The story
Cliveden is primarily a country house, and since the mid-1980s a luxury hotel, set high above the Thames in Buckinghamshire. It belongs to the National Trust, which looks after the gardens and parkland and opens a select part of the house only on limited occasions. The painting people come to find hangs in the Great Hall, beside the chimneypiece. It is John Singer Sargent's 1908 portrait of Nancy Astor, the American-born wife of the politician Waldorf Astor. His father had given them Cliveden as a wedding present two years earlier.
Nancy made the house a famous meeting place for politicians, and in 1919 she became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons. In 1942 the Astors gave Cliveden to the National Trust.
The house she knew is the third on the site. Two earlier ones burned, in 1795 and in 1849, and the architect Charles Barry rebuilt it in 1851 for the Duke of Sutherland. Long before that, on 1 August 1740, the song Rule, Britannia! was first performed in the grounds, at an open-air masque staged for Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was living at Cliveden.
