Great Houses with Julian Fellowes (2013) s01e02 Episode Script
Episode 2
Turning over, please.
I enjoy writing Downton Abbey, and I suppose I've made my living out of writing about fictional country houses that are occupied by fictional characters.
But to be turned out of Downton.
But Britain's great houses are real and inhabited by real people.
"Charlie, I have been very wicked with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others" I'm trying to find the real Lord Grantham, the real Lady Mary.
That's great.
I love jewels, actually.
Presumably that's not the countess! The real Bates, the real Anna.
My eyes absolutely fill at the thought of this, really.
Oh, look at that.
Do you think Harry Clark would have been put into one of these? This rather grisly instrument amputated the Earl of Uxbridge's leg.
The families who built and lived in these houses were governing the country.
Their servants were making the whole thing work.
Pretty well all of us have got ancestors who were either giving orders or taking them, or probably both.
"Thomas Lever, stable boy, runaway.
" These are not just houses for posh people to live in, their history belongs to all of us.
So there's a story for everyone in this kind of place.
I'm on my way to Goodwood House in West Sussex.
For 300 years it's been the seat of the Dukes of Richmond.
And it's home to the current duke's heir, Charles Gordon Lennox, Earl of March.
Goodwood would attract the most fashionable people of the day.
This is a great great house, even by the standards of great houses.
Lord Fellowes, sir.
Welcome back to Goodwood.
Good to see you.
How are you? Not too bad, sir.
You brought some great weather with you today.
Goodwood is the seat of a great dynasty that has played its part in our history.
And there's an interesting detail at the very beginning of theirs.
The story of the Richmonds, of their titles, their house, of their place in our history, begins with rather an extraordinary woman, who was the love of King Charles II's life.
This is Louise De Keroualle.
She was the king's last mistress and certainly his favourite.
But actually, Louise's tale is more interesting than an ordinary love story.
And it's worth investigating.
My starting point is hidden deep in the basement of the West Sussex records office.
My word, look at all this.
These are all the County Council archives.
So beautiful.
Yes.
This cosy cubby hole.
The one you want is in the safe.
This is fantastic.
This is where, presumably, all the super-special stuff is.
Yes.
These are the really special archives, going back to 780.
780?! Yep.
That's our earliest.
And this is the document that you want.
Great.
You're so efficient - locking it while we're standing right here! In case there's an air attack.
What I'm looking for is a remarkable letter written by King Charles II.
Known as the Merry Monarch for his hedonistic ways, Charles fathered at least 15 children outside his barren marriage.
A king's illegitimate sons were usually named Fitzroy, which means son of the king, and was traditionally given to royal bastards.
But not this son.
Charles gave him an ancient royal title - Duke of Richmond, and even more significantly, a proper surname.
"Windsor, last of July.
Upon better thoughts, I do intend that the Duke of Richmond's name shall be Lenox.
" Here he has decided that this child will be special.
It's quite moving because he's making the boy almost legitimate.
And that is really quite unusual.
And here we have CR - Carolus Rex.
It's rather extraordinary to think this isn't a letter dictated, this is a letter by Charles II.
But what makes one curious about is why was he so attached to this child? He was just a little three-year-old at this point.
What was it about this boy and his relationship with the boy's mother that marked him apart from the others? I'm meeting royal historian Dr Anna Keay, to find out why Louise and her son were so special.
What do you think it was really that made her such a success? She was utterly devoted to him in a way previous mistresses hadn't been.
They were good-time girls whose attentions, like the King's own attentions, could flit to other people.
Whereas Louise, although she was described often as being attractive, she wasn't a great beauty, but what it was that she had was an ability to please and to charm, first and foremost, the king, and those around him.
And that won her his affections.
I think the contrast with people like the Duchess of Castlemaine and some of the others, who spent their life breaking looking glasses and yanking curtains down and screaming at him Obviously when he was young he thought that was exciting and sexy and all of that stuff, but by this stage he'd had enough, and who can blame him? So she created this almost kind of marriage, a sort of domestic marriage for 15 years at the end of his life.
But while Charles was falling hopelessly in love, it seems Louise's true loyalty lay with another man, the French King, Louis XIV.
So what is this? This is a letter written in 1670, the year that Louise arrives in England from France, from one of her countrymen, to her, encouraging her to put aside her foibles, and to begin a relationship with the king.
This seems unusually bold: "Happy is the woman who knows how to behave herself discreetly without curbing her inclinations.
For as it is a disgrace for one of her sex to abandon herself to love without any regard to her fame, tis on the other side, a great mortification to pass her life without an amour.
" It's a pretty extraordinary letter.
It's essentially saying, you know "Get out there, kid!" Yes, exactly.
"Whip 'em off.
" And she did.
Extraordinary.
I don't really understand what he was hoping to achieve - that she would be a good influence on the King of England, that she would bring him round to French interest.
Well, I think that was part of it.
And I think anyone who cared about France would have seen a French mistress who could keep the king happy was the Holy Grail.
And in Louise various French people felt they had found her.
He did love her, I think.
I think he did.
And the wonderful thing is some of his letters to her survive.
We've got one of them here.
Which do give you an amazingly intimate glimpse of their relationship.
He's writing to her from Newmarket.
He's in Newmarket.
At the races.
".
.
where tis impossible to express the true passion and kindness I have for my dearest dearest fubs.
" Yes, and I think in that pet name that he had for her, you can get a sort of flavour of the intimacy of their relationship.
But also in this very interesting cipher at the bottom, because he doesn't sign himself Charles or CR, Carolus Rex, he signs with this very particular little sort of cipher, which is a combination of a C and an L.
And the same cipher is on this absolutely ravishing emerald ring, which Charles gave to Louise.
This is fabulous.
So engraved on the surface of a table-cut emerald, there, is the C and the L entwined, with her Duchess's coronet surmounting both of the letters.
Duchess not the king.
I have to put it on.
I love jewels actually.
I always think it's rather a shame we're not allowed to wear them.
Born in the wrong age.
I know! If I'd been at Louis' court I'd have been smothered in them.
No, I think one has to concede that she did make him love her.
She gave him what he wanted.
You know, whatever her motives were, she delivered.
And she gave him the happiest period in his life.
And for me that is the significance of the fact that he changes the child's name from Fitzroy to Lenox.
All of that says to me, "This is my true son.
This is my boy.
" And he is almost legitimate.
Almost, but critically not! Not quite! Whether Louise truly came to love Charles or not we'll never know.
But her attentions to him paid off.
He even converted to Catholicism, albeit on his death bed.
And she was hugely rewarded, with jewels and properties and a dukedom, all given by Louis XIV.
But it was her son who really made it.
Unlike most of his children, Charles left the Duke of Richmond a fortune.
So in 1697, he bought a hunting lodge, set in a good wood.
But it's in these woods on the estate where I discover an extraordinary story of crime and punishment that is at the centre of our history.
Burnett strangled Thomas Hewitt, strangled him.
I'm at Goodwood in Sussex, for 300 years the seat of the Dukes of Richmond.
And one of the greatest landed estates in England.
Here we have another picture of the triumphantly successful double agent and mistress Louise.
This one interests me.
Not actually because of her.
But because of the black servant who attends her, there on her left.
In the 17th century, fashionable ladies thought it chic to be painted next to black children, as they believed the dark faces highlighted the pallor of their own skin.
