The great survivor

Burghley House, Lincolnshire, part II The home of Miranda and Orlando Rock In the second of two articles celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Jeremy Musson looks at the 20th- and 21st-century story of the seat he created

- Lord Burghley, Jeremy Musson

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 17thcentury 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 their four children. That the house should remain a residence was an express element of the Burghley House Preservation Trust founded by David, the 6th Marquess, in 1969. Lord Exeter was a pioneer: Burghley was one of the first generation of houses and collections made the object of dedicated trusts, something that became more familiar after the Finance Act of 1974. In this case, the collections, as well as a major part of the house and estate, are vested in the trust that is supported by an endowment. The family quarters and some property are subject to a separate, overlapping family trust.