Woking Palace, Surrey, England

This was not only a palace but also in effect the manor house of the old Royal Manor of Woking which had more or less similar boundaries to the ancient parish of St Peters, Woking. The Palace stood in a park the boundaries of which were roughly the present day Old Woking Road, Pyrford Common Road, Church Hill and Newark Lane with the River Wey as its southern boundary.

Under the ownership of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, various building works turned the Manor into a Palace. The Palace was frequently visited by Henry VII on his accession to the throne and by his son Henry VIII who extended and enlarged the Palace between 1515 and 1543. Further work was carried out between 1565 and 1594 during Elizabeth Is reign. In 1620 the Palace was granted by James I to Sir Edward Zouch who abandoned it and built himself a new manor house at Hoe Place. There is some evidence that materials from the Palace were reused in the construction of the new house. It is possible too, that some of the fine glass at Sutton Place was taken from the Palace and the Jacobean style staircase at Fishers Farm may well have originated from the same source.

When the Palace was abandoned in the 1620s, the Park was turned over to farming. This new phase probably gave rise to the building of farmhouses in the Park or the conversion of existing buildings to such use. The Old House and Woking Park Farm both shown in the margin were probably two of those farmhouses. Archaeologically, little trace remains of this history. A small building measuring 30ft by 18ft with one window and two doors has been recorded, as has a run down barn. A shallow depression is all that remains of what was referred to by the Victoria County History as a double moat. It is suggested that two “stagnant ponds” in Oldhall Copse, at the north-west of the moated enclosure may be the fishponds of the palace.

===From Victoria County History:===

The manor of WOKING seems to have been Crown property from very early times. When the Domesday Survey was taken Woking was in the king's hands, and the Confessor was also reported to have held it. It remained in the hands of the Crown for several centuries. King John shortly after his accession made a grant of the manor of Woking to Alan Basset, who held it for half a knight's fee. His eldest son Gilbert was holding it in 1236–7. He died in 1242. It was held by his brother Fulk, who was Bishop of London and died in 1259. His younger brother Philip succeeded. On the death of Philip, who left no heirs male, the manor descended to Aliva his daughter, who was married twice. Her first husband was Hugh le Despenser the Justiciar, killed at Evesham, to whom she bore the son who was afterwards popularly known as the elder Despenser. She married, secondly, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, against whom Elaine, wife of Philip Basset, brought a suit for the dower which she ought to have enjoyed in Woking Manor. Aliva's death, which occurred in 1281, was the signal for a dispute over her estates. The earl brought a suit against Hugh le Despenser, Aliva's son and heir, on the grounds that he himself had had issue by his wife, but withdrew his claim.

Hugh le Despenser was executed in 1326 in the troubled time when Edward II was deposed, and Woking reverted to the Crown. Edward III in the first year of his reign granted the manor of Woking, then said to have been forfeited by Hugh le Despenser, to his uncle, Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent. Under Mortimer's régime, however, Edmund was soon afterwards attainted and executed. His son Edmund was restored in 1330, but died in 1333 while yet a minor, and was succeeded by his brother John. After John's death without issue in 1352 the manor became the right of his sister Joan, then married to Sir Thomas Holand, who was summoned to Parliament as Earl of Kent in her right. But his widow Elizabeth kept part of it as dower till her death in 1410–11. The son of Joan and Thomas was Thomas, second Earl of Kent in the Holand line.

Joan died in 1386, and although the king is named as her heir in the inquisition taken after her death, many of her lands apparently passed to her other son; Thomas de Holand was certainly holding Woking at the time of his death some ten years later. In the next year the Despensers released to Thomas his son and heir all rights which they possessed in Woking Manor.

After the accession of Henry IV Thomas, whom Richard had created Duke of Surrey and whom Henry had deprived of the dignity, joined in the conspiracy of 1400 against the king and was beheaded as a traitor, and Woking was forfeited among his other lands. Henry IV, however, restored it to Alice widow of Earl Thomas,and she continued to hold until her death in 1416. She left her husband's four sisters as co-heirs, and it seems as though some deed of partition must have been made, since Woking Manor remained intact in the possession of the Beaufort Dukes of Somerset, who descended from Margaret, one of the co-heirs aforesaid.

Edmund, Duke of Somerset, son of Margaret, was slain at the first battle of St. Albans, and it was recorded at the time of his death that he held Woking Manor of the king by the service of paying him one clove gillyflower a year. He was succeeded by his son Henry, who also embraced the Lancastrian cause, and was attainted in 1461, restored in 1463, but beheaded after the battle of Hexham in 1464, and attainted after his death by an Act annulling his former restoration.

