It is hard to determine whether it was fear of the ultimate result of the use of these heavy guns, or the sight of the actual damage done, which caused this sudden collapse of the defence on the day of the great assault, July 20th, 1644. The heavy guns were, it is said, situated on the flat ground on the east of the house, and on the other side of the valley—a distance of one and a quarter miles. Some assert that the range from here (Pentrich Moor) was too great, and that the guns were brought round to the west side and placed in a wood, a breach being opened from there. Should this have been the case, the breach would be in the south-west angle of the larger courtyard, and the approach to this is of such a nature that an entry would be a matter of difficulty. The necessity of an armed assault on the breach was nullified by the collapse of the defence.
The Window in the Banqueting Hall: Wingfield.
The death of the Royalist governor, Colonel Dalby, who succeeded Colonel Roger Molineux, can have had no part in causing the surrender, for, according to Pilkington, he was traitorously shot by a deserter, who had recognized him despite his disguise of a common soldier, and who is said to have put his musket through a hole in the wall of the porter’s lodge and shot him in the face. Pilkington also asserts that one of the cannon-balls which he saw weighed 32 lbs.! This was in 1789.
The surrendered garrison was a resourceful one it appears, as the besiegers either having cut off the water supply (presumably in pipes) or else seized the source of this necessary fluid, they promptly dug a well in the south courtyard, and therefrom secured a sufficient supply. This well fell in about 1850, and the hole was filled up.
An old account of the capture of the manor house runs thus:—
“Colonell Gell finding that his ordinance would do noe good against the Mannor and understanding that Major General Craford had foure great peeces, sent two of his officers unto him to desier him to send them for three or foure days for battering; and in soe doinge he would doe the countrey good service, because it was a place that could not bee otherwise taken without they were pined (starved) out.”
The stirring times of war now left the house, and its further use as a fortress was nullified by an order for its dismantling on June 23rd, 1646.
The fabric of the house now went from bad to worse as it passed from one owner to another. Twenty years after the order for its dismantling was received, it was occupied by one Imanuel Halton, an auditor of the Duke of Norfolk. As a man of culture and learning he was more or less distinguished, being especially noted as an astronomer; while allowing much of the fabric to fall into ruins, he amused himself by decorating the crumbling walls with sun-dials, two of which remain. A piece of gross vandalism was perpetrated by this worthy, for he converted the magnificent banqueting hall into a two-floored dwelling-house, with chimneys in the centre, and made ugly structural alterations to the north windows to suit his convenience. The Halton family continued to enjoy the air of Wingfield, and to pull the manor house about, for the next hundred years, till, in 1744, the “powers that were” decided to pull down the lovely building, which they utilized as a convenient quarry from which to obtain stone for the erection of a truly ugly house—described as “a small box at the foot of the hill”—which is the present Hall. After this disgraceful exploit, the progress of decay was practically unchecked, and at this day the buildings are deteriorating more and more rapidly under the changes of our capricious climate. In the Topographer, by Shaw, vol. i., of 1789 (only fifteen years after the removal of the family residence to the new hall), it is stated that the roof was gone from the banqueting hall, and that all the arms and quarterings of the great family of Shrewsbury were open to the destructive influences of the weather. This was in 1789, yet in 1785—only four years previously—a sketch by Colonel Machell shows the banqueting hall as roofed and glazed. At the close of the eighteenth century a great part of the banqueting hall—between the lovely oriel window and the porch—fell down; about a quarter of a century later a tower in the south-east angle of the inner courtyard (at the back of the present farmhouse) collapsed utterly.
The statement often made that no less a person than the much maligned Oliver Cromwell was present at the fall of the manor house in person is, of course, a fiction used by some for the greater entertainment of visitors to the house. Nevertheless, it is a curious coincidence that by the power of a Lord Cromwell these magnificent buildings were raised from the ground, and that by the power and will of another Cromwell they were razed, in places, to the ground, but two hundred years separating the two events, and including much history of more than local interest.