My family's involvement upon this scene dates back to 1540, when John Thynn was a mere twenty-five years old. He was my direct ancestor, of precisely thirteen generations back, and he then acquired the site upon which Longleat now stands - for the sum of £53.
This site contained the ruins of an ancient priory of the same name, which had formerly belonged to the Black Cannons of St Augustine. They had fallen into disgrace relatively early in the trend towards dissolution, having a reputation for depravity which included rumours about the practice of witchcraft. Their goose was finally cooked when they started flaunting silver greyhounds embroidered upon their black habits. Their superiors who had been tolerant of all previous misdemeanour, now decided to remove them from the priory, and it was eventually razed to the ground. The site upon which it had been standing was then acquired by a certain Sir John Horsey who sold it, later, to the young John Thynn.
All of John Thynn's ambition, spirit and life-long drive went into the rebuilding of Longleat - as a family seat this time, rather than as a building dedicated to any manner of religion. It had probably been his intention from the very start, to use the site he had purchased to this end, which was in effect the creation of a launching pad for his own family dynasty. But the construction work was only really commenced in 1568, when he was already in his fifties. So a little more needs to be explained how the man had managed to emerge within Tudor society, in a sufficient state of acquired wealth and affluence so as to be able to realise such an ambition.
John Thynn was a typical specimen of the new Protestant breed of rapaciously acquisitive, ruthlessly determined, shrewdly self-interested men on the make within the Tudor court. He was both truculent and difficult to please: a hard task-master, if not a slave-driver, obsessed with the desire to obtain the maximum return on any penny spent. "I have good reason" was the motto that he eventually chose for himself, but it might have been more in character of the man if the phrase had read: "I demand value for my money."
John was the son of a Shropshire farmer. But it was under his uncle, William Thynn, who was the Chief Clerk to the Royal Kitchens, that he made his first entry upon court circles: soon to receive the patronage of the young Earl of Hertford, who was Jane Seymour's brother and Henry VIII's brother-in-law. And as his patron's political power increased, so too did John Thynn's own influence and affluence, no doubt in part from the profitable task of selling and dispersing the lands confiscated from the monasteries. The site of the 'Longlete' priory was indeed acquired during this period, even if at second hand.
After the death of Henry VIII, Hertford was initially the power behind the throne to Edward VI, and was created Duke of Somerset and Protector of the Realm, virtually ruling the country as guardian to the boy-king who was his nephew. In the company of his patron, John Thynn's own star was in the ascendant. In addition to all the methods for accumulating wealth (legal or otherwise) which came his way as a result of the posts he held, he was also acquiring invaluable experience in the building of Somerset House for his patron, stimulating personal ambitions which were later to be fulfilled.
Then in 1547, on the battlefield at Pinkie, he was knighted for valour against the Scots, or perhaps more deservedly as a measure of his prolonged services to the Protector Somerset, who was riding at the head of the English army. Sir John's enemies later were to cast aspersions against the idea that he had been at all valiant on the battlefield, suggesting instead that he had spent the hours of combat cowering in a wagon. But in those days there were inadequate laws against libel and slander, to deter such abuse from people who were, in all probability, intent on settling their own grievances against a man's reputation, which had somehow infringed upon their own advancement.
So now came the whole question of how Sir John could find acceptance within the Tudor court, as a genuine nobleman, instead of being permanently disesteemed as the common upstart that indeed he was. Little was authoritatively known about his true ancestry, other than that his immediate forebears came from Shropshire, and included lawyers as well as farmers as their kin. But he required more detail than that, if he were to receive the acceptance of society, while contending with all the prejudices and the snobberies of court circles in that day and age.
What he really needed was a long Norman ancestry, to replace the suspicion of Saxon heritage, which was then regarded as plebeian. And by this time he had doubtless all the power and influence which might be required to cook the records, so that he might appear to have the authentic credentials for such lineage, when they were in fact absent. By my own conjecture, the subsequent story might well run like this.
The genealogists of the day had probably discovered that a few generations back the Thynns had married into a genuinely Norman family: the Botevilles, or Botfields as the name were sometimes becoming, with descent from Sir Geoffrey de Boteville, who had come over to England from Poitiers, to assist King John in his power struggle with his barons. Both Thynns and Botfields were by the approach of Tudor times living in Shropshire; and the genealogists made it their business to present the Thynns as the patrilineal descendants of the de Botevilles.
I say this in the belief that the true origin of the Thynn family name was Saxon descriptive, in the manner that it might more obviously appear. All other descriptions exist, like Bigge, Tall, Little, Small, Short, Slim, Fatt, Broad or Narrow. So there must have been something astonishingly remiss in the reproductive abilities of 'thin' Saxons, if they never left any trace of their visual appearance within common English surnames. But to furnish Sir John with Norman ancestry, it was necessary for them to play around with the word Thynn, so that it might sound to have different origins.
In the vagueness which existed in those days concerning precise family origins, there was probably no difficulty in passing off a previous direct ancestor , by the name of John Thynn as being a Boteville, from the family who had married into the Thynns. All they needed to say was that this John Boteville was in the habit of describing himself as being "of the Inne", which later became Thynne by elision: the whole purpose (it was said) being to avoid confusion with another John Boteville currently living in those parts, with the final E (of Thynne) now appended to the name, more often than not, to match their contemporary spelling of the word Inne. No one has satisfactorily established whether the Inn was supposed to have been a large dwelling-place, a public house, or an inn of court, but it was more probably the latter because law had been one of the family's principal concerns. And by the end of these machinations, Sir John emerged with the genealogical status and social regard that were so necessary for the fulfilment of his ambition.
One immediate result of his newly recognised nobility was that he became more eligible as a bachelor within the eyes of the lesser nobility, so that Sir John was now able to find himself a worthy wife. This was in Christian Gresham, the twenty-four year old daughter of Sir Richard Gresham, London's Lord Mayor and one of London's wealthiest new rich. She was to bear him eleven children, although only five survived to become adults. But she also brought him additional wealth and land, and she stood by him in loyal support during the lean years which were to follow.
Sir John's misfortune was that the Duke of Somerset was worsted, as a result of a power struggle with the Earl of Warwick, (or the Duke of Northumberland as he was soon created.) In his capacity as Somerset's steward, Sir John was aware how they might expect similar treatment, and both of them were indeed carted off to the Tower on successive occasions, in 1549 and in 1551. The charges of treasonable activity didn't stick, so they were initially released. But the new ruling clique was determined at the very least to strip them of all political influence. And on a second attempt, they made out a better case against Somerset, who was promptly beheaded, and they almost got Sir John on the charge of embezzlement, although he was ultimately saved by his marital association with the Gresham family. Nonetheless he was obliged to pay substantial fines, even though the charges remained unproven, but what probably stuck more in his gullet than the obligation to part with some of his dubiously acquired wealth was the requirement to write humble letters to Northumberland, pleading that he was really an honest man.
His fortunes took a turn for the better when Mary acceded to the throne, for his arch-enemy Northumberland was himself executed, after attempting to take the Crown on behalf of his niece, the Lady Jane Grey. Sir John was then released from the Tower, yet despite his all too evident disaffiliation from the previous ruling clique, as a Protestant, there could still be no real place for him within Queen Mary's entourage. His competence as an administrator however, had never been in doubt, and his experience of life in the Tower befitted him especially for appointment as the Comptroller of the young Princess Elizabeth's household, in that her own freedom was currently under her sister's restraint.
It was a role which Sir John may well have regarded with unease, knowing as he did how servants (if powerful enough) were often called upon to follow their employers to the scaffold. So while being none too arduously attendant upon the young Princess' welfare, he managed to keep his nose clean, thus surviving into Elizabeth's accession to the throne, and even retaining for a while his post as the Comptroller to her household.
Sir John may have been an uncouth, domineering, formidable rogue of ill-gotten wealth, shrewdly cunning and essentially ruthless, but he was now emerging as an eminent Elizabethan, with a far healthier climate for the development of his own interests. Even though the post of Comptroller was soon awarded to another, particular services were still demanded of him by the young Queen. He was also the Member of Parliament for Wiltshire. Yet by and large he had learned his lesson, in that he had now become a far more cautious, and politically less ambitious man, content to focus the remainder of his days upon the greatest of all his ambitions, which was to build the new Longleat.
In one way or another, he had been squaring up to this task ever since he acquired the site in 1540, preparing the land, and generally renovating the ruins of the old priory so that it became a large habitable dwelling once again. But in 1567 there was a great fire, from causes unknown. (Sir John had accumulated enemies, as well as wealth, by his truculence towards neighbours, which included petty warfare against those whom he regarded as poaching scoundrels.) But this destruction by fire of all that he cherished most, which would have shattered some lesser man, in fact turned out to furnish his opportunity of a lifetime. For it was a year later, in 1568, with a good twenty-five years of experience in building to his credit, he was at liberty to start afresh upon the construction of his architectural dream palace.
It should be noted how this was a fabulously ostentatious task, and one that hitherto could not have been undertaken, if only for the reason of attracting too much attention to his dubiously acquired riches. But it was also a daring enterprise in that it set out to build something in a style which had never yet been ventured upon British soil: a real harbinger of the Renaissance, in effect, in that its architectural innovations had taken this long to creep northwards through Europe and reach England.
Smithson may have been the master mason, or perhaps even its architect, but it was Sir John himself who demanded the inspiration and furnished the compulsive drive, and the tenacity of purpose for its completion. Whoever worked on the place was carefully enacting what their employer had planned, and they were essentially introducing the new concept of an ornate Italianate style: a rich facade flaunting a myriad windows, false pillars, rondelles containing busts, and a roof surmounted with false battlements (since replaced by a balustrade,) and with an eccentric array of chimneys and domes breaking up the severe outline of the rectangular silhouette. So in this manner the Longleat House, more or less as I know it today, arose like a phoenix from the ashes of the renovated Longlete Priory. And some might say that this was the finest example of High Elizabethan architecture within the stately homes of Britain. It rose to dominate the peaceful landscape within its cradling park: the ambition of one ruthless old rogue fulfilled (or nearly so,) within the latter days of his life.
Christian Gresham, Sir John's first wife, had not lived to witness the building of Longleat, for she had died in 1565. Yet within a year Sir John had acquired another Lord Mayor's daughter to be his bride: one Dorothy Wroughton. And he fathered on her a second strand of the Thynne family: some eight children in all, seven of which were sons. If all of the male issue from the first brood were now to perish, he would still be left with descendant heirs to Longleat.
Sir John's final mark upon the English political scene was in his lavish entertainment of Queen Elizabeth, on the occasion of her Royal Progress through the West Country. She had stated that it was her royal pleasure to cast her countenance upon this new palace that he was building. But lavish hospitality was entirely out of character for Sir John, and he did his utmost to escape from such an onerous duty, making all manner of excuses to put off the costly day of her descent upon his scene.
To start with it may have been all right to plead that the new house was still insufficiently complete to house her in regal style, but after 1572, it became common knowledge that he himself, and his entire family, had already taken up their residence in the building, so it clearly couldn't be that uncomfortable. And when he claimed even now that it wouldn't be safe for her to visit, since there was a disease within the household, she finally lost her temper and declared him to be a scoundrel: whereupon Sir John promptly made amends, and did his utmost to make the visit a huge success - which it was finally proclaimed to be, by no lesser person than the Queen herself.
Sir John lived on at Longleat until 1580. He died after a short illness when he was sixty-five, which was then regarded as being quite a ripe old age.

Founder of a dynasty and builder of a stately home,
with momentary glimpses of assigned national power,
you endowed a long line of successive Thynns
with lineage awareness. We salute your visionary intent.
Relentless in ruthless pursuit of personal goals,
you boldly promoted an egocentric ideal,
keel-hauling your many (reprisal-bent)
enemies beneath the hulk of your princely monument.
Pondering naught other than the "good reason"
of seasonable self-interest, you trod the plodded
road of wishful ambition, devoid of glory,
but a story full of privately entrenched enrichment.
The jutting chin and scowling glare pronounce
determined resolution with a bounce.

