Burghley House

En un regard

Le château en bref

Burghley House, a little over a kilometre south of Stamford, is one of the finest examples of an Elizabethan "prodigy house". William Cecil, later Lord Burghley and Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I, had it built between 1555 and 1587; his descendants, the Earls and later Marquesses of Exeter, still live there. Since 1961 the house has belonged to a family charitable trust, the Burghley House Preservation Trust, which opens it to the public seasonally. While the exterior has kept its Elizabethan silhouette bristling with chimneys and turrets, most of the interiors were remodelled before 1800: a suite of Baroque state rooms carved by Grinling Gibbons, ceilings painted by Antonio Verrio in the Heaven Room and the Hell Staircase, and several hundred seventeenth-century Italian paintings. The park, laid out by Capability Brown between 1755 and 1779, surrounds an artificial lake and hosts the Burghley Horse Trials every year. A regular filming location (Pride & Prejudice, The Da Vinci Code, The Crown), Burghley plays Windsor Castle in season 4 of the Netflix series "The Diplomat", released on 15 October 2026: it lends its façades to the royal residence where the presidential motorcade is diverted in the first episodes.