Guidebook: Audley End. 2nd (revised) Edition
‘The rooms are high and hung with beautiful tapestries: the beds amply decorated with golden velvet and silk bed hangings and covers.’From the account of the visit of Johann Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, to Audley End, September 1613Built between about 1605 and 1614 by Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk, Audley End was one of the greatest houses of Jacobean England. This immense ‘palace’ prompted James I to quip that, though it was ‘too big for a king … it might suit a Lord Treasurer’. The house gradually declined in scale over subsequent centuries, and was altered many times. Today, visitors to Audley End can see interiors and gardens reflecting its generations of owners. In the early 19th century the 3rd Lord Braybrooke and his wife created a nursery for their eight children on the top floor of the south wing. This revised second edition of the guidebook includes a new section on these rooms, now open to the public for the first time, as well as new features on the Braybrooke’s children and the original 19th-century dolls’ house. The re-dressed rooms of the 19th-century apartment are captured in atmospheric new site photography, and new features focus on Audley End’s impressive paintings and natural history collections. This fully revised guidebook offers a complete tour and history of Audley End house and gardens. A new reconstruction drawing of the Jacobean house helps visitors to visualise its original scale, and the story of the house and gardens is brought to life with new photography, historic images and contemporary eye-witness accounts.