Handed on

To be found amongst the many thousands of treasures which together comprise the Royal Collection is ‘one of two known copies of the Articles of Union signed by the Scottish Parliament in 1706, evidenced by the signatures and seals of the Scottish commissioners preceding those of the English’. This momentous step had signalled intent to end centuries of rivalry and conflict between the two nations, who would be formally bound together as Great Britain by respective Acts of Union the following year.

And what connects this pivotal development in the country’s history with Garnons, the Wye Valley seat of the Cotterell baronets, ‘with sweeping vistas east towards the Black Mountains’, some nine miles west of the cathedral city of Hereford?¹ In truth, absolutely nothing at all save for the curious, unaccountable fact that ‘in 1854, Sir Geers Henry Cotterell, 3rd Baronet found the Treaty amongst his possessions, without any record of any provenance. It was presented by his son, Sir John Cotterell, 4th Baronet, to King Edward VII in June 1906.’

The 3rd baronet was just twenty years of age when the rather baffling discovery was made, perhaps during a preparatory survey of estate papers within the ‘fine embattled mansion’ which had been built for his grandfather and of which Sir Geers was imminently to become master.² While the house’s defensive stylings were entirely fanciful, rebellious uprisings elsewhere in the kingdom had in no small part delayed its creation by almost a quarter of a century.

But during Garnons protracted gestation – which would involve the input of a host of notable practitioners at one time or another – the only battle going on locally was one of aesthetics, albeit the Picturesque ideals being argued by his county neighbours perhaps flew somewhat over the head of the no-nonsense, military-minded first baronet. A sequence of unexpected family tragedies would see him effectively succeeded by grandson Geers Henry Cotterell, whose distinctive first name remembered the family whose 17th-century acquisitions across three parishes…

… became the foundation of the present day estate occupying a stretch along the Wye rising north to a densely wooded escarpment concealing remnants of Offa’s Dyke.

In the east, William Geers ‘bought the manor of Bridge Sollers in 1622′, centred on an isolated property called Marsh Court. His son Francis subsequently added land to the north-west in the parish of Mansell Gamage, property formerly possessed by the Garnons family whose name remained attached to the accompanying unremarkable Jacobethan ‘big house’.

It was here in 1642 that the Geers household found itself singled out for punitive attention by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War. ‘On Tuesday morning, October 4 Captain Hammond and his barbarous company plundered Mr Geeres howse at Garnons, both them and me of much goods,’ recorded spinster Joyce Jeffries, a relation of independent means who had fled her own house in Hereford hoping for refuge.³

In the midst of this instability Garnons welcomed the birth of Francis Geers’s grandchild, a boy for his eldest son Thomas. In time, Thomas Geers (2) would become the first of his family to be elected a member of parliament having earlier made an advantageous marriage with heiress Sarah Colles, which would add Hatfield Court (left), 25m north-east on the Worcestershire border, to the Geers’ property portfolio.

Also, rather more local and enduringly significant, Byford Court (r), a gabled 16th/17th century in-filled H-plan house immediately to the south of Garnons and long the seat of the Gomonds would be added via the early-18th century carve-up of that family’s debt-burdened properties upon the expiry of their line.⁴

While Marsh Court in Bridge Sollers descended in the Geers’ senior male line (which soon accrued yet more estates elsewhere through marriage) Garnons passed through younger sons until the death of John Geers in 1762 leaving only a daughter, Anne. It was her marriage into a landed Worcestershire family of similar standing, which had taken place six years earlier, which would introduce the name of Cotterell to the Garnons story.

Not that Cotterell had been her husband’s name at birth, however. For John Brookes’s father would later adopt the name of his maternal uncle, Thomas Cotterell, upon inheriting the latter’s estate near the picture-book village of Broadway in Worcestershire.

It was here after his marriage to Anne Geers that Sir John Brookes Cotterell (knighted in 1761) would build castellated Farncombe House (r), the full-height bows of its garden front enjoying ‘superb views’ west.⁵ It was not until his death in 1790 that the focus turned to what had been his wife’s inheritance sixty miles west in Herefordshire.

While the Brookes’ insignia has remained a significant element of the family’s arms, from the time of Sir John’s son and heir that part of the name would henceforth disappear. And just months after his father’s death, in January 1791 John Geers Cotterell bolstered the family fortunes still further by marrying another wealthy heiress.

