The original
manor and area known as Broadlands belonged to
Romsey Abbey since before the
Norman Conquest. In 1547, after the
dissolution of the monasteries, Broadlands was sold to Sir Francis Fleming. His granddaughter married Edward St Barbe, and the manor remained the property of the St Barbe family for the next 117 years.
Sir John St Barbe, 1st Baronet () made many improvements to the property but died without children, bequeathing his estate to his cousin
Humphrey Sydenham of
Combe, Dulverton. In the chancel of
Ashington Church, Somerset, is a monument of grey and white marble, inscribed: Having been ruined by the 18th-century
South Sea Bubble, Sydenham sold Broadlands in 1736, with its Tudor and Jacobean manor house, to
Henry Temple, 1st Viscount Palmerston, for £26,500. The Viscount began the deformalisation of the gardens between the river and the house and produced the broad-lands, a "gentle descent to the river". In 1767, a major architectural "transformation" of the house and garden was begun by
Capability Brown, the celebrated architect and landscape designer, and completed by the architect
Henry Holland, which made Broadlands the
Palladian-style country house seen today.
Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston had requested that Brown go there and seize upon the "capabilities" of the earlier manor house. Between 1767 and 1780,
William Kent's earlier "deformalising work" was completed, as well as further landscaping, planting, clearing and riverside work. Broadlands was the country estate of the 19th-century British prime minister
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston. After his death, the estate was inherited by his step-son,
William Cowper-Temple, 1st Baron Mount Temple (1811–1888). A devout Christian, he held public prayer meetings in the grounds and also banned all blood-sports on the property. On his death, the estate passed to his nephew,
Evelyn Ashley (1836-1907), a younger son of
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885) and Lord Mount Temple's sister Lady Emily Cowper (1810-1872). Subsequently, Broadlands passed to Evelyn Ashley's son
Wilfrid Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple, who died in 1939 and left it to his daughter
Edwina Ashley, the wife of
Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Elizabeth II (then Princess Elizabeth) and
Prince Philip spent their honeymoon at Broadlands in November 1947; the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, whose home Broadlands was at the time, was Philip's uncle. In 1981, the newly married
Prince (later Charles III) and
Princess of Wales also spent the first three days of their
honeymoon at Broadlands, travelling to the estate by train from
London Waterloo. ==The present==