ELIZABETH CRAVEN AND HER WORLD

    There were a lot of actresses on the English stage in Georgian times who attracted noble, rich and sometimes powerful admirers. Some of them - quite a lot - became mistresses. This one did even better for herself, and married an Earl.     She is Louisa Brunton, celebrated comedic actress, Jane Austen fan and Countess of Craven. Unlike many others who trod the boards, she was not interested in liaisons or a quick legover in return for a few jewels and a bunch of flowers. No! She was virtuous, and she was smart. She was also, let's face it, lucky.      There were lots of rich admirers who were married already and others whose families would have put a firm foot down to prevent such a misalliance. The heir to a noble house was usually supposed to marry some titled girl whose ancestry - and dower - were worthy of his.     The noble admirer whose eye Louisa caught was none other than William, Earl of Craven, who was quite a catch from ...

The writer Elizabeth Craven had seven children while she was married to her first husband, William, Lord Craven. This group portrait shows six of them, and is dated 1777. They are standing in front of an archway of classical design, through which a landscaped park can be seen. It may be that of Benham Place, in Berkshire, where Capability Brown had just landscaped the park for Lord Craven. The painting was in the Craven family collection until sold by Sotheby's in 2013 for only £25,000, which sounds like a bargain to me. Four of the children are standing, one is sitting on a woman's lap and the youngest of all is a baby in the arms of another woman, at the back of the picture.      But which child is which? And who are the women holding the youngest ones? Certainly neither is Elizabeth Craven.     One identification is easy.  The boy in the greenish-blue jacket and yellow waistcoat, with a dog at his side, is Elizabeth Craven's eldest son, William, who l...

Soon after Elizabeth Berkeley married William Craven in 1767 he inherited the title of Lord Craven and this ancestral home, Coombe Abbey, near Coventry in Warwickshire.  This tinted drawing taken from the South side was published in 1810, by which time Elizabeth Craven's son had inherited Coombe Abbey. The house stood in a beautiful deer park, part of which still exists. This much earlier drawing done by Daniel King in 1656 shows the structure and layout of the building very clearly. Coombe Abbey was, like so many English aristocratic country houses, constructed out of the ruins of a pre-Reformation monastery. The Gothic cloister of the original monastery is still clearly visible in the central quadrangle of the building. The pointed arches of the windows and regular pattern of vaulting from an original covered walkway resemble what you would see in a convent in Italy or in many Oxford and Cambridge colleges today.     The Tudor additions make the buil...