The Hidden Treasures Of Britain's Grandest Country Houses | All Episodes | Real Royalty

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things royal history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history you've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount for history hit tv make sure you check out the details in the video description and use the code real royalty all one word when you sign up now on with the show [Music] this time on treasure houses of britain the settles of burley collectors on a grand scale this is actually a wedding present from cosmo de medici and in to 1683-4 when they went to florence they stayed with the grand duke and this was this fantastic present that he gave to them the rooms they designed to entertain a queen who never came but there are fantastic advantages too and it's you couldn't ask for a more special place to to raise a family and how to keep alive england's greatest elizabethan house it's such an incredible time capsule in many ways and we're very very lucky that it's to remain so complete with all the images but the real problem that we face is trying to make it relevant to people today [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] like venice a favorite city for those on the grand tour burley wears two faces its mask is the elizabethan house commissioned by william cecil the first lord burley in the early 1500s but inside it's a dual box of pieces collected by his successors as they toured europe in the following 200 years the cecils of burley just couldn't stop collecting and those who didn't collect commissioned paintings and murals and tapestries ceilings and furniture to make this one of the real treasure houses of britain so yes [Music] burley is the creation of sir william cecil principal secretary and lord treasurer to queen elizabeth the first it took 32 years to build in the lincolnshire countryside just outside the town of stamford cecil himself was the architect though howie found time to supervise the masons who worked here while being elizabeth's right-hand man no one knows by all accounts cecil ennobled by elizabeth as the first lord burley in 1571 was a remarkable man called the queen's greatest gravest and most esteemed counsellor but it was his heirs the earls of exeter who transformed burley from the late 17th century and that transformation started with the fifth earl whose tour of europe brought this house treasures which survived to this day [Music] john burleigh the fifth girl made at least four visits to france and italy he collected not only art but artists and paid them to redecorate the house he'd inherited amongst them was antonio verio the baroque painter who'd spent 10 years decorating windsor castle at burley vario gave the earl this a vision of hell [Music] admittedly a baroque vision but nevertheless frightening especially when it was lit by candlelight as it must have been when verio finished painting it at the end of the 17th century [Music] but from hell the fifth earl's guests ascended into heaven verio's work is part of our national heritage you can see it at windsor hampton court and chatsworth but the heaven room at burley is written to be his masterpiece [Music] is this what heaven is really like i wonder full of wine and debauchery and fat bottomed gods and goddesses cavorting around together on clouds and amidst the clouds these fearsome looking creatures serpents centaurs there's a lion that's being clumped to death i see and then from the clouds come tumbling all these cherubs who are trying to bring back bad men to earth it all looks full of kind of brio and energy but there's some interesting little there there's a an old man looking towards a god with a with a sickle but the other side of that old man is a young one looking down i guess towards his youth the old ones looking of course towards death and this place that they're all going to end up in but the more you look the more you see [Music] and here's verio sitting serenely in the forge of the one-eyed cyclops it's a reminder how he and his patrons were in love with the whole idea of the ancient world gods and goddesses nymphs and cherubs myths and legends [Music] [Music] so [Music] verio's masterpiece was cleaned 10 years ago but very cleverly they left a piece to remind us of what it used to look like there the grime of 300 years here the restoration of today when the fifth girl died he left behind two things a whole series of unfinished staterooms and enormous debts the debts were settled but the room stayed like that for another 50 years it was the ninth earl who decided to complete the work his great-grandfather had started and they also had something in common a love of travel the ninth earl brownlow was a modern man who loved italy best though he wanted to move with the times he also wanted to retain the fifth earl's doors and door cases and moldings and baroque ceilings [Music] so he married them to the modern neoclassical style which appeared in england in the 1760s and produced something unique [Music] after 50 years of lying empty and unloved the state rooms were brought to life and named after the king the ninth earl clearly felt that at last burley had a suite of rooms suitable for showing off all the treasures he'd collected on his european tours [Music] for grandeur the interior now matched the exterior the pagoda room tells the story of succession in this remarkable family from sir william's long association with elizabeth the first to the family link with the dukes of devonshire through marriage to the montagues the fifth earl the great traveller and the ninth earl who followed in his footsteps and whose study this was and there must be eventually a portrait of the 20th and 21st century custodians of burley for today this house is in the loving care of sir william cecil's descendant miranda rock and her husband orlando [Music] so [Music] well this is the fourth george room it's one of the state rooms that was left unfurnished but isn't it opulent it is extraordinary i mean here we are in lincoln yet it's a recreation of a sort of italian palazzo isn't it with old masters towering up to the ceilings and gods distorting themselves on the ceilings it's rather a surreal contrast well then i einstein of course absolutely absolutely loved italy didn't he he did he was really really obsessed with all things to tell him he inherited that disease from the fifth earl and so in the um in the 18th century he tried to finish off these rooms which had been left undone by the incredible extravagance of the fifa um and he didn't do a bad job actually he was incredibly respectful of his ancestors taste um and indeed a lot of the things which we have here are a mixture of the two earl's tastes put together and they work incredibly well together you've brought me here what is this i have well this is one of my favorite things because both the ninth and the fifth fell were obsessed with all things that were marble and this is actually a wedding present from cosmo de medici um the cosmic manager had travelled to england with the earl of devonshire of chatsworth and the fifth house wife was the daughter of the isle of denture later first duke and in 1683 to four when they went to florence they stayed with the grand duke and this was this fantastic present that he gave to them as a wedding which is incredible actually and it was the start of many gifts between the two of them in fact the fifth earl of actually sent um the grand duke of carriage which came from went from england as well but it has this incredibly beautiful technique of pietro jorah which is specimen hearthstone all in late to create wonderful still lives of birds on branches so what i love in this architectural arrangement is you've got these fantastic figures of the four seasons looking down on on this incredible exuberance and even down here in the central panel of the door you've got this lapis lazily cup with pomegranates and exotic fruits but it's not just reserved for the outside because the inside has got this incredible fitted interior which is full of perspective and what is that well it's almost like a stage set like a theater set with these illusionistic partry flaws solomonic columns your eye is drawn into it and it becomes the centerpiece for this whole arrangement so i mean it's an absolute masterpiece and i think what's so amusing about this is that one forgets rather like all the italian pictures in the cabinet this was contemporary art in the 17th century you know they were very very cutting edge you forget it don't you yeah it's very easy yeah okay and i think what's i mean now we move into um a table that was made pretty much at the same date as the house i mean this is a late 16th century augsburg south german table with this fantastically fantastic sort of strapwork market all over and wonderful colors here but um this is a later introduction it's a particularly interesting table for me because it's got this very very architectural base down below and it's very like a description that um of a holbein table that was uh in william beckford sale in 1822 and i've been trying to we we definitely bought some things for the house in the 1822 sale and i've been trying to pin this one down so what you have is this absolutely fantastic incredibly complicated marquetry design with these wonderful strapwork motifs and these flowers and fruits and green stained leaves and these were all taken from engravings that were published and would have been the source not only for the market chief at this table but also for buildings and indeed law burley would have used exactly the same engravings when he was designing the architecture of the house here so um it's rather suitable it should be here actually i love this that's a beautiful thing well that's allspurge as well actually that's a century later that's late 17th century and that has this incredible filigree work of repuce silver and silver and and these rather beautiful solomonic columns which are look as though they're malachite almost but they're green-stained horn and ivory with them with this rather beautiful mottled torch shelf that looks like marble again so it says of exotic materials used to create a fantastic jewel-like object [Music] that's the point about these great houses they kept records and compiled inventories one from 1688 shows a set of blank dashing figures on the mantelpiece in the bow room and they are there still to that extent burley is timeless [Music] it is one of the great joys of this place that so many treasures survive the story of england's great houses is often one of acquisition in one century disposal in another but across the centuries the cecils managed to avoid having to sell paintings or furniture or land to keep burley alive this is your favorite piece this whole house rather ironically it's by no means the most valuable but it's something that that really hits a call with me um i mean of course it's got the sissel lion on it and this rather wonderful drilled mane here but it's um it summarizes the taste of the of the ninth early minute he was obsessed with marbles and um he brought endless specimen marbles back which he had fitted in a desk which he wrote inscriptions of where he found them and the dates of them and and the type and this has a rather wonderful handwritten um label in his hand which says that this was dug up in the tiber in the 1730s um and this is a great treasure of antiquity now one has to be slightly careful because of course there were the wonderful cicerone like um james bars and thomas jenkins who were spent um a long time selling wonderful things and not quite such wonderful things to english grand tourists and lords in the 18th century and and this was something which um buyers i think sold to the ninth earl at a vast fortune and there's some debate as to whether it's it is roman or whether it is a um a sort of cavacheppi late 18th century kind of um copy in a very good antique taste but i love it well yes a poor lion he's cowering he looks as though he's been given such a beating and been pushed away somewhere he looks very very really his hackles are up isn't he's definitely on the defense he's probably i mean maybe it's a gladiatorial thing that was sort of um after a great fight in the coliseum it was then discarded the title at some other time but it somehow is resonable with antiquity and everything about italy that that he loves so this is my thing i'd take with me so if there's a fire this would be the place this would be a room and this would be the object and it would be in your back pocket and off you'd go it probably would be although ironically it would probably survive the fire rather well being being marbled so i should be focusing on something else but i love it [Music] what would william cecil the first lord burley make of the fifth and ninth earl's alterations to the house he created and what would he say to the daughter of the sixth marquess lady victoria and her husband simon lethem who took on the running of burley in the 1980s certainly they've done a good job now that responsibility has passed to their daughter miranda [Music] the ninth cell would recognize this if he came back today wouldn't it's got everything that he ever had around him he would actually i think he'd be amused by it as well we have um his desk here which actually my my husband spotted in the estate office about a year ago it's being used by the clerk works and tiles and marbles after they're dropped off against it horror that's really important it's probably the night cells let's get it back in the house yes how did you think why did you think it was the ninth house it's the right date it's the right sort of sort of piece of furniture that he would have had that's important enough that um it would have been a commission by him so it makes perfect sense so it's useful to have someone like orlando to keep everyone right around here it sounds to me yes and and uh and these portraits these portraits are so special aren't they everything's special in this house but these particularly sing out yes this this really this wall tells the story i think there you have right in the middle this beautiful gearheart's portrait of elizabeth the first not in her first flush of youth but looking incredibly regal so much jewelry i was thinking that enormous ruby in her hair like a tomato and then and then above her of course william sissel lord treasure and his robes of state um was her secretary and this is his house the house he built to establish his family is an important um line of of the aristocracy and the son who first lived at burley thomas thomas sissel first earl of exeter and this one here is robert devereux earl of essex possibly by isaac oliver great favorite elizabeth the firsts looking slightly sideways at her like the way henry viii elizabeth's father yeah looking very majestic and and the jewelry when the when the light hits that jewelry i mean look at it it's very and queen elizabeth's got the similar kind of jewelry yeah so it's amazing actually we start looking at elizabeth and she's peppered in jewelry and and henry as well and actually while we're standing here looking at it some of those sort of square cut embellishments to his it's a bodice you see again on her portrait and i like the idea that perhaps he gave them to her and she's reused them and stuck them in her hair it's a wonderful room and it's so obviously oak paneling behind sets everything off doesn't it is this would you say this was your favorite i think it's certainly one of my favorites and i love that everybody's in here and this fantastic portrait of the night nightfall there in his beautiful frock coach with the vesuvius in the background the great grand tourist the things he collected the pagoda the desk he worked at possibly his globe it's so evocative and if you ever have any doubt about who you actually are who do you think you are you can come sit in here and remind yourself [Music] the ninth earl finished off his work by employing the celebrated landscape architect lancelot capability brown to remodel the roofline on the south front in fact he worked at burley on and off for 20 years [Music] capability brown gave the earl not only a changed roofscape but also the type of landscape for which he would become so famous like his parks at chatsworth and blenheim this one is enjoyed by all those who live nearby in the 18th century it was considered the epitome of the english rural idle nothing has changed [Music] the transformation of burley was complete in 1801 the year they created the united kingdom and the union flag which flies today on the roof of this building the earls of burleigh were elevated to marquises but none did so much to their ancestral home as the burleys of the 17th and 18th centuries there was nothing left to do to burly it was there to be enjoyed an elizabethan house with a sumptuous baroque interior and to the victorians a curiosity [Music] the second mark was set out to enjoy the home his ancestors had built and furnished he entertained on a lavish scale victoria came here once as a princess and then as queen in 1844 she and prince albert slept here but only after the marquis made some alterations [Music] there's a watercolor of the dinner held in their majesties honor in the great hall when the queen was invited to plant a tree in the grounds she thought the silver spade too heavy so a child's wooden spade was hastily found and used instead it survives a memento from an age when having the queen to stay was a height of aspiration but the greatest survivor from queen victoria's visit to burley is the state bed which was decorated for the occasion with the royal arms [Music] and because the queen was famously short it was lowered for the monarch nothing was too much trouble [Music] as you might expect from a house of many layers there's a victorian legacy the billiard table was made in 1850 of oak from the wreck of the royal george which sank