Sir Edmund Prideaux of Forde Abbey, England - 1640

Forde Abbey - the cloisters

• General Notes
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    During the four centuries that separated the reign of King Stephen from the Reformation, Forde Abbey, founded in 1146, was one of the most significant Cistercian monasteries in England. The buildings seen today were all in existence in the Middle Ages, forming the Abbot’s and monk’s quarters, their kitchen, refectories, and their chapter house. The abbey church has gone, together with the guest wing and three sides of the cloisters. Though altered, the monastery the monks knew still stands, clothed in the new architectural fashions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.While the final years of so many English monasteries are remembered for their feebleness and decadence, Forde ended in a blaze of glory. Thomas Chard, the last of the thirty-two abbots devoted much of his time and energy to repairing and reconstructing the fabric of the Abbey building. In 1539 Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the larger monasteries. Chard, his work unfinished handed the Abbey over to the King, and was subsequently made vicar of Thorncombe, the local village.
    
    100 years after the dissolution the Abbey was acquired by
    ##### Sir Edmund Prideaux, Attorney General to Oliver Cromwell at the time of the Commonwealth. He transformed what must have been a somewhat dilapidated monastery into the magnificent country house you see today, by adding state apartments above the monastic cloisters and transforming the principal rooms with the addition of paneling and ornate plaster ceilings. These ceilings are almost unique in England. The famous tapestries that hang in the Grand Saloon are copies of the cartoons drawn by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel. This set were ordered by Sir Edmund Prideaux from the factory at Mortlake but only reached Forde when Queen Anne presented them to Sir Francis Gwyn, who married Prideaux’s granddaughter, in recognition of his services as Secretary of State for War.
    
    Today the House is the home of the Roper family (Mark Roper), who together occupy and care for the Abbey.
    
    NOTE - In a guide book that is over a hundred years old, Forde Abbey is described as:
    "No one can exceed in beauty and interest Forde Abbey, with its outdoor scenery of folded hills striped up and down with hedges, its green meadows, and rich corn fields, its fruitful orchards, graceful trees, and sparkling waters, and, besides these, the highly cultivated gardens in the immediate vicinity of the house, with all their glories of fruit and flower, fern and foliage."
    
    Forde Abbey  which is still a place of beauty was founded in 1138 by Cistercian monks that were offered the site that stands a few miles to the south of Chard, on the banks of the River Axe. And for another 300 years it was described as the  "richest and most learned establishments of the Southwest".
    
    Baldwin who was born of a humble birth rose to become Abbot of Forde and later to Bishop of Worcester and he followed Thomas à Becket as the Archbishop of Canterbury. He organised a crusade throughout the country in 1188 and set out with King Richard two years later on the Third Crusade. Badlwin also crowned Richard while Archbishop of Canterbury. He eventually died from disease which also killed many more of the crusaders in the Holy Land.
    
    When Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, Thomas Chard and his monks handed the Abbey over, this ended a long tradition of 'long labour and constant devotion'. The abbey and its land was then leased by the king to Richard Pollard and  in the next hundred years it passed into the Poullet, Mallet and Rosewill families. Thomas Chard did a lot to Forde and the cloister which he rebuilt and refectory remain the same today as he left them, he did in 1544.
    
    The abbey was then bought by Edmund Prideux who was Attorney General to firstly King Charles I and then to Oliver Cromwell, and he and Inigo Jones worked together in transforming it into the Italian style, Prideux was given a Baronetcy from Cromwell but a year after the work was done he died and was succeed by Edmund his son.
    Edmund was a friend of the Duke of Monmouth and this resulted in him spending time in the Tower for High Treason, he managed to pay a £15,000 ransom though.
    
    The inheritance then went to his daughter Margaret, who in 1702 was married to Francis Gwyn and their descendants lived throughout the 18th century at the abbey. In 1815 the abbey was leased for three years by Jeremy Bentham who was a radical philosopher. Gwyn inherited the estate through marriage in 1702. He was Queen Annes Secretary of War and she presented him with tapestry copies of the Raphael Cartoons. the original hang in the Victoria and Albert museum.
    
    The Gwyn family finally came to an end in 1864 (??1846) and the abbey with its contents was sold on to a Mr Miles who came from Bristol and he then sold it on to a Mrs Bertram Evans who left it to her sons and then to her niece who had married Freeman Roper, his son Geoffrey lived for almost eighty years in the house.
    
    Then during the early part of the 19th century the house was rented by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It then became the home to Mark and Lisa Roper.
    
    Though the house has many valuable paintings and other objects of historical interest the most prized possessions are the Mortlake Tapestries which we woven by a Belgian in a Brussels factory that was founded by King Charles I.