The Stately Homes of England

by Llewellynn Frederick William Jewitt; S. C. Hall

Cobham Hall.

The mansion stands in the midst of scenery of surpassing loveliness, alternating hill and valley, rich in “patrician trees” and “plebeian underwood,” dotted with pretty cottages, and interspersed with primitive villages: while here and there are scattered “old houses” of red brick, with their carved wooden gables and tall twisted chimneys; and glimpses are caught occasionally of the all-glorious Thames. A visit to Cobham Hall, therefore, furnishes a most refreshing and invigorating luxury to dwellers in the metropolis; and the liberality of its noble owner adds to the rich banquet of Nature as rare a treat as can be supplied by Art. The Hall, independent of the interest it derives from its quaint architecture, its fine, although not unmixed, remains of the Tudor style, contains a gallery of pictures, by the best masters of the most famous schools, large in number and of rare value.

Before we commence our description of the Hall, the demesne, the Church, the College, and the village of Cobham,[5] it is necessary that we supply some information concerning the several families under whose guardianship they have flourished.

Cobham Hall has not descended from sire to son through many generations. Its present lord is in no way, or at least but remotely, connected with the ancient family who for centuries governed the “men of Kent,” and who, at one period, possessed power second only to that of the sovereign. That race of bold barons has been long extinct, the last of them dying in miserable poverty; and if their proud blood is still to be found within their once princely barony, it runs, probably, through the veins of some tiller of the soil.

The Cobhams had been famous from the earliest recorded times. In Philipot’s “Survey of Kent”—1659—it is said that “Cobham afforded a seat and a surname to that noble and splendid family; and certainly,” adds the quaint old writer, “this place was the cradle or seminary of persons who, in elder ages, were invested in places of as signall and principal a trust or eminence, as they could move in, in the narrow orbe of a particular county.” In the reign of King John, Henry de Cobham gave 1,000 marks to the king for his favour. He left three sons, viz., John, who was Sheriff of Kent, Justice of Common Pleas, and Judge Itinerant; Reginald, also Sheriff of Kent, Constable of Dover Castle, and Warden of the Cinque Ports; and William, also Justice Itinerant. The eldest, John de Cobham, was succeeded by his son John, who in turn became Sheriff of Kent, one of the Justices of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, and Baron of the Exchequer. His son Henry de Cobham was Governor of Guernsey and Jersey, Constable of Dover Castle, and Warden of the Cinque Ports; so was also, again, his son Henry, who likewise was Governor of Tunbridge Castle, and was summoned to Parliament 6 to 9 Edward III. He was succeeded by his son John de Cobham, Admiral of the Fleet, Justice of Oyer and Terminer, and Ambassador to France, who in “10 Richard II. was one of the thirteen appointed by the predominant lords to govern the realm, but was after impeached for treason, and had judgment pronounced against him, but obtained pardon, being sent prisoner to the island of Jersey.” Dying in the ninth year of Henry IV., he left his granddaughter, Joan, his heiress. This lady married for her third husband Sir John Oldcastle, who assumed the title of Lord Cobham. Reginald de Cobham, half brother to John, was Justice of King’s Bench, an Admiral, an Ambassador to the Pope, and commander of the van of the army at Crecy. He was succeeded by his son, Reginald de Cobham, who likewise was succeeded by his son Reginald; he left an only daughter as heir.

No less than four Kentish gentlemen of the name embarked with the first Edward in his “victorious and triumphant expedition into Scotland,” and were knighted for services rendered to that prince in his “successful and auspicious siege of Caerlaverock.” With Reginald de Cobham, as has been shown, the male line determined. Joan, his daughter, is said to have had five husbands, by only one of whom, Sir Reginald Braybrooke, she left issue, Joan, who being married to Sir Thomas Broke, of the county of Somerset, Knight, “knitt Cobham, and a large income beside, to her husband’s patrimony.”[6]

Their eldest son, Sir Edward Broke, was summoned to parliament, as Baron Cobham, in the 23rd Henry VI. In 1559 Sir William Broke entertained Queen Elizabeth at Cobham Hall, in the first year of her reign, “with a noble welcome as she took her progress through the county of Kent.” His son and successor, Henry, Lord Cobham, was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; but “being too deeply concerned in the design of Sir Walter Raleigh,” he was deprived of his estates, though not his life.[7]

His younger brother, George, was executed; but Cobham “lived many years after in great misery and poverty,” dying in January, 1619; and sharing the humble grave of some lowly peasant, apart from the magnificent tombs which cover the remains of his great and gallant ancestors. He is said, by Weldon, to have been reduced to such extreme necessity, that “he had starved, but for a trencher-scraper, some time his servant at court, who relieved him with scraps.”

A sister of Lord Cobham’s was married to Secretary Sir Robert Cecil: his estimable and greatly beloved lady died in January, 1596-7. She was also a kinswoman of Sir Walter Raleigh, and in one of his letters to Cecil he says:—“It is trew that you have lost a good and vertuous wife and my sealf an honorable frinde and kinswoman. Butt ther was a tyme when shee was unknowne to you, for whom you then lamented not. Shee is now no more your’s, nor of your acquayntance, butt immortall, and not needinge nor knowynge your love or sorrow. Therfor you shall but greve for that which now is as it was, when not your’s; only bettered by the differance in this, that shee hath past the weresome jurney of this darke worlde, and hath possession of her inheritance. Shee hath left behind her the frute of her love, for whos sakes you ought to take care for your sealf, that you leve them not without a gwyde, and not by grevinge to repine att His will that gave them yow, or by sorrowing to dry upp your own tymes that ought to establish them.” This lady was sister to two of the unhappy conspirators of 1603 and kinswoman to the third, as well as being wife of the chief officer of state by whom these conspiracies had to be brought to light. Well therefore was it, for her, that her pure spirit had taken its flight before the time of attainder of her brothers, Henry, Lord Cobham, and George Broke, and their baseness by falsity and otherwise in leading the much-injured Raleigh to the scaffold. “Whatever mysteries,” says Mr. Edwards, “may yet hang over the plots and counterplots of 1603, it is certain that George Broke proved in the issue to have been the instrument of the ruin alike of his brother Cobham and of Raleigh. It is also certain that mere ‘credulity of the practices of malice and envy’ could never have ripened, save in a very congenial soil, into the consummate baseness displayed both in the examinations and in some of the letters of George Broke after his arrest. In certain particulars his baseness exceeded his brother Cobham’s, and that is saying not a little as to its depth.” His estates, at the time of their confiscation, are estimated to have been worth £7,000 per annum; and he possessed £30,000 in goods and chattels. His nephew was restored in blood; but not to the title or property. These were transferred—“the manor and seat of Cobham Hall, and the rest of Lord Cobham’s lands”—by James I. to one of his kinsmen, Ludovick Stuart, Duke of Lennox, whose male line became extinct in 1672.