Most of these children arrived in Britain along the Thames.
They were a kind of bi-product of the trade in slaves led by Britain between Africa and our colonies across the Atlantic.
From 1562 to 1807, millions of people were shipped from Africa to work as slaves in the sugar and tobacco plantations.
Steve Martin, an expert in the history of slavery, will tell me more.
Most tellingly, we've got that structure over there - the site of Ambrose Crowley's wharf, which was central to to the manufacture of fetters, shackles, all sorts of repressive technologies.
Manacles The technologies of repression and control.
Absolutely.
They had a contract with the Royal Africa Company, which was immensely profitable.
I didn't have any idea about that.
Well, you remember as well that along this stretch of river, more than 3,000 slaving voyages departed from London docks.
That's a lot of business.
It's a lot of money and it's a lot of people.
Not just going out but also coming in as well.
So grotesque that, isn't it? It's nightmarish.
But what of those little children who ended up in England, having their portraits painted with the great ladies of the day? Here are a couple of images that should interest you, I think.
Here is our page.
Very very distinctive here.
On the edge of the composition.
He's clearly there as an ornament.
As sort of um Almost a kind of pet.
You can see the way she drapes her hand over him.
That is a gesture which you wouldn't make to an ordinary footman.
No.
This is of ownership and of status.
And what happened next? That's the thing.
Well, there are a number of fates which could have awaited them.
There were many people who were given their freedom.
There were many more people who would have stayed in some indeterminate state, working on the estate, obviously unwaged.
Um, the worst possible fate, inevitably, would have been being sent back, or being sent to a plantation society.
And that really happened.
Some people did Yes.
Remember that when these young boys hit their teen years, they were no longer lovable, they were no longer petable.
They were young men, who'd require resources from the household, and it was all too easy simply to sell on the problem, to trade the problem - the person.
To be sent back to the plantations is a dreadful thought.
But thankfully it's not the only story.
There's a painting of another black servant at Goodwood.
This time from the 18th century.
He's dressed rather smartly in the Richmond livery.
Curator James Peill knows more about him.
Well, we think this boy here was someone called Thomas Robinson, who was a young page, given to the Duke of Richmond by Sir Thomas Robinson, Governor of Barbados.
Given.
Extraordinary, isn't it? And he's chosen to put him in a particularly important place because he's holding the Duke's prize horse - this Arab horse.
Which in those days, this is the equivalent of having your Ferrari.
It's interesting, though, they like him, they put him in the picture, but they don't even give him his own name.
Extraordinary.
He's named after the man who gives him to them.
Yes.
But we do have a hint of his real name in the archive here at Goodwood.
Could we go and have a look? Certainly.
This is an interesting group of documents.
Mainly letters written in the late 1720s.
This is the letter I want to show you here.
The wonderfully artistic hand This is very flamboyant.
"For Master Thomas Robinson" And it's written by Margaret Woffington - The great actress.
The great actress Peg Woffington.
Yes, exactly.
How interesting.
She signs herself Margaret.
How on earth would Thomas Robinson have come to know a great star of the London stage? Who knows? But read the letter.
"My pretty little Oroonoko" That's very interesting because of course Oroonoko was a novel by Aphra Behn, and he was a heroic figure, it's a very positive figure.
And obviously what she feels is she doesn't know his name but she's damned if she's going to call him Thomas Robinson! Except on the envelope so it gets to him.
Yes.
Yes.
That's quite nice, I think.
"I'm glad to hear of your safe arrival in Sussex.
Sir Thomas Robinson writes me word you are very pretty, which has raised my curiosity to a great pitch.
And it makes me long to see you.
I am, my dear black boy, your admirer and humble servant, Margaret Woffington.
" And that is the sum total of what we know about Thomas Robinson.
That's all we have, yes.
We think that he was given a classical education by the Duke of Richmond.
Beyond that there's nothing else in the archive.
He may have been given an classical education, but what we know for sure from the servant's book is he wasn't paid.
The painting of Thomas Robinson is one of three at Goodwood by Britain's most famous painter of horses - George Stubbs.
But what's interesting to me is not the horses but the people.
Presumably these are special servants, the ones we can see the faces of.
And chosen, you know, because perhaps the Duchess liked them or whatever.
And here I have the book of The London and Goodwood Servants.
This is a wonderful piece of work actually.
It's so meticulously kept.
All the servants are entered, the date they arrived, their wages.
And when they left.
Discharged.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything bad.
It just means when they stopped being here.
And it tells such a story really Stable boy maid.
Carter, head groom.
And so on.
We've got This one.
"Thomas Lever, stable boy runaway.
" Runaway.
I like this one.
Patience Armstrong.
Maid.
It just says, "To Godalming.
" So clearly that's all we need to know about Patience! She's gone to Godalming.
And here, Thomas Doulton, head groom.
"Killed by a horse.
" On March 24th, 1741.
Poor fellow.
I thought I might learn something about Doulton's death in the papers.
But instead I discovered a more intriguing story.
Ah, here we are.
The Bath Chronicle.
Thursday January 6th, 1780.
"On Wednesday morning, the 15th incidence - a barbarous murder was committed in a copse at Goodwood in Sussex, the seat of His Grace the Duke of Richmond.
On the body of Thomas Hewitt, one of His Grace's grooms.
In which situation his cowardly and inhuman antagonist, one Burnett, a poacher, seized him fast by the throat, and never quitted his hold till he had killed him.
" I don't think it's very hard to tell which side the newspaper's on.
Burnett was caught carrying a brace of pheasant, food, I suppose, for his family.
But he'd broken the law under the ferocious Black Act of 1723, which made hanging the punishment for hunting game.
This same act turned 50 other crimes into capital of fences.
You weren't allowed to damage a tree, you weren't allowed to set a fire, you weren't allowed You weren't allowed to try to grow vegetables! That was another hanging of fence.
So if you were caught it was die now or die later.
Straightaway.
Anyway, the point is Burnett was a dead man on the run.
Never mind the murder of Hewitt.
So he was in desperate straits.
Unfortunately for him, they took up two of his accomplices, who, to save their own skins, turned king's evidence and testified he was the one who had killed the groom.
So he was really a goner.
I'm going to meet 18th century expert Professor Steven Conway, to find out what happened next.
Here's something that might interest you, Julian.
This is an article in the Derby Mercury.
"At the Assizes of Sussex the following prisoners were tried: James Burnett, indicted for the wilful murder of Thomas Hewitt at Goodwood Park in December last and found guilty of manslaughter.
And sentenced to be burnt in the hand and imprisoned 12 months in Horsham Jail.
" I'm surprised by being burnt in the hand.
I thought branding had finished ages before that.
Not ages before it.
Funnily enough, it was supposed to have finished the year before this.
Only a year before this.
So this must be one of the last cases where we see branding officially being used.
He was branded with something like this.
It has ink on it to indicate what the mark would have looked like.
And it was here, wasn't it, on the thumb? On the thumb.
And it would go in like that Imagine what it was like if it was hot.
I don't want to.
There we go.
M for Manslayer.
Oh, Manslayer not Manslaughter? No, Manslayer.
What I find very interesting about this, is while I do not envy Burnett being branded on his thumb, the fact is, even to modern ears, one year's detention seems incredibly low.
It does.
This is a copy of the original assize record.
