Lulworth Castle from 1700

Abstract

The owners of Lulworth Castle were Roman Catholic. That distinction from the mainstream of English culture gave Lulworth Castle a special character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Welds were, and remain, English landowners with their roots firmly in this country, but they were also part of a network which stretched across Europe. Rome had a double significance for cultivated English Catholics. On the one hand was the Augustan idyll perceived through patrician English eyes, which inspired the elegant refurbishment of so many English country houses in the eighteenth century, Lulworth included. On the other, Rome was the head and heart of a religion so alien to the eighteenth-century English establishment that its devotees paid for their loyalty financially, socially and politically.