Charlecote Park

Charlecote Park (

Charlecote Park covers 185 acres (75 ha), backing on to the River Avon. William Shakespeare was said to have poached rabbits and deer in the park as a young man, and to have been brought before the magistrates.^[3]

From 1605 to 1640, the house was organised 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 distributing alms to the poor each Christmas. Her eldest three sons inherited the house in turn, then it fell to her grandson Sir Davenport Lucy.^[4]

In the Tudor great hall, the 1680 painting Charlecote Park by Sir

The lands immediately adjoining the house were further landscaped by Capability Brown 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 (1818), Sir Walter Scott (1828) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (c 1850).^{[citation needed]}

Charlecote was inherited in 1823 by George Hammond Lucy (d. 1845), who in December 1822^[7] had married Mary Elizabeth Williams of Bodelwyddan Castle, 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.^[8] 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.^[9]

In 1890, artist

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.^[11]

Today

The

A set of archives for the Lucy family at Charlecote is held by the Warwickshire County Record Office.[13] 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

Charlecote Park has extensive grounds. A parterre 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.^[14]

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. (
  ISBN 978-0-8063-0742-8
  )
• Historic England. "Charlecote Park (1381799)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
• Mistress of Charlecote: The Memoirs of Mary Elizabeth Lucy 1803-1889. (Victor Gollancz 1983) Alice Fairfax-Lucy.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Charlecote Park.

• Charlecote Park webpage at the National Trust
• Wikidata List of Paintings at Charlecote Park
• Photos of Charlecote Park and surrounding area on geograph
• Photographs of Charlecote in 1892 by George Washington Wilson