History of Rushton Triangular Lodge
Rushton Triangular Lodge is one of most striking and daring buildings in Britain. It was ostensibly a small lodge for a warrener at the centre of a profitable rabbit farm, which was part of the Northamptonshire estate of Sir Thomas Tresham. But it is much more than that. Encoded in its design is a complex expression of Tresham’s Catholic faith in the face of its suppression in Elizabethan England.
The story of the Lodge’s construction reveals the power and dangers of religion in Tudor England, the bonds of a family through persecution, treason and its consequences, and Elizabethan delight in secret codes and symbols.
Sir Thomas Tresham and his faith
Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) was the designer and builder of the Triangular Lodge. In 1559, aged only 15, he inherited one of the biggest estates in England. His grandfather, a Catholic, had been a staunch supporter of Mary Tudor, who had attempted to restore the Catholic faith in England on becoming queen in 1553. But she died the year before Thomas inherited the estate from his grandfather, and was succeeded by her Protestant sister, Elizabeth I.
Initially Sir Thomas conformed at least outwardly to Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. He was even knighted by her at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. But he publicly committed to Catholicism in 1580, after receiving a mission of Jesuit priests from the Continent who were attempting to regenerate English Catholicism.
As the head of one of the richest families in Northamptonshire, Sir Thomas became one of the most prominent Catholics in England, at a time when Catholics had little scope for expressing their faith publicly, and risked persecution and even imprisonment.
Religious strife in Tudor England
Under the Tudors, all subjects were expected to be loyal to the monarch and share his or her faith. But this was not a straightforward task. In the 1530s, Henry VIII (reigned 1509–47) had declared England independent of the pope, and the English monarch as supreme head of the Church in England. Henry’s son and successor, Edward VI (r.1547–53), enforced Protestant modes of worship, and favoured Protestant families in the face of Catholic resistance. But his sister Mary I (r.1553–8) brought back Catholic worship and favoured Catholic families like the Treshams, while punishing Protestants as heretics.
Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I (r.1558–1603), inherited a country split between faiths. Initially, she followed a more conciliatory path than her sister. Catholic worship was banned, Catholics could not hold public office and it was illegal not to attend Anglican services. Some made token visits but remained Catholic and were known as ‘Church Papists’. But those who didn’t attend only had to pay small fines that the rich could easily afford. Such individuals were known as recusants (from the Latin verb recusare, ‘to refuse’).
Later in Elizabeth’s reign, however, life for Catholics became far more perilous. In 1570 Pope Pius V declared Elizabeth a heretic, thus releasing her Catholic subjects from their allegiance. Priests were trained and sent to England in order to consolidate Catholics in their faith and turn Church Papists into recusants. All Catholic subjects were now potential traitors.
The situation deteriorated further when Spain launched the Armada against England in 1588 with the blessing of the pope, and urged English Catholics to assist the potential invasion. Elizabeth passed laws in 1581, 1585 and 1593 to penalise Catholics more heavily. The recusancy fine for not attending Sunday worship was increased a hundred times, and it became a felony for a lay person to help or harbour a priest.
Planning the Lodge
Although Sir Thomas Tresham was a recusant, he argued that Catholics could practise their faith while remaining loyal to the Crown as head of state. He even expressed a desire to fight for his country. But his professions of loyalty were in vain. From 1581 until 1593 he was continuously either in prison, subject to house arrest or under surveillance. He was first sent to prison in 1581, for refusing to admit or deny that he had entertained John Campion, a Jesuit priest, at his house. Later, Tresham and his fellow Catholics were locked up as potential enemy agents, and Tresham remained in prison until 1593.
Unable to express his faith publicly, Sir Thomas turned instead to more discreet means of doing so. He amassed a vast library of books intended to be a repository of Catholic knowledge. While they were mostly theological, he had a large collection of architectural books and at least seven on emblems.
He also embarked on a programme of building works. The Triangular Lodge was not his first attempt at architectural design – he had built the Market House at nearby Rothwell in 1578. But on his temporary release from prison in 1593, he set about designing a series of buildings at his estates. He built a new residence for himself at Lyveden. And at the family seat, Rushton Hall, he planned the Triangular Lodge as an architectural statement of his family and religious identity.
