Throughout history the British have oft taken particular delight in getting one over on the French. For 18th-century Admiral Edward Boscawen this purpose was just about the principal reason for getting out of bed, his boundless zeal for the cause the driving force behind a brilliant naval career. Its zenith came in 1758 during the Seven Years War, Boscawen’s masterminding of victory at Louisburg effectively wresting colonial control of Canada from the old Gallic foe.
To mark this great triumph the Worcester Porcelain Factory rushed out a celebratory mug carrying a likeness of ‘one of Britain’s finest naval officers’, the image adapted from a portrait of Boscawen by his friend Allan Ramsay.1 The original painting hangs not at Hatchlands, the Surrey mansion Boscawen was then building on the back of his French booty (and for which, soon after Louisburg, he ‘hired Robert Adam to fit out the interior’) but at Tregothnan in Cornwall, his birthplace and seat of the Boscawens, Viscounts Falmouth, for almost 700 years.
Despite this prodigious longevity, however, one late 19th-century historian was moved to observe that, in contrast to ‘other distinguished Cornish families, who have all yielded more than one man of mark deserving special notice, this can hardly be said of the Boscawens: the interest centres in Admiral the Hon. Edward Boascawen almost to the exclusion of all his ancestors, and [to this point] all of his descendants’.2
As the third son of the 2nd viscount, Boscawen would never in fact inherit the family seat. But the admirable admiral’s splendid full-length portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (later copied, right) would be given pride of place above a new 42ft imperial staircase as part of his grandson’s wholesale reimagining of Tregothnan House in the second decade of the 19th century. And hopefully the contents of this ever-private country house will also include one of those old commemorative mugs, a highly appropriate receptacle with which to enjoy the Boscawen estate’s present-day claim to fame as the UK’s original purveyor of homegrown tea.
The Roseland peninsula, east of Truro, is a long way from tropical Asia, the more natural home of the Camellia sinensis shrub from which all teas are derived. But the Tregothnan estate – bounded by the Tresillian and Truro rivers in the west and the Fal to the south – enjoys ‘an extremely special micro-climate’, which has been yielding ‘the most British tea in history’ since 2005. An Earl Grey blend features among Tregothnan’s commercial range, the rank of earl also being the Boscawens’ aristocratic high-water mark, from which they would later retreat by one step.
The family’s various surviving titles include the barony of Boscawen Rose, created in 1720 in recognition of the Boscawens’ original Cornish manor, further west near Lands End, whence John Boscawen would remove following his 1334 marriage to Joan, daughter and sole heir of John Tregothnan, of that place. Many subsequent alliances over the course of the next five centuries would prove the Boscawen boys’ finely-tuned radar for an eligible landed heiress…
… not least John and Joan’s daughter-in-law, Joan de Albalanda, who would bring into the fold extensive tracts south-west of Truro which in time were to yield great mineral riches. (One modern survey of UK land ownership reckoned the Boscawens’ Cornish holdings to be 42,000 acres, ‘one of the largest landed estates in the country’.3)
But despite the family’s increasing prominence in the county it was not until the 17th century that they began to flex some political muscle.
In the wake of their Roundhead sympathies, Hugh Boscawen (1625-1701) became ‘the first of the family to sit’ in Parliament, representing various Cornish constituencies over a period of half a century. Of the house he had inherited at Tregothnan (‘which formed three sides of a court entered through a gate-tower’) all that remains today is a doorway repurposed as the entrance to the kitchen garden (right). This he would rebuild c.1650 in the compact rectangular style of the Commonwealth period, its hipped roof ‘surmounted by a cupola and a pair of tall chimneys’.4
Internally, two parlours from this period, with moulded ceilings and ‘lavish chimneypieces’, would survive a later (and altogether more dramatic) remodelling of Tregothnan House.4 Visiting in 1698 family relation Celia Fiennes noted that while the principal rooms were ‘new modelled, wanscoated and hung just as the new way is’, she was pleased to find some of her cousin’s handiwork – ‘old hangings, to the bottom’ – still about the place.

Country Life 17 May 1956
‘In the Cupulo I could see a vast way at least 20 miles round,’ Fiennes recorded, also noting the practical bent of the gardens close by the house. These were the product of Hugh’s wife Margaret’s keen interest in medicinal remedies, adapting recipes and ideas sourced from her sizable library of works on the subject.5 Alas, this diligence would be to little avail, the couple’s offspring…
… being ‘numerous but unhealthy’, with all eight sons predeceasing their father.
