Address: Melbury Sampford is a small parish 8 m. S.S.W. of Sherborne. Melbury House and the church are both monuments of importance.
Melbury House in Melbury Sampford near Evershot, Dorset, has been the seat of the Strangways family of Dorset since the estate was sold in 1500 by William Bruning to Henry Strangways. Parish Church of St. Mary stands 50 yards E. of the house. The present house was rebuilt after 1546 by his son, Sir Giles Strangways (died 1562), using ham stone from a quarry nine miles away. Though Sir Giles lived extravagantly and encumbered his considerable estate with debts at his premature death, at Melbury he built a conservative house, "a courtyard with no frills", as Mark Girouard described it, "apart from the one gesture of its tower". This remarkable feature, a hexagonal tower, rises near the intersection of three ranges of buildings, filled above the level of adjoining roofbeams with banks of tall arched windows of many leaded panes that offer views in every direction over the rolling landscape of the park and the countryside beyond. Its roof has mock battlements.
It was altered and extended in 1692 by Thomas Strangways, under the direction of Watson, a local mason-builder who is probably to be identified with John Watson of Glashampton, Gloucestershire. It was further modernized in the 19th century.
The house has remained in the same family, passed from the Strangways heiress to Stephen Fox-Strangways, 1st Earl of Ilchester, who took the additional name of Strangways in right of his wife's mother's mother. When Horace Walpole visited Melbury, he admired the paintings and tapestries in "apartments most richly and abundantly furnished".
Stephen Fox was the lover of Lord Hervey (http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/4776148.html) for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736. There exist many passionate letters between the two ("The Gay Love Letters of John, Lord Hervey to Stephen Fox"; excerpts from My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries (1998), edited by Rictor Norton). Hervey initially favoured Stephen's brother, Henry Fox, but when charmingly rebuffed paid infatuated court to Stephen. His relationship with Lord Hervey ended only when a marriage was arranged with thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Horner, daughter of Thomas Strangways Horner and Susanna Strangways, in 1735.
Melbury House has evolved over the centuries from a simple medieval country manor house of the former village of Melbury Sampford, to the imposing building that stands here today (of which just a small part is visible). Its unique hexagonal tower, and the multi-gabled mansion that lies behind this view of the entrance front, can only be glimpsed further along the public footpath that runs through the park. The house has as its backdrop a magnificent park landscaped by Capability Brown that contains many superb tree specimens, deer, and a lake. Owned by the Strangeways family and their descendants, one of whom was created Lord Ilchester in 1741, the park and its estate is known collectively today as the Ilchester Estates, and continues under the ownership of a Strangeways family descendant.
Not long after marrying, while recovering his health in Bath in 1726, Lord Hervey began courting Stephen Fox, a young country gentleman, and then visited his estate in Somerset. Hervey was thirty-one, Stephen twenty-three. The men spent so much time together that Lady Hervey protested that her estate at Ickworth had become "my hermitage." For fifteen months during 1728–9 Hervey and Stephen travelled Europe together on their Grand Tour. Exactly how close the two men became on that trip may be indicated by the fact that the first twenty-six pages of Hervey's volume of letters covering that period were torn out and destroyed by his grandson the first Marquess of Bristol. On their return from the Continent, Hervey could not stand the separation: "I must see you soon; I can't live without You" (November 15, 1729). In August 1730 Hervey proposed that they live together: "why should we see one another by Visits, but never have a common home?" He arranged for Lord Bateman to lend his house in Windsor to Stephen so that they could see one another while Hervey was engaged in his courtly duties at Windsor Castle; the Earl of Sunderland had arranged for his daughter to marry Bateman, but he was forced to separate from her when his homosexual tastes became too public. In November Hervey signed over the lease of his house on Great Burlington Street to Stephen, so they did