A right royal home

Royal connections shaped the history of two country houses that are now on the market

- Carla Passino

ON a fateful day in February 1527, a fresh-faced, 13-year-old boy, William Parr, found himself in the chapel at Stanstead Hall, the seat of Henry, 2nd Earl of Essex, to tie the knot with the Earl’s daughter, 10-year-old Anne Bourchier. It was the beginning of one of Tudor England’s most disastrous marriages (Anne left her husband in the 1540s), but also the foundation of Parr’s fortune and, with it, of the hall’s reinvention.

Sitting pretty at the centre of a moat-encircled island by Greenstead Green, in Essex, Grade II*-listed Stanstead Hall—for sale through Savills (01245 293221) at a guide price of £6.5 million—stands on 46 acres of land that had once been held by Robert Malet, Chamberlain of England in 1092, who soon lost it after he had the misguided idea of joining a conspiracy against Henry I.

The whims of kings and the vagaries of marriage and inheritance eventually saw the estate land in the hands of judge John de Bourchier. His son, Robert, 1st Baron Bourchier, would become Lord Chancellor to Edward III and, having fought valiantly for the King, was allowed to crenellate the house in the 1340s, according to the 1875 Handbook for Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Cambridgeshire. The moat was probably added under Sir Robert’s tenure, too, which makes it about 681 years old.