Talk about Romantic Decay. Some of us remember Great Tew, possibly the prettiest village in Oxfordshire, some 30 years ago when many of the cottages had 17th-century timbers (some still covered in bark) poking through their rotting thatch, and parishioners in flat caps took turns to serve warm beer through a hatch in the Falkland Arms pub, because the Lord of the Manor was tardy about appointing a full-time publican.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Great Tew’s first benefactor, the undeniably Romantic Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, who before the Civil War used to gather around him at Great Tew all the wisest and cleverest people of his age to discuss art, classics, religion, beauty and, of course, politics.

Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon — Chancellor of Oxford University and, indeed, Lord Chancellor of England — wrote in hisbest-selling account of the English Civil War, The History of the Rebellion: “In this time, his house being within ten miles of Oxford [in fact Great Tew is a little further] then contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that university; who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgement in him, so infinite a fancy bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in any thing, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college in purer air.”

He added: “Nor did the lord of the house know of their coming or going, nor who were in the his house, till he came to dinner or supper, where all still met; otherwise, there was no troublesome ceremony or constraint, to forbid men to come to the house, or to make them weary of staying there; so that many came thither to study in a better air, finding all the books they could desire in his library, and all the persons together, whose company they could wish, and not find in any other society.”

Such lovely prose, no wonder the proceeds of the book funded the building of Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building in Broad Street, Oxford.

But the point here is that all these clever, rational people wanted one thing only: that peace should prevail in Britain — and yet their efforts came to nothing and Civil War broke out.

At the first battle of Newbury on September 20, 1643, Lord Falkland declared: “he was weary of the times and foresaw much misery to his own country and did believe he should be out of it ere night”.

Which he was. He rode out on the Royalist side and was instantly shot dead.

He had been brought up in Ireland where his father was Lord Deputy and he could afford to keep open house, and to bring all sides together in the worsening political and religious climate of the time, thanks to an inheritance from his grand father, Sir Lawrence Tanfield of Burford.

His house was an earlier one than the great house now standing in Great Tew, and the landscape of the village has been altered by a later landscape gardener, namely John Claudius Loudon.

Great Tew later passed to descendants of steam engineer Matthew Boulton.

It fell into disrepair when reclusive Boulton descendant, Major Robb, decided to guard it against the modern world. Since his death in 1985 it has been largelly restored — though much Romantic Decay may still be found there; even if the place has sprouted a car park, and the pub, sold off by the estate in 1978, has gone gastro.