As a consequence Tregothnan passed to a nephew, also Hugh, the son of his brother Edward, recently come of age and married to Charlotte, niece of the 1st Duke of Marlborough and a Maid of Honour to Queen Anne. And at the Hanoverian succession in 1714 Hugh Boscawen found ready acceptance within the new court, appointed comptroller of the Royal Household and ‘the only important English courtier to accompany George I to Hanover in 1715’.6
By this time the Boscawens had Truro and several other Cornish constituencies completely sewn up, Hugh having represented most of them by the time the king ‘offered him an annual pension of £4,000 if he would lead the government in the Commons’.7 Deciding that this role would likely be far more trouble than it was worth, Boscawen declined and in 1720 removed to the Upper House upon being created Viscount Falmouth (and Baron of Boscawen Rose).
‘Maliciously nicknamed ‘Lord Foulmouth’,’ he died of an apoplexy fit as he came downstairs’ in October 1734, to be succeeded by his namesake eldest son. This Hugh Boscawen had reputedly been somewhat of a disappointment to his father (‘not behaving in a manner he expected with regard to him’), a sentiment later shared by the second viscount’s wife, Hannah, ‘who often threatened .. that she ‘would part with my lord”.2
Personal shortcomings aside, the family’s fortunes prospered through Falmouth’s near-half-century as master of Tregothnan, not least through his exploitation of the Boscawens’ many and various mineral rights in the county. But towards the end of his life resistance to the family’s local political dominance began to surface.
“Betrayed and deserted as we have been by Men who professed themselves our Friends .. we join in utter detestation and Contempt of their treacherous Practices.”
An excerpt from a press notice paid for by George Evelyn Boscawen and his cousin William, nephews of Lord Falmouth, placed in reaction to secret manoeuvres by the corporation of Truro to select other candidates in the general election of 1780. For their part the dissatisfied locals declared that Falmouth’s ‘avarice, increasing with age, grossly abused their confidence’ and that the ‘interference of any peer in the election of Members of the Lower House is subversive of the very essence of our constitution’.8
In a separate notice, George Boscawen claimed to have been caught on the hop by the dissolution of Parliament: “I was unfortunately in a very remote part of Ireland. On first news of it I lost no time to repair to England where .. I had the Mortification to find that the Station of being one of your Representatives, which I have always had sanguine Hopes of attaining to, had been allotted to another.”8 However, even if his desire had been granted, 42-year-old George would soon have had to stand down…
… as in February, 1782 his uncle died without legitimate issue, and he became the 3rd Viscount Falmouth (r). As the youngest son of national hero Admiral Edward Boscawen this turn of events had never been an inevitability. A late child, born in the year of his father’s great triumph at Louisburg, George had lost his two older brothers: Edward, a sickly ‘fop‘ (who nevertheless somehow became Member of Parliament for Truro), had died in a French health resort in 1774, five years after young naval recruit William Boscawen had drowned whilst bathing in the West Indies.
But, just as his father had been, George would be taken in his fiftieth year, dying in February, 1808; three months later his son and heir, Edward, came of age and his era would see the house at Tregothnan radically redefined.
*
In 1809 landscape architect Humphry Repton visited Cornwall, his winning ways proving persuasive to the Corytons of Pentillie Castle, near Saltash, much of the surroundings of which would soon be typically beautified. Repton’s proposals also included the romantic Gothicising of the Corytons’ house (Pentillie remains in that family) which would also be taken up, the realisation of which he left in the hands of his architectural friends and fellow East Anglians, Messrs William Wilkins senior and junior.
Maximising his visit way out west that year, Repton (and elder son, George) also took the opportunity to call in on the 4th Viscount Falmouth just as the new squire of Tregothnan was getting to grips with his birthright. Coming up with another of his trademark Red Books (which in Tregothnan’s case ‘is actually blue’9), Repton’s scheme, though later modified, would underpin the development of the Boscawens’ parkland, including the introduction of an epic four-mile driveway (‘the longest in Europe‘) meandering the wooded bank of the Tresillian.
Unlike at Pentillie, however, young Lord Falmouth – that tricky specimen, a client with ideas of his own – proved somewhat less receptive to Humphry and George’s designs for the remodelling of his family seat. But another member of the Repton family would still prove highly influential, albeit indirectly, in the imminent radical transformation of Tregothnan House.
