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The Berkeley family’s imposing Georgian mansion, designed by London architect, John Tasker, was built at the turn of the nineteenth century, but the story of the Spetchley Estate extends right back to the Tudor period.
A Tale of Three Houses
The original residence was indeed a moated Tudor house, situated on the north bank of the Garden Pool. It was home first to the Lyttleton family and then to the Sheldon family, before wealthy wool merchant and banker, Rowland Berkeley, bought the estate in 1605.
Rowland passed the Spetchley estate to his son, Sir Robert Berkeley, a judge in the reign of Charles I, but disaster struck just prior to the Battle of Worcester in 1651 when, in spite of Sir Robert’s Royalist sympathies, a disgruntled band of Scottish Presbyterians, themselves Royalists too! - succeeded in burning the family home to the ground, ostensibly to prevent Cromwell from using the house as his headquarters.
Sir Robert then converted the stables which became the main residence at Spetchley until the present house, constructed of Bath Stone in the Palladian Style, was built in 1811.
Merging Estates
Rowland Berkeley was descended from the Lords of Berkeley who had lived in Gloucestershire’s Berkeley Castle since Saxon times. When the 8th Earl of Berkeley died, Spetchley’s then owner (Mr. John Berkeley’s father) inherited the Castle, and the Berkeley and Spetchley estates became united in ownership.
Miss Willmott's Ghost
Now sadly bereft of its famous avenues of elm trees, decimated during the 1970’s by Dutch Elm Disease, Spetchley’s seventeenth century parkland, with its enclosure for herds of red and fallow deer, has nevertheless altered little over the years.
The gardens have been developed by successive generations of the family, and John and his father have extended the vast collection of plants. Many improvements were made at the turn of the nineteenth century by John's grandmother, Rose Berkeley, and his great aunt, Ellen Willmott (left) of Warley Place in Essex.
Author of The Genus Rosa and a celebrated gardener, Ellen was as famous for her habit of scattering eryngium seeds in friends’ gardens as for her enviable plant knowledge. She makes her presence felt in late summer when the tall, silver-blue, cone-like heads of eryngium Miss Wilmott’s Ghost burst randomly through the soil and settle in all the wrong places!
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