ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

  Like many other great English families, in the late nineteenth century the Cravens were strapped for cash. Running numerous stately homes and mixing in London society had become ruinously expensive, particularly after the ambitious building projects of the third Earl. So the fourth Earl decided to follow the trend and in 1893 he married an American heiress, which was the obvious solution. Cornelia Martin, 1877-1961.     The Martins, an  immensely wealthy family of New York bankers, bought an an estate in Scotland where in the early 1890s they met William George Robert Craven, the fourth Earl, and introduced him to their daughter Cornelia. With no discouragement from her parents, he  proposed to Cornelia and married her in 1893 when he was twenty-four, and she was only sixteen.       Cornelia entered London society, where other American heiresses such as Lady Randolph Churchill and the Duchess of Marlborough, took a leading rôle. With he...

  Maria Johnstone was the niece of William, 6th Baron Craven, Elizabeth Craven's husband, so she was the writer's niece by marriage. Several watercolour paintings by her of Coombe Abbey and its surroundings are preserved in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry.  They give a vivid picture of the house as it was in 1797, before the ambitious alterations of later generations. Seen at this distance and from this angle, it merges into one harmonious whole, with the Georgian wings on the left and the Tudor  and Stuart buildings visible on the right, unified by being in stone of the same colour. A few sheep graze peacefully in the foreground.  Coombe Abbey was by this time owned by Elizabeth Craven's son, the next Lord Craven, who was too busy on active service during the war to spend much time there.  Maria Johnstone was aged twenty when she did these paintings. Her father, the Rev. Robert Augustus Johnstone, had married Anna Rebecca Craven in 1773, and M...

William, the  first Earl Craven,  was a loyal supporter of the Stuarts during the English Civil War, and  after  it  in 1663 King Charles II rewarded him in many ways, among other things making him one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, a position he could pass on to his  successors. William Craven 1st Earl of Craven of the 1st creation In 1663, King Charles II granted the land that became South and North Carolina to eight English noblemen: the Earl of Clarendon, the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Craven, the Earl of Shaftesbury,  Sir George Carteret, Sir John Colleton,  Baron Berkeley of Stratton, and his brother Sir William Berkeley.   (These Berkeleys were not the ancestors of Elizabeth Craven but a different branch of the family, distantly related.) Carolina itself was of course named after King Charles II, and the king or his officials appointed North Carolina's governor and had the right to approve (or disapprove) its l...