 In 1829, the house was sold for £80,000 to John Gladstone, a Scottish merchant from Liverpool whose family (originally called Gledstanes) had been farmers in Biggar, before becoming wine merchants in Leith in the years following 1745.John Gladstone built up a business empire in property and international trade that by the 1820s had made him extremely wealthy.Through his estates in the West Indies, by the end of plantation slavery in the British colonies in 1833 Gladstone was one of Britain's biggest owners of enslaved people.