The Long Gallery

Curses, ghosts, and the secrets of thirty great houses

Thirty of the grandest houses and gardens in the world, from Blenheim to Mount Vernon — and every one of them, it turns out, keeps a strange story: a duchess who must never stop building, a garden that sprays its guests, a Botticelli walled up for three centuries. Each links to the house it belongs to.

Blenheim's rent: the Duke of Marlborough holds the palace by delivering ONE small flag (a standard with three fleurs-de-lis) to the sovereign at Windsor every year on the battle's anniversary — "an acquittance for all manner of rents."Read it: Blenheim Palace
Duchess Sarah locked the architect out of his own masterpiece: Vanbrugh, cheated of his salary, "was obliged to stand without the gates of Blenheim" and spend two nights at the inn without a glimpse of his building.Read it: Blenheim Palace
Vanbrugh's epitaph: "Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he / Laid many a heavy load on thee."Read it: Blenheim Palace
The trees in Blenheim park were planted in the formation of the Battle of Blenheim — each clump a battalion.Read it: Blenheim Palace
The key of Blenheim's main door is a copy of the key to the gates of Warsaw; a colossal bust of Louis XIV, looted from Tournay, tops the south portico.Read it: Blenheim Palace
Imprisoned at Woodstock, Princess Elizabeth wrote on the window-pane with a diamond: "Much suspected of me / Nothing proved can be / Quoth Elizabeth Prisoner" — and envied a milkmaid "singing pleasantlie."Read it: Blenheim Palace
The ghosts that drove Cromwell's commissioners out of Woodstock were staged by "an adroit and humorous Royalist, named Joe Collins."Read it: Blenheim Palace
The first Duke of Marlborough, on his quarrelsome wife vs. his portrait painter: "It has given me more trouble to reconcile my wife and you than to win a battle."Read it: Blenheim Palace
Blenheim's Raphael (Madonna d'Ansidei) sold for £70,000; the Titian gallery — paintings on LEATHER — burned in 1861; the present Duchess is an American, born Vanderbilt.Read it: Blenheim Palace
The Achilleion (Empress Elisabeth's Corfu palace, later the Kaiser's): its grotto works as a giant mirror — you peer into a cavern and see the whole lower garden reflected in reverse; Shakespeare is the only non-Greek in its hall-of-fame colonnade.Read it: The Achilleion
Aranjuez: Philip II shipped English ELMS to Spain because he admired them on his wedding trips; "in their branches all the nightingales of Spain collect."Read it: The Gardens at Aranjuez
At the Spanish court's Aranjuez fêtes, the ministers drove the avenues in landaus drawn by eight or ten MULES; equestrian ballets (parejas) played to 10–12,000 spectators.Read it: The Gardens at Aranjuez
The two standard guidebooks to Aranjuez turn out to be copied "almost identical, word for word" — both ending with the same Schiller quotation.Read it: The Gardens at Aranjuez
Villa Lante's fountain boys have been polished "as metal" by four centuries of falling water.Read it: Gardens of the Villa Lante
Miramar: Maximilian accepted the crown of Mexico in his brand-new castle, sailed away, and was executed at Querétaro; his widow returned "raving mad." The prefect's remark: "Never did the Prince see this creation of his mind in its present superb reality."Read it: Gardens of Castle Miramar
In Maximilian's study stands Marie Antoinette's writing-table — a gift from Napoleon III. Guidebooks persist in calling the sandstone castle "marble."Read it: Gardens of Castle Miramar
Horikiri: virtually every modern garden iris descends from THREE wild specimens a Japanese farmer collected around 1790 — 300+ varieties from three plants; the shogun himself came to look.Read it: The Iris Garden at Horikiri
Geishas take the iris-name "Ayame" as a stage name — but private families avoid it, the flower being "too striking" for the ideal of womanly modesty.Read it: The Iris Garden at Horikiri
The Taj Mahal's gardens were probably a public ORCHARD — the mausoleum was a charity, and Mogul emperors planted fruit for travelers; Jahangir planted shade trees along 400 miles of road from Agra to Lahore.Read it: Gardens of the Taj Mahal
In Mogul planting the cypress = death and the flowering fruit tree = life; the British kept replanting the Taj's cypress avenue in the wrong lines, "undermining" the dome visually.Read it: Gardens of the Taj Mahal
