Founded and run by the Society of Jesus, it offered a Roman Catholic public school education in rural surroundings, while lying, like the neighbouring Eton College, within easy reach of London.

It was therefore for many professional Catholics with school-age children a choice preferable to Stonyhurst College, the longer-standing Jesuit public school in North Lancashire.

The estate was then owned for a period by the Tyle family, and subsequently by John Morley, Francis Kibblewhite, William Christmas and Henry Frederick Thynne (clerk to the Privy Council under Charles II) in the 17th century.

In 1751 the Duke of Roxburghe purchased the land for his eldest son, the Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford (then a boy at Eton College), and renamed it Beaumont in his honour.

Resident at the date of the census were one other priest, three "clerks in minor orders" and a lay brother, 8 servants and 23 schoolboys including one American, one Canadian, one Mexican and two Spaniards; one of the latter was Luís Fernando de Orleans y Borbón, a Spanish royal prince.

Bampton's Captain system was adopted also at Stonyhurst and at sister Jesuit schools in France and Spain, and in 1906 Beaumont was admitted to the Headmasters' Conference.

was one of only two public school headmasters who detected a hoax letter by Humphry Berkeley, then a Cambridge student, purporting to come from a fellow-head H. Rochester Sneath (invited to lead an exorcism, Sinnott requested a packet of salt "capable of being taken up in pinches").

The main drive curves round an open field to a rendered 18th-century mansion known as the White House, most of the ancillary buildings being concealed by trees.

Other outbuildings ran backward from there, including the ambulacrum and tuck shop, but without obtruding unduly on the garden dominated by two specimen cedar trees and a war memorial by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

[citation needed] Behind the war memorial, woodland ran down the edge of the estate, where there was a path leading to Windsor Great Park, much used by the pupils for walks and cross-country runs.

When Pierre de Coubertin visited England in the course of researching the basis of his new Olympic movement, the four schools he looked at were Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Beaumont.

Prior to and during World War II, there were sufficient pupils to divide students into three separate Houses, Heathcote, Eccles and O'Hare, named after three previous Rectors.

Moreover, by the 1960s the atmosphere of the Second Vatican Council was also lending weight to a feeling that the Order ought not to devote so large a part of its resources to the education of the better-off of the First World.

[citation needed] The property is now owned and operated by Principal Hotel Company under the brand name De Vere Beaumont Estate.

[13] On 22 September 2007 cattle at Beaumont Farm were found with foot and mouth disease, in the course of the second outbreak following an escape of contamination from the Pirbright research establishment.