Farnborough Abbey
We recently have been doing some business with Farnborough Abbey which is one of those places which would be a fantastic find for any movie location scout. Subterranean passageways, secret basement tomb chapels, ancient and priceless treasures; Harry Potter could have done stuff here. Ditto, the appalling Da Vinci Code. Only a stones throw from Farnborough Town Centre (twinned with Snoozeville) the commuters who populate this deeply inoffensive townlet would largely never guess what a remarkable gothic anachronism the Abbey is.
Set in acres of secluded real estate, worth who knows what, with flocks of trained tame sheep, a handful of Benedictine Monks and the tombs of the last Emperor Napoleon of France, his Empress wife and his Prince son. Allegedly, the French want the Emperor’s body back but the monks won’t let them. Yes, I know, it is bonkers.
Napoleon the Third, of Farnborough, whilst disparaged by some historians, is nonetheless a significant figure. If his schemes had gone differently, Mexico would have been a vassal state of France, slavery would have endured in the USA, Russia would have crumbled into nothingness and Germany as we know it (along with World War 1 and 2) would not have happened. However, pretty much everything he tried to do with his army failed. However, he did create modern France and re-design the whole of Paris. Exiled after losing the Franco Prussian War he died during a botched experimental kidney stone operation. His only child, Prince Louis Napoleon died soon after, speared 16 times whilst fighting for the British in the Zulu wars. Mum, the Empress, built the Abbey as a mausoleum in which to grieve for her dead menfolk and as a uber French home-from-home. She outlived her son by 41 years, which isn’t what you want. The last of the imported French monks, Dom Zerr, died in 1956.
