ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST, 1850, by David Brandon (GR). In the E.E. style (even the W tower, in spite of its Perp outline). Stone, not flint. Interior with naturalistic leaf capitals. Added in 1930 a S chapel for the Hall-Cain family. Perp with rich lierne-vault, by F. E. Howard.
Lemsford. It lies in the valley of the Lea between the Great North Road and the park of Brocket Hall, the fine 18th-century house which witnessed the deaths of two Prime Ministers, Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston.
The famous landscape gardener Capability Brown laid out the grounds and planted beeches, cedars, and cypresses to vie with the glory of the ancient oaks. He formed a lake by widening the River Lea, and across this the architect James Paine built a stone bridge to enhance the beauty of the waterfall.
The hall is richly adorned in the Adam style and has a grand pillared staircase, and ceilings painted by Francis Wheatley and John Mortimer. Among its art treasures is a Reynolds portrait of George IV, given by him to that brilliant woman the first Lady Melbourne. Often the house has echoed with the footsteps of illustrious people, among them Lord Melbourne, the first Prime Minister of the young Queen Victoria, and Lord Palmerston, who married Lord Melbourne’s sister, and held office in every government except two between 1807 and 1865. He died here when he was 81, an unfinished despatch by his side, for he would not give up. One of the most pathetic stories told of him is that not long before he died he was seen trying to leap over the railings in front of his London house to show that he was well. Lady Palmerston, who for a quarter of a century had been his unfailing helpmate, lived on here for another four years and was then laid beside him in Westminster Abbey. Lord Palmerston had no children, the property descending to William Cowper, one of the children of Lady Palmerston’s first marriage; and it was the Cowpers who gave the village its church.
The church has a handsome tower with two dragon gargoyles, and a lovely chapel with coloured arms on its vaulted roof. Over the altar are five oak panels portraying Adam and Eve, Abraham’s Sacrifice, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Resurrection. Under an arch leading to the chapel from the chancel is an altar tomb in 15th-century style, with a sculptured figure of Lady Florence Hall-Cain, who died in 1927, angels supporting her head and other mourning figures standing under canopies below.
In the churchyard a granite cross marks the last resting-place of Lord Mount Stephen, a Canadian financier who gave a million pounds to charity. George Stephen, as everyone knew him before he became a peer, was born in 1829, the son of a humble Scottish carpenter. He left school to be apprenticed to an Aberdeen draper, and seven years later, after working in Glasgow and London, went to Canada at the invitation of a draper cousin in Montreal. There he prospered, first at his own trade and later as a financier, and in 1878 (like another of his cousins, Lord Strathcona) he became one of a group of six men who, in the face of tremendous difficulties, built the Canadian Pacific Railway and made huge fortunes. He spent his last few years at Brocket Hall and died here in 1921.
But the romantic story of Brocket is the strange, pathetic tale of Lady Caroline Lamb, who here spent her last tragic years. Lady Caroline Lamb survives as a legendary figure of Hertfordshire. Extremely beautiful, petite, and dainty as Ariel, gifted with talents which made her notable as poet and novelist, a clever talker, she was a brilliant figure of gilded Mayfair and the tragic heroine of a career more strange than any which she pictured in her romances. She was in girlhood a kind of Cinderella, for, although she was a daughter of the Earl and Countess of Bessborough, the illness of her mother, with whom for several years she lived in Italy, led to her being brought up by servants; and when she joined her cousins at Devonshire House in London the children were so neglected that they would take their silver plates into the kitchen and beg for titbits.
Tiny, delicate, and romantic, Caroline could never speak without lisping, yet she could tame and ride an unbroken horse, and, despaired of by unsympathetic governesses, she taught herself ancient and modern languages. Tomboy, student, half-fairy, she declared to William Lamb (later, as Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister) that she could not marry him as he desired, but she would dress as a boy and serve him as clerk in the grim chambers where he awaited the coming of his first barrister’s brief.
But she did marry him, and as Lady Caroline Lamb she was one of the most famous and most astonishing figures of the age. She became the wayward heroine of volcanic friendships with men who were destined to win immortality in our literature. The most celebrated and unfortunate of these friendships was that with Byron, who was fascinated by her beauty and intellect. She was in love with his poetry and deemed him an Apollo. As both loved praise with equally ardent appetite, they soon quarrelled, and Caroline dramatised her grief and embellished it with the pageantry and ceremonial of high tragedy.
Her country home as Lady Melbourne was at Brocket Hall, and it was here that she collected a company of Young Village Beauties and robed them all in white. She caused a great fire to be kindled in the grounds to resemble a funeral pyre, and on this fire, as her chorus of white-clad maidens danced a tragic measure, she cast a miniature of the poet and a number of his letters, reciting sad Elegies as they burned. Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, she returned to the house to study afresh the originals. They were only copies of the poet’s correspondence that she had consigned to the flames.
But there came one day to her at Brocket Hall a real tragedy. As she drove out of the park her progress was arrested by a funeral procession passing the entrance. She enquired the name of the dead, and was answered, “Lord Byron.” The poet’s body, brought from Greece, had lain in London while his friends sought burial for it in Westminster Abbey, and the dean had sternly refused. Thus the last remains of the author of Don Juan were on their way to the colliery village of Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire, hard by Newstead Abbey, the scene of his turbulent youth.