You will see there's something interesting here.
"Sir John Bridger, Knight Sheriff, for the murder of Thomas Hewitt, ordered inquisition to be quashed, not being returned on parchment.
" What on earth does that mean? They found a technical flaw.
It's not been produced on the right paper.
Oh, I see.
So he's getting off on a technicality as we would say now.
I think it may well be that there is some sympathy on the part of the jury for poachers.
Because poachers came onto the estate to take some of the produce of the land.
These are things that people in rural England have been doing generation after generation.
For centuries.
There's an increasing sense that punishments are not fitting crimes.
Punishment is too severe, and there needs to be some way of moderating it.
And if the law doesn't moderate it then the jury will do its work.
Yep, yep.
Burnett's story shows how these great houses once ruled our lives.
Goodwood began its life as the result of a royal love affair, and 200 years later the house was again connected to royal romance.
"Charlie, I have been very wicked with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often, and in open day.
" I'm at glorious Goodwood.
I'm searching for the stories of people who lived and worked in this most glamorous of Britain's great houses.
Famous for its racecourse but also for its luxurious house parties, that were known to be the most terrific fun.
One kind of fun, inspired by the jockeys having to be weighed before races, is the Goodwood weigh-in book.
The Duchess of Richmond apparently thought it a charming amusement to weigh her guests before and after dinner.
This, chaps, are one of my absolute favourites in the story of Goodwood.
It was called Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar.
Here he is weighed before dinner at 19 stone 12.
And then, poor fellow, he is weighed again after dinner at 20 stone two! And he was so enormous that he actually fell through the floor of the yellow drawing room.
Not once but, we are told, several times.
And I quote: Here we have his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and in July of 1864, he only weighs 12 stone six.
Things were going to get a lot worse before he finished as everyone's favourite King Tumtum.
And what is rather nice is that he never allowed himself to be weighed again.
He obviously just said, "I'm terribly sorry, Richmond, it's not gonna happen!" Edward VII, who gave his name and style to the opulent Edwardian era, adored staying at Goodwood.
The atmosphere of the house party, given the strictures of royal life, must have been incredibly liberating.
The careful plus-more dinner, the choosing of rooms, all marvellously judged, make the Prince of Wales enjoy himself.
Then there were the huge teas.
It was a feed just like dinner or lunch and absolutely enormous.
And you have the guns coming in after a day of killing, with their tweeds wet and covered in mud.
And there they would be greeted by the women, wearing their beguiling tea gowns.
Loose and flattering.
And an hour of flirtation would set in before the gong went for them all to go up and change for dinner.
And in fact, the tea gown played a very special part in this society, because it was the time to visit your mistress in London.
The reason being that was the only outfit these women wore that they could get in or out of without the help of a maid.
Of course, what one has to remember is that all of this was absolutely hidden from the public.
That is until one ill-starred day in 1870.
That afternoon, Sir Charles Mordaunt came home early from a fishing trip and found his young wife Harriet taking tea with Edward Prince of Wales.
Sir Charles sued for divorce and the heir to the crown was splashed all over the newspapers.
I want to find out more from royal biographer Jane Ridley about the scandal of the age.
Here we have The Times reporting the trial.
Absolutely word by word.
The whole nation is absolutely horrified by what's coming out.
Horrified but gripped, presumably.
Totally! And here we have Sir Charles Mordaunt - this is the crux, really, the most important part of his case against his wife and against the Prince of Wales.
So this is the confession.
This is him describing the confession.
Yes, I see.
"She was silent a quarter of an hour," this is Lady Mordaunt, "and then burst into tears and said, 'Charlie, I have been very wicked.
I have done very wrong.
' I said, 'Who with?' She said, 'With Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often and in open day.
' There was nothing to indicate insanity.
" I'm not sure I can completely go along with him there.
This seems to me certainly rather an unbalanced declaration - "often and in open day.
" I mean I think she misread her husband very badly.
She thought he would say, you know, "Don't worry.
" "We'll go to Scotland for a month.
That should sort it out.
" Yes.
Oh, dear.
We have here what I think is really interesting, which is the very brief testimony that was given when the Prince of Wales was called as a witness in the court.
Oh, when he actually took the stand.
"'Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?' His Royal Highness, in a very firm tone, 'There has not.
'" So, no fooling there.
"There was a burst of applause.
" It must have been extraordinary, actually.
It would be extraordinary now for the Prince of Wales to have to appear in a court and testify in a divorce case.
You can't imagine it! Unimaginable.
Exactly.
So I mean then, even more so.
Even more so.
I think this really was a wake-up call.
It was what you might call a crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy.
Republicanism was never really stronger than it was at that point, the Republican danger to the monarchy, even in the 20th century.
It was a really dangerous time.
And Bertie's indiscreet scandalous behaviour over the Mordaunt case was the thing that brought it to a head.
I'm reminded of the advice once of a great-aunt of mine.
I said, "What do you think is the recipe for a happy marriage?" She said, "Always breakfast alone and never come home unexpectedly.
" And that clearly was the rule! Pretty good advice, I agree.
The Mordaunt scandal didn't stop Edward's dalliances, or the naughty behaviour at house parties here at Goodwood.
But it did make discretion feel even more essential.
We're told that the King used to tell people where to sit, which is rather interesting, particularly in view of what I'm actually looking for.
Which is Ah, here we are.
This woman was called Alice Keppel.
And behind, her husband, George Keppel.
He didn't have a penny.
And so she didn't really initially have a podium for her talents.
She was good-looking, she was a great hostess.
Tremendous fun and so on.
But what changed for her was when she caught the King's eye.
And here he is, sitting just a few places away.
The reason, perhaps, that he is sitting a few places away, may be because on his other side is his wife.
And this was an arrangement that to our generation seems puzzling.
That must be so odd, really, for the Queen, sitting there, and there is La Favorita wandering around chatting before dinner.
I don't know.
They had, sort of, nerves of steel, in a way.
The look of the thing was everything.
The performance.
There must be no ripple in this wonderfully admirable powerful, glamorous world.
And nothing as startling as a row.
Unlike Edward's many other mistresses, the Keppel, as she became known, had staying power.
The Richmonds liked Mrs Keppel and so she stayed here pretty often.
The Queen wasn't in the party.
She had rooms next to the King while her own husband slept in a distant wing.
At dinner, rules of precedence would be set aside, so she could sit next to the King.
But the point was within the rules and privacy of the house party, all this could be achieved without scandal.
I want to find out from Royal biographer Piers Brendon what was the key to her success? It goes back to the whole business of playing by the rules.
And Alice Keppel absolutely knew how to play by the rules and she played by the rules - She may have told lies about it but she destroyed the evidence.
I think she had that desire to be at the centre of everything and I think because of that the falling-off must have been terrible.
She was so much younger than him that when it was over she was still in the middle of her life.
Indeed.
Well, she had hysterics when he died.
And um produced this letter that he had written, saying, "If I get very ill, Mrs Keppel must be allowed to come and see me.
" Which she did.
And she told stories about it afterwards.
She totally reinvented it.
She created this wonderful scene of her and the Queen standing there graciously, the King breathing his last, a handkerchief in each hand.
And in fact it was more like a scene out of Public Enemy No.
1.
She screamed the place down, had to be dragged out by the guards, and of course the discipline in the Queen Absolutely.
