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Tunnicliffe was pleased enough with
this culmination of his provincial practice to issue an engraving signed
"R. Tunniclif, architectus" which must date before 1734, as it is
dedicated to Baron Malton, Watson-Wentworth's earlier title. However the
Baroque style was disliked by Whigs, and the new house was not admired. In c.
1734, before the West Front was finished, Wentworth's grandson Thomas
Watson-Wentworth commissioned Henry Flitcroft to build the East Front
"extension", in fact a new and much larger house, facing the other
way, southeastward. The model they settled on was Colen Campbell's Wanstead
House, illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus i, 1715.
That same year the rebuilding was already well underway. In
a letter from the amateur architect Sir Thomas Robinson of Rokeby to his
father-in-law Lord Carlisle of 6 June 1734, Sir Thomas reports that he found
the garden front "finished" and that a start had been made on the
main front: "when finished 'twill be a stupendous fabric, infinitely
superior to anything we have now in England", and he adds "The whole
finishing will be entirely submitted to Lord Burlington, and I know of no
subject's house in Europe will have 7 such magnificent rooms so finely
proportioned as these will be." In the 20th century, Nikolaus Pevsner
would agree, but the mention of the architect-earl Burlington, arbiter of
architectural taste, boded ill for the provincial surveyor-builder,
Tunnicliffe. It is doubtless to Burlington's intervention that about this time,
before the West Front was finished, the Earl of Malton, as he had now become,
commissioned Henry Flitcroft to revise Tunnicliffe's plan there and build the
East Front range. Flitcroft was Burlington's professional architectural
amanuensis— "Burlington Harry" as he was called; he had prepared for
the engravers the designs of Inigo Jones published by Burlington and William
Kent in 1727, and in fact Kent was also called in for confabulation over
Wentworth Woodhouse, mediated by Sir Thomas Robinson, though in the event the
pedestrian Flitcroft was not unseated and continued to provide designs for the
house over the following decade: he revised and enlarged Tunnicliffe's
provincial Baroque West Front and added wings, as well as temples and other structures
in the park. Contemporary engravings of the grand public East Front give
Flitcroft as architect. Flitcroft, right-hand man of the architectural
dilettanti and fully occupied as well at the Royal Board of Works, could not
constantly be on-site, however: Francis Bickerton, surveyor and builder of
York, paid bills in 1738 and 1743.
The grand East Front is the more often illustrated. The West
front, the "garden front" that Sir Thomas Robinson found to be
finished in 1734, is the private front that looked onto a giardino secreto
between the house front and the walled kitchen garden, intended for family
enjoyment rather than social and political ambitions expressed in the East
Front. Most remnants of it were redesigned in the 19th century.
Wentworth Woodhouse was inherited by Charles
Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, briefly Prime Minister in 1765–66
and again in 1782. He received Benjamin Franklin here in 1771. The architect he
employed at the house was John Carr of York, who added an extra storey to parts
of the East Front and provided the porticoes to the matching wings, each the
equivalent of a moderately grand country house. James "Athenian"
Stuart contributed designs for panels in the Pillared Hall.The Whistlejacket
Room was named for George Stubbs' portrait that hung in it of Whistlejacket,
one of the most famous racehorses of all time. The additions were completed in
1772. The second Marquess envisaged a sculpture gallery at the house, which
never came to fruition; four marbles by Joseph Nollekens were carried out to
his commission, in expectation of the gallery; the Diana, signed and dated
1778, is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Juno, Venus and Minerva,
grouped with a Roman antique marble of Paris, are at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Wentworth Woodhouse, with all its contents, subsequently
passed to the family of the Marquess's sister, the Earls Fitzwilliam.
The park
Having finished the course of alterations in the hands of
John Carr, Lord Fitzwilliam turned in 1790 to the most prominent landscape
gardener, Humphry Repton, for whom this was the season's most ambitious
project, one that he would describe in detail while the memory was still fresh,
in Some Observations of the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803).
A terrace centred on the main block effected a transition between the house and
the rolling grazing land. Four obelisks stood on the bowling green, dwarfed by
the scale of the house; Repton re-sited them. Though the parkland had
accumulated numerous eye-catcheres and features (see below), Repton found there
were few trees, the house being surrounded by "coarse grass and
boulders" which Repton also removed, before the large-scale earth-moving
operations began, effected by men with shovels and donkey-carts, to reshape the
lumpy ground into smooth swells. Two large pools, visible from the East Front
and the approach drive, were excavated into a serpentine shape. Some of
Flitcroft's outbuildings were demolished, though not Carr's handsome stable
court (1768), entered through a pedimented Tuscan arch. Many trees were
planted.
Follies
The grounds (and surrounding area) contain a number of
follies, many with associations in the arena of 18th-century Whig politics.
They include:
Hoober stand. A tapering pyramid with a hexagonal lantern,
named for the ancient wood in which it was erected. It is 98 feet (30 m) high
and was built to Flitcroft's design in 1747–48 to commemorate the defeat of the
Jacobite rebellion of 1745, in which Lord Malton and his surviving son took
part; his defensive efforts for the Hanoverian Whig establishment were rewarded
with the Lord Lieutenancy of Yorkshire and the title Marquess of Rockingham:
thus the monument indirectly reflects the greater glory of the family. The
tower, which surveys the surrounding landscape like a watchtower, is open to
the public on Sunday afternoons throughout the summer.
