The Country House Revealed (2011) s01e04 Episode Script
Episode 4
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.
I'm on way to see one of the largest privately owned country houses in Europe.
It's also one of the most secretive.
It's been shrouded in mystery for years.
In fact, I'm heading towards Yorkshire, and the house is called Wentworth Woodhouse, and it's been the centre of intrigue and family feuding since it was built in the 18th century.
But this is more than a story of a family or a building.
It's a story of the time in the 18th century when the country house became a vital cog in the machinery of power.
Almost an engine of state designed to dominate the land.
And the great families that owned these powerhouses ran the nation.
Wentworth Woodhouse would play a vital role in a struggle between two competing parties, two royal families.
Indeed, two ideas of just what it meant to be British.
And the results of this struggle would shape not just the house, they would do much to form the modern world.
A history that still echoes in the corridors of this spectacular building, arguably the most artistically breathtaking ever created in Britain.
A house that today is largely forgotten, but which was once one of the most important and powerful places on Earth.
The visitors to Wentworth Woodhouse would often take this to be the main house.
But, in fact, the Wentworth Woodhouse is so big, the family that made it so wealthy, that this is just the stable block.
My word! An incredible piece of architectural theatre.
Just about the biggest classical country house in Britain.
Debated, to a degree.
I mean, so large is this building, so surrounded by myth, that it's uncharted territory.
Even its actual size no one agrees upon.
I guess the house could never have looked more stunning than today.
It's like being in Saint Petersburg, isn't it? In the winter.
Absolutely beautiful.
Wentworth Woodhouse once sat in the centre of a 19,000-acre estate.
And the family that created it has roots here dating back to at least the 13th century.
The house was built largely between 1724 and 1750.
The public has never been allowed inside to witness its palatial grandeur, most visible in the room I'm heading to now, the very heart of Wentworth Woodhouse.
This is the Marble Hall, absolutely stunning.
In the 1760s, it was called the finest room in England.
And I think it is.
Certainly very handsome.
In its way, it's a hymn to Neoclassical civilisation.
It's also rather surprising to find such a huge room in a private house.
It measures 60 foot square and rises 40 feet.
It's a very precise cubic proportion.
It feels very sculptural.
It feels rather like an outside space.
I mean, it's the heart of the home, but it's like a square, like a piazza.
Strange.
And, of course, for that reason, one can understand why naughty children used to roller-skate across the marble floor.
And also, it was in this room, in 1912, that Anna Pavlova danced for George V and Queen Mary.
What an appropriate event for such a glorious and ostentatious space.
For two centuries, Wentworth Woodhouse hosted many such royal visits.
Some drew immense crowds of over 20,000 people.
But the gods that raised the family high were ultimately against them.
And in the 20th century, their glittering life here came to an end.
They sold the house in 1989, and just over 10 years ago, it was bought by Clifford Newbold, a retired architect.
He's already spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to return Wentworth Woodhouse to its former splendour.
We wanted a grade 1 building that hadn't been modernised at all, and we decided that we'd really fallen in love with the place.
And that it's just what we were looking for, just the type of work that we wanted to do, and to restore it and get it back onto its feet again.
A few days later, after we'd done our completion, I came up here to receive the key of the door.
The key to the door.
I imagine it was pretty To get in.
But sure enough, I came up here, and they presented me with the key of the door.
You wouldn't believe it, but the key of the door was a simple Yale key.
- For a big place like this.
- Frightfully disappointing.
And I was terribly disappointed.
So when I'd finally taken over, I sorted round the house and what did I find? The key of the door.
That's more like it, isn't it? It's a lovely That's more appropriate for a house of this size.
That's a lovely 18th-century key.
But I've got to say, I'm full of admiration.
I mean, you're talking about buying this house as if it were, you know, a sort of an average building.
But you were actually buying just about the biggest house in Britain.
I know, I know, I know.
I know it's big, but I felt that I knew I was quite capable of financing it, and also doing the work.
- Yes, where shall we start? - Shall we start down here? The Newbolds are living in one small section of the house while they restore the rest.
They've given me free rein to poke around and explore.
Because of Wentworth Woodhouse's sheer scale, it really does take time to get to know.
It's often said to have 365 rooms, one for every day of the year.
The actual number is closer to 305.
But so large is the place, no one can seem to agree on the exact figure.
In the past, some rooms had remarkably specialised functions.
One was devoted solely to the preparation of candles.
Another to the family barber.
Linking them were vast stretches of corridor.
In Victorian times, guests would be given confetti to lay a trail from their bedroom to dinner so they could find their way back.
Photographs from Country Life magazine in 1906 show the house in its full splendour, when its epic scale seemed still to have a purpose, a world now vanished.
This part of the house is extraordinary.
Echoing rooms, emptiness, none of the grand furniture you might expect to find in a house of this palatial architectural quality.
And, indeed, in this splendid room, debris.
An air of abandonment.
House lost in time, in a way.
Uncanny, otherworldly.
Wentworth Woodhouse has struggled to find a role in the modern world, in part because of its enormous size, well over 100,000 square feet.
Which leads you to ask just what inflated ambitions produced it in the first place.
The story begins with one of the bitterest family feuds the country has ever seen.
Because the house wouldn't exist without a fateful decision taken by one man.
William Wentworth, the second Earl of Strafford, commemorated here alongside his wife in the village church.
Strafford owned the Wentworth Estate.
But in 1695, he died childless, and in an astonishing act for the time, reported even to have shocked the King, he disinherited his eldest male heir.
Incredible.
He is the man that made the momentous decision to leave Wentworth Woodhouse, his land, his fortune, not to the male heir, when he died in 1695, but to the third son of his sister.
But why? We do not know why he made this strange and very, I say, provocative decision.
Did he simply want to give the youngest son of his sister a chance in life? It's tremendously moving being here in the presence of the man that ultimately made the decision that gave life and birth to the creation of one of the most beautiful houses in Britain.
But the beauty of the house is only matched by the fury of the feud that created it.
A feud between two cousins, both called Thomas.
On the one hand, the hot-tempered Thomas Wentworth, also known as Lord Raby, a diplomat and army officer outraged by his lost inheritance.
On the other, one of the luckiest men in the country, Thomas Watson, who was gifted this enormous estate.
Historian Patrick Eyres has studied the feud's every twist and turn.
Can you tell me about the family feud that resulted from the disputed inheritance over Wentworth Woodhouse? Yes, that was That ran around for half a century, this feud.
And it outraged Thomas Wentworth, and he was, you know, apoplectic about it for the rest of his life.
A bitterness? I mean, it becomes extreme.
Is it true that Lord Raby called the Wentworth family vermin? Indeed.
He instructed his agent to use code names, and he said that the principal will be known as vermin.
And, of course, what's fascinating is that this rivalry becomes expressed dramatically through architecture.
Absolutely.
In fact, I mean, the great inheritance of this rivalry is the fact that South Yorkshire is awash with these two estates with fantastic architecture, monuments and landscape gardening.
So - One vying with the other.
- Absolutely.
Although Wentworth Woodhouse is the most spectacular product of this rivalry, it began five miles away here at Stainborough.
When Lord Raby bought this Yorkshire estate, he was plotting revenge.
Livid not just about losing Wentworth, but also that his cousin seemed to be stealing the family name.
Plain old Thomas Watson had taken to calling himself Watson-Wentworth.
In retaliation, Raby changed the name of the existing house here from Stainborough to Wentworth Castle.
And then he started secretly to buy up land neighbouring the Wentworth Woodhouse Estate.
This was turf war.
If he couldn't inherit Wentworth Woodhouse, he was going to certainly overshadow it.
Part of the strategy to do that was to commission, in 1708, this splendid continental-style Baroque palace.
Raby by now was British ambassador to Prussia.
And so he showed off by hiring the Prussian court architect.
And alongside his new home, he built a medieval-style castle, a symbol of his family's pedigree.
It was definitely round one to Lord Raby.
Thomas Watson-Wentworth backed down.
But when he died in 1723, his son, also called Thomas, upped the stakes dramatically.
