Beyond the Gatehouse E-Book

David Long

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 262

Beschreibung

Beyond the Gatehouse is a lighthearted, witty but factual biographical account of the eccentric lifestyles of the builders and residents of some of England's best-known country houses. Extraordinary buildings require extraordinary people, and over the centuries our historic houses have produced more than their fair share of oddballs. Insulated from the outside world by vast wealth, rolling acres and the social status that a title implies, aristocrats have always been able to amuse themselves – and now us – by pursuing their idiosyncratic interests and manias to the point of eccentricity. David Long lifts the lid on all that's bizarre, implausible, unthinkable and delightfully wacky about our glorious heritage homes and their unusual occupants.

Leseprobe

Other books by David Long

London’s Secret Square Mile

The Hats that Made Britain:A History of the Nation through its Headwear

London Murders: In the Footsteps of the Capital’s Killers

London’s 100 Most Etraordinary Buildings

London’s 100 Strangest Places

London Underground: Architecture, Design and History

Henry Ford: Pocket Giants

Cover illustrations: Zebra (https://unsplash.com/photos/C6oc9k6hwAY); Giant tortoise (iStock.com/CraigRJD); Lyme Hall, Cheshire (iStock.com/Snowshill)

First published 2012

This paperback edition published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© David Long, 2012, 2022

The right of David Long to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7524 7821 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Bedfordshire

Woburn Abbey

Berkshire

Ashdown House

Basildon Park

Cliveden

Buckinghamshire

Dinton Hall

Hartwell House

Stowe

Waddesdon Manor

West Wycombe Park

Cambridgeshire

Kimbolton Castle

Wimpole Hall

Cumbria

Lowther Castle

Derbyshire

Calke Abbey

Chatsworth House

Elvaston Castle

Renishaw Hall

Devon

Castle Drogo

Knightshayes Court

Dorset

Clouds Hill

St Giles House

Essex

Belhus

Champion Lodge

Hedingham Castle

Gloucestershire

Snowshill Manor

Hertfordshire

Ashridge

Hatfield House

Letchworth Hall

Lockleys

North Mymms Park

Tring Park

Kent

Chartwell

Chevening House

Cold Harbour

Down House

Howletts

Knole House

Mount Morris

Sissinghurst

Lancashire

Birchin Bower

Lincolnshire

Gunby Hall

Harlaxton Manor

Middlesex

Bentley Priory

Trent Park

Norfolk

Abbots Hall

Northamptonshire

Deene Park

Easton Neston

Rushton Lodge

Northumberland

Cragside

Nottinghamshire

Bestwood Lodge

Bunny Hall

Clumber Park

Welbeck Abbey

Oxfordshire

Faringdon House

Friar Park

Swinbrook House

Thame Park

Rutland

Exton Park

Shropshire

Attingham Park

Halston Hall

Mawley Hall

Suffolk

Ickworth House

Stoke College

Surrey

Clandon Park

Devil’s Punch Bowl

Painshill Park

Witley Park

Sussex

Batemans

Brightling Park

Petworth House

Warwickshire

Coton House

West Midlands

Tettenhall Towers

Wiltshire

Fonthill Abbey

Worcestershire

Broadway Tower

Yorkshire

Sledmere House

Walton Hall

Note: The majority of the houses described are opened to the public at specified times of year, those owned by the National Trust being marked in the text (NT) and others in the care of English Heritage (EH).

By 1965 the old county of Middlesex – England’s smallest but for Rutland – was largely subsumed into Central London with small portions allotted to Hertfordshire and Surrey.

INTRODUCTION

Lord Monboddo, a judge, believed men were born with tails but that this was concealed by a conspiracy of midwives who cut them off at birth. Sir Francis Galton, using a system no-one but he could understand, spent years compiling a map of the country showing the distribution of its most beautiful inhabitants and the really ugly ones. And as recently as 1976 a retired schoolmaster called Ernest Digweed left £26,000 for the Second Coming which ‘the Public Trustee . . . upon obtaining proof which shall satisfy them of His identity, shall pay to Lord Jesus Christ’.

Ostentatious or absurdly secretive, crazily ambitious, insanely inventive, pathologically reclusive or just faintly ridiculous, there is something irresistible about eccentrics and rarely more so than when it comes to the builders and burrowers, the collectors, hoarders, faddists and strange obsessives who have created, occupied and occasionally lost many of the great country houses which form such an important part of Britain’s cultural inheritance.

