South Kensington Living
Harrington-Villars estate
One estate covering 87 acres in Kensington was the Harrington-Villars estate. In the 17th century, there was a large country house called Hale House, which once stood where Queen's Gate crosses the Cromwell Road. In 1606 Sir William Blake, who had a wine business in the City, bought the house and the surrounding land as his country residence. In 1645, when Blake and then his widow had died, William Methwold, a director of the East India Company, bought the house and land. Methwold was still ‘family’ because he had married Sir William Blake's sister. He also added to the estate by buying some additional land from the Blake family.
The estate stayed in the Methwold family till 1754 when his great grandson, Thomas Methwold, sold the estate to Sir John Fleming, a captain in the army. The Hale House land comprised only the southern part of the modern Queen’s Gate area. In 1763 Fleming bought an additional 28 acres on which the northern part of Queen's Gate, Queen's Gate Terrace and Elvaston Place were later built.
Fleming had two daughters, so when he died in 1763 they each acquired a share in his estate. The eldest daughter, Seymour Dorothy Fleming, married Sir Richard Worsley, who was not only a Member of Parliament in England but also a Minister to the Republic of Venice. When he died in 1805 - presumably tired out by the commuting - Seymour Dorothy married a Swiss named Jean Louis Cuchet. He sounds like a bit of a social climber and adventurer. They both changed their names to Fleming and he became ‘John Lewis Fleming’. They moved to Paris where Seymour Dorothy died in 1818, and he inherited her half share in her father’s estate. Cuchet then married the daughter of a French count and very successfully began climbing another social tree – he was made a Baron by Louis XVIII in 1821. The baron had a daughter, Cesarine, by his French wife and he left the share in the Kensington estate to her. So quite quickly one half of Sir John Fleming’s estate was owned by people not related to him in any way. In 1841, Cesarine married Denis Bernard Frederic Baron de Graffenried Villars of Switzerland (the ‘Villars’ of the ‘Harrington-Villars’ estate).
Inheritance of the other half of the estate proceeded in a more conventional manner. In 1779 Sir John Fleming's second daughter, Jane, married Charles Stanhope, the 3rd Earl of Harrington. Her share in the estate was inherited by their son the 4th Earl of Harrington, and then by his brother, Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope, the 5th Earl.