Profoundly deaf John Adey Repton, the younger son of Humphry, was born in Norwich in 1775 and as a teenager was sent by his father to study under “my ingenious friend” architect William Wilkins in that city; Wilkins’s own son, William junior, born in Norwich in 1778, also became a pupil in his father’s practice.10 The young Repton soon became a deft, diligent draughtsman.
In February 1808 he exhibited his fine studies of a ‘richly decorated’ but then ruinous brick Tudor mansion in Norfolk, East Barsham Manor (r), at the Society of Antiquities, of which both he and the Wilkinses were fellows. ‘In the following decade Repton’s detailed survey became the source for two influential houses by William Wilkins, Jnr.’11
Commissioned in 1814 by the Earl of Rosebery, Dalmeny House on the Firth of Forth west of Edinburgh (r), was something of a stylistic and structural sensation in the context of architectural traditions north of the border. ‘Dalmeny’s entrance front clearly derives from East Barsham Manor’ but the ‘regularity of the plan [and muted neo-Classical interiors] showed ‘Wilkins’ appreciation that the historical style had to be adapted to contemporary life.’12 And, being more than 500 miles away at the opposite end of Britain, Viscount Falmouth was happy to ask Wilkins down to Cornwall to more or less repeat the trick at Tregothnan (↓).
Where the Reptons had proposed completely replacing the existing house, Wilkins was now happy to accommodate Falmouth’s wish to encase its Cromwellian core, whose five bays became the plainest element of new elevations ‘of extreme picturesqueness: castlellations, turrets and a forest of elaborately decorated chimneys’.13 His client’s later whim to incorporate a substantial ballroom ‘ending in a polygonal projection facing the river’ further added to Tregothnan’s eventual ‘most pleasing‘ irregularity as the project gradually evolved distinctive variations on the Dalmeny model.12
‘The two-storey entrance porch leads through to a spectacular staircase contained in the square tower. High above, the fretted and gilded ceiling is rich in Tudor emblems [and] large windows fill the space with light.’4 But elsewhere, as at Dalmeny, Gothic gave way to restrained Classical principal rooms of which ‘the library, fitted with Grecian bookcases is the most impressive’.14
In 1821 Falmouth was further elevated to become 1st Earl of that ilk, a fitting accompaniment to the aggrandized house in which, two decades on, he would rather suddenly expire (‘the first symptom of the attack of which he died having shown itself but an hour and a half before he was a corpse’).15 This event ushered in the succession of his accomplished if somewhat eccentric bachelor son George, then 39 and who, despite a relatively short tenure, would also make his mark at Tregothnan House.
‘Reputedly the worst-dressed man-about-town in London,’ the 2nd earl, a keen amateur musician, spent much of his time at No.2 St. James’s Square…16
… the family’s handsome townhouse (acquired by the 2nd viscount for £8,200 a century before) wherein his sartorial disregard meant that ‘he was more apt to be taken for a servant than the master of the house’. It was here in the summer of 1848 that Falmouth would host a recital by the great Frédéric Chopin (‘attended by a numerous assemblage of the dilettanti’) for the specific purpose of which the earl imported a splendid Broadwood pianoforte.17
Five years on Falmouth’s own collection of instruments (including his Stradivarius violin) would be sold at auction (along with ‘perhaps the most complete library of chamber music over formed’) following Boscawen’s demise aged 41 at St. James’s Square in August 1852. Yet despite his metropolitan life, a world away down in Cornwall the 2nd earl had also overseen the further enlargement of Tregothnan, creating the mighty footprint the house retains to this day.
While George Boscawen’s lack of children meant the extinction of the earldom (but not the viscountcy), the marriage of his cousin and heir Evelyn in 1845 would bring another title to the family in due course. For the 1st earl had earlier been involved in the guardianship of one Mary Stapleton, the daughter of a sister-in-law, who as a nine-year-old in 1831 had inherited not only an estate in Kent, Mereworth Castle, but also the ancient le Despencer barony (being among that small number of titles also held by right in the female line).
In 1836 Colen Campbell’s spectacular early-18th century Palladian villa at Mereworth (r) was in need of remedial attention, architect Lewis Vulliamy, rated ‘a highly competent practitioner of the second rank’, being hired for the work.18 Subsequently, in 1845 (and seven years before he would trump her with his Falmouth viscountcy), Evelyn Boscawen married Mary Stapleton, by now the 13th Baroness le Despencer…
… as his uncle the 2nd earl was midway through his enlargement of (Grade I listed) Tregothnan House, the work there being overseen by .. Lewis Vulliamy.
