Breamore House: The Tudor masterpiece with a past tainted by tragedy

As the River Avon flows south from Salisbury, it passes a number of historic houses in parkland settings: Longford Castle, Trafalgar House, Hale Park and then Breamore (pronounced ‘Bremmer’). Breamore was important enough in the Anglo-Saxon period to be the site of an unusually large church and during the Middle Ages was owned by a series of great landowners who lived elsewhere. Following the Norman Conquest, it belonged to Baldwin de Redvers, Earl of Devon, who founded a priory of Augustinian canons by the Avon.

Thereafter, the manor belonged to the Courtenay Earls of Devon, until Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, fell victim to Henry VIII’s suspicious mind and was executed in 1538. The estate was held in succession by Katherine Howard and Catherine Parr, then the latter’s second husband Thomas Seymour, until he, too, was executed. In 1579, Elizabeth I gave it to Sir Christopher Hatton and, in 1580, he sold it to Sir William Dodington, the builder of the present house.

Sir William’s family came from Mere in Wiltshire. He prospered through his marriage to Christian, sister of Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, a connection that put him at the heart of the Elizabethan regime. The house, constructed of brick with stone dressings, was probably built in the 1580s. Its main front is E-shaped in plan and the side façades are, by contrast, attractively informal.

A long wing extends back to one side, creating an entrance court to the rear. Altogether, the house is built on a grand scale, but has a frank simplicity with no extraneous ornament. The skyline is crowded with brick chimneys that rise above the gables (Fig 1) and the whole enjoys an Arcadian valley setting, at once spreading and secluded.

Breamore, however, brought no comfort to its builder. A legal dispute with a Hampshire neighbour landed Sir William in prison and, although released through the interest of friends, he was threatened with an action in Star Chamber. On the morning of April 11, 1600, he climbed the steeple of St Sepulchre’s, Holborn, London, and threw himself from the battlements. A suicide note was discovered on his body subscribed ‘Lord save my soul and I will praise thy name’. In it he blamed ‘John Buckley and his fellows’ who ‘by perjury and other bad means hath brought me to this end. God forgive it them and I do’. A ballad describing the episode was suppressed by the authorities and the details of what actually happened are hazy.

Misfortunes pursued his heir, another Sir William, described by one contemporary as a ‘pure, precise gentleman’. In a letter dated 1629, Sir Henry Bourchier reported to Archbishop Usher that one of Sir William’s younger sons ‘being reprehended for some disorderly courses by his mother, drew his sword and ran her twice through, and afterwards, she being dead, gave her many wounds; and had slain his sister at the same time, had he not been prevented’.

He was hanged for murder. Sir William’s eldest son, Herbert, died young, too. According to Thomas Fuller, a prebendary of Salisbury, he bore all this with ‘saint-like patience’, but came to regard his family as cursed for having seized property from the church, to which he generously restored it.

Breamore eventually passed to Sir William’s granddaughter, Anne, who married Robert Greville, Lord Brooke. For a century, the house belonged to this aristocratic family, who rarely went there. There was a fresh start, however, in 1748, when the 8th Lord Brooke sold the estate to George II’s physician, Sir Edward Hulse. His descendants have owned it ever since.

The family came from Hulse, near Middlewich in Cheshire, and Edward Hulse (1631–1711), ‘a person of great skill in the practice of physick’, studied at Leiden and became court physician to the Prince of Orange. He then returned to England to practice. His son, another Edward, followed the same career and became physician-in-ordinary to Queen Anne, George I and George II, who conferred a baronetcy on him in 1739. The present baronet, Sir Michael Hulse, is the 11th.

The 1st Baronet resided at Dartford Heath in Kent; he never lived at Breamore, which he bought for his son, but he is commemorated in the house by a superb pastel portrait by Francis Cotes. He married an heiress, Dorothy Westrow, and portraits of her ancestors line the hall. The Westrow ancestry evidently meant a lot to the family, for, in the mid 19th century, the 6th Baronet named his elder son Edward Hamilton Westrow Hulse and, since then, the heirs have always borne this name. The 2nd Baronet did not pursue medicine and lived as a landed gentleman, although he, too, married an heiress, Hannah Vanderplank, daughter of a Netherlandish merchant.

His heir, yet another Sir Edward, also wed a City heiress, Mary Lethieullier, a descendant of Flemish Protestants who took refuge in England in the early 17th century. Her uncle was the noted connoisseur and antiquary Smart Lethieullier; on his death in 1761, his estate at Aldersbrook in Essex and his collections passed to Mary; some souvenirs of him are still at Breamore. Sir Edward was perhaps overshadowed by his soldier brother Samuel (1747–1837), who, when young, was in the Prince of Wales’s circle and took on the thankless task of being the Prince’s treasurer and receiver-general. He went on to enjoy a distinguished military career, becoming a Field Marshal and Governor of Chelsea Hospital. Many objects relating to him remain in the family collection.

