The Lady in the Painting
Under the captured heat of the jetstream arch, welcome shade is found in the sharp shadows of the Topiary Garden. A yew chess piece provides the perfect sunscreen. It’s hard to believe that a house dating from the 1200s aproned by the world’s oldest topiary garden on a 3,800 hectare estate is a Cumberland sausage’s throw from the A590. Levens Hall and Topiary Garden, the home and demesne of Hal and Susie Bagot, are firmly on the cultured tourist trail of The Lakes of Cumbria. Elevenses – nettle and elderflower sparkling botanical drink with meringues – awaits in Levens Bakery at the rear of the house.
Susie Bagot shares: “The history starts with a very early 12th century recording of the enclosure of the land and we have the original deed that actually shows that which is very interesting – it’s not known if there was a house here at the time and there is of course a pele tower built here – a defensive tower built against the raiding across the Border that was going on at that time and probably where the Hall is there was a primitive form of medieval hall.”
“And then of course the house passed through the Redmond family at that time and it was then sold to a Bellingham and James Bellingham was the first Bellingham to live here and he made money out of the dissolution of the monasteries and built the Elizabethan house that we’re sitting in now, so he enclosed the pele tower within the Elizabethan house – you can still see in the cellars remains of the medieval structure and anyone who knows the house from behind the scenes will come across immensely thick walls in that end of the house.”
“Then you have the Elizabethan house and that stayed the same while the Bellinghams were here and then the last Bellingham who was the great grandson of James Alan Bellingham was a bit of a character – he was a great gambler evidently and he had to sell the estate so he sold it to his cousin James Grahme and Grahme added to it – he did many, many things, he was a wonderful man – he was Privy Purse to King James II and he was very prominent in the Court in London at the time, both Charles II’s court and James II’s.”
“He added the two wings onto the house – the south wing and the other wing that runs the other way which weren’t actually joined at that time – for kitchens, laundries, storerooms, all that sort of thing, and more bedrooms and also the brewhouse where they brewed the famous Morocco Ale; anyway James Grahme stayed here and then he left the house to his daughter who was his only remaining child – his other children had died.”
“James Grahme’s daughter Catherine then inherited although she was by marriage the Countess of Suffolk and Berkshire so she had many other houses and didn’t come to Levens very much – there is a fascinating correspondence between her and the agent here so we know a lot about the house at that time and then she left it to her daughter and then her granddaughter inherited it to so it went through the female line for about three generations and that’s why the garden is preserved – they loved them – they didn’t have the means to alter them so they didn’t become fashionable so to speak and so we have the lovely early garden that we have nowadays because of them really.”
“Mary Howard’s mother Francis who was Catherine’s daughter had married a Bagot, Richard Bagot, but it’s sort of the tradition that whoever marries a Howard changes their name to Howard, so it gets very complicated so that’s why the Bagots appeared and disappeared; anyway, Mary didn’t have any children so when she died she left it to her great great nephew Jocelyn Bagot – we’re talking mid 1880s – he came to live here and that was the start of the Bagot line.”
“James Bellingham created the Hall of the house with local craftsmen working with local oak to do the panelling and the plasterwork; within the plasterwork you’ll see the coat of arms of the Bellingham family – a stag and a hunting horn – and that’s repeated throughout the house within the stained glass and the carving and all the rest of it; he also put in the coat of arms of Elizabeth I with the lion and the Welsh dragon and also the various shields round the room are marriages and alliances of the Bellingham family.”
“You’ll see the Hall very much as it would have been in his day and then of course furniture and paintings have been added since by the family, and there’s Cromwellian armour found in the house – I’m not sure where it came from; we’ve no idea what the allegiance of this house was although it’s fairly likely that it was Royalist bearing in mind the Stuart connections.”
“My father-in-law was a polymath – he was brilliant at everything he turned his hands to really; at one time he was a member of the Magic Circle; he was a land agent by profession, and then he decided to start building harpsichords; he built four harpsichords one of which we have got here; he worked in the house on these harpsichords for many years and he was brilliant with his hands at doing all that sort of detail and he became a very good watercolourist and of course his father before him had been a very good painter – the harpsichord is played in concerts still.”
“In the Drawing Room there is a magnificent overmantel incorporated in the panelling with Elizabeth I coat of arms and then the Bellingham coat of arms of the supporting stags and the bugles and the date 1595 in the top right hand corner – this is a famous piece of carving so it’s represented in encyclopaedias; it’s just wonderful craftmanship really but also in the windows you can see the different stained glass shields of the Bellingham family with again the hunting horn in them.”
