At the gates of Leeds, Temple Newsam is a vast horseshoe-shaped brick house, born under the Tudors and bound up with one of the most far-reaching episodes in British history: it was here that Lord Darnley was born, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and father of the king who would one day unite the crowns of Scotland and England.
From the Knights' Temple to the Tudor house
The estate appears as early as the Domesday Book (1086) under the name Neuhusam, "the new houses." Around 1155, Henry de Lacy granted it to the Knights Templar, who built a preceptory there — hence the "Temple" in its name; the order was suppressed in 1307. Having passed to the Darcys in 1377, the estate came in 1488 to the young Thomas, 1st Baron Darcy, who between 1500 and 1520 raised a brick Tudor house. But Darcy took part in the Catholic rising of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) against Henry VIII's religious policy: arrested, he was executed for treason in 1537, and Temple Newsam reverted to the Crown.
The cradle of a dynasty
In 1544, Henry VIII gave the house to his niece Lady Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox; and it was here that their son Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was born in 1545 and brought up. Darnley married Mary, Queen of Scots; from this union came James VI of Scotland, who would become James I of England in 1603 — the king of the Union of the Crowns and of the Bible that bears his name. Temple Newsam is, then, quite literally a dynastic cradle. For its imposing scale and its long gallery, the house has indeed earned the nickname of the "Hampton Court of the North."
In 1622, Lennox began the sale of the estate to the financier Sir Arthur Ingram for £12,000, a transaction completed in July 1624. Over the next twenty years, Ingram rebuilt the house on its horseshoe plan, but kept part of the Tudor house in the west wing: the original brickwork and the projecting bay windows at the centre of the west front still date from that time. This west wing, the only visible fragment of Lord Darcy's house and of Darnley's birth, remains the Renaissance heart of the whole, set within the Jacobean building that surrounds it. In the 1760s the park was redesigned by Capability Brown. Look for: the U-shaped brick front, the surviving Tudor west wing, the original projecting bays, the interiors and collections (furniture, silver), the great landscaped park.
Did you know?
In a house near Leeds was born the man whose son would unite two kingdoms. Lord Darnley, born at Temple Newsam in 1545, married Mary, Queen of Scots; their son James took the Scottish throne as a child, then the English one in 1603. The whole Union of the British Crowns has its genealogical root in this Yorkshire house.
Renaissance notes
Temple Newsam lies east of Leeds (West Yorkshire). The city of Leeds acquired the estate in 1922 for a nominal sum and opened it to the public in October 1923; the house holds today an important collection of decorative arts.
Quiz
- Which momentous figure was born at Temple Newsam in 1545?
- Lord Darnley, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots
- William the Conqueror
- Oliver Cromwell
- Why did the house revert to the Crown under Henry VIII?
- Its builder Lord Darcy was executed for the Pilgrimage of Grace
- It was won at cards
- It burned down
- Where does the "Temple" in Temple Newsam come from?
- From a Knights Templar preceptory (around 1155)
- From a Roman temple
- From a Protestant church