Wanstead Hall

[2] Henry had developed a taste for privacy towards the end of his reign, and acquired Wanstead as a maison de retraite in the vicinity of Greenwich Palace, laying out considerable sums on it.

[3] Henry VII used Wanstead as a location for receiving payments from what the Tudor historian David Starkey calls his "slush fund" of extra-parliamentary taxation and fines, away from the eyes of the magnates in the formal royal palaces.

(A heronry, i.e. colony of heron birds, is shown on Lincoln Island on a 1919 OS map of Wanstead Park, unless this is merely a confusion over the nomenclature of the lakes.)

Charles II granted the estate to his brother, James, Duke of York, but it was restored in about 1662 to Sir Robert Brooke, Mildmay's son in law.

When John Evelyn, the diarist, visited Wanstead in March 1683 he wrote: "I went to see Sir Josiah Child's prodigious cost in planting walnut trees about his seate, and making fish ponds many miles in circuit in Epping Forest, in a barren place.

On Sir Josiah II's death in 1704, Richard Child became 3rd Baronet, having succeeded to his title and estates[10] – eleven years later he commissioned the design for the Hall's replacement, Wanstead House.