Brissac: Henry II declared "Were I not Henry of France I would wish to be Brissac"; the Spanish general admired Brissac's soldiers in rags — "my men are clad like damsels, yours appear like soldiers."Read it: The Chateau de Brissac
Marshal Brissac paid his unpaid army with his daughter's dowry.Read it: The Chateau de Brissac
The sixth Duc de Brissac, caught with his mistress by a prince who ordered "Leave the room, Sir," replied: "Sir, your highness's forefathers would have said: 'Let us leave the room.'"Read it: The Chateau de Brissac
The eighth Duke was so kind to foundlings that mothers left babies in his park at night; he was massacred in the Revolution. His deaf old kinswoman was condemned without hearing a word — the tribunal president ordered the clerk to record "that she has conspired deafly." She was beheaded at 70.Read it: The Chateau de Brissac
The Marquis d'Assigny staged fake chivalry: he sent messengers announcing imprisoned damsels, pretended to ride to their rescue, and had staff interrupt his servants' dinners with false alarms of approaching enemies.Read it: The Chateau de Brissac
Stowe's kitchen fire took A TON OF COAL to get going in the morning.Read it: Stowe House
The MS-room ceiling at Stowe carries the 719 heraldic quarterings of the families who owned it; the chapel is panelled in cedar taken from a captured Spanish prize ship.Read it: Stowe House
At Stowe the exiled Louis XVIII received Louis Philippe, who fell on his knees to beg pardon "for having ever worn the tricolored cockade."Read it: Stowe House
Lord Chesterfield on Palladian houses: he advised one owner "to hire a lodging over the way and spend his days in looking at his house."Read it: Stowe House
The poet Thomson wandered Stowe's gardens in his dressing-gown "and bit off the sunny side of his host's peaches."Read it: Stowe House
"Capability" Brown got his start at Stowe — confined, the author notes acidly, to the kitchen-garden, "and it would have been well if he had never strayed from the cultivation of useful herbs."Read it: Stowe House
One Stowe matriarch lived to see "four generations and seven hundred of her descendants."Read it: Stowe House
La Granja's great fountain jet rises 130 feet — "whose peer is not to be found in Europe" — fed by a mountain reservoir called El Mar, "the sea"; one trick fountain scatters spectators with unexpected overflows.Read it: Royal Gardens of La Granja
Philip V built La Granja, abdicated to live in it — and was forced back onto the throne when his son died after eight months. He and his queen lie buried there.Read it: Royal Gardens of La Granja
The fountains of La Granja play only a few days a year; the village celebrates those days as fiestas.Read it: Royal Gardens of La Granja
Claydon House: in the attic Lady Verney found trunks of family papers including one packet of letters that had NEVER BEEN OPENED — never seen by the people they were addressed to, two centuries late.Read it: The Home of the Verneys
Sir Edmund Verney, the King's standard bearer, died at Edgehill; the royal ring he wore was "recovered from the severed hand" and is the family's chief heirloom.Read it: The Home of the Verneys
In 1620 a pot of Roman coins was dug up by the Steeple Claydon pond — buried treasure from ~290 A.D.Read it: The Home of the Verneys
The book's great "might-have-been": had Prince Henry lived, "England might have had no Charles I — no Civil War — no Cromwell… and, who can tell, no American War."Read it: The Home of the Verneys
More Verneys: Sir Francis Verney ran away, turned Barbary PIRATE, and died a galley slave; a later Earl Verney escaped his creditors by hiding in his wife's hearse as it left for the funeral.Read it: The Home of the Verneys
The Claydon state four-poster was loaned out for funerals; Florence Nightingale had her own room at Claydon — she was Lady Verney's sister.Read it: The Home of the Verneys
The Floating Gardens of Mexico (chinampas): garden-rafts staked down with willows that took root and anchored them; the legend of "Coxcox, the Mexican Noah," survived among the lake peoples.Read it: The Floating Gardens of Mexico
The chili-pepper saying recorded of the chinampa country: Mexicans eat so much chili that "no wolf or vulture will touch a dead Mexican."Read it: The Floating Gardens of Mexico
