OK, turning over, please. Action.
I enjoy writing Downton Abbey
and I suppose I've made my living out of writing about fictional country houses
that are occupied by fictional characters.
Now we're to be turned out of Downton!
Cut. Thank you.
Britain's great houses are real and inhabited by real people.
'Charlie, I have been very wicked with Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone,
the Prince of Wales and others...'
In this series what I'm trying to find is the real Lord Grantham,
the real Lady Mary.
That's great. I love jewels, actually.
Presumably that's not the Countess?
The real Bates, the real Anna!
My eyes fill at the thought of this.
Oh, look at that.
Do you think Harriet Clark would have been put into one of these?
Oh! This rather grisly instrument
amputated the Earl of Uxbridge's leg.
The families who built and lived in these houses
were governing the country.
Their servants were making it all work.
Wow!
Pretty well all of us have got ancestors
who were either giving orders or taking them, or probably both.
After you. After YOU!
Thomas Leaver, stable boy, ran away.
These are not just houses for posh people to live in.
Their history belongs to all of us.
So there's a story for everyone in this kind of place.
Subtitles by MemoryOnSmells http://UKsubtitles.ru.
This is Burghley House in Lincolnshire.
For 500 years, it's been the home of the descendants of William Cecil,
Lord Burghley,
as they rose to be first Earls and then Marquesses of Exeter.
Burghley built this house to show the world he had founded a great dynasty
and to entertain his queen, Elizabeth I,
the greatest of the Tudors.
But Elizabeth never stayed here.
News of smallpox in the house kept her away.
Life was fragile then,
a clue to my first story,
which links Burghley to death of a different queen.
Ah, yes. There it is.
William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley,
one of the most powerful men in the country.
Burghley was Queen Elizabeth's right-hand man,
the political brain and the iron fist behind her throne.
If he looks a bit nervous, clutching his staff of office,
he had pretty good reason.
Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII,
had left a legacy of chaos.
He had changed England from Catholic to Protestant
in order to marry Anne Boleyn,
and in doing so started well over a century of religious division.
One of Lord Burghley's treasured possessions
tells us how much he feared a Catholic attack.
This is his atlas.
Not only did he sign it,
but he also annotated it
and made all these little entries.
Here's a map of France.
Pretty good.
He makes his notes over the page.
They're quite capacious.
All of that. And this here.
We have...
'Deux compagnies de cent hommes.'
Two companies of 100 men
So he's finding out the strength against him.
This whole book is a tool. It's lovely to us,
but it's a tool of government.
He's got to know everything. Every detail.
Nothing is too small. 'How strong is this town?'
'How weak is this defence?'
He lived in a kind of permanent state of jitters.
The threat to Elizabeth from Catholic France was deadly,
because they supported a rival queen.
To most Catholics, Elizabeth was only the bastard daughter
of a marriage that was never legal, and the person with the best claim to the throne was her Catholic cousin,
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
To them, Mary remained the true Queen of England.
Burghley and his spymaster Walsingham uncovered plot after Catholic plot
to assassinate Elizabeth.
On the 11th of August, 1586,
Burghley had Mary brought to a stronghold near his own home,
deep in the fields of Lincolnshire,
so Elizabeth would not be tarnished by any foul deed.
I suppose London would have been too dangerous,
because once the word got out, there'd be tension and alarm, and a risk of riots.
But what does come through is that he'd had enough,
he'd had a bellyful.
He was not going to rest until the Queen of Scots was dead.
This is very nice of you.
Burghley's descendant, Lady Victoria Leatham,
lives next door to the ruin, Fotheringhay Castle,
where her ancestor held Mary captive.
So why was the decision finally made for Fotheringhay
to be the place?
Well, I think it was easily defended.
Secondly, it suited Burghley down to the ground.
He lived nearby. He'd have been able to run it like a piece of theatre.
So the whole thing had all come to a head now
and this was the sort of hour of decision? It was,
and this was the point at which Cecil decided that Mary had to die.
