Chastleton House

Chastleton House (/ˈtʃæsəltən/) is a Jacobean country house at Chastleton, Oxfordshire, England, close to Moreton-in-Marsh (grid reference SP2429). It has been owned by the National Trust since 1991 and is a Grade I listed building. Chastleton House was built between 1607 and 1612, possibly by Robert Smythson, for Walter Jones, who had made his fortune from the law, although his family were originally Welsh wool merchants. The estate was bought in 1602 from Robert Catesby, although his residence was demolished to make way for the new house and no traces of the original building on this spot remain. The house is built of Cotswold stone, around a small courtyard, called the Dairy Court. Chastleton House is famous for an episode from the English Civil War in which a loyal wife duped (and drugged) Roundhead soldiers to save her husband. Sarah Jewell, granddaughter of the art critic Alan Clutton-Brock and his first wife Shelagh Archer, who died in a road accident in 1936, recalled her childhood reenactments of the scene when visiting her grandfather and his second wife Barbara (née Foy-Mitchell), the last owners of the manor (it having passed on the death of Irene Whitmore-Jones in 1955 to Alan Clutton-Brock, her relative by marriage): "My sisters and I used to love running around searching for the secret room where Arthur Jones, the grandson of Walter Jones, hid after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Arthur was a Royalist and had been fighting for Charles II but the troops were defeated by Cromwell and Arthur galloped back to Chastleton with Cromwell's soldiers in hot pursuit. His quick-witted wife, Sarah – my childhood heroine – hid him in the secret closet over the porch and although the pursuing soldiers found his exhausted horse in the stables they couldn't find him. Sarah saved Arthur's life by lacing the soldiers' beer with laudanum and saddling up one of their horses for his escape as the soldiers slumbered.