Drayton House is a Grade I listed country house of many periods south-west of the village of Lowick, Northamptonshire, England.
Described as Northamptonshire's most impressive medieval mansion by Nikolaus Pevsner, "one of the best-kept secrets of the English country house world" by architectural historian Gervase Jackson-Stops, and (affectionately) "a most venerable heap of ugliness, with many curious bits" by Horace Walpole, the house is generally held to have been begun in 1328, and there have been changes to the house in each century since, including works recorded by Isaac Rowe, John Webb, William Talman, Gerard Lanscroon, William Rhodes, Alexander Roos, George Devey and John Alfred Gotch. It sits in a park of about 200 acres known as Drayton Park.
It has passed only by inheritance since it was last sold in 1361, although this was itself an arrangement within extended family who had been there for nearly 300 years already. It is currently owned by the Stopford Sackville family and is open by prior written appointment.
History
The de Veres, later de Draytons
Aubrey de Vere I participated in the Norman conquest of England and, after the Geoffrey de Montbray, Bishop of Coutances forfeited it, he may have been awarded the manor of Drayton near Northampton, or it may have been awarded to his son, Aubrey de Vere II. Aubrey II was made Great Chamberlain by Henry I in 1133, and died in a riot in London in 1141. Whilst Aubrey III, his eldest son, eventually rose to become Earl of Oxford in 1156, Drayton passed to his younger son, Robert.
Robert married twice, second to Maud de Furnell, mother of Henry, to whom Drayton passed on his death. In the early thirteenth century, after inheriting Drayton from after his father's death in 1193-4, his son, Sir Walter de Vere, perhaps dropped the "de Vere" family name, and assumed the surname "Drayton", taken from the village, although this may also have been Walter's son, Henry. On Sir Walter's death in 1210-11, the house passed to Henry, later Sir Henry, and upon Sir Henry's death in 1253, to Sir Henry's thirty-year-old son, Baldwin, who died in 1278. Baldwin passed the estate to his son John, who is held by some sources to have built the present "crypt" and died in 1291.
Although still a minor 8 years after his father's death in 1299, Sir Simon de Drayton would go on to success, being member of parliament for Northamptonshire several times between 1320 and 1347, and likely began construction of the house present today in 1328, when he received a licence to crenellate. On his widow's death in 1359, it passed briefly to his son, John, before John quickly passed it to his son, Baldwin. However, it was soon purchased by Sir Henry Green in 1361 or 1362. This purchase was a somewhat obscure arrangement in which Sir Henry's second son, also Henry, would have the estate instead of John's son, who was Sir Henry's nephew through his wife, Katherine.
The Greens
The first Sir Henry Green, of Boughton, was Chief Justice between 1361 and 1365. On his death in 1370, Drayton passed to his younger son, who was described in a later family genealogy as "the delight and hopes of his old father". The second Henry was a favourite of Richard II, consequently being executed in 1399 for his support for Richard by Henry Bolingbroke, later King of England.
Nonetheless, soon after his father's beheading, Ralph Green was returned to his father's estates, including Drayton. It eventually passed to Ralph's nephew, another Henry Green, who was High Sheriff through the Wars of the Roses, reportedly acting impartially and thus saving his landholdings — at that time "one of the most considerable Estates ... in the posession of any Gentlemen in the Kingdom of England". Upon his death in 1467, he passed the house, via his only child Constance, to John Stafford, a son of the Duke of Buckingham.