There was no other way out.
She was acting like a lightning rod and attracting trouble from the continent,
and for the safety of the land and the Queen,
he couldn't see any other option.
But Elizabeth believed monarchs were chosen by God.
For her to contrive the death of an anointed sovereign
was to risk her own eternal damnation.
Burghley wrote out the warrant anyway.
How long had Burghley actually had the death warrant drawn up
before he managed to get her to sign it?
Oh, weeks and weeks before.
He'd been crafting it and working on it, and every single word was his.
Was he urging the Queen all the time,
or was he sort of waiting in silence until the right moment?
He was at her elbow for days and weeks
trying to get her to sign this thing.
Constantly asking her, or just standing there like a figure of death?
I think he knew that she knew
that that's what he had under his arm.
It's a murky area, the whole thing.
She didn't know what she was signing. She DID know? Yes, she knew.
Because she said to the man who brought it to her,
'We'll tell your master you've done this
and it'll make him feel much better.' It was Walsingham's man.
I love this because you descend from Burghley and I descend from Walsingham!
So here we are, the descendants of killers! Exactly.
But what a marvellously bureaucratic pair they were!
Do you think he was afraid?
He might well have been, but he was a pragmatist.
All he could see in black and white was the fact that England would be scuppered
if she had been alive to carry on as she was.
I think he was at one or two points very afraid that he would lose his head.
Burghley didn't lose his head.
But he made sure that Mary did, on the 8th of February 1587,
without Elizabeth's knowledge.
That at least is the official version.
There's an eyewitness account of Mary's execution.
'Groping for the block, she laid down her head,
putting her chin over it with both her hands,
she endured two strokes of the axe,
she making very small noise or none at all,
so the executioner cut off her head,
saving one little gristle, which being cut asunder,
he lifted up her head to the view of all the assembly
and bade God save the Queen.'
It is a very strange thought
that Mary Queen of Scots died here.
This is where it happened.
This is the last view of England
that she ever looked upon.
And it was a seismic event,
and only Lord Burghley had the nerve to kill her.
But it was not just royalty that suffered such a cruel fate in this house.
Did the guy die?
He actually dies of this incident. He dies?
She came down here and heard the door clang...
She must have thought she'd reached the end.
I'm at Burghley House,
built 500 years ago by William Cecil,
the man who executed Mary Queen of Scots.
I'm looking for true stories of some of the people
who lived and worked here. And not just upstairs stories.
In these places, without the servants, nothing happens.
They were the cogs in the vast machine
that was Lord Burghley's household.
And at its heart lay the kitchen.
So I've come to see Dr Annie Gray, a food historian.
This is the most incredible place!
Isn't it brilliant? It's like a cathedral!
Yes. And of course this dome lets in light
and also lets out the smoke and the fumes and the smells.
So presumably the size tells us a little about how many people would have been in here.
What would have been Burghley's kitchen household?
You're looking at about ten to 15 people,
all of whom would be men at that point.
All men, even the washing up? All men?
Yeah. It's really testosterone-fuelled in here!
We're not far away from the medieval household.
You would often have had the younger sons of Lord so-and-so's best mate serve you at the table.
They'd serve at the table? Yes, very much so.
You'd get... A knight in training would enter a household at seven
in order to be a page,
whose job was to hold incredibly heavy trays, serving people.
It does two things. It builds up their muscles so they can kill the French... I love that!
So it was a sort of training. It's training in terms of taking orders.
I can easily believe it. When I look at that tray,
it looks as if it trained a few knights in its day.
I couldn't lift that, never mind if anything was on it!
This chain of command is at the core of everything.
It was an absolutely stratified society.
Was that reflected in what they ate?
Yes. A lot of it's prestige. Things like hunted meats are more prestigious,
but also spices, and a lot of that will be predicated on what he's feeling like.
If Lord Burghley is feeling particularly melancholic,
then perhaps you'll feed him something warming, like ginger...
