Castle Ashby House

The castle in the name is older than anything now standing. In 1306 Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, obtained a licence to castellate his mansion in the village of Ashby, and the fortified manor that followed gave the parish the name it still carries. Sir Gerard Braybroke was at one time of Castle Ashby Manor.

The present rebuilding was begun in 1574 by Henry Compton, 1st Baron Compton, and carried on by his son William, created Earl of Northampton. Like other houses of its moment it was set out on an E-shaped plan, the deep central porch and its flight of steps forming the centre stroke of the E, a compliment to the coronation of Elizabeth I. The queen made her first visit in 1600.

When King James and his queen first stayed in 1605 the place was recorded as "Lord Compton's princely mansion", and the household of that year ran to 83 servants, four chaplains, three musicians and the Gardener of Ashby. The band of stone lettering round the parapet is dated 1624 and carries the 127th Psalm in Latin: except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. By 1635 an ambitious classicising screen had closed the open southern side of the courtyard, probably so that the two wings could be reached directly from one another. Its design departs far enough from Palladian canons to make Inigo Jones an unlikely author; Howard Colvin suggested instead Edward Carter, Jones's deputy at St Paul's, on the strength of £8 paid to "Cartor Surveyor" in the Earl's accounts in September 1631. Work went on until, as the architect Colen Campbell put it, "the Civil Wars put a stop to all Arts".

With the family away fighting for the Royalist cause in the Civil War, the east side of the house was set on fire and severely damaged. Folklore holds that an old woman called Elspeth, who lived in the parvise over the north porch of the church, saw the blaze first and roused the village, saving the rest of the building; the marks of the flames can still be read on the window lintels. Parliamentarian forces looted the contents and did much damage across the estate.

King William III visited in October 1695 and brought with him the Dutch custom of planting avenues — partly to add to the importance of the house, partly to improve the outlook from its windows. Within a month Lord Northampton had begun four avenues facing each front of the house, a planting that took twenty-five years to complete. Thirty-five years later the fashion had reversed. Capability Brown, called in during 1760, broke the avenues into small clumps, did away with the Elizabethan gardens, enlarged the ponds below the house into ornamental lakes, dug a ha-ha round the park and built the dairy and the temple against the menagerie; only two of the avenues survived him. In 1771–74 John Johnson rebuilt the Great Hall for the 8th Earl.

No further substantial change came until the 1860s, when Charles, 3rd Marquess, and his wife brought in Sir Digby Wyatt to remake much of the interior — work that later generations, finding it ugly, largely put back as it had been. The terraces with their terracotta balustrading belong to this campaign, as do the Italian "golden gates" at the entrance to the front drive, hung on piers Wyatt designed himself. Lady Northampton did not live to see it finished: she died of consumption, and the terracotta lettering beside the church reads "To Theodosia, sweetest of wives…Begun in hope, finished in despair 1865."

E. W. Godwin was called in from 1867 and designed the Italianate Orangery and the Birmingham show houses, with the old kitchen garden between them turned into an Italian garden of shaped beds divided by box edging. A pair of lodges built in 1868 stood too close together and were pulled down the next year, then rebuilt where they stand now. Under the 4th Marquess (1877–1897) the Long Gallery, Great Hall, Billiards Room and Chapel were redecorated; William Burges drew up plans for the Long Gallery that were never executed, and the work fell to Thomas Graham Jackson. The house was listed Grade I in 1968, the park and gardens in 1984, and Castle Ashby remains one of the seats of the Marquess of Northampton, its estate — reaching into Grendon, Denton and Yardley Hastings — managed by Compton Estates.