RUSHBROOKE HALL, WHICH STOOD SOME THREE MILES SOUTH-EAST OF BURY ST EDMUNDS, belonged to the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in medieval times but is said to have been occupied from late in the twelfth century by ancestors of the Rushbrooke family to whom the property passed again in 1808. The memorial in Rushbrooke Church to Robert Rushbrooke, who died in 1829, records that he ‘after it had been successively possessed during a period of six centuries by the families of Jermyn and Davers became the proprietor of this seat of his ancestor’. The house, which survived until 1961, is believed to have been built by Edmund Jermyn about 1550 or some twenty-five years later by Sir Robert Jermyn.

The Jermyn family was prominent in Suffolk and Norfolk, various members of it serving as Sheriffs of those counties. Queen Elizabeth I was entertained at Rushbrooke during her East Anglian progress in 1577. Members of the family were notable in the next century for their support of the Royalist cause. Henry Jermyn, who was created Baron Jermyn of St Edmundsbury in 1643, Earl of St Albans in 1660 and a Knight of the Garter in 1672, served in the Court of Queen Henrietta Maria and lived in exile as head of her household after the execution of King Charles I. He is reputed to have been clandestinely married to the Queen, and one unproven account alleges that he fathered King Charles II. There are accounts of him as a gamester, bully and coward, ‘an adventurer of a base type’ and ‘a coarse and brutish libertine’. His nephew, another Henry, is said to have married Mary, Princess of Orange, daughter of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria, but there does not appear to be any evidence to support this suggestion. A portrait of William, Prince of Orange (later King William III) as a boy holding an arquebus was included in the 1919 sale of the contents of Rushbrooke and can be seen in the photograph of the staircase (illustration 60). This Henry was a Roman Catholic and, being a supporter of King James II, went into exile with his monarch.

The Jermyn male line came to an end in 1708 with the death of Henry, third Lord Jermyn. He had succeeded his brother Thomas whose son (also Thomas) had been killed aged 16 by the falling of a ship’s mast in 1692.