Edward Weld (Senior)

[4][5][6][7] Weld also continued laying out the grounds, begun by his father, extending the castle's southern balustraded terrace and making a walled garden.

[4][8] He was responsible for initiating the internal Adam style decor and 18th-century furnishing of a rare example of an early 17th century mock Jacobean castellated hunting lodge.

Weld became the subject of a sensational lawsuit taken out by his wife in the ecclesiastical Arches Court at Canterbury on the grounds of non-consummation of their marriage, in effect accusing him of impotence.

[13] In 1745 Weld was accused of being associated with the Jacobite rising of 1745, then raging in Scotland and the northern counties of England, due to a letter allegedly found on the road to Poole.

[16] Accordingly, Edward, John and Thomas were despatched to the College of St Omer, later at Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands, where their relatives, the Simeon Welds had settled, and which aside from providing a good education, prepared them for the Grand Tour with social openings in the power centres of Paris and Rome.

[17] Edward's grandfather, William Weld, reclaiming Lulworth after its forcible occupation by Roundheads in the English Civil War, came close to insolvency.

[6] The castle lay a derelict ruin for seventy years until one of Edward's descendants, Wilfrid Weld, undertook a painstaking restoration in partnership with Historic England to bring it to its current status as a museum.

[18] Very occasionally, furniture and pictures from Lulworth have appeared in auction rooms, which by their provenance and mid-eighteenth century dating suggest their original acquisition was by Edward Weld.