Bramshill House, in Bramshill, northeast Hampshire, England, is one of the largest and most important prodigy house mansions from the Jacobean period in England. It was built in the early 17th century by the 11th Baron Zouche of Harringworth but was partly destroyed by fire a few years later. The design shows the influence of the Italian Renaissance, which became popular in England during the late 16th century. The house was designated a Grade I listed building in 1952.
The mansion's southern façade is notable for its decorative architecture, which includes at its centre a large oriel window above the principal entrance. Interior features include a great hall displaying 92 coats of arms on a Jacobean screen, an ornate drawing room, and a gallery. Numerous columns and friezes are found throughout the mansion, while several rooms have large tapestries depicting historical figures and events on their panelled walls. The house is set in of grounds containing an lake. The grounds, which received a listing in 1984, are part of a Registered Historic Park that includes about of early 17th-century formal gardens near the house. The wider medieval park was landscaped from the 17th to the 20th century and contains woodland.
Bramshill appears to have been a local sporting and social venue since the 16th century. The cricket ground at the house played host to a first-class match in 1823 when an early Hampshire team played an England XI, and it hosted three other matches in 1825–26. During the Second World War, the mansion was used as a Red Cross maternity home, before becoming the residence of the exiled King Michael and Queen Anne of Romania for a number of years. It became the location of the Police Staff College in 1960, and was later home to the European Police College. As a result, many campus buildings have been added to the estate. Owing to escalating maintenance costs the property was sold to the heritage property developers City & Country in August 2014. Among the 14 ghosts reputed to haunt the house is that of a bride who accidentally locked herself in a chest on her wedding night and was not found until 50 years later.
Location
Bramshill House is at the approximate centre of a triangle formed by Reading, Basingstoke and Farnborough, about by road southwest of central London. It lies northeast of Hartley Wintney, east of Hazeley off the B3349 road, and southeast of the village of Bramshill, which lies on the B3011 road.
Three main lanes approach the property: Mansion Drive from the B3011 in the southwest; Reading Drive South from the B3011 to the east of Bramshill village from the north; and the shorter Pheasantry Drive, which approaches from the southeast via Chalwin's Copse, just north of the course of the River Hart. Within the grounds is a private lane, Lower Pool Road, which connects Mansion Drive to Reading Drive South, passing the pond and several outer buildings. The location is 51°19′57.9″N 0°54′43.2″W, or 51.332759, −0.911991.
History
Original house The 1086 Domesday Book lists one of the two manors of Bromeselle (the Anglo-Norman spelling of Bromshyll) as held by Hugh de Port.
In the early 14th century, Sir John Foxley, Baron of the Exchequer, built and endowed a chapel in the village of Bramshill. His first wife, Constance de Bramshill, may have been the heiress of the Bramshill family. Their son, Thomas Foxley, became MP for Berkshire in 1325, and was appointed constable of Windsor Castle in 1328, soon after the accession of the 14-year-old Edward III. In 1347 he obtained a licence to build a manor house or small castle at Bramshill, which included a wooded park. The house, built between 1351 and 1360, had thick walls, vaulted cellars, and an internal courtyard measuring . Based on the similarity of the surviving vaults under Bramshill House and those under what became the servants' hall and steward's room at Windsor Castle, it may have been a copy of William of Wykeham's work there.
The estate remained in the hands of the Foxley family and their heirs, the Essex family, until 1499, when it was sold to Giles Daubeney, 1st Baron Daubeney. Giles's son Henry Daubeney (later Earl of Bridgewater) sold the property to Henry VIII, and in 1547 Edward VI granted the estate to William Paulet, whose heirs sold it in 1600 to Sir Stephen Thornhurst of Agnes Court, Kent.
New manor house
In March 1605, Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche, a favourite of James I, bought the property from Thornhurst. A house was earlier planned on the site for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, whose heraldic feathers are displayed above the central pediment. Lord Zouche demolished a large part of the building and began to build the Bramshill House of today. Henry Shaw describes the new house which Zouche built as a "specimen of Elizabethan architecture [which] merits particular attention, exhibiting all the stateliness for which the period referred to was remarkable, with a suite of apartments both large and lofty. The amplitude of its dimensions indicate a princely residence."
An inventory taken in 1634 after Zouche's death listed the library as having 250 books and a collection of mathematical instruments, and revealed that the maids' chamber was of a very high standard. James Zouch, grandson of Edward la Zouche, sold the property to the Earl of Antrim in 1637, at which time the house's furniture was valued at £2,762. During the reign of Charles I, the house was partly destroyed by a fire. On 25 June 1640, Lord Antrim sold Bramshill for £9,500 to Sir Robert Henley. In 1673 it was the property of his son, Sir Andrew Henley, 1st Baronet.
