Woodcote, Hampshire; Coldham House, Suffolk; Watcomb and Maple-Durham, Berkshire; Stonyhurst in Lancashire; Treago, Herefordshire; Harborough Hall, situated midway between Hagley and Kidderminster, all had their secret chambers; and the ancient seat of the Tichbornes was similarly provided, together with a complication of secret passages and stairs.
Compton Wynyates, a remote and picturesque mansion belonging to the Marquis of Northampton, has an upper chapel in the topmost gable, with ancient wooden altar, three staircases leading to the Priest’s room in the lower story, secret passages, and hiding-places behind the wainscoting spacious enough to hold one hundred persons in case of alarm. The existence of such a chapel sufficiently indicates that the rites of the old religion were practised in private, although the Protestant place of worship remained open below.
In Essex, the Wisemans of Braddox or Broadoaks were of the number of those who suffered during the reigns of Elizabeth and James for their noted ‘harbouring of priests.’ In P. R. O. Dom. Elizabeth, vol. 244, n. 7, may be seen two forms of indictment of Richard Jackson, priest, for saying mass at Braddox, and of various members of the Wiseman family for being present at mass on the 25th August and the 8th of September 1592. Again: ‘Mr Worseley and Mr Newall have been to Widow Wiseman’s house in Essex, and found a mass preparing; but the priest escaped.’ There were two hiding-places in Braddox: the most important of these adjoined the chapel, and was constructed in a thick wall of the chimney, behind a finely laid and carved mantel-piece.
In connection with the old mansion of the Carylls at West Grinstead, the Abbé Denis tells us that it also has two hiding-places. ‘One of these is between the mantel-piece and ceiling of the dining-room; and the way to get to it is to go up the flue of the chimney as high as the ceiling of the room on the second floor; and then, by an aperture in the side of the chimney or flue, to drop down into the hiding-hole. Another opening also exists in the chimney of the room above. The second place of concealment is quite underneath the roof of the house. It had likewise two ways of access—the one from an attic, the other from a closet or small room underneath.’ In Benton, the original seat of the Carylls in Sussex, there is one on the ground-floor between two kitchen chimneys, which is entered by an opening in the room at the back. At New Building, a house more recently erected by the Carylls, there are also two secret rooms; one on the second floor, formed in the thickness of the wall between two chimneys, but entered by a concealed door in one of the two adjoining rooms. The other is in the opposite gable, and is entered from the room on the ground-floor below, through the top of a cupboard which stands in the wall close to the chimney.
The walls of the ‘ancient moated and turreted mansion’ of Lyford, Berks, were ‘pierced with concealed galleries and hiding-places;’ one of the latter was excavated in the wall above the gateway.
Several ‘hiding-holes’ have also come to light in the fine old house of Sutton Place, near Guildford, Surrey; and some years ago, a ‘most beautifully embossed leather casket, iron-bound, containing relics of some of the martyred priests,’ was found in one of these places of concealment behind the wainscot panelling of the chapel. A curious printed volume entitled A Sure Haven against Shipwreck was found concealed ‘between the floor and the ceiling.’ It would seem that Brother Nicholas Owen, alias Little John, S.J., ‘that useful cunning joiner of those times,’ was the constructer of many of these secret rooms, to be found in the greater portion of our ‘stately homes of England,’ for we read in Records of the English Provinces that ‘he was divers times hung upon a Topcliff rack in the Tower of London, to compel him to betray the hiding-places he had made up and down the land.’ This said ‘skilful architect’ was afterwards seized, according to the same authority, in company with Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne, in one of the numerous hiding-places in Hendlip House, near Worcester, already referred to in No. 1040 of this Journal. The secret chamber in which these Jesuit Fathers were concealed is thus described in Lingard’s England: ‘The opening was from an upper room through the fireplace. The wooden border of the hearth was made to take up and put down like a trap-door, and the bricks were taken out and replaced in their courses whenever it was used.’ The former Westons of Sutton Place were well known to government as shelterers of priests. It was searched on the 5th of November 1578, by order of the Privy-council, for ‘popish priests;’ and again on the 14th of January 1591, for one Morgan, a ‘massing priest,’ supposed to be ‘lurking there in secret sort.’
The far-famed ‘Burleigh Park by Stamford Town’ is also in possession of a secret chamber. This concealed apartment, of whose existence the family were altogether unaware, was brought to light in the course of this century through the instrumentality of the law agent, and was found to contain furniture of an old-fashioned description, together with several framed engravings. These latter, when agitated by the wind, which found its way in through a broken window-pane, struck against the wall, thereby producing a flapping noise, which had long procured for the adjoining sleeping apartment the designation of ‘the Haunted Room.’
The grand old historic mansion of Knebworth, Herts, like others of similar age and importance, possessed trap-doors, hiding-places, &c.; and underneath a room adjoining the so-styled ‘Haunted Chamber,’ and belonging to one of the square towers of the gateway, there was a mysterious room or oubliette, of which the late Lord Lytton thus speaks: ‘How could I help writing romances, when I had walked, trembling at my own footsteps, through that long gallery with its ghostly portraits, mused in these tapestry chambers, and passed with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses’ of the secret chamber. This portion of Knebworth was pulled down in 1812.
Referring to houses north of the Border having secret chambers, Sir Walter Scott says: ‘There were few Scottish houses belonging to families of rank which had not such contrivances, the political incidents of the times often calling them into occupation.’ ‘The concealed apartment opening by a sliding panel into the parlour,’ in the old mansion-house of Swinton, is made good use of by Sir Walter in his beautiful novel of Peveril of the Peak.
Some ten or twelve years ago, while workmen were employed in making alterations at the house of Nunraw, near the village of Garvald, Haddingtonshire, they came upon a secret chamber in the depth of one of the walls, which on inspection was found to contain some mummies, pictures, and other property. In olden times, Nunraw was a nunnery belonging to the priory of Haddington, and though modernised, still exhibits evident marks of great antiquity.