Sir John left behind him a feuding family, with Dorothy, his second wife, resisting the inheritance by John, his first wife's eldest son. She remained in residence for some months, parading of an evening with her entire household up on the roof at Longleat, while the legitimate heir negotiated her eventual departure to the house in neighbouring Corsley, which had housed the family just after the fire of 1567. Even at this small distance however, the relationship between the two branches of the family festered until Dorothy remarried to Sir Walter Raleigh's brother Carew, going to live with him on his own estate, and thus centring her brood upon a different homestead.
John (junior) wasn't a patch on his father, but it needs to be stated that he had lived a difficult life. He was only ten at the death of his mother Christian, and was thereafter disliked by his stepmother and overshadowed by his father. He almost got disinherited by his father because of his seduction of one Lucy Mervyn, who claimed that he had fathered her eldest son. But Sir John regarded her as unsuitable to become Longleat's chatelaine. John (junior) bowed to his father's wishes, ditched the luckless Lucy (who was later to wed Lord Audley,) and himself followed what was fast becoming a family tradition by marrying Joan, the daughter of another Lord Mayor of London, Sir Roland Hayward.
The marriage may have reconciled father and son, but Joan never proved any better fitted to the running of Longleat than her ill-esteemed husband managed to be. By emulating the domineering tactics without the shrewd cunning to set them to useful purpose, John inspired as much dislike and resentment locally as ever his father had done. And in the judgement of posterity, he must be criticised for letting slip the essential opportunity to complete the building of Longleat from his father's plans, and with the assembled team of masons. The completion was finally achieved more gradually, over the course of several centuries, in accordance with varying intentions and designs.
His own real interests were split between the hunting of game, and the social life of London society. As far as public service was concerned, he so displeased the Queen's Privy Council, which accused him of both fraud and mismanagement, that he was ultimately fined and dismissed from his Stewardship of the Royal Manors. Nevertheless like his father, he acquired the distinction of a knighthood, for no better reason than that (Scottish) King James, on his accession to the British throne in 1603, required support from the principal English landowners.
The next big drama within the family was when his son, Thomas, declared his intention to marry Lord Audley's daughter, whose mother was the former Lucy Mervyn, (his father's rejected love.) This didn't go down at all well, opening up an additional possibility for disinheritance. But Lucy Audley eventually managed to prevail upon the father, by unrecorded methods, to withdraw his objections to this legitimate, if belated, blending of their family genes.
The marriage was proclaimed, and they had issue. Nor did father and son have sufficient time to become irreconciled again, for soon after the marriage had been consummated, Sir John II learned of a plot to kidnap him, and fled to London where concealment could more easily be arranged - quite apart from the fact that life in the capital could be appreciated more lavishly.
He only returned to Longleat in time to fall ill and die, to be buried alongside Sir John I in the family vault at Longbridge Deverill. His wife Joan set up house on their estate in Shropshire, becoming patron to the composer John Maynard, from whom was dedicated to her a book of his lute music: while Longleat itself passed into the ownership of his son Thomas. It should be noted incidentally that in the spelling of the family name, Thynn was preferred to Thynne by both father and son. It was only in subsequent generations that the final E was always included, in line with the first Sir John's machinations to acquire Norman ancestry.

Thomas was clearly a man of far greater calibre than his father had been. Soon after he had inherited Longleat, he was knighted and appointed Ambassador to the Netherlands: then subsequently High Sheriff of three separate counties, as well as Member of Parliament for Wiltshire. But he managed to avoid any too open alignment with either King, or Parliament, during the period of polarisation after Charles I ascended to the throne. From the little that has been left on record concerning his life and career, it is a matter for personal regret that we do not know more about him, for he is a direct ancestor, of whom I might have some good cause to feel proud.
What is known is that Sir Thomas was loved and revered by each of his successive wives, with Maria Audley being followed by Catherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk. Our marital relationship with the latter family entailed, incidentally, that her own Thynn progeny might also claim to be of royal descent: a line which carries through to myself.

Between the two broods of children fathered by Sir Thomas, there was to arise much acrimony and litigation: all because the second wife, Catherine, persuaded him when delirious on his death-bed, to rewrite his will so that her own brood received a far higher proportion of the wealth and properties than any from Maria's brood. And the quarrelling was to endure for an entire generation, with Sir James (Maria's eldest surviving son) winning the opening skirmish by having Catherine and her son, Sir Henry Frederick Thynne, thrown out of Longleat with all their belongings. Having initiated such chaos, Catherine was soon to die, but the two half-brothers were to battle for many a year to come.
In his youth, James had travelled and had seen active service in the Netherlands, at the outset of what had been intended as a military career. He married the beautiful Lady Isabella Holland, daughter of the Earl of Holland, and was knighted on joining Charles I's court. But Henry Frederick in the other corner, (whose first names derived from his godfather, the King of Denmark,) was also knighted by Charles I after marrying Mary, the daughter of Lord Coventry, and he was now settled on his estate up in Gloucestershire. When it came to the Civil War however, Sir Henry Frederick came out in much more open support of the Royalist cause, got stripped of his lands by Parliament, and was therefore in a far better position to gain royal favour, and promotion, at the time of the Restoration. He was then raised to the very brink of nobility, when he was created a baronet, going by the name of Sir Henry Frederick Thynne of Warminster.
Not that any real blame can be attributed to Sir James, for neglecting to fulfil his military promise by rallying to the King's standard at the outbreak of hostilities. Examples of what happened to the property of those who resisted the will of the Parliamentary forces were easy enough to observe, on the very doorstep of Longleat, where Woodhouse Castle was raised to the ground, and Nunney Castle left nothing but a shell. There may have been words of reproach from the Royalist camp that Sir James had been unwilling to risk his neck for the King, yet by his caution, he almost certainly saved Longleat from destruction. Nor was he by any means disgraced at the time of the Restoration, if we judge from the fact that he was then appointed High Sheriff of Wiltshire.
His wife, Lady Isabella had enjoyed the Civil War rather more festively than himself. The marriage had in fact failed relatively early, but she then proceeded to acquire for herself a reputation of being one of the most libertine of courtesans attending the King's court at Oxford. She is described as dancing on the banks of the Thames, with a lute and clad only in loose and very inadequate attire. By the time of the Restoration, she had deserted her husband completely, and moved to London where she involved herself in numerous affairs, giving birth to various love-children who were to turn up, subsequently, with monotonous regularity, to put in their claims to the Longleat inheritance after Sir James had died childless.

Litigation between the half-brothers had continued right up to the time of Sir James' death, with the occasional half-hearted attempt at reconciliation in compromise, which invariably broke down in further insult or outrage. Nor was the battle concluded with his death, since he had bequeathed everything to his nephew, Tom (o' Ten Thousand) Thynne, who was the son of his full brother Thomas, himself recently deceased. And with Tom came the opportunity for Sir John Thynne's dynasty to attain its long-desired goal of ennoblement: not for actually doing something great, yet by way of compensation to the family for his assassination. I shall offer two different versions as to how this came about.
Tom o' Ten Thousand inherited Longleat in 1670 when in his thirties, and in some ways he epitomised the Restoration rake, as a wealthy womaniser of somewhat foppish appearance. (The 'Ten Thousand' incidentally, indicated his estimated annual income from the Longleat estates, which in the currency of those days was regarded as excessive.) Amongst his closest friends was the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's illegitimate son, with whom he frequented London's brothels and gaming-houses.
Tom also had political ambitions. He was the Member of Parliament for Wiltshire and, more dangerously, the Colonel of the Regiment of Horse in the Wiltshire Militia. By 1680 however, Charles II was beginning to have cause for suspicion about the political intentions of both Monmouth and Tom Thynne. They were jointly cultivating the Exclusionist cause throughout the West Country: a movement which sought to exclude all Roman Catholics from the throne, and was calculated to permit Monmouth to inherit the Crown, in preference to Charles' younger brother James. And this worried Charles, who firmly believed it to be in the best interests of the country he governed to abide by the constitutional expectations for succession, rather than to risk a second Civil War, after all the ravages of the first. He therefore removed the Regiment of Horse from Tom's command and attempted, inadequately, to dissuade Monmouth from his treasonous ambitions.
It was at this point that Tom married the Lady Elizabeth Percy, a mere fifteen year old, but already widowed from the Earl of Ogle. This first marriage had been sufficient to render her rich, but even more significantly, she was the sole heir to the Duke of Northumberland who had recently died, leaving her with the expectation to inherit a vast estate up north. In the meantime her grandmother, the Dowager Duchess, was concerned to get her spliced to the right person, even before there could be any realistic talk about consummating the marriage. First it was to Lord Ogle and, after he died, to Tom Thynne.
The official version then of Tom Thynne's assassination runs like this. Elizabeth the child-bride was in Holland, having quarrelled with her grandmother. There she met the glamorous Count Konigsmark, a notorious Swedish rake, and fell madly in love for the first time. And Konigsmark, regarding Tom Thynne as the sole obstacle between himself and a substantial fortune, came over secretly to London, in the company of three villainous henchmen, to rid himself of his rival. Attempts to challenge Tom to a duel came to nothing, so a plan was evolved to gun him down by blunderbuss as he rode in his carriage; and this was finally staged in no less a street than Pall Mall, not far from the royal residence of St James' Palace.
There was public shock, and general consternation as to how such a thing could happen in broad daylight on the streets of London: also bewilderment as to why anyone should wish to murder someone so gregariously popular as Tom. All manner of theories were whispered abroad. But evidence quickly emerged that Konigsmark was in town, and scandalous relationship was rumoured between him and Tom's child-bride. In the hue and cry which followed, the authorities had soon rounded up all four suspects and put them on trial. The three henchmen were convicted and hanged in Pall Mall, at the scene of their crime, but Konigsmark was curiously acquitted and permitted to leave the country: not that he ever won the hand in marriage of the Lady Elizabeth. He was to die a few years later, as a soldier of fortune, while taking part in the siege of Argos against the Turks.
So much for the official version, but I shall now venture some fresh ideas. In 1682, the year of the assassination, Tom Thynne was regarded by Charles II as being politically dangerous: the one person who might be capable of rallying the West Country to Monmouth's banner in the event of a rebellion. So the simplest and surest method of thwarting his favourite son's undesirable ambitions was for the King to devise a plan for Tom to be assassinated. And to this end his agents, in Holland, may have suggested to Konigsmark that he could win the hand of the lady he desired, and even get away with murder, if he took it into his head to dispose of Tom Thynne. Whether or not Charles' agents required to assist any further in Konigsmark's designs remains dubious, even if the site chosen for the murder was suspiciously close to the King's own doorstep.
It was safe to assume that the English public would be well pleased by the conviction of the four undesirable aliens accused of the crime. Yet Konigsmark himself had kept well behind the scenes during the actual perpetration of the deed. Even so it is astonishing that he was actually acquitted. It was clear to John Evelyn (in his diary of that time) that the jury who tried the case had been corrupted with bribes, and some of the judge's rulings were outrageous even by contemporary standards. He went further than merely advising them to acquit Konigsmark whose own bearing, from the moment of his arrest, was as if he expected that this would be the outcome: almost as if he had been promised an acquittal if ever the need should arise - provided that he never revealed the source of his patronage, which in reality may have been from no less a person than the King himself.
What is perhaps even more surprising is the way Charles II hastened to bestow honours upon the Thynne family, arranging for Tom's corpse to be interred at Westminster Abbey. And since the Longleat inheritance was now passing over to Sir Henry Frederick's branch of the family, (to his son Sir Thomas in fact, who had now become the second baronet,) feelings about a miscarriage of justice organised by the Crown were perhaps minimised by the hastily expedient elevation of Sir Thomas to the peerage - as happened within a couple of months of the cousin's assassination. He was to be known thenceforward as the 1st Viscount Weymouth.
No one from his side of the long-standing fraternal divide had any further cause for complaint. And nor have I, if it comes to that. Without of course condoning any of the criminal decisions that may have been taken along the course of this history, as a descendant from Sir Henry Frederick rather than from Sir James, I recognise that it does stand to my advantage that matters were resolved in this way.

