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.

detail of Caleb Stanley’s “Claremont House: the south front” c.1843 Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

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The Belvedere built c.1715 image from the Claremont Facebook Page

About 17 miles from his town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields   the Duke of Newcastle, a leading politician and several times  Prime Minister in the 18thc, developed a country retreat in Surrey which is now one of the earliest surviving English landscape gardens.

Its creators are a roll-call of the great and good of the day  starting with Sir John Vanbrugh, Charles Bridgeman and William Kent and later Capability Brown and Henry Holland as well as the work of the Duke’s gardeners, Thomas and John Greening.

Referred to by the Duke as   “Dear Claremont” it was already being described in 1727 – long before its completion – as “the noblest of any in Europe”.  Its high status continued right up until the First World War after which it fell into decline until the house became a school and much of the garden  was acquired by the National Trust.  The estate still retains many of its original features, and the grounds  are  now Grade I listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

The lake and amphitheatre, photo by Charles Miller on Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

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Happy New Year!

…and to start it off I want to give you two bits of important news about the blog and its future.

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The  blog is about to celebrate its 11th birthday!

  The first post was on New Years Eve 2013 and  the numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with over 236,000 views  by 143,000 visitors over the course of the year,  just slightly  up on last year’s already record 224,000, the 100,000 for 2020 and less than 7,000 for the whole of 2014!  All adding up to a grand total of over 1.08 million views from 625,000 visitors

As always, thank you  for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep  telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list.  Just  go to the very bottom of any post, enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in time for breakfast. And now for the quiz….

Not Mr and Mrs Nesfield celebrating to acquisition of their archives by the Garden Museum but, believe it or not, an advert for the Anthracite Bedding Manufacturing Co., 1910. Image: Library of Congress.

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