Burghley House
Interesting facts
- An inventory made in 1688 lists Japanese porcelain still in the house, the earliest recorded pieces of their kind in Europe.
- The house has 35 major rooms on its two main floors, along with more than 80 lesser rooms.
- William Cecil spent about £21,000 on building the house, a vast sum in Elizabethan England.
- John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter, bought around 300 works of art on his Grand Tour journeys, shaping much of the collection seen today.
- The collection includes seven paintings by the Neapolitan master Luca Giordano, among them a self-portrait.
- Capability Brown turned a nine-acre pond into the 26-acre lake after finding a waterproof blue clay on the estate to line it.
- Brown's Lion Bridge cost 1,000 guineas; its original Coade-stone lions weathered and were replaced with stone ones carved in 1844.
- The Billiard Room displays six oval portraits of members of the Order of Little Bedlam, the 5th Earl's drinking club.
- Fourteen green sea turtle skulls hang in the Old Kitchen, most likely relics of the Victorian taste for turtle soup.
- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert each planted a tree in the park to mark their visit to Burghley.
Why it is worth it
Burghley is best understood from the outside first, and from a distance. Above its walls rises one of the most exuberant rooflines in England: roofs covering about an acre and a half, bristling with 76 chimneys, cupolas, turrets, pinnacles and obelisks, all climbing towards the spire over the clock tower of the inner court, which carries the date 1585. It is the skyline of an Elizabethan prodigy house, built to show a queen and her court that its owner stood at the very top of the state.
That owner was William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I and her closest adviser. He built the house over three decades, from 1555 to 1587, around a rectangular courtyard, taking the royal privy lodgings at Richmond Palace as a model, and each of its four façades is different, worked in the full vocabulary of towers, bays and mullioned windows. His descendants, the Cecils, Earls and, from 1801, Marquesses of Exeter, have lived here ever since, and the house is now held by a preservation trust run by the family.
Inside, the Elizabethan shell gave way to Baroque splendour at the end of the seventeenth century. The Italian painter Antonio Verrio covered the walls and ceilings of two rooms between 1697 and 1699 with his most famous work: in the Heaven Room the Olympian gods and goddesses disport themselves across walls and ceiling alike, and the Hell Staircase that leads up to it gives the underworld its turn. Louis Laguerre painted the Bow Room, and Grinling Gibbons carved woodwork for the state rooms. Outside, Capability Brown reshaped the park between 1755 and 1779, adding a lake of some 26 acres and the Lion Bridge of 1778. The park hosts the Burghley Horse Trials each year, and the house has served as a film set, among others for Pride & Prejudice (2005) and The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Getting there
Burghley stands just south of Stamford in Lincolnshire, about 1.5 km from the town and close to the A1. Stamford railway station is about half a mile from the park entrance and roughly 1.5 miles from the house, a walk through the parkland; the station is linked to the London–Edinburgh main line via Peterborough. A local bus stops at the main visitor entrance on Barnack Road, about 600 metres from the house, and parking is on site. The nearest airport is London Luton (LTN), about 86 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Burghley House is a grand 16th-century English country house near Stamford, Lincolnshire. It is a leading example of the Elizabethan prodigy house, built and still lived in by the senior (Exeter) branch of the Cecil family and is Grade I listed.
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