Melbourne Hall second Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, was separated from his wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, in 1825, when her liaison with Lord Byron had become notorious. The house passed into the hands of the Cowper family when Emily Lamb, sister of the childless third and last Viscount Melbourne, married the 5th Earl Cowper. (She later married another Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.) It remained in the Cowper family until Lady Amabel Cowper married Admiral of the Fleet Lord Walter Kerr who made Melbourne the family home in 1906. The current owner Lord Ralph Kerr also owns Ferniehirst Castle in Scotland. He
William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher that her father was one Louis Mayer. They had two sons, Reginald, and Eugène, and a daughter Violet, wife of William Humble Dudley Ward and mother of William Dudley Ward. Lord Esher died in London in May 1899, aged eighty-one, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Reginald. William Brett, 1st Viscount Esher William Baliol Brett, 1st Viscount Esher, PC (13 August 1815 – 24 May 1899), known as Sir William Brett between 1868 and 1883, was a British lawyer, judge, and Conservative politician. He was briefly Solicitor-General under Benjamin Disraeli and then served as a justice of the Court