Humphreys – 18th century

Sir William Humphreys had been created a baronet in 1714 when he was Lord Mayor of London and married Margaret Wintour by whom he had a son, Orlando. His second wife was Ellen Lancashire. Orlando inherited the baronetcy and the Hever estate on the death of his father in 1735, there followed a series of tragedies which were to result in the family selling the Castle eighteen years later.

Sir Orlando married his stepsister Ellen, from her mother’s first marriage. They had three sons and two daughters, but tragically two of his sons died. Orlando was an ill man and during his lifetime he gave Hever to his surviving son Robert, who died in 1736 at the age of 28, a year before his father. As Robert had no children, the estate passed to his two sisters but the family’s misfortune followed his elder sister Mary. 

Mary’s husband, William Bell Waring, died in 1746 and she married her second husband, John Honeywood, who died two years later. Mary’s mother, Ellen, remarried in 1746 taking Charles Gore, MP for Hertfordshire, as her second husband. Meanwhile, Mary married her third husband, Thomas Gore, uncle to her mother’s new husband – thus becoming both daughter and aunt to her mother. In this complicated situation it became difficult to decide who owned the Castle and they agreed to sell the estate in 1749.