The Lorts seem to have begun the process of estate-building in this district in 1573, when William and Margaret Mather granted a lease of the manor house at Stackpole to George Lort and his sons Roger and George for the term of their lives. In 1589 George Lort had a grant of East Trewent from William Herbert of Swansea, and a year later he acted as attorney for the Mathers in the leasing of two messuages in Stackpole to his sons Roger, George II and Sampson. In 1595 Sampson and his cousins Henry and John were granted leases of seven messuages in Sampson, St. Petrox and Stackpole. Two years later Roger Lort leased land at Rowston for 31 years, and in 1598 he and his father were granted half an oxland (about 7 acres) in Stackpole together with half of Hall manor in Angle. At this juncture the Lorts were not in complete control of Stackpole lordship, for the Mathers still retained a number of properties and resided there occasionally. Margaret died at Stackpole on 7th. March 1604 and her husband William died there in November 1607. Sir Edward Stanley, son of Margaret by her first husband thereupon inherited her lands, and in December 1611 sold Roger Lort and his eldest son Henry the manors of Stackpole Elidor and Stackpole Bosher in consideration of œ2,000, a move which crowned a process of piecemeal acquisition which had been proceeding for at least 38 years. Roger Lort performed various public duties appropriate to his social station, and was sheriff in 1607-8. He died on 17th. May 1613 at Stackpole. Under the terms of his will, which was drawn up four days before his death, 5s. were left to the cathedral at St. David's, and 20s. to the church at St. Petrox. The sum of œ6-5- 8d. was bequeathed to the poor of Stackpole, 30s. to the poor of Bosherston, and 13s. 4d. to the poor of St. Petrox. George, one of his younger sons, was given the fee simple of the three farmsteads of Trebrowen, Caneston and Kitewell and other lands in Rhoscrowther, whilst another son, John, was bequeathed the lordship of Castlemartin together with a number of farmsteads there. Anne, Roger's only surviving unmarried daughter, was left œ500 and placed under the tutelage of his widow Abra until she should come of age. Abra herself was given the use of Rowston and Kitehill for life, for which she had to pay a yearly rent to the mayor and burgesses of Tenby, together with a little tenement called "Sainte Johns Houlde, being in the towne of Rowston" and "a convenient chamber for her selfe and her diett in my nowe dwellinge house of Stackepoole Courte with my eldest sonne Henry Lorte and also diett and lodginge for a man servaunte and a maide servant to attend her and a couple of horses ready for her use as often as shee shall have occasion to ride, she payinge to my said sonne Henry Lorte the some of 20 poundes in recompense thereof yearely". If she did not care for this arrangement Abra was to have the best bed, two new trunks, half a dozen pairs of sheets, and œ20 in money so that she might set up house elsewhere. The bulk of the estate, apart from cash bequests to the testator's brothers Sampson and George, was left to the heir Henry Lort, the lands involved lying in the parishes of Monkton and Castlemartin as well as within the ancient barony of Stackpole. Henry Lort, who was born about 1591, married into a Puritan family, for his wife Judith was one of the Whites of Henllan - an alliance which must have had some bearing on the political alignments of the Lorts during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. He was actively involved in the running of his estate and, inevitably, filled various local government offices, but in the 1630s much of his time was taken up with legal entanglements which seem to have stemmed from poor personal relationships with a number of squirearchal neighbours. He was accused of wrecking, but there is some evidence to suggest that his troubles in this respect arose mainly from his efforts to secure a grant of all wrecks occurring along the coastline of his manors. Among his opponents were Sir lames Perrott, Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and, once they had been sufficiently stirred up by the latter, the lords of the Admiralty. On 15th January 1631 George Ellis of Trewent, who was no friend of the Lorts, wrote to Sir Thomas Canon stating that in the previous November a wreck had occurred at Bosherston in which all the people and cattle on board perished. He added that the wreck, which came ashore, was seized by Henry Lort, who claimed that as lord of the manor he was entitled to it. Local commissioners were thereupon appointed to investigate the circumstances of the wreck and to report to Sir Henry Marten, Judge of the Admiralty.
