Belvoir Castle

Belvoir Castle stands on a sudden hill at the northern edge of Leicestershire, where the county meets Lincolnshire to the east and Nottinghamshire to the west. The house looks northwest over the Vale of Belvoir. It sits about six miles west of Grantham and about ten miles northeast of Melton Mowbray, at a height of 138 metres. The villages of Redmile, Woolsthorpe, Knipton, Harston, Harlaxton, Croxton Kerrial, Muston and Bottesford lie around the hill.

The tiny county of Rutland, from which the family title comes, lies about sixteen miles to the south. A castle was begun here immediately after the Norman Conquest of England, and the hill has carried a great house ever since. The building that stands now is a Gothic Revival castle of the early nineteenth century, the last of at least four campaigns on the same ground. It was listed in the highest grade on 14 July 1953.

It remains the private home of David Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland, and it is opened to visitors.

The name Belvoir is Norman French for a beautiful view. Emma Manners, Duchess of Rutland, has said that French-speaking Normans brought the name in the eleventh century, and that Middle English speakers, unable to pronounce it, called the place Beaver Castle. That spoken form is still the local one. The name is also given as Belvedere in a document of 1130.

John Leland (antiquary), who died in 1552, put the site in one sentence that later writers have kept: the castle stands on the very nape of a high hill, steep up each way, partly by nature and partly by the working of men's hands. He was born in London on 13 September, most probably about 1503, studied at St Paul's under William Lily and at Christ's College, Cambridge, and has been called the father of English local history because his journeys treated the county as the unit of England's past. His two pictures of Belvoir, one of a ruin and one of a house made fair again, are the clearest accounts of the castle before the seventeenth century.

The Norman Conquest of England was the invasion of 1066 led by William, Duke of Normandy, later William the Conqueror. His claim rested on a familial tie to the childless king Edward the Confessor, who died in January 1066. Edward was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson. The Norwegian king Harald Hardrada invaded the north, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September.

Three days later William's fleet landed at Pevensey. Harold marched south, and on 14 October William defeated and killed him at Hastings and became king. He was not secure until after 1072. Lands of the resisting English elite were confiscated, and castles were raised on strong points so that a small number of armed followers could hold the kingdom.

Belvoir was one of that first generation of castles. The French name suggests a new site rather than an old English fortress reused. The hill is naturally defensible, unusually prominent, and it straddles the Leicestershire and Lincolnshire boundary while commanding two great medieval roads, the Fosse Way and the Great North Road. The first castle stood in the wapentake of Framland and looked over the wapentake of Winnibriggs.

The founder is named in two ways. One account calls him Robert de Todeni, also Robert of Belvoir, an Anglo-Norman lord who held lands after the Conquest, and says he was William's standard-bearer at Hastings. Another calls him Robert de Tosny, a close relative of Ralph de Tosny, and says that Ralph, by tradition, refused the Norman standard at Hastings because carrying it would have kept him from the fighting. The Domesday survey of 1086 does not name Belvoir itself, but it records the breaking up of nearby English holdings into an honour, or castlery, that could build and feed a great castle.

One neighbouring estate was split among ten newcomers, presumably in return for knight service. Robert de Todeni is named in that survey. With the castle came a settlement at the gate and a monastery at the foot of the mound.

Belvoir Priory was a Benedictine house, founded between 1076 and 1088 for four monks, and in 1088 it was made a cell of St Albans Abbey. It was dissolved in 1539. Excavation has recovered the plan of the church, a nave, an apsidal chancel and side chapels, though the walls were too poor to date by their architecture. Iron Age and Roman pottery, and part of a bronze stylus, were found in 1900.

The eighth Duke of Rutland dug extensively around the published site. The founder's inscribed coffin was recorded at the end of a barn and now rests in the castle chapel. Two fishponds to the east were probably the priory's, and have since been landscaped. The finds are kept in the castle.

A village is thought to have stood between the priory and the later estate yard until the Civil War.

In the early twelfth century the castle passed by marriage to William d'Aubigné, and after a short minority to his son William d'Albini, or d'Aubigny, about 1172. This William, Lord of Belvoir, who died on 1 May 1236, must not be confused with the Earl of Arundel of the same name. He was a leading opponent of King John. In 1201 he was allowed to keep Belvoir only if he handed over his own son as a hostage.

In May 1203 he was allowed to repair the walls, brattices, gates and ditch, which is almost all that is written down of the castle's fabric at that date. By 1215 he was in open rebellion and was one of the twenty-five baronial leaders named in Magna Carta. He then commanded the garrison of Rochester. After a bitter siege the castle fell, and the threat that he would be executed brought Belvoir to submit to the king.

The Roos, or Ros, inheritance was joined to Belvoir by marriage in the middle of the thirteenth century. Isabel, granddaughter of the earlier William d'Aubigny, married Robert de Ros about 1234. Another account dates the match, of the heiress of the last Albini to Robert de Ros, Lord of Helmsley in Yorkshire, to 1247. Belvoir is also described as a royal manor until it was granted to Robert de Ros in 1257.

In 1267 he received a licence to crenellate, and he raised a new embattled wall. A royal licence of the same year to enclose a place called Belver, in Lincolnshire, with a dyke and a wall of stone is taken to mean Belvoir, though that is not certain. A thirteenth-century seal shows what the castle then looked like: a quadrangular keep of three storeys, battlemented, inside an outer wall that was battlemented too. The family still stayed at Belvoir from time to time until the Wars of the Roses.

A deer park was created in 1306 in Redmile, northwest of the later park, and was probably disparked in the 1460s.

