Elizabeth Craven and Ashdown House, Oxfordshire


Ashdown House near Lambourn stands on the Berkshire Downs, although nowadays owing to boundary changes it is officially in Oxfordshire. It is a mid-seventeenth century house associated with two famous women, both of them called Elizabeth. One of them is the writer Elizabeth Craven and the other is Elizabeth Stuart, Princess of England, Queen of Bohemia, for whom it was originally built.




Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, married the Elector of Palatine who was crowned King Frederick of Bohemia in 1619. But after only a few months, he was driven from his throne, had to flee Bohemia, and soon he lost his domains in the Palatinate too. He and his young wife got the melancholy titles of the Winter King and Queen. 


Portrait of 1st Lord Craven between those of Frederick, King of Bohemia and Elizabeth his wife at Ashdown House.

Elizabeth Stuart returned to England where eventually her brother King Charles I suffered an even harsher fate, losing his head as well as his crown. The widowed Queen needed a protector and luckily for her she found one in William, the first Lord Craven, an immensely rich and gallant royalist who is thought to have fallen in love with her. Ashdown House is the country home he built for her, so she could get away from London where the Plague was menacing. He also bought Coombe Abbey, because it was her childhood home, where she had been brought up by her guardian, Lord Harrington. He built her an even grander house at Hampstead Marshall, close to Ashdown in Berkshire, but it burnt down after fifty years.
   

     Ashdown is a strikingly beautiful house in the Dutch style that had just become fashionable in the Restoration. Elegant, romantic and aristocratic, it has tall windows looking out commandingly over the surrounding deer park. It still contains a lot of the family portraits of the Stuart royal family and their loyal champions, the Cravens.



This was the first marital home to which another William Craven brought the young Elizabeth Berkeley a century later. She arrived there as a bewildered young bride, aged only sixteen.






Portraits of Prince Rupert and his cousin Prince Charles, later King Charles II of England.

There was something rather gloomy about being stranded in the depths of the countryside with an older husband, a man she hardly knew. He was doubtless proud to bestow all these signs of wealth and status on his young wife but the massive deer's antlers which adorned some of the walls might have offered an omen of what would ensue.



Elizabeth Craven's life had some marked similarities to that of the Winter Queen. Both of them were married at the age of sixteen, and had large families of children. Both of them married minor German princes, in Craven's case the second time around. And both experienced great changes of fortune in their lives, from prosperity  to relative poverty. Both coped with these fluctuations in a strong and determined manner.
Elizabeth Craven was actually related by blood to the Stuart Princess. The Berkeley family could trace their ancestry back to Charles II through his natural son, the Duke of Richmond. Elizabeth Craven's grandmother, Lady Louisa Lennox, was a daughter of this Duke and granddaughter of Charles II. So Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Elizabeth Craven. 



To find out more about Elizabeth Craven, her life and her writings, read 

Elizabeth Craven: Writer, Feminist and European ...

https://vernonpress.com/title?id=334



23 Jun 2017 - Elizabeth Craven's fascinating life was full of travel, love-affairs and scandals but this biography, the first to appear for a century, is the only one to focus on her as a writer.




View from the windows of Ashdown House across the Berkshire Downs.

Ashdown House is now the property of the National Trust and is open to the public.












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