Near Kendal, in Cumbria (the former Westmorland), Sizergh Castle is a fortified house of the Stricklands, a Catholic family faithful to the old faith. Around a medieval tower, it keeps a jewel of Elizabethan wooden décor: the 'Inlaid Chamber', a marquetry room among the finest in the North-West.
A Catholic family of Westmorland
Sizergh is built around a medieval tower (pele tower) — those refuge-towers typical of the northern border, made to protect from raids. It was the seat of the Stricklands, a Westmorland gentry family that remained Catholic through the persecutions of the Elizabethan age. Like so many families of the North attached to the old faith, the Stricklands had to navigate between religious loyalty and loyalty to the Crown. The house keeps a traditional (but uncertain) link with Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife, through the kinship of her second husband, Lord Latimer, with the Stricklands.
The Inlaid Chamber, a wooden masterpiece
Around 1575, in the full reign of Elizabeth I, the Stricklands added to their tower remarkable Elizabethan arrangements: they enlarged the great hall and above all created the 'Inlaid Chamber' — a chamber panelled with marquetry of floral and geometric motifs, in light poplar and bog oak. This inlaid wooden décor is one of the finest and most refined of Elizabethan north-western England, a testimony of the new taste for interior ornament and comfort. Sizergh thus illustrates how, even in the fortified houses of the North, the Renaissance brought art and pleasure. To see: the medieval tower (pele tower), the Tudor panelling and the 'Inlaid Chamber' (woodwork returned in 1999), the portraits, the listed gardens and the fern collection.
Did you know?
The splendid inlaid woodwork of the Inlaid Chamber (c. 1575) nearly left Sizergh for ever: sold in the nineteenth century to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, it stayed there more than a century. It was only in 1999 that it returned to the castle, at last restoring to the Elizabethan chamber its original décor. It is rare for a dismembered and dispersed Renaissance interior to recover, four centuries later, its original coherence — Sizergh offers a fine example.
Notes
Sizergh Castle lies at Helsington, near Kendal, Cumbria (hist. Westmorland); a National Trust property (Strickland family still resident), open to the public. The Catherine Parr link is traditional/uncertain. Seasonal hours to check.
Quiz
- To which faith did the Stricklands remain loyal?
- Catholicism
- Calvinism
- Islam
- What is the 'Inlaid Chamber' of Sizergh?
- An Elizabethan marquetry room (c. 1575)
- A dungeon
- A chapel
- When did its woodwork return to the castle?
- In 1999 (bought back from the V&A)
- In 1575
- Never