In the Weald of Kent, Sissinghurst is today famous for its twentieth-century gardens — but beneath the flowers survives a great Tudor court residence, built by a family of servants of the Crown. Its rose-brick tower and its gatehouse are the remains of an Elizabethan 'prodigy house' that welcomed the queen in person.
From the Baker gatehouse to the prodigy house
The estate owes its Tudor face to the Bakers. Sir John Baker, privy councillor of Henry VIII and a harsh persecutor of the reformers — which earned him the nickname 'Bloody Baker' — raised in the 1530s a brick gatehouse, still standing. His son Sir Richard Baker transformed the whole, in the 1560s-1570s, into a vast house of state arranged around a tall four-storey brick tower, flanked by two octagonal turrets: a 'prodigy house', of those sumptuous residences the nobility built to dazzle the court and, if possible, the queen. The word 'Castle' came later: Sissinghurst was not a fortress, but a house of prestige with court and tower, girdled by medieval moats inherited from an earlier manor. The rose-coloured brick, fired on the spot, and the tall wrought chimneys are the signature of these great houses of the Weald, that region of Kent rich in clay and timber where the art of building in brick flourished under the Tudors.
Elizabeth's visit (1573)
In August 1573, Elizabeth I honoured Sissinghurst with her presence for three days, during one of her summer 'progresses' — those tours where the queen stayed with her great subjects, at their expense. To receive the sovereign was a ruinous and coveted honour: she had to be lodged, fed and entertained with a splendour worthy of her, and sometimes a whole wing had to be rebuilt for the occasion. The visit of 1573 marks the apogee of Tudor Sissinghurst, before a long decline. In the twentieth century the writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, charmed by the brick tower, created here from 1930 one of the most famous gardens in the world, but it is indeed the Elizabethan silhouette that remains its skeleton.
What to see
- The 1560s brick tower and its two turrets.
- The west wing / gatehouse (c. 1533), now a library.
- The Priest's House and the South Cottage.
- The medieval moats and the rose-brick setting.
Seeing it differently
Climb the narrow stair of the tower and stop at the floor where Vita Sackville-West set her writing room: through the mullioned windows the eye takes in at once the modern gardens and the Tudor geometry of the estate. Look, in the brick, for the difference of tone between the gatehouse of the 1530s and the tower of the 1560s: two generations of Bakers left their mark there. And remember, as you walk these flowered paths, that they cover the site of a house once vast enough to lodge a queen and her court. Sissinghurst is read in layers: a medieval manor, a prodigy house, then a garden — three ages laid one over another beneath the roses.
Did you know?
Fallen into ruin, the Tudor house of Sissinghurst served in the eighteenth century as a prison camp of the Seven Years' War. The historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was posted here as a militia officer and complained of the 'inconceivable dirtiness' of the place — and it is from those French prisoners that the name 'Castle' comes.
Notes
Sissinghurst lies near Cranbrook, in the Weald of Kent; the house and its gardens are today in the care of the National Trust.
Quiz
- Who built Sissinghurst's brick gatehouse in the 1530s?
- Sir John Baker, councillor of Henry VIII
- Cardinal Wolsey
- Thomas Cromwell
- Which queen stayed here in August 1573?
- Elizabeth I
- Mary Stuart
- Anne of Cleves
- What was Sissinghurst in Tudor times?
- A great house of state (prodigy house)
- A border fortress
- A monastery