OCKWELLS MANOR-HOUSE—DORNEY COURT—BOVENY—BURNHAM ABBEY
[Illustration: THE HALL, OCKWELLS.]
In a remote situation, two miles from Bray Wick, and not to be found
marked on many maps, is situated the ancient manor-house of Ockwells. The
hills and dales on the way to it are of a Devonshire richness of wooded
beauty. The manor was, in fact, originally that of “Ockholt,” that is to
say, “Oak Wood,” and oaks are still plenteously represented. Ockholt,
as it was then, was granted in 1267 to one Richard de Norreys, styled
in the grant “cook” in the household of Eleanor of Provence, Queen of
Henry the Third. In respect of his manor, Richard de Norreys paid forty
shillings per annum, quit rent; but there is nothing to show what his
house was like, the existing range of buildings dating from the time of
John Norreys, first Usher of the Chamber to Henry the Sixth, Squire of
the Body, Master of the Wardrobe, and otherwise a man of many important
offices, eventually knighted for his services. He died in 1467. His
grandson was that Sir Henry Norreys who was, with others, executed in
1536, on what appears to have been a false charge of unduly familiar
relations with Anne Boleyn. His body rests in the Tower of London, where
he met his untimely end, but his head was claimed by his relatives,
and buried in the private chapel of Ockwells. The chapel has long since
disappeared. The son of this unfortunate man became Baron Norreys of
Rycote, and the family thence rose to further honours and riches and
left Ockwells for even finer seats. It then came into the hands of the
Fettiplaces, and thence changed ownership many times, exactly as old
Fuller says of other lands in this county: “The lands of Berkshire are
skittish, and apt to cast their owners.” The old mansion finally came
down to the condition of a farmhouse, and so remained until some fifty
years ago, when it was restored and made once more a residence. Since
then it has again been carefully overhauled, and is now a wonderfully
well-preserved example of a brick-and timber-framed manor-house of the
fifteenth century. Oak framing enters largely into the construction,
for this was pre-eminently a timber district; and massive doors, much
panelling, and even window mullions in oak testify alike to the abundance
of that building-material, and to its lasting qualities, far superior,
strange though it may seem to say so, to stone. Even such exceptionally
exposed woodwork as the highly enriched barge-boards to the gables is
still in excellent preservation. With age they have taken on a lovely
silver-grey tone, not unlike that of weathered stone itself. In the Great
Hall the heraldic glass yet remains, almost perfect, its colours rich and
jewel-like, with the oft-repeated Norreys motto, “Faythfully serve.”
It is somewhat singular that another exceptionally interesting old
manor-house of like type with that of Ockwells should be found within
three miles. This is the beautiful residence of Dorney Court, on the
opposite side of the river, in Buckinghamshire. The village of Dorney
lies in a very out-of-the-way situation, and in fact, although the
distance from Ockwells is so inconsiderable, the route by which you get
to it makes it appear more than twice that length. The readiest way is
through Maidenhead, and over the bridge to Taplow railway station, and
thence along the Bath road in the direction of London for over a mile,
when a sign-post will be noticed directing to Dorney on the right hand.
[Illustration: DORNEY CHURCH: THE MINSTREL-GALLERY.]
The village is small and scattered, consisting of the Palmer Arms, some
cottages and farmsteads; and the little parish church stands in an
obscure byway, divided from Dorney Court only by a narrow lane leading
nowhither. The church has ever been, and may still be considered, a
mere appendage of the Court, as a manorial chapel. Its red-brick tower,
apparently of early seventeenth-century date, is added to the west end
of a quite humble building, the greatly altered survival of an early
Norman structure, whose former existence may easily be deduced from the
remains of a small, very plain window built up in the south wall of the
chancel with later work in chalk. Entering by a brick archway in the
south porch, you find yourself in one of those little rural churches
of small pretensions which in their humble way capture the affections
much more surely than do many buildings of more aspiring kind. It is a
church merely of aisleless nave and chancel, with a chapel—the Garrard
Chapel—thrown out on the north side. A great deal of remodelling appears
to have taken place in the early part of the seventeenth century, for not
only is there the western tower of that period, and the south porch, but
the interior was evidently plastered and refitted with pews at the same
time. A very quaint and charming western gallery in oak would seem to
fix the exact date of these works, for it bears the inscription in fine,
boldly cut letters and figures, “Henry Felo, 1634.” That date marked a
new era at Dorney, for the Garrards, who had for some time past owned
the Manor, ended with the death of Sir William Garrard in 1607. His
monument and that of his wife and their fifteen children is in the north
chapel, and is a strikingly good example of the taste of that period
in monumental art, with kneeling effigies of Sir William and his wife
facing one another, and the fifteen children beneath, in two rows—the
boys on one side, the girls on the other. The mortality among this family
would seem to have been very great, for about 1620 Sir James Palmer,
afterwards Chancellor of the Garter, married Martha, the sole survivor
and heiress, and thus brought Dorney into the Palmer family, in whose
hands it still remains. The Palmers themselves were of Wingham, in Kent,
and of Angmering and Parham, Sussex, and have numbered many distinguished
and remarkable men. Tradition declares them to be of Danish or Viking
origin, while a very curious and interesting old illuminated genealogy
preserved at Dorney declares that the family name originated in the
ancient days of pilgrimage, when the original Palmer “went a-palmering.”
