HISTORIC SPLENDOUR

Renovated and decorated during the 19th century in the neo-Elizabethan style, Charlecote Park is the Lucy family’s loving tribute to its ancestors

Take a tour of a neo-Elizabethan styled country estate

When visiting the splendid Charlecote Park, the honey- coloured Warwickshire mansion that has been the Lucy family home for nearly 500 years, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne proclaimed it ‘a most delightful place’. The author of

The Scarlet Le er was a guest in the mid 19th century and described the interiors as ‘perfection’. He wrote that such a house ‘could have been brought about only by the slow ingenuity and labour of many successive generations’.

Charlecote’s Victorian owners, George and Mary Elizabeth Lucy, would no doubt have been delighted with this praise. It was, a er all, they who carried out the extensions and renovations that transformed George’s family seat on the banks of the River Avon, a few miles from Stratford, from a cold and creaking Elizabethan country house – once visited by Queen Elizabeth I herself – into a lavish and comfortable Victorian family home. But they also saw Charlecote as the shared endeavour of a lineage, and in creating the Charlecote that exists

today – and where, in the south wing, the family still live – they paid homage to its Tudor origins, introducing many faux Elizabethan features and decorative !ourishes in the fashionable 16th- century style.

‘George felt that the golden age of the house had been at the time of the "rst Sir Thomas Lucy, who built the Tudor brick mansion between 1551 and 1558, and he wanted to recreate that atmosphere for his family,’ explains Neil Chandler, lead day guide at Charlecote. George’s wife, Mary Elizabeth, had similarly ambitious

plans, ! nding the house with its small, ra"ling window panes and worn stone #oors, cramped, cold and lacking in comfort.

Beginning in the 1830s, the couple embarked on an extensive programme of improvements that saw them add, amongst other things, a new dining room and a library. The Great Hall, the ! rst room entered by visitors, would, in the 16th and 17th centuries, have been the main reception room and it was here that Queen Elizabeth I was received when she visited the house in 1572. The Hall today, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling and gallery of stags’ heads and family portraits, is certainly an impressive sight, but, says Neil, much of the wow factor was introduced by George and Mary Elizabeth. ‘ The ceiling’s e$ect is of carved wood, but in fact it’s all painted plaster,’ Neil explains. ‘ Likewise, the walls may look like stone, but they are actually brick covered in plaster.’

The enormous Italian pietra dura (hard stone) table came from the

famous Fonthill Abbey sale of 1823, when, with the house on the verge of collapse, owner William Beckford sold its entire contents. ‘ The table was made for the Borghese Palace in Rome, and sat there for many years until the Napoleonic Wars. It then disappeared but reappeared in Paris, which is where Beckford acquired it,’ says Neil.

The Fonthill sale provided an enormous haul of furniture and objects for Charlecote, with George buying over 60 items from the aesthete and compulsive collector Beckford. The large pietra dura cabinet inlaid with motifs of !owers and fruit in the Drawing Room also came from the sale, but the table is the most important piece. George is said to have outbid King George IV for it, paying a staggering 1,890 guineas (over £ 80,000 in today’s money) – more than half of the total he spent at the sale.

For the Dining Room, artist Thomas Willement designed a !ock wallpaper of crimson, blue and gold, along with a bold Axminster carpet of heraldic motifs. The Dining Room’s "ne oak panelling, also designed by Willement, was – as in other rooms – carved by local cra #sman JM Wilcox of Warwick, who also made the bookcases for the Library. The same cra #sman’s work is displayed in the most important piece of furniture in the Dining Room: the Charlecote Bu $et, a colossal carved oak sideboard made by Wilcox for Queen Victoria. It was bought by Mary Elizabeth a #er the queen decided she didn’t want it.

Following George Lucy’s death in 1845, and despite increasing "nancial di %culties, Mary pressed on valiantly with Charlecote’s renovations. The "nal touches were added in the 1850s when she created the Billiard Room and the Ladies’ Drawing Room. By this time the estate was severely impoverished, however the dream of "nishing the project started by George’s ancestors, and creating a spectacular family home that celebrated its Tudor origins, had been triumphantly achieved.

The Victorian Kitchen is part of the service wing added by George and Mary Elizabeth Lucy in the 1830s. It remains much as it was in their day. The Elizabethan flagstones were originally in the Great Hall, whose floor was dug up and relaid in the Kitchen, after the Hall was upgraded to Italian marble.

ABOVE The Victorian Lucys invested in the latest kitchen appliances, such as this range. BELOW Bells in the servants’ corridor. Each rings at a different pitch and long-serving staff could tell by ear which room they were being summoned to.

ABOVE The original silk wallpaper in the Drawing Room was replaced in the 1980s with an exact replica. This is one of Mary’s three Erard harps. She purchased the ebony settee and tête-à-tête seat from a London dealer. BELOW The pietra dura cabinet was made in Florence and bought by George in a sale of the contents of Fonthill Abbey in 1823.

ABOVE FROM LEFT The ebony bed, in the Ebony Bedroom, was made c1815 for Fonthill Abbey; the Ebony Bedroom features a number of chinoiserie elements including two 18thcentury mirrors and an English cabinet wardrobe, made c1750.BELOW Family photos on display at the foot of the bed.