Syon House

Long before this riverside estate became one of England's grandest homes, it was a place of imprisonment and tragedy. Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, spent her final desperate months locked within these walls in 1542, praying for mercy that never came. The king had her executed for adultery. Just five years later, his own body would lie here for a single night, his jewelled coffin resting in the very rooms where his wife had wept.

This is Syon House, standing where the Thames curves gently past Brentford, directly across the water from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Built on the ruins of one of England's wealthiest monasteries, dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, it rose as an Italian Renaissance palace in the 1540s. In July 1553, a terrified 15 year old girl named Lady Jane Grey stood in the Long Gallery when powerful men informed her she was now Queen of England. Her reign lasted just nine days before she was arrested and later beheaded.

The Percy family acquired Syon in 1594 and still lives here, making it the last great ancestral estate in the area to remain with its original family. In 1609, mathematician Thomas Harriot made history here by creating the first telescope drawings of the moon, beating Galileo by several months. The spectacular rooms were transformed by architect Robert Adam in the 1760s into the neoclassical masterpiece visitors see now.