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Wentworth Woodhouse, standing in a park of 250 acres & situated about four miles from , with its East Front of over 600 feet & its courts & buildings covering three acres or more of ground, is ranked as perhaps the very largest of the country palaces created by our 18th Century Whig Magnates. It was the home of Charles 1st’s ill­fated administrator, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford. There were Wentworths at Wentworth in the 13th Century & there they continued until 1695. Then, on the death of William 2nd Earl of Strafford, son of the 1st Earl, it passed to Thomas Watson, a son of his sister who had married Edward 2nd Baron Rockingham. He died in 1723 & was succeeded by his only son, Thomas Wentworth, who was created 1st in 1746 & died in 1750. He was succeeded by his fifth & youngest son, Charles, 2nd & last Marquess of Rockingham, who died in 1782 without issue. Wentworth then passed to William 4th , who was the eldest son of the Marquess’ eldest sister who had married the 3rd Earl Fitzwilliam of Milton. It remained in the hands of the Fitzwilliam family until 1989. The house & around 90 acres of land were then bought by Mr Wensley Haydon­Baillie, a businessman, who was here for 10 years. In 1999, it was bought by Mr Clifford Newbold & his family, who were in the process of restoring the house to its former glory upto 2015. Since then the Wentworth preservation Trust have taken over. The history of Wentworth Woodhouse, as well as the village of Wentworth, is inextricably linked with the history of the great aristocratic families – the Wentworths, Watsons & Fitzwilliams – who presided over it for generations. ­­ooOoo­­

Below is an extract from: "Black Diamonds": The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty by Catherine Bailey, Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

