From Geoffrey Chaucer to Graham Greene, finding the literary and cultural legacy of Berkhamsted

From Geoffrey Chaucer to Graham Greene, Berkhamsted has a rich literary and cultural heritage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

There was so much to see in Berkhamsted during my visit earlier this month that I returned again this week. Apart from the castle and Saint Peter’s Church, which I described in a blog posting earlier this week, I was interested to learn more about the town’s many literary and cultural associations, from Geoffrey Chaucer and the ‘Physician’s Tale’ to Maria Edgeworth, William Cowper and Peter Pan, and to Graham Greene, Claud Cockburn and the early days of the BBC.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of the Canterbury Tales, is said to have visited Berkhamsted in 1389 to oversee renovations at the castle after he was appointed the clerk of the king’s works. During his time in office, Chaucer organised most of the king's building projects, including repairs to Westminster Palace and Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor, and work on the wharf at the Tower of London.

It is not known whether Chaucer spent much time working at Berkhamsted Castle. It is claimed by some sourves that while Chaucer was at Berkhamsted he got to know – or least know of – John of Gaddesden, who lived nearby in Little Gaddesden and who became the model for the Doctor of Phisick in the Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400.

Berkhamsted Castle … did Geoffrey Chaucer ever spend any time working there? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

However, Chaucer could never have met John of Gaddesden (1280-1361), who died almost a generation before Chaucer is said to have visited Berkhamsted. Indeed, the ‘Physician’s Tale’ is usually seen as an early work by Chaucer, probably written before much of the rest of the Canterbury Tales. The long digression possibly alludes to an historical event that may date it to 1386, three years before Chaucer is said to have visited Berkhamsted.

John of Gaddesden was a writer in his own right too. He was born near Berkhamsted, but spent most of his academic life in Oxford. He was the author of Rosa Medicinae (‘The Rose of Medicine’), or Rosa Anglica (‘The English Rose’). It was written between 1304 and 1317, and regarded as the first English textbook of medicine.

John of Gaddesden was a theologian, a fellow at Merton College, Oxford, a physician to kings and princes, and the most celebrated medical authorities of his day. It is said his medical works, alongside those of Gilbertus Anglicus, formed part of the core curriculum that underpinned the practice of medicine for the next 400 years.

The hymn writer William Cowper (1731-1800) was born in Berkhamsted Rectory, where his father, the Revd John Cowper, was the Rector, and was baptised in Saint Peter’s Church.

Although William Cowper moved from Berkhamsted when was still a boy, there are frequent references to the town in his poems and letters, and two windows in Saint Peter’s Church commemorate his life and writing. His popular hymns include ‘Oh! for a closer walk with God,’ and he give the English language the phrase ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’

Cowper was an active abolitionist in the anti-slavery movement. In the Victorian era, Cowper became a cult figure and Berkhamsted was a place of pilgrimage. He was quoted by the Revd Martin Luther King in his protest speeches in the 1960s.

Dean Thomas Charles Fry was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School for almost quarter of a century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), a prolific writer of adults’ and children’s literature, was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She lived in Berkhamsted as a child in the 18th century. She spent her early years with her mother’s family, living at The Limes, now known as Edgeworth House, in Northchurch, Berkhamsted.

Her mother died in 1773 when Maria was five. Later that year, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) from Lichfield, married his second wife Honora Sneyd, and Maria went with them to live on his Irish estate af Edgeworthstown, Co Longford.

Between 1904 and 1907, the five Llewelyn Davies boys were the inspiration for the author and playwright JM Barrie’s Peter Pan. Their grandfather, the Revd John Llewelyn Davies, was outspoken on social issues like poverty and inequality, and active in Christian socialist groups.

Their parents, Sylvia (1866-1910) and Arthur Llewelyn Davies (1863-1907), moved out of London and went to live in Egerton House, an Elizabethan mansion in Berkhamsted, in 1904, the year when Barrie’s play had its debut. The brothers were first cousins of the writer Daphne du Maurier.

The Revd Dr Thomas Charles Fry (1846-1930), was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School in 1887-1910. He was one of the pioneers in the work of the Christian Social Union, and was the author of Old Testament History for Schools, Social Policy for the Church and Sermons on Social Subjects. Later, as the Dean of Lincoln (1910-1930), Fry worked devotedly to raise funds for the restoration of the cathedral.

Saint John’s House, Berkhamsted … the birthplace of Graham Greene (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

While Fry was headmaster of Berkhamsted, his wife’s cousin, Charles Henry Greene (1865-1942), was second master and the housemaster at Saint John’s House. When Fry became Dean of Lincoln in 1910, Greene succeeded him as headmaster of Berkhamsted.

Greene’s brother, Edward Greene, once a highly successful coffee merchant in Brazil, also moved to Berkhamsted, and lived in some splendour at the Hall or Berkhamsted Hall, near the Rectory. Edward Greene bought the house in 1917 and was the last private resident there. The Hall was used by Berkhamsted School as a prep school from 1928, while the former gardens were sold off for housing development. By then, however, the house was suffering from dry rot, and finally it was demolished in 1937.

