The Country House Revealed (2011) s01e01 Episode Script
Episode 1
Our great country houses.
The most familiar and yet intriguing sights Britain has to offer.
Standing like sentinels in the landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of us visit them every year, but not all are open to the public.
I've been granted the privileged opportunity to pass through the portals of six of our greatest country houses normally hidden from public view.
They've seen five centuries of British history up close and personal.
The families who built these houses played their part in great affairs of state.
Central to their dreams, the great house, the ultimate status symbol, but all too often also the ultimate money drainer.
Few of these families went the distance, but their houses did, with their secrets intact.
This is their story, but it's also our story, for these houses offer a guided tour of our nation's hidden history.
Back in the Middle Ages, it would have been madness to build anything so fanciful, so ostentatious, so open to attack as a beautiful, undefended country house.
They owe their birth to two primal forces, peace after decades of war and to the all too human desire to show off.
It began in England 500 years ago.
Country houses were a creation of the Tudor age, taking root across the landscape.
I'm on my way to explore one of the earliest.
South Wraxall Manor.
This house and the power hungry family that built it, the Longs of Wiltshire, brutally embodied the spirit of late medieval and Tudor England.
Ruthless opportunism, new money, social climbing.
This really is one of England's most special and secret homes.
It didn't just spring into the world fully formed as you see it today.
Its origins lie in this early 15th century Great Hall with its projecting porch and then, over the next 180 years or so, the house grew to reflect the expanding fortunes of the Long family.
Beginning as a kind of medieval starter home, just a few small rooms clustered round a central hall, South Wraxall blossomed into one of the most beautiful homes in Wiltshire.
It's a hidden gem, with its lush interiors, exquisite decoration and a wealth of sumptuous fireplaces, all perfectly preserved through the centuries.
But Wraxall also stands as a monument to Long family's ruthless rise to the top.
The simple country folk who reinvented themselves as a hardnosed dynasty of national statesmen.
The house was an extension of their personality.
Ostentatious but brutal and determined.
Its beauty marks a darker tale of violence, even murder.
A darkness hinted at above the front door itself.
Up there on the oldest part of the house is a startling series of gargoyles.
One shows a beast, a lion or a dog, devouring a naked man head first.
Another shows a man being devoured feet first, or perhaps vomited up.
What can these mean? Are they warnings? Or are they declarations of intent? Wraxall's hideous beasts seem to be saying to all who approach, "Don't mess with me.
" These terrifying gargoyles were probably the brainchild of Robert Long, the man whose fierce ambition gave birth to this house, where he ruled as its first lord of the manor.
Oh! This is tremendous.
It's like going back in time.
This is a stupendous medieval Great Hall, the beating heart of the home.
It's so well preserved.
A magnificent relic of our ancient past.
Look, up here there's a terrific traceried window and then, my word, the roof timbers.
This mighty truss up here, and between the trusses, these delightful cusped panels.
All of this, of course, was to do more than kept the rain out.
It was to be seen and admired, to express status, taste and power.
This is very much a medieval design statement.
A statement of Robert Long's enormous egotism and drive, for he was both a new moneyed hotshot lawyer and a Wiltshire MP, the first of over 70 Longs who made their way into Parliament.
On high days and holidays, he would have wined and dined distinguished guests here, holding court in his own private fiefdom.
In the centre of the hall, just about here, would have been originally a roaring open fire with the smoke curling up past the roof timbers and leaving through a hole right up there.
People sitting here would have seen, through the smoke, strange beings.
Now, in the church of this period, those beings would most likely have been angels but here, they're smirking impish, apes or monkeys.
Seems to me there's an anti-clerical joke going on here, because in that corner is a carving of a monk.
So there's a pun, monks are monkeys and monkeys are monks.
Long clearly had a wicked sense of humour.
But it wasn't just Robert Long's sense of humour that was wicked.
The story of Wraxall and the relentless rise of the Long dynasty is a tale of generations of double crossing and dodgy dealing.
Here, you've a copy of the Longs' family tree, compiled in the 17th century.
At the top is Robert Long, who died in 1446, but of course families do not spring from nowhere and we now understand that Robert Long's father was a chap called Long Thomas, a man embroiled in the rustling of livestock.
So clearly at this stage in the 15th century, the Longs have a rather chequered history.
More detail is provided by the history of Parliament.
Robert Long, "The founder of an important Wiltshire family.
" Oh, he was apparently of quite lowly origins and Robert was set up by one of the old Lords Hungerford, a big local family and, indeed, through his connection he became wealthy, he became a man of prestige and a man of power in his own right.
Of course, we know that he used that power, when he felt like it, in a very unscrupulous manner.
Says that here as well, he was abusive.
He could fleece clients of their fees.
So there we have it.
This beautiful house founded on fortune made in the most corrupt manner by a most conniving fellow.
But don't just take my word for it.
To get a bigger understanding of how this combative, upwardly mobile family forced its way to the top, I'm off to meet one of their modern descendents, Sara Morrison.
Well, we are surrounded by portraits of generations of Longs.
What do you think it meant for them, South Wraxall? Their background is, well, shall we say chequered? What do you know about that? Well, it always struck me when one heard, probably, apocryphal stories as a child, that they were the most frightful cads and probably quite classy thieves, cattle thieves in particular.
I think that's rather an honourable origin.
I mean, that's a perfectly good learning curve for any family.
Robber barons have a great history in this country.
I always fancied that the original Long was such a classy cattle thief, that he was eventually rewarded by being given his pile of grey stones - called the Manor House.
- Yes.
My Long relations still existed when I was a child, pooh-poohed it 'cause they liked to think they were more respectable than that, but certainly as a child, it seemed to me that the right way to start in life was stealing other people's cows.
And they seem to have been involved in law and parliament, almost professional Members of Parliament.
The perfect beginning for maximum mischief making on at least a county scale, if not a national scale.
To be lawyers and politicians and hand in glove with local business is a very good mixture for either making a great deal of money or going to jail and I should think they probably did both in equal quantities.
But I think all of them had a pretty devious self-serving touch, most particularly when it came to choosing who they married.
I think they enriched their genes quite profitably, literally and metaphorically, at almost every stage.
They were efficient breeders, efficient marriers and efficient self-serving individuals.
In 1490, Robert Long's nephew Thomas inherited Wraxall manor.
In a mere 50 years, the Longs had become contenders in aristocratic circles, enabling Thomas to marry Margerie, daughter of Sir Geoffrey Darrell, the wealthy owner of the nearby estate of Draycot.
Wraxall was becoming a showpiece for a family on the make, hungry for recognition, climbing the social ladder.
Thomas's main contribution to the fabric of South Wraxall is this splendid symbolic gatehouse.
It is very much tangible evidence of the new luxuries and freedoms of the English country house and very different to gatehouses of earlier periods, which are serious bits of defensive architecture, with battlements, moats and watchtowers.
His gatehouse was a reflection of the huge changes of English society, brought about by Henry VII's reign and the dawn of the Tudor era.
The old Feudal order gave way to peace and prosperity.
No need now for the castellated fortifications of a war-like age.
It was goodbye to the drawbridge, hello to the welcome mat.
So the gatehouse was no longer a place to repel enemies.
It was more of a porter's lodge.
The porter would come here and look through the little squint windows to see who was coming and report back to the people in the main house.
All, really, I suppose the early, very early 16th century equivalent to a modern day video surveillance system.
Visitors passing through Thomas's gatehouse would have been struck by one particular detail.
A carving of a fetterlock, an ancient padlock used to shackle prisoners.
The fetterlock was the ancestral crest of Draycot, the estate Thomas eventually inherited through his marriage, so he just nabbed it as the Long's first badge of honour.
At the time, only high class families could display heraldic devices, so by putting the fetterlock on the gatehouse, Thomas was making it clear to all people that the Longs had arrived.
They'd been elevated in stature and grandeur.
Elevated, in fact, into royal circles.
In 1496, Thomas helped Henry VII to capture the treacherous pretender to the throne, Perkin Warbeck.
He was knighted at the wedding of Prince Arthur, the elder brother of the future King Henry VIII.
And with Henry VIII's reign came a frenzy of country house building.
Throughout England, the newly rich with their huge disposable incomes build trophy homes that boasted of wealth, taste and social aspiration.
Henry was obsessed by building.
He initiated a vast programme that resulted in the purchase, the building or the remodelling of 55 palaces and large houses.
He promoted the idea that a fine building was the badge of a fine man.
Few Tudor royal homes survive.
This is one of them, Hampton Court.
Inside it holds a fascinating painting that captures the Tudors' mania for showing off through building.
This is the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a celebration held in 1520 to forge an alliance between Henry VIII and King Francis of France.
This was status architecture gone crazy, where pavilions were actually clad in fabrics woven from pure gold.
It's brilliant, it's like a cartoon, really, or one of those graphic novels today where you can see everything happening all at once and the golden tents give their name to the whole occasion.
It's called the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
- Yes.
- And it was this sort of great party town they constructed outside Calais.
And in the top tent there, that's the actual meeting of the kings as brothers, 'cause they're friends at this point.