at spit head in 1782 but was raised in 1841. on the walls are portraits of members of the little bedlam club a gentleman's drinking club based at burley in the 17th century the artist antonio verio was a member and in the bow room is the table on which victoria's prime minister benjamin disraeli drew up the congress of berlin in 1878 [Music] later marquesses may not have had the collecting bug or a passion for redecoration but they were steadfast some were members of parliament for this part of lincolnshire another served in the royal navy and the sixth marquis david cecil was known to the world as the runner who took a gold for britain in the 400 meters hurdles at the 1928 olympic games his triumph was immortalized in the film chariots of fire all these men had something else in common a determination to keep this house in the family between the first and second world wars and on into the 1950s and 60s having a house and land on this scale was like having a millstone tied around your neck all over england hundreds of houses were knocked down very often by their owners who couldn't face debt or death duties or both [Music] that determination to preserve their heritage is embraced by miranda and orlando rock who moved in here three years ago she an expert on ceramics he a specialist in antique furniture now burley has a tenant and a young family and for miranda it's a case of coming home so where are we at the moment so now we're in the in a courtyard oh isn't it magnificent and it's kind of secret and sheltered it is it's a bit like a theater set i always think fantastic architecture you get that lovely impression facing this way of the elizabethan building behind the diamond playing glass this is like the most fantastic playground they camp out here couldn't be safer i was going to say right drive their tractors we now have a puppy who spends all day digging up the lawns or is that what's caused that problem and a guinea pig i think i heard about a guinea pig someone one soul remaining guinea pig there were two now there's only one oh dear and lots of games of badminton orlando discovered his joy that every lawn is the perfect size for a badminton court well so we rotate the net around when we were too much so i mean are you pleased i mean are you pleased to be here are you thrilled to be here or is this something that you felt you know is going to take a lot of work and effort and everything to adjust to living here it has done that and it still does that um house demands a lot of us all as a family and we'll obviously some compromises in how we live but there are fantastic advantages too and it's you couldn't ask for a more special place to to raise a family into imbuing them some sense of amazing history that they're part of and yeah and just that thing of being someone that's so beautiful also it's like living with a lot of ghosts isn't it because every room you go into there are faces from the past obviously apart from the ceilings and the walls the paintings on the walls and all of that you can't help but be confronted by the past and it goes back what three or four hundred years yes it does and actually sometimes it's good to say to remember that because you can begin to look at the things on the walls just as objects and paintings but then you think actually that was the night sound of i related to him and so my children and what's he really like as a person and a fantastic archive you can read some things he's written and really feel their personalities just over time you get that sense of their ghost still being in the house that's an amazing thing [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm afraid as a teenager living here i was interested in the paintings but not so much in the the layers of history and the personalities that have put all this together and when great changes happen to the building and as all that begins to form into place you get a much greater sense of of what this house means not only for us but for people who visit it it really is a remarkable survival [Music] every room at burley has its treasures but there are some pieces which are considered too valuable to leave unattended among them the burley bowl this is the famous burly bowl isn't it it is indeed and one of the great treasures of burley is the collections of japanese and chinese porcelain most of which were bought in the 17th century and recorded here in 1688. this is slightly later this is yongzhen so mid-1730s just when the family rose palette starts to replace the fermi vert the green palette but what's so rare about this is that like all our moral porcelain you have this wonderful sense of the trade between the far east and and europe and designs and patterns often for coats of arms are sent out so here we have the eighth earl of exeter's coat of arms with his wife hannah sophia chambers what's very rare yeah is on the other side of the burley bowl yes we actually have the entire south front of the house um and it's it's particularly interesting because this shows the house before it was altered on the outside by cable d brown who decided to rationalize the skyline so indeed that wonderful strap work cresting which we have in the middle was replaced by a balustrade later on and a lot of the windows were changed but it's an incredibly rare um example of an engraving of a house which actually appears on a plate taken from a print and it's the only one um it's the you've got here that we've got here and it's the only one that we know of well worth a lot of money i dare say we better not drop it [Laughter] [Music] what of burley today like all the country's finest houses it faces a daily battle to keep the roof wind and water tight to maintain the fabric to conserve the collections to protect capability brown's park and to strike a balance between encouraging the paying public to visit and damaging the house through wear and tear the earls and marcuses of exeter descendants of william cecil created a gallery for the paintings and furniture brought back from italy but their guests could be numbered in scores not the thousands who tour burly today [Music] funny isn't it to enter an obviously elizabethan house and spend the next few hours wrapped in the baroque for visitors to burley the people whose entrance fee helps keep this place alive there are only two rooms that the first lord burley would recognize if he came back today one is the great hall the other is the kitchen in tudor times this would have been a very busy place and also one of the warmest rooms in the house but lightering was not allowed there's an impressive sign here which says it is expressly ordered by his lordship that no servant shall enter the kitchen except on business or remain longer than is necessary to perform what they have to do [Music] what can today's generation bring to burley education miranda and orlando rock are putting all their efforts into interpreting this time capsule from the tudor kitchen to the georgian staterooms they've assembled a team of teachers and parties of school children now meander through this magnificent place throughout the year the rocks feel that if young people can absorb even a fraction of the history of england which burley represents it'll be worth it [Music] to me taking responsibility for such an important part of the nation's heritage would be terrifying but miranda and orlando rock seem to take it in their stride well it's handy i guess that you're both kind of scholarly about antiquities but when you were asked to come here or you decided to come here and take over as custodians of this place did you take a deep breath i mean did you think shall we or was it just automatic i would love to do it we did we took a big deep breath and actually the process meant that we had to apply for the position um to come here and that gave us a real opportunity i think knowing a bit about what it involved to say is this really what we can see ourselves doing and can we adjust our life enough to to do the job properly it's a big consideration wasn't it yeah and you felt the same way did you you felt you wanted to do this you wanted to spend your life with your children here you know and grow up let your children grow up here well to me i think for the children and it couldn't be a better place to be because you spend your life looking at interesting things and being distracted by things and really learning by osmosis which i think is an incredibly rare thing to be able to do if you were in this house on your own say and you were told to evacuate it we know what orlando would take what would you take the children [Laughter] other than that there's a couple of pictures which i i really love because i remember them from when i was younger and i see them every day well that's the key isn't it it's because you were brought up really surrounded by all of this that you hope to pass on to your own children this feeling this kind of being so much in touch with your background yes but it's a it's a mighty background isn't it it is it's a strange thing to live here surrounded by and be reminded about where you've come from when you watch things like who do you think you are on television i've got so much evidence here of pictures of everybody it's a remarkable thing i think one of the things we really struggle with here is it's such an incredible time capsule in many ways and we're very very lucky that it's to remain so complete with all the inventories but the real problem that we face is trying to make it relevant to people today when people come around you really want to somehow bring in a 21st century element to it bring in more contemporary things this was a contemporary house in the elizabethan period it was in the 17th century and in the 18th century so somehow one of the kind of difficult things about the trust that preserves it which is fantastic in many ways is that in some ways the clock has had to stop slightly and that is i think the biggest challenge that yeah that we face going forwards actually because in 100 years or 200 years hence it will all be that far back and the national trust faces the same problems again actually in terms of so many houses been given over within this sort of mid 20th century period and and yes you haven't and we have to forget as well although it's your family home and you you get a great deal of personal satisfaction and and wonder from being here you've also got to transmit that to all the people who come and walk around here you are you are genuinely custodians of this place and have and have to spend a large part of your time and energy how first of all how on earth do you manage to do it when you've got four children to bring up well that is an enormous challenge i think dividing up our time and making sure we do have family time that nobody's watching is has been the biggest challenge there are a lot of people that work here obviously the visitors that come here and it pulls us in many different directions why is it important that children should be taught about our heritage why is it that we need houses like this well we have them and i think that's i think they should be overlooked i says i would approach from a different angle and say if they're going to be learning in the classroom about what england is and they do need to learn that then surely the most enlivening and enriching thing is to come somewhere where history has happened and to see what that really means and understand a bit about all the different parts of that history that you know the social history the political history agricultural history garden history art history you know and that's all brought together in a state like burnley [Music] i think what's incredibly rare here is that because there's been such continuity and thankfully there haven't been huge sales there are incredible records and inventories right away from the 17th century onwards so you can trace the history of the objects you can trace the history of collecting the history of patronage and through that you can then see through the eyes of the collectors themselves and their political ambitions and the tastes and connoisseurship that they displayed and i think you know to be able to see why they bought that in naples or why they commissioned this picture is a particularly rare survival and long may continue [Music] burleigh is just as impressive as william cecil intended 450 years ago [Music] orlando rock sometimes dreams of returning this great house to an earlier age and i can see the fascination in wanting to know what it looked like before the fifth and the nine girls got to work but like miranda i think the layers of art and decoration are part of burly's charm the first lord burley saw this building as a statement of his importance and position as one of queen elizabeth's most trusted advisors his successor saw it as a gallery in which to display their treasures today perhaps uniquely in this country burley manages to be both [Music] this time on treasure houses of britain chatsworth home of the dukes of devonshire without people without people populating it particularly it would be it would be i think very lonely and grim and of course financially it would be impossible ancestors by the score the new duke arranges his family tree it's using the house as a backdrop for one's own taste which we're very lucky to be able to do and it's great fun and the greatest garden in derbyshire capability brown's work lives on [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] when britain's stately homes fell on hard times in the 20th century their bewildered owners tried everything to keep their inheritance from safari parks to zoos and hotels today a visit to a country house is part of our daily life but the idea is relatively new except at chatsworth where visitors have been made welcome since the house was completed in the 18th century um for chatsworth we have to thank bess of hardwick this remarkable woman had four husbands and it was with her second sir william cavendish that she built a house in a valley in her native derbyshire it was remote from london where sir william was one of henry viii's trusted advisors but bess made its construction and that of hardwick hall nearby a life's work [Music] after her death in 1608 bessie's creation went to sleep for nearly 80 years but in 1686 her successor the first duke of devonshire decided to make some alterations his plan was to remodel just the south front and keep the rest of the house as it was but the first duke got bitten by the building bug although he only intended to remodel the south facade he couldn't resist taking down the east then the west and finally the north facade in fact he got a bit carried away [Music] while the house was being altered to what we see today he took on george london and henry wise to design a huge formal garden and a frenchman called griez to build a water cascade [Music] the first duke died in 1707 but he lived just long enough to see his creation completed the cavendish family first earls then dukes of devonshire lost and remade a fortune in the 16th century supported charles the first in the english civil war during which they narrowly avoided losing chatsworth to parliament helped bring william iii and queen mary to the throne and entered politics one of them was briefly prime minister [Music] but they all had the same idea about their country seat that it should be part of the community and open to all [Music] in the 18th century the duke and duchess of devonshire spent most of their time in london but they left instructions with the housekeeper at chatsworth to show people round if they called [Music] and that idea that chatsworth belongs somehow not only to the family which built it but also to the nation has lasted for 300 years [Music] chatsworth is a mix of art and architecture and styles applied over three centuries the first duke altered the outside of his house but kept much that was inside including this fabulous ceiling in the painted hall which is the work of louis laguerre [Music] successive dukes left their mark the marble floor belongs to the fifth duke the stairs to the ninth and this charming and sad inscription to the sixth who never got over the death at the age of 29 of his beloved niece blanche [Music] william spencer duke of devonshire inherited this most beautiful house from his father in the year 1811 which had been begun in the year of english liberty 1688 and completed in the year of his sorrow 1840. [Music] the painted hall is really the heart of chatsworth successive dukes may have tinkered with it but laguerre's ceiling is exactly as it was when the house opened everyone passes through here family staff and visitors and every christmas since 1890 this has been the setting for a party thrown for the children of the estate by the duke and duchess of devonshire in this house tradition is important [Music] the heart of chatsworth is pure theatre like the rest of england's nobility the first duke wished for one thing above all else a visit from the king and queen here was the stage on which that visit would be played out the painted hall and the stairs beyond were the route to the first floor where the devonshires created a whole suite of state apartments so that the business of the court could be conducted while the monarch was here though the family owned many houses it was chatsworth which they remodeled to make it a palace fit for a king the painted ceiling and the great staircase were built on a ducal scale this was the devonshire's principal residence but it wasn't their only one they had hard hall also in dervisher bolton abbey and london hall in yorkshire lismore castle in ireland compton place in eastbourne and three london residences chiswick and devonshire house and burlington house both in piccadilly there's a lovely story told by deborah the dowager duchess of devonshire of a conversation she had with her grandmother-in-law the older duchess was talking about the family's social calendar