Sir Henry Frederick's brood of children were a closely knit bunch, who remained in concerned relationship with one another throughout their lives. They were also ambitious and efficient, with the eldest brother (now created Viscount Weymouth) firmly at the head of the family, supported by their respect and affection. Even prior to his inheritance of Longleat, the young Thomas had acquired some distinction: to start with as a Critic and Antiquarian at Oxford University, then as the Member of Parliament for Oxford, in addition to being Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, and then appointed as the Special Envoy for Charles II to the Swedish Court. This latter honour was during the time he belonged to the Duke of York's household just after the Restoration, (long prior to his accession to the throne as James II,) while Thomas was only twenty-six years old.
By 1672, Thomas was also a married man, with both sons and daughters: the wife being Frances Finch, daughter of the Earl of Winchelsea. She was a good lady, of nervous disposition, who had brought a large estate of 22,000 acres into the family as part of her dowry. This was at Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, immediately south of what is now the North Ireland border. Of his two surviving brothers, James was a jovial womanising bachelor, and Henry Frederick (through whose line the family was eventually to trace its patrilineal descent,) was a staid but competent model of respectability: a successful civil servant who in turn was Keeper of the Royal Library, Secretary to the Chancellor, Clerk to the Privy Council, and Treasurer to Charles II's widow.

It may be of interest to point out that, with Frances Finch, the Thynne family's kinship with the royal family was enhanced (for the first time since Sir Thomas Thynne had married Catherine Lyte-Howard) in that she herself bore indirect descent from Henry VII, through his daughter Mary Tudor (the sister of Henry VIII), who was married initially to King Louis XII of France, but then after being widowed, to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. They had a daughter, Lady Frances Brandon, who somewhat confusingly married Henry Grey, a different Duke of Suffolk, (formerly Marquess of Dorset), who was the father of Lady Jane Grey - with both of them being executed after his attempt to place her on the throne instead of Princess Mary. But there was a younger sister, Lady Katherine Grey, who married Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, whose great-granddaughter Lady Mary Seymour married the Earl of Winchelsea; and their daughter was the Lady Frances Finch who married the 1st Viscount Weymouth.
Returning to the year 1682 however, just after Tom o' Ten Thousand had been assassinated, and Sir Thomas had been created the 1st Viscount Weymouth, the major issue concerning the family was whether Tom's child-bride, Lady Elizabeth, might not insist that Longleat House should be regarded officially as her own place of residence. She had never had the opportunity to move in, but the situation was delicate in that there were some who whispered how she herself could have been implicated in Tom's murder. It turned out however, to be the young girl's wish to get the whole Thynne saga firmly behind her, which she achieved by wedding the Duke of Somerset. This was a sufficiently significant step up the social ladder for her to cede, with grace, to the Thynne family's insistence that Longleat House belonged to themselves.
There was still the Monmouth rebellion itself for them to contend with, when it finally erupted in 1685, immediately after James II's accession to the throne. Thomas had already been obliged to contend with a certain antagonism from those who worked on the Longleat estate, in that his own political affiliation was Loyalist rather than Exclusionist. And when Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset, to rally the West Country to his banner, there were quite a few who joined the rebel ranks, principal among whom was Captain Kidd, who had been the head gamekeeper at Longleat in Tom o' Ten Thousand's day. He was to become the only man knighted on the field of battle by Monmouth.
As the rebel forces approached Longleat, there was considerable trepidation concerning what their attitude towards the new occupants might be. Thomas found it wiser to remain up in London, while Frances quickly journeyed to visit friends in Salisbury. Monmouth fought an indecisive skirmish at Norton St Philip, on his withdrawal from Bath. He then occupied Frome, and the local militia in Warminster deserted to his cause. Rebel scouts even visited Longleat for purposes which remain uncertain. But Monmouth and his rabble (which they claimed to muster 30,000 men) then marched suddenly to Sedgemoor, which at that time was an outlying part of the Longleat estate; and it was here that they were finally routed by the Loyalist forces, amongst whose commanders was the Duke of Somerset, who had so recently married Tom o' Ten Thousand's young widow.
The fleeing rebels were quickly rounded up and dispatched, without mercy, after Judge Jeffreys' bloody assize. It took five strokes of the axe to get Monmouth properly decapitated, up in London, after being found disguised as a woman and hiding in a ditch on the outskirts of the New Forest. The wretched Captain Kidd fared even worse, getting hanged, drawn and quartered on the beach at Lyme Regis: which is probably the fate that might have been dished out to Tom Thynne, if he had survived the assassination attempt, for he would almost certainly have thrown in his lot with Monmouth. Instead of that he was left peacefully at rest in Westminster Abbey, amongst the country's most revered and loyal citizens.
The Monmouth rebellion, which was the last occasion for any armed battle upon English soil, may have been little more than a disturbing hiccough within the life of the 1st Viscount. He had in fact already embarked upon his programme of good works at Longleat, to modernise the building and to set the estate in efficient working order; and it was to this programme that he now returned. Previous generations had lapsed in their care of the place: particularly at fault being Tom o' Ten Thousand, who had been more of a London man. But when Thomas and Frances took up their residence, they displayed an abundance of good intentions, their concern being to create a little paradise, on a basis of mutual service and benefit between landlord and community. And a considerable success he made of it, whether in terms of the estate's annual revenue, which soon reached £12,000, or the total acreage which reached 50,000 in his lifetime; but most of all perhaps, in terms of the good will of his tenants.
His modernisation of the house interior was not to enduring effect. For example there was a chapel introduced within the west wing, which has now given way to a billiard room and service flat. But there were some alterations which were indeed to endure. The roof sprouted a balustrade (instead of battlements) which he surmounted with a series of stone statues, depicting an aristocracy of immortals to watch over the Thynne family dynasty: figures carefully chosen by himself, like Alexander the Great, Henry V and Boadicea. The front door of the house was also aggrandicised, and a special livery in mustard and black was designed for those who stood in attendance upon the family, (although gold and black were more officially the family colours.)

What changed most of all however, were the general surroundings to the house, for Thomas was impassioned by the idea of gardens, and inspired in particular by Versailles. He employed George London to lay out a vast complex of ornate terraced flower beds, with symmetrical paths and avenues, to furnish Longleat with a decorative environment, which stretched for the most part eastwards, across the leat (having diverted 'the long lete' with a canal), and on up into what is now the safari park. And the whole family. when gathered, took much delight in the home-grown fruit to be harvested at Longleat.
Blessed though they were with good fortune in so many ways, Thomas and Frances were out of luck when it came to raising a family. Smallpox was the great killer disease in those days, and miscarriages blighted other hopes for offspring. But for a long while they did have a son and heir, in the person of Henry. Sickly at the start, and then too fat, he dismayed his tutors who were unable to tailor him into the material that his father desired. On the other hand Thomas was in no hurry to get him married off and thus settled: particularly when it was the Earl of Pembroke, from the neighbouring stately home of Wilton House, who was seeking an appropriate match for his thirteen year old daughter. (He disapproved of the Pembrokes, the Earl as a drunken brawler, and the Countess as a tart.) Thomas told him politely at the start, but then on repetition, more bluntly why he felt disinclined to encourage such a financially beneficial marital alliance between the two most powerful Wiltshire families. And the relationship between the two noblemen was thenceforward soured.
A close friend from the 1st Viscount's days at Oxford had been Thomas Ken, who was later to become the Bishop of Bath and Wells. How he ever rose that high within the clerical hierarchy came as a surprise to many since, as a canon at Winchester, he had refused his permission for Nell Gwynne to be lodged in his house, when accompanying Charles II (as his mistress) upon some official business in the town. Yet it was Charles himself who promoted Ken, against the ambitions of others, having been impressed by the man's devout sincerity.
This was not the end of all trouble for the new Bishop however. With six others, he obtained a spell of imprisonment under James II, for forbidding his Declaration of Indulgence to be read out from the diocesan pulpits. Yet with the advent of William and Mary to the throne after the Bloodless Revolution of 1688, he refused to transfer his oath of allegiance from James, on the grounds that once given, it could not be forsworn. In the company of all such non-jurors, he was deprived of his see.
So at this juncture in his life, the Bishop turned to his aristocratic friend from university days, which led to him taking up residence on the top floor at Longleat for a period of some twenty years. And during this time, he exerted a profound influence upon the 1st Viscount, becoming what some might describe as his conscience. Thomas thus acquired a reputation for good deeds, which he himself regarded as spontaneous enough, but which the friends of his youth were inclined to regard as having been inspired by his devout friend, the Bishop. And as an example of such benevolence, somewhere between the two of them, they founded the Lord Weymouth School at Warminster.
Notable too is the fact that a portion of the West Wing was now transformed into a chapel for the household's daily worship. Not that its interior ever matched the architectural finery of equivalent chapels in other stately homes, but it was in any case evidence of the devout spirit which prevailed at Longleat over that particular historical period.
The influence of Bishop Ken was not wholly spiritual. It should also be noted that he contributed materially to Longleat, in bequeathing his fine library of books to it. The 1st Viscount himself had a fine library. So when all this was added to the thirty odd books of exceptional value, which had previously been collected by the first Sir John, the house could be said to have embarked upon a tradition, which subsequent generations have felt obliged to sustain by making their own manner of contribution to the collection. And mention too must be made of the portrait paintings by Kneller and Lely, commissioned by Thomas, in addition to Flemish tapestries, lacquered screens, silver flagons, rare clocks and inlaid writing tables, all brought into the house at this time.
Thomas' official career had continued to make steady progress, despite the fact that he never really quite made it into the history books. He was periodically in and out of royal favour, even on such a relatively minor issue of whether or not to continue as the Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire. He was appointed first by Charles II, lost it under James II, appointed again under William and Mary, only to lose it again under Anne.
He was always an active member of the House of Lords, and along with the Earl of Pembroke, whom he had so recently offended on the issue of marital ties, he was sent to Holland with an official letter inviting William of Orange to take over the government. What was galling however was the way William greeted Pembroke with affection, because he was a friend already, while choosing to ignore the wretched Thomas; and this episode was in part responsible for kindling his sympathy with the non-jurors, led by Bishop Ken.
So it was only under Queen Anne that his political career ripened, and despite the loss of the lord lieutenancy, he was appointed to the Privy Council, and created Secretary of Trade and the Plantations. In the latter capacity, he was responsible for introducing the Lord Weymouth pine to Britain: (useful for ship masts in that it grew tall and slender.) But in truth this was a bit of a cheat, in that the name really derived from one George Weymouth, totally unrelated, who first discovered this pine growing in Maine. All Thomas did was to arrange for its importation, and prefix a Lord in front of the Weymouth in the tree's official appellation.
Thomas had his bouts of ill health. In fact in 1667, when he was laid low with the gout, he was never expected to recover - though he did. And in any case he managed to outlive all his male relatives, both his own and the succeeding generation, leaving him sadly without any grandsons from male issue. Family legend has it that he was twice offered an earldom during his final years. Yet without there being any male heir from his own loins, and with the inheritance of Longleat required by family entail to pass through the male line of descent from Sir John Thynne, he didn't really feel there was much point in accumulating any additional honours. He was more inclined to suppose that the whole line would soon be extinct, or too distant in blood ties for him to trouble himself.
In 1712 his wife Frances died; and two years later, it would seem that his will to continue with life had been severely depleted. So he followed suit. He was then seventy-four years old.