Both Charles Greene and Edward Grene each had six children and this influential generation of cousins were key figures in literary and cultural life in 20th century.

Graham Greene (1904-1991), one of the ‘School House’ Greenes, is the best known of these cousins. He was a bestselling novelist by the age of 28 and he was often tipped for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was also known as a politically contrarian, anti-American, a Catholic convert, a sometime publisher, a spy and a friend of Kim Philby.

In The Human Factor (1978), Graham Greene describes a scene in Saint Peter’s Church, Berkhamsted, when a sonic boom suddenly ‘shook the old glass of the west window and rattled the crusader’s helmet which hung on a pillar.’ The helmet is that of Sir Adolphus Carey – who lived 300 years after the crusades.

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (1910-1987), Graham Greene’s youngest brother, first made his name as a journalist in pre-war Nazi Germany. During World War II, he was in charge of BBC broadcasting to Germany. He later became the director general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, modernising the BBC at a time of great social change.

After retiring from the BBC, Greene published several books, including a collaboration with his brother Graham Greene, and made television programmes both for the BBC and ITV.

Their oldest brother, Herbert Greene, is often seen as the ‘black sheep’ in the family, and he became the model for several of Graham Greene’s antiheroes, such as Anthony Farrant in England Made Me.

Another brother, Dr Raymond Greene (1901-1982), was a doctor and mountaineer who took part in two Everest expeditions. He chaired Heinemann Medical Books from 1960 to 1980, and his autobiography, Moments of Being, was published in 1974.

The ‘Hall’ Greene cousins included the journalist Felix Greene (1909-1985), a creative figure in the early history of the BBC who set up its American offices in the 1930s. He first visited China for the BBC in 1957, and he was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he travelled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960s. He published books on China, Vietnam in 1960s and 1970s.

His brother Ben Greene (1901-1978) was a fellow pacifist, a Quaker and a key figure in the pre-war Labour Party. But he moved to the far-right politically, and during World War II he was imprisoned without trial along with the fascist Oswald Mosley.

The literary contemporaries of the Greene cousins at Berkhamsted School included Claud Cockburn (1904-1981), who lived later at Myrtle Grove in Youghal, Co Cork, from 1947, and in Ardmore, Co Waterford, in 1980. For many years, Claud Cockburn was a columnist with The Irish Times while I worked there, and some of his sons, including Patrick Cockburn, also contributed to The Irish Times.

Other writers and literary figures in school with the Greenes at Berkhamsted include Sir Peter Quennell (1905-1993); the diplomat Humphrey Trevelyan (1905-1985), who wrote a number of books about his career, including The India We Left and The Middle East in Revolution; and the diplomat and writer Sir Cecil Parrott (1909-1984), known for his translation of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk and The Red Commissar, his biography of Hašek, The Bad Bohemian, and his autobiographical books, The Tightrope and The Serpent and the Nightingale.

The children’s authors HE Todd, author of the Bobby Brewster books, and Hilda van Stockum have also lived in Berkhamsted.

Greene's Court … place names are reminders of the literary legacy of Berkhamsted (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The disturbing Irish links with the war memorial at Liverpool Street station

Sir Henry Wilson’s memorial plaque, beneath the World War I memorial in Liverpool Street Station, London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

On way back to Stansted Airport earlier this week, I changed trains at Liverpool Street station, and stopped for a moment to photograph once again Frank Meisler’s bronze sculpture of the Children of the Kindertransport.

It is a monument I have stopped at many times in the past, and it resonated particularly at this time as I reflect on my visit to Berlin the previous week.

Then I was reminded of the impressive World War I Memorial in Liverpool Street Station, and thought it was worth visiting once again as we approach the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

I pass through Liverpool Street Station regularly throughout the year, but as I stopped for a moment at this memorial, with a row of poppy wreaths at its base, I notice a smaller plaque with an image and the inscription:

To the memory of
Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson Bart
GCB DSO MP
whose death occurred on Thursday 22nd June 1922
within two hours of his unveiling
the adjoining memorial

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, war memorials were erected to employees in many public places throughout the islands, particularly in railway stations. The war memorial in Kingsbridge/Heuston station in Dublin, for example, is in particularly good condition.

As I stood silently in Liverpool Street Station on Wednesday evening, I realised, of course, that Henry Wilson was one of the leading Irish-born generals during World War I.

When he unveiled the memorial, dedicated to employees of the Great Eastern Railway Company, Wilson had recently retired from the army as chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) and had been elected to the House of Commons as the Unionist MP for North Down.

At Liverpool Street station, he spoke of the fallen, saying that ‘in doing what they thought right, they paid the penalty.’ Within hours of unveiling the memorial, he was assassinated on his own doorstep in Eaton Square by two English-born war veterans who had fought in World War I but who had become Irish republicans.

Wilson was born in Co Longford in 1864 into an Irish landed family. The Wilson family traced its family tree back to an ancestor who landed at Carrickfergus with William III in 1690 and settled at Rashee, Co Antrim. The family fortune was made a century later by his great-grandfather, Hugh Wilson, through a shipping business in Belfast. When Hugh Wilson died, the inheritance was used to buy landed estates in Dublin, Westmeath and Longford, and Henry Wilson was born at Currygrane, near Edgeworthstown, Co Longford.

