Who owns penshurst place

He was quite intellectual, and might have been a happier man had he been able to spend all his days among his books, yet he had a devotion to duty and took an active part in public life, holding a number of diplomatic posts. Queen Elizabeth I first visits Penshurst Place. The Queen Elizabeth Room, open to the public today, was named after her, as she often held audience there during her many visits after He was the first commoner to receive such a tribute. Dying only a few months after his father, Sir Philip never took control of the Penshurst Place estate.

It therefore passed to his brother Robert. Sir Henry Sidney had spent his childhood at court as the constant companion of the young Prince Edward and, on his accession as King Edward VI, Sir Henry remained his closest friend: legend has it that Edward died in his arms. Sir Henry also became one of the most faithful servants of Queen Elizabeth I. Henry made substantial additions to his house at Penshurst, with alterations to the Buckingham building, adding an attic storey and dividing the first-floor hall into a series of State Rooms, which are now known as the Queen Elizabeth and Tapestry Rooms, open to the public.

He saw Penshurst Place as a fitting gift, and the house and its estate — located not far from the Sidney ironworks in Sussex — were given to William in thus began the long and fascinating history of the Sidney family at Penshurst Place. He would visit his friend and kinsman of the Sidneys, Charles Brandon, Earl of Suffolk, whilst courting Anne Boleyn, his second wife and future Queen, whose family owned nearby Hever Castle. Henry had no male heir and saw Buckingham as a threat.

My parents could easily have abandoned Penshurst and lived very comfortably there. But they both decided they ought to make a go of trying to save Penshurst — it had been the family home for years.

So they sold the estate in Yorkshire and invested the proceeds, minus lots of tax, in Penshurst. It took six months in the post-war era to get glass to re-glaze the house and the ancient drains had fractured, pouring water into the lawn. I was born in April so I was very young but I remember we all lived — I had two later four sisters — in very few rooms because the house was in turmoil.

But my mother and father did a fantastic job of repairs, putting in plumbing and bathrooms, and so on. I was very lucky in that my father encouraged me to join the Army first, which is what I wanted to do. Then I learned how to run the estate by doing it, in the same way, that my son, who is on the board of management, is learning it.

You absorb it and we have fantastic staff here — about 30 on the whole estate. We like to think we have as few people as possible, all of whom work jolly hard. But Penshurst is very much our family home, which is visited, and not an attraction in which we live.

Fortunately, people are very interested in its history. There are some things we would not do, lions in the park, that sort of thing. We get around 2, visitors to our annual Armada Week [featuring historical re-enactors], and we allow weddings here and for Penshurst to be used as a film location — The Other Boleyn Girl , Wolf Hall, and The Hollow Crown , and the creaking floorboard sound effects for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films came from our Long Gallery!

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