Succession indeed there was through the line of his youngest brother, Henry Frederick, who married one Dorothy Phillips, producing yet another Thomas Thynne as their son, who was to become known as Thomas Thynne of Old Windsor. He was to die young however, although not before the death of his cousin Henry, the 1st Viscount's own son. And it was as heir presumptive to the Longleat estate that he married the Lady Mary Villiers, daughter of the Earl of Jersey. He himself died shortly before the 1st Viscount, leaving his wife pregnant; and when the child turned out to be a boy, there was considerable excitement, in that great-grandfather Sir Henry Frederick's branch of the family once again had an heir. So with a devotion to tradition that was beginning to become obsessive, the boy was yet again named Thomas, acquiring nobility at the tender age of four, and thus becoming known to the world as the 2nd Viscount Weymouth: the Crown having made special arrangements at the time of Tom O' Ten Thousand's assassination to ensure that the title, then endowed, could pass down to any of Sir Henry Frederick's male descendants.
Let us consider the situation. Here was a four year old boy who had never known his father, being brought up by a vain and extravagant young woman who was even then only twenty-three years old. She knew next to nothing about the Thynne family traditions, and there were few to whom she could turn to learn about them. It was a situation which required a husband of course, and this she rapidly found in the person of George, Lord Landsdown. Indolent and reckless, he was a dramatist and minor poet who wrote a number of unremarkable plays. Shortly after his marriage to Lady Mary, he was appointed Treasurer of the Royal Household, but his political career was curtailed when, in 1714 after the death of Queen Anne, he threw in his lot with James Stewart, the Old Pretender, and (perhaps inspired by Tom o' Ten Thousand's unrealised ambition,) incited a small uprising in the West Country, in reward for which he was imprisoned for three years in the Tower. Yet the two of them had been appointed joint guardians to the young Thomas, who was then raised in the belief that Longleat would only become his property at their death - which was in fact false. Longleat was to become his automatically, as soon as he attained the age of twenty-one.
It cannot be said that Lord and Lady Landsdown were much concerned about the welfare of the young Thomas, an extremely ugly child whose upbringing was entrusted largely to a spinster nanny, whom he adored. (The initiation of a new family tradition perhaps?) After the step-father's release from the Tower they all moved into Longleat, but it was a curious situation in that they all relied so much on the young Thomas' survival, without feeling emotionally involved in it. He was pampered with the luxury furnished by the estate, without either parental concern or guidance. The sickly unloved child was soon transformed into a spoiled brat, obstinately self-willed, and yet lacking any disciplined sense of purpose. So the rule of discipline was severely applied, by a succession of tutors encouraged to emphasise that he was supposed to emerge as "a young nobleman", (whatever that phrase might have been intended to imply.)
By the time he had reached the age of twelve however, Lord Landsdown departed from Longleat - because the marriage had failed. Lady Mary who was weak-willed and coquettish, decided that something had gone awry with her son's development. So she switched tactics, now permitting total freedom from discipline, whereupon the boy grew unruly and his temper a lot worse. And with the knowledge at last that Longleat belonged to him only, he began contradicting her instructions, and thus undermining her authority with the servants. And when the young Thomas wrote to the trustees in an attempt to dismiss his tutors, they decided that the only sensible solution was to send him to Eton, which blunted his arrogance in that he was then obliged to mingle with boys in a similar disposition to himself.
Another tactic thought up by his mother and the trustees, to induce the young Thomas to become more humane, was to marry him off at an early age; and the bride they selected for him was Elizabeth Sackville, the fourteen year old daughter of the Earl of Dorset. Thomas himself was packed off on a prolonged European tour, to complete his education, and to avoid the embarrassing possibility no doubt, that he might insist on the marriage's consummation before his bride had been emotionally prepared for such an event. The two children never did get round to it however, for Elizabeth fell ill and died while Thomas was still in France; and on finally returning to Longleat in 1731, aged twenty-one, he decided he'd had enough of people arranging his life for him, and persuaded his mother to take up her residence elsewhere, (in Berkshire.) They were never reconciled, and four years later she died.
Of rather more enduring influence over the young man was Lord Landsdown's niece, Mary Carteret (or Granville), who on marriage became Mrs Delany. (Some of her portrait silhouettes which she cut from black paper are preserved at Longleat up in the Old Library). In the absence of any stronger maternal influence, it was she who now undertook to guide the attention of this vain, yet physically unattractive young horror to some inappropriately beautiful and sweet-tempered young filly - on the theory that being mistress of Longleat would compensate for it all. And the girl selected for this honour was a relative of hers, Louisa Carteret, daughter of the Earl of Granville.
Louisa was in fact related to her future husband too, as his second cousin once removed, through lines of descent which I should perhaps explain - not least because it will show how the 1st Viscount's genes, and the royal descent of his wife Frances Finch, were reintegrated within the direct line of Longleat descent through their daughter, Frances, the sister of William who died young and without issue. For Frances Thynne went on to marry Sir Robert Worsley; and it was their daughter Frances Worsley who married Lord Carteret, (subsequently Earl of Granville), who was the father of Louisa Carteret. There was perhaps some poetic justice in the idea that the Longleat line did, after all, come to descend from the 1st Viscount, through the manipulative marital arrangements of his clan.
I n other ways the young couple were perhaps not quite so well matched. Mrs Delany's own recorded verdict on Thomas was that he was "warm in temper, for he cannot bear contradiction and has not discernment to be reasoned with." Yet she could not very well escape from the responsibility of having saddled sweet Louisa with this young brute, so the judgement she pushed in her direction was that he was "affectionate and good natured." Someone who expressed herself rather more bluntly was Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough who, when writing to her grand-daughter, lamented that the "agreeable" Louisa should be marrying "such a pig". And the poor girl was only nineteen years old.
The 2nd Viscount's idea of the fit use of Longleat was as a hunting ground. Lord and Lady Landsdown had already permitted the ornate gardens to degenerate into little better than a tangled scrubland, and some of it he now turned back into pasture land. He had always been an accomplished horseman, for it was all part of becoming "a young noblemen", (the image which had been foisted upon him as a child.) His hunting activities as a young man are portrayed in the huge set of paintings by Wooton, which he commissioned to hang in the Great Hall. His supercilious, and arrogantly pouting face peers down from the walls of Longleat, far more frequently than has come to be regarded as his due.
Marriage and fatherhood wrought their benefit upon Thomas, for Louisa evidently brought out the best in him. He even started paying attention to the needs of Longleat, and its tenants, although his special imprint upon the environment was limited to the laying down of a front drive between an avenue of elm trees, (now replaced by tulip trees.) The young couple also spent much of the year in their London house, where Louisa was held socially in high esteem.
Of their relationship Mrs Delany noted: "He is excessively fond of her, which I do not wonder at, for if anyone's heart is to be won by merit, she has a good title to his. I never saw more complaisance and sweetness of manner than she has in her whole behaviour." As for Thomas, Mrs Delany wrote that his time was mis-spent. He was impressionable, inclined to drink, and "easily worked on by those who have his ear." But if this period is to be regarded as the happiest within a sad life, it wasn't to endure for long. After giving birth to a third son within four years of marriage, Louisa's health deteriorated suddenly, and on Christmas day 1736, she died, leaving Thomas "like a madman", (as Mrs Delany records.)
According to family legend, Louisa's ghost still haunts Longleat. Thomas had become insanely jealous of one of his employees at Longleat, (or so the story runs,) supposing the man to be Louisa's secret lover - though I should perhaps interject at this point that the 2nd Viscount was of notoriously poor judgement, so could have been prone to believe any tittle-tattle that was whispered in his ear by those who stood to advantage themselves from the servant's dismissal. But it would have been in character for Thomas, under such circumstances, to have flown into a blind rage; and according to the legend in any case, the faithless retainer was murdered by getting flung down the spiral staircase, which descends from the top passage within the east wing of the house. It is up on that top passage that the beautiful Louisa is still said to be searching for her vanished 'lover'.

A lady in green or grey (the tale is flexible)
treks the eternal circuit of the upper floor,
ignoring assured statements from solemn faces
that the places are empty - the devoted servant fled.
Her tread animates the creaking passage boards
from a store of blended (if loosely remembered) legends,
to register atmosphere more real than the pallid
reality, within his palace of squabbling unrest.
Her zest for life had wilted on its wizened stem,
as trembling doubts paraded possibilities,
filling her youthful well-instructed head
with dread perception of permanent marital bonds.
Within that troubled brood where she belonged,
she feared the worst, on sensing drastic wrong.

My feeling is that it would be curious if this man's direct descendants (amongst whom I myself am numbered,) would have seen fit to concoct such a legend unless there were some truth in it. And it is interesting to note that in 1915, when a boiler for central heating was first installed at Longleat, the workmen down in the cellars uncovered beneath the flagstones a skeleton, wearing jackboots dateable to this period. The remains were then placed within a hatbox (as I've been told), and quietly interred within Horningsham churchyard.
Whatever the reason, Thomas was so much turned against the thought of continuing to live at Longleat after the death of Louisa, that he took his brood of three young children, plus the aged nanny, and moved to a small house in Horningsham (opposite the contemporary war memorial:) quite inconsolable, as Mrs Delany liked to think. As for Longleat itself, it was emptied, the windows shuttered, and the entire domestic staff dismissed, for he had lost all interest in the estate, which now plunged heavily into both debt and disrepair.
His stable (including race horses) was perhaps all that kept his interest in Wiltshire alive, although up in London, he was not without achievement and esteem. He was Grand Master of the Freemasons, Keeper of Hyde Park, Ranger of St James' Park and Keeper of the Mall: not that any of these posts might have been said to furnish him with his prime interests in life.
Then finally in 1751, at the age of forty-one, he died, arranging in his will that he should not be laid to rest in the family vault at Longbridge Deverill. Instead of that, (and with certain retrospective poetic justice perhaps,) he was buried in the same churchyard at Horningsham where the remains of the mystery corpse were also, at a later date, to join him.
If my judgement upon the 2nd Viscount be too harsh, let me now soften it by quoting a poem, found amongst his papers and probably composed by himself - unless we should suppose that it was some favourite verse by another, which he copied out in his own hand. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt: in which case there may have been a sensitive (if troubled) soul concealed beneath those petulant features; and it might seem that he was aware that he had led a wasted, if exalted life, where death itself is the final leveller.

Can costly robes or beds of down,
can all the gems that deck the fair,
can all the glories of the crown,
give health or ease the brow of care?

The sceptered king, the burdened slave,
the humble and the haughty die.
The great, the good, the just, the brave,
in dust without distinction lie.