Keppel's Column. A 115 ft (35 m) Tuscan column built to
commemorate the acquittal of the court-martialed Admiral Keppel, a close friend
of Rockingham. Its entasis visibly bulges owing to an adjustment in its height,
made when funding problems reduced the height. It was designed by John Carr.
The Rockingham Mausoleum. A three-storey building 90 ft high, situated in woodland, where only the top
level is visible over the treetops. It was commissioned in 1783 by the Earl
Fitzwilliam as a memorial to the late first Marquess of Rockingham; it was
designed by John Carr, whose first design, for an obelisk, was rejected, in
favour of an adaptation of the Roman Cenotaph of the Julii at
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, near Arles.The ground floor is an enclosed hall
containing a statue of the former prime minister by Joseph Nollekens, plus
busts of his eight closest friends. The first floor is an open colonnade with
Corinthian columns surrounding the (empty) sarcophagus. The top storey is a
Roman-style cupola. Like Hoober Stand, the Mausoleum is open on summer Sunday
afternoons.
Needle's Eye. A 46-foot (14 m) high, sandstone block pyramid
with an ornamental urn on the top and a tall Gothic ogee arch through the
middle, which straddles a disused roadway. It was built in the 18th century
allegedly to win a bet after the second Marquess claimed he could drive a coach
and horses through the eye of a needle.
Bear Pit. Accessible if patronising the nearby Garden
centre. Built on two levels with a spiral stair. The outer doorway (about 1630)
is part of the architecture of the original house. At the end of the garden is
a grotto guarded by two life-sized statues of Roman soldiers
Royal visit of 1912
Arms of Watson, Earl of Rockingham: Argent, on a chevron
azure between three martlets sable as many crescents or. Motto: "Mea
Gloria Fides" ("Faith is My Glory")], which is displayed in
large Roman capitals on the frieze of the classical pediment of Wentworth
Woodhouse
King George V and Queen Mary visited South Yorkshire from 8
to 12 July 1912, and stayed at Wentworth Woodhouse for four days. The house
party consisted of a large number of guests, including: Dr Cosmo Gordon Lang,
Archbishop of Canterbury; The 5th Earl of Harewood and The Countess of
Harewood; The Marchioness of Londonderry; The 1st Marquess of Zetland and Lady
Zetland; The 10th Earl of Scarborough and Lady Scarborough; The 5th Earl of
Rosse and Lady Rosse; Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and Lady Mina Beresford;
Mr Walter Long and Lady Doreen Long; and Lord Helmsley and Lady Helmsley.
The visit concluded on the evening of 11 July with a
torchlight tattoo by miners, and a musical programme by members of the
Sheffield Musical Union and the Wentworth Choral Society. A crowd of 25,000
gathered on the lawn to witness the King and Queen in the balcony of the
portico, from which the King gave a speech.
The Intelligence connection in the Second World War
During the Second World War the house acted as a Training
Depot and Headquarters of the Intelligence Corps, although by 1945 conditions
for trainee intelligence soldiers had deteriorated to such a state that
questions were asked in the House of Commons. Some of the training involved
motorcycle dispatch rider skills, as Intelligence Corps personnel often used
motorcycles. The grounds of the house and surrounding road network were used as
motorcycle training areas.
Coal mining on the estate
Opencast mining reaching the back of the house. From The
Sphere, 8 February 1947
In April 1946, on the orders of Manny Shinwell (the then
Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power) a "column of lorries and heavy
plant machinery" arrived at Wentworth. The objective was the mining of a
large part of the estate close to the house for coal. This was an area where
the prolific Barnsley seam was within 100 feet (30 m) of the surface and the
area between the house and the Rockingham Mausoleum became the largest open
cast mining site in Britain at that time: 132,000 tons of coal were removed
solely from the gardens. Ostensibly the coal was desperately needed in
Britain's austere post-war economy to fuel the railways, but the decision has
been widely seen as useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the
coal-owning aristocracy. A survey by Sheffield University, commissioned by
Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl, found the coal to be "very poor
stuff" and "not worth the getting"; this contrasted with
Shinwell's assertion that it was "exceptionally good-quality."
Shinwell, intent on the destruction of the Fitzwilliams and
"the privileged rich", decreed that the mining would continue to the
back door of Wentworth, the family's east front. What followed saw the mining
of 99 acres (400,000 m2) of lawns and woods, the renowned formal gardens and
the show-piece pink shale driveway (a by-product of the family's collieries).
