{"id":34,"date":"2020-03-16T18:20:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T18:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boughrood.wales\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2020-09-24T12:05:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T12:05:25","slug":"boughrood-castle","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/boughrood.wales\/?page_id=34","title":{"rendered":"Boughrood Castle"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n

Boughrood Castle and the Fowkes Family<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

\"\"The original Boughrood Castle was built in the 12th<\/sup> century, although there are few signs other than some stones of this building.\u00a0 The current Boughrood Castle was built in 1817 by Francis Fowke, who had corruptly made an estimated \u00a370-80,000 from bribes, army contracting and opium dealing while in the service of the East India Company in Bengal. \u00a0On his return from India, he wanted a castle \u2013 maybe to compete with his former colleague, Walter Wilkins (later de Winton) with his grand Maesllwch Castle at Glasbury. His new house therefore was well-supplied with battlements.<\/p>\r\n

Fowke had sixteen illegitimate children, fifteen of them by Mary Lowe, a London actress who became his mistress when she was twenty.\u00a0 Her few remaining letters reveal that she was a loving mother and had received the education of a lady, despite being abused as a prostitute.<\/p>\r\n

Fowke made a will in 1813 in which he stated that all his thirteen surviving children were born before he married Mary Lowe.\u00a0 But Fowke\u2019s eleventh son, Charles, after his mother\u2019s death, started an action in Chancery in which he challenged the will and the executors\u2019 division of the estate, and claimed that his parents were married before he was born and that he was therefore the only legitimate male heir, and should pay legacy duty at 1% rather than 10%.\u00a0 He produced a certificate of marriage from Gretna Green, but it left the Commissioners of Taxes unmoved since it had not been tested in court.<\/p>\r\n

Francis Fowke died in 1819 and the Castle was inherited by his son, also called Francis, born in 1789, who disliked the battlements and re-modelled the building to give it its present appearance.\u00a0 His father had intended that his children should get equal shares of his fortune after buying an annuity of \u00a3500 for his widow, but these provisions were not scrupulously obeyed.\u00a0 Mrs Fowke and the family lived \u2018out of the till\u2019 for years, and matters were further complicated when the executor, Capt. Francis Fowke died suddenly in 1826, leaving debts amounting to \u00a34,000, and instructing his executors not to sell the estate till the youngest child was 21.<\/p>\r\n

The Castle and the Fowkes lands in Boughrood and Llanstephan were sold to Walter Wilkins (de Winton) of Maesllwch in 1832-3.\u00a0 The family lands in Cefnllys were sold to Sir John Walsh.\u00a0 With Government stocks, and other securities, the total estate amounted to \u00a341,520-18-4 (worth about \u00a35m in modern money).<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0Charles Fowke\u2019s share of the estate was \u00a32,545-13-0, on which a man with a small family might have lived a frugal genteel life.<\/p>\r\n

Before he was 21, however, Charles fathered a child, Charles, on Anne Prosser, of Noyadd Farm, Llanstephan.\u00a0 He appears to have married her when he came of age, since a further eleven children born to them are not stigmatised in the parish registers.\u00a0 But Charles was a born failure.<\/p>\r\n

He failed as a farmer at Noyadd and at Cwrt-y-graban, and failed as a land surveyor while living at Village Farm, Boughrood, and at Boatside Cottage, Boughrood Bridge.\u00a0 After one social triumph, when he married off his second daughter to a naval officer who was the son of an admiral, he went rapidly downhill.<\/p>\r\n

His eldest son had gone to Tenby, where he became a common sailor.\u00a0 The second son, Robert, aged 14, became a farm servant at Boughrood Court, which the Fowkes had once owned.\u00a0 The fourth daughter, aged 12, became a servant \u2013 the only servant \u2013 at the lonely mountain farm, Blaenau, above Talgarth.<\/p>\r\n

The eldest daughter, Ann, suffered the humiliation of living at Boughrood Castle \u2013 as a housemaid.\u00a0 But the ultimate in humiliation was kept by fate for Charles himself.\u00a0 In 1861, \u2018C.F. former gentleman, born in St George\u2019s, Hanover Square\u2019 was an inmate of Hay Union Workhouse.<\/p>\r\n

