Famed for its boarding school but its history goes deeper

For the last century, it has been a world famous boarding school, but Stowe House in Buckingham was once home to a family whose arrogance got the better of them. They built and built – and then the world fell down around them.

Since 1997, the Stowe House Preservation Trust has been on a mission to preserve Stowe – with it roughly 400 rooms – for the nation. In June last year, the phased restoration plan was completed when the state dining room – renewed with replicas of the original Flemish tapestries, 3D-scanned and reproduced chimneypieces, and a fully conserved painted mosaic ceiling – reopened.

Now, all of the main state rooms planned for restoration have been restored at a cost of £27m.

Walking around the building, it is easy to forget that Stowe is a school – the quality of the work far exceeds the decorative expectations of even the smartest institutions. That this has been done to fit the needs of a working school makes it all the more impressive.

Scores of experts have been consulted; the historical paint consultant Patrick Baty has worked widely across the project, taking paint samples for analysis, while in the state drawing room, an extraordinary feat has been pulled off thanks to textile research by Annabel Westman. Where there was once orange silk damask on the walls, wallpaper replicating the same soft, bouncy effect has been created by Zardi and Zardi. It is a total triumph.

With 400 rooms, it wasn’t possible to restore every single one, admits Simon Wales, chief executive of Stowe House Preservation Trust. Some, like the garter room, formerly the state bedchamber, at the western end of the great 11-room enfilade, is in the “too difficult” pile, since it is used as the school servery. Plenty of other projects await; work to uncover a scheme of previously unknown 1740s paintings by William Kent on the eastern staircase and landing, now part of a boarding house, is one such.

Since Stowe is a school as well as a visitor attraction, it takes some managing. The estate has three partners: the school, the preservation trust, and the National Trust, to whom the school gave the gardens in 1989.

“We have a really good ongoing relationship with the National Trust and the school,” says Wales, who joined Stowe in September 2022. “It’s complicated for the parents, and it can be complicated for the visitors to understand what it is you can do here when you get here, but I rather like complexity, it makes life interesting.”

The house has long been open to the public – guidebooks for Stowe exist from 1759 – but the Temple family who built Stowe could scarcely have imagined that the house would ever be home to quite so many people.

They first came to Stowe in 1571, when Peter Temple took a lease on the estate. In 1588, his son John bought it, and a century later it was inherited by 19-year-old Sir Richard Temple, who built an elegant pile, with north and south-facing facades, the beginnings of the house that stands today.

Over the years, members of the family have successively built on, outside, and within Stowe, displaying their increasingly elaborate tastes, and displays of wealth. After Sir Richard Temple, made Baron and then Viscount Cobham, inherited Stowe in 1697, he enlisted John Vanbrugh to restructure the house.

By 1719, the new North Hall with a painted ceiling by William Kent had been built, featuring Mars handing a sword to Cobham, political mentor to a young William Pitt. Cobham brought his influence to the park, too, taking on a young Lancelot “Capability” Brown as head gardener in 1741; Brown went on to become the most influential landscape architect of his generation.

When Cobham died, the estate passed to his nephew Richard Grenville, later 2nd Earl Temple and brother of prime minister George Grenville, who transformed Stowe’s interiors, turning the state bedroom into an imitation of a temple from Palmyra, and commissioning the 19×14-metre marble saloon, modelled on the Pantheon.

When Temple died childless in 1779, Stowe passed to his nephew George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, later 1st Marquess of Buckingham, who with John Soane in 1803, inspired by Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, built the Egyptian Hall, complete with replica sarcophagus. It was here, while at school in the 1960s, that the future Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson made some of his first business phone calls, using the school payphone.

The Buckingham era marks the last years of Stowe as a successful family home, and it is to this period that the house has been restored, explains Anna McEvoy, the house’s custodian. “About 1800 is Stowe’s heyday, and then it starts going downhill.”

The work that Cobham, Temple, and Buckingham commissioned had been expensive, and inheriting Stowe in 1813, Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, made Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1822, started to look for ways to raise money.

“He asked John Soane whether he could sell him some documents,” explains McEvoy, “it was almost like a pawn shop.”

When the first duke died in 1839, his son, also Richard, succeeded him. Five years later, the second duke had debts totalling £854,282, yet for the visit made by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in January 1845, he lavished a further £75,000 on Stowe.

After their visit, his total debt had risen to over £1m. It didn’t impress the queen, who found Stowe extravagant; she recognised the Persian carpet in her apartment, thought to be the largest ever imported, which had cost Buckingham £200 (£20,000 today). As she said to Prince Albert: “I know this carpet… it was offered to me, but I did not like to spend so much money on one carpet.”

In August 1848, Stowe’s contents were sold at auction, raising just £75,000, and the duke died in a railway hotel in 1861. In modern times, the tale of Stowe and the Temple-Grenvilles has been dominated by his fall, but this is all wrong, says McEvoy.

“They were top political figures who changed British foreign policy, yet nobody has heard of them because of the second duke. They would be horrified that everyone just remembers him, he was an idiot – they would be quite ashamed.”

After the third duke died without a son in 1889, the dukedom became extinct. His eldest daughter Mary succeeded to the Lordship of Kinloss, but after her heir Captain Hon. Richard Morgan-Grenville, Master of Kinloss was killed in action in December 1914, Stowe was thrown into limbo.

In 1921, Richard’s brother the Reverend Luis Morgan-Grenvile sold the house and its remaining contents. The following year, the house was sold again to what became the governors of Stowe School, and on May 11 1923 the founding headmaster JF Roxburgh welcomed the first 199 boys.

For McEvoy, Stowe’s undeniable “it factor” is in the life it contains. “It’s a living, breathing building, not a mausoleum. Every single space is used. It can be frustrating, but it is loved by a thousand people, and that’s before any visitors have walked through the door.”