How did they diagnose it and decide that Lord Burghley was melancholic
and needed some whatever you were going to put in.
The easiest way was for them to pee in a bottle
and for that bottle to be taken by one of his personal servants - a gentleman -
over to the doctor, and the doctor would smell it, probably taste it,
and then pass his judgment. More than I bargained for!
I'm rather inspired by these smart young men,
seeking to learn the mysteries of government
as they served their instructors at table.
I've come to the National Portrait Gallery in London
to find one young man in particular who lived with Lord Burghley.
Hello. This is very kind of you.
Can you just talk a bit about the actual life of the gentleman servant,
what were their duties?
Joining an aristocratic household was an important part
of a gentleman or gentlewoman's education.
It was something like being an intern.
They would go to lessons and practise their dancing and fencing,
they wouldn't be involved in the servile tasks,
emptying the coals or changing the rushes or anything like that.
But being a gentleman servant wasn't considered servile.
It was a kind of honour if you went into a great household.
Yes, it was an enviable place.
You looked for the highest-status house you could get your children into,
and that was the best way to ensure their future.
What's the significance of this chap?
This is the young Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
He came to Cecil's house when he was 12.
Do you think he was pleased with his hat? Very pleased.
The Earl of Oxford spent most of his wealth on frivolities
like clothes, rapiers, daggers.
We know that he abandoned his wife and went to Venice,
took up with a courtesan and a choirboy at the same time.
He even brought the choirboy home with him. So he was versatile, we know that.
He was a particularly notorious young man.
When he was 17, in the garden at Burghley's house,
the Earl of Oxford and a tailor named Baynam
were practising fencing,
and unfortunately Thomas Brinknell, an undercook, entered the garden.
Somehow Oxford's rapier ended up in Brinknell's thigh.
And what happens then? Was he all right?
There was an inquest. Did the guy die?
He actually dies of this incident. Dies? Yes.
From a wound in the thigh.
After that, what I want to know is more about the wretched Thomas Brinknell.
Here is Burghley, this great house,
humming like a factory
with all these different kinds of people within it,
and here we've got one who isn't one of the portraits in the gallery
or one of the figures in history,
just someone working away, trying to make the sauce for lunch,
and suddenly he's dead.
So what happened at the inquest, I wonder?
This is a copy of the coroner's report.
'On the 23rd day of July, 1567, between 7 and 8 in the evening,
Edward, Earl of Oxford, and Edward Baynam, tailor,
were together in the back yard of the residence of Sir William Cecil,
meaning no harm to anyone.' Hm...
'Each had a sword and together they meant to play at the science of defence.'
Not sure how much we believe any of this!
'Along came Thomas Brinknell, drunk,
and deceived by incitement of the devil,
rushed upon the point of the Earl's sword,
worth 12 pence...' A rather unworthy detail.
'..And pierced himself in the thigh
and gave to himself a mortal wound four inches deep
and an inch wide.
This to the exclusion of all other explanations
was the way he feloniously and wilfully slew himself.'
I can't help but feel this is a rather partisan view. I think so.
That's extraordinary.
We are being asked to believe
that Brinknell killed himself or committed suicide. Yes.
Do we know any more about Brinknell?
Is there any more information about who he was and where he came from.
Yes, we do have some more. Can I look at those? Is that all right?
Indeed, yes. We've got them on microfilm.
This makes me nostalgic because my grandmother had handwriting just like this.
I could never read a word of it.
We're looking at the parish register of the parish of St Martin in the Fields.
Here we've got the marriage of Thomas Brinknell and Agnes Harris.
It's on the eighth day of August.
We know it's 1563, because the year is written on the month below.
So they had... just short of four years being married. Yes.
So was there a child? Do we know if there was a child?
Yes, we do. Yes.
Here we are. We're in November 1567
in the burials section.
There was another tragedy.
John Brinknell, a christened child,
died within the first month.
Christened and buried.
So a christened child died within the first month? Yes, that's right.