november to january here at chatsworth lismore castle from february to april london in may june and july bolton abbey in august and september for grouse shooting hardwick for partridges in october but what about chizik said deborah chizik oh we sometimes used it for breakfast [Music] the duke chose baroque for the decoration of the state apartments what else it was the fashion all the rage imported from continental europe [Music] there'd been a long gallery in this part of the elizabethan house now the first duke hoped that it would be the king william iii and his court which paraded in the unfillard of rooms he'd arranged [Music] he employed the painters louis laguerre and antonio verio to decorate the ceilings and samuel watson for the carving [Music] and he filled these rooms with tapestries woven at mort lake and cabinets by the frenchman andres charles boom [Music] there would be a great chamber a state drawing room music room bedroom and closet [Music] each room more intimate and richly decorated than the last [Music] by the time it was complete the duke must have been convinced that he would be favored by a royal visit [Music] all this done for the king but the king never came a hundred and fifty years later the sixth duke was solely tempted to do away with this series of rooms which occupied the prime position at chatsworth he called them a dismal ponderous range of hampton court-like chambers thank goodness he didn't otherwise we'd be denied the opportunity to see this riot of baroque decoration all the exquisite craftsmanship that went into a vain attempt to please the king [Music] it was the sixth duke who perhaps did most to change chatsworth he had plenty of time in which to do it he was a bachelor he inherited this vast house at the age of 21 and he devoted his life to it and he employed the architects of jeffrey whiteville to build the north wing [Music] for nearly 50 years the bachelor duke worked on his many houses at chatsworth his new wing included a sculpture gallery to house works including many by konova which she collected in italy [Music] it was the perfect space in which to interest guests before they went into dinner in the new great dining room of which he was especially proud [Music] when it was completed in 1832 the sixth duke thought it was perfect it was like dining in a great trunk he said you expect the lid to open this is one of three dining rooms in chatsworth but certainly the grandest and the one with the most history the first dinner given here was attended by the duchess of kent with her daughter princess victoria at 13 it was the first time she dined with adults the duke knew how important that visit was he staged a dress rehearsal of the whole meal the day before could spend an hour in this room and still not take it all in the four side tables were made for the room the marble fireplaces were carved by richard westmacot the younger and robert sevier the sixth duke commissioned new silver the portraits either side of the door are by van dyke but the wall lights are new they were put up in 1959 the 11th duke discovered them in the stables they'd come from devonshire house in london and laying in packing cases for 40 years outside the duke took on the young joseph paxton as head gardener the man who would later build crystal palace for the 1851 great exhibition the fourth duke had already radically changed the setting of chatsworth by employing capability brown to create the type of parkland for which he would become so famous paxton gave his duke the emperor fountain a wonderful piece of engineering fed entirely by gravity from reservoirs built on the moor above the house it was then and has remained the symbol of chatsworth but these alterations taxed even the wealthiest families though he kept chatsworth the sixth duke was forced to sell londsborough and most of the town of wetherby in yorkshire to pay for the changes everyone brought something to chatsworth in the case of the bachelor duke's father the fifth duke it was a menage a trois involving his wife the duchess jorgena and her very good friend lady elizabeth foster elizabeth became the duke's mistress and had two children by him though this didn't seem to affect his relationship with georgina when she died elizabeth married the duke to become the next duchess it's one of the oddest stories of chatsworth as told by its head of art and historic collections matthew hurst all of the objects here recall georgina her taste things that she commissioned and owned and including this portrait by thomas gainsborough which shows her in the height of fashion in 1785 when it was painted with these huge broad rimmed hats that uh she was so famous for wearing she's got a very cheeky look on her face hasn't she a foxy look on her face yes yes we will know all about it through the book and the film of course but that sort of encapsulates that doesn't it i think you do see her personality here and there's a another wonderful portrait in here by reynolds gainsborough's great rival which is an unfinished portrait and that has a little bit more of a sense of immediacy about it and i think is a bit more relaxed whereas this is she's obviously clearly posing for for us as the spectator well amidst all the gems in this room uh and the crystals there's this little work of art which is hers is that right it was hers yeah tell me about it um it's a cordle cup and uh cover on a saucer with a tray and in all there are actually nine in the collection and it was commissioned by georgina from the derby porcelain factory she was a great supporter of derby porcelain being just down the road and it's a set that she would have used it was made for um caudal which was a sort of warm uh gruel if you like which would have been laced with ale and was given to women who were unwell or perhaps even in childbirth so so you think she might have drunk from this cuff absolutely yes without a doubt and to kill the pain probably probably and it would have been filled to the top i presume it must have been with two handles and you would take it exactly and the cover is there to to keep it all warm for you so that it doesn't go cold so here we have one of the cups this is georgina's cup and you can see her initials here with the coronet here in blue the dukel coronet and then gd for georgina devonshire and within this you've also got this wonderful gilded decoration which shows all these sort of monsters and snakes and beasts so at first glance it looks just like a sort of gold pattern but actually you've got these sort of little mythological creatures that live in amongst it and this is quite interesting because in the set we had one saucer with the initials edie on it and about two years ago we were approached by the derby factory because they had received a letter from somebody in america who had a cup of exactly the same design as these with the initials e.d and it transpired through research that was done that the ed cup actually belonged to elizabeth devonshire who was originally elizabeth foster part of the great menage a trois with the fifth duke andrew jaina and in 1806 when georgina died um elizabeth foster married the fifth duke and became duchess herself and we think that she must have commissioned replacement cups for ones that have been broken and so that's a polite way of pushing it well perhaps i mean from from a woman's perspective it's like what was good for georgina is good enough for me so i want my own but i want it exactly the same it could have been that it could have been that um and it's exactly the same exactly the same same initials but obviously an e instead of a g and about sort of 15 20 years later than georgina's so i think it's quite a conscious effort as you say to sort of have the same because it's in the same design it's the same style which perhaps would have been a little bit out of date by 1806 1807. and you've only got one cup and one saucer exactly so out there somewhere oh i love others perhaps who knows ring matthew yes [Music] in every age the devinches of chatsworth had a role to play in the life not only of derbyshire where bess of hardwick had settled in the 17th century but also in the life of the nation but it was a struggle the sixth juke died still a bachelor the title was inherited by the grandson of his uncle the seventh duke lived quietly to make up for the extravagances perhaps of the previous 50 years and mourned the tragic loss of his young wife to whom that inscription over the fireplace in the painted hall is dedicated [Music] in the 20th century though the family continued to live in the grand manner death duties nearly did for chatsleth the ninth duke had to sell books and paintings to settle a bill of half a million pounds a huge sum in 1912. [Music] the tenth duke succeeded in 1938 and planned to improve chatsworth but before he could do so war broke out [Music] the house was given over to the girls and staff of penrose college in wales and the devonshires went to war [Music] the 10th duke's eldest son and heir william billy hartington they called him married kathleen kennedy sister of the man who would later become the 35th president of the united states four months later billy was killed in action in belgium serving with the cold stream guards which is how chatsworth came to be inherited by the duke's second son andrew cavendish [Music] together with his wife deborah youngest of the midfoot sisters they transformed chatsworth and reopened it to the public [Music] and now it's the turn of their son peregrine and his wife amanda [Music] it's how many years since you've been in charge well my father died in may 2004 and then we came here on the 1st of january 2006 and so sort of then roughly and you had a plan you knew what you wanted to do right from the very outset no we didn't really have a plan from the outset we knew that we needed to do services because my parents had done it 50 years ago so the heating and the electrics and all those things were worn out they've been good but they'd lasted 50 years so we needed to do that and we thought once we're going to do that and make a mess we might as well make improvements to the visitor route but vision you have it is like a whirlwind you're being quite bashful about it but we're standing here on the oak staircase surrounded by something that you did just like that you revealed this wonderful space up here you you did all of this and this is just a tiny part of what you're doing at chatsworth we were very lucky we got peter inscript to be the architect and he did a lot of research and one of the things we said was to make the house more intelligible for us and for our visitors was to put it back more or less as it was when it was built in different parts so this is a victorian part um and my great-grandmother dutch evening had changed it a lot and it wasn't that we didn't like her intervention but we wanted to go back to the original wyattville but also apart from this it you've introduced modernity into chatsworth which i think a lot of people were quite shocked by the fact that you brought in modern sculptures modern paintings that you have a particular view about this house which is in a way unusual is it not well i think we're very lucky because we don't have sort of committed to go through anything like that and um so if we both like something or even if one of us likes something very much uh we can try that and put it my parents put modern contemporary sculpture whatever in 1991 with a frank warhorse so that was the first and we followed that and we've perhaps done a bit more of it than they did um but it's really just it's using the house as a backdrop for one's own taste which we're very lucky to be able to do and it's great fun if you live in a house and i live in a house and i would hate to have visitors walking around walking through walking in and out but you don't as you say you don't seem to mind any of that and chatsworth is absolutely packed with people isn't it at weekends and holidays they love coming here i think that it's very popular it always has been my parents made it popular and the people who work here make it popular because they're very welcoming it's the one thing that we really really think we do as well if not better than anybody else it's crucial to welcome people as visitors and never ever as the public and that's what we do from top to bottom and it works i think and it's always been the same way hasn't it in the 18th century chatsworth were always welcomed visitors if the duke and duchess were away in london for example they gave instructions to the housekeeper to make sure if any visitor call that they were made well i think it's important to remember this house was built to show off the first duke rebuilt the elizabethan house to make it absolutely clear to all who passed by which were very few people in those days that he was an important and very successful man he put in big gold letters his name on the front of the house just in the same way as donald trump does and for the same reason he wanted people to know that he lived here he'd made it and he could afford to build a virtual palace and so there's no point building a show off house if you then say it's private keep out you have to you know and now it's about it used to be about the people who lived here now it's about the house but the responsibilities of looking after a house like this with all these treasures in them is it's pretty darn is it not daunting it must be daunting well it's not daunting because we have a great team and without them it would be very daunting but we have brilliant people here uh some have been here a long time some people have been less long and between them all and with us um sort of getting in the way and interfering it it works okay it always seems we can do better but it it's certainly not daunting it's really exciting so [Music] do you have a favorite duke well i mean obviously my father because i knew him i didn't know any i knew my grandfather a little bit but um i knew my father very well said that it's good that he's there with his with his ancestors but the the two figures in the middle well here is lord burlington and his family who um were in a way nothing to do with us except the younger daughter the little one was looking at the music she married the person who became the fourth duke when there's a painting of him in the corner much older she died when she was very young but she was the only surviving child of burlington and therefore she inherited all his collection and burlington house in london and chidwick lives more castle in ireland and so uh he is enormously influential on the collection here because his pictures and bronzes and furniture he was a a patron of kent and uh so there's a lot of his stuff here all of it the absolute top quality and then above him is the first duke who um the the um the man who painted his name and gold on the on the front of the house quite rightly and that picture of him on a horse is um not a sort of a shrinking violet image at all um and i love that i love that self-confidence and it was a self-confident time and he was he was made duke in 1694 for getting william and mary to come to be a king i mean i'm not by himself but with a few others and i i think it's it it says a lot about him about how he felt about himself about how he felt about the house and i love that self-confidence as a child i expect you must have looked at that picture and thought hey that's the kind of man i might like to be well i don't think i did really i don't think that you know i don't think i ever until actually after my father passed away i don't think i ever felt that i was going to be duke so it wasn't the sort of thing that you took i took for granted or anticipated at all um pretty illogical but that's how it was [Music] in the spirit of those who've gone before the duke of davenger is spending 14 million pounds renovating cleaning and opening up chatsworth to better reveal its treasures among them his favorites and this is one of your special treasures isn't it this is a beautiful thing it was made i think in about 1650 uh for the savile family this the owl at the top is the emblem of the savile family dorothy savile married the third out of bennington the architect of titic house and this was perhaps made for her grandfather and passed down to her and then their only surviving daughter charlotte married the man who became the fourth duke of devonshire and so chats with inherited this and many other beautiful objects and it's something which uh we have out often uh sometimes on the visitor route sometimes in our part of the house and it's something which i think the workmanship is really astonishing and you get a modern silversmith somebody like hiroshi suzuki to look at this and they are amazed by the skill um and would be delighted if they could make anything as beautiful as them it is auricular it is something this word auricular meaning ear meaning the shape of the ear is that what it's all about the shape of that i think it's that is sort of shorthand for the style um it was made by huguenot craftsman who came to england in the 17th century for religious persecution reasons and they were immensely skilled and this is one of the products of that skill and we're very lucky to have it it flows doesn't it look at the lines if you look all the way almost here it's almost liquid you could almost feel that it could melt away um and yet it's solid as anything did your father give you any advice any help before you took over um chatsworth no not overtly not not as such but he he made it absolutely clear first of all how incredibly lucky he we were are and that's right from the very beginning it was always there he was always talking about that and that's quite an important pretty obvious thing but it's it was good that he he kept it in the forefront and also he was he loved derbyshire and he spent a lot of time going to various local things all his life um often two or three things