This was the man who'd become the first Marquis of Rockingham.
Twenty-nine years old and already a tough politician, he'd long been plotting retaliation, and within a year, he began to build.
The fight-back started here.
But not with this house, with another one.
Because one of the truly astonishing things about Wentworth Woodhouse is that it's not one house, but two.
Hidden behind this, the eastern elevation, is another slightly smaller house facing in the opposite direction.
And it was this house that represents the next round in this super-sized family feud.
It's designed in an idiosyncratic Baroque style, and loaded with odd details.
Replacing a Jacobean house on the same site, Watson-Wentworth wanted something exotic to outdo the Prussian Baroque of his rival's home.
And it is a substantial country house in its own right.
Indeed, at many times in Wentworth Woodhouse's history, the family's living quarters have been here, a practice continued today by the Newbolds.
A beautiful room.
I mean, the obvious thing is the astonishing contrast between the west and the east.
But why, having spent a small fortune on this house, did Rockingham start building another right behind it? The answer lies in the striking contrast between the two houses.
It reveals something remarkable about the feud, but also about the struggle that defined Britain in the 18th century.
The battle between two political parties that loathed one another with a passion, the Whigs and the Tories.
In 1740, a new king, George I, established the German House of Hanover as the ruling dynasty in Britain, largely through the aid of the Whigs.
Many Tories were convinced George was an illegitimate usurper.
But to Whigs like Rockingham, the new king was the protector of liberty, who would uphold the Bill of Rights of 1689, the ground-breaking settlement that created a constitutional monarchy by limiting the powers of the Crown and safeguarding those of Parliament.
Rockingham's rival cousin, Lord Raby, was a Tory.
So the feud responsible for this house echoed a national struggle.
And the building itself was intended to impress the Whig elite.
But Rockingham had made an architectural faux pas.
Unfortunately, the house was not regarded as a great success.
One rather stuffy visitor who came here, indeed a member of the Whig coterie, into which the future marquis wanted to enter, the chap came here, had a good meal, I suppose, and then rather sneeringly wrote afterwards, that apart from a rather fine library, there was little that could be said in praise of the house.
Rockingham had been planning his new home for almost a decade, but he hadn't been keeping up with changing tastes.
The Whig elite he sought to join had, in that time, turned their back on the Baroque.
To them it was somehow un-English, tainted by association with their enemies, too European, too Catholic, too Tory.
In terms of style, Rockingham had got it all wrong.
During the first decades of the 18th century in England was a battle to establish a dominant national architectural style that carried the punch of historic precedent and pedigree.
And that was thought to reflect national characteristics and artistic aspirations.
The search for national style had a political agenda.
With their king on the throne, the Whigs were in the ascendant.
Now, they wanted to dictate not just how the country was ruled, but to transform the way it looked.
To impress the Whigs, the future marquis really needed a home built in the style they deemed politically correct.
A style based on the designs of a 16th-century Italian, Andrea Palladio.
Perhaps the most influential architect the world has ever known.
This is the book that revealed and promoted Palladio to the British, and did much to make Palladianism the dominant style in Britain for much of the 18th century.
This is Volume 1 of Vitruvius Britannicus, published in 1715 and written by Colen Campbell.
It's a terrific tome, wonderful inspirational plates here.
And it was to Campbell's designs that Rockingham turned when he decided he simply had to build a second new house.
Today when we value artistic novelty and originality, it's hard to think of copying as being creative.
But Palladians, well, they were suspicious of wilful originality.
They believed Palladio had provided a prototype, a format for perfection in architecture.
All you had to do was indeed copy it, maybe slightly creatively tweak it a bit, but essentially reproduce the basic designs that Palladio had produced himself.
In front of me is a design for Wanstead House in Essex.
Here we have it, the essential composition with a central pedimented building with wings, with these end pavilions.
What's incredible is that this provides the blueprint, as it were, for the design of Wentworth Woodhouse.
Sadly, Wanstead House no longer exists, but its legacy lives on at Wentworth.
By copying a masterpiece, Rockingham knew he would avoid another embarrassing blunder.
All plans were submitted to Lord Burlington, the so-called architect earl, a privy counsellor and arbiter of taste amongst the Whigs.
Eventually, even the original architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe, was replaced by one of Burlington's favourites, Henry Flitcroft.
Building Wentworth Woodhouse was a staggering undertaking.
The finest craftsmen worked with the most expensive materials.
Including marble from Siena in Italy to create Palladian perfection Unlike the baroque house, there's a stripped-back majesty.
Everything informed by a near-religious belief in the virtue of harmonious proportions, as found here, in the Marble Hall.
To understand the magical power of proportion in this room, look at the fireplace.
Apart from being exceptionally handsome, it is in many respects, apparently, a normal fireplace until I get here and you see it's well over six feet high.
You wouldn't think so, would you? So now, we appreciate the vast size of this room.
This entire space is pure Palladio, designed using the exact ratio of three to two.
The floor plan of 60 feet square, determining the ceiling height of 40 feet.
Just one of Palladio's seven ratios that his disciples believe were divinely inspired.
And this entire side of the house follows equally exacting rules.
It was deemed a triumph.
The very man who criticised the Baroque side wrote that no other house in Europe could boast such magnificent rooms, so finely proportioned.
But if the style of Wentworth Woodhouse was deeply political, so, too, was its enormous size, which had a very practical purpose.
And a clue to what it was can be found here at the City of Sheffield archives.
This is a very remarkable book.
It starts off as an account book or a ledger, rather dry.
Then, halfway through, only for a few pages, it becomes something astonishing.
It becomes the journal of the first Marquis of Rockingham.
For example, here, he gives a large entertainment to all my tenants in the neighbourhood.
But then you read on, you discover that this entertainment was for no fewer than 1,000 persons.
You see here that the number of dishes, good heavens, were 225.
Great Scott! Viz of beef, 43, of pork, 30, of venison pasty, 24.
Turkeys, 15, geese, 21, puddings, 30, and so it goes on.
Vast amount of food offered and consumed by all the neighbourhood.
Well, this is an amazing event, isn't it? 1,000 people, how generous.
But it's not just to do with generosity.
This is how country houses worked.
This is a man winning the hearts and minds of the electorate.
This is a wonderful example of how a country house was used in the18th century to influence people.
Be generous, and then get them to vote for you.
And it was successful.
At this time in Yorkshire, little more than 15,000 men, no women, voted.
With such a tiny electorate, a powerhouse like Wentworth Woodhouse could function effectively as an election-winning machine.
The vast new Palladian house helped Rockingham turn Yorkshire, traditionally a Tory county, into something of a Whig stronghold.
But it wasn't all about politics.
The house also cemented the family's position in society.
It helped establish Rockingham and his descendants as the most influential family in the county.
And for over two centuries, the big house fostered a sense of loyalty amongst the locals.
It was the biggest employer in the area, and the family had a reputation for treating their staff well.
It's a lost world, although some of its traditions survive today.
And a few people remain with a direct connection to this history.
I'm here to meet the former head gamekeeper of Wentworth Woodhouse.
It's a Saturday morning, the guns have gathered.
There's a shoot about to take place here to pot pheasant.
I suppose, of course, men have hunted on these grounds, this very spot, for centuries, shooting pheasant, and rabbits and hare.
Of course, that's the thing about Wentworth Woodhouse.
Nothing seems to change here.
The house presides over the landscape.
All seems settled, as if for eternity.
John Ambler was head gamekeeper at Wentworth until he retired in 1999, the last of many generations of his family to work here.
John, how long has your family been involved with Wentworth Woodhouse, and with the Fitzwilliam family? They came in 1808.
Everybody in this area then worked for the family.
You've got to realise, you see, in them days, the big house was the hub of the circle.
I like to think, from my point of view, with the dealings I had, - it's not really us and them.
- Yes.
It's us.
It's the family.
We're all together.
But it's still Wentworth Woodhouse, isn't it? And it's still there.
It's part of English history, that house.
- Very important part.
