My home Stoke Park has become a hotbed of sex and violence

When I’m not busy editing the Oldie magazine, I live near Towcester in south Northamptonshire where things are pretty unexciting. It’s at a place called Stoke Park, where two 17th-century pavilions, originally a chapel and a library linked by colonnades to the sides of a substantial country house, survived a fire that destroyed the main building in the late 19th century. It wasn’t always so dull here. In Tudor times one could have looked out across the valley of the River Tove to see Henry VIII hunting deer with Anne Boleyn. On the horizon one can still see the tower of the church at Grafton Regis where Henry used to stay and where he had his last ever meeting with Cardinal Wolsey. Stoke Park was on Crown land, which in 1629 was given by Charles I, in payment of a debt, to a courtier and entrepreneur called Sir Francis Crane, founder of the Mortlake tapestry works in London. With the assistance of the architect Inigo Jones, an admirer of Andrea Palladio, he built the pavilions that are still there today, the remnants of what is supposed to be the first example in Britain of a palladian layout — a house with two pavilions linked by colonnades to its sides.

There followed quite a lively period. Charles I stayed there in 1635, the year before Crane died, and in 1672 there was a long visit by Isaac Newton, who complained in letters to London about the inefficiency of the Towcester postal service. During the next couple of centuries Stoke Park remained the property of Crane’s descendants, and nothing much seems to have happened there until the fire of 1886 — nor indeed thereafter until it was requisitioned in the second world war for use by Canadian troops who left the place derelict.