Portrait Of Ralph Freeman Jr. Of Aspenden (1666-1742)

Portrait of Ralph Freeman Jr. of Aspenden (1666-1742) Oil on canvas 124 x 101cm (48¾ x 39¾ in.) Provenance: Private Estate Christie's, London, Tyttenhanger House, St. Albans, March 5, 1982, lot 18 Ralph Freeman Jr .was born at Aspenden Hall in 1666. He was one of the leaders of the Hanoverian Tories in Queen Anne's reign, Freeman nevertheless remains a rather colorless, and in some ways registrable, figure. His youth was spent in a hothouse of piety under the influence of his father and of his tutor, James Bonnell. Freeman's father had wanted his son to 'be a scholar if he be capable of it', but Ralph jnr. entered Parliament in December 1697 at a by-election for Hertfordshire, a seat he was to hold until the accession of George II. Tyttenhanger Park The Tyttenhanger estate was originally owned by the Abbey of St Albans until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It was then granted by the Crown in 1547 to Sir Thomas Pope, founder of Trinity College, Oxford. Pope died without issue in 1559 and following the death of his wife, Elizabeth it entered into the ownership of his nephew Sir Thomas Pope Blount (1552-1638), in 1598. Blount's nephew, Sir Henry Blount (1602-1682), High Sheriff in 1661, demolished Pope's pre-existing manor house and built the present mansion on the site in 1654/5. The house was altered and extended throughout the 18th century. Sir Henry's son Thomas Pope Blount (1649-1697) was created the first of the Blount baronets in 1680. On the death of the third Baronet in 1757 the estate passed to his niece and heiress Catherine Blount, daughter inlaw of the sitter. The family retained ownership of the house until 1973 and of the portrait until it was sold at Christie's in 1982