Nonsuch

On September 21, 1665 Pepys made a solo business trip to Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, near Epsom, carrying a substantial sum of money, "so rode in some fear of robbing".

His resulting diary entry (below) is fascinating on many levels, as Nonsuch* is one of England's great lost palaces.

 

 

 

Certainly the garden was already in a bit of a state — even if there were still paintings by Holbein and Rubens indoors — and less than twenty years after Pepys's visit the palace was demolished entirely.

It had been the biggest of Henry VIII's building projects, at a cost of ten million quid in today's money, and his only surviving legitimate son, the future Edward VI, was born there. The name was chosen to suggest a royal crib of then unparalleled presumption.

Henry had chosen the spot because it was close to one of his favoured hunting grounds, yet the site would prove impractical because of the lack of available water for domestic use. In the end it seems that the King only visited three times.

The property was returned to the Crown with the Restoration in 1660. Ten years after that, Charles II gifted it to his mistress Barbara Villiers, naming her Baroness Nonsuch. I approve of that name. 

 

But the Baroness was a gambler —  and a loser —  and had soon piled up so much debt that the palace's upkeep was beyond her, so she fancied selling it off in pieces. It was pulled down in 1682.

These elms mentioned by Pepys were the last survivors as, according to John Evelyn, who would visit a year later, "the rest of these goodly trees, both of this and of Worcester Park adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the late war."

There's a certain ambiguity about the "getting" in the last sentence there. Anyone with any familiarity with the Diary will be aware that Samuel was ever a predator...and that he liked them young. 

 

However, I suspect that in this instance, Pepys is probably simply noting the possibility of someday hiring a servant girl with a fine singing voice. In the absence of Netflix, home entertainment in his household largely consisted of making music.

 

* The only other place to bear this rather lovely name was the earliest ever prefab building, made in the Netherlands and then put back together at one end of old London Bridge. Also lost.