From Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales, Their Legendary Lore and Popular History, by John Timbs, re-edited, revised, and enlarged by Alexander Gunn, Volume II.; Frederick Warne and Co.; London; pp. 64-68.
The parish of Hurley, Berkshire, is beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames about thirty miles from London. In the Norman survey, commonly called Domesday, it is said to have lately belonged to Efgin, probably a Saxon or Danish family; but to be then in possession of Sir Geoffrey Mandeville. This person had greatly distinguished himself at the battle of Hastings in which King Harold was defeated, and received this estate from William the Conqueror among other spoil, as the reward of his labours and attachment. Towards the end of the Conqueror’s reign — in 1086 — Geoffrey de Mandeville founded here the priory of St. Mary, to this day commonly called Lady Place, and annexed it as a cell to the great Benedictine Abbey of Westminster. The charter of the foundation is still preserved in the archives there. In the instrument the founder calls himself Gosfridus de Magnavilla, and thus states the motives of his donation: — “For the salvation of my soul and that of my wife, Lecelina, by whose advice, under the providence 65 of divine grace, I have begun this good work; and also for the soul of Athelais, my first wife, the mother of my sons, now deceased; and also for the souls of all my heirs who shall succeed me.” He then states the particulars of his endowment and its objects — “For the support of the religious order serving God perpetually in this church.”
William the Conqueror approved and confirmed the endowment of the founder of Hurley Priory, and afterwards Pope Adrian IV., in a bull dated 1157, confirmed it among other possessions to the Abbey of Westminster.
Geoffrey, the son of the founder, created Earl of Essex, was likewise a benefactor. He married Roisia, sister to Aubrey de Vere, first Earl of Oxford. This lady caused a subterraneous chapel to be cut out of the solid rock, near the centre of the present town of Royston, in which she was buried. This chapel, on the walls of which many rude figures are still to be seen in relievo, after being lost and unknown for ages, was accidentally discovered by some workmen in 1742, and an account of it published by Dr. Stukely. It is well worthy the attention of tourists, and being perfectly dry and easily accessible, is often visited by strangers passing between London and Cambridge.
The Earl of Essex was standard-bearer of England in the time of the Empress Maud and of King Henry II.
Hurley Priory remained for about 450 years nearly in the same condition as that in which the founder and his son left it. It was suppressed among the lesser monasteries in the 26th of Henry VIII. In the 33rd year of the same king’s reign the Priory of Hurley became the property, by grant, of Charles Howard, Esq.; and three years afterwards the site, then and ever since called Lady Place, from the convent having been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, as already mentioned, became the property of Leonard Chamberleyn, Esq., from whom It passed in the same year to John Lovelace, Esq., who died in 1558.
From Mr. John Lovelace, himself merely a private gentleman, a distinguished family sprung. Richard, the son of John, spent an adventurous youth. He was with Sir Francis Drake, on the Spanish Main, and being a gentleman of position and means he very probably, as was the custom in those days, invested money in fitting out the expedition on the guarantee that when the expedition was over, that money should be repaid together with a per-centage on all the spoils captured during the voyage. But on whatever 66 condition he went out with Drake, it is certain that he returned from the El Dorado of that age enriched with a harvest of moidores and broad-pieces, the spoils of the Spanish treasure-ships or of the palaces of the Spanish Governors, who, being inveterate robbers themselves, and always having good store of gold and silver in their cellars, ready for transport periodically to Spain, were always tempting prey to the English buccaneer. This young and lucky adventurer spent his money profitably in building Lady Place upon the ruins of the ancient convent, about the year 1600. His son, Sir Richard Lovelace, was elevated to the peerage in 1627, as Baron Lovelace, of Hurley, Berks. John Lovelace, second baron, married Lady Anne Wentworth, daughter of Thomas, Earl of Cleveland, and this lady, upon the death of her niece, Baroness Wentworth, succeeded to that barony in 1686. Thus the family had become wealthy and powerful; but it was probably under the third baron, John Lord Lovelace, a somewhat stormy but resolute and consistent man, who succeeded to the barony in 1670, that the family rose to the zenith of its power. Lord Lovelace was distinguished by his taste, by his magnificence, and by the audacious and intemperate vehemence of his Whiggism. He had been fiver or six times arrested for political offences. The last crime laid to his charge was, that he had contemptuously denied the validity of a warrant signed by a Roman Catholic justice of the peace. He had been brought before the Privy Council and strictly examined, but to little purpose. He resolutely refused to criminate himself, and the evidence against him was insufficient. He was dismissed, but before he retired James exclaimed in great heat, “My lord, this is not the first trick that you have played me.” “Sir,” answered Lovelace, with undaunted spirit, “I have never played any trick to your Majesty, or to any other person. Whoever has accused me to your Majesty of playing tricks is a liar!” Lovelace was subsequently admitted into the confidence of those who planned the Revolution.
