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Broughton Castle

Oxfordshire

APPROACHED THROUGH a battlemented gatehouse of around 1400, Broughton Castle seems too good to be true. A massive slab of a house, clasping itself to its square moated island, it seems like a familiar illustration from a history book. Built in warm stone, the house sits in its enclosing landscape and speaks of a rich and complex history that encompasses centuries of occupation, and a slow evolution towards a house of mellow weathered beauty. It is a house that exercises a curious aesthetic draw. As Martin Fiennes, whose home Broughton Castle now is, observes: ‘at six o’clock on a summer evening, there is no more beautiful room than the Oak Room, with its door open to the garden – a scent of roses drifting in on the warm air.’

The feeling of ages: the great hall of Broughton Castle, the walls stripped back to the stone at the end of the nineteenth century, when the eighteenth-century Gothic-style ceiling plasterwork was retained.

Stately Broughton Castle seen across the moat, an early fourteenth-century house much remodelled in the mid-sixteenth century.

The gabled entrance front of the house took this form from the 1550s.

The fourteenth-century battlemented gatehouse, with the ancient stables alongside, and parish church of St Mary beyond, seen from the house.

Broughton Castle has been the home of the Fiennes family since 1450. In the mid-seventeenth century, it hit troubled times: William Fiennes, the 8th Lord Saye and Sele, was one of the leading figures of the Parliamentary cause, while his second son Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes was in charge of the Parliamentary garrison at Bristol. Broughton Castle was surrendered to Royalist troops in 1642. Despite the establishment of the Commonwealth, the house was not quickly revived, so when William’s granddaughter, the famous diarist Celia Fiennes, came there in the 1690s she wrote gloomily of how it was ‘much left to decay and ruin when my brother come to it’.

Layers of ages

Once through the gatehouse, it is a surprise to realise that the facade you are approaching is principally a Tudor one. This was a refacing and remodelling of a grand early fourteenth-century residence thought to have been completed for John de Broughton, who died in 1315. This earlier house had a great hall with withdrawing apartments at one end, and a service range at the other – and a double height chapel which survives at the head of worn stone steps, the licence for which was granted in 1331. From this work also dates the vaulted passage off the great hall with its distinctive carved corbels.

In 1377, Broughton Castle had been acquired by William of Wykeham, the energetic bishop of Winchester (a leading politician and founder of both Winchester College and New College, Oxford). The house then passed to Thomas Wykeham, who was granted a licence to ‘crenellate his manor at Broughton’, although major remodelling work in the sixteenth century was carried out by Richard Fiennes, perhaps as a result of his marriage to Ursula Fermor, daughter of a wealthy London merchant. It was all sufficiently complete to receive a visit from Queen Elizabeth in 1566.

The house was a jumble, so Richard Fiennes adapted the original hall and service rooms, creating one long, tall house with a largely symmetrical entrance front. He brought the interiors of the castle up to date too, with a grand new series of domestic apartments on the top floor of the building. Still today these rooms have a light and spacious character, and include a long gallery (where the family could walk and talk in wet weather) and a parlour and great chamber with fine plasterwork ceilings. The latter two are in many ways the finest rooms in the house still today – the parlour, known as the Oak Room, flooded with light in the evening, remains the family’s favourite room.

A glorious chimneypiece

One of the finest features of the whole house is a glorious ornate chimneypiece, now in the room called the King’s Chamber. It seems this room was, in the sixteenth century, all part of the long gallery arrangement. The overmantel shows a vivid scene derived from Ovid of dryads dancing around an oak tree. The design was modelled on an engraving of a painting for the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau, and was probably designed by Nicholas Bellin of Modena, who worked at Fontainebleau and later for Henry VIII at Whitehall and Nonsuch – it is possible that it came from Nonsuch at some point (finally demolished in 1682–3).

Richard’s son completed the decoration of the house, and appears to have extended the oriel of the great hall, and commissioned the plasterwork ceiling of the great chamber and great parlour (now known as the Oak Room) – all dated to the 1590s and almost certainly by leading London craftsmen. The Oak Room (the late sixteenth-century dining room) retains fine wainscot of this date, and an internal porch with carved heraldic embellishment (which may have been moved here from another room). The refurbished Broughton Castle was visited four times by James I, in 1604, 1608, 1610 and 1619.

