The most English spot in England is Stowe, the country estate that borders the town of Buckingham. Stowe qualifies for a number of reasons. First, by straddling the Buckinghamshire/Northamptonshire border, it lies somewhere in the middle of the country. Second, it occupies an iconic position historically, because Buckingham was for a century the forward garrison of King Alfred's England, protecting us from the Danelaw of the Norsemen of Northamptonshire. And third, Stowe is beautiful, in an English way.
The landscape gardens at Stowe are the finest in England. They, and the house they embrace, were created by a galaxy of giants including Capability Brown, John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs, Robert Adam, William Kent, Charles Bridgeman and John Soane. The gardens are so richly endowed that they possess no fewer than 23 listed buildings, most of which are temples and other follies.
But the gardens have an English theme: freedom. The statues and grottoes pay homage not only to beauty but also to the glorious revolution of 1688 by which parliamentary government and the rule of law were installed. Most of the temples are in classical Greek styles, Greece being the birthplace of democracy. Yet the most ideological of the monuments is the Gothic temple, over whose doorway is written "Thank God I Am Not A Roman," the conceit being that Greece's freedoms were extinguished by the Romans, and that English democracy and liberties were the gifts of the Anglo-Saxon invaders. This strand of our history was quietly forgotten after 1914, but English gentlemen were once proud of their German roots.
Stowe was the creation of one family, the Temples, who over 350 years developed the estate in an English way—subtlety. The first Temple, Peter, a sheep farmer from Warwickshire, took over the estate in 1571. He and his descendants used their power and patronage to channel heiresses and sinecures their way, and by the 18th century the family, who eventually became Dukes of Buckingham, were among the richest in Britain.
And they built ruthlessly, displacing the villagers at Stowe whose hovels obstructed their architectural and horticultural glorification. But in 1733 the head of the family, Lord Cobham, fell out with Walpole. Consigned to opposition, the family decided they were living under tyranny, and they shaped their park as an elegy to the lost freedoms of England.
Eventually, dissipated by spendthrift dukes, the family lost its money, and the sale of the century in 1848 took 40 days to auction the family's accumulated treasures. Thereafter, the house and gardens decayed, and they would have been demolished but for one very English Englishman: JF Roxburgh.
Roxburgh (1888-1954) was a schoolmaster—an inspired one. Early in his career he taught Evelyn Waugh at Lancing, and, as Waugh recalled in his autobiography and letters, the two men respected each other as scholars and stylists. But Roxburgh was also a doer. Having been educated at Charterhouse under the grim regime Robert Graves described in Goodbye to All That, he wanted to create a different sort of school, one that harnessed beauty to bring out the best in his pupils. The purchase of Stowe House in 1923 allowed him to do that.
Under Roxburgh's headship, Stowe developed into an enlightened school. He knew every boy personally and his pupils became his extended family. The carnage of the second world war—which saw one in seven old Stoics killed—broke his heart. Yet his school flourished, to challenge Harrow as the aristocracy's second choice after Eton and, purportedly, to produce more Oxbridge entrants than any other school. But some of Roxburgh's successors failed, and on his retirement the school declined, as did the house and gardens. Whereupon England, again, expressed itself at its finest.
Although the English love freedom, their great contribution to world history has been the creation of institutions of trust. Parliament, for example, was governance by consent and trust—not by fiat or diktat or other non-English words. Similarly, Stowe was saved by two great Trusts. First, the National Trust acquired the gardens and park, then the Stowe House Preservation Trust was created to acquire and restore the house. The school still occupies its historic home but, thanks to those two charities, the estate at Stowe is today well kept.
Meanwhile, freed of the burden of maintenance, the school has invested in itself, to flourish again. The headmaster who oversaw the recovery was Jeremy Nichols, who taught originally at Eton. Nichols is a traditional English gentleman, out of the pages of PG Wodehouse.
His successor, the current headmaster Anthony Wallersteiner, could be the president of an American university. Tall, dark and with a PhD in art history, he is chic. And he embodies a further aspect of England—assimilation. At a time of anxiety over immigration, let us recall such people as Hallé, Siemens, Schroder, Rothschild and now Wallersteiner, who immigrated to England's lasting advantage.
Stowe today is the product of history, beauty, good men and bad, freedom and institutions. It is England embodied.