“His mansion,” says Macaulay, “built by his ancestors out of the spoils of Spanish galleons from the Indies, rose on the ruins of a house of our Lady, in that beautiful valley, through which the Thames, not yet defiled by the precincts of a great capital, nor rising and falling with the flow and ebb of the sea, rolls under woods of beech round the gentle hills of Berkshire. Beneath the stately saloon, adorned by Italian pencils, was a subterraneous vault in which the bones of the monks had sometimes been found. In this 67 dark chamber some zealous and daring opponents of the government held many midnight conferences during that anxious time when England was impatiently expecting the Protestant wind.” It was in this retreat of darkness and secresy that resolutions were first adopted for calling in the Prince of Orange, and it is said that the principal papers which brought about the Revolution were signed in the dark recess at the extremity of the vault. When the time for action came — when William, having landed at Torbay, was on his march to London — Lovelace with seventy followers well armed and mounted, quitted his dwelling and directed his course westward. He was one of the boldest and most earnest of William’s supporters. After King William obtained the crown he visited Lord Lovelace at his estate, and descended with him to view the vault in which his fortunes had been so often the theme of whispered conversations. Inscriptions, recording this visit, as well as that of George III. and General Paoli in 1780, to the same vault, as the cradle of the Revolution, were placed here by a subsequent proprietor, Joseph Wilcocks, Esq.
Lord Lovelace, who was captain of the band of pensioners to King William, lived in a style of such splendour and prodigality that he involved himself in difficulties. A great portion of his estates came to the hammer under a decree of the Court of Chancery. One source of his embarrassment was the expense he occurred in fitting up and decorating the family mansion. The grand inlaid staircase was very magnificent. The ceilings of the principal hall and of other rooms were painted by Verrio probably at the same time with those at Windsor Castle, and the panels of the saloon, painted in landscape by Salvator Rosa, were in themselves treasures of an almost inestimable value. The inlaid staircase has been removed to a house in the north of England, and the painted panels were sold in one lot for 1000l.
On the decline of the Lovelace family, which speedily followed, the estate was sold under a decree of Chancery.
Lady Place and the Woodlands were purchased by Mrs. Williams, sister to Dr. Wilcocks, Bishop of Rochester, which lady in one lottery, had two tickets only, and one of these came up a prize of 500l., the other of 20,000l., with which she purchased the property here. The estate then passed to Mrs. Williams’s daughter, and from her to her relative Joseph Wilcocks, in 1771.
The next person in the entail was the brave but unfortunate Admiral Kempenfeldt, who went down in the Royal George off 68 Portsmouth. His brother succeeded to Lady Place; but dying unmarried, he left the property to his relative Mr. Richard Troughton, of the Custom House, whose representatives sold the estate in lots some time after. Lady Place itself and part of the estate were purchased for the Hon. Henry Waller.
The old mansion of Lady Place, venerable even in decay, with its enclosure of fifteen acres, having fish ponds communicating with the Thames, having been much neglected or inadequately occupied for so many years, gradually fell into a ruinous condition.
The house itself was entirely destroyed in 1837, and the vaults, covered by a mound of green turf, are all that remain. Admiral Kempenfeldt and his brother planted two thorn trees here during the proprietary of the former. One day on coming home the brother noted that the tree planted by the admiral had withered away. “I feel sure,” he said, “that this is an omen that my brother is dead.” That evening came the news of the loss of the Royal George.