House 
Vol. VIII 
and Garden 
August, 1905 
No. 2 
HOUSES WITH A HISTORY 
MOOR PARK 
By P. H. Ditchfield, M.A., F.S.A. 
TTEW houses can rival Moor Park in its 
historical associations, the home of Lord 
and Lady Ebury, the lineal descendant of 
the great house famous in English annals, 
with which everybody who was anybody and 
every event worth recording seem somehow 
to have been connected. Lord Bulwer Lyt- 
ton loved to people it with the shades of the 
mighty warriors in his Last of the Barons. In 
an autograph letter written to Lord Ebury in 
1871, which lies before me, he says: “I sup¬ 
pose there is no historical romance existing 
which adheres so rigidly to accuracy in detail 
as The Last of the Barons. And I may say 
that now without vanity, for instead of deem¬ 
ing it a merit, I deem it a fault.” Sir Walter 
Scott, Shakespeare, and other writers have 
made it a background of their romances, and 
many a scene recorded in true history, more 
remarkable than fiction, has taken place here 
on this site. 
The present house owes its birth to the 
unfortunate Duke of Monmouth, a natural 
son of foolish Charles II., a man who added 
to his crime of rebellion against the King, for 
which he lost his head in an uncomfortable 
fashion on Tower Hill, the terrible fault of 
pulling down the old mansion, the home of 
romance and chivalry, for more than two 
centuries the magnificent abode of monarchs 
and princes. 1 be estate of Moor Park be¬ 
came the property of the Crown on the at¬ 
tainder of the Duke, but was granted to the 
widowed Duchess by James II. as some com- 
MOOR PARK 
Copyright , 1905, by The John C. Winston Co. 
5 1 
