I am fascinated by the story of Frances Evelyn Greville, or the Countess of Warwick as she became. Lady Warwick was a society hostess, and one of the richest women in England having inherited her father's estates at the age of four in 1865. Her principal house was at Little Easton in Essex, though her marriage to Lord Brooke brought with it Warwick Castle among other places when her husband assumed his father's title.
Easton Lodge is now mostly demolished. Only a single wing - the West Wing - survives today as a private home. The site is not too far from us, and so we did not pass up the opportunity to visit on the last open day of 2016 (there are nine open days in total - for which, see the Easton Lodge gardens website).
We were well looked after on our visit by a team of enthusiastic volunteers, all clearly proud of the Easton Lodge story and what has been achieved there in the 11 years or so since the Easton Lodge Gardens Preservation Trust was set up. An archive room containing multiple folders of press cuttings and written information helps to provide background on the fascinating story of the house, gardens and social world of Lady Warwick.
The story is an intriguing one. By the 1880s and 1890s Lady Warwick had developed a reputation as the 'it' girl of her age. Wealthy and well-connected, her rumoured extra-marital romantic liaisons included with (among many others) the Prince of Wales. An extravagant ball at Warwick Castle in 1895 drew the censure of a left-wing newspaper and led Lady Warwick to visit the editor, Robert Blatchford, to demand an apology. She left Blatchford's office equipped with a new perspective on the world, and over the coming decade became a committed socialist and supporter of the Labour Party.
While continuing her penchant for hunting, parties and glamorous attire, Lady Warwick campaigned relentlessly for the socialist cause. She even stood as a Labour candidate (against Anthony Eden). At Easton Lodge she was surrounded by left-leaning figures: HG Wells (who lived at Easton Glebe, on the Easton Lodge estate), Conrad Noel (whom she appointed to the living at Thaxted), and Noel Noel-Buxton (a minister in the 1920s Labour government).
Having an affair with Bertie was one thing, but turning so dramatically to the socialist cause might have been considered a far graver turn of events by many of her class. Lady Warwick even at one stage offered the house to the Labour Party (they declined to accept the gift of such an aristocratic figure) and to the Trades Union movement. Eventually, the house was taken over during the war by the military, and an airfield laid out opposite it. After the war Lady Warwick's son took the decision to demolish most of it.
The place was left in ruins for several decades, until Brian and Diana Creasey bought it in the 1970s and set about the task of restoring the gardens, originally laid out by Harold Peto in the 1920s (part of a redesign that followed an house fire in 1918, apparently started by Lady Warwick's pet monkey). Today, the Italianate gardens form the centre of the experience, but visitors can also explore Peto's other innovations (such as the pavilion at what would have been the side of the house). A recreation of Lady Warwick's yew sun dial also sits in the garden: this was originally at Stone Hall, a cottage ornee some distance from the house.
I enjoyed hearing the story of Daisy Warwick, and of the house at Easton. A bank of trees now marks where the house would have been, the footprint of its chapel and library only just visible in the undergrowth. It takes a leap of imagination to wander though those trees and listen to the conversations that might have taken place there - in a house where a discreet bell was rung at 6am every morning so that house guests could quietly return to their designated beds from whichever room they had actually spent the night....
