Qualla: Hinchingbrooke House

Hinchingbrooke House: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. On 27 April 1603, King James I rode up the gravel drive of Hinchingbrooke House and was greeted by Sir Oliver Cromwell - not the Lord Protector, who was a small child at the time, but his lavish, spendthrift uncle. Sir Oliver presented the new king with hawks, horses, hounds and a gold cup, in the manner of a host determined to overspend his way into royal favour. He largely succeeded. He also bankrupted himself. Within a generation the family would be selling Hinchingbrooke to recover, and a teenage Oliver Cromwell would grow up watching his uncle's grand estate slip away. The house has spent four centuries swallowing such reversals and producing more of them. Today, sixth-formers walk corridors where Queen Elizabeth slept in 1564.

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Image: Public domain

Hinchingbrooke House: A Nunnery Acquired at a Discount

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Noble, Public domain. The bones of Hinchingbrooke are Benedictine. An 11th-century nunnery stood here, quiet and self-sufficient, until the dissolution of the monasteries swept through England in the 1530s. On 8 March 1538, Richard Williams - nephew of Thomas Cromwell, the architect of the dissolution...

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Image: Mark Noble | Public domain

Hinchingbrooke House: Kings and a Sandwich

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit After John Opie, Public domain. Elizabeth I came in August 1564 after the entertainments at Cambridge University. James I came in 1603, 1610, and sent Prince Henry in 1612. After the Cromwells went broke, the Montagu family - eventually the Earls of Sandwich - took possession. The most famous of them was John M...

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Image: After John Opie | Public domain

Hinchingbrooke House: Fire and Rebuilding

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Preston Neale, Public domain. A serious fire in 1830 gutted much of the interior, and the architect Edward Blore - the same man who completed Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria - rebuilt and restored it in the Gothic style then in fashion. Further restorations followed in 1894 and again in the 1960s. The mo...

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Image: John Preston Neale | Public domain

Hinchingbrooke House: The Stately Home That Became a Sixth-Form College

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Duncan Grey, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1970 Hinchingbrooke House became part of Hinchingbrooke School, housing the sixth form. The school itself is the modern descendant of Huntingdon Grammar School - the same grammar school that Oliver Cromwell and Samuel Pepys attended, whose original building now houses the Crom...

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Image: Duncan Grey | CC BY-SA 2.0