Richard & Anne Cust Memorial

Memorial in St. George’s Church, Stamford, Lincs, to Sir Richard Cust and his wife Lady Anne Cust

Janet Roworth, Belton Research Group

The memorial provides a weath of detail on the Cust family. Janet's transcription of the memorial text is below. It is followed by notes on the life of Sir Richard and Lady Anne Cust taken from Records of the Cust Family. This link offers more information on the church.

Notes on the life of Sir Richard and Lady Anne Cust taken from Records of the Cust Family, Series II, The Brownlows of Belton, 1550-1779, compiled by Lady Elizabeth Cust and published in 1909

Richard Cust was baptised at St George’s Church on 30 October 1680.  He was the only son of Sir Pury Cust by his first wife Ursula Woodcock.  Ursula died when Richard was three years old, and his father later married for a second time.

Richard went to school at Eton when he was 14, and then on to Cambridge, and finally to London to study law.

However, Sir Pury Cust died in 1699 ‘hopelessly in debt’.  Although aged just 18, Richard ‘declared his intention of taking all his father’s debts on himself, a resolution which he afterwards scrupulously carried out’.

Described as ‘a young man of most amiable and charming disposition’, Richard seems to have been well-liked within his family and circle of friends and acquaintances.

When nearly 20 his grandfather, old Sir Richard Cust, died and Richard succeeded to the baronetcy and the family estate.  Through the sale of some property Richard was able to maintain the legacies paid to his stepmother and grandmother until their respective deaths, and by the age of 35 he was eventually free from debt and ‘able to turn his thoughts to matrimony’.

On 30 September 1717 Sir Richard Cust married Anne Brownlow, the daughter of Sir William Brownlow and sister to Sir John Brownlow, Viscount Tyrconnel.   ‘The marriage proved a very happy one, the only cloud which ever disturbed their happiness being Sir Richard’s bad health’.  The couple lived first in London where their sons John and William were born; then they took a house in Leasingham, Lincs, where, between 1722 and 1732, their eight other children were born – Francis, Peregrine, Elizabeth, Jane, Anne, Richard, Dorothy and Lucy.  All, except Anne who died aged three, survived to adulthood and are named on the memorial in St. George’s Church.

In 1734 Sir Richard died at Leasingham, just days after he had arranged the purchase of a house in Grantham which was to be a home for his family.  Lady Anne, now a widow, with nine children aged between 16 and two years old, moved to Grantham House.  Sir Richard had appointed Lady Anne as sole executor of his estate and she thereafter ‘devoted herself to the care and education’ of her children, ‘assisted by the advice and kindly interest in their nephews and nieces’ of her brother-in-law Savile Cust and her brother Viscount Tyrconnel.  All five Cust boys attended the grammar school at Grantham; John, Francis and Richard then going on to Eton and Cambridge, while William entered the Royal Navy and Peregrine began an apprenticeship in London.

Lady Anne had two Brownlow brothers so there was no expectation that she would become the heiress of Belton.  However, her brother William died in 1726, and when Viscount Tyrconnel died without issue in 1754, Lady Anne inherited Belton House and Estate.  This passed to her eldest son Sir John Cust who became Speaker of the House of Commons from 1761 to 1770, and then to John’s son Sir Brownlow Cust who was created Baron Brownlow in 1776 and commissioned the above memorial in 1797.  Belton House remained in the possession of the Cust family until 1984 when, through gift and purchase, the National Trust acquired the house, gardens and parkland.

Janet Roworth, Belton Research Group 2024.