Royal Wedding: was Hartland Abbey the venue for Prince William's stag do?
Hartland Abbey, in Devon, was Prince William’s carefully kept stag-night secret. Or was it? Clive Aslet reports.
'Our mouths are zipped,” announces Lady Angela Stucley, châtelaine of Hartland Abbey. She and her husband, Sir Hugh, will neither confirm nor deny that their home, on the wild north Devon coast, was the scene of Prince William’s stag party. If they have a smidgeon of satisfaction that the world’s paparazzi had infested Norfolk, while their quarry were – according to every report except their own – enjoying a blissfully private weekend at their home, they only betray it by crinkling their eyes.
The pair would rather be hanged from the tower of St Nectan’s church than pose for a photograph, which could (were any royal event to have occurred within the vicinity) be mistaken for self-promotion. This has always been a Royalist area. A picture of Sir Bevill Greville who died at the Battle of Lansdown in 1643 hangs in the dining room. One has the feeling that Sir Hugh would don a breastplate and plumed hat and do battle, given half a chance.
The surfers down at Hartland Quay weren’t so discreet. They spotted the party in wetsuits, but word of the sighting did not find its way to the tabloids for four days. Presumably nobody had a mobile phone handy because the story was illustrated by an old picture of Prince William, demonstrating, to local eyes, the miserable inadequacy of the Fourth Estate; it was taken at Rock, which isn’t even in Devon, and showed him carrying the wrong sort of surfboard.
Let me risk the wrath of the Stucleys and assume that Hartland did indeed host the Princes. Part of its attraction must have been the tennis, clay-pigeon shooting and five-a-side football that could be laid on. With four children and nine grandchildren, many of whom stay at Hartland during the summer, the Stucleys, in their mid-sixties, are equipped with plenty of entertainment for young people.
There are also no end of bedrooms, florally wallpapered, hung with political cartoons and equipped with the ewers and basins that were once essential to ancestral ablutions. I suspect that the bathrooms belong to the heroic age of plumbing, with mighty pipework and baths on feet; we’re in dressing gown and hotwater bottle territory, where a guest in search of a bath has to sprint down an unheated corridor during the winter – a way of doing things that has died out in all but the very grandest of homes. The Princes must be some of the very few people in Britain still used to it.
Hartland has, of course, seen royalty before. The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, visited Sir Hugh’s father and mother; it was the time that, temporarily exiled from his homeland after Mussolini’s invasion, the Lion of Judah was reduced to opening fetes at £5 a time, a service that he performed at Hartland. Rastafarians go on pilgrimage to the chair that he sat on, displayed in the church.
Protocol practically runs in the family blood. Among the photographs of men hunting and women in bridal veils are some of the Kaiser, in Britain to witness his aunt Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, being entertained at two houses – one Kingston Lacey, now owned by the National Trust, the other in the New Forest – both of which were owned by one of Sir Hugh’s great-grandfathers.
Mind you, on the subject of blood, there are some who say that George III’s fifth son, the Duke of Cumberland, who became King of Hanover - 'a really horrible man,’ as Sir Hugh calls him - had an affair with Georgina Nugent, whose daughter married into the Bankes family, and as a result, since Sir Hugh’s grandfather married a Bankes’ heiress... but sssh. Silence, prudence, as they say in France. If any royal DNA does course through Stucley veins, it got there on the wrong side of the blanket.
Nor are parties at Hartland anything new. How could they be, when the courtier to take possession of the abbey lands after the Dissolution of the Monasteries was the Sergeant of Henry VIII’s wine cellar?
In the mid 18th century, the then owner, Paul Orchard, decided to demolish much of the old structure, and – having done well out of an office to collect duties at Barnstaple (sleaze? Never heard of the word) – rebuilt Hartland in the Gothick style of Strawberry Hill, finishing in 1779. The Stucleys were, at this time, still seated at Affeton Castle, or what remained of it after the sleighting by beastly roundheads after the Civil War. The 18th-century antiquary William Stukeley, who published an early book on Stonehenge, was sufficiently closely related for his portrait to appear in the Little Dining Room. In the Victorian period, Sir Hugh’s ancestor, Lewis Buck, was a close associate of Disraeli. Looking at his portrait, hung next to some election posters expressed in the robust language of the time, Sir Hugh muses: 'If he had lived a little longer, I might have been Lord Stucley. Not that I’m complaining,’ he quickly adds. As it was, Lewis’s son George, also an MP, was awarded a baronetcy, in recognition of his father’s services, upon which he took the name of Stucley-Stucley.
