Burghley House

A settlement called Burghley is named in Domesday, but it had been abandoned by 1450. Its site has never been found, and the supposition that it stood near the present house, and perhaps lies beneath the estate, rests on that failure to locate it.

The house that carries the name was built for Sir William Cecil, later 1st Baron Burghley and Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I, between 1555 and 1587, at a cost of £21,000. It was modelled on the privy lodgings of Richmond Palace, and its floor plan was laid out in the shape of the letter E in honour of the queen. Its stonemasonry and proportion make it one of the main examples of 16th-century English Elizabethan architecture, reflecting both the prominence of its founder and the lucrative wool trade of the Cecil estates.

Burghley passed to Cecil's descendants, the Earls of Exeter, and from 1801 to the Marquesses of Exeter. It was built by, and is still lived in by, the senior Exeter branch of the Cecil family.

The exterior largely keeps its Elizabethan appearance, but most of the interiors date from remodellings carried out before 1800. In the 17th century the open loggias around the ground floor were enclosed, and a suite of rooms was remodelled in the baroque style, with carvings by Grinling Gibbons.

Antonio Verrio painted the substantial ceiling paintings of the room known as the Heaven Room and of its neighbouring Hell Staircase between 1697 and 1699, and many of the delicately painted walls and ceilings elsewhere in the house are his work as well. The walls of the Hell Staircase are not his: they were completed about a century later by Thomas Stothard. The Bow Room carries wall and ceiling paintings by Louis Laguerre.

Two collectors account for much of what hangs at Burghley. John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter (c. 1648-1700), and Brownlow Cecil, 9th Earl (1725-1793), both bought in Italy; they visited eight times and brought back large quantities of art. John Cecil purchased 300 works during his 22 years at Burghley, and on his last visit to Europe he spent £5,000, something near £600,000 in 2017 currency.

The chapel holds a large altarpiece by Paolo Veronese and his workshop and two large paintings by Johann Carl Loth, a German painter active in Venice whose work is scarce in British collections. Seven works by Luca Giordano include a self-portrait. The Pagoda Room hangs portraits of the Cecil family alongside Elizabeth I, Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, and the Billiard Room six oval portraits of members of the Order of Little Bedlam, the 5th Earl's drinking club.

The collection of Japanese export porcelain matters for a documentary reason. Pieces still in the house, together with others sold in 1888 and 1959, can be matched against an inventory of several hundred ceramic items drawn up in 1688. They are the earliest recorded pieces in Europe that can be documented in that way, and of great interest to scholars. Death duties in the 1960s stripped out a number of important pieces, but the collections are otherwise mainly intact and very extensive, running to several hundred paintings, silver, tapestry and furniture by the 18th-century cabinet makers Ince and Mayhew. A Treasury space in the Brewhouse shows annually changing exhibitions drawn from them.

Under the 9th Earl, and under the guidance of the landscape architect Capability Brown, the house was altered to suit the ground around it: the south front was raised to change the roof line, and the north-west wing was demolished to allow better views of the new parkland; the house is now missing that wing. A chimney-piece after a design by the Venetian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi was added in the same period.

Brown laid out the avenues of the park to designs he supplied over more than two decades from the mid-1750s, paying due respect to pre-existing plantings, some of them from the 16th century or earlier. He made the park's lake between 1775 and 1780: he had found a seam of waterproof blue clay in the grounds, which allowed him to enlarge the original nine-acre pond to the 26 acres it covers now, shaped to give the impression of a meandering river. The Lion Bridge followed in 1778 at a cost of 1,000 guineas. He was paid £23,000 in total for his work on the park.

Coade stone lions were used as ornament at first; after they weathered, the stone examples standing now were made by a local mason, Herbert Gilbert, in 1844. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert planted two trees to commemorate their visit. Between 2012 and 2016 Brown's landscape was conserved by the planting of 30,000 new trees. The parkland and gardens have been listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens since 1985.

Since 1961 Burghley has been owned by a charitable trust set up by the family. The Burghley House Preservation Trust runs the house and remains under the Cecils' control. David Cecil, 6th Marquess of Exeter, an Olympic gold medal-winning athlete, an MP and president of the IAAF, is commemorated in the house by the Olympic corridor; his daughter Victoria Leatham, born in 1947, an antiques expert and television personality, ran Burghley from 1982 to 2007.

The marquessate went elsewhere. It passed in 1988 to Victoria Leatham's uncle Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909-1988), and then to his son William Michael Anthony Cecil, born in 1935. Both were Canadian ranchers, on land originally bought by the 5th Marquess, and neither has lived at Burghley.

Miranda Rock, Victoria Leatham's daughter and a director of the trust, has lived in the house since 2007 with her husband Orlando Rock, chairman of Christie's UK, and their family; she is the most active live-in trustee. Figures from before the COVID-19 pandemic showed that annual visitor numbers had almost doubled during her tenure, to 110,000. Fourteen green sea turtle skulls hang on a kitchen wall, likely remnants of the Victorian delicacy turtle soup, a taste that heavily reduced green sea turtle numbers before it dropped out of favour with the upper classes.

The house has been listed Grade I since 1956, with its north courtyard and gate listed Grade I separately, and it opens to the public on a seasonal basis. The park carries the annual Burghley Horse Trials, the Burghley Run for Stamford School and an annual meet for the Cambridge University Draghounds.