Choosing a successful wedding present can often be difficult but in 1816 the British government made a pretty good guess.  Princess Charlotte, George IV’s only child and the heir to the throne was to be married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, an impoverished  minor German princeling she had met and chosen for herself over her father’s preferred candidate. According to Charlotte, Leopold  expressed a wish for “a large place and a house in the country where he can farm, shoot and  hunt etc a day’s journey from town.” 

That large place proved to be  Claremont. [see last week’s post],the estate created by the Duke of Newcastle, the long-serving 18thc Prime Minister, which had been described as “the noblest of any in Europe”. It was on the market and  Charlotte was delighted when she heard that “Ministers will certainly buy it for us”.  It cost £56,000 with a further £6,000 for the contents, and the couple moved into “the most fit royal residence that can be found anywhere,” in August 1816.

As usual the photographs are my own unless otherwise acknowledged.

Charlotte’s story is the stuff of fiction – a mix mostly of drama and tragedy but with a dash of romance once she had married Leopold.  It’s well worth reading about , and theWikipedia article about her is a good place to start if you want to follow it up more closely.  Claremont, described by her as “a real paradise” was to be the much loved setting for their short marriage. Leopold was very interested in gardens, while plants were for him “a constant and never-failing source of amusement.”

Within a few months  Charlotte wrote that they began “doing a great deal to improve the place”,  employing J.W.Hiort of the Office of Works,  [does anyone know more about him?] who worked with the architect John Papworth, not only to fence in the entire estate, but also design lodges, cottages, domestic offices, a moss seat, and an aviary.  

There were also two more important  buildings. The first was an elaborately painted  Gothic teahouse sited on the very highest level of Bridgeman’s amphitheatre. 

The other was the  Camellia House which did more than merely house camellias. The couple also used it as a library and private retreat where unexpected visitors merely interrupted “Mrs and Mrs Coburg doing their accounts.”

The greenhouse was an early example of its kind, and divided into 3 sections with a stove attached to the rear  to provide heating to the camellias which were thought [but didn’t]  need it as well as citrus and other tender plants.  Some of the original camellias, thought to be amongst the oldest in the country, still survive despite the fact that the building had fallen into such disrepair that it was demolished in 1959. All that’s left now is the stone paving of the terrace in front of the house and the surrounding iron railings with Leopold’s crown and cypher.

 

Their gardens were managed  by Thomas Fairbairn, formerly gardener to Sir Joseph Banks,  who obviously took good care of them and Leopold’s already extensive collection of rare plants. The open ground floor of the Belvedere was converted into a conservatory for such rarities and they even employed  a man just  to write plant labels. The couple started a hortus siccus with the idea that it would become “a national ornament and unique specimen of the beauties of the vegetable world.”

The couple did not enjoy Claremont together for very long because Charlotte died in childbirth a few months later in November 1817. There was a national outpouring of grief, rather like the Princess Diana phenomenon and Leopold opened the grounds to “allow the public to view those places and scenes which were rendered so interesting by the footsteps of the late lamented Princess.” Unfortunately his generosity led, as had been the case with Alexander Pope’s villa [see this earlier post for more on that], to the removal of crystals from the grotto for souvenirs.

The Gothic tea-house on the amphitheatre was unfinished at the time of Charlotte’s death and Leopold decided to adapt it as a mausoleum for Charlotte. Augustus Pugin was commissioned to alter the interior, adding stained glass windows and a bust of the princess. A flower garden was planted against the south facing wall, and the whole building was later surrounded by railings.

The Mausoleum was demolished in 1922 to make way for planned housing development on the site, which in the end did not happen. [More about that shortly]

The National Trust recently built a mock facade to indicate its appearance and location but have no intention of recreating it. [For a fuller account of the mausoleum see this  blog post by the  Folly Flaneuse ]

Leopold continued to live at Claremont, and  develop the gardens until 1831 when he was offered the crown of Belgium. [Power politics 19thc style!] When he went off to Brussels he lent Claremont to his niece Princess, later Queen, Victoria. She had spent a lot of time there and loved the house and grounds and after she became queen she still used it as a private retreat away from the formality of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.  However, her use of the house declined after the building of Osborne House in 1845.

By then there was already encroachment by property development  and in order to protect their privacy both Leopold and Victoria added land to the estate until it reached over 16000 acres, with a perimeter of  well over three miles.  60 acres of this were formal pleasure grounds with 10 acres of flower and kitchen gardens .

A new royal connection was started in 1848 following the revolution in France that year which deposed King Louis Philippe.   His daughter had become the second wife of Leopold and so it seemed appropriate that when he and  his wife Queen Amelie  fled to Britain they were offered Claremont  as a new home by Queen Victoria.

Penniless on their arrival they were joined by their children and loyal courtiers, effectively relying on Victoria’s  charity until they were able to obtain money from the sale of their properties in France.  There were over 30 exiles there even as late as 1866 when Amelie died.