- Especially South Yorkshire history.
And really, it's something for the people of South Yorkshire - to be proud of, you know.
- Yes.
Our ancestors were all part and parcel of being here, because it were a marvellous, big estate.
But if Wentworth Woodhouse won the affections of many, its past is equally marked by division and conflict.
Rockingham's new house quickly found itself on the front line.
In 1745, there was a huge uprising against King George II, led by Jacobites, many of them Tories.
They supported Bonnie Prince Charlie instead.
If successful, it would have spelt disaster for Rockingham as Lord Lieutenant for the area, the King's personal representative.
Since 1745, this would have been a frontier zone in a sense, wouldn't it? That the Jacobite armies marched south of here, towards Derby.
This house would have been a bastion of opposition, - a military outpost, really.
- Absolutely.
- Militias quartered here.
- Yes.
And as it's the house of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, responsible for the defence of the whole of Yorkshire, then it's an intelligence gathering centre, messengers galloping down to London with information, and equally the point where the volunteer regiments raised, as the regulars were abroad in Flanders, would have been gathering here to defend the county.
As we tend to think that history is written by the victors, then we forget just how turbulent politics of the early 18th century was, especially after 1714, when the Hanoverians were imported with George I.
You know, four uprisings, we only hear of two, 1715 and '45.
And so, this was a moment when this major threat to the Hanoverian dynasty was now eradicated.
Ultimately, the Jacobite army lost its nerve, retreated north and was destroyed, its cause lost forever.
And his support had boosted Rockingham's standing with the King.
He had already risen to be a baron, then an earl.
Now, he would be well rewarded for his loyalty to the Crown.
In April 1746, the King made him a marquis, something commemorated here on the estate.
The Hoober Stand is a most peculiar building.
In its details, it's Palladian, but in its plan and form, most bizarre.
The plan is triangular, the form is a truncated pyramid, perhaps references to a Freemasonry most popular in the 18th century.
But its purpose is clear.
It was to celebrate the victory over the Jacobites, also to celebrate the elevation of Watson-Wentworth into the first Marquis of Rockingham.
And there's a deeply personal footnote to this event.
By being elevated to Marquis, Thomas Watson-Wentworth finally eclipsed the family of his cousin and rival who, all those years before, had sought to do his family down.
But Rockingham didn't enjoy his newfound status for long.
In 1750, a year after the completion of the Hoober Stand, he died.
It was during the time of his son, the second marquis, that Wentworth Woodhouse reached the peak of its political influence.
The second marquis held true to the Whig ideals of his father, but he was also a gambler, art lover, horse-racing fanatic and a wily operator, something that propelled him to the highest office in the land.
In the late 18th century, in its heyday, this house was one of the most powerful and important places in Britain.
In the 1760s, the second marquis was prime minister.
You can imagine him sitting here, the whole place exuding power.
At the same time, vast wealth flowing in.
The second marquis amassed a fortune from his investments and his lands, both in Britain and Ireland, equivalent to almost four billion pounds today.
Much of his money went on enlarging the estate.
He left it twice the size that his father had inherited.
Countless thousands also went on the house's interior.
The second marquis was a softer man than his father.
He introduced colour, warmth and sensual touches, like here, in the painted room, a depiction of the five senses.
It's one of the few places where original art work remains untouched.
And elsewhere, more sweeping changes such as here, in the Whistlejacket Room.
This originally was a dining room.
That's apparent from the decoration of this spectacular fireplace.
The meaning of the room is sort of embedded in the design.
Here, in the middle of the fireplace, is Bacchus, god of wine.
Another thing about this fireplace is that it just is such a high-quality piece of work.
I mean, Wentworth Woodhouse is a great pile, but it's rich, so rich in minute and fine detail.
A tremendous variety.
Each room really is different.
It's incredibly satisfying.
Lovely.
Then, in the 1760s, the room was transformed.
The great Stubbs portrait, really, of Whistlejacket, the spectacular horse, becomes the centrepiece of a reorganisation of the room into a sort of drawing room.
That, sadly, is not the original painting.
That's a photographic reproduction.
But it does the job to remind one of what was the inspiration for the room in the 1760s.
The original of Whistlejacket, perhaps the most famous painting ever made of a horse, now hangs in the National Gallery in London.
And the rest of the house's wonderful art collection has been dispersed, including a celebrated family portrait by Van Dyke, and depictions of several of the marquis' other favourite horses also commissioned from George Stubbs.
The marquis kept over 80 thoroughbreds at Wentworth, some of them the biggest winners in British racing history.
The second marquis loved his horses, as is apparent from the size of his stables.
Also, he loved to gamble.
He lost money, but more generally, he made money.
One of the great myths of Wentworth Woodhouse is that on one horse, Bay Moulton, he won enough money to build these stables.
Well, it's possible.
The stables, designed by John Carr of York, were, until very recently, the biggest in the land.
But they weren't the second marquis' only indulgence.
He loved hunting, socialising and extravagant gestures.
It's rumoured that one monument on the estate, The Needle's Eye, was built as a bet.
The marquis was intent on proving you could drive a horse and cart through a needle's eye, something seen here put to the test many years later.
But if he had a frivolous side, a sense of aristocratic duty kept drawing Rockingham back to politics.
He was a bad public speaker, but a very good operator, and for almost two decades, he led the largest group of parliamentary Whigs.
But where his father had been loyal to the throne, the second marquis found himself forced to rebel.
George III had become King in 1760.
Worryingly, to Rockingham, he showed every sign of being a Tory-supporting autocrat.
Rockingham, however, was rich and powerful enough to feel he could take on the King, something he did during two short terms as Prime Minister, and by leading the Rockingham Whigs, a powerful opposition group.
Their supporters included the philosopher, Edmund Burke, and the influential statesman, Charles James Fox.
They fought the King at everything, from the power of parliament, to the rights of the American colonies.
Indeed, Rockingham had a major role in the settlement following America's War of Independence.
He died in 1782, only 14 weeks into his second term in office.
But his ideals celebrated here at the Rockingham monument lived on, shaping politics in both America and Britain, where the Whigs eventually became the Liberal Party.
Oh! The monument really is a heroic piece of architecture.
I love the dome above me, wonderfully delicately detailed.
It commemorates the life of the second marquis.
Here he is in front of me, a splendid statue, his hand raised as if bestowing a blessing on the house, which he stands here contemplating for eternity.
But I suppose, more importantly, this monument celebrates the triumph of Whig values in niches on the walls of busts of various British worthies admired by the Whigs.
There's Edmund Burke, and here, Charles James Fox.
And these values remain important and relevant because they did so much to shape the world as we know it today.
Ironically, the success of these progressive values would undermine Wentworth Woodhouse's position as a powerhouse.
The second marquis died childless, and the estate passed to his nephew, the fourth Earl Fitzwilliam.
And it was during his time that the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, the first step towards votes for all.
With a bigger electorate, the role of large country houses as vote-gathering machines diminished.
Under the Fitzwilliams, the family lost much of its political clout, but they were handed a lifeline that kept them at the top of the tree for the next 150 years.
Britain was changing, the Industrial Revolution shifting power away from the landed aristocracy to the city.
But a new source of riches seemed to guarantee the fortunes of the family.
And those riches were right beneath their feet.
The estates were astride the immensely rich Barnsley seam.
Exploiting the mineral wealth of coal like this secured the family's fortune for generations to come.
Coal had been worked on the estate on a small scale since Elizabethan times.
But now, powerful new steam-driven machinery industrialised the process.
In 1795, deep mining began on the Wentworth Estate for the first time.
At their peak, the family's mines would produce over 300,000 tons of coal a year.
The author Clive Aslet has written extensively on the fate of the country house in the 20th century.
They had coal, and coal was the thing which made the Industrial Revolution.
It was why Britain was so prosperous, because we had so much of this coal.
And it was also very important for the Empire.
Coal drove the ships which were the lifeline of the Empire.
Through this coal, the wealth of the Fitzwilliams practically knew no bounds.
