Tag: nobility

The nobility in Europe had a long run of power and I enjoy plumbing history in order to write about their worlds, their exploits and their relationships.

The era of the Grand Tour is one that inspired great envy in me so I search for stories highlighting the lives of the nobility with the ability to travel the world as young adults, one of these is Horace Walpole, whose estate, Strawberry Hill, I visited in 2015. The largely unfurnished gothic mansion has now been restored to its former glory as closely as the Strawberry Hill Trust could come with the information available to them.

The restoration was accomplished in two phases, the second of which was just completed, opening more of the house to tours in March (2015). Walpole began building the rambling gothic mise-en-scène at the age of 30, purchasing a pair of small houses on a large swath of property along a fashionable section of the River Thames in 1747. As he acquired paintings, baubles and furnishings, he often outgrew the rooms he’d rendered with his pals Richard Bentley and John Chute, a clique Walpole dubbed the Committee of Taste. As a result Strawberry Hill became the sprawling spired and turret-topped bon-bon of a residence it was when he died in 1797, 50 years after he’d bought it.

On his Grand Tour through Italy with poet Thomas Gray, for example, he wrote to his pal Richard West about the then recent discovery of the town of Herculaneum, which had been buried during one of the major eruptions of Vesuvius. That was in 1740, and he returns years later to add a footnote to the letter stating that eight years after he wrote the initial missive Pompeii was discovered! You can bet I’ll be scouring literary history for more stories like Walpole’s so click on the nobility tag to find all the stories about the moneyed and landed gentry of a bygone era.