Ancient trees were uprooted and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50 ft
(15 m) high in front of the family's living quarters.[36]
Despite Shinwell's vindictiveness, local opinion supported
the earl - Joe Hall, President of the Yorkshire Area of the National Union of
Mineworkers, said that the "miners in this area will go to almost any
length rather than see Wentworth Woodhouse destroyed. To many mining
communities it is sacred ground" – in an industry known for harsh
treatment of workers, the Fitzwilliams were respected employers known for
treating their employees well. The Yorkshire branch later threatened a strike
over the Labour Government's plans for Wentworth, and Joe Hall wrote personally
to Clement Attlee in a futile attempt to stop the mining. This spontaneous
local activism, founded on the genuine popularity of the Fitzwilliam family
among locals, was dismissed in Whitehall as "intrigue" sponsored by
the earl.
The open-cast mining moved into the fields to the west of
the house and continued into the early 1950s. The mined areas took many years
to return to a natural state; much of the woodland and the formal gardens were
not replaced. The current owners of the property allege that mining operations
near the house caused substantial structural damage to the building due to
subsidence, and lodged a claim in 2012 of £100 million for remedial works
against the Coal Authority. The claim was heard by the Upper Tribunal (Lands
Chamber)in April 2016. In its decision dated 4 October 2016 the Tribunal found that
the damage claimed for was not caused by mining subsidence (2016 UKUT 0432
(LC).
Two sets of death duties in the 1940s, and the
nationalization of their coal mines, greatly reduced the wealth of the
Fitzwilliams, and most of the contents of the house were dispersed, in auction
sales in 1948, 1986 and 1998. In the Christies sale in 1948, Rinaldo conquered
by Love for Armida by Anthony van Dyck raised 4,600 Guineas[40] (equivalent to
£161,180 in 2016).
Many items still remain in the family, with many works lent
to museums by the "Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Estates".
On 23 November 2016, the Conservative Chancellor Philip
Hammond announced that £7.6 million would be invested in reversing the damage
caused by the mining that commenced in 1946, and restoring the house to
conditions suitable for visiting.
Lease to Lady Mabel College
The Ministry of Health attempted to requisition the house as
"housing for homeless industrial families". To prevent this, the Earl
attempted to donate the house to the National Trust, however the Trust declined
to take it. In the end, Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, sister of the 7th Earl and a
local alderman, brokered a deal whereby the West Riding County Council leased
most of the house for an educational establishment, leaving forty rooms as a
family apartment. Thus, from 1949 to 1979, the house was home to the Lady Mabel
College of Physical Education, which trained female physical education
teachers. The college later merged with Sheffield City Polytechnic (now
Sheffield Hallam University), which eventually gave up the lease in 1988 as a
result of high maintenance costs.
Sheffield City Polytechnic
1979 - 1988 saw students from Sheffield City Polytechnic
(now Sheffield Hallam University) based at Wentworth Woodhouse. Two
departments, Physical Education and B.A. Geography & Environmental Studies
were based on site. The mansion building housed student accommodation
(reputedly haunted, according to student accounts) and a dining room and
kitchens for lunch and dinner for students living on site. Four separate blocks
of modern student accommodation were built in the grounds of the deer park. The
Stable Block became the centre of student life, housing offices, lecture rooms,
laboratories, squash courts, a swimming pool, and a student bar.
Sold by Fitzwilliam family
By 1989, Wentworth Woodhouse was in a poor state of repair.
With the polytechnic no longer a tenant, and with the family no longer
requiring the house, the family trustees decided to sell it and the 70 acres
(280,000 m2) surrounding it, but retained the Wentworth Estate's 15,000 acres
(61 km2) of land. The house was bought by locally born businessman Wensley
Grosvenor Haydon-Baillie, who started a programme of restoration. However a
business failure caused it to be repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on
the market in 1998. Clifford Newbold (July 1926 – April 2015), an architect
from Highgate, bought it for something over £1.5 million. Newbold progressed
with a defined programme of renovation/restoration as evidenced in Country Life
magazine dated 17 and 24 February 2010. The surrounding parkland is owned by
the Wentworth Estates.
In 2014, the house was informally offered for sale by
Newbold, with no price specified, but a figure of around £7 million was thought
to be sought according to The Times. The house was reported to need works of
around £40 million. Following the death of Mr. Newbold, the house was formally
advertised for sale in May 2015 via Savills with an asking price of £8 million.
In March 2017, the house was sold to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust
for £7 million after a sale to the Hong Kong-based Lake House Group fell
through.
In the United Kingdom Chancellor's budget statement of
November 2016, it was announced that the Trust was to receive a grant of £7.6
million for restoration work; the Chancellor noted a claim that the property
had been Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberley in her novel Pride and
Prejudice. It was thought that there might have been a connection to the house
because Austen uses the name Fitzwilliam in her novel, but following the
Chancellor's Autumn Statement the Jane Austen Society dismissed the likelihood
that Austen had had the house in mind, given the absence of any evidence that
she had visited the estate. Austen does, however, name a character Frederick Wentworth
in Persuasion, and the eponymous heroine of Emma has the surname Woodhouse.
I noticed "another scion of the family caused controversy by becoming engaged to Kathleen Kennedy, the vivacious sister of JFK, Bobby and Teddy from another torn and tormented clan from the other side of the Atlantic".
ReplyDeleteWhat was the controversy about - that the Kennedy family was Catholic? Surely not that the Kennedy family were themselves scandal-ridden. That would be too ironic, surely.