During the 19th and 20th century, Wentworth Woodhouse played host to eight royal visits, evidence of the family's elevated social status.
And there were many other lavish entertainments.
When the future eighth earl was christened, it was on the scale of a coronation.
100,000 people came to the park.
But, of course, that shows that the Fitzwilliams in Yorkshire, they were really like royalty.
That was their life.
They operated on a plane which was quite different from anybody else, really, even then.
It's said the Fitzwilliams looked after their miners well.
And by the middle of the 19th century, their numbers had grown 20-fold.
The family built many of them new homes in villages on the Estate.
And here, too, the Fitzwilliams occasionally flaunted their wealth.
In the 1870s, when they commissioned a new church for Wentworth, it was large enough for a major city rather than a small village.
But the source of the family's new riches would come back to haunt them.
The construction of the grand new parish church can be seen as representing the high point of the family's power, but the writing was already on the wall.
In this family vault there is an atmosphere of foreboding of the darkness that was to come.
As the 20th century progressed, the family's fortunes faltered and life at Wentworth Woodhouse was transformed forever.
The election of a Labour government in 1945 was one catalyst sparking the family's decline.
After the war, Britain was desperately short of coal.
Using emergency powers, the Labour minister, Emanuel Shinwell, ordered land at Wentworth be ripped open to strip as much coal out of the ground as quickly as possible.
Local miners, whose families enjoyed using the parkland surrounding the house, were horrified.
Even Joe Hall, president of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, objected.
Joe Hall wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, about the proposed mining scheme here at Wentworth Woodhouse.
I have a copy of the letter in front of me.
It's dated the 8th of April, 1946.
"Dear Mr Prime Minister, "my purpose in writing to you is to vigorously protest "against a scheme which is about to be operated at Wentworth near Rotherham.
" It goes on, "I make this personal appeal to you "to do all in your power "to prevent what can only be described as vandalism.
" To add to that outrage, miners like Joe Hall knew strip mining would only gather poor-quality coal near the surface.
But later that same month, Manny Shinwell sent in the heavy machinery.
They quarried 98 acres, destroying parkland, some designed by Humphry Repton, the famous landscape gardener, more than 150 years earlier.
Bob Mortimer used to be the head carpenter at Wentworth.
He was a child when the diggers went in.
Before you worked on the estate with the Fitzwilliams, - you were from here, I presume? - Yeah.
I mean, do you have much memory of the open-cast mining, - and the disruption and destruction? - Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
- Yeah, Manny Shinwell.
Ooh! - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- What's your view about all of that? Well, I'm on camera now, and I don't want to swear.
Yeah, because he destroyed a lot, he did.
You couldn't do nothing about it.
Yeah.
He destroyed a lot in Wentworth.
- A lot of good land.
- Yeah.
Because now we've got all clay land, you see.
It brought all that rubbish to the top.
But what did the village feel, seeing this destruction of beauty, the landscape, the house itself, you know, threatened with obliteration? I should imagine they were very sad to see it come that close to the house, - both principal front and back front.
- Yeah.
Because it were practically up to each door.
The poor quality of the coal has led to suggestions that this mining was an act of revenge.
Manny Shinwell wanting to show this filthy rich family who was the boss.
Roy Young is the author of a book about the house.
I must say the images I've seen of these slag heaps within yards of the house.
Some people would term it the rape of Wentworth.
- Here's one, now there's the house.
- There's the house.
There's the stables.
They've gone right up to the gravel - in front of the house.
- It's incredible.
Sixteen feet from the bottom of the step at the back and front.
And this slag heap mounting nearer and nearer, higher and higher.
Good grief.
And then on January 1, 1947, came a still more dramatic event.
Britain's collieries were nationalised.
The massive revenues which had sustained Wentworth Woodhouse were history, and overnight, instead of having thousands working for them on the estate and in the mines, the family was left with a staff of just seven.
By the time of Peter, the eighth earl, the family had retreated to the Baroque house, the rest having been occupied by the army during the war.
And now it seemed they'd never again enjoy their home as their ancestors had.
Outside, their land was being ripped apart.
Inside, they were in retreat.
And then, human tragedy struck.
This is the grave of Peter, the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam.
He died in a plane crash in France in 1948.
It says here, "Killed flying, 1948.
" He was only 37 years old at the time, and 1948 was a year after the Fitzwilliam coal mines had been nationalised.
With hindsight, one can see the death of Peter as marking the beginning of the end of the Fitzwilliams at Wentworth Woodhouse, and indeed, the end of the house as the vibrant heart of the community.
Another victim of the crash was the marchioness of Hartington, "Kick" Kennedy, sister of the future American president.
She and Peter had been having an affair.
Both families were terrified the scandal would break.
But the newspapers reported that a chance invite to France had brought the two together rather than the real reason.
The Fitzwilliams' fortunes were clearly on the slide.
The crash meant paying huge death duties, something they'd already faced just five years earlier when Peter's father died.
In 1948, Christie's sold off hundreds of items from Wentworth at one of the earliest of the great country house auctions.
The family's grip on the house was slipping away.
They leased much of Wentworth to the local council to ease the financial burden.
The Palladian house became a PE college, and instead of being celebrated as one of the finest rooms in England, the marble hall was turned into a gymnasium.
Finally, in 1989, the family sold the remaining interest in the house.
What did you feel when, at the end, they had to sell and move and leave the house to its fate, almost? Well, I'm looking at it from my point of view.
I mean, bad day for me, yeah.
As I say, we were brought up in an era where the big house was the hub of the circle.
And then to lose that, you know, you think, "Oh, dear, what's going to happen?" What could happen? But on the morning, I come into the park, the big house is still there.
But in reality, Wentworth Woodhouse is only just clinging on.
The new owners are battling decades of neglect and other potentially more serious problems.
Here in the library, it's clear all is not well.
This library door, the handles are clearly out of kilter.
Look at the bottom.
Oh, dear! Not aligned.
And above me, in the ceiling, some quite major cracks.
Of course, you know, all houses move, they all settle.
But these are rather substantial, and altogether really a clue that something is not right.
And the damage in the library is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Oh! Here the trouble is more serious, or certainly more obvious.
The ceiling's collapsed, damp's getting through.
On the floor a pile of plaster, wonderful black and white marble floor.
This is a wonderful room.
It's the chapel.
Butter leaves.
Sensational massive Venetian window.
Full of early crown glass, sparkling and wobbling.
An incredibly good room, I say, but very obviously in trouble.
In fact, whole sections of Wentworth Woodhouse are under threat, suffering not only from general decay but subsidence as well.
The Newbolds paid one-and-a-half million pounds for Wentworth, the low price reflecting the extensive restoration work required.
What is your vision, the future for the house? How do you see it going forward? What we want to do is to try and get it financially safe - by getting income in from somewhere.
- Yeah.
And they've done it in Chatsworth and in Blenheim Palace, and we see no reason why we shouldn't do the same thing for South Yorkshire here.
And we've got ideas on how we can use the place for restaurants and open it up a little bit to the public to come and see.
But we want to get the whole of the structure really firm and in good condition before we make up our final minds about it.
But the Newbolds claim that the subsidence affecting the house has dramatically worsened in recent years.
They believe this is due to the open cast and deep mining around the house in the preceding decades.
There's an ongoing legal dispute with the coal authority which will seek to determine if these cracks are the direct result of mining and, if so, to what extent the Newbolds should be compensated for the expensive repairs needed to restore the house.
So now, Wentworth Woodhouse sits brooding, frozen in time, waiting for its future to be resolved, and to see if such an enormous building can find a new role in the modern world.
The vast size of the house intended, of course, to reflect the family's power, wealth and aspirations, continues to amaze.
What I suppose is extraordinary is that such a vast house, over 300 rooms, could have functioned so effectively for so long.
But the house is in trouble.
Plans are afoot to find a new use for it, to repair it and to regenerate it.
Whether those are the right plans, well, that remains to be seen.
But the great thing is, the house endures.
It remains a stupendous document of the age when the country was governed from such sensational powerhouses.
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.
