This
elegant villa was the seat of the Duke of Devonshire in the eighteenth
century. The house had formerly belonged to the seventeenth-century
Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, whose wife had been disgraced after she
was found guilty of the murder of Thomas Overbury. Somerset’s
daughter Anne married into the Bedford family, and Somerset had to mortgage
this house in order to raise the money for her portion. Richard Earl
of Burlington purchased the house in the late eighteenth century before
it passed into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire.
Walpole
described the house as "the model of taste, though not without
faults", while Lord Hervey remarked that "the house was too
small to inhabit, and too large to hang one's watch."
Italianate
gardens full of over-ornamented sculpture originally surrounded the
villa, but during the eighteenth century the gardens were made more
naturalistic "pleasure grounds" which included a
Temple (a Temple apparently being 'naturalistic' in Regency tastes).
A small deer park adjoined the pleasure gardens.
