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104 COUNTRY LIFE--APRIL 2, 1987

THE ESTATE MARKET

GUNPOWDER, GARDENS AND GHOST

ON E of the most historic manor houses in England, Ashby St Ledgers in Northamptonshire, has just been

placed on the market through the London office of Hampton and Sons. Not only does it have links with the Gunpowder Plot, but it was extensively altered and extended earlier this century by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who laid out the magnificent gardens (and once claimed that the house had a ghost).

Ash by St Ledgers itself is a medieval estate village whose parish Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Leodegarius is an unusual dedication for an Anglican church. It may be due to the adjacent manor house being owned by the Catesbys, a family of Catholic recusants.

Sir William Catesby, who died in 1470, is commemorated in the floor of the chancel of the church by a fragmentary brass . His son, also William, became a favourite of Richard Ill, the hunchbacked usurper of the throne of England, who made him Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons in 1484.

On August 22, 1485, William Catesby was captured at the Battle of Bosworth, and three days later he was beheaded at Leicester. His body was buried at Ashby, where there is also

By MICHAEL HANSON

(Left) 1-ASHBY ST LEDGERS, NEAR DAVENTRY, NOR ­THAMPTONSHIRE. The original stone hall added by Lutyens in 1909-10, seen here in a 1951 COUNTRY LIFE

photograph, had a floor inserted in about 1968, and service rooms created at the lower level

(Right) 2-THE UPPER LEVEL OF THE HALL TODAY. "The open timber roof now seems overwhelmingly heavy" and an upper dining

room is superfluous

a brass to him and his wife in the chancel. In his will , made on the day he died, he instructed his wife to restore to its rightful owners all the land he had wrongfully purchased, and divided the rest of his property between their children. His estate was attainted by virtue of his treason , but Henry VII reversed the attainder in favour of his son George, and over the next century the family prospered.

William's uncle, Sir John Catesby, owned the manors of Lapworth, Warwickshire, and Whiston, Northamptonshire. When he died in 1486, he is said to have been buried in the "abbey of St James at Northampton" (presum­ably the Roman Catholic church of St John the Baptist, whose 15th-century figure of the saint came from the church at Ashby St Ledgers) .

By the second half of the 16th century, the manor of Lapworth was owned by Sir William Catesby, a descendant of the attainted William. This Sir William was a Roman Catholic recusant, harassed for refusing to attend his parish church, who in 1585 compounded to pay one-fifth of his income to meet his fines.

His son, Robert, who became implicated in the gunpowder conspiracy, was also fined for recusancy and even imprisoned. To meet the

fines imposed on him in 1601 for supporting the uprising of Robert, Earl of Essex, once Elizabeth l's favourite, he was forced to sell the Chastleton estate in Oxfordshire, which he had inherited from his grandmother in 1593.

Robert Catesby (whose wife had died at Chastleton) moved to Ashby St Ledgers to live with his widowed mother, whose husband had died in 1598. The plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 while the king, James I, was in the House of Lords is said to have been hatched in a room over the gatehouse at Ashby by Catesby, John Wright and Thomas Winter. Guy Fawkes was later hired to carry out the atrocity. When the plot fai led, Catesby and other conspirators fled to Ashby and then on to Holbeche House in Staffordshire. Here, surrounded by Royalist forces, they ignored calls to surrender, and Catesby, Wright and Thomas Percy were shot in the subsequent fighting . Winter was executed later.

Once again the Catesby estates were attainted, though Ashby St Ledgers was not forfeited, because it had been settled on Robert's mother. But in 1611 it was granted to one of James l's followers, Sir William lrwing, who sold it the following year to a London draper,

3-THE DINING ROOM CREATED BY LUTYENS IN 1904. It is now the kitchen, with a flat ceiling. The chimneypiece on the right has been removed and is now a door to a corridor; and the round-headed arch has been blocked in. (Right) 4---A VIEW FROM THE HOUSE,

LOOKING OUT TOWARDS THE CHURCH. In a room in the black and white half-timbered gatehouse, the Gunpowder Plot was hatched

COUNTRY LIFE-APRIL 2, 1987 105

5---THE FORECOURT. Ahead is the Jacobean house of the lansons, linked by the Lutyens range of 1904-38 on the left to the Tudor house of the Catesbys (not seen)

Bryan Ianson, who died in 1634. His son, John Ianson, built the main house in 1652.

In 1703 Ashby was sold to another draper, Joseph Ashley, whose family is commemorated by a series of monuments in the church. In 1903, Ashby St Ledgers was sold to Ivor Guest, who became the 1st Viscount Wimborne in 1918. At various times from 1904 until his death in 1939, Lord Wimborne used Sir Edwin Lutyens to enlarge and alter the house. It was Lutyens' longest association with a client­longer even than his work on New Delhi­and it ended with him designing Lord Wimborne's memorial stone cross and sarcophagus in the churchyard.

The manor house was described in CouNTRY LIFE in 1951, and it has since been featured in numerous books on Lutyens. But no one seems to be aware of the extensive alterations that the 2nd Lord Wimborne made in 1967-68, before he sold the estate in 1976. These involved drastic changes to Lutyens' work, and even demolition, but there was no reference to this in the Lutyens exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1981-82.

It is not easy to understand a description of the house until one visits it, because it rambles around three sides of a courtyard and includes buildings of so many periods. To make matters worse, the interior alterations have changed the function of some rooms, so that references to old plans or photographs are confusing.

The most fundamental

The barrel-vaulted dining room that Lutyens created in 1904 was turned into a kitchen by the 1st Lord Wimborne, and given a flat ceiling. The elegant new dining room added by Lutyens in 1924 is now known as the office, but the arch connecting it to the old dining room has been blocked up-though its enormous glass doors remain. The former common room to the left of the main entrance is now a dining room, making the upper dining room superfluous.

The staff and guest rooms that Lutyens added in 1923 have all been swept away, along with the north service range of 1904. As a result, the first-floor gallery no longer connects with the half-timbered bridge that Lutyens added in 1904 to link the Catesby house with the main Jacobean house of the Iansons.

In 1976, the 2nd Lord Wimborne sold the whole 2,850-acre estate to the Airways Pension S<;heme for about £2 million. In 1977, the manor was resold with 33 acres to Mr and Mrs Ronald Billington. They have since made various improvements, including installing efficient oil-fired central heating and cleaning

the Jacobean elm panelling, but have put in ghastly modern bathrooms. The farmland was resold in 1984 to Barkers , the local farmers and butchers .

In 1951 the house was approached from the west end of the forecourt. Today it is reached more logically: from the south entrance beside the church. This requires visitors to pass the entrance lodge (now occupied by the head gardener) and the gatehouse, which is not used; the upstairs room in which the Gunpowder Plot was hatched is now in poor repair. Nor is the original Tudor house of the Catesbys occupied. Its ground-floor rooms are remarkably plain, but it has a fine staircase and some beautiful decorative plasterwork in the upper rooms, all in need of restoration.

That leaves the original Jacobean house, to which Lutyens added a matching wing and his connecting range in 1904. A half-timbered Tudor house that Lord Wimborne brought from Ipswich and had re-erected on the site in 1908 now contains a billiard-room with bedrooms above.

For all its piecemeal development, Ashby St Ledgers is not an unduly large house by today's standards. Situated just two miles from Junction 16 of the M1, London can be reached in H hours. The 33 acres of gardens and grounds are among the finest of their kind, having been designed by Lutyens. He created a lawn bounded by a balustrated wall on the east front, with steps descending to a parterre with yew hedges and sunken canal leading to a large fishpond. He also designed a rustic bridge over a stream.

change, and hardly one that any admirer ofLutyens can consider to be an improvement, is the inser­tion of a floor in the two-storey stone hall of 1909-10. Not only has this produced an upper dining room whose open timber roof now seems overwhelmingly heavy, but the lower half of the hall has been turned into a set of mundane service rooms. The best of these is the flower room, lit by part of the mullioned east window, which has been extended down­wards by a row of four lights .

6---THE LUTYENS BRIDGE. Lutyens designed the formal gardens and created a landscape using water features such as an artificial

stream and pond, in the best traditions of the picturesque

Hamptons are seeking offers of £2 million for the house and 33 acres. The contents, which are available at a valuation, would cost about another £1 million. And the ghost? In his 1951 CoUNTRY LIFE articles, Christopher Hussey said Lutyens "invented ( I think) a fantastic ghost-story" in a letter to his wife--but the recent volume of Lutyens letters makes no mention of it.