I'm on way to see one of the largest privately owned country houses in Europe.
It's also one of the most secretive.
It's been shrouded in mystery for years.
In fact, I'm heading towards Yorkshire, and the house is called Wentworth Woodhouse, and it's been the centre of intrigue and family feuding since it was built in the 18th century.
But this is more than a story of a family or a building.
It's a story of the time in the 18th century when the country house became a vital cog in the machinery of power.
Almost an engine of state designed to dominate the land.
And the great families that owned these powerhouses ran the nation.
Wentworth Woodhouse would play a vital role in a struggle between two competing parties, two royal families.
Indeed, two ideas of just what it meant to be British.
And the results of this struggle would shape not just the house, they would do much to form the modern world.
A history that still echoes in the corridors of this spectacular building, arguably the most artistically breathtaking ever created in Britain.
A house that today is largely forgotten, but which was once one of the most important and powerful places on Earth.
The visitors to Wentworth Woodhouse would often take this to be the main house.
But, in fact, the Wentworth Woodhouse is so big, the family that made it so wealthy, that this is just the stable block.
My word! An incredible piece of architectural theatre.
Just about the biggest classical country house in Britain.
Debated, to a degree.
I mean, so large is this building, so surrounded by myth, that it's uncharted territory.
Even its actual size no one agrees upon.
I guess the house could never have looked more stunning than today.
It's like being in Saint Petersburg, isn't it? In the winter.
Absolutely beautiful.
Wentworth Woodhouse once sat in the centre of a 19,000-acre estate.
And the family that created it has roots here dating back to at least the 13th century.
The house was built largely between 1724 and 1750.
The public has never been allowed inside to witness its palatial grandeur, most visible in the room I'm heading to now, the very heart of Wentworth Woodhouse.
This is the Marble Hall, absolutely stunning.
In the 1760s, it was called the finest room in England.
And I think it is.
Certainly very handsome.
In its way, it's a hymn to Neoclassical civilisation.
It's also rather surprising to find such a huge room in a private house.
It measures 60 foot square and rises 40 feet.
It's a very precise cubic proportion.
It feels very sculptural.
It feels rather like an outside space.
I mean, it's the heart of the home, but it's like a square, like a piazza.
Strange.
And, of course, for that reason, one can understand why naughty children used to roller-skate across the marble floor.
And also, it was in this room, in 1912, that Anna Pavlova danced for George V and Queen Mary.
What an appropriate event for such a glorious and ostentatious space.
For two centuries, Wentworth Woodhouse hosted many such royal visits.
Some drew immense crowds of over 20,000 people.
But the gods that raised the family high were ultimately against them.
And in the 20th century, their glittering life here came to an end.
They sold the house in 1989, and just over 10 years ago, it was bought by Clifford Newbold, a retired architect.
He's already spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to return Wentworth Woodhouse to its former splendour.
We wanted a grade 1 building that hadn't been modernised at all, and we decided that we'd really fallen in love with the place.
And that it's just what we were looking for, just the type of work that we wanted to do, and to restore it and get it back onto its feet again.
A few days later, after we'd done our completion, I came up here to receive the key of the door.
The key to the door.
I imagine it was pretty To get in.
But sure enough, I came up here, and they presented me with the key of the door.
You wouldn't believe it, but the key of the door was a simple Yale key.
- For a big place like this.
- Frightfully disappointing.
And I was terribly disappointed.
So when I'd finally taken over, I sorted round the house and what did I find? The key of the door.
That's more like it, isn't it? It's a lovely That's more appropriate for a house of this size.
That's a lovely 18th-century key.
But I've got to say, I'm full of admiration.
I mean, you're talking about buying this house as if it were, you know, a sort of an average building.
But you were actually buying just about the biggest house in Britain.
I know, I know, I know.
I know it's big, but I felt that I knew I was quite capable of financing it, and also doing the work.
- Yes, where shall we start? - Shall we start down here? The Newbolds are living in one small section of the house while they restore the rest.
They've given me free rein to poke around and explore.
Because of Wentworth Woodhouse's sheer scale, it really does take time to get to know.
It's often said to have 365 rooms, one for every day of the year.
The actual number is closer to 305.
But so large is the place, no one can seem to agree on the exact figure.
In the past, some rooms had remarkably specialised functions.
One was devoted solely to the preparation of candles.
Another to the family barber.
Linking them were vast stretches of corridor.
In Victorian times, guests would be given confetti to lay a trail from their bedroom to dinner so they could find their way back.
Photographs from Country Life magazine in 1906 show the house in its full splendour, when its epic scale seemed still to have a purpose, a world now vanished.
This part of the house is extraordinary.
Echoing rooms, emptiness, none of the grand furniture you might expect to find in a house of this palatial architectural quality.
And, indeed, in this splendid room, debris.
An air of abandonment.
House lost in time, in a way.
Uncanny, otherworldly.
Wentworth Woodhouse has struggled to find a role in the modern world, in part because of its enormous size, well over 100,000 square feet.
Which leads you to ask just what inflated ambitions produced it in the first place.
The story begins with one of the bitterest family feuds the country has ever seen.
Because the house wouldn't exist without a fateful decision taken by one man.
William Wentworth, the second Earl of Strafford, commemorated here alongside his wife in the village church.
Strafford owned the Wentworth Estate.
But in 1695, he died childless, and in an astonishing act for the time, reported even to have shocked the King, he disinherited his eldest male heir.
Incredible.
He is the man that made the momentous decision to leave Wentworth Woodhouse, his land, his fortune, not to the male heir, when he died in 1695, but to the third son of his sister.
But why? We do not know why he made this strange and very, I say, provocative decision.
Did he simply want to give the youngest son of his sister a chance in life? It's tremendously moving being here in the presence of the man that ultimately made the decision that gave life and birth to the creation of one of the most beautiful houses in Britain.
But the beauty of the house is only matched by the fury of the feud that created it.
A feud between two cousins, both called Thomas.
On the one hand, the hot-tempered Thomas Wentworth, also known as Lord Raby, a diplomat and army officer outraged by his lost inheritance.
On the other, one of the luckiest men in the country, Thomas Watson, who was gifted this enormous estate.
Historian Patrick Eyres has studied the feud's every twist and turn.
Can you tell me about the family feud that resulted from the disputed inheritance over Wentworth Woodhouse? Yes, that was That ran around for half a century, this feud.
And it outraged Thomas Wentworth, and he was, you know, apoplectic about it for the rest of his life.
A bitterness? I mean, it becomes extreme.
Is it true that Lord Raby called the Wentworth family vermin? Indeed.
He instructed his agent to use code names, and he said that the principal will be known as vermin.
And, of course, what's fascinating is that this rivalry becomes expressed dramatically through architecture.
Absolutely.
In fact, I mean, the great inheritance of this rivalry is the fact that South Yorkshire is awash with these two estates with fantastic architecture, monuments and landscape gardening.
So - One vying with the other.
- Absolutely.
Although Wentworth Woodhouse is the most spectacular product of this rivalry, it began five miles away here at Stainborough.
When Lord Raby bought this Yorkshire estate, he was plotting revenge.
Livid not just about losing Wentworth, but also that his cousin seemed to be stealing the family name.
Plain old Thomas Watson had taken to calling himself Watson-Wentworth.
In retaliation, Raby changed the name of the existing house here from Stainborough to Wentworth Castle.
And then he started secretly to buy up land neighbouring the Wentworth Woodhouse Estate.
This was turf war.
If he couldn't inherit Wentworth Woodhouse, he was going to certainly overshadow it.
Part of the strategy to do that was to commission, in 1708, this splendid continental-style Baroque palace.
Raby by now was British ambassador to Prussia.
And so he showed off by hiring the Prussian court architect.
And alongside his new home, he built a medieval-style castle, a symbol of his family's pedigree.
It was definitely round one to Lord Raby.
Thomas Watson-Wentworth backed down.
But when he died in 1723, his son, also called Thomas, upped the stakes dramatically.
This was the man who'd become the first Marquis of Rockingham.
