The Mausoleum in Knebworth Park was broken into in the 1950s, so my grandmother Hermione had it bricked up. Towards the end of her life, she was keen to restore the building, so in 1999 we broke through the brick and replaced the door and the lock. We found that one of the coffins had been crowbarred open. Its lid sat loose. Clearly someone had not known how fantastically unlikely it would be for ever-short-of-cash Edward Bulwer Lytton – or any member of the Lytton family – to consign anything of monetary value to eternity.
The coffin was his daughter’s – my great-great-great-aunt, Emily Bulwer Lytton (1828-1848) – who died aged 19, in tragic and never fully explained circumstances. Around the same time as the discovery of her open coffin, we also discovered a box of letters that Emily wrote to her father from an Orthopaedic Institute in Germany, where she had been sent for three years for treatment of curvature of the spine. The letters are “cross-written” – the letter-writer turns the paper 90 degrees and writes over what they have already written to save paper and postage – so are very difficult for an untrained eye to read. Our Archivist Clare Fleck has spent the last 16 years transcribing the letters, and they tell a most extraordinary story of a troubled but much loved teenager – which I have just finished turning into a biography to be published at Christmas.
To celebrate the completion of the manuscript and Emily’s 188th birthday – 27th June – Clare and I, and a collection of people who have contributed to the book, went back into the Mausoleum with a white rose from the Knebworth House Gardens, which we put into Emily’s coffin before sealing the loose lid once and for all. It was a moving moment – and putting it in perspective for me is the fact that if I am fortunate enough to end up in this august company one day, and my descendants come and visit me on my 188th birthday, it will be the year 2150. How happy will my spirits be if there are still beautiful roses blooming in the Knebworth House Gardens in the second half of the next century!
Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com