Fane family, Earls of Westmorland

The Fane family held land at Tudeley and elsewhere in Kent by the late Middle Ages. Sir Thomas Fane married Mary Nevill (d. 1626), daughter and heir of the 6th Lord Abergavenny and Baroness Le Despenser in her own right. She inherited the Nevill estates of Mereworth (Kent) and Althorne (Essex). Their son, Francis Fane (1583-1628) married in 1599 Mary, daughter and heir of Sir Anthony Mildmay (d. 1617), through whom he acquired the Apethorpe (Northamptonshire) estate and property in Wiltshire that Mildmay had inherited through his marriage to a co-heir of Sir Henry Sherrington of Lacock (Wiltshire). Francis Fane was created Earl of Westmorland in 1624. An estate at Sharlston (Yorkshire, West Riding) entered the family through the 6th Earl’s marriage in 1707 to Catherine, daughter and heir of Thomas Stringer of Sharlston. The Apethorpe estate was sold in 1904 to Henry Brassey, later Baron Brassey.

On the death of the 7th Earl in 1762 the Kent properties passed to descendants of his sisters (see below), but the earldom and the other estates were inherited by his cousin Thomas Fane (1707-71), the son of Henry Fane of Redland (Gloucestershire) and grandson of Sir Francis Fane of Fulbeck (Lincolnshire), the 2nd Earl’s younger brother. Before his accession as 8th Earl, Thomas Fane had already inherited his father’s estate at Brympton (Somerset) and other property from his mother, sister and co-heir in her issue of John Scrope of Wormsley (Buckinghamshire). Brympton subsequently passed to a daughter of the 11th Earl, Lady Rose Weigall (1834-1921), to whom certain family papers, including the correspondence of Priscilla, Countess of Westmorland, also descended.

Mary, a sister of the 7th Earl, married Sir Francis Dashwood, 1st baronet of West Wycombe (Buckinghamshire) in 1705. Her sister Catherine married William Paul and had a daughter Catherine, her heir, who married Sir William Stapleton, 4th baronet of Rotherfield Greys (Oxfordshire), to which family the Kent estate and the barony of Le Despenser ultimately passed, together with the Fane family papers and Kent estate muniments kept at Mereworth Castle.

Estates in 1883: 5,973 acres in Northamptonshire; 1,401 acres in West Riding of Yorkshire; worth a total of £11,142 a year.