In 1464 the Norman castle was already recorded as a ruin, and in that year the Lancastrian Thomas Ros, or Roos, ninth Baron Ros of Helmsley, was executed. He had been born on 9 September 1427 and he died on 17 May 1464. Belvoir was among the estates taken from him and given to William Hastings, first Baron Hastings, a close friend of Edward IV and his Lord Chamberlain. Hastings, born about 1431, was among the richest men in England at Edward's death, and he was summarily executed on a charge of treason by Edward's brother Richard III.

The traditional date is 13 June 1483, though the day has been disputed. John Leland (antiquary), writing about 1540, says that when Hastings came to look over the ground and to lie in the castle he was suddenly driven off by Mr Harrington, a powerful neighbour and a friend of Lord Ros. Hastings returned with a strong force and, in a rage, spoiled the castle, stripped the lead from the roofs and left them defaced. The timber then rotted, and elders grew in the soil between the walls.

The wrecking probably came after 1471, when Hastings was the effective ruler of the Midlands. He gathered his power on three new castles, Ashby de la Zouch, Kirby Muxloe and Bagworth, and on the royal castle of Nottingham, at the expense of older lordships such as Belvoir. His killing in 1483 cut that project short, but the grudges it left helped to set the sides taken in the Civil War two centuries later.

Belvoir was restored to the Ros family when Henry VII became king. It then passed to the Manners family by the marriage of Eleanor, sister and heiress of Edmund, Lord Ros, to Sir Robert Manners. When the male Ros line ended in 1508, the manor and castle went to their son George Manners, eleventh Baron de Ros, nephew of the last baron, who took the barony through his mother. A direct male ancestor of the present duke has held Belvoir since that year.

George's son was Thomas Manners, first Earl of Rutland and twelfth Baron Ros, born about 1497. His skill in the tilt yard brought him into the circle of Henry VIII. In 1525 the king created him Earl of Rutland, a title that sat beside the old family castle and made its repair a matter of honour. In 1528 the king's mason, carpenter and plumber were sent to judge the ruins and the cost.

Thomas began a large Tudor house that year. It was finished in 1555, in the time of the second earl.

The dissolution gave him the materials. In March 1539, in exchange for lands sold to the king, among them his favourite house of Elsinges in Middlesex, he received at least fourteen manors, mostly in Leicestershire, and the property of several monasteries, including Rievaulx near Helmsley, Belvoir Priory and Croxton Abbey. That year the Catholic powers of Europe were briefly allied against Henry VIII. Royal castles were surveyed, a chain of coastal forts was begun, and empty monasteries were either cleared or turned into houses, with particular force spent on pulling down their churches.

In the summer of 1540 the earl was living at Croxton Abbey, and his son and heir was born there. In November a building account notes four days spent casting down stone at the abbey church for the new causeway in the castle ward. Belvoir Priory, just north of the castle, was probably largely razed at the same time, though some of its farm buildings lasted into the 1540s.

An account book of 1542 and 1543 shows the house becoming the centre of the earl's business. It records work on the wardrobe and the chambers over it, a new window for the counting house, battlements over the gate, ironwork for the great gate, the thatching of the courthouse, ovens and a brewhouse, and the carriage of stone, lime and plaster. Paving for the hall entry and the main entrance came from Croxton. A wooden banqueting house was brought from Nottingham Castle, which is evidence of garden work as well as of the house.

From 1542 Thomas was Warden of the Northern Marches. He was called back from Scotland because he was ill. He died at Belvoir on 20 September 1543, a very rich man, and he was buried at St Mary the Virgin in Bottesford, about three miles north of the castle. That church held the monuments of all eight earls.

The long family custom of burial there begins with him.

John Leland (antiquary) saw the repaired castle and called it fairer than it had ever been. He counted the many stone steps from the village to the gate, noted two fair gates, and described the dungeon as a fair round tower turned over to pleasure, railed around the wall, with a garden plot in the middle, a place to walk and see the whole country. That is the first clear evidence of a motte. Such a mound is likely to have been thrown up in the eleventh century.

Its place, southwest of the present house, can be picked out on the surveys of 1779. From the twelfth century it was usual to crown a motte with a wall. A tapestry map of Nottinghamshire, commissioned by Mary Eyre in 1632 and now kept at Nottingham Castle, shows the tower with a zigzag outline, probably steps at the wall-walk rising to projecting turrets, and courtyard ranges behind it. The Battery, which guards the approach from the northwest, has been read both as the base of a triangular Norman masonry fortification and as the motte itself, later cut down into a promenade.

Views of 1731 show it as a walk. The Battery that exists now is smaller, and belongs to an early nineteenth-century remodelling. Of the medieval castle, little else is thought to survive in the present walls. The southeast Staunton Tower keeps a considerable amount of medieval masonry in its lower storeys, and at one level it is clearly early Tudor, with a ribbed vault and a decorated keystone, now used as a wine cellar.

The courtyard ranges were altered again so that Stuart kings could stay. In April 1603 tents were brought for the retinue of James VI and I, and new ovens were built. The fifth earl had been implicated in the Earl of Essex's plot against Elizabeth I and imprisoned in the Tower, then released, with his lands restored, when James came to the throne. He entertained the king on the journey south from Scotland.

On the morning the king left, he made forty-six knights. Some of the work of 1625 to 1627 was overseen by the London surveyor John Thorpe. A drawing of the east front of the hall range from that time is not an architect's design, as has been thought, but part of a herald's brief setting out alternative schemes of arms. In 1602 two local carpenters refurbished the billiard table, and a new baize cloth was bought from a merchant in Grantham.

In August 1612 Prince Henry and the Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini stayed. Foscarini had been named ambassador to England in July 1610 and had taken up the post only on 4 May 1611. Those delays, and an earlier delay in his embassy to France, later formed part of the accusations at his two trials, though he was found otherwise to have behaved fittingly. His opposition to the pope and the Jesuits was open.

