Various additions and alterations were made to the house over the years and the estate remained in the ownership of the Bankes family from the 17th to the late 20th century.

Leased to those who found favour with the monarch, lessees included the de Lacys, Earls of Lincoln, who held it in addition to estates at Shapwick and Blandford Forum.

[4] Sir John was born in Cumberland, but through his extensive legal works had acquired sufficient funds to purchase the Corfe estate.

During the Civil War, the Bankes family remained loyal to the crown; Sir John died at Oxford in December 1644, the King having retired there for the winter.

Left to fend for herself during two sieges, his wife Mary Bankes defended Corfe Castle, but it eventually fell to the Parliamentary forces.

John Bankes the Elder regained the property in 1693, and with his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Henry Parker of Honington Hall, completed most of his father's original development plan.

In 1772 the house passed to his second son Henry who remodelled it, built a servants' wing, and enclosed the parkland for better agricultural management.

He demolished the hamlet of Kingston which was situated adjacent to the 16th-century Keeper's Lodge, diverted the Blandford road (now the B3082) and converted former agricultural land to parkland.

[1] Bankes entertained his friends at the house, including William Pitt the Younger and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.

He travelled extensively in the Middle East and Asia, amassing the world's largest individual collection of Ancient Egyptian antiques.

His art collection was left at Kingston Lacy, where his notes and drawings remained for many years in a cabinet, unpublished and forgotten.

During the Second World War an extensive military encampment was established in the south-east quarter of the park, which was only restored after the National Trust took ownership.

[2] Ralph Bankes died in 1981 and the Kingston Lacy estate, including 12 working farms, and Corfe Castle were bequeathed to the National Trust.

Rather than rebuild Corfe Castle, the eldest son Ralph Bankes built a house on their other Dorset estate near Wimborne Minster.

The house is entered from the north through a later mid-19th-century porte-cochère, while to the south there is a stone-flagged terrace with balustrade extending the full width of the building, and broad shallow steps leading down to the lawns.

Other artworks include The Judgement of Solomon by Sebastiano del Piombo and works by Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Titian and Jan Brueghel the Younger.

The state bedroom is extremely ornate and has housed such important guests as Kaiser Wilhelm II who stayed with the family for a week in 1907.

[13] The land surrounding Kingston Lacy was registered as being of special historic interest in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens in 1986, it being "parkland developed in the seventeenth, late eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, together with late nineteenth-century formal gardens and informal pleasure grounds."

The site slopes gently towards the southwest and includes the summit of the Iron Age hillfort of Badbury Rings towards its northwest extremity, and within the estate is part of the Roman road from Dorchester to Old Sarum.