Local history: Ham House. Today Ham House cherishes its romantic past. Yet Ham was in the very forefront of English architectural innovation in the late 17th century
Ham House was originally built for Sir Thomas Vavasour in 1610, when King James granted him a lease for his services to the crown. When Charles I came to the throne, he gave the lease of the house to William Murray, who had had been his ‘whipping boy’ when they were children. This meant that as boys, Murray, who was educated alongside Charles, was punished for Charles’ misdemeanors, as a future king could not be disciplined by his tutors. Perhaps in compensation for this, Murray was given the lease of Ham and he extensively remodelled the interior of the house.
When the Civil War interrupted normal life, little was done to the house until the 1670s. Murray, who had supported the King, had been created Earl of Dysart in 1643. He died in 1651.
On his death, his eldest daughter, Elizabeth Murray, inherited the title. She married the Duke of Lauderdale in 1672. Both had been married before – Elizabeth to Sir Lionel Tollemache – and went on to have 11 children. Lauderdale was the Secretary of State for Scotland and, under Charles II, became governor there.
The couple set about modernizing Ham. The south front was re-built and counter-balanced sash windows were installed, which had been invented in England only about five years earlier. Ham was probably the first house to have a major installation of sash windows. The Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale also appeared to have been influenced by French fashion by creating two separate apartments for themselves. A set of state rooms, installed for the visit of Catherine of Braganza, again followed French fashion by placing the royal bed on a dais.
The Duke was a keen bibliophile and one of the special features at Ham was his private library – probably the earliest private library in a country house, designed just for keeping books. The Duchess had a private bath installed, a very rare luxury then. However, by the late 18th century, Horace Walpole said that Ham House was so blocked up with trees ‘You think of yourself a hundred years back’. A century later, Augustus Hare, said, ‘No half-inhabited chateau of a ruined family in Normandy was ever so dilapidated as this home of the enormously rich Tollemaches.’
In 1948, the Tollemache family gave Ham House to the National Trust and it is now a beautiful house to visit.
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