It doesn't last.
That's right, a celebration of peace that doesn't last.
No, they're at war just a few years afterwards again.
And in order to show their friendship first they embraced and then later on they jousted and they danced and they had a wrestling match.
And this pavilion here's a sort of welcome area and it shows a lot of the main features of Tudor party architecture, so it's very highly decorated.
- Everything's ornamental.
- It's got statues on it, it's got the royal coat of arms, it's got HR for Henry, it's got the Tudor roses and the splendour of the court - Yes.
- doesn't just lie in the buildings.
It lies in the people, the richly dressed masses of people and if you were a Tudor courtier you had to invest an awful lot in your appearance.
So to buy a suit fit for wear at court, just a plain suit, cost the same amount of money as the rent on a London townhouse - for the whole year.
- Really? Really? So being one of the king's men on the Cloth of Gold meant you had really made it into the elite.
This was a pivotal turning point in the fortunes of the Long family for one of Henry's courtiers at the pageant was the man who inherited South Wraxall in 1508, Sir Henry Long.
Henry Long gets knighted by Henry and he was here at the party, so he may be one of these little figures in the procession, or maybe watching the jousting.
Oh, but also, I believe the Longs Henry's here, but his son, of course, gets involved in the royal household, doesn't he? Robert Long.
Well, Robert Long gets a significant position at court in the royal household 'cause he's made a Squire of the Body to Henry VIII, which means that he has a very significant job.
He helps the king to get dressed in the morning and this is a position of enormous privilege because if you were an assassin, this was your chance.
You had to have really trustworthy people doing this job.
Okay, so therefore, clearly the Longs were trustworthy, they were trusted.
They were given very, very intimate access to the king.
Yeah, and that, it means you're in a great position to ask for favours.
- Yes, yes, yes.
- 'Cause there's a record, in fact, that the best time to ask the king for a favour was when, after he'd had wine in the evening, when he was seated upon his closed stool.
Okay, be patient with his codpiece - He was then relaxed.
- Got no defences, yes.
- So I think what your guys, the Longs - Yeah.
tell us about the Tudor age is that it's an age of mobility.
- Yeah.
- You can see them rising up through the ranks, entering royal circles, becoming part of royal circles.
As the ferociously single-minded Henry became the highest ranking Long so far, so his influence rose across Wiltshire.
The county was his for the taking because Henry VIII had opened up amazing opportunities for land ownership.
When he broke with the Roman Catholic church in 1534, it launched the Reformation and ultimately led to the dissolution of the monasteries.
Land that had been sacred for centuries fell into the hands of people like Henry Long.
Ruthless capitalists who didn't miss a chance.
Henry's royal connections paid huge dividends at the time of the dissolution, when he acquired large amounts of former monastic land from the Crown, including St Mary's Priory near Kington St Michael and Bradenstoke Priory here in Wiltshire.
Many of the old monastic buildings were turned into sumptuous private homes.
Others were looted of their materials to build new country houses.
Bradenstoke itself is now ruined, barely even a shadow of its former self.
But poking around in the dark, dank undercroft provides food for thought.
It's a sobering reminder of how the king's sweeping reform brought untold reward to greedy, material folk like Henry Long.
Mmm, probably not rendered since the dissolution of the monasteries.
Oh.
The dissolution was a blaze of destruction.
From its spoils, Henry could fund his own programme of construction.
Back at South Wraxall manor, Long, now a profiteering landlord, filled the house with the sophisticated decor the Tudor age expected.
He modernised many parts of the building, adding all the mod cons of the early 16th century such as fireplaces to all the rooms.
As a man who had lived it up at the Field Of The Cloth Of Gold, Henry, doubtless had a taste for the finer things in life.
Summed up by one writer of the period as "stately and curious workmanship.
" This is stately and curious workmanship indeed.
Look at this wonderful frieze up here, carved acanthus leaf, lovely.
Very modish for the time.
And below, a lovely linen fold carved oak panel.
Really very, very high quality.
Lovely.
In this room, you can best see what Henry Long did to South Wraxall.
Very much in the spirit of the time, he wanted to increase its sense of privacy, comfort, convenience and luxury.
He added this wonderful fireplace in what was perhaps once a larger room.
He wanted to sit here, away from the noise and bustle in the Great Hall, like I say, be private, be comfortable.
A lovely fashionable design, this, classical cornice up here, the Tudor arch very much the theme of the moment.
Also, this fireplace tells a particular romantic tale.
Look here at this corner.
Initials.
"HL.
" Henry Long.
Then we go along here.
There's a wonderful carving, I think, of acanthus leaves and vines commemorating what would happen in front of this fireplace, a good glass of wine.
Then we get across to this side.
Other initials.
"H" again, Henry.
"E," Eleanor, his second wife, and these initials are linked by a lover's knot.
How very lovely.
So this fireplace commemorates in stone their love for eternity.
The Tudor enthusiasm for exquisite decoration was meant to say, "I am a man of culture and refinement.
" But Henry was a Long through and through.
Perhaps his improvement to the house was simply a smokescreen for a much darker personality.
Local historian Tim Couzens knows all about his wicked ways.
He was quite a complex character.
I think you can call him quite unscrupulous overall.
He has this sort of veneer of respectability, he has a brother at court who is in daily contact with King Henry VIII.
So very high-powered connections.
And they kept that influence over a very, very long period of time.
There's a great quote of him being called a usurper, a tyrant even, and all sorts of disputes over land where he could actually pack courts and have magistrates and juries that would just come down in his favour.
And if they didn't, he actually locked them up and if they still refused to come down in his favour, he actually wrote to King Henry VIII and it was directed, "I'll take your names and give me the names of the people "that are not acting in favour of Sir Henry Long in Wiltshire, "and we'll obviously sort them out in some way.
" You can imagine them being shipped off to the Tower.
It's sort of kind of a picture of a lawless world, where they were judge and jury and they would go to Stop at nothing, really, to achieve their end, whether it's sort of about, you know, Getting property, getting power, getting riches.
Really, really, really An alarming world, isn't it? Yes, within the county of Wiltshire it's almost total power.
Of being able to control how things were happening.
Over a period of time, they're using the house to put the sort of veneer of respectability on top of that and, of course, through time that takes over.
But in Wiltshire they were using their role as the sheriff to basically act as the law.
South Wraxall manor passed to Henry's son, Robert Long, in 1556.
By then, Robert was the head of an enormously powerful dynasty.
The Longs now owned nine estates across Wiltshire.
But Robert had a novel plan for cementing the family's greatness through building.
He saw no point in spending any money doing up the manor, since only select guests would ever see inside it.
Far better to big up the Longs' name and stature with a self-important gesture in the very heart of the local village.
Robert did what many noble families did at the time.
He tarted up the family chapel at the local parish church, in this case St James's at South Wraxall.
Now, Robert left his mark here.
Look, RL, Robert Long, and the date, 1566.
He added this door so the Longs could enter the church directly, rather than mixing with the common parishioners who would've passed through this arch here.
I will enter the church as the Longs did.
This really is the hallowed land of the Longs.
The family would have sat here, seeing the altar through the squint in front of me.
Living Longs surrounded by dead ancestors' bodies in the crypt below and on the walls, gigantic monuments.
Look at this one.
A wonderful affair dating, I suppose, from the 1490s or so.
It shows a Long widow.
You can see that by her widow's veil, but her face tragically destroyed in some frenzied post-Reformation attack.
The Longs' status symbols are everywhere.
Here, their coat of arms, and yet again, the fetterlock, positively aglow in the chapel's windows.
I must say, standing here, looking at this glorious stained glass, one's reminded of the lost stained glass from the Great Hall at South Wraxall, how wonderful that must have been.
The celestial light flooding the Great Hall and bathing all those sitting there in these glorious hues.
The Longs' chapel was a very public piece of self-publicity, but it's also testament to huge changes in society, brought about by the reformation.
The Catholic Church's dominance had been overturned.
Churches became more secular places.
This allowed ego-driven families like the Longs to leave their mark in sacred spaces for all time, blessed not only in this world, but also in the next.
In 1581, Robert was succeeded by his eldest son, Walter Long, a man of enormous prestige.
Not simply an MP and knight, but also a justice of the peace and rapacious landowner.
And ultimately, Walter was the true master builder of South Wraxall.
The manor as we find it today is the result of his ambition and verve.
Beforehand, the house had grown as a series of small extensions.
Walter tied them all together and built upwards and outwards into make one great unified building that spoke splendidly of the Longs' bigness.
Bigger than ever before.
But perhaps more than anything, Walter's story, a story that includes a dramatic feud with a local family, demonstrates that in Elizabethan England, one of the great spurs of building was one-upmanship.
And building, of course, included the creation of spectacular interiors that were seen as badges of honour and status of a family.
Walter's improvements at South Wraxall captured the fervour for elegance and civilised culture that characterised Elizabeth's reign.
Flamboyant displays of taste, wealth and comfort.
For an age of Elizabethan socialising, first impressions mattered enormously.
Hence, this sensational fireplace.
It's dated 1598 and was the height of Renaissance fashion, but it contains some very curious and personal details.
