On May 20 the Prince of Wales visited Mullaghmore , Co. Sligo where his great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was murdered by the IRA on 27 August 1979. In a letter(attached) published, in slightly abbreviated form, in The Daily Telegraph on May 22, Alistair Lexden explained how Mountbatten came into possession of Classiebawn Castle, his holiday home at Mullaghmore.
SIR—This week the Prince of Wales visited Classiebawn Castle where his great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, spent his last days (“Mournful memories amid the beauty of Sligo”, May 20). It was the great Lord Palmerston, the only Liberal Prime Minister to win three consecutive elections, who instigated the building of Classybawn Castle (as it was originally spelt) on his 12,500-acre Sligo estate. Oddly, he allowed a controversial Gothic design, having provoked a furious row in London by tearing up plans for a new Gothic Foreign Office by the country’s leading architect in 1859.
He tried hard to help some of the tenants on his overcrowded estates find a better life in Canada, but the plans went disastrously wrong. His agents in Ireland packed them into “coffin ships” and Palmerston was denounced in the Canadian Legislative Council for acting “without regard to humanity or even to common decency” when 107 died on the voyage and 174 of the female survivors came ashore almost naked.
Palmerston’s illegitimate daughter married the great social reformer, Lord Shaftesbury. Their second son, Evelyn Ashley, inherited Classiebawn which in 1939 passed to Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, on the death of her immensely rich father Wilfred Ashley, Lord Mount Temple. Palmerston was her great-great grandfather.
Lord Lexden
London SW1