Wentworth Woodhouse The Country House Revealed

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 in tact.

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 power houses 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 St 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,

so 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 ten 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 I building, that hadn't been modernised at all

and we decided that we'd really fallen in love with the place,

and 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 of 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! And I was terribly disappointed.

So when I'd finally taken over, I sorted round the house and what did I find?

They key of the door.

That's more like it, isn't it? It's lovely.

That's more appropriate for a house of this size.

It's a lovely 18th century key.

But I've got to say, I'm full of admiration.

You're talking about buying this house as if it were an average building,

-but you were actually buying just about the biggest house in Britain.

-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.

-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 were 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.

Indeed, in this splendid room,

debris, an air of abandonment, house lost in time in a way.

Uncanny, other-worldly.

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 2nd 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 who 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 know not 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.

The 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 ran and ran 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, the great inheritance of this rivalry is the fact that South Yorkshire

is awash from these two estates with fantastic architecture, monuments and landscape gardening.

-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 a man who'd become the 1st Marquis of Rockingham.

29-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 the opposite direction.

And it was this house that represented 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.

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 to define Britain in the 18th century.

The battle between two political parties that loathed one another with a passion.

The Whigs and the Tories.

In 1714, 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 stiffy visitor 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,

there 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 a 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.

It's Volume I of Vitruvius Britannicus,

published in 1715 and written by Colin 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 the 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 Sienna 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 you appreciate the vast size of this room.

This entire space is pure Palladio,

designed using the exact ratio of 3:2,

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 1st 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, a vast amount of food

offered and consumed by all the neighbourhood.

Well, this is an amazing event, isn't it?

A thousand 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 the 18th 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 Saturday morning, the guns have gathered.

There's a shoot about to take place.

They're 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.

GUNSHOTS

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.

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.

-It is, a very important part.

Especially South Yorkshire history.

And really it's something for the people of South Yorkshire

to be proud of, you know.

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.

So, in 1745 this would have been a frontier zone, in a sense, wouldn't it?

The Jacobite armies marched south of here towards Derby.

This house would have been a bastion of opposition,

-a military outpost.

-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,

it's an intelligence-gathering centre,

messengers galloping down to London with information.

And 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.

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 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 new found 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 4 billion today.

Much of this 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 artwork remains untouched.

And elsewhere more sweeping changes,

such as here in the Whistle Jacket 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

s 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 is transformed.

The great Stubbs portrait, really, of Whistle Jacket,

the spectacular horse, becomes the centrepiece

of a re-organisation 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 the Whistle Jacket,

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 the celebrated family portraits by Van Dyck.

And depictions of several of the marquis's 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 Malton, 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's 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 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 on everything from the power of parliament

to the right to 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 an 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, 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 are busts of various British worthies

admired by the Whigs.

There's Edmund Burke and here, Charles James Fox.

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 stood 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.

A hundred thousand 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 plain which was quite different from anybody else,

really, even then.

It's said the Fitzwilliams looked after their miners well.

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 the 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?

Yes.

Do you have much memory of the open cast mining

-and the disruption and destruction?

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

Manny Shinwell. Yeah. Oof, yeah.

What's your view about all of that?

Well, I'm on camera now and I don't want to swear.

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.

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, 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,

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 stables.

They've gone right up to the gravel in front of the house.

It's incredible.

16 feet from the step, back and front.

And this slag heap mounting nearer and nearer, higher and higher... Good grief.

Then on January the 1st, 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, in the end, they had to sell and move

and leave the house to its fate almost?

Well, looking at it from my point of view,

I mean, a bad day for me.

As I say, we were brought up in an era

when 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 a 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.

Ooh, 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.'

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 a chapel. In front of me

is a 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 £1.5 million 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.

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.

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 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 power houses.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]