“So it’s very much James Bellingham’s influence on this room; when Grahme came here he brought the wonderful furniture and today the room is very much as it would’ve been in his time – you’ve got William and Mary and Charles II furniture – and there’s the portrait of James Grahme, very influential in the Court, and of course when James II abdicated James Grahme came to live up here, probably to get out of the heat of the day I should think and to stay well out of the way of the Court but he was eventually pardoned and continued to play his part in the national life.”
“James Grahme married Dorothy, the lady-in-waiting of Catherine of Braganza; now James Grahme as well as bringing all the wonderful furniture also knew Guillaume Beaumont, the French gardener who he brought to lay out the Topiary Garden – he’d worked at Hampton Court, and James Grahme would have met him in the Court scene in London.”
“The first glimpse of the Topiary Garden from inside the house is from the Drawing Room windows – the Garden is surrounded by very high walls so whoever walks into the Garden gets quite a surprise because they don’t really get much idea of them before they go in; you come up a few stairs into the Drawing Room and you can just see the tops of the topiary trees through the windows and as you climb further up in the house it gets even better because it is a garden that is laid out in such a way that looking at it from above is absolutely stunning.”
“The room next to the Dining Room has changed its purpose – I think originally it was probably quite a primitive room and was a serving room for the Dining Room because there’s a doorway through and then panelling was added later and as you can see the panelling’s a much lighter colour and thought possibly to be Dutch and it may have been brought up by canal as the Portuguese Bed was and anyway now this room is the Library; it’s a very nice room to sit in.”
“James Grahme’s golden parlour as he called it in his correspondence: the walls of the Dining Room are covered with Spanish leather – each square is the skin of a goat evidently and we’ve had it all restored and now I think it’s looking as good as it ever has really; I think the colours have probably changed a bit – they may have darkened a bit over the years with layers of nicotine from dining in here probably – but this was a Bellingham room as well; you can see James Bellingham’s coat of arms over the fireplace which is rather simpler than the drawing room overmantel.”
“It’s very clever in this house that the rooms that needed the light are all this end of the house – you get the lovely sun in the Dining Room and into the old Kitchen which is rather nice – there’s a lovely Elizabethan table and this set of Charles II hand carved walnut chairs which are really very very special and then there’s a lovely little spirit barrel on the table at end there; the leather is very exceptional and it’s used throughout the house.”
“In one of our bedrooms there is the earliest English patchwork known, worked in 1708 by Colonel Grahme’s two daughters, beautifully preserved, so you’ve got wonderful colours and it’s 32 stitches to the inch so you can imagine how tiny the stitching is – in fact you almost can’t see it with the naked eye; James Grahme and his family lived in St James’s Palace for a time and would have worshipped in the Chapel; it’s a rather nice tie in that it’s quite likely that they sat there possibly rather bored and they looked up at the pattern in the ceiling and they then repeated it in their patchwork.”
“This next room we call the Museum Room because various interesting things ended up in it and I think that’s quite a good name for it; Charles Bagot who was known as Beauty Bagot married a niece of the Duke of Wellington, Mary Wellesley-Pole, so hence we have all this Wellingtoniana as we call it in the house because it was given by her uncle to her.”
“The Blue Bedroom has an atmosphere to it that some people find deeply uncomfortable – I’ve got friends who simply will not sleep in this bedroom and others don’t notice it which perhaps bears out one’s thinking on ghosts that some people see them some people don’t; I mean the Grey Lady who is seen on the bottom drive down by the river I truly believe in – my mother saw her several times and that’s not very long ago but other people have been knocked off their bicycles thinking they were riding into somebody and she’s been seen on Levens Bridge and it’s supposed to be a gipsy lady who was turned away after cursing the house and saying no male would inherit until the River Kent froze over and there was a white deer born in the Park, and we have its ears pressed in a book so we know there was a little white deer.”
“There’s a little black dog has been known to follow people up to their bedroom – I’ve been seen with it and my mother has been seen it with but I have never actually seen it; the one that is probably most famous is my father-in-law who has been seen playing the harpsichord in the house when he was alive and wasn’t actually here so he was a ghost before he passed on and that’s been proven – it was a priest called Julian Stonor who saw him playing the harpsichord in the hall.”
“Levens Hall is a very special house – it is our family home but we love sharing it with other people because it contains so much of interest for everybody.”