The 2nd Viscount's two surviving sons were named (you'll never guess!) Thomas, and Henry Frederick. But it is only the former who should concern us here. He was eighteen when he succeeded his father as the 3rd Viscount Weymouth and, at twenty-one, he took the decision to move back into Longleat. This was in 1754. He was charming, ambitious but lazy, and on an even more dubious note, he was to be described later as a man of unprincipled cunning.
During these early years there may also have been some doubts concerning his sexual orientation. George II commented that he could not be "a good kind of man", since he was never seen in the company of women.: the gaming tables, and the drinking of strong beer in the company of his fellow men, being all that he appeared to enjoy. And Lady Caroline Fox observed dryly that he was "a very pretty man" - for which his descendants should be grateful, since it entailed that Louisa's (rather than her husband's) looks had been genetically transmitted within the main line of the Thynne family. And on the question of sexuality, at the age of twenty-six, Thomas set the record straight by marrying Lady Elizabeth Cavendish-Bentinck, the twenty-five year old daughter of the Duke of Portland, by whom he had children frequently. In retrospect, it was regarded as a happy marriage, despite there being so much publicised infidelity on his side.
The 3rd Viscount launched himself with some extravagance into the task of bringing Longleat back into good repair: both the house and the grounds. But the fashion in landscape had now turned away from ornate gardens such as had been introduced by the 1st Viscount, towards the romantic idea of enhanced natural settings. The task of transforming the Longleat landscape was entrusted to Capability Brown, so as to enfold the house within its park, as if the one really belonged to the other. Huge quantities of earth were displaced and resituated, all by hand. The shape of the leat was changed, although not into the form that we know today, and the empty scrubland became woodland plantation, surrounding the rolling pastureland of the park, with Longleat as the jewel at its centre.
Within this new pastoral setting, the young household developed idyllic ways. A grotto was built to house an imported hermit who, in return for his stipend, must dress in sackcloth, with both hair and fingernails uncut, refusing to answer when addressed by any of the Longleat employees. But it is recorded that he debunked from his post, and was later found drinking in a Warminster tavern. There were also fun and games nearby the hermit's grotto, involving a ring of small boulders reminiscent of Stonehenge: for dancing in all probability, as if the ring furnished some kind of a maypole. But an exact description of such merriment has not survived.
Thomas' political career began to take off when George III came to the throne in 1760. It was only then that he received his first official post, as Lord of the Bedchamber. He then became associated with the fourth Duke of Bedford and the influential group known as the Bloomsbury Gang, containing members of the landed Whig aristocracy who dominated political life during the early years of the King's reign. But his taste for gambling, in addition to the landscaping of Longleat's park, brought him near to bankruptcy, so that some kind of official remuneration for his work became more than just desirable. And through Bedford's influence, in 1765, he was offered the vacant post of Secretary of State for Ireland: pocketed the year's salary of £19,000, and promptly resigned - without ever having actually visited the place, and despite the fact of owning a large estate out there.
When he next held office, in 1768, it was as Secretary of State for the North: to be transferred later that year to being Secretary of State for the South, just at the time when John Wilkes was causing trouble, and London was threatened with mob rule. Thomas thus became responsible for the maintenance of law and order: a task to which he was ill-suited, being of too indolent a disposition. So in 1770, he seized an opportunity to resign, in that he found himself the only member of the cabinet in favour of declaring war against Spain, in a dispute over the ownership of the Falkland Islands.
By 1775 he was back as Secretary of State, with special concern for the North American colonies. This was just after he had acquired a vast estate of 700,000 acres in North Carolina, (bequeathed to him by his Carteret uncle, Earl Granville, since Louisa's brother had finally died without an heir. But with the disaffection of the settlers in that state, he never managed to get his ownership of the land properly authenticated. Nor could George III or his Prime Minister, Lord North, furnish any assistance in that, between the three of them, they had already alienated the entire American colonies, culminating in their Declaration of Independence. They were all in this business together however, so they had few reproaches to offer one another.
On finding himself with debts in excess of £25,000, Thomas was persuaded to give more of his time to the efficient management of the Longleat estate, which necessitated that he should extricate himself completely from politics. He had served under Grenville, Rockingham, Grafton and North, but he had never scintillated as a minister, and had certainly drawn the fire of some of the government's enemies. He was the first member of the Thynne family to get pilloried in the gutter press, (by Junius amongst others:) mainly as a gambling debauchee, who was too fond of his claret, burgundy and port, but also because of an affair with Harriet Lambe, a noted courtesan. Despite all this he had acquired for himself a certain public respect as an astute parliamentarian, who was once described as a prompt and graceful speaker: "though to profit by the latter it was necessary to follow him to White's, to drink of claret, and to remain at table to a very late hour of the night."
On hearing of his intended resignation, George III endeavoured without success to persuade him to soldier on for a few years. This was in 1789, a year when in France at least people were having second thoughts about the value of aristocracy. But the King now decided to reward the fifty-six year old Viscount by conferring upon him a Marquisate: the marquesses being largely a Hanoverian innovation, introduced within the hierarchy of the British peerage so as to remain lesser in aristocratic standing to the dukes, and yet superior to the politically troublesome earls. They were a new breed of noblemen, powerful, and yet of relatively recent rise to national distinction.
To bring Thomas' career to its social zenith, George III and Queen Charlotte came to spend two nights at Longleat. They were feasted and paraded before a loyally carousing throng, in a pageantry such as Longleat had not seen since the visit of Queen Elizabeth I. And before his departure the King was heard to remark that "everything at Longleat is very good."
So Thomas now became known as the 1st Marquess of Bath, and he passed the final seven years of his life predominantly at Longleat, endeavouring to get the finances of the estate into good working order. And as an initial gesture of a reformed life style, he sold off the contents of his wine cellar.
His interests were still wide, as can be noted for example in his collection of telescopes and scientific instruments, which are still preserved in the house. But his main concern was for agricultural improvement, even receiving an award from the Bath Agricultural Society for his research to discover which breed of sheep are best fitted to the pastures of the West Country. The woodlands that he had planted some thirty years earlier were just beginning to take shape, and the farms were now profitable. The mortgages taken out by the 2nd Viscount were all repaid, but his own extravagance in matters of modernisation necessitated a new loan, this time for as much as £80,000.
His health was also failing, as the years of dissipation began to take their toll, and the use of a sedan chair was forced upon him by his gout. On a visit to London in 1796, he died. A 700-man mounted escort returned his corpse to Longleat, and he was buried in the family vault at Longbridge Deverill. If he had failed to obtain any real political success, he had still succeeded in rescuing the estate from near ruin; and he left behind him the new woodlands, Capability Brown's park landscape, nine children, his title and his debts.

The 2nd Marquess of Bath, who was once again called Thomas, inherited when he was thirty-one years old. He was a far shyer man than his father, less sure of himself perhaps, but free from excesses in either gambling or drinking habits. He was married to a plump, homely, jovial woman: Isabella Byng, the daughter of Viscount Torrington, who bore him eleven children, some of whom were to give cause for embarrassment. But I'll be coming to all that later.
Isabella made it her special concern to involve herself with the estate tenants, with schemes to improve their conditions, while Thomas applied his attention to the task of completing, or rebuilding, the parts of Longleat which were left incomplete in the 16th century, refashioning portions of the garden and park, and generally consolidating the estate after his father's life of extravagance. Not that he himself stinted on spending money where he deemed it necessary. By the year 1815 for example, he had paid out more than £100,000 upon the rebuilding programme. And the increased levels of taxation (to finance the Napoleonic Wars) no doubt made life difficult for them. But the fact remains that, by the time of his death, the estate had been set back into good order.
So let us examine what he did. Most of it indeed can be described in terms of what both Jeffrey Wyatt and Humphrey Repton (separately) constructed, on Thomas' commission. A north wing to the house was added, so as to enclose two courtyards. A system of corridors was also introduced, so as to lessen the dependence upon room to room entry or exit. And the walls of each bedroom were decorated with hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, towards the end of the century - and probably predating what rapidly became a fashion, once the Prince Regent had introduced such decor into his Brighton Pavilion. A grand front staircase appeared, replacing a smaller spiral one by Sir Christopher Wren, which the 1st Viscount had commissioned, while coal stoves, branched candelabra, and flushing water closets were included in the bathrooms for the first time.
The former assortment of stable buildings were replaced with a stable courtyard, more akin to the character of the house. An arching South Lodge was constructed, at the head of the front drive, and a Gothic Lodge to act as a boathouse, upon the new lake at Shearwater: (which was now filled with water, although the Warminster common land comprising its original basin had originally been enclosed by the 1st Marquess.) The meandering river, or leat, such as had been left by Capability Brown, was now resculpted into a series of lakes with waterfall, and a boathouse was introduced at the bottom of the garden. A picnic area was also laid out, upon a newly cleared hill summit, which they entitled Heaven's Gate.
Within the category of interests and hobbies, Thomas was concerned to carry on the traditions of the house. He acquired valuable items of furniture, and added to his father's collection of scientific instruments. He also collected first editions for the library, if somewhat indiscriminately, without any special theme. Isabella was of a more literary turn of mind, and as the unlikely aristocratic disciple of William Cobbett (who was after all a distinctly Radical MP,) she published a selection of his writings on self-sufficiency, presenting a copy to each of the cottagers on the estate.
This was an age when the social structure of Britain had been undergoing much rapid change, as it geared itself for the Industrial Revolution. But it was the practice of enclosing such common land as was only lightly farmed by the local community, which had deprived many people of their livelihood. The general practice of enclosures had been widespread over the past century, and the Longleat estate had no doubt profited from all this, but not so their tenants. There may have been increased opportunities for employment upon the estate, but Thomas and Isabella perceived how the ties between house and local community needed to be strengthened psychologically.
Picnicking was therefore encouraged within the estate grounds, and Longleat itself was, for the first time, thrown open to the public once a week and free of charge. Indeed there is a family legend of the 2nd Marquess being revealed in hiding, when an inquisitive tourist made too personal an investigation as to what some cupboard might contain. But the will existed to benefit others, and to be esteemed thereby. So he was probably an excellent choice in his appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Somerset. And in 1823, his career peaked when he was created a Knight of the Garter, although some peers were dismayed that he should thus have been singled out for such distinction after what had been a fairly quiet, if sober life.
His later years had in fact been troubled by the behaviour of his sons. Two of his daughters were to marry just as he might have hoped, to the Earl of Harewood and to the Duke of Buccleuch. But in 1820, and without consulting either parent, his twenty-four year old son and heir (Thomas, the 5th Viscount Weymouth), eloped to the continent with Harriet Robbins, who was the black-haired and beautiful daughter of the local tollkeeper. The Marquess was furious at this disruption of the family harmony, or indeed, of the whole family decorum and respectability.
A certain inflexibility in parental posture had suddenly raised its ugly head. For two months there was complete silence, but eventually a letter from Italy arrived, in which the young Weymouth wrote: "You know the remorse I feel for having given so many miseries to so good a father.... A sort of fate hurried us on.... I saw myself surrounded by misfortunes which I find at last were of my own making.... My mind was in a state of confusion and despair, and I am ashamed to say I tried to attach the blame on you. I did not dare open the last letter from you for a long time, but when I did, I flew to anything to drive away reflection...."
Weymouth had already blotted his copybook even before Harriet Robbins had captivated his heart, having almost got himself imprisoned for debt, and a reputation for drunkenness might indicate that he had inherited his grandfather's vices, without perhaps his abilities. But this 'discreditable connexion' by marrying Harriet was regarded as the last straw to the breaking of the relationship between father and son. It caused a rupture which was never to mend, despite some favourable reports concerning how the young marrieds were faring.
It was the Marquess' wish to exclude his eldest son from the Longleat succession, with money even offered to get Weymouth to relinquish his heritage. But it was declined with the assertion that they were happy to bide their time living in Paris, where they had finally settled, until his father died and Longleat would be theirs, to use as they pleased. And by the terms of the family entail, Weymouth had the law on his side, no matter what his father might threaten.
Of his younger sons, there were two (Charles and Edward) who caused some additional embarrassment to the family, principally by their debts, causing the 2nd Marquess to send a notice to the Times, disclaiming all responsibility for their insolvency. There isn't any clear record of what became of these brothers, but it is possible that Charles may have ended up in Canada, and Edward in Australia, inasmuch that there now appear to be distant Thynne 'cousins' on both of those continents, claiming recent descent from the Longleat Thynnes - although there appears to be no record of such emigrations within the family records. So the relationship may possibly be more distant.
Isabella had striven in vain to keep the family united, being the only one in the family to travel to Paris to stay with the Viscount and Viscountess. Before leaving, she forgave them for their "unkindness and misconduct". But as far as her husband was concerned, it was all to no avail. And after Isabella's death in 1830, there was no one left to help bridge the gulf between father and son. In fact the whole sense of there being a united family began to disintegrate, with both the Marquess and his heir, hanging on to their lives in a determination to outlive the other.
If the 2nd Marquess may have been too stern and rigid as a father, I must quote from the letter which Isabella had delivered to him after her death, and which speaks well for his role as husband. She wrote: "I cannot bear the idea of being snatched away from this world without bearing some testimony to the affection that has entirely filled my heart for my beloved husband. Accept my grateful thanks for all the kindness and happiness you have bestowed on me for so many years, which has been returned by the warmest affection that one mortal is capable of for another.... Talk to our children of your interests, of your affairs, and try to get reacquainted with theirs. Be their friend, as well as their respected father...." She wrote those last sentences with the understanding perhaps, that the family unity was crumbling, and that with her gone, it would soon fall apart.
In the event, the 2nd Marquess did manage to outlive his son, the 5th Viscount, but only by the skin of his teeth: by a matter of five weeks in fact. He himself was seventy-four when he died, and Weymouth a mere forty-one, with Harriet just a few years younger than that when she became a widow. So the family now awaited with bated breath to hear if she were pregnant. Insensitive suggestions were made about getting her to submit to an official examination, so as to preclude the possibility of her turning up at Longleat in years to come, having acquired a son of approximately the right age, to claim the inheritance retrospectively. Yet such cynicism proved unwarranted. Harriet went on to marry an Italian nobleman, and never did have any children. But in any case she did not attempt, nor wish to give any further trouble to the Thynne family.