Well, when he died, she apparently said, "At last I know where he is.
" The great ladies of Goodwood and their house parties are renowned.
But there is one ball thrown by the fourth Duchess that has a real place in our history.
A panting messenger burst into the ballroom and he brought the news that Napoleon was about to attack.
I'm at Goodwood in Sussex, where the Duchesses of Richmond have been throwing some of the most glamorous parties for centuries.
At houses like these, social occasions are often fun but they can also be politically important.
And even internationally significant.
And tonight I've been invited to a modern-day version of just such a ball.
The Richmonds have a pretty good reputation actually throughout history of hosting great entertainments.
And this is the annual ball to celebrate the Revival Car Festival.
The theme is Dr Zhivago.
And I've come as Komarovsky, which is Rod Steiger to most of us! The ball that I'm interested in took place almost 200 years ago on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.
Charlotte, the fourth Duchess of Richmond, and her family, were in Brussels at the time.
Brussels was in a fever of anticipation.
News had come that Napoleon had escaped from Elba four months before.
And now he was marching towards the city.
He could take it at any moment.
Faced with this terrifying French advance, the Duke of Wellington hit upon the perfect tactic to boost morale.
His friend the Duchess would throw a ball.
The message they were trying to send out is, "We're fine.
We don't care about this funny little Corsican running around.
We're absolutely great and we do things here as we would in Mayfair.
There's no difference.
" So the date they arrived at was the 15th June The invitations went out.
Everyone came as the phrase goes.
The flowers were magnificent, the food was wonderful.
The Duchess opened the ball dancing in the arms of the Duke of Wellington.
The whole thing was going swimmingly.
Then, at some time after 11 o'clock, a panting messenger burst into the ballroom.
And he brought the news that Napoleon was about to attack.
The men, of course, most of them soldiers, immediately had to go off and do their duty.
They literally left their partner standing on the dance floor as they said goodbye, I'm afraid, in many cases, for the last time.
It's a haunting image, these careless, beautiful people dancing and flirting as if nothing could touch them.
And then riding off in their party clothes to face muskets and mud and in many cases, death.
They were the cream of the officer class, and their names survive in a remarkable artefact in the house.
I'm here in the small library, in search of a document which I think should prove pretty interesting.
It's the Duchess's own list of her guests at the ball in Brussels.
Which is here.
Get it out very carefully.
And this is actually written by her, which I find particularly extraordinary.
So we start with His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange.
And of course the Duke of Wellington, top of the page after the two royal dukes.
General Pozzo di Borgo.
Now that I find really interesting because the Pozzo di Borgos were the one family on Corsica that absolutely hated the Bonapartes.
So whatever side Napoleon was on, the Pozzo di Borgos would have been on the other.
I remember hearing all that from a Pozzo di Borgo from my own childhood who was a big pal of my father's.
Here we have the Earl of Uxbridge, who survived Waterloo but lost his leg.
It was taken off by a cannonball.
And the story is that he looked over to the Duke, he said, "By God, I've lost my leg.
" And the Duke said, "By God, so you have, sir.
" And that was the level of his sympathy.
Of course, the real miracle is that something like this has survived at all.
Because for most people it would have been lost and chucked out with the laundry list.
And that is the great bonus of a family staying in the same place.
On the morning of June 18th, the French attacked and the fighting began.
By the time it was done, 55,000 troops lay dead.
Most of the gallant young men from the Duchess's guest list were no more.
I've come to the National Army Museum in London to see what Julian Farrance, an expert on the battle, can tell me.
We've got some interesting articles here from our collection to look at.
We've got this which is the glove of a surgeon, a surgeon who had to deal with an injury to one of these guests, one of the more important ones.
So this is not mud.
That is the blood of Wellington's principal cavalry commander, the Earl of Uxbridge, who famously was very badly injured at the end of the battle.
I know.
You know the story.
Struck in the leg.
"My God, I've lost my leg.
" "My God, so you have.
" Exactly that.
And they assessed the damage to his leg and determined the only way his life could be saved was for the leg to be amputated.
This is the glove of the surgeon who performed the operation.
And this grisly instrument is the saw which took it off.
The actual saw? The saw that amputated the Earl of Uxbridge's leg.
The extraordinary thing is, he became the first Marquis of Anglesey, he improved his house enormously, he had a long and lovely life.
Why wasn't he dead half an hour after that? Quite a lot of them are.
You have to be very strong obviously.
And it's all in the skill of the surgeon.
And bearing in mind of course that at this point, no anaesthesiology.
So he would have been perfectly aware of what was going on.
Drunk? Not even a tot of rum would he have got.
Why not? Because alcohol is not very good as an analgesic.
It makes you MORE sensitive to pain.
And more likely, if you're the surgeon, if you give somebody alcohol, they're more likely to struggle.
I can't believe that.
I'm afraid I should insist! I should make it a condition.
A little fortification.
So they would have held him tight around his arms and the situation is that once you cut through the arteries in the leg, they will contract for a short amount of time, which is why you must get through them quickly.
I never knew that.
I always imagine them sitting there with a bowl of hot tar and whacking it on the bottom of the leg.
In the 17th century it might have been that they would try to cauterise and seal it that way.
But at this point, they're suturing, so they would actually use cat-gut sutures on the major arteries.
But he must have been as strong as an ox.
I'd say he was a fairly tough character.
My word! Here he is.
Old one-leg as he was later known in the arms of his commander, the Duke of Wellington.
The victory at Waterloo ended 23 years of almost constant war between France and the rest of Europe.
Crushed and humiliated, Napoleon was exiled to the remote island of St Helena, where he died six years later.
I must confess, to something of a soft spot for Napoleon, who was actually rather a hero of mine.
So I'm now headed back to Goodwood because I'm told that the family has a remarkable memorial of him, which was given to the Duchess as a thank-you for the ball.
Wellington's gift to the Richmonds in still sits in the small library of Goodwood's current owner, Charles Gordon Lennox, Earl of March, and future Duke of Richmond.
Can I come in? Oh, Julian, hi.
Absolutely.
Do.
I've come to see The wonderful chair.
Napoleon's chair.
There it is.
Well, it is fantastic, isn't it? It's a lovely thing, isn't it? And you think of him having it carried from campaign to campaign, is just extraordinary.
I know.
All the places and the moments it must have had.
And we've all been sitting on it.
I love the fact you're sitting here in front of your computer on Napoleon's chair! I sit here every night.
And my grandfather did too.
I remember him always in it.
And my father too.
So it's been much treasured by all members of the family.
The male members of the family hope it's going to wear off! Of course, I have to sit in it if that's all right.
Indeed.
You'll find it's very comfortable.
One of the main reasons it's always been used is because it's such - Oh, it is very comfortable, isn't it? The way the back's made and everything.
I feel quite moved actually because I am mad about Napoleon.
And I'm, as the Americans would say, channelling him! Are you feeling any kind of?! I'm about as psychic as a door which doesn't help with this sort of thing.
But it is rather an extraordinary thing.
It does feel special.
It makes you sit up in a way that makes you a fine leader of men! Yes.
Very useful in my profession! I suppose what I feel finally about these houses these great estates, these mini kingdoms is that they're part of us all really.
Over the years, the hundreds of men and women who've lived here, who've worked here, every kind of activity, every social strata.
They're sort of telling our history in this place.