At the top there in the centre is a face of Hercules or the Greenman, symbolising, I suppose, strength.
Here is, once again, the fetterlock.
And below Hercules, is a shield with, on the left, the Long lion and crosses.
On the right a bird, the emblem of the Carne family, that's Walter's mother's family.
So this is not just a great architectural statement, but a monument to the family's distinction.
I imagine Walter standing here with his friends, contemplating this fireplace, would have been very proud.
And he had much to be proud of.
During the 16th century, European classical design had arrived in England with a vengeance.
Homeowners added novel classical details as signs of sophistication.
And Walter Long was no exception.
The Great Hall's old oak screen was replaced around 1600 in a most fashionable Renaissance manner, all part of this thorough updating of Wraxall's decor.
And in what is now the dining room, we find another of his great fireplaces, a masterpiece of symbolism packed with clues like a cryptic crossword puzzle.
It really is sensational.
The whole fireplace is loaded with messages.
Here, you see, it says "Faber est quisq.
" I mean, this is saying "Every man is the architect of his own fortunes.
" And here, "Praised by the good "and to be abused by the bad is all praise alike.
" These, I suppose, are moral messages that you can't really argue with, they're like mottos in a Christmas cracker, but in the middle is a rather more intriguing message "Mors rapit omnia.
" "Death seizes all things.
" And that message is being delivered by a little Caliban creature, a monkey.
Very strange.
So peculiar.
So what was this fireplace, this room, all about originally? Well the first thing is that it was originally much smaller.
It's now a rather charming, large, well lit dining room that was created about 1700.
Originally a small closet, just off the Great Hall over there.
The Great Hall, a place of light, life, entertainment, the present.
Here, of course, a tiny room, the counterpoint, come here to contemplate not this world but the next.
Death, eternity, the afterlife.
All things pass, be prepared, memento mori.
Very much the spirit of a late Elizabethan, a Jacobean world.
Death is ever present, in life there is death.
That's the lesson of this little room and the fireplace.
But there could be more.
Perhaps Walter's relentless improvements to Wraxall were a direct response to the most scandalous and tragic incident in the Long family history.
For all was not as it seemed behind Walter's highly refined country house.
Deep down, he was as manipulative and self-important as his ancestors.
Despite the civilised manners of 17th century society, fierce and bloody rivalries were still raging across England's shires.
And the Longs were embroiled in a bitter feud of one-upmanship with another Wiltshire dynasty, the Danvers.
Sir Walter was by then high on his own grandeur, having married into the fabulously wealthy family of Longleat.
Together with his brother Henry, he was determined to show the Danvers who really ruled the roost around his manor.
The row started as a petty squabble.
But by looking at the records in Britain's national archives, we can see how it got completely out of hand.
I'm looking through some of the State Papers Domestic of Queen Elizabeth I and this story is told in these papers in some considerable detail.
Clearly regarded as an event of, well, of national importance and certainly quite some feud.
"A true declaration of the ground of the conceived mislike "of Sir Walter Long, Knight, and Henry Long, Gent, his brother, "against Sir John Danvers, Knight, his sons and followers.
" So here we see the characters in this play that's about to unfold in front of me.
It's incredible.
The account explains how Henry Long and one of his servants carried out a robbery on a Danvers property, provoking their ire.
All too quickly, it escalated.
Ah, now here we go.
This paper talks of "many insolent behaviours" and how one of Danvers' servants was murdered by a Long servant and another dangerously wounded.
Heady stuff.
Clearly, the Longs are carrying out enormities against their rivals.
The Danvers and people are being murdered, wounded.
Golly.
Sir John Danvers, a magistrate, seized the upper hand by charging four of Walter Long's servants with murder.
When his son Charles tried to make peace, by exchanging gentlemanly letters, it could all have been settled, except Walter's brother, Henry, fired off poisonous letters in return.
So Henry taunts Sir Charles "sundry times," sending him word that "wheresoever he met him, "he would untie his points.
" He wants to take his trousers down.
"And whip him with a rod, "calling him ass, puppy fool and boy.
" That is fighting talk.
Just picture that.
This really is, you know, this is it, isn't it? It's heading for an absolute incredible violent collision.
You can't just can't call a chap those things, can you, and get away with it? And he couldn't.
The Danvers boys had been pushed too far, humiliated.
They wanted revenge.
On October the 4th, accompanied by a gang of over 20 retainers, they burst into a house in the village of Corsham, where the Longs were having dinner.
According to the Corsham coroner's court record, "Henry Danvers did assault the aforesaid Henry Long "and the aforesaid Henry Danvers "voluntarily, feloniously and of malice prepense "did discharge in and upon the said Long a certain engine called a dag" A type of primitive pistol.
"charged with powder and a bullet of lead "which Henry Danvers had in his right hand "and inflict a mortal wound upon the upper part of the body of Long, "under the left breast, of which wound he instantly died.
" Bang.
As Henry lay dead, the Danvers fled.
The chase was on.
The high sheriff of Wiltshire and the justices of the peace set out to capture them.
The Danvers headed to Titchfield, near Southampton, where their friend, the Earl of Southampton, hid them away.
In a matter of days, they made a getaway to France, evading justice for many years.
But because the Earl of Southampton was one of William Shakespeare's great patrons, some people believe the Longs' feud was the inspiration for one of the Bard's greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet.
Historian Jonathan Bate is one of them.
It's in the mix, the timing is right.
The events took place in late 1594 and Romeo and Juliet was written the following year.
Now, that's not to say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatisation of the Danvers-Long feud but the interesting question is why does Shakespeare decide to dramatise a story about a family feud at this time, at this moment? It's the Southampton connection that is the real key here.
We have to go back to 1592, just the moment Shakespeare's establishing himself as a successful playwright, but then the theatres get closed down because of plague.
Well, what a writer does when it's not possible to put on plays and make money that way is target a wealthy patron.
So Shakespeare leaves London and writes some poems and dedicates them to the Earl of Southampton and they seem to have done the trick.
There's a fair bit of evidence that by the summer of 1594, Shakespeare has got a close connection with the Earl of Southampton and he may, indeed, even be staying with Southampton down at Titchfield.
Because what happens very soon after this is the theatres reopen, a new theatre company is formed and Shakespeare starts writing some of his greatest plays.
Well, Shakespeare probably wasn't at the house when the Danvers turned up, but he would have found out about them, about it, the feud, and I suppose one can say that I'm pretty certain that the notion of feuding families, that inspired him, did it? That's absolutely right and, of course, the thing about Shakespeare's plays is that, although they're usually set abroad, they do feel very English.
So when you get the servants fighting at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, these are English servants, they have English names.
So there's a sort of double take going on.
Yes, on the one hand, we're in Verona, but on the other hand, we're in England.
So that means that Shakespeare's audience would have connected the family feud, the Capulets and the Montagues in the play, with family feuds among great houses in England and certainly the most notorious, the most talked about feud of that time, especially in the Southampton circle, was Danvers and Long.
So it's no mere coincidence that in the years immediately following his brother's brutal murder, Walter Long turned South Wraxall into one of the finest homes of its time.
Beautifying the manor was about having the upper hand, showing that the Longs were still a force to be reckoned with.
Walter masked his own devious involvement in the affair with domestic glory.
And it doesn't get more glorious than this.
This is Walter's most splendid creation at South Wraxall.
He transformed the Great Chamber into this drawing room.
It really is a visual explosion, almost an assault.
Look at these huge windows in front of me and over there, letting light flood inside.
They are in themselves a statement of wealth, 'cause glass was still relatively expensive at that time.
Above is a splendid barrow-vaulted ceiling, a wondrous thing festooned with carvings, faces, suns, moons, perhaps even with the moustachioed face of Walter Long himself.
An image of the vault of heaven.
But best of all, of course, is this overwhelming fireplace, just look at it.
This is one of the greatest creations of late Tudor England.
It was carved by local masons, but nobody knows who designed it.
Perhaps it was Walter Long himself.
Certainly is packed with lots of messages and meanings, most of them moral rather than Christian.
And I suppose many would be appropriate for Walter and this part of the country.
In the centre we see the image of Pan, the god of nature, of shepherds and flocks who lived in Arcadia.
Well, of course, this was wool country at the time and this part of Wiltshire, is as beautiful as Arcadia.
At each end we have, well, here an image of Prudence and over there an image of Justice.
Again, very appropriate attributes for Walter as lord of the manor and magistrate.
He should indeed be prudent and just.
Each side of Pan we have representations of Arithmetic and Geometry, the attributes of architecture.
What's really remarkable about this great creation is that it shows how Walter Long brought the virtues of Renaissance civilisation to this part of rural Wiltshire.
Walter's drawing room is the epitome of domestic comfort and grandeur, one of the most spectacular rooms of the Elizabethan age.
It seems to proclaim victory.
To show that Walter Long, unlike Henry Danvers, was a civilised fellow, no crude, pistol-wielding assassin.
The splendour of South Wraxall remains a testament to Walter's ambition.
He wanted his house to be fit for a king.
But this wasn't just lofty posturing.