Accustomed as you were to riding roughshod on the black
track of your pampered whims, you lost your heart
to the artful charms of a local country girl -
then hurled your fortune to the wind in hasty flight.
Frightening, implacable in his wounded pride, your father
would rather lose an errant son than accept
his inept and socially demeaning marital bond,
responding in wrath with threats of disinheritance.
The terrible ticking of calendrical clocks told
of the old man ageing, but holding it back
with unslackening grit in a mutual determination
to motion the other first to the life hereafter.
Although you hoped that time was on your side,
by early death your dreams were nullified.

The 2nd Marquess was succeeded by his second son, who had been christened (none other than!) Henry Frederick. Not a great deal has been left on record about the 3rd Marquess, but he was forty at the time he inherited, and was married to Harriet Baring, the daughter of Baron Ashburton, with two sons to reinforce the family's hopes that the dynasty might continue. He had spent most of his life in the royal navy, at one time commanding the sloop `Frolic'. Other commands followed, and he saw active service in the Mediterranean and South Atlantic. He was a sober, fair minded and competent captain, but little more can be said than just that.
He had never expected to inherit Longleat, so had rarely visited the place; and now that he found it to be his own, he admitted to feeling uncomfortable there. But in any case, within three months of the 2nd Marquess dying, he himself was dead, leaving his eldest six year old son to inherit Longleat, under the prolonged tutelage of the Dowager 3rd Marchioness.

John Alexander, the 4th Marquess of Bath, became known by the second of his forenames: Alexander being a family name of the Barings. And it should be appreciated that now, once again, (as it was before when Lady Landsdown was bringing up the 2nd Viscount,) a mother who had been widowed relatively young, found herself responsible for tutoring the heir to Longleat according to a cultural pattern of her own choosing. The Baring as opposed to the Thynne character therefore may well have been emphasised. But the 4th Marquess was old enough when his father died to retain some personal memory of him; and there were numerous uncles and aunts who, on their visits, were no doubt concerned to keep the Thynne traditions very much alive. The fact that Harriet Baring never saw fit to remarry is indicative that she may have preferred to identify herself within the Thynne family mould.
She had in fact displayed admirable competence and financial restraint in her management of the estates, with the assistance of various agents. There were in fact three estates at this time: at Longleat, in Shropshire and in Ireland. And by the time of Alexander's coming of age, there was more than £50,000 in the kitty. An additional point about Harriet is that, for the first time, she introduced a gene of substantial longevity into the Thynne family, finally dying in 1892 at the age of eighty-eight - a revered Victorian Dowager Marchioness, residing at Munpham Court in Sussex over the latter half of her life.
The 4th Marquess was by all accounts shy (like his grandfather,) attributable no doubt to the isolating nature of an upbringing at Longleat. There is a description of him by Thackery, who met him in Paris while still a very young man, as a high bred, high fed, petted and not over-wise young-man-about-town, whose greatest religion is brandy and water. But then intellectuals of that calibre do somewhat delight in the chance to demean those categories in society which have impressed upon them their unreasoned access to life's opportunities.
Alex (as he was more usually called) was in fact well educated - at Eton and Cambridge, of good intellectual standing and of high Christian principles. He was to be described in his obituary, many years later, as a highly cultured, scrupulously honest English gentleman of the best type, who remained unto the last under a cloak of reserve bordering upon hauteur, but one of the most kind-hearted of men.
A characteristic where he seems to have made some progress on his forebears was in his appreciation of art, developing a fervent admiration for the Italian Renaissance. This dated from his grand tour of Europe as a young man, although it was to be some years before it bore any fruit. Then deeming that Longleat was itself a building of that inspiration, he decided (in the fashion of many other Victorians) to imitate such an historical style of decor when refurbishing his home. He then embarked upon the construction of his dream interiors for Longleat, with a vision at heart of the palatial splendours he had viewed when in Italy.
Alex was thirty before he married. This was to Frances (Fanny) Vesey, the daughter of Viscount de Vesci, and reports varied concerning whether this was to be regarded as a good match. A friend of the family commented that his marriage to Frances would ruin the finest brains in Britain. Perhaps he was really just trying to say that she was shallow. But someone else found her high-minded and charming. Disraeli after two visits to the house (which he found profoundly gloomy,) had words of commendation however for his hostess, appreciating her gay, light-hearted good humour; and his comment upon Alexander, when in her company, was that he had never met a man so entirely absorbed in the existence of another.
Petite and elegant, her numerous dresses are still preserved at Longleat. In many ways she was, in character, the exact opposite to her husband, being witty and gregarious in contrast to his cool solemnity. Fanny's vivacity was perhaps the best possible antidote to Alex's own instinct for solitude. By encouraging impromptu house parties, dinners and outings, she saved him from fastidiousness and persuaded him to change his habits.
There had been a time when she had her doubts about the prospect of marrying him, being someone who carefully vetted those who were courting her. She once wrote to a friend about another suitor: "I want to know if he has family diamonds and much plate." And she nearly married Lord Longford, shortly prior to her marrying Alex. Subsequent generations of both Packenhams and Thynnes can be thankful that she finally decided against that match, in that their very existence today depends upon the genetic selection having been precisely as it turned out to be, after their second thoughts on the issue. But in any case it would appear that Fanny was well pleased with her final choice, in that she wrote to her mother shortly after returning from their honeymoon, to say: "I am so happy with Bath. His good qualities come out more and more every day."
The year when Alex inherited Longleat was 1837, coinciding with the accession of Victoria to the throne; and he was to die in 1896, just five years short of the Queen. The entire period can therefore be regarded as eminently Victorian, with the dignity and pursuits that would be regarded as typical of that age.
Significant too was the pomp and snobbery which now emerged as an important character of life amongst the family's servants and retainers below stairs. Now that the middle classes in Britain had become so important, and conscious of their own identity, the residual aristocracy (alongside the monarchy) had their own sense of identity delineated for them by the new social groups. An acceptance of the prevailing class divisions was taken for granted within Longleat's enlarged domestic household. Who was entitled to speak to whom, and with what degree of informality was all carefully regulated within what came to be regarded as standard etiquette, and literature on the subject soon rigidified the rules still further. Yet within that household, everyone knew his place, and much of the nostalgia within my parents' own generation found its inspiration here, in what they grew up regarding as a golden age for Longleat.
Alex is perhaps most remembered for his introduction of the Italianate decor (as previously mentioned) within all the grand rooms on the east wing of the house. But he also added his own collection of books to the library, having taken the French Revolution as his particular theme. In this and many other ways, he certainly left his mark on the place. And it was here that he entertained many famous guests, including royalty. For example the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra, who were at Longleat for four days in 1881 for a shooting party.
The 4th Marquess was thought to furnish the social centre of life in the West Country, in terms of being the tone-setter for those who wished to live decorously. While having been raised upon the Victorian ethos of duty, responsibility and self-improvement, he was relaxed to the point of shyness in his approach to such matters, always preferring home life interspersed with bouts of foreign travel, to any more determinedly ambitious goals.
It was his love of privacy which prevented him from really entering politics, although he did write an influential pamphlet on the situation in the Balkans. He also served as a special royal legate to foreign courts, on occasions when the Queen demanded such services of him; and he was appointed the Chairman, when the Wiltshire County Council first came into existence. In addition to all this, he was an Honorary Colonel in the Wiltshire Rifle Volunteers, and a Trustee of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
Alex had seen Longleat's prosperity reach its peak, and begin to decline. The years of agricultural depression had turned the scales of fortune against landed estates, in favour of the new industrial empires; and in his awareness of what was taking place within the country, he became morose and unsociable. Moreover someone described him as being preternaturally thin and singularly pedantic in his mannerisms. He had little faith in the ability of his eldest son, Thomas, to maintain Longleat and was pessimistic about the future of England and its empire.
It was during a final bout of travelling abroad, to get away from it all, that Alexander (at the age of sixty-five) finally died, and his body was returned to England for burial within the family vault at Longbridge Deverill. Fanny survived him, to continue the recent family tradition of there being a revered Dowager Marchioness, offering encouragement and wisdom in the background. Harriet, the 3rd Marchioness had prepared a new Dowager suite in the West Wing, for her own use whenever revisiting Longleat - decorated with Chinese wallpaper similar, if more recent, to the ones previously installed upstairs. And it was now Fanny's turn to have substantial use of this suite. She was to die much later during the first World War.