As might be inferred, Sir George Stucley-Stucley had a high sense of family history, commissioning a series of chivalric wall paintings in the Drawing Room and Dining Room to celebrate valorous moments in epic style. They are the chief work of Alfred Beer, a stained glass artist from Exeter; the spaces left unfilled at the time of Beer’s death are occupied, in contrasting idiom, by scenes inspired by the frescoes at Pompeii, to which the Stucley-Stucleys had recently steamed on their yacht.
They also commissioned Sir George Gilbert Scott to create the vaulted and stencilled Alhambra Corridor after having visited Granada. This was the scene of a difficult moment in Sir Hugh and Lady Angela’s early years at the house, left in charge of showing the Abbey to the notoriously cantankerous Cornish historian A.L. Rowse and the aesthete Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, while Sir Hugh’s parents were on holiday. Not deemed sufficiently knowledgeable to conduct the tour themselves, they were told that the local vicar would be fielded for the occasion. His tour was conducted to scholarly barracking from an increasingly irate Rowse. 'And here is the Alhambra Corridor,’ Rev. Pennington, perhaps flustered, informed the party, 'inspired after a visit paid to the Alhambra Cinema.’ Rowse exploded.
Between the Wars, the chatelaines of Hartland and neighbouring Clovelly Court were sisters. They attracted a literary and artistic crowd which included the architect Sir Herbert Baker, the historian Lord David Cecil and the mural painter Rex Whistler. Picnic locations would be arranged on the day by an exchange of telegraphs delivered by a boy on a bicycle. That halcyon world ended abruptly when the Abbey was requisitioned on the very day that the Second World War broke out. Instead of bohemian house parties, Hartland played host to Highgate Junior School. 'I’m never going to have those boys back in the house,’ asserted Sir Hugh’s father, Sir Dennis Stucley, when, some years after the War, the idea of a reunion was broached. Eventually he relented, found that the boys had turned into civilized men, and reunions have been held biannually ever since. Highgate Juniors left in 1942, when its place was decorously taken by a young ladies’ finishing school called The Monkey Club (after the three monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.) One of the girls died from polio after her father, Sir Malcolm Sergent, had taken her on a conducting tour of Italy in 1945; later, Sir Malcolm would stay every Christmas with the Stucleys, visiting her grave.
The demands of country-house entertaining are many and various. When Lady Thatcher came to lunch, the problem was to find 16 sets of matching glasses. Lady Stucley reserved the two smallest ones for herself, only to find that, when everyone sat down, her calculations had gone awry. Sir Dennis, who occupied the place that should have been hers, was aghast to find himself provided with drinking vessels that were 'no bigger than thimbles’.
Less formality prevails when, as often happens, a film crew is in the house. It was the setting for the BBC’s adaption of Sense and Sensibility in 2007. The 1984 film Water lives in the family memory, as having starred Michael Caine, Leonard Rossiter and Billy Connolly. The Antiques Road Show, which will be filmed here in July, might seem small beer by comparison, although some prudent fans have already come to the Abbey, to make sure of the route.
In terms of visitor numbers, will this be a good season for Hartland? Easter is late, but then, courtesy of the Royal Wedding, there will be an extra bank holiday. I daren’t suggest that, if Prince William and Kate cannot face Westminster Abbey, they could also repair to Hartland, which has licences which allow it to marry people in no fewer than five different locations (soon to be six, with the addition of a summerhouse). The Stucleys would probably regard the idea as treason. 'Where do you keep your prisoners?’ Haile Selassie asked during his visit. One of them would certainly be me.
Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of Country Life.
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