Adding more towers, chimneys and projecting gables, rendered in a style wholly consistent with William Wilkins’ richly wrought Tudor homage, ‘Lewis Vulliamy’s extensions dramatically elongated the north and south elevations, and greatly increased the picturesque effect’.13 However, despite Tregothnan’s enhanced magnificence and, pertinently, the splendid and ample stable facilities (↓)…
… its far-flung location would prove inconvenient – certainly relative to that of his wife’s inheritance – for pursuit of the 6th Lord Falmouth’s passion, the breeding of top-class racehorses. Thus Mereworth Castle now became the Falmouths’ primary centre of operations, the stud there developing a formidable reputation. Recruiting trusted allies, trainer Matthew Dawson and a promising young jockey, Fred Archer, the trio would carry all before them throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, achieving unprecedented success including 15 homebred classic winners.
But Falmouth’s racing days would come to a rather abrupt end, the ageing peer’s growing disenchantment seemingly reaching tipping point with the 1883 Derby, post-race rumours soon suggesting that Archer had deliberately underperformed aboard Falmouth’s horse Gaillard to the advantage of the race’s winner, Highland Chief, trained by Archer’s younger brother. The following year the earl’s racing concern was sensationally disbanded, resulting in what was then ‘the most important disposal of bloodstock on record’.19 Meanwhile, down in Cornwall…
… Lord Falmouth would oversee substantial development of the gardens at Tregothnan where the locally competitive Victorian enthusiasm for exotic plant-hunting was taken up with gusto by his brother, Rev. John Townshend Boscawen, Rector of nearby Lamorran. Many varieties of camellia and rhododendron along with sundry other rare species were introduced and which have since collectively matured into ‘Cornwall’s largest historic garden’, its 50 acres opened (unlike the House) two days a year, billed as ‘the world’s largest open garden weekend’.9
(In early 2000s formal terracing before the south front of Tregothnan House was the primary element (↓) in a programme of garden enhancements undertaken for the Hon. Evelyn Boscawen, who assumed management of the estate in 1980. ‘The new parterre was constructed over the remnants of a Victorian garden by William Andrews Nesfield. We were subsequently asked to produce landscape proposals for the enlarged ponds in the botanic garden, including a new summerhouse designed as a Chinese tea pavilion.’)
Lord Falmouth died at Mereworth in 1889, his son, Evelyn also later succeeding as 14th Baron le Despencer on the death of his mother in 1891.
Hitherto a professional soldier, ‘the 7th viscount, while using and developing his Cornish seat, spent much time and gave great thought to Mereworth’ where Lady Falmouth took the lead in redesigning the gardens (left). ‘Nowhere has modern formalism been better contrived than in the environs of the best and completist Palladian villa on English soil,’ purred Country Life magazine.19
But death duties in the wake of the 7th Lord Falmouth’s demise in 1918 occasioned some retrenchment. The great house at Mereworth was sold in 1922 (with ‘a remarkable group of Jacobean full-length portraits’ now transferring to the staircase hall at Tregothnan4), followed later by the disposal of No.2 St. James’s Square. Some 2,000 acres of land in Kent were retained, however, and where today the present heir to Tregothnan is producing alcoholic additions to the Boscawens’ beverages range from vineyards cultivated since 2016.
Beyond his stewardship of Tregothnan 8th viscount Evelyn Boscawen would establish a notable career in science and energy administration and research (being a prime mover behind the rise of Imperial College, London) prior to his death in 1962. He would doubtless have been most interested in Tregothnan’s most recent mining venture, prospecting for potential lithium extraction on the estate, an initiative made viable by the inexorable transition to electric vehicles and one which, remarkably, his heir lived long enough to see, the 9th Viscount Falmouth dying aged 102 in March this year (pictured below).

see: Cornwall Live
The destiny of George Boscawen had been determined by the death of his elder brother, Evelyn, killed in action in World War Two. ‘Conscientious Lord Falmouth paid close attention to the mining rights owned by his family [which] had for generations helped to support the landed estate’ and which may do so again under his son Evelyn, 10th and present Viscount Falmouth.20
One way or another Tregothnan seems intent on recharging our batteries, if not through lithium then at least with a nice cup of tea…