Shirburn Castle
Shirburn Castle is a Grade I listed, moated castle located at the village of Shirburn, near Watlington, Oxfordshire. Originally constructed in the fourteenth century, it was renovated and remodelled in the Georgian era by Thomas Parker, the first Earl of Macclesfield who made it his family seat, and altered further in the early nineteenth century. The Earls of Macclesfield remained in residence until 2004, and the castle is still owned by the Macclesfield family company. It formerly contained an important, early eighteenth century library which, along with valuable paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts including furniture, remained in the ownership of the 9th Earl and were largely dispersed at auction following his departure from the property; notable among these items were George Stubbs's 1768 painting "Brood Mares and Foals", a record setter for the artist at auction in 2010, the Macclesfield Psalter, numerous rare and valuable books, and personal correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton. Still privately owned, the castle is not open to the public although its exterior and some portions of the interior have been publicly visible on account of its use in a number of film and television productions.
Description and history
Eleventh to thirteenth centuries
The land on which Shirburn resides was part owned by the Norman nobleman Robert D'Oyly who accompanied William the Conqueror on his conquest of England in 1066. Various nineteenth century sources, stemming in the main from a short "History of Shirburn Castle" compiled by Lady Macclesfield in 1887, state that D'Oyly constructed a castle there, which was described as having been surrendered to Empress Matilda in 1141 as part of a ransom negotiation. Later one Warin de Lisle, apparently possessed the estate; this Warin was executed at York in 1322 for taking part in an insurrection. Subsequently, his widow was pardoned and her late husband's lands restored; whether these included a Norman castle at Shirburn, or whether such a structure even existed in that form, has not been verified by subsequent researchers and may in fact simply reflect a desire of the then occupants to claim a more ancient origin for the castle than was actually the case. The relevant chapter of the Victoria County History notes only the previous existence of a manor, which belonged in the 13th century to Robert de Burghfield, "likely to have been on the site" of the present castle. A supposed account of a pre-1300 visit to a "castle" at Shirburn by Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, also quoted in nineteenth century sources, was revealed as a forgery of a book published in 1948.File:Bodiam-castle-10My8-1188.jpg|thumb|Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, showing a possible analogue for the appearance of some aspects of Shirburn prior to the latter's 18th-century remodelling
1377-1716 (de Lisle/Quatremain/Fowler/Chamberlain/Gage era)
A "licence to crenellate" the present castle was granted to the earlier Warin's grandson, Warin de Lisle in 1377, with actual construction taking place around 1378. The present, still moated, two-to-three storey building has a quadrangular form with four rounded corner towers. Rendered on the exterior, it has been stated as being the earliest brick building in Oxfordshire, however this appears to be based on a misconception: Emery, cited below, believes that the original construction was probably built entirely in limestone, with the brick "casing" added only when the castle was remodelled in 1720 in the Georgian style. Emery writes:Emery also compares and contrasts de Lisle's castle at Shirburn with that constructed a few years later by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge at Bodiam in Sussex, noting similarities in original architectural features but also that Shirburn "seems to have had less of a martial air than the castle at Bodiam", in particular that the "formidable twin-towered gate-house" at Bodiam presents a stronger front than its equivalent at Shirburn.
After de Lisle's death in 1382, the castle passed to his daughter, who married Lord Berkeley, and then to her daughter who married Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, whose principal residence was Warwick Castle. Later it was owned or occupied by successive families including the Talbots, Quartremayes and Fowlers and eventually sold to the Chamberlain family, commencing with Edward Chamberlain, whose mother took out a lease on the Shirburn estate from her brother in 1505 and who died there in 1543. The castle's next owner was Sir Leonard Chamberlain, d.1561, who was also the Governor of Guernsey from 1553. An account survives from 1559 documenting something of the internal layout of the rooms at that time, specifically: "the wardrobe, the entry, the great chamber at the lower end of the hall, the inner chamber, 'the brusshynge howse', the hall and the chamber over the parlour, and an inner chamber there; there was also a cellar, buttery, chambers each for the butler, priest, horse-keeper, cook, and chamberlains, an additional chamber, a low parlour, a kitchen larder, boulting house, fish-house, garner, brew-house, and other outhouses". During the 1642–1651 English Civil War Shirburn was held by Richard Chamberlain for the King, but was surrendered to Sir Thomas Fairfax for the Parliamentarian cause in 1646, apparently without damage.
After the end of the Civil War, the castle remained in the Chamberlain family. The last male of the line, John Chamberlain, died in 1651, leaving no sons but two co-heirs, his daughters Elizabeth, wife of John Nevill, 10th Baron Bergavenny|John Neville, Lord bergavenny, and Mary, who was married first to Sir Thomas Gage of Firle, Sussex, and later to Sir Henry Goring. Elizabeth and Lord Abergavenny possessed the manorial rights there until Elizabeth's death ; by 1682 both Elizabeth and Mary had died and the castle passed to Joseph Gage, Mary's fourth son by her first husband, Thomas Gage.
The appearance of the castle prior to its sale to Parker in 1716 is not known in detail from contemporary accounts or illustrations; it does appear on Robert Plot's 1677 "Map of Oxfordshire", similar to the castle of today, although whether this is intended to be a "stock" castle representation or an actual likeness is unclear. Emery, 2006, suggests that many features of its original external and likely internal appearance probably would have resembled its near-contemporary at Bodiam in Sussex; unlike Bodiam and many other castles of the era, Shirburn appears to have survived the Civil War relatively unscathed, the Victoria County History stating that it was never besieged but surrendered at the time after appropriate terms had been negotiated.