*

As the new squire of both Garnons and Farncombe, John Cotterell was in no great need of another country house and estate; helpfully, the most significant element of his wife Frances Isabella Evans’s inheritance would be a very choice portfolio of lease- and freehold townhouses in one of London’s smartest new districts, Mayfair. Among the prime movers behind this Georgian greenfield development extending the capital westwards was architect/builder Henry Holland, also a business partner and in-law of Capability Brown.

It was at Holland’s own house in Hertford Street – the entirety of which his firm had created – that the famed landscaper collapsed and died in 1783. And many properties in this street (including No. 10 with its Robert Adam interiors, left, the one time home of theatrical impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan) would be acquired from the Hollands by brewer and property speculator Henry Michael Evans…

… eventually to become the handsome endowment of his only child, Frances, who became the wife John Cotterell at St. George’s, Hanover Square in January 1791. And in the same year as his marriage, Cotterell would turn to the man oft seen as Capability Brown’s successor, Humphry Repton, to mastermind a reimagining of his Herefordshire estate.

The first of his numerous commissions in the county, Repton had likely come to Cotterell’s attention via his neighbour immediately to the north, Uvedale Price, squire of the 4,000-acre Foxley estate, where Price had been practising Picturesque landscaping principles for several decades.⁶ While he deprecated the wholesale radical makeovers offered by Capability Brown (pure artifice indulging wealthy landowners’ lust for instant gratification), Price was not nearly as hardcore in his principles as his sometime county ally in this cause, Richard Payne Knight of Downton Castle, (‘one of the most romantic designed landscapes in England’⁷).

Knight would go boldy into print urging the physical destruction of the landscapes created by Brown and others with their ‘charts, pedometers and rules in hand’, suggesting that ‘in contrast to their mechanical ways, the responsible landowner [should deploy] a painterly approach to improvement’. While Repton would despair that Knight and Price had become ‘more like Luther and Calvin than a couple of west country gentleman’, his own core product was in one sense nothing if not painterly.⁶

Repton’s Red Book containing before-and-after artistic impressions of his visions survives at Garnons, as indeed do the improvements therein proposed: ‘Since the early 19th century there have been no substantial changes to the park.’⁸ But more immediately exasperating to Humphry Repton than the aesthetic crossfire of landscape purists was the notorious tardiness of the architect co-opted to come up with designs for a suitable new house at Garnons.

“I shall pass through town that I may call on Mr. Wyatt and see you,” Repton informed his client in May, 1791. “When I last talkd with him he promised to have all finished for your inspection by the 1st week in May but I confess I hardly dare hope he will be punctual.”⁹ James Wyatt duly lived down to his reputation, failing to produce workable designs 18 months after the initial survey by Repton, who was obliged to apologetically include a design of his own (above) in the eventual Red Book presented to John Cotterell.

Giving up on Wyatt, Repton now recommended they engage a Norwich associate, architect William Wilkins to get the job done. But despite involvement stretching across several years, Wilkins ultimately failed to satisfy his client, with whom relations were often strained not least because Cotterell (pictured below) had certain ideas of his own.

“You say the designs I made are not what you wished & I must answer that there never was a Plan so perfect at first as to meet the ideas of the Employer, so that it required no alteration,” suggested Wilkins in December 1794 following criticisms which included his costing estimates. Wilkins defended his professional charges as being consistent with ‘all regular Architects in which number I consider neither the common Country builder or carpenter nor the young inexperienced artist from town to whom a first job is desirable on any terms”.¹⁰

While developments in the park progressed, including moving the local turnpike road further from the site (and sight) of the intended residence, the business of the latter dragged on inconclusively. The beleaguered architect was not without support in the face of some of Cotterell’s suggestions, Humphry Repton informing their client in October 1797 that ‘Mr. [John] Nash said in general terms that your plan of making half the house in front offices was impracticable’.⁹

And the following year a national emergency would see the entire house-building project shelved indefinitely as John Cotterell now sprang to the defence of the realm. ‘At the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in 1798, when it became necessary to accept the assistance of militia regiments, Herefordshire, under Col. Cotterell’s command, was one of the first to volunteer service, and performed it with distinguished credit, and for [which] a baronetcy was conferred on him.’¹¹

*

‘Dear Sir George, a near neighbour of mine, Sir John Cotterell, has inherited what he calls a collection of pictures from a rich father in law: he tells me they are all original and of the best masters. They are to be sent down as soon has his new house is ready to receive them.’¹²

