In 1974, Charles, Prince of Wales, accepted the prospect of living on the estate. According to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby (for whom Prince Charles arranged access to royal journals and unpublished family correspondence), he was considering at that time a possible marriage to the Honourable Amanda Knatchbull, granddaughter of his great-uncle, the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma: „In 1974, following his correspondence with Mountbatten on the subject, the prince had tentatively raised the issue of marriage to Amanda with her mother (and godmother). Lady Brabourne. She was sympathetic, but advised to delay the case of her daughter, who had not yet celebrated her seventeenth birthday. Amanda`s paternal great-aunt was Lady Eileen Browne, daughter of the 6th Marquess of Sligo, whose childless marriage to the last Earl Stanhope led to Chevening being designated by law as a potential home for a member of the British royal family.[8] If Amanda became Princess of Wales by marriage, the Prince`s acceptance of Chevening would have a family meaning. But this was not the case, although the prince visited the house several times. In an April 24, 1978 note to his private secretary, Sir David Checketts, Prince Charles remarked: „I know there are advantages, particularly financial, in the Chevening establishment, but I regret to say that I quickly conclude that these are the only advantages.“ In June 1980, Prince Charles wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to give up her Chevening residence (without actually living there). A few weeks later he bought Highgrove in Gloucestershire. According to Dimbleby, Amanda Knatchbull, whose close family members had recently been murdered, had rejected the prince`s marriage proposal,[10] and he would soon begin courting Lady Diana Spencer. [11] Philip Henry Stanhope, 4.

Earl Stanhope, was a gifted amateur landscape architect and architect, half-brother of Lady Hester Stanhope and the legal guardian of Kaspar Hauser. Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl Stanhope, was the driving force behind the founding of the National Portrait Gallery and the Historical Documents Commission: as Viscount Mahon, he was a respected historian of the 19th century and endowed the Stanhope Essay Prize at Oxford. Arthur Stanhope, 6th Earl Stanhope, was a Conservative MP before inheriting and serving as the first Commissioner of Ecclesiastical Domains from 1878 to 1903. His two brothers pursued careers in politics. The Right Honourable Edward Stanhope (Conservative) was a reforming Secretary of State for War (1887-1892), while the 1st Lord Weardale (Liberal) was President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1912-22) and the Save the Children Fund. James Stanhope, 7th Earl Stanhope (also 13th Earl Stanhope) The Earl of Chesterfield was a Conservative politician who served almost continuously from 1924 to 1940 and held ministerial posts from 1936 under Baldwin and Chamberlain. He founded the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Once submitted, applications will be reviewed electronically against our eligibility criteria. All applications deemed ineligible will be removed from the selection process.

The list of the most common errors can be found here. If you make these mistakes in your application form, your application will not be authorized. Please note that it is not possible to modify your application afterwards. Below are examples of the most common mistakes Chevening applicants make in their application form. Due to these errors, applications will be considered ineligible and applicants will not be accepted at the next stage of the competition. Applicants must correctly complete all parts of the pre-eligibility check in order to access the application form. An incorrect answer to any of these questions would result in the applicant not completing the preliminary examination phase of the application. With no children and his only brother killed in the First World War, the last Earl Stanhope in Chevening wanted to create a lasting memorial to a family that had provided politicians from across the political spectrum and no fewer than five members of the Royal Society for two and a half centuries. He therefore drafted the Chevening Estate Act 1959[6] to ensure that the estate was not dissolved after his death, but rather retained an important role as a private residence in public life. Ownership of the property would be transferred to a board of directors, which would maintain it as a furnished country residence for a suitably qualified candidate chosen by the prime minister.