Cliveden

The name means "valley among cliffs" and refers to the dene that cuts through part of the estate east of the house; over the centuries it has been written Cliffden, Clifden, Cliefden and Clyveden. Much of what is known of the earliest ownership comes from The Historical Descent of Cliveden, a document compiled in 1894 by William Waldorf Astor and drawn from George Lipscombe's History of the County of Buckingham, the Lysons brothers' Magna Britannia and James Joseph Sheahan's History of Buckinghamshire. It shows the land in the hands of Geoffrey de Clyveden in 1237 and, by 1300, of his son William, who held fisheries and mills along the stretch of the Thames known as Cliveden Reach and at nearby Hedsor. The Mansfield family held the ground after them. In 1569 a lodge stood on the site with 50 acres of land, owned by Sir Henry and later by his son Sir Edward, and by 1573 there were two lodges on 160 acres of treeless chalk escarpment above the river.

It was that high and exposed ground that George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, chose for the first Cliveden house. He pulled down the earlier buildings and engaged William Winde, whose design of 1666 set a four-storey house above an arcaded terrace. That terrace, 400 feet long and 20 feet high, is the only feature of Buckingham's house to survive the fire of 1795, and the present mansion still stands on it. The Duke's intention was to use Cliveden as a hunting box, though it later housed Anna Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury. In 1668 a duel between the Duke and her husband, Lord Shrewsbury, took place at Barn Elms near London, and Shrewsbury died of his wounds. Samuel Pepys wrote of Buckingham's affair with Anna in his diary of the period.

John Evelyn, a diarist of the same years, visited the Duke at Cliveden on 22 July 1679 and recorded "that stupendous natural rock, wood, and prospect, of the Duke of Buckingham's, and buildings of extraordinary expense", judging the cloisters, descents, gardens and avenue through the wood "august and stately" but the land all about "wretchedly barren, and producing nothing but fern". Buckingham died in 1687 and the house then stood empty.

The estate was bought in 1696 by George Hamilton, 1st Earl of Orkney, a soldier and colonial official. He employed the architect Thomas Archer to add two wings joined to the house by curved corridors; an almost identical arrangement stands today, but these are later reconstructions, the originals having gone in the 1795 fire, and a staircase in the West wing is all of Archer's interior work that remains. Orkney's mark on the grounds lasted better. The Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni designed for him the Blenheim Pavilion of about 1727, built to commemorate his victory as a general at the Battle of Blenheim, and the Octagon Temple of 1735, meant as a gazebo and grotto; Charles Bridgeman was commissioned to devise woodland walks and to carve a rustic turf amphitheatre out of the cliff-side. The large plateau south of the house was first arranged in about 1723. Orkney had commissioned elaborate parterre schemes from Claude Desgots, nephew of André Le Nôtre and, like his uncle, a designer who had worked at Versailles, but settled instead on an open expanse of lawn with a sunken feature at the far end where his horses were exercised in a form of open-air manège. He called it his "Quaker parterre" because of its simplicity.

Orkney died in 1737 and Cliveden passed to his daughter Anne O'Brien, 2nd Countess of Orkney in her own right, who immediately leased it to Frederick, Prince of Wales, eldest son of George II and father of George III. After Frederick fell out with his father, Kew and Cliveden became his refuge from life at the royal court and family homes for his wife Augusta and their children. On 1 August 1740, Rule, Britannia!, an aria by the English composer Thomas Arne with lyrics by the Scottish poet James Thomson, was performed in public for the first time in the cliff-side amphitheatre at Cliveden, played as part of the masque Alfred to celebrate the third birthday of the Prince's daughter Augusta.

Cliveden was also the setting for Frederick's final illness. It was believed that while playing cricket in the grounds in 1751 he received a blow to the chest from a batted ball and that this caused an infection which proved fatal; an alternative interpretation has him dying from a cold followed by a pulmonary embolism. His family kept Kew and their townhouse, Leicester House, but gave up the Cliveden lease, and Anne moved back in, passing the house to her daughter Mary O'Brien, 3rd Countess of Orkney, and her granddaughter Mary FitzMaurice, 4th Countess, who also lived there. On the night of 20 May 1795 the house caught fire and burned down, the cause thought to have been a servant knocking over a candle. The 4th Countess moved out but kept the site, and while living in one wing of the burnt mansion she commissioned from the architect Peter Nicholson a Gothic-style summerhouse of 1813, used as a tea house and spa for visitors drawn to the mineral springs that ran from the chalk cliff down to the Thames. Auction particulars of 1821 list it as a Banqueting house "at the much admired spring". She sold the site in 1824.

