Hatfield House

The first great house at Hatfield was the Royal Palace of Hatfield, built in 1497 by Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry VII's minister. It was laid out as four wings in a square around a central courtyard, and the nearby parish church of St Etheldreda's in Old Hatfield served the bishop's palace as well as the village. Henry VIII seized the palace along with other church properties. Only part of that earlier building survives, a short distance from the present house.

Henry VIII's children Edward VI and the future Elizabeth I spent their youth at Hatfield Palace, which was Elizabeth's favourite residence. His eldest daughter, Mary, lived there between 1533 and 1536, sent to wait on the then Princess Elizabeth as punishment for refusing to recognise her father's marriage to Anne Boleyn and his religious reforms.

In 1548, when she was only fifteen, Elizabeth came under suspicion of having illegally agreed to marry Thomas Seymour. Edward VI's agent Robert Tyrwhit seized the house and her servants and interrogated her there, and she defended her conduct with wit and defiance. Seymour was executed in 1549 for numerous other crimes against the crown.

Elizabeth returned to Hatfield after two months' imprisonment in the Tower of London at the hands of her sister, Queen Mary. Queen Elizabeth's Oak on the estate is said to be the place where she was told that Mary was dead and that she was queen, though the story is considered unlikely, since Mary died in November. In November 1558 Elizabeth held her first Council of State in the Great Hall.

Elizabeth's successor, James I, did not like the palace, which was included in the jointure estate of his wife, Anne of Denmark. In 1607 the king gave it to his chief minister, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, in exchange for Theobalds, the Cecils' family home on the site of what is now Cedars Park at Broxbourne.

Cecil, who liked building, tore down three wings of the royal palace in 1608 - the back and the two sides of the square - and used the bricks to raise the present house. Robert Lemynge supervised the work, with input from the royal surveyor Simon Basil, and Inigo Jones visited in October 1609. The new house was built in 1611, a leading example of the prodigy house and of Jacobean architecture.

The gardens, covering 42 acres, date from the early seventeenth century and were laid out by John Tradescant the elder, who visited Europe and brought back trees and plants that had never previously been grown in England. They took in orchards, fountains, scented plants, water parterres, terraces, herb gardens and a foot maze. Neglected in the eighteenth century, they began to be restored in Victorian times.

During the First World War the grounds were used to test the first British tanks. An area was dug with trenches and craters and covered with barbed wire to represent no man's land and the German trench lines on the Western Front. To mark that work, the only surviving Mark I tank stood at Hatfield from 1919 until 1970, when it was moved to The Tank Museum at Bovington.

During the Second World War Hatfield House was the location of the first Civil Resettlement Unit and acted as headquarters for the scheme. The units were created to help repatriated British prisoners of war make the return to civilian life, and the luxurious setting at Hatfield was considered very beneficial to these men. On 12 July 1945 the king and queen visited the unit at Hatfield, a visit that generated significant news coverage.

The house was listed Grade I on 6 February 1952, and its park and garden received a Grade I designation of their own on 11 June 1987. It is the home of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, and is open to the public: the State Rooms are shown on midweek guided tours, with visitors free to look round at their own pace at weekends. Restoration of the gardens has continued under the present Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury. The house keeps a collection of objects associated with Elizabeth I, among them gloves and a pair of silk stockings believed to have been the first in England, a 22-foot illuminated parchment roll in the library tracing the queen's pedigree back to Adam and Eve, and the "Rainbow Portrait" in the Marble Hall.

In the grounds stands the 'Troopie' memorial statue placed by the Rhodesian Light Infantry Regimental Association, sited at Hatfield because of the long association of the Cecil family with Southern Rhodesia. Around its base runs a roll of regimental members who fell in the Rhodesian Bush War, together with several inscriptions, including 'In reconciliation and hope for future peace in Zimbabwe'.