He'd pulled it off.
The family was now beginning to earn its place among the great and powerful in British history.
The social ascent of the Longs had now reached its peak.
Incidents in their family's history had perhaps inspired William Shakespeare.
They were acquainted with Queen Elizabeth and visited by eminent characters such as Sir Walter Raleigh, the chap who brought tobacco to England.
Indeed, probably brought tobacco to South Wraxall.
The Raleigh legend haunts the building today, quite literally for some.
Generations of visitors have been spooked by a ghostly scent of tobacco smoke appearing as if from nowhere.
But Raleigh isn't the only spectre to walk these halls.
Another ghostly tale hangs over Wraxall's history.
It concerns the dastardly backstabbing behaviour of Sir Walter's second wife, Catherine.
By now, the Longs' tradition of cunning and conniving was so ingrained that the family was turning on itself.
Catherine was the ultimate wicked stepmother, masterminding a devious plan to prevent Walter's eldest son, John Long, from inheriting the family fortune.
As the 17th century historian John Aubrey tells it.
"The second wife did use much artifice to render the son by the first wife, "who had not much Promethean fire, odious to his father.
"She would get her acquaintances to make him drunk "and then expose him in that condition to his father.
"She never left off her attempts "till she got Sir Walter to disinherit him.
" With the help of her lawyer brother, Catherine plotted to change Walter's will, to leave all the family's considerable riches to their firstborn son, also named Walter.
But her dastardly scheme seems to have aroused the spirits of South Wraxall.
The clerk employed to commit John's fate to paper was horrified when, "A fine white hand interposed between the writing and the candle.
"He could discern it was a woman's hand and then vanished.
" This happened not once, not twice, but thrice.
The clerk was terrified.
He imagined, he was sure, it was the hand of the late Lady Long.
He threw down his pen and he refused to continue writing.
In the end, there was a compromise.
Young Walter got the house nearby Draycot.
Young John inherited Wraxall.
Perhaps John's mother had indeed saved the day from the afterlife.
And fanciful though this tale of the white hand seems, there is something haunting about South Wraxall.
A strange aura has got me thinking about the very origin of the building.
So here we are, back where we started.
Back to these extraordinary man-eating gargoyles.
But I wonder It now occurs to me these were created not so much to ward off evil, but as to act as warnings, warnings from the past to the future, warnings that this is an ancient haunted site.
Even in the 15th century, this was a strange and magical realm.
By the 18th century, the haunted tag stuck to Wraxall Manor.
In the family's eyes, the building had become tainted by a curse.
With 14,000 acres of land and many houses at their disposal, they neither wanted nor needed to live there.
Wraxall was a mere bauble in their empire, used as a rest home for spinster aunts or often just left empty.
But that, ironically, is what saved it.
Never modernised to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, it remained trapped in time.
But as the 20th century arrived, the Long empire was in sharp decline.
Most of their estates and lands were sold off and South Wraxall Manor once again became the main residence of what was left of the Long family.
Sara Morrison grew up there.
But I was there until I was five with my father, until the beginning of the war.
And so I remember it in true, sort of, rose-tinted spectacles as a small child.
Old Walter Long, my great-grandfather, and my father's father - had been killed in the First World War.
- Yes.
And so getting it back was, sort of, my father recapturing it, if you like, for the Longs.
When Sara's father was tragically killed in the Second World War, she inherited the house which was soon rented out to a family friend, Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail.
I had the unusual experience of spending a lot of holidays there, as it were a guest in my own house.
And so I had a sort of second childhood at Wraxall in the late '40s and early '50s, when it was under Rothermere command and the whole world walked through its front door.
Evelyn Waugh, I remember, because he was so disagreeable.
And I remember being told that we'd got to mind our manners if we were going to have lunch in the dining room, because people like Evelyn Waugh took great exception to unpleasant children.
What those grownups didn't understand is that we took great exception to unpleasant grownups.
And I remember lan Fleming there, 'cause we were told that he was frightfully glamorous and a spy.
And us looking at this figure that was sort of leaning back in his chair and saying, "If he was a spy Absolutely ridiculous.
"Anybody would see that he was a ridiculous Englishman at 500 yards.
"Can't possibly have been a spy, they don't look like that.
" And being told that we were And did he like a dry Martini? He Do you know, he did in those days, and, of course, that's an odd thought, to think that that was the last time that one heard the constant noise of cocktail shakers.
To move on a bit, then, you're a guest in your own home and then eventually you are mistress of your own home.
When did that happen? Well, that happened when, rather tactfully, I married a Wiltshire man and my grandmother reckoned that the minute Charlie and I were married, we would live at Wraxall.
He was 21 and I was 19 and we moved into Wraxall.
To begin with, I was thrilled, but increasingly it became obvious that unless one could afford to do it really easily and really well and wanted to become something of a slave to a medieval museum, it was just not the way that suited us to live indefinitely at that stage.
We were very young and eventually moved out in about 1965.
Oh, you moved out then, is it No, no, no, we sold it then.
We sold it.
- You sold it in '65? - Sold it in '65.
At the time, strange to say, it was a no brainer.
- It was - Tomorrow mattered more than yesterday, as it were, and it just seemed that it was going to be the wrong thing to do, to try and keep it, against the odds.
I thought the time had come.
The bad moment when I left, which was meant so very kindly, was the village suddenly asked me to go to the village hall and the village gave a goodbye party for the last Long.
That that was bad.
That was exactly like going to one's own funeral.
And, in fact, I felt that it would have been more suitable if they'd shot me instead of being nice.
The evening I actually left there and was the last member of the family to go, I did sort of feel that I was Oh, I don't know, spitting on the altar of the ancestors or killing them all, all over again and just for a moment I thought, "Oh, maybe I am very, very unpleasant indeed "and shouldn't be doing this.
" But I'm a complete meritocrat.
I think the Longs had a hell of a good run and rather a long one in Wiltshire but I'll feel that it's rather suitable that a house that had lived through so much history should be casting its, sort of, historic shadow over, essentially, new and modern people as opposed to anachronistic old bits of yesterday like me.
In the 40 years after the Longs departed for good, South Wraxall changed hands three times.
The latter owner planning to convert it into a luxury hotel.
Then, in 2004, its fortunes turned when it was spotted in Los Angeles by some very modern people indeed.
Rock musician John Taylor of Duran Duran and his wife Gela Nash-Taylor, co-founder of fashion label Juicy Couture.
For Gela, it was love at first sight.
The manor's current restoration and authentic furnishings are all down to her determination to create the perfect embodiment of English country house living.
Did you have an image in your mind of the sort - of English house you wanted? - Yes.
- Oh! - I was obsessed with Gosford Park.
I think that's gotta be every American's fantasy is Gosford Park.
In my head, that's what I was looking for.
I mean, for me, it was the whole combination of the silver services and dressing for dinner.
And I think it's fun to be an American in an English world like that too, because I think we probably see things a little bit different.
I saw it in Country Life and called up and had to come and see it, flew over to see it.
The first time I saw it, it was very dark and I'd never been inside a manor house before.
And it was crazy.
I mean, the fireplaces just were unbelievable and when I first would come to stay here, every night before I went to bed, I would walk in that room and just Because I'm a designer and I'm affected by my surroundings and by aesthetics, this place is just, it's heaven.
I mean, you just come here and the beauty of the house just speaks to you, it's just incredible to live here.
You really can't help, when you're sitting around, to, sort of, think, you know, "Who was here before and what were they doing "and what were their lives like?" When you live in such an old historical place, you think about that, there's no way around it.
And I think that we, my family, we're just so fortunate to have stumbled upon it and then met amazing people to help us restore it.
I definitely wanted it to be English.
I wanted the bulk of the furniture to be English antiques.
And I wanted to feel when you walked in, that was the way it is.
And it doesn't feel I mean, when you walk in, you don't look around and feel like it was just decorated.
There's nothing about it that feels that way.
It feels authentic.
There are, of course, some rather wonderful ghost stories about this house.
Do you feel it's haunted? Do you ever feel anything like that? No, but both my girls, the first few times they stayed here, came screaming over to us.
They were sure that there were ghosts in their rooms.
And then there's the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh smoking the first pipe in the Raleigh Room.
So people will say, "Mmm, you know, did you smell smoke when you were sleeping in that room?" - But that's - Did you? Well, I never have, no, not personally but I think if there are ghosts, they're happy that we're here, so they're, sort of, chill.
They let us be.
But South Wraxall is filled with presence, traces and memories.
To visit the house is to wander through an amazing relic of British history, but also to intimately feel the pride, passion and power of the unstoppable force of nature that built it, the ancient Long dynasty.
This extraordinary building stands as a permanent monument to four men who used any means necessary, fair or foul, to make it the hidden architectural marvel it is today.
Walter, Henry, Thomas and, of course, Robert, who laid the foundations of this magnificent Great Hall almost 600 years ago.
Amazing.
South Wraxall Manor retains its magical quality, its labyrinth-like charm around every corner, a new delight, a new telling detail.
But taken all together, it's transported me back to the Tudor age.
The age that saw the birth of the great English country house.
