Sudeley Castle is a Grade I listed castle in the parish of Sudeley, in the Cotswolds, near to the medieval market town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. The castle has 10 notable gardens covering some 15 acres (6.1 ha) within a 1,200-acre (490 ha) estate in the Cotswold hills.
Building of the castle began in 1443 for Ralph Boteler; the Lord High Treasurer of England, on the site of a previous 12th-century fortified manor house. It was later seized by the crown and became the property of King Edward IV and King Richard III, who built its famous banqueting hall.
King Henry VIII and his then wife Anne Boleyn visited the castle in 1535; and it later became the home and final resting place of his sixth wife, Catherine Parr who remarried after the king's death. Parr is buried in the castle's church, making Sudeley the only privately owned castle in the world to have a Queen of England buried in its grounds. Sudeley soon became the home of the Chandos family, and the castle was visited on three occasions by Queen Elizabeth I, who held a three-day party there to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
During the First English Civil War, the castle was used as a military base, by King Charles I and Prince Rupert, and it was later besieged and slighted by parliament, remaining largely in ruins for the following few centuries until its purchase in 1837 by the Dent family, who restored the castle and turned it into a family home.
History
11th century
Although the origins of Sudeley are lost to time, its name is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon name Sudeleagh, meaning 'south lying pasture or clearing in forest', gives an indication of how the area was like. Sudeley most likely owes its early rise as a royal estate to its proximity to Winchcombe, which, during the reign of King Offa, was the capital of the Kingdom of Mercia. Under royal patronage, Winchcombe prospered, becoming a walled town with its own monastery, where a king and a saint are now buried.
By the turn of the 11th century, Sudeley had grown into a manor house set in a royal deer park, given as a gift from King Æthelred the Unready to his daughter Goda on her wedding day.
Despite William the Conqueror's policy of depriving Saxon nobles of their estates after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the family managed to retain Sudeley, and Goda's descendants would hold it for another four centuries.
12th century
During The Anarchy, John de Sudeley supported the Empress Matilda in her fight against her cousin, Stephen of Blois.
It is believed that the first castle at Sudeley was built during this time, otherwise known as an adulterine castle. Nothing is known as to what this castle looked like; it may have simply been the fortification of the existing manor house, or an altogether new structure.
However, after the sacking of Worcester in 1139 by the forces of the Empress Matilda, under her brother Robert of Gloucester, Waleran de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Worcester retaliated, attacking and capturing both Sudeley and Tewkesbury.
Although little is known of what happened to Sudeley during this attack, it seems likely that its fortifications were pulled down by the Earl of Worcester, as soon after Roger, Earl of Hereford built a replacement motte and bailey castle in Winchcombe.
A few decades after the Anarchy, the Sudeley family stepped once more in the world stage with John's younger son, William de Tracy, participated in the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. William was subsequently excommunicated by Pope Alexander III. He went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1171 and gained an audience with the pope, who exiled him and his fellow conspirators to Jerusalem.
Construction of the current castle
By the start of the 15th century, the Sudeley name was believed to have gone extinct and the Boteler family had inherited the castle through the marriage of Joan, the sister of the last de Sudeley.
Ralph Boteler is believed to have started the construction of the castle in 1443, around the same time he became Lord High Treasurer of England. He rose to prominence during the Hundred Years' War; serving in France under John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford in 1419, and was later appointed to the Regency Council of King Henry VI in 1423 and created Baron Sudeley.
Sudeley was not Ralph's first great project, having extensively renovated the Manor on the More, the house he used when attending court, and was later described by a French Ambassador, Jean du Bellay, as more magnificent than Hampton Court. Unfortunately, Ralph failed to gain royal permission to crenellate the castle, and had to seek Henry VI's pardon.
Ralph built Sudeley Castle on a double courtyard plan; with the outer courtyard being used by servants and men-at-arms, and the inner court and its buildings reserved for the use of Ralph and his family.
In 1449, Ralph's son, Thomas Boteler, married Lady Eleanor Talbot, famed as England's Secret Queen for her relationship with King Edward IV after the death of her husband. It was this relationship that King Richard III used to illegitimise his brother's children and heirs, clearing the way for himself to take the crown.
Richard III
Ralph, now out of favour as a supporter of the Lancastrian cause, was in 1469 compelled to sell Sudeley and six other manors to the crown. Edward IV bestowed Sudeley upon his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who used it as a military base before the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.
In 1478, Richard swapped Sudeley for Richmond Castle, before re-inheriting it when he acceded to the throne in 1483, when he seems to have visited both Sudeley and Kenilworth Castle on a Royal Progress.
Richard is credited with having built the large banqueting hall at Sudeley. This "Great Hall" was built in the latest fashions of its time, with a ground floor hall being used for meeting guests and feasting, and the upper great hall being kept specially for the king and his special guest's use, with his own bedchambers being connected to this room. When approached from the outside, the edges of the hall's oriel windows are decorated with what is presumed to be the White Rose of York.
The banqueting hall now lies in partial ruins, and has been redesigned as a garden, with roses and ivy climbing the walls. In 2018, conservators were working to stabilise the ruin.
After the death of Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Sudeley, as property of the crown, transferred to King Henry VII, who in turn presented it to his uncle Jasper Tudor.
Catherine Parr
During his reign, King Henry VIII only stayed at Sudeley once, on his 1535 Royal Progress with Anne Boleyn. In the months leading up to Henry's visit to Sudeley, he started to enact the Dissolution of the Monasteries, executing Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Moreover, it was while he was at Sudeley that Pope Paul III and Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I started discussing his excommunication and removal.
