Cowdray House

Cowdray House in Sussex is a 16th-century Tudor mansion which was badly damaged by fire in 1793. Construction began in the 1520s after Sir David Owen demolished a 13th-century manor house on the site and was completed by William Fitzwilliam in 1542. Though owned by the Viscount Cowdray, the building is maintained by the Cowdray House Trust, a charity established in 1996. In the early 20th century the ruins were opened to the public, however their continued decay meant that in the 1980s the site was closed for safety reasons. After a multi-million pound restoration project lasting two years, Cowdray House was reopened to the public in 2007.

History

The Bohun family owned Coudreye, and in 1273 Sir John Bohun began building a manor house there. The estates descended with the family until the late 15th century. When the Bohun line became extinct in the late 1490s Sir David Owen inherited the family property through his marriage to the daughter of the last John Bohun. Beginning in around 1520, Owen set about demolishing the 13th-century manor house at Coudreye and building a grand house for himself. Owen did not live to see Cowdray completed, and died in 1535.

Cowdray House was sold to Sir William Fitzwilliam in 1528 for £2,193 6s 8d. The sale was arranged without Owen's permission by his son, Henry, though Owen later honoured the agreement with Fitzwilliam. In the 1520s Fitzwilliam was rising to prominence, becoming a Justice of the Peace in Kent and Middlesex and by the time of his death had acquired 16,000 acres across three counties with an annual income of over £1,000. By the late 1520s parts of the house were habitable as Owen was permitted to spend his remaining years there and Fitzwilliam moved in on the previous owner's death. The building work was finished under Fitzwilliam. After his death in 1542, Cowdray House and its lands passed to his half-brother, Sir Anthony Browne. Four years earlier King Henry VIII had given Battle Abbey, also in Sussex, to Brown. Possession of the house passed through Browne's descendants until the building was ravaged by fire in the 18th century.

In 1533 Henry VIII granted representatives of Fitzwilliam a licence to crenellate Cowdray House. The licence allowed the holder to “impark 600 acres of land meadow, pasture and wood, in Essborne and Midhurst, Sussex, to be called the park of Cowdry, to have free warren and fishery within the same, and to build fortifications therein”. Despite the wording of the licence, Cowdray House was not built as a fortification. While it features architectural elements found in castles – such as battlements around the tops of walls, though often without a walkway behind them.

The fire of 1793 and later history

In 1793 George Samuel Browne, 8th Viscount Montague, was betrothed and Cowdray House was preparing for the marriage. While the Viscount was abroad in Switzerland a fire broke out. The small number of servants at the house on the night of 24th September were unable to extinguished the fire, which had begun in the north gallery but quickly spread. Only the kitchen escaped the fire because its thick walls prevented it spreading. A few days after the fire Browne drowned in the River Rhine. The Viscount had no brothers and left no male heir, so his title passed to a distant relative in France who also died without heirs. The family estates however passed to Browne's sister. In 1843 her daughters sold Cowdray House to the Earl of Egmont.

Cowdray House was not repaired and the ruins were allowed to decay and become overgrown until the early 20th century. Sir Weetman Dickinson bought Cowdray house from the Earl of Egremont in 1908 and five years later employed Sir William St John Hope to repair the ruins. Under Hope's supervision parts of the foundations were uncovered. He also compiled a comprehensive history of the building which was published in 1919. Dickinson became the first Viscount Cowdray and the building has passed through his descendants to the present day. Further repairs were carried out between 1985 and 1992 and in 1996 the Cowdray Heritage Trust was formed. The charity was created to better inform visitors leases the house from Viscount Cowdray and in 2009 they published a guidebook.

By the 1980s the ruins of Cowdray House were in a dangerous state and as a result were closed to the public. In 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £2,600,000 to the Cowdray House Trust to fund the restoration of Cowdray House. English Heritage contributed £300,000 and there were contributions for other parties. The project lasted two years and in 2007 the house was reopened to the public. Cowdray House is both a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Monument.

Layout and architecture

Surrounding Cowdray House is a 600 acre park. The house sits, which sits in the south west corner, was approached by a 400 metre causeway leading from the town of Midhurst with trees carefully arranged on either side. The grounds include a stable block and a lodge keeper's cottage, neither of which were reached by the fire. The stable block had even been reused as Cowdray House's visitor centre.

Cowdray House was arranged on a roughly square plan, measuring about 70m by 70m externally. At the centre was a courtyard measuring 38m by 32m, with a fountain at the centre. The 3m high fountain is now part of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the artwork may have been created by Italian sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano. The main entrance was through a three-storey gatehouse, with a wide archway between two towers crested by battlements. The arms of Sir Anthony Browne were added above the door in 1555. Whereas Cowdray is mostly built from local stone, stone was shipped from France to highlight the edges of the gatehouse towers. The gatehouse is one of the better survivals at Cowdray, but still lacks floors, a room, and the lead domes which once stood on top of the towers.

The north and south ranges were almost completely destroyed by fire, and only the foundations – which were excavated in the early 20th century and left uncovered – remain. Artists' depiction from before the fire indicate how the ranges would have appeared, whilst the contents of recorded in inventories offer clues as to the use of the rooms. The north range consisted of two storeys while the south range had three.