On the hill west of the town, looking down over the roofs to the river, stands a house that was once a royal palace. A prince of Wales kept his court there. He was married in it, by proxy, to Catherine of Aragon. When he died his body was carried down the hill and rested a night in the chapel where St Anne’s now stands. Most people in Bewdley walk past the bottom of the drive without a second thought.
The goats’ hill
The name has nothing to do with anyone called Tickenhill. It comes from the Saxon tican-hill, the goats’ hill, and it has stuck for a thousand years although the goats are long gone.
Tickenhill was a manor in its own right, separate from Bewdley, and it belonged to the Mortimers. A manor implies a manor house, and the Mortimer whose carved coffin lid can still be seen in Ribbesford church is as likely a builder as anyone. It may well have been that man who, standing up here around 1299 and looking down at the Severn valley with the hamlet of Wribbenhall at his feet, called what he saw beau lieu, the beautiful place, and gave the town its name.
John Leland saw it in its prime. He describes “a fayre Mannour place by West of the Towne standing in a goodly Parke well wooded, on the very Knappe of an hill that the Towne standeth on”.
Prince Arthur
Under the Tudors, Tickenhill became a working royal residence. Arthur, Prince of Wales, elder brother of the future Henry VIII, presided over the Council of the Marches, and he kept his court here for a good part of the year. In 1500 the Bishop of Lincoln, having got as far as Lichfield on his way north, was overtaken by an express from the King and turned back to Bewdley to deal with the Prince’s affairs, “who was then at Bewdley, where he had for some time kept his court”. A letter of 1501 from Arthur to the University of Oxford is signed off “Given under our signett at the manor of Beaudley the 12 day of August”.
In May 1499, in this house, Arthur was married by proxy to Catherine of Aragon. He was twelve years old. She was in Spain.
The marriage proper took place in 1501 and Arthur was dead by the following April, at Ludlow, at fifteen. The account of what happened next is worth reading in the original. His body was brought from Ludlow to Bewdley on St Mark’s day, 25 April 1502, on “the foulist could windy & rayney day, & the worst way”, so bad that oxen had to be put to the carriage to drag it through. It was set in the quire of the chapel at Bewdley and the Dirige was sung, after which the lords went to their dinner, it being a fasting day. Next morning the Earl of Surrey officiated at the requiem Mass, and twopence was given to every poor man and woman who came. Then the procession went on to Worcester, where Arthur lies.
Had he lived, there would have been no Henry VIII as we know him, no Anne Boleyn, and no break with Rome. That is not this town’s doing, but it began here as much as anywhere.
Princess Mary, and a house full of weapons
About twenty years after Arthur’s death Henry VIII had Tickenhill repaired as a residence for his daughter, the Princess Mary. The accounts survive and they are wonderfully specific. Workmen’s wages came to £354 5s 5d over eighteen weeks, at a time when a labourer earned around fourpence halfpenny a day. The rooms mentioned include My Lady’s Own Chamber, My Lord President’s Chamber and The Prince’s Chamber. And there is a payment of two shillings and threepence for carting twenty-seven loads of bows, arrows, gunpowder, guns, stones and harness from the manor down into the town.
Under Edward VI the house passed to Lord Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset, probably through his marriage to Catherine Parr. When Seymour was executed in March 1549 it went back to the Crown.
A king, and a poisoning
Tickenhill stayed in use for the Lords President of the Marches, who kept the Court at Ludlow in winter and here for much of the summer. Kings came too. In October 1615 James I was at Bewdley, probably staying at Tickenhill, when word reached him that Sir Thomas Overbury had been poisoned in the Tower. The information pointed directly at his own favourite, the Earl of Somerset. He ordered a strict inquiry anyway. Charles I came in June 1644 and stayed three days.
Decline and afterwards
After the execution of Charles I the contents of the royal palaces were sold off. The survey of Tickenhill is a sad document: “Ticknell Howse with a green court, yard, garden, & offices, & containing by estimation 2 acres, very much out of repair, & valued for the materials at £797 4s.” Through the Commonwealth it was left to decay, and when the Court of the Marches was abolished in 1689 the last official reason for keeping it up went with it.
Dr Stukeley visited in 1712 and found part of the old house still standing, a gatehouse with dwellings either side. Children had been baptised in its chapel as late as 1624 and marriages solemnised there in 1701. Around 1738 most of what was left was pulled down and rebuilt by a Mr Ingram, who had married a Winnington daughter. Some of the inner walls are probably original, and around 1830, while repairs were being made to the wainscot, someone found a lady’s shoe of the Tudor period behind it.
In 1873 the house and its grounds were bought from the Crown by Joseph Tangye, a mechanical engineer from Cornwall, and Tickenhill finally stopped being royal property after roughly four hundred years.
It is a private house today and not open to visitors, so admire it from the road and leave the residents in peace.