Much less straightforward is the tale of the Seymour family home. Before they
moved into Tottenham House, the Seymours lived at nearby Wolf Hall,the
inspiration for Hilary Mantel’s award-winning novel. But for sheer
entertainment value, nothing that happened there in the Tudor era can
compete with recent developments on the Savernake estate.
Some of the finer points are still obscure – or sub judice – but there are
enough plot-twists and colourful minor characters to fill a TV series.
Centre stage – and a tragicomic figure on a heroic scale – is the house’s
part-owner David Brudenell-Bruce, Earl of Cardigan. He is the 61-year-old
Old Etonian scion of an aristocratic family which has fallen on hard times.
If Tottenham House were turned into a television series, this would be a part
for Sir Michael Gambon, not Hugh Bonneville. The Earl is a maverick in the
great British tradition. At different times, he has been secretary of his
local Conservative association and a defender of travellers against alleged
harassment by the police.
The Grade II-listed Preston Hall will be developed into 36 luxury
apartments
He currently lives with his second wife and baby daughter in an unheated lodge
in the grounds of Tottenham House and has been living on a £71-a-week
jobseeker’s allowance while training to be a lorry driver. He has an
estranged daughter from his first marriage, the pop singer Bo Bruce, to whom
he once referred as “my little scorpion”.
If the Earl’s title rings a bell, it is probably because of the 7th Earl of
Cardigan, a distant forebear. He not only gave his name to the cardigan, but
also led the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.
“Half a league, half a league/ Half a league onward… Someone had blundered.”
Generations of schoolchildren have had to memorise Tennyson’s famous poem
about the military fiasco. But the tale of Tottenham House, and of its
fiercely protective blue-blooded owner, is equally piquant.
The Grade I-listed Palladian house has more than 100 rooms and was built in
the early 19th century. It sits at the centre of the 4,500-acre Savernake
estate, which is mainly forested – the only major private forest in Britain
– and a much-loved local beauty spot.
The Earl is the 31st hereditary warden of the forest – now managed by the
Forestry Commission on a 999-year lease – which was originally given to his
family by William the Conqueror in 1067. But its days as a family residence
have been numbered since the Second World War, when American soldiers were
billeted here. It became a prep school for a time (Hawtreys) and was then
leased to a charity, the Amber Foundation, which worked with unemployed
young people.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, the Preston Hall became a military
hospital
But it has been unoccupied for most of this century, and despite the Earl’s
magnificent rhetoric – “I have been put on this earth to take care of
Savernake and will never let it go” – the fabric of the property has been
decaying fast.
Finding someone to take on the house has spawned a long-running legal dispute,
which came before the Court of Appeal last month. The litigants were the
Earl, who owns 49 per cent of the estate, and the two trustees acting for
the Earl’s son Thomas, Viscount Savernake, who own the remaining 51 per
cent.
The Earl and the trustees have been at loggerheads for years, and have had
fallings out over such matters as the selling of family silver and other
heirlooms. Their feud has rumbled on, with many a comic interlude. In 2013,
the Earl was bound over for 12 months by Swindon Crown Court after being
accused of damaging six pheasant-feeders.
The Earl’s original plan for Tottenham House was to offer it on a 150-year
lease to a US company that planned to turn it into a golf resort and spa,
the Savernake Club.
It looked great in the brochure, with its Peter Alliss-designed championship
golf course and opulent garden residences. Alas, the company went bust in
2011, so it was back to the drawing-board.
The trustees then came up with an alternative plan: to sell Tottenham House to
an unnamed buyer, known simply as Mr A, for £11.25 million. Provisional sale
terms were agreed last year.
Tottenham House is now destined for “residential refurbishment”
Over my dead body, said the Earl, who insisted that the property was worth
more than that – and who claimed that he had found an upmarket hotelier
prepared to buy it on a 999-year lease. But the Court of Appeal eventually
decided that the trustees’ proposed sale was reasonable and should proceed.
“I am utterly gutted by the decision,” the Earl told Marlborough News Online.
“We have lost the freehold of a block of land that has been ours for nearly
1,000 years.”
In a separate legal action, which looks likely to stall the sale of Tottenham
House, the Earl is asking to have the trustees removed on the grounds of
“breaches of confidentiality, financial mismanagement, a want of honesty, or
at any rate candour… hostility, breach of privacy, criminal conduct, etc” He
has so far succeeded in having one of the trustees removed, but not the
other.
The whole thing has turned intoa long-running legal soap opera, with echoes of
Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Other sub-plots include the highly
contentious sale of a portrait of Jane Seymour. M’ learned friends have been
having a field day.
Contracts for the sale of Tottenham House are now finally believed to have
been exchanged, however, and the identity of the mysterious Mr A has also
come to light. He is, reportedly, Jamie Ritblat, a Conservative donor and
multimillionaire property developer whose company Delancey owns, inter alia,
the former athletes’ village at the site of the 2012 London Olympics. Mr
Ritblat has declined to comment on the reports.
Tottenham House is now destined for “residential refurbishment” and although
the exact details remain unclear, it looks likely that it will be divided
into luxury apartments. There are also fears the surrounding Savernake
estate will be broken up.
David Brudenell-Bruce, Earl of Cardigan
Nothing is set in stone and there may be further legal challenges, but as a
new chapter in the history of Tottenham House opens, local opinion is
divided on the likely repercussions of the sale.
“It is hard to understand what the hell is happening,” says one local
resident, who asked to remain anonymous. “What happens to Tottenham House is
probably less important than what happens to Savernake Forest. In the
worst-case scenario, the trustees might decide to sell it, which would cause
outrage locally.” There is a disappointment that the new jobs that would
have come to the area if Tottenham House had been turned into a golf resort
and spa – or even an upmarket hotel – are now not likely to materialise.
Others are more sanguine. “Tottenham House is tucked away in the middle of the
forest, so the environmental impact of its refurbishment is likely to be
quite modest,” says Rob Fanshawe of Property Vision, which has an office in
Hungerford, to the east of Savernake. “And there could be plenty of positive
knock-on effects. I would imagine, for example, that most retailers in the
area will be delighted at having so many new property owners on their
doorstep with serious money to spend.”
Hungerford is a prosperous market town, but probably more in need of well-off
shoppers than Marlborough, to the west of Savernake, which is known for
blue-chip Marlborough College. It is a likeable enclave in a likeable
county. North Wiltshire property prices have been pretty buoyant lately,
with villages close to the M4 performing particularly well.
But the seemingly interminable wranglings over Tottenham House and Savernake
Forest – which, between them, form such a rich slice of our national
heritage – have cast something of a pall.
Many are hoping that the scriptwriters can come up with a happy ending.