a day uh of a sort of civic nature of a charitable nature and so that was an example which i wouldn't come up to that standard but he he he made it clear that there was uh that no blessed bleeds which is important i think would he have approved of you having so much energy now in chats with coming in and and changing things and changing it to you know your artistic taste yes definitely he he was um he collected very well he collected the most the thing he's probably best known for is that he collected a lot of loose and freud paintings he commissioned uh lucent to paint a lot of members of our family but he also collected some wonderful modern british things and he added a lot to the collection of illustrated flower books and he also added significantly to georgena duchess's collection of minerals so he collects on a fairly wide front uh and he was very proud of that and and he about those things he knew a lot about i think he would have been very enthusiastic he was he loved chats with being popular he loved it that people liked coming and naturally it would be odd not to i mean there is a um a tension always between the curatorial influence which is to keep everything as it is and not change it um and prevent it being damaged and the fact that there's hundreds of thousands of people here doing their best to trample about and not overtly damage works of art but to change things because if you walk so light's not good for stuff but without it you can't see it [Music] well so what do you think about being known as a custodian of our nation's heritage is this something that you give any real thought to or is it something that is just you know part of your nature you feel you know i think that you have to take it quite seriously i mean chatsworth is very very very important to me and um we want to try and get it right so we need to have good historical knowledge of what happened before before we change things we may then change them but we need to know why what it was before we change it i think that's really important otherwise blunder about a bit um and i'm all for blundering about but in a sort of knowledgeable way um and we have um brilliant people who help us with that and i think that being i'm awful change but if it's something like putting sculpture in the garden or redecorating room that's fine because it can always be put back but to make physical significant physical change you've got to be very careful and we have the planning process which is wonderful and i think puts this country ahead of practically anywhere else in the world that i'm aware of um without the planning process in this country we would be living in a much less attractive place and i think it's worth remembering that because they don't always get the benefit of the work that they do so i think that the customership is crucial [Music] if it were me living here as you're living here to get up in the morning to see so many people walking around your house i mean it's not as though you're cut off from the house you have a wing but it all interlinks you use this corridor to get to there and you go through public areas and you meet people and that's lovely it is lovely but also they're always there you never get away from them no i don't feel it like that at all um the house doesn't open until half of 10 11 o'clock and it closes again sort of at the late afternoon so then in the evenings and in the mornings there's nobody much there and also without people without people populating it particularly it would be it would be i think very lonely and grim and of course financially it would be impossible um so all those things together um it's not just because of the money that the visitors provide although that's important but the very fact that chatsworth and derbyshire are being enjoyed by so many people from all over the world is a huge source of pride [Music] so chatsworth endures the present duke is a collector in the mould of his ancestors sculpture and modern art are his passions a new piece seems to arrive on the back of a lorry almost every week and all around him are the ghosts of this great house the first duke's architecture the fourth duke's park the extravagant sixth duke's dining room and his own father and mother's heroic role in restoring this important piece of the nation's heritage this is the story of chatsworth what else can there be to discover this is one of the hidden treasures of chatsworth a private theater rarely seen by the public a wonderful reminder of how the present duke's ancestors were so anxious to entertain their guests it's absolutely magical just look at this it's incredible imagine here is the evidence of the hand of one william helmsley who styled himself a leading london designer and supplier of theatrical scenery and appliances they survive and they're very rare indeed this was originally a ballroom built by the bachelor duke in the 18th century but turned into a theater by the eighth duke in the 1890s the prince of wales came here he came here so often that it was dubbed the theater royal but just look at it the original proscenium arch the gas lights the pulleys the curtains everything as it was 120 years ago [Music] so chatsworth has everything you cannot say you've seen england's stately homes if you've not been here [Music] i think what appeals to me about chatsworth is that it feels just right it's made of local stone it nestles into a wooded valley which looks as though it's been made to receive it it feels as though it's been here forever that didn't happen by accident the devonshires have worked at it over the years along the way they've improved and extended this great house loved it and cherished it and filled it with treasures [Music] the people of derbyshire who walk in this park and have done for 300 years believe chatsworth belongs to them but in fact it belongs to the nation it may be privately owned but thanks to the duke of devonshire everyone can enjoy one of the treasure houses of britain [Music] this time on treasure houses of britain what they did for the man who won the battle of blenheim there's the first duke riding a great charger and he's receiving the surrender of master terrorize who's lifting his hat to him a house fit for a national hero this is a a incredible room this long library it's a 183 feet long and memories of winston churchill for whose ancestors blenheim palace was built 300 years ago inside the watch there's an inscription says to blanford from winston spencer churchill christmas 1937. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] blenheim is quite unlike any other house in this series firstly it's not a house at all it's the palace created by an act of parliament secondly where most of britain's treasure houses were displays of wealth and status paid for by the families who built them blenheim was the gift of a grateful nation to a man who turned the tide of war so it's something of everything monument baroque castle family home but indisputably part of the nation's heritage [Music] [Music] [Music] on the battlefield at blenheim in bavaria in 1704 could john churchill the first duke of marlborough have imagined that his great victory over the french would lead to a palace that would last through time perhaps he and his wife the fiery sarah jennings were royal favorites sarah had been a longtime friend of queen anne when the french tried to take spain's empire in what became known as the war of the spanish succession it was to john churchill that britain turned to crush the opposing army the country rejoiced that the duke had defended her interests on the continent and the new queen was only reflecting the national mood when she gave him land at woodstock in oxfordshire parliament authorized the building of a monument which would mark forevermore the moment when britain finally crushed the ambition of louis xiv to rule all europe in case visitors needed reminding how this house came to be the east gate incorporated a plaque which told the story and tells it still under the auspices of a munificent sovereign this house was built for john duke of marlborough and his duchess sarah by sir j van brah between the years 1705 and 1722 and this royal manner of woodstock together with a grant of 240 000 pounds towards the building of blenheim was given by her majesty queen anne and confirmed by act of parliament in seventeen hundred and five two hundred and forty thousand pounds was a huge sum but it still wasn't enough the marlborough had to find sixty thousand pounds of their own to complete the palace with all the decoration that a duke might expect marlborough chose the architect john vanbra to design his palace surveyor dramatist political spy here was a man who'd been imprisoned by the french for four and a half years and who in that time had soaked up the new baroque style in europe now he would develop it in england first at castle howard in yorkshire and then at blenheim it would consume 15 years of his life van bruh was self-taught but he worked closely with nicholas hawksmore a former clerk in the office of sir christopher wren together they set out to commemorate a great victory by carefully contriving the way in which visitors would approach the palace through a series of arches this procession of arches seems deliberately small intimate even to contrast with the great glory of blenheim the north front [Music] in a peacetime echo of marlborough's victory over the french van burer wanted blenheim to rival versailles the palace built by louis xiv he gave john churchill baroque but a more refined baroque than the style which had swept through europe in the 17th century nevertheless it was bold like marlborough himself vanbra was never in doubt that this was first and foremost a monument to britain's prowess in war it was secondly a home for the nation's leading warrior but apart from the royal family few individuals in england could boast of a house so grand so imposing so magnificent [Music] in the 18th century first impressions were everything the interior had to match the exterior in grandeur and here in blenheim's great hall van bruh excelled it's a triumph of the master craftsman from the carvings by grynlin gibbons to the ceiling painting by sir james thornhill everything has been built and designed on a ducal scale the lock on these huge doors is said to have been modelled on the gates to the city of warsaw and it has a key fit for a duke [Music] of course the inspiration for much of this decoration came from the ancient world marlborough was to be seen in the mould of the generals of the roman empire the columns the statues the pillars were all nodding towards another civilization no wonder that under the bust of the first duke his wife had inscribed the words in latin and in english nor could augustus better calm mankind grinling gibbons the leading carver of the day in wood and in stone gave the first duke a celebration of his royal favor from the arms of queen anne in the keystone to the corinthian capitals and the arches which were described as cut extraordinary rich and sunk very deep [Music] it would be difficult to find a more imposing entrance to any house and in shape and form and decoration today's visitors are seeing just what the duke's guests would have seen at the start of the 18th century [Music] but where are the other treasures here in the saloon used by the present duke only once a year on christmas day sir james thornhill who'd painted the ceiling in the great hall did the sketches but the first duchess fell out with him over the cost she turned instead to the french artist louis laguerre and paid him the modest sum of 500 pounds [Music] for that he included a ceiling which showed the duke riding to victory but stayed by the hand of peace [Music] and a self-portrait of the artist to remind visitors down the ages just who was responsible for this triumph of the muralist's art the side table is set with a centerpiece by the silversmith's garad showing the duke on horseback pausing to write a dispatch from the battlefield at blenheim a moment in history immortalized in silver [Music] blenheim was a treasure house from the start the first duke would certainly recognize these rooms today but as with all great houses its treasures have been added to by successive generations a mighty organ by henry willis and sons at the end of the 19th century installed by the present duke's grandfather has become one of the new treasures of blenheim [Music] and successive dukes have cherished the original decoration from the tapestries which depict a string of successful battles fought by marlborough after blenheim to the letter from the battlefield itself carefully looked after for 300 years and handed down to the 11th duke john george vanderbilt spencer churchill well we're now coming into the green writing room and in here we have the famous tapestry of the battle of blem there's the first duke riding a great charger and he's receiving the surrender of martial tellride who's lifting his hat to him and in there you see the grenadier holding the fleur-de-lis the captain furtherly the flag of france you have this wonderful perspective in this tapestry leading to the danube and you see the french on the retreat towards the danube with the victorious english army over there and was this commissioned by his wife uh the duchess no well these were commissioned by the duke himself from devos in brussels there's a series of chapters of different battles that he wants and you'll see the rest throughout the house do you think he sits well on his horse very well he's got his heel well down and it's well balanced he looks a very fine man this is what all the marlboroughs look like is it on horseback well um i'm not going to get it on horseback today he would judge me but i used to ride a lot and i think we do struggle strike our resentences throughout the generations the battle of blenheim a single day in 1704 was decisive france under louis xiv had set its sights on the spanish empire but spain was part of the grand alliance which included england and holland portugal and the holy roman empire when france and its ally bavaria moved to capture vienna the duke of marlborough led the allies on a 250-mile march from the netherlands to the danube in just five weeks he orchestrated a brilliant campaign of disinformation to confuse the other side about his destination and then when he reached bavaria his troops plundered villagers to persuade the enemy to fight so on the 13th of august the allies faced the french and the bavarians and the commander marshall tallard at blenheim by nightfall the french and bavarians had lost twenty thousand men the allies four and a half thousand the grand alliance had prevailed and the domination of europe by the french was over marlborough's work was finished but he found time to send news of the victory to his wife this is the dispatch note sent by the first duke to his wife giving the account of the battle of blenheim so that she could pass it on to the queen it's very interesting to see that this is written very quickly on an old piece of scrap of paper which was a receipt from certain items that he had received from his uh troops and it's hardly written in pencil and it's kept intact all these years you have a it's written in block capitals here if i read it to you i want to ask you another question about this because it's fascinating i have not time to say more but beg you will give my duty to the queen and let her know her army's had a glorious victory marshall tallard and two other generals are in my coach and i'm following the rest the bearer my ada colonel parker will give her an account of what has passed i shall do so in a day or two by another more at large it's signed marlborough but to write to his wife not to the queen not to anyone else not to the head of the army but to his wife he was heavy well of course i was going to say he must have been the head of the army at that time but to write to his wife i know but they had a wonderful love affair they got on freighter well the only thing they didn't really agree about was the building of this house of course the first two wanted as a monument to his his life and his all his victories and she wanted a smaller mod more modest house but she was wonderful because she was always determined to see the house completed and she was chasing the bills the whole time because she wanted it available for him to live in his latter part of his life and in after fact he was only able to live here three years before he died was it was it rare at that time for people to have this love affair you talk about a love affair but when you read about the many distractions a man like marlborough must have had when he was coming through the courts of the various monarchs you know to have this association with a woman that lasted all his life was quite remarkable yes it was and he was always writing letters to it he was asking how the progress of the house was and he also was saying how the peaches doing down in the gardens i see but he came from a very poor background in many ways didn't he so he must have taken a supreme delight in all the things that perhaps he never had as a child growing up exactly [Music] the great love story of john churchill and his duchess sarah is a theme throughout blenheim when he died in 1722 sarah commissioned william kent to design a memorial for the family chapel with her husband portrayed as a roman general [Music] after the first duke died sarah lived for a further 22 years would she recognize her house today certainly though she might be amused to meet visitors in every room seven days a week [Music] so [Music] it's nearly 300 years since they laid the foundations of this palace and in that time its decoration has been enhanced by a family which has always been conscious of its place in the life of the nation [Music] after the first duke the fourth duke was the first to live permanently at blenheim he changed the look of the palace by