Eccentricity is by no means a preserve of the rich, aristocratic and landed, but for those determined to turn their backs on the mainstream, a large fortune and an isolated country estate certainly makes it easier. Insulated by walls of stone and the wealth of oligarchs, such men (and occasionally women) preside over personal fiefdoms and are answerable to no-one. It’s an environment which provides ample scope for eccentricities and idiosyncrasies to thrive, and as can be seen in the following pages many grasped the opportunity with both hands as they set off on their own, peculiar personal odysseys

Among their number one finds visionaries and mad men, builders and destroyers, and collectors who ruined themselves in the process. It was a Spaniard, the Romantic painter Francisco Goya, who insisted ‘fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters’ – but more than 400 years of English eccentricity has also thrown up things of wonder, value and beauty which we can still enjoy today.

David Long, Suffolk, 2022www.davidlong.info

Bedfordshire

WOBURN ABBEY, Woburn

Woburn’s saviour was very much the 13th Duke of Bedford (1917–2002) who, after being disinherited for marrying beneath him, took the courageous step of renting the place from his own trustees in the hope he could earn enough to settle the estate’s enormous death duties.

His grandfather Herbrand, the 11th Duke, was a famously mean-minded and miserable misanthrope who in the words of his eventual successor ‘lived a cold, aloof existence, isolated from the outside world by a mass of servants, sycophants and an eleven-mile wall.’ With major landholdings in central London, and two houses in Belgrave Square which he rarely visited, he famously sold off Covent Garden and put the money into Russian shares which were immediately wiped out by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Herbrand rarely spoke, but that was alright as his duchess was stone deaf. After waiting until she was a pensioner before deciding to learn to fly, she took off at the age of 71 and was never seen again (she’s assumed to have taken a wrong turning instead of flying back home where a servant had helpfully stencilled the word ‘Woburn’ on the roof to guide her in).

Hastings, their only child, was born in a derelict crofter’s cottage while his parents were out shooting, and inherited his fair share of peculiarities from both sides of the family. To these he added a penchant for extreme right-wing politics – the House of Lords eventually passed a motion that ‘the Duke of Bedford no longer be heard’ – and such a preference for parrots over people that his own son described him as the loneliest person he had ever met. For company he also kept a pet spider which he hand-fed roast beef, and ‘incapable of giving or receiving love, utterly self-centred and opinionated,’ when he died it was of a gunshot wound, self-inflicted and almost certainly intentional.

Prior to this, and in order to supplement their own meagre rations, his children were forced to steal food from parrots – mostly chocolates, which the birds adored – and were denied the opportunity to go to school because their father had been bullied at Eton. After marrying a divorcee the future 13th Duke was then cut off without a penny, finding work as rent collector in London’s East End and a reporter on the downmarket Daily Express.

By the time he inherited, aged 36 in 1953, the abbey had been empty for thirteen years and was shockingly run-down. Priceless artworks were stacked around the walls like a warehouse, and those parts which had not already been demolished were riddled with rot.

The duke realised the only way to finance its repair would be to open Woburn to the public, and believing his ancestral possessions were ‘just plain boring’ he looked for new ways to give visitors their money’s worth including a children’s playground, a shooting gallery, an antiques market and a bingo hall.

Fellow dukes looked on in horror, but Bedford revealed himself to be a real showman as well as an entrepreneur. Special weekends were laid on for nudists, thereby guaranteeing yards of newspaper coverage, and recognising that people preferred seeing a living duke to a dead one by Van Dyke, 50 guineas would buy a bed for the night together with what His Grace described as ‘tea in golden teapots and that sort of thing’.

Never one to pass up on free publicity, he twice acted the part of a duke on screen, sold the television rights to his third marriage, appeared in a commercial for shoe polish and even admitted that when he was prosecuted for careless driving, the fact that the police had identified him by his numberplate (DOB 1) will have done nothing to harm Woburn’s takings.

Eventually he handed the place over to his son and retired to Monte Carlo, hardly the usual destination for a duke but then as he himself always said, he was never ‘an old-fashioned grouse-shooting sort’.

Berkshire

ASHDOWN HOUSE, Lambourn, nr Newbury (NT)

Owned by the National Trust but at the time of writing leased to a rock guitarist, the tall and narrow Ashdown House is a romantic place with a romantic history. It was built in the 1660s by William, 1st Lord Craven, for the unrequited love of his life, Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Elizabeth was the sister of Charles I, nicknamed the ‘Winter Queen’ not for her frosty temperament but because she was forced into exile with her husband Frederick V. This followed his defeat by the Habsburg Emperor at the Battle of White Mountain, in November 1620.

