Features of Washingley Hall included a kitchen garden, fishponds, curved garden walls, lawns, a summerhouse and a lily pond.

To the east of the house the walls of the kitchen garden still remain and the fishponds are beneath the mature trees which once formed the pleasure grounds. The curved garden wall foundations from the south front of the house can also be found in the grass. These stone walls had arched recesses with seating. A paved terrace leads directly onto the extensive south lawn. It is interesting to note that during the early-18th century, Charles Bridgeman bought an inn for his wife in Stilton, and may have been involved in the garden at Washingley.

When Lord Cobham acquired the property, the south gardens contained clipped yews around flower beds, and there was a summer house and lily pond. The south garden would have been bounded by the moat. The stable block to the west is now a farm. All these are within a park with fishponds, pheasantry and stew ponds.

Washingley Hall is to the west of the village of Stilton near to the remains of a castle. The house was built in the 17th century, remodelled and enlarged in the 18th century, on the site of an earlier property.

The Apreece family claimed descent from Gruffydd ap Rhys (d. 1202), Prince of South Wales, whose descendants lived in Breconshire and were set out in William Betham's Baronetage of England in 1804. According to Betham, it was Isaac ap Rhese who in the reign of King Henry VII first went to live at Washingley in Huntingdonshire, but if so it must have been as a tenant. His son, Robert ap Rhese (c.1472-1555), married the daughter of William (or by some accounts John) Otter of Walthamstow (Essex), and Washingley was her dowry, so the Ap Rheses were established at Washingley by about 1500, if not a little before.  The family name of Ap Rhys had become fixed by the early 15th century, but the spelling and Anglicization was very inconsistent until the mid 17th century and different members of the family apparently favoured different versions. Ap Rhys and Ap Rhese were most common in the 16th century, when Apreece also makes its appearance, but Rhys, Reece and Price are also found, which makes the family uncommonly hard to identify securely in the records. Only with Robert Apreece in the late 17th century does this form of the name seem to have become standard. 

The Washingley estate passed in turn to William Apreece (c.1505-74) and his son Robert Apreece (1535-1622), who held to the Catholic religion despite increasing persecution. Those harbouring Catholic priests ran the risk of severe penalties, but nonetheless Robert put up Fr. Edmund Campion during the winter of 1580-81, when he is recorded as preaching and conducting mass in Northamptonshire. Campion was captured by the authorities in July 1581, and hung, drawn and quartered later in the year; he was canonised by the Pope in 1886. Apreece himself was fined for recusancy and in 1594 was briefly imprisoned at Ely. Two of his sons were later involved in assisting the escape of three Catholic priests from custody at Wisbech.  Robert produced a large family of nine sons and six daughters according to his monument in Lutton church, but only twelve of these children have been identified; the rest may have died young. Although most of his sons grew to adulthood, it was his seventh son, Jerome, who inherited Washingley. He is the most obscure of the owners of Washingley, but was perhaps responsible for building a new Jacobean E-plan house there, the fabric (although not the appearance) of which largely survived until the final demolition of the house.

Jerome's only recorded son was Col. Robert Apreece alias Price (d. 1644), an active Royalist who participated in the defence of Lincoln against the forces of Parliament.  The day after the city was captured by the Earl of Manchester's Parliamentary forces, some of the Earl's soldiers - perhaps men from his Huntingdonshire estates - accosted Apreece in the street and demanded whether he was "Price the Papist". When he admitted that he was "Price, the Roman Catholic", one of them pulled out a pistol and shot him dead. This avowal of his faith and its fatal consequence caused Apreece to be beatified in 1887.

The heir to Washingley was the Colonel's young son, Robert Apreece (1638-1723), who was brought up as a Protestant in the household of his stepfather, Humphrey Orme. Although contemporaries were sometimes suspicious of his loyalty to the Protestant faith, his outward conformity allowed him to hold many public offices and to be MP for Huntingdonshire several times. His supposed Catholic sympathies made him particularly acceptable to King James II, who brought him back into the commission of the peace in 1687, but he was not removed from it again when James fled abroad and was replaced by King William III in 1689 and he remained a JP until his death at a very advanced age in 1723.

His son, Robert Apreece (c.1677-1744), married Sarah (1672-1749), the eldest daughter and eventual heiress of Sir Thomas Hussey of Honington (Lincs). Through his marriage, the couple acquired first Honington Hall and later Doddington Hall (Lincs). Honington descended with Washingley to Robert and Sarah's only surviving son, Thomas Hussey Apreece (c.1702-77), but Doddington passed on Sarah's death to her daughter Rhoda (1701-59), the wife of Francis Blake Delaval of Seaton Delaval (Northumberland), who had commissioned the rebuilding of that house by Vanbrugh. It seems likely that it was the income from Robert and Sarah's three estates which made possible a major remodelling of the Jacobean house at Washingley in the mid 18th century.  The style of the alterations - and the tendency of building to be the occupation of younger owners - might incline one to suppose that these changes were made by Thomas Hussey Apreece after 1744, but he seems to have spent most of his time in London and to have preferred Honington to Washingley when in the country, so on balance they were probably made for Robert and Sarah in the 1730s or early 1740s; their architect is unknown.

Thomas Hussey Apreece (c.1702-77) was perhaps in the Grenadier Guards in his early 20s and comes across as impatient of the slow routines and respectability of county gentry life. He lived mainly in London and went through a clandestine marriage in the Fleet in 1725, and this seems to have been a case of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure, for he and his wife were divorced four years later. In 1739 he tried again, only for his second wife to die in childbirth two years later. Early the next year he married for a third time, to the daughter of an Essex baronet, who brought him a dowry of £12,000, and with her he at last produced a family of three sons and one daughter. His fortune was further augmented in 1749 when he inherited the bulk of the fortune of Thomas Ball of Mamhead (Devon), who is said to have been a distant relation, although I have not traced the connection.

