On 20 December 1546, in the months prior to his death, during a tour of his Surrey estates, the king was overcome by his various ailments and was unable to continue on to his Palace at Whitehall, so he stopped for three days at Catherine's house.

Beaumont restored and extended The Old Rectory, repaired the exterior, transformed the interior, laid out the grounds and planted the famous fig walk.

His successor, Samuel Willson, who bought the house for £6,000 in 1882, carried on the works, adding two-storey drawing-room wing and installing carved-oak doors and English, Flemish and Italian chimney pieces.

In 1909 the house was purchased by marine engineer Matthias Jacobs, who enlarged it considerably with help from his brother, an architect, who designed a new single-storey billiard room, a large service wing to the north and a study extension to mask the chapel.

Faidhi had fled Iraq for Britain and though he spent vast sums[clarification needed] restoring the house with assistance from English Heritage, he also created a basement discothèque for his daughter, Nina, and a bar.

In 1994, the astrophysicist, songwriter and lead guitarist of the rock band Queen, Brian May CBE, paid £4 million for the house, with the intention of living there with his partner and later wife, the long-running BBC TV soap opera Eastenders actress Anita Dobson.

In 2006 May sold The Old Rectory for £16 million to an Italian architect-owner Antonella Carminati and her husband, who initiated further works with the help of the architect Sir Donald Insall CBE.

Edward's sarcophagus sits within the Cecil chapel at St Mary's church, Wimbledon, near the site of his demolished home.

The entrance court, essentially a deep gated terrace entered from the sides, lay 26 steps below the upper cour d'honneur, which could be approached only by a monumental axial staircase with paired helical flights rising from a central raised landing.

[16] John Thorpe's undated plan of Wimbledon's ground floor and forecourts of ca 1609,[17] suggests that they were about twelve acres in extent, divided among eleven separate spaces, featuring plantations, walks, and parterres, laid out asymmetrically on the sloping site.

[18] During the libel trial of Anne Lake Cecil, Lady Ros in 1618, evidence was submitted that a servant overheard the Countess of Exeter in the great chamber.

Overseeing plans and construction was the court architect Inigo Jones, Surveyor of the King's Works, and on site was the prominent sculptor-builder Nicholas Stone.

[24] A richly decorated room "below stairs" in the service quarters of the main house was used by the gardeners to plant orange and pomegranate trees in "boxes" or planters.

[29] After noting the lower court and the upper court, the survey reported its several ascents in detail, counting the very steps:[30] The scite of this manor-house being placed on the side slipp of a rising ground, renders it to stand of that height that, betwixt the basis of the brick-wall of the sayd lower court, and the hall door of the sayd manor-house, there are five severall assents, consisting of three-score and ten stepps, which are distinguished in a very graceful manner; to witt, from the parke to a payre of rayled gates, set betwixt two large pillers of brick; in the middle of the wall standing on the north side of the sayd lower court is the first assent, consisting of eight stepps, of good freestone, layed in a long square, within which gates, levell with the highest of those eight stepps, is a pavement of freestone, leading to a payr of iron gates rayled on each side thereof with turned ballasters of freestone, within which is a little paved court leading to an arched vault neatly pillowred with brick, conteyning on each side of the pillers a little roome well arched, serving for celleridge of botteled wines; on each side of this vault are a payre of staires of stone stepps, twentie-three stepps in assent, eight foote nine inches broad; meeting an even landing-place in the height thereof, leading from the foresayed gates unto the lower court, and make the second assent; from the height of this assent a pavement of Flanders brickes thirteene foot six inches broad", leading "to the third assent, which stands on the south side of the lower courte, consisting of a round modell, in the middle whereof is a payre of iron gates rayled as aforesayd, within which is a fountayne fitted with a leaden cesterne fed with a pipe of lead; this round conteynes a payre of stone stayres of 26 stepps in assent, ordered and adorned as the second assent is, and leades into the sayd higher courte, and soe makes the third assent; from the height whereof a pavement of square stone nine foote broad and eightie-seaven foote long leades up to the fowerth assent, which consists of eleven stepps of freestone very well wrought and ordered, leading into a gallery paved with square stone, sixtie-two foote long and eight foote broad....From the forementioned first assent there is a way cut forth of the parke, planted on each side thereof with elmes and other trees, in a very decent order, extending itself in a direct line two hundred thirty-one perches from thence quite through the parke northward unto Putney-common, being a very special ornament to the whole house.As a consequence of the English Civil War, the monarchy was overthrown in 1649 and the Crown lands were put up for sale.