In the long run the family were to have their day: a favourite son was to drown but their daughter Sophia was to become the founder of the Hanoverian dynasty, which held sway in Britain from George I in 1714 until the death of Victoria nearly two centuries later. In 1620 their plight was desperate, however, and after barely more than a year on the throne Frederick and Elizabeth found themselves stripped of their ancestral lands and effectively stateless.

Fighting a rearguard action, Frederick eventually established a government-in-exile, basing himself in The Hague although thereafter he seems to have spent more time hunting and taking country walks than actually overseeing the administration. Within ten years he was anyway dead of pestilential fever, and his widow eventually returned home to England where she had the good fortune to find herself under the protection of the devoted and wealthy Lord Craven.

A soldierly type who had fallen in love with her while fighting for her husband, one likes to think his motivations were entirely honourable for although Pepys admitted to being shocked by his bawdy language in other regards the old soldier seems to have been driven by wholly chivalrous impulses. According to legend he decided to build Ashdown House after hearing that the deposed queen was ‘longing to live in quiet’, presumably choosing a style not unlike a typically tall, narrow Dutch townhouse in the belief that this would enable Her Majesty to live in surroundings at once comfortable and quietly familiar.

He furnished it beautifully too, including one painting by Sir Peter Lely (sadly now sold) entitled An Allegory of Love that is said to represent the lovelorn Lord Craven and the object of his adoration. It is also believed that he chose this spot high on the rolling, windswept Berkshire Downs as a safe refuge from plague-hit London.

Sadly, true or not, it was a gambit which in the end failed to matter. While Lord Craven enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that he was providing for his love’s every wish, while staying at his London home in Drury Lane, Elizabeth of Bohemia contracted an infection and died before Ashdown House was ready to receive her. Craven was heartbroken, and though he lived to be ninety years old he never married, preferring to live in seclusion surrounded by Elizabeth’s paintings and papers and other personal effects.

Successive generations of Cravens were to remain at Ashdown until the mid-1950s when it was handed to the National Trust by the 7th Countess. Since then much work has been carried out to make good the fabric which took a bruising during a period of military occupation in the war, and then again following a fire which gutted it in 1984. Now restored and tenanted, limited public access to the house and grounds is possible at certain times of the year.

BASILDON PARK, Lower Basildon, nr Reading (NT)

Over the years any number of British buildings have gone missing. In 1930 Henry Ford found a 350-year-old house he liked in the Cotswolds and had it shipped back home to Michigan. In the 1960s London Bridge followed it across the Atlantic to be rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. And in 2007 London’s old Baltic Exchange – a Grade II listed beauty blown up by the IRA and then swept away to make room for the Gherkin – was snapped up by someone wishing to reassemble it in Estonia.

It seems incredible now, but once upon a time eighteenth-century Basildon Park looked like it might go the same way. In 1771 the estate had been purchased by Sir Francis Sykes Bt, who having made a fortune as an Indian ‘nabob’, planned to spend most of it building a new house for himself. Unfortunately almost the day work on it began he lost the equivalent of £14 million when shares in the East India Company crashed. Then two years later was forced to hand back another chunk of cash following allegations of corruption during his time in India.

By the time he died in 1804 most of the money was long gone and, while the house was completed, the principal rooms were bare and unfurnished. The 2nd Baronet then survived his father by a matter of weeks, leaving a heavily mortgaged Basildon to a five-year-old, who by the age of fourteen was himself spending enormous sums of borrowed money entertaining his new best friend, the notoriously profligate Prince Regent.

In 1829 the estate was back on the market, but failed to sell because this latest Sir Francis refused to consider anything less than £100,000 (approximately £80 million today). Between times his family solved their immediate money worries by renting the house out and moving somewhere cheaper, and it was during this period that Lady Sykes had an ill-judged affair with a friend of Charles Dickens. Not unreasonably Sir Francis objected, but in so doing caused such a scandal that the author took revenge by appropriating his name for the odious ‘Bill Sikes’ in Oliver Twist.

By 1838 Sir Francis had been persuaded to accept £93,000 from James Morrison, a successful Hampshire merchant whose collections included not only English paintings and continental old masters but other estates in Kent, Wiltshire, Yorkshire and Scotland. He could certainly afford another one and Basildon Park – at least until 1916, when it was turned over to the Army – now entered something of a golden period.