employing the celebrated landscape architect capability brown to create the grounds we see today the seventh duke inherited years of debt and presided over blenheim at a low point in its history he had to sell books from the long library to make ends meet the eighth duke was landed with the same money worries and was forced to sell 200 old masters but he used the funds which this raised to repair and maintain blenheim the ninth duke solved the financial problems of the estate by marrying consuela vanderbilt the influx of american money paid for the restoration of the staterooms and the long library which got its books back the tenth duke allowed pupils from molven school to use blenheim during the second world war and later gave over the long library to mi5 but he will be remembered most for his decision to open the palace to the public in nineteen fifty [Music] so it was a national treasure open to all which the 11th duke inherited in 1972 his was the challenge of bringing blenheim besieged by tourists into the 21st century [Music] it was the eighth duke who installed the willis organ in the long library and the ninth duke who provided the books all 10 000 of them but the room owes everything else to the first duke and especially nicholas hawksmore this is nicholas hawksmoor's finest room in blenheim 200 feet long 30 feet high and full of life and interest and like the rest of the palace these walls and these ceilings tell the story of a difficult birth blenheim was built over 15 years and in that time the duchess managed to fall out with just about everyone she rowed with john van bruh about his designs and expenses she crossed swords with hawks more she queried the bills of grindling gibbons and the painters at james thornhill by the time the long library was being decorated vanbrud left in a rage so had thornhill which explains the empty ceilings [Music] finally sarah lost the friendship of the queen yet twenty years after queen anne died the duchess appears to have relented she commissioned a statue by the flemish sculptor john michael reisbrach to the memory of queen anne and whose auspices john duke of marlborough conquered and to whose munificence he and his posterity with gratitude owe the possession of blenheim a.d 1746 well to me this is one of the most appealing of the treasures at blenheim out of this piece of italian marble has been carved a tapestry of cloth right down to the fringe detail and the lace and the urmin on this tall and imposing figure with the cinched in waist of queen anne when in fact queen anne was just four foot ten inches high and weighed three hundred pounds she died when she was just 49 years old [Music] after queen anne's death george the first honored the blenheim debt but the payments from the treasury had dwindled it was one reason craftsman drifted away though it may not have been completely finished they left behind a masterpiece it is undoubtedly one of the greatest private rooms in britain [Music] after the first duke died in 1722 hoxmoor remained in favor with the duchess but vanbra was banned for good he tried to get into the park in 1725 to see his great creation but was turned away [Music] hawkesmore completed the triumphal arch and saw blenheim through to completion the work itself was overseen by the cabinetmaker james moore it was a sorry ending for a story which had started with such vim and vigor later in the 18th century capability brown contrived the lake which is such a feature of the palace we know today but the great house was unchanged [Music] five years after the first duke died sarah commissioned the column of victory on the axis of the palace inscribed with the story of the battle of blenheim and the stirring words these are the actions of the duke of marlborough performed in the compass of a few years sufficient to adorn the annals of ages the acts of parliament shall stand as long as the british name and language last illustrious monuments of marlborough's glory and of britain's gratitude [Music] blenheim is all about words the grander the better in the 20th century president kennedy would lord winston churchill as the man who marshaled the english language and sent it into battle but churchill's ancestors had been doing it for years winston himself described the inscription on the column of victory as a masterpiece of compact and majestic statement in fact it would serve as a history in itself where all other records lost [Music] of the palace winston was to write in his book marlborough his life and times a paragraph which for the present duke says it all [Music] maura had set his heart upon this mighty house in a strange manner it was as a monument he desired it as the pharaohs built their pyramids so he sought a physical monument which would certainly stand if only as a ruin for the thousand years about his achievements he preserved the complete silence offering neither explanations nor excuses for any of his deeds his answer was to be this great house [Music] man at blenheim everything had to be accompanied by words in the long library at the end of the 19th century it was not sufficient to ask the famed organ builders willis and sons to install an organ it had to be dedicated this is a wonderful description which was put there by my grandmother in 1891 for this willis organ it says in memory of happy days and as a tribute to this glorious home we leave thy voice to speak within these walls in years to come when ours are still i think it's so lovely that description [Music] in my grandfather's time he had a group of people here who were coming to auburn concert and he thought he would show them that he could play the organ and we there is a machine which plays organ roles and he timed it so the organ rail was switched on and it gave him time to get to the seat and pretend to be playing the organ unfortunately on the way to get into the seat he tripped up over a carpet and the organ started playing before he could sit down in front of it this is a a incredible room this long library it's a 183 feet long and it contains the same equivalent as as the private side so on the private side we have seven rooms downstairs and eight up and the this room if you put those bedrooms and rooms in it would be fit inside this room which so it shows you the scale of this room but it's so well proportioned you don't realize how big it is [Music] the long library runs along the west facade of blenheim so it was among the last rooms to be completed [Music] hawkesmore approached its design as if it were five rooms rather than one but bore in mind vanbra's idea that it should be a noble room of parade a 19th century equivalent of the elizabethan long gallery it is one of the treasures of blenheim [Music] you love this place don't you you love blenheim my life has been looking after brennan which is a wonderful treasure as far as i could send it's not only has been an important part of our national heritage it's also a world heritage site so my family and i have got great responsibility to ensure that it is they're kept in good shape so that people from all over the world can come along and enjoy our treasures and the wonderful surroundings there are here [Music] visitors come here for different reasons for some it's on the tour for others it's a must see on the list of england's greatest houses but for many blenheim is a link with one of the most powerful and memorable voices not of the 18th century but of our own time hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war if we can stand up to him winston spencer churchill was born here on the 30th of november 1874. the room to which they took his mother the american jenny jerome lady randolph churchill when she went into premature labor is perfectly preserved it seems hard doesn't it believe that you're clutching a simple bed on which this great statesman and your you know your great um well i was gonna say cousin but not he must have been second cousin was he with his second cousin and godfather and it's so simple it's such a simple room and it's such a simple bed and here in this great big palace with all these treasures i know but it was an extraordinary coincidence he happened to be born here because he was his mother was attending a party here and it's the two sides of the story one that he that his mother was dancing to vigorously and brought on the child the other side of the story is that they were out in the park in the carriage and they were going over some rather rough ground again the baby was brought on but then the fact still remains winston churchill was born here in this room and i guess winston churchill loved every minute of the fact later on that he was actually born in blenheim i mean it was very important wasn't it to him as a as a child growing up and as a man yeah so he spent a lot of time here as you know and he's he once said i i made two very important decisions of blenheim to be born and to be married and i'm happily content with both those decisions and he also became a godparent to you was he because it must have been a very difficult time in his life when he became a godparent to you but he had a lot of work to do he can't have been too indulgent was he as a godparent well i didn't see a lot of him as a young man but i was fortunate enough uh when i was age about 14 to be taken on this trip to manchester and liverpool where he was inspecting uh bomb damage and a munition factory and there's a wonderful picture of me in the churchill exhibition here walking with him and i've got a coat which is rather too long but as you know in those days there was a close rationing of where there's food rationing so my mother very essentially bought this rather long coat it's rather amusing picture winston churchill relished his connection with blenheim he spent part of his childhood here it inspired his painting and his writing he was to write the life and times of mulberry in the 1930s during his wilderness years and he was godfather to the present duke [Music] probably the first time i can really remember meeting him was in 1937 when he came here for christmas and he suddenly drew me aside and said lanterns because i was called blanton that day i've got something for you and believe it or not he produced this amazing watch which i treasure to this day because inside the watch there's an inscription if i can get it open yes such a fine fine it says to blanford from winston spencer churchill christmas 1937. in the gathering gloom of the late 1930s churchill's gift to the marquis of blandford was a rare moment of intimacy he had other matters on his mind made prime minister in 1940 he was denied the chance to see blenheim throughout the second world war because the palace was thought to be an easy target for german bombers but in his long life winston churchill never forgot the military prowess of his ancestors nor the words which adorned the family seat there's no doubt that they inspired his speeches which rallied the nation in the darkest days of war is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget [Music] and when the end came in 1965 there was only one destination for the mortal remains of the 20th century's greatest statesmen i can see myself in front of a black and white television in january 1965 watching the funeral of winston churchill those of us who are old enough have snapshots the cranes on the river thames bowing in salute as the coffin was conveyed downstream to waterloo the well-wisher standing along the railway line as the battle of britain locomotive carried him here to oxfordshire and the churchyard at bladen he lies in a simple grave within sight of the palace where he was born and which he loved [Music] the connection with sir winston churchill is a powerful attraction for those who marvel at a man who was 65 at the start of the second world war 70 at its end who was never made a duke or an earl but remains in the public consciousness almost as much as he was 50 years ago it was his wish to be buried at bladen alongside his mother and father and in 1977 he was joined by his wife clementine to whom he'd proposed in the grounds of blenheim almost 70 years before like the first duke and sarah theirs had been a long and loving marriage [Music] when winston and clemmy became engaged in the grounds of blenheim it was a private house [Music] today its treasures are on view to tens of thousands of visitors every year but it still remains the home of the duke of marlborough who like the best of his ancestors has devoted his life to keeping the palace intact my great ancestor won the battle of branham in one day well we've been fighting the battle of london for several years and my successors will go on having to do so but it's something that we're proud to own and we will strive with all our might to ensure that he's kept for generations for the future so that people from all over the world can come and enjoy our wonderful treasures and these beautiful surroundings [Music] there is another blenheim blenheim as the last of the visitors goes home if you can contrive to be here as the final tour recedes into the distance and there's only the sound of doors being bolted you may glimpse the blenheim that the first jew knew in the long library you may hear the eighth duke pretending to play the willis organ the voice which he left to speak within these walls in years to come when ours are still and in the great hall there may echo the rolling cadences and slightly slurred speech of another of blenheim's famous sons the british and american people will for their own safety and for the good of all work together in majesty these are the faces and voices of blenheim [Music] there's a sadness about the early history of blenheim all those rouse hawks moore and van bruh resigning during construction van bruh not being given the chance to see his creation before he died and of course it wasn't completely finished when john churchill the first duke died in 1722 he just spent two summers here but by then it was becoming clear that in spite of all the feuding two of the country's greatest architects and their patron had created something remarkable and thanks to the duke's descendants this great palace has remained intact both inside and out which makes it truly one of the treasure houses of britain [Music] this time on treasure hardest of britain holcomb hall home of the earls of leicester there were no surprises i knew exactly what was here and and but basically what was here was everything pretty much in good order a palladian mansion in the north norfolk countryside and the marble hall modeled on the temples of rome this was being built in 1756-57 and he died thomas cook died in april 1759 and the worst thing of course about it is that he never saw it completely did he after all the energy and enthusiasm he put into it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hokum would not have happened without this man or rather without his fortune sir edward cook was speaker of the house of commons and served elizabeth the first and james the first as attorney general he had a brilliant mind which eventually earned him the job of lord chief justice of england he moved in the highest circles yet he never forgot his connection with norfolk the county in which he was born [Music] sir edward came from milam in norfolk he was the son of a london barrister so it may have seemed natural that he should turn to law his skills were recognized early at trinity college cambridge and then at the inner temple in london after that his rise to the high offices of state was swift here's one of holcomb's treasures it's the legal document by which sir edward was appointed attorney general to elizabeth the first in an age when life expectancy was short sir edward did very well he lived to be 83 and spent much of that time in public service he even outlived james the first but fell out with charles the first who imprisoned him in the tower of london he was dead before the beginning of the english civil war but his legal judgments are still quoted 400 years later [Music] throughout his life sir edward invested in land lots of it in the parish of holcomb right on the north norfolk coast he didn't live here nor did he build and when he died in 1634 he left it to his fourth son john but holcomb hall is not the work of the next generation its creation belongs to the generation after that the land passed to thomas cook who inherited when he was just 10 years old with both parents dead thomas was a handful at 15 his guardians decided that what he needed was a grand tour the fashionable pursuit of every 18th century gentleman but his was a grand tour with a difference six years on the continent most of those in italy [Music] and it was there that he came across the work of andrea palladio the 16th century architect who had promoted the building style of ancient rome [Music] this is thomas in his rose of the order of the bath does he look determined stubborn and willful is how he was described by those who knew him best well willful enough to turn his dream of a palladian house in the norfolk countryside into reality [Music] thomas cook returned from his grand tour in 1718 married lady margaret tufton and took his place in london society he was to become the first earl of leicester [Music] but his thoughts were in norfolk where he was determined to build a vast house such as palladia might have designed 200 years earlier he would spend the rest of his life doing just that it still wasn't finished when he died in 1759 it took his widow another five years to complete it [Music] i suppose we could set up a competition to see who has the most imposing hall in england blenheim has its great hall chatsworth it's painted hall but it may be that holcomb's marble hall would win the first prize if for nothing else but sheer hutzpah [Music] [Music] here is a collision of rome and derbyshire rome for the inspiration derbyshire for the alabaster from which this remarkable space is made if the 18th century was all