George William Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry

He married his first wife Maria Gunning, daughter of John Gunning of Castle Coote, Co. Roscommon, Esquire, in March 1752. Together they had one son, George William (later 7th Earl), and 3 daughters: Elizabeth Ann, who died an infant, Maria Alicia and Ann Margaret. After the death of his first wife, he remarried to Barbara, daughter of John St John, 10th Baron of St John of Bletsoe. Together they had two sons: John and Thomas William.

George William became MP for Bridport and Worcester. He was appointed Lord Lieutenant and Custos Rotulorum for Worcester in 1758 and served as Recorder of Worcester from 1774-1809. In October 1747 he was appointed the first co-president of Worcester Infirmary alongside the Bishop of Worcester. He chaired the annual meetings for this without fail for the next 20 years. George William served as Lord of the Bedchamber to George II and George III.

It was under George William that extensive works were carried out on Croome Court and the surrounding parkland. His elder brother, Thomas, had many plans for improvements he wished to make. His untimely death affected his younger brother greatly and the transformation of Croome by George William owes largely to his desire to carry out his wishes. Not long after death of his elder brother, George William began to put his plans for the estate into action. Survey work was carried out, fields were exchanged, divided and enclosed and there was reduction in leaseholders between 1749-50, which was made possible by doubling the rent. Formal gardens were also swept away, creating a blank canvas for work to begin. Around 1751 Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-1783) was commissioned to work on the designs for the house and the garden. He was to continue working at Croome for over 30 years, until his death in 1782 on his way home from dining with the Coventry family. Croome is believed to be the first complete landscape design by 'Capability' Brown. This places particular importance upon the original plant bills and accounts in the collection, which show evidence of the original work carried out at this time.

George William also employed Scottish architect and designer, Robert Adam(1728-1792), to work on the redesign of the house and its surrounding buildings. Apart from his work on the house and the church at Croome, Adam designed most of the important buildings in the park, including the Temple Greenhouse, the Alcove or Park Seat, the London Arch and the pier gates, and possibly Dunstall castle. Architect James Wyatt completed the work in the park after Adam's death and developed the design of the Panorama tower from Adam's drawings. Original letters and bills from Adam's work survive in the Croome archive.

'Capability' Brown was also commissioned to build a new house for the Earl on his Broadway estate around 1763, called Springhill House. This was built with the aim of allowing the Earl a place in Worcestershire where he could retreat from his arduous social and official duties. In 1764 the Earl acquired another new home, Coventry House, in Piccadilly, London.

George William died 3rd September 1809 at Coventry House, aged 87. His body was taken to Croome and is said to have been met at Evesham by a whole body of his tenants. The funeral procession was said to have been 1 mile long. A monument to the Earl was erected in Croome Park, on the jubilee of George III later that year.

Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus

In 1509, Douglas married Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Bothwell. After her death in 1513 he married, on August 6 1514, the queen dowager and regent, Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV and elder sister of Henry VIII. The marriage stirred up the jealousy of the nobles and the opposition of the faction supporting French influence in Scotland. Civil war broke out and Margaret lost the regency to John Stuart, Duke of Albany.

Angus withdrew to his estates in Forfarshire, while Albany besieged the queen at Stirling and got possession of the royal children; then he joined Margaret after her flight at Morpeth and on her departure for London returned and made his peace with Albany in 1516. He met her once more at Berwick in June 1517, when Margaret returned to Scotland on Albany's departure in vain hopes of regaining the regency.

Meanwhile, during Margaret's absence, Angus had become involved with a daughter of the Laird of Traquair. Margaret avenged his neglect of her by refusing to support his claims for power and by secretly trying through Albany to get a divorce. In Edinburgh Angus held his own against the attempts of James Hamilton to dislodge him. But the return of Albany in 1521, with whom Margaret now sided against her husband, deprived him of power. The regent took the government into his own hands, Angus was charged with high treason in December and in March 1522 was sent practically a prisoner to France, whence he succeeded in escaping to London in 1524.

He returned to Scotland in November with promises of support from Henry VIII, with whom he made a close alliance. Margaret, however, refused to have anything to do with her husband. On the 23rd, therefore, Angus forced his way into Edinburgh, but was fired upon by Margaret and retreated to Tantallon Castle.
 
