A family's love of their gothic home has inspired a new drama series set in the English Civil War.

Martine Brant and her novelist husband Michael Stewart have always maintained that they rescued Wytham Abbey as a family home when they acquired it from Oxford University in the early 1990s.

Now it seems the abbey has played a key role in delivering her first television project, The Devil’s Whore, a four-part historical drama being shown on Channel 4, starting tomorrow.

She co-wrote the £7m series with Pete Flannery, creator of the series Our Friends In The North.

It has taken her 15 years to bring The Devil’s Whore to television after she first came up with the a story of a free-spirited aristocratic woman caught up in the turmoil of the 1640s.

She said: “We live in a 16th century house just outside Oxford. I found that Oliver Cromwell may well have been here and actually planned the siege of Oxford from this house.

“It has been a tremendous financial burden. But for me the attraction of the house has never been its size or the number of bathrooms.

“It has always been about the layers of history contained within it, and being part of the house’s story.”

Ms Brant was thrilled when the cast, including Dominic West, who plays Cromwell, came to rehearse in Wytham Abbey – although, for cost reasons, filming took place in South Africa, the production team re-creating the Brant home there.

The central character is based on Lady Ann Fanshawe. Ms Brant said: “My husband’s ancestry through his mother goes back to the Fanshawes.

“My three daughters are direct descendents of Lady Ann Fanshawe, who was at Charles I’s court at Christ Church.”

Ms Brant, whose MPhil thesis was on Wicked Women, added: “I wrote my thesis on the gallows speeches of women in the 17the century hanged at Tyburn, often for petty offences.

“Most of them were pitifully misunderstood and persecuted for not conforming to a patriarchal system.”

Her youngest daughter, 15-year-old Miranda, made her acting debut in The Devil’s Whore, playing Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of King Charles I.