HADDON HALL.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 246, 25 July 1940, Page 2

HADDON HALL.

To'the list of places which owe some of their at:ruction to the novelist’s imagi'.mtiou be added Haddou Hal!, with its stories of Dorothy Vernon and her elopement, says the “Man* Chester Guardian,” Dorothy was a real person, who married John Manners, but her elopement w r as the invention of an early Victorian novelist. There is no evidence that the Manners —Vernon marriage differed in any way from the normal Elizabethan marriage with due attention to “settlements,” and certainly Dorothy did not go down the famous “Dorothy Vernon’s Steps,” for the sufficient reason that they were built after her time. However, history makes amends to fiction, for about a century after Dorothy’s death "one of her descendants did actually elope from Haddon Hall. On an April Saturday in 1672 Lady Anne Manners, the seventeen • year-old daughter of the eighth Earl of Rutland, eloped with Sir Scropo Howe, a twenty-four-year-old knight who afterwards became Viscount Howe. A contemporary letter describes the elopement: “Early that morn ng she walked into the’ park with m.-r maid, and at the park gate horses nr.d pillions waited for her which carried them to the top of Rows ley Barr where Sir Scrope’s coach with his friends and servants received her.” Sir Scrope and Lady Anne were married at Selssliire, on the way to Langar, Nottinghamshire, the bridegroom’s estate and twice on the day following the elopement and marriage attended service at Langar Church .