Understanding the Lodge
Tresham used this unusual canvas to express pride in his family and his faith, but he did so in clever and cryptic ways. The Elizabethans loved buildings, paintings and poems with secret or oblique meanings, and called such creations ’devices’. The Lodge is a device, in which Tresham combines detailed knowledge of the Bible with dashes of humour.
Most obviously it is an expression of the Holy Trinity, one god who is also three – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is conveyed most simply in the triangular shape, the three floors, trefoil windows, and three triangular gables on each of the three sides, each of which measures 33 feet wide, 33 also being Christ’s age when he was crucified.
The decoration of the Lodge also conveys many other messages to the informed viewer, in emblems referring to biblical passages, Latin phrases distributed around the building, and hymns and ritual phrases encoded in numbers and letters. Some of the codes and symbols proudly proclaim Sir Thomas’s family connections.
But daringly, as well as symbols relating to the Trinity – regarded as uncontroversial by both Protestants and Catholics – Sir Thomas encoded references to Catholic beliefs, such as devotion to the Virgin Mary, and rituals such as the Catholic Mass, which was illegal.
Read more about the meaning of the Lodge
Building the Lodge
The Triangular Lodge was skilfully designed and exquisitely crafted. Sir Thomas seems to have designed it himself in collaboration with his employees. Construction work was directed, and probably surveyed, by George Levens, the Treshams’ steward, who meticulously recorded all the money spent on materials and the names of the craftspeople who built it. Tresham conceived the Lodge in 1593 (the date written in iron on the Lodge) but work started in 1594 and was largely completed in 1596.
Most of the structure was made by local masons, including the Tyrrell family: they built the walls using brown ironstone and white limestone from the estate for the distinctive horizontal banding. Two joiners from Rothwell, Thomas Greene and his brother, made moulds for the entablature (which runs along the top of the upper storey, and contains the long inscriptions) and chimney. A specialist mason named Parris was entrusted with carving the ornamental details, such as the angels and the lettering.
The rabbit warrens
Lodges in Tudor estates were typically intended as destinations for hunting parties, as eyecatchers in the landscape, or to house practical estate functions. The Triangular Lodge was referred to as the Warrener’s Lodge in the family accounts and may have been a space from which a warrener could manage and protect a rabbit farm. Perhaps the warrener hung up rabbit skins to dry on the lower floor and lived on the upper floors.
The rabbit farm was in the field around the Lodge and another across the river. These fields would have been covered in large, specially made burrows, known as pillow mounds. The remains of one are visible just north of the Lodge, as a gentle bank inside the wall beside the road.
Rabbit farming was a lucrative business in Tudor England. The warren was an important part of the Treshams’ finances, and exploiting the value of the estate was vital given the large recusancy fines imposed on them, as well as the expense of marrying off their daughters. The Treshams sold the rabbits in London for between £3 and £10 per hundred: the most expensive were the bigger black-and-white rabbits, valued both for their meat and their fur, which was sought after for trimming clothes.
The Lodge’s elaborate construction and symbolic importance to the Treshams indicate that it may have had a more prestigious function, perhaps as a place to entertain, hold banquets, or to contemplate and study one’s faith. However, no evidence of the Treshams’ use of the interior survives.
Francis Tresham and the Gunpowder Plot
Sir Thomas Tresham continued to profess his support for Elizabeth I, despite his imprisonment and aspersions cast on his loyalty. But his eldest son, Francis, was one of the followers of the Earl of Essex during his rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. His family paid a large fine and made desperate pleas to powerful people at court to save him from execution.
Then in 1605, shortly before the death of his father, Francis was drawn into what would become the most infamous conspiracy in British history, when a group of Catholics embarked upon the ‘Gunpowder’ Plot to blow up Parliament and Elizabeth I’s Protestant successor, King James, on 5 November. Robert Catesby, its prime instigator, was Francis’s first cousin, and probably recruited him with an eye on Francis’s inheritance as funding for the enterprise. Francis appears to have been a reluctant participant and urged his friends to abandon their scheme. Guy Fawkes records that Francis was concerned for the safety of Catholic peers attending Parliament, despite Catesby’s assurances that they would be safe.
At the end of October Lord Monteagle, a Catholic, received an anonymous letter warning him not to attend Parliament. Instead of burning the letter as instructed, he took it to the secretary of state, Robert Cecil. The letter was probably written by Francis. The plot was uncovered, and the conspirators arrested.
