A future in the Arts

One of the most important historic houses in Surrey is enjoying a new lease of life as a centre for the Arts. John Goodall looks at the history of this remarkable building

- John Goodall

ON January 27, 1591, the ailing Viscount Montague called together his Surrey neighbours for a valedictory dinner at West Horsley Place. The event is recorded in an anonymous contemporary account recently rediscovered by Michael Questier (Historical Research, 77, 2004). After ‘good cheer’ over dinner, all the guests, as well as ‘the gentlewomen of the house, the waiting maids, strangers and others, all his men servants, gentlemen and yeomen’ were gathered ‘in the great chamber… where my Lord caused us of the better sort to sit down, himself sitting amongst us’. There, he began a speech, explaining that he wanted to be merry in this company because he might never return to the house. Also, that he wanted to explain his life—‘how I have been dealt withal’—and for his audience to bear witness to what he said.

Locally born at Betchworth, the Viscount continued, he and his father had been raised to prosperity by Henry VIII. During Queen Mary’s reign, he had done some service to the future Elizabeth I, who knew thereby his ‘faithful and loyal heart’. There followed a revelation. Elizabeth I had granted him ‘an extraordinary favour, the freedom of my conscience. For I confess before you all that I am a Catholic in my religion’. He went on to state that he neither interfered nor directed any other person’s beliefs and, with reference to the Armada, insisted that he would oppose a foreign invasion of England. Everyone, he urged, owed loyalty to the Queen.