(♪ The Old Garden Gate, Bea Hankey ♪)
One and a half miles from the medieval town of Saffron Walden in Essex we find a true East
Anglian treasure: Audley End. A stone-clad mansion surrounded by sumptuous gardens
which witness an explosion of colour every spring as 19,000 bulbs burst from the soil.
In the early days of summer, a walled kitchen garden packed with organic produce witnesses
thousands of brightly-coloured irises and peonies in a cascade of purples and pinks.
Meanwhile, all year round, the River Cam glides gracefully by.
When first built, Audley End was one of the largest and most opulent houses in Britain.
It was a fantastic Jacobean mansion that was for a time even a royal palace and it speaks to us of
grand families and the rise and fall of fortunes. It's filled with beautiful art, furniture and some
of the most remarkable collections that still fill the rooms and the halls here. But it's also filled
with extraordinary human stories. The house sits in a Capability Brown
landscape and while the grounds themselves look tranquil today, the relationship between
Capability Brown and Sir John Griffin Griffin, the owner at the time, was far from tranquil and
it's clear from their letters that they had some serious disagreements and fallings-out.
Thankfully for us today, those fallings out and that enmity doesn't seem to have translated into
the landscape that we see around us. In the 19th century the house was significantly remodelled
giving us the treasure house that we see today where features from throughout
the house's long history are still visible and we really get that sense of the different phases,
the different fortunes that the house had been through. They're all here. We can read them all.
During the Second World War Audley End was home to Polish soldiers of the Special Operations
Executive who trained here in secret before being dropped behind enemy lines in occupied Poland.
It's an interesting recent story and again it tells us of these
extraordinary human stories that are associated with this place.
Away from the lavish reception rooms and the elaborately-decorated royal apartments,
you step into the Service Wing.
This was the engine of the house where around 30 servants worked day in day out in addition
to another 80 or so staff who worked across the estate. These people were just as much a part
of the house as the lords and ladies they served and we can find their stories captured here too.
A house like this speaks to us of all the grand and the fine things
but it can also open the door to the world of domestic service.
A house like Audley End required a huge number of people to enable it to function. It's like a
machine. Just to give one example, coal must be brought into the building and it must be stored,
it must be moved around the building into the kitchens and into the many, many fireplaces.
Those fires must be lit, food must be brought in, food has to be prepared, food has to be taken out,
served at table. Lamps have to be lit. Every single one of these activities requires expense.
They're expensive places to maintain. They require constant spending of money in the form of wages,
repairs, material and supplies. The house has had its ups and downs as well,
initially a house of huge proportions and literally fit for a king -- Charles II in
this case. It had to be scaled back in the early 1700s just to make it a more manageable size.
The house was successively modernised and remodelled in the 18th and 19th centuries
but by the middle of the 20th century it still did not even have gaslight, let alone electricity.
Looking at a house like Audley End with its fantastic art collection and its beautiful
architecture and its landscaped grounds, sometimes it's easy to forget that these were the backdrop
to a complex series of human relationships but we're really lucky that we've got and
we continue to uncover documentary evidence that really helps to fill in the detail
about the lives that were lived intertwined with the house and its gardens. And these are intensely
personal histories that speak of love, separation and even occasionally of secret relationships.
We're pairing this beautiful Essex mansion with an exquisite traditional song that was originally
documented by the famous song collector and composer Vaughan Williams when he heard it sung
in 1904 in the Essex village of Hornden. The song documents the compexities of human relationships
and features a story of a woman forced to reject the approaches of the man she loves
as she's aware that he's been unfaithful. The song, sung for us by Bea Hankey, ends with a
poignant warning to girls who might court a false lover: untrustworthy men are described
as being like a star on a foggy morning. You think they're near, but in truth they are far, far away.