Princess Mary’s New Home.

Hokitika Guardian, 2 March 1922, Page 3

Princess Mary’s New Home.

| ITS ROYAL ASSOCIATIONS. ' (By Thornton Hall, author of “The Redmans of Harewood and J.evens.” There are few, if any, manors in England which have a more romantic and distinguished history than that of Harewood, the future home of Princess Mary, who will, however, it is understood, spend the early years of her married life at Goldsborougli Hall, Kiiaresho rough. Ever since the Conqueror gave the rich Haitewood lauds, with the neighbouring fee of Skipton-in-Craveii to Robert de Romelli. one of his soldiers, the manor has had a sequence ot lords as illustrious, and of ladies as fair and lii'di-borii, »Uy in England. Robert's

only (langhtei louild n husband in William dc .Meseliincs, the Conqueror’s great-grand-nephew, thus forging the first of many links between Harewood and the Throne.

Cecily’s daughter, Alice, found a husband in another royal lord, William Fitz-Duncan, Earl of Murray, and r/spliew of Meleolm, King of Scotland. And' it was the son of this union, the “Boy of Egremond,” who was so tragically drowned in the waters of the Strid, in Bolton Woods, and whose untimely end found such a sympathetic describe! - in Wordsworth. As cousin to Meleolm, King of Scotland, and to H/enry VI of England, this youthful lord of Harewood was within sight of a throne.

Thus the Hareivocd lords and ladies follow each other down the centuries—de Courcvs and Fitzgeralds; an Earl of Devon and an Earl or Albemarle—until we come to Aveline de Fortibus, who succeeded to both Earldoms, and combined the sovereignty of the Isle of Wight with the lordship of Harewood.

An heiress so richly dowered was a prize well worth the winning of a King’s son; and thus it came to pass that Adeline was mated with Edmund Plantagenet, afterwards Duke of Lam caster. Henry Ill’s son, “the King and Queen (we read) and almost all the nobility being present at the wedding.” Thus for the fourth time within two centuries Harewood bad a lord of royal blood.

In the generations that followed we find among the lords of Harewood John, Lord ife Lisle, one of the first hatch of Knights of the Garter; Sir Richard Redman, Speaker of the House of Commons, who had for wife a daughter of the first Lord Aklebui'gh ; and the great and ill-fated Earl of Strafford, who preferred a “poorlmuse” outside ■his park to the splendours of Lis ancestral castle.

Harewood Castle, which had seen six centuries of splendid life, had become a dismantled ruin when, in 1738, the manor passed by purchase into toe hands of Henry Lascelles, ancestor of the present earl; and it was not until twenty years later that the walls of Harewood House, one of the most magnificent of England’s “lordly pleasure hoiiffes,” began to rise.

Although no link of descent connects the Lascelles with the long line of earlier lords, they have worthily continued Marewood’s splendid traditions for nearly two centuries. They have added to' the long and distinguished list of Harewood ladies two daughters of marquises (Bath and Clanricaide), and the daughter of the third Earl of Bradford; and they have dispensed a regal hospitality from the days, a centurv and more ago, when the Grand Duke Nicholas was their guest, to the recent visit of Queen .Mary and Princess Mary, who will be Harewood’s first Royal lady.