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History
In its present form, Womersley Park owes its existence to Tobiah Harvey, who some three hundred years ago built the Hall on the site of an Elizabethan house. Womersley was already then in the third generation of the Harvey family. It was to remain their family home until their heiress, Frances Ann Harvey, daughter of Stanhope Harvey, married Edward Harvey-Hawke on August 28th, 1798 to become the first Harvey-Hawke. On March 27th, 1805, Martin Bladen the 2nd Lord Hawke passed away, and Edward Harvey-Hawke succeeded to the title of the 3rd Lord Hawke.
This marriage made Womersley in turn home to her husband’s grandfather the 1st Lord Hawke. He was the famous Sir Edward Hawke, KB, 1st Lord of the Admiralty and Victor of the Battle of Quiberon Bay, which so totally destroyed the French fleet as to remove any further threat from France in the middle of the eighteenth century, protecting Britain from invasion of the French during the Six Year War.
In Yorkshire, the best known Lord Hawke must be the 7th, who captained the county’s cricket team for 28 years and also the MCC in South Africa through the last years of the nineteenth century. He did much to spread cricket throughout the world, leading teams to American, Argentina, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the West Indies.
In 1870, the then Lord Hawke’s only child, the Hon. Cassandra Harvey-Hawke, married Laurence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse of Birr Castle (County Offaly, Ireland) set in its estate of 26,500 acres.
On Cassandra’s death in 1921, Womersley passed to the head of the Parsons family, Michael, already then the 6th Earl of Rosse whose father (and Cassandra’s son) William, the 5th Earl, had by then been killed in the First World War in 1918. Although the estate was briefly placed on the market, it was redeemed when the 6th Earl married Anne (born Messel of Nymans, now National Trust and divorced from Ronald Armstrong-Jones) on 19th September 1935, mother of Tony Armstrong-Jones, later to become Earl of Snowden as HRH Princess Margaret’s husband and Susan.
When war was imminent, the Rosses decided that Womersley was the place for Lady Rosse to take the children and they all spent many happy times living in the Hall. During the war
, part of the Hall was requisitioned but friendly relations were soon established with the troops quartered in a wing and they helped Lady Rosse make a knot garden which still stands to this day. Gradually the house was pieced back together and later, as various elder members of the family, including the 6th Earl’s widowed mother, the Dowager Viscountess de Vesci came to retire there, the by then derelict drawing room was completely restored to its original splendour, along with the rest of the Hall.
As the 6th Earl approached the end of his life in 1979, Womersley then devolved upon his younger son, the Hon Martin Parsons, and his family then made it their home for 30 years thereby completing a full dozen generations of the same family by direct descent from the Harveys at the start of the seventeenth century. His elder son, Lord Oxmantown became the 7th Earl of Rosse and lives at Birr Castle today.
The house has witnessed many events, both comic and tragic. The son of the 4th Lord Hawke once rode his horse up the fine regency mahogany stairs in the Great Hall, while in the later Victorian period, a stage coach steered by a drunken coachman ploughed into and injured a dozen guests at a Womersley Park garden party!
