Qualla: Woodstock Palace

Woodstock Palace: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk into Blenheim Palace grounds today and you are walking on the ruins of an older, lost palace - Woodstock, where Henry I built a hunting lodge sometime before 1129 and surrounded it with seven miles of walls to make the first enclosed park in England. He kept lions inside the walls. And leopards. Two centuries before any king of England had a zoo, Woodstock had exotic beasts wandering its grounds. The palace that grew up here is gone now, mostly demolished after the Civil War, its stone reused to build Blenheim for the Duke of Marlborough. But the place where Woodstock stood absorbed seven centuries of English royal history, and the events that happened on this ground shaped much of what came next.

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Woodstock Palace: Fair Rosamund and the Hunting King

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Henry II inherited Woodstock from his grandfather Henry I, expanded it, and made it his favored country residence. He kept his mistress Rosamund Clifford here - 'Fair Rosamund' of the medieval legend, said to be lodged in a bower at the heart of a maze that only Henry could navig...

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Woodstock Palace: Treaties, Marriages, and Lost Plays

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Woodstock was the setting for some of the major diplomatic events of medieval and early-modern Britain. King William the Lion of Scotland married Ermengarde de Beaumont here in 1186. In 1247, Henry III signed the Treaty of Woodstock with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the Welsh prince who...

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Woodstock Palace: Catherine, Anne, and the Boy Who Would Be Arthur

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 15 August 1497, a betrothal ceremony was held at Woodstock for Catherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur, eldest son and heir of Henry VII. Catherine was eleven and still in Spain. Arthur was eleven and at Woodstock. The marriage took place by proxy. Arthur would die five years la...

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Woodstock Palace: The Prisoner's Diamond

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From 20 May 1554 until June 1555, the future Queen Elizabeth I was held at Woodstock as a prisoner of her half-sister, Queen Mary I. Elizabeth was suspected of involvement in Wyatt's Rebellion. Her keeper was Sir Henry Bedingfield, a careful Catholic gentleman who refused to allo...

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Woodstock Palace: How Woodstock Became Blenheim

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

King James I and Anne of Denmark visited Woodstock in September 1603 during an outbreak of plague in London. Sir Robert Cecil was unimpressed by the building. 'Unwholesome,' he wrote, 'all the house standing upon springs. It is unsavoury, for there is no savour but of cows and pi...

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