The Hon. Topham Beauclerk (1739-80) was the only son of the great fortune hunter Lord Sydney Beauclerk MP (1703-44), and grandson of the 1st Duke of St Albans. He is best known as the great-grandson of Charles II and Nell Gwynne, and the friend of Dr Samuel Johnson, whom he met at Trinity College, Oxford, and of James Boswell. He was an amateur chemist, and a bibliophile, with a collection of over 30,000 books. These books were mortgaged to the Duke of Marlborough, and were sold in 1781, following Beauclerk's death, for £5,011. In 1768 Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer (1734-1808), an artist, and the eldest daughter of the 4rd Duke of Marlborough. The marriage took place two days after her divorce was finalised from Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke. Her first marriage had been unhappy on account of the Viscount’s infidelity, but the divorce was prompted by her affair with Beauclerk.

The Grove at Muswell Hill was one of Beauclerk’s various residences during the last decade of his life. Located in the London borough of Haringay, it was originally the location of a twelfth-century well, said to hold curative properties, and around which was built a dairy belonging to the Augustinian Priory, St Mary's of Clerkenwell. The land came into private ownership following the Dissolution. The Grove itself, set within eight acres, was an eighteenth-century, three-storey, nine-bay pedimented villa, built to the designs of an unknown architect. In 1770 Beauclerk commissioned Robert Adam to make designs for a curtain wall around his observatory there, and for the interior decoration of his wife's dressing room. None of Adam's designs for The Grove were executed, but Walpole reports that a library which Adam had designed was installed in 1779 at Beauclerk's house on Great Russell Street (demolished in 1788). Beauclerk also acquired a house on the Adelphi in 1773.

Following Beauclerk's death in 1780, The Grove was sold to a Mr Poker. It passed through various hands, and was finally demolished in the 1870s, when the Alexandra Palace railway line was constructed. The eight acres surrounding the house were incorporated into Alexandra Park.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, p. 30, Index pp. 23, 62; F.M. Smith, 'An eighteenth-century gentleman: the Honorable (sic) Topham Beauclerk', The Sewanee Review, Volume 34, (April 1926), pp. 205-219; B. Weinreb, and C. Hibbert, (eds), The London encyclopaedia, 1983, p. 547; J. Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy: 1701-1800, 1997, p. 65; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume I, pp. 423-24, Volume II, pp. 179, 218

Frances Sands, 2013