And that makes you think.
I enjoy writing Downton Abbey, and I suppose I've made my living out of writing about fictional country houses that are occupied by fictional characters.
But to be turned out of Downton.
But Britain's great houses are real and inhabited by real people.
"Charlie, I have been very wicked with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others" I'm trying to find the real Lord Grantham, the real Lady Mary.
That's great.
I love jewels, actually.
Presumably that's not the countess! The real Bates, the real Anna.
My eyes absolutely fill at the thought of this, really.
Oh, look at that.
Do you think Harry Clark would have been put into one of these? This rather grisly instrument amputated the Earl of Uxbridge's leg.
The families who built and lived in these houses were governing the country.
Their servants were making the whole thing work.
Pretty well all of us have got ancestors who were either giving orders or taking them, or probably both.
"Thomas Lever, stable boy, runaway.
" These are not just houses for posh people to live in, their history belongs to all of us.
So there's a story for everyone in this kind of place.
I'm on my way to Goodwood House in West Sussex.
For 300 years it's been the seat of the Dukes of Richmond.
And it's home to the current duke's heir, Charles Gordon Lennox, Earl of March.
Goodwood would attract the most fashionable people of the day.
This is a great great house, even by the standards of great houses.
Lord Fellowes, sir.
Welcome back to Goodwood.
Good to see you.
How are you? Not too bad, sir.
You brought some great weather with you today.
Goodwood is the seat of a great dynasty that has played its part in our history.
And there's an interesting detail at the very beginning of theirs.
The story of the Richmonds, of their titles, their house, of their place in our history, begins with rather an extraordinary woman, who was the love of King Charles II's life.
This is Louise De Keroualle.
She was the king's last mistress and certainly his favourite.
But actually, Louise's tale is more interesting than an ordinary love story.
And it's worth investigating.
My starting point is hidden deep in the basement of the West Sussex records office.
My word, look at all this.
These are all the County Council archives.
So beautiful.
Yes.
This cosy cubby hole.
The one you want is in the safe.
This is fantastic.
This is where, presumably, all the super-special stuff is.
Yes.
These are the really special archives, going back to 780.
780?! Yep.
That's our earliest.
And this is the document that you want.
Great.
You're so efficient - locking it while we're standing right here! In case there's an air attack.
What I'm looking for is a remarkable letter written by King Charles II.
Known as the Merry Monarch for his hedonistic ways, Charles fathered at least 15 children outside his barren marriage.
A king's illegitimate sons were usually named Fitzroy, which means son of the king, and was traditionally given to royal bastards.
But not this son.
Charles gave him an ancient royal title - Duke of Richmond, and even more significantly, a proper surname.
"Windsor, last of July.
Upon better thoughts, I do intend that the Duke of Richmond's name shall be Lenox.
" Here he has decided that this child will be special.
It's quite moving because he's making the boy almost legitimate.
And that is really quite unusual.
And here we have CR - Carolus Rex.
It's rather extraordinary to think this isn't a letter dictated, this is a letter by Charles II.
But what makes one curious about is why was he so attached to this child? He was just a little three-year-old at this point.
What was it about this boy and his relationship with the boy's mother that marked him apart from the others? I'm meeting royal historian Dr Anna Keay, to find out why Louise and her son were so special.
What do you think it was really that made her such a success? She was utterly devoted to him in a way previous mistresses hadn't been.
They were good-time girls whose attentions, like the King's own attentions, could flit to other people.
Whereas Louise, although she was described often as being attractive, she wasn't a great beauty, but what it was that she had was an ability to please and to charm, first and foremost, the king, and those around him.
And that won her his affections.
I think the contrast with people like the Duchess of Castlemaine and some of the others, who spent their life breaking looking glasses and yanking curtains down and screaming at him Obviously when he was young he thought that was exciting and sexy and all of that stuff, but by this stage he'd had enough, and who can blame him? So she created this almost kind of marriage, a sort of domestic marriage for 15 years at the end of his life.
But while Charles was falling hopelessly in love, it seems Louise's true loyalty lay with another man, the French King, Louis XIV.
So what is this? This is a letter written in 1670, the year that Louise arrives in England from France, from one of her countrymen, to her, encouraging her to put aside her foibles, and to begin a relationship with the king.
This seems unusually bold: "Happy is the woman who knows how to behave herself discreetly without curbing her inclinations.
For as it is a disgrace for one of her sex to abandon herself to love without any regard to her fame, tis on the other side, a great mortification to pass her life without an amour.
" It's a pretty extraordinary letter.
It's essentially saying, you know "Get out there, kid!" Yes, exactly.
"Whip 'em off.
" And she did.
Extraordinary.
I don't really understand what he was hoping to achieve - that she would be a good influence on the King of England, that she would bring him round to French interest.
Well, I think that was part of it.
And I think anyone who cared about France would have seen a French mistress who could keep the king happy was the Holy Grail.
And in Louise various French people felt they had found her.
He did love her, I think.
I think he did.
And the wonderful thing is some of his letters to her survive.
We've got one of them here.
Which do give you an amazingly intimate glimpse of their relationship.
He's writing to her from Newmarket.
He's in Newmarket.
At the races.
".
.
where tis impossible to express the true passion and kindness I have for my dearest dearest fubs.
" Yes, and I think in that pet name that he had for her, you can get a sort of flavour of the intimacy of their relationship.
But also in this very interesting cipher at the bottom, because he doesn't sign himself Charles or CR, Carolus Rex, he signs with this very particular little sort of cipher, which is a combination of a C and an L.
And the same cipher is on this absolutely ravishing emerald ring, which Charles gave to Louise.
This is fabulous.
So engraved on the surface of a table-cut emerald, there, is the C and the L entwined, with her Duchess's coronet surmounting both of the letters.
Duchess not the king.
I have to put it on.
I love jewels actually.
I always think it's rather a shame we're not allowed to wear them.
Born in the wrong age.
I know! If I'd been at Louis' court I'd have been smothered in them.
No, I think one has to concede that she did make him love her.
She gave him what he wanted.
You know, whatever her motives were, she delivered.
And she gave him the happiest period in his life.
And for me that is the significance of the fact that he changes the child's name from Fitzroy to Lenox.
All of that says to me, "This is my true son.
This is my boy.
" And he is almost legitimate.
Almost, but critically not! Not quite! Whether Louise truly came to love Charles or not we'll never know.
But her attentions to him paid off.
He even converted to Catholicism, albeit on his death bed.
And she was hugely rewarded, with jewels and properties and a dukedom, all given by Louis XIV.
But it was her son who really made it.
Unlike most of his children, Charles left the Duke of Richmond a fortune.
So in 1697, he bought a hunting lodge, set in a good wood.
But it's in these woods on the estate where I discover an extraordinary story of crime and punishment that is at the centre of our history.
Burnett strangled Thomas Hewitt, strangled him.
I'm at Goodwood in Sussex, for 300 years the seat of the Dukes of Richmond.
And one of the greatest landed estates in England.
Here we have another picture of the triumphantly successful double agent and mistress Louise.
This one interests me.
Not actually because of her.
But because of the black servant who attends her, there on her left.
In the 17th century, fashionable ladies thought it chic to be painted next to black children, as they believed the dark faces highlighted the pallor of their own skin.
Most of these children arrived in Britain along the Thames.
