308 Murder of Henry Long, Esq. 
From the first of the documents following it will be seen that a 
few days before the murder of Mr. Long, Sir Henry Danvers was 
at Tichfield House,! below Southampton, then the seat of Henry 
Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton; and that after the event 
he and his brother fled thither for refuge. Their reason for so 
doing is partly explained by the fact that Lord Southampton was 
an intimate friend of Sir Charles’s: being afterwards one of his 
accomplices in the Essex Plot against Queen Elizabeth. Of the 
design against Long he could therefore scarcely be ignorant, but 
there is no information to show that he was in any way involved 
in the quarrel. 
Henry Long, the victim, was one of the younger brothers of Sir 
Walter Long, the last owner of the united estates of South Wrax- 
hall and Draycote-Cerne. He appears to have been unmarried. But 
of the nature of the provocation which he had given, whether public 
or private, a personal insult or family feud, jealousy or revenge, as 
indeed of every circumstance connected with the cause of the 
outrage, nothing whatever is known. 
The murder was*committed at Corsham; in the house of one 
Chamberlayne, about 12 o’clock in the day, at dinner time. The 
company present, were his brother Sir Walter, Mr. Anthony 
Mildmay, Thos. Snell (afterwards Sir Thomas Snell of Kington St. 
1 Tichfield House, near the town of that name, between Southampton and 
Portsmouth, was about three miles from the shore of Southampton water. It 
stood upon the site of a Premonstratensian Abbey, which had been granted 
at the Dissolution to Thomas Wriothesley, Secretary to Henry VIIL., afterwards 
the celebrated Earl of Southampton, and Lord Chancellor. ‘‘ Here he built” says 
Leland, ‘‘a right stately house embattled, having a goodly gate, and a conduit 
castelled in the midst of the court of it.” On the extinction of the male descen- 
dants of the Lords Southampton in 1667, it came by a daughter to the Earl of 
Gainsborough: by his daughter to the Duke of Beaufort, by whom it was sold 
to the ancestor of the present owner Mr. Delmé. The only remnant is the 
central gateway with its octagonal turrets, six ornamental brick chimneys, some 
fine old casements, &c. Part of what was the base court serves for a modern 
residence, Adjoining the house (now called ‘‘ Place House”), on the western 
side, was a noble pile of stabling, of which very little is left. To this 
house Charles I. repaired on his flight from Hampton Court in November 1647, 
and hence he was conducted by Colonel Hammond to the Isle of Wight. At the 
time of Mr. Long’s murder, it was the property of the Chancellor’s grandson, 
the 3rd Earl of Southampton, the friend and liberal patron of Shakespeare. 
