Cowdray House

Cowdray House stands in West Sussex beside the River Rother, its red-brick ruins rising where a great Tudor mansion once welcomed kings and queens. The original fortified manor was built in the 13th century by Sir John Bohun and renamed from the Norman word for hazel woods. In the 16th century Sir David Owen began the current house, later sold to Sir William Fitzwilliam who received a licence from Henry VIII to build fortifications and enclose 600 acres. The gatehouse faced a causeway across marshy ground, its reflections adding to the display of power. The house became a stage for Tudor history: Henry VIII visited five times, imprisoning Margaret Pole the last Plantagenet countess until her execution in 1541. Elizabeth I arrived in 1591 to feasts and theatrical entertainments printed the same year, while Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare’s patron, was born here in 1573. The 16th-century wall-paintings, copied in etchings before their destruction in 1793, recorded near-contemporary events in vivid detail. Visitors walk among the Grade I-listed ruins where musket balls from the Civil War still mark the courtyard walls. The North Gallery’s fire of 1793 spared only three paintings and a few small pieces, but the Kitchen Tower survives with a later floor inserted above its hearth. Capability Brown reshaped the gardens in 1770, and ivy once hastened the decay before restoration began in the 20th century. The site remains cared for by the Cowdray Heritage Trust, its Tudor story visible in every crumbling arch and watery reflection.