Of the six children fathered by the 4th Marquess, three had been sons, named with almost complete predictability Thomas, John and Alexander. If there had been a fourth, there should be little doubt that he would have been called Henry Frederick. Yet John had in fact been killed in a riding accident while still a young man; and of the two surviving brothers, Alexander was by far the most extrovertly sociable, remaining a popular womanising bachelor until his death in action in 1918. So it was Thomas alone of this particular generation, (which is to say the eldest brother and 5th Marquess of Bath,) upon whom rested all hope of sustaining a direct line from their father. Alternatively, the line would pass through the descendants of Alex's brother, Ulrick Thynne. The need for a son and heir to survive the gauntlet of life had always been a worry within the family.
Of Thomas' three sisters, there was Alice who was to marry Sir Hugh Shaw Stewart, a wiry little man with a brittle temper. "Bosh! Alice," he was often heard to say, when his wife was expounding her views. My mother describes her as having a curious Thynne family trait (shared to some extent by Thomas) of taking a deep breath, and rolling her eyes upwards until nothing but the whites could be seen, while at the same time fluttering her eyelids, and using this to emphasise any point she wished to make. She also displayed a tendency to pouch her food in her cheeks, like a monkey, unpouching it again later for digestion at her leisure.
The second sister was Katie, who was to marry Lord Cromer of Egypt. She was sweet and gentle, but was bullied by the other sisters, as a result of which she steered her own serene course.
Finally there was Beatrice who never married, and was the only one of my great-aunts to survive into my own day. She had been an art student at the Slade, and was painted on several occasions by Henry Tonks: some say romantically involved with him as well. She was certainly the most eccentric, and perhaps the most intellectual of the sisters. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by Beatrice and thought she possessed "not only rank, beauty and easy pleasant good manners but a kind of lazy pagan majesty, a natural grace." These qualities were no longer quite so visible by the time I knew her. But she was the only artist within recent generations on either side of my family.
The relationship between Thomas and his father had never been close. The 4th Marquess had mistrusted his son's reserve, describing it as "the evil he most has to combat", and Thomas' "strange reluctance to open his mind" made his father unwilling to involve him in the running of the estate during his own lifetime.
Educated at Eton and Bailliol College, Oxford, Thomas grew up shy, independent and self-reliant. After a period of travelling abroad, he returned to England and entered Parliament as the Conservative member for Frome: eventually in 1905, to serve briefly as Secretary of State for Ireland. But he was to become better known locally as the Chairman of the Wiltshire County Council, a post which he held for nearly forty years. In 1922 he was created Lord Lieutenant of Somerset and, finally, in 19.., a Knight of the Garter, which marked the summit of his career. Only the second Marquess had previously been rewarded with such high honour; but the reason for it, in the case of the 5th Marquess was attributed partly to his personal contribution to the war effort in 1914, when he turned Longleat into a hospital for the convalescence of those wounded at the front, (running it largely at his own expense,) and partly to his close personal relationship with the royal family.
Back in the 1880's when Thomas was still a very young man, it had been planned that he should marry the beautiful Princess Mary of Teck, who was currently in London completing her education. Being so shy a person however, Thomas gave her insufficient indication that this might still be the intention he had in mind. In fact against all the wishes of his parents, he had fallen in love with the frail and mysterious Violet Moncrieffe, whose very birth had been a matter of considerable social scandal.
More on that in a moment. But Thomas didn't know how to contend with the problem of neglecting to propose to the lady his parents so much anticipated would become their daughter-in-law. His solution was to go abroad, and he remained there until Princess Mary had fallen in love with someone else, who happened to be none other than the future King George V. So the story had a happy ending for both parties, in that Thomas now felt free to return from his travels, to plead more strongly for his parents' acceptance of the lady who had captured his heart. As for Queen Mary, (to call her by her subsequent name,) she became a life-long friend of my grandfather, in that he remained a trusted counsellor and representative of the Crown within the West Country at large.
The enigma surrounding the birth of the lady whom Thomas was eventually to marry is of course of particular interest to me, in that I am descended from her genes. My grandmother was the daughter of Harriet Moncrieffe, who had married Sir Charles Maudant, a close friend of the Prince of Wales. But after Violet's birth in 1869, Lady Maudant told her husband that he was not the father. In fact she went a lot further by confessing that there had been a number of lovers and that she had "done wrong" (as she put it) "with the Prince of Wales, often and in open day." The name she had mentioned with the greatest degree of affection was that of Lord Cole, who later became the 4th Earl of Eniskillen. But she also named Sir Frederic Johnstone, who had left her if not with child, then most probably with the venereal infection which she had acquired at this time: and her list included the Prince of Wales, with an additional three names also mentioned, some of which were not quite grand enough to merit official inclusion. But the net result was that Sir Charles started divorce proceedings against his wife in what became known as 'the Warwickshire scandal'.
Now it wasn't the custom in Victorian days to drag royalty through the divorce courts, but here was someone saying that the Queen's own son and heir had been guilty of adultery. Apart from Lady Maudant's own confession, letters and a valentine in the Prince's handwriting were found amongst her papers; and Sir Charles' servants swore that the Prince had visited Lady Maudant regularly when her husband was out of the house. When such evidence was disclosed, the whole nation was duly shocked.
Sir Charles was in fact restrained from citing the Prince as a co-respondent. To contend with the lady's own testimony, it was rapidly decided that she was insane, and merely fantasising upon her relationship with the Prince. She ended her days suitably castigated by Victorian ethics, locked away in an asylum. As for the rest, the Prince was called to give evidence, and recited a carefully rehearsed negation to a series of short questions, to the effect that there had never been any "improper familiarity or criminal act" between himself and Lady Maudant. The focus of attention was then permitted to shift towards Viscount Cole, who had indeed been cited, and who avoided the requirement of perjuring himself by going on a prolonged trip abroad. But the secret concerning who my great-grandfather may truly have been remains uncertain to this day, with an extensive analysis of all the relevant DNA, amongst the descendants of the parties concerned, being now perhaps the only method by which such a question could be resolved.
It was in 1890 that Thomas and Violet were married, when he was twenty-eight and she herself was twenty-one; and just four years later, at the death of the 4th Marquess, they moved into Longleat as the new master and mistress. There was a London house in Grosvenor Square which accounted for some of their time, but it was at Longleat where they mostly lived; and their residence was to span the reigns of both Edward VIII and George V.
The Irish estate had already been sold by the 4th Marquess, in his final years, to compensate for the loss in agricultural revenue elsewhere. The Thynnes had been absentee landlords at Carrickmacross, and despite an extensive charitable programme which had been implemented from time to time, their departure from the Irish scene cannot have been lamented. And Thomas himself was to sell off the Shropshire estate, immediately after the first World War, to compensate once again for the declining revenue from the Longleat estate.
In one respect however, Thomas set the estate upon a highly lucrative course by taking the decision to participate in the commercial exploitation of the Cheddar caves. It was not an idea which originated from himself, in that these touristic attractions were already a going concern. The two caves had in fact been discovered during the life of the 4th Marquess, the first in 1837 by a miller called Mr Cox, who had been quarrying for limestone to build himself a carthouse, when he had broken through into what is now known as Cox's cave. And right from the start, he had charged an admission fee to any tourist who expressed a curiosity to view the splendid array of stalactites and stalagmites, which it contained. Then during the 1880's, he had tried to sell the cave, but was prevented from doing so when the Thynne family's lawyers pointed out that it was the legal property of him who owned the farmland up above - who happened to be the 4th Marquess.
Then a second cave had been discovered by Mr Gough, a local entrepreneur who had long been probing around in the gorge, in the hopes of making such a discovery and then exploiting it. Much excavation was taking place during the 1890's, despite the fact that it had now been legally established where the ownership lay. He was however permitted to exploit the commercial potential of Gough's cave, in the same manner that Mr Cox was permitted to continue in the presentation of the other one. The sum of one shilling and sixpence was demanded of tourists in those days - which it should be noted was in fact a sizeable proportion of the current weekly wage.
No doubt there had originally been some resistance to the idea of the Thynne family participating in so blatantly a commercial venture. But the caves were now attracting the considerable public interest which they deserved. They had been carved out from the soft limestone crags, by the melting ice which swirled the gorge in an underground torrent during five successive ice ages. And there was additional public interest when the remains of a skeleton were unearthed in 1903, from a hollow cavity just a little way inside the entrance of Gough's cave. These bones were eventually to be dated as coming from the Palaeolithic age, some nine thousand years ago. They were promptly put on display to the visiting public, as the earliest of human remains ever yet to be discovered in the British Isles. And it was around this time that Thomas took these enterprises under his own wing, employing relatives of the Gough and Cox families to run them for him.
The commercial exploitation was still low key, but in any case it represented a start. He had taken the plunge, so to speak, by displaying a willingness (now that his father was safely deceased) to indulge in commerce. And it might be said that the business interests of the Longleat estate were thenceforward geared towards tourism, and what were ultimately to be described as the leisure industries.
Violet was a somewhat different brand of Marchioness to her predecessors, coming from a more risqué demi-mondaine background. Her uncertain parental identity may have coloured her own constant quest for identity with Deity: a search for God, that culminated in her adoption of the Christian Scientist faith. She was someone who set great store by her personal visions concerning events which were still to happen. ("Pictures before my eyes", as she chose to describe them.) And her children grew up revering what came to be known as her psychic powers.
To some extent she was a lonely figure, never fully coming to terms with the innumerable Thynnes who flooded through Longleat: cousins, great-uncles and nieces being all equally welcome. Violet lacked their sense of family unity and kinship. She took refuge in her religion, writing copious notes on the character of Christ, and the meaning of the Lord's Prayer. Amongst her papers is an enigmatic letter that suggests her sense of isolation went far deeper than anyone realised. It was written to her by a friend with whom she had shared a railway compartment on a journey across France, shortly before the start of the first World War. "The situation is this, we have mutually fallen in love with each other. If I had been a man, it would have been disastrous, but both being muddled women we are doing nobody any harm and ourselves, I think, a great deal of good, as we are able to give what the other lacks and help each other to play the game."
Another feature of Violet's life which may be regarded as illuminating, is that she loved animals, and started the Pets' Cemetery at Longleat. Their tombstones span the period of her residence at Longleat, and the tradition has been continued right up to the present day.
Violet's health began to deteriorate after the first World War. She could only walk with the aid of a stick, and spent much of her time in a wheel-chair, or lying upon a day-bed in her drawing-room. But she in fact survived until 1928.
Between the years 1895 and 1905, Thomas and Violet had five children. The eldest was John, followed by my aunts Kathleen, Emma and Mary. And finally came my father, Henry Frederick, a person who at that stage was regarded as of no particular significance within the family hierarchy. All this was changed however with the carnage of the first World War. John Alexander, the 9th Viscount Weymouth, was killed in action at Hulluch, near Vermelles - where he lies buried. The news came as no surprise to Violet, who had "seen" his death in one of her visions. The problem then was more a case of readjusting their appreciation of the eleven year old Henry, who was now their sole surviving son and heir.
It hadn't seemed to matter very much before, that his schoolwork was abysmally bad, but there were now fears that he might not be able to match up to the responsibilities that he would inherit. My father could remember his mother taking him outside to get a good look at Longleat, and then asking him if he felt he was capable of looking after the place. Thereafter, he would find himself gazing up at the great edifice, while exclaiming: "How can I look after you? I'll never be able to do it." And in some essential formative manner, this prescribed injunction became the cornerstone within the attitude-formation of the man who was eventually to become the 6th Marquess.
My father in his own telling of the tale, would admit to feelings of gross inadequacy, as a young boy, for the task that was thus being imposed upon him. He had not previously been encouraged to think that he was sufficiently significant a person to deserve such status. And this character trait, of humility concerning his own human capacity, was to remain with him for life. He had no intellectual pretensions, having failed for Eton, and only getting into Harrow after his father had pulled strings; and the same might be said, I daresay, for Christ Church, Oxford, where he was to read Agriculture - without actually sitting his final exams.
Signals that he was indeed regarded as an important human being however, were constantly being fed to him from the moment when he became the 10th Viscount Weymouth. And because he accepted unquestioningly the value of Longleat as something truly great, he accepted as a rider that, as scion of Longleat, some of it must wash off on himself. So he developed a curious blend of shy humility and ruthless arrogance, traceable perhaps to this sudden contrast in peoples' evaluation of his worth. And inasmuch that my father's attitude was to some extent formative on me, initially by his example and then, eventually, in terms of my reaction to it, I shall endeavour to paraphrase how he himself might have chosen to express it.
He might have said: "Hierarchy is an essential part of life. Longleat and all who belong in it, stand high within that hierarchy. I may not be especially bright. The entire Thynne family isn't especially bright; nor does it need to be, in that the power of Longleat is behind them. But I have my wits, and a certain flare of ingenuity, by means of which I can pull out of the bag all the tricks I need. With the help of my good looks and my charm, I could get away with murder if the need should ever arise. But of course I wouldn't dream of doing anything quite so bad as that. I only trick and cheat within moderation, to an extent that enables me to get my own way: but not more than can be forgiven me. It would surprise me greatly if anyone accused me of ever having been other than gentlemanly in my conduct. But what is a gentleman, if we get down to it? Survival of the fittest is what really governs our lives. And having Longleat in the blood is a real survival factor. If Longleat were to be destroyed, or taken away from us, I don't think I'd have the will to live for very much longer."

