Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, England, that has been owned for more than 250 years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands on extensive grounds which include a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.
Since 1754 the estate has been the seat of the Earls of Shelburne, created Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784. The ninth and present Marquess is Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice. Notable guests have included Founding Father Benjamin Franklin and Mirabeau, an early leader of the French Revolution, among others. [1] [2]
The first house at Bowood was built circa 1725 on the site of a hunting lodge, by the former tenant Sir Orlando Bridgeman, 2nd Baronet, who had purchased the property from the Crown. His grandfather Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, had been granted the lease by Charles II. [3] Bridgeman got into financial strife, and in 1739 under a Chancery decree, the house and park were acquired by his principal creditor, Richard Long. In 1754 Long sold it to the first Earl of Shelburne, who engaged the architect Henry Keene to extend the house. [4]
William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, who served as Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783, was created Marquess of Lansdowne to negotiate peace with America after the War of Independence. He furnished Bowood and his London home, Lansdowne House, with superb collections of paintings and classical sculpture, and commissioned Robert Adam to decorate the grander rooms in Bowood and to add a magnificent orangery, as well as a small menagerie for wild animals where a leopard and an orangutan were kept in the 18th century. Adam also built a fine mausoleum in the park for the first earl. [5] Adam commissioned Benjamin Carter to sculpt chimney-pieces for the house. [6]
In the 1770s the two parts of the house at Bowood (the "Big House" and the "Little House") were joined by the construction of an enormous drawing room.
In World War I, the 5th Marchioness set up an auxiliary Red Cross hospital in the orangery. [7] During World War II, the Big House was first occupied by a school, then by the Royal Air Force. Afterwards it was left empty, and by 1955, it was so dilapidated that the 8th Marquess demolished it, employing architect F. Sortain Samuels to convert the Little House into a more comfortable home. Many country houses were knocked down at this period. Before it was demolished, the Adam dining room was auctioned and bought by the Lloyd's of London insurance market, which dismantled it and re-installed it as the Committee Room in its 1958 building. The room was subsequently moved in 1986 to the 11th floor of its current building, also on Lime Street in the City of London. A portico from the house was re-erected at Roath Court, Cardiff. [8]
The mausoleum was designated as Grade I listed in 1960, [5] and the remaining parts of the main house were given the same status in 1972. [9]
The remaining house is still large, and the front wing is open to the public with rooms, paintings and sculpture on display. One of the rooms was the laboratory of Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen there on 1 August 1774. In the year 2000, Bowood House was designated an ACS National Historic Chemical Landmark in recognition of the importance of Priestley's discovery. [10]
The lake was formed at the sacrifice of a village called Manning's Hill, which to this day remains submerged. In 2007, divers found the remains of two cottages and stone walls under the water. [11]
On the grounds are an adventure playground for children aged 12 and under, a large waterfall, and many gardens incorporating 2 miles (3.2 km) of rhododendron walks in May and June, and carpets of daffodils, narcissi and bluebells in spring.
Bowood was laid out over 2,000 acres (8 km2) in the 1760s. It replaced an earlier, more formal garden of avenues and wildernesses. Brown's design encompasses a sinuous lake (almost 1 km long), with lawns sloping gently down from the house, and drifts of mature trees. Submerged in the lake are foundations of cottages forming the Mannings Hill hamlet, rediscovered by divers in 2007 in shallow but heavily sedimented water. [12]
Brown planted an arboretum of rare trees in the Pleasure Grounds behind the walled garden, and these were added to in the mid-19th century when a pinetum was begun. It was at about this time that the Doric Temple folly, originally situated by Brown in the Pleasure Grounds, was moved to its present position beside the lake. [13]
In 1766, Lady Shelburne visited the landscape garden created by Charles Hamilton on his Surrey estate, Painshill Park. Hamilton was then asked to improve on Capability Brown's design. Working with Josiah Lane, the artisan stonemason who had built a cascade and grotto at Painshill Park, in the 1780s Hamilton added a cascade, grottoes and a hermit's cave to the lakeside. [14]
The Italianate terrace gardens on the south front of the house were commissioned by the 3rd Marquess. The Upper Terrace, by Sir Robert Smirke, was completed in 1818, and the Lower, by George Kennedy, was added in 1851. [15] Originally planted with hundreds of thousands of annuals in intricate designs, the parterres are now more simply planted.
In 1987 the formal garden, pleasure ground, park and woodland were listed as Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of special historic interest in England. [16] A golf course was laid out towards the west of the park in the late 1990s [16] and a hotel was opened nearby on the Home Farm site in 2009. [17]
Bowood House is the stately home of the Lansdowne family and has been the residence of:
Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne,, was a British statesman who served successively as Governor General of Canada, Viceroy of India, Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
William Petty Fitzmaurice, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, was an Anglo-Irish Whig statesman who was the first home secretary in 1782 and then prime minister in 1782–83 during the final months of the American War of Independence. He succeeded in securing peace with America and this feat remains his most notable legacy.
