Product Code Database
Mount Stewart is a 19th-century house and garden in County Down, Northern Ireland, owned by the National Trust. Situated on the east shore of Strangford Lough, a few miles outside the town of Newtownards and near Greyabbey, it was the Irish seat of the Stewart family, Marquesses of Londonderry. Prominently associated with the 2nd Marquess, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Britain's Foreign Secretary at the Congress of Vienna and with Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, the former Air Minister who at Mount Stewart attempted private diplomacy with Nazi Germany, the house and its contents reflect the history of the family's leading role in social and political life in Britain and Ireland.
As fellow Presbyterians, the Stewarts appeared to the county's enfranchised forty-shilling freeholders as "friends of reform", and on that basis Mount Stewart rivalled Hillsborough Castle, seat of the Earls (later Marquesses) of Downshire, for control of the county's two parliamentary seats. In the increasingly troubled 1790s, Mount Stewart quietly converted to Anglicanism and stilled the contest, agreeing with Hillsborough that each should return a member to the parliament in Dublin unopposed. (1991). 9780850340457, Athol Books. ISBN 9780850340457
Titles and office followed. In 1795 Alexander's son, Robert Stewart (1739–1821) was elevated to Earl of Londonderry (Marquess in 1816), and in 1797 his son Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant, Londonderry's brother-in-law, John Pratt, Earl Camden.Bew (2011), p. 113
After helping, in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, to push the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament, bringing Ireland under the Crown at Westminster, Castlereagh went on to serve the new United Kingdom as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies and Foreign Secretary, building the coalitions that defeated Napoleon.Bew (2011), pp. 311-418
In 1787, sharing with her brother William Drennan (a disappointed supporter of the Stewarts' electoral ambitions, later to be targeted by Castlereagh as a United Irishman), her impressions Martha McTier des Mount Stewart "much expense, no taste, everything unfinished and dirty, grand plans for the future, nothing pleasant nor even comfortable at present".
Commensurate with the family's rising fortunes, Castlereagh moved to realise some of these plans. In 1803, he choose the architect George Dance the Younger to design a neoclassical Regency replacement of the west wing with new receptions rooms. A number of the present furnishings reflect Castlereagh's career, including a portrait of the French emperor, and chairs elaborately embroidered for the delegates who redrew the map of Europe at Vienna.
Other offenders (David Bailie Warden who commanded the local rebels in the field, (2025). 9781909556065, Ulster Historical Foundation. ISBN 9781909556065 and the Reverend Thomas Ledlie Birch who urged them to "drive the bloodhounds of King George III, the German king, beyond the seas"),quoted by J. C. Robb, Sunday Press, 1 May 1955. The source is not given. were allowed American exile. Porter's offence may have been to have serially lampooned Londonderry in a popular satire of the landed interest, Billy Bluff. Porter caricatured the master of Mount Stewart as Lord Mountmumble, an inarticulate tyrant who has a dog shot for the temerity of barking.Bew (2011), p. 101
Controversially in 1847, while spending £15,000 on the refurbishment, the Marquess of Londonderry gave just £30 to local soup kitchens for famine relief, University College Cork records on the Irish Famine , ucc.ie; accessed 20 December 2015.Kineally, Christine (2013). Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: The Kindness of Strangers. London: Bloomsbury. p. 53. and as the hunger persisted rejected rent reductions. Despite reports of general distress, he insisted that only most "supine and inert" among this tenantry could "be suffering in any serious degree under the failure of the potato".Trevor Parkhill9781903688687, Ulster Historical Foundation. ISBN 9781903688687 This was in contrast to his wife's management of her estate in Antrim. Even as she embarked upon of the construction a castellated summer residence (Garron Tower), the Marchioness not only reduced the rents of her tenants, but in dire cases of potato blight, waived them altogether.
The Famine-era remodelling created the present exterior of Mount Stewart. The original Georgian era building and the small portico on the west wing were demolished and the house was increased to eleven bays. On the entrance front, a huge portico was added in the centre, and a smaller 'half portico' was added to the other side.
The marriage also brought in much of the Vane-Tempest property, including land and coal mines in County Durham. Wynyard Hall was redesigned in the Neoclassical style. The couple bought Seaham Hall, also in County Durham, and then later bought Holdernesse House on London's Park Lane. This was later renamed Londonderry House.
In 1854, Emperor Napoleon III was among the subscribers who helped raise a memorial tower to the 3rd Marquess north of Mount Stewart at Scrabo Tower.McCavery, Trevor (1994). Newtown – A history of Newtownards. Belfast: The White Row Press. , p. 140a
Frederick Stewart, 4th Marquess of Londonderry, married the widow of Richard Wingfield, 6th Viscount Powerscourt, and lived at her home, Powerscourt, near Dublin. George Vane-Tempest, 5th Marquess of Londonderry, lived at his wife's ancestral property, Plas Machynlleth, in Wales. These long periods of neglect threatened an irreversible deterioration of the Irish property.
