No doubt the isolated position of Stowe, and the long distance from London was one cause of its being destroyed. Lord Carteret was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Devonshire in 1716, and the previous year he had been doing all he could in support of the new Hanoverian establishment. While the Jacobite rebellion was at its height in the north, Carteret was writing from Stowe to Robethon, the French Secretary of George I.—
“I am now two hundred long miles from you, situated on a cliff overlooking the sea, and every tide have fresh prospects in viewing ships coming home. In this corner of the earth have I received your letter, and without that I should have heard nothing since I came. Sept. 25, 1715.”—Brit. Mus. Sloane MSS. 4107, fol. 171, etc.
Another cause may have been the bursting of the “South Sea Bubble,” in which Countess Granville and the Carterets had invested a good deal of money. Lord Carteret wrote to a friend in October, 1720—
“I don’t know exactly how the fall of the South Sea has affected my family, but they have lost considerably of what they had once gained.”
The stables alone remain, and these have been converted into a farmhouse, the tennis-court into a sheepcote, and the great quadrangle into a rick-yard, and civilisation, spreading wave after wave so fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lovely corner of the land, let us hope only for a while.
Referring to this ruined mansion, Edward Moore exclaimed—
“Ah! where is now its boasted beauty fled?
Proud turrets that once glistened in the sky,
And broken columns, in confusion spread,
A rude mis-shapen heap of ruins lie!
Where, too, is now the garden’s beauty fled,
Which every clime was ransacked to supply?
On the dread spot see desolation spread,
And the dismantled walls in ruin lie.
Along the terrace walks are straggling seen
The thickly bramble and the noisome weed,
Beneath whose covert crawls the toad obscene,
And snakes and adders unmolested breed.”