The great survivor

THE splendours of Burghley House can be overwhelming. Christopher Hussey ‘compressed’ the story of the house into five succeeding articles in COUNTRY LIFE in 1953 and the authors of The Stately Homes of England (1877) took six pages to describe the architecture and interiors of the house before admitting (exhausted, no doubt): ‘We regret we cannot find space to describe numerous other admirably constructed and beautifully furnished apartments of this noble mansion, one of the most interesting of the many glorious baronial halls of the kingdom.’

Quite what its appeal was to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who reputedly selected the house as his official residence in the event of a successful invasion of Britain, is less clear.

Part fairy-tale castle, part treasure house, this great building, the Tudor genesis of which was described last week, has been repeatedly re-worked (Fig 2). It possesses superb 17th-century interiors and one of Capability Brown’s greatest surviving landscapes (Fig 1).

Burghley remains home to William Cecil’s descendants and is today lived in by Miranda Rock (a granddaughter of the 6th Marquess of Exeter), her husband, Orlando, and