The Lucy family owned the land from 1247. Charlecote Park was originally built in 1558 by Sir
Thomas Lucy, and Queen
Elizabeth I stayed in the room that is now the drawing room. Although the general outline of the original Elizabethan house remains, the present house is of mostly Victorian construction. Successive generations of the Lucy family modified Charlecote Park over the centuries until George Hammond Lucy (
High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1831) inherited the house in 1823 and set about recreating the house in its original Tudor style. Charlecote Park covers , backing on to the River Avon.
William Shakespeare was said to have
poached rabbits and deer in the park as a young man, and to have been brought before the magistrates. From 1605 to 1640, the house was occupied by Sir
Thomas Lucy. He had twelve children with
Lady Lucy, who ran the house after he died. She was known for her piety and for distributing alms to the poor each Christmas. Her eldest three sons each inherited the house in turn, then it fell to her grandson Sir Davenport Lucy. High up on one wall in the Tudor great hall is the 1680 painting
Captain Thomas Lucy by Sir
Godfrey Kneller, dated 1680. It includes what is believed to be one of the earliest depictions of an enslaved black presence in the
West Midlands. The painting includes a young black groom in the right hand background, dressed in a blue livery coat and red stockings and wearing a gleaming, metal collar around his neck. The National Trust notes that "It is not known if Kneller painted this unidentified figure from a model or if it is a portrait of a real groom in Captain Lucy's household". In 1735, a black child called Philip Lucy was baptised at Charlecote. The lands immediately adjoining the house were further landscaped by
Capability Brown in about 1760. This resulted in Charlecote becoming a hostelry destination for notable tourists to Stratford from the late-18th to mid-19th century, including
Washington Irving (1818), Sir
Walter Scott (1828) and
Nathaniel Hawthorne (c 1850). Charlecote was inherited in 1823 by George Hammond Lucy (d. 1845), who in December 1822 had married Mary Elizabeth Williams of
Bodelwyddan Castle, Wales, upon whose extensive diaries the current "behind the scenes of Victorian Charlecote" are based. Seven years of major renovation and rebuilding, including an extension on the river side, were commenced in 1829 after a builder's survey had revealed grave defects in the fabric. G.H.Lucy's second son, Henry, inherited the estate in 1847 from his elder brother. In 1848, Mary Elizabeth Lucy had the "wretched old Anglo-Norman church" in the Park pulled down. A new church, built to her design, was completed and opened in February 1853. In 1890, artist
Edith Mary Hinchley worked on a family tree image on deerskin that involved the creation of 500 heraldic shields. She did the work because she was a genealogist and a friend of the family. The "Lucy Deerskin" is still at Charlecote Park. After the deaths of both Mary Elizabeth and Henry in 1890, the house was rented out by Henry's eldest daughter and heiress, Ada Christina (d. 1942). She had married Sir Henry Ramsay-Fairfax, (d. 1944), a line of the
Fairfax Baronets, who on marriage assumed the name Fairfax-Lucy. From this point onwards, the family began selling off parts of the outlying estate to fund their lifestyle. In 1946, Sir Montgomerie Fairfax-Lucy, who had inherited the residual estate from his mother Ada, presented Charlecote to the National Trust
in lieu of death duties. Sir Montgomerie was succeeded in 1965 by his brother, Sir Brian, whose wife Alice researched the history of Charlecote and assisted the National Trust with the restoration of the house. ==Today==