Twenty-nine years old and already a tough politician, he'd long been plotting retaliation, and within a year, he began to build.
The fight-back started here.
But not with this house, with another one.
Because one of the truly astonishing things about Wentworth Woodhouse is that it's not one house, but two.
Hidden behind this, the eastern elevation, is another slightly smaller house facing in the opposite direction.
And it was this house that represents the next round in this super-sized family feud.
It's designed in an idiosyncratic Baroque style, and loaded with odd details.
Replacing a Jacobean house on the same site, Watson-Wentworth wanted something exotic to outdo the Prussian Baroque of his rival's home.
And it is a substantial country house in its own right.
Indeed, at many times in Wentworth Woodhouse's history, the family's living quarters have been here, a practice continued today by the Newbolds.
A beautiful room.
I mean, the obvious thing is the astonishing contrast between the west and the east.
But why, having spent a small fortune on this house, did Rockingham start building another right behind it? The answer lies in the striking contrast between the two houses.
It reveals something remarkable about the feud, but also about the struggle that defined Britain in the 18th century.
The battle between two political parties that loathed one another with a passion, the Whigs and the Tories.
In 1740, a new king, George I, established the German House of Hanover as the ruling dynasty in Britain, largely through the aid of the Whigs.
Many Tories were convinced George was an illegitimate usurper.
But to Whigs like Rockingham, the new king was the protector of liberty, who would uphold the Bill of Rights of 1689, the ground-breaking settlement that created a constitutional monarchy by limiting the powers of the Crown and safeguarding those of Parliament.
Rockingham's rival cousin, Lord Raby, was a Tory.
So the feud responsible for this house echoed a national struggle.
And the building itself was intended to impress the Whig elite.
But Rockingham had made an architectural faux pas.
Unfortunately, the house was not regarded as a great success.
One rather stuffy visitor who came here, indeed a member of the Whig coterie, into which the future marquis wanted to enter, the chap came here, had a good meal, I suppose, and then rather sneeringly wrote afterwards, that apart from a rather fine library, there was little that could be said in praise of the house.
Rockingham had been planning his new home for almost a decade, but he hadn't been keeping up with changing tastes.
The Whig elite he sought to join had, in that time, turned their back on the Baroque.
To them it was somehow un-English, tainted by association with their enemies, too European, too Catholic, too Tory.
In terms of style, Rockingham had got it all wrong.
During the first decades of the 18th century in England was a battle to establish a dominant national architectural style that carried the punch of historic precedent and pedigree.
And that was thought to reflect national characteristics and artistic aspirations.
The search for national style had a political agenda.
With their king on the throne, the Whigs were in the ascendant.
Now, they wanted to dictate not just how the country was ruled, but to transform the way it looked.
To impress the Whigs, the future marquis really needed a home built in the style they deemed politically correct.
A style based on the designs of a 16th-century Italian, Andrea Palladio.
Perhaps the most influential architect the world has ever known.
This is the book that revealed and promoted Palladio to the British, and did much to make Palladianism the dominant style in Britain for much of the 18th century.
This is Volume 1 of Vitruvius Britannicus, published in 1715 and written by Colen Campbell.
It's a terrific tome, wonderful inspirational plates here.
And it was to Campbell's designs that Rockingham turned when he decided he simply had to build a second new house.
Today when we value artistic novelty and originality, it's hard to think of copying as being creative.
But Palladians, well, they were suspicious of wilful originality.
They believed Palladio had provided a prototype, a format for perfection in architecture.
All you had to do was indeed copy it, maybe slightly creatively tweak it a bit, but essentially reproduce the basic designs that Palladio had produced himself.
In front of me is a design for Wanstead House in Essex.
Here we have it, the essential composition with a central pedimented building with wings, with these end pavilions.
What's incredible is that this provides the blueprint, as it were, for the design of Wentworth Woodhouse.
Sadly, Wanstead House no longer exists, but its legacy lives on at Wentworth.
By copying a masterpiece, Rockingham knew he would avoid another embarrassing blunder.
All plans were submitted to Lord Burlington, the so-called architect earl, a privy counsellor and arbiter of taste amongst the Whigs.
Eventually, even the original architect, Ralph Tunnicliffe, was replaced by one of Burlington's favourites, Henry Flitcroft.
Building Wentworth Woodhouse was a staggering undertaking.
The finest craftsmen worked with the most expensive materials.
Including marble from Siena in Italy to create Palladian perfection Unlike the baroque house, there's a stripped-back majesty.
Everything informed by a near-religious belief in the virtue of harmonious proportions, as found here, in the Marble Hall.
To understand the magical power of proportion in this room, look at the fireplace.
Apart from being exceptionally handsome, it is in many respects, apparently, a normal fireplace until I get here and you see it's well over six feet high.
You wouldn't think so, would you? So now, we appreciate the vast size of this room.
This entire space is pure Palladio, designed using the exact ratio of three to two.
The floor plan of 60 feet square, determining the ceiling height of 40 feet.
Just one of Palladio's seven ratios that his disciples believe were divinely inspired.
And this entire side of the house follows equally exacting rules.
It was deemed a triumph.
The very man who criticised the Baroque side wrote that no other house in Europe could boast such magnificent rooms, so finely proportioned.
But if the style of Wentworth Woodhouse was deeply political, so, too, was its enormous size, which had a very practical purpose.
And a clue to what it was can be found here at the City of Sheffield archives.
This is a very remarkable book.
It starts off as an account book or a ledger, rather dry.
Then, halfway through, only for a few pages, it becomes something astonishing.
It becomes the journal of the first Marquis of Rockingham.
For example, here, he gives a large entertainment to all my tenants in the neighbourhood.
But then you read on, you discover that this entertainment was for no fewer than 1,000 persons.
You see here that the number of dishes, good heavens, were 225.
Great Scott! Viz of beef, 43, of pork, 30, of venison pasty, 24.
Turkeys, 15, geese, 21, puddings, 30, and so it goes on.
Vast amount of food offered and consumed by all the neighbourhood.
Well, this is an amazing event, isn't it? 1,000 people, how generous.
But it's not just to do with generosity.
This is how country houses worked.
This is a man winning the hearts and minds of the electorate.
This is a wonderful example of how a country house was used in the18th century to influence people.
Be generous, and then get them to vote for you.
And it was successful.
At this time in Yorkshire, little more than 15,000 men, no women, voted.
With such a tiny electorate, a powerhouse like Wentworth Woodhouse could function effectively as an election-winning machine.
The vast new Palladian house helped Rockingham turn Yorkshire, traditionally a Tory county, into something of a Whig stronghold.
But it wasn't all about politics.
The house also cemented the family's position in society.
It helped establish Rockingham and his descendants as the most influential family in the county.
And for over two centuries, the big house fostered a sense of loyalty amongst the locals.
It was the biggest employer in the area, and the family had a reputation for treating their staff well.
It's a lost world, although some of its traditions survive today.
And a few people remain with a direct connection to this history.
I'm here to meet the former head gamekeeper of Wentworth Woodhouse.
It's a Saturday morning, the guns have gathered.
There's a shoot about to take place here to pot pheasant.
I suppose, of course, men have hunted on these grounds, this very spot, for centuries, shooting pheasant, and rabbits and hare.
Of course, that's the thing about Wentworth Woodhouse.
Nothing seems to change here.
The house presides over the landscape.
All seems settled, as if for eternity.
John Ambler was head gamekeeper at Wentworth until he retired in 1999, the last of many generations of his family to work here.
John, how long has your family been involved with Wentworth Woodhouse, and with the Fitzwilliam family? They came in 1808.
Everybody in this area then worked for the family.
You've got to realise, you see, in them days, the big house was the hub of the circle.
I like to think, from my point of view, with the dealings I had, - it's not really us and them.
- Yes.
It's us.
It's the family.
We're all together.
But it's still Wentworth Woodhouse, isn't it? And it's still there.
It's part of English history, that house.
- Very important part.
- Especially South Yorkshire history.
And really, it's something for the people of South Yorkshire - to be proud of, you know.
