Bespoke – Grant Thornton

PROTECT YOUR WEALTH
SPARE ATHOUGHT for Peter Isaac
Thellusson. He was 36, newly married
and exceptionally upwardly mobile, when
his father died in 1797. Suddenly, the
young Thellusson –who at the time was
MP for Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and later
became the first Baron Rendlesham –was
financially secure for the rest of his life.
Or so he thought.
His father,who was also called
Peter Thellusson, had been afabulously
wealthy man. Indeed, at the time of his
demise he was thought to have been worth
around £700,000 –that’sapproximately
£34 million in today’smoney.Even if he
had decided not to favour his eldest son
and had shared his fortune equally with
all six of his children, none of them
would have had reason to complain.
In financial terms, they were about to
live happily ever after.
So imagine the scene when the family
solicitor read out the terms of Peter
Thellusson’swill. What drama. Presumably,
his widow Anne (née Woodford, who
hailed from aLincolnshire landowning
family) gathered together her brood in
the drawing room of Brodsworth Hall,
the flamboyant stately home in Yorkshire
that her husband had acquired seven
years earlier.
Expectation hung tantalisingly in
the air. The ornate, symmetrical room
provided aperfect backdrop to what
would become acause célèbre in high
society and alandmark in legal history.
‘There was no indication of what was
to come,’ says Caroline Carr-Whitworth,
acurator at Brodsworth Hall, which
English Heritage acquired in 1990. ‘Peter
Thellusson was not thought to have been
an eccentric man, or mean or strange. In
fact, he was atypical merchant financier
who put money into several ventures and
reaped the rewards. He had been successful