Henry Wilson was unsuccessful in trying to get into Sandhurst and Woolwich, but he finally began a military in 1882 by joining the Longford Militia and training with the 5th Munster Fusliers.

His time in the Boer War forged a life-time friendship with Field-Marshal Earl Roberts (1832-1914), whose family was from Co Waterford. Roberts became Wilson’s patron, and recommended him for the post of commandant of the staff college at Camberley in 1907.

Wilson moved to the War Office in 1910 as director of military operations (DMO), where he developed a political alliance with the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law at a time when Irish Home Rule was a major political issue in Westminster. Wilson advised Law ‘that there was much talk in the army, and that if we were ordered to coerce Ulster there would be wholesale defections.’

The Curragh mutiny in March 1914 brought Wilson to the fore politically. Brigadier-General Hubert Gough (1870-1963), who also came from a Co Waterford landed family, and the officers under his command at the Curragh Camp in Co Kildare, warned they would not obey orders they believed would coerce Ulster into a united Ireland and they threatened to resign.

Wilson was one of the first to hear the news when General John Gough (1871-1915), younger brother of Hubert Gough, called to him at the War Office. The government, anxious to quash the crisis, provided a written guarantee that it would only order troops to assist the civil power in keeping law and order. Sir John French (1852-1925), later Earl of Ypres and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and also from an Irish family, agreed that troops would not be used to force Ulster to accept the Home Rule Bill.

Asquith considered taking disciplinary action against Wilson, but Wilson was now lionised as the ‘man who saved the Empire’ and became a popular figure on the political right.

Later, Wilson showed his military skills by securing the Anglo-French alliance and in planning the British expeditionary force sent to France after the outbreak of World War I. On a visit to the Western Front in 1915, Asquith dined with the officers, and over dinner remarked to French, ‘It is a curious thing, Field-Marshal, that this war has produced no great generals.’ Wilson quickly retorted, ‘No, Prime Minister, nor has it produced a statesman.’

Wilson was turned down for several promotions until Asquith’s resignation in 1916. As Prime Minister, Lloyd George brought Wilson back into the centre of events and appointed him Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) or professional head of the army in 1918, praising him as ‘the greatest strategist we possess.’

The War Memorial at Liverpool Street Station, unveiled by Henry Wilson in 1922 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

After the war, in June 1919, Wilson accepted promotion to field marshal, after Churchill had offered him a choice of promotion or a peerage. At 55, he was the youngest non-royal field marshal since Wellington. Wilson was also given the title of baronet, with the territorial designation ‘of Currygrane in the County of Longford.’ Over the next few years, he received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast.

Wilson remained CIGS until February 1922. As the Irish War of Independence unfolded, he disapproved of the use of the Black and Tans but advocated the declaration of martial law. But Lloyd George’s negotiations with Sinn Féin and the worsening Irish situation led to the disintegration of relations between the Prime Minister and Wilson. In Wilson’s last eight months as CIGS, the two men barely spoke. Wilson thought the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed on 6 December 1921, a ‘shameful & cowardly surrender to the pistol’ by a ‘Cabinet of Cowards.’

With his resignation, Wilson turned his attention to party politics Westminster, and in 1922 he was elected unopposed as the Unionist MP for North Down. He was then 57 and had spent 40 years in the army.

Wilson’s contributions in the House of Commons were few, but were well received, even by his opponents. Asquith noted that on his maiden speech Wilson ‘spoke very well, and shortly, which is a real merit.’

He became the chief security adviser to the new Northern Ireland government, and Irish nationalists identified him with security policies in Northern Ireland, but wrongly linked him to Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics. Wilson was a devout member of the Church of Ireland, and on occasion attend Roman Catholic services, but disliked ritual, especially among Anglican clergy.

Wilson was in full uniform when he was murdered on the steps of his home at 36 Eaton Place, London, on 22 June 1922 by two IRA members, Reginald Dunne and Joe O’Sullivan. One report says Wilson turned on his attackers with the word, ‘You cowardly swine!’ The assassination came five months after the Anglo-Irish treaty was signed, ending the War of Independence and just a few months after he was elected an MP.

Wilson’s assassination shocked the nation. It was the first assassination of an MP since the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in 1812 and the last until Airey Neave’s assassination by the INLA in 1979.

Wilson was given a state funeral, the streets were thronged with mourners as the gun-carriage bearing his coffin body moved through the streets, and was buried in the crypt in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, beside his patron, Earl Roberts.

His murder led directly to the Civil War in Ireland, but to this day no historian has determined with satisfaction who ordered the murder.

The British government blamed the anti-treaty rebels, then occupying the Four Courts in Dublin. The British told the provisional government in Dublin to deal with the Four Court rebels or they would deal with them.

Arthur Griffith called Wilson’s shooting an ‘anarchic deed.’ The Defence Minister, Richard Mulcahy, threatened to resign. The leader of the anti-Treaty side, Eamon de Valera, said: ‘The killing of a human being is an awful act, but as awful when the victim is the humble worker or peasant, unknown outside his own immediate neighbourhood, as when the victim is placed in the seats of the mighty and his name known in every corner of the earth ... I do not know who they were who shot Sir Henry Wilson, or why they shot him ... I do not approve but I must not pretend to misunderstand.’

