Qualla: Stowe House

Stowe House: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, CC0. The 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos was, by 1845, the Greatest Debtor in the world. He had run up £1,464,959 in debts - more than £100 million in 2003 terms - and his creditors were closing in. In August 1847 he fled abroad. The following year the contents of Stowe House went under the hammer at Christie's: paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens, family silver, more than 21,000 bottles of wine in the cellars below the Marble Saloon, eleven works believed at the time to be by Rembrandt, ancient Roman statues, a 75-foot dining table, the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare. The sale ran from 15 August to 7 October 1848. It raised £75,400. The garden staff dropped from 40 men to four. The greatest neoclassical mansion in England survived the catastrophe and is now a school.

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Image: Daderot | CC0

Stowe House: How a Sheep Farm Became a Palace

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Attributed to George Willison, Public domain. The Temple family started in sheep. Peter Temple rented pasture at Burton Dassett in Warwickshire in 1546. His son John bought the Stowe estate from the Gifford family in 1589, having previously leased it. The Temples kept rising. Sir Thomas Temple bought a knighthood from James ...

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Image: Attributed to George Willison | Public domain

Stowe House: The Garden That Invented a Style

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Attributed to William Hogarth, Public domain. Stowe's gardens are sometimes described as the most influential landscape garden ever made. The historian Christopher Hussey called them 'the outstanding monument to English landscape gardening.' Lord Cobham, who inherited the estate in 1697 and lived until 1749, was a member of ...

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Image: Attributed to William Hogarth | Public domain

Stowe House: Five Prime Ministers and a Garter Bed

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Sonard, Public domain. The Temple-Grenville family produced an extraordinary string of statesmen. Lord Cobham's nephew George Grenville became Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1760s. Cobham's sister Hester married William Pitt the Elder, who also became Prime Minister. Their son William Pitt the ...

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Image: P. Sonard | Public domain

Stowe House: The Marble Saloon

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. The single most spectacular room at Stowe is the Marble Saloon, immediately behind the south portico. It was probably designed by the Italian Vincenzo Valdre, built between 1775 and 1777, with the decoration completed by 1788 at a cost of £12,000. The plan is elliptical, modeled ...

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Image: Daderot | Public domain

Stowe House: Stowe School and the Long Restoration

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0. After the 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos died without male heirs in 1889, the family tried to sell Stowe for £200,000. No one wanted it. The house was rented out until 1894, then stood empty until 1901 when the Duke's daughter Lady Mary Morgan-Grenville moved back in as a wid...

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Image: pam fray | CC BY-SA 2.0