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Family traditions about English country houses are often despised by art historians, but they have a habit of being based on fact, however long forgotten. The attribution of a certain wing to a certain architect has more than once been verified by the rediscovery of his original drawings, framed in passe-partout, in a remote servants’ lavatory. Often, as in the case of Cliveden, the evidence is far closer at hand but it has for one reason or another been overlooked. In about 1905, twelve years after buying Cliveden and embarking on a scheme of major alterations to the house and garden, William Waldorf Astor had all the surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural drawings, garden designs, engravings and manuscripts to do with the building bound in a large album for safe keeping.

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