about impressing your guests thomas cook had it made [Music] palladio is everywhere the hall is modeled on a roman temple of justice the colonnade is copied from the temple of fortuna virulence in rome and the ceiling from the pantheon imagine being received at the front door in 1764 and ushered in here [Music] but it wasn't meant to be like this though cook was confident in so many ways he had a change of heart about the marble hall halfway through its construction we know what he was thinking and what he did because the original plans and notes and inventory survive in the care of holcomb's archivist christine hiskey the original ideas for the marble hall were worked on together by thomas cook the owner of holcomb and william kent the architect and this is um one of the the earliest plan we have uh of the what was intended at the time so it was so it was must have been drawn what about what time what yeah probably early 1730s before building the hall started at all yes the um the hall was the whole hall was several a dozen years in the planning so um this is probably around about the early 1730s and that from first from france glimpse this piece here which is where we're sitting in these stairs here is is a smaller hall than the one we have right now is that right that's right the original idea was for a cube um hall with a columned walls all the way around and this split staircase and then this is all together different does this kind of come up that's right it's almost as though it's been a 3d model the plan is drawn as though this has been a 3d model and the side has been flattened down so we can see what the stairs would have looked like coming round a massive statue of jupiter which thomas cook had bought on his grand tour so 3d is nothing new of course 1730s i know you found for us uh the original accounts as well for this marvel hall would you like to if i take this away would you like to show me this this wonderful copperplate writing um in this book again what year is this is 1756 so this is eight years after william kent died and they're only just getting around to building the marble hall building progression stages over 30 years how many men were working on it have you worked this one out yet well this is the carpenters um page of accounts here so we had the carpenters at work on certain aspect we had the team of bricklayers at work and then in the summer of 1757 the alabaster masons started arriving and they were gathered from various parts of the country some traveled for two days and some for six days to come to holcomb and gradually the whole team was assembled which consisted of up to 18 masons sometimes at work in the hall at any one time and their work carried on for three years and how much did that cost to carve all this alabaster well in modern figures it was the equivalent of about ninety seven thousand pounds [Music] the capitals were carved in the workshops of the firm in london and they were sent by sea but the rest of the columns and the bases and the plinths were all worked here by the masons and thomas cook would have taken a great deal of interest in all of this wouldn't he while it was going on yes his personality is stamped very clearly upon this this part of it this part especially um he the bricklayers were building the north wall in 1756 57 and it was partly built when thomas cook obviously came along looked at it and decided it wasn't giving the right impression [Music] so here on these accounts we have the the carpenters making the model of the great hall staircase so that's in the course in the course of being altered as well i see so so all of this is listed every tiny bit isn't it that's right this is uh the building accounts cover each tradesman who is heading a large team and it covers the bills that they submitted so this bill ended on the 20th of november in 1756 and we can see that the carpenters were assisting at the columns in the great hall scaffolding in the great hall that would have been wooden scaffolding making molds for the masons altering the model of the great hall staircase making senses for the passages around the great hall and so on of the grand old sum of what what what is this is this this particular bill is 33 pounds nine and eight months and the worst thing of course about it is that he never saw it completely did he after all the energy and enthusiasm he put into it right he couldn't open the doors to his guests that's right this was this was being built in 1756-57 and he died thomas cook died in april 1759 he probably could see how the columns and so on were shaping although they were not finished but the staircase which he'd taken such pains to remodel was probably not above foundation level so when it was all finished and all the accounts were settled and the masons were about to go home did they show their gratitude to the family show their gratitude anyway towards them the final bill for the marble masons was submitted in 1760 and this is the equivalent of 97 000 pounds and the masons themselves were given two guineas to celebrate they celebrated their arrival by um having six gallons of beer at the two village pubs and i suspect they probably ended in the same way [Music] [Music] is it the most dramatic entrance to a private house in all england it may be but what shocks me most is the contrast between holcomb's restrained paladian facade and the first room visitors actually see and if it shocks me in the 21st century how imposing it must have been to those who came here 200 years ago [Music] if visitors were not impressed by the marvel hall and who could fail to be they must have been in awe of the next room into which they were taken the marble hall is cool and classical but the saloon is a riot of colour and decoration it was a deliberate contrast all this crimson all this gold all these magnificent paintings [Music] thomas cook topped the saloon with a coffered ceiling and filled it with works by peter paul rubens and anthony van dyke tables made from a pavement excavated at hadrian's villa and guilt decoration by the architect william kent who had worked at burlington house in london they had met in italy and in cook william kent found an enthusiastic supporter of palladio's style together with a norfolk builder matthew breshingham they would be responsible for almost everything in holcomb hall and where would thomas cook have taken his guests next probably to this window to show them the symmetry of his house north to the marble hall and south to the fountain and the park [Music] at holcomb all the staterooms are on the first floor if you were a favored guest of the first earl of leicester once you had risen the staircase from the marble hall you need never descend until your departure everything you needed was at hand and as you progress from state room to state room roman gravitas gives way to the sumptuousness of the 18th century [Music] what i like about hulkham is that much of it remains untouched the fabrics must have been vivid the day they were installed but age and light have dulled them to the colours that we see today but they're still ravishing and a tribute to the people who wove them but then the cooks never stinted on the quality they paid 899 pounds for 250 yards of velvet which was a huge sum in those days and the tapestries well they were the very best that they could get [Music] tapestries by flemish weavers tapestries from english weavers in soho no expense was spared but it's the craftsmanship that impresses everyone who visits holcomb [Music] by this point you've forgotten the roman temple that greeted you all you can do is admire the designs of william kent and the attention to detail of matthew breshingham's builders [Music] and attention to detail that the family was careful to observe even after the first earl's death [Music] this is one of the many secret doors here at holcomb which links the world below stairs with that of upstairs the maids would come through this door in the morning and clean out and lay the fire and then disappear from whence they came and no one would ever have known they'd been everything was carefully thought out but of course there was time to think holcomb took 30 years to build and in that time cook indulged his love of the ancient world by creating a setting for everything he had collected on the grand tour every great roman house including one in north norfolk had to have a sculpture gallery here is a young god of wine backus and next to him is one of the joys of this place diana the goddess of hunting thomas cook paid an incredible 1500 pounds for her when he was on the grand tour in the 18th century making her one of the finest acquisitions here at hokum next to her is the goddess of love and fertility venus and above the fireplace apollo so there's a theme here fruitfulness and plenty the very things that thomas cook hoped for from the huge estate that he could see from the windows of this gallery it was all carefully planned today holcomb is in the care of another thomas his family call him tom vi count cook he's taken over from his father the seventh earl of leicester who was retired after thirty years of loving and restoring holcomb it was he who returned many of the treasures from the grand tour to the positions they occupied when holcomb was completed in 1764 and now they're here to fascinate and intrigue another generation all these uh treasures were collected on the grand tour weren't they yeah so thomas cook went on the longest recorded grand tour a total of six years and he headed off with his he was 14 years old when he started 20 years old when he finished uh came back and on his 21st birthday was married but he was he was very well advised his tutor was dr hobart he spent most of the time in italy um but fed a bit of it in france austria as well and were these his these beautiful delicious treasures in front of us well he then died in 1759 his son had pre-deceased him so the title died out and he had to hand the house on to someone else his his wife completed the building of the house and it was then his great nephew also called thomas william cook then subsequently became under queen victoria uh the given the earldom of leicester back so he's known as the first earl of the second creation um and these are uh wonderful pieces of silver which he commissioned um made in about 1776 to 1778. if we look at this wonderful paul store um candelabra you can see these rams heads uh on on all over all over yeah and look at this ostrich what is this you yeah it it's our family crest or as uh uh one of my friends uh in a rather 21st century uh moment said our logo but it's it's our family crest yes and it was the story of that is that sir edward cook who was attorney general to queen elizabeth first and and lord chief justice to james the first he was reputed to be the first englishman to fully comprehend and digest the english legal system and so uh he chose for his crest the ostrich which has a cast iron digestion and can digest anything that it eats it's very simple and he's sitting on a big egg or something isn't it i don't know what it is or a boat there's a cap of maintenance which signifies what i don't know and in his mouth he holds a a horseshoe and in heraldic terms the ostrich is always depicted by a horseshoe because at some battle between the romans and the carthaginians the roman cavalry were actually outflanked and beaten by the nubian cavalry who were mounted on ostriches and so in that one particular battle the ostrich uh won out over the horse so remarkable i mean it almost overwhelms you doesn't it the amount of knowledge within these treasures and these are what wine flagons these are wine viewers um designed in uh and built by william holmes and wonderful serpent handles and um and what's nice is we do still use these uh next weekend i've got a house party and we will have these on at the center um place of the on the table and will you fill these with wine no we won't fill these with wine because i suspect it's been tarnished by but a sort of um you know a silver polish yeah well it's just the kind of thing you could do that with isn't it and lift a glass but they're very very stunning [Music] the fact that holcomb and its treasure survive is a tribute to successive earls down the centuries even by the sometimes eccentric standards of the british aristocracy north norfolk must have felt rather remote but the family prospered because the leicesters managed their land well all 25 000 acres of it and none more so than another thomas cook who became known as cook of norfolk to distinguish him from the man who built this house cook of norfolk came to holcomb in 1776. he too had been on a grand tour of his own but though he appreciated the house and no doubt wanted to pass it on in good condition his real interest was the countryside [Music] he was the founder of the hulcum sheep shearings the forerunner of the county show and as a member of parliament for over 50 years who championed the needs of farmers he became a national figure [Music] like all the landed gentry of the 18th century thomas cook cook of norfolk had a sense of self he wanted to ensure that those who came after saw him as he would like so thomas gainsborough that great court and social painter made him thomas cook the hunter and the italian pompeo batoni caught him at a fancy dress ball whilst he was on the grand tour cook the dandy i suppose they were the different guyses of a man who at the end of his life was elevated to the peerage by a young queen victoria and who styled himself the earl of leicester of holcomb [Music] cook of norfolk brings as i suppose to modern times in many of england's finest houses the story of their early life of the architects and builders and materials are carefully documented but the fallow years of the 20th century when houses like this were hard to keep up are often not so well recorded but not at holcomb from the second half of the 19th century holcomb was of course captured on camera and there are lots of wonderful photographs in the archives here this one is particularly appealing it uh it shows the second girl lying in his bed right here in the saloon on his bed of course is his favorite scotty dog but next to him is a very important visitor his neighbor king edward vii has come to pay him a visit but it's full of interest the different artifacts in the room but it's been made to be a bedroom a receiving room for all his friends and visitors he looks quite happy actually he's looking at camera anyway and here's another one of him he obviously like being wheeled around in a bath chair tied up it seems the piece of old roof is his mattress and he's well wrapped against the cold but this is a very interesting photograph because it shows four generations of the elves of leicester the second third fourth and fifth girls the fifth of course is the child being held by his father don't they look grand i love the second earl's hat he looks very commercially there doesn't he and of course here in the 1930s a little bit later on of course is a typical shooting lunch out in the open a table laid for lunch with white damask cloths and and silver and crystal and the shooting party enjoying themselves well wrapped up against the norfolk chile and this is my favorite photograph it's the third earl in his favorite shooting suit his jacket is held together it looked like safety fins or something that's stitched in there which has come adrift it's grubby it's torn his wife apparently tried to throw it out many many times but he retrieved it uh from the the bin his trousers look as though they're in the same state of dishevelment i guess they look as though they've been tied with a bit of biliband around his waist anyway perry is the third earl of leicester speaks volumes about the attitude of the nobility in the 1930s waste not or not [Music] make do and mend were the watchwords in the early 1970s when the seventh earl took over this great estate was just waiting to be modernized [Music] [Music] it's four years isn't it since you took over the running of this estate from your father yes and uh and how was the estate when you took over when you got when you finally got your hands on it what what did you find i mean was it was it something that was everything you expected it to be or a big problem or a big headache well i i had been here for um gosh about 12 13 years working on the estate with my father under my father and so there were no surprises i knew exactly what was here and and and but basically what was here was everything pretty much in good order uh when my father took over in the mid 70s every facet of the estate was losing money even farming and farming was very much subservient to the game shooting then um and so my father set about turning it turning it around and uh he was advised by the banks to sell cottages which were more of a liability than a uh than an income producer and he said no i'm not taking that advice i'm actually furthermore i'm going to borrow money which of course then was at sort of 15 16 percent um and modernized the cottages um shocking to think that in the 70s 80 of our housing stock had uh outside lose and yet he held firm your father was obviously a remarkable or is a remarkable man you know to have withstood all of that what was it that what was his focus that made him do you think hold tight to his view of where it should go why this house should be i think uh i mean i think the the importance of the house uh there's a there's i'd like to think i have the same you have a sort of inner drive to really make sure this house can survive and um the fact that we hadn't really appreciated was that after the second world war a period of great austerity um the fourth earl tried to give this house to the national trust um and it was my grandfather who had been the black sheep of the family and and sent off to to southern africa with a one-way ticket age 17 having been expelled from public school um who refused to sign the