I didn't know that. On the 7th of November.
So this is almost exactly the same moment as he was murdered?
That's right, yes. It was a posthumous baby.
Yes. The father has already been killed.
But if we wind back two pages...
I can't bear it! Getting worse, isn't it?
We're now in July 1567.
What you're not seeing here is the burial of Thomas Brinknell.
Because he's a suicide, and so buried in unhallowed ground. Yes.
With all the attendant shame, and also the property was forfeit.
All his property was forfeit? Indeed, yes.
So she loses... Her husband is murdered,
her son is born and dies,
and she's been stripped of all her property. Yes.
And this is all done
to avoid besmirching the reputation of Lord Oxford! It looks like it, yes.
Dearie me. I'm not much of a revolutionary,
but every now and then you do see their point. Yes.
And she didn't marry again, some lovely scrumptious cook
who was handsome and senior? Sadly, no.
What I find hard to accept is the cruelty of it.
I don't think Oxford meant to kill Brinknell.
I think he was drunk, he was fooling around, he got angry.
If he'd meant to kill him, he wouldn't have stabbed the leg. Maybe it WAS an accident,
but why didn't they go with that?
Why did they have to go on this ludicrous story
of him committing suicide by running onto Oxford's sword?
And you think of that pregnant widow.
And they just took everything she had
and blackened his name and ruined the lives of his families.
I understand realpolitik, I do,
but that was savage.
Edward de Vere not only got off scot-free,
Burghley gave him the hand of his eldest daughter Anne in marriage.
Unsurprisingly, they had a pretty rocky time of it.
And now for a very different question.
If you're a buxom housemaid,
how did you deal with the unwanted attentions of a wild Italian drunk?
He was always in debt, drunk, disorderly, unreliable.
Quite hard for her working here
to know there was a six-breasted version of her on the ceiling!
I'm on the hunt for stories
hidden within the walls of Burghley,
one of the very greatest Elizabethan houses.
These days there are plenty of weddings at Burghley.
Nearly every week a happy couple celebrates their vows
in this marvellously romantic spot.
This is a wonderful place for a wedding
and I'm sure the bride is thrilled with her choice.
But would she be quite so thrilled if she was told she had to live here?
This picture is of Henry Cecil,
the 10th Earl of Exeter,
with his second wife and their daughter Sophia.
Painted by Lawrence in 1795,
it's a tender, almost modern image,
a unusual pose for the time.
In fact, it was a very unusual marriage.
Her name was Sarah Hoggins.
She was the daughter of a farmer.
It was the 'ultimate local girl makes good' story, really.
But it's difficult to understand how it could have happened in that era,
when aristocratic marriage was as tightly controlled
as something in a laboratory.
And I want to get to the bottom of it.
The story begins in a remote Shropshire village in July of 1789
when a stranger called John Jones arrives in the village.
Apparently the villagers think he's a highwayman
because he was receiving random sums of money from no apparent source.
Now they would have thought he was a drug dealer,
but I think the difference is that a highwayman
had a certain romance attached to them, which drug dealers don't.
So he was just living there with money, this John Jones? Yes.
Let's go in.
John Jones was really Henry Cecil, the heir to Burghley,
who had abandoned his aristocratic life
when he learned that his first wife Emma was unfaithful.
So we have a letter from John Jones.
This is actually from him.
It's girlie writing paper, isn't it? Very standard for the time.
Was it? Looks like My Little Pony!
'As I was undressing to go to bed,
Emma came suddenly into my room, apparently frantic,
and related to me in a broken and almost incoherent discourse
that she had been unfaithful to my bed
and that she had been attached for five years.'
So he has discovered that his wife has been unfaithful to him.
Yes, with the local curate.
With a curate? That's a bit desperate.
So what happens then?
He's gone off to Shropshire. He's changed his name
and he's passing absolutely incognito in the village.
He was sort of playing hooky on his own real life. Yes.
This is where the story gets a little more complicated.