achieve a common home even though technically Hervey moved into an apartment in St James's Palace. The letters had reached their peak of intensity in late September 1730, when Hervey tells Stephen that it is impossible "had I time to write volumes, how warmly, how tenderly, how gratefully, how contentedly and unalterably I am Yours" (September 24), and that "Every Body has some Madness in their Composition, & I freely acknowledge you are mine" (September 25). Hervey and Stephen spent the next two months together. The letters now conclude with frank avowals of love: "Adieu, que je vous aime, que je vous adore: & si vous m'aimé de même venez me le dire" (September 25). The Earl of Ilchester, who edited the letters in 1950, cut out the frequent avowals of devotion. Hervey regularly closes with Mon cher, et trés cher, carissime; caro et carissimo, et sempre caro; mea cara et sola voluptas; le plus aimable et le plus aimé qu'il y est au monde. In August 1731, at a large dinner party in the presence of the Prince of Wales, the Lord Chancellor drank to Stephen's health, and Hervey told Stephen that "without the least affectation, I assure you, I colour'd and felt just as I imagine your favorite & fondest Mistress would have done upon the same Occasion." But Hervey was sophisticated and urbane, and Stephen felt himself to be provincial; in November 1733 he told Hervey he was unfit to keep him company and planned to live alone in the country, at which Hervey protested "I should like you rusty better than any other body polish'd," but their correspondence more or less ceased by the end of that year. Hervey was appointed Vice-Chamberlain, i.e. master of court ceremonies, in 1730, and acted as a political propagandist under Walpole's ministry. He was frequently attacked by his enemies as a homosexual, e.g. an anonymous lampoon notes of his attendance at Parliament that he is "Lady of the Lords," and it was rumoured that he was the "pathick" of Frederick Prince of Wales, son of George II. They were undoubtedly close to one another (in later life they shared a mistress), and Stephen was jealous. Hervey arranged for Stephen's marriage to a child-heiress in 1736, and turned his attentions to Francesco Algarotti, the young Italian scholar who had taken London by storm that year. Another series of billets doux ensued between the two men, and Algarotti moved into Hervey's apartment at St James's in 1739. (Source: http://rictornorton.co.uk/hervey1.htm, Lord Hervey and His Friends 1726–38, ed. the Earl of ilchester (London: John Murray, 1950) and Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century courtier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).)
St Mary's Chapel, the former parish church of the lost village of Melbury Sampford lies close by within the grounds and to the southeast of Melbury House. The house Open Day also provided a rare chance to visit the church which is not normally accessible to the public. The building dates from the 15th century whose pinnacled tower decorated with heraldic beasts, guards the tombs beneath of the Brounings and Strangeways families.
In 1758, Lord Ilchester assumed the additional surname of Strangways. He died in September 1776 (buried in Melbury Sampford, the Parish Church of St. Mary, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/dorset/vol1/pp161-167), aged 72, and was succeeded by his son Henry Thomas Fox-Strangways.
The pioneer of photography Henry Fox Talbot was born in the house. Thomas Hardy made use of Melbury House, as "King's Hintock Court", for passing mentions in "The Duke's Reappearance" in A Changed Man and Other Tales and in A Group of Noble Dames, 1891.
The house and its stable yard to the north are Grade I listed buildings. Melbury’s present owner, is Robin Fox-Strangways, 10th earl of Ilchester. He lives in rural Warwickshire and not, as the first seven of his predecessors had, at the Grade-I house which sits at the heart of the 15,000-acre Ilchester Estate.
( Strangways's genealogy )https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=zdRJwtySDT14.k4ln0xmbkVNk&usp=sharing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Blind Spot (The Stonebridge Mysteries 3) by Maggie Kavanagh
Meet the author: Maggie Kavanagh writes gay romances that explore flawed, human characters finding love. She went to graduate school for English literature and reads and writes voraciously, whenever she can steal a moment alone. You can find her in the wee morning hours typing away with coffee at hand and cat in lap, happily embodying the romance writer cliché.
