Transcript of an article from Country Life Magazine - May 25th, 1907

DOMESDAY BOOK has nothing within its covers of Apley Park on Severn water. It was a mere appurtenance of Higford or Hugford which Godwin held in the Confessor's time, Berner coming after the Conquest to hold it under that great Baron, Roger de Lacy. When surnames began, those who followed Berner at Hugford took their name from their lands, and two centuries after the Great Survey we find Sir William of Hugford, a knight, holding as members of his manor of Hugford the townships of Norton, Apley and Astall, and keeping them in peace, since the Barons had long ago been broken at Evesham. So stout a Royalist was he that, when the poor King was a crowned captive in his enemies' hands at Hereford, the Barons, his gaolers, made him set his hand to an order that Sir William of Hugford, a Lord Marcher of his Welsh Border, should leave the land, so that England might have peace-that quality of peace demanded by the victors of Lewes. But Sir William and other March Lords did not budge for a few inches of sheepskin and soon afterwards their King was his own master again in Shropshire and in all England. For more than 400 years these Hugfords held by Hugford and their other Shropshire lands, which passed at the last with a lass to a family whose longer endurance has made its name more familiar to us. Alice of Hugford, who became co-heir of her brother, was wife to a Warwickshire knight, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. We may guess that this was a marriage arranged for her according to the custom of great Feudal houses, for, when Sir Thomas died, his widowed lady grieved for him but eight weeks before giving her hand to a squire of lower degree.

The new lords of Hugford were knights of an old stock, deriving their home of Charlecote from a Walter of Charlecote, who, marrying with a daughter of the Lucys, gave their name to his descendants. Evesham field had found Fulk de Lucy, "who was a lover of good horses," reining his war-steed against the Hugfords' King; but Fulk, like many another who had risked all in the tugging between King and Barons, made his peace and died a loyal man. Such a family, with great possessions in several countries, brought together by well-chosen matches, could not but take a part in the Wars of the Two Roses; but it was a politic part. Though they were up for the White Rose of York, the turn of the tide did not leave them stranded, and the Tudor age found a Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote and Apley not only an officer of King Henry VIII.'s Court, but married to a daughter of that Richard Empson who had filled the royal coffers and swung on a gallows for his pains.

Grandson of Sir Thomas by Elizabeth Empson was another Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote and Apley. We know much of his doings. He lived nigh to seventy years, and rebuilt Charlecote Hall in red brick, a great "E" of buildings, honouring the Virgin Queen in its ground plan. Foxe of the "Book of Martyrs" gave him his first book-learning, and made him something of a puritan. He was a knight and a Parliament member for Warwick; he married a well-born shrew and begot a son and daughter, and when at the last he died, three heralds, with Master Camden at their head, came down from London to lay him in his alabaster tomb in Stratford church. But these things, or the like, belong to the history of any worshipful justice of the peace; yet Sir Thomas has been caught up and set among the stars as surely as ever was Orion's dog. He put on immortality the day he had before him a certain Stratford lad who had taken the wrong side of his deer park paling. For this is none other than Justice Shallow in the flesh-Justice Shallow custos and rotulorum, Master Slender's cousin, whose ancient coat bore those white laces which you may see today over Sir Thomas's tomb. To think that any herald's book of Warwickshire shows a score of knights living as his neighbours, and now all dead and forgotten, while Sir Thomas is deathless as Mr. Micawber or Captain Bunsby! Lucys bearing his name and his descendants on the distaff side live on at Charlecote to this day, but neither the old stock nor the new graft has borne such another.

It was not, we may take it, for lack of money that the Lucys sold away their Shropshire manor, in which Apley had long since displaced Hugford as the chief township, for they were still rounding up their Warwickshire lands. Apley, inconveniently far front Charlecote, became the seat of William Whitmore, the son of London citizen by an alderman's daughter, and Sir William Whitmore, knight of Apley was Sheriff of Shropshire in 1620.

