Qualla: White Ladies Priory

White Ladies Priory: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Just after dawn on 4 September 1651, a tall young man in a sweat-streaked horse soldier's coat rode up to a small priory house in the Shropshire woods near Boscobel. He had been on horseback all night, and the day before he had lost a kingdom. He was Charles II, defeated at the Battle of Worcester thirty-six hours earlier, with a Parliamentary price on his head of one thousand pounds, and he was looking for somewhere to hide. The house was White Ladies Priory, a half-converted Augustinian nunnery now lived in by Catholic tenants. A servant named George Penderell opened the door. By breakfast Charles had been put into the rough clothes of a woodman and sent into the trees with George's brother Richard. He would spend the next forty-three days running for his life across England.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

White Ladies Priory: Five Canonesses and a Habit

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0. Long before the king came running, White Ladies had been a small Augustinian convent of canonesses regular dedicated to St Leonard of Brewood. The earliest documentary reference is from 1186, but the surviving Romanesque work in the ruined nave is typically late 12th century, so ...

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Image: Richard Croft | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Ladies Priory: The Long Slow Decline

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mick Malpass, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the late 15th century White Ladies was in financial trouble. Most of its income came from leases granted at fixed rents in earlier centuries, and 16th-century inflation made those rents almost worthless. In 1471 Prioress Joan Shirley had granted a 99-year lease on a property i...

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Image: Mick Malpass | CC BY-SA 2.0

White Ladies Priory: The King at the Door

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 3 September 1651 Oliver Cromwell's army won what he called his crowning mercy at the Battle of Worcester. The young Charles II, twenty-one years old, escaped the field with a small group of officers. They rode all night, north out of Worcestershire and into the wooded country ...

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Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

White Ladies Priory: The Penderells

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The Penderell brothers, Richard, William, Humphrey, John and George, were small Catholic farmers who worked for the Giffards. A sixth brother had been killed at Edgehill in 1642 fighting for the King's father. They were exactly the kind of family who paid the highest price in 17t...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

White Ladies Priory: The Ruin Today

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MagicRubberDuck, CC BY-SA 4.0. The post-Reformation house built into the priory was largely lost by the early 19th century, although the artist Edward Williams sketched what was left in 1791. In 1938 Edward Fitzherbert, the 13th Baron Stafford, whose family had eventually inherited the site through marriage fr...

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Image: MagicRubberDuck | CC BY-SA 4.0