Boughton in Northamptonshire is an improbable dream of a house. It is an essay in restrained French Classicism that was gently set into the English countryside in the late seventeenth century, encasing an older building (Fig.1). The house was chiefly the creation of the francophile Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu (1638–1709), who served as Charles II’s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV. Its most splendid internal feature is the so-called Grand Apartment, which consists of a parade of impressive state rooms.

A once-in-a-lifetime event, this exhibition spans the century of the greatest grandeur enjoyed by the Mughal Empire, from 1560 to 1660. One of the largest centralised states in Early Modern history, it encompassed most of subcontinental India, far outstripping in size and resources both the contemporary Islamic empires of the Safavids and Ottomans, and in global terms it was rivalled only by Ming China.