Under pressure from the British, Michael Collins borrowed two 18-pounder guns from the British army and shelled the Four Courts, leading to the Civil War.

Some historians have speculated that Collins ordered the assassination of Wilson before the treaty and forgot to rescind it. Some suggest it was a provocative act to give Collins the carte blanche to attack the Four Courts garrison. Scotland Yard investigations centred around the involvement of Sam Maguire, Collins’s chief intelligence officer in London.

Others suggest Dunne and O’Sullivan acted on their own, believing it would provoke a British retaliation and unite nationalists who had been bitterly divided by the treaty. Dunne had been in Dublin visiting Collins and Rory O’Connor in the Four Courts a week earlier.

Dunne and O’Sullivan were caught by an angry mob shortly after the shooting. Both were born and reared in London, and were army veterans. O’Sullivan had lost a leg at Ypres, but both men went on to join the IRA after World War I.

At their trial, the two were prevented from making a speech from the dock. They were hanged on 10 August 1922. Twelve days later, Michael Collins was killed in the Irish civil war.

The Wilson memorial in Liverpool Street, erected in 1922-1923, is the work of Charles Leonard Hartwell (1873-1951). It includes a bronze portrait mounted on marble tablet, and is signed in the bottom left corner of the relief panel, ‘C Hartwell ARA.’ Later Asquith would say Wilson was ‘not a man whom I would trust,’ while Lloyd George considered him ‘an intense and intriguing politician all the days of his life’. Wilson’s reputation was ruined in 1927 with the publication of an official biography that quoted extensively and injudiciously from his entertaining, indiscreet, and wildly opinionated diaries.

The bodies of Dunne and O’Sullivan’s were brought to Ireland in 1967, and reburied in the Republican Plot in Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin. Sean Mac Stiofain, who was to become the Chief of Staff of the IRA, delivered the main oration, and an IRA firing party emerged from the crowd and fired a volley of shots over the graves.

A row of poppy wreaths beneath the War Memorial at Liverpool Street Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Ardagh House has survived rebuilding, fires and neglect over three centuries

Ardagh House, built in 1730 and rebuilt in the 19th century, is at the heart of Ardagh in Co Longford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

While I was visiting the church sites in Ardagh last week – including the site of old Saint Mel’s Cathedral, the ruins of a mediaeval church, and the 200-year old Saint Patrick’s Church – I was constantly aware of the presence of neighbouring Ardagh House.

The arrival of the Fetherston family in Ardagh in the early 18th century had a major influence on the life and character of this Co Longford village for the next two centuries.

The Fetherston family built Ardagh House as its residence, laid out Ardagh as a planned village, built many of the houses and cottages for their estate workers, helped to rebuild the parish churches, and also supplied the clock tower, one of the most visible landmarks in the village.

The first members of the Fetherston family moved to Ireland by 1651. Thomas Fetherston bought a house in Ardagh and 235 acres of land, from the Farrell family around 1703.

Around 1730, he built Ardagh House, which is now an eight-bay, two-storey – but originally three-storey – over-basement house. The house was standing in 1744-1745, when Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) visited Ardagh on his way between Ballymahon and Edgeworthstown. Ardagh House was so magnificent that the young Goldsmith mistook it for an inn. The Featherston family played along with his mistake and pretended to be the servant girls.

Goldsmith’s adventure at Ardagh House inspired the plot of his most successful play, She Stoops to Conquer, although Samuel Lewis states in 1837 that the play in question is Mistakes of a Night.

Thomas Fetherson died in 1749. His eldest son, the Very Revd John Fetherson, was Dean of Raphoe, while his youngest son, Sir Ralph Fetherston (1731-1780), who was MP for Co Longford (1765-1766), inherited Ardagh House and received the hereditary title of baronet in 1776.

Ardagh House and the title passed in 1780 to Sir Ralph’s son, Sir Thomas Fetherston (1759-1819), the third baronet. His son, Sir George Ralph Fetherston (1784-1853), then became the third baronet. He was educated at Trinity College Cambridge and was MP for Co Longford (1783-1800) and High Sheriff of Co Longford (1834). Sir George and his wife, the former Frances Solly, were mainly responsible for rebuilding Ardagh House, and laying out Ardagh as a planned, estate village.

Ardagh House, built in 1730, was altered in 1826 and again in 1863 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

John Hargrave (1788-1833) carried out ‘trifling alterations for Sir George Fetherston’ at Ardagh House in 1826, and the house would be altered again in 1863.

Ardagh House is set in landscaped surroundings to the north of Ardagh, and beside the ecclesiastical sites associated with Saint Patrick, Saint Mel and Saint Brigid.

Although Ardagh House was first built in the early 18th century, the house now has a predominantly early-to-mid 19th century appearance. The elegant porch and conservatory, and the former ballroom block to the east, were also added at this time.

The house has a single-bay porch with a tetrastyle porch to the centre of the front façade on the south side, adjoined to the east by a four-bay, single-storey conservatory to the east.

