Leaving the Palace of Westminster after a heavy, sober day of witness testimony is always disorienting. To break up the journey, we pulled off the highway into the ancient Warwickshire landscape, spending the afternoon at Packwood House and Baddesley Clinton.
The detour felt like a perfect historical mirror. The exact themes we were debating in Westminster—accountability, systemic breakdown, and the immense pressure placed on individuals who resist institutional power—are baked into the very timber and stone of these houses.
The geographical loop is striking. In 1542, Westminster was the arena where the civil arrest of MP George Ferrers (the first to translate Magna Carta into English) sparked a massive constitutional battle over parliamentary privilege—a clash over the rule of law that famously resulted in Soulton’s own Sir Rowland Hill (then Sheriff of London) being thrown into the Tower of London. It was an abuse to do that to Old Sir Rowland, and it was widely understood to be so, which is why he was knighted in the end over this very incident.
A view across the central courtyard of the moated manor, where the lawn is beautifully laid out with the diamond-shaped mascles from the Ferrers family coat of arms.
While that high-stakes battle over public accountability was unfolding in the capital, Ferrers’ cousins back in Warwickshire were navigating a completely different version of institutional oppression: they chose a path of quiet, absolute non-conformity, turning Baddesley Clinton into a defiant, hidden sanctuary for a persecuted faith.
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- Looking across the still waters of the moat at the historic gate tower and porter’s lodge.
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- Looking over the moat at the historic, earliest wing of the house, home to the sacristy and the chapel above the kitchen.
Spending time at Baddesley Clinton today feels like a quiet meditation on what it means to hold onto a position out of integrity when the structures around you break down.
The infamous latrine priest hole at Baddesley Clinton, where nine priests hid during a raid in 1591.
Most visitors look at the public priest hole—like the ingenious drop below the first-floor sacristy where, it is said, a priest could slide straight down an old medieval garderobe shaft into the dry, subterranean sewers to escape a government raid.
The incredible, claustrophobic hiding spot—built (we were told) by legendary priest-hole craftsman Nicholas Owen—was hidden below the house in the original medieval sewers and accessed via the shaft of a garderobe (a Tudor toilet). While historical accounts sometimes vary slightly on the exact headcount, with some sources citing nine priests and lay assistants and others mentioning five to six Jesuits hiding at once, the daring event famously unfolded early one morning in 1591. Government pursuivants surrounded the manor at five o’clock in the morning just as the priests were preparing to celebrate Mass. In a frantic race against time, the household managed to hide all visible signs of the service before the men slipped down into the sewer hideout, which sat ankle-deep in freezing water. For roughly four hours, they crammed silently into the damp, claustrophobic drain while the hunters aggressively ransacked the rooms directly above them. Meanwhile, Anne Vaux, who was leasing the home, bravely kept the search party occupied by inviting them to breakfast and eventually paying them off for their “trouble,” allowing the priests to successfully avoid capture.
The architecture is, though, probably still keeping secrets from most of us, as we understand that the current private office spaces—the zones today’s public cannot visit—contain a continuation of this hidden floor plan.
There is a deep layers-of-time complexity to how this space evolved.
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- Inside the peaceful chapel adjacent to the sacristy, where generations of the family gathered to worship—both in secret during the Tudor persecutions and openly in later centuries.
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- A view inside the sacristy. While openly recognized as such only since the 19th century, it is believed to have been used secretly during the Tudor period of Catholic recusancy—a history attested to in the 17th century by Father Garnet.
While the Tudor era required physical concealment and dark voids, the beautiful domestic chapel we see today was only fitted out openly in the nineteenth century.
This late Victorian restoration allowed the family to finally bring their clandestine faith into the light, dressing the space with public devotion and rich gothic revival craftsmanship long after the immediate danger of the state penal laws had passed.
Pleasingly, a paved floor offers a sense of welcome and insight as a careful geometry is shown to you in it when you arrive: beautiful geometric floor paving surrounds the Porter’s Lodge, which greets you with a crisp, repetitive rhythm.
Baddesley Clinton: The intricate, geometric stone paving surrounding the Porter’s Lodge offers a striking sense of welcome.
At a gatehouse threshold where a family once had to instantly distinguish a trusted friend from a deadly government informant, this rigid, beautiful geometry feels like a deliberate statement of domestic order holding back a chaotic, dangerous external world.
Finishing the drive and pulling back into Soulton Hall brings the entire journey full circle.
At Westminster, we are still fighting the same battles that Sir Rowland Hill and George Ferrers engaged with five centuries ago: trying to ensure that market integrity is maintained, that leadership is “fit and proper,” and that ordinary people are protected from systemic institutional abuse. At Baddesley Clinton, the Ferrers family responded to institutional failure by retreating into silence, stone, and shadow. But at Soulton Hall, the solution was to build an environment that integrated these turbulent lessons—using geometry, mathematics, and heritage to celebrate the preservation of foundational national liberties like Magna Carta.
Looking back through the historic stone gate piers for a beautiful parting view of the manor house and its peaceful forecourt.