documents to say we'll hand it over to the national trust why did he do that i don't know um i really don't know maybe it was it was the the belief that you know through adversity one can still one can still struggle through uh i think it's very difficult for people my generation to understand the mindset of of those who had lived through the second world war lost lost a son killed and who had been used to living the life of riley i mean certainly an old trustee of mine who died about 15 years ago he remembers coming and having dinner with the family in 1938 in the north state dining room where they dined every single night in white thai and he felt distinctly underdressed he was in black tie so when you've lost all that and and of course james milne of the national trust was very sort of acerbic about these poor people who've lost all their servants but that was the case and and they didn't know another way of of living [Music] a house like this costs 350 000 pounds a year to run which is all coming from um from income that is produced to the estate if we didn't have the house we just had the land and i you know i could race around in a ferrari and things like that so there's some there's some life choices which have been made for me [Music] but you're hitched to this house in a way that most people would find restrictive you know for a young man with a growing family uh you know your future is here isn't it this is this is part this is your life and do you not feel sometimes that you would like to break away from it all um i remember being uh strangely jealous of friends at university who in the last year i was i had a burst room was going into the army and then after the army i might have had five or ten reasonably interesting years doing something which was hitherto unknown to me but then i was going to come back here and it was going to be you know farming and shooting and a bit of forestry [Music] and if you know for them the world was their oyster and you know two of my great mates from university are out in hong kong one's an architect one's a a journalist and you know they're having a fantastic time but actually i am not trained in farming i don't know a great deal about forestry but i've been able to embark upon completely you know as i say hitherto unknown businesses such as hotels leisure all these leisure industry businesses which we've we've started and it's been really interesting how important do you think it is for a place like this to be almost in trust for the nation you know we're talking now about britain in the 21st century this house lasted what 300 400 years and you're the custodian latest custodian of it can you give me an idea of what you think and how you think in a house like this is vital for our watching today you know what has britain given the world um i suppose you have to look to our most sort of preeminent time in in in history and it's it's got to be the uh late 18th century when we were heading off around the world dominating it or certainly embarking upon it and bringing back the riches to this country upon which houses like this were built [Music] i don't think i could do it take on the responsibility of a great house like holcomb the worry of keeping the building wind and water tight of protecting its treasures of repairing its furniture and fabrics would daunt most people but lord and lady cook seem to have taken it on with gusto they're even adding to the collections well it is good to see that you've got the cook collecting bug this is your contribution to the collection here yes well uh spotted by a friend uh coming up for sale in uh four years ago 2006 at sotheby's and um the trustees were very happy to agree to my request that we we buy this or bid for it and it's a john piper of holcomb painted in 1939 so quite an early period and of course 1939 i think everybody in this country knew that the war was coming so you see these black storm clouds it's quite unsettling and yet uh very nice to to think that we can have our own little contribution nothing to rival the majesty of of thomas cook's collection but uh it's great that we can uh continue it in our own little way and it's important to have uh you know someone a work by someone like piper of your own house well as you say it's so difficult isn't it to put your own mark on a collection like this which you know you can't imagine taking any of these statues down and putting your own statue your own taste in statues up there yeah one of the things my father did was was to put the house back put the pictures back to the original hang with the from the first inventory in 1773 and uh his view and i think he's right is that uh it was rather presumptive for us mere mortals really to to try and change anything that someone of thomas cook's learning had had put together and put so much thought into it so this hangs in the uh in the private uh wings where um it's uh you know we've got a little bit more leeway to move things around at least it hasn't stopped you i know that you are collecting you your other pieces of works of art you you have you set your eye on you like you buy you have which is the best thing isn't it [Music] so holcomb is in good hands its estate survives and prospers from the kind of land management cook of norfolk would have applauded but above all the house which the first earl of leicester built is still here open to the public and thriving a palladian fantasy on the north norfolk coast when cook of norfolk died in 1842 england was a very different place from the land his namesake thomas the builder had known a palladian house would sit uncomfortably in victoria's britain and in the 20th century a house like holcomb would be a candidate for demolition too big too costly to maintain but thomas's successors were in love with this great house just as much as he was and thanks to them holcomb has survived no one would be more delighted to know that his creation has become one of the treasure houses of britain [Music] this time on treasure houses of britain bouton the house they call the english versailles every door you open is into another room full of treasures and when they went shopping they always bought in pairs a jewel box in the english countryside if i open the door you will actually find inside the evidence of the person for whom it was made and collections from yesterday and today it has more atmosphere than any other great house you will see you feel the generations you feel the sentries [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] bowton is the genius of rafe first duke of montague he was determined to create the english equivalent of versailles nestling in the northamptonshire countryside his legacy is one of this country's most beautiful houses it took him 20 years when rafe died his son john carried on his work but when he died in 1749 bowton went to sleep for 150 years [Music] [Music] there's something magical about barton it seems timeless not that big pretty much unchanged since it was transformed at the end of the 17th century a jewel box set in the northamptonshire countryside and every compartment of that jewel box is stuffed with treasures it's exactly as rave montague intended england's answer to versailles [Music] the montagues came to england with william the conqueror who gave harold one in the eye at hastings in 1066 but the story of barton starts with sir edward montagu who bought this land in 1528 he was chief justice of the king's bench and an executor of henry viii's will sir edward built a great hall part of which survives under the later alterations but so much was changed by his successors that we don't really know what edward's house looked like the most dramatic changes were the work of sir edward's grandson rafe who was to become the first duke he was ambitious at court and that ambition won him the position of ambassador to france in 1666 he was in awe of the french king louis xiv and astonished by the palace at versailles and he conceived the idea of building a copy at balton two marriages to wealthy women gave rafe the means to achieve his dream but he brought something other than ideas back from france with him came paintings and furniture artists and craftsmen [Music] today we would say of rafe that he had an eye for beauty but it may be that in the second half of the 17th century there was an embarrassment of riches from which to choose bouton contains english tapestries from mortlake cabinets by the very best of french craftsmen paintings by the flemish artist sir anthony van dyke and the english court painter thomas gainsborough mirrors by daniel marrow and some of the earliest carpets to have been woven in england it is quite simply stunning today bouton is owned by the duke of the clue not because it has ever been bought or sold but because in one of those complicated stories of english family descent the montagues became linked to the scots of the clue by marriage so two great estates consisting of magnificent houses in scotland and in england came together and have stayed together for 250 years well look at this what does one say about this this is a heraldic device under and a half isn't it it's just it certainly is please don't ask me to try and decipher it why not let me go on have a go completely lost i would get completely lost but what i can tell you is that this is one of really quite a large number of chimney pieces in the house and the montague dukes that's rafe and john um were completely obsessed by their whole dream they were fascinated by their descent and they longed to be able to trace themselves back and i think they did say successfully to ancient and grand people from the past and in particular here at bowton they trace themselves back to queen eleanor the wife of edward the first we're talking now about the 1290s she died in and they wanted to do that because one of the memorial crosses which marked the passage of her of her body when she died back to london is nearby and so in fact you find coats of arms all over the house not only here above the fireplace but if you look down below you see the far back which has got its lozenges and its grippings and if we go next door actually to the great hall uh through here you see some of the most magnificent examples in fact you see if you look back up there you see this huge coat of arms um sitting up on the top you see the red lozenges the diamond shaped things um next door to the griffins and this very large pair of griffins gazing down on the diners in the great hall the first and second dukes were fascinated by genealogy they traced their family line back to drago de montecuto one of william the conquerors knights on the one hand and to edward the first on the other [Music] both the dukes were determined to celebrate their lineage visitors to the great hall at bowton would be left in no doubt that this was a great family and was destined to be even greater so sir edward montague is here wearing his chain of office as chief justice above the fireplace is james scott the first duke of monmouth and the clue elizabeth the first has a privileged position a portrait shows her in the 37th year of her reign 1595 and alongside her are the earl and countess of southampton she the queen's lady in waiting he the patron of william shakespeare it's the story of the montagues intertwined with the history of england and it's all crowned by a carved coat of arms so big that no one who lingered here could doubt the importance of this family after all sir edward montague served four monarchs which considering the intrigue the plotting and the executions of the 16th century is remarkable is such a sensational room isn't it it is wonderful and of course it's at the heart of boughton because this really was the original building when edward montague the man behind us in 1528 he had a tude a great hall you might not imagine that when you see the room now with its wonderful painted barrel ceiling but up above that ceiling there's a hammer beam wooden roof concealed by we've actually got photographs of what it looks like that tudor hall was then transformed by rafe the first duke of montague in the late 17th century and it was he who as well as putting in the ceiling and having it painted he ran the molt lake tapestry factory and a lot of our tapestries date from that area at the end of the 17th century and they were woven for him got his coats of arms and everything else on them and what's happened over the centuries is that you have an accumulation of generations of family portraits unlike so many houses um in in this country uh which had victorian makeovers in the 19th century nobody touched biotin it's really what makes it so precious and so special that you have a sense of having at least a hundred two hundred years perhaps of it lying dormant and then very slowly uh reawakening so the colors of this place have been kept like this because the shutters have been closed against the world absolutely yes yes and you haven't had people drifting through and having bright ideas about doing this that and the next thing with it it's a very very continuous center and so and so if you come into one of these rooms now you're almost stepping in the footsteps of of rafe of all the associates that he had i mean it gives you it's a remarkable feeling isn't it i think it is terribly important to remember that they are individuals human beings who had uh foibles likes dislikes characteristics some of which are admiral some of which were not so admirable and i think you need to sort of look at portraits like we have on the wall um and try and look into the characters of the people who are there and very slowly as we managed to get to grips with the archives i hope we'll be able to find out a bit more about what what made them tick in a way [Music] every nobleman in england wanted a visit by the king in rafe montague's case it was a visit by william iii in this english version of versailles he set about creating a series of state apartments which the king would use while he was here this set of rooms is almost exactly as it was when william arrived on the 23rd of october 1695. the walls are the drab color they were first painted the paintings and tapestries are those which the king would have seen and a hundred years after it was loaned to the victoria and albert museum the state bed is back in its original position although this sumptuous bed um was balton's bed it in fact does not now belong to bowdoin does it well that is strictly true yes because back in 1918 my great grandfather became deeply concerned about the condition of a lot of the furniture here and particularly textiles it was decaying in the old country life photograph saying it decaying so he wrote to the director of the vna the torah and albert museum saying mighty by any chance have space for a bed and i think almost by return a lorry was dispatched from london to collect the bed and there it stayed throughout the great part of the last century it was wonderfully restored as you can see i can't remember how many thousands and thousands of hours of patient work went into restoring these hangings but they were as keen to try and return it to its original home as we obviously were to have it back and very happily only five six years ago we managed to reach an agreement whereby would come back on long-term loan and it's thoroughly right that it should do so because it is sitting exactly where it sat when it was bought by rafe montague at the end of the 17th century surrounded by the same tapestries from the molt-lake acts of the apostles series as hung in the room at that time so you have such a sent sense of of the continuity of it being here and what it did for bowton i think is so important is that it reminded us of the vivid uh coloring that people at the 18th end of the 17th century lived with this wonderful crimson and when we talk about the state rooms we're really talking about a series of very formal rooms this would have been the third there would have been a state dining room to begin with then a withdrawing room and then the state bedroom and this was to entertain the grandest of all guests and rafe must have very much hoped that king william would come and stay here at bowton as indeed he did in 1694. the only downside of that was that the rooms probably weren't quite ready by then and we know that rafe had a particular problem with his bed so in fact magnificent though this is it's actually a secondhand french cast off it wasn't the latest fashion in state beds but it obviously did for king william uh or it did at least for the formal part of his stay so he slept in this bed let's say that he stepped in this bed um the little secret i have to let you in on is that there's actually a fourth from a more private retiring room when he could get rid of his coaches and disappear into and if you go in there you'll find even a little secret doorway that leads through one of these great hanging tapestries into what would have been a very comfy cosy room and one suspects that he retired there but to all intents and and for formal presentational reasons this was his bed rafe montague um having been at versailles brought back lots of ideas to inspire his his decorative plans for biotin and ordinary though this might look nowadays it's actually one of the earliest examples of parque de versailles parque flooring as we now know it in this country and in fact it would have been so special that the rugs which nowadays we uh lay out the wonderful rugs we have in these rooms would not have been on it visitors would have been admiring that but what we've tried to do um is to bring together the furniture that would have been in these rooms in particular everything with the crimson covering the late 17th century chairs so you've certainly got probably as good a feeling um as you will get anywhere in britain of what these rooms would have been like and you can have a sense of the um of the taste of those days as i say the bright colors but