God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests & the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot by Alice Hogge

Appendix
    Of those houses mentioned in this book several are open to the public. Oxburgh Hall is near King’s Lynn in Norfolk; Baddesley Clinton is near Knowle in Warwickshire: both are managed by the National Trust. Coughton Court, near Alcester in Warwickshire, also managed by the Trust, has a permanent exhibition detailing the house’s links with the Gunpowder Plot. Stonor Park, near Henley-on-Thames, has a permanent exhibition illustrating the life of Edmund Campion, and visitors there can see the rooms believed to have housed the press on which Campion’s Decem Rationes was printed. Sadly there have been casualties among the houses no less than among their owners. Hindlip Hall is now the site of the headquarters of West Mercia Constabulary; Harrowden Hall is home to Wellingborough Golf Club.
    Lastly, I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to a house not featured in this book, but worth visiting. This is Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. Harvington belonged to Humphrey Pakington, a recusant and a close friend of Thomas Habington at nearby Hindlip. This friendship makes it likely that Pakington was known to the Jesuits, and still extant at Harvington is a cluster of hiding-places believed to be by Nicholas Owen.
    The hides are situated around the massive Great Staircase, the design of which dates from about 1600. Given the upheaval to the household that its construction would have caused, it makes sense to suppose that it and its surrounding hides were built of a piece (the former providing cover for the latter), some time after this date.
    Climb the Great Staircase at Harvington today, to the top landing, and before you is a set of five steps leading up to what is known as the Nine Worthies Passage. * Place your fingers under the top two treads of these steps and they hinge back to reveal a small triangular hide, suitable for books and massing equipment. In the far wall of this hide is a gap, once covered by a secret door (probably camouflaged to look like brickwork), through which you can climb to a larger, man-sized hide beyond.
    Carry on along the passage and you come to the Marble Room, with a triangular fireplace built into the far corner. This fireplace has no chimney-stack beneath it and extends only as far as the ceiling: it is entirely false. If you were to climb up it, through its carefully blackened surrounds, you would enter a bewildering maze of attics above, with a second hide built into the end garret.
    Below the Marble Room is Dr Dodd’s Library. At the far end of this library, opposite the window, is a small raised stage, once used as a bookcupboard. The back wall of it is panelled; the sides would once have been panelled too, but now they consist of bare brick and upright timber beams. In the darkest recesses of this stage is a timber beam, the end of which can be raised. It pivots open to reveal a hide beyond, eight foot long, three foot wide and five foot high—luxury in terms of hiding-places—with a small wooden joint-stool as furniture. This stool is too big to pass through the ten-inch-wide entrance to the hide, so it must have been built, or assembled, in situ. The hide was discovered by accident in 1897 by boys playing in the, then, derelict hall. It and its companion pieces are some of the very finest hiding-places ever to have been built. They provide enduring evidence of the genius of Nicholas Owen.
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    * The existing staircase is a replica: the original was dismantled and moved to Coughton Court in 1910.

Bibliography
    Unless otherwise specified, place of publication is London.
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