Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 124

Once known as the most famous will in the world, Peter Thellusson’s will has nevertheless had to wait for more than two hundred years before a book has been devoted to it. The will was famous for two rather different reasons. For a while contemporaries thought that it might pose a threat to the established social order, for it provided that the Thellusson fortune from trade and finance should be invested in land, and the income should be invested in more land to accumulate during the lives of his three sons and six grandsons, and on the death of the last of these nine lives the accumulated property should be divided into equal shares for the three eldest male lineal descendants of his three sons. Since the youngest grandson was en ventre sa mere when his grandfather died, the accumulation would continue for an entire lifetime before anyone could inherit the estates, and it was supposed that by then these would have grown to such a vast size that they would eclipse the grandest of the ducal estates. Precisely because the will disinherited the sons and grandsons, the family was bound to challenge it, and for a very long while, little short of 60 years, the Thellusson will was in Chancery. Practically every lawyer of note and every Lord Chancellor had a finger in the case, and many have thought it was the model for Dickens’s Jarndyce v. Jarndyce (the case of William Jennens, who died in 1798, may have a better claim; claimants to part of the Jennens fortune were still appearing over a hundred years later).

Peter’s sons tried to have the will set aside on the grounds that it ran foul of the rules against perpetuities, but much as some of the judges in the Chancery court may have wished to strike it down on social and moral grounds – that it amounted to an ‘unnatural’ disinheritance – they were obliged to uphold it on legal grounds since it did not attempt to tie up the estate beyond the term of lives in being. Loughborough, as Chancellor, delivered judgement upholding the will in 1799, and an appeal to the House of Lords was finally rejected in 1806. Meanwhile Loughborough as a cabinet minister, fearing that Thellusson had invented a device for the delayed action destruction of the power of the territorial aristocracy by the power of new money at compound interest, had put through the so-called Thellusson Act in 1800 ‘to prevent the effects of posthumous avarice’ by limiting the right to provide for the accumulation of the income from real or personal property to a period of 21 years from the grantor’s death. This was the effect of the will on statute law. Its effects on Chancery law are not so simple to detect.

Polden tells the story as legal history as well as family history, and provides abundant information on all the leading cases affecting perpetuities, trusts, lineal male descendants, contingent remainders, and the like, but to the layman it seems that the Thellusson case was subjected to the established rules and doctrines and did not produce any development of them. It is true that because the will had been contested in Chancery the trust created by it was ‘in Chancery’ throughout its life, so that every decision by the trustees – not merely the big ones of what lands to purchase on what terms, but the minor ones on what repairs to carry out at what costs – had to be approved by a Master in Chancery. This was a slow and costly process, and the publicity attracted by this particular case may well have contributed to the pressure, eventually successful, for the reform of Chancery procedures. That, however, appears to be the limit of its ‘consequences on Chancery law’.

As family history the book provides exhaustive information on Peter Thellusson’s forebears as well as on all his descendants, in the remorseless detail which family historians find irresistible. The big disappointment is that very little can be said about the core operations of the will-trust as purchaser and manager of landed estates. Polden records the bare bones, concluding that by 1833, when some of the more irksome features of the trust were removed by a private estate act, the great accumulation had become a harmless laughing stock since instead of performing like some giant snowball threatening to crush the old aristocracy it had produced fat pickings for lawyers and precious little land. In fact by the time the accumulation ended with the death of the last of the ‘measuring lives’ in 1856 over £1 million had been laid out in the purchase of over 30,000 acres, not a spectacular outcome for a fortune valued at about £500,000 in 1797, but not negligible. Polden perhaps tends to underestimate its importance because in comparing the trust estates with long-established great estates an extra nought has strayed into the rental of the Duke of Bedford’s estates in the home counties which he puts at £300,000. In the event there were only two eligible male lineal descendants of Peter Thellusson living in 1856, and they each inherited sizeable estates. One, centred on Rendlesham in Suffolk, went to the third Lord Rendlesham, grandson of Peter’s eldest son, and the second, with a seat at Brodsworth near Doncaster, to Charles Sabine Thellusson, grandson of Peter’s youngest son (the middle son died unmarried). The Rendlesham side of the family sold up in 1921. In the Second World War the land and house were swallowed by the U.S. Bentwaters airfield and no trace remains. Charles Sabine, on the other hand, employed the Tuscan architect Chevalier Casentini to build a splendid new house at Brodsworth, subsequently both supported and undermined by coal workings. Brodsworth was given to English Heritage in 1988, and sensitively restored it has become Lucinda Lambton’s favourite country house. Could Peter Thellusson have wished for a more memorable legacy?