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Worksop Manor is an 18th-century country house in Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire. It stands in one of the four contiguous estates in the Dukeries area of Nottinghamshire. Traditionally, the Lord of the Manor of Worksop may assist a British monarch at his or her coronation by providing a glove and putting it on the monarch's right hand and supporting his or her right arm. Worksop Manor was the seat of the ancient Lords of Worksop.
The house was an important English country house of the Talbot and Howard family families between the 1580s and its destruction by fire in 1761; an even grander rebuilding was only partially completed, and after 1777 it was neglected and largely dismantled in the 1830s.
The building as it is now, greatly reduced and rebuilt but still very large, is mostly 18th and 19th-century. It has 2 and 3 storeys of ashlar with hipped slate roofs, forming a quadrangle approximately 25 bays wide by 14 bays deep.
In the 1580s a new house was built on the site for the very wealthy George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury (husband of Bess of Hardwick), probably designed by Robert Smythson. It was a leading example of the Elizabethan prodigy house.Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (Yale, 1983), pp. 110-137. At the same time Smythson also designed the associated Worksop Manor Lodge, which survived in substantially original form until 2007 when it was burnt down. It is currently being restored. The lodge, occupied by Roger Portington, keeper of the Worksop parks, was compared to the Medici Villa di Pratolino.Lucy Worsley, 'An Habitation not so Magnificent as Useful: Life at Welbeck Abbey in the 17th Century', Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 107 (2003), p. 138.
The house was much admired, especially for its long gallery on the top storey, where one chimneypiece had the date "1585".Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (Yale, 1983), p. 113-4. In 1607 there were rumours about the grandeur of a mansion that George Home, 1st Earl of Dunbar was building in the ruins of Berwick Castle. George Chaworth wrote to Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury saying he heard the long gallery at Berwick would make that built by his father at Worksop look like a garret or attic.Edmund Lodge, Illustrations of British History, vol. 3 (London, 1838), pp. 214-5
In August 1604 Charles I (when younger as a prince) stayed at Worksop when he travelled from Scotland. HMC Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, vol. 1 (London, 1888), p. 50. He was accompanied by Dr Henry Atkins who described four days of music, and the young Duke of York's initiation into hunting, when deer were driven close to the house.M. S. Giuseppi, HMC Salisbury Hatfield, vol. 16 (London, 1933), p. 227.
Later that year, James Paine was commissioned to build a replacement for the burnt-out Elizabethan mansion. He planned a roughly square mansion with a vast hall in the central courtyard which would have been one of the largest houses ever built in England, had it been completed. Only one wing had been finished when work stopped on the house in 1767, but even this was on a palatial scale. On the death of the 9th Duke in 1777, the estate passed to a distant cousin, aged 57 and living in Surrey. Neither he nor his immediate successors lived at Worksop and it became neglected. Bernard Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk gave it to his son, the Earl of Surrey, in 1815.
In 1838, the Earl of Surrey sold the estate to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 4th Duke of Newcastle of nearby Clumber Park for £375,000, who ruthlessly stripped the house. He demolished the main wing of the house with gunpowder, having sold off the roof lead and some fittings, as he was only interested in adding the land to his own estate. In spite of the money received from salvage and timber he made a huge loss on the purchase which seems to have been animated by anti-Catholic sentiment, the Duke of Norfolk having been a leading Catholic aristocrat. After a number of years the surviving parts of the house, that is the stable, the service wing and part of the eastern end of the main range, were reformed into a new mansion ( pictured here), which was leased for a number of years by Lord Foley and afterwards by William Isaac Cookson, a manufacturer of lead. In 1890 a large part of the estate was sold by auction; the house and adjoining parkland was bought by Sir John Robinson, a Nottingham businessman, who felled many of the mature trees for sale. He was appointed High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1901.
Since at least 1890 the estate has been home to the Worksop Manor Stud, which breeds thoroughbred horses.
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