Madresfield: One house, one family, one thousand years - Tapa dura

Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home surrounded by a perfect medieval moat, in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been continuously owned and lived in by the same family, the Lygons, back to the time of the Domesday Book, and, unusually, remains in the family's hands to this day. Inside, it is a very private, unmistakably English, manor house; a lived-in family home where the bejewelled sits next to the threadbare, the heraldic and feudal rest easily next to the prosaically domestic. The house and the family were the real inspiration for Brideshead Revisited: Evelyn Waugh was a regular visitor, and based his story of the doomed Marchmain family on the Lygons. Never before open to the public, the doors of Madresfield have now swung open to allow Jane Mulvagh to explore its treasures and secrets. And so the rich, dramatic history of one landed family unfolds in parallel with the history of England itself over a millennium, from the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen Mary in the Dudley plot; through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens' Bleak House; to the secret love behind Elgar's Enigma Variations; and the story of the scandal of Lord Beauchamp, the disgraced 7th Earl.

Romantic, turreted, ancient, Madresfield Court, with its one hundred and sixty rooms, spectacular Tudor hall and medieval moat, has been the home of the Lygon family for over nine hundred years. Beneath the Malvern Hills, unmistakably English, it is a lived-in family home in which the sumptuous sits next to the threadbare, the heraldic next to the domestic. Over the centuries, the Lygons have played their part in history. They were the inspiration and model for the doomed Marchmain family in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: Waugh was a regular visitor in the 1930s, one in a long line of writers, composers, painters, royals and rebels who passed through Madresfield's doors. Now Jane Mulvagh has been given access to this very special and private house, still lived in by the twenty-eighth generation of Lygons, to explore its treasures and secrets. Drawing on a unique and virtually unknown archive that dates back to the Conquest, she illuminates a rich and dramatic history. From the Lygon who conspired to overthrow Queen mary in the Dudley plot, through the tale of the disputed legacy that inspired Dickens's Bleak House, to the secret love behind Elgar's Enigma Variations, and the scandal of William Lygon, the disgraced seventh Earl Beauchamp, the story of Madresfield unfolds as part of a thousand years of English history.