The house remained a ruin for the first quarter of the 19th century. In 1824 the estate was bought by Sir George Warrender, 4th Baronet, who chose the Scottish architect William Burn to rebuild it and settled on a two-storey mansion designed with entertaining on a grand scale in mind. Warrender died in 1849 and the house was sold to the Leveson-Gower family, headed by George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 2nd Duke of Sutherland. He had held the estate only a few months when the house burned down for the second time in its history; the cause this time appears to have been negligence on the part of the decorators.

The Duke was prompt in commissioning Charles Barry, whose best-known project is arguably the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, to rebuild Cliveden in the style of an Italianate villa, and Barry took the outline of the two earlier houses as his starting point. The third house was completed in 1851–52 and its exterior has changed little since; the main contractor was Lucas Brothers. Below the balustraded roofline runs a Latin inscription composed by William Ewart Gladstone, continuing round all four fronts and recalling the building's history: Barry's plan of 1851, the foundations laid long before by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in Charles the Second's reign, and the restoration by George, Duke of Sutherland, and Harriet his wife on a site where two houses had previously burnt down. Of Barry's interior only one element survives, the painted ceiling above the staircase by the French artist Auguste Hervieu showing the Sutherlands' children as the four seasons.

A 100-foot clock tower, in fact a water tower and still supplying the house today, was added in 1861 to the design of the architect Henry Clutton, and was later described by Nikolaus Pevsner as "the epitome of Victorian flamboyance and assertiveness". The architect George Devey was commissioned for half-timbered cottages on the estate along with a dairy and a boathouse, and in 1857 the Duke had him enlarge the Countess of Orkney's riverside summerhouse into a two-storey building, Spring Cottage. It served chiefly as a place of leisure, and Harriet used it often to entertain guests, most notably her friend Queen Victoria. The parterre had by then been neglected, the Duke's son Lord Ronald Gower calling it "a prairie...a huge field of grass and wild flowers"; the Duke asked both Barry and his head gardener John Fleming for designs, and Fleming's was chosen and remains the template on the ground. Fleming pioneered this style of planting at Cliveden, later named carpet-bedding, and documented it in his handbook Winter and Spring Flower Gardening of 1864. The Duke died in 1861 and Harriet went on living at the house for part of the year until her own death in 1868, after which it was sold to her son-in-law Hugh Lupus, Earl Grosvenor, later 1st Duke of Westminster, one of the wealthiest Englishmen of the period, who during his ownership from 1868 to 1893 added the porte cochère on the north front, a new stable block and the dovecote, all designed by Clutton.

In 1893 the estate was bought by an American millionaire, William Waldorf Astor, later 1st Viscount Astor, who made sweeping alterations to the gardens and the interior; after the early death of his wife he lived a reclusive life there. Wanting a more impressive entrance than Barry had given the Sutherlands, in about 1894–95 he had the square entrance-hall, morning room and separate stairwell thrown together to make the Great Hall, and in 1897 he bought from Jules Allard the 18th-century Rococo panelling of the French Dining Room, which came from the Château d'Asnières near Paris, a house leased to Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour as a hunting lodge. Most of the garden sculpture was acquired between 1893 and 1906, among it the 17th-century Borghese Balustrade, bought in the late 19th century from the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome. He commissioned the maze in 1894 and the Japanese-style Water Garden, designed in about 1893 and believed to be the first such East Asian inspired garden in the country. Leoni's Octagon Temple he converted into the Astor family chapel, and in 1893 it was adapted to serve as the family mausoleum as well; three generations of Astors lie there, among them the ashes of the 1st Viscount, of his son the 2nd Viscount and of the latter's wife Nancy Astor.

