History - The House And Its Owners
From Knights Templar to Renaissance Princes 1086 - 1565
THE MANOR OF NEWSAM ('new houses') is first recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. In 1155 it became a property
of the Knights Templar, the military - religious order who guarded the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem. Their
farmstead, excavated in 1991, was about half a mile to the south of the present house, close to the river Aire.
After the order's suppression the property eventually passed to the Darcy family and the first person to build
the new house on this site in c. 1500 was Thomas Lord Darcy, a courtier, mercenary and crony of Cardinal Wolsey.
This was a spectacular four-sided courtyard house of which only the west wing survives as the central block of
the building we see today.
Darcy was beheaded in 1537 for his part in the revolt known as the Pilgrimage of Grace and his properties
were forfeited. Temple Newsam was then given by Henry VIII to his niece, the Countess of Lennox and it was here that
her sons Henry Lord Darnley and Lord Charles Stuart were born and brought up. The house was evidently furnished
and equipped as a Renaissance palace. It became the centre of political intrigue which culminated in Darnley's
disastrous marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots and his subsequent murder. Queen Elizabeth thereupon seized Temple Newsam,
throwing the Countess in the Tower of London, and it became a property of the crown.
A New Beginning 1622 - 1688
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