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Waynflete's Tower
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The following is an article on Wayneflete's Tower in Esher by JW Lindus Forge, formerly President of the Walton and Weybridge Local History Society. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the society. Esher Place was the name for the house and estate of which Wayneflete's Tower is the only remaining part.
Of the thousands who travel on the former Southern Railway main line to Waterloo, there are probably few who look across the water meadows between Hersham and Esher stations and notice the red-brick tower which stands on the farther bank of the River Mole. Yet those walls have held captive a Cardinal-Archbishop and a High Admiral of Spain; in the pages of Cavendish its rooms are peopled for us with the sombre pageantry of Tudor England, and Horace Walpole, in one of his letters, has sketched the atmosphere of cultured ease at this country home of an eighteenth century prime-minister. The mellow brick-work with its black diaper is some-thing more than the structure of an ancient monument: it is part of the fabric of English history.
Waynflete's Tower, as the name implies, was added to an existing palace by the great statesman who held the See of Winchester for nearly forty years, in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The Bishop was an early patron of the comparatively new craft of the "brekke-masons", as his work at Eton bears witness, and Mr. John Harvey suggests that the same architect may have been responsible for the gate-houses at both school and palace - one John Cowper who worked also at Tattershall and Kirby Muxloe. The main structure is unquestionably of this period, but later hands have added their "improvements", and the least spoiled feature of the building is the magnificent spiral staircase with its ingenious brick vault and moulded hand-rail. One link with Waynflete remains: the lilies from his arms which are painted on the joists of an upper floor and, in their naturalistic treatment, are surprisingly unlike the stiff, heraldic flowers of that age.
It was in the following century, however, that the palace was to have its most distinguished occupant. Norfolk, in the third act of King Henry VIII, delivers this sentence:
"Hear the King's pleasure, Cardinal;
who commands you
To render up the Great Seal presently
into our hands, and to confine yourself
To Asher House, my Lord of Winchester's…"
and it was to Esher that Wolsey retired, taking boat to Putney and riding thence by mule "with a great following of clerks, gentlemen and yeomen." Here they found little else but "good provision of all kynd of victualles," and continued "the space of iii or iv weekes without beddes, shetes... cuppes and dyshes," eventually borrowing these necessities from the Bishop of Carlisle and Sir Thomas Arundel.
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