We now come to the point where my father, Henry Frederick Thynne, the 10th Viscount Weymouth, met my mother Daphne Vivian, daughter of Baron Vivian. They had first met while he was still at Harrow, but it wasn't until he was at Oxford that they really became attracted to one another. This was in the environment of the Twenties: a decade when society was trying to set the memory of the recent war's carnage firmly in the past, without much noticeable concern for the storm clouds of economic bad weather which were gathering. It was a world where the Bright Young Things danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom, mixed exotic cocktails and attended the fancy-dress parties given by Laura Corrigan, the ex-waitress widow of an American steel millionaire, who gave away jewelry and gold sock-suspenders to her guests.
Life for these people was an endless party, later to be satirised by Evelyn Waugh, who was an Oxford contemporary of my father's. (Waugh had disliked my father, and almost loved my mother, whom he regarded as his inspiration for characters like Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies.) They indulged in wild public-baiting games, which were all part of the syndrome of an aristocratic generation heavily losing out to the upsurge of proletarian power: games like 'Follow-my-leader' through Selfridges in Oxford Street, climbing over counters or otherwise enraging customers and shop assistants alike. It was a lifestyle which contrasted diametrically with the dignified restraint demanded of them by Thomas and Violet, on the occasions when Henry invited Daphne to Longleat. It comes therefore as no surprise that words of discouragement were heard when, in 1926, the young couple endeavoured to announce their engagement. Before proceeding however, let us pause to examine briefly, the ancestry of this Daphne Vivian, who was to become my mother.
The Vivian family were of similar antiquity to the Thynnes - if we discount the latter's claim to have Norman ancestry. They were settled at Trenoweth in Cornwall during the reign of Henry VII, and later moved to Trewan. A descendant, Thomas Vivian, (whose mother was a Cavell) married Lucy Glynn. Their son John Vivian, of Truro, became a Vice-Warden of the Stanneries. And it was his son, Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, who was in 1841 created the first Baron Vivian: famous in his day as being the man who led the last cavalry charge at Waterloo, which finally broke the back of Napoleon's army.
He was later appointed Equerry to George IV, ultimately with the rank of Lt-General. He married Eliza de Crespigny, and their son, Hussey Crespigny the second Baron Vivian, became Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, after a long spell of military service. He married Arabella Scott, who was in turn the daughter of Lady Arabella Brabazon, the sister of the Earl of Meath.
The next in line to succession was Hussey Crespigny the third Baron Vivian, who was a diplomat - eventually to be appointed the British Ambassador in Rome from 1891-1893. His wife, the beautiful Louisa Alice Duff, caused a certain stir in those circles by having a nervous breakdown while they were still in office. But she was more or less restored to good health by Dr Axel Munthe, and was able to return to her maternal duties in raising a large family, amongst whom was my maternal grandfather, George Crespigny Brabazon the fourth Baron Vivian.
George (by my mother's account) was a fierce eccentric, with a bullying streak and a love of practical jokes. At Eton, he had rowed in the VIII, and had been elected into Pop. He had then embarked upon a military career, serving as a cavalry officer with considerable distinction in both the Boer War, and in the first World War. Among his medals were the DSO, the Legion of Honour, and the Croix de Guerre, and he was eventually appointed Aide-de-camps to King Albert of the Belgians. His three sisters incidentally, were Maids of Honour to successive Queens Victoria, Alexandra and Elizabeth II. One of them was to marry Field-Marshal Earl Haig, while George himself married Barbara Fanning, an Edwardian beauty with aspirations to go on the stage.
This marriage was turbulent from the start. When they first set up house together, their quarrels were so violent that, after exhausting every throwable object in the room, they would use the baby as a missile. That baby was my mother. A year and a half later, a second baby was born. This was my Uncle Tony. Then a couple of years later still, Barbara ran off with another gentleman, leading to an embittered divorce suit. Cruelty had only recently been introduced as legal grounds for divorce, and it was cited for the very first time in Barbara's cross-petition against George. Nevertheless it was the father who retained custody, and Barbara's name was no longer to be mentioned within the household.
Not that this prevented Daphne from gleaning all the information she could about her disgraced mother - like the fact of her finally achieving her ambition by going on the stage: certainly not the profession for a lady of rank in that day and age. But this wasn't all that Barbara achieved. Over the course of a long life, she acquired five husbands in succession, and two additional children - with all but the final marriage being terminated by her sudden decision to bolt. Nancy Mitford is said to have been inspired by her example to create her own fictional character of 'the Bolter'. In any case there was a romantic side to such notoriety, and Daphne grew up craving to learn more about the absent mother whom no one was allowed to mention, while at the same time both hero-worshipping, and yet terrorised by her excessively dominant father.
Daphne had far more contact throughout childhood with her two grandmothers, who whole-heartedly detested each other after all the family mud-slinging engendered by the divorce. There was Louisa Alice Duff, the former Ambassadress, and there was 'Mouse' de Bathe, who first married Robert (or William Atmar) Fanning, and then the wealthy Harry McCalmont. She was a notable traveller and socialite. But if she levelled the charge of insanity at the rival grandmother, she had much to excuse herself in her choice of Barbara's father, Robert (or William Atmar) Fanning, who was perhaps equally insane. In any case he was an alcoholic, with a vile temper.
There is one story of him bringing two prostitutes back home with him, and then obliging them at pistol-point to undress and climb into bed with his wife, threatening to shoot the first lady to attempt an escape. And there they remained all night, although the tale doesn't furnish any enlightenment on how the situation progressed - apart from the fact that no one got shot. But Robert Fanning soon absconded from the scene, setting a fine example, one might note, to his young daughter Barbara.
My grandfather George was more fortunate in his choice of a bride in his second marriage, which was to Nancy Lycett-Green, by whom he produced two more children, my Aunt Vanda and my Uncle Douglas. Nancy was a Master of Hounds and a spouse far better fitted to George's own temperament, in that she was good-natured and (on the surface) placidly pliable - while at the same time keeping him under firm control in that she held the purse strings. To all appearances George may have dominated the family, but he must now have found himself financially restrained by the strong family ties of the Lycett-Green clan. The young Daphne was therefore given a comparatively stable upbringing, albeit as the daughter of a disgraced mother, and she was sent off to a variety of boarding-schools, from which she was invariably expelled.
When in 1926 my father Henry, and my mother Daphne were intending to become officially engaged, the two families were by no means enthused with the prospect. Thomas my paternal grandfather, wrote to George my maternal grandfather, to say that Henry was too young to think of marrying and needed a very steady wife. To this Lord Vivian bombastically replied that he disapproved of Henry and thought he would be a most unsuitable match for his daughter, to whom he intended making this thoroughly clear.
That is as much of the exchange of opinions that has gone down on official record. But unofficially, the Thynnes were even more concerned about what they regarded as the bad Vivian blood. People didn't usually talk about suspect genes in those days, but it was pointed out quite correctly that a sizeable proportion of the Vivians and their collateral relations had spent too much of their lives, hospitalised within asylums. Not that Henry's parents had any just cause to feel complacent about their own genes. Lady Maudant had after all, ended her days in such a place. But their general feeling was that Daphne was flighty, like her mother, and might well bring some additional insanity into subsequent generations of a staid and respectable family.
Henry's parents felt that the wisest approach was to persuade him to spend a year in America, by which time they hoped that Daphne's hold over him would have been broken. But my mother had no intention of giving him up quite so easily. At this particular period in their lives, Daphne was dominant, in that she was six months older than my father, and knew the ropes - so to speak - whereas Henry had been over-protected as a child. We shouldn't forget that he was his parents' one remaining hope for an heir to Longleat, in direct line of descent from themselves.
So my mother persuaded my father to marry her in secret, just before setting sail for America, where he spent six months working on a Texan cattle-ranch. His parents then relented, writing to say that he could return; but the marriage remained a secret even after that. Since all parental opposition to such a wedding had now been withdrawn, the young marrieds felt it prudent to say nothing about the legal splicing which had already occurred. Instead they displayed a commendable compliance with all that their parents suggested to them by way of playing the starring roles in the social big event of the London season: their second, but this time official wedding. This was in 1927.
Daphne's viewpoint on her new family, as an outsider, changed on closer acquaintance. 'The silent Thynnes' had been the descriptive term in general circulation around London at that time: from which it might be inferred that the family was clannish, wrapped up in its own isolated perspective upon existence, and shy of attempting communication with any wider audience. But Daphne discovered how this reputation was in stark contrast to the atmosphere which prevailed when the Thynne clan was gathered at Longleat, for the celebration of seasonal events like Christmas. She records that it was then a round of vehement exchanges between established sparring partners, with all and sundry participating in a general chorus of cliché personal jokes, delivered as old chestnuts, in a cross between affection and malice, and giving rise to shrieks of laughter and outbursts of ritual singing.
My grandfather had never greatly admired my father's capacity for hard work. But the need now was for Henry to settle down, and Thomas was aware that his son's passion was for Longleat and its estate. So inasmuch that he himself had never relished the sheer banality of estate management, he now decided to place his son in charge of it. There were rapidly some misgivings however, when Henry's enthusiasm prompted him to build a new piggery for the home farm, in a fashion which Thomas had been brought up to believe unnecessarily extravagant. Besides, the new buildings had been mistakenly sited: too far from the farm, and unprotected from the wind. And when the tenant farmer gave up breeding his pigs there, my father decided that he preferred the forestry to the agricultural side of the estate's industry. It was safer too, in that there was time enough to await the harvesting of his new plantations, without any immediate economic assessment of what his managerial skills might be worth.
There had already been one other apparent failure in Henry's incipient career in that, at Queen Mary's insistence, he had been appointed to the Council to advise the Prince of Wales in his running of the Duchy of Cornwall. My father was to retain throughout his life a sincere admiration for Edward VIII, as he later became - both as a romantic, and as someone so eminently up front in the trend-setting social elite; but this esteem was never reciprocated, and the Thynne family felt some chagrin when the Prince requested that young Henry should send in his resignation.
The loss of that position meant little to him personally, since his interest in life was already focused upon the Longleat estate. As a young married couple they had befriended Russell Page, the newly fashionable landscape gardener, and it was largely at his inspiration that Henry now turned his thoughts to the possibility of beautifying Loncombe drive, (at the entrance to the park,) with a blaze of colourful rhododendrons and azaleas - replacing the common varieties which were already growing there in profusion. It was a task which they tackled piecemeal, over the course of the next decade, with ultimate spectacular effect.
Henry was also concerned to upgrade the commercial potential of the Cheddar caves. Plans were now formulating in his head to build a whole complex of buildings, including a restaurant, on land at the opening of Gough's cave. This was not completed until 1933, but the decisions were taken at this time - thus to augment the scale of the whole enterprise at Cheddar.
There was also much else to occupy Henry's mind, for in deference to his father's ethos of public service, he agreed to stand for Parliament as the Conservative candidate for Frome. First, he had to spend a couple of years wooing the electorate, opening bazaars and the like. But he was finally elected to the House of Commons in 1931. It maintained the Tory-dominated National government in power, although with the former Labour premier Ramsey Macdonald still theoretically at the helm.
All of this electioneering took place while I was actually on the way, so to speak, awaiting the time of birth within my mother's womb. But I wasn't the first, or even the second child born to Henry and Daphne. Caroline, my elder sister, arrived in 1928, almost four years prior to myself. Henry's mother, Violet died shortly prior to her birth, firmly predicting that she knew the child was going to be a son, because sex (in her view) was determined by it being the opposite of the dominant parent. Henry was furious that she didn't live long enough to see that she was mistaken. Then a year later came Timothy, my elder brother, but he survived for less than a year - due to respiratory defects, involving a collapsed lung. But this brings the story of my ancestral background to the very threshold of my own birth: from which point, I shall resume the tale later.
However, let me first say a few words in summary of the general picture that I have described. There was never a question of me entering upon life's stage as an independent entity, with parents concerned to nourish any divergent degree of individualism that might emerge. I was conceived for their purpose of furnishing an heir to Longleat, and all individualism was expected to remain subordinate to that end. Traditions and expectations had to be learnt from the very start, but also the distinction between Thynne and Vivian family traditions and expectations. For there was a potential schism involved: particularly if we assess these concerns through the eyes of the two people who had married to become my parents.
The Thynnes, as my father viewed them, were a Saxon family of down-to-earth unpretentious respectability, with no fuss and nonsense about intellect or art, but a tradition to uphold as pillars of the establishment within the West Country at large. They had always been regarded as a family of outstanding significance within that arena, but they had never quite managed to produce any giant upon the national scene. Respected, but mediocre, could have been an outsider's verdict.
The Vivians on the other hand, as my mother viewed them, were a Celtic family of military and monarchist traditions, with a flare for adventure and daring. They were also less Philistine: more concerned about literature and art.
But my father and mother were united on a feeling that the first World War had swept aside the rigid conventions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and that they themselves were representative of the new breed of young people, eager to profit from the general release from social restraints. All this combined with a fundamental conventionality concerning upper class social mores. They were rebels against all outdated stuffiness, and yet they believed quite firmly in their own aristocratic elitism.
It was from origins such as these that my own sense of identity, and my own sense of revolt, were gradually to coalesce. I don't suppose it ever occurred to my parents, for a single second, that they themselves had initiated a revolt against the established traditions which, as I see it, was to become my own role in its ultimate clarification and fulfilment.

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