Woking passed to the Crown. The rightful heir, Margaret Beaufort, daughter of John first Duke of Somerset, was restored to her lands at the accession of her son Henry VII, and she seems to have spent most of her time at Woking, where the existing remains, though they are on the lines of the moated house described in extents of the 14th century, seem to be chiefly of about her date.

At Margaret's death in 1509 the manor once more became Crown property. Henry VIII appears to have made it a favourite residence, to judge from the number of his letters which are dated thence, and it was when Wolsey was on a visit to his royal master at Woking that he received the news of his nomination to the Sacred College.

The Tudors continued to hold Woking in demesne, for it was Elizabeth's own house in 1583. James I, however, made a grant of it in 1620 to Sir Edward Zouch, who died in 1634. From him the manor passed to his son James, who married Beatrice daughter of Lord Mountnorris. He died in 1643, leaving two sons, of whom Edward, the elder, died in 1658, and James, the second son, succeeded to the inheritance at his brother's death. This James became a person of mark in the county of Surrey; he filled the office of High Sheriff, and Symmes, the local historian of the time, speaks of him with considerable respect. He died in 1708. In 1671 James had granted the reversion of his property to the king, and Charles II leased it for 1,000 years to Lord Grandison, among others, to hold in trust for his cousin, the notorious Duchess of Cleveland, and her children.She held a court in 1709, but died the same year. The trustees held courts down to the year 1715, when they conveyed Woking to John Walter, who held his first court in May 1716. He was followed by his son Abel Walter, who in 1748 obtained an Act of Parliament granting him the fee simple in place of the 1,000 years' lease which his father purchased. He sold to Lord Onslow in 1752. It has remained in the Onslow family down to the present day.

Domesday Book mentions the existence of a mill at Woking. At the end of the 14th century the manor possessed a water-mill and a fulling-mill; it seems possible, however, that one of these was really in Sutton, and should be identified with the mill which was there at the time of the Survey. Henry VIII leased Woking mills to Thomas Spencer, and the water-mill was again granted out by Elizabeth and James I. The fact that the two mills were separated after the grant of Sutton Manor to Sir Richard Weston again seems to suggest that one of these mills was in Sutton. This one would then be the mill near Trigg's Lock, the other the mill on the old river just south of Woking village.

Henry VI in 1451 granted to Edmund Duke of Somerset and his heirs the privilege of having a fair every Whit Tuesday.

James Zouch in 1662 received the grant of a fair on 12 September and a weekly market on Friday, and in 1665 he built the market-house which still stands in Woking village street.

The old royal residence at Woking Park lay down the river a mile from old Woking village. An early 14th-century survey was seen by Symmes in very bad condition, and copied. It has now perished. It appears from it that there were extensive buildings, with two chapels, within a double moat. The double moat is shown in the survey of Woking Park by Norden of 1607, and the remains of it are still visible at Woking Park Farm. There were a cornmill and a fulling-mill on the manor, and a deer park. The park extended from the manor-house along the river to Woking village and up over the high ground nearly to the present railway line. In addition to the royal visits mentioned above, Edward VI was there in 1550, and Elizabeth in 1569 and 1583. In what is now a farm building is a brick gateway of the earlier 15th century, much dilapidated, leading into a building with a barrel vault of small bricks of a rather later date, and communicating with what is now a barn of old chalk, brick, and timber work. But the whole is in very bad repair. Sir Edward Zouch, probably finding the manor-house in a ruinous state, built a new house with two courtyards nearly a mile away on higher ground at Hoe Bridge Place. James Zouch his grandson built a third house contiguous to this, on a smaller scale, the date of which is fairly determined by mythological paintings on the staircase attributed to Antonio Verrio, who decorated Hampton Court for James II and William III, and by a painting on the ceiling of a drawing-room, attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, and certainly celebrating the peace of Ryswick under allegorical forms. Some part of the second house perhaps remains in the stable buildings and its foundations. James Zouch died in 1708, and Hoe Bridge Place passed to his niece Sophia, who in 1718 conveyed it to James Field, who sold it in 1730 to John Walter; he cleared away the remains of the second house and altered the existing building. It is now the residence of Mr. F. H. Booth, who has made further alterations. The park was destroyed at the time of the Civil Wars, when the Zouch family was royalist.