In 1634 Lort spent most of June in London on legal business and on the last day of the month he was called to give evidence against George Ellis of Trewent who was being arraigned in a church court, the Court of Arches, because of his refusal to pay church dues. Apart from giving evidence in this matter and about the lands held by Ellis, he had to field a number of awkward questions. Did the churchwardens of the parish meet at Stackpole Court in order to apportion the tax? Were the assessments fixed in accordance with Lort's prejudices? Did not various members of the Lort family hold lands upon which George Ellis was being asked to pay tax? Why did not Lort pay tax for the privilege of burying his family in the Virgin Chapel, which formed part of the chancel of Stackpole church? In reply to the latter question Lort replied that he kept the chancel in good repair at his own charge " for that the sayd chapped doth not belong to Stackpole church ". He went on to add that he had received permission to bury his family in the Lady Chapel from William Dolben, a former rector, " seven, eight, or ten years since" - in fact Dolben had left Stackpole some sixteen years previously.
A litigious and thrusting man, it is not surprising that Henry Lort should have been denounced when he himself infringed the law. About 1637 some local J.P.s complained that he had transported corn into other parts of the kingdom to make profit despite great local dearth, an offence for which he was deprived of his place on the commission of the peace. Lort, who pointed out that his ancestors were " lately " settled in the county, pleaded that they had improved their estates by good tillage, that in the previous year he had been custos rotulorum, and that the informers against him were is adversaries, some of them being currently engaged in a law suit against him. Possibly George Ellis was one of them. He went on to declare that Pembroke was a great corn-producing county, that the local people were accustomed to making bread from the flour of barley, oats and rye, and that he had not exported any of these cereals during the dearth. His agents had only sold wheat, which was little used by the common people of the district. Moreover, he had not exported corn out of the realm, for he had only sent one boatload to Bristol and another to Beaumaris.
In December 1639 he was in further trouble, for he was called before the Star Chamber and charged with causing depopulation through converting arable lands to pasture. He was fined the crippling sum of œ2,500 and thereupon begged a royal pardon, listing his public service as sheriff, J.P. and deputy lieutenant and describing himself, though aged only forty-nine, as " very old and infirm" .He was indeed ill, for he died little more than a year later. Of his daughters, Abra married Thomas Bowen of Trefloyne, a Catholic, and Elizabeth became the wife of George Owen of Trecwn. Henry left at least five sons - his eldest son Roger; Sampson, who became a prominent Roundhead and lived first at Rowston and later at East Moor; John, who married Abra Bowen of Trefcoyne and settled at Pricaston ( the Lort Philipps family was descended from him ); a younger son Griffith, who died without heirs; and William, who was living at Stackpole in 1651, but of whom little is known.