Perhaps you'd like to look at that.
Here we are.
John Jones of this parish, and Sarah Hoggins of this parish,
married in this church on the 13th day of April
in the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety.
Well, surely he can't possibly have got a divorce in that time.
He hadn't. So this is a bigamous marriage! It is.
I feel rather sorry for Sarah Hoggins now. Yes.
He knew he was taking a completely innocent young woman
and turning her into his mistress. Effectively, yes.
It's not very fragrant, that bit, is it? We better pass over it!
Perhaps we should.
So there he was, living a blissful bigamous fantasy life as John Jones.
But his uncle was growing older
and his inheritance was looming.
Then Sarah became pregnant
and it was up to Henry to decide whether the child would be his heir
or his bastard.
His divorce had been secured,
so now he married Sarah again.
It was time to go back to reality.
That means presenting her to his family.
The story goes, he brought her here, she still hadn't met any of them,
she sees the house and says, 'Oh, my word, we'll get in trouble for trespassing.
Whose house is this?'
And he says, 'We're not in trouble, my dear. It's yours.'
Astonishment was hardly the word.
She was stunned.
She'd only ever had one servant. Now there were more than 50.
And as for the house, 100 rooms, 200...
Nobody even knew how many.
Society was unforgiving.
One contemporary, the Comtesse de Boigne,
was especially cruel in her dismissal.
'Though the chief beauty of her village,
when transported to another environment,
she lost her confidence and became ridiculous.'
The Earl was vexed and irritation was followed by embarrassment.
I'm afraid Sarah's life at Burghley must have been a nightmare.
It was a minefield of small failures...
Which knife to pick up? Which fork? Which glass to use?
If she wanted water, did she pour it herself? Did she ask the footman?
And she could not break herself of the habit
of addressing great ladies as 'ma'am'.
And that's not the worst of it.
This is Miss Hauchecorne, the governess.
A rather bitchy society rumour at the time
was that she had been hired to rescue the children from their mother's inadequacies.
Poor Sarah.
She didn't have to put up with it for long.
She only had four years at Burghley before she died,
probably from opium poisoning which she'd taken
for the pain of giving birth to her last child -
further proof, if we needed it,
that these houses are not only palaces of glory and beauty,
they can also be tyrannical masters
that suck the life out of you.
The current lady of the house is Miranda Rock,
a granddaughter of the 6th Marquess of Exeter.
I want her to tell me the secrets of what is known as the Heaven Room,
painted by the Italian artist Antonio Verrio.
The centrepiece of the room is the scene of Mars and Venus
caught in flagrante on the bed
by Vulcan, her husband.
I might have been a little concerned about the choice of subject!
The Heaven Room, it seems slightly odd to name it that.
I suppose it depends on your perspective.
And do we find the 5th Earl and his family among these faces?
Presumably that's not the Countess?
I don't imagine she would have agreed to that!
Do we know any of the other portraits?
There's Verrio himself, in Vulcan's forge, among the Cyclops.
The bald guy? The bald guy, sketching, yeah.
I feel an immediate sympathy with him.
Do we know anything about him, what he was like as a man?
Yes, we do. He was a complete rogue.
He was always in debt, drunk, disorderly, never paid his bills.
We know that he was tempestuous and extravagant, unreliable...
He's done all these ceilings along there, and this room and the staircase.
How long was he here? He came and went, but about ten years.
Family legend has it that Verrio liked to slip in mischievous portraits of the household
as his cavorting gods and goddesses.
We know there's at least one portrait of a servant
on the ceiling in this room.
And then above us, up here, is the figure of Ceres, or Plenty,
surrounded by loaves and fowls,
with six breasts. Oh...
From quite early on, that is documented as being a housemaid
or someone who worked here,
whom Verrio had a relationship with and fell out spectacularly.
And there she is, depicted with six breasts on the ceiling for evermore.
It's rather hard for her working here
to know there was a six-breasted version of her on the ceiling,
and then having to come in and do the fire.