A crowd of thousands shifted nervously on the great lawn in front of Wentworth House, waiting for the coffin to be brought out. It was the winter of 1902: ‘February,’ as one observer remarked, ‘in her worst mood.’ Two hundred servants, dressed in black, stood stiffly along the length of the façade facing the crush of mourners. Shrouds of fog enveloped the statues and pediments crowning the house; an acrid smell clung to the mist, catching in the nostrils, effluent from the pits, foundries and blast furnaces in the valley below. The fog drained everything of colour. Now and then it lifted to reveal a portion of the house: on a clear day the crowd could have counted a thousand windows, but that morning most of it was obscured. The hearse, a glass coach, swathed in sable and crêpe, was ready outside the Pillared Hall. It was drawn by four black horses: plumes of black ostrich feathers adorned their bridles and black­tasselled cloths were draped across their backs. Mutes, the customary Victorian funeral attendants, stood by them; macabre figures, veils of black crêpe trailed from their tall silk hats. Bells tolled in the distance. In the nearby villages the shops were closed and the curtains in the houses drawn fast. At the stroke of midday, three hours after the crowd had first begun to gather, the coffin, mounted on a silver bier, was carried out of the house. It was followed by a procession of housemaids and footmen bearing hundreds of wreaths of flowers. A brilliant splash of colour in the bleak scene, they drew a murmur from the crowd. The oak coffin contained the body of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the richest men in Britain. He had left a legacy of £ 2.8 million pounds – more than £3 billion at today’s values. In the century to come, only one Englishman, Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate, would leave a larger fortune. The dead Earl was among the very wealthiest of Britain’s twentieth­century aristocrats. His money had come from land and a spectacular stroke of luck. In the late eighteenth century, the Fitzwilliams’ estates – over 20,000 acres in total – were found to straddle the Barnsley seam, the main artery of the coalfield. Wentworth House, situated nine miles north­east of Sheffield, lay at its heart. The Earl was born in 1815, the year of Waterloo. Over the course of his lifetime his wealth had increased a thousandfold. Rapid technological advances, spurred by the huge demand for coal, had made it possible to sink mines deeper and deeper along the lucrative Barnsley seam. The Earl’s collieries, as one contemporary noted, were ‘within rifle shot of his ancestral seat’: by the close of the century, mines and pit villages crowded the hills and valleys around the house. The Earl’s death at the age of eighty­six – after he caught a sudden chill – had stunned the district. His life had been spent overseeing his vast estates and enjoying his wealth. For a man of few other achievements, the local newspaper’s coverage of his demise was extraordinary: He was a noble lord, and moreover, a man who had the respect of all who knew him and the affection of those who knew him best. In 1902, tens of thousands of people across the South Yorkshire coalfield were wholly dependent on the Earl for a living. On the morning of his funeral, they were drawn to Wentworth House. A remarkable feature of the proceedings was the great muster of miners. Genuine sorrow cannot be bought with gold or wrung from the hearts of an unwilling community. It must spring from love or admiration. Through the slush and the searching rain the mourners came to the funeral. Old men who had worked for the Earl for 50 years risked serious illness for love of their noble master and trudged sorrowfully from station or neighbouring village to swell the mournful gathering. The size and grandeur of Wentworth House were but faintly suggested through the haze of mist and fog. It was built for the Earl’s ancestor Thomas Wentworth, later Marquess of Rockingham, in the 1720s. Designed by , it had taken more than fifteen years to complete and its façade was the longest in Europe. The house had a room for every day of the year and five miles of passageways. One guest, a Baron von Liebig, resorted to crumbling wafers along the route from his bedroom to the dining room so that he could find his way back after dinner. Thereafter, guests were presented with a crested silver casket containing different­coloured confetti. The house lay in parkland encompassed by a nine­mile­long stone wall. Humphrey Repton, the famous eighteenth­century landscape designer, had sculpted the Park; twelve follies – towers, columns and a mausoleum built in the classical style – marked its highest points. Millions of tons of coal lay under the land but so rich was the Earl, he had no need to mine it. Yet even he could not inure Wentworth from the grime that trespassed inside the boundaries of the Park. Coal dust carried from the nearby collieries settled in the sheaves of corn grown in the fields. The streams running through them were orange: ‘ochre water’, as the locals called it, polluted by the mines that honeycombed the district. Shortly after one o’clock, a bugler sounded the Last Post. It was the signal for the 5,000­strong cortège to begin the mile­long walk to the village church. As if on cue, the fog lifted as the mourners moved off. A thousand miners from the Earl’s pits led the procession, flanked by an escort of fifty soldiers from the Yorkshire Dragoons. The family’s downfall was unthinkable. William, Earl Fitzwilliam, had left a great fortune. Four sons – each named William after him – survived him. The coal industry was booming: the family’s wealth and power seemed as solid and unshakeable as the foundations of their vast house. Yet the Fitzwilliams and the thousands who worked for them were about to become the central figures in an approaching catastrophe. What was unthinkable on that day in February 1902 happened. In 1902, Wentworth was the largest privately owned house in Britain. It still is today. Its size is truly extraordinary, almost impossible to visualize. Imagine Buckingham Palace: the glorious, sweeping East Front at Wentworth is almost twice as long. Marcus Binney, the architectural historian, sees it as ‘unquestionably the finest Georgian house in England’. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner wrote glowingly of its ‘interiors of quite exceptional interest’. But unlike the much cherished Chatsworth or Blenheim, few have heard its name and fewer still have actually seen it. It is England’s forgotten palace. Today, the house looms blank and shuttered. The home of a reclusive figure, it is closed to the public. ‘I’ve never seen him,’ remarked a former postmistress in the nearby village. ‘And no one I know ever has.’ The baroque West Front of the house is hidden behind a screen of tall cedars, but the 600­foot­long Palladian East Front can be glimpsed from the Trans­Pennine Way, the public footpath that runs through Wentworth Park. The first impression is a familiar one: the pediments, pillars and domed pavilions the hallmarks – be they on a breathtaking scale – of a grand stately home. But look a little longer and something jars. Longer still and the image is unnerving – even chilling. It is like looking at a picture one knows intimately from which something is missing, though it is impossible to say what. The clues can be found in the fields that sweep away from the house. Time is not written on the land as it is on the adjacent façade; there are no hedgerows, ditches or centuries­old oaks. The fields are bare and desolate, as if denuded by some unseen hand. The traces of the past have been kicked over. An obsession with secrecy corrupts the twentieth­century history of the house. The Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments – the family and estate papers of the Earls Fitzwilliam and their ancestors, the Marquesses of Rockingham and the Earls of Strafford – form one of the most important historical archives in Britain today. Rich in correspondence, there are thousands of letters and papers dating back to medieval times. But in 1900 the transparency of centuries comes to a halt: few family papers exist in this impressive historical collection after this date. Their absence is no accident. In July 1972 the 10th and last Earl Fitzwilliam ordered his employees to destroy the bulk of Wentworth’s twentieth­century records. Sixteen tons of documents were hauled by tractor from where they were stored in the Georgian Stable Block to Trawles Wood, a beech copse in the valley below Wentworth that was used in the eighteenth century as a dumping ground for the household’s refuse and rubbish. There, the documents were burnt in a bonfire that blazed, night and day, for three weeks. Other smaller fires had preceded it: in a deliberate attempt to hide from history, the private papers of the 7th, 8th and 9th Earls – the tenants of Wentworth in the first half of the twentieth century – were destroyed after their deaths. The cull even extended to the personal papers of their employees. Peter Diggle, the son of Colonel Heathcote Diggle, a Fitzwilliam family trustee and the manager of their estates, watched his father burn documents that chronicled three decades of working as an adviser to the 7th Earl: ‘The Fitzwilliams had a secret life and if you have a secret life then there are things that must be destroyed.’ The twentieth­century Fitzwilliams were obsessive in guarding their secrets, both in the systematic destruction of the family papers and in vows of silence. ‘My grandmother made me promise that I would not tell anybody about these private things that went on at Wentworth,’ Ann, Lady Bowlby, the granddaughter of Maud, Countess Fitzwilliam, who lived at Wentworth from 1902 until 1948, recalled. ‘She didn’t want it all broadcast. It was to do with the Communistic trait of the world then.’ ‘That generation of the family were very proud, very private and very destructive. It was in their blood,’ Ian Bond, another of the Fitzwilliam descendants, remembered. ‘They wanted to destroy things as they themselves had been destroyed. They lived through the downfall of the family. They had experienced a huge sea change. They saw so many sadnesses. They did not want to remember. The world had passed them by.’ The world has also passed Wentworth House by. Although it is the largest and one of the most beautiful of England’s stately homes, the story of what happened there during the twentieth century is a deep mystery because of the loss of the Fitzwilliam family’s archives. Fragments remain: a few scattered but precious collections of family papers have survived. These – and the memories of those who lived and worked at the house and in the pit villages around it – were the beginnings of this book. The story starts at the edge of the void; at the moment when the official history of Wentworth House stops. ­­ooOoo­­

