Melbourne Hall is a
Georgian style
Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830. It is named after the first four Monarchy of the United Kingdom, British monarchs of the House of Hano ...
country house
An English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a town house. This allowed them to spend time in the country and in the city—hence, for these peopl ...
in
Melbourne, Derbyshire
Melbourne () is a market town and civil parish in South Derbyshire, England.
It was home to Thomas Cook, and has a street named after him. It is south of Derby and from the River Trent. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 Census was ...
, previously owned by
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, (15 March 177924 November 1848), in some sources called Henry William Lamb, was a British Whig politician who served as Home Secretary (1830–1834) and Prime Minister (1834 and 1835–1841). His first pre ...
,
British Prime Minister
The prime minister of the United Kingdom is the head of government of the United Kingdom. The prime minister advises the sovereign on the exercise of much of the royal prerogative, chairs the Cabinet and selects its ministers. As modern p ...
from 1835 to 1841. The house is now the seat of Lord and Lady Ralph Kerr and is open to the public. The house is a Grade II* listed building; more than twenty features in the grounds are Grade I listed.
History
Melbourne, a manor that had belonged to the
bishop of Carlisle
The Bishop of Carlisle is the Ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Carlisle in the Province of York.
The diocese covers the county of Cumbria except for Alston Moor and the former Sedbergh Rural District. The see is in the city of Car ...
in the twelfth century, was partly rebuilt in 1629–31 for
Sir John Coke
Sir John Coke (5 March 1563 – 8 September 1644) was an English civil servant and naval administrator, described by one commentator as "the Samuel Pepys of his day". He was MP for various constituencies in the House of Commons between 1621 and ...
by a Derbyshire mason, Richard Shepherd.
[Colvin] In 1692 it was inherited by
Thomas Coke (1675–1727), a gentleman architect in the golden age of English amateur architecture, who laid out the formal gardens that survive, with some professional assistance from
Henry Wise, between about 1696 and 1706: there are avenues, a
parterre
A ''parterre'' is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of ...
, a yew walk that has become a yew tunnel, basins and fountains, and lead and stone sculpture, much of it supplied by
John Nost
John Nost (Dutch: Jan van Nost) (died 1729) was a Flemish sculptor who worked in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Life
Originally from Mechelen in what is now Belgium, he moved to England in the second half of the 17th centur ...
. Coke travelled in the Netherlands and he turned to Nost, the famous sculptor born in the
Austrian Netherlands
The Austrian Netherlands nl, Oostenrijkse Nederlanden; french: Pays-Bas Autrichiens; german: Österreichische Niederlande; la, Belgium Austriacum. was the territory of the Burgundian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire between 1714 and 1797. The p ...
, with premises in Haymarket, London, who provided lead figures of amorini, vases, baskets of flowers and mythological figures, still identifiable at Melbourne, and most notably the lead "Vase of the Seasons" (1705), that is one of the finest examples of Baroque sculpture in lead in an English garden.
[Gunnis] Nost also provided a number of chimneypieces in the house as well as for Sir Thomas's London house in St. James's Place, one of which came to £50. At the sale of Nost's effects, Sir Thomas purchased his copy of
Serlio
Sebastiano Serlio (6 September 1475 – c. 1554) was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treat ...
's ''Five Books of Architecture, English'd by Robert Peake'', which is still in the Library.
Though he drew up a plan for remodelling the sixteenth and seventeenth-century house and had the west wing rebuilt by
Francis Smith of Warwick
Francis Smith of Warwick (1672–1738) was an English master-builder and architect, much involved in the construction of country houses in the Midland counties of England. Smith of Warwick may refer also to his brothers, or his son.
Architectura ...
, it remained to his son,
G. L. Coke to rebuild the east front, facing the garden, and adjust the south front, in 1743–44, to a design by William Smith, the son of Francis Smith. His design for a gatehouse, built "according to his Honour's Draught" was built by Smith of Warwick but dismantled before the end of the eighteenth century. Unidentified alterations undertaken in 1720–21 were carried out by the builder William Gilks of Burton-on-Trent. The figure of George Lewis Coke remains an ambiguous one. Some believe that he was never at Melbourne after he left for a foreign tour in his late teens.