With an enormous cardigan! Yes.
It's extraordinary, really.
I'm rather captivated by this woman on the ceiling,
so cruelly lampooned for giving Verrio the cold shoulder.
I wouldn't mind learning a bit more about him and the wild behaviour.
He must have driven the Cecile mad!
I wonder what the house archive might reveal.
This is a bill. Fabulous!
This is Mr Varrow's bill.
Mr Varrow's bill!
This is Signor Verrio's bill. Exactly.
And here... He always seemed to have a bottle. 12 bottles of claret,
six bottles of Canary.
He does eat. A breast and a neck of lamb.
There are chickens and poulets... Two dozen larks.
He knew how to eat well.
Larks. Was that a great luxury? I should think it was.
What was he paid for one of the rooms?
What would be the going rate for that?
The general rate for the scene was ã200.
The Heaven Room I think was a ã500 contract.
ã500? It's quite good money, isn't it? It's a substantial amount.
So having established that Verrio was obviously completely impossible,
do we know more about this woman that he has revenged himself on
in the ceiling? Do we have any idea who it is?
Well, there are possibilities. This document gives us clues.
This is a wonderful thing.
This is an inventory, a record of everything that was in the house.
What puts us on the track of the servant girls...
Oh, and all the servants in kitchens and... The little rooms.
And here.
Goody Rudkin's room.
A bedstead, a feather bed,
a bolster, a sideboard, which could mean just a small table,
and four stools.
Why do we think Goody is the one in the ceiling?
Do we have anything to link her to Verrio?
One little scrap did turn up when going through the Verrio papers.
You'll see it's a bill from... Miss Rudkin's bill. Indeed.
And guess what it's for?
Ale?
I'm not quite sure how this ties in.
I think she must have been the kind of house brewer.
I don't think now
that she was necessarily being punished
for turning down a pass.
I think she was being punished
for not letting him have enough ale.
This is a man who wanted all the ale he could get his hands on
and she may have thought he'd had enough.
Because that solves why he makes her the Goddess of Plenty!
It's a good idea. With all the bosoms.
It's a joke about the fact that she hasn't been plentiful enough!
I'm sure that's it, you know. It's a good idea.
So I've discovered Goody's job and, I suspect, her determined character.
And the contents of her room seem quite substantial.
A feather bed, a rug, four stools.
Perhaps she sat up playing cards with her friends.
But there may be more clues to her story elsewhere.
Unbelievable! This is like Paris Hilton!
He's never out of the papers!
We turn up some more proof that these great houses
hold the history of all of us.
Do you know her connection to this house? No. No, we don't.
Well, you're going to find out!
This is Burghley House in Lincolnshire,
for 500 years the home of a noble family and their servants,
each with their own story to tell.
I've been trying to find descendants of the servants who worked here
and I'm on the trail of Goody Rudkin, this woman on the ceiling,
so cruelly lampooned for giving Verrio the cold shoulder.
Some families stay in an area for generations,
less so now, of course, but it's possible we might turn up some real live Rudkins.
I've come to the local town, Stamford,
to see if the name rings any bells.
What name is it? The name's Rudkin.
But I haven't thought to end up out the back of a council roads depot.
Here we are.
This way. Here's our index cards...
This is where she'd be if we've got any? That's right.
So the name was Rudkin...
Here we are.
Robinson. Roden.
Royal visits.
Rubbins.
Rudkin! Well, well.
Oh, my word!
This is John Rudkin. A gamekeeper for the Honourable William Knowle.
He figures in the Stamford Mercury here...
Look at this. Eight.
This is like Paris Hilton. He's never out of the papers!
I think we've established that she came from a local family that was in service.
That's what we thought, and that is borne out by this.
But I now feel we have to follow up the gamekeeper bit
because I've never seen so many entries! My gosh.
All pretty complicated for a man who can't work a tin opener, but...
Right, here we are.
