From the Telegraph

Knole, near Sevenoaks in Kent, was established in the mid 15th century and requisitioned in 1538 from Thomas Cramner by Henry VIII, who in his overbearing kingly way had taken a liking to it. Horace Walpole, too, was impressed, describing the manor house’s “beautiful, decent simplicity which charms one”. In the 17th century, the house was transformed by the Sackville family from a medieval archbishop’s palace into a Renaissance mansion, complete with old masters bought on various grand tours. Vita Sackville-West – author and inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando – loved Knole, writing that it “has a deep inward gaiety of some very old woman, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go…It is above all an English home. It has the tone of England.”