[109456] Harewood House : North Front

Harewood House, West Yorkshire, 1759-71.

Grade l listed.

North Front.

 

The central part of the house by John Carr of York (1723-1807).

The two lateral extensions and wings by Robert Adam (1728-1792).

For Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood (1713-1795).

 

Altered and heightened 1843 by Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860).

For Henry Lascelles, 3rd Earl of Harewood (1797-1857) in an Anglo-Italian style.

 

Some interior modernisation and alteration c1930 on a scheme by Sir Herbert Baker executed by Brierley & Rutherford of York.

For Henry George Charles Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood (1882-1947) and his Countess, Mary, Princess Royal (1897-1965).

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Harewood House was built by Edwin Lascelles (1713-1795) with a fortune inherited from his father, Henry Lascelles (1690-1753). Henry's immense wealth had been accumulated through business connected with the West Indies. He was the fifth son of a Yorkshire landowner - both his father and grandfather had been MP for Northallerton - Henry made his own fortune. Having arrived in Barbados by 1712 to work as a merchant, he married the daughter of a local merchant and slave trader.

 

He prospered as a Barbadian customs collector between 1715 and 1734, despite being accused of corruption, and was employed to supply troops stationed in the Caribbean during the Wars of Jenkins' Ear (1739-42) and the Austrian Succession (1742-48). He established a London business importing sugar, as well as loaning money to West India planters. With a partner he formed a syndicate of merchants to establish a fleet of vessels permanently moored off the Guinea coast to receive slaves for shipment to the Caribbean. He owned one plantation, the Guinea Estate in Barbados, bought in 1738 and sold in 1758. After 1732 he conducted his business from England, where he invested in land, and served as MP for Northallerton from 1745 to 1752.

 

Henry Lascelles established his second son, Daniel, as inheritor of his business, assigning to him vast West Indian loans. By 1748 his eldest son Edwin had been installed as lord of the manors of Gawthorpe and Harewood, bought in 1739. Henry Lascelles's mercantile activity in the Caribbean had provided the income on which the transformation of his family into one of Yorkshire's principal aristocratic dynasties was founded.

 

In 1784 Daniel Lascelles died, childless, and Edwin inherited an immense portfolio of West Indian property, as planters defaulted on loans and were forced to surrender their plantations. Between 1773 and 1787, Edwin acquired more than 27,000 acres in Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica and Tobago, together with 2947 slaves. When Edwin died, also childless, in 1795, Harewood was inherited by a Barbadian-born cousin, Edward Lascelles (1740-1820), later 1st Earl of Harewood. The owners of Harewood gradually reduced their interests in the Caribbean, although in 1833, the year of the Slavery Abolition Act, Henry Lascelles (1767-1841), who had become 2nd Earl in 1820, owned six plantations and 1277 slaves, for the loss of whom he received £23,309 in compensation.

 

Henry Lascelles was MP for Yorkshire with William Wilberforce from 1796-1806; in the election of 1807, fought shortly after the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, Wilberforce was returned but Lascelles was beaten; one of several issues on which the election was fought was candidates' attitude to slavery, and Lascelles was known to be a plantation owner. He later spoke strongly against the emancipation of slaves. Nevertheless, his relations with Wilberforce were, at least at one time, amicable; the great abolitionist accompanied the slave-owner to inspect sugar-cane growing in the Harewood kitchen garden, and in 1799 Wilberforce's famous singing voice was heard at a concert of sacred music in the Harewood Music Room.

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