Following his return from ambassadorial duties in Versailles, Ralph Montagu commissioned the building of a suite of Staterooms in the french style to show the English Court the design and granduer of their French counterparts.

The Staterooms are in the facade added to the north of the original monastic Great Hall. They consist of two projecting pavilions connected by five Staterooms on the first floor. Each Pavilion was designed to contain a suite of rooms with reception rooms on the ground floor and bedrooms on the first floor . There was one Pavilion for 'him' and one Pavilion for 'her'.

The North facade of Boughton House has led to it gaining the sobriquet of 'The English Versailles'. The french features of the architecture include the mansard roof, the rustication of the stonework, the fluted doric pilasters columns on the first floor and the sash windows. Internally, the Staterooms are enfilade, with the first example of parquet de Versailles seen in England. Within the archives there are many fine references to the craftsmen and their invoices, but nowhere is there a record of the architect - it was probably Ralph himself.

When King William III arrived at Boughton on October 23rd 1695 the State Rooms, or ‘Great Apartment’ were barely ready for entertaining the Monarch. The building works, which would have embraced the East Pavilion to match those of the Pavilion rooms on the west, remained incomplete and it is doubtful how many of the ceilings had been painted. Even the State Bed was somewhat cobbled together from an old French frame, rather than constructed new and in the latest fashion as Ralph would have preferred; time, as so often with big building projects, had run out.

Nevertheless the effect must have been spectacular and, three hundred years on, they remain, perhaps, the most complete survival in an English country house of a series of rooms specially prescribed for the very grandest entertaining. The visitor has a direct view along the whole sequence, the enfilade, which begins with the Dining Room; followed by the Withdrawing Room; then the most important of all - The State Bed Chamber; and finally a further, more private, sitting room. Now, as then, they are rooms of formal parade, barely altered with only the minimal provision of electric lighting in the last century.

The enfilade

After his visit King William III commissioned a version of the staterooms for his Hampton Court Palace.

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