The Gage family outfitted the castle with an armoury in the late seventeenth–early eighteenth century, containing among other items suits of armour and weapons such as broadswords and "pistols and muskets all marked to Gage family... typical of those used by a Household Militia force in the event of social unrest or more likely, at that time, of French invasion"; according to later illustrations, this armoury was retained as a feature of the post-1716 remodelling of the castle by Thomas Parker, and can be glimpsed in the 1823 engraving by J. Skelton entitled "Ancient Entrance Hall of Shirburn Castle".
The castle continued as the seat of that branch of the Gage family until 1714, when the eldest son, another Thomas Gage succeeded his wife Elizabeth's late father to the estate of High Meadow, a property in Gloucestershire, and associated "considerable fortune". He then decided to sell Shirburn.
1716-c.1800 (Parker era, first part)
In 1716 the castle was acquired by Thomas Parker, Baron of Macclesfield and subsequently Lord Chancellor of England from 1718 to 1725, the purchase price being £25,696 8s. 5d. ; Mowl and Earnshaw, cited below, state that according to "a manuscript note made by Parker", the portion of the purchase price actually allocated to the castle exclusive of the grounds was £7,000, and that he also spent an additional £42,297 on the land needed for the park. From this date the castle became the seat of the Earls of Macclesfield, until the present time. The then very wealthy, soon-to-be first Earl was responsible for extensive renovations to the castle, costing a further £5,000, and also started to accumulate the castle's extensive and important library, which survived intact for almost 300 years until its dispersal. Thomas Parker's son George, later to inherit the earldom and castle upon his father's death, set out for Italy on the "Grand Tour" in 1719 for a trip lasting almost three years, during which time he was commissioned by his father to acquire "important works" for the castle, the fruits of which included numerous plaster busts plus at least 13 similar bronzes. Additions to the library were continued by the 3rd Earl, and by the latter's death in 1795 "the six collections for which the library is famous had been brought together, and 12,700 or so printed books and 260 manuscripts had been assembled... many first editions of early English books, including two Caxtons, and among its most valuable manuscript possessions is the unique Liber de Hida."The Earls of Macclesfield are protective of their privacy, allowing few visitors to see the inside of the castle and denying requests for access for an examination to scholars of medieval architecture, with the result that Anthony Emery wrote in 2006: "Shirburn Castle has a well deserved reputation for being barred to all students of architecture...Consequently, the castle has never been studied in detail...The list extends from Lord Torrington in 1775 to Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural staff of Country Life, and the Department of the Environment recorders 200 years later....Not surprisingly, Shirburn has been ignored by all writers on castles except for the summaries of ownership by Sir James Mackenzie, The Castles of England, 1 163-5 and Sir Charles Oman, Castles 46-9". The medieval entrance hall, a surviving room from the pre-eighteenth century castle, was previously illustrated by J. Skelton "after F. Mackenzie" and published in Skelton's Antiquities of Oxfordshire in 1824.
Emery postulates that after Thomas Parker purchased the castle in 1716, the latter's renovations probably affected more than three-quarters of the building, with the result that what stands at Shirburn today is "essentially an eighteenth-century interpretation of the medieval castle, following its original plan", although he allows that survivals from the original fourteenth-century structure include a "reasonable amount of the west range", the lower stages of two corner towers, and "possibly some ground-level walling internally", although he was unable to inspect the latter in person. The Victoria County History also suggests that: "The present south range may represent the medieval south range, with new windows inserted and with another range of rooms added to the south, outside the original outer wall." In a 1981 paper discussing the architecture of the present castle, authors Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw suggest that the eighteenth-century rebuild intentionally incorporated round-arched, or neo-Norman, expressions of medievalism, "probably to assert a link with a supposed Norman foundation." The same authors also point to Vanbrugh Castle, a London house designed and built by John Vanbrugh in 1719 for his own family, as a similar expression of neo-medievalism of around the same date, again with rounded windows, in contrast to the more pointed windows associated with the mid-18th century "Gothick" style of a few decades later. The rounded window style appears to have been used consistently in the Parker-era rebuild or renovation, including in all of the surviving inward-facing walls surrounding the courtyard, although from 1830, the effect was masked by the incorporation of more "standard" segmental-headed sash windows in the new external additions along several frontages. Considering all of the accounts presently available, it would seem to be the case that, at a time when his contemporaries had most recently been constructing their new country houses in the English Baroque style, Parker decided to purchase an actual, habitable 14th-century castle and construct his new residence entirely within it, at the same time adding new windows to the surviving medieval walls and towers in the Georgian style.
Among the household of Thomas Parker, the 1st Earl, was his friend, the Welsh mathematician William Jones, close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley, who acted as tutor to Parker's son George, the future second Earl. Jones had earlier acquired the extensive library and archive of the mathematician John Collins, which contained several of Newton's letters and papers written in the 1670s, and later edited and published many of Newton's manuscripts. His collection of books and papers eventually passed into the Earl's library and was passed down through the Parker family until the 2000s; the Newton-associated items were ultimately sold to the Cambridge University Library.
George Parker, the 2nd Earl of Macclesfield resided at Shirburn and inherited the earldom and the castle upon his father's death in 1732. He was celebrated as an astronomer and spent much time conducting astronomical observations at Shirburn, where he built an observatory and a chemical laboratory. The observatory was "equipped with the finest existing instruments" and the 2nd Earl used it from 1740. In 1761 the astronomer Thomas Hornsby observed the transit of Venus from the castle grounds. A 1778 mezzotint by James Watson, a copy of which is now in the National Maritime Museum, shows the 2nd Earl's two astronomical assistants, Thomas Phelps and John Bartlett, at work in the observatory.