‘We left London for our family estate – and never looked back’
Great Estates
Estate: Boughton House Location: Kettering, Northants Founded: Rebuilt in 1528 Acres: 11,000
‘English Versailles’ has been asleep since 1700, writes Eleanor Doughty
Boughton House has been the English home of the Duke of Buccleuch since 1790, and now belongs to the current duke, Richard Montagu Douglas Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch and 12th Duke of Queensberry. As well as Boughton, Richard Buccleuch has three other stately homes in Scotland, across estates totalling 196,000 acres. Until 2019, he was the UK’s largest private landowner. He moves between his different homes – Bowhill in the Scottish Borders, Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, and houses in London and France; no one lives at Boughton full time.
Since 2020, his younger son Lord Charlie Montagu Douglas Scott and his wife Flora have lived in a house on the estate, taking a role in the community, with Charlie a director of Boughton. We meet among the Christmas trees propped up for sale outside the house on a blissfully bright, sunny day. Boughton is closed to the public for the winter, and conservation works are taking place; the peace is broken by the hum of tools, but it is otherwise a total idyll. Our dogs run around madly, blessed by the spoiling surroundings – hundreds of acres of open parkland.
The Scotts moved to Northamptonshire from London on the day the first lockdown was announced, with an idea to buy a house locally and continue their commuter lifestyle – Charlie at Christie’s, and Flora in finance. But then life, and Boughton, got in the way.
First, they found that just buying a rectory wasn’t the easiest task: “You’d think that would be straightforward,” says Flora, “but the stock isn’t there.” And who’d give up the chance to live at Boughton? “The power and magic of Boughton is unbuyable, extraordinary,” she says. Giving up the search for a new home, they decided that they would build one instead, and their new house, designed by Robbie Kerr of Adam Architecture, will complete next year.
Inspired by Boughton’s history, its extraordinary collection, and the efforts to conserve it, they launched a furniture restoration business, Summerfield and Scott, dealing and sourcing antique furniture and prints, using Boughton’s backdrop in their photography.
Now, Charlie divides his time between the business and his role at Boughton, feeding back to his older brother Walter, Earl of Dalkeith, vice chairman of Buccleuch, the family estate business. As the younger son, Charlie will not inherit Boughton.
Moving to Northamptonshire, he felt he could create a tangible, everyday link between the family and the business, supported by his father and brother, who felt that “having a family member on the ground would be helpful – there hadn’t been someone here full time since my great-grandmother”. This setup has not been trialled before; though Richard Buccleuch’s brothers Lords John and Damian Scott are involved with the estates, neither live at any of the family houses.
Boughton began as a monastery, and in 1528 Edward Montagu acquired it from St Edmundsbury Abbey, building a manor on to its great hall. In the late 17th century Ralph Montagu, later 1st Duke of Montagu, former ambassador to Paris, lavished French architectural influences on it, bringing a touch of Versailles to the heart of England.
In 1767, his great-granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Montagu married Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch – a descendant of Charles II via his son James Scott, Duke of Monmouth – and the house was absorbed into the Buccleuch empire. With the duke preoccupied with his Scottish estates, Boughton entered its sleep, unused by the family in any meaningful way until the early 20th century.
It is hard to imagine how 100-room Boughton, a calendar house with seven courtyards, 12 entrances, 52 chimney stacks and 365 windows could ever be overlooked for another. The so-called “English Versailles”, 15 miles from Kettering, is utterly magnificent; as Sir Henry “Chips” Channon described it in 1948, “it is the stillness, the curious quiet of Boughton, for the place is half asleep, that impresses the most”.
Benign neglect saved it; there is no Victorian wing, nor Edwardian library. It is as it was left in 1700 – but it is now receiving far more care and attention.
With innovation – or rather, turning to old ways of doing things: six miles of hedgerows will be laid – there remains a responsibility. In a family company like Buccleuch, Flora says: “It’s your name on the tin. You’ve had a responsibility to people, communities, and to your environment, for hundreds of years. You can’t screw that up because you’ve tried to turn a quick buck on something.”
It’s a helpful reminder, says Charlie, “that we are a very small part of a very long history. Decision-making has to be with the view of how it will look in 50 to 150 years’ time – if you lose something now, you’ll never be able to get it back”.