Warwick Castle hung WOOLPACKS on hooks down its walls to deaden Parliamentary cannonballs in the 1642 siege — the hooks are still there; the garrison also flew a winding-sheet and a Bible from a pole as a defiance flag.Read it: Warwick Castle
A prisoner's verse scratched in Warwick's dungeon survives: "if my pin had bin beter, my vers wold hav bin sweter" (Master John Smith, "gunner to his majesty's highness," 1642).Read it: Warwick Castle
Guy's Porridge Pot at Warwick holds 120 GALLONS; the keeper of Guy's sword was anciently paid twopence a day for the office.Read it: Warwick Castle
Warwick's gate passages have "murder holes" overhead for pouring heated sand and pitch on attackers.Read it: Warwick Castle
Piers Gaveston, who mocked the Earl as "the Black Hound of Arden," was seized and beheaded on Blacklow Hill nearby — the Earl's reply: the hound would bite him.Read it: Warwick Castle
The Warwick Vase in its greenhouse came from the bottom of a lake at Hadrian's villa; the hall shows Irish elk antlers measuring 10 feet 9 inches across.Read it: Warwick Castle
Sir Fulke Greville, granted Warwick by James I, was assassinated by his own servant — enraged at being left out of his master's will.Read it: Warwick Castle
Persian gardeners will not cut a fine blossom: they spread a carpet before the plant and sit contemplating it — flowers are for the garden, not the vase.Read it: Persian Gardens
Persian gardens are FLOODED wholesale: the mirab (water-master) lets in the water fortnightly and the raised beds stand as islands in a temporary lake; centuries of city filth made the soil so rich it needs no manure.Read it: Persian Gardens
Persian etiquette of understatement: a subject's garden must never outshine the Shah's — "to outshine a sovereign is to court a gracious confiscation."Read it: Persian Gardens
Broughton Castle kept a secret Civil War council chamber: Puritan leaders' horses filled the stables while the servants "heard voices but never saw the visitors" — the room's owner, Lord Saye and Sele, was nicknamed "Old Subtlety."Read it: Broughton Castle
Broughton's paneling was painted WHITE as a signal of loyalty to the Stuarts — paint as politics.Read it: Broughton Castle
Saybrook, Connecticut is a portmanteau town: founded 1635 by Lord SAYE and Sele with Lord BROOKE of Broughton — the book ties this quiet Oxfordshire house to the settlement of New England.Read it: Broughton Castle
A carved corbel at Broughton shows a rabbit chewing a pea-pod; a visiting bishop, shown the bedrooms named for saints, joked "Let the saints rejoice in their beds!"Read it: Broughton Castle
Villa Danti's bridal cupboard: for generations, every bride in the family left her wedding slippers in one cupboard the morning after her wedding — rows of slippers spanning centuries.Read it: The Villa Danti
Concord, the Spanish governor's mansion at Natchez, kept its STABLES on the ground floor with the government apartments above — horses under the state rooms.Read it: Colonial Homes of Natchez
Natchez sits among "Devil's punch bowls" — vast circular pits in the bluffs; one antebellum library there ran to 8,000 volumes.Read it: Colonial Homes of Natchez
Moor Park: Archbishop Nevil was arrested AT HIS OWN BANQUET — the King invited himself to hunt, sat at the Archbishop's table, then seized him and his treasure; his jeweled mitre was "converted into a crown" whose stones "perhaps still sparkle there."Read it: Moor Park
Anne Boleyn's love letters from Henry VIII were STOLEN and chased to Calais; the thief outran pursuit and the letters "remain until this day" — in the Vatican.Read it: Moor Park
Cardinal Wolsey signed the Treaty of the More at Moor Park — its price included 100,000 gold crowns; ranger Russell begged Cromwell in 1535 for eight pence a day to keep the garden.Read it: Moor Park
The Duke of Monmouth pulled down the old palace of the More for his new seat — and lost his head soon after; a later owner, Styles, bought Moor Park with South Sea stock sold at the very top of the bubble.Read it: Moor Park
Dr. Johnson, hearing Admiral Anson's endless voyage stories at Moor Park, revenged himself with a sarcastic epigram on the spot.Read it: Moor Park
Wealthy Romans commonly kept FIVE OR MORE country villas each — winter, summer, seaside and mountain; Cicero bought Greek statues for his "as American millionaires buy French paintings."Read it: Ancient Roman Country Houses
