In the Surrey countryside, Loseley Park presents the sober, harmonious façade of a classic Elizabethan house. Built around 1562-1568 by Sir William More, a gentleman in the service of Elizabeth I, it unites, in a single house, the new elegance and the memory of the dissolved abbeys.
A house for receiving the queen
Sir William More, a rich notable and faithful administrator of the Crown in Surrey, had Loseley built to keep his rank and, it is said, because Elizabeth I had let him understand that his house of the time was too modest to receive her. The calculation paid off: Elizabeth I stayed here several times during her summer progresses, as did James I later. The house, U-shaped, with long mullioned windows and a balanced façade, embodies the Elizabethan taste for measure and light, far from the fantasies of the prodigy houses: here reign restraint and the rightness of proportion. Inside, the great hall keeps panelling, a richly carved chimneypiece and a wrought ceiling, the typical decoration of a well-off gentry house; family and royal portraits hang together there. More, a trusted man of the Crown, was in turn sheriff of Surrey, member of parliament and justice of the peace, serving the Tudors faithfully from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Elizabeth; his new house was the visible sign of that patient rise in the service of the state.
The stone of the abbeys
Loseley carries, in its very walls, the trace of the Reformation: part of the stone that built it comes from the ruins of Waverley Abbey, the first Cistercian abbey in England, founded in 1128 and dissolved by Henry VIII. Like so many houses of the age, the new house is thus made, literally, of the debris of the old religious world. Sir William More, a methodical and lettered man, also kept an abundant correspondence and archives — the famous 'Loseley manuscripts' — that offer a precious witness to the life of a gentleman in the service of the Tudor state, to his accounts, his lawsuits and his dealings with the court. The house has stayed, generation after generation, in the line of the More-Molyneux family.
What to see
- The Elizabethan façade, U-shaped, sober and luminous.
- The great hall with its panelling, carved chimneypiece and wrought ceiling.
- The stones of Waverley Abbey reused in the building.
- The portraits and the gardens surrounding the house.
Seeing it differently
Draw near the walls and look, in the stonework, for the older, worn blocks that were not cut for this house: they are the remains of Waverley, praying stones become the walls of a parlour. Then compare Loseley's façade with the excess of a Wollaton or an Audley End: here no towers, no glass in profusion, but a sobriety that shows another face of the Elizabethan, that of the cultivated gentry who preferred measure to display. Loseley is read like a page of archive: discreet, but full of what it has seen and kept.
Did you know?
Part of Loseley's walls comes from Waverley Abbey, dissolved shortly before: the new house of a servant of Elizabeth I was thus built with the stones of the first Cistercian monastery in England. Nothing says the English Renaissance better than this transfer of matter — the praying stone of the monks become the parlour of a gentleman, where the queen was received.
Notes
Loseley Park lies near Guildford, in Surrey, south-west of London; it is a private house, still in the line of the More-Molyneux family.
Quiz
- Which gentleman had Loseley Park built around 1560-1570?
- Sir William More
- Sir John Thynne
- Sir Walter Raleigh
- Where does part of Loseley's stone come from?
- The ruins of Waverley Abbey
- An Italian quarry
- Nonsuch Palace
- Which sovereign stayed at Loseley?
- Elizabeth I
- Mary Queen of Scots
- Catherine of Aragon