The History of Hever Castle

Six hundred and forty years, 36 owners from 12 families, and one of them the woman whose marriage broke England away from Rome. Hever’s history is unusually well documented because so much of it turns on people the rest of the country was watching.

1383: a licence to crenellate

John de Cobham was granted a licence to crenellate Hever in 1383. The moat, the gatehouse, the walls, the towers, the great hall and the end block all date from that work. The shape it produced — a walled bailey behind a gatehouse, wrapped in water — is still the shape of the place today.

The Cobhams and what came before them

A building known as Hever Cobham was inherited by Stephen de Cobham, Baron Rundale, in 1308, seventy-five years earlier. It was a motte-and-bailey castle centred on a timber great hall with a central hearth. Around it stood the kitchen, stores, barns, stables, dairy and workshops. None of it survives, and the evidence is documentary rather than standing.

The exterior walls of the fourteenth-century castle were whitewashed with powdered chalk and water. That weatherproofed them, and made the building far more dramatic than the grey stone you see now. The front was painted in strong colours.

Geoffrey Boleyn buys Hever, 1462

Geoffrey Boleyn, a London mercer who became Lord Mayor, bought the castle in 1462 and died the following year. His son William put the large windows into the north wall of the great hall and partitioned off the Parlour. His grandson Thomas added the spiral stone staircase and ceiled the open crown-post roof over the family apartments. The hearths moved with it, into the fireplaces that are still there.

Anne Boleyn’s Hever

Anne Boleyn grew up here with her sister Mary and her brother George. Henry VIII visited during the courtship. Her insistence that she be his wife rather than his mistress is what led him to break with Rome and create the Church of England, and she was queen for a thousand days.

She came back to Hever between about 1526 and 1528, away from the heat and the watching of the court. She was here in the summer of 1528, recovering from the sweating sickness. Two of her Books of Hours, inscribed and signed by her, are on display in the castle.

Anne of Cleves and the three rooms she left

Hever passed to Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, and she owned it from 1557. Three of her additions still stand. The Entrance Hall on the front of the house, the grand staircase and Staircase Gallery above it, and the Long Gallery running the full width of the castle. More of the building you walk through is hers than most visitors realise.

The Waldegraves, the window tax and the collapse of 1838

From 1557 the castle passed through the Waldegraves, the Humphreys and the Meade Waldos. Henry Waldegrave installed the Morning Room fireplace in 1644. The Long Gallery’s north windows were bricked up to avoid the window tax introduced in 1696, and reopened in 1898. Around 1715 a terrace was built inside the moat as a damp course, and the wooden drawbridge became a stone bridge so a horse and coach could reach the front door.

In the nineteenth century the north-east corner collapsed under a fifteenth-century chimney built on top of the kitchen flue. The kitchen was moved into the Great Hall in 1838, and the fireplace reached its present position in 1898.

The Waldos and the Meade Waldos

Sir Timothy Waldo added to the estate until it ran to 1,300 acres by his death in 1786. Jane Waldo took out the central portcullis in the 1830s. In 1895 Captain Guy Sebright and his wife Olive took a lease from the Meade Waldo family. Three years later they began the restoration, lowering the courtyard and the ground floor and turning the two wings into a drawing room and a library.

27 July 1903: William Waldorf Astor

Astor inherited a fortune in 1890 that made him the richest man in America. He decided the country was “no longer a fit place for a gentleman to live” and moved to England in 1891, with a reputed hundred million dollars. He bought Hever on 27 July 1903.

748 men, 800 more, and a lake

Work on the castle finished in 1906 and on the grounds in 1908, with Frank Loughborough Pearson as architect. 748 men worked on the building and a further 800 excavated the 38-acre lake. Every fragment of the original structure was kept. The Sebrights’ modern doors, locks and glass were replaced with sixteenth-century materials, and the workmen were allowed the adze and the chisel but not the modern plane. The carving and plasterwork are by Nathaniel Hitch and William Silver Frith.

Astor to Guthrie, 1963 to today

John Jacob Astor inherited in 1919. He had won Olympic gold in rackets at the 1908 London games; he became MP for Dover and bought The Times. His son Gavin opened the castle and gardens to the public for the first time in 1963. After the floods of 1968 the estate became too expensive to run, and in 1983 the castle and some 3,000 acres were sold to John Guthrie, who owns it now.

Hever is Grade I listed as both a building and a garden. Hever Castle is privately owned. It is not a National Trust property and it is not English Heritage.

The 36 owners from 12 families who have held Hever since 1383

A Hever Castle guided tour runs out to the castle from a London hotel, and Hever Castle Tours compares the ones that do. The rooms page takes the story indoors, and the gardens are almost entirely Astor’s work.