On October 19, 1856, in the time of the 5th Baronet, another Sir Edward, the house burnt down. The wing was undamaged, but the main block was gutted. Sir Edward restored the building with great sensitivity and also doubled the depth of the main block, creating a new entrance façade set back to back with the original Elizabethan frontage. This addition faithfully adopts the style of the original architecture, with a tall porch in the middle and gables to either side. It allowed for the building to be turned back to front with a new door to the rear. Therefore, although visitors normally approach from the south, the drive continues round the house to the court behind. This arrangement gives prominence to several service buildings, including a tall octagonal water tower built in the mid 19th century. Another notable building is the Georgian stable block, which features a hipped roof and pediment carried on Tuscan pilasters (Fig 2).

The porch leads into an entrance hall (Fig 4), which is hung with recent family portraits. To the right is a screen of re-used woodwork and the Inner Hall. The state portrait of George I that hangs here was a gift to his physician, the 1st Baronet. Also on display are Samuel Hulse’s field-marshal’s baton and telescope, and paintings of Napoleon’s victories. Beyond is the main range of the Elizabethan house, which was originally divided up to accommodate a great hall, screens passage and services.

After the 1856 fire, however, these divisions were stripped out to create a single room with the character of a long gallery, running the full length of the building between the two wings (Fig 3). It contains two identical carved stone chimneypieces, one presumably of the 1580s, and is lined with oak panelling. The hall’s decorative plaster ceiling was evidently modelled by hand and the whole scheme looks convincingly Elizabethan, not at all like conventional work of the 1850s: it may represent an early application of Arts-and-Crafts principles by local craftsmen.

There is an impressive collection of furnishings, including two large Flemish tapestries after designs by David Teniers, a magnificent peasant scene by the same artist and several 16th- and 17th-century portraits, many of Dorothy Westrow’s ancestors. Among them is a full-length image of Sir Thomas Coningsby with ‘Crickit a Dwarf’ and Mary, Queen of Scots, in white mourning dress. The dining room, in the wing, has a similar ribbed plaster ceiling and a great stone chimneypiece (Fig 5). Its paintings of game against a landscape background, by Pieter Andries Rysbrack, are part of the large collection of Dutch pictures in the house and there is a remarkable model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that once belonged to Smart Lethieullier.

The Blue Drawing Room has been recently redecorated and the strong blue makes a good background for late-17th- and early-18th-century portraits (Fig 8). These include one by John Riley of the first Dr Edward and others of the 2nd Baronet with his wife, Hannah. The elaborate Dutch marquetry furniture in this room was given by her father. The adjacent West Drawing Room has been painted a warm red to serve as the family’s sitting room and has a fine array of 18th-century portraits and furniture. A painting of young Walter Hawksworth Fawkes is one of the earliest paintings of a cricketer in existence.

Many of the house’s treasures are on the first floor, such as the magnificent English table carpet with a green ground, dated 1614, that hangs above the main stairs (Fig 7). On the landing nearby is a set of 14 paintings, apparently from 18th-century Mexico, representing the racial types of its population. The Blue Bedroom has a Georgian mahogany bed and superb pastel portraits. In the east wing, two rooms are furnished as Tudor bed-rooms, with 16th-century furniture, portraits, textiles, and huge oak bedsteads (Fig 6).

The house stands on a terrace, facing south-east over the valley, with, to the north, a pool garden enclosed by yew hedges. The specimen trees on all sides are one of the great features of the place. To the south, in a grove of cedars and ancient yew trees, is the church, visibly a work of Saxon architecture, with a central belfry. Inside, the south transept arch has a Saxon inscription and a splendid collection of funeral hatchments for successive members of the Hulse family.

Breamore also has the superb Countryside Museum, formed in the 1970s by the 10th Baronet, Sir Edward, who died in 2022. This occupies a group of large purpose-built barns with themed displays. The first building presents rural businesses and crafts, including a cooper’s shop, schoolroom, village shop, a cobbler, blacksmith’s, brewhouse and so on. Further zones have collections of agricultural equipment, tractors, steam engines and machinery of all kinds. The collections were assembled by Sir Edward by purchase or gift, over 50 years or more, and embody a deep and evident love for lost or vanishing rural ways of life. The museum is open on most days; the house has limited opening for guided tours.

A path leads north through an ancient woodland, Breamore Wood, and out onto the chalk downs, where the ancient past reveals itself. There is a linear earthwork, Grims Ditch, and a long tumulus, the Giant’s Grave. About a mile from the house is a little hill covered with yew trees that conceal the Miz Maze, one of eight ancient turf mazes to survive in Britain. The concentric turf walks, cared for by the estate, are laid out in a pattern like the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth.

The downs and the valley, the earthworks and the maze, the Saxon church, the village, the farms and fields, the ancient woodlands, the park and gardens and the grand Elizabethan house together form a landscape of great beauty and historic resonance. It is all superbly maintained today by the Hulse family, the estate team and the village community.

For more information about the house, see the Breamore House website.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.