In the same generation the castle was the scene of a witchcraft prosecution. Joan Flower and her daughters Margaret and Philippa were accused of killing, by witchcraft, the two young heirs of Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland. The boys were Henry, who died in 1613, and Francis, who died in 1620. Joan was taken around Christmas 1618.

One account says she died in prison. Another says she died on the way to her trial. Margaret and Philippa were hanged on 11 March 1619. It has since been suggested that the women may have been framed.

During the English Civil War Belvoir was one of the more notable strongholds of the king's supporters, and the fighting around it was bitter. King Charles spent a night here on his way into Lincolnshire. In 1645 the castle was besieged for four months before the Royalist garrison surrendered. The Tudor house was then destroyed because the family had stood for the king.

In May 1649 Parliament ordered that it be made indefensible. The men sent to inspect the work two months later said they were not soldiers, and they were unsure whether enough had been done. Demolition is also dated to 1649, ordered by Parliament with the reluctant consent of the eighth earl. John Manners, eighth Earl of Rutland, was born on 10 June 1604 and died on 29 September 1679.

He sat in the House of Commons from 1640 until 1641, when he inherited the earldom from his second cousin George Manners, seventh Earl of Rutland. One account says the fire of a later century destroyed all but the outer walls of the house that followed. That is a different disaster. For 1649 the sources agree that the Tudor castle was slighted and taken down, and that enough masonry remained for the next house to reuse the old courtyard.

The countess asked John Webb to design a new mansion on the old site. Webb, born in 1611 and dead on 24 October 1672, was an architect and scholar who had worked with Inigo Jones and, after Jones's death, was among the leading architects in England. He was at Belvoir in 1654. His first scheme was a grand palace: an east front 260 feet long, of two and a half storeys over a rusticated basement, with end pavilions and a portico taken from one of Jones's designs for the king's lodging at Newmarket, and inside a central oval hall of columns with apsed vestibules on the cross-axis.

That palace was not built. The scheme that went forward kept the courtyard of the old castle, the embattled south range, and its medieval and fifteenth-century angle towers, with a little old fabric on the inside of the west wing. Work is dated both from 1654 and from 1655. Between 1655 and 1668 the sum of £11,730 was spent, and the house is said to have been completed by 1668.

Another account says the classical mansion was finished in 1688. The older courtyard buildings were in effect cannibalised. Samuel Marsh, paid for masonry in 1654, 1655 and 1667, supervised the building and may have designed the plain elevations, to judge by his later work at Nottingham Castle. The joiner was Thomas Kinward, who became Master Joiner of the king's works after 1660.

Webb at least controlled the plan and some details. The sequence of rooms follows his first plan, and a drawing of his, dated 1667, gives the architrave, frieze and cornice of one room. On each side were two storeys over a basement, the top floor a little taller, under a straight parapet. The north front had projecting wings and steps up to a plain entrance without a portico.

A model of that seventeenth-century house is kept in the castle. Its plan is close to today's, without the covered entrance on the northwest and with a projection to the southeast. After the Restoration the new terraces were so massive that they hide most traces of the medieval castle. A wide area around the house was planted in geometric avenues.

The ninth earl was created Marquess of Granby and Duke of Rutland in 1703. Belvoir has been the Manners family's home for five hundred years and the dukes' seat for more than three centuries. The surviving stable block, a U-shaped building of ironstone by John Barker, is believed to date from about 1704 or 1705, and now holds offices and accommodation. Within its yard an exercise ring of about 1819 is probably the earliest free-standing structure of its kind in England, and it has a place in the history of hunting.

Other early eighteenth-century stables, a six-bay house and Brewery Row stand nearby. The first duke commissioned seven statues from the Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber in 1680, at a cost of £35. Cibber died in 1700. The figures stood along the spiral walk on the castle slopes, and they appear in views by Thomas Badeslade, published in 1731, and by Jan Griffier the younger in 1730, 1731 and 1744, together with a hunting scene in full cry.

The third duke added a picture room and cellars in the early eighteenth century, and a Wilderness garden, a geometric labyrinth, around 1730. That picture room, of about 1750, was built for his collection, which is now much reduced. In the 1720s the castle looked, to one traveller, like a palace, and the family's wealth, drawn from lead mines and coal pits, seemed to have no limit. A sketch of an allegory of Apollo and the Vices, signed by the French artist Boitard, may record a painted scheme of that time.

By 1776 another visitor found the house almost entirely unfurnished and the gardens neglected, and wrote that it looked more like the home of a man in distress than the seat of one of the richest nobles in the kingdom.

Lancelot Brown, known as Capability Brown, was asked to improve both house and park. He was baptised on 30 August 1716 at Kirkharle in Northumberland, the fifth child of a land agent and a chambermaid, and he died on 6 February 1783. He learned his trade in the kitchen garden at Kirkharle Hall, moved south in 1739, and made his name from 1741 as under-gardener and then head gardener at Stowe, under William Kent, before setting up on his own. Clients knew him as Capability because he would tell them their ground had capability for improvement.

He designed more than 170 parks, supplying the design and then the planting as one service. His pleasure gardens and shrubberies were usually tucked where they would not break the view to and from the house, and few of those flower gardens survive later changes. For Belvoir, his surveyor Jonathan Spyers mapped an estate of 3,928 acres in 1779. Brown's own rolled plan and a leather-bound folio of a miniature watercolour plan and ten architectural elevations are dated 1780, and were found again in the private archives in recent years.

He charged £516 and 8 shillings, paid to his executors after his death. Another account places his proposals for the house, attics and battlements, and his survey drawings, in 1789, and says those alterations to the building were never carried out, while the drawings show that the nineteenth-century medievalising changed the seventeenth-century house less than it appears to.

