We start in Elizabethan England when adventuring your money across the oceans pleased and delighted the Queen. Bess of Hardwick built both status and fortune for her heirs, manifest in her prodigy house, Hardwick Hall, and its extraordinary collections. Her dynasty is manifest in Chatsworth and the Cavendish family, Dukes of Devonshire. Estates rich in coal and lead, and the wool of their grazing sheep. Talman’s status house bears elegant witness to the Age of Enlightenment and cutting-edge 19th-century technology. Double death duties nearly killed the estate in the mid-20th century but the talented Debo Devonshire put Chatsworth back on the map in every sense.
The East and West India Companies were sources of fabulous fortunes, the latter with acts of unspeakable excess. ‘White gold’ (sugar) was the source of the Lascelles Barbados-based wealth that underwrote the building of Harewood House. The Sassoon fortune was made trading in Bombay, Baghdad money-lenders, they accepted goods rather than repayment. Prime Minister Robert Walpole built Houghton Hall on winnings from the South Sea Bubble. His descendant’s marriage to the well-educated Sybil Sassoon saved and revived its structure and political influence before, during and after the First World War.
A taste for the Gothic, high and revival, provides rich pickings from seams of coal in Wales and guano from South America, the latter revolutionising British agriculture. We will compare and contrast inherited fortune, industrial vision and trading genius. Firstly, the Bute family with properties across Great Britain, culminating in the fairy tale conversion of Cardiff Castle by William Burges for the 3rd Marquess. Secondly, William Gibb’s Victorian Gothic revival Tyntesfield near Bristol. Across Europe the name Rothschild is associated with lavish building, Ferdinand and his sister Alice masterminded the creation of Waddesdon Manor, its landscape and fabulous collections. Finally an overview of today’s mega-rich status homes - dreams, fantasies or follies? There will be a field trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum.