By 1920 Morrison’s grandson was head of the family. Injured at the Somme and awarded the DSO, he spent a time improving the estate but rarely stayed except for lavish shooting parties. Eventually his money ran out too – married three times, he liked to live well – and in 1928 he sold up to a neighbour. Unfortunately the neighbour wanted the land more than the house, and after stripping out a few choice fireplaces and door surrounds, Basildon Park was passed on to one George Ferdinando.

Ferdinando immediately advertised Basildon Park for sale at $1,000,000, the price to include the cost of dismantling it and shipping the parts across Atlantic where it could be reassembled for ‘any patriotic American wishing to benefit his native state by presenting this imposing building . . . ready for occupation as a private residence, museum, college building or public library.’

The Great Depression meant buyers were hard to come by, and once a caretaker helped himself to lead from the roof the house began badly to deteriorate. Returning home Ferdinando briefly lived in one corner of what was now a leaky ruin, and perhaps in the belief that he was rescuing them, sold many of the more vulnerable fixtures and fittings to New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Thereafter Basildon’s second salvation had to wait until another period of military occupation (1939–45) after which it was sold for the final time. By chance the buyers were the son and daughter-in-law of the neighbour who had acquired the land in 1928, the 2nd Lord Iliffe and his wife lovingly returning Basildon Park to its former glory and then presenting it to the National Trust.

CLIVEDEN, nr Taplow (NT)

Cliveden was created for one duke, let to another, rebuilt by a third, and bought by a fourth, yet to most these days the best-known association is with the Astors and the names of its illustrious ducal quartet –Buckingham, Gloucester, Sutherland and Westminster – are all but buried in its past.

When he took on the estate from his widowed mother-in-law, the 1st Duke of Westminster already had a seat at Eaton Hall in Cheshire but wanted money to support his growing charitable commitments. William Waldorf Astor had money ($175 million from his father) but needed a seat and in 1873 found what he wanted in Cliveden, for which he paid $1.2 million.

For an American as hell-bent as Astor on acquiring the trappings and titles of an English aristocrat, Cliveden was a catch. Designed by Sir Charles Barry (architect of the Houses of Parliament) it was built on the spot where ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed, high above what for many is the very loveliest stretch of the River Thames.

The price included most of the contents too, although not the valuable paintings – which were returned when His Grace realised these had been left behind – and not the 200-year-old visitors’ book, which Astor nevertheless refused to hand back despite repeated requests to do so.

He then spent an incredible £6,000,000 fixing the place up, acquiring antique wainscoting from Madame de Pompadour’s Château d’Asnières, a fountain and a balustrade from the Villa Borghese, and various old Roman sarcophagi and statuary which were placed around the grounds. Astor also built tall walls around the park to stop members of the public boating on his lake, hence the joke locally that his name was really ‘Walled-Orf”.

It was his son, another Waldorf, who really put Cliveden on the map though – he and his teetotal bride Nancy, the first woman to sit in the Commons, gathering together a group of influential individuals known as the ‘Cliveden Set’. Accused of being pro-Nazi, most were really just supporters of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement movement although the arrival of the odious Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley – who brought a petrol can full of dry martini to jolly up the weekend – did little to quell the rumours.

Cliveden’s second brush with scandal – and one can only imagine what Christian Scientist Nancy might have made of it – hit the headlines in 1963. With all the right ingredients – call girls, glamour, aristocracy and espionage –when the Minister for War, John Profumo, admitted lying to Parliament, Macmillan’s government was doomed. Having an affair was bad for a married cabinet minister; worse still Profumo shared his mistress with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, assistant Russian military attaché and almost certainly a spy.

By this time Cliveden had been gifted to the nation and, when the 3rd Viscount Astor died five years later, the National Trust moved in, restoring its peerless setting and giving the house a new lease of life as a fine hotel. The swimming pool where Profumo met Christine Keeler met is still in use, but there is as yet no sign of the duke’s visitors’ book.

Buckinghamshire

DINTON HALL, Dinton

A large, gabled sixteenth-century brick house built by William Warham (1450–1532) – variously Master of the Rolls, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury – in 1617 Dinton Hall came into the possession of the roundhead, lawyer and regicide Simon Mayne, although today its strongest association is with John Bigg, the so-called Dinton Hermit.