The house also has a three-bay, two-storey block, formerly a ballroom, that is attached as the south-east end, and there are multiple extensions to the east and the north-east of the house. There are gates and gate lodges to the west and the south-east, and the adjoining complex of outbuildings includes a stable block.

The estate walls surrounding Ardagh House were built mostly during the famine in the 1840s, when they provided relief work for the local population. Two road entrances from the village led into the grounds of Ardagh House. These entrances are beautifully built of cut stone with wrought iron railings and each with a gate lodge.

When Sir George died in 1853, he was succeeded briefly by his youngest brother, the Revd Sir Thomas Francis Fetherston (1800-1853), as fourth baronet, but he died six weeks later.

His eldest son, Sir Thomas John Fetherston (1824-1869) then succeeded to the estate and title. He carried out major work in extending the original house and in re-designing Ardagh village as a tribute to his late uncle Sir George. This work involved moving the main street away from the front of the house to its present location, the creation of the village green and building of most of the present houses. Much of this work was carried out with his widowed aunt, Frances Elizabeth, Lady Fetherston, who built the Clock Tower beside the Village Green in memory of her husband.

The Fetherston family developed much the village of Ardagh, mainly in the 1860s, and this work continue after Sir Thomas died on 21 September 1869.

During this period, the Dublin-born architect James Rawson Carroll (1830-1911) carried out extensive ‘alterations, repairs and additions’ for Sir Thomas Fetherston in 1860-1864.

Carroll was articled to George Fowler Jones, the architect of Cloghanadfoy Castle, Co Limerick. Carroll set up his own practice at 180 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, in 1857. By the end of 1870 he had been appointed architect to the United Diocese of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh.

Carroll had a considerable country house practice as well as designing several churches and other public buildings. In 1882, he took his nephew and pupil John Howard Pentland into partnership.

The last of the Fetherston baronets was Sir Thomas’s only son, the Revd Sir George Ralph Fetherston (1852-1923), who was still in his teens when he inherited the title and estates. He was in his mid-20s when he entered Salisbury Theological College to prepare for ordination in the Church of England. He served as a curate in Tenby and Worcester, and for six years was the Vicar of Pydeltrenthide in Dorset.

During World War I, he was an honorary chaplain to Millbank Military Hospital in London. He was one of the first two Anglican priests to serve as sheriff in his county, which was not permitted before the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. As High Sheriff of Co Longford in 1897, he received the Diamond Jubilee Medal and preached the Jubilee Sermon marking Queen Victoria’s jubilee in Saint Patrick’s Church, Ardagh.

His interests and hobbies included music, travel, cycling, fishing, photography, collecting ancient china and stamps, bird-watching and the study of insects. He travelled widely in Europe, Africa, North and South America, and was a Fellow and Vice-President of the Guild of Church Musicians and of the Victoria College of Music. He composition 150 alternative tunes for Hymns Ancient & Modern, and various chants, songs and other music.

The Fetherston estate extended to about 11,000 acres by 1900. But Sir George took little interest in the Ardagh estate, which was administered by trustees. For example, the plasterwork at Ardagh House was carried out in 1877 on behalf of the Fetherston trustees.

In 1903, Sir George entered into agreements with over 300 tenants to sell to them the freehold of their farms under the Irish Land Act 1903.

The Ardagh estate was not acquired by the Irish Land Commission, but instead it advanced the money needed by the tenants and others, and the holdings were vested in them by the Commission in 1922-1923. An area of 427 acres of bog land was vested in trustees for the use of buying new freeholders.

Sir George continued to own Ardagh House and some of the original demesne land. An attempt to destroy Ardagh House by fire in 1922 during the Irish Civil War may have been a local expression of dissatisfaction with the allocation of estate land or an effort to hasten the sale of the last remnants of the estate. Manuscripts written in Irish were salvaged from the flames of Ardagh House.

Sir George died in a nursing home in Worcester in 1923. He was buried in Tenby, the South Wales where he had been a curate. He had never married, and when he died the title of baronet died with him.

Ardagh House was bought by the Sisters of Mercy in the early 20th century, and from 1927 they used it as a training college. But a fire in 1948 resulted in the house being reduced to two storeys in height.

Nevertheless, Ardagh House remains a substantial former country house and retains much of its early character. Despite the fire, and apparent neglect in recent years, the surviving fabric includes some timber sliding sash windows, console brackets to the porch, plasterwork and fireplaces. Ardagh House continues to form the centrepiece of a large group of related sites and is an important element of the social history of Ardagh and Co Longford.

Ardagh House has survived changes of ownership and fires and is still standing after almost 300 years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Maria Edgeworth, an Irish writer whose father lived an extraordinary life in Lichfield

Stowe House in Lichfield ... home in the 1770s to Richard Edgeworth, who also gave his name to a town in Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

There is a number of interesting literary anniversaries this year.

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx who was born in Trier on 5 May 1818, and whose Das Kapital was a best-seller; the bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on 1 January 1818; and it is 200 years since the birth of Cecil Frances Alexander in April 1818.

