The Late 17th Century
to the Modern Era

The Late 17th Century
 

The 3rd Earl of Downe’s only son inherited the title and properties when his father died in 1667. But a year later he also died, bringing an end to the Earldom. The Wroxton lease was inherited by his three sisters and their cousin, Lady Elizabeth Lee.

One of the sisters, Lady Frances Pope, married Francis North in 1672. In 1681, following the death of the third Earl’s widow, Sir Francis North, now Lord Guilford and Chief Justice of Common Pleas, bought out the inheritance of his sisters-in-law and their cousin for £5,100. The Wroxton lease was now North property and remained so for 250 years. Lord Guilford was to spend much of his leisure time at the Abbey with his two brothers and his sisters, a company he labeled societas exoptata. According to his brother Roger North, Lord Guilford made Wroxton:

“…his Retirement for vacations, the place afforded him very much pleasure, for he took his nearest relations and friends downe with him, and ever kept his family full.”

Roger North described the alterations to the main house as building from the ground a withdrawing room and back stairs and finished up the rooms of state, as they were called, and shaped the windows, which before had made the rooms like bird cages. (Lives of the Norths, 1826).

By 1683 the project was complete apart from some wainscoting in the withdrawing room and great bedchamber When Celia Fiennes visited, she approved of the alterations as “all the new fashion way.” (Through England on a Side Saddle, 1888).
 

Roger North described the alterations to the main house as building from the ground a withdrawing room and back stairs and finished up the rooms of state, as they were called, and shaped the windows, which before had made the rooms like bird cages. (Lives of the Norths, 1826).

By 1683 the project was complete apart from some wainscoting in the withdrawing room and great bedchamber.

When Celia Fiennes visited, she approved of the alterations as “all the new fashion way.” (Through England on a Side Saddle, 1888).

 
During his last illness, Lord Guilford retired to Wroxton, partly due to his affinity for the Abbey and partly due to the recent discovery of the “medicinal properties” of the waters at nearby Astrop. He took the seal with him and carried on his work from the Abbey until he died aged 47 on 5 September 1685, still in office as Lord Chancellor and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England.
 

Before his death he improved the old house by making the north wing habitable and adding stabling. The property was only leased to him, and this may have inhibited greater spending. Together with his brothers, Roger, an accomplished architect, and Dudley, he built “an ordonnance of stabling” south of the house, partly financed by the sale of timber, though still being paid for after his death. He corresponded with his steward Francis White on the design:

“Whereas my first intentions were to have the whole building one entire through stable I think it better to divide the same by walls and to have two doors and also several stables at least…which will be more safe, more private and more convenient.”
(North MSS, Bodleian Library).

The building housed coaches, horses, and later provided a brew house and laundry. The latter was destroyed in the early part of the twentieth century and the stabling converted to a lecture hall, dining room and bar with a kitchen in 1974-5 by Geoffrey Forsyth Lawson for Fairleigh Dickinson University.

In 1727, Francis, the second Baron Guilford decided that Wroxton should have a garden on a scale that would correspond with the recently much improved house.

 
Tilleman Bobart, a son of Jacob Bobart, the first curator of the Oxford Botanic Gardens, was commissioned as the designer. Bobart had trained under Henry Wise, the Royal gardener at Hampton Court Palace and at Blenheim Palace, before setting-up on his own.

At Wroxton, he removed the old orchard and constructed two terraces along the slope of the land on the east side of the house. The higher platform was a terrace walk, and the lower terrace contained a central canal, 240 feet long, 40 feet wide and 3-4 feet deep. Bobart also altered the entrance court and carried out works to the parlor garden on the north side of the house.
 
In 1730 Bobart constructed the walled garden on high ground to the northeast. It is thought likely that Bobart was also responsible for the stone-built icehouse situated on the northern boundary of the grounds.