Bigg served as a clerk to Mayne, and saw him through an exceptionally difficult period following the Restoration. Along with the other prominent Parliamentarians who had signed the King’s death warrant, Mayne was hunted down by an understandably aggrieved Charles II who was keen to avenge his father’s execution.

Mayne foolishly tried to hide away at Dinton, surely the first place anyone would look, and on being discovered was dragged back to London, and locked in the Tower where he fell ill – too ill to walk to the scaffold – and died. Bigg took the news badly, moving out of the hall and into a nearby cave where he settled down to spend the rest of his life.

Today such behaviour would have earned a diagnosis of clinical depression, but in seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire it saw Bigg recast as a local celebrity. Though not without means, Bigg chose to live very simply, refusing to beg for alms but happy to accept the charity of villagers and visitors who fed and watered him for the next thirty-five years.

Once handsome, he very soon lost his youthful appearance, something not helped by his choice of apparel which included a peculiar, twin-peaked hooded cape and a succession of leather bottles which he hung from his waist to store the milk, strong ale and small beer which he received from local benefactors.

As time went by this singular appearance was exaggerated by his habit of making and mending his own clothes. Living in a cave, wear and tear was considerable, and as Bigg continued to sew patch onto patch onto patch, his garments – often as many as twelve layers thick – came to resemble little more than a heaps of scraps thrown together.

Visitors to his cave were encouraged to bring any suitable scraps with them when they called, Biggs performing a similar trick with his shoes which were soon well over six inches wide with new pieces of leather being nailed on each time an older piece wore through. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, none of the clothes has survived, but since 2003 a pair of shoes has been available for inspection at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, each one thought to comprise as many as 1,000 pieces of leather.

HARTWELL HOUSE, Hartwell, nr Aylesbury (NT)

Another National Trust property run as an hotel, the Hartwell estate is mentioned in Domesday – it was owned by the bastard son of William the Bastard – although the present house is largely of the seventeenth century.

A number of historical figures are connected to the Hampden and Lee families which owned it from about 1650 until the 1930s, including the American Civil War general, Robert E. Lee, and the founder of the Royal Meteorological Society which held its inaugural meeting in the library in 1850. The most interesting resident was merely a tenant, however – the exiled King Louis XVIII of France who leased it from 1809–14.

As befits a Bourbon, Louis attempted to live in the style to which any king would have been accustomed, arriving with around 100 attendants, courtiers and protégés and paying £500 per annum rent.

Unfortunately Louis was broke, so broke the British taxpayer was already bailing him out, and in truth Hartwell was way too small. Partitions had hastily to be erected to divide state apartments into smaller, more private ones, and all over the estate various outbuildings and animal shelters were turned over to individuals who before the revolution occupied some of the most splendid palaces in France. (The royal chickens were at the same time kept on the roof, although this was probably because His Majesty wished to keep an eye on the eggs and not because their coops had been lent to distressed nobles.)

Hartwell’s owner, Sir George Lee Bt, seemed not to mind what was going on, instead remaining philosophical and admitting he was on the whole ‘satisfied with the remuneration of the British government.’ Despite the death of his queen in 1810 Louis seems to have managed to keep his spirits up too, although his brother was reportedly prone to deep depressions. It may have helped that Louis was able to walk in the grounds with his friend Gustav IV, formerly of Sweden, the two of them able to share the lonely experience of being deposed, exiled and indigent, a writer in Bell’s Weekly Messenger noting ‘the rare and not unaffecting sight of two ex-kings promenading the groves together, and ministering, apparently, to each other, condolence and consolation.’

English visitors were rare, and on the whole the French kept themselves to themselves, licking their wounds and waiting for news that Napoleon had come a cropper so they could return home. Occasionally, to the delight of the people of Berkhamsted, Louis would stop in the town en route to London and was said to have struck up a friendship with the landlord’s daughter at the King’s Arms. She later visited him in Paris, but afterwards wrote to a newspaper insisting that the King’s Arms at Berkhamsted were the only king’s arms into which she had fallen.

STOWE, nr Buckingham (NT)

Home to conceivably the best situated school in the country if not the best per se, the house at Stowe may be only rarely opened to the public but for much of the year the grounds are accessible – and for many they are the best thing about the place.

With more follies than any other landscape garden – nearly thirty-five of them at the last count, a good proportion of which are temples – Stowe was the creation of the 1st Viscount Cobham, the aptly named Sir Richard Temple (1669–1749), a leading Whig politician who distinguished himself during the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns in the War of the Spanish Succession.

