Parks with particular reference to Essex
demolished this building in its entirety and set about creating what became the largest Jacobean
'prodigy' house ever built. The house was centred around what had been the cloister of the old
abbey, with a vast courtyard (the outer court). As ever, the fortunes of the house and park waxed
and waned with the fortunes of the owner. Thomas Howard was convicted of embezzlement and
after a brief imprisonment in the Tower, retired in disgrace to Audley End.
Parks and their great houses were often a drain on the resources of their owners and by 1609, even
the number of royal parks had dwindled to around a hundred. Audley End, however, did become a
later royal holding (by Charles II from 1668 - 88), but this royal ownership was relatively brief,
and the house reverted back to the Earls of Suffolk in 1701. The vast mansion was eventually to
prove too much of a burden to subsequent owners and it was eventually much reduced in size and
the house we see today is less than half of the former Jacobean mansion.
The civil war brought park-making to an abrupt standstill - parks were seen to be a powerful
royalist symbol (the licence to empark was at the behest of the Crown). Royal parks were confiscated
and sold to fund the unpaid wages of parliamentarian soldiers. Other parks were raided for their
timber and deer. In 1643 there was a complaint "... that divers unruly persons without any authority.
do daily enter into the Park of Havering........and there cut, destroy and root up the trees growing
in the said park, and also pull down the pales and inclosures thereof;......it........would be the utter
destruction of the park and deer therein". Havering eventually became one of the many royal parks
disparked and sold during the Commonwealth in 1652.
Sir Josiah Child, Chairman of the East India Company, purchased the old Wanstead House and
Park in 1667 and he spent a fortune on planting the park. In 1683 the diarist, John Evelyn, visited
Wanstead ".....to see Sir Josiah Child's prodigious cost in planting walnut trees about his seate
.........in Epping Forest". Child also planted lime avenues and sweet chestnut in complex quincunx
formations, some trees of which survive to this day, including some huge sweet chestnuts. In 1715
the old Wanstead House was demolished and in its place one of the finest and most splendid - but
short-lived - examples of Palladian architecture ever seen in England, to a design by Colen Campbell,
took its place.
The creation of artificial water features (ie not for utilitarian fish or stock ponds), but for visual
pleasure, was a concept readily taken-up by park owners and re-invented by the 18th century
landscapers. Artificial lakes became a feature of many parks, including Audley End, Wanstead and
later, Hylands.
A very complex landscaping plan for Thorndon Park was drawn-up by the landscaper Bourginion
and the eighth Lord Petre. Presumably because of its vast scale, it was never completed and ultimately
the ninth Lord Petre commissioned the famous Lancelot 'Capability' Brown in 1778 to draw-up
plans for the park centred on the new James Paine mansion of 1764 - 70. This obliterated much of
the Bourginion work. The 1777 Chapman and Andre map shows Thorndon Park as a separate
entity from the neighbouring Childerditch (and little Warley) Common. In a 1774 survey Childerditch
Common had listed for it 2,080 oak pollards and 1,323 hornbeam trees. By 1805 the Henry Clayton
estate map shows this common to have been incorporated into the new park (now Thorndon Park
North). Subsequently many of the old pollards were destroyed and plantations created in their
place. Today one sees just the odd, old pollard amongst even more recent plantations of Beech.
Larch, Scots Pine, Sweet Chestnut and Oak.
Essex Parks: Section 1 - Parks in Essex
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