Bagshot Park, Woking, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

While there has been a house in Bagshot Park since the 17th century, the present house was built between 1875 and 1879, on instructions from Queen Victoria, as a home for her third son, HRH Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught on his marriage to Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia. The architect was Benjamin Ferrey (died 1880), the style, brick and stone Tudor. The north wing was added by 1887. The house remained the residence of the Duke until his death in 1942, at the age of ninety-one. From 1947 until 1996 it was leased by the Crown to the Ministry of Defence for use by the Royal Army Chaplains Department. In 1997 it returned to private ownership.

The first known reference to a royal park at Bagshot dates from 1486 when the office of the keeper of the Park of Bagshot was granted. John Norden's map of 1607 shows a house, Bagshot Park Lodge, standing close to the site of the current farm buildings and set within an enclosed park which measured 415 acres (168 hectares). The Lodge was frequently used by the Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, as a base for hunting expeditions. The land was disparked by Parliament during the Commonwealth but in 1682, Col James Graham, Privy Purse to the King, was by Royal Warrant made Ranger and Keeper and authorised to spend £1200 on repairing the house and reimpaling the park.

Throughout the 18th century, the office of Ranger and Keeper was granted by successive sovereigns to members of the nobility: the Earl of Arran from 1706, the Earl of Albemarle from 1766, his brother the Admiral Augustus Keppel from 1772. In 1798, William Frederick, later (1805) Duke of Gloucester (died 1834), was made Ranger. In 1816 he married his cousin Mary, fourth daughter of George III, and during their occupancy the house was enlarged following a plan by John Nash (1752-1835). The Duchess, who shared her mother the Queen's interest in botany and garden-making (the Queen had laid out the gardens of Frogmore, in Windsor Great Park (there are descriptions of both these sites elsewhere in the Register)), was responsible for the creation of an 8 acre (about 3 hectares) flower garden in the park to the north of the house. In this she was assisted by her Scottish head gardener, Andrew Toward (born 1796) who, following the Duchess' move to White Lodge, Richmond Park in 1844, took up an appointment as Agent and Farm Bailiff to Queen Victoria at Osborne House (there are descriptions of both these sites elsewhere in the Register) on the Isle of Wight. At a House of Commons Railway inquiry in 1837, William Sawrey Gilpin (1762-1843), present as a witness, cited the late Duke of Gloucester, Bagshot, as a former employer; further details as to what Gilpin's involvement in the Bagshot Park landscape might have been are not known.

After the departure of the Duchess the house was occupied by a succession of short-term tenants, and when the Duke of Connaught arrived in 1879 the grounds were in a neglected state. Bagshot Park Lodge was demolished in 1878.