Lady Caroline Hobart, Lady Suffield (1767 - 1850)
Little is known about the long tenure of Lady Caroline Suffield and her husband, who became Lord Suffield in 1810, as despite inheriting Blickling in 1793, it wasn't until the late 1820s that she made her mark on the house, garden and park.
During the Suffield's tenure, Blickling twice escaped destruction by fire in the early nineteenth century. The first was in 1808, where people came from Aylsham to fight the blaze and the town was afterwards thanked with significant gratuities. The second broke out a year before her death, in April 1849 and it was described how the staff exposed themselves to fire and smoke, to the point of near suffocation, until the fire was extinguished.
With regards to her impact on the design of the estate, Lady Caroline Suffield approached landscape designer Humprey Repton for informal advice, as they had previously worked together at Gunton Hall. As a result, his son John Adey Repton, worked on Blickling's flower beds and garden structures. Humprey Repton himself had painted ‘Lady’s Cottage in the Great Wood’ on the estate in 1780 and this is one of his earliest known watercolours.
Notably, Lady Suffield also commissioned fashionable London architect, Joseph Bonomi, to design Blickling's iconic Mausoleum as a memorial to her father after his death.