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Levens Hall's garden exists because two men lost their jobs in the same political earthquake, and both ended up at the same house in the Kent valley making the best of it.
Colonel James Grahme was Keeper of the Privy Purse to King James II — a senior, trusted position at the heart of the royal household. When the Glorious Revolution of 1688 removed James from the throne, Grahme lost that position along with everyone else closely associated with the old regime. That same year, he bought Levens Hall from the Bellingham family, who had held it since 1562. According to local tradition the Bellinghams lost the house through gaming — a story impossible to verify with certainty this many centuries on, but one that has stuck to the property regardless.
Grahme brought his former royal gardener, Guillaume Beaumont, with him from London, and the two men spent the following decades transforming Levens from a Bellingham-era house into the garden visitors see today. Grahme didn't fully commit to Levens as his main home immediately — he made it his principal residence only in 1699, over a decade after buying it, once the political dust of the Revolution had properly settled.
The estate passed out of the Grahme name by marriage to the Howard family, and from the Howards to the Bagot family, who have owned and cared for Levens since 1885 — and whose ancestry traces directly back to Colonel Grahme himself. It's a rare thing for a garden begun by a disgraced courtier's second act to still be maintained, in essence, by his own descendants over three centuries later.
What makes Levens' origin story distinctive isn't just the scale of the topiary — it's that the whole garden was built by two men whose careers had just been abruptly ended by the same event, working together at a private house because the grander royal stage was no longer available to either of them. Whatever Grahme and Beaumont lost at court in 1688, Levens is what they built instead.
Colonel Grahme’s Levens Hall can be included in a bespoke Jacobite and Civil War heritage day.