Anthony Brand, 6th Viscount Hampden - Glynde Estates

Glynde Estates

Subsequently he was estate manager of his own 6,000 acres (24 km2), Glynde Estates, 1984–2002. Much of these and the flint faced Elizabethan (1569) mansion house Glynde Place he had inherited from a second cousin (twice removed), Humphrey Brand (1895–1953), and his widow in c1953 and 1978. (He had married Aimée, aka Poss, on 24 January 1940. The younger daughter of Sir Rupert Clarke, she by her first husband is grandmother of the present Baron Gerard, etal.). Humphrey Brand was the son of Admiral the Hon. Thomas Seymour Brand (1847-1916), who was second son of the 1st Viscount, Mr. Speaker Brand. (There had been a 1851 provision that the holder of the Barony of Dacre should always relinquish the Glynde estate in favour of the junior line; however, with the separation of the Dacre barony and the Hampden viscountcy in 1965 this arrangement would have lapsed, if it had not already).

Glynde is a few miles north-east of Lewes, between Glyndebourne and Firle. Another part of the estate is at Mayfield, within Rother and the Weald; where the author Pamela Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, was once a tenant.

Glynde Place, which the Welsh Trevor family inherited in 1679, owes much of its present condition to an ancestral uncle, Richard Trevor (1701–1771), Prince Bishop of Durham from 1752 to 1771, who wintered there after 1744. Bishop Trevor is otherwise remembered today for having endowed in 1756 the Bishop's Palace, Auckland Castle, which he had had re-modeled from 1760, with the series of 12 (of the 13) portraits of Jacob and his sons which Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664) had painted in 1640. Glynde is home not only a fine portrait of the Prince-Bishop by Thomas Hudson but to the Apotheosis of King James I (1629-30), an 37.5 x 25 inches oil-on-wood sketch Rubens (1577-1640) made as preparation for his Banqueting House (Whitehall, Westminster) ceiling scheme. With some associated sketches it has been on loan (number L79) to the National Gallery since 1981. That picture had been acquired by Bishop Trevor's elder brother, Robert (1706–83), or by one of his nephews, the 2nd and 3rd (and last) viscounts Hampden (first creation). .

This 2 December 2008 auctioneers Christie's will try to sell, from their King Street, London rooms, two Canalettos from the Glynde collection (from the estate of the late Viscount), and another, also acquired by Thomas Brand (c1717-1770).