'John Rudkin, the gamekeeper, has orders to be very vigilant
in detecting and prosecuting all unqualified persons and poachers.'
So this is all about poaching, which in 1823 was a very serious of fence.
So let's see if we can bring up anything about Burghley.
Gamekeepers and Burghley.
Here we are.
The gamekeeper saw the defendant take a leveret from a snare.
This is all poaching again, I suppose.
Wait a minute...
Here we have Burghley again.
This is not about poaching.
'Concealment of birth.
On Wednesday morning at the town hall, Stamford,
before G Cayley Esq, Harriet Clark, dairymaid at Burghley House, Stamford,
was charged with concealing the birth of her child
in a bottle closet...'
That sounds rather uncomfortable.
'..On the 18th of June.
The prisoner, who was undefended,
appeared to feel her position acutely.'
I'm afraid there's a very sad story behind this one.
Before her trial, Harriet was kept at Stamford Jail
in the cells below the town hall.
Hello. Hello. Welcome to the town hall. Very nice to see you.
Come through.
This is very grim. It is grim.
This is great.
Quite frightening if you're on the other side.
Oh, my God! Look at that.
They're shackles from the time when it was a prison.
They would have been used.
Do you think Harriet Clark would have been put into one of these?
Difficult to say, really. A bit gruesome.
What's that? That's the same.
That's the same. Young children were held here as well
for quite small crimes, really -
stealing bread...
I suppose it looks very grim to us.
I don't know if it was so grim for people at the time.
It was very grim. This prison was described as one of the worst in England.
Oh, really? It was described as evil and smelly.
I can think of plenty of places and people that qualify for that.
I think it was bad even at the time. Yeah.
This is extremely grim.
We don't actually know where Harriet Clark was in prison, do we?
No, we don't.
When she came down here and heard the door clang,
she must have thought she'd reached the end.
On Wednesday morning the 4th of July 1884,
Harriet was taken upstairs to the town hall courtroom
and faced her judges.
So these papers presumably tell the story of Harriet Clark.
Yes. These are the court records
that give the stories of all the witnesses called,
who were mostly members of the household.
They talked to Julia Hicks... The housekeeper? The housekeeper.
'I had noticed that Harriet's figure was rather stouter than it should be
for some time before.
About five or six weeks ago, I said to her,
"Are you a married person?"'
She didn't have a word for describing,
or not a polite word that could be repeated in court, for describing that state of being -
pregnant without a husband.
'She replied, "No, it is my figure."'
She would have been the person who would have really been in charge of morals amongst the maids.
So she's in a bit of a sticky position here
because of course there's been a lapse on her watch.
So who have we got next now?
Now we've got John Woods, who was the house porter.
'About a quarter to eight in the morning of the 18th of June instant,
I saw Harriet Clark go into a bottle house.
She was carrying a bundle. I saw her come out two or three minutes afterwards.
She had no bundle with her then."
John Woods.'
Presumably a bottle house was a kind of store or something, was it?
It must have been in a courtyard or something just off the main house.
She's not thinking straight, is she? No. Absolutely.
So then we hear from the doctor, Dr Newman.
'I went Burghley House and saw a bundle in Mrs Hicks's room.
I opened the bundle and found it to contain the dead body
of a male child.
There were no marks of external violence.'
We're not saying she killed it, are we?
Is that part of it?
That's what the trial was trying to ascertain.
If she had killed the child,
that would have been treated as a murder
and could carry the death penalty.
'I attribute the death of the child
to these conditions consequent upon delivery,
in other words, death from natural causes. William Newman.'
Terribly sad testimony, that,
that we have that image of her giving birth by herself.
It's clear the servants knew what was in the bundle.
They knew she wasn't stealing butter.
So what else do we have in the way of...
Just a comment from Harriet Clark herself.
'I have nothing to say.'
My eyes absolutely fill at the thought of this.
The point is, the crime was not killing a child.