If that were indeed the case, the old heraldic coat of the house might be
expected to exhibit an allusive scallop-shell. But we find no badge of
the pilgrim’s way-wending on their heraldic shield, which bears instead
two fesses charged with three trefoils; a greyhound courant in chief. The
crest is a demi-panther argent, generally represented “regardant” spotted
azure, with fire issuant from mouth and ears. This terrific beast is
shown holding a holly-branch. An odd, but scarcely convincing attempt to
account for the greyhound declares it to be “in remembrance, perchance,
of their pilgrimage, a dog, that faithful and familiar creature, being a
pilgrim’s usual companion.”
A remarkably large and interesting sampler, worked probably about
1625, has recently come to Dorney under rather curious circumstances.
It appears to have been sold so long ago that its very existence was
unknown, and it only came to the knowledge of the present representative
of the Palmers through a photographic reproduction published in an
illustrated paper, illustrating the stock of a dealer in antiques. It
was readily identified as an old family possession by reason of the
many Palmer shields of arms worked into it. On inquiry being made, a
disappointment was experienced. It was found that the sampler had been
sold; but in the end the purchaser, seeing that its proper place was in
its old home, with much good feeling resold it to Major Palmer.
[Illustration: THE PALMER SAMPLER
WORKED ABOUT 1620.]
This beautiful piece of needlework, done in coloured silks, has
the unusual feature of presenting, as it were, a kind of Palmer
portrait-gallery of that period. In the midst is a shield of the Palmer
arms impaling those of Shurley of Isfield, Sussex. This identifies
that particular Palmer as Sir Thomas, of Wingham, the second Baronet,
who married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Shurley, and
succeeded his grandfather in the title 1625. That baronetcy became
extinct in 1838.
There are eight needlework portraits of men in this sampler, obviously
Palmers, since each holds a shield of the family arms; and evidently
portraits, because each one is clearly distinguished from the others in
age, costume, and features, and the first is easily to be identified by
the wounded right arm he bears in a sling. Among those other quaintly
attired men, who yet are made to seem so very real to us, one notices
a figure with a tilting-lance, another, in the lower range, holding a
weapon probably intended to represent the axe carried by the honourable
corps of gentlemen pensioners in attendance upon the Sovereign; while
the last carries a bunch of keys, in allusion to some official position.
The sampler appears to have been carried out of the Palmer family by the
marriages in the eighteenth century of the two daughters and heiresses of
a Sir Thomas Palmer with an Earl of Winchilsea and his brother.
But to revert to the figure with the wounded arm. This personage was Sir
Henry Palmer, Knight, second of the famous triplet sons of Sir Edward
Palmer, of the Angmering family, who were born in 1487, according to
tradition, on three successive Sundays. This remarkable parturition
is still famous at Angmering, where the rustics readily point out the
identical house, now divided into cottages, near the Decoy. It was this
Henry who established the Wingham line that ascended from knighthood to a
baronetcy and became extinct in 1838, having in the meanwhile thrown off
a branch now represented at Dorney. Let us take the triplet brothers in
their proper sequence. John, the eldest, who inherited Angmering, came
to a bad end. He was much at the dangerous Court of Henry the Eighth,
and was particularly intimate with that monarch, not only playing cards
continually with him, but always winning. A careful courtier in those
times did well to lose occasionally. It was not well to be always winning
from the Eighth Henry, and that fierce Tudor did in fact hang him on some
pretext.
