Publisher's Synopsis
This book chronicles the rags-to-riches tale of the Grenvilles, who rose from the gentry to become dukes, making a fortune and building Stowe, one of England's great country houses, in the process - only to come close to bankruptcy by 1850 and eventually lose their title.;John Beckett asks how this happened. He traces the rise of the family from their modest Buckinghamshire background in 1710 through a series of highly lucrative marriages, an earldom, a marquessate, a dukedom and, by 1822, a major landed estate spread across southern England and Ireland. He explores the disastrous profligacy of the first two Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos between 1813 and 1847, which nearly led to the family becoming the first landless dukes by the 1850s. He explains how the hardworking third duke managed to rescue a substantial portion of the estates, though the Grenvilles still failed to survive the cold winds of change which brought the downfall of so many landed families after the First World War. Today their showpiece house, Stowe, is a public school, and the dukedom is no more.