Brown's landscape was a late design, and one of his last. He proposed lakes, new woods, clumps and belts, a large walled garden, and heavy earth-moving: the bowling green was to come off Castle Hill, and the spoil was to build an embankment joining that hill to Blackberry Hill. He wanted Gothic battlements, a new attic storey and a service tunnel on the castle, new rides, and new approaches with lodges, including a drive from Harston across the lakes he planned to the southeast, and Croxton Avenue skirting the southwest of the park from Knipton. He did not want the village of Woolsthorpe moved to clear the view.

He folded it into the design and screened it with trees. A ha-ha was to run below the northeast terrace. Formal gardens, the canal and the Wilderness were to stay, the Wilderness turned into parkland clumps. He also planned a chase for hunting and the revival of a free warren for hawks, a nod to the medieval estate.

Horace Walpole, shown the designs, said they had judgement and would be magnificent, and then asked where the money would come from, because the duke's treasury was extremely empty. The fourth duke had inherited large debts and made them worse by art, gambling, women and entertainment. His lawyer and agent, Joseph Hill, took the estate in hand, and the duke's appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, together with sales of timber, was part of the rescue. Brown last visited in October 1782.

Planting began at once. Thomas Thoroton wrote that the oaks at the foot of the northeast terrace, opposite the stables, were exactly as Brown had drawn them. Acorns were scattered on Woolsthorpe Hill between 1785 and 1787, and plantations at Croxton Bank and Cedar Hill followed in 1789. By the turn of the century most of the perimeter belts were in.

The fourth duke died in 1787. His heir was nine. The fourth duchess and her brother, the Duke of Beaufort, were joint trustees, and in 1792 Beaufort ordered an avenue from the old church at Woolsthorpe.

The money for the next building also came out of the valley. Between 1793 and 1799 the Grantham Canal was cut through the estate. The agent William King raised funds for the family, and the engineer William Jessop, who advised on more than a hundred canal and waterworks, wrote in 1792 on the use of reservoirs for flood water. The act for the canal from the Grantham side to the Trent passed in 1793.

The canal, opened to traffic in 1797, is believed to be the first in England supplied mainly by reservoirs, and the first industrial scheme designed from the start to depend on flood water. Knipton Reservoir, begun in 1794, was the first sizable lake at Belvoir. It takes the shape of Knipton Vale and the floodwaters of the River Devon, and it fed the canal through the duke's land by open channels and brick culverts. The Knipton enclosure of 1797 took the waste and common of the parish into the duke's property.

A letter of 1787 from Hill to the fourth duke had already suggested that the Knipton valley could fill a river and a lake and give the country shade, shelter and a little ornament, so a reservoir may have been talked of with Brown. An ornamental boat was brought from London in 1801, and a thatched boathouse was built on the east bank in 1802. The water was raised in 1804. A draw-off tunnel was made in 1944, and a second weir, bridge and spillway in 1972.

In 1801 the banks were planted with five thousand spruce, a thousand larch, a thousand alder and a thousand birch, and the water was stocked with fish. A woodman's cottage stood there in 1819. Reservoir Cottage, a fishing lodge of 1806, perhaps by Thoroton, was extended in 1823 and again in the middle of the twentieth century. The reservoir lies about three kilometres south of the castle.

Its water covers about forty-nine acres, holds about 543,000 cubic metres, and is about seven metres deep. The canal passed to a railway company in 1854 and was formally abandoned in 1936. Croxton Avenue, the private drive between Belvoir and Croxton Park, was laid along the reservoir embankment in 1802 to 1804. Queen Adelaide arrived by that route in 1839, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert used it in 1843.

John Henry Manners, fifth Duke of Rutland, was born on 4 January 1778 and died on 20 January 1857. He was styled Lord Roos and then Marquess of Granby, and he succeeded his father at the age of nine, so that he held the dukedom for nearly seventy years. He came of age on 4 January 1799, after a minority of twelve years, and the neighbourhood talked of little else. Within a month he was engaged to Lady Elizabeth Howard, then eighteen.

She was born Elizabeth Howard on 13 November 1780, daughter of the fifth Earl of Carlisle, and she died on 29 November 1825. She had grown up at Castle Howard. They married in the spring, and the duke went back to Ireland with his regiment. Tradition says she was horrified by the house she had married into.

The clergyman Bowyer Edward Sparke, who had been the duke's tutor and was then living at Grantham and sorting the archives, wrote on 22 July 1799 that the duke meant to take the opinion of Wyatt the surveyor that summer. Sparke warned that Wyatt, left to himself, was apt to be very expensive, and he cited a house near Blandford that had cost £30,000. By the end of September he was expecting Wyatt and Mr Mickle, who had been Brown's assistant. The Wyatt who came that autumn was Samuel, James's elder brother, not James himself.

Several earlier schemes for the fourth duke were put in front of him, including plans by Colonel Frederick Trench, whom the fourth duke had met in Dublin and who had drawn proposals in 1785. Samuel wanted Brown's original designs. The folio could not be found. Trench's copies of them, explained in French, were translated on the spot because Samuel could not read the notes.

Those French drawings do not survive at Belvoir. They may have been lost after they were taken to London.

James Wyatt was born on 3 August 1746 at Weeford, near Lichfield, and he died on 4 September 1813. He spent six years in Italy from 1762 to 1768, studied drawing in Venice, and measured the dome of St Peter's in Rome. The Pantheon in Oxford Street, opened in 1772, made him famous at twenty-six. Horace Walpole called it the most beautiful building in England.

Wyatt became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1770 and a full Academician in 1785, and he was the Academy's president from 1805 to 1806. He was Surveyor of Westminster Abbey, Architect of the Ordnance, and from 1796 Surveyor General of the king's works. Around 1800 he was altering Windsor Castle for George III, and in 1802 he designed a castellated palace at Kew that used a great deal of cast iron. He was the most employed architect of his day, and clients complained that he did not give each of them enough time.