The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward VI led way for the rise of Edward and Thomas Seymour. Henry's will had an "unfulfilled gifts" clause that allowed for his executors to award themselves new lands and titles, which led to Edward being declared Lord Protector of the Realm, and making his brother Baron Seymour of Sudeley.
A few months after this, Thomas secretly married Henry's widow and final wife, Catherine Parr, without the permission of the king, causing a minor scandal.
In 1548, Catherine, now pregnant, moved with her husband to Sudeley Castle, taking a considerable retinue: 120 Yeomen of the Guard and Gentlemen of the Household, plus her ladies-in-waiting. Prior to her arrival, Seymour had spent "vast amounts of money on the Castle, to fit it for a Queen". The castle was specially prepared for this move, and descriptions still exist of what Catherine's bedchamber looked like. During Parr's tenure, one of her attendants was Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Seymour's ward, who would be queen for nine days in 1553.
Catherine died at Sudeley on 5 September 1548 from what was described as "childbed fever", five days after giving birth to her daughter Mary Seymour. At the funeral, Lady Jane Grey was the chief mourner, and ecclesiastical reformer Myles Coverdale preached his first Protestant sermon.
Catherine was buried two days later at St. Mary's Church, within the grounds of Sudeley, in what was the first Protestant funeral in English. Over the next two centuries, her original tomb was "mutilated and defaced" and the location of her burial place was lost. In 1782, a coffin was discovered, with a lead plate that read "Here lyeth Quene Kateryne wife to Kyng Henry the VIII and Last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley... dyed 5 September...". In 1792, vandals dug up the coffin. In 1817, the remains were placed in a stone vault near the remains of the 6th Lord Chandos.
After the chapel restoration was completed in 1863, Parr's remains were placed in a new neo-Gothic canopied tomb designed by George Gilbert Scott and created by sculptor John Birnie Philip.
Today, her tomb with its life-sized effigy lying under a canopy of ornately carved marble, is considered a place of pilgrimage.
After Catherine's death, her husband Thomas retained Sudeley; he held it until he was executed for treason six months later. Catherine's brother William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, then inherited the castle, he in turn held Sudeley until 1553, when he was also accused of treason, and Sudeley was seized by the crown.
Late 16th century
On 8 April 1554, John Brydges was elevated to Baron Chandos of Sudeley by Queen Mary I. He had previously been Lieutenant of the Tower of London, befriending Lady Jane Grey. He was the one who led Jane to her execution while she was in his care.
His elevation almost certainly came from his assistance in the suppression of the Wyatt rebellion.
His son Edmund Brydges heavily remodelled the castle in the 1560s and 1570s, almost completely rebuilding the outer courtyard, the part of the castle that the current family occupy, into what we see now.
Elizabeth I stayed at Sudeley on three occasions during her reign, first visiting her old friend, the recently widowed Dorothy Bray, Baroness Chandos at Sudeley in 1574. Staying again during the Royal Progress of 1575, that saw Robert Dudley throw a lavish party at Kenilworth Castle in a final attempt to convince her to marry him.
Elizabeth's most famous stay at Sudeley was in 1592, when Giles Brydges, 3rd Baron Chandos threw a three-day party for her. Giles extensively landscaped the grounds surrounding the castle in preparation for the visit, and held banquets, plays, dances and gave extravagant gifts during her stay, even presenting his daughter, Elizabeth Brydges to the queen in the guise of Daphne. The visit reputedly almost bankrupted the Brydges family.
The yearly excavations by archaeologists DigVentures began in 2018 and set out to discover more about this party, uncovering extensive Tudor Gardens to the east of the Victorian reconstructed gardens currently on the site. Through these investigations, evidence of multiple phases of landscaping have been revealed, the earliest of which dated to the middle of the 16th century. This is significant as previously these gardens had been attributed to Giles Brydges, 3rd Baron Chandos and the landscaping efforts in advance of Elizabeth's visit. LiDAR shows extensive areas surrounding the castle grounds which still may contain the evidence of these works, but it is worth noting that there appears to have been another phase of work, likely associated with the works done by Thomas Seymour in advance of the arrival of Catherine Parr.
English Civil War
Under the Chandos family, Sudeley continued to prosper and thrive, with Grey Brydges, 5th Baron Chandos gaining the title "King of the Cotswolds" for his magnificent style of living and his generosity. Records show that he had been buying in expensive tapestries from abroad through William Trumbull, envoy to the Archdukes of Austria, to decorate Sudeley. Grey was an influential courtier and an avid traveller, extensively travelling Europe and taking part in the War of the Jülich Succession. He married Lady Ann Stanley, descendant of Henry VIII's younger sister Princess Mary Tudor, and possible heir to the throne of England. He died in 1621.
Sudeley's final royal occupant was to be Charles I during the English Civil War, a war that was fought between the king and parliament.
The new lord, George Brydges, 6th Baron Chandos supported the royalist cause, and it was while he was supporting Prince Rupert in the siege of Cirencester in January 1643 that Sir Edward Massey, with some five hundred soldiers and two cannons attacked the castle. The small garrison soon fell and the castle was plundered; soon to be abandoned after the news that the royalist army had taken Cirencester and was turning its attention to the castle.
Later that year, after the royalist army failed in the Siege of Gloucester, Charles I set up camp at Sudeley, using it as his base of operations in Gloucestershire; and then set about trying to force Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex into an open pitch battle.
The castle was to switch hands several times during the war, most famously holding out against cannon bombardment by Sir William Waller, until it was betrayed by one of its officers who let the attackers in.