- Yes.
Our ancestors were all part and parcel of being here, because it were a marvellous, big estate.
But if Wentworth Woodhouse won the affections of many, its past is equally marked by division and conflict.
Rockingham's new house quickly found itself on the front line.
In 1745, there was a huge uprising against King George II, led by Jacobites, many of them Tories.
They supported Bonnie Prince Charlie instead.
If successful, it would have spelt disaster for Rockingham as Lord Lieutenant for the area, the King's personal representative.
Since 1745, this would have been a frontier zone in a sense, wouldn't it? That the Jacobite armies marched south of here, towards Derby.
This house would have been a bastion of opposition, - a military outpost, really.
- Absolutely.
- Militias quartered here.
- Yes.
And as it's the house of the Lord Lieutenant of the county, responsible for the defence of the whole of Yorkshire, then it's an intelligence gathering centre, messengers galloping down to London with information, and equally the point where the volunteer regiments raised, as the regulars were abroad in Flanders, would have been gathering here to defend the county.
As we tend to think that history is written by the victors, then we forget just how turbulent politics of the early 18th century was, especially after 1714, when the Hanoverians were imported with George I.
You know, four uprisings, we only hear of two, 1715 and '45.
And so, this was a moment when this major threat to the Hanoverian dynasty was now eradicated.
Ultimately, the Jacobite army lost its nerve, retreated north and was destroyed, its cause lost forever.
And his support had boosted Rockingham's standing with the King.
He had already risen to be a baron, then an earl.
Now, he would be well rewarded for his loyalty to the Crown.
In April 1746, the King made him a marquis, something commemorated here on the estate.
The Hoober Stand is a most peculiar building.
In its details, it's Palladian, but in its plan and form, most bizarre.
The plan is triangular, the form is a truncated pyramid, perhaps references to a Freemasonry most popular in the 18th century.
But its purpose is clear.
It was to celebrate the victory over the Jacobites, also to celebrate the elevation of Watson-Wentworth into the first Marquis of Rockingham.
And there's a deeply personal footnote to this event.
By being elevated to Marquis, Thomas Watson-Wentworth finally eclipsed the family of his cousin and rival who, all those years before, had sought to do his family down.
But Rockingham didn't enjoy his newfound status for long.
In 1750, a year after the completion of the Hoober Stand, he died.
It was during the time of his son, the second marquis, that Wentworth Woodhouse reached the peak of its political influence.
The second marquis held true to the Whig ideals of his father, but he was also a gambler, art lover, horse-racing fanatic and a wily operator, something that propelled him to the highest office in the land.
In the late 18th century, in its heyday, this house was one of the most powerful and important places in Britain.
In the 1760s, the second marquis was prime minister.
You can imagine him sitting here, the whole place exuding power.
At the same time, vast wealth flowing in.
The second marquis amassed a fortune from his investments and his lands, both in Britain and Ireland, equivalent to almost four billion pounds today.
Much of his money went on enlarging the estate.
He left it twice the size that his father had inherited.
Countless thousands also went on the house's interior.
The second marquis was a softer man than his father.
He introduced colour, warmth and sensual touches, like here, in the painted room, a depiction of the five senses.
It's one of the few places where original art work remains untouched.
And elsewhere, more sweeping changes such as here, in the Whistlejacket Room.
This originally was a dining room.
That's apparent from the decoration of this spectacular fireplace.
The meaning of the room is sort of embedded in the design.
Here, in the middle of the fireplace, is Bacchus, god of wine.
Another thing about this fireplace is that it just is such a high-quality piece of work.
I mean, Wentworth Woodhouse is a great pile, but it's rich, so rich in minute and fine detail.
A tremendous variety.
Each room really is different.
It's incredibly satisfying.
Lovely.
Then, in the 1760s, the room was transformed.
The great Stubbs portrait, really, of Whistlejacket, the spectacular horse, becomes the centrepiece of a reorganisation of the room into a sort of drawing room.
That, sadly, is not the original painting.
That's a photographic reproduction.
But it does the job to remind one of what was the inspiration for the room in the 1760s.
The original of Whistlejacket, perhaps the most famous painting ever made of a horse, now hangs in the National Gallery in London.
And the rest of the house's wonderful art collection has been dispersed, including a celebrated family portrait by Van Dyke, and depictions of several of the marquis' other favourite horses also commissioned from George Stubbs.
The marquis kept over 80 thoroughbreds at Wentworth, some of them the biggest winners in British racing history.
The second marquis loved his horses, as is apparent from the size of his stables.
Also, he loved to gamble.
He lost money, but more generally, he made money.
One of the great myths of Wentworth Woodhouse is that on one horse, Bay Moulton, he won enough money to build these stables.
Well, it's possible.
The stables, designed by John Carr of York, were, until very recently, the biggest in the land.
But they weren't the second marquis' only indulgence.
He loved hunting, socialising and extravagant gestures.
It's rumoured that one monument on the estate, The Needle's Eye, was built as a bet.
The marquis was intent on proving you could drive a horse and cart through a needle's eye, something seen here put to the test many years later.
But if he had a frivolous side, a sense of aristocratic duty kept drawing Rockingham back to politics.
He was a bad public speaker, but a very good operator, and for almost two decades, he led the largest group of parliamentary Whigs.
But where his father had been loyal to the throne, the second marquis found himself forced to rebel.
George III had become King in 1760.
Worryingly, to Rockingham, he showed every sign of being a Tory-supporting autocrat.
Rockingham, however, was rich and powerful enough to feel he could take on the King, something he did during two short terms as Prime Minister, and by leading the Rockingham Whigs, a powerful opposition group.
Their supporters included the philosopher, Edmund Burke, and the influential statesman, Charles James Fox.
They fought the King at everything, from the power of parliament, to the rights of the American colonies.
Indeed, Rockingham had a major role in the settlement following America's War of Independence.
He died in 1782, only 14 weeks into his second term in office.
But his ideals celebrated here at the Rockingham monument lived on, shaping politics in both America and Britain, where the Whigs eventually became the Liberal Party.
Oh! The monument really is a heroic piece of architecture.
I love the dome above me, wonderfully delicately detailed.
It commemorates the life of the second marquis.
Here he is in front of me, a splendid statue, his hand raised as if bestowing a blessing on the house, which he stands here contemplating for eternity.
But I suppose, more importantly, this monument celebrates the triumph of Whig values in niches on the walls of busts of various British worthies admired by the Whigs.
There's Edmund Burke, and here, Charles James Fox.
And these values remain important and relevant because they did so much to shape the world as we know it today.
Ironically, the success of these progressive values would undermine Wentworth Woodhouse's position as a powerhouse.
The second marquis died childless, and the estate passed to his nephew, the fourth Earl Fitzwilliam.
And it was during his time that the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, the first step towards votes for all.
With a bigger electorate, the role of large country houses as vote-gathering machines diminished.
Under the Fitzwilliams, the family lost much of its political clout, but they were handed a lifeline that kept them at the top of the tree for the next 150 years.
Britain was changing, the Industrial Revolution shifting power away from the landed aristocracy to the city.
But a new source of riches seemed to guarantee the fortunes of the family.
And those riches were right beneath their feet.
The estates were astride the immensely rich Barnsley seam.
Exploiting the mineral wealth of coal like this secured the family's fortune for generations to come.
Coal had been worked on the estate on a small scale since Elizabethan times.
But now, powerful new steam-driven machinery industrialised the process.
In 1795, deep mining began on the Wentworth Estate for the first time.
At their peak, the family's mines would produce over 300,000 tons of coal a year.
The author Clive Aslet has written extensively on the fate of the country house in the 20th century.
They had coal, and coal was the thing which made the Industrial Revolution.
It was why Britain was so prosperous, because we had so much of this coal.
And it was also very important for the Empire.
Coal drove the ships which were the lifeline of the Empire.
Through this coal, the wealth of the Fitzwilliams practically knew no bounds.
During the 19th and 20th century, Wentworth Woodhouse played host to eight royal visits, evidence of the family's elevated social status.