They were a kind of bi-product of the trade in slaves led by Britain between Africa and our colonies across the Atlantic.
From 1562 to 1807, millions of people were shipped from Africa to work as slaves in the sugar and tobacco plantations.
Steve Martin, an expert in the history of slavery, will tell me more.
Most tellingly, we've got that structure over there - the site of Ambrose Crowley's wharf, which was central to to the manufacture of fetters, shackles, all sorts of repressive technologies.
Manacles The technologies of repression and control.
Absolutely.
They had a contract with the Royal Africa Company, which was immensely profitable.
I didn't have any idea about that.
Well, you remember as well that along this stretch of river, more than 3,000 slaving voyages departed from London docks.
That's a lot of business.
It's a lot of money and it's a lot of people.
Not just going out but also coming in as well.
So grotesque that, isn't it? It's nightmarish.
But what of those little children who ended up in England, having their portraits painted with the great ladies of the day? Here are a couple of images that should interest you, I think.
Here is our page.
Very very distinctive here.
On the edge of the composition.
He's clearly there as an ornament.
As sort of um Almost a kind of pet.
You can see the way she drapes her hand over him.
That is a gesture which you wouldn't make to an ordinary footman.
No.
This is of ownership and of status.
And what happened next? That's the thing.
Well, there are a number of fates which could have awaited them.
There were many people who were given their freedom.
There were many more people who would have stayed in some indeterminate state, working on the estate, obviously unwaged.
Um, the worst possible fate, inevitably, would have been being sent back, or being sent to a plantation society.
And that really happened.
Some people did Yes.
Remember that when these young boys hit their teen years, they were no longer lovable, they were no longer petable.
They were young men, who'd require resources from the household, and it was all too easy simply to sell on the problem, to trade the problem - the person.
To be sent back to the plantations is a dreadful thought.
But thankfully it's not the only story.
There's a painting of another black servant at Goodwood.
This time from the 18th century.
He's dressed rather smartly in the Richmond livery.
Curator James Peill knows more about him.
Well, we think this boy here was someone called Thomas Robinson, who was a young page, given to the Duke of Richmond by Sir Thomas Robinson, Governor of Barbados.
Given.
Extraordinary, isn't it? And he's chosen to put him in a particularly important place because he's holding the Duke's prize horse - this Arab horse.
Which in those days, this is the equivalent of having your Ferrari.
It's interesting, though, they like him, they put him in the picture, but they don't even give him his own name.
Extraordinary.
He's named after the man who gives him to them.
Yes.
But we do have a hint of his real name in the archive here at Goodwood.
Could we go and have a look? Certainly.
This is an interesting group of documents.
Mainly letters written in the late 1720s.
This is the letter I want to show you here.
The wonderfully artistic hand This is very flamboyant.
"For Master Thomas Robinson" And it's written by Margaret Woffington - The great actress.
The great actress Peg Woffington.
Yes, exactly.
How interesting.
She signs herself Margaret.
How on earth would Thomas Robinson have come to know a great star of the London stage? Who knows? But read the letter.
"My pretty little Oroonoko" That's very interesting because of course Oroonoko was a novel by Aphra Behn, and he was a heroic figure, it's a very positive figure.
And obviously what she feels is she doesn't know his name but she's damned if she's going to call him Thomas Robinson! Except on the envelope so it gets to him.
Yes.
Yes.
That's quite nice, I think.
"I'm glad to hear of your safe arrival in Sussex.
Sir Thomas Robinson writes me word you are very pretty, which has raised my curiosity to a great pitch.
And it makes me long to see you.
I am, my dear black boy, your admirer and humble servant, Margaret Woffington.
" And that is the sum total of what we know about Thomas Robinson.
That's all we have, yes.
We think that he was given a classical education by the Duke of Richmond.
Beyond that there's nothing else in the archive.
He may have been given an classical education, but what we know for sure from the servant's book is he wasn't paid.
The painting of Thomas Robinson is one of three at Goodwood by Britain's most famous painter of horses - George Stubbs.
But what's interesting to me is not the horses but the people.
Presumably these are special servants, the ones we can see the faces of.
And chosen, you know, because perhaps the Duchess liked them or whatever.
And here I have the book of The London and Goodwood Servants.
This is a wonderful piece of work actually.
It's so meticulously kept.
All the servants are entered, the date they arrived, their wages.
And when they left.
Discharged.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything bad.
It just means when they stopped being here.
And it tells such a story really Stable boy maid.
Carter, head groom.
And so on.
We've got This one.
"Thomas Lever, stable boy runaway.
" Runaway.
I like this one.
Patience Armstrong.
Maid.
It just says, "To Godalming.
" So clearly that's all we need to know about Patience! She's gone to Godalming.
And here, Thomas Doulton, head groom.
"Killed by a horse.
" On March 24th, 1741.
Poor fellow.
I thought I might learn something about Doulton's death in the papers.
But instead I discovered a more intriguing story.
Ah, here we are.
The Bath Chronicle.
Thursday January 6th, 1780.
"On Wednesday morning, the 15th incidence - a barbarous murder was committed in a copse at Goodwood in Sussex, the seat of His Grace the Duke of Richmond.
On the body of Thomas Hewitt, one of His Grace's grooms.
In which situation his cowardly and inhuman antagonist, one Burnett, a poacher, seized him fast by the throat, and never quitted his hold till he had killed him.
" I don't think it's very hard to tell which side the newspaper's on.
Burnett was caught carrying a brace of pheasant, food, I suppose, for his family.
But he'd broken the law under the ferocious Black Act of 1723, which made hanging the punishment for hunting game.
This same act turned 50 other crimes into capital of fences.
You weren't allowed to damage a tree, you weren't allowed to set a fire, you weren't allowed You weren't allowed to try to grow vegetables! That was another hanging of fence.
So if you were caught it was die now or die later.
Straightaway.
Anyway, the point is Burnett was a dead man on the run.
Never mind the murder of Hewitt.
So he was in desperate straits.
Unfortunately for him, they took up two of his accomplices, who, to save their own skins, turned king's evidence and testified he was the one who had killed the groom.
So he was really a goner.
I'm going to meet 18th century expert Professor Steven Conway, to find out what happened next.
Here's something that might interest you, Julian.
This is an article in the Derby Mercury.
"At the Assizes of Sussex the following prisoners were tried: James Burnett, indicted for the wilful murder of Thomas Hewitt at Goodwood Park in December last and found guilty of manslaughter.
And sentenced to be burnt in the hand and imprisoned 12 months in Horsham Jail.
" I'm surprised by being burnt in the hand.
I thought branding had finished ages before that.
Not ages before it.
Funnily enough, it was supposed to have finished the year before this.
Only a year before this.
So this must be one of the last cases where we see branding officially being used.
He was branded with something like this.
It has ink on it to indicate what the mark would have looked like.
And it was here, wasn't it, on the thumb? On the thumb.
And it would go in like that Imagine what it was like if it was hot.
I don't want to.
There we go.
M for Manslayer.
Oh, Manslayer not Manslaughter? No, Manslayer.
What I find very interesting about this, is while I do not envy Burnett being branded on his thumb, the fact is, even to modern ears, one year's detention seems incredibly low.
It does.
This is a copy of the original assize record.
You will see there's something interesting here.
