Ampthill Park House

Summary

Park House to 1737

The present Park House was built in the late 1680s to replace the Great Lodge, built c. 1525-1550 as a residence for Sir Francis Bryan. It is not clear if Park House is on exactly the same site but the earlier house, too, could have used the escarpment with its dramatic view to the North. Park House was intended as a dower house for the Dowager Lady Ailesbury (d.1689) and the future seat for her younger son, Robert Bruce. Her eldest son Thomas, 2nd Earl of Ailesbury (1656-1741), lived at Houghton House.

Preparations for building the house were made in 1685 soon after the death of the 1st Earl. Board for wainscot - 2248 feet-was sawn (paid for in May 1686). The building seems to have been designed by Robert Grumbold (1639-1720), mason of Cambridge. Robert Bruce was at Queens’ College in 1683—1684 and would have known of Grumbold from the number of collegiate buildings he was involved in at the time, including the Wren Library at Trinity College, where he was master mason to Sir Christopher.

Grumbold's design was for a double pile house (a rectangular building two rooms thick) with basement, two principal floors and an attic. The house was to have a pediment and a central cupola (similar no doubt to the earlier one on the north front at Wrest Park). The base of the cupola survives in the roof and the cupola itself was probably transposed to the Moot Hall in Ampthill in the late 1760s.

Simon Houfe in his important series of articles on Park House comments on the “conventional even conservative” ground plan. The entrance hall led into the great parlour with rooms connected by corridors around this central area. The first floor had a central corridor connecting two staircases at either end. The main construction of the house seems to have been completed by October 1687 when a bill was submitted for “270 foot of cornish and 421 foot of guttering under the lead”, which indicates that the cornicing must have gone round at least three sides of the house, if not the fourth. Grumbold built a typical late seventeenth century house influenced by Sir Robert Pratt and Wren but by the late 1680s already a little old-fashioned.

On the death of the Dowager Lady Ailesbury on 8 April 1689 all work on the interior was suspended.