The Moving Temples of Stowe: Aesthetics of Change in an English Landscape over Four Generations

Abstract

Eighteenth-century Stowe is full of surprises. But nothing, in the end, is more astonishing about that extraordinary place than the continuity of change. Other outstanding English gardens had their active period of creation, with perhaps a second active period of revision twenty or thirty years later, but the gardens at Stowe were always being added to and always being modified, so that some areas were worked over three or four times. From the death of Queen Anne in 1714 to the death almost exactly a hundred years later of the marquess of Buckingham, the gardens of Stowe seem to have been perpetually on the move. Behind this continuous change, prompting and stimulating it, were two constant factors: a profusion of money and an indirect line of succession. Sir Richard Temple (1675-1749), successful general in the French wars and uncompromising Whig, who depended, for his own and his family's whole future, on George I, was duly created Baron Cobham at the king's accession in 1714 and raised to viscount four years later. He made a fortune out of political and military appointments, and in 1715 he married the daughter of a millionaire London brewer. So he had no shortage of money and from that moment, determined to keep Stowe at the growing point of taste, he set out to make his house and his garden, especially his garden, the most famous in England. He was the first of Stowe's three creative and innovative owners. When he died, over thirty years later in 1749, he had added several lakes to his garden and nearly fifty