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Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, daughter of Penshurst Place, Kent, made her marital home at Loughton Hall, Essex, and remained there as a widow until her own death in 1651.1 The house was burnt down in 1836, and little is known of its appearance or history. This is a loss in two major respects. Firstly, as the home of a major literary figure whose work draws heavily on her life, we might expect that the home environment she created was both shaped by and informed her evocation of place and space in her work. This is not to suggest that literary work can be read back into the built environment, but Loughton Hall should take its place amongst the houses within the Sidney circle: Penshurst Place, Wilton House, and Houghton Conquest House, for example. There is more to say about its landscape setting. Secondly, Wroth had a role in remodeling the old house, and there is a tantalizing but unproven association with Inigo Jones, known to Wroth from the Court. This provides the second theme for this discussion, the Court and the classical tradition in architecture. The early decades of the seventeenth century in England are distinguished by what might be called a classical turn in building, in the form of heightened awareness of and interest in the theory and practice of architecture as inherited from Italy and a Roman past. Wroth was in a very good position to observe design at Court and in her own circle, with special emphasis on her female friendships, such as that with Mary Herbert, Dowager Countess of Pembroke.
Early nineteenth-century artists' views provide some evidence for Loughton Hall's appearance, but these are in an important respect highly misleading. The methodological challenges of writing the history of a lost house, with a fragmentary archive, are considerable. In the absence of standard architectural sources such as building accounts, household inventories, plans, and interior views, an innovative use of sources more familiar to social historians in the form of Hearth Tax records provides new insights into the scale and relative status of Loughton Hall. Ultimately, however, it is Wroth's creative persona that brings the house ba ck in to view: without this, Loughton would remain a regrettable but minor loss in the...