The house as he found it was of red brick and Palladian in style. With ideas of turning it into a neoclassical palazzo, Hope had the now unfashionable bricks stuccoed, and employed Chequers architect William Atkinson to erect Italianate towers, orangeries and new entrance wings. He filled both house and gardens with sculptures made from Coade stone. His rooms became heavy with Greek vases and antiquities from his travels, arranged over Regency furniture of his own design. It was in Deepdene’s landscapes, however, that Anastasius haunted Hope most. At the end of the novel, Anastasius is devastated by the death of his son. In 1817, Hope and his wife experienced a similar tragedy: their young son Charles died from a fever. Heartbroken, Hope built for him the mausoleum at Deepdene. When Thomas died in 1831, his body was, as requested, “deposited in the quietest manner next to that of my ever lamented son Charles”.

The elder of Thomas’s surviving sons, Henry, was a “simple good boy”, who had studied at Eton and, fleetingly, at Cambridge. At Deepdene, he furthered his father’s work, extending the house to form what his friend Disraeli called “a perfect Italian palace, full of balconies adorned with busts”. More than anyone else, Disraeli idolised Byron, so one can imagine his delight on discovering that Deepdene was the home of the man who gave the world Anastasius. Henry expanded its landscapes, purchasing the nearby manor of Brockham, and Betchworth Castle, which he dismantled to form a folly. Working together as a whole, the various components of Deepdene now conformed handsomely to the fashion for the picturesque. Henry had become a great landowner. The only thing he lacked was a peerage.

Before he died, Henry’s father had determined to secure peerages for himself and his son. However, for all Deepdene’s grandeur, as an Amsterdam-born scion of a banking family, Thomas was by no means a shoo-in for such an honour. Since the late 18th century, peerages had been awarded increasingly for services which benefited the public good. One of the characters in Coningsby expresses a familiar view, that it was “monstrous” that men should be peers of places they had never been to, or that the few should possess such privilege of power. Dominated by the landed classes, the House of Lords had almost as much authority as the Commons. But, argued Coningsby, a “preponderance of aristocratic principle” provides stability in politics. The Lords, as Disraeli knew, was a necessity that needed reforming, but acceptance to a peerage was not always as straightforward as one might have imagined. Certainly the Hopes faced a challenge. It is said that an approach was made on Thomas Hope’s behalf to the Duke of Wellington with an offer of £10,000 in exchange for a peerage. It was rejected. With his father’s help, Henry became MP for the rotten borough of East Looe, but failed to obtain a peerage from Robert Peel.

Young England was not a particularly auspicious beginning either for Disraeli or for Henry Hope. Just as the movement was winding down in 1846, Disraeli, championing the landed interest, found himself at the centre of the Tory party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws. Henry, meanwhile, managed to secure the Tory seat for the City of Gloucester, which is where he made Disraeli’s acquaintance, but lost it in 1852. The failure of the two Hopes to achieve the honours they desired might have confirmed what Disraeli believed — that a landowner was a landowner, regardless of his class. For all the Hopes’ money, their power was negligible. A peerage, besides, hardly guaranteed a landowner security, as events at Deepdene would show.