That's right. And that's absolutely crucial
because this is the historical moment
where there was a wave of scandals around the practice of baby farming,
as it was called - people who had taken babies in
and then had no particular incentive to keep them alive,
so allowed them to die and perhaps even claimed insurance premiums after their death.
So there was a lot of concern.
As a result you have the founding, just a year before this case,
of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
which still operates today. In 1883. That's right, yeah.
It's so recent. My grandmother was born in 1882.
She was already a toddler when this was going on.
She only died in 1982.
It's virtually within living memory!
It is extraordinary, this.
So what else have we got now?
This last line here, 2 CM.
That means she got two calendar months.
Of course it was a lifetime sentence in another way.
So she would have come out of Huntingdon Prison
without a character reference.
And the awful truth is, there was one option open to her.
That's right. There was a strong link between people who HAD been domestic servants
and then those who ended up as prostitutes.
So she could have ended up on the streets.
So really by the end of this story, she had a past and no future. That's right.
I found this photograph, five of the maids.
None of these are Harriet Clark, because she was a dairymaid.
These are all housemaids of different types. But they would have known her.
This was the fate every young woman was terrified of.
And of course it did engulf Harriet Clark.
This one looks nice. I bet she was sorry for her.
But that's not the end of Harriet's story. Our research has discovered
what happened to her AFTER prison, which is not at all what I expected.
Hello. How do you do?
How do you do? I'm Julian Fellowes.
Pleased to meet you. Hello. How do you do?
Hello. Welcome. This is Michael.
I understand you've got a photograph with you. Yes.
Oh, it's right here.
Oh, yes.
And do you know her connection to this house? No. No, we don't.
Well, you're going to find out! Come on in.
This is the kitchen which is an absolutely incredible apartment.
In the 1880s there were about 22 servants working in the house,
of whom one was a dairymaid called Harriet Clark.
She would have been bringing in cheese and butter and things.
But her real workplace was not the kitchen. It was the courtyard,
and I'd like to take you and show you.
This is the sort of working world of Harriet.
The house, this is where the laundries were.
That's the dairy over there,
which would have been her main place of operation.
This is the porter's lodge, which played a part in the story.
The point is, Harriet woke up to find she was pregnant.
And one day Harriet came out of the house carrying a bundle.
And she was seen by the porter sitting in the porter's lodge
and she went down those steps to what was called the bottle closet.
So let's go and have a look down there.
So she carried her bundle... Now watch this, it's a bit slippery.
Down here. One's heart bleeds for her,
because obviously the bundle contained a baby. Yes.
It is an extraordinary place.
It's hard to imagine her going through that alone.
So awful.
And knowing how alone she was,
because there was no-one she could appeal to without immediately losing her income and everything else.
But then she's got to come back to bury the... I'm afraid so.
That was her plan, I'm sure, to come back under cover of darkness.
Anyway she needed to hide it.
And so she brought it down here.
This is very likely where she brought the bundle...
and hid it.
But of course she was in fact spotted
and taken up and put on trial.
And I am afraid, I assume that she was probably headed for destitution
and probably prostitution.
But I was wrong.
And in fact we DO find her quite shortly after coming out of prison
working as a charwoman. As you know, it was hard work for not much money,
but nevertheless, she married and she had two children -
her elder daughter Mary, who in fact died of meningitis,
but she had a younger daughter Lily.
And that's where you come in!
You've got the picture there...
and Lily is your mother,
which means that you're Harriet's granddaughter. Yes.
It's wonderful, that, isn't it? I love that.
It's all a mystery to us as well.
We never knew anything about it. We never knew anything about this.
And your mother never gave you a clue? Not a clue.
She would never tell me anything about her. Extraordinary, really.
Well, it's a good story,
with a rather British happy ending. Yes. A modestly happy ending!
Next time I'm at Goodwood in Sussex, home of the Dukes of Richmond
who threw the most famous ball in our history
and gave house parties for the King of England.
Subtitles by MemoryOnSmells http://UKsubtitles.ru.