Uvedale Price of Foxley writing to noted art connoisseur Sir George Beaumont in May 1820 indicating that an all-new Garnons was at last nearing completion. One visitation several years later observed that ‘though a modern structure, having been built by the present proprietor under the superintendence of Mr. Atkinson, [the house] yet bears a perfect resemblance to the old baronial mansions of the 13th century.’²

After the stop-start vexations of earlier years it was a fresh pair of eyes in the shape of country house architect William Atkinson, a former pupil of James Wyatt, who had finally brought the building project to (albeit somewhat truncated) fruition in the fashionable romantically crenellated style. ‘It stands on two raised terraces, under the upper one of which the entrance is formed through a handsome Tudor arch.’² Atkinson also created the three-sided stabling range with a square clocktower east of the house while remnants of its predecessor provided service functions to the rear.

‘Among the curiosities [inside] is a large Glass in a superb frame by Gibbons, and a singularly rare carved oak bedstead removed to Garnons from Hatfield.’² Naturally some fresh family portraits were also among the adornments of the new mansion, including George Hayter’s likeness of the 1st baronet ‘wearing brown coat [and] lace cravat, with Garnons in the background’ [Select pictures list].

‘I am curious to know what I am really to expect,’ continued a sceptical Uvedale Price to Sir George Beaumont, Bt., ‘I have rather more faith in the [artistic] judgement of a baronet in all respects a very different stamp from my neighbour. The pictures [inherited by Cotterell from his late father-in-law Henry Michael Evans] are now at a cleaners whose name was recommended to Sir John by Mr. Hayter,  the portrait painter.’¹²

Having lived with the promise of a splendid new abode, Lady Frances Cotterell would not survive to see the reincarnation of Garnons, dying in 1813 after twenty-three years of marriage. And while the union had produced several sons, their various ill-starred destinies would ensure that the widowed baronet’s remaining years continued to be punctuated by tragedy and tribulation.

In July 1825 ‘the anti-Catholic Tory squire [was] devastated by the death of [24-year-old second son] Henry after an illness of four days only’. Worse still was the similarly premature demise of eldest son John Henry, 33, at his house in Hertford Street in 1834, a disaster compounded by the fact that Henry and John’s younger brother, wayward and profligate Thomas, had just been packed off to the New World.

‘My dearest Father, I see by your manner .. how very much you are annoyed at the receiving of my very extravagant bills, and well you might be, for I have deceived you too often.”¹³

So begins a grovelling mea culpa from young Thomas Cotterell to his exasperated father, having been sent to live with a private tutor in Yorkshire in 1827 in a last-ditch attempt to instil some learning, application and general discipline. Regular missives from Mr Hildyard of Beverley revealed the hopelessness of the task.

‘Dear Sir,  I wish I could say anything to you more wholly comforting on the subject of your son’s success but I regret to inform you I see little or no chance.’

‘He has made himself a great favourite in the society of the town, the Ladies in particular, by his good-natured agreeable manner and in this way, and in gardening, and in a sort of indolent life, he would gladly pass his days; but books, classical studies, in short application of any sort he mortally detests.’

‘His delicacies are so great and his mind so weak that there is no profession he would be fit for.’

Concluding his apologia to his father, Thomas Cotterell hinted at his globetrotting destiny: ‘You have been the kindest father towards me, but I have been a most undutiful and disobedient son towards you. I am willing to do anything, and go anywhere you should think proper to get my bread.’

And Thomas was soon on his travels, initially to Canada where, continuing to max out his father’s allowance, he entertained the idea of buying a farm and settling. When this scheme eventually fell through Plan B saw arrangements made in 1838 for Tom to sail to Australia and buy land; he would end his days Down Under. Meanwhile, the future of Garnons now rested with Sir John Cotterell’s grandson who had been a child of three when he lost his father, John Henry, and was still only fourteen when he succeeded to the baronetcy in January 1845.

*

‘On Monday last the remains of the late Baronet were consigned to the family vault in Mansell Church. The ringers at All Saints commenced a muffled peel at three o’clock in the afternoon, and completed the arduous task at one o’clock on Tuesday morning during which time 7,744 rounds were given.’¹⁴ (In the twentieth century the memorials to Sir John Cotterell and Lady Frances would be relocated to St. John the Baptist in Byford (↓) after the decommissioning of Mansell Gamage church.)

