Bramshill House
Interior features include a great hall displaying 92 coats of arms on a Jacobean screen, an ornate drawing room, and a 126.5-foot-long (38.6 m) gallery.
Numerous columns and friezes are found throughout the mansion, while several rooms have large tapestries depicting historical figures and events on their panelled walls.
The grounds, which received a Grade II* listing in 1984, are part of a Registered Historic Park that includes about 25 acres (10 ha) of early 17th-century formal gardens near the house.
During the Second World War, the mansion was used as a Red Cross maternity home, before becoming the residence of the exiled King Michael and Queen Anne of Romania for a number of years.
Bramshill House is at the approximate centre of a triangle formed by Reading, Basingstoke and Farnborough, about 47 miles (76 km) by road southwest of central London.
[6] Based on the similarity of the surviving vaults under Bramshill House and those under what became the servants' hall and steward's room at Windsor Castle, it may have been a copy of William of Wykeham's work there.
A house was earlier planned on the site for Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales (1594–1612),[13] whose heraldic feathers are displayed above the central pediment.
Henry Shaw describes the new house which Zouche built as a "specimen of Elizabethan [sic] architecture [which] merits particular attention, exhibiting all the stateliness for which the period referred to was remarkable, with a suite of apartments both large and lofty.
"[15] An inventory taken in 1634 after Zouche's death listed the library as having 250 books and a collection of mathematical instruments, and revealed that the maids' chamber was of a very high standard.
[27]" Bramshill House became a Grade I listed building on 8 July 1952,[28][29] and was acquired by the British government the following year[30] as a dedicated site for police training.
[33][34] By the late 1980s the estate had become expensive to maintain, and according to John Wheeler, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, by 1989 it was "in a poor state of repair".
[37][38] The 15-bedroom 56,974 square feet (5,293.1 m2) Bramshill House is one of the largest and most important Jacobean mansions in England,[21][39] described as one of the "glories of English architecture" by the historians Anthony Blunt and James Lees-Milne.
[42] Surviving records do show that the stone mason Richard Goodridge was working at Bramshill in 1617 and again in 1621 and the authors of the revised Hampshire volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England suggest him as a possible alternative designer.
[42] The elevations are symmetrical, facing outwards, but the interior court is narrow, and projecting wings lie at either end of the eastern and western sides.
[28] The north façade has three bays separated by windows and features a loggia, typical of early 17th-century houses, with a central arched entrance to accommodate coaches.
[42] The central bay is crowned by an ornamental pierced parapet below a niched Dutch gable, which shelters a small statue of Lord Zouche[42][45] or James I.
[55] Those in the drawing room contain scenes from Roman history and were based on designs by Peter Paul Rubens, who supervised the work in Brussels.
[58] The billiard room has a hidden door leading to the original entrance on the north side of the house through the Foxley gatehouse into the interior courtyard, and several doorways remain in the kitchen and housekeeping areas.
[57] Across from this is the former dining room, containing a large tapestry, believed to have been made by an English artist, "representing forest scenery in very subdued colours".
[64] The massive chimneypiece in the drawing room is classically designed, believed to be inspired by one of the great Italian architects of 16th-century Mannerism, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola.
[65] The plaster frieze in the library also displays fine workmanship; 1 foot 7 inches (0.48 m) wide, it is designed in a striking arabesque pattern, with an evident Florentine influence.
[75] When the chapel ceiling was restored by Sir William Cope, it was discovered that one section of the plaster work had previously been replaced with carved wood.
[78] To the west of the house is Peatmoor Copse and to the east Bramshill Forest,[2] and the grounds contained what was known as the "Green Court" and the "Flower Garden" at the time of William Henry Cope in the 1880s.
[83] Kingsley was reportedly especially enamoured of the fir trees, which he considered "a source of constant delight",[80] fondly naming them "James the First's gnarled giants".
[27] They include a Grey Lady (one story suggests that her husband, a religious dissenter, was beheaded in the 17th century) and a Green Man (a Cope family member who either drowned in the lake in 1806, according to the journalist P. Lal, or threw himself off a cliff near Brighton, according to the author Penny Legg).
A young man dressed in 1920s tennis garb, reputed to be a Cope family member who fell from a train, has supposedly been seen in the reception area of the house.
[97] In addition, Bramshill House was cited by the historian William Page as a possible location for the Legend of the Mistletoe Bough, a ghost story associated with several English country mansions.
In the case of Bramshill House, the story has it that this happened at Christmas time, and that the bride was found fifty years later still wearing her wedding dress and with a sprig of mistletoe in her hand; the chest is on display in the entrance hall.
[101] According to Legg, Michael I of Romania asked to be moved to another room during a stay there, in order to not be disturbed by the young woman in white who passed through his bedroom every night.
[98] An old man with a grey beard, thought by Legg to be the father or husband of the White Lady, is reported to stare through windows and at the Mistletoe Chest.
