The Full Montagu

From the archive, first published Friday 14th Oct 2005.

CHIPPENHAM NEWS: An extravagant cad got two sisters pregnant and sent them to the workhouse just years after his father eloped and was thrown out of the military for having too many affairs.

This may sound like the plot of a TV drama but in reality it's the story behind one of Lacock's most powerful families: the Montagus, who owned Lackham House three centuries ago.

Writer Tony Pratt has scoured archives, history books and even back copies of the Wiltshire Times and Chippenham News for gossip about the family and will reveal all at a talk in Lackham House on Tuesday.

To whet appetites the 49-year-old historian, of Long Close, Chippenham, gave a sneak preview of some of the eyebrow-raising family antics to the Chippenham News.

Top of the Montagu scandals has to be spendthrift cad George Conway Montagu, who was destined to inherit Lackham House but instead lost all the family's money in the late 18th century.

As a young man he eloped to Gretna Green in Scotland to marry Mary Green Wilson and then lived a life of luxury and excess, safe in the knowledge he was set to inherit the family's fortune.

Mr Pratt said: "He spent money like it was going out of fashion."

He used false names yo escape the creditors but ended up in the King's Bench Prison in London on numerous occasions.

His wife filed for divorce after she found out, in 1789, he had two illegitimate children with two of his maids, who were sisters.

They were thrown out into the local workhouse when Montagu discovered they were pregnant.

To top it all, George Conway then took his father to court in a dispute about who rightfully owned Lackham House and lost all the family's money and estate.

His father, George Montagu, is today remembered as a naturalist with Britain's rarest bird of prey, the Montagu's Harrier, named after him.

Once Colonel of the Wiltshire Militia, he was thrown out in disgrace after he ran off with a married woman, Elizabeth Dorville, who had illustrated his nature books, despite having a wife and children himself.

He was written out of the family will by his brother James in disgrace for having children out of wedlock. But in an added twist to the tale, his brother instead left much of his inheritance to his own illegitimate children.

Mr Pratt said: "It's rather a strange lifestyle we think today."

The Montagus had first taken on Lackham House in the early 1600s when a previous James Montagu, third son of the Earl of Manchester, married Mary Baynard, heiress of the estate.

She was just 14 when they married and Mr Pratt thinks her father, who died six months later, had been terminally ill and keen to find an appropriate "match" for his only child.

"I can't prove that but it seems like a reasonable assumption," Mr Pratt said.

Signed copies of The History of the Manor of Lackham will be available after Tuesday's talk in Lackham House, which begins at 7.30pm.

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