For two hundred years, the royal council that governed Wales and the border counties did a great deal of its business from Bewdley. Not a local magistrates’ bench: a body with authority over a whole region, presided over by bishops and earls and, at the start, by a prince of Wales. Its headquarters were elsewhere, but its presidents lived here, wrote their letters here, and made their appointments here, and almost nothing in the town marks it.
What the Council was
The Marches were the border lands between England and Wales, a patchwork of lordships where the King’s writ ran unevenly and disputes were frequent. The Council in the Marches of Wales existed to impose order on that: to hear suits brought by people too poor to sue at common law, to try murder, felony and piracy, to investigate misgovernment by officials, and generally to represent royal authority in a region a long way from Westminster.
Its jurisdiction covered Wales together with Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Cheshire and Gloucestershire, so Bewdley was squarely inside it. Worcestershire tried unsuccessfully to get itself excluded in 1576. The Council’s exact powers were never crisply defined, which caused arguments that lasted as long as it did.
Where it actually sat
Ludlow Castle is the place most associated with the Council, and along with chambers at Shrewsbury it was the headquarters. Bewdley was not that. What Bewdley had was Tickenhill, the royal house on the hill, which was maintained as a residence for the Lords President, and the documents show them using it constantly.
The evidence is in the State Papers. Sir Hugh Paulet wrote from here in 1559. Sir Henry Sidney, who was Lord President for twenty-six years, wrote to Cecil from Bewdley in 1563. The Earl of Pembroke wrote to Walsingham from Tickenhill in 1587. Lord Eure wrote from Ticknell in 1609. Official appointments were made “apud Beaudley” in 1590 and 1598. On one occasion the Queen directed the Justice of Chester to return to Bewdley to hold the sessions for Wales in place of an indisposed Lord President. And in July 1586 Henry Townsend wrote to Lord Burghley that the Council of Wales “were agreeable to remove their sittings from Worcester to Bewdley, where all things had been made ready for their reception”.
Bewdley’s own charter puts it beyond doubt. When James I re-incorporated the borough in 1606, one of the reasons the charter itself gives for the favour is that the town was the “frequent abode and residence of our Council in the Marches of Wales”.
Bewdley’s Victorian historian, weighing all of this, concluded that Ludlow was fixed for the winter sittings while Tickenhill was kept for the Lords President and the Court must have been held here nearly every summer. That last part is his inference from the letters rather than a documented rota, and it is worth saying so. What the documents do establish is that for the best part of two centuries, the men who governed Wales were regularly and officially at work in this town.
Prince Arthur
The connection begins with a boy. Arthur, Prince of Wales, elder brother of the future Henry VIII, presided over the Council from Tickenhill. In 1500 the Bishop of Lincoln had got as far as Lichfield on his way north when an express from the King turned him back to Bewdley “to direct certain arduous affairs of the Prince of Wales, who was then at Bewdley, where he had for some time kept his court”.
Arthur died in 1502, but the arrangement outlasted him by nearly two centuries. The list of Lords President reads like a roll call of Tudor and Stuart government: Bishop Alcock of Worcester, Bishop Smyth of Lincoln, Rowland Lee, John Dudley Earl of Warwick, Nicholas Heath, the Earls of Pembroke, Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Zouche, the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Bridgewater, the Duke of Beaufort, and finally the Earl of Macclesfield.
What it meant for the town
A royal council in residence for half the year changes a place. It brought judges, clerks, lawyers, petitioners, servants and hangers-on, all of whom needed feeding, housing and entertaining, and all of whom spent money. It is part of why a town of a few thousand people supported so many inns.
The chapel accounts catch the atmosphere better than any description could. One of the old chantries was set aside for the use of the Lord President and his Council, and in 1580 its floor was strewn with fresh rushes for them. In 1596 the bells were rung when Henry Earl of Pembroke arrived with his wife, Mary Sidney, sister of Sir Philip Sidney and one of the most cultivated women in England. The townswomen presented her with a gift worth ten pounds and a shilling, a serious sum, and on a later visit gave her a sugar loaf, two boxes of comfits and four boxes of marmalade. When Lord Zouche entered the town as the new President in 1604, the waits played and the bells rang again.
In 1586 the Council was even willing to shift its sittings from Worcester to Bewdley, and a letter to Lord Burghley records that “all things had been made ready for their reception”.
The end of it
After the Restoration the Court no longer sat at Bewdley, and on 25 July 1689, following the Glorious Revolution, the Council in the Marches was abolished altogether. Tickenhill, which had been maintained for two centuries largely because the Lords President needed somewhere to stay, had no further official purpose and was left to decay.
Nothing in the town marks any of this. There is no courtroom to visit, no plaque, no surviving chamber. What there is instead is a private house on a hill, a charter that mentions the Council as a reason for granting privileges, and a set of churchwardens’ accounts recording that somebody once bought rushes to strew on a floor for the Lord President of Wales.