Though the Queen's flower gardens may have fallen to ruin in the decade of the Civil War, the glory of Wimbledon aside from the straight avenue of elms and other trees centred on the house, that stretched forth as far as Putney was chiefly its fruit.

Among a thousand fruit trees of every kind, the Parliament-men who inventoried the house and gardens in 1649 noted the "three great and fayer" fig trees that covered a very "greate part of the walls of the south side of the manor-house" "by the spreading and dilating of themselves in a very large proporcion, but yet in a most decent manner"; to have grown so extensive in 1649 the figs must have been planted in the time of Lord Exeter or his son Lord Wimbledon.

Doubtless the inventoried bay tree (Laurus nobilis) and the equally tender "Irish arbutis, very lovely to looke upon," were being taken into the orangery for winter protection, as England was then in the frigid grip of the Little Ice Age.

This theory appears to be confirmed by the Wimbledon Museum: "Although he (Janssen) was allowed to keep his newly built house he preferred to live in another, nearer the High Street".

The family were for a century and a half the proprietors of a great vinegar yard in Southwark, afterwards Potts's, and from the last of those wealthy merchants Sir William inherited a large fortune.

This was immediately behind where the former Cecil house had stood and close to the junction of the present Arthur Road and Home Park Road in the grounds of the current Ricards Lodge school.This iteration of Wimbledon manor house was engraved in 1771 for the fifth volume of Vitruvius Britannicus,[37] where attribution for the design of fifty years previous was given to Lord Pembroke's assistant Roger Morris.

[40] English Heritage, which lists Wimbledon Park a Grade II* protected monument,[41] suggest that the Duchess consulted the landscape gardener Charles Bridgeman, but the extent of his contribution is unknown.

Through the Duchess of Marlborough, Wimbledon manor passed, in 1744, to her heir, the 10-year-old John, Viscount Spencer,[42] soon to be made the 1st Earl Spencer.Under a contract of late 1764 Lancelot "Capability" Brown undertook landscaping projects in the park, which still comprised some 1200 acres; his work, which included the lake (Wimbledon Park Lake),[43] was complete by 1768,[44] In 1780, Hannah More visited the house as the guest of Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, to whom Lord Spencer lent the house annually for a season: "I did not think there could have been so beautiful a place within seven miles of London.

The situation is singularly eligible, having a beautiful home prospect of the park, with a fine piece of water towards the north, and an extensive view over the country of Surrey on the south.

[47] Lord Spencer cleared away the ruins and leveled and turfed the ground, so that scarcely a trace remained of its foundations except for a tunnel, which still survives, which had linked the main house to the separate staff quarters.

[49] Joseph Paxton, renowned later as the designer of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition, worked here as a garden-boy assisting his brother, the head gardener.

In 1864, still lord of the manor, the 5th Earl, attempted to get a private parliamentary bill[55] to enclose Wimbledon Common, which he still owned, for the creation of a new park with a house and gardens and to sell part for building.

[57][58][59] In 1996 the 9th Earl Spencer sold his vestigial interest in Wimbledon, the title of lord of the manor of Wimbledon, to a buyer from Brazil for £171,000; manors may bring minor rights such as fishing, lesser mineral, and foraging rights but no powers nor property are believed to appertain to the archaic estate (interest in land), an incorporeal hereditament.