The 17th Century House (Part of the older house) There is nothing to show what the original Woodhouse may have been. The house gave way to another, there is nothing to show by which of the early Wentworth’s it was created. The double square court, with the Porters Lodge in the outer wall, was a plan of the houses built in the reign of Henry VIII and the early part of Elizabeth’s, and the house was of the classical manner introduced into England by Inigo Jones after his return from Italy in 1615. All that remains of this house can be seen from the Chapel Court. The gateway to the south is attributed to Inigo Jones and traces of his work can be seen on the elevation that faces the gateway. This house, still called Wentworth Woodhouse, was added to by the 1st Marquess of Rockingham about 1725, who changed the name to Wentworth House, but we find the old name in use again about the time of the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam. The central block of the West Front (1725­1734) is set against what remains of the 17th Century house that stretches beyond it to the south. Over the windows of the south end of the wing may be seen the Wentworth Crest and letters TW in cipher – these initials may stand for either the first or second of the Watson owners. In 1734 we find that not only was the entire west section complete but building work had already commenced on the East Front. Coal mining on the estate

In April 1946, on the orders of (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, but the decision has been widely seen as useful cover for an act of class­war spite against the coal­owning 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 good­quality.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 show­piece pink shale driveway (a by­product 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 Labour Government's plans for Wentworth, and Joe Hall wrote personally to 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; much of the woodland and the formal gardens were not replaced. The owners of the property alleged that mining operations near the house caused substantial structural damage to the building due to subsidence, and lodged a claim in 2012 of £100 million for remedial works against the Coal Authority. The claim was heard by the Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber) in April 2016. In its decision dated 4 October 2016 the Tribunal found that the damage claimed for was not caused by mining subsidence . Two sets of death duties in the 1940s, and the nationalization of their coal mines, greatly reduced the wealth of the Fitzwilliams, and most of the contents of the house were dispersed, in auction sales in 1948, 1986 and 1998. Many items still remain in the family, with many works lent to museums by the "Trustees of the Fitzwilliam Estates". On 23 November 2016, the Conservative Chancellor announced that £7.6 million would be invested into reversing the damage caused by the mining that commenced in 1946, and restore the house to conditions suitable for visitation Lease to Lady Mabel College