Astor gave the house to his son Waldorf, later 2nd Viscount, on his marriage to Nancy Langhorne in 1906 and moved to Hever Castle. The young Astors used Cliveden for entertaining on a lavish scale, the house, its setting and the sport on offer making it a destination for film stars, politicians, world leaders, writers and artists. The heyday of that entertaining fell between the two world wars, when the Astors held regular weekend house parties whose guests included Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi, Amy Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, H. H. Asquith, T. E. Lawrence, Arthur Balfour and the writers Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Edith Wharton. As the home of Nancy Astor, Cliveden was the meeting place during the 1920s and 1930s of the Cliveden Set, a group of political intellectuals. The entertainer Joyce Grenfell, Nancy Astor's niece, lived in a cottage on the estate through those years.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Waldorf Astor offered the use of some of the grounds to the Canadian Red Cross for the building of a hospital, the HRH Duchess of Connaught Hospital, which was dismantled at the end of the hostilities. In September 1939, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he again offered the use of the land, at a rent of one shilling a year, and the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital was built there to the designs of Robert Atkinson. In the preface to Joyce Grenfell's memoir, James Roose-Evans stated that during that war she ran two of its wards and worked as an informal welfare officer, completing errands for patients, writing letters, shopping, teaching needlework and organising social events and informal concerts. Attached to the military hospital and within the grounds, Cliveden War Cemetery holds 42 Commonwealth war graves, 40 from the First World War and mostly Canadian and two from the Second, besides two American service war graves from the first war. In 1942 the Astors gave Cliveden to the National Trust, and with the gift the Trust also received from the Astor family an endowment of £250,000, equivalent to £10,180,000 in 2025. The gift carried the proviso that the family could continue to live in the house for as long as they wished; should they cease to do so, they expressed the wish that it be used "for promoting friendship and understanding between the peoples of the United States and Canada and the other dominions".

The house was listed Grade I in September 1955. After the death of the 2nd Viscount in 1952 his son William, known as Bill, the 3rd Viscount Astor, took the house on until his own death in 1966. In 1957 Spring Cottage came to the attention of the London osteopath Stephen Ward, who had been hired to treat Bill Astor; he leased the cottage from the Astors for a minimal rent as a weekend retreat, and among the guests invited to stay there were Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. A chance meeting in 1961 between Keeler and the cabinet minister John Profumo, a guest of the Astors, at the Cliveden swimming pool led to the Profumo affair, which so damaged the Macmillan government. Following Bill Astor's death the National Trust took over the management of the estate, and after the family stopped living there the house was leased by the 1970s to Stanford University, which used it as an overseas campus. The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, whose main work after the war had been as a nursing school, a maternity unit and a rheumatology unit, closed and was abandoned in 1985, lay derelict for two decades and was demolished in 2006 to make way for a housing development for people aged 55 and over.

In 1984 Blakeney Hotels, later Cliveden Hotel Ltd, acquired the lease to the house and, under its chairman John Lewis and managing director John Tham, restored and refurbished the interior, while between 1984 and 1986 the National Trust overhauled the exterior and installed a new lead roof. In 1990 a new 100-year lease was granted to run from 1984. Spring Cottage was awarded Grade II listed status in 1986, and in 1997 the hotel company took its lease too, spending a reported £750,000 on the dilapidated building before reopening it in 1998 as a self-contained luxury holiday let. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange for a period in the 1990s as Cliveden Plc and was bought in 1998 by Destination Europe, a consortium including the Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates; in the early years of the 21st century the lease was acquired by von Essen Hotels, for whom Cliveden House was the "jewel in the crown" when the company collapsed in 2011. In February 2012 the property developers Richard and Ian Livingstone, owners of London & Regional Properties and of the neighbouring 220-acre Dropmore Park estate, purchased the lease and placed it under the management of Andrew Stembridge. Natalie Livingstone, wife of Ian Livingstone, published The Mistresses of Cliveden, a history of some of the female occupants of the house, in 2015; that January the hotel closed for a month for interior refurbishment and for the Trust to repair the roof.

The National Trust owns and runs the estate, and the gardens have carried Grade I status on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens since 1987. Restoration has continued: the maze, overgrown and inaccessible since the 1950s, was replanted and opened to the public in 2011, the same year the Trust began work on the 19th-century Round Garden at the eastern edge of the estate, and further exterior work in 2013 restored 300 sash windows and 20 timber doors. In the spring of 2012 the clock tower was topped with a bronze reproduction of Augustin Dumont's winged figure Le Génie de la Liberté, replacing two earlier versions, the first of which had fallen from the tower in a storm in the 1950s. In 2004 a colony of the small Mediterranean land snail Papillifera bidens, new to the English fauna, was found living on the Borghese Balustrade, presumably brought in with the stonework in the late 19th century. In October 2021 Cliveden was one of 142 sites across England to receive part of a £35 million injection into the government's Culture Recovery Fund. About 180 acres of the estate are garden, the rest woodland and paddocks; visitors have access to the parkland and occasional limited access to a select area of the house, and Cliveden has been one of the National Trust's most popular pay-for-entry visitor attractions, with 563,416 visitors in 2025.