The Hope family mausoleum was recently uncovered at Deepdene. The council had buried the monument to roof level beneath a mound of soil and in the shelter of a steep hillside around 1960 to protect it from vandals. Conservators have now dug it out. Its ashlar walls are still drying.

Inside, the mausoleum is as cold as one can imagine. Only thin streams of light issue through the half-moon window above the iron gates and into the antechamber to reach the inner sanctum. Behind three walls are loculi, 33 in all, which hold the remains of the Hopes, who once made Deepdene their own. 

Henry Hope’s father Thomas, “a little ill-looking man . . . with a sort of effeminate face and manner” and “a very disagreeable voice” was the first of the family to arrive at Deepdene, purchasing the estate in 1807. Born in Amsterdam 38 years previously, Hope was descended from a prominent Dutch-Scottish banking dynasty, which had profited magnificently during the Seven Years War by providing governments with loans in exchange for trade. With little interest in the family business, Thomas Hope had embarked upon a very extended Grand Tour, before returning to England to settle with his wife Louisa Beresford, a pretty heiress (a contemporary caricature cruelly branded them “beauty and the beast”). In addition to Deepdene, they kept a property on London’s Duchess Street, which Sir John Soane much admired.

In a full-length portrait by Sir William Beechey, Thomas Hope, full-faced with a small, dark moustache, is dressed in luxurious woven fabrics and a turban. His travels had taken him to Italy, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Greece, and finally to the Ottoman Empire. Rather than chronicle his travels in a “trite” journal, he chose to do so through the eyes of a fictitious Greek hero named Anastasius. The book became a novel, which Hope had published — at first anonymously — after settling at Deepdene.

Near the beginning of the book, Anastasius reflects, “Smyrna had been, in my imagination, the utmost limit of the habitable globe; and as to Europe, I deemed it to lie somewhere not far from the antipodes”. Thomas Hope was rather better travelled when he began his Grand Tour, having coming to London from Amsterdam to escape the French Revolution. It was not, however, autobiographical inaccuracy that led the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine to assume that the book had been written by someone else. Anastasius was so brilliant, assured and familiar that he believed it could only have been written by Lord Byron. Whether more flattered or angered upon seeing Byron’s name in the review, Hope wrote at once to assert himself as “sole author” of the work. Although Byron is said to have told Lady Blessington that he wept when he read Anastasius because he had not written it himself, rumours of the involvement of his and other hands have never gone away.

Whether Hope was the sole author of Anastasius or not, the spirit of the book may still be felt at Deepdene. The “whole wide world” which had struck Anastasius’s “young heart with awe” found its way to the English countryside, as Hope went about transforming his estate.