Hanbury Manor
Hanbury Manor, centred on the multi-wing Hanbury Manor Hotel, is a converted late-Victorian country house and adjoining golf course in Thundridge, north of Ware, Hertfordshire, some north of Greater London. It is part of a leisure retreat and country club owned by Marriott Hotels. The house is Grade II* listed on the National Heritage List for England. History Grant of land to Reginald Pole (1500-1558) A purported manor here derives from ownership of a grand house approximately on the site of the current house in the 16th century. A manor is a leading family estate typically with farmland and other manorial rights across a wider area. The longstanding mention of the estate as 'Poles' derives from the erection of a major house (and possible subinfeudation of some of the Church Manor's rights rather than inheritance of a medieval manor) to Reginald Pole, a cardinal before Henry VIII's English Reformation. His mother The Blessèd Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury was the last legitimate Plantagenet based on strict patrilineality. He served two years as the last catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and died 12 hours after Queen Mary I of England. Sampson Hanbury (1769–1835) During the final years of the 18th century the Hanbury family chose to settle here (first becoming lessees) and later purchasers. This branch of the Hanbury family had Norman noble ancestry; forebear Geoffrey De Hanbury (a Norman first name) settled in Worcestershire in the 14th century. Sampson Hanbury bought Poles outright about the year 1800. From 1799 to 1830 he was Master of the Puckeridge Hounds. Childless, he left Poles to his widow, Agatha. Robert Hanbury (1798–1884) Robert Hanbury was senior partner in the Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co major brewery in East London. He inherited Poles on the death of his aunt Agatha in 1847. He was a magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant, and in 1854 became the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire. His son, also Robert Hanbury (aka Robert Culling Hanbury after second marriage) (1823–1867) died before inheriting. He was a partner in the brewery and from 1857 to 1867 was one of the two MPs for Middlesex. Edmund Smith Hanbury (1850–1913) Edmund Hanbury was a partner in the brewery from 1873, from which he retired in 1886. On his grandfather's death he brought his family to live at Poles, a property which, at that time, was in excess of . His wife, Amy, found the house to be a rambling, uninhabitable monstrosity and refused to live in it. Architects Sir Ernest George and Harold Peto designed a replacement grand house, built by Simpsons & Ayrton of Paddington in 1890–91 for £20,000. The final cost, £30,000 (), may well have hastened the end of the great prosperity of his branch of the family. The house, built in the Jacobean style in red brick with blue brick reticulation and stone mullioned windows, was the first in the parish to have electricity and to have a central heating system. Like his father, he became a Justice of the Peace and