"Sir John Bridger, Knight Sheriff, for the murder of Thomas Hewitt, ordered inquisition to be quashed, not being returned on parchment.
" What on earth does that mean? They found a technical flaw.
It's not been produced on the right paper.
Oh, I see.
So he's getting off on a technicality as we would say now.
I think it may well be that there is some sympathy on the part of the jury for poachers.
Because poachers came onto the estate to take some of the produce of the land.
These are things that people in rural England have been doing generation after generation.
For centuries.
There's an increasing sense that punishments are not fitting crimes.
Punishment is too severe, and there needs to be some way of moderating it.
And if the law doesn't moderate it then the jury will do its work.
Yep, yep.
Burnett's story shows how these great houses once ruled our lives.
Goodwood began its life as the result of a royal love affair, and 200 years later the house was again connected to royal romance.
"Charlie, I have been very wicked with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often, and in open day.
" I'm at glorious Goodwood.
I'm searching for the stories of people who lived and worked in this most glamorous of Britain's great houses.
Famous for its racecourse but also for its luxurious house parties, that were known to be the most terrific fun.
One kind of fun, inspired by the jockeys having to be weighed before races, is the Goodwood weigh-in book.
The Duchess of Richmond apparently thought it a charming amusement to weigh her guests before and after dinner.
This, chaps, are one of my absolute favourites in the story of Goodwood.
It was called Prince Edward of Saxe-Weimar.
Here he is weighed before dinner at 19 stone 12.
And then, poor fellow, he is weighed again after dinner at 20 stone two! And he was so enormous that he actually fell through the floor of the yellow drawing room.
Not once but, we are told, several times.
And I quote: Here we have his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and in July of 1864, he only weighs 12 stone six.
Things were going to get a lot worse before he finished as everyone's favourite King Tumtum.
And what is rather nice is that he never allowed himself to be weighed again.
He obviously just said, "I'm terribly sorry, Richmond, it's not gonna happen!" Edward VII, who gave his name and style to the opulent Edwardian era, adored staying at Goodwood.
The atmosphere of the house party, given the strictures of royal life, must have been incredibly liberating.
The careful plus-more dinner, the choosing of rooms, all marvellously judged, make the Prince of Wales enjoy himself.
Then there were the huge teas.
It was a feed just like dinner or lunch and absolutely enormous.
And you have the guns coming in after a day of killing, with their tweeds wet and covered in mud.
And there they would be greeted by the women, wearing their beguiling tea gowns.
Loose and flattering.
And an hour of flirtation would set in before the gong went for them all to go up and change for dinner.
And in fact, the tea gown played a very special part in this society, because it was the time to visit your mistress in London.
The reason being that was the only outfit these women wore that they could get in or out of without the help of a maid.
Of course, what one has to remember is that all of this was absolutely hidden from the public.
That is until one ill-starred day in 1870.
That afternoon, Sir Charles Mordaunt came home early from a fishing trip and found his young wife Harriet taking tea with Edward Prince of Wales.
Sir Charles sued for divorce and the heir to the crown was splashed all over the newspapers.
I want to find out more from royal biographer Jane Ridley about the scandal of the age.
Here we have The Times reporting the trial.
Absolutely word by word.
The whole nation is absolutely horrified by what's coming out.
Horrified but gripped, presumably.
Totally! And here we have Sir Charles Mordaunt - this is the crux, really, the most important part of his case against his wife and against the Prince of Wales.
So this is the confession.
This is him describing the confession.
Yes, I see.
"She was silent a quarter of an hour," this is Lady Mordaunt, "and then burst into tears and said, 'Charlie, I have been very wicked.
I have done very wrong.
' I said, 'Who with?' She said, 'With Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone, the Prince of Wales and others, often and in open day.
' There was nothing to indicate insanity.
" I'm not sure I can completely go along with him there.
This seems to me certainly rather an unbalanced declaration - "often and in open day.
" I mean I think she misread her husband very badly.
She thought he would say, you know, "Don't worry.
" "We'll go to Scotland for a month.
That should sort it out.
" Yes.
Oh, dear.
We have here what I think is really interesting, which is the very brief testimony that was given when the Prince of Wales was called as a witness in the court.
Oh, when he actually took the stand.
"'Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?' His Royal Highness, in a very firm tone, 'There has not.
'" So, no fooling there.
"There was a burst of applause.
" It must have been extraordinary, actually.
It would be extraordinary now for the Prince of Wales to have to appear in a court and testify in a divorce case.
You can't imagine it! Unimaginable.
Exactly.
So I mean then, even more so.
Even more so.
I think this really was a wake-up call.
It was what you might call a crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy.
Republicanism was never really stronger than it was at that point, the Republican danger to the monarchy, even in the 20th century.
It was a really dangerous time.
And Bertie's indiscreet scandalous behaviour over the Mordaunt case was the thing that brought it to a head.
I'm reminded of the advice once of a great-aunt of mine.
I said, "What do you think is the recipe for a happy marriage?" She said, "Always breakfast alone and never come home unexpectedly.
" And that clearly was the rule! Pretty good advice, I agree.
The Mordaunt scandal didn't stop Edward's dalliances, or the naughty behaviour at house parties here at Goodwood.
But it did make discretion feel even more essential.
We're told that the King used to tell people where to sit, which is rather interesting, particularly in view of what I'm actually looking for.
Which is Ah, here we are.
This woman was called Alice Keppel.
And behind, her husband, George Keppel.
He didn't have a penny.
And so she didn't really initially have a podium for her talents.
She was good-looking, she was a great hostess.
Tremendous fun and so on.
But what changed for her was when she caught the King's eye.
And here he is, sitting just a few places away.
The reason, perhaps, that he is sitting a few places away, may be because on his other side is his wife.
And this was an arrangement that to our generation seems puzzling.
That must be so odd, really, for the Queen, sitting there, and there is La Favorita wandering around chatting before dinner.
I don't know.
They had, sort of, nerves of steel, in a way.
The look of the thing was everything.
The performance.
There must be no ripple in this wonderfully admirable powerful, glamorous world.
And nothing as startling as a row.
Unlike Edward's many other mistresses, the Keppel, as she became known, had staying power.
The Richmonds liked Mrs Keppel and so she stayed here pretty often.
The Queen wasn't in the party.
She had rooms next to the King while her own husband slept in a distant wing.
At dinner, rules of precedence would be set aside, so she could sit next to the King.
But the point was within the rules and privacy of the house party, all this could be achieved without scandal.
I want to find out from Royal biographer Piers Brendon what was the key to her success? It goes back to the whole business of playing by the rules.
And Alice Keppel absolutely knew how to play by the rules and she played by the rules - She may have told lies about it but she destroyed the evidence.
I think she had that desire to be at the centre of everything and I think because of that the falling-off must have been terrible.
She was so much younger than him that when it was over she was still in the middle of her life.
Indeed.
Well, she had hysterics when he died.
And um produced this letter that he had written, saying, "If I get very ill, Mrs Keppel must be allowed to come and see me.
" Which she did.
And she told stories about it afterwards.
She totally reinvented it.
She created this wonderful scene of her and the Queen standing there graciously, the King breathing his last, a handkerchief in each hand.
And in fact it was more like a scene out of Public Enemy No.
1.
She screamed the place down, had to be dragged out by the guards, and of course the discipline in the Queen Absolutely.
