Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN PALACE TO BUCKDEN TOWERS 105 man in the kingdom. It reverted to the diocese only on his execution on 22 January 1551/2, in the reign of Mary I. 1 John Williams, who was bishop of Lincoln from 1621 to 1641, found Buckden Palace in a dilapidated condition when he arrived in there in 1625, and began restoring buildings and making improvements to the grounds. We can still walk around the Little Park on the raised walk-way he introduced, even if it is no longer as high as the original three feet. However, in the course of a dispute with the king, Charles I, and Archbishop Laud of Canterbury, he was for three years (1637-1640) deprived of his functions and benefices and imprisoned in the Tower of London. A solicitor by the name of Richard Kilvert, who had played an underhand role in the bishop’s downfall, was appointed to administer the estate at Buckden. He sold off a large amount of movable property and caused considerable damage. Shortly after, in 1649, the estate was confiscated by the parliamentary regime and passed into private hands a second time, being sold to Alderman Sir Christopher Packe, a former lord mayor of London. He pulled down many of the buildings. He also destroyed the deer park (q.v.). On the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the palace returned to the Church. Further efforts were made to restore the property from time to time, especially by Bishop Robert Sanderson (1660-1663). Two bishops who followed him, William Fuller (1667- 1675) and Thomas Barlow (1675-1692), found the place so attractive that Fuller rarely went to Lincoln and Barlow never reached it at all. Barlow earned the title of the ‘Bishop of Buckden who never saw Lincoln’. Not all their successors felt the same, however, and the palace went into a decline during the eighteenth century: Bishop Gibson (1716-1723) referred to it as merely ‘a convenient old house for [the bishops’] summer residence.’ A visitor reported in 1790 that ‘the ancient appearance diminishes hourly, as much of the moat has lately been filled up and many walls pulled down’ (John Byng , q.v.) In 1836, on the recommendation of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of England, William IV approved the reorganization of the diocese of Lincoln, and as a result Buckden, with the rest of Huntingdonshire, was transferred to the diocese of Ely. John Kaye (q.v.), the last bishop of Lincoln to use the Palace, left in 1837; two years later demolition began. The Palace and the north wing of the Inner Gatehouse were pulled down, the Great Tower was stripped out, and a sale of furniture took place in 1838. The remains of the property were transferred to the vicar of Buckden in 1842, and for a while an elementary school for girls and infants found a home there. At this period the Little Park was known as the ‘Palace Garden and Pleasure Grounds’. So it was that the fortunes of the Palace came to their lowest ebb in the reign of Queen Victoria. Even the books of the diocesan library, which were left behind when Kaye departed, were eventually removed to a building in Huntingdon designed to house them. The Marshall Years When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sold the property to James Marshall in 1870 it passed into lay ownership for the third time. From then on it was known as Buckden Towers. The history of The Towers follows the fortunes of the Marshall family until the First World War, and a detailed account of their years at Buckden may be found in a 1999 monograph Arthur W. Marshall, Owner of Buckden Towers by David Thomas , past chairman of Buckden Local History Society. Marshall had bought the estate for his son, Arthur Wellington Marshall (q.v.), and it was to undergo several changes during his ownership. The most important was the family home he had built in 1872. His architect, Colonel Robert Edis, proved an excellent choice; he was later called on by the Prince of Wales to make improvements to Sandringham after a fire there. Arthur Marshall’s house is unexpectedly restrained for a mid-Victorian building, and shows much forethought in the architectural details which tie it in with the nearby Great Tower and Inner Gatehouse. The string-courses match those on the tower, as do the windows, with their decorative brick arches over stone lintels. The crenellation on the older buildings is picked up on the tower above the main door of the house. David Thomas’s monograph describes how similar attention to detail was exercised within the house, which has good Arts and Crafts details in tiles and windows. As a preliminary, Marshall continued the demolition of the old palace, begun some thirty years before. Now the Great Chamber and Chapel were pulled down. The remaining, western, part of the moat was filled in and the bridge demolished. The Outer Gatehouse was built at this time, and wrought-iron gates were inserted in the fifteenth-century archway. They bear the monogram AWM, 1 Somerset was tried for treason. Although acquitted, he was found guilty of the lesser, but still capital, crime of bringing together men for a riot.