Henry Palmer, the second brother, was a distinguished soldier, and Master
of the Ordnance. He received a shot-wound in the arm at Guisnes, of which
he eventually died, at Wingham, in 1559. The sampler clearly shows this
wounded soldier, with his arm bound up, and supporting himself with a
stick. The third brother, Thomas, died on Tower Hill, by the headsman’s
axe, as an adherent of the Lady Jane Grey. He suffered with the Duke of
Northumberland and Sir John Gates, and chroniclers tell how the unhappy
trio quarrelled to the last as to whose was the responsibility for
the failure of that rising. But Palmer made the boldest exit of all,
declaring with his last breath on the scaffold that he died a Protestant.
[Illustration: DORNEY COURT.]
Sir James Palmer, Chancellor of the Garter, who married the heiress of
Sir William Garrard, and thus founded the Palmer family of Dorney, was a
younger son of the Wingham Palmers. He died in 1657, and was succeeded by
his son, Sir Roger, created Earl of Castlemaine, who died 1705, without
acknowledged children, and left the property to his nephew, Charles, from
whom the present family are descended.
Dorney Court is a picturesque mansion, chiefly of the period of Henry the
Seventh. It was once much larger, as appears from old drawings preserved
in the house, in which it is shown as groups of buildings surrounding
two large courts and one smaller. The construction is largely of oak
framing filled with brick nogging, disposed sometimes in herring-bone
fashion, and in other places in ordinary courses. There are no elaborate
and beautiful verge-boards to the gables, such as those extremely fine
examples seen at Ockwells, but, if a distinction may be drawn between the
two houses, Dorney Court is especially attractive in the fine pictures it
gives from almost every point of view. It forms a strikingly picturesque
composition seen from the north-east, a grouping in which the great gable
of the entrance-front and its two remarkable flaunting chimneys come well
with the three equal-sized gables of the north front, the church-tower
rising in its proper association in the background, emphasising the
ancient manorial connection.
A good deal of work has recently been undertaken, in the direction of
correcting the tasteless alterations made at some time in the eighteenth
century, when sashed windows here and there replaced the original
leaded lights. The plan adopted has been that of acquiring such old oak
timbering as could be picked up from houses demolished in neighbourhoods
near and far, and of setting it up in the reconstructed doors and
windows. If it may be permitted to speak of the interior, it can at any
rate be well said that it does by no means belie the exterior view.
The panelled and raftered rooms are in thorough keeping, and the hall,
neglected for generations, has been brought back to something of its
ancient appearance. From those walls the panelling had disappeared, but
it has now been replaced with some genuine old work of the same period,
acquired by fortunate chance at Faversham in Kent, from an old mansion in
course of demolition. The hall greatly resembles that of Ockwells; but
whatever heraldic glass may have been here has long vanished, leaving
no trace. Here, among the many family portraits, hangs a fine example
of a helmet brought from the church, an unusually good piece of funeral
armour, removed from the church to prevent its rusting away. The family
portraits include some Lelys, Knellers, and Jamesons, and a number of
early-eighteenth-century pastel portraits, many of them displaying a
facial characteristic of the Palmers, constant through the successive
generations: that of a somewhat unusually long nose.
[Illustration: DORNEY COURT: THE GREAT HALL, SHOWING THE MODEL PINE-APPLE.
_The seventeenth-century sampler hangs on the panelling._]
It is one of the greatest charms of our long-settled English social
order, that we have in this England of ours a not inconsiderable number
of ancient homes that have been “home” to one family throughout the
changes and chances of centuries, and in Dorney Court we see such a
house. Here, on the old woodwork, are painted the heraldic shields of the
Palmers, with their greyhound courant conspicuous, and the devices of the
families with whom they have intermarried.
An interesting incident in fruit-growing history belonging to Dorney
Court is alluded to in the model on a gigantic scale of a pineapple,
shown in the hall. It recalls the fact that the first pineapple grown
in England was produced here in the reign of Charles the Second by the
Dorney Court gardener. A panel-picture at Ham House, the seat of the Earl
of Dysart, near Richmond, illustrates this first English-grown pineapple
being presented to the King in the gardens of either Ham or Hampton
Court, by Rose, the royal gardener. The rendering of the architecture
in the picture makes it uncertain which of the two places is intended.
It will be observed by the illustration that there has been a great
improvement in the art of growing hot-house pineapples since that time,
for it is a very small specimen that is being offered to the King.
