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If there is a house more beautiful than Broughton Castle, it is hard to imagine.
This ancient building, near Banbury – a medieval hall with a Tudor mansion wrapped around it, on a moated island – has been the home of the Fiennes family since 1447. It smells a bit like a cathedral.
Today, its custodian is Martin Fiennes, 22nd Baron Saye and Sele. While he has adopted the title, following his father Nathaniel Fiennes, 21st Baron Saye and Sele’s death, aged 103, in 2024, he prefers to be called Martin. “I am Lord Saye and I’m very proud of it; I just don’t use it,” he says.
Fiennes knows everything about Broughton. In the chapel, consecrated in 1331, he admires the “fixed top altar – in most Anglican churches the altar is away from the back wall and so this is idolatrous Catholic stuff, which because we’re a sound Protestant family nobody ever smashed up.”
Up in the council chamber, “the room which hath no ears,” used by parliamentarians plotting against Charles I, lies a row of heavy cannonballs which “shock you with the intensity”.
In the great hall, featuring a tribute to his late mother, Mariette, who died in April, I admire the 1760s pendant ceiling. “The one upstairs is even better,” says Fiennes. “This is alright.”
Broughton was built by Sir John de Broughton in 1306, whose family sold it to William of Wykeham, founder of Winchester College, in 1377. From there, the house descended through a series of Twisletons, Wykehams and Fienneses.
The Fienneses came from outside Calais, first with William the Conqueror and then with Eleanor of Castile, and settled in Kent.
James Fiennes, who lived at Knole, was made 1st Baron Saye and Sele in 1447, taking “Sele” from a nearby hamlet and “Saye” from Geoffrey de Say, “the ancestor who signed Magna Carta”. In the mid-15th century, Sir William Fiennes married Margaret Wykeham, and then, in 1649, the Cromwellian colonel John Twisleton married Elizabeth Fiennes.
Surnames varied until the Venerable Frederick Twisleton succeeded as 16th Baron Saye and Sele in 1847 and changed the family name to Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. This triple barrelling was considered overkill by Fiennes’s father, who changed it by deed poll in 1965.
Although Broughton is startlingly lovely, it hasn’t always been an idyll.
In September 1968, Fiennes’s younger brother Thomas died aged two, shortly followed by his paternal grandparents, “so Dad lost his son and two parents in the space of six weeks”. Soon after, the family moved to Broughton, where “nothing had been done since 1890 – my grandparents were immune to the cold”.
With them came a whirlwind in the form of Richard, Fiennes’s older brother, who had developed epilepsy as an infant. “Sometimes people who have had epilepsy when they’re young grow out of it, but he had status epilepticus – fits that would last for 24 hours.”
When Richard was at Broughton, “there was quite a lot of violence around the place,” says Fiennes. “He had a tough time.”
Broughton performed a uniquely supportive role during this period. One day, Nathaniel Saye and Sele was seen outside the house, “his right arm stretched out, palm pressed flat against a buttress, his head dropped”, as Fiennes’s other brother William describes in his 2009 memoir The Music Room. When asked what he was doing, “he said he was asking the house for some of its strength”.
As a result of Richard’s ill health, Fiennes knew as a teenager that he would one day take on Broughton, “but it didn’t enter my thinking, not remotely”.
Richard died in 2001, aged 41. “He would have loved the book, he would have been so proud.” He stands up and fetches Richard’s beloved Leeds United mug from a kitchen cupboard.
Meanwhile, the Saye and Sele still had Broughton to manage. After the war, during which he had been one of the first to witness the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Nathaniel Saye and Sele trained as a land agent and, alongside his day job, embarked upon a 15-year restoration project at Broughton.
In 1988, in the midst of this, Nicholas Ridley, then environment secretary, declared that aristocrats who could not keep their houses should give them up to people who could. Interviewed soon after, Nathaniel Saye and Sele asked: “Do you think that by removing us and installing a nouveau riche family, the heritage would be maintained in the way we maintain it?”
When Mariette died, Fiennes bridled at mention of this in her obituary. “Dad would have been horrified at that being taken out of context – ‘nouveau riche’ today means something different to what he meant in the 1980s.”
Both he and his father agreed, he says, that new money is good for big houses. “It’s lovely if [families like ours] can afford it, but if they can’t, get someone in who can.”
His father, he says, would have admired the efforts of the businessman Sir Stephen Hester and his wife Suzy at Broughton Grange. “All you need is money, passion and commitment. Having the capital resources outweighs being posh.”
Nevertheless, he hugely admires his parents’ efforts. “They had an incredible marriage, for 66 years, and would sit holding hands watching the telly when he was 100.”
The house is full of pictures of his father – some by his twin sister Susannah, an artist. “I think he did about two things in his life that weren’t perfect. He was one of those people who would write a thank-you letter within 24 hours. I am the opposite – in my life, I have carried skeletons with me of letters not written.”
After a varied career – working on trade shows, running amusement arcades, and then in venture capital – Fiennes has retired to do “full-time unpaid work” on Broughton, having moved into the house in 2014.
With his former wife, he has three sons under 30, the second of whom, Ned, a soldier, is likely to take on Broughton. “The older two had a chat and agreed that Ned would do it. Half the fun of living in this place is sharing your toy with other people. It’s no different from having an Action Man when you were eight.”
The house is open Wednesdays, Sundays and bank holiday Monday afternoons from April to September. It’s a big ask. “Boy, is that marriage crowded,” he says. “The house is a person too.” (Fiennes is getting married in September; his fiancée, he says, is “up for it”).
Roughly 10,000 people visit a year. “In an ideal world we’d be 20,000 – I’d like to double or triple the number who come to the garden,” he says.
There are few weddings – he describes one particular experience as “one of the most stressful two weeks of my life”. But Broughton has starred in several films and series, including Shakespeare in Love, Jane Eyre and Wolf Hall. “When the crews leave, the house says to you, ‘I’m bruised’. It feels it.”
It has been 19 months since Fiennes became Lord Saye and Sele; he urges me not to write that name on my thank-you letter.
“It’s the 21st century. These things are of great historic interest, but they don’t matter. It’s decoration – the sir this, the Lord that. It’s frills. I enjoy all the frills, including the posho frills. But nobody will ever call me ‘m’lord’.”
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