“provided the best masters for all kinds of education, and the children of his neighbours shared the advantage with his own. Thus, in a manner, he became the father of his county, and not only engaged the affection of the present generation, but laid a foundation of friendship for posterity which has not worn out to this day.”
John Granville, Earl of Bath, pulled down old Stowe, and in its place, though on a different site a little farther from the shore, built a magnificent new mansion (covering 3½ acres of ground, and containing, it is said, 365 windows) out of the moneys he had received from the Government as a debt owing to himself and his father for their sacrifices to the royal cause. Dr. Borlase describes this new house as “by far the noblest in the west of England, though with not a tree to shelter it.” And in the MS. diary of Dr. Yonge, F.R.S., a distinguished physician of the latter part of the seventeenth century, the following entry occurs in the year 1685:—
“I waited on my lord of Bathe, then Governor of Plymouth, to his delicious house Stowe. It lyeth on ye ledge of ye North Sea of Devon,—a most curious fabrick beyond all description.”
Here lived John, Earl of Bath. His son Charles, Lord Granville, shot himself (accidentally the jury found) while preparing for the journey into Cornwall to take down his father’s body for burial, and they were both buried together in Kilkhampton Church, September 27th, 1701. His boy, William Henry, then nine years of age, succeeded, but died of small-pox, unmarried, May 17th, 1711, aged nineteen.
The next male heir was George Granville the poet, who presented his cousin, Chamond Granville, to the Rectory of Kilkhampton on October 22nd, 1711, and on December 31st, 1711 (after serving in the Parliaments called in the fourth and seventh years of Queen Anne), he was created Lord Lansdowne of Bideford, “a promotion justly remarked to be not invidious, inasmuch as he was at that time the heir of a family in which two peerages, that of the Earl of Bath and Lord Granville of Potheridge, had recently become extinct.”
Lord Lansdowne’s claim to the estates of the Earls of Bath was, however, disputed by the two surviving daughters of John, first Earl of Bath, viz. Lady Jane Leveson-Gower and Lady Grace Carteret. A family law suit was the result of this claim, which lasted for some years. With the death of Queen Anne (who had specially honoured him with her favour, making him Comptroller of her household, and also Secretary of State for War, and afterwards Treasurer) Lord Lansdowne’s prospects darkened. He was supposed to be in favour of the exiled Stuarts rather than of the House of Hanover; and there seems no little doubt that he was more or less implicated in the scheme for raising an insurrection in the West of England, which Lord Bolingbroke and the Duke of Ormonde were at the head of. At any rate, Lord Lansdowne was seized as a suspected person, and on September 26th, 1715, was committed, along with Lady Lansdowne, to the Tower, where they were confined as close prisoners. Whilst there he compromised the law suit for £30,000, and the Devonshire property passed to Lady Jane Leveson-Gower, and the Cornish to Lady Grace Carteret, who was created Countess Granville in her own right.
Stowe, having stood for a little over half a century, was pulled down in 1739. In Polwhele’s “History of Cornwall” it is stated that a man of Stratton lived long enough to see its site a cornfield before the building existed, and after the building was destroyed a cornfield again. The materials were sold piecemeal by auction. The carved cedar wood in the chapel, executed by Michael Chuke,[164] was bought by Lord Cobham and applied to the same purpose at his mansion of Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The staircase is at Prideaux Place, Padstow, while the Corporation of South Molton, who were then building a new Town Hall, Council Chamber, etc., purchased the following:—
These articles, with many others, were taken to Bude, shipped to Barnstaple, and thence carted to South Molton. The outlay for the whole only amounted to £178! The “carved Cornish and Triumph of Charles II.” is still to be seen over the fireplace in the old dining-room in the Town Hall at South Molton.