He was killed in a carriage accident in 1813.

He first came to Belvoir about two weeks after a visit Sparke made in June 1801, when demolition had barely started although the preparations were well along. Work itself had begun on Good Friday that year. James found the dining room should be four feet wider than Samuel had drawn it, and he rejected a Grecian house, which was what Brown had proposed for the building. On such a hill, he said, there should be nothing but a castle, or at least the look of a castle, and the rougher and more broken the outline, the stronger the effect.

One account says the duke, among the richest landowners in the kingdom, sold seven villages and their lands to pay for the work. A letter of August 1800 speaks more narrowly of the proposed sale of two estates, which would let the duke begin at Belvoir without cutting into his income. Elizabeth is the person credited with driving the project. A diarist wrote in 1823 that she had made the place, and that the duke took no part in the improvement.

By 29 September 1803 the old chapel had been taken down entirely, and the end tower was nearly finished. In 1813 the duke and duchess received the Prince Regent and his brother the Duke of York. Wyatt died the same year.

On 26 October 1816 a fire almost destroyed the house. It took the entrance range, the hall, the great staircase and the picture gallery. The loss was estimated at £120,000, including pictures by Titian, Rubens, van Dyck and Reynolds. Another account counts some thirty paintings by Reynolds, Titian and van Dyck, and does not name Rubens.

In one version the fire destroyed everything but the outer walls. In the other, the west and south wings, which Wyatt had finished, escaped, and the north and east were burned. The rebuilding cost a further £82,000 and was largely done by 1832. The whole Regency work, from 1801, has been put at £200,000.

The man who took charge is named both as Sir John Thoroton and as Sir James Thornton. He was the duke's friend and chaplain, and rector or vicar of Bottesford. He was also an illegitimate son of the fourth duke. During the fire he saved the Rutland children.

His epitaph at Bottesford claims he had an architectural hand from the start of the work, and a letter of 15 October 1799 already mentions Thoroton's druid's castle, so he may have been involved earlier than the fire. He died in 1820. He completed the wings Wyatt had left standing, redesigned the outside and the circulation of the damaged ranges, and carried the short wings of the seventeenth-century entrance front up into towers. Decoration of the state rooms was by Benjamin Dean Wyatt and Philip Wyatt, with others of the Wyatt studio, and by Matthew Cotes Wyatt.

Elizabeth, who was an enthusiastic amateur architect and a capable draughtsman, shared the direction until her death in 1825. The result looks, at a distance, like a medieval castle, and the central tower recalls Windsor. Close to, it is a Romantic mixture: yellow ironstone with grey dressings and slate roofs, an irregular plan, and asymmetrical fronts. The four corner towers mark the footprint of the medieval and Tudor building and still hold some of its masonry.

The north, or entrance, front has a three-bay porte-cochère brought forward from the main wall on a long covered passage, dropped to basement level. The King's Rooms lie on the main elevation, between square towers of three and four storeys with angle buttresses and machicolated, crenellated parapets. Most windows are still the seventeenth-century rectangle, an upright cross-casement, with a label over it. The west front holds the Regent's Gallery from the corner tower to the chapel, and a huge circular tower of three storeys on a two-storey basement, with five round-headed bays and deeply splayed windows below.

In the batter of its base are deeply cut arches. The chapel reads as a west front, whatever the internal axis: a three-bay loggia between full-height polygonal turrets, three Perpendicular windows of two lights above the loggia, and a rectangular tower with an oriel and a round bartizan closing the southwest. The parapet of the loggia was copied from Lincoln Cathedral. The south front is simpler, with a full-height canted bay in the centre and four bays to each side.

The southeast Staunton Tower is massive, with a stair turret. The east front is dominated by Thoroton's gigantic rectangular tower, which runs out from the inner court, projects three bays, and ends in a canted face. Its first-floor windows carry zigzag Norman ornament, heavier Norman detail than Wyatt had used, and the parapet is crowded with round crenellated turrets and a tall bartizan at the inner corner. The Chinese Rooms lie toward the Staunton Tower, and the Grand Dining Room the other way.

The inner court is a trapezoid, narrowing to the south. Every side except the south is two ranges thick. The north range is the Picture Gallery behind the King's Rooms, the west is the Library behind the Regent's Gallery and the chapel, and the east is the Grand Corridor, or ballroom, behind the Chinese Rooms. An outer wall with round towers rings the castle.

In 1846 the house was called by far the most superb architectural ornament of which Leicestershire could boast.

Inside, the Gothic of the route is said to be modelled on Lincoln Cathedral, which can sometimes be seen from the hill. How closely Thoroton followed Wyatt is not clear. Downstairs the Gothic is stone. Upstairs, apart from structure such as the ballroom piers, it is plaster.

The entrance leads to the Guard Room, two storeys high, with a flat lierne vault and open four-centred arches that look through to the Grand Staircase. Dogtooth ornament is used freely. The stair starts as a double flight through a full-height Perpendicular doorway, with wrought-iron balusters, and reaches a low landing under a tierceron vault. A similar, quieter stair rises behind the east tower to the Grand Corridor.

That corridor replaced bedrooms and dressing rooms shown on an eighteenth-century plan, and it links the family rooms in the south wing to the state rooms. Three pairs of arches of thirteenth-century type, with traceried spandrels, stand on engaged columns under a lierne vault. Stained glass fills the open tracery and the tall windows. Capitals are carved with a kind of stiff leaf.

Thoroton's sequence, the entrance passage, the Guard Room, the stairs and the gallery, is the first thing a visitor walks through, and it is a deliberate contrast with the classical rooms the Wyatts made.

