Ask any of the very knowledgeable guides at Sulgrave Manor who owns the place, and they will answer: “You do.” Then they will explain that you share it with not only every other Briton alive today but also with every American. For the Manor is in a way a celebration of Britain’s “special relationship” with USA — as the Union Flag and the Stars and Stripes flying alongside each other over the lawn bear witness.

It’s a lovely place all right, in an area sometimes called Banburyshire: in Northamptonshire, in fact, but still so close to Oxfordshire as to have an OX postcode; a region so rural that until the late 1950s it had no electricity.

When my wife Anne and I arrived there last Thursday, we found members of a local club playing croquet in front of the house, and we felt we had reached the very heart of England and Englishness. It was intriguing, therefore, to see the Stars and Stripes repeated in the coat of arms over the front door on the Tudor porch, which was built in 1539.

For the manor, of course, once belonged to the ancestors of the first US president George Washington (1732-1799), and a charity, established for the purpose, bought it in 1914 on behalf of all of us. The purchase commemorated Washington’s rural English roots and at the same time marked 100 years of peace between the two nations — the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war of 1812, having been signed in 1814.

In truth, the connection to George Washington is at best described as remote but interesting. He was the great-grandson of John Washington (1632-1677) who emigrated to Virginia in 1656. And this John, who came from a cadet branch of the family, was himself the great-great-grandson of the builder of Sulgrave Manor, Lawrence Washington (1500-1583). Remote indeed: how many of us can even give the surnames of our 16 great-great-grandparents? All the same, there the connection is, however slight, and it would be churlish to carp.

The central part of the house dates from the 16th century and is furnished entirely with things dating from that period; there is even a painting of President Washington, one of a series, similar to the portrait of him that adorns every dollar bill. And outside in the Colonial Garden there are tobacco plants to remind you that George Washington made his fortune from that particular weed, using — it cannot be denied — slave labour.

Strange to think, though, that during the time that Lawrence Washington lived in the house the New World had only recently been discovered. To him, his wife Anne Pargiter from nearby Greatworth and their 11 children it must have seemed as exotic as Outer Space now seems to us; unknown but full of opportunities which, at that time, were being mainly exploited by Spaniards and Portuguese. Names such as Florida (land of flowers), and Brazil (named after a kind of wood) might have been familiar to them, but they could not possibly have imagined that one day both a capital city and a state would bear their family name.

Lawrence Washington was a successful wool merchant who had himself emigrated from County Durham where the senior branch of the family owned Washington Old Hall. He was a cousin of the Spencers, ancestors of Princess Diana and owners of the two nearby great houses of Althorp and Wormleighton; and he bought Sulgrave, formerly the property of Northampton Priory, for £321.14s.10d, from Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries.

He was keen to hang on to it, too, and in this context one story — or perhaps legend — that refuses to go away is the one about how, during the reign of Mary I, the Washington family gave shelter to the Queen’s sister Princess Elizabeth who — so the story goes — tried to escape from Woodstock where she was held captive. The tale is the subject of Cynthia Harnett’s book Stars of Fortune, published in 1956.