A right royal home
‘William Parr lost his estate, his title and very nearly his head’
ON a fateful day in February 1527, a fresh-faced, 13-year-old boy, William Parr, found himself in the chapel at Stanstead Hall, the seat of Henry, 2nd Earl of Essex, to tie the knot with the Earl’s daughter, 10-year-old Anne Bourchier. It was the beginning of one of Tudor England’s most disastrous marriages (Anne left her husband in the 1540s), but also the foundation of Parr’s fortune and, with it, of the hall’s reinvention.
Sitting pretty at the centre of a moat-encircled island by Greenstead Green, in Essex, Grade II*-listed Stanstead Hall—for sale through Savills (01245 293221) at a guide price of £6.5 million—stands on 46 acres of land that had once been
