WHERE THERE IS no evidence there can be no history. That much is evident. But where there is evidence its interpretation is often controversial; therein lies the fascination of history – especially for Norman who has squared up with verve to some of the most controversial and ambiguous sources. It would therefore seem appropriate that an essay in his honour should attempt to explain, even to reconcile, some of the ambiguities presented by the fabric of a great house. And how felicitous that, in an essay dedicated to one of Suffolk's foremost antiquaries, this house should have been built by Suffolk's greatest Elizabethan son – Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I.

The story of how he came to build at Stiffkey, a small coastal village situated on the north Norfolk coast midway betweenWells and Blakeney, is easily told. By 1568 he was anxious to find a bride for his second son, Nathaniel, then aged twenty-two. After unsuccessful overtures to two parties in Suffolk,2 he seems to have accepted that his son had fallen in love with Anne, the base daughter of Sir Thomas Gresham (brother-in-law of Sir Nicholas) by the Netherlandish wife of one of his household servants. By late July Anne had been naturalised, a certificate granted for their marriage without banns, and the event solemnised. What role Sir Nicholas and Sir Thomas played in this match we do not know, but they contrived to bestow on the couple a miscellaneous group of manors stretching from Combs in mid-Suffolk to Langham-cum-Morston in north Norfolk. These manors had at least one thing in common: their demesnes had been let, which meant that there was no suitable residence for the couple. When, therefore, the principal manor in Stiffkey, a parish adjacent to Morston and Langham, came up for sale with its demesne in hand, Sir Nicholas purchased it. This was a shrewd move since it provided a manor-house which could be rebuilt, began the consolidation of a fragmented estate and, in terms of East Anglian politics, expanded the Bacon influence into north Norfolk.

With unsurpassed eloquence Sir Francis Bacon captures the significance of gardening for the human spirit and proclaims its challenge to artistic creativity. Yet as a garden designer Francis Bacon is an enigmatic figure. The problem arises because the ideal garden which he described in his essay Of Gardens (1625) owes nothing to the garden he created at Gorhambury. As Sir Roy Strong has remarked: ‘his detailed specification for a royal garden is oddly surprising after his own at Gorhambury’. The latter, planned in 1608, was a water-garden which, as will be shown, comprised a series of streams, palisaded ponds and islands which provided a setting for flowers, statues, a rock, a grotto, an arbour and a banqueting house. It has been suggested that he drew inspiration from the water parterres created for Henry IV at Fontainebleau, Gaillon and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, even perhaps from Salomon De Caus, whose work at Richmond and Hatfield may well have coincided with that of Francis at Gorhambury.