Oatlands and Walton's Royal Connection

Walton’s clearest link to Tudor royalty runs through its immediate neighbour rather than through the town itself. Oatlands Palace, Henry VIII’s lost royal residence, stood just across the parish boundary in Weybridge, and Walton’s own connection to it survives in a single striking brass inside St Mary’s Church.

Henry VIII’s palace next door

Oatlands Palace was built by Henry VIII between 1537 and 1545, on the site of an earlier moated manor house, as a residence intended for his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves; in the event, it was at Oatlands that Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, on 28 July 1540. Built substantially from stone salvaged from the recently dissolved Chertsey Abbey, the palace rivalled Henry’s other great Surrey residence, Hampton Court, in its scale and ambition. Elizabeth I later used Oatlands regularly as a retreat from the business of state, and had the palace’s long gallery decorated during her reign.

John Selwyn, keeper of Oatlands

Walton’s own physical link to this history is the 1587 brass inside St Mary’s Church commemorating John Selwyn, keeper of Oatlands Park, shown together with his wife and eleven children. As keeper, Selwyn would have been responsible for managing the royal park attached to the palace, a genuine Tudor administrative post rather than a ceremonial title, and his memorial gives Walton parish a direct, named connection to the Tudor court next door, preserved in metal rather than merely in proximity.

A shared heritage with Weybridge

It is worth being precise about geography here: Oatlands Palace itself stood, and its surviving gateway still stands, in Weybridge, not Walton, and the palace’s story properly belongs to that parish’s own history as much as to Walton’s. What Walton can genuinely claim is a documented, named connection through John Selwyn and his role at Oatlands, commemorated in the parish church rather than the palace grounds. The palace was demolished after the Commonwealth government sold it to help pay parliamentary debts, its bricks reused in the locks of the nearby Wey Navigation, and today only the Tudor gateway in Weybridge’s Palace Gardens survives above ground. Selwyn’s brass at St Mary’s, by contrast, has never left Walton, and remains the more intact of the two Tudor survivals between the neighbouring towns.