So passed the man with whom the little Fairy Queen, as she was called, had so bitterly quarrelled, and she fell swooning to the ground with her reason unhinged. She recovered, and reproached with extravagance, wrote a book, about stables and economy, to prove, as she said, that she had been “a good housewife and saved William much.” To which William (Lord Melbourne) gently answered that it was useless to save in one place and squander the saving in another.
The famous landscape gardener Capability Brown laid out the grounds and planted beeches, cedars, and cypresses to vie with the glory of the ancient oaks. He formed a lake by widening the River Lea, and across this the architect James Paine built a stone bridge to enhance the beauty of the waterfall.
The hall is richly adorned in the Adam style and has a grand pillared staircase, and ceilings painted by Francis Wheatley and John Mortimer. Among its art treasures is a Reynolds portrait of George IV, given by him to that brilliant woman the first Lady Melbourne. Often the house has echoed with the footsteps of illustrious people, among them Lord Melbourne, the first Prime Minister of the young Queen Victoria, and Lord Palmerston, who married Lord Melbourne’s sister, and held office in every government except two between 1807 and 1865. He died here when he was 81, an unfinished despatch by his side, for he would not give up. One of the most pathetic stories told of him is that not long before he died he was seen trying to leap over the railings in front of his London house to show that he was well. Lady Palmerston, who for a quarter of a century had been his unfailing helpmate, lived on here for another four years and was then laid beside him in Westminster Abbey. Lord Palmerston had no children, the property descending to William Cowper, one of the children of Lady Palmerston’s first marriage; and it was the Cowpers who gave the village its church.
The church has a handsome tower with two dragon gargoyles, and a lovely chapel with coloured arms on its vaulted roof. Over the altar are five oak panels portraying Adam and Eve, Abraham’s Sacrifice, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Resurrection. Under an arch leading to the chapel from the chancel is an altar tomb in 15th-century style, with a sculptured figure of Lady Florence Hall-Cain, who died in 1927, angels supporting her head and other mourning figures standing under canopies below.
In the churchyard a granite cross marks the last resting-place of Lord Mount Stephen, a Canadian financier who gave a million pounds to charity. George Stephen, as everyone knew him before he became a peer, was born in 1829, the son of a humble Scottish carpenter. He left school to be apprenticed to an Aberdeen draper, and seven years later, after working in Glasgow and London, went to Canada at the invitation of a draper cousin in Montreal. There he prospered, first at his own trade and later as a financier, and in 1878 (like another of his cousins, Lord Strathcona) he became one of a group of six men who, in the face of tremendous difficulties, built the Canadian Pacific Railway and made huge fortunes. He spent his last few years at Brocket Hall and died here in 1921.
But the romantic story of Brocket is the strange, pathetic tale of Lady Caroline Lamb, who here spent her last tragic years. Lady Caroline Lamb survives as a legendary figure of Hertfordshire. Extremely beautiful, petite, and dainty as Ariel, gifted with talents which made her notable as poet and novelist, a clever talker, she was a brilliant figure of gilded Mayfair and the tragic heroine of a career more strange than any which she pictured in her romances. She was in girlhood a kind of Cinderella, for, although she was a daughter of the Earl and Countess of Bessborough, the illness of her mother, with whom for several years she lived in Italy, led to her being brought up by servants; and when she joined her cousins at Devonshire House in London the children were so neglected that they would take their silver plates into the kitchen and beg for titbits.
Tiny, delicate, and romantic, Caroline could never speak without lisping, yet she could tame and ride an unbroken horse, and, despaired of by unsympathetic governesses, she taught herself ancient and modern languages. Tomboy, student, half-fairy, she declared to William Lamb (later, as Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister) that she could not marry him as he desired, but she would dress as a boy and serve him as clerk in the grim chambers where he awaited the coming of his first barrister’s brief.
But she did marry him, and as Lady Caroline Lamb she was one of the most famous and most astonishing figures of the age. She became the wayward heroine of volcanic friendships with men who were destined to win immortality in our literature. The most celebrated and unfortunate of these friendships was that with Byron, who was fascinated by her beauty and intellect. She was in love with his poetry and deemed him an Apollo. As both loved praise with equally ardent appetite, they soon quarrelled, and Caroline dramatised her grief and embellished it with the pageantry and ceremonial of high tragedy.
Her country home as Lady Melbourne was at Brocket Hall, and it was here that she collected a company of Young Village Beauties and robed them all in white. She caused a great fire to be kindled in the grounds to resemble a funeral pyre, and on this fire, as her chorus of white-clad maidens danced a tragic measure, she cast a miniature of the poet and a number of his letters, reciting sad Elegies as they burned. Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, she returned to the house to study afresh the originals. They were only copies of the poet’s correspondence that she had consigned to the flames.
But there came one day to her at Brocket Hall a real tragedy. As she drove out of the park her progress was arrested by a funeral procession passing the entrance. She enquired the name of the dead, and was answered, “Lord Byron.” The poet’s body, brought from Greece, had lain in London while his friends sought burial for it in Westminster Abbey, and the dean had sternly refused. Thus the last remains of the author of Don Juan were on their way to the colliery village of Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire, hard by Newstead Abbey, the scene of his turbulent youth.
So passed the man with whom the little Fairy Queen, as she was called, had so bitterly quarrelled, and she fell swooning to the ground with her reason unhinged. She recovered, and reproached with extravagance, wrote a book, about stables and economy, to prove, as she said, that she had been “a good housewife and saved William much.” To which William (Lord Melbourne) gently answered that it was useless to save in one place and squander the saving in another.
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