As a pun on the name, his motto was Templa Quam Dilecta – ‘HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THY TEMPLES’ – something he and his descendants took to heart at Stowe where they employed many of the leading architects and landscape designers of the period.

The latter included Charles Bridgeman, the inventor of the ha-ha; Capability Brown, obviously; Humphrey Repton; William Kent and J.C. Loudon. When it came to architects the obvious choice was a fellow soldier, Sir John Vanbrugh, and when he died Giacomo Leoni and James Gibbs were brought in to continue beautifying the estate.

Visitors came from far and wide to see the results, including the aforementioned exiles, Louis XVIII and Gustav IV; also the Prince of Wales, Christian VII of Denmark, and two future Tsars – Alexander and Nicholas I. One wonders, however, how many of them understood the political subtext to the gardens, or indeed realised that their creator was interested in far more than simply providing somewhere beautiful for him and his guests to enjoy.

The Temple of Modern Virtue, for example, was deliberately left a ruin as a comment on what Lord Cobham saw as the ruinous policies associated with the ministry of the despised Sir Robert Walpole. Unfortunately it has since disappeared, but the complementary Temple of Ancient Virtues still stands and was designed around the same time to celebrate the many admirable qualities that Cobham thought were under threat. A third temple by William Kent, an elegant stone curve dedicated to ‘British Worthies’, contains the busts of those whom Cobham felt conformed to his own world view, including the writer Alexander Pope who was also strongly opposed to Prime Minister Walpole.

If all this makes Cobham sound a tad obsessive, not to say slightly vindictive, then consider this story of what happened to a couple of young poachers caught on the estate in 1748. Among landowners Cobham was known to come down hard on this kind of thing, so when the wives of the men heard that they had been caught going after his deer, both of them presented themselves at the big house and respectfully asked for an audience.

A little surprisingly they were received with some warmth, before being ushered into the nobleman’s presence. After making their appeal, both were assured by Lord Cobham – now an old man of eighty – that of course the men would be returned to their wives and children, and that he would see to it personally that they were not kept waiting long.

He kept his promise too, but neglected to mention that the two men would be returned in burial shrouds as they had already been hauled off to the courthouse in Buckingham. Following a brief hearing both had been ‘drawn through the town streets to a neighbouring common, and there done to death amid the yelling of an execution mob that had gathered to feast its eyes on the sight of their agony’.

Locally there are still those who maintain that the vicious viscount went on to commemorate the encounter by erecting statues of the two dead men in his park, each one supporting a dead deer. This could well be true – as a politician he had strongly supported the introduction of the notorious Black Acts which dramatically increased the number of capital offences – but happily (if they existed) these grisly memorials have long since disappeared.

WADDESDON MANOR, Waddesdon, nr Aylesbury (NT)

A fairytale neo-Renaissance-style château, Waddesdon was conceived in 1874 by the lonely and prematurely widowed Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, a member of the famous banking dynasty who was looking for somewhere to house his extensive collections of old master drawings, important French royal furniture, Sèvres porcelain, Beauvais tapestries, Savonnerie carpets and – more curiously – theatrical costumes.

In France Baron James de Rothschild had chosen an English architect so here in England it was perhaps only to be expected that Baron Ferdinand should plump for a Frenchman. He chose the exotically named Gabriel-Hippolyte Alexandre Destailleur, and for its setting a once-bare hillside rising to around 600ft above sea level.

Le Baron was out hunting when he first laid eyes on the unpromising, misshapen cone of Lodge Hill, a place where, in his own words, ‘there was not a bush to be seen, nor was there a bird to be heard.’ Making the owner an offer he could not refuse, he set about levelling the summit (in the manner of a giant soft-boiled egg) before planting the resulting plateau with trees and rare shrubs which he acquired in immense numbers.

Some of these came from other estates, such as Woburn Abbey and Claydon; others Rothschild collected himself from as far afield as Algiers. The total may not have been quite the 1,000,000 trees of legend, but nearly a century and a half later the effect is undeniably magnificent and a lasting tribute to its creator’s botanical interests and knowledge of horticulture.

For the house Destailleur chose to copy stylistic elements from the royal Château de Chambord, although with the leitmotif very definitely the last word in luxury – the windows in the staircase towers were glazed unlike the sixteenth-century originals. Rothschild similarly asked for all the eighteenth-century chandeliers to be converted to run on electric power, such a novelty at the time that Queen Victoria is said to have spent more than ten minutes flicking a switch from on to off and back again.