Images: exterior views of Westenhanger (photos by C.A. Stanford) and plan of Westenhanger from a seventeenth-century drawing, reproduced from George Clinch, “Notes on the Remains of Westenhanger House, Kent,” Archaeologia Cantiana 31(1915): 78.a.
Acquired: 1540
Westenhanger was a large moated mansion begun in the fourteenth century by the Poynings family. When Henry felt the need to acquire a house in southeast Kent, probably due to the intense coastal fortification construction he had begun for national defense, he acquired the estate by exchange with the current owner. The king expanded the park and paid for some additional building works, such as enlarged kitchens and a new drawbridge over the moat, besides the usual repairs and refurbishment required before a royal visit, which Henry seems to have made in 1544.
The house evidently contained a hall, a chamber over the hall gate, a tower chamber over a gallery, a tower chamber next to the watching chamber, the king’s privy chamber, a “close gallery,” the queen’s great watching chamber, and a “chamber above the leads before the chapel” (Colvin, 284). None of these survives, as the greater part of the house was pulled down in the eighteenth century, and the farmhouse portions that survive are of uncertain origin.
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