The Elizabeth Saloon, named for the fifth duchess and set in Thoroton's tower, was decorated in 1824 by Matthew Cotes Wyatt in a Louis XIV manner that was then new in England, a mixture of Baroque and Rococo later used by the Wyatts in London. White and gold boiseries, pier glasses and an elaborate frieze of Manners peacocks surround blue silk. The ceiling, painted by Wyatt in an older Baroque manner, is the Triumph of Juno, and it shows the duke and duchess as lightly clothed deities with the family peacock. Portrait medallions of their friends sit in the spandrels.

A white statue of the duchess, designed by Matthew Cotes Wyatt and carved by his son, who was also called James Wyatt, stands in the room. Her taste for French furniture and textiles set the style. The Grand Dining Room, by Benjamin Dean Wyatt and Philip Wyatt, is Roman, with wall arches on marble piers, gilt boiserie and a coffered ceiling. A side table carved by Matthew Cotes Wyatt has a marble tablecloth.

A simpler Hunter's Dining Room lies beyond, and a service stair between them stands where the seventeenth-century stair went down to the basement kitchen. The Picture Gallery, also by the Wyatt brothers, has a heavy coved cornice and three floating groin vaults lit by Diocletian windows and roof lights. It holds what remains of the third duke's pictures.

The Regent's Gallery is James Wyatt's enlargement of the seventeenth-century long gallery. He pushed a huge semicircular bay out into his round tower and made a drawing room of it, in red, gold and white, with gilt cornices. The chimneypiece is by Matthew Cotes Wyatt. The gilded frieze resembles one he had made with his father at Liverpool Town Hall in 1789 to 1792.

French tapestries of Don Quixote, after Coypel, were bought only in 1814. Their peacock crest is a coincidence. Fourteen busts line the room. At least eight are by Nollekens, and they show both the family and the duke's politics: Lord Robert Manners and the Earl of Mansfield in 1790, the fifth duke and duchess in 1810, Lord Chatham in 1811, and the Prince Regent in 1815, among figures of the Pitts and of Cromwell.

The King's Rooms, behind the gallery and opening onto the great stair, were decorated for the Prince Regent in a Chinese taste about 1815 to 1822. The Chinese Rooms off the corridor, a bedroom, a dressing room and a lobby, are hung with eighteenth-century Chinese silk, with gilt plaster ceilings. The lobby looks toward Lincoln.

The south end of the Regent's Gallery opens into a fan-vaulted private pew above the two-storey chapel, which stands where the seventeenth-century chapel stood. The chapel has a high lierne vault, tall Perpendicular windows, attenuated Gothic panelling with gabled ogee arches, and a wrought-iron communion rail of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Over the altar, plaster tabernacle-work frames a painting by Murillo. Visitors come up a stair in one of the polygonal turrets to a plain antechapel.

There the coffined remains associated with Robert de Todeni, the eleventh-century founder, lie under a lid with Lombardic lettering. With them are a tomb-slab with incised hands from Croxton Abbey, a much restored effigy of an abbot found at Newton in Lincolnshire in 1923, and a plaster cast by Violet, Duchess of Rutland, for a monument whose marble is at Haddon Hall. The Library, with Gothic windows and a flat ribbed ceiling, runs beside the chapel and is the direct way from the Regent's Gallery to the family rooms in the south range. Those rooms are late Georgian, and they were redecorated in the 1960s by David Hicks.

The duchess's boudoir in the southwest tower has mythological panels and roundels. Below it are the duke's bedroom and dressing room. Along the south front are the family study, drawing room and dining room, the last in an early eighteenth-century style. The other private rooms are not opened to the public.

A portion of the castle is still the Manners family's home. The house has 356 rooms.

While staying at Belvoir in the 1840s, Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford, found dinner served between seven and half past eight. A light luncheon had been introduced to fill the gap after breakfast, and the long afternoon left people hungry. She took tea, usually Darjeeling, with cakes or sandwiches, and then asked friends to join her. Afternoon tea spread through middle-class and upper-class houses.

She was born Anna Maria Stanhope on 3 September 1783, died on 3 July 1857, married Francis Russell in 1808, and became Duchess of Bedford in 1839. She was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1841. The claim that she invented afternoon tea, placed around 1840, has been contested and cannot be verified. The Belvoir visit remains the setting given for the habit.

The gardens are as much Elizabeth's work as the house. She used Brown's plan as a pattern and went beyond it. Between 1801 and 1804 the bowling green was dug away and the embankment between Castle Hill and Blackberry Hill was built. A model farm to Wyatt's design included a working dairy and a kitchen garden of eight acres.

The walled kitchen garden that stands at the foot of the hill was set out in 1816, about 220 metres by 120, on a north-south axis. A gothic garden house of the mid-nineteenth century looks down its axis. In 1821 work began on the lakes in the Devon valley, ten and a half acres in all, Brownian in character but set further south of Woolsthorpe than Brown had drawn, and a little different in size. Each sheet of water is about 500 metres long.

In 1825 the five-arched bridge at Brewer's Gate was built to hide a change of level between them, a device typical of Brown, and the retaining wall below the northeast terrace was made, on a tighter line than his. Dairy Cottage, of 1813, to Wyatt's design, is an octagonal two-storey block with side pavilions, listed in its own right, with a thatched cowhouse beside the paddock. An icehouse of about 1830 stands by the terraces northeast of the castle, where a swimming pool and a hard tennis court now occupy the middle terrace.

Elizabeth moved five of Cibber's statues from the broad walk to make the Ladies' Garden, now the Statue Garden. The figures are Juno, Ceres, Flora, Bacchus, Pomona and Diana, with Winter elsewhere, all of about 1680. They stand in two curving rows down a steep slope. She also developed the Duke's Walk, a circuit of about two miles, with a root-and-moss house and a flower garden, now the Duchess Garden, in a secluded clearing of about 1810.