Lady Londonderry (Theresa Chetwynd-Talbot) was valued for her family and political connections in England. In 1903, at Mount Stewart, she had hosted Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. She also proved an effective organiser, helping build the UUWC into a mass organisation, and in the preparation of an armed resistance to a Dublin parliament, the Ulster Volunteers to whom she offered Mount Stewart as a potential infirmary and triage site.
At the height of the Home Rule Crisis, the German Emperor had occasion to refer to the Marchioness's gardens. Meeting the unionist leader Sir Edward Carson at a luncheon at Bad Homburg in August 1913, Wilhelm II remarked that having seen a photograph of the gardens, he believed that they must be very beautiful. When Carson (who once proposed that he was "born to lounge and enjoy" himself at Mount Stewart) affirmed that indeed they were, the Kaiser warmed to his theme. The management of gardens is very like that of states. But Britain had done little to cultivate the unity of its empire, so that when he had asked his grandmother, Queen Victoria, leave to visit Ireland she had refused him. "Perhaps she thought I would steal the little place." When after the general laughter he persisted with questions on Ulster, Carson adroitly changed the subject. Through the gardens of Mount Stewart the Kaiser had been probing intelligence that in the event of a European war conflict in Ireland might stay Britain's hand.
The house retains a memento of this private diplomacy: an Allach porcelain figurine of an SS Fahnenträger (SS flag bearer). A gift from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, after the outbreak of war it was neither destroyed nor removed. With talk of his internment, Londonderry retreated to Mount Stewart where, following a series of debilitating strokes, he died in 1949.Kershaw, Ian (2004), Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War. London: Penguin/Allen Lane. Flanked by statues of four Irish saints, he is buried in the estate's family graveyard.
The ancestral home of the 7th Marchioness of Londonderry, Edith Halen Chaplin, was Dunrobin Castle in Scotland and it was that house's gardens which inspired her reworking of those at Mount Stewart with themed plantings (the Italian, Spanish, and Mairi gardens) and the Dodo Terrace with its whimsical statuary (Ribbentrop described the effect as "paradise"). Rather than enter her gardens through a house door she would dive in and out of a sash window, followed by her dogs – of which there were 14 at one time, ranging from deerhound to Pekingese. Lady Edith also redesigned and redecorated much of the interior, for example, the huge drawing room, the Castlereagh Room, the smoking room (whose mantelpiece displayed the Fahnenträger) and many of the guest bedrooms. She named the latter after European cities including Rome and Moscow.
On Lady Bury's death, her daughter Lady Rose Lauritzen, wife of art historian Peter Lauritzen, became the live-in family member.
In 2015, the National Trust completed an extensive restoration of the house and its contents and purchased an additional 900 acres (360 hectares) of land that had previously been part of the wider estate. At the end of January 2025, the enlarged property lost more than 10,000 trees to the hurricane-force winds of Storm Eowyn. The losses included "mature trees with veteran qualities and significant histories".
Portions of what are now Lady Londonderry's sitting room, the music room, the Castlereagh room and the staircase were left untouched, but a new suite of rooms was added. Of these the principal is the Drawing Room, which looks out onto the main gardens and, before the building along the shore of the A20, would have had a view of Strangford Lough. The house's private chapel, with stained glass windows and Italian murals, was added after the death of 3rd Marquess in 1854, and in his memory.
The National Trust refurbishment, completed in 2015, sought to restore the interiors to how they appeared in the 1950s when the house belonged to Lady Edith, the seventh Marchioness. An exception is the Ionic-columned octagonal main hall, where the chequered stone floor laid by the 3rd Marquess has been uncovered and restored.
Prior to her husband's succession to the Marquessate in 1915 the gardens had been plain lawns with large decorative pots. She added the Shamrock Garden, the Sunken Garden, increased the size of the lake, added a Spanish Garden with a small hut, the Italian Garden, the Dodo Terrace with its 'menagerie' of cement animals, the Fountain Pool and laid out walks in the Lily Wood and rest of the estate. It was she who first realised the benefits of the sub-tropical local climate. The area is frost-free and, as Lady Edith discovered, Mount Stewart enjoys island conditions, the atmosphere is humid and, in hot weather, there are heavy dews at night. Tender tropical plants thrive here and many greenhouse varieties have been planted outside with impressive results. In 1957, she gave the gardens to the National Trust. Queen's University Belfast website, Ulster Archaeological Society section, Survey Report Number 30: Mount Stewart Demesne, page 10 (2016)
Many country houses in the UK had adaptations of the 'temples' their owners had seen on their tours of the Mediterranean. The temple is similar to structures at Shugborough and West Wycombe Park, both National Trust properties.
Other residences of the Marquesses of Londonderry:
|
|
