The house held other treasures, including a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript, the Codex Leicester, which had been purchased in 1717.
(The illustriousness of the Coke family dates to the sixteenth century, when Sir Edward Coke, a celebrated jurist and legal scholar, served as attorney general to Queen Elizabeth I.) The Cokes even had a marble hall of sorts: Holkham’s front door leads to a grand interior modelled on Roman temples, with a domed, coffered ceiling supported by pink-veined columns and a stone staircase ascending to a gilded reception room known as the Saloon. An intergenerational favorite was the aria “I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,” from the 1843 Irish opera “The Bohemian Girl,” in which the soprano imagines having “riches too great to count,” and boasting “of a high ancestral name.” It was a joke between grandfather and granddaughter, given that they actually possessed a high ancestral name. His eldest granddaughter, Anne, who was born in 1932, loved listening with him.
The fourth Earl used to play classical-music recordings on it. In the early twentieth century, the long gallery was equipped with a more modern object: a gramophone. In this space, Coke-who was ennobled as the Earl of Leicester in 1744, and whose name, like that of his descendants, is pronounced “cook”-displayed acquisitions from his Grand Tour, including a statue of Diana that had reputedly once belonged to Cicero. Commissioned by a wealthy landowner named Thomas Coke, the house was designed according to strict Palladian principles, and consists of four symmetrical wings arranged around a central core, which contains a long gallery. Holkham Hall, an austere eighteenth-century sandstone mansion that is among the most spectacularly situated of England’s stately homes, was built just south of the dune-edged beaches of Norfolk, in a park that extends for three thousand acres and encompasses woodland, rolling greensward, and an ornamental lake.
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