Sir John Cope purchased the property in 1699, and his descendants occupied the premises until 1935. The Cope family shortened the wings on the south side in 1703, converted most of the chapel to a drawing room and introduced a mezzanine on the west side during the 18th century. They were responsible for much of the interior, with significant renovation work done in the 19th century and in 1920. After his victory over Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington was offered his choice of house by Parliament; he visited Bramshill but in 1817 chose Stratfield Saye instead.
Sporting events
Numerous paintings and prints depict games and social events taking place on the lawn; one such painting by Joseph Nash, now in the National Fencing Museum, depicts 17th-century rapier practice, with a number of upper-class men, women and children as spectators.
The cricket ground at the house first played host to a first-class match in 1823 when an early Hampshire team played an England XI. Hampshire won by five wickets. Two further first-class matches were played there in 1825, when Hampshire drew against Godalming and defeated Sussex. A final first-class match was held there in 1826 when a combined Hampshire and Surrey team played and lost to Sussex.
Modern times In 1935, the house was purchased from the Cope family by Ronald Nall-Cain, 2nd Baron Brocket, the house's last private owner. It was used by the Red Cross as a maternity home during the Second World War, after which it became the home of the exiled King Michael and Queen Anne of Romania for several years."
Bramshill House became a Grade I listed building on 8 July 1952, and was acquired by the British government the following year as a dedicated site for police training. It became the location of the National Police College in 1960. From 2005, two buildings on the site housed the European Police College (CEPOL) until this was moved to Budapest in 2014.
By the late 1980s the estate had become expensive to maintain, and according to John Wheeler, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, by 1989 it was "in a poor state of repair". In July 2013 the Home Office placed the house and estate on the market for £25 million. It was sold to the heritage property developers City & Country in August 2014. In 2018, the house, with a reduced estate of about 90 acres, was put back on the market with a guide price of £10 million.
Architecture
Exterior
The 15-bedroom Bramshill House is one of the largest and most important Jacobean mansions in England, described as one of the "glories of English architecture" by the historians Anthony Blunt and James Lees-Milne.
The architecture of the three-storey building was inspired by the Italian Renaissance, and was executed mainly by German builders. It is approximately in length. The design is traditionally attributed to the architect John Thorpe, although no records remain to confirm the attribution. Surviving records do show that the stone mason Richard Goodridge was working at Bramshill in 1617 and again in 1621 and the authors of the revised Hampshire volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England suggest him as a possible alternative designer.
The building stands on the edge of a plateau, overlooking the park to the south. The plan of the house is unusual, partly because of its incorporation of the earlier building; it extends at right angles to the primary (southern) façade. The elevations are symmetrical, facing outwards, but the interior court is narrow, and projecting wings lie at either end of the eastern and western sides.
Bramshill House is three storeys high on the southern main entrance side and two storeys high to the north and east. There are three vaulted cellars to the west. The house is built of red brick laid in English bond dressed with stone, with ashlar quoining at the corners of the wings. Stone dressings are featured on numerous large mullion windows. An open carved parapet surmounts the building. The roof consists of red tiles, and there are large gables on the west side. The chimney stacks are rectangular.
North and south
The north façade has three bays separated by windows and features a loggia, typical of early 17th-century houses, with a central arched entrance to accommodate coaches. The central bay is crowned by an ornamental pierced parapet below a niched Dutch gable, which shelters a small statue of Lord Zouche or James I. There are small obelisks at either side of the gable. Thorpe originally intended the main entrance of the house to be on this side, building on the gatehouse of the earlier Foxley house.
The southern façade was described by Nikolaus Pevsner as "among the most fanciful pieces of Jacobean design in [England]". It is three storeys high and features three sets of three bays in either wing, with five inner sections.
The outer two of the inner sections feature eight angular windows, aligned in rows of four on the first two floors and then a row of four windows on the top floor. The inner two sections have the same layout on the first and top floors with eight windows aligned in rows of four on the first floor and four windows on the top floor, but the ground floor features two arches, which form part of the central loggia.
The stone central bay, wide, is emphasised by superimposed double decorated pilasters on all floors and the central archway of the loggia in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, surmounted by a florid perforated pediment. In addition there is an oriel window on the first floor above the main entrance.
An important difference from the other sides of this building is a terrace, in width, between the projecting wings, a kind of architectural foreground to the garden. The terrace is bounded by a balustrade. The arcade on the terrace of the southern front is a good example of Italian domestic architecture, used in villas. The triglyphs and ornamented metopes, together with the simple capitals of the columns, indicate the Doric order, but are light enough to be Ionic. The south entrance was the model for Darlington, the Crocker-McMillin Mansion in New Jersey, US, built between 1901 and 1907.
East and west