The third Baron Guilford (1704-90), grandson of the Lord Keeper, and later Earl of Guilford (1752) made extensive alterations to the grounds and gardens at Wroxton. He had a taste for the Rococo style in gardening. After 1735 the formal gardens were removed, leaving only the raised earthworks as two grassed terraces within the sweeping lawns that today give the abbey its pastoral setting.

The Great Pond was modified into a more curving shape, and below its dam, a Rococo garden was created around the water flowing from the lake. The garden starts with the Grand Cascade where the water flows down a 20-ft waterfall into a basin and to a stepped cascade, and then into the Serpentine River, which flowed over a small cascade, past a mount, and under a Chinese bridge to further cascades and bridges to the end of the garden.

In the 1740s, Sanderson Miller, from nearby Radway Grange in Warwickshire, was involved in the designs of Wroxton’s gardens. A leading exponent of the Gothic revival in architecture in the 18th century, he was an adviser on landscape gardening to many estate owners in the Midlands. Miller was responsible for the design of the dovecote (1745) in the form of a Gothic tower with loop windows, battlements, and a splendid banner-type weathervane. He also designed the Drayton Arch on the old driveway from Banbury, and the Temple on the Mount (1750-51).

The house was not left unaltered, though the accounts of that period do not precisely clarify the timing of the works. Throughout the middle years of the 18th century, the Wroxton estate was run at a deficit. The first Earl’s son, Frederick, was Prime Minister between 1770 and 1782 and received £16,062 from King George III. This is an indication of the estate’s financial difficulties.

19th Century Alterations

The only building work undertaken between the death of the first Earl in 1790 and the beginning of the fifty-year tenure of Wroxton by Baroness Susan North, appears under the fifth Earl (1817-27) when a library, attributed to Sydney Smirke, was built on the east side. In this construction, modification to the side lights in Sanderson Miller’s chapel apse was necessary.

Much of what is seen in the Abbey today can be attributed to Baroness North. The interior decoration of the 19th century overshadows the earlier work by Francis and Roger North and the 1st Earl Guilford. A liberal sprinkling of ‘N’s and baron’s coronets on the paneling and glass suggest work on the interior after the revival of the barony in 1837.

The most significant development of the 19th century was the completion of the building with the addition of the south wing in 1859.

 
The Norths did a sympathetic and skillful job in creating symmetry from a western aspect and, by altering every window, restored the balance of the original design. Horace Walpole had remarked that the house was “neither good nor agreeable; one end of the front was never finished.” Several engravings and watercolors illustrate this imbalance. By completing the south side of the house, the Norths followed their motto: Animo et Fide Peerage. (“Carry through to completion in courage and faith.”)

The 20th Century

After the death in 1932 of William Henry John North, the 11th Baron North, the family was unable to bear the great expenses of maintaining the mansion and its staff. The Abbey lease was surrendered to Trinity College in 1932 and its art and furnishings sold at auction. To view the auction catalog, with its descriptions of the many treasures accumulated by the Popes and the Norths over the centuries, click the image of the catalog cover to the right.

Now in full possession of Wroxton Abbey for the first time since 1556, Trinity College leased the property in 1938 to Pawson & Leafs who turned the abbey into a residential warehouse during the second world war. The interior fabric of the house was protected by screening as the clothiers went about their business. The Great Hall was the dispatch department, hosiery was stored in the Library and lingerie in the Regency Room, while the King’s Room accommodated the counting house.

In 1948 the lease was given to Lady Pearson who rented out large flats in the building incurring some unsympathetic treatment of the property.

Lady Pearson opened the house to the public and lunches and teas were served in the restaurant that was created in the south wing.

The maintenance of the building became too costly for both Lady Pearson and the landlords and, in 1963, the property and fifty-six acres were sold to Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Thus began Wroxton College, a semester-abroad destination for American college students, based in the ancestral home of the British prime minister who served during the American War of Independence.

Wroxton College in 2025 became an independent institution, preserving its legacy for future generations. The College continues to meet its founding vision of an intellectual community, cloistered in an idyllic setting, housed in a remarkably beautiful, modernized 17th-century manor house.