Well, when he died, she apparently said, "At last I know where he is.
" The great ladies of Goodwood and their house parties are renowned.
But there is one ball thrown by the fourth Duchess that has a real place in our history.
A panting messenger burst into the ballroom and he brought the news that Napoleon was about to attack.
I'm at Goodwood in Sussex, where the Duchesses of Richmond have been throwing some of the most glamorous parties for centuries.
At houses like these, social occasions are often fun but they can also be politically important.
And even internationally significant.
And tonight I've been invited to a modern-day version of just such a ball.
The Richmonds have a pretty good reputation actually throughout history of hosting great entertainments.
And this is the annual ball to celebrate the Revival Car Festival.
The theme is Dr Zhivago.
And I've come as Komarovsky, which is Rod Steiger to most of us! The ball that I'm interested in took place almost 200 years ago on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.
Charlotte, the fourth Duchess of Richmond, and her family, were in Brussels at the time.
Brussels was in a fever of anticipation.
News had come that Napoleon had escaped from Elba four months before.
And now he was marching towards the city.
He could take it at any moment.
Faced with this terrifying French advance, the Duke of Wellington hit upon the perfect tactic to boost morale.
His friend the Duchess would throw a ball.
The message they were trying to send out is, "We're fine.
We don't care about this funny little Corsican running around.
We're absolutely great and we do things here as we would in Mayfair.
There's no difference.
" So the date they arrived at was the 15th June The invitations went out.
Everyone came as the phrase goes.
The flowers were magnificent, the food was wonderful.
The Duchess opened the ball dancing in the arms of the Duke of Wellington.
The whole thing was going swimmingly.
Then, at some time after 11 o'clock, a panting messenger burst into the ballroom.
And he brought the news that Napoleon was about to attack.
The men, of course, most of them soldiers, immediately had to go off and do their duty.
They literally left their partner standing on the dance floor as they said goodbye, I'm afraid, in many cases, for the last time.
It's a haunting image, these careless, beautiful people dancing and flirting as if nothing could touch them.
And then riding off in their party clothes to face muskets and mud and in many cases, death.
They were the cream of the officer class, and their names survive in a remarkable artefact in the house.
I'm here in the small library, in search of a document which I think should prove pretty interesting.
It's the Duchess's own list of her guests at the ball in Brussels.
Which is here.
Get it out very carefully.
And this is actually written by her, which I find particularly extraordinary.
So we start with His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange.
And of course the Duke of Wellington, top of the page after the two royal dukes.
General Pozzo di Borgo.
Now that I find really interesting because the Pozzo di Borgos were the one family on Corsica that absolutely hated the Bonapartes.
So whatever side Napoleon was on, the Pozzo di Borgos would have been on the other.
I remember hearing all that from a Pozzo di Borgo from my own childhood who was a big pal of my father's.
Here we have the Earl of Uxbridge, who survived Waterloo but lost his leg.
It was taken off by a cannonball.
And the story is that he looked over to the Duke, he said, "By God, I've lost my leg.
" And the Duke said, "By God, so you have, sir.
" And that was the level of his sympathy.
Of course, the real miracle is that something like this has survived at all.
Because for most people it would have been lost and chucked out with the laundry list.
And that is the great bonus of a family staying in the same place.
On the morning of June 18th, the French attacked and the fighting began.
By the time it was done, 55,000 troops lay dead.
Most of the gallant young men from the Duchess's guest list were no more.
I've come to the National Army Museum in London to see what Julian Farrance, an expert on the battle, can tell me.
We've got some interesting articles here from our collection to look at.
We've got this which is the glove of a surgeon, a surgeon who had to deal with an injury to one of these guests, one of the more important ones.
So this is not mud.
That is the blood of Wellington's principal cavalry commander, the Earl of Uxbridge, who famously was very badly injured at the end of the battle.
I know.
You know the story.
Struck in the leg.
"My God, I've lost my leg.
" "My God, so you have.
" Exactly that.
And they assessed the damage to his leg and determined the only way his life could be saved was for the leg to be amputated.
This is the glove of the surgeon who performed the operation.
And this grisly instrument is the saw which took it off.
The actual saw? The saw that amputated the Earl of Uxbridge's leg.
The extraordinary thing is, he became the first Marquis of Anglesey, he improved his house enormously, he had a long and lovely life.
Why wasn't he dead half an hour after that? Quite a lot of them are.
You have to be very strong obviously.
And it's all in the skill of the surgeon.
And bearing in mind of course that at this point, no anaesthesiology.
So he would have been perfectly aware of what was going on.
Drunk? Not even a tot of rum would he have got.
Why not? Because alcohol is not very good as an analgesic.
It makes you MORE sensitive to pain.
And more likely, if you're the surgeon, if you give somebody alcohol, they're more likely to struggle.
I can't believe that.
I'm afraid I should insist! I should make it a condition.
A little fortification.
So they would have held him tight around his arms and the situation is that once you cut through the arteries in the leg, they will contract for a short amount of time, which is why you must get through them quickly.
I never knew that.
I always imagine them sitting there with a bowl of hot tar and whacking it on the bottom of the leg.
In the 17th century it might have been that they would try to cauterise and seal it that way.
But at this point, they're suturing, so they would actually use cat-gut sutures on the major arteries.
But he must have been as strong as an ox.
I'd say he was a fairly tough character.
My word! Here he is.
Old one-leg as he was later known in the arms of his commander, the Duke of Wellington.
The victory at Waterloo ended 23 years of almost constant war between France and the rest of Europe.
Crushed and humiliated, Napoleon was exiled to the remote island of St Helena, where he died six years later.
I must confess, to something of a soft spot for Napoleon, who was actually rather a hero of mine.
So I'm now headed back to Goodwood because I'm told that the family has a remarkable memorial of him, which was given to the Duchess as a thank-you for the ball.
Wellington's gift to the Richmonds in still sits in the small library of Goodwood's current owner, Charles Gordon Lennox, Earl of March, and future Duke of Richmond.
Can I come in? Oh, Julian, hi.
Absolutely.
Do.
I've come to see The wonderful chair.
Napoleon's chair.
There it is.
Well, it is fantastic, isn't it? It's a lovely thing, isn't it? And you think of him having it carried from campaign to campaign, is just extraordinary.
I know.
All the places and the moments it must have had.
And we've all been sitting on it.
I love the fact you're sitting here in front of your computer on Napoleon's chair! I sit here every night.
And my grandfather did too.
I remember him always in it.
And my father too.
So it's been much treasured by all members of the family.
The male members of the family hope it's going to wear off! Of course, I have to sit in it if that's all right.
Indeed.
You'll find it's very comfortable.
One of the main reasons it's always been used is because it's such - Oh, it is very comfortable, isn't it? The way the back's made and everything.
I feel quite moved actually because I am mad about Napoleon.
And I'm, as the Americans would say, channelling him! Are you feeling any kind of?! I'm about as psychic as a door which doesn't help with this sort of thing.
But it is rather an extraordinary thing.
It does feel special.
It makes you sit up in a way that makes you a fine leader of men! Yes.
Very useful in my profession! I suppose what I feel finally about these houses these great estates, these mini kingdoms is that they're part of us all really.
Over the years, the hundreds of men and women who've lived here, who've worked here, every kind of activity, every social strata.
They're sort of telling our history in this place.
And that makes you think.