Committed to the Tower of London as one of the conspirators, Francis protested his efforts to frustrate Catesby’s plan. But since he had not revealed the plot to the king, he was considered complicit. Although he died in the Tower before his trial, his actions were treated as treason, and he forfeited his property and titles posthumously. His corpse was beheaded, and his head displayed in Northampton.
Read more about the Gunpowder PlotMuriel Tresham
Sir Thomas Tresham had been the ward of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton Court in Warwickshire, and around 1566 married his daughter Muriel. The Treshams had four sons and six daughters. During Thomas’s long periods of imprisonment, Muriel used various family networks of patronage, both Catholic and Protestant, to lobby for his release. Almost uniquely for a Tudor woman, a large collection of her letters survives, demonstrating how tirelessly she petitioned allies for aid. When Francis was imprisoned for his part in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, Muriel and her daughters petitioned their patrons and friends to secure his release.
Muriel actively defied the law to pursue her Catholic faith. In 1587, ‘Lady Tressam’ was listed as one of those who purchased and received a translation of a banned book, Luis da Granada’s A Memoriall of a Christian Life. This was one of over 600 illicit Catholic devotional texts smuggled into the Marshalsea prison for distribution in England.
After Sir Thomas died, Muriel successfully managed his large debts but also fought off attempts to exploit her widowhood. The limited rights of married Tudor women meant it was difficult to punish them for not attending church. As a widow, however, Muriel was legally accountable for her recusancy, and was threatened with imprisonment by John Lambe, proctor of Northampton. But Muriel believed he was chasing her not as a recusant but as a widow, so as to seize her lands for himself. By mobilising her network of patrons, especially Robert Cecil, she successfully resisted his efforts. She died at Lyveden in 1615.
Image: Muriel Throckmorton, who later married Sir Thomas Tresham, is depicted in this detail from a portrait of her family with her mother, Elizabeth, three of her sisters and a brother. The portrait, dated c.1550, is at Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire
© Photo courtesy of Dave Penman
The Midland Rebellion
Two years after Sir Thomas Tresham’s death, there was a series of popular uprisings across Northampton and the adjacent counties, now known as the Midland Rebellion. In Northamptonshire these centred on the estates of Sir Thomas and the extended Tresham family, particularly his cousin (also called Thomas Tresham). At Newton mere, a few miles from Rushton, the Northampton militia ended the uprising by killing 40 protesters, and the leaders were executed.
It was no coincidence that the protests centred on the estates of the Tresham cousins. They were notorious for enclosing common land for private use in the 1590s, the period during which the Triangular Lodge was being constructed. Although the opinions of Sir Thomas Tresham’s Rushton tenants are unknown, his tenants in Orton had previously signed a petition complaining about their treatment, which included him raising rents and fining them to make them give up their lands.
Elsewhere, Tresham’s removal of common land for sheep grazing in Rockingham forest had led to him being called ’the most odious man in the country’. But the Treshams were also unpopular for their Catholicism and Francis’s involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, so this made them easier targets than Protestant landowners engaged in the same activities.
Later history
Francis Tresham had only a life interest in his father’s estates. Despite his attainder, after his death the estate passed to his younger brother Lewis.
Lewis was a spendthrift, and the debts left by Sir Thomas on the estate continued to accumulate. In 1614 the Rushton estate was sold to one of Lewis’s main creditors, Sir William Cokayne, a wealthy merchant, financier and moneylender. He substantially enlarged and altered Rushton Hall in about 1630.
Cockayne’s descendants lived at Rushton until 1810 and in 1828 the estate was sold to William Hope. The Hopes made various changes to the Lodge and probably installed the cast-iron fireplace surround and grate on the upper floor.
After a series of subsequent owners, in 1951 Mr GH Pain placed the Lodge in the guardianship of the Ministry of Works, a predecessor of English Heritage.
Find out more
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Visit Rushton Triangular Lodge
This delightful triangular building was designed by Sir Thomas Tresham (father of one of the Gunpowder Plotters) and constructed between 1593 and 1597.
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Decoding Rushton Triangular Lodge
Sir Thomas Tresham left no explanation of the Lodge’s decoration, but we can still decode many of its hidden meanings. Explore this enigmatic building with the help of our 3D model.
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