The sub-manor of Belsize, lying on the south side of the parish of Hampstead, was given to the Abbot and Convent of Westminster by Sir Roger le Brabazon in 1317, upon condition that they should provide a priest to say a daily Mass in their church for the souls of Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, Blanch, his wife, the said Sir Roger, and all the faithful departed this life.
Whether, at the dissolution of the abbey, it passed through the hands of the Bishop of Westminster is not known. At present it is the property of the Dean and Chapter of that minster. The manor-house was for a long period the residence of the Waad (subsequently Wood) family, who held the lease during many years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the said Dean and Chapter.
Armigall Waad was Clerk of the Council to Henry VIII. and Edward VI. He was also a nautical adventurer of some notoriety, and Anthony Wood asserts the first Englishman who discovered America. This idea, for it amounts to nothing more, is derived from the inscription formerly on an old monument in Hampstead Church—apart from which, it is said, there is not a shred of evidence of a discovery to which, as everybody knows, he had no claim. It is not even clear that he was amongst the first Englishmen who visited that country. Fuller says that his voyages are fully described by Hakluyt; but Park says that readers may search there or elsewhere in vain for Waad’s voyages, although in Hore’s account of his voyage to Newfoundland, in 1536, Waad is mentioned as an adventurer in that undertaking.
Queen Elizabeth employed him on an undertaking of some importance, and in old age he retired to Belsize, where he died in 1567. He was buried in Hampstead Church, under a fair monument of alabaster, the inscription on which Nordon copied. Gerard tells us that in a wood by a village called Hamstede, ‘near unto a worshipful gentleman’s house (Belsize), one of the clerks of the Queen’s Council called Mr. Waade,’ he found betony with white flowers, whence he brought the plant into his own garden at Holborn.
Pepys.
James I., who hoped to buy popularity by scattering titles broadcast, knighted Mr. Waade’s son and heir, who succeeded to his father’s office as Clerk to the Council, and after being employed in various foreign embassies and other high official services, was made Lieutenant of the Tower. His widow (a second wife), daughter of Sir Henry Browne, Knt., Lady Anne Waad, disposed of her interest in Belsize in 1640.[288] Twenty-eight years afterwards Pepys, in his ‘Diary’ under the date of August 17, 1668, tells us that he went to Hampstead to speak with the Attorney-General (Sir Geoffrey Palmer), whom he met in the fields by his old route and house, and, after a little talk about business, went and saw the Lord Wotton’s house and garden (Belsize), ‘which is wonderfully fine, too good for the house the gardens are, being, indeed, the most noble that ever I saw, and brave orange and lemon trees.’ In June, 1677, Evelyn pronounces the gardens ‘very large, but ill-kept.’
Remembering that the Tradescants, father and son, were successively gardeners to the Wotton family, it is not to be wondered at that the gardens and grounds of Belsize House exceeded in beauty any that the diarist had previously seen. Lord Wotton made Belsize his principal residence for many years—Brewer says from 1673 till 1681.
In the year 1681, under the head of ‘London, October 18,’ we read:
‘Last night eleven or twelve highway robbers came on horseback to the house of the Lord Wotton, at Hampstead, and attempted to enter therein, breaking down part of the wall and the gate; but there being four or five men within the house, they very courageously fired several musquits and a blunderbuss upon the thieves, which gave an alarm to one of the Lord’s tenants, a farmer that dwelt not far off, who thereupon went immediately into the town, and raised the inhabitants; who going towards the house, which was half a mile off, it is thought the robbers hearing thereof and withall finding the business difficult, they all made their escape. It is judged they had notice of my Lord’s absence from his house, and likewise of a great booty which was therein, which put them upon this desperate attempt.’—The True Protestant Mercury, October 15-19, 1681.