Qualla: Burghley House

Burghley House: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified painter, Public domain. William Cecil ran England for forty years. As Lord High Treasurer and Principal Secretary to Elizabeth I, he was the queen's closest counsellor through every crisis of her reign: the religious settlement, the Spanish threat, the question of what to do with Mary, Queen of Scots. Between 1555 and 1587, while doing all of that, he also spent twenty-one thousand pounds (roughly the GDP of a small county at the time) building himself a country house outside Stamford in the shape of the letter E. The E was for Elizabeth. The house was modelled on the privy lodgings of Richmond Palace, where the queen herself lived. He intended her to visit, and she did. Four hundred and fifty years later his descendants still live there.

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Image: Unidentified painter | Public domain

Burghley House: An Architecture of Loyalty

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Airwolfhound from Hertfordshire, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. Burghley is the great surviving example of what architectural historians call the Elizabethan prodigy house: a building designed to demonstrate the wealth and loyalty of a courtier whose entire fortune depended on royal favour. Its profile from the south is theatre: a long roofli...

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Image: Airwolfhound from Hertfordshire, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Burghley House: Hell, Heaven, and the Italian Painters

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artemisia Gentileschi, Public domain. Most of the interior dates from later remodellings. John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter, made several extended visits to Italy between the 1670s and 1699, bringing back paintings and decorative ideas by the wagonload. He purchased around three hundred works of art during his twenty-tw...

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Image: Artemisia Gentileschi | Public domain

Burghley House: Capability Brown's Lake

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BardofL, CC BY 3.0. Lancelot Brown, called Capability for his habit of telling clients their grounds had 'capability of improvement', spent most of the 1750s through the 1770s working on Burghley. He drew up the avenues. He demolished the north-west wing of the house to open up the prospect. Most sp...

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Image: BardofL | CC BY 3.0

Burghley House: Cecils, Carbon, and Turtle Skulls

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Hogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. The family who built Burghley still own it. The peerage descended through twenty generations from William Cecil's son Thomas, becoming the Earldom and then in 1801 the Marquessate of Exeter. David Cecil, the 6th Marquess, won Olympic gold in the 400m hurdles in 1928, became presi...

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Image: Graham Hogg | CC BY-SA 2.0