Nonsuch Park -and the site of Nonsuch Palace

THE FORGOTTEN PALACE OF HENRY VIII

by Leslie Walford

King Henry VIII of England was best known to the world for chopping and changing his wives with alarming frequency. Henry 'Six Wives' Tudor was also very fond of hunting on horseback and not very fond of the Church.

When he saw the opportunity to acquire a further 2000 acres of land on which to hunt at Cuddington between the villages of Cheam and Ewell in north-east Surrey he did not hesitate to pull down the the village together with its church , dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, and build his last and most remarkable palace in its place. He called his palace Nonsuch because it was so splendid that there was none such other like it.

The church and village which he wiped off the map dated back, it is believed, to AD675. It was certainly included in the Domesday Survey in 1086.

Nonsuch Palace was built by an army of workmen between 1538 and 1545 and the materials used cane from far and wide, but much of it was from Merton Priory, just a few miles away`, which Henry had pulled down at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries following his break with the Church of Rome.

The new palace was soon famous throughout Europe for its magnificence and was visited by kings and queens, noblemen and ambassadors.

Today, all that remains are contemporary drawings, fragments of carved stone and pottery, and two 30 years old obelisks recording details of the site of the palace in the publicly-owned Nonsuch Park, some 13 miles from the centre of London. Where Henry VIII and his courtiers, and Queen Elizabeth I and her court, once hunted deer families now stroll in the sunshine and dog owners exercise their charges. The 80ft towers covered with carved slate and stucco and topped with "heraldic beasts and gilded weather vanes" are no more.

The palace fell into decay in the second half of the seventeenth century and during the Great Plague of 1665 the diarist Samuel Pepys, then Surveyor General of the Victualling Office, was billeted there with other civil servants from the Exchequer in London. He was struck by the decline in the fabric of the building. "A fine place it hath heretofore been", he wrote sadly, "and a fine prospect about the house". After recording some of the surviving splendours, he described walking "in the ruined garden".

Despite the neglect, Nonsuch Palace might well have survived to bccome in time the jewel in the crown of the National Trust or English Heritage but for Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine. After many years as mistress of King Charles II, she was pensioned off and loaded with further titles and the ownership of the unwanted Nonsuch Palace.

The countess was a notorious gambler and, despite the pensions and various lump sums she extracted from Charles, she had trouble paying her gambling debts, It is said that she lost £20,000 and a good deal of her jewellery on one night's gambling. She solved some of her cash flow problems by having her palace pulled down and the materials and rubble sold off to be incorporated in other great housess and buildings.

The lost palace would have become simply a local myth but for John Dent, one time Borough Librarian of Epsom and Ewell. Using evidence found from trenches dug preparatory to building a road before the Second World War and aerial photographs, he set about organising an excavation which in 1959 uncovered the foundations of Nonsuch Palace and its separate Banqueting Hall..

Nonsuch is now gone but, thanks to John Dent, not forgotten.