And there were many other lavish entertainments.
When the future eighth earl was christened, it was on the scale of a coronation.
100,000 people came to the park.
But, of course, that shows that the Fitzwilliams in Yorkshire, they were really like royalty.
That was their life.
They operated on a plane which was quite different from anybody else, really, even then.
It's said the Fitzwilliams looked after their miners well.
And by the middle of the 19th century, their numbers had grown 20-fold.
The family built many of them new homes in villages on the Estate.
And here, too, the Fitzwilliams occasionally flaunted their wealth.
In the 1870s, when they commissioned a new church for Wentworth, it was large enough for a major city rather than a small village.
But the source of the family's new riches would come back to haunt them.
The construction of the grand new parish church can be seen as representing the high point of the family's power, but the writing was already on the wall.
In this family vault there is an atmosphere of foreboding of the darkness that was to come.
As the 20th century progressed, the family's fortunes faltered and life at Wentworth Woodhouse was transformed forever.
The election of a Labour government in 1945 was one catalyst sparking the family's decline.
After the war, Britain was desperately short of coal.
Using emergency powers, the Labour minister, Emanuel Shinwell, ordered land at Wentworth be ripped open to strip as much coal out of the ground as quickly as possible.
Local miners, whose families enjoyed using the parkland surrounding the house, were horrified.
Even Joe Hall, president of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, objected.
Joe Hall wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, about the proposed mining scheme here at Wentworth Woodhouse.
I have a copy of the letter in front of me.
It's dated the 8th of April, 1946.
"Dear Mr Prime Minister, "my purpose in writing to you is to vigorously protest "against a scheme which is about to be operated at Wentworth near Rotherham.
" It goes on, "I make this personal appeal to you "to do all in your power "to prevent what can only be described as vandalism.
" To add to that outrage, miners like Joe Hall knew strip mining would only gather poor-quality coal near the surface.
But later that same month, Manny Shinwell sent in the heavy machinery.
They quarried 98 acres, destroying parkland, some designed by Humphry Repton, the famous landscape gardener, more than 150 years earlier.
Bob Mortimer used to be the head carpenter at Wentworth.
He was a child when the diggers went in.
Before you worked on the estate with the Fitzwilliams, - you were from here, I presume? - Yeah.
I mean, do you have much memory of the open-cast mining, - and the disruption and destruction? - Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
- Yeah, Manny Shinwell.
Ooh! - Yeah.
- Yeah.
- What's your view about all of that? Well, I'm on camera now, and I don't want to swear.
Yeah, because he destroyed a lot, he did.
You couldn't do nothing about it.
Yeah.
He destroyed a lot in Wentworth.
- A lot of good land.
- Yeah.
Because now we've got all clay land, you see.
It brought all that rubbish to the top.
But what did the village feel, seeing this destruction of beauty, the landscape, the house itself, you know, threatened with obliteration? I should imagine they were very sad to see it come that close to the house, - both principal front and back front.
- Yeah.
Because it were practically up to each door.
The poor quality of the coal has led to suggestions that this mining was an act of revenge.
Manny Shinwell wanting to show this filthy rich family who was the boss.
Roy Young is the author of a book about the house.
I must say the images I've seen of these slag heaps within yards of the house.
Some people would term it the rape of Wentworth.
- Here's one, now there's the house.
- There's the house.
There's the stables.
They've gone right up to the gravel - in front of the house.
- It's incredible.
Sixteen feet from the bottom of the step at the back and front.
And this slag heap mounting nearer and nearer, higher and higher.
Good grief.
And then on January 1, 1947, came a still more dramatic event.
Britain's collieries were nationalised.
The massive revenues which had sustained Wentworth Woodhouse were history, and overnight, instead of having thousands working for them on the estate and in the mines, the family was left with a staff of just seven.
By the time of Peter, the eighth earl, the family had retreated to the Baroque house, the rest having been occupied by the army during the war.
And now it seemed they'd never again enjoy their home as their ancestors had.
Outside, their land was being ripped apart.
Inside, they were in retreat.
And then, human tragedy struck.
This is the grave of Peter, the eighth Earl Fitzwilliam.
He died in a plane crash in France in 1948.
It says here, "Killed flying, 1948.
" He was only 37 years old at the time, and 1948 was a year after the Fitzwilliam coal mines had been nationalised.
With hindsight, one can see the death of Peter as marking the beginning of the end of the Fitzwilliams at Wentworth Woodhouse, and indeed, the end of the house as the vibrant heart of the community.
Another victim of the crash was the marchioness of Hartington, "Kick" Kennedy, sister of the future American president.
She and Peter had been having an affair.
Both families were terrified the scandal would break.
But the newspapers reported that a chance invite to France had brought the two together rather than the real reason.
The Fitzwilliams' fortunes were clearly on the slide.
The crash meant paying huge death duties, something they'd already faced just five years earlier when Peter's father died.
In 1948, Christie's sold off hundreds of items from Wentworth at one of the earliest of the great country house auctions.
The family's grip on the house was slipping away.
They leased much of Wentworth to the local council to ease the financial burden.
The Palladian house became a PE college, and instead of being celebrated as one of the finest rooms in England, the marble hall was turned into a gymnasium.
Finally, in 1989, the family sold the remaining interest in the house.
What did you feel when, at the end, they had to sell and move and leave the house to its fate, almost? Well, I'm looking at it from my point of view.
I mean, bad day for me, yeah.
As I say, we were brought up in an era where the big house was the hub of the circle.
And then to lose that, you know, you think, "Oh, dear, what's going to happen?" What could happen? But on the morning, I come into the park, the big house is still there.
But in reality, Wentworth Woodhouse is only just clinging on.
The new owners are battling decades of neglect and other potentially more serious problems.
Here in the library, it's clear all is not well.
This library door, the handles are clearly out of kilter.
Look at the bottom.
Oh, dear! Not aligned.
And above me, in the ceiling, some quite major cracks.
Of course, you know, all houses move, they all settle.
But these are rather substantial, and altogether really a clue that something is not right.
And the damage in the library is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Oh! Here the trouble is more serious, or certainly more obvious.
The ceiling's collapsed, damp's getting through.
On the floor a pile of plaster, wonderful black and white marble floor.
This is a wonderful room.
It's the chapel.
Butter leaves.
Sensational massive Venetian window.
Full of early crown glass, sparkling and wobbling.
An incredibly good room, I say, but very obviously in trouble.
In fact, whole sections of Wentworth Woodhouse are under threat, suffering not only from general decay but subsidence as well.
The Newbolds paid one-and-a-half million pounds for Wentworth, the low price reflecting the extensive restoration work required.
What is your vision, the future for the house? How do you see it going forward? What we want to do is to try and get it financially safe - by getting income in from somewhere.
- Yeah.
And they've done it in Chatsworth and in Blenheim Palace, and we see no reason why we shouldn't do the same thing for South Yorkshire here.
And we've got ideas on how we can use the place for restaurants and open it up a little bit to the public to come and see.
But we want to get the whole of the structure really firm and in good condition before we make up our final minds about it.
But the Newbolds claim that the subsidence affecting the house has dramatically worsened in recent years.
They believe this is due to the open cast and deep mining around the house in the preceding decades.
There's an ongoing legal dispute with the coal authority which will seek to determine if these cracks are the direct result of mining and, if so, to what extent the Newbolds should be compensated for the expensive repairs needed to restore the house.
So now, Wentworth Woodhouse sits brooding, frozen in time, waiting for its future to be resolved, and to see if such an enormous building can find a new role in the modern world.
The vast size of the house intended, of course, to reflect the family's power, wealth and aspirations, continues to amaze.
What I suppose is extraordinary is that such a vast house, over 300 rooms, could have functioned so effectively for so long.
But the house is in trouble.
Plans are afoot to find a new use for it, to repair it and to regenerate it.
Whether those are the right plans, well, that remains to be seen.
But the great thing is, the house endures.
It remains a stupendous document of the age when the country was governed from such sensational powerhouses.