Later in 1845 the Farncombe estate was sold off and Pyne Cotterell, the first baronet’s widowed daughter-in-law, remarried. As Mrs. Harcourt Vernon she would be a principal trustee of the Garnons estate during the minority of its expected heir, her eldest son Sir John Henry Cotterell. But fate would soon to take another grim turn, the youthful 2nd baronet succumbing ‘after ten days of typhus fever’ at Eton school in February 1847, ‘plunging his family in the deepest affliction’.¹⁵

This tragic event, which saw John’s 12-year-old brother (Geers) Henry Cotterell now promoted as 3rd baronet, did at least give the trustees more time to set the estate on a more viable footing. For it had become apparent their late grandfather had rather taken his eye off the ball in later years, bequeathing an ill-managed property mortgaged to the tune of some £84,000 at 4%pa. There had been next to no oversight, ‘the tenant farmers left ‘to go on their own voyages of discovery’ at the expense of the estate’.¹⁶

But luckily for Garnons the man who had presented this sobering assessment to its trustees, and who would be given responsibility for remedying the situation, was more than up to the task. Land agent Thomas Blashill had previously worked at Hampton Court Castle during which time that house had been picturesquely rebuilt (under William Atkinson).¹⁶ Blashill now not only took the management of Garnons successfully in hand (in lock-step with Mrs. Harcourt Vernon, now often resident at her own family’s seat, Glynde Place in Sussex), but would also play a key role in defining Garnons as it is seen today.

For a decade later the situation was so improved that a major expansion of the house could be entertained ahead of the coming of age of the 3rd baronet. Taking his stylistic cues directly from William Atkinson, and applying earlier experience at Hampton Court Castle, Thomas Blashill appears to have been entirely responsible for the creation of the substantial new range. Six crenellated bays now extended west, ashlar and of two storeys over a basement, terminating in a one-bay tower, with similar bookending the north return.

In its deliberately conspicuous elevated parkland setting, the mansion at Garnons was now of a massing and scale more closely resembling the scenario as originally conceived over half a century before by Humphry Repton. ‘The drive approaches the house on a rising, curving line, Garnons only being revealed as it breasts the line of the old turnpike road and passes clumps planted to form a screen. The drive then continues to the lower terrace below the house.’⁸

Though the estate was maturing to its effulgent (5,000-acre) peak through the second half of the 19th century, in his later years Sir (Geers) Henry Cotterell (left) was an infrequent presence at Garnons, residing principally abroad having ‘never found the climate of the county to suit him’.¹⁷ And at the of age 65 he would make a wedding present of the entire estate to his son and heir John on the occasion of the latter’s marriage to Lady Evelyn Gordon-Lennox, eldest daughter of the 7th Duke of Richmond & Gordon, in 1896. Four years later the 3rd baronet passed away at his town residence, 10 Hertford Street.

The first decade of the new century would see developments of varying degree at the principal residences on the estate.

At Garnons itself, architect Reginald Blomfield was brought in to refashion aspects of the house, de-Gothicizing the fenestration and Georgianizing the interior, ‘introducing some excellent later 18th century chimney pieces’.¹⁸ Byford Court (r) also underwent some internal alteration, its hall being ‘lined with early 17th century panelling formerly at Marsh Court [which was itself] pulled down about 1910′.

Three daughters were born to Sir John and Lady Evelyn before the arrival of a son and heir in the summer of 1907. Richard Cotterell was 14 years old when the health of his mother – ‘a smart all-round cricketer and fine fisherwoman’ – went into precipitous, terminal decline in February 1922.¹⁹ ‘It is sincerely hoped that her ladyship’s death will not have the effect…

… of accelerating the departure of the family from Garnons, which Sir John has broadly hinted at lately, owing to the post-war taxation that is bearing so heavily on all landowners.’²⁰ The fear of the local newspaper was not borne out but the estate did lose some longstanding residents later that year when the 4th baronet decided to disperse entirely his renowned herd of Hereford cattle.

In this era ‘the Cotterell family were important patrons of the artist Philip de László’, the last in a sequence of nine portraits across two decades being that of Sir John (left)  ‘wearing the ceremonial uniform of the Life Guards, officially unveiled at Hereford Shirehall in 1934’. The 4th baronet died at 10 Hertford Street three years later.

In 1931 Laszlo had painted a portrait of the new baronet, Sir Richard Cotterell, together with a companion pendant of his wife of almost a year. Safe to say the artist did not warm to Lady Lettice Lygon – pictured with the couple’s four children in 1943 at their wartime home Byford Court (r) – in the slightest. The Cotterells’ eventually divorced in 1958, the culmination of turbulent period which saw the 5th baronet taking some momentous decisions in the face of stark post-war exigencies.

