Qualla: Nonsuch Palace

Nonsuch Palace: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Flemish School, Public domain. Henry VIII picked the name first and dared the architects to live up to it. Nonsuch - as in 'none such,' meaning unrivalled. The palace he commissioned in Surrey in 1538 was meant to make the French sweat. Francis I had just finished the Chateau de Chambord, and the English king, then forty-seven and well past the slim splendour of his youth, wanted a building that would announce the Tudor dynasty in stone and stucco and gold leaf. He chose a site near his favourite hunting grounds. He never bothered to check whether there was water there. There wasn't, not enough of it anyway, and that small oversight would shadow the palace's entire short life.

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Image: Flemish School | Public domain

Nonsuch Palace: A Building Like a Boast

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charlesdrakew, Public domain. Construction began in 1538 and ran for years. Two courtyards rose from the chalky Surrey ground: an outer court of stone, fortified in the heavy medieval style of older English palaces, and an inner court that was something else entirely. Italian stuccoists and woodcarvers had be...

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Image: Charlesdrakew | Public domain

Nonsuch Palace: The Hand-Offs

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris mcdonn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Henry never quite finished it. After his death in 1547 the palace passed through complicated hands. Mary I sold it in 1556 to Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel, who completed the work by 1559. In 1585 Elizabeth I came to Nonsuch to sign the Treaty of Nonsuch with the Dutch Rep...

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Image: Chris mcdonn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nonsuch Palace: Hunting, Civil War, Sale

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Doyle of London, CC BY-SA 4.0. James I and Charles I both visited Nonsuch for hunting and racing. Anne of Denmark held it as her jointure - widow's portion - though she rarely went, except for one well-attended visit in July 1617 with the Earl of Southampton and others. When the English Civil War swept the Cro...

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Image: Doyle of London | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nonsuch Palace: Pulled Down for Gambling Debts

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Boaden, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1670, Charles II gave Nonsuch to his mistress Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, along with the title Baroness Nonsuch. She liked card games more than country houses. Around 1682 to 1683 she had the entire palace - all those stucco panels, those octagonal towers, that Renaissan...

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Image: Bill Boaden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nonsuch Palace: Digging Up the Boast

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AndyScott, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Nonsuch existed mainly as a few engravings, a watercolour from 1568, a corner of John Speed's 1610 map of Surrey, and the meticulous Lumley inventory of 1590. Then in 1959 a young archaeologist named Martin Bidd...

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Image: AndyScott | CC BY-SA 4.0