The Ministry of Health attempted to requisition the house as "housing for homeless industrial families". To prevent this, the Earl attempted to donate the house to the , however the Trust declined to take it. In the end, Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, sister of the 7th Earl and a local alderman, brokered a deal whereby the West Riding County Council leased most of the house for an educational establishment, leaving forty rooms as a family apartment. Thus, from 1949 to 1979, the house was home to the Lady Mabel College of Physical Education, which trained female physical education teachers. The college later merged with Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), which eventually gave up the lease in 1988 due to high maintenance costs.

Sold by the Fitzwilliam family

By 1989, Wentworth Woodhouse was in a poor state of repair. With the polytechnic no longer a tenant, and with the family no longer requiring the house, the family trustees decided to sell it and the 70 acres (280,000 m2) surrounding it, but retained the Wentworth Estate's 15,000 acres (61 km2) of land. The house was bought by locally born businessman Wensley Grosvenor Haydon­Baillie, who started a programme of restoration. However a business failure caused it to be repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on the market in 1998. Clifford Newbold (July 1926 – April 2015), an architect from Highgate, bought it for something over £1.5 million. Newbold progressed with a defined programme of renovation/ restoration as evidenced in Country Life magazine dated 17 and 24 February 2010. The surrounding parkland is owned by the Wentworth Estates. In 2014, the house was informally offered for sale by Newbold, with no price specified, but a figure of around £7 million was thought to be sought according to The Times. The house was reported to need works of around £40 million. Following the death of Mr. Newbold, the house was formally advertised for sale in May 2015 via Savills with an asking price of £8 million. In March 2017, the house was sold to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust for £7 million after a sale to the Hong Kong­based Lake House Group fell through. In the United Kingdom Chancellor's budget statement of November 2016, it was announced that the Trust was to receive a grant of £7.6 million for restoration work; the Chancellor noted a claim that the property had been Jane Austen's inspiration for Pemberley in her novel Pride and Prejudice. The Latitude of this Seat, taken by Mr Gordon, June 21st 1731 The Design of the Principal Front of Wentworth House in Yorkshire, the seat of the Rt. Hon. Thomas Lord Malton, Baron Malton, in the County of York

The great East Elevation, with a length of over 600 feet, was based on Wanstead House in Essex () and was designed by Henry Flitcroft, who had then become Lord Malton’s chief architect. Ralph Tunnicliffe must have acted as resident architect under Flitcroft as a print of the East Front bears his name, along with another print bearing the name of Flitcroft – from these prints it is evident that Flitcroft’s plan was the one adhered to.

Alterations to the East Front John Carr of York, who was called in by the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam when he succeeded his uncle, the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, drew the plan for the alteration to the two wings by the addition of a third floor. He adhered to Flitcroft’s design for the roof and balustrade, but added the two pediments to balance the central structure and thereby vastly improved the look of the whole East Front. From the letters of Bishop Pococke, who stayed at Wentworth in 1750, we find that the interior of the new East Front was not completed.

Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed country house in the village of Wentworth, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, England. It is the largest private house in the United Kingdom (aside from royal residences like Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace) and, with an east front of 606 feet (185 m), has the longest country house façade in Europe. The house has more than 300 rooms, although the precise number is unclear, with 250,000 square feet (23,000 m2) of floorspace[4] (124,600 square feet (11,580 m2) of living area). It covers an area of more than 2.5 acres (1.0 ha), and is surrounded by a 180­acre (73 ha) park, and an estate of 15,000 acres (6,100 ha). The original Jacobean house was rebuilt by Thomas Watson­Wentworth, 1st Marquess of Rockingham (1693–1750), and vastly expanded by his son, the 2nd Marquess, who was twice Prime Minister, and who established Wentworth Woodhouse as a Whig centre of influence. In the 18th century, the house was inherited by the Earls Fitzwilliam who owned it until 1979, when it passed to the heirs of the 8th and 10th Earls, its value having appreciated from the large quantities of coal discovered on the estate.