Roger Lort was born in 1608. He graduated at Wadham College, Oxford, entered the Inner Temple, and in 1632 married Hester Annesley, daughter of Lord Montmorris and a granddaughter of Sir John Philipps, first baronet of Picton. He inherited the Stackpole estate in 1641 and soon after the outbreak of the first Civil War in August 1642 went to Carmarthen, joined the Marquis of Hertford, and set about recruiting men for the Royalist cause. He was instrumental in setting up the Royalist Association of Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire, had a commission to raise a regiment for the King, and in October 1643 took œ2,000 raised by himself and others to the Earl of Carbery and the Royalist H.Q. in Oxford. He caused a number of local mansions to be fortified for the King, including Stackpole Court, but his ardour was quenched on the 30th January 1644 when the Parliamentarian commander Rowland Laugharne led a force of 300 foot and 50 horse out of Pembroke and took Stackpole Court after an eight- hour engagement. According to tradition Lort escaped capture by hiding in a cave. On the very same day Parliament passed the Declaration of Both Kingdoms, offering relief from condemnation as a delinquent to those Royalists who submitted to Parliament. Roger Lort thereupon travelled to London to make his submission, and by the following June was, together with his brother Sampson, a member of the Parliamentarian Association of Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire. On 26th July he was freed from delinquency upon payment of œ1,000 fine, and his estates were restored to him. From this point onwards he identified himself with the Parliamentarian cause, though some of his new allies distrusted him as " a subtle ambidexter". The indications are that he was concerned above all else with the preservation of his estate, and that there was some justification for the statement of an anonymous contemporary that he was " of any principle or religion to acquire wealth". Indeed, the claim was made after the end of the first Civil War that when the capable and ruthless Royalist commander Sir Charles Gerard had invaded Pembrokeshire in 1645, Roger Lort entered into correspondence with him and obtained from him a letter of protection. There was clearly bad blood between Lort on the one hand and the two veteran Parliamentarian leaders Roland Laugharne and John Poyer, and in the summer of 1647 Poyer seized Roger, Sampson and John Lort, and imprisoned them in Pembroke castle. They were released a month later, following intervention by the judges of the Pembrokeshire Great Sessions, and during the second Civil War opposed Laugharne and Poyer, who had now embraced the Royalist cause. During the Interregnum Roger Lort profited from the fact that his brother Sampson was one of the most active and influential Puritans in the county, but at the Restoration he affirmed his allegiance to Charles II and, despite the opprobrium heaped upon Sampson, was knighted and given a baronetcy in 1662, probably through the influence of his old Royalist commander the Earl of Carbery.
Roger Lort's first wife died in 1647. He later married Joan, daughter of Humphrey Windham of Dunraven Castle, Glamorgan, who survived him and took as her second husband Sir Edward Mansell of Muddlescombe, Carmarthenshire. According to tradition, she haunted the district after her death in 1692, driving headless in her carriage at night through Ludchurch and Templeton to Stackpole. It is said that the apparition was finally laid at the request of local people by Charles Pritchett, rector of Stackpole from 1780 to 1813.
Sir Roger died early in 1664 and was buried in St. Petrox. He had five children - John, Frances, Hester, Anne, and Dorothy - by Hester his first wife, and two, Roger and Joan, by Joan Windham. His son John was born in 1638, admitted to Lincoln's Inn in July 1660, and knighted less than two years later. In 1663 he married Susannah Holles, daughter of the second Earl of Clare, by whom he had two children, Elizabeth, born in 1665, and Gilbert, who was born about 1670. Sir John died in October 1673, and in his will made detailed arrangements for the education of his children, both of whom were minors. His son Gilbert was also short-lived, for he died unmarried at the age of twenty-eight, whereupon the Stackpole estate descended to his sister Elizabeth. She was already a widow. Some ten years previously she had met in London Sir Alexander Campbell of Cawdor, who belonged to a cadet line of the house of Argyll. They married and had four children, John, Gilbert, Susan, and another daughter whose name has not been established. Evidently his wife had been in straightened circumstances before their marriage, for in a letter written in 1744 their son John observed that " during the short time he lived (Sir Alexander) paid part of the family debt, with a moderate income and a growing family". The debt encumbering the estate increased during the course of the eighteenth century and stood at over œ123,000 in 1793. Sir Alexander died on 27th August 1697, just over a year before the death of his brother-in-law, Sir Gilbert Lort.