As with many major houses, the changes continue. The ceiling of the great hall, the fitting out of the library at the foot of the west stairs and the division of the long gallery into a series of bedrooms, with a reduced long gallery, was carried out in the 1760s, and has been attributed to the designer Sanderson Miller, whose wife was a Fiennes. In 1837, much of the contents of the house were sold to help pay the debts of the spendthrift 14th Lord Saye and Sele. Broughton Castle was then inherited in 1847 by a clerical cousin, Frederick, who was the archdeacon of Hereford and knew the architect George Gilbert Scott, who helped him restore the house. Martin Fiennes says: ‘He is known in the family as “Good Frederick” and introduced the Zuber paper, the Chinese wallpaper and the German flock in the great chamber, while his heir “Bad John” spent all his money on the horses.’

The glorious panelled Oak Room, filled with evening light in summer months – the family’s favourite room.

The lively, mid-sixteenth-century plasterwork pendants of the great parlour.

The inner porch in the Oak Room.

The detail of the mid-nineteenth-century wallpaper in the great chamber.

The sixteenth-century long gallery, with its Georgian Gothic plasterwork, and a warm peach colour introduced in the 1970s.

The great parlour, which has become a family museum.

The costs of the restoration, and the collapse in land values and agricultural returns meant that the house was rented out from 1885 to 1912. One tenant, Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox, seems to have been responsible for the stripping of the panelling and plaster from the walls of the great hall.

A family home

The present Lord Saye and Sele (the 21st) and his wife Mariette took the house on in 1968 and raised their family there. He recalls: ‘my grandparents lived here in fairly old-fashioned style. My parents lived here from 1948 for twenty years very happily. My father and my mother loved especially to sit in the bay window of the Oak Room.’ The sofas and chairs in the great hall are upholstered in an 1880s plush manufactured in a local village and exported round the world for court liveries. Martin Fiennes recalls: ‘my father’s parents lived very much in the whole house, with the great hall as a drawing room, and my grandfather’s study in the oriel window – my earliest memories are of a rather formal tea with my grandparents in this room.’

As they increasingly opened the house to the public in the 1970s, the family converted part of the eastern end of the house into their private accommodation with architect James Fletcher-Watson. Lady Saye and Sele recalls: ‘it was a happy experience, I think we were even better friends at the end than we had been at the beginning.’ Fletcher-Watson adapted a family kitchen and breakfast room out of the original scullery and larder and also introduced a concrete spiral staircase, entirely modern so that the insertion would be clearly read as belonging to its day and age. This staircase leads to the first floor and their private first-floor sitting room and library, which link with the chapel on the upper floor and the panelled dining room on the ground floor.

The plasterwork overmantel in the King’s Chamber: inspired by French examples, and depicting The Dance of the Dryads – some think the overmantel came from Nonsuch Palace.

‘This is an English house, inside and out . . . it has an unexpected beauty.’
MARTIN FIENNES

They sold some silver in around 1970 and had some advice from John Fowler, which included painting the ceiling in the great hall in three shades of white. At this time much of the oak furniture in the great hall was also introduced. Film location fees (from Joseph Andrews, Three Men and a Little Lady, Shakespeare in Love and The Madness of King George, to name a few) have allowed investment in furniture and carpets. Some furniture was inherited from a dealer, Tom Crispin. A friend, Ann Norman, advised them on curtains.

A number of modern commissions have made an important contribution to the character of the house: two modern tables in the Oak Room, by Alan Peters; the 1992 bed specially designed and made by Robin Furlong for the King’s Chamber; and the north window in the chapel by Alfred Fisher and Peter Archer in 2005.

Martin Fiennes is also enjoying digging forgotten nineteenth-century paintings out of the attic and putting them back on the walls, and has restored some thirty pictures since he took over the house. His brother William published a memoir of growing up at Broughton, The Music Room, in which he wrote of life in the house: ‘The gatehouse doors hung on rusting iron hinges, grids of sun-bleached vertical and cross beams like the gates of an ancient city, a Troy or a Jericho. When the gates were closed it was as if the house had picked up a shield, but they were almost always left open. My father worried for the strength of the hinges and didn’t want to stress them.’

Martin Fiennes adds: ‘This is an English house, inside and out, and a lovely mixture. It is not really a castle, but a part-fortified manor house, which nonetheless makes it an alpha male of the Tudor English mansions – but it has an unexpected beauty. In the evening, the north Oxfordshire ironstone glows with a rusty gold and everything takes on a magical air.’

Devoted custodians of house and family: Lord and Lady Saye and Sele seated in the great hall.

Nineteenth-century Zuber wallpaper in the Bury Lodge Bedroom.

The Queen Anne’s Room with sixteenth-century plasterwork and stone chimneypiece – named in honour of a visit from Anne of Denmark in 1608.

The intimate Georgian library.

The King’s Chamber with the bed made in 1992 especially for the room by Robin Furlong.

The parterre seen from the roof.

A detail of the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper in the King’s Chamber.