Thomas' eldest son and namesake, Sir Thomas Hussey Apreece (1744-1833), 1st bt., seems to have been rather like his father in many ways. He served as a young man with the Huntingdonshire militia and while his unit was serving in Northumberland during the American War of Independence, he is said to have distinguished himself by protecting Alnwick from an attack by John Paul Jones, an American naval officer and ex-pirate who sailed around the British coast causing panic by some fairly random attacks, including one on Alnmouth in 1779. In the 1790s he devised a plan for raising volunteer yeomanry units for local defence during the Napoleonic crisis which was adopted and implemented by William Pitt the younger.  The yeomanry were designed - like the Home Guard in World War II - as the last line of defence in the event of an invasion which never came, but they provided countless gentlemen and farmer's sons with a splendid excuse for dressing up and playing soldiers in the 1790s and 1800s. Sir Thomas was a keen sportsman and a member of the Prince of Wales' Carlton House set, despite being a generation older than the Prince himself, and this perhaps explains why he was advanced to a baronetcy in 1782.  Like his father, Sir Thomas was unlucky in love. In 1771 he married an entirely suitable woman, the daughter of a Leicestershire gentleman and quickly produced a daughter and a son and heir, but about 1774 the couple separated.  The children remained with their mother and were estranged from Sir Thomas, who took a number of mistresses, by at least one of whom he produced illegitimate children. In 1790, however, he met his wife by chance at an inn in Rutland and for one night they achieved a sufficient reconciliation to conceive a third child. Later, Sir Thomas settled down with another mistress, Louisa Venmore, by whom he produced a daughter in 1796, and with whom he was still living at his death. Louisa and her daughter Lucy inherited everything that he had power to dispose of, including a substantial estate at Effingham (Surrey) which he built up in the early 19th century. His legitimate daughter was cut out of his will entirely and his surviving son received only what was entailed, including the Washingley and Honington estates.

Sir Thomas' elder son, named after his maternal grandfather, was Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece (1773-1807). He married in 1798 or 1799 and moved into Washingley Hall, which he is said to have renovated extensively. Unfortunately, however, he died without issue in 1807, and so it was his much younger brother, Sir Thomas George Apreece (1791-1842), 2nd bt., who succeeded his father in 1833. Shuckburgh's widow, incidentally, retired after his death to her native Edinburgh, where five years later she married the scientist and inventor, Sir Humphry Davy.  Sir Thomas George Apreece, like several of his grandfather's descendants, was mentally unstable. An uncle and two cousins were confined as lunatics and although Sir Thomas escaped this, contemporaries were aware of his marked eccentricities of behaviour. He was unmarried and in the late 1830s moved to Margate, where he lived with a housekeeper, in whose presence he shot himself on New Years Eve 1842. This event marked the end of the Apreeces as a gentry family: the baronetcy died with him, and by his will he left his estates to St George's Hospital, London. His sister contested the will but was unsuccessful, and Honington was sold in 1851 and Washingley in 1859. Both houses were then in poor repair. Honington was rebuilt in 1861-63 and Washingley remodelled in 1861; both houses were demolished after the Second World War.


Washingley Hall
There was a manor house on the moated site of Washingley Hall from at least the 13th century, and the park includes the earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle which was no doubt its predecessor, as well as a deserted medieval village and a series of stewponds and some garden features.  The house was rebuilt in the 17th century as a two-storey brick E-plan block, perhaps by Jeremy Apreece who inherited the estate in 1621.

The house was evidently extensively remodelled in the mid 18th century when it was given sash windows, which were pedimented on the first floor of the nine bay rear elevation, and a panelled parapet punctuated by square plinths carrying ball finials.  The interiors of this date, with enriched plasterwork ceilings and cornices and elaborate pedimented chimneypieces, survived until the house was demolished. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the house was little used by successive generations of the family, who lived mainly in London and at Honington, and it continually fell into disrepair. After his marriage in 1798 or 1799, Shuckburgh Ashby Apreece came to live at Washingley and "completely beautified and repaired" the house and made a new lake in the grounds. After he died in 1807, it again reverted to a state of decay and Sir Thomas George Apreece sold the contents of the library in the 1830s.  

Descent: William Otter of Walthamstow; to daughter Joan, wife of Robert Apreece (d. 1555); to son, William Apreece (c.1505-74); to son, Robert Apreece (1535-1621); to son, Jeremy Apreece; to son, Col. Robert Apreece (d. 1644); to son, Robert Apreece (1638-1723); to son, Robert Apreece (d. 1744); to son, Thomas Hussey Apreece (c.1702-77); to son, Sir Thomas Hussey Apreece (1744-1833), 1st bt.; to son, Sir Thomas George Apreece (1791-1842), 2nd bt.; bequeathed to St. George's Hospital, London, which sold 1859 to Leicester Fitzgerald Charles Stanhope, 5th Earl of Harrington (1784-1862); to Seymour Sydney Hyde Stanhope, 6th Earl of Harrington (1845-66); to Charles Wyndham Stanhope, 7th Earl of Harrington (1809-81), who sold 1870 to J.C. Dymoke Robertson (d. 1895); to brother, William Henry Robertson (d. 1918); to Maj. George Robertson who sold 1928 to T. Shaw, who sold 1934 to Robert Disney Leith Alexander, 16th Baron Cobham (1885-1951); probably demolished after his death.

Features

• Garden Wall
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• Pond
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• Fishpond
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• Lawn
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• Kitchen Garden
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• Summerhouse
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698

• House (featured building)
• Earliest Date: 31 Dec 1599
• Latest Date: 31 Dec 1698