Although a supporter of the Hanoverian Succession he married in 1726 Mary, daughter and co-heiress of Lewis Pryse of Gogerddan in Cardiganshire, a Jacobite sympathiser. Their eldest son, Pryse, was born in the following year. John and Mary Campbell had two other sons, John Hooke Campbell of Bangeston, and Alexander who became a professional soldier, as well as three daughters, Anne, Elizabeth, who married Joseph Adams of Holyland, and Mary. In 1735 John pulled down part of Stackpole court and started building a new south wing and drawing room. His agent, John Wright, described in a letter how when the wainscotting was pulled down as part of the work large numbers of rats fled from the building. In the following year he noted in another letter how he had seen " the people unload a little ship ( at Barafundle) that was laden with slate to cover the house". William Pitt, later Earl of Chatham, visited Stackpole about this time and expressed his approval of the new works. John Campbell died in 1777 at the age of 82, being predeceased by Pryse, so the latter's son and heir John next inherited the Stackpole estate at the age of twenty two. Pryse, who had married Sarah, daughter of Sir Edmund Bacon, in 1752, had three other sons, Alexander, George, who became an admiral, and Charles, a Royal Navy captain, together with a daughter, Sarah, who married a lawyer named Thomas Wodehouse. John Campbell II of Stackpole ( 1755-1821) M.P. first for Nairn, and from 1780 -1796 for Cardigan Boroughs, was a supporter of Lord North and later of the younger Pitt's war policy. In 1789 he married Isabella Caroline, eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Carlisle, by whom he had two sons, John Frederick, and George, who became an admiral. It was probably through his support of Pitt that he was created Baron Cawdor of Castlemartin in 1796. A year later he won considerable fame through his handling of the local forces which compelled the French to surrender at Fishguard, an episode described in detail by Commander E. H. Stuart-Jones in his book The Last Invasion of Britain (Cardiff, 1950). John Campbell was a considerate landlord and a notable improver, two of his principal achievements being the drainage of Castlemartin Corse and the creation of Bosherston lakes. His generosity to the poor was proverbial; in 1812 he and his eldest son John Frederick gave œ800 to buy barley for distribution amongst the poor of South Pembrokeshire. He died at Bath in 1821 and was buried in the Abbey.
His heir, John Frederick, (1790 - 1860), who was married to Lady Elizabeth Thynne, daughter of the second Marquis of Bath, had since 1813 been Whig M.P. for Carmarthen Boroughs, and after succeeding his father he continued to play an active part in politics. In 1827 he was created Earl Cawdor and Viscount Emlyn. He supported Catholic emancipation, argued forcibly in favour of abolishing the Courts of Great Sessions, and backed the Reform Bill of 1832. Later he joined the Conservative Party and as a staunch supporter of the agricultural interest was strongly opposed to the Repeal of Corn Laws in 1846. He was a leading member of the Pembroke Agricultural Society and had wide cultural interests, being especially interested in antiquities. He died at Stackpole Court in 1860, and was succeeded by his eldest son John Frederick Vaughan (1817-98), who since 1841 had been serving as Conservative M.P. for Pembrokeshire. He married Sarah Mary Compton-Cavendish, a maid of honour to Queen Victoria, by whom he had five daughters and two sons, the younger of whom, Ronald was killed in the Zulu Wars in 1879. The second Earl maintained the family tradition of taking an enlightened interest in his estates, and this was continued in turn by his heir Frederick Campbell (1847- 1911), the third Earl Cawdor. Like his father, the third earl was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and became a Conservative M.P. He held a large number of public appointments, being amongst other things an Ecclesiastical Commissioner from 1880 onwards, Chairman of the GWR from 1895 to 1905 and Lord Lieutenant of Pembrokeshire from 1896. He became First Lord of the Admiralty and a Privy Councillor in 1905.
Stackpole Court was now in its heyday . In 1883 the second earl had been one of 28 noblemen who owned more than 100,000 acres of land in the United Kingdom, 17,735 acres of which were in Pembrokeshire, and Stackpole Court, though architecturally undistinguished, was one of the greatest country houses in the kingdom. In February 1902 the third Earl entertained Edward VII there in circumstances of great splendour. The house was superbly sited and appointed, its grounds and gardens were renowned, and an army servants, domestic and outdoor, catered for the whims of the owner's family and guests. However, the tide of fortune was about to turn. Increasingly subject to penal taxation, the Cawdors, like many of the other great land-owning families of Britain, found it necessary to adapt to changing circumstances and to adopt economic strategies which involved radical and often unpalatable changes in land management. These affected Stackpole profoundly, and resulted in the demolition of Stackpole Court itself in 1963 and the subsequent alienation of most of the Campbell lands in the district.