But it slipped my attention that this year also marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of the writer Maria Edgeworth on 1 January 1768.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) was a prolific writer of adults’ and children’s literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe, and she strongly influenced the work of other writers of the day, including Sir Walter Scott.

Although Maria Edgeworth was born at Black Bourton in Oxfordshire, she is often regarded as an Irish writer, and her father lived an extraordinary life in Lichfield, where he was part of the literary and intellectual circle that included Anna Seward, Erasmus Darwin and the members of the Lunar Society.

Maria Edgeworth was the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who eventually fathered 22 children by four wives, and Anna Maria Edgeworth (née Elers). She spent her early years with her mother's family in England, until her mother died when Maria was five.

When her father married his second wife Honora Sneyd in 1773, she went with him to his Irish estate at Edgeworthstown, in Co Longford.

When Maria’s stepmother Honora died in 1780, her father married Honora’s sister Elizabeth – a marriage that was socially scandalous at the time and legally forbidden after 1833.

As an adult, she took charge of managing her father’s run-down Irish estate, and she lived and wrote there for the rest of her life.

Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) … lived with her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) at Stowe House, Lichfield, and in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford

The Edgeworth family has given its name to Edgeworthstown in Co Longford, and to Edgeworth House on Oakenfield in Lichfield.

Stowe House, overlooking Stowe Pool in Lichfield, is a Grade II listed building that was built in the 1750s by Elizabeth Aston. At first, Stowe House was home to the Revd Thomas Hinton of Saint Chad’s, who died in 1757.

However, the most famous resident of Stowe House must be Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817). Although he never owned Stowe House, Edgeworth came to live there in 1770 with his large, growing family, and his friend Thomas Day, and he stayed on in Lichfield for many years.

Edgeworth was a failure as a student at both Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. He was still an undergraduate at Oxford when he eloped with Maria’s mother, Anna Maria Elers. The two were married in Gretna Green in 1763, and a church wedding took place on 21 February 1764. Their first child followed immediately, a son named Dick, who was born on 29 May just before Richard’s twentieth birthday.

Richard first visited Lichfield in 1776 at the invitation of Erasmus Darwin, who introduced him to the intellectual and cultural circles centred in the Close. In Darwin’s house, he saw the doctor revive his drunken brother, found ‘nearly suffocated in a ditch.’ At dinner with the Seward family in the Bishop’s Palace, he flirted briefly with the poet and biographer of Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward (1747-1809), the ‘Swan of Lichfield’ – until Darwin’s wife Polly revealed that Edgeworth was married.

Richard later reminisced: ‘How much of my future life has depended on this visit to Lichfield.’ He returned regularly to Lichfield, and came to live in Stowe House in 1770. He was a tall, dark and handsome Irishman who made friends easily, and befriended other members of the Lunar Society. He channelled his energies into several inventive projects, and was a pioneer in a number of fields, including telegraph communications, agricultural machinery, and transport. He also flirted with Anna Seward’s attractive young ward and cousin, Honora Sneyd, and fell in love with her although he was married man with children.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) ... the most famous resident of Stowe House, Lichfield

Richard’s wife, Anna Maria Edgeworth, who was the mother of four small children, was only 29 when she died in March 1773. On her deathbed, she was attended by Dr Darwin, who tried in vain to save her. Within weeks, Richard married Honora in the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral, with Anna’s father, Canon Thomas Seward, officiating at the wedding on 17 July.

Honora, who had earlier rejected Thomas Day’s proposal, had lived with the Sewards in the Close from the age of nine. Richard took her back to live on the large estate he inherited from his father in Ireland, and there they had two more children.

The former Bishop’s Palace … home to Anna Seward and her cousins, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

By 1779, Honora was dying from tuberculosis, but still Richard visited Lichfield alone in 1779, calling on Anna Seward in the Close. Honora died on 30 April 1780 in Beighterton, near Shifnal, 30 miles west of Lichfield – once again attended by Darwin. Anna blamed Richard’s neglect for her ill-health and her death. By then, Anna was causing scandal though her relationship with John Saville, a married man and a Vicar Choral of Lichfield Cathedral, for whom she bought No 6 The Close.

Darwin House … Richard Edgeworth was first invited to Lichfield by Erasmus Darwin in 1766 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Oddly, Honora had suggested that Richard should marry her sister Elizabeth. This they did eight months later, on Christmas Day 1780, in Saint Andrew’s Church, Holborn – where no-one knew them and no-one could oppose the banns. Elizabeth too had earlier rejected a proposal from Thomas Day.

Richard and Elizabeth – who had six more children between 1781 and 1794 – moved to Ireland in 1782. Elizabeth died there in 1797, and Richard – never the man to be a heart-broken widower – married for the fourth time a few months later on 31 May 1798, this time marrying Frances Ann Beaufort, the daughter of an Irish archdeacon. But he kept in touch with his friends in the Lunar Society, and when Erasmus Darwin died in 1802 he wrote his obituary in the Monthly Magazine.

