The original mansion and park at Buscot were built between 1779 and 1783 for Edward Loveden Loveden (c.1749–1822) by James Darley at the cost of £20,000. Loveden’s family had acquired land in Buscot some two centuries previously, having purchased the manor of Michael’s Court from Sir Francis Stonor in 1557. Edward Loveden Townsend, who was born in Cirencester, inherited the estate in 1749, when still an infant, at the death of his great-uncle, Edward Loveden, the last direct male heir. In 1772, Townsend (as his uncle’s bequest required) changed his name to Loveden, having by then completed his education at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford.
  
Loveden was an extremely wealthy individual, benefiting, as one biographer put it, ‘from his own father’s estate, inherited in 1787, the Loveden estate, and from three provident marriages’. He served as High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1781–2, as a magistrate in Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, as lieutenant-colonel of the Berkshire militia, and as an independent MP – first for Abingdon, from 1783 to 1796, then for Shaftesbury in Dorset, from 1802 to 1812. He was a co-founder of the Board of Agriculture (now the Royal Agricultural Society), in 1793, and he became its vice-president in 1807.
  
Perhaps his greatest achievement, for which he earned the nickname ‘Old Father Thames’, was to preside over the parliamentary committee of 1793 tasked with improving the Thames Navigation, from Staines, upstream in Berkshire, to Lechlade in Gloucestershire. Loveden was, in the words of Humphrey Household, historian of the Thames & Severn Canal, ‘a very active and purposive commissioner, and a powerful advocate for new cuts or canals which would improve navigation and shorten distances’. He also had a strong vested interest in the route of any proposed new canals, since the tolls he charged for the use of Buscot Lock were amongst the highest on the Thames and afforded him a considerable income. As one of the prime movers behind the Thames & Severn and the Wilts & Berks Canals, he devoted much energy to their planning and finance, though he resigned angrily and in disillusionment in 1812 when it became clear that his private interests were no longer being served.
  
Despite the provident marriages, Loveden spent a great deal on building Buscot and acquiring land. After his death in 1822, papers refer to the debts of the estate and to the fact that much of the additional land acquired between 1786 and 1792 was mortgaged. This continued to be the position as Buscot passed to Loveden’s son, Pryse Pryse, in 1822, to his grandson, Pryse Loveden, in 1849 and to his great-grandson, Sir Pryse Pryse, first baronet, in 1855. The latter’s main interests were in the Pryse estates in Wales, and in 1859 he put the Buscot estate on the market.

In 1773, Edward Loveden married Margaret Pryse, a Welsh heiress with property worth over £1,000 a year, which came to Edward at her death in 1784. He then married an even richer heiress, the daughter of a wealthy London hop merchant, whose death in 1788 left him with an additional £4,500 a year. His third marriage, to Anne Lintall, provided him with a further £400 a year, which continued, even after this marriage ended in a sensational divorce, which (in those days) could only be achieved through a parliamentary private member’s bill (the whole story is told in Lawrence Stone’s Broken Lives: Marital Separation and Divorce in England 1660–1857 published in 1993).

Together with moneys inherited from his uncle, he had a very comfortable gross income of £8,667 a year (about £335,000 by today’s values), though he gross debts of around £54,000 (£2.08 million), some of which were incurred in the building of Buscot Park and the remainder in acquiring further land for the estate.