And now the house of Apley comes into our history. When the Civil War came to Shropshire the county was divided against itself. Corbets of Stanwardine and Corbets of Adderley were for the Parliament as hotly as Corbets of Moreton and Corbets of Humphreston were for the King. The Parliamentarians were Mytton of Halston, ancestor of mad Jack Mytton, and Clive of Styche, forefather of the conqueror of Plassey. Jones of Kilhendre signs a Shropshire name to the King's death warrant. But Whitmore and his sons at Apley were in good Shropshire company when they declared for the King. Bridgnorth was filled with pikes and muskets early in the campaign. In October of 1642 Essex, after driving Prince Rupert of the Rhine out of Ludlow town and castle, arranged to billet ten regiments of horse and 6,000 foot on the Bridgnorth citizens, who were mustered with their old bows and pikes to hold their town against the Cavaliers. The next year Lord Capel was building earth works there against Walla, and Apley Park was armed as one of five blockhouses to guard the Severn water-way. Happily we have a document before us which gives a picture of Apley Park in those drumming and trumpeting days. Nigh to forty years after the head was hacked from Arthur, Lord Capel, an old officer living in Warwick told my Lords daughter, the Duchess of Beaufort, the story of that campaign on Severn. When the King came to Bridgnorth, his troops were quartered out of town at Sir William Whitmore's, a fair large house which would have given my Lord a good feather-bed, such as other lords lay on.

But my Lord preferred to tumble in the straw with a hundred gentlemen lying in Sir William's barn, and when in the morning the King asked him how he had slept, "Very well," says my Lord, "for since I came with your Majesty from York, I never before met with a bed that was long enough for me."

The house at Apley was the scene of one of those sudden surprises common in this country-side warfare of Shropshire. Thus Mytton galloped a party of horse from Wem and took Sir William Vaughan, "The Devil of Shrawardine," on his knees in Shrawardine chancel. Sir John Price, governor of Montgomery, came down at Hinton on red-nosed Sir Francis Ottley, the sheriff, with a recruiting commission from the King, bringing back fifteen gentlemen to his castle. Another such flying column made its way secretly from Wem on a February day in 1645, and took Apley Park unawares, riding home with Sir William Whitmore, his son Sir Thomas and the Apley garrison of sixty men as prisoners of war. The war was over for the Whitmores of Apley; there remained but the bill to foot, and heavy composition money was paid over before Apley was their own again. The old knight did not survive long his capture, and it was his heir who laid down £5,000 before the Parliament's commissioners. His rich city kinsfolk could do little in this evil day, seeing that old Sir George of Hackney, his uncle and an ex-Lord Mayor, was himself turning out his pockets and suffering imprisonments and duress for the good cause.

A baronetcy given to Thomas Whitmore, the eldest son of the house, died out with the grantee. The Whitmores of Apley remained Shropshire squires until they sold house and lands in the year 1867 to Mr. Orme Foster, whose son has since succeeded him as lord of the ancient manor which Berner held of Lacy and sole owner of all the land in Stockton parish. Long before they left Shropshire the Whitmores had made new the old home from which the Parliament's troopers had carried away the two Whitmore knights, and the present house was built by Mr. Thomas Whitmore in 1811. Such a noble domain should have a house worthy of it. Seen across the ford of Severn water, its battlements rising among tall trees on Apley hill, the house has a certain stateliness, a quality which made it beloved by the old school of landscape men who came to draw the beauties of Apley with soft pencils on tinted paper. Built solidly in Grinshill stone, a look at our view of the south-eastern front, where is the main entry under a battled gable decorated with three meaningless drain-pipe turrets, will show it for an unfortunate example of "the Gothick taste." A happier view of the house is that from the lower lawn above which the square tower stands sturdily, and in our picture of the fountain stairs trees and water come to aid the uncompromising lines of the house. But this seat of Shropshire knights and squires is well named Apley Park rather than Apley Hall. Two hundred and fifty acres of timbered park hanging over the bend of Severn give it rare distinction. See how the carriage drive winds through greenwood shadows flecked with sunlight, and by a Titan's path hewn out between cliffs. All the grave beauty of time old garden is here-smooth lawns haunted by yew and cypress, fountain pools bordered with green, secret rose gardens and broad walks by the long stone balustrade. The high terrace-way, two miles in length, where six carriages, it is said, might drive abreast, is unmatched, for looking from it the eye takes the view of Clee and the Wrekin and of Worcestershire fields and hills far to the south.