A great Roman villa ran on 400–500 slaves; when Julius Caesar dropped in on Cicero, he brought 2,000 soldiers, and Cicero wrote with relief that he wasn't asked to entertain them twice.Read it: Ancient Roman Country Houses
Hadrian's villa at Tivoli covered A SQUARE MILE; Pliny asked friends to send notice ahead of visits so the baths could be pre-heated.Read it: Ancient Roman Country Houses
The Borda Garden, Cuernavaca: José de la Borda — "Bordeaux Joe," a penniless French boy turned mining multimillionaire — reputedly spent a million dollars on his nine-acre garden; its owners now grow coffee in it and charge photography fees "regulated according to the size of the camera."Read it: The Borda Garden
Cortés built a palace at Cuernavaca — and in 1908 the conquistador's sugar estate there was "still owned by his heirs," nearly four centuries on.Read it: The Borda Garden
The tame fish in Nur Mahal's Kashmir garden reservoirs came when called — and some of the largest wore GOLD RINGS with inscriptions, "placed there, it is said, by the celebrated Nur Mahal."Read it: Indian Gardens
The emperor Babar's verdict on India: "no grapes or musk-melons, no good fruit, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazars, no candles or torches — never a candlestick!"Read it: Indian Gardens
A Mogul garden had to be honestly PAID for — one acquired by force or fraud would bring only misfortune; each owner kept one favorite garden set apart to be his tomb.Read it: Indian Gardens
Mogul air-conditioning: the "Sawan Bhadon" room at Lahore made indoor monsoon — sheets of water falling past lamp-niches to imitate rain, light and dark; a pavilion at Alwar could wrap itself in a mist of water jets under the cornice. Shahlimar's great reservoir carries 144 fountains, and its marble water-chutes are carved in patterns to make flat water ripple like a mountain stream.Read it: Indian Gardens
Jahangir struck coins for love: an inscription declared gold "acquired a new value" since Nur Mahal's name appeared on it — he confessed he never knew what marriage was until he married her.Read it: Indian Gardens
Beaulieu Abbey exists because of a NIGHTMARE: King John, having ordered Cistercian monks trodden to death under wild horses, dreamed he was scourged by them as punishment — "when he awoke in the morning, he was covered with the marks of the lashes" — and founded the abbey in atonement.Read it: Beaulieu Abbey
Beaulieu's dormitory roof is Spanish chestnut, a wood that "never harbors flies or any other insects, nor do spiders weave their webs nor birds build nests in it."Read it: Beaulieu Abbey
The Beaulieu monks ran vineyards in Hampshire whose wine "won a world-wide reputation," held hunting rights in the New Forest, and received a tun of wine yearly from the King.Read it: Beaulieu Abbey
Battle Abbey's high altar was placed on the EXACT SPOT where King Harold fell at Hastings — and when excavators dug centuries later, "the evidence found by the spade confirmed the truth of the legend."Read it: The Abbey of Battle
The Curse of Cowdray: a monk told Sir Anthony Browne, feasting in the seized abbot's hall, that "by fire and water" his line should perish. Two hundred and fifty years later Cowdray House burned to the ground — and the last Viscount Montague drowned in the Rhine.Read it: The Abbey of Battle
Henry VIII's commissioners arrived at Battle wearing looted copes as doublets, altar tunics as saddle-cloths, "and the silver relic-cases hammered into shields for their daggers."Read it: The Abbey of Battle
Battle's gateway still has the hangman's beam over the prison door — the Abbot held power of life and death — plus ceiling openings for boiling oil, melted lead or red-hot sand, with the stone cauldron for heating them still in place.Read it: The Abbey of Battle
In 1377 the Abbot of Battle armed his monks' vassals, refused the French raiders' ransom demand ("it was early to think of buying what he had not yet lost"), and drove them into the sea — spawning the Sussex proverb "'Ware the Abbot of Battel when the Prior of Lewes is taken prisoner."Read it: The Abbey of Battle
After Hastings, William the Conqueror "eats and drinks amongst the dead, and makes his bed upon the blood-stained field."Read it: The Abbey of Battle
Villa Palmieri is said to be a villa of the DECAMERON — one of those Boccaccio chose for the retreat of his storytellers fleeing the Black Death; Queen Victoria twice borrowed it for spring holidays.Read it: The Villa Palmieri