­­ooOoo­­ Visit organised by Thorner Historical Society Sunday 15th October 2017 (Addendum)

Fitzwilliam Family History

The Fitzwilliams acquired extensive holdings in the south of the West Riding of Yorkshiree, largely through strategic alliances through marriage. In 1410, Sir John Fitzwilliam of Sprotboroughe, who died in 1421, married Margaret Clarelle, daughter of Thomas Clarell of Aldwarke, the descendant of a major Norman landholding family. This is how the Fitzwilliams acquired the Clarell holdings. Sir William Fitzwilliam (c. 1460–1534) was an Alderman and Sheriff of London and acquired the estate in in 1502. His grandson Sir William Fitzwilliam served as Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1571 to 1575 and from 1588 to 1594e; he supervised the execution of the death sentence on Marye, Queen of Scots.

Barons Fitzwilliam His grandson William Fitzwilliam (d. 1643) was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as: Lord Fitzwilliame, Baron of Liffere, alias Lifforde, in the County of Donegale, in 1620. 1 He was the first Baron FitzWilliam. 2 His son was William FitzWilliame, 2nd Baron FitzWilliam (c.1609 – 21 February 1658). 3 His son William became 3rd Baron FitzWilliam.

Earls Fitzwilliam

1 The 3rd Baron FitzWilliam succeeded his father in 1658, and in 1716 was created the first Earl Fitzwilliame, of the County of Tyrone with the subsidiary title Viscount Miltone, in the County of Westmeathe, also in the Peerage of Ireland. The eldest son of the Earl Fitzwilliam bore the courtesy title Viscount Milton. He was succeeded by his son, the second Earl. 2 The second Earle, John Fitzwilliame, sat as Member of Parliament for Peterborough. On his death the titles passed to his sone, the third Earl. 3 The third Earle, William Fitzwilliame, also represented Peterborough in the House of Commons. In April 1742 he was created Lord Fitzwilliame, Baron of Milton in the County of Northamptone, in the Peerage of Great Britaine, and in 1746 he was further honoured when he was made Earl Fitzwilliame, of Nor borough with the subsidiary title Viscount Miltone, both in the County of Northamptone, also in the Peerage of Great Britain. Lord Fitzwilliam married Lady Anne Watsone­Wentworth e(died 1769), daughter of Thomas Watsone­Wentworthe, 1st Marquess of Rockinghame, and sister of Charles Watsone­ Wentworthe, 2nd Marquess of Rocking ham. He was succeeded by his son, the fourth Earl. 4 The fourth Earle, William Fitzwilliam, was a prominent Whig politician and served as Lord President of the Council and as Lord­Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1782 he inherited the Watson­Wentworth estates (including Wentworth Woodhouse) on the death of his uncle Lord Rockingham, which made him one of the greatest landowners in the country. When he died the titles passed to his son, the fifth Earl.[9] 5 The fifth Earl, Charles Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, represented several constituencies in the House of Commons and was made a Knight of the Garter in 1851. In 1856 Lord Fitzwilliam assumed by Royal licence the additional surname of Wentworth. He was succeeded by his second but eldest surviving son, the sixth Earl. 6 The sixth Earl was William Wentworth­Fitzwilliam. He sat as Member of Parliament for Malton and County Wicklow and served as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire. His eldest son William FitzWilliam, Viscount Milton, was also a member of parliament but predeceased his father. Lord Fitzwilliam was therefore succeeded by his grandson, the seventh Earl. Also, Lady Mabel Fitzwilliam, a socialist politician and "an ardent pioneer in education and social welfare", was a granddaughter of the 6th Earl. 7 The seventh Earl was William Wentworth­Fitzwilliam (25 July 1872 – 15 February 1943), the eldest son of Viscount Milton (William Wentworth Fitzwilliam). He represented Wakefield in Parliament as a Liberal Unionist. When he died the titles passed to his son, the eighth Earl.

