‘I live in the house where the Gunpowder Plot was planned’

Great Estates: Ashby Manor House has been restored after falling into disrepair

In the autumn of 1605, a group of young Catholic men gathered in a small panelled room above the timber-framed gatehouse to the manor house at Ashby St Ledgers. They had a plan: to assassinate James I, the king of England.
The group’s leader Robert Catesby, the rich, handsome son of Sir William Catesby, knew the room well.
He had grown up at Ashby, his family’s home since 1375, and its central location, near Daventry, Northamptonshire, made it the perfect command centre for the plotters – not just to meet, but to store the arms that they were amassing.
Though the gang’s attempt to blow up the king on November 5 1605 ultimately failed, their actions were immortalised – as was Ashby St Ledgers.
Almost 300 years after the Gunpowder Plot, in 1903, the Hon. Ivor Guest, a Conservative, soon-to-be Liberal MP and the future lord-lieutenant of Ireland, came across Ashby St Ledgers.
He and his new wife, Lady Alice Guest, made their home there. They entertained the great, the good, and the Prince of Wales alongside a slew of Ivor’s friends, political allies, and women on the side, as well as Alice’s own paramour, the composer William Walton, until Ivor’s death in 1939.
Beyond their friends, however, lay an important partnership. In 1904, the Guests – who became Viscount and Viscountess Wimborne in 1918 – commissioned the architect (now Sir) Edwin Lutyens to work on Ashby. Lutyens described Ivor as “nicely outspoken”, one of few clients able to say no to him.
When Ivor died, the estate passed to his eldest son, also called Ivor, the traditional family name for the eldest son, who became 2nd Viscount Wimborne. When he died in 1967, aged 63, his eldest son, not yet 30, became 3rd Viscount Wimborne while on his honeymoon in Jamaica.
Having inherited Ashby – and £800,000 of death duties – rather earlier than expected, the new Wimbornes eventually sold the estate in 1976, to the British Airways Pension Fund. Over time, the house fell into disrepair.
In 1998, the record producer Ivor Guest, 4th Viscount Wimborne, who succeeded to the title upon his father’s death five years earlier, came across the house by chance and decided to buy and restore it.
The purchase wasn’t just about the property, he said in 2013, but it was also, in the wake of his father’s death, “a way of figuring out what it meant to come from the kind of background I did”.
Lord Wimborne’s 17 years at Ashby were transformational. He renewed the roof, and undoing the 1960s conversion of the north end of the house, recreated a 100-foot run through the house to Lutyens’s dining room.
In 2015, his cousin and his wife Nova Guest, who had married at Ashby in 2009, bought the house from him.
Like Lord Wimborne, they have made an active choice to buy the house and look after it. As such, “we have been able to look at it with a more commercial hat on while still cherishing it as a family home,” says Nova.
Her move to Ashby was not just from London, where she met her husband in the early 2000s, but from Perth, Western Australia, where she grew up, 9,000 miles away. Remembering her first visit to Ashby, she describes how “it was beyond anything I’d ever seen in Australia. Perth was founded in 1829, so to be in a house where the origins date back to the Domesday Book was extraordinary.”
She soon found her feet – even if the kitchen she might have expected of a house like Ashby wasn’t quite the one she got: a compact space at the end of the great hall. “It’s diminutive but functional,” she says, “but I can see why Ivor put it there – he wanted to preserve the architectural integrity of Lutyens’ work”.
Lord Wimborne’s other amendments have also served them well: leaving the house with simple white blinds rather than traditional swag curtains, and whitewashing the place in Farrow & Ball’s Wimborne White has been a wise design choice.
“It is quite modern, and it’s all the same colour which provides a fantastic backdrop for pieces of art,” says Nova.
Traditional family portraits of the kind usually found in big houses have been carefully mixed with a number of pieces of Aboriginal art, to reflect Nova’s heritage. The result is a relaxed juxtaposition of old and new against Lutyens’ ingenious backdrop.
Nova’s work has continued outside, too. During Lord Wimborne’s ownership of Ashby, the garden had been simply but faithfully maintained, the lawns mowed and the hedges clipped.
Influenced by her mother, a great admirer of antiques, interiors, and gardening, Nova set to work learning about the garden.
During the Covid pandemic, the Guests restored the walled garden with the help of landscape architect Daniel Combes. Its produce fills the countless jugs and vases in the house.
Beyond the walled garden, Lutyens left quite a legacy. His canal garden, which dates from the early period of his partnership with Ivor and Alice, is particularly wonderful. “Even if you did nothing you would have the most beautiful structure there, with the parterres [a level, decorative part of a formal garden] and the hedges,” says Nova.
Despite its part in British history, Ashby is not open to the public in a conventional way, but made available for a handful of weddings and events.
The Guests have no plans to change that: intensive tourism doesn’t combine with the small adjoining village, and, adds Nova, “the plotting room is very small”.
They want to bring school groups to Ashby, though, to improve access to that famous little room. For their own part, they love the relationship that Ashby has with history.
“The Gunpowder Plot is part of the DNA of the house,” says Nova. “We are simply temporary custodians who have a duty to maintain it for the benefit of future generations.”
In an act of architectural vandalism, in the 1960s, a wing of the house designed by Lutyens was torn down. Now, Ashby is Grade II*-listed, and no such thing would be allowed.
“There’s not a day that goes past where I don’t think how lucky I am to be here,” Nova says. “I get a lot of pleasure in all the unique aspects of the house – even as I walk down the stairs.”