Great Estates: the real royal roots of PG Wodehouse's Blandings Castle

Lady Ashcombe at her home Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

In August 1592, Sudeley Castle hosted a mad party. Over three days, Queen Elizabeth I and her 300-strong entourage feasted, drank wine and danced to music. The event is said to have bankrupted the Chandos family, the castle’s owners since 1554.

Such parties are no longer de ­rigueur in the mild village of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where, down a lane off the A40, the castle sits. Now owned by Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, the estate has changed hands many times through the years. First built in 1441 in the reign of King Stephen, it was held by the Crown until 1547, when Edward VI gave it to his uncle Thomas Seymour, the brother of Jane, who became Henry VIII’s third wife.

Seymour then married the dowager queen Katherine Parr, who was Henry’s sixth wife; when she died in 1548, she was buried in the chapel, making Sudeley the only private house to have a queen buried in its grounds. When Thomas Seymour was executed for treason the following year Sudeley passed to the Marquess of Northampton, Katherine Parr’s brother, William, but he was stripped of his properties after the failure of John Dudley’s plot to make Jane Grey Queen. In 1554, Mary I gave Sudeley to John Brydges, Lord Chandos.

 By 1837, Sudeley had another new owner, the Dent brothers. “They saw Sudeley when they were coming over the hills,” Lady Ashcombe says; Cleeve Hill is one of the few places in England where you can look down on a castle.

“They fell in love with it and decided that they would acquire it.” In 1856, the estate passed to their nephew John Dent and his wife Emma Brocklehurst, the Victorian matriarch who would live at Sudeley for 50 years.

Lady Ashcombe was born Mary Elizabeth Chipps, in Virginia, and was a student at Parsons school of art in New York when she met stockbroker Mark Dent-Brocklehurst. Her first experience of Sudeley could have been straight out of a Blandings Castle tale, the P G Wodehouse saga said to have been based on Sudeley: “I didn’t know much about it, but I had heard how difficult Mark’s mother was.”

Instructions were given for breakfast: 8.30am, dressed, in the dining room. “I took it that ‘dressed’ meant that you had to look smart. So I am all dressed up, Mark never appears for breakfast, and when he does he is in his dressing gown. I had to sit there with my future mother-in-law, nervous and freezing cold.” Since then, she smiles, “Sudeley has opened its heart to me.”

CREDIT: CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

The couple married in 1962, and lived in London with their two children, Henry, now 50, and Mollie, now 46, until Mark’s mother announced that she would be downsizing. Sudeley needed a complete overhaul. “There was no modernisation, very little heating. It was shocking that it was allowed to get in that state,” says Lady Ashcombe. Mark’s plan was to open it to the public, which they did in 1971, moving from London the next year. A few months later, he suffered a fatal heart attack. “It was a terrible thing,” Lady Ashcombe says. “He had so looked forward to coming here.” Somehow, life at Sudeley had to go on, and Lady Ashcombe continued the public opening.

In 1979, she married a friend of Mark’s, Harry, the late Lord Ashcombe. Her new husband, who owned the Denbies estate near Dorking, was ­initially “wary” of Sudeley. “But we couldn’t keep both going, so he sold Denbies, a huge generosity on his part.” The couple lived at Sudeley until 2013, when Lord Ashcombe died aged 89. Since then, Lady Ashcombe has divided her time between London and her apartment at Sudeley with Tulah, her miniature wire-haired dachshund.

Sudeley’s immediate future is secure, Lady Ashcombe says. As Mark died intestate, the estate was split ­between Mollie and Henry, who each have an apartment in the castle and half of the 1,200 tenanted acres. But what will happen next is uncertain: Lady Ashcombe has five grandchildren, and “you can’t split it between five”.

For now, her ambition is to increase the visitor numbers from 82,000 to 100,000, to support the ongoing maintenance required. “The more the merrier,” she says. The estate hosts weddings and other events including outdoor cinema evenings, classic car rallies, ghost tours of the castle for Hallowe’en and the “Spectacle of Light” winter show. But there’s no infrastructure on Gloucestershire’s country roads for anything on a larger scale. “We couldn’t have a big pop concert even if we wanted to,” Lady Ashcombe says.

Inside, the castle is compact, with “about 50” average-sized rooms, containing paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens and Turner. But it’s no stately home. “I wouldn’t like to live at Longleat,” Lady Ashcombe offers as an example. “They’re beautiful places but they’re overbearing.”

She hopes, at some point, to retire, and someone will have to take over. Upstairs, in the stone drawing room, Lady Ashcombe sits to have her photograph taken. “We took all the Victorian panelling off the walls in here. Everybody disapproved but we exposed the original stone. You really feel like it’s Sudeley.” Next door, the billiard room is hung with Lord Ashcombe’s favourite sporting art. “My mother-in-law raised the floors in here,” Lady Ashcombe says. “Everybody has pushed and pulled this castle around to their liking. But I don’t know what the next generation might do. I know Henry is keen on power showers.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/luxury/great-estates-real-royal-roots-pg-wodehouses-blandings-castle/