From 19 to 31 July 2025 the grounds of Petworth House are hosting a major archaeological community dig under the auspices of the Henry on Tour project. Co-ordinated by our project partners, Digventures and the National Trust, and with additional funding from the South Downs National Park Authority, we will be welcoming eager amateur archaeologists of all ages both from the immediate local Sussex community and elsewhere in the UK to as far afield as Australia.
King Henry VIII may have first sighted Petworth when he came with his father, Henry VII, on progress along the south coast in 1504 when he was about 10 years old. They stopped at the town of Midhurst before arriving at the nearby manor house at Cowdray. The royal party then moved to Chichester (probably staying at the bishop’s palace) before going on to Porchester Castle, Southampton and Winchester on a royal journey that undoubtedly made a huge impression on the young prince, though it was over twenty years before he would return to Petworth itself.
Henry was in West Sussex in 1519 residing from 19 to 28 July at the duke of Norfolk’s mansion at Chesworth, near Horsham, but was not at Petworth until 27 July 1526 when conducting his southern progress of that year. The king was greeted there by courtiers and local landowners Henry Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, Thomas West, Lord de la Warr and Sir David Owen and received a ‘goodly present’ of 6 oxen and 40 wethers from Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland. That morning of his first day at Petworth Henry was approached with some letters from Wolsey, but postponed looking at them until the evening as he was ‘going out to have a shot at a stag’. This was an opportunity for Henry to wield ‘soft power’, socialising with foreign diplomats and local society in the comparative privacy of the extensive parkland. It was evidently a successful visit: the king was said to have had ‘good game and recreation, entertaining those gentlemen who resorted to him in familiar manner and with good words, and presenting them with venison’. Staying five days before heading on to Arundel Castle, Henry was described as being ‘merry and of good health’.
The king dined with Robert Sherburne, bishop of Chichester (1508-36) at his ‘commodious’ house (probably Amberley Castle, near Arundel) and no doubt stopped at Chichester Cathedral, too, on his way towards the countess of Salisbury’s residence at Warblington in Hampshire. In anticipation or commemoration of this royal visit, local artist Lambert Barnard painted panels in the south transept of the Cathedral depicting Henry VIII in an historical allegory combining elevation of English kingship and promotion of the Tudor dynasty with a concern for safeguarding the rights of the see and highlighting the monarch’s duties towards the Church.
If Henry was flattered by the painting, which like the Winchester Round Table connected him with the legendary King Arthur, he was probably highly enamoured by the opportunities provided by Petworth’s location within the rich landscape of the South Downs. Henry’s close companion and treasurer of the royal household, Sir William Fitzwilliam (later earl of Southampton), had bought nearby Cowdray House from Sir David Owen (another courtier) in 1528, which he promptly set about rebuilding. On 18 January 1535, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland signed and attached his seal to a charter confirming the surrender and grant of the honour and manor of Petworth (and eight other manors in Sussex) to
"...our most illustrious, serene and mighty lord, Henry VIII, by the grace of God King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland and Supreme Head of the Church of England"
The grant accorded the king all the houses, outbuildings, chapels, dovecots, mills, vineyards, woods, heaths and pastures pertaining to the Petworth estate together with the right to rents and services, rights over villeins and bondsmen and authority to hold all manner of courts, fairs and markets within the domain. Percy also confirmed in the charter the grant to Henry VIII of the earl’s manor or principal messuage in Hackney (then in Middlesex) and certain liberties and franchises he possessed in Wales.
The king embarked on a lengthy progress with Queen Anne to the West Country in the summer of 1535, but in the following year he turned his attention to Petworth and instructed his chief surveyor, James Needham, to carry out repairs to the house and undertake some new building work there, which was carried out from 21 May to 16 July 1536. Attention was focussed on creating new lodgings over the gatehouse leading into the manor and constructing new lodgings to the right-hand side of it. The work involved purchasing a hundred standing oak trees from ‘my lady of Shaftesbury’ and cutting down and hewing the timber required for making the wooden frame for the building. The costs for the materials amounted to £25 19s 6½d (equivalent to about employing the carpenters, sawyers, bricklayers, slaters, labourers, purveyors and clerk came to £22 5s 9d.
Henry VIII arrived at his new palace at Petworth on 27 July 1538, twelve years to the day since he last visited it when the property was still owned by the Percys. He enjoyed his time so much he returned at the same time (albeit a day earlier) the very next year. The king’s next visit was not until the summer of 1545, but the progress was mired by the devastating sinking of the king’s great warship the Mary Rose in the Solent between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight after an attack by the French fleet on 19 July. Henry, who was dining with the Admiral on the flagship, the Great Harry, in Portsmouth Harbour had to hurriedly disembark to enable the English fleet to engage with them. The Mary Rose’s captain, Sir George Carew and at least 700 men lost their lives when it was holed: only thirty members of the crew were rescued.
The imperial ambassador, François Van der Delft, informed his master, Charles V, that even after the tragic events at Portsmouth he has ‘still continued to follow the King on his progress’. Travelling via Titchfield, where Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley had recently converted the former abbey into a grand mansion, Stansted Park and Cowdray (recently inherited by Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Hourse), the king arrived at Petworth on 6 August and spent nine days there. Delft reported that ‘His Majesty has done me all possible honour, inviting me several times to accompany him in hunting, which invitations I have always accepted’. Since the Privy Council met every day during the visit, government business remained on the agenda. News came through too from the Mary Rose salvage team at Portsmouth, which was aiming to drag the wreck of the ship to shallow ground.
Petworth is not overtly Tudor in its architecture and its parkland has been transformed since Henry VIII’s time by the legendary eighteenth-century gardener and landscape architect, ‘Capability Brown’. Comparatively little is known for certain at present about the structure of the medieval manor house. We know the property was expanded under Henry over the next decade as he made it one of his key residences outside the ring of existing Thames Valley palaces. Our new excavations combined with a fresh examination of the Petworth estate archives will hopefully be able to shed more light on this. Tune-in to the Digventures website to follow Henry on Tour’s progress!