Lansdowne House now 9 Fitzmaurice Place is the remaining part of an aristocratic English town house building to the south of Berkeley Square in central London, England. The initial name was for two decades Shelburne House, then its title matched its owning family's elevation to a higher peerage in 1784. In the mid to late 19th century, it was frequently let, as a whole, to families of very high wealth or income, such as Lord Rosebery and Hannah de Rothschild of Mentmore Towers from 1878 to 1890. Some of its 18th-century interiors, among the best in London, were taken elsewhere. It was at different times leased by three 19th century British prime ministers, and William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor of Cliveden House, widely believed to be the richest man in America at the time of his tenancy (1891–1893) and also by Harry Gordon Selfridge in the 1920s. Landsdowne's heirs sold the property in 1929, two years after the death of the 5th Marquess, a prominent government frontbencher.
Marquess of Lansdowne is a title in the Peerage of Great Britain created in 1784, and held by the head of the Petty-Fitzmaurice family. The first Marquess served as Prime Minister of Great Britain.
Earl of Shelburne is a title that has been created two times while the title of Baron Shelburne has been created three times. The Shelburne title was created for the first time in the Peerage of Ireland in 1688 when Elizabeth, Lady Petty, was made Baroness Shelburne. She was the wife of the noted economist Sir William Petty. The title was for life only and became extinct on her death in circa 1708. It derives from Shelburne , a region of County Wexford, Ireland. On the same day that Lady Shelburne was elevated to the peerage, her eldest son by Sir William Petty, Charles Petty, was also raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Shelburne. He died young in 1696, when the title became extinct. The barony was created for a third time in the Peerage of Ireland in 1699 in favour of the Hon. Henry Petty, younger son of Sir William Petty and Lady Shelburne. In 1719 he was further honoured when he was made Viscount Dunkerron and Earl of Shelburne, also in the Peerage of Ireland. On his death in 1751 these titles also became extinct.
Lansdowne or Lansdown may refer to:
This is a list of people who have served as Lord Lieutenant of the English county of Wiltshire. From 1750, all Lord Lieutenants have also been Custos Rotulorum of Wiltshire.
Charles Maurice Petty-Fitzmaurice, 9th Marquess of Lansdowne,, styled Earl of Shelburne between 1944 and 1999, is a British peer, landowner and army officer.
Henry Thomas Petty-Fitzmaurice, 4th Marquess of Lansdowne, styled Lord Henry Petty-FitzMaurice until 1836 and Earl of Shelburne between 1836 and 1863, was a British politician.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin, as well as from the classic Chinese gardens of the East, which had recently been described by European travellers and were realized in the Anglo-Chinese garden.
Maud Evelyn Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marchioness of Lansdowne,, was a British aristocrat and courtier. She was the wife of Henry Charles Keith Petty-FitzMaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, Governor General of Canada from 1883 to 1888. She was then Vicereine of India from 1888 to 1894 while her husband was Viceroy.
Painshill, near Cobham, Surrey, England, is one of the finest remaining examples of an 18th-century English landscape park. It was designed and created between 1738 and 1773 by Charles Hamilton. The original house built in the park by Hamilton has since been demolished.
Lord Charles George Francis Fitzmaurice MVO was an English soldier and courtier. For the last few months of his life he was known as Lord Charles Mercer Nairne.
Edmond George Petty-Fitzmaurice, 1st Baron Fitzmaurice,, styled Lord Edmond FitzMaurice from 1863 to 1906, was a British Liberal politician. He served as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1883 to 1885 and again from 1905 to 1908, when he entered the cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under H. H. Asquith. However, illness forced him to resign the following year.
Petty-Fitzmaurice is a double-barrelled surname of Irish origin.
William Thomas Petty-FitzMaurice, Earl of Kerry, styled Earl of Wycombe between 1811–8, was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Whig Member of Parliament for Calne, Wiltshire. He was the heir to his father, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, but died aged only 25.
John Petty Fitzmaurice, 1st Earl of Shelburne PC (Ire), known as John FitzMaurice until 1751 and as The Viscount FitzMaurice between 1751 and 1753, was an Anglo-Irish peer and politician. He was the father of William Petty FitzMaurice, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1782 to 1783.
The Life of Sir William Petty 1623–1687 is a book, written by Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, and published in 1895. It is a biography of Sir William Petty, the 17th-century scientist, known for his inventions, his charting of large parts of Ireland, in the Down Survey, and his publications on many different topics, like "political arithmetic" and political economy.
The Bowood circle was a loose, international group of intellectual figures and writers of the later 18th century drawn together around Lord Shelburne, Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1780s, and named after his residence Bowood House. They had in common an interest in political reform. They met informally at Bowood House, or in London, and have been compared to a think tank.
Fiona Mary Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marchioness of Lansdowne,, previously known professionally as Fiona Shelburne, is a British aristocrat, socialite and interior designer. Since 2022, she has served as a queen's companion to Queen Camilla.