8 The eighth Earl was Peter Wentworth­Fitzwilliam (31 December 1910 – 13 May 1948). He was killed in an air crash in France. On his early death the line of the eldest son of the sixth Earl failed and titles passed to the late Earl's first cousin once removed, the ninth Earl.

9 The ninth Earl was Eric Spencer Wentworth­Fitzwilliam (4 December 1883 – 3 April 1952). He was the son of Captain the Hon. Sir William Charles Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, fourth son of the sixth Earl. When he died in 1952 this line of the family also failed and the titles were inherited by his second cousin, the tenth Earl.

10 The tenth Earl was William Thomas George Wentworth­Fitzwilliam (28 May 1904 – 21 September 1979). He was the son of George Charles Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, son of the Hon. George Wentworth­ FitzWilliam, MP, third son of the fifth Earl. He and his wife had no children.

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List of the Barons Fitzwilliam (1620)

William Fitzwilliam, 1st Baron Fitzwilliam (died 1644) William Fitzwilliam, 2nd Baron Fitzwilliam (c. 1609–1658) William Fitzwilliam, 3rd Baron Fitzwilliam (1643–1719) (created Earl Fitzwilliam in 1716)

List of the Earls Fitzwilliam (1716; 1746)

William Fitzwilliam, 1st Earl Fitzwilliam (1643–1719) John Fitzwilliam, 2nd Earl Fitzwilliam (1681–1728) William Fitzwilliam, 3rd Earl Fitzwilliam (1719–1756) (created Earl Fitzwilliam in the Peerage of GB in 1746) William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam (1748–1833) Charles William Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 5th Earl Fitzwilliam (1786–1857) William Charles Wentworth­FitzWilliam, Viscount Milton (1812–1835) William Thomas Spencer Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 6th Earl Fitzwilliam (1815–1902) William Wentworth­FitzWilliam, Viscount Milton (1839–1877) William Charles de Meuron Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 7th Earl Fitzwilliam (1872–1943 William Henry Lawrence)Peter Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 8th Earl Fitzwilliam (1910–1948) Eric Spencer Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 9th Earl Fitzwilliam (1883–1952) William Thomas George Wentworth­Fitzwilliam, 1 0th Earl Fitzwilliam (1904–1979) TITLES PRECEDENCE

A. Duke: The highest rank and title in the British peerage, first introduced by Edward III in 1337 when he created the Black Prince the first English duke. A Duke is “Most Noble”; he is styled “My Lord Duke” and “Your Grace” and all his younger sons are “Lords” and all his daughters “Ladies” with the prefix “Right Honorable”. The coronet of a duke is a circlet, heightened with eight conventional strawberry leaves, and encloses a velvet cap.

B. Marquess/ Marquis: The second order of the British peerage, in rank next to that of the Duke. Introduced in 1387 by Richard II. A Marquess is “Most Honorable”; he is styled “My Lord Marquess” all his younger sons are “Lords” and his daughters “Ladies”; his eldest sons bears his father’s “second title”. The coronet is a golden circlet heightened by four strawberry leaves and as many pearls, arranged alternately.

C. Earl: In Latin, “Comes” in French “Comte” or “Count.” Before 1337, the highest, and now the third degree of rank and dignity in the British peerage. An earl is “Right Honorable”; he is styled “My Lord”, the eldest son bears his father’s “second title,” generally that of Viscount; his other sons are “Honorable” but all his daughters are “Ladies.” The circlet of an Earl’s coronet has eight lofty rays of gold rising from the circlet, each of which supports a large pearl, while between each pair of these rays is a golden strawberry leaf.

D. Viscount: The fourth degree of rank and dignity in the British peerage. Introduced by Henry VI in 1440. A Viscount is a “Right Honorable” and is styled “My Lord.” All his sons and daughters are “Honorable.” The coronet has a row of sixteen small pearls set on the circlet.

E. Baron: The lowest rank in the British peerage. A Baron is “Right Honorable” and is styled “My Lord”. The coronet is a golden circlet topped by six large pearls. An Irish baron has no coronet. All children of a Baron are “Honorable.”

F. Baronet: A hereditary rank, lower than the peerage, instituted in 1612 by James I, who fixed the precedence of baronets beforefore all Knights, those of the Order of the Garter alone excepted.