Madresfield: The Real Brideshead By Jane Mulvagh Doubleday, 383pp. £20EVELYN WAUGH WAS a consummate literary stylist and a devoted student of aristocratic habits and habitats. At Oxford, successfully insinuating himself into the company of wealthy upper-class undergraduate aesthetes, he observed a high incidence of homosexuality and alcoholism, and became involved himself in drunken love affairs with men.
After coming down from the university, he adjusted his sexual orientation to orthodoxy, but romantic memories lingered and inspired the creation of the most memorable character of all his novels, Lord Sebastian Flyte, the charming, gay, young dipsomaniac with teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited, who favoured a diet of plovers' eggs and champagne. In the guise of Charles Ryder, Waugh wrote of his own infatuation with elegant grandees, no matter how effete, and the grandeur of their homes.
Jane Mulvagh, who read history at Cambridge, has assiduously researched and written the fascinating story of the Lygons, an ancient English family, and Madresfield Court, their Worcestershire manor house, and of how Waugh wrote about them on sociological field trips while enjoying intimate freeloading of the premier class. With the movie Brideshead Revisited, starring Emma Thompson, due later this year, the timing of Mulvagh's book couldn't be better.
The Lygons's ancestral home is situated in tranquil rural seclusion between the River Severn and the Malvern Hills, pleasantly close to the Cotswolds, in a part of England that has not yet suffered the worst depredations of progress. The name of the 12th-century estate is derived from the Old English maederesfeld, which means "mower's field". In other words, it was originally the name of a building site, rather than the dwelling that was built on it. As Mulvagh points out, the region has always "sheltered a conservative squirearchy, passionate ruralists and those wishing to remain far from the crowd".
The Lygons for centuries fitted in this category of privileged recluses, but elevation to the peerage early in the 19th century made their connections more urban, more cosmopolitan. The eight Earls Beauchamp played increasingly active parts in social and political intercourse in London and beyond.
Concentration on the family's domestic life, however, is what makes the book luxuriously beguiling. Mulvagh describes the evolution of Madresfield from its first wattle-and-daub simplicity to the culminant extraordinary architectural hybrid, "a hotchpotch of styles, the accretions of each generation," part Tudor, part Gothic, with its steeple, domes, turrets and moat, encompassing 160 rooms, from the cosy little nursery, where Waugh wrote much of Brideshead, to a banqueting hall of baronial dimensions.
For almost 1,000 years, the Lygons have ensured continuity of ownership of their property by sound management and judicious marriages, one of which eventually qualified a William Lygon (there was a series of Williams), son of Reginald Pindar Lygon, to inherit, in 1798, from William Jennens the Miser, of Suffolk, the richest commoner in England, the equivalent in today's terms of £40 million. The Lygons were then able to extend again the manor house and its gardens, to move from one London house to a bigger and more fashionable one, now the premises of the London Library, and, in 1806, to acquire the title of Baron Beauchamp of Powick, reviving a medieval baronetcy, for £800. They later got their earldom for £10,000. Paying cash for honours was not reprehensible at that time, let alone criminal.
Mulvagh guides the reader to tour Madresfield's most important rooms, one by one, including what may be regarded as the soul of the establishment, the Muniment Room, containing 12,000 documents, such as contracts, diaries and letters, dating from the time of Henry I, the son of William the Conqueror, to which the author was given unrestricted access.
She has provided an efficient scholarly apparatus to support all her descriptions of architecture, decor, furniture and works of art - a four-page family tree of 28 generations with three stop-gap female grafts, a bibliography, notes and index. Nick Barlow and Arthur Pickett have contributed exceptionally good colour photographs of the building, inside and out. There is a particularly fine shot of the intricate facade viewed from the moat and a close-up of a chapel fresco that exemplifies the arts and crafts movement of the 19th century - a mural that Waugh depicts in detail in Brideshead.
Mulvagh's book reaches a surprising climax in the melodrama of the Seventh Earl's banishment from England when homosexual practices were illegal. He had a long way to fall, having been a Knight of the Garter, a cabinet minister under Herbert Asquith and Lloyd George and a confidant of King George V. Waugh's Marquess Marchmain (note the superior rank) is estranged from his wife and goes into voluntary exile for the less scandalous misdemeanour of adultery, but the disruption is similar, and poor, befuddled Sebastian also takes flight.
The realities of Madresfield and the inventions of Brideshead are so intimately interlinked that it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Prof David Cannadine, who suggested and supervised Jane Mulvagh's whole enterprise, bestows his imprimatur on it in an introduction to what he calls Brideshead Re-Revisited.
• Patrick Skene Catling is an author