A Botticelli spent ~300 years hidden in this villa's wall: his "Coronation of the Virgin" was condemned as heretical (it illustrated Palmieri's poem about neutral angels reborn as men), concealed in a recess of the library, rediscovered in the 1800s — and now hangs in London's National Gallery.Read it: The Villa Palmieri
Bess of Hardwick was told by a gipsy she would never die as long as she kept building. At ninety, restoring Bolsover Castle, a hard frost stopped the masonry — she had fires lit on the walls to keep the mortar working, "but at last the frost conquered them and her and she died."Read it: An English Castle and its Village
Richard the Lionheart funded his crusade partly by SELLING castle-fortification licenses "to every baron who would pay his price" — Bothal's was one.Read it: An English Castle and its Village
Bothal's gateway carries King Edward III's shield with an act of false heraldry that Philip of Valois publicly jested about.Read it: An English Castle and its Village
The vanished Moorish palace at Cordova had a central fountain of QUICKSILVER — a jet of liquid mercury "whose glitter in the sun was too dazzling for eye to bear."Read it: The Gardens of the Alcazar
The Alcázar garden walks hide burladores — "jokers": concealed waterworks that suddenly fire jets of spray UP from the pavement to drench unsuspecting strollers, a royal practical joke in permanent installation.Read it: The Gardens of the Alcazar
King Ferdinand burned MORE THAN ONE MILLION Arabian books in an open square of Granada — all he could collect in Spain.Read it: The Gardens of the Alcazar
Philip V would fish for hours in the Alcázar's cistern-pool, "imagining that he thus was realizing the peaceful existence of a monk."Read it: The Gardens of the Alcazar
Charles V had the Alcázar's boxwood clipped into his own coat of arms, and set a bronze MAP of his garden labyrinth into his pavilion floor — consult the floor, then enter the maze.Read it: The Gardens of the Alcazar
Dunster's octagonal yarn market still bears the mark of a cannonball fired from the castle during the siege of 1646.Read it: Dunster Castle
Dunster's gallery is hung with 17th-century painted-leather panels of Cleopatra — as a golden-haired Venetian beauty in period dress. Tradition says the ship carrying them wrecked opposite Dunster, and the Lord of Dunster, owning rights to everything cast on the foreshore, simply kept them.Read it: Dunster Castle
King Charles's room at Dunster contains a secret cupboard in the thickness of the wall, with a stone seat at the far end, where the future Charles II could hide "should occasion arise."Read it: Dunster Castle
A lemon tree a hundred years old still bears fruit against Dunster's terrace wall; the castle held out 160 days under siege before surrendering with full honors of war.Read it: Dunster Castle
Levens Hall's "judge's wig" topiary stands six feet high — afternoon tea is served under it even in the rain, courtships were traditionally conducted inside it, and two concealed entrances at the back "have more than once caused serious interruption by an eavesdropper."Read it: Levens Hall — An Old World Garden
Levens' seven acres of gardens contain NINE MILES of box hedge; the tower clock has a single hand; the deer park has been enclosed by the same yew fence since 1360.Read it: Levens Hall — An Old World Garden
Washington's hounds, from his own housebook: Vulcan, True Love, Ringwood, SWEET LIPS, Singer, Forester, Music and Rockwood.Read it: The Gardens and Grounds of Mount Vernon
Lafayette sent Washington a pack of French staghounds in 1785 — Washington found them "fierce and troublesome," gave them away, and stocked Virginia deer instead.Read it: The Gardens and Grounds of Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon is a wooden house dressed as stone: its boards are worked into chamfered panels "to give the appearance of cut and dressed stonework" — and the disguise has outlasted everything else.Read it: The Gardens and Grounds of Mount Vernon
Washington's own plan of Mount Vernon labels every building — including, at letter "e," the "Repository for Dung."Read it: The Gardens and Grounds of Mount Vernon
Washington laid out his own landscape with a surveyor's instrument on the west steps, personally choosing every tree for transplanting as he rode the estate in the early mornings.Read it: The Gardens and Grounds of Mount Vernon