He now organized a large party of nobles against Margaret with the support of Henry VIII and in February 1525 they entered Edinburgh and called a parliament. Angus was made a Lord of the Articles, was included in the Council of regency, bore the king's crown on the opening of the session and with Archbishop Beaton held the chief power. In March he was appointed Lord Warden of the Marches and suppressed the disorder and anarchy on the border. In July the guardianship of the King was entrusted to him for a fixed period (until the 1st of November) but he refused at its close to retire and advancing to Linlithgow put to flight Margaret and his opponents.

He now, with his followers, engrossed all the power, succeeded in gaining over some of his antagonists, including Arran and the Hamiltons, and filled the public offices with Douglases, he himself becoming Chancellor. 'None that time durst strive against a Douglas nor Douglas's man'.
 
The young king, James V, now fourteen, was far from content under the tutelage of Angus but he was closely guarded and several attempts to free him were foiled. Angus defeated John Stuart (qv), 3rd Earl of Lennox, who had advanced towards Edinburgh with 10,000 men in August and subsequently took Stirling. After his military successes, he reconciled with Beaton, and in 1527 and 1528 was busy in restoring order through the country.

On 11 March 1528 Margaret succeeded in obtaining her divorce from Angus and about the end of the month she and her lover, Henry Stewart, were besieged at Stirling. A few weeks later, however, James escaped from Angus's custody, took refuge with Margaret and Arran at Stirling and immediately proscribed Angus and all the Douglases, forbidding them to come within seven miles of his person.

Angus, having fortified himself in Tantallon, was attainted and his lands confiscated. Repeated attempts by James to subdue the fortress failed and on one occasion Angus captured the royal artillery. At length, Tantallon was given up as a condition of a truce between England and Scotland, and in May 1529 Angus sought refuge with Henry VIII, obtained a pension and took an oath of allegiance, Henry promising to make his restoration a condition of peace.

Angus had been largely guided in his intrigues with England by his brother, Sir George Douglas of Pittendriech, Master of Angus (died 1552), a far more clever diplomat than himself. George's life and lands were also declared forfeit, as were those of his uncle, Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie (died 1535), known by the nickname of Greysteel, who had been a friend of James. These men fled into exile.

James avenged himself on such Douglases as he could. Angus's third sister Janet, Lady Glamis, was summoned to answer a charge of communicating with her brothers and when she failed to appear, her estates were forfeited. In 1537 she was tried for conspiring against the king's life. She was found guilty and burnt on the Castle Hill, Edinburgh on 17th July 1537. Her innocence has been generally assumed but Tytler (History of Scotland, iv. pp. 433, 434) considered her guilty.

Angus remained in England until 1542, joining in the attacks upon his countrymen on the border, while James refused all demands from Henry VIII for his restoration and kept firm to his policy of suppressing the Douglas faction.

On James V's death in 1542 Angus returned to Scotland, with instructions from Henry to negotiate a marriage between Mary Stuart and Edward VI. His forfeiture was rescinded, his estates restored and he was made a privy councillor and lieutenant-general.

In 1543, he successfully negotiated a peace treaty and the marriage, and the same year he married Margaret, daughter of Robert, Lord Maxwell. Shortly afterwards a struggle between Angus and the regent Arran broke out and in April 1544 Angus was captured.

The same year Lord Hertford's marauding expedition, which did not spare the lands of Angus, made him join the anti-English party. He entered into a bond with Arran and others to maintain their allegiance to Mary and gave his support to the mission sent to France to offer the latter's hand. In July 1544 he was appointed lieutenant of the south of Scotland and distinguished himself on 27th February 1545 in the victory over the English at Ancrum Moor.

He still corresponded with Henry VIII but nevertheless signed, in 1546, the act cancelling the marriage and peace treaty, and on 10th September commanded the van in the great defeat of Pinkie, when he again won fame. In 1548 the attempt by Lennox and Wharton to capture him and punish him for his duplicity failed, Angus escaping after his defeat to Edinburgh by sea, and Wharton being driven back to Carlisle.

Under the regency of Mary of Lorraine his restless and ambitious character, and the number of his retainers, gave cause for frequent alarms to the government. On 31st August 1547 he resigned his earldom, obtaining a regrant sibi et suis haeredibus masculis et suis assignatis quibuscumque.

