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Mount Stewart
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Mount Stewart
Mount Stewart is a 19th-century house and garden in County Down, Northern Ireland, owned by the National Trust. Situated on the east shore of Strangford Lough, a few miles outside the town of Newtownards and near Greyabbey, it was the Irish seat of the Stewart family, Marquesses of Londonderry. Prominently associated in particular with the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (better known as Viscount Castlereagh), Britain's Foreign Secretary at the Congress of Vienna, and with the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, the former Air Minister who at Mount Stewart attempted private diplomacy with Hitler's Germany, the house and its contents reflect the history of the family's leading role in social and political life in Britain and Ireland.
The original property, Mount Pleasant, was purchased with neighbouring estates in 1744 by Alexander Stewart (1699–1781). Exceptionally for an aspiring member of the landed Ascendancy, the Stewarts did not conform to the established (Anglican) church. They were Presbyterians, farmers and linen merchants whose fortunes had been transformed by Alexander's marriage to the sister and heiress of Robert Cowan, the East India Company governor of Bombay.
As fellow Presbyterians, the Stewarts appeared to the county's enfranchised forty-shilling freeholders as "friends of reform", and on that basis Mount Stewart rivalled Hillsborough Castle, seat of the Earls (later Marquesses) of Downshire, for control of the county's two parliamentary seats. In the increasingly troubled 1790s, Mount Stewart quietly converted to Anglicanism and stilled the contest, agreeing with Hillsborough that each should return a member to the parliament in Dublin unopposed.
Titles and office followed. In 1795 Alexander's son, Robert Stewart (1739–1821) was elevated to Earl of Londonderry (Marquess in 1816), and in 1797 his son Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant, Londonderry's brother-in-law, John Pratt, Earl Camden.
After helping, in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, to push the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament, bringing Ireland under the Crown at Westminster, Castlereagh went on to serve the new United Kingdom as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies and Foreign Secretary, building the coalitions that defeated Napoleon.
In 1787, sharing with her brother William Drennan (a disappointed supporter of the Stewarts' electoral ambitions, later to be targeted by Castlereagh as a United Irishman), her impressions, Martha McTier does Mount Stewart "much expense, no taste, everything unfinished and dirty, grand plans for the future, nothing pleasant nor even comfortable at present".
Commensurate with the family's rising fortunes, Castlereagh moved to realise some of these plans. In 1803, he choose the architect George Dance the Younger to design a neoclassical Regency replacement of the west wing with new receptions rooms. A number of the present furnishings reflect Castlereagh's career, including a portrait of the French emperor, and chairs elaborately embroidered for the delegates who redrew the map of Europe at Vienna.
During the three-day "Year of Liberty" in Ards and north Down, 10 to 13 June 1798, Mount Stewart was briefly occupied by the United Irish insurgents. In the wake of the courts-martial that followed, the wife of the local Presbyterian minister, James Porter, appeared at the house with her seven children to plead for his life. Together with her younger sister, Lady Elizabeth, then dying of tuberculosis, Frances Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, was tearfully persuaded. (She had often received Porter at Mount Stewart, and in correspondence with the United Irishwoman Jane Greg had referred to herself as a "republican countess".) But Lord Londonderry was to see to it that Porter, convicted on uncertain evidence of having consorted with the rebels, was hung outside his church and home at Greyabbey.
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Mount Stewart
Mount Stewart is a 19th-century house and garden in County Down, Northern Ireland, owned by the National Trust. Situated on the east shore of Strangford Lough, a few miles outside the town of Newtownards and near Greyabbey, it was the Irish seat of the Stewart family, Marquesses of Londonderry. Prominently associated in particular with the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (better known as Viscount Castlereagh), Britain's Foreign Secretary at the Congress of Vienna, and with the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, the former Air Minister who at Mount Stewart attempted private diplomacy with Hitler's Germany, the house and its contents reflect the history of the family's leading role in social and political life in Britain and Ireland.
The original property, Mount Pleasant, was purchased with neighbouring estates in 1744 by Alexander Stewart (1699–1781). Exceptionally for an aspiring member of the landed Ascendancy, the Stewarts did not conform to the established (Anglican) church. They were Presbyterians, farmers and linen merchants whose fortunes had been transformed by Alexander's marriage to the sister and heiress of Robert Cowan, the East India Company governor of Bombay.
As fellow Presbyterians, the Stewarts appeared to the county's enfranchised forty-shilling freeholders as "friends of reform", and on that basis Mount Stewart rivalled Hillsborough Castle, seat of the Earls (later Marquesses) of Downshire, for control of the county's two parliamentary seats. In the increasingly troubled 1790s, Mount Stewart quietly converted to Anglicanism and stilled the contest, agreeing with Hillsborough that each should return a member to the parliament in Dublin unopposed.
Titles and office followed. In 1795 Alexander's son, Robert Stewart (1739–1821) was elevated to Earl of Londonderry (Marquess in 1816), and in 1797 his son Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland by the Lord Lieutenant, Londonderry's brother-in-law, John Pratt, Earl Camden.
After helping, in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, to push the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament, bringing Ireland under the Crown at Westminster, Castlereagh went on to serve the new United Kingdom as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies and Foreign Secretary, building the coalitions that defeated Napoleon.
In 1787, sharing with her brother William Drennan (a disappointed supporter of the Stewarts' electoral ambitions, later to be targeted by Castlereagh as a United Irishman), her impressions, Martha McTier does Mount Stewart "much expense, no taste, everything unfinished and dirty, grand plans for the future, nothing pleasant nor even comfortable at present".
Commensurate with the family's rising fortunes, Castlereagh moved to realise some of these plans. In 1803, he choose the architect George Dance the Younger to design a neoclassical Regency replacement of the west wing with new receptions rooms. A number of the present furnishings reflect Castlereagh's career, including a portrait of the French emperor, and chairs elaborately embroidered for the delegates who redrew the map of Europe at Vienna.
During the three-day "Year of Liberty" in Ards and north Down, 10 to 13 June 1798, Mount Stewart was briefly occupied by the United Irish insurgents. In the wake of the courts-martial that followed, the wife of the local Presbyterian minister, James Porter, appeared at the house with her seven children to plead for his life. Together with her younger sister, Lady Elizabeth, then dying of tuberculosis, Frances Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, was tearfully persuaded. (She had often received Porter at Mount Stewart, and in correspondence with the United Irishwoman Jane Greg had referred to herself as a "republican countess".) But Lord Londonderry was to see to it that Porter, convicted on uncertain evidence of having consorted with the rebels, was hung outside his church and home at Greyabbey.
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