When John Saville died in 1803, Anna Seward erected a monument to his memory in the cathedral. But she never forgave Richard, and she carried that hurt until she died in 1809.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his third wife, Elizabeth Sneyd, with some of his many children (Adam Buck, 1787)

Richard died on 13 June 1817, and was buried in the family vault in Edgeworthstown churchyard. He had fathered 22 children in all. His kinsman, the Abbé Edgeworth, attended Louis XVI on the scaffold during the French revolution and later escaped to Russia. Richard’s widow Frances outlived him by many years, and died in 1865.

Richard’s daughter Maria is best remembered for her novel Castle Rackrent, but in her day she was recognised as a talented author, respected and admired by writers such as Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. When She died on 22 May 1849, she was buried in Edgeworthstown, but Sir Walter Scott composed her epitaph for a memorial in Lichfield Cathedral.

Edgeworthstown, a small market town in the Irish Midlands, recalls the most famous resident of Stowe House. The town, in east Co Longford, developed on Richard’s large Irish estate. When he was an MP in the Irish Parliament (1798-1800) it was known as St Johnstown, and the Anglican parish church he built there is still known as Saint John’s. In the 19th century, the town became Edgeworthstown.

In a fit of nationalist pique in 1935, Longford County Council changed the town’s name to Mostrim. But local residents reused to cast aside the memory Richard and his family. The new name was seldom used, and in 1974, a government order restored the name of Edgeworthstown.

Edgeworthstown House … the former Edgeworth family mansion is now a nursing home and has lost much of its character.

Further Reading

Teresa Barnard, Anna Seward: A Constructed Life: A Critical Biography (Ashgate, 2013).
Howard Clayton, Cathedral city: a look at Victorian Lichfield (Lichfield, ca 1977).
Howard Clayton, Coaching City: A glimpse of Georgian Lichfield (Lichfield: Abbotsford, 2009, 4th ed).
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent(1800), (Oxford, 1995).
MW Greenslade (ed), The Victoria History of the County of Stafford (Oxford, 1990), Vol 14, Lichfield.
Wendy Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife (Hachette, 2013).
Marion Roberts, ‘Close Encounters: Anna Seward, 1742-1809, a woman in provincial cultural life’ (unpublished MLitt thesis, University of Birmingham (December 2010).
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Philip K Wilson, Collecting the Instruments of Life Around Me: Anna Seward’s Creation of a Life in her Memoirs of Dr Erasmus Darwin (1804) (Lichfield, 2007).

The two-storey Market House at the south end of Edgeworthstown, designed by James Bell, bears the Edgeworth family arms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

A Lichfield eccentric who gave his name to an Irish town

Stowe House … home in the 1770s to Richard Edgeworth, who also gave his name to a town in Ireland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I am equally at home in Lichfield and in Ireland, and so I have often been fascinated by some of the Irish names I find on houses and streets in Lichfield, including Donegal House in Bore Street, and Ardmore Cottage and Ardmore House, which have been Grade II Listed Buildings with Nether Beacon House since 1973.

Donegal House takes its name from the Chichester family, who held large estates near Lichfield but who were a politically powerful family in Ireland, where they had the titles of Marquis of Donegall and Earl of Belfast.

However, I have never discovered how the pretty seaside village of Ardmore in Co Waterford – the inspiration for many novels by Norah Roberts – gave its name to two timber-framed houses daring from the late 17th or early 18th century.

But naming and exchanging names works both ways. The Chichester family of Fisherwick Hall, who had a vault in Saint Michael’s Church, Lichfield, gave their name to squares, streets and side streets in Belfast, including Chichester Street and Fisherwick Place.

So, why should I wonder that a family with strong Lichfield associations has given its name to Edgeworth House on Oakenfield in Lichfield and to a small market town in the Irish Midlands?

Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) ... the most famous resident of Stowe House, Lichfield

Stowe House, overlooking Stowe Pool in Lichfield, is a Grade II listed building that was built in the 1750s by Elizabeth Aston. At first, Stowe House was home to the Revd Thomas Hinton of Saint Chad’s, who died in 1757.

However, the most famous resident of Stowe House must be Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817). Although he never owned Stowe House, Edgeworth came to live there in 1770 with his large, growing family, and his friend Thomas Day, and he stayed on in Lichfield for many years.

Edgeworth was a failure as a student at both Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. He was still an undergraduate at Oxford, when he eloped with Anna Maria Elers, and the two were married in Gretna Green in 1763, and a church wedding took place on 21 February 1764. Their first child followed immediately, a son named Dick, who was born on 29 May just before Richard’s twentieth birthday.

The two-storey Market House at the south end of Edgeworthstown, designed by James Bell, bears the Edgeworth family arms (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Richard first visited Lichfield in 1776 at invitation of Erasmus Darwin, who introduced him to the intellectual and cultural circles centred in the Close. In Darwin’s house, he saw the doctor revive his drunken brother, found “nearly suffocated in a ditch.” At dinner with the Seward family in the Bishop’s Palace, he flirted briefly with the poet and biographer of Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward (1747-1809), the “Swan of Lichfield” – until Darwin’s wife Polly revealed that Edgeworth was married.

