A N N A L S OF A N O L D M A N O R - H O U S E SU TTON P LACE GU I LDFORD , F R E D E R I C H A R R I S O N I “ New an d Aéridged Edition 10 11110 11 LL ' A M T D MA C M A N N D C O . I , LI I E NEW YOR K : THE MACMI LLAN COMP ANY 1899 %>inn ep !batman LESS E E OF S UTTON P LA C E WH I CH H E H A S OCCUP I E D FOR A G E N E R AT IO N A ND H A S DO N E SO M UCH P R E S E R V E TH IS E D ITIO N OF ITS A N N A LS IS I NSCR I B E D B Y B HIS ROTHER , THE AUTHOR P R E FA C E O NE by one the old buildings of our country are perishing accide n t e r m m by , n glect, or wanton dest uction their e ory t m m W passes away, and heir place knows the no ore . hen the passion for covering this island with railways and - r factories shall have done its worst, our great g andchildren will hardly possess a fragment of the older work to recall to their eyes the beauty and the life of England in the s m pa t . And so it beco es a sort of social duty for those to whom chance has thrown it in their path to preserve such wreckage of old things as the tempest of change has left - any relic that they find still mouldering in the flotsam m m and jetsa of ti e . Thus I came to put together in spare days of leisure some memorials of a very beautiful and most interesting m house, which is a land ark in the history of art, and has not a few associations with the history of our country . During the last twenty-four years I have often found there a time of peace and quiet thought and pacing up and down the court, and watching the hues of russet and m orange in the ouldings , or the evening light as it glowed through the jewelled quarries in the oriels, I became curious to k now a little more about the builders m m m and the building of it . Fro what ove ent of art did it spring ? Whence came those amorini over T udor viii ANNALS OF AN OLD MANOR-HOUSE r e G gates, and the I talian a ab sques in those othic traceries ? What manner of life did these walls witness and serve ? Of what kin were the men whose devices ? are recorded in the painted glass As , one by one, I learned to recognise the story they could reveal, and had found how curiously the house was connected with the tempestuous days of the eighth Henry and his three m children and successors, as I traced all the circu stances of the strange and bloody tragedy which set its mark upon these walls almost before the mortar in them was e m dry, I b gan for yself a connected record of the place . “ A - me S well known historian used to say to , ink a m n shaft, as it were, in so e chosen spot in the a nals of m m England, and you will co e upon uch that is never ” So m found in the books of general history . I sunk y t a shaft in this spot, and tried to unders and a bit of loc l m m history, as seen fro a single anor and a particular m . SU DTON E fa ily and house I tried to identify , as m m m it is described in Do esday, and to ake out the eadow, “ ” r 2 and the land or a able, the woodland of 5 swine, and m The m the ill . fortunes of the anor sway back and m u forwards during feudal ti es, as the fort nes of England T e n m the itself. ti es it fell back into the hands of Crown ; ten times it was granted to royal favourites or m m inisters eight ti es it was lost by attainder, forfeiture, or surrender between the days of the Conqueror an d the T V days of the udors ; till at length Henry I II . grants m the ancestral do ain of the last of the Beauforts, his ’ m m father s other, to the soldier and inister of his own who built the house . I have often pictured to myself the veteran gazing at his newly fi nished home when his only boy lay headless r T wou ld in the f esh grave on ower Hill . I wonder i f PREFAC E ix m he still continued to entertain here his fierce aster, and m still put his faith in princes . It would see so, for he kept his honours and his wealth and in the inventory of his goods for the proving of his will is a grete carpete ’ K n s fi to lay under the y g fete . And we nd his widow soon after sending presents of game and swete bagge s from this house to the Princess at Guildford . And then I would try to conceive with what feelings the son of that slaughtered youth came to receive the daughter of Anne Boleyn in the house which his father had not lived m w to inherit, which he hi self o ed to the slayer of that W m father . ith what thoughts, I have often as ked yself, did Elizabeth keep state in the hall as sociated so closely with the death of her mother and the wayward passions m m of her father, where are still to be seen the e ble s of C S m r atherine of Aragon and Jane ey our, of Ma y and G r m o m a diner, of a succession of chiefs fro b th ca ps in that fu rious revolution ? Flodde n And the old Duke of Norfolk, the hero of , C b and Lord B erners, the friend of axton, oth the n S colleagues of the fou der, and tanley of Derby, the m C m W th e fa ous ha berlain , and Paulet of inchester, m T m m mm m fa ous reasurer, do their e ble s co e orate their presence here ? And the calm proud face on the canvas m m m of Zucchero, which s iles as she ight have s iled in m h welco e to the Queen , t at Dorothy Arundell who had lived to see some twenty of her relations die as traitors in the T m m ower, did the past beco e to her a drea ; and as m she did the honours of her ho e, did she find it a natural incident of life that attainder should fall on the head of m ’ her father, and her other, and her aunt, and her husband s father, and on her relations of both sexes and of every degree on her father ’ s and her mother ’ s side x ANNALS OF AN OLD MANOR- HOUSE Sir W m And then that later Richard eston , who ade We m the canal upon the y, and who laboured so uch in r m agricultu e, how ca e he to keep his house safe and his estate intact in the great Civil War which shook and battered down so many of his neighbours around him ? How come we to find in his windows designs from the m fancy of the Parlia ent Poet, and also the portrait of King Charles ? These me n and women were nothing to me or to m m m o r ine, no ore than any other na es in the history those days ; their house and their pictures and their m me am escutcheons do not belong to ine or to , who m but a passing visitor amongst them. But I ca e to love the old place, the very brickwork and the weeds and m lichens which have clung round the ouldings, the swallows twittering round the tiles, and the deep glow of So m the painted glass . , bit by bit, y notes grew into a connected account of the house and its vicissitudes . And as the owner pressed me to work into it the me mor m anda which he had collected in anuscript, and the hints m of any artistic and antiquarian friends, I found it b convenient for the curious in art, and the neigh ours m who ight visit it, to put the rough sketch I had gathered together into print . So this book is but the expansion of a catalogue or m anual that I began long ago for the use of our friends . To any special acquaintance wi th art or with antiquities m of any kind I can ake no sort of pretension . I have m sought, since no one else was disposed to do so, to ake a record or inventory of that which is passing away before am our eyes . I neither professed historian nor antiquary, am am and I certainly no genealogist or herald .