STANSTED PARK

Stansted Park

Sources suggest that there has been a house of some kind at Stansted since at least 1094, when a hunting lodge was built there for Roger de Montgomery, 1st Earl of Arundel. In the late 15th century, William Fitzalan, 9th Earl of Arundel settled the Stansted estate on his son Thomas, Lord Maltravers, who in 1480 rebuilt the house. Just over a century later in 1591, by which time John Lumley, 1st Baron Lumley was in charge at Stansted, Elizabeth I visited the house. Soon after,  Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury described Stansted as ‘fayre, well builte without and not meanly furnished within, but want of water is a greate inconvenience’.

Another new, more modern house was built at prodigious expense on the site of the present house in 1688 for Richard Lumley, 1st Earl of Scarbrough, with formal gardens, avenues, and sweeping parkland. Less than a century later, Stansted was inherited by George Montagu-Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax; when he died in 1771 his daughter Anna Donaldson inherited the estate, hosting George III and Queen Charlotte in 1778, but later selling Stansted the Indian nabob Richard Barwell.

In 1924, Vere Ponsonby, 9th Earl of Bessobrough bought Stansted, having been forced to leave Ireland after his County Kilkenny pile Bessborough House was burned by Irish republicans. Stansted was considerably marked by the Second World War, when 85 bombs fell on the estate. On one occasion a German aircraft carrying a landmine fell on the cricket ground and exploded, killing its crew, watched by the Countess of Bessborough from a safe distance. Evacuated children from Portsmouth occupied the north and stable wings of the house, and when the Home Guard was formed they used the theatre at Stansted during the evenings, until one day in 1942 it was accidentally burned down.

The house passed through the Bessboroughs until 1983 when Frederick Ponsonby, 10th Earl of Bessborough transferred the house to the Stansted Park Foundation. When he died in 1993 without a male heir, his title was inherited by a cousin, and the house remained in the care of the foundation.