The most familiar and yet intriguing sights Britain has to offer.
Standing like sentinels in the landscape.
Hundreds of thousands of us visit them every year, but not all are open to the public.
I've been granted the privileged opportunity to pass through the portals of six of our greatest country houses normally hidden from public view.
They've seen five centuries of British history up close and personal.
The families who built these houses played their part in great affairs of state.
Central to their dreams, the great house, the ultimate status symbol, but all too often also the ultimate money drainer.
Few of these families went the distance, but their houses did, with their secrets intact.
This is their story, but it's also our story, for these houses offer a guided tour of our nation's hidden history.
Back in the Middle Ages, it would have been madness to build anything so fanciful, so ostentatious, so open to attack as a beautiful, undefended country house.
They owe their birth to two primal forces, peace after decades of war and to the all too human desire to show off.
It began in England 500 years ago.
Country houses were a creation of the Tudor age, taking root across the landscape.
I'm on my way to explore one of the earliest.
South Wraxall Manor.
This house and the power hungry family that built it, the Longs of Wiltshire, brutally embodied the spirit of late medieval and Tudor England.
Ruthless opportunism, new money, social climbing.
This really is one of England's most special and secret homes.
It didn't just spring into the world fully formed as you see it today.
Its origins lie in this early 15th century Great Hall with its projecting porch and then, over the next 180 years or so, the house grew to reflect the expanding fortunes of the Long family.
Beginning as a kind of medieval starter home, just a few small rooms clustered round a central hall, South Wraxall blossomed into one of the most beautiful homes in Wiltshire.
It's a hidden gem, with its lush interiors, exquisite decoration and a wealth of sumptuous fireplaces, all perfectly preserved through the centuries.
But Wraxall also stands as a monument to Long family's ruthless rise to the top.
The simple country folk who reinvented themselves as a hardnosed dynasty of national statesmen.
The house was an extension of their personality.
Ostentatious but brutal and determined.
Its beauty marks a darker tale of violence, even murder.
A darkness hinted at above the front door itself.
Up there on the oldest part of the house is a startling series of gargoyles.
One shows a beast, a lion or a dog, devouring a naked man head first.
Another shows a man being devoured feet first, or perhaps vomited up.
What can these mean? Are they warnings? Or are they declarations of intent? Wraxall's hideous beasts seem to be saying to all who approach, "Don't mess with me.
" These terrifying gargoyles were probably the brainchild of Robert Long, the man whose fierce ambition gave birth to this house, where he ruled as its first lord of the manor.
Oh! This is tremendous.
It's like going back in time.
This is a stupendous medieval Great Hall, the beating heart of the home.
It's so well preserved.
A magnificent relic of our ancient past.
Look, up here there's a terrific traceried window and then, my word, the roof timbers.
This mighty truss up here, and between the trusses, these delightful cusped panels.
All of this, of course, was to do more than kept the rain out.
It was to be seen and admired, to express status, taste and power.
This is very much a medieval design statement.
A statement of Robert Long's enormous egotism and drive, for he was both a new moneyed hotshot lawyer and a Wiltshire MP, the first of over 70 Longs who made their way into Parliament.
On high days and holidays, he would have wined and dined distinguished guests here, holding court in his own private fiefdom.
In the centre of the hall, just about here, would have been originally a roaring open fire with the smoke curling up past the roof timbers and leaving through a hole right up there.
People sitting here would have seen, through the smoke, strange beings.
Now, in the church of this period, those beings would most likely have been angels but here, they're smirking impish, apes or monkeys.
Seems to me there's an anti-clerical joke going on here, because in that corner is a carving of a monk.
So there's a pun, monks are monkeys and monkeys are monks.
Long clearly had a wicked sense of humour.
But it wasn't just Robert Long's sense of humour that was wicked.
The story of Wraxall and the relentless rise of the Long dynasty is a tale of generations of double crossing and dodgy dealing.
Here, you've a copy of the Longs' family tree, compiled in the 17th century.
At the top is Robert Long, who died in 1446, but of course families do not spring from nowhere and we now understand that Robert Long's father was a chap called Long Thomas, a man embroiled in the rustling of livestock.
So clearly at this stage in the 15th century, the Longs have a rather chequered history.
More detail is provided by the history of Parliament.
Robert Long, "The founder of an important Wiltshire family.
" Oh, he was apparently of quite lowly origins and Robert was set up by one of the old Lords Hungerford, a big local family and, indeed, through his connection he became wealthy, he became a man of prestige and a man of power in his own right.
Of course, we know that he used that power, when he felt like it, in a very unscrupulous manner.
Says that here as well, he was abusive.
He could fleece clients of their fees.
So there we have it.
This beautiful house founded on fortune made in the most corrupt manner by a most conniving fellow.
But don't just take my word for it.
To get a bigger understanding of how this combative, upwardly mobile family forced its way to the top, I'm off to meet one of their modern descendents, Sara Morrison.
Well, we are surrounded by portraits of generations of Longs.
What do you think it meant for them, South Wraxall? Their background is, well, shall we say chequered? What do you know about that? Well, it always struck me when one heard, probably, apocryphal stories as a child, that they were the most frightful cads and probably quite classy thieves, cattle thieves in particular.
I think that's rather an honourable origin.
I mean, that's a perfectly good learning curve for any family.
Robber barons have a great history in this country.
I always fancied that the original Long was such a classy cattle thief, that he was eventually rewarded by being given his pile of grey stones - called the Manor House.
- Yes.
My Long relations still existed when I was a child, pooh-poohed it 'cause they liked to think they were more respectable than that, but certainly as a child, it seemed to me that the right way to start in life was stealing other people's cows.
And they seem to have been involved in law and parliament, almost professional Members of Parliament.
The perfect beginning for maximum mischief making on at least a county scale, if not a national scale.
To be lawyers and politicians and hand in glove with local business is a very good mixture for either making a great deal of money or going to jail and I should think they probably did both in equal quantities.
But I think all of them had a pretty devious self-serving touch, most particularly when it came to choosing who they married.
I think they enriched their genes quite profitably, literally and metaphorically, at almost every stage.
They were efficient breeders, efficient marriers and efficient self-serving individuals.
In 1490, Robert Long's nephew Thomas inherited Wraxall manor.
In a mere 50 years, the Longs had become contenders in aristocratic circles, enabling Thomas to marry Margerie, daughter of Sir Geoffrey Darrell, the wealthy owner of the nearby estate of Draycot.
Wraxall was becoming a showpiece for a family on the make, hungry for recognition, climbing the social ladder.
Thomas's main contribution to the fabric of South Wraxall is this splendid symbolic gatehouse.
It is very much tangible evidence of the new luxuries and freedoms of the English country house and very different to gatehouses of earlier periods, which are serious bits of defensive architecture, with battlements, moats and watchtowers.
His gatehouse was a reflection of the huge changes of English society, brought about by Henry VII's reign and the dawn of the Tudor era.
The old Feudal order gave way to peace and prosperity.
No need now for the castellated fortifications of a war-like age.
It was goodbye to the drawbridge, hello to the welcome mat.
So the gatehouse was no longer a place to repel enemies.
It was more of a porter's lodge.
The porter would come here and look through the little squint windows to see who was coming and report back to the people in the main house.
All, really, I suppose the early, very early 16th century equivalent to a modern day video surveillance system.
Visitors passing through Thomas's gatehouse would have been struck by one particular detail.
A carving of a fetterlock, an ancient padlock used to shackle prisoners.
The fetterlock was the ancestral crest of Draycot, the estate Thomas eventually inherited through his marriage, so he just nabbed it as the Long's first badge of honour.
At the time, only high class families could display heraldic devices, so by putting the fetterlock on the gatehouse, Thomas was making it clear to all people that the Longs had arrived.
They'd been elevated in stature and grandeur.
Elevated, in fact, into royal circles.
In 1496, Thomas helped Henry VII to capture the treacherous pretender to the throne, Perkin Warbeck.
He was knighted at the wedding of Prince Arthur, the elder brother of the future King Henry VIII.
And with Henry VIII's reign came a frenzy of country house building.
Throughout England, the newly rich with their huge disposable incomes build trophy homes that boasted of wealth, taste and social aspiration.
Henry was obsessed by building.
He initiated a vast programme that resulted in the purchase, the building or the remodelling of 55 palaces and large houses.
He promoted the idea that a fine building was the badge of a fine man.
Few Tudor royal homes survive.
This is one of them, Hampton Court.
Inside it holds a fascinating painting that captures the Tudors' mania for showing off through building.
This is the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a celebration held in 1520 to forge an alliance between Henry VIII and King Francis of France.
This was status architecture gone crazy, where pavilions were actually clad in fabrics woven from pure gold.
It's brilliant, it's like a cartoon, really, or one of those graphic novels today where you can see everything happening all at once and the golden tents give their name to the whole occasion.
It's called the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
- Yes.
- And it was this sort of great party town they constructed outside Calais.
And in the top tent there, that's the actual meeting of the kings as brothers, 'cause they're friends at this point.
It doesn't last.
That's right, a celebration of peace that doesn't last.
