How the Empire's richest financier intervened in a bitter will dispute that revolved around a lost Durham country house

This was a bitter family dispute over a will that was made by a man on his deathbed in a village on the outskirts of Darlington. The case was so simple that it would take nearly a decade to resolve; so expensive that it would drive a widow into great debt; so intriguing that it had a pantomime villain named Eugene du Boison, and so fascinating that it would end up being settled for love by the king’s financier who was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

The Northern Echo was reporting exactly 150 years ago that the case revolved around the will of Robert Thompson Maxwell, a master mariner from Saltburn who died in his country home of Croft House, Hurworth Place, on June 28, 1871, just seven days after writing his contentious will.

His cause of death was given as gastric fever, but the Echo said that his condition had worsened after he inhaled “some poisonous matter while superintending some alterations at Croft House”.

Croft House, Tees View, Hurworth Place, which was demolished in 2017 and replaced by five executive homes

The paper said Robert had gone to sea at an early age, and he had had three children with his first wife before he had married her. She had died in 1849, and two years later, aged 52, Robert had married 17-year-old Mary Annie. She told the court the marriage had initially been “clandestine” but despite the age gap their relationship was very “affectionate” and produced three more children.

As he neared death’s door, with a doctor and solicitor in attendance at his bedside and fortified by a glass of milk, weak Robert altered his will to write out his three earlier children and leave everything to Annie and her offspring.

The three older Maxwells, who had previously had good expectations of their father’s will, alleged he was of “unsound mind” and acted under the “undue influence” of Annie in his dying days, and asked the court to annul the will.

The Echo valued Robert’s estate at £40,000 – which is £3.3m in today’s values according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator – and said it included Croft House and his summer retreat of The Towers in Saltburn – an artful villa built in a prominent location alongside the Zetland Hotel. He built both properties out of Pease buff bricks in the early 1860s when, as a master mariner, his boat must have come in.

The Towers, Saltburn, which Robert Thompson Maxwell built in the 1860s out of Pease buff bricks

The dispute over the will took an unexpected twist when only five months after Robert’s death, Annie remarried a Frenchman called Eugene du Boison, who was described as a “traveller in Roman Catholic vestments”. In the Echo report, she is referred to as Madame du Boison and she told the court that she was living with her new husband in Regents Park in London.

After going through all this juicy detail, the paper finishes its report by saying the case was adjourned. In fact, it seems to disappear from the news pages for a couple of years, and when it resurfaced it had taken another remarkable twist.

An Edwardian postcard view from Croft Bridge looking towards the Durham side of the River Tees with Croft House on the far left

Because Annie had realised that Eugene was not all that he seemed to be. In fact, in 1870 when he had been called Eugene Marchand, he had buried two children – believed to be his own – in St Pancras in London.

She concluded that he was, in fact, a gold-digger who had hurriedly married her not for love but for her late husband’s attractive fortune. In 1874, the High Court dissolved their marriage and Eugene was arrested for a seventh time for making false declarations in a bid to gain an English naturalisation certificate.

But, despite being in prison, Eugene launched a counterclaim in the will case in a bid to wrench something of value out of the estate for himself, and so the case of Maxwell v Maxwell v du Boison turned into a Dickensian epic along the lines of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

As the decade neared its end, the costs had eaten away so much of Robert’s estate that Annie had to re-mortgage Croft House for £4,000 to pay her London barrister, and her eldest son, Arthur, fled to the Channel Islands to avoid liability.

Annie died in 1879, leaving her children only debts.

But help was at hand from an unexpected quarter.

The Zetland Hunt outside the Croft Spa Hotel in January 1909, just over the river from the Maxwells' disputed Croft House

In those days, south Durham and North Yorkshire were regarded as one of the best hunting territories in the country, and many of the big houses were rented for the season by London hotshots. For example, for one season in the 1870s, Walworth Castle, near Darlington, is believed to have been rented by financier Ernest Cassel (below).

Cassel had arrived in Liverpool aged 18 in 1869 from Cologne with only a bundle of clothes and a violin.

Using Jewish connections, he very quickly made an international mark, bankrolling railways in America and iron ore mines in Sweden.

Hunting was his favourite pastime, although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that this was despite his “certain dislike of horses and his incompetence at riding them”.

It is believed that while at Walworth, out with either the Zetland or the South Durham, he met Annie’s daughter, Annette.

They married on September 3, 1878, which was the day Cassel became a naturalised British subject.

After a year of marriage, his debt-laden mother-in-law died, and he was so wealthy that he was able to finesse away all of the Maxwells’ money difficulties.

Tees View Villa from the A167 on February 28, 1941. Piles of snow line the road and the floodwaters from the rivers Skerne and Tees appear to have met outside the villa. According to stamps on the rear of this picture, wartime censors ordered that this picture should not be published

Arthur returned from the Channel Islands to take up residence in Croft House and, next to it, Tees View Villa – the first house in the village on the A167 as you arrive from Darlington – was built apparently for another member of the family.

It is also said locally that Cassel himself transformed Croft House’s groom’s quarters by embellishing them with castellations and large stone unicorns and lions. Now called Tees View Cottages, they remain spectacular oddities.

Tees View Villa today and, below, the curious Tees View Cottages

On December 18, 1880, Annette gave birth to a daughter, Maud, but then she contracted tuberculosis. As she lay on her deathbed, Cassel agreed to convert to Catholicism so they might meet again in the next life, and the priest summoned to give her the last rites instead baptised him in her bedroom.

After Annette died, Cassel devoted himself to building up his international business – he financed the Nile dam and the Central Line of the London Underground – and doted on his daughter. He became very friendly with Edward VII, and was the last visitor in the royal bedchamber on the night the king died in 1910. The next morning, it is said an envelope stuffed with a fortune in banknotes was mysteriously found on his pillow.

For all his great wealth, Cassel’s life is tinged with great sadness. Having lost Annette to TB after only two years of marriage, his beloved daughter, Maud, succumbed to the same disease at the age of 33, soon after giving birth to Edwina, Cassel’s grand-daughter whom was named after the king.

He said: “I have had everything in the world that I did not want, and nothing that I did.”

The view from Croft Bridge looking towards the Durham side of the River Tees on March 7, 1963. Croft House is on the far left with the castellated Tees View Cottages in the centre. These properties are said to have been the groom's quarters for Croft House

Because of Cassel’s German background, he had a hard time during the First World War and was never fully accepted in British society. He died in 1921 leaving a fortune of £7.3m (worth nearly £300m today) having given away £2m to charities – it is one of the largest fortunes ever amassed in a single lifetime in Britain.

A year later after his death, Edwina, who was a great society beauty, married Queen Victoria’s great grandson, Lord Louis Mountbatten.

This ended the family’s connection with Croft House, which had been built by Edwina’s great-great-grandfather and had been saved by Sir Ernest. It was auctioned in 1923, and since its demolition in 2017, only its gatepost remains to tell of its curious connection to one of the wealthiest self-made men in the British Empire.