At that point Victoria was concerned that the government might try and persuade her to sell the estates to property developers  as it would have been worth £200,000 as building plots.  Given her love for the house it’s not surprising she thought it “an extremely distasteful idea”. Leopold too was appalled at what he called “the desperation of the scene of his short lived happiness.”

As so often Victoria got her way and Claremont was spared. Instead it became  home  to her youngest son, Leopold Duke of Albany, on his marriage in 1882 to Princess Helen of Waldeck. That marriage was short-lived too as Leopold was a haemophiliac and died in 1884 following a fall. After Leopold’s death, the Duchess and her two children, Alice and Charles Edward, continued to reside intermittently at Claremont House.  However the architectural style was no longer so fashionable and in 1897 when Country Life profiled the estate, it commented that the house was “plain and unattractive” and  “notable perhaps more for the interesting people who have dwelt there than for itself.”   Little attention or interest was paid to its recent history and when in 1928 Avray Tipping wrote a lengthy article for the magazine about Claremont he concentrated almost entirely on its early history with the royal period compressed into just a single long paragraph.

Claremont was taken over for use as a military hospital during the first part of  the First World War until  1917 when the Duchess moved into an apartment in Kensington Palace and the mansion was let to a girls finishing school. The gardens were clearly kept up during all this time, with head gardener Mr Kelly winning prizes at RHS shows, and Suttons Seeds carrying photos of a border of antirrhinums there in their 1913 catalogue. Country Life too featured the hardy flower border there in August 1916.

As we have seen property developers had already been snapping at the gates of the estate from the late 19thc, and Country Life was full of advertising for houses and building plots “adjoining the country residence of the Duchess of Albany”. Her occupancy continued to be used as an added attraction for the location after she had moved out.

After the Duchess’s death in 1922 the freehold reverted to the government and a few months later the estate was put up for auction.  As the coverage in Country Life made clear the vultures were gathering with “the  noteworthy point about the company was the representative gathering of London and Surrey estate agents”.

It did not reach the reserve and  was withdrawn at £51,000. However “competition for building sites on the borders of the estate was very active”  and shortly afterwards the grounds were split up.  

The mansion and 210 acres were bought by Sir William Corry, a director of Cunard. Although he lived in the house Corry also had plans for building and gradually plots were sold off. The mausoleum and temple were demolished to make way for more housing. However Sir William died before that  could be started and the estate was put up for sale yet again.

It changed several  times  until in 1930 it looked as if the mansion, now abandoned for several years would be demolished. Luckily  it was bought  for £64,000 for use as a ladies college. It has continued in educational use ever since, with Fan Court School  who have recently  celebrated their centenary, now occupying the house and part of the grounds.   

One parcel of about 49 acres of the grounds including the area around the lake had been bought for development by Sir Samuel Rowbotham but the depression and then the outbreak of war prevented this being started.  With no maintenance whatsoever taking place it did not take long for the site to become overgrown and derelict, the lake to get clogged up, and  some buildings to collapse while others were rendered ruinous.

If it had not been for the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act with its introduction of the Green Belt and quite tough regulations to prevent  unrestricted development there’s no doubt that Claremont would have vanished under bricks and mortar.    But with legislation now in place the local authority, Esher Urban District Council placed Claremont in a conservation area preventing its redevelopment, and eventually Rowbotham’s widow offered the 49 acres to the government in lieu of death duties.   They in turn gave it to the National Trust.

However just because they owned it did not mean they could afford to repair it or even run it. As you’re probably aware the National Trust usually requires an endowment to take on a property so without one, while the Trust maintained ownership of  the gardens, management  was left to Esher council.   They ran it like a local park with little done except keeping paths clear and the grass areas cut. As a result several buildings including the Camellia House and Boat House continued to deteriorate until the point where they were in such a poor  state they had to be demolished. Luckily others  like the temple on   Belisle and the grotto just about survived.

It was only  in the 1960s that the National Trust seem to have really realised quite how significant Claremont was. This enlightenment coincided with the development of garden history as an academic discipline in its own right and the early days of serious garden archaeology.  As a result of research, and grants they then began a major restoration programme between 1975 and 1980. Buildings were repaired, invasive plants curbed, the lake dredged, and probably most impactful visually the amphitheatre was cleared of the evergreen planting that had been introduced in the mid-18thc. 

Of course there is still no endowment and no obvious ways of exploiting the historic elements of the site commercially – no holiday cottages or obvious wedding venues – so instead every summer the garden is the setting for open-air concerts and other al fresco events all aimed at raising visitor numbers and crucially income.  I haven’t visited on a busy event day so I don’t know how the site is impacted but I’m sure the spendthrift Duke of Newcastle and the impoverished Louis Philippe and his family would understand the Trust’s dilemma.