Chevening House

Chevening House, is a large country house in the parish of Chevening in Kent, in south east England. Built between 1617 and 1630 to a design reputedly by Inigo Jones and greatly extended after 1717, it is a Grade I listed building. The surrounding gardens, pleasure grounds and park are listed Grade II*.

Formerly the principal seat of the Earls Stanhope, under the Chevening Estate Act 1959 (amended 1987) the house and estate are held in trust by the Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate to serve as a furnished country residence for a person nominated by the Prime Minister, so qualified by being a member of the Cabinet or a descendant of King George VI. The nominee pays for their own private living expenses when in residence.

The Government does not own the estate, ownership being vested in the Board of Trustees. The house is maintained not by public funds but by the income from the estate. Chevening House is not an official residence but, when the nominated occupant is a minister of the Crown, Government departments are able to arrange with the Board to conduct official business in the house.

There has been a house on the site since at least 1199 and the estate originally formed part of the archiepiscopal manor of Otford. The present 15-bedroomed house is a three-storey, symmetrical red brick structure in the early English Palladian style, attributed to Inigo Jones, set at the foot of the North Downs in extensive parkland. A garden to the south encircles a man-made lake. The house was extended from 1717 by the addition of symmetrical wings by Thomas Fort, a master carpenter and royal clerk of works who had worked under Wren at Hampton Court. Much remodelled by the 3rd Earl Stanhope in the late 18th-century, the house was extensively restored in the 1970s by Donald Insall Associates for the Board of Trustees of the Chevening Estate.

The house was for 250 years the principal seat of the Earls Stanhope, a cadet (and ultimately the final) branch of the Earls of Chesterfield, from 1717 to 1967. James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope was a general under Marlborough and a Whig politician who served as chief minister to King George I until his death in 1721. Through marriage he was the uncle of William Pitt the Elder. Philip Stanhope, 2nd Earl Stanhope was tutored by the 4th Earl of Chesterfield and became a distinguished patron of science during the Enlightenment. Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, both first cousin and brother-in-law to William Pitt the Younger, was a prolific inventor whose major achievements in such diverse fields as printing, building a mechanical calculator, steam navigation, optics, musical notation and fire-proofing in buildings were overshadowed at the time and subsequently by his reputation, as the self-styled "Citizen Stanhope", for eccentricity and political radicalism. Philip Henry Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope was a gifted amateur landscape gardener and architect, half-brother to Lady Hester Stanhope, and the legal guardian of Kaspar Hauser. Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope was the driving force behind the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery and the Historical Documents Commission: writing as Viscount Mahon he was a distinguished 19th-century historian and established the Stanhope Essay Prize at Oxford. Arthur Stanhope, 6th Earl Stanhope was a Conservative MP before inheriting and served as First Ecclesiastical Estates Commissioner from 1878 to 1903. Both his brothers made their careers in politics. The Rt Hon Edward Stanhope (Conservative) was a reforming Secretary of State for War (1887–1892) while the 1st Lord Weardale (Liberal) was president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1912–22) and of the Save the Children Fund. James Stanhope, 7th Earl Stanhope (also 13th Earl of Chesterfield) was a Conservative politician who held office almost continuously from 1924 to 1940, serving in Cabinet posts from 1936 under Baldwin and Chamberlain. He founded the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.

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