His career was a long struggle for power and for the interests of his family, to which national considerations were completely subordinate. He died in January 1557. By Margaret Tudor he had Margaret, his only surviving legitimate child, who married the Earl of Lennox, and was mother of Lord Darnley. He was succeeded by his nephew David, son of Sir George Douglas of Pittendriech.

George Howard, 6th Earl of Carlisle

George was the eldest son of Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle and his wife Margaret Caroline Leveson-Gower. Margaret was a daughter of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Marquess of Stafford and his wife Louisa Leveson-Gower, Countess Gower. Louisa was in turn daughter of Scroop Egerton, 1st Duke of Bridgewater.

Howard was First Commissioner of Woods and Forests and later Lord Privy Seal in the Tory governments of George Canning and Frederick John Robinson, 1st Viscount Goderich. He split with the Tories over reform and was later Lord Privy Seal in the government of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1834 ). He was made a Knight of the Garter in 1837 and died in 1848.

He married Lady Georgiana Cavendish (1783 -1858 ), daughter of William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana Spencer. They were parents to twelve children.

Henry Howard, Earl of Norwich, 6th Duke of Norfolk

Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk (July 12 1628 - January 13 1684) was the second son of Henry Howard, 22nd Earl of Arundel and Lady Elizabeth Stuart. He succeeded his brother Thomas Howard, 5th Duke of Norfolk after his death in 1677. He had previously been created Baron Howard of Castle Rising in 1669 and Earl of Norwich in  1672, on the latter occasion obtaining the restoration of the office of Earl Marshal of England to him and to his family.

In about 1652, Howard married Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of Edward Somerset, 2nd Marquess of Worcester and Elizabeth Dormer. In January 1678, he took his seat in the  House of Lords but in August the first development of the Popish Plot was followed by an Act for disabling Catholics from sitting in either house of Parliament. He would not comply with the oath and withdrew to Bruges for three years. There he built a house attached to a Franciscan convent and enjoyed freedom of worship. He later gave away the greater part of his library, grounds and rooms to the Royal Society and the Arundelian marbles to Oxford University.

The peerages created for him died out with his grandson the 9th Duke in 1777, though the current Baron Mowbray descends from the 9th Duke. The 10th and later Dukes of Norfolk, who have inherited the associated peerages and office of Earl Marshal, descend from his brother Charles Howard of Greystoke.

George Seton, 5th Lord

He was the eldest son of the 4th Lord Seton (d.1549) and was educated in France. He was present at Mary's marriage with the dauphin (later Francis II of France) in 1557 and three years later he was again in France because of his adherence to Roman Catholicism. When Mary returned to Scotland (1561), he became privy councillor and master of the household, but four years later he again found it advisable to retire to France. Mary and Lord Darnley spent their honeymoon at Seton Palace, and Mary found a retreat there after the murder of David Riccio and again after the murder of Darnley. After Mary's escape from Lochleven in May 1568, Lord Seton took her to his castle at Niddrie, Linlithgowshire, and thence to Hamilton. A week later he was taken prisoner at Langside. He was set free after the assassination of the regent, the Earl of Moray, and made his way to Flanders, where he was said to have made his living as a wagoner. He was, in fact, entrusted by Mary's supporters with a mission to the duke of Alva and sought in vain to secure for service in Scotland two regiments of Scots then in Spanish pay.

He returned home in 1571, being apparently reconciled with the government, but he retained his Roman Catholicism and his friendship for Mary, who wrote to Elizabeth I in 1581 desiring a passport for Lord Seton that he might alleviate her solitude. In 1581 he was one of the judges in the trial of the accused murderer of Darnley, the 4th earl of Morton, and in 1583 he was sent as ambassador to France, where he sought interference on Queen Mary's behalf. He died soon after his return in 1585.

George married Isabel Hamilton, daughter of Sir William Hamilton and Catherine Kennedy, by whom he had four surviving children - three sons and a daughter.

Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Rutland

Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford (1765 - 1802), eldest son of Francis Russell, Marquess of Tavistock (d.1767), by his wife, Elizabeth (d. 1768), daughter of  William Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, was baptized on 23 July  1765. In January 1771 he succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Bedford, and was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, afterwards spending nearly two years in foreign travel. Regarding Charles James Fox as his political leader, he joined the Whigs in the House of Lords, and became a member of the circle of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. Having overcome some nervousness and educational defects, he began to speak in the House, and soon became one of the leading debaters in that assembly. He opposed most of the measures brought forward by the ministry of William Pitt, and objected to the grant of a pension to Edmund Burke, an action that drew down upon him a scathing attack from Burke's pen.