With many country house owners now opting to either sell up or tear down, the choice at Garnons was partial demolition. ‘Sir Richard Cotterell is having a large part of his 50-room house reduced to a “more handy size,” said his butler’ to an enquiring Daily Express.²¹

And it was Blashill’s century-old block (‘originally mostly a service wing’¹⁸) which would survive, its towers lowered, at the expense of Atkinson’s original composition, the latter repurposed at ground level in the form of a 3-bay loggia linking to a conservatory. With significantly less house-room, 1957 also saw the sale of much furniture, dozens of paintings and several thousand books.

Four years later Sir Richard’s heir John returned to the fold to manage the home farm at Garnons, eventually succeeding as 6th baronet in 1978. ‘Despite never applying for a job, throughout his life Sir John Cotterell found himself in demand to serve on public and charitable organizations’…²²

… most notably, perhaps, as the long-serving chairman of the Mappa Mundi Trust. When in 1988 cash-strapped Hereford Cathedral took the decision to sell ‘the largest map of the world to have survived from the Middle Ages’, it seemed destined to go abroad. But ‘with inspired brinkmanship, Cotterell, almost single-handedly persuaded’ sceptical key stakeholders to support a rescue scheme, successfully ensuring the precious 5ft-high artefact remained not only in the country but in the county of Hereford.²²

Sir John would lose his similarly active wife, Lady Alexandra Cotterell (the first woman to hold the ancient office of High Sheriff of Herefordshire) to cancer at 65 in 2005, a melancholy echo of the bereavement suffered by his son and heir six years earlier. Married in 1986, Harry Cotterell and Carolyn (Beckwith-Smith) ‘had recently moved into and redecorated the main house on the estate when illness struck’.²³

Eighteen months later the new chatelaine of Garnons succumbed to melanoma aged 43, the experience triggering an enduring commitment to cancer therapy research by Sir Harry Cotterell (r), who would succeed as the present 7th baronet in 2017. Picking up batons from his father, Cotterell serves as a trustee of the Mappa Mundi Trust and continues to support another ancient aspect of Herefordshire heritage, cider-making, substantial swathes of the (2,500-acre) estate being devoted to commercial apple orchards.

While the cut-down (Grade II listed) mansion at Garnons may not, as Humphry Repton’s Red Book believed necessary, ‘form such a mass of building as will give an air of Greatness to the general appearance’²⁴, its author – whose own ‘flexible and pragmatic approach considered the pocketbook of the client’²⁵ – would likely be understanding of the compromise, and gratified that so much of its setting remains extant and appreciated…

[360° drone footage 2023]

1. Reid, P. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses Vol.II, 1980.
2. Neale, J.P. Views of the seats of noblemen.., Second Series Vol.IV, 1828.
3. Spicksley, J.M. The business and household accounts of Joyce Jeffreys Spinster of Hereford, 1638-48, 2012.
4. Robinson, C. A history of the mansions and manors of Herefordshire, 1873.
5. Brooks, A., Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Worcestershire, 2014.
6. Daniels, S. Humphry Repton: Landscape gardening and the geography of Georgian England, 1999.
7. Turner, T. English garden design: history and styles since 1650, 1986.
8. Whitehead, D. A survey of historic parks and gardens in Herefordshire, 2001.
9. [MS] D52/69, Herefordshire Archive Service.
10. [MS] D52/70 Herefordshire Archive Service.
11. The Annual Register 1845.
12. Watkins, C., Cowell, B. The letters of Uvedale Price, Walpole Society, Vol.68, 2006.
13. [MS] D52/91, Herefordshire Archive Service.
14. Hereford Times 6 Feb 1845.
15. Hereford Times 27 Feb 1847.
16. Whitehead, D. Thomas Blashill snr: land agent at Hampton Court and Garnons, c1825-60, Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists Field Club Vol.63, 2015.
17. Hereford Journal 24 March 1900.
18. Brooks, A. Pevsner, N. Buildings of England: Herefordshire, 2012.
19. Hereford Journal 25 Feb 1922.
20. Hereford Times 25 Feb 1922.
21. Daily Express 25 Nov 1957.
22. Daily Telegraph 2 Feb 2018.
23. Western Daily Press 14 Oct 1999.
24. Mowl, T., Bradney, J. Historic Gardens of Herefordshire, 2012.
25. Bermingham, A. Landscape and ideology: the English rustic tradition 1740-1860, 1986.

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