The garden sits in a natural amphitheatre about 180 metres across, facing south, which the moraines of glaciers had formed, and springs keep the plants in growth. The root house, a hexagonal thatched summerhouse with moss-filled walls, still stands and is itself a listed building. This ground is also named as the first place where spring flowers were bedded out in mass, a practice developed by the head gardener, Mr Divers. The gardens were later called among the greatest north of London.

They are being brought back with the help of a body of volunteer friends of the gardens.

Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland, took the gardens up again in the new century. She was born Marion Margaret Violet Lindsay on 7 March 1856, a granddaughter of the twenty-fourth Earl of Crawford, and she died on 22 December 1937. She married Henry Manners in 1882, was Marchioness of Granby from 1888, and became duchess in 1906, when her husband succeeded. She was a portraitist and, later, a sculptor, though not formally trained, and she was one of the Souls.

Her children included John Manners, the ninth duke, and the society figure Lady Diana Cooper. The eighth duke came to Belvoir in 1906, and Violet set about the house and the gardens. In 1906 she asked Harold Peto, the Edwardian garden designer, to remake the Rose Garden, which Thoroton had terraced in 1814. Peto's plan, found again in the family archives, shows the garden as a boat, with a Chinese horse at the bow and a circular seat at the stern.

Cibber's Winter stands at the east end of the axis, and the other six statues were moved down into the Statue Garden. A Corinthian column bought in Bologna in 1907, and a marble horse given to the fifth duke in 1851 by Admiral Thomas Cochrane, were set among the roses. After the Second World War the gardens were left for more than thirty years, and they were found again only in 1970 by Frances, the dowager duchess.

The old burial place remained Bottesford until the dukedom changed the custom. Since 1703 most of the dukes have been buried in the grounds of a mausoleum at the castle. The fifth duke built it after Elizabeth's death in 1825. The building itself is dated 1826 to 1828, a limestone Romanesque design by Benjamin Dean Wyatt and Philip Wyatt, southwest of the castle, and it is not opened to the public.

Most of the eighteenth-century monuments were moved there from Bottesford. Those buried in it include John Manners, the first, second, third and fifth dukes, Charles Manners, the fourth duke, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, Duff Cooper, first Viscount Norwich, who was a son-in-law of the eighth duke, Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich, and Charles Manners, tenth Duke of Rutland.

The park that visitors see is largely the early nineteenth-century landscape, on top of a deer park that certainly existed by 1731. It runs about two kilometres east, west and south of the castle. Woodland wraps Castle Hill, Middlesdale and Blackberry Hill. The plateau of Blackberry Hill was a private golf course earlier in the twentieth century.

Frog Hollow lies in the valley south of it, and in 1905 there was a bog garden there. West Wong, to the northwest, is arable land with tree clumps. Two fishponds, one of them called Westminster, lie northeast of the castle. The Belvoir Hunt, called the Duke of Rutland's Hounds, is dated both to 1740 and to 1750, and it has long been among the best-known packs in the country.

Its kennels, of 1802, stand southeast of the castle, moved from Croxton Park. They are four-sided, with corner turrets, and were built for four packs. Kennel Wood and Kennel Walk were planted with them. The wider estate is given as almost 15,000 acres, in the heart of fox-hunting country, and the hounds are kennelled a short way southeast of the house.

The designed landscape, of nearly a thousand years of layers and about 900 hectares in the registered area, was registered on 5 March 1986, and the entry was amended on 31 January 2020.

The ninth duke was Captain John Henry Montagu Manners, born on 21 August 1886 and dead on 22 April 1940. He was styled Marquess of Granby from 1906 until he succeeded in 1925, and he was a medievalist as well as a peer. A history published in 2012 follows a mystery about him that its author found in the estate archives, and it does not belong in outline here beyond that. His son Charles John Robert Manners, tenth Duke of Rutland, was born on 28 May 1919 and died on 4 January 1999.

He was Marquess of Granby until 1940, a landowner and a Conservative who chaired Leicestershire County Council. Robes made for the ninth duke to wear at the coronation of George VI in 1937 were put on show at the castle in 2023, for the first time in twenty-two years. The tenth duke wore the same robes at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. George VI, born Albert Frederick Arthur George on 14 December 1895, had not been expected to reign.

He was the second son of George V, served at sea and in the air in the First World War, was made Duke of York in 1920, and married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923. When his brother Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, Albert became king and took the name George. His coronation was in 1937. He died at Sandringham on 6 February 1952, and his elder daughter succeeded him.

Allan Warren photographed the tenth duke outside Belvoir in the late 1990s. Warren, born Michael Allan Warren on 26 October 1948, is a portrait photographer, writer and former actor, known for sittings with public figures and with members of the royal family, often in black and white and strongly lit. The photograph is one of the last widely seen likenesses of the tenth duke at the castle he had held since 1940.

David Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland, was born David Charles Robert Manners on 8 May 1959, the elder son of the tenth duke by his second wife, Frances Sweeny. He was educated at Stanbridge Earls School, near Romsey, and he succeeded on 4 January 1999. He has a younger brother, Lord Edward Manners, a sister, Lady Teresa Manners, and a half-sister, Lady Charlotte Manners. He sat in the House of Lords from his father's death until November 1999, when the hereditary sitting was ended, and he later stood in six by-elections for a seat there, between 2005 and 2016.

A rich list of 2013 put his fortune at £125 million, and he sold a painting to keep the castle maintained. He was a prominent supporter of a party that campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, and he held fundraising events at Belvoir. On 6 June 1992, at the castle, he married Emma Watkins, daughter of a Welsh farmer from Knighton in Powys. They had met at a dinner, and she did not at first know that he was the heir to a dukedom.

