Sudeley Castle is a Grade I listed castle in the parish of Sudeley, in the Cotswolds, near to the medieval market town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. The castle has 10 notable gardens covering some 15 acres within a 1,200-acre estate nestled within the Cotswold hills.
Building of the castle began in 1443 for Ralph Boteler; the Lord High Treasurer of England, on the site of a previous 12th-century fortified manor house. It was later seized by the crown and became the property of King Edward IV and King Richard III, who built its famous banqueting hall.
King Henry VIII and his then wife Anne Boleyn visited the castle in 1535; and it later became the home and final resting place of his sixth wife, Catherine Parr who remarried after the king's death. Parr is buried in the castle's church, making Sudeley the only privately owned castle in the world to have a Queen of England buried in its grounds. Sudeley soon became the home of the Chandos family, and the castle was visited on three occasions by Queen Elizabeth I, who held a three-day party there to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
During the First English Civil War the castle was used as a military base, by King Charles I and Prince Rupert, and it was later besieged and slighted by parliament, remaining largely in ruins for the following few centuries until its purchase in 1837 by the Dent family, who restored the castle and turned it into a family home.
History
11th century
Although the origins of Sudeley are lost to time, its name, a corruption of its Anglo-Saxon name Sudeleagh, meaning ‘south lying pasture or clearing in forest' gives us an idea of what it was like. Sudeley most likely owes its early rise as a royal estate to its close proximity to Winchcombe, which, during the reign of King Offa, was the capital of the Kingdom of Mercia. Under royal patronage, Winchcombe prospered, becoming a walled town with its own monastery, where a king and a saint are now buried.
By the turn of the 11th century, Sudeley had grown into a manor house set in a Royal deer park, given as an extravagant gift from King Æthelred the Unready to his daughter Goda on her wedding day.
Despite William the Conqueror's policy of depriving Saxon nobles of their estates after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the family managed to retain Sudeley, and Goda's descedants would hold Sudeley for another four centuries.
12th century
During The Anarchy, John de Sudeley supported the Empress Matilda in her fight against her cousin, Stephan of Blois.
It is believed that the first castle at Sudeley was built during this time, otherwise known as an adulterine castle. Nothing is known as to what this castle looked like; it may well have simply been the fortification of the existing manor house, or an altogether new structure.
However, after the sacking of Worcester in 1139 by the forces of the Empress Matilda, under her brother Robert of Gloucester, Waleran de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Worcester retaliated, attacking and capturing both Sudeley and Tewkesbury.
Although little is known of what happened to Sudeley during this attack, it seems likely that its fortifications were pulled down by the vengeful Earl of Worcester, as soon after Roger, Earl of Hereford built a replacement motte and bailey castle in Winchcombe.
A few decades after the Anarchy, the Sudeley family were to step once more onto the world stage with John's younger son, William de Tracy, participating in the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. William was subsequently excommunicated by Pope Alexander III. He went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1171 and gained an audience with the pope, who exiled him and his fellow conspirators to Jerusalem.
Construction of the current castle
By the start of the 15th century, the Sudeley name was believed to have gone extinct and the Boteler family had inherited the castle through the marriage of Joan, the sister of the last de Sudeley.
Ralph Boteler is believed to have started the construction of the castle in 1443, around the same time he became Lord High Treasurer of England. Ralph rose to prominence during the Hundred Years' War; serving in France under John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford in 1419, and was later appointed to the Regency Council of King Henry VI in 1423.
Sudeley was not Ralph's first great project, having extensively renovated the Manor on the More, the house he used when attending court, and was later described by a French Ambassador, Jean du Bellay, as more magnificent than Hampton Court. Unfortunately, Ralph failed to gain royal permission to crenellate the castle, and had to seek King Henry VI's pardon.