ONE DAY IN 1885, The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, suggested to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford and chatelaine of Highcliffe Castle, that the place should go to a certain member of her husband's family, after her death. Lady Waterford respectfully demurred. Highcliffe, she explained to His Royal Highness, was 'a Stuart place'.

It had been a Stuart place since 1770, or thereabouts, when Lady Waterford's great-grandfather, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, on a botanical expedition, found himself on the cliff-top overlooking Christchurch Bay, and was charmed by the scene before him. The story is that he decided, there and then, to make his home there, and that he would not leave the spot until Robert Adam, the architect, arrived to begin work on his project. He called his new house High Cliff.

Lord Bute's fourth and favourite son, Lieutenant-General the Honourable Sir Charles Stuart, inherited High Cliff, but he was forced by landslips to demolish the house, and he chose to sell the greater part of the estate. Years later, however, General Stuart's elder son, Lord Stuart de Rothesay, bought back the land that had been sold, and built the house that became known as Highcliffe Castle.

Lord Stuart de Rothesay had no son to inherit his title and property, but he had two daughters, Charlotte, Viscountess and later Countess Canning, and Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, neither of whom had children. The house passed to Lady Stuart de Rothesay and then to Lady Waterford, who bequeathed it to a cousin, Major-General the Honourable Edward Stuart Wortley. General Stuart Wortley had a son, Rothesay, and two daughters, Louise, who married Sir Percy Loraine, Bt., and Elizabeth, or Bettine, who married Montagu Bertie, 8th Earl of Abingdon. Rothesay died before he could inherit the house, and it was bought from his widow by Lord Abingdon, who was its last private owner.

The house was called simply Highcliffe for many years, while the nearby village, grown from a hamlet known as Slop Pond, was called Newtown. Gradually, however, the place took over the name of the house. In 1862 a new parish was carved out of the Parish of Christchurch and called Highcliffe, and in 1892 Newton Post Office, for which confusion with other places called Newtown had become a problem, was officially renamed Highcliffe Post Office. It was then, at the turn of the century, in order to avoid further confusion, that the house became known as Highcliffe Castle.

INTRODUCTION FROM The Stuarts of Highcliffe

© Robert Franklin 1998

ISBN 9781897887172

128 Pages, Hardback

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