They lived first at Knipton Lodge, a Georgian house of six bedrooms, and in 2001 they moved into private apartments in the castle, formerly the nanny's rooms. They have five children: Violet, born on 18 August 1993, who married in 2025 William Lindesay-Bethune, seventeenth Earl of Lindsay; Lady Alice Manners, born on 27 April 1995; Lady Eliza Manners, born on 17 July 1997; Charles Manners, Marquess of Granby, born on 3 July 1999; and Lord Hugo Manners, born on 24 July 2003. They separated in 2012 and continue to live in separate quarters of the castle. The duchess runs the commercial life of the house, including shooting parties, weddings and a furniture range.

In the summer of 2005 the duke bought the Manners Arms at Knipton, a hunting lodge built for the sixth duke in the 1880s. From late 2024 that Grade II hotel and public house was refurbished in its bar, dining room and ten bedrooms, under the duchess's eye.

In 2016 the duke was banned from driving for a year after gathering twenty-four points, and he was ordered to pay £3,025 in fines and costs. In July 2018 an advertisement for unpaid actors to perform at the castle was withdrawn after the performers' union said the request was unacceptable. In October 2023 the burning of a large area of moor on his land around Sheffield caused a serious local pollution of the air and calls for moor-burning for grouse to be outlawed. The mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard, called it a moment of real anger and concern.

The duke said he regretted that so many fires had been set that day and that so much smoke had drifted across Sheffield. He did not attend, or send anyone, to the inquiry held the next year. Under the name David Rutland he published, with Emma Ellis, a book in 2017 on two brothers in the crisis of a world war.

The castle has been used as a setting for films and television, among them Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1980, Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985, King Ralph in 1991, the 1999 version of The Haunting, Rosie and Jim in 1999, Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story in 2001, The Da Vinci Code in 2006, The Young Victoria in 2007, The Crown, and The Diplomat in 2026. The regimental museum of the 17th and 21st Lancers was established in the castle in 1964 and had to leave in October 2007. That collection, now the Royal Lancers and Nottinghamshire Yeomanry Museum, is at Thoresby Hall. For ten years the estate ran a ten-bedroom hotel in a former hunting lodge, meant to serve shoots and events, and closed it after a loss of £250,000.

In 2019 a retail village opened below the castle, in the nineteenth-century Engine Yard, with every unit let to an independent tenant. One of them, a butcher, sells beef raised on the estate. Belvoir Cricket Club plays on the grounds. In 2009 the grounds held the CLA Game Fair.

Since 2013, except in 2020 when it was cancelled under the restrictions of that year, a twenty-four-hour race has been run near the autumn equinox on a circuit of about ten kilometres through the estate. In July 2026 the ninth flower and garden show was held in the grounds. Each New Year's Day a charity walk is held for Dove Cottage Day Hospice, including a three-mile circuit through parkland first designed by Capability Brown. A Regency Christmas was held in 2021, and in 2025 the castle opened to the public at Christmas for the first time in two years.

In November 2025, after complaints about traffic, parking and the length of the annual fireworks, which had been moved to a new part of the estate, the castle said it would review the display. In early 2025 an exhibition called The Motherhood traced the women who have lived in the castle over five hundred years and included clothes worn by past duchesses. In November 2014 the duchess appointed Timothy Grayson as poet in residence. In August 2010 the castle's website was defaced by an Algerian group that blanked the pages and inserted antisemitic Arabic text.

The group had mistaken the house for a fortress of the same name in Israel. Briery Wood Heronry, a biological site of special scientific interest, lies in the grounds.

The most recent recovery of the place has been in the landscape and the archives together. From January 2013 a two-year programme cleared more than five hundred acres of woodland. At the same time a set of landscaping plans drawn by Capability Brown in 1780, thought to have burned in 1816, was found in the castle archives. The present duchess has had those drawings planted: the gap in the tree belt around the cemetery of St James's church has been filled, the view from Knipton Pasture into Frog Hollow has been opened, the wood at Harston that Brown proposed and that was never planted has been established, and Woolsthorpe Avenue, begun only for the Silver Jubilee of 1977, has been finished.

The ponds below Harston, dug the year after Elizabeth's death and long since silted, were dug out again and named the Memorial Lakes in 2015. A grotto half a mile beyond the root house, in what is called the Hermit's Garden, was found about 2015 and restored, and several grottoes have been found there. In 2019 tours of Brown's park were begun, and the garden was a finalist, the only one from the East Midlands, in a national garden award. A restoration of the Rose Garden, costed at £200,000, followed the rediscovery of Peto's drawing.

The Japanese Woodland holds magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias raised from the nineteenth-century seed collection of Charles Williams of Caerhays in Cornwall.

Under the ground, the Norman castle is mostly a matter of slopes and one deep hint. A field inspection on 30 June 1970 found the earthworks around the house largely artificial, terraces, roads, paths and drives built up over a long time. Nothing that could be called Norman was identified, though many slopes are plainly old. Excavation northeast of the castle uncovered timbering at about sixteen feet down, which could have been revetting for the first fortification.

A second look on 1 May 1972 found no change. In 2002, during a restoration, trenches at the riding ring found only thin layers of sand or loam, and no paved or other permanent surface. In 2016 the eighteenth-century laundry near the stables, a listed building inside the castle's conservation area, was recorded before a proposal to turn the main part of it into a house. The record of the priory, the coffin in the antechapel, the medieval core of the Staunton Tower, and that buried timber are what the first castle has left.

Everything a visitor walks through above them was raised after 1654, and most of the silhouette was raised after the fire of 1816, on a hill chosen in the aftermath of 1066 because it commanded the vale and the roads.