Redecorations of the interior were carried out throughout the century, in several campaigns. In 1745 Joseph Hall of Derby was paid for the chimneypiece in the Great Dining Room;
in the 1760s,
stucco
Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and a ...
by
Samuel Franceys was executed, and for the
First Viscount Melbourne, in 1772, further interior alterations were carried out by the leading Derbyshire architect, Joseph Pickford.
The second Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, was separated from his wife,
Lady Caroline Lamb
Lady Caroline Lamb (née Ponsonby; 13 November 1785 – 25 January 1828) was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for ''Glenarvon'', a Gothic novel. In 1812 she had an affair with Lord Byron, whom she described as "mad, bad, and ...
, in 1825, when her liaison with
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and Peerage of the United Kingdom, peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and h ...
had become notorious.
The house passed into the hands of the Cowper family when
Emily Lamb
Emily Temple, Viscountess Palmerston (née Lamb, later Clavering-Cowper; 1787–1869), styled The Honourable Emily Lamb from 1787 to 1805 and Countess Cowper from 1805 to 1839, was a leading figure of the Almack's social set, sister to Prime Mi ...
, sister of the childless third and last Viscount Melbourne, married the 5th
Earl Cowper
Earl Cowper ( ) was a title in the Peerage of Great Britain. It was created in 1718 by George I for William Cowper, 1st Baron Cowper, his first Lord Chancellor, with remainder in default of male issue of his own to his younger brother, Spencer ...
. (She later married another Prime Minister,
Lord Palmerston
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, (20 October 1784 – 18 October 1865) was a British statesman who was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century. Palmerston dominated British foreign policy during the period ...
.) It remained in the Cowper family until Lady Amabel Cowper married
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Walter Kerr
Admiral of the Fleet Lord Walter Talbot Kerr, (28 September 1839 – 12 May 1927) was a Royal Navy officer. After taking part in the Crimean War and then the Indian Mutiny, he supervised the handover of Ulcinj to Montenegro to allow Montenegro ...
who made Melbourne the family home in 1906.
The current owner is Ralph Kerr, a former
High Sheriff of Derbyshire
High may refer to:
Science and technology
* Height
* High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area
* High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory
* High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift t ...
. He also owns
Ferniehirst Castle
Ferniehirst Castle (sometimes spelled Ferniehurst) is an L-shaped construction on the east bank of the Jed Water, about a mile and a half south of Jedburgh, in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland, and in the former county of Roxburghshire. It ...
in Scotland and is the
heir presumptive
An heir presumptive is the person entitled to inherit a throne, peerage, or other hereditary honour, but whose position can be displaced by the birth of an heir apparent or a new heir presumptive with a better claim to the position in question.
...
to the
Marquessate of Lothian and the chiefship of
Clan Kerr
Clan Kerr () is a Scottish clan whose origins lie in the Scottish Borders. During the Middle Ages, it was one of the prominent border reiver clans along the present-day Anglo-Scottish border and played an important role in the history of the Bo ...
, currently held by his brother, the politician
Michael Ancram
Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr, 13th Marquess of Lothian, Baron Kerr of Monteviot, (born 7 July 1945), commonly known as Michael Ancram, is a British politician and life peer who served as Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party from 2001 to ...
.
Architecture
House
The house was reroofed in 2012.
Garden
Among fine wrought iron made for the grounds at Melbourne by
Robert Bakewell is the arbour known as the "birdcage". This was restored by the architect
Louis Osman
Louis Osman (30 January 1914 – 11 April 1996) was an English artist, architect, goldsmith, silversmith and medallist. He is notable for the gold coronet he designed and made for the investiture in 1969 of Charles, Prince of Wales. His work as a ...
in 1958, in conjunction with the ironwork specialists George Lister & Sons Ltd. Osman researched Bakewell's plans, removing a ton of paint and inserting a thousand new pieces of wrought iron to replace crude repairs, as well as restoring the original colours.
