Chatsworth House

In 1549 Sir William Cavendish, Treasurer of the King's Chamber, bought the Leche family's property here; his wife Bess of Hardwick had persuaded him to leave Suffolk for her native county. Bess began the new house in 1553 on a site near the Derwent. Sir William died in 1557; Bess finished the house in the 1560s and lived there with her fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury.

In 1568 Shrewsbury was entrusted with the custody of Mary, Queen of Scots, and brought his prisoner to Chatsworth several times from 1570, lodging her in what are still called the Queen of Scots rooms. Bess joined her for long spells between 1569 and 1571, when the two worked on the Oxburgh Hangings. Bess died in 1608 and the estate passed to her eldest son Henry, who sold it to his brother William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire, for £10,000.

William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, a staunch Royalist, was expelled from the House of Lords in 1642 and left England; his estates were sequestered and Chatsworth was occupied by both sides in the Civil War. He returned only at the Restoration, and the Elizabethan house was by then outdated and unsafe. Thomas Hobbes, a friend of the family for nearly 70 years, spent his last four or five years at Chatsworth; many of his manuscripts were found there after his death at Hardwick Hall in December 1679.

The 4th Earl — made 1st Duke in 1694 for helping to put William of Orange on the throne — began rebuilding in 1687. The south and east fronts, to William Talman's designs, were finished by 1696, the west front by 1702 and the north front in 1707, shortly before he died; the result was a key building in the development of English Baroque architecture.

In 1748 the 4th Duke married Lady Charlotte Boyle, sole surviving heiress of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, whose death brought the Devonshires his architectural drawings, Old Master paintings and Kent furniture with many estates. The Duke moved the approach to the west, had the old stables and parts of Edensor village pulled down so they were not visible from it, and between 1755 and 1764 had Lancelot "Capability" Brown replace the 1st Duke's formal gardens with naturalistic landscape.

The 6th Duke inherited in 1811 with eight major estates, among them Hardwick Hall and Lismore Castle, covering 200,000 acres. He had Jeffry Wyatville build the North Wing, doubling the size of the house and providing a purpose-built sculpture gallery, an orangery, a theatre and a vast new kitchen.

Joseph Paxton, trained at Kew, was appointed head gardener in 1826 at the age of 23. Princess Victoria took her first formal adult dinner here in October 1832, aged 13, and returned as Queen with Prince Albert in 1843 to see the gardens and fountains illuminated. Told that Tsar Nicholas I might visit the following year, the Duke had Paxton build the Emperor Fountain in six months, fed by a lake dug on the moors above the house; its jet is on record at 296 ft. The Tsar died in 1855 and never saw it.

Thinking schoolgirls would make better tenants than soldiers, the 10th Duke arranged for Penrhos College, a girls' school from Colwyn Bay, to occupy the house; the contents were packed away in 11 days and 300 girls arrived in September 1939 for a six-year stay, the state rooms serving as dormitories. In May 1944 Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, married the Duke's elder son, the Marquess of Hartington, who was killed in action in Belgium that September.

The 10th Duke died in 1950, a few weeks too early for his transfer of assets to escape death duties, and tax was charged at 80 per cent — £7 million. A proposal to hand Chatsworth to the nation as a Victoria and Albert Museum of Northern England came to nothing; the 11th Duke sold tens of thousands of acres, transferred Hardwick Hall to the National Trust in lieu of tax and sold works of art, and negotiations with the Inland Revenue took 17 years. The house was listed Grade I in 1951 and the family moved back in 1959.

In 1981 the trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement created the Chatsworth House Trust to preserve the house and its setting "for the benefit of the public", granting it a 99-year lease of the house, its main contents and 1,822 acres for a token rent of £1 a year. Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire, succeeded in 2004; a structural survey that year led to a £32 million programme of repairs, the most extensive for 200 years, completed in 2018. The house is open to the public.