Foxlease 05
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Then in 1791 all was changed. Sir Phillip did not end his days in the house which he had built. Perhaps disturbances on the continent,
Tudor window in the Quiet Room
rumours of revolution and invasion, induced him to part with his possessions. Sir Phillip sold Foxlease to a Mr. Isaac Pickering, who spent thirty-six years there but left no trace behind. Nothing is known of him beyond the date when he took possession and the date (1827) when he in his turn sold the house to Mr. Wentworth Bayley.
Although nothing can be told about either of these owners, except that the first spent half a lifetime in the place and the second barely a year, their successor brought to Foxlease a name destined to be linked with the house's story. He was Mr. Henry Weyland-Powell, an officer in the Grenadier Guards and the great-uncle (though he did not know it) of Lord Baden-Powell. In 1828 he bought the house from the fleeting Mr. Bayley, including the adjoining estate of Wilverley Park. It was in his time, probably before 1840, that the large bay windows were added to the big room on the ground floor and probably in this same period that the relief of Iphigenia was painted white, as it has since remained.
The description of the grounds proves that the original approach was from further up the Lyndhurst road and that the drive crossed the pond by "an elegant iron bridge of a single arch". By this pond and also on the hill behind the house, there grew some of the . . .
