SHIPTON COURT, OXFORDSHIRE
BROUGHTON CASTLE, OXFORDSHIRE
Before the breaking out of the Civil War, Hampden, Pym, Lord Brooke, and other of the Parliamentary leaders, held secret meetings at Broughton Castle, oxon, the seat of Lord Saye and Sele, to organise a resistance to the arbitrary measures of the king. In this beautiful old fortified and moated mansion the secret stairs may yet be seen that led up to the little isolated chamber, with massive casemated walls for the exclusion of sound. Anthony Wood, alluding to the secret councils, says: "Several years before the Civil War began, Lord Saye, being looked upon as the godfather of that party, had meetings of them in his house at Broughton, where was a room and passage thereunto which his servants were prohibited to come near."[1] There is also a hiding-hole behind a window shutter in the wall of a corridor, with an air-hole ingeniously devised in the masonry.
[Footnote 1: Memorials of Hampden.]
The old dower-house of Fawsley, not many miles to the north-east of Broughton, in the adjoining county of Northamptonshire, had a secret room over the hall, where a private press was kept for the purpose of printing political tracts at this time, when the country was working up into a state of turmoil.
When the regicides were being hunted out in the early part of Charles II.'s reign, Judge Mayne[1] secreted himself at his house, Dinton Hall, Bucks, but eventually gave himself up. The hiding-hole at Dinton was beneath the staircase, and accessible by removing three of the steps. A narrow passage which led from it to a space behind the beams of the roof had its sides or walls thickly lined with cloth, so as to muffle all sound.
[Footnote 1: There is a tradition that it was a servant of Mayne who acted as Charles I.'s executioner.]
Bradshawe Hall, in north-west Derbyshire (once the seat of the family of that name of which the notorious President was a member), has or had a concealed chamber high up in the wall of a room on the ground floor which was capable of holding three persons. Of course tradition says the "wicked judge was hidden here."