If Broughton Castle (which I wrote about last time) is a hidden jewel in the Cotswolds, then it’s a modest ruby compared to the glittering diamond that is Sudeley Castle. Make time for both, but if you have to choose one, Sudley has more all around sex appeal.
Like Broughton, Sudeley is a Historic Houses Association (HHA) property, still privately owned and a family home, working hard in the hospitality trade to earn its maintenance. Both were proper medieval castles that evolved into grand residences. They share golden Cotswold stone, Tudor and Elizabethan architecture, storybook settings and romantic gardens. But while Broughton owes its current state of preservation to benign neglect on the part of its owners for well over a century, Sudeley is indebted to rich Victorian industrialists with an eye for history and hopes of turning new money old.
What you see today is therefore a marvellous pastiche of a Victorian country house with all of the most modern comforts, built in a tasteful historic style, inserted sensitively into ruins that now serve as a picturesque backdrop for the castle gardens. The house interiors are a real treasure trove, full of priceless collections. The Dent family had made their fortune in gloves and leather goods, and happened to be on the way up as the Walpoles of Strawberry Hill descended. Many of the most interesting and priceless objects in the Gloucestershire castle come from a massive sale of the famous Twickenham house’s contents. (You can read about my visit to Strawberry Hill here.)
Sudeley’s warm, comfortable rooms envelop you in rich wood panelling or colourful neo-Gothic wallpapers. There are plenty of overstuffed sofas, deep armchairs, and magnificent beds piled high with pillows. The most extraordinary is a four-poster, canopied mash-up of carving from both the Tudor and Stuart eras, said to have been slept in by Charles I. The Dents clearly liked their creature comforts.
My favourite treasure inside the house was a rare, early English tapestry of such rich colours you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Victorian copy rather than the 16th century original. It tells the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, but its interest lies in its borders, rich with beautiful little scenes of hunting and woodland life. You could look at it for hours.
There’s also an exceptional collection of pencil sketches of Holbein portraits, copies by one of his students but so masterful most would think they were originals. But the prize for quirkiest collection goes to a large group of wax miniature portraits in the same bedroom with that Charles I bed. You often come across one or two of these in museums like the Victoria and Albert. I think they were very fashionable for a short period of time. The wax gives the artist a chance to create a 3-D image that is spookily lifelike. There are two bookshelves stuffed with them here. It’s the biggest collection I’ve ever seen in one place. I suspect most people don’t even notice them. The room steward was so pleased that I had, she invited me step behind the rope to get a closer look. (Something more likely to happen to you in an HHA house than one managed by the National Trust.)
Many visitors will find Sudeley’s exteriors more memorable. The Dent’s decision to leave parts of the castle in ruins turns the whole site into a romantic garden folly, with plants climbing up crumbling walls and through empty windows. Courtyard gardens offer intimate spaces for quiet contemplation, while a massive Victorian-style rose garden that would be spectacular on its own is even more dramatic with the house and ruins as a backdrop. And though these days the estate is a relatively small one, the garden “borrows’ spectacular views from the lush countryside around. The pheasantry is a delightfully unexpected addition to the outdoor fun. I had no idea there were so many varieties around the world, nor that they were so spectacularly beautiful.
Ample benches and quiet corners throughout the garden invite you to linger. I spotted a fair few visitors enjoying picnics, while I settled beneath the shade of a yew hedge to try to capture some of the romance of those ruinous gardens with my fledgling watercolour skills. (This new hobby that encourages me to pause and properly look at things may be my best thing to come out of pandemic lockdowns.)
For me, unsurprisingly, the best part of Sudeley is the history. Every stately home in the country has its stories, but few outside of royal palaces have had so many kings and queens passing through, or played a role in quite so many significant events. There’s so much to tell that the family has set up a history museum in one of the towers to walk you through more than 1000 years of excitement. Displays combine waxworks, art, artefacts and video to shed light on highlights. These include the rise and fall of Richard III (history here gives weight to the argument he was a decent king set up by Henry VII and Shakespeare to be the villain), the drama of Tudor and Elizabethan times, the heroic restoration efforts of the Dents and the castle’s rebirth in recent times.
It’s the stories of the women of Sudeley that make it most special for me. High on my list of things I’d like to do in retirement is writing historical fiction about women who deserve to be better known. The women of Sudeley could be a whole series.
We’d start with Princess Goda of England, daughter of Ethelred the Unready and the fascinating Emma of Normandy (she deserves her own novel), and sister to Edward the Confessor, last Anglo-Saxon King of England. Sudeley was a wedding gift from her father. And though she’d died by the time of the Norman Conquest, and most of her family lands were redistributed to conquering Norman knights, Sudeley somehow managed to stay in the family. History is murky on the point, but in my novel I’d have Goda … more worldly and politically adept than her brother … anticipating the trouble to come and doing a secret deal to preserve her estates for her children.
Next comes Eleanor Talbot Boteler, a young widow of the heir to the castle who caught the eye of Edward IV. Claims that he married her, and thus that his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was illegal, precipitated the final crisis in the Wars of the Roses. Whatever the political truth, Eleanor’s story … married at 13, widowed in her early 20s, living with her father-in-law as her family lands were confiscated in a civil war, invited into a relationship with a king who could restore all, secretly married, abandoned and retired to a Carmelite nunnery … would be a great one to write.
The most fascinating and dramatic of Sudeley’s stories is Katherine Parr’s. Having been the only wife to survive Henry VIII, and widowed veteran of two arranged marriages to old men before her time as queen, Katherine followed her heart and quickly married Thomas Seymour, then owner of Sudeley. He was, and had been for some time, the love of her life. Sadly, he was also a complete bastard who made sexual advances to their ward, the young princess Elizabeth, while she was staying at Sudeley and couldn’t be bothered to attend his wife’s funeral after she died giving birth to his child. One of the most poignant displays in the exhibition is a letter from Katherine … one of the best educated and most powerful woman of her time … asking his forgiveness for writing to him more often than he’d proscribed, and begging for just a little news of his life in London. It’s heartbreaking. Thomas’ indifference left Lady Jane Grey to be Katherine’s chief mourner. She had been living with Katherine at Sudeley and would soon be on her own trajectory to tragedy.
Emma Dent’s story is, thankfully, far more cheerful. She grew up in one family of rich industrialists, married into another, and could have been a textbook example to other women of the age in how to run a great home with panache. Most of the best works of art here are thanks to her tasteful collecting. She was an avid letter writer who collected autographs of the great and good of her age; there’s a whole room with examples including letters from both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. She oversaw the reconstruction of the chapel in the grounds which holds the tomb of Katherine Parr. (Notice the resemblance of the tomb to the Albert Memorial? The same architect, George Gilbert Scott, designed both.) Emma created those fabulously romantic gardens and was a famous hostess, deploying all the wonders of the Castle to create memorable house parties.
And we mustn’t forget the current chatelaine, Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, who belongs to that noteable club of American brides who have saved the aristocratic homes they married into. Unlike so many others, she didn’t do it with a massive inheritance but with determination and good business sense. When her husband died of a heart attack at just 40, she was left with two children and a crumbling castle mired in debt. Sudeley’s opening to the public, followed by its slow and steady renovation to the beautiful showcase and multi-faceted tourist destination it is today, owes a great deal to her.
Until I get a chance to write those books, your best bet for digging into the lives of those fascinating women is to get yourself to Sudeley. I’d recommend it for anyone on holiday in the Cotswolds, but its location just outside Cheltenham and near the M5 means it’s a reasonable day trip from London or many other parts of the country.
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