Foremost among the thirty or more portraits at Dorney are the two large
Lelys hanging in the hall, representing Roger Palmer, Baron Limerick, and
Earl of Castlemaine, and his wife Barbara, the beautiful and notorious
Barbara Villiers. They are half-lengths. She is curiously shown, holding
what looks like the model of a church-steeple in her left hand. Lely
intended it for a castle, and thus is seen to be guilty of painting an
Anglo-French pun; “Castle_main_.” The beautiful Barbara is better known
in history as “Barbara Villiers,” her maiden name, and by the title of
Duchess of Cleveland. Born in 1641, she married Palmer in 1659. He was
shortly afterwards raised to the peerage. There were no children of
this marriage, for it was very shortly afterwards that Lady Castlemaine
began that extraordinary career of vice which has made her name eminent
among even the notorious beauties of Charles the Second’s scandalous
Court. The first of her seven children was a daughter, Anne, born in May
1661, and at first acknowledged by Palmer, although Lady Castlemaine had
undoubtedly been mistress of Charles the Second since May 1660. There
are three portraits of Anne Palmer, or Anne Palmer Fitzroy, as she was
afterwards known, at Dorney, the earliest of them exhibiting a romantic
hilly landscape for background, with a beacon or fire-cresset along the
winding road, such as were placed on the more obscure ways in those times
for the guidance of travellers. She married in 1675 Thomas Lennard, Lord
Dacre and Earl of Sussex.
[Illustration: PRESENTATION TO CHARLES THE SECOND OF THE FIRST PINE-APPLE
GROWN IN ENGLAND.
_From the painting at Ham House._]
Castlemaine, shortly after the birth of this putative daughter, became
a pervert to the Roman Catholic religion, and his wife, seizing upon
this as a pretext, finally left him and lived openly as the King’s
mistress. Several of her children were acknowledged by Charles, and two
of them were created dukes, her second son, Henry Fitzroy, becoming
Duke of Grafton, her third, George, Duke of Northumberland. She was,
with an astounding display of cynical humour, in 1670 created Baroness
Nonsuch, “in consideration of her own personal virtues,” and Duchess of
Cleveland; and as Duke of Cleveland her eldest son succeeded her. Thus,
with Barbara, with Nell Gwynne, and others, Charles the Second abundantly
recruited the ducal order and other ranks of the peerage; thus giving
point to the Duke of Buckingham’s joke. The King had been addressed at
Court as the “father of his people.”
“Of a good many of them,” observed Buckingham behind his hand.
The Earl of Castlemaine lived to see a good many changes. It was
not necessary in those times to live to a great age to witness many
revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was committed to the Tower
shortly after the accession of William the Third, and remained a prisoner
there from February 1689 until February 10, 1690. He died in 1705.
A little to the north of Dorney, between it and the Bath road, are the
remains of Burnham Abbey, a house for Benedictine nuns founded in 1265
by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and titular King of the Romans, brother
of Edward the Third. There were an abbess and nine nuns when the
establishment was surrendered to Henry the Eighth’s Commissioners. The
ruins are now amid the rickyards and agricultural setting of the Abbey
Farm, and although the church has wholly disappeared, the remains of
the chapter-house and the domestic buildings form an exquisite picture,
untouched by any busybodying “tidying-up” activities. The seeker after
the picturesque, who finds historical evidences destroyed by well-meaning
“restorers”; the artist, who generally discovers the artistic negligence
of his foregrounds abolished in favour of neatly kept flower-beds and
gravel paths and the feeling of ruin and decay thus utterly disregarded,
will be rejoiced here, and will find the ruins still put to farming uses,
just as Girtin and Turner and the other roaming artists of a hundred
years ago were accustomed to find the castles and abbeys of their day.
There is more pure æsthetic delight in such scenes as this, left in their
natural decay and put to the uses to which they in the logical order
of things descended, than in the same place swept and garnished to be
made a show. The Lady Chapel and the refectory are stables, where the
cart-horses shelter and form a picture so exactly like Morland’s stable
interiors that the place might well have been a model for him. Every
detail is complete in the Morland way, even to the old stable-lantern
hanging on a post. Much of the ruined buildings is of the Early English
period, and the horses come and go through pointed doorways. Gracious
trees richly surround and overhang the scene.
[Illustration: BURNHAM ABBEY.]