Bedford was greatly interested in agriculture. He established a model farm at  Woburn and made experiments with regard to the breeding of sheep. He was a member of the original Board of Agriculture and was the first president of the  Smithfield Club. He died at Woburn on 2 March 1802 and was buried in the family vault at Chenies. The duke never married and was succeeded in the title by his brother, John.

Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire

Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house near the village of Wentworth, in the vicinity of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. "One of the great Whig political palaces" its East Front, 606 ft (185 m) long, is the longest country house façade in Europe. The house includes 365 rooms and covers an area of over 2.5 acres (10,000 m²). It is surrounded by a 150 acre (0.6 km²) park and a nearly 90,000-acre (360 km²) estate (now separately owned). Built by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Marquess of Rockingham (1693–1750), and added to by his heir, in the nineteenth century it became the inherited family seat of the Earls Fitzwilliam.

The huge length of the East Front is credibly the result of a resentful rivalry with the Stainborough branch of the Wentworth family, who inherited Strafford's minor title, Lord Raby, but not his estates, which came to Watson, who added Wentworth to his surname. The Wentworths, for whom the earldom was revived, lived, not by accident, at the nearby Wentworth Castle, which was purchased in 1708, in a competitive spirit, and strenuously rebuilt in a magnificent manner.

The Baroque, brick-built, western range of Wentworth Woodhouse was begun by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, after 1728 Lord Malton, after he inherited it from his father in 1723. It replaced the Jacobean structure that was once the home of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, whom Charles I sacrificed in 1641 to appease Parliament. The builder to whom Wentworth's grandson turned for a plan for the grand scheme that he intended, was a local builder and country architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe, who had a practice in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire.

The grand East Front is the more often illustrated. The West front, the "garden front" that Sir Thomas Robinson found to be finished in 1734, is the private front that looked onto a giardino secreto between the house front and the walled kitchen garden, intended for family enjoyment rather than social and political ambitions expressed in the East Front. Most remnants of it were redesigned in the nineteenth century.

In April 1946, on the orders of Manny Shinwell (the then Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power) a "column of lorries and heavy plant machinery" arrived at Wentworth. The objective was the mining of a large part of the estate close to the house for coal. This was an area where the prolific Barnsley seam was within 100 feet (30 m) of the surface and the area between the house and the Rockingham Mausoleum became the largest open cast mining site in Britain at that time: 132,000 tons of coal were removed solely from the gardens. Ostensibly the coal was desperately needed in Britain's austere post-war economy to fuel the railways; it was, however, useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning aristocracy. A survey by Sheffield University, commissioned by Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl, found the quality of the coal as "very poor stuff" and "not worth the getting"; this contrasted to Shinwell's assertion that it was "exceptionally good-quality."

Shinwell, intent on the destruction of the Fitzwilliams and "the privileged rich", decreed that the mining would continue to the back door of Wentworth, the family's East Front. What followed saw the mining of 99 acres (400,000 m²) of lawns and woods, the renowned formal gardens and the show-piece pink shale driveway (a by-product of the family's collieries). Ancient trees were uprooted and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50 ft (15 m) high in front of the family's living quarters.

Local opinion supported the Earl. Joe Hall, Yorkshire branch President of the National Union of Mineworkers said that the "miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth Woodhouse destroyed. To many mining communities it is sacred ground" - in an industry known for harsh treatment of workers, the Fitzwilliams were respected employers known for treating their employees well. The Yorkshire branch later threatened a strike over the Government's plans for Wentworth, and Joe Hall wrote personally to Clement Attlee in a futile attempt to stop the mining. This spontaneous local activism, founded on the genuine popularity of the Fitzwilliam family amongst locals, was dismissed in Whitehall as "intrigue" sponsored by the Earl.

The opencast mining moved into the fields to the west of the house and continued into the early 1950s. The mined areas took many years to return to a natural state and much of the woodland and the formal gardens were not replaced.

I highly recommend Catherine Bailey’s Black Diamonds for more detail.