Robert George Cecil Fane was born in 1796. Educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, he became an equity barrister with a successful practice at Lincoln’s Inn. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, “his judicial bearing was marked by an eccentricity of manner, but although his decisions were frequently the subject of comment, very few of his judgments were reversed on appeal”. He was an ardent lover of field sports and well known in the Leicester hunts.
On 24 June 1835, Fane married Isabella, the youngest daughter of Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey, and a large part of Hempstead was left to her by her father. However, Isabella died just three years later at the Harvey seat of Rolls Park, Chigwell; the couple had no children.
Fane went on to marry Harriet Blackwood (the daughter of another admiral, the Hon. Sir Henry Blackwood, Bart) and the couple had a son Cecil Francis William Fane and two daughters.
Cecil (known to his friends as ‘Cis’) inherited the Hempstead estate on his father’s death in 1864. According to his friend Charles McNeill, Cecil “was an extremely witty and popular man: spoke French like a native, and knew as many good stories in both languages as anyone”.
In May 1880, Cecil married the 22 year old Lady Augusta Fanny Rous. The Hempstead bells were rung several times throughout the day, which upset the curate John Escreet.
In later life, Lady Augusta (‘Gussie’ to her friends) wrote a book of spirited reminiscences called Chit Chat. In his foreword to the book, Charles McNeill wrote
“She was absolutely untireable out hunting, never turning for home till the long finishing note sounded on Tom Firr’s wonderfully speaking horn; then for a hot bath and a dinner party, followed by reminiscences of the chase, songs and music, and probably a game of cards, and the morning found her fresh as a daisy, hacking to the meet”.
The marriage seems to have been a stormy affair. McNeill says that Gussie “was by far the prettiest debutante of her year, and if she would let herself go and tell of all her love affairs we would indeed have some thrilling reading.” Cecil, by the same token, does not seem to have spent much of the later years of their marriage at home. Although two children were born in 1881 and 1884, Lady Augusta’s divorce petition of 1903 states that her husband “has refused and still refuses to live and cohabit with your petitioner and to render her conjugal rights”.
The couple were divorced in 1904 and Cecil almost immediately remarried, coincidentally to another Harvey (although his new wife Muriel seems to have been unrelated to Admiral Eliab and his line). Clearly Lady Augusta retained the Hempstead estates in the divorce settlement, because – although never, as far as we know living in Hempstead – she is noted as ‘lady of the manor and principal landowner’ of Hempstead in Kelly’s Directories up to at least 1922. She died in 1950, aged 92.