But Charles managed to bounce back from this and in 1866, he, his daughter Matilda, his carpenter son Edward, and Edward\u2019s wife and children, emigrated to the little outback town of Braidwood, New South Wales, where Charles\u2019 sister Elizabeth Bell was living.\u00a0 They could hardly have been welcome.\u00a0 Elizabeth, now a widow with a large family, was having a hard time and pining for Wales, not for her ne\u2019er-do-well brother.<\/p>\r\n

Elizabeth\u2019s husband was Thomas Bell, surgeon R.N., of Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Anglo-Irish protestant gentry to the backbone.\u00a0 He had taken part in Parry\u2019s third expedition to the Arctic, and served in the East Indies and in home waters, and was superintendent-surgeon on convict ships.<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0The Bells\u2019 first child, Julia, had been born at Boughrood Castle.\u00a0 Her fate, and that of her three daughters, was to die of tuberculosis in Australia.<\/p>\r\n

Bell bought land and also \u2018squatted\u2019, near Braidwood.\u00a0 He was sheep farmer, doctor, magistrate and Crown Commissioner for Lands, but in spite of hard work he did not become rich, even though gold was found on his land.\u00a0 Elizabeth\u2019s first and roughest experience of Australian life involved arson.\u00a0 Three convicts burned down her second house, with her English furniture, the night before she and her family were to occupy it.<\/p>\r\n

At Braidwood, Charles Fowke practised for a time as a land surveyor, then went to live out his life with a daughter married to a grazier.\u00a0 His carpenter son, Edward, after some experience of the life of a bush farmer, lost his wife, remarried and went to Sydney and raised a second family (Elizabeth Jane).\u00a0 His daughter by his first wife was the grandmother of Dr. Terence A. Bunn, a medical practitioner in New South Wales.\u00a0 Like Mrs Talbot and Mrs Corlette, he has a special interest in Radnorshire.<\/p>\r\n

Elizabeth\u2019s twin sister, <\/strong>Eliza, had a shorter life and a terrible end.\u00a0 After living for a time at Boughrood, she and her husband, George Games, moved to Llan-pwll-llyn, the house now known as the Old Rectory near Boughrood Bridge.\u00a0 In 1849, Eliza and her husband went down with typhus.\u00a0 Both were dead in three weeks.<\/p>\r\n

Their children, Georgiana Sarah, Eliza Isabella, and Anna Maria were brought up in Brecon, first by John Games, a builder, their father\u2019s brother, and then by their second cousin, William Games, a solicitor who was three times Mayor of Brecon.\u00a0 Georgiana married her second cousin, George Games, a solicitor, of Hay.<\/p>\r\n

Perhaps the strangest of the Fowke daughters was Mary.\u00a0 Her first husband, an unsuccessful Worthing attorney, gave her three children and then died, leaving her penniless.\u00a0 Boughrood Castle became her home, and her children were brought up there, and two died there.\u00a0 At the age of 34, Mary married a 21-year-old adventurer, David Williams, son of the Rector of Llyswen.<\/p>\r\n

The wedding over, this unscrupulous fortune-hunter, the second in Mary\u2019s life, entered St. John College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate and was eventually ordained.\u00a0 He and Mary lived at Cwmdu, Crickhowell, until he succeeded his father as Rector of Llyswen.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Another of Francis\u2019s sons, Edward Fowke, was at first a tenant farmer at the Lodge, Talgarth (now farmed by Mr. Robert Meredith), and also agent for the Ashburnham Estates in Breconshire.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

He moved to Glanhenwy, Cusop, Hay, as agent to the Maaesllwch Estate, and then to Penmyarth as agent for the Glanusk Estate. He married a widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Forrester, one of the Prossers of Tredustan and Porthamel. They had five children, the youngest of whom, Francis, joined the Bombay Civil Service and died there, aged 20 \u2013 his memorial is in St. Gwendoline\u2019s Churchyard, Talgarth.<\/p>\r\n

The castle changed hands many times in the twentieth century, and in the 1970s was run as a writers\u2019 retreat by Michael Howard, the son of the co-founder of the publishing house Jonathan Cape.<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Many of the facts in this piece came from an article in the <\/em>Express of 10th<\/sup> May 1973 preserved by Eileen Pugh.\u00a0 The article was written by Eileen and Harry Green, authors of a booklet on the Fowkes family available from the Radnorshire Museum.<\/em><\/p>\r\n