The parks of Blenheim and Ditchley have been closely connected for the past 400 years or so, since long before either of them contained the great mansions now built upon them. What thoughts, for instance, can have run through the mind of Queen Elizabeth I when she passed through Woodstock in 1592 on her way to visit her jousting champion, Sir Henry Lee at Ditchley?

After all, she had arrived in Woodstock on a previous visit as a prisoner of her half-sister, Mary I, in 1554.

On that occasion she had been kept under close house arrest at the old Royal Palace of Woodstock (which stood just across the bridge from the present Blenheim Palace) and had scratched with a diamond on a window pane: “Much suspected of me, Nothing proved can be, Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.”

But at Ditchley she hunted and caroused with the best of them, being entertained constantly with masques and balls and heavy verses along the lines of “Happy hours, happy day That Eliza came this way”.

She had a particular liking for Oxfordshire and at Ditchley had herself painted standing on a carpet map of England with Oxfordshire between her feet and sunshine before her, clouds and tempests fleeing away behind her. The painting of the Virgin Queen now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Where exactly that old Ditchley House stood in relation to the present mansion, designed by James Gibbs, no one quite knows. But diarist John Evelyn, writing in 1664, said: “It is a low ancient timber house with a pretty bowling green.”

And Oxford historian Thomas Hearne, visiting the house as late as 1717, noticed the date of the Queen’s visit (1592) upon one of the lead drainpipes.

He wrote: “The front on the south side is very pretty considering the method of building at the time.”

Ditchley’s connections with Woodstock cross from fact to fiction too. In Sir Walter Scott’s best-selling book Woodstock, the author takes enough artistic licence to muddle the Elizabethan Sir Henry with his successor and kinsman of the same name who lived there during the English Civil war of the following century. He even transcribes the original Sir Henry’s dog, Bevis, who famously saved his master’s life by sniffing out a potential murderer under the bed, into the later century! But the most famous connection between the two parks comes with England’s bawdiest courtier, John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. He became the Ranger of Woodstock Park and lived much of his later life at High Lodge, the castellated building that may still be seen across the lake from Blenheim’s south front.

Rochester was brought up at Ditchley and educated at Burford Grammar School. His mother, Anne St. John, had married Wilmot, first earl, after the death of her first husband, Sir Francis Lee.

In one of my favourite Oxfordshire history books, A History of Spelsbury, published in 1962, its author Elsie Corbett writes: “Rochester’s life and amusements at court cannot be described in a respectable book like this; indeed they are almost incredible.”

Suffice to say that he married his heiress wife by the simple expedient of kidnapping her — though she seems thereafter to have been reasonably happy with her louche genius of a husband.

The last connection between the two parks came in the Second World War when Prime M inister Churchill, born at Blenheim, used Ditchley as his country retreat.