Richard later reminisced: “How much of my future life has depended on this visit to Lichfield.” He returned regularly to Lichfield, and came to live in Stowe House in 1770. He was a tall, dark and handsome Irishman who made friends easily, and befriended other members of the Lunar Society. He channelled his energies into several inventive projects, and was a pioneer in a number of fields, including telegraph communications, agricultural machinery, and transport. He also flirted with Anna Seward’s attractive young ward and cousin, Honora Sneyd, and fell in love with her although he was married man with children.

The Edgeworth family’s coat of arms on the Market House in Edgeworthstown (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Richard’s wife, Anna Maria Edgeworth, who was the mother of four small children, was only 29 when she died in March 1773. On her deathbed, she was attended by Dr Darwin, who tried in vain to save her. Within weeks, Richard married Honora in the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral, with Anna’s father, Canon Thomas Seward, officiating at the wedding on 17 July.

Honora, who had earlier rejected Thomas Day’s proposal, had lived with the Sewards in the Close from the age of nine. Richard took her back to live on the large estate her inherited from his father in Ireland, and there they had two more children.

The former Bishop’s Palace … home to Anna Seward and her cousins, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

By 1779, Honora was dying from tuberculosis, but still Richard visited Lichfield alone in 1779, calling on Anna Seward in the Close. Honora died on 30 April 1780 in Beighterton, near Shifnal, 30 miles west of Lichfield – once again attended by Darwin. Anna blamed Richard’s neglect for her ill-health and her death. By then, Anna was causing scandal though her relationship with John Saville, a married man and a Vicar Choral of Lichfield Cathedral, for whom she bought No 6 The Close.

Darwin House … Richard Edgeworth was first invited to Lichfield by Erasmus Darwin in 1766 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Oddly, Honora had suggested that Richard should marry her sister Elizabeth. This they did eight months later, on Christmas Day 1780, in Saint Andrew’s Church, Holborn – where no-one knew them and no-one could oppose the banns. Elizabeth too had earlier rejected a proposal from Thomas Day.

Richard and Elizabeth – who had six more children between 1781 and 1794 – moved to Ireland in 1782. Elizabeth died there in 1797, and Richard – never the man to be a heart-broken widower – married for the fourth time a few months later on 31 May 1798, this time marrying Frances Ann Beaufort, the daughter of an Irish archdeacon. But he kept in touch with his friends in the Lunar Society, and when Darwin died in 1802 he wrote his obituary in the Monthly Magazine.

When John Saville died in 1803, Anna erected a monument to his memory in the cathedral. But she never forgave Richard, and she carried that grudge until she died in 1809.

Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his third wife, Elizabeth Sneyd, with some of his many children (Adam Buck, 1787)

Richard died on 13 June 1817, and was buried in the family vault in Edgeworthstown churchyard. He had fathered 22 children in all. His kinsman, the Abbé Edgeworth, attended Louis XVI on the scaffold during the French revolution and later escaped to Russia. Richard’s widow Frances outlived him by many years, and died in 1865.

Richard’s daughter Maria, who shared his interest in education, was the daughter of his first wife, Anna Maria. Today she is best remembered for her novel Castle Rackrent, but in her day she was recognised as a talented author, respected and admired by writers such as Sir Walter Scott, who wrote her epitaph in the cathedral, and Jane Austen.

Ardmore Cottage, Beacon Street … how did it acquire the name of an Irish seaside village? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Edgeworthstown, a small market town in the Irish Midlands, recalls the most famous resident of Stowe House. The town, in east Co Longford, developed on Richard’s large Irish estate. When he was an MP in the Irish Parliament (1798-1800) it was known as St Johnstown, and the Anglican parish church he built there is still known as Saint John’s. In the 19th century, the place became Edgeworthstown.

Donegal House … named after a family that also gives its names to squares, streets and side-streets in Belfast (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In a fit of nationalist pique in 1935, Longford County Council changed the town’s name to Mostrim. But local residents refused to cast aside the memory Richard and his family. The new name was seldom used, and in 1974, a government order restored the name of Edgeworthstown.

Rev Canon Professor Patrick Comerford lives in Dublin, and returns regularly to Lichfield where he has family roots.

Edgeworthstown House … the former Edgeworth family mansion is now a nursing home and has lost much of its character

Further Reading

Teresa Barnard, Anna Seward: A Constructed Life: A Critical Biography (Ashgate, 2013).
Howard Clayton, Cathedral city: a look at Victorian Lichfield (Lichfield, ca 1977).
Howard Clayton, Coaching City: A glimpse of Georgian Lichfield (Lichfield: Abbotsford, 2009, 4th ed).
Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent(1800), (Oxford, 1995).
MW Greenslade (ed), The Victoria History of the County of Stafford (Oxford, 1990), Vol 14, Lichfield.
Wendy Moore, How to Create the Perfect Wife (Hachette, 2013).
Marion Roberts, ‘Close Encounters: Anna Seward, 1742-1809, a woman in provincial cultural life’ (unpublished MLitt thesis, University of Birmingham (December 2010).
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Philip K Wilson, Collecting the Instruments of Life Around Me: Anna Seward’s Creation of a Life in her Memoirs of Dr Erasmus Darwin (1804) (Lichfield, 2007).

This essay and these photographs were published as a two-page feature in the January/February 2014 edition of the Lichfield Gazette (No 63), pp 42-43.