contrasted with this rather curious drab wool painting the color of the walls is exactly as it was in seventeen hundred [Music] this is not blenheim or chatsworth with their great halls and huge spaces bowton has something else an intimacy that is thrilling the present duke's father who died in 2007 spoke of the atmosphere in this house he was intoxicated by it and by the blend of fragrances that exude from the paneling the dust in the tapestries the oak logs in the great fireplaces the new moon grass on the south lawn ticking clocks wind whistling through the ancient window frames and row after row of family portraits of men who knew what it was to employ those who work their land [Music] originally this room would have been used by members of the family to promenade in wet weather but later it came to be known as the audit room bowton had 17 000 acres of land in the 18th century and tenants would gather here every lady day to pay their rents but the great glory of the room is this gaming table it's nearly 40 feet long and you used to be able to play a form of shuffleboard on it we know from the ledgers that the estate carpenter made it for three pounds seven shillings and fortunes this room tells a story in oil paintings of the history of the montague family there's rafe of course first duke next to his wife the sensuous elizabeth she'd been married twice before but it didn't stop him chasing her around the continent before she agreed to be his wife sadly elizabeth died in childbirth when she was just 40 but he went on to marry again they say he was quite a catch but he doesn't look much of an oil painting to me [Music] one man has been writing about baltan for years and wondering like me why more people don't know about this hidden treasure marcus binney architecture correspondent of the times author and former editor of country life believes that bowton is in a league of its own [Music] the father of the present duke said that he was intoxicated with barton and there's little wonder is there every door you open is into another room full of treasures and when they went shopping they always bought in pairs on either side of this these two lovely white japanese lacquer cabinets well we're in the drawing room and apart from the two lack of cabinets we've got is it 40 van dycks on the wall 40 vang dykes all matching grizzai they're called painted in monotone and they're all of his contemporaries both in flanders and in england and one of the great things with van dyke was the way he painted his hands often very sort of languid but here you have the complete repertoire of every kind of hand that van dyke ever did the fists the fingers everything [Music] van dyke was the greatest portrait painter of the time rubens was practically the richest painter who ever lived you know who was his master but then along came van dijk who could charge as much as reuben's uh by the end of his life and of course he died terribly young sort of thing so to have 40 band acts is an amazing thing [Music] van dyke has always been fashionable in england because he flattered his aristocratic patrons the ladies were in long dresses the men always looked elegant and uh to have a van dyke let alone 40 is the grandest thing you can have in any treasure house [Music] it is a surprise among all the great houses the others are wonderfully well known but people 50 miles away from here may not have heard about and this is what makes it this wonderful surprise it has more atmosphere than any other great house you will see you feel the generations you feel the centuries and everywhere there are treasures grand and small when rafe montague died in 1709 bouton was already full of treasures but his son found room for more john the second duke married the daughter of the first duke of marlborough the man who defeated the french at blenheim and set out in 1722 on a campaign to take saint lucia and saint vincent in the west indies he failed but the evidence of his interest in arms and armor was later displayed at bowton and survives intact this is incredible is it not this place it's the finest private armory in the original house of the family a mixture of montagues and scots warring peoples and this is what they had klansmen highlanders regiments yeah this was both hunting and war so we have swords from the 18th century we have guns from from the same era don't we i mean the remarkable remarkable guns flintlocks pistols every weapon which you could get if you were a very rich nobleman and you could have beautifully engraved shotguns and then fantastic swords so wonderful displays of swords here that they arranged them in fans and in great circles and this was the traditional way in an armory of showing off your immense collection and even this you're going to tell me about this because this is a remarkable machine as well isn't it it's called a puckle gun this is right it's an early sort of gatling machine gun but you know years decades ahead of its time and it fired round bullets for christians and square ones for turks he had six of them made for a disastrous expedition to invade the caribbean island of salusia and take it from the french well in a way neither of the bullets worked the round one saw the square ones so anyway you brought the guns back and so it took another 100 years to get to lucia but here's the gun and it's surprising is it not that he's kept everything all the family have kept everything right down to the very last tiny little pistol for foot pads i noticed you know you have a pistol to shoot someone who attacks you in the street but they kept them well of course in the great treasure house you don't have to throw things away there are sellers there are attics there are storms and strong rooms so these are just put into boxes and but of course they always were proud of the armory so it's been in different parts of the house in different centuries [Music] at bowsen duke john extended the landscape and in london he built montague house overlooking the thames in whitehall [Music] it was one of the many houses the family owned yet for some curious reason he never completed bowton which is lucky for us because the unfinished wing gives us an opportunity to see how bowton was built 300 years ago it is an amazing opportunity isn't it to see behind the scenes of the house this this miniature versailles here we are and it's cold and i think the duchess must have come here decided to move to a smaller cozier house but the fun for us today is to see you know how they built these houses because it's stone on the inside as well as stone on the outside straddled by enormous oak beams an enormous beam but why are they diagonal it's to avoid fireplaces and windows so it's all very cleverly thought out very careful ah so it wasn't just cobbled together it was not i mean do you think that these beams have been reclaimed from an older building no you always hear that story they came from a ship or they had great oaks on this estate they would have got the best beams right from the park out there so what impresses you apart from the beams what else impresses you about this unfinished wing the windows you know they began with french-style versailles casement windows opening in and out and then the sash windows more english rising up and you've got the sash windows down below renewed but with the glass you can't see through because they didn't want people to see inside the unfinished wing what's this this chinese pavilion i mean what was this used for well this is a a wonderful little folly the 18th century loved garden pavilions and follies and temples in the grounds but this one was one which you could take up and put down and it was bought by the duke in 1745 and uh it seems it was he actually just bought it he didn't commission it but it shows what you could do when he went in century he must have had a thing in shopping about china they did then didn't they well they did and this was actually but this is one of the earliest little chinese pavilions in england before the chinese pagoda queue so he was very much a setter of taste where's it been hiding all these years here at barton well why is it black apparently it was painted black as a camouflage against zeppelins in the first world war really but inside it's as cozy as can be it's got dragons on the ceiling and and comfy sofas all around it's perfect isn't it for a little bit of tete yeah well they would have had ladies would have had tea yes i mean it was always party time in the 18th century it's just hard to imagine how often and how long they were partying every day late in the evening and the night and this would have been the scene of it how did the tent end up here well montague house was demolished so they brought it here and then they put it up on the lawn every summer for 60 years so they continued to enjoy it and now it's here in the unfinished wing now you're standing in front of something else that's quite remarkable it's a chinese screen obviously tell me about this because it has a an interesting history doesn't it well it was only discovered a year ago in the stewards room and this shows you know these treasure houses always have more treasures to find and this is a a real chinese screen not a piece of shinrazary made in england but actually came from china this beautiful lack of screen and the fun about it is it looks like the imperial palace in in beijing but in fact it's just i think a grand nobleman's house but you look at the lines of people bringing him gifts you know queueing up and then the musicians entertaining them bands and then not only wives but concubines children all these different wives playing you go today to beijing and see it full of tourists but here you see who was living here originally and here is this the procession you know two by two they're coming and how he is sitting in granger in this under this canopy they're all bowing before him and wonderful dancers just in front entertaining people peacocks yes can you imagine how much this must be worth today when you think of the chinese and how much they want their art back can you imagine yes also can you imagine how much time it's going to take to carefully repair it to the pristine state [Music] in london montague house where the chinese pavilion could be seen on the lawn every summer has long since been demolished but unlike other members of the nobility the dukes of the clue seemed better able to cope with the pressures which the 20th century brought to bear on britain's landowners [Music] bowton sailed on regardless the seventh duke started a process of conservation at the start of the 20th century the eighth and ninth the present duke's father followed suit the ninth duke was once called a one-man national trust which is not so very odd when you consider that the family owns hundreds of thousands of acres in scotland and england and divides its time between drumlandry castle in dumfricia with its collection of rembrandts bow hill and the borders and bowsen in northamptonshire and at all the family properties the present duke continues the conservation work started by those who went before him [Music] such a magnificent treasure isn't it well it is glorious isn't it now it's very rich and very ornate and it's looking even more wonderful uh since a conservation program which took place two years ago when it was almost literally taken to pieces the conservation is necessary with this sort of furniture it's a cabinet by andre charles boole because this wonderful metal work marquetry as it's called with time begins to spring out and it's absolutely vital to to reattach it so that it doesn't tear tear away and if i open the door you will actually find inside the evidence of the person for whom it was made you look up here and you'll see a coat of arms and this is the coat of arms of a man called colbert he was an archbishop of reams uh you can see his cardinals hat there and colbert lived at the end of the 17th century we believe he died i think in 1707. um and what's been wonderful about the uh process of conservation on this piece is that it's enabled a little bit of detective work to happen simultaneously so for instance it's been possible to analyze the brassies like this and within this piece of brass it's an alloy that includes copper using non-invasive technology ultra violet spectrography it is possible to discover that there are small quantities of silver within that now that would never have been left there but it wasn't until the industrial revolution that that could be extracted so we're able to say at least from that that this piece is an 18th century piece uh if not earlier and then if we look down here at this wonderful blue color you see ultramarinitis which is backing a piece of clear horn and again using scientific analysis it's possible to identify that it is ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli a very very rare and expensive product which furniture makers would have ceased using when a replacement cheaper color came along and that happened in the first decade of the 18th century when some german chemists accidentally came across a new type of blue pruss and blue it's caused called uh they stopped using the uh the uh the ultramarine and moved to prussian but because we know this the analysis of that uh we know that that is ultramarine we know that this whole piece is roughly contemporary with uh with colbert's dates and bulls dates so that must have been thrilling for you when you were told by the conservator of this you must have thought that it was christmas all over again well it is wonderful and it is very nice i think even though we all admire the artistry the craftsmanship of this piece of furniture and seeing it disassembled in a workshop when it literally comes into a thousand pieces and you go back to the oak frame at the heart of it and you see hundreds of nails and screws and everything used to make it all of that is fascinating but actually i think what is equally important is a sense of the people to whom it belongs how did it get into this english country house having originated in a great french palace what sort of man was colbert why did my full bears buy it when did they buy it i think all these threads of the human story that accompanies a great work of art are really just as important and just as interesting well so tell me who restored it well we were very lucky to find a remarkable and appropriate enough a frenchman called yannick shastan who'd worked at the wallace collection in london and then a few years ago he set up his own independent conservation studio and yannick came to bite and he looked at all the french furniture and he identified the bits that were in most urgent need of conservation and he took it back to his workshop and he he took it all to pieces it was really rather scary to go in and see it literally in a thousand pieces with all the screws and all the nails and everything else right back to the oak carcass at the heart of it and then very slowly he began putting things back on gluing at the marquetry where necessary and cleaning um the the various brasses and i think one of the uh secrets of his success is the fact that he did it so slowly so that he was able to leave time for instance having cleaned the brass leave time for a little bit of oxidization so that it lost the gleam so that it didn't stand out too sharply before putting on a varnish cover and i think it is terribly important when doing conservation work particularly when you have a piece in a historic house like this where not everything is going to be restored that it doesn't jar you know with everything else and it applies not just to furniture like this but obviously to paintings where you have the pattern of aids created by the varnish the slightly mellow feel and i think it's very important to find the right balance when you're doing conservation work and yannick surely did it with this piece [Music] we have our forebears to thank generation after generation for what they collected what they added to the collections um over 300 years and very slowly my wife and i we're beginning that process again of trying to uh renew so to speak the art collection and the landscape this is not a museum this is a living living place and we just feel incredibly lucky to be able to be part of it for however long we're lucky enough to live here [Music] bowton is ravishing all the more so because you feel you're discovering history at every turn it's the history of the montague family [Music] but it's also our history the scots the montagues the clues their names ring down the ages and the houses and treasures they built and collected are part of the fabric of the nation something which successive dukes have recognized [Music] [Music] there's a charming post script to the story of bowton other dukes might be tempted to live with the furniture and silver and paintings amassed by their ancestors through the generations after all you can make it a life's work conserving some of england's finest houses but the duke of the clue was determined to add to his collection last year he commissioned this harpsichord by the english instrument maker andrew garlick it looks as though it's always belonged here in the morning room and is proof if proof were needed that balton continues to be one of the treasure houses of britain [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Real Royalty

Views: 121,052

Keywords: real royalty, real royalty channel, british royalty, royalty around the world, royal history, real royalty family, real royalty documentaries, real royalty queen victoria, chatsworth house, country houses britain, lords and ladies of britain, blenheim palace, blenheim palace documentary, blenheim palace tour, british history, holkham hall, boughton house history, burghley house documentary, most famous houses in the world, treasure houses of britain tv show

Id: _0cEGrrhvrg

Length: 219min 38sec (13178 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022