Listing designations
Melbourne Hall is a
Grade II* listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
. The gardens contain an unusually high number of listed structures and statuary, the majority of which are listed at the highest grade. Those features listed Grade I include: six pairs of
cherub
A cherub (; plural cherubim; he, כְּרוּב ''kərūḇ'', pl. ''kərūḇīm'', likely borrowed from a derived form of akk, 𒅗𒊏𒁍 ''karabu'' "to bless" such as ''karibu'', "one who blesses", a name for the lamassu) is one of the u ...
im, statues of
Perseus
In Greek mythology, Perseus (Help:IPA/English, /ˈpɜːrsiəs, -sjuːs/; Greek language, Greek: Περσεύς, Romanization of Greek, translit. Perseús) is the legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty. He was, alongside Cadmus ...
,
Mercury
Mercury commonly refers to:
* Mercury (planet), the nearest planet to the Sun
* Mercury (element), a metallic chemical element with the symbol Hg
* Mercury (mythology), a Roman god
Mercury or The Mercury may also refer to:
Companies
* Merc ...
, and
Andromeda the Birdcage Arbour, the
Muniment Room and a barn, seats near the Fountain Pond, eight vases, two fountains flanking the Lower Terrace, the steps that link the Top, Upper and Lower Terraces, and the Tea Rooms, a pair of statues depicting slaves, and the walls to the south and east of the house. Features listed at Grade II* include a pair of walls at the top terrace, the water channel which runs through the garden and the bridges that cross it, the stables and stable cottages, a pair of benches, and a
grotto
A grotto is a natural or artificial cave used by humans in both modern times and antiquity, and historically or prehistorically. Naturally occurring grottoes are often small caves near water that are usually flooded or often flooded at high ti ...
. An
ice house, an urn and a pair of metal flower baskets, and three sets of walls are listed at Grade II.
Gallery
The Four Seasons Vase in Melbourne Hall gardens (geograph 3221823).jpg, The Four Seasons Vase
Statue of Andromeda in Melbourne Hall Gardens.jpg, The Andromeda Statue from the workshop of John Nost
John Nost (Dutch: Jan van Nost) (died 1729) was a Flemish sculptor who worked in England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Life
Originally from Mechelen in what is now Belgium, he moved to England in the second half of the 17th centur ...
Two Pairs of Cherubs in Melbourne Hall Gardens.jpg, Two brace of cherubs
The Birdcage - geograph.org.uk - 528330.jpg, The Birdcage by Robert Bakewell
Melbourne Hall vase.jpg, Detail from a vase
Notes
References
Sources
* Howard Colvin, ''A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840,'' 3rd ed. 1995: Thomas Coke, William Gilks
* David Green, ''Gardener to Queen Anne'', 1956. (Henry Wise)
*
Rupert Gunnis
Rupert Forbes Gunnis (11 March 1899 – 31 July 1965) was an English collector and historian of British sculpture. He is best known for his ''Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851'', which "revolutionized the study of British sculpture, pr ...
, ''
Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851
The ''Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851'' is a biographical dictionary of sculptors active in Britain in the period between the Restoration of Charles II and the Great Exhibition of 1851. It has appeared in three editions, published in 1 ...
'', rev, ed.
*
Christopher Hussey, ''English Gardens and Landscapes 1700–1750''.
External links
Melbourne Hall and Gardensofficial site
{{Derbyshire Places of interest
Country houses in Derbyshire
Grade I listed buildings in Derbyshire
Historic house museums in Derbyshire
Gardens in Derbyshire
Prime ministerial homes in the United Kingdom
Grade II* listed houses
Melbourne, Derbyshire
Grade I listed parks and gardens in Derbyshire