ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

Prince Rupert (1619-1682),1st Duke of Cumberland and Count Palatine of the Rhine by Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656) in  1642. Of all the owners of Brandenburgh House in its two hundred year history, Prince Rupert of the Rhine is the most illustrious. He is famous for his military heroism on the Royalist side in the Civil War, but as well as being an outstanding cavalry leader he was also a sea captain, at one time a pirate, a scientist, an inventor, an artist, a sportsman and a business entrepreneur who set up the Hudson Bay Company and became its first governor. Rupert was distantly related to Elizabeth Craven, who was descended from the prince's cousin Charles II through the Richmond line. And he was a lifelong friend of the Earl of Craven, who was devoted to Rupert's mother and built Ashdown House for her. Portrait by Lely said to be  Margaret Hughes. Once in collection of  1st Earl of Craven. In the Restoration period, Prince Rupert bought the  pro...

Kingston Lacy House, in Dorset, the ancestral home of the Bankes family, is a National Trust property I went to see last week in order to get what NT director Tony Berry calls "the outdated mansion experience," or what others would call a chance to appreciate fine architecture and works of art in their original setting and context.  Like Coombe Abbey, it has facades in different styles, as one side of the original Restoration building was given a more Palladian look in the following century. Both are strikingly handsome and the house contains a substantial art collection amassed by its owners over generations. The website tells us that this is a "Venetian palace in the Dorset countryside" but to my mind, the house with its Italianate architecture, statues and paintings, has rather more resemblance to a baroque building in Rome or Naples in its scale, its atmosphere and grandeur. It could be the palace of a cardinal. I would not have been surprised to learn that that...