No, they're at war just a few years afterwards again.
And in order to show their friendship first they embraced and then later on they jousted and they danced and they had a wrestling match.
And this pavilion here's a sort of welcome area and it shows a lot of the main features of Tudor party architecture, so it's very highly decorated.
- Everything's ornamental.
- It's got statues on it, it's got the royal coat of arms, it's got HR for Henry, it's got the Tudor roses and the splendour of the court - Yes.
- doesn't just lie in the buildings.
It lies in the people, the richly dressed masses of people and if you were a Tudor courtier you had to invest an awful lot in your appearance.
So to buy a suit fit for wear at court, just a plain suit, cost the same amount of money as the rent on a London townhouse - for the whole year.
- Really? Really? So being one of the king's men on the Cloth of Gold meant you had really made it into the elite.
This was a pivotal turning point in the fortunes of the Long family for one of Henry's courtiers at the pageant was the man who inherited South Wraxall in 1508, Sir Henry Long.
Henry Long gets knighted by Henry and he was here at the party, so he may be one of these little figures in the procession, or maybe watching the jousting.
Oh, but also, I believe the Longs Henry's here, but his son, of course, gets involved in the royal household, doesn't he? Robert Long.
Well, Robert Long gets a significant position at court in the royal household 'cause he's made a Squire of the Body to Henry VIII, which means that he has a very significant job.
He helps the king to get dressed in the morning and this is a position of enormous privilege because if you were an assassin, this was your chance.
You had to have really trustworthy people doing this job.
Okay, so therefore, clearly the Longs were trustworthy, they were trusted.
They were given very, very intimate access to the king.
Yeah, and that, it means you're in a great position to ask for favours.
- Yes, yes, yes.
- 'Cause there's a record, in fact, that the best time to ask the king for a favour was when, after he'd had wine in the evening, when he was seated upon his closed stool.
Okay, be patient with his codpiece - He was then relaxed.
- Got no defences, yes.
- So I think what your guys, the Longs - Yeah.
tell us about the Tudor age is that it's an age of mobility.
- Yeah.
- You can see them rising up through the ranks, entering royal circles, becoming part of royal circles.
As the ferociously single-minded Henry became the highest ranking Long so far, so his influence rose across Wiltshire.
The county was his for the taking because Henry VIII had opened up amazing opportunities for land ownership.
When he broke with the Roman Catholic church in 1534, it launched the Reformation and ultimately led to the dissolution of the monasteries.
Land that had been sacred for centuries fell into the hands of people like Henry Long.
Ruthless capitalists who didn't miss a chance.
Henry's royal connections paid huge dividends at the time of the dissolution, when he acquired large amounts of former monastic land from the Crown, including St Mary's Priory near Kington St Michael and Bradenstoke Priory here in Wiltshire.
Many of the old monastic buildings were turned into sumptuous private homes.
Others were looted of their materials to build new country houses.
Bradenstoke itself is now ruined, barely even a shadow of its former self.
But poking around in the dark, dank undercroft provides food for thought.
It's a sobering reminder of how the king's sweeping reform brought untold reward to greedy, material folk like Henry Long.
Mmm, probably not rendered since the dissolution of the monasteries.
Oh.
The dissolution was a blaze of destruction.
From its spoils, Henry could fund his own programme of construction.
Back at South Wraxall manor, Long, now a profiteering landlord, filled the house with the sophisticated decor the Tudor age expected.
He modernised many parts of the building, adding all the mod cons of the early 16th century such as fireplaces to all the rooms.
As a man who had lived it up at the Field Of The Cloth Of Gold, Henry, doubtless had a taste for the finer things in life.
Summed up by one writer of the period as "stately and curious workmanship.
" This is stately and curious workmanship indeed.
Look at this wonderful frieze up here, carved acanthus leaf, lovely.
Very modish for the time.
And below, a lovely linen fold carved oak panel.
Really very, very high quality.
Lovely.
In this room, you can best see what Henry Long did to South Wraxall.
Very much in the spirit of the time, he wanted to increase its sense of privacy, comfort, convenience and luxury.
He added this wonderful fireplace in what was perhaps once a larger room.
He wanted to sit here, away from the noise and bustle in the Great Hall, like I say, be private, be comfortable.
A lovely fashionable design, this, classical cornice up here, the Tudor arch very much the theme of the moment.
Also, this fireplace tells a particular romantic tale.
Look here at this corner.
Initials.
"HL.
" Henry Long.
Then we go along here.
There's a wonderful carving, I think, of acanthus leaves and vines commemorating what would happen in front of this fireplace, a good glass of wine.
Then we get across to this side.
Other initials.
"H" again, Henry.
"E," Eleanor, his second wife, and these initials are linked by a lover's knot.
How very lovely.
So this fireplace commemorates in stone their love for eternity.
The Tudor enthusiasm for exquisite decoration was meant to say, "I am a man of culture and refinement.
" But Henry was a Long through and through.
Perhaps his improvement to the house was simply a smokescreen for a much darker personality.
Local historian Tim Couzens knows all about his wicked ways.
He was quite a complex character.
I think you can call him quite unscrupulous overall.
He has this sort of veneer of respectability, he has a brother at court who is in daily contact with King Henry VIII.
So very high-powered connections.
And they kept that influence over a very, very long period of time.
There's a great quote of him being called a usurper, a tyrant even, and all sorts of disputes over land where he could actually pack courts and have magistrates and juries that would just come down in his favour.
And if they didn't, he actually locked them up and if they still refused to come down in his favour, he actually wrote to King Henry VIII and it was directed, "I'll take your names and give me the names of the people "that are not acting in favour of Sir Henry Long in Wiltshire, "and we'll obviously sort them out in some way.
" You can imagine them being shipped off to the Tower.
It's sort of kind of a picture of a lawless world, where they were judge and jury and they would go to Stop at nothing, really, to achieve their end, whether it's sort of about, you know, Getting property, getting power, getting riches.
Really, really, really An alarming world, isn't it? Yes, within the county of Wiltshire it's almost total power.
Of being able to control how things were happening.
Over a period of time, they're using the house to put the sort of veneer of respectability on top of that and, of course, through time that takes over.
But in Wiltshire they were using their role as the sheriff to basically act as the law.
South Wraxall manor passed to Henry's son, Robert Long, in 1556.
By then, Robert was the head of an enormously powerful dynasty.
The Longs now owned nine estates across Wiltshire.
But Robert had a novel plan for cementing the family's greatness through building.
He saw no point in spending any money doing up the manor, since only select guests would ever see inside it.
Far better to big up the Longs' name and stature with a self-important gesture in the very heart of the local village.
Robert did what many noble families did at the time.
He tarted up the family chapel at the local parish church, in this case St James's at South Wraxall.
Now, Robert left his mark here.
Look, RL, Robert Long, and the date, 1566.
He added this door so the Longs could enter the church directly, rather than mixing with the common parishioners who would've passed through this arch here.
I will enter the church as the Longs did.
This really is the hallowed land of the Longs.
The family would have sat here, seeing the altar through the squint in front of me.
Living Longs surrounded by dead ancestors' bodies in the crypt below and on the walls, gigantic monuments.
Look at this one.
A wonderful affair dating, I suppose, from the 1490s or so.
It shows a Long widow.
You can see that by her widow's veil, but her face tragically destroyed in some frenzied post-Reformation attack.
The Longs' status symbols are everywhere.
Here, their coat of arms, and yet again, the fetterlock, positively aglow in the chapel's windows.
I must say, standing here, looking at this glorious stained glass, one's reminded of the lost stained glass from the Great Hall at South Wraxall, how wonderful that must have been.
The celestial light flooding the Great Hall and bathing all those sitting there in these glorious hues.
The Longs' chapel was a very public piece of self-publicity, but it's also testament to huge changes in society, brought about by the reformation.
The Catholic Church's dominance had been overturned.
Churches became more secular places.
This allowed ego-driven families like the Longs to leave their mark in sacred spaces for all time, blessed not only in this world, but also in the next.
In 1581, Robert was succeeded by his eldest son, Walter Long, a man of enormous prestige.
Not simply an MP and knight, but also a justice of the peace and rapacious landowner.
And ultimately, Walter was the true master builder of South Wraxall.
The manor as we find it today is the result of his ambition and verve.
Beforehand, the house had grown as a series of small extensions.
Walter tied them all together and built upwards and outwards into make one great unified building that spoke splendidly of the Longs' bigness.
Bigger than ever before.
But perhaps more than anything, Walter's story, a story that includes a dramatic feud with a local family, demonstrates that in Elizabethan England, one of the great spurs of building was one-upmanship.
And building, of course, included the creation of spectacular interiors that were seen as badges of honour and status of a family.
Walter's improvements at South Wraxall captured the fervour for elegance and civilised culture that characterised Elizabeth's reign.
Flamboyant displays of taste, wealth and comfort.
For an age of Elizabethan socialising, first impressions mattered enormously.
Hence, this sensational fireplace.
It's dated 1598 and was the height of Renaissance fashion, but it contains some very curious and personal details.
At the top there in the centre is a face of Hercules or the Greenman, symbolising, I suppose, strength.
Here is, once again, the fetterlock.
And below Hercules, is a shield with, on the left, the Long lion and crosses.
On the right a bird, the emblem of the Carne family, that's Walter's mother's family.
So this is not just a great architectural statement, but a monument to the family's distinction.
I imagine Walter standing here with his friends, contemplating this fireplace, would have been very proud.
And he had much to be proud of.
During the 16th century, European classical design had arrived in England with a vengeance.
Homeowners added novel classical details as signs of sophistication.
And Walter Long was no exception.
The Great Hall's old oak screen was replaced around 1600 in a most fashionable Renaissance manner, all part of this thorough updating of Wraxall's decor.
And in what is now the dining room, we find another of his great fireplaces, a masterpiece of symbolism packed with clues like a cryptic crossword puzzle.
It really is sensational.
The whole fireplace is loaded with messages.
Here, you see, it says "Faber est quisq.
" I mean, this is saying "Every man is the architect of his own fortunes.
" And here, "Praised by the good "and to be abused by the bad is all praise alike.
" These, I suppose, are moral messages that you can't really argue with, they're like mottos in a Christmas cracker, but in the middle is a rather more intriguing message "Mors rapit omnia.
" "Death seizes all things.
" And that message is being delivered by a little Caliban creature, a monkey.
Very strange.
So peculiar.
So what was this fireplace, this room, all about originally? Well the first thing is that it was originally much smaller.
It's now a rather charming, large, well lit dining room that was created about 1700.
Originally a small closet, just off the Great Hall over there.
The Great Hall, a place of light, life, entertainment, the present.
Here, of course, a tiny room, the counterpoint, come here to contemplate not this world but the next.
Death, eternity, the afterlife.
All things pass, be prepared, memento mori.
Very much the spirit of a late Elizabethan, a Jacobean world.
Death is ever present, in life there is death.
That's the lesson of this little room and the fireplace.
But there could be more.
Perhaps Walter's relentless improvements to Wraxall were a direct response to the most scandalous and tragic incident in the Long family history.
For all was not as it seemed behind Walter's highly refined country house.
Deep down, he was as manipulative and self-important as his ancestors.
Despite the civilised manners of 17th century society, fierce and bloody rivalries were still raging across England's shires.
And the Longs were embroiled in a bitter feud of one-upmanship with another Wiltshire dynasty, the Danvers.
Sir Walter was by then high on his own grandeur, having married into the fabulously wealthy family of Longleat.
Together with his brother Henry, he was determined to show the Danvers who really ruled the roost around his manor.
The row started as a petty squabble.
But by looking at the records in Britain's national archives, we can see how it got completely out of hand.
I'm looking through some of the State Papers Domestic of Queen Elizabeth I and this story is told in these papers in some considerable detail.
Clearly regarded as an event of, well, of national importance and certainly quite some feud.
"A true declaration of the ground of the conceived mislike "of Sir Walter Long, Knight, and Henry Long, Gent, his brother, "against Sir John Danvers, Knight, his sons and followers.
" So here we see the characters in this play that's about to unfold in front of me.
It's incredible.
The account explains how Henry Long and one of his servants carried out a robbery on a Danvers property, provoking their ire.
All too quickly, it escalated.
Ah, now here we go.
This paper talks of "many insolent behaviours" and how one of Danvers' servants was murdered by a Long servant and another dangerously wounded.
Heady stuff.
Clearly, the Longs are carrying out enormities against their rivals.
The Danvers and people are being murdered, wounded.
Golly.
Sir John Danvers, a magistrate, seized the upper hand by charging four of Walter Long's servants with murder.
When his son Charles tried to make peace, by exchanging gentlemanly letters, it could all have been settled, except Walter's brother, Henry, fired off poisonous letters in return.
So Henry taunts Sir Charles "sundry times," sending him word that "wheresoever he met him, "he would untie his points.
" He wants to take his trousers down.
"And whip him with a rod, "calling him ass, puppy fool and boy.
" That is fighting talk.
Just picture that.
This really is, you know, this is it, isn't it? It's heading for an absolute incredible violent collision.
You can't just can't call a chap those things, can you, and get away with it? And he couldn't.
The Danvers boys had been pushed too far, humiliated.
They wanted revenge.
On October the 4th, accompanied by a gang of over 20 retainers, they burst into a house in the village of Corsham, where the Longs were having dinner.
According to the Corsham coroner's court record, "Henry Danvers did assault the aforesaid Henry Long "and the aforesaid Henry Danvers "voluntarily, feloniously and of malice prepense "did discharge in and upon the said Long a certain engine called a dag" A type of primitive pistol.
"charged with powder and a bullet of lead "which Henry Danvers had in his right hand "and inflict a mortal wound upon the upper part of the body of Long, "under the left breast, of which wound he instantly died.
" Bang.
As Henry lay dead, the Danvers fled.
The chase was on.
The high sheriff of Wiltshire and the justices of the peace set out to capture them.
The Danvers headed to Titchfield, near Southampton, where their friend, the Earl of Southampton, hid them away.
In a matter of days, they made a getaway to France, evading justice for many years.
But because the Earl of Southampton was one of William Shakespeare's great patrons, some people believe the Longs' feud was the inspiration for one of the Bard's greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet.
Historian Jonathan Bate is one of them.
It's in the mix, the timing is right.
The events took place in late 1594 and Romeo and Juliet was written the following year.
Now, that's not to say that Romeo and Juliet is a dramatisation of the Danvers-Long feud but the interesting question is why does Shakespeare decide to dramatise a story about a family feud at this time, at this moment? It's the Southampton connection that is the real key here.
We have to go back to 1592, just the moment Shakespeare's establishing himself as a successful playwright, but then the theatres get closed down because of plague.
Well, what a writer does when it's not possible to put on plays and make money that way is target a wealthy patron.
So Shakespeare leaves London and writes some poems and dedicates them to the Earl of Southampton and they seem to have done the trick.
There's a fair bit of evidence that by the summer of 1594, Shakespeare has got a close connection with the Earl of Southampton and he may, indeed, even be staying with Southampton down at Titchfield.
Because what happens very soon after this is the theatres reopen, a new theatre company is formed and Shakespeare starts writing some of his greatest plays.
Well, Shakespeare probably wasn't at the house when the Danvers turned up, but he would have found out about them, about it, the feud, and I suppose one can say that I'm pretty certain that the notion of feuding families, that inspired him, did it? That's absolutely right and, of course, the thing about Shakespeare's plays is that, although they're usually set abroad, they do feel very English.
So when you get the servants fighting at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, these are English servants, they have English names.
So there's a sort of double take going on.
Yes, on the one hand, we're in Verona, but on the other hand, we're in England.
So that means that Shakespeare's audience would have connected the family feud, the Capulets and the Montagues in the play, with family feuds among great houses in England and certainly the most notorious, the most talked about feud of that time, especially in the Southampton circle, was Danvers and Long.
So it's no mere coincidence that in the years immediately following his brother's brutal murder, Walter Long turned South Wraxall into one of the finest homes of its time.
Beautifying the manor was about having the upper hand, showing that the Longs were still a force to be reckoned with.
Walter masked his own devious involvement in the affair with domestic glory.
And it doesn't get more glorious than this.
This is Walter's most splendid creation at South Wraxall.
He transformed the Great Chamber into this drawing room.
It really is a visual explosion, almost an assault.
Look at these huge windows in front of me and over there, letting light flood inside.
They are in themselves a statement of wealth, 'cause glass was still relatively expensive at that time.
Above is a splendid barrow-vaulted ceiling, a wondrous thing festooned with carvings, faces, suns, moons, perhaps even with the moustachioed face of Walter Long himself.
An image of the vault of heaven.
But best of all, of course, is this overwhelming fireplace, just look at it.
This is one of the greatest creations of late Tudor England.
It was carved by local masons, but nobody knows who designed it.
Perhaps it was Walter Long himself.
Certainly is packed with lots of messages and meanings, most of them moral rather than Christian.
And I suppose many would be appropriate for Walter and this part of the country.
In the centre we see the image of Pan, the god of nature, of shepherds and flocks who lived in Arcadia.
Well, of course, this was wool country at the time and this part of Wiltshire, is as beautiful as Arcadia.
At each end we have, well, here an image of Prudence and over there an image of Justice.
Again, very appropriate attributes for Walter as lord of the manor and magistrate.
He should indeed be prudent and just.
Each side of Pan we have representations of Arithmetic and Geometry, the attributes of architecture.
What's really remarkable about this great creation is that it shows how Walter Long brought the virtues of Renaissance civilisation to this part of rural Wiltshire.
Walter's drawing room is the epitome of domestic comfort and grandeur, one of the most spectacular rooms of the Elizabethan age.
It seems to proclaim victory.
To show that Walter Long, unlike Henry Danvers, was a civilised fellow, no crude, pistol-wielding assassin.
The splendour of South Wraxall remains a testament to Walter's ambition.
He wanted his house to be fit for a king.
But this wasn't just lofty posturing.
He'd pulled it off.
The family was now beginning to earn its place among the great and powerful in British history.
The social ascent of the Longs had now reached its peak.
Incidents in their family's history had perhaps inspired William Shakespeare.
They were acquainted with Queen Elizabeth and visited by eminent characters such as Sir Walter Raleigh, the chap who brought tobacco to England.
Indeed, probably brought tobacco to South Wraxall.
The Raleigh legend haunts the building today, quite literally for some.
Generations of visitors have been spooked by a ghostly scent of tobacco smoke appearing as if from nowhere.
But Raleigh isn't the only spectre to walk these halls.
Another ghostly tale hangs over Wraxall's history.
It concerns the dastardly backstabbing behaviour of Sir Walter's second wife, Catherine.
By now, the Longs' tradition of cunning and conniving was so ingrained that the family was turning on itself.
Catherine was the ultimate wicked stepmother, masterminding a devious plan to prevent Walter's eldest son, John Long, from inheriting the family fortune.
As the 17th century historian John Aubrey tells it.
"The second wife did use much artifice to render the son by the first wife, "who had not much Promethean fire, odious to his father.
"She would get her acquaintances to make him drunk "and then expose him in that condition to his father.
"She never left off her attempts "till she got Sir Walter to disinherit him.
" With the help of her lawyer brother, Catherine plotted to change Walter's will, to leave all the family's considerable riches to their firstborn son, also named Walter.
But her dastardly scheme seems to have aroused the spirits of South Wraxall.
The clerk employed to commit John's fate to paper was horrified when, "A fine white hand interposed between the writing and the candle.
"He could discern it was a woman's hand and then vanished.
" This happened not once, not twice, but thrice.
The clerk was terrified.
He imagined, he was sure, it was the hand of the late Lady Long.
He threw down his pen and he refused to continue writing.
In the end, there was a compromise.
Young Walter got the house nearby Draycot.
Young John inherited Wraxall.
Perhaps John's mother had indeed saved the day from the afterlife.
And fanciful though this tale of the white hand seems, there is something haunting about South Wraxall.
A strange aura has got me thinking about the very origin of the building.
So here we are, back where we started.
Back to these extraordinary man-eating gargoyles.
But I wonder It now occurs to me these were created not so much to ward off evil, but as to act as warnings, warnings from the past to the future, warnings that this is an ancient haunted site.
Even in the 15th century, this was a strange and magical realm.
By the 18th century, the haunted tag stuck to Wraxall Manor.
In the family's eyes, the building had become tainted by a curse.
With 14,000 acres of land and many houses at their disposal, they neither wanted nor needed to live there.
Wraxall was a mere bauble in their empire, used as a rest home for spinster aunts or often just left empty.
But that, ironically, is what saved it.
Never modernised to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, it remained trapped in time.
But as the 20th century arrived, the Long empire was in sharp decline.
Most of their estates and lands were sold off and South Wraxall Manor once again became the main residence of what was left of the Long family.
Sara Morrison grew up there.
But I was there until I was five with my father, until the beginning of the war.
And so I remember it in true, sort of, rose-tinted spectacles as a small child.
Old Walter Long, my great-grandfather, and my father's father - had been killed in the First World War.
- Yes.
And so getting it back was, sort of, my father recapturing it, if you like, for the Longs.
When Sara's father was tragically killed in the Second World War, she inherited the house which was soon rented out to a family friend, Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail.
I had the unusual experience of spending a lot of holidays there, as it were a guest in my own house.
And so I had a sort of second childhood at Wraxall in the late '40s and early '50s, when it was under Rothermere command and the whole world walked through its front door.
Evelyn Waugh, I remember, because he was so disagreeable.
And I remember being told that we'd got to mind our manners if we were going to have lunch in the dining room, because people like Evelyn Waugh took great exception to unpleasant children.
What those grownups didn't understand is that we took great exception to unpleasant grownups.
And I remember lan Fleming there, 'cause we were told that he was frightfully glamorous and a spy.
And us looking at this figure that was sort of leaning back in his chair and saying, "If he was a spy Absolutely ridiculous.
"Anybody would see that he was a ridiculous Englishman at 500 yards.
"Can't possibly have been a spy, they don't look like that.
" And being told that we were And did he like a dry Martini? He Do you know, he did in those days, and, of course, that's an odd thought, to think that that was the last time that one heard the constant noise of cocktail shakers.
To move on a bit, then, you're a guest in your own home and then eventually you are mistress of your own home.
When did that happen? Well, that happened when, rather tactfully, I married a Wiltshire man and my grandmother reckoned that the minute Charlie and I were married, we would live at Wraxall.
He was 21 and I was 19 and we moved into Wraxall.
To begin with, I was thrilled, but increasingly it became obvious that unless one could afford to do it really easily and really well and wanted to become something of a slave to a medieval museum, it was just not the way that suited us to live indefinitely at that stage.
We were very young and eventually moved out in about 1965.
Oh, you moved out then, is it No, no, no, we sold it then.
We sold it.
- You sold it in '65? - Sold it in '65.
At the time, strange to say, it was a no brainer.
- It was - Tomorrow mattered more than yesterday, as it were, and it just seemed that it was going to be the wrong thing to do, to try and keep it, against the odds.
I thought the time had come.
The bad moment when I left, which was meant so very kindly, was the village suddenly asked me to go to the village hall and the village gave a goodbye party for the last Long.
That that was bad.
That was exactly like going to one's own funeral.
And, in fact, I felt that it would have been more suitable if they'd shot me instead of being nice.
The evening I actually left there and was the last member of the family to go, I did sort of feel that I was Oh, I don't know, spitting on the altar of the ancestors or killing them all, all over again and just for a moment I thought, "Oh, maybe I am very, very unpleasant indeed "and shouldn't be doing this.
" But I'm a complete meritocrat.
I think the Longs had a hell of a good run and rather a long one in Wiltshire but I'll feel that it's rather suitable that a house that had lived through so much history should be casting its, sort of, historic shadow over, essentially, new and modern people as opposed to anachronistic old bits of yesterday like me.
In the 40 years after the Longs departed for good, South Wraxall changed hands three times.
The latter owner planning to convert it into a luxury hotel.
Then, in 2004, its fortunes turned when it was spotted in Los Angeles by some very modern people indeed.
Rock musician John Taylor of Duran Duran and his wife Gela Nash-Taylor, co-founder of fashion label Juicy Couture.
For Gela, it was love at first sight.
The manor's current restoration and authentic furnishings are all down to her determination to create the perfect embodiment of English country house living.
Did you have an image in your mind of the sort - of English house you wanted? - Yes.
- Oh! - I was obsessed with Gosford Park.
I think that's gotta be every American's fantasy is Gosford Park.
In my head, that's what I was looking for.
I mean, for me, it was the whole combination of the silver services and dressing for dinner.
And I think it's fun to be an American in an English world like that too, because I think we probably see things a little bit different.
I saw it in Country Life and called up and had to come and see it, flew over to see it.
The first time I saw it, it was very dark and I'd never been inside a manor house before.
And it was crazy.
I mean, the fireplaces just were unbelievable and when I first would come to stay here, every night before I went to bed, I would walk in that room and just Because I'm a designer and I'm affected by my surroundings and by aesthetics, this place is just, it's heaven.
I mean, you just come here and the beauty of the house just speaks to you, it's just incredible to live here.
You really can't help, when you're sitting around, to, sort of, think, you know, "Who was here before and what were they doing "and what were their lives like?" When you live in such an old historical place, you think about that, there's no way around it.
And I think that we, my family, we're just so fortunate to have stumbled upon it and then met amazing people to help us restore it.
I definitely wanted it to be English.
I wanted the bulk of the furniture to be English antiques.
And I wanted to feel when you walked in, that was the way it is.
And it doesn't feel I mean, when you walk in, you don't look around and feel like it was just decorated.
There's nothing about it that feels that way.
It feels authentic.
There are, of course, some rather wonderful ghost stories about this house.
Do you feel it's haunted? Do you ever feel anything like that? No, but both my girls, the first few times they stayed here, came screaming over to us.
They were sure that there were ghosts in their rooms.
And then there's the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh smoking the first pipe in the Raleigh Room.
So people will say, "Mmm, you know, did you smell smoke when you were sleeping in that room?" - But that's - Did you? Well, I never have, no, not personally but I think if there are ghosts, they're happy that we're here, so they're, sort of, chill.
They let us be.
But South Wraxall is filled with presence, traces and memories.
To visit the house is to wander through an amazing relic of British history, but also to intimately feel the pride, passion and power of the unstoppable force of nature that built it, the ancient Long dynasty.
This extraordinary building stands as a permanent monument to four men who used any means necessary, fair or foul, to make it the hidden architectural marvel it is today.
Walter, Henry, Thomas and, of course, Robert, who laid the foundations of this magnificent Great Hall almost 600 years ago.
Amazing.
South Wraxall Manor retains its magical quality, its labyrinth-like charm around every corner, a new delight, a new telling detail.
But taken all together, it's transported me back to the Tudor age.
The age that saw the birth of the great English country house.