Qualla: Ingatestone Hall

Ingatestone Hall: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. In December of 1589, the composer William Byrd spent Christmas at Ingatestone Hall, writing Mass settings that could not legally be sung anywhere else in England. The Petre family chapel was one of a small number of places where Catholic worship still happened in Elizabethan England, and it happened in secret. Above the courtyard a one-handed clock ticks beneath the motto Sans dieu rien - without God, nothing. The Petres have lived in this house since the 1540s. They still do.

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Image: Andrew Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ingatestone Hall: Built from a Monastery

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Myers, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir William Petre bought the manor of Ingatestone soon after Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, paying about £850 for land that had belonged to the abbey of Barking. Between 1539 and 1556 he raised a house of red English-bond brick around a central courtyard, with stepp...

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Image: John Myers | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ingatestone Hall: The Queen Stays the Night

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glyn Baker, CC BY-SA 2.0. In June 1561, Elizabeth I came to Ingatestone on royal progress. She held court here for several nights, and the family records show the staggering cost of entertaining a Tudor monarch - the food procured, the rooms hung with fresh cloth, the gifts assembled, the hopes managed. T...

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Image: Glyn Baker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ingatestone Hall: Priests in the Walls

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Petres were recusants - Catholics who refused to attend Anglican services after the Reformation made them mandatory. The penalties were ruinous: monthly fines, social exclusion, the constant threat of treason charges if a priest were found in the house. The family worshipped ...

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Image: Michael Garlick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ingatestone Hall: Surviving the Centuries

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Winfield, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Petres held on. They lost their fortunes more than once, served in the Lords when Catholics were finally readmitted to Parliament in 1829, and watched the larger family seat at Thorndon Hall burn down in 1876. During the First World War the sixteenth baron, Lionel Petre, was ...

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Image: John Winfield | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ingatestone Hall: Bleak House on Screen

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Garlick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The exterior was used in the 2005 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, standing in for the Jarndyce family seat. It has also appeared in